The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact,” it can be gathered that the Gospels, when rightly understood, must be accepted in a very special way. As I intend to speak on the Gospels during this winter I would like to say that it is not possible for me always to begin again from the beginning for the sake of the younger members, so that there will certainly be much in these lectures that will be difficult of comprehension for younger members.

It has frequently been remarked on the occasion of the annual meeting how necessary it is that our younger members should take part in the courses of lectures, that these should be arranged so that early teachings are constantly repeated. May I say here something rather strange—it does not seem practical that the younger members should work so very energetically at going over the beginnings of theosophical life. In that case it might happen that the higher realms of spiritual science were incomprehensible to them, and they might for this reason form strange opinions as to what spiritual science is. This is, however, a matter for the individual member.

I showed in the book mentioned above that we have to accept the Gospels as “books of initiation.” This means that they are nothing less than accounts of the ancient ritual of initiation, paraphrased in a certain way. What is stated in these ancient writings? They mainly contain accounts of how the candidate in his training was led step by step along the path to higher worlds. How he gradually went through certain soul-experiences and was finally brought to the point where certain forces slumbering in his soul were awakened. We read how higher stages gradually evolved out of lower ones, up to that stage when the spiritual world dawned within the soul of the would-be initiate and the secrets of the spiritual world were revealed to him. He could then look into the spiritual world. He could behold, for example, the Beings of the different hierarchies as we have described them in other connections on many occasions. Thus the content of such “books of initiation” was what anyone seeking initiation had to carry out.

In studying pre-Christian ages we find that many persons passed through initiation in different centres of the Mysteries; that this was not always exactly the same in form, though similar in character, that the stages were introduced one by one up to the point where the person seeking initiation could see into the spiritual world, where the Beings of the Hierarchies appeared before him spiritually—that is in a different way to a physical appearance.

This was how it was in pre-Christian times. What meaning for Christianity had these initiations into the ancient Mysteries? What was their significance towards the Christ-Impulse? Their significance was that a Being, outwardly visible on the physical plane and known as “Jesus of Nazareth,” disclosed the secrets of the spiritual world in a way that was not customary, in a way not in accordance with the methods of pre-Christian times. An individual initiated in accordance with ancient ritual (when the events just described had taken place in his soul) could come before men and speak of the secrets of the spiritual kingdoms. But in the case of Christ Jesus something was present by which this personality, Jesus of Nazareth, could speak of these hidden matters without having been led to them in the ancient customary manner.

Jesus of Nazareth had been led to them through what is called the baptism in Jordan. The Spirit of Christ then entered into him. From this moment—that is from the moment of an historic event when the person of Christ Jesus was initiated in so open a way—the Spirit of Christ spoke to the people around Him of the Mysteries of the spiritual realms, but in a higher way than had been done before. Something had there-fore been accomplished on the physical plane, open for all the world to see, which formerly had been attainable—and to a certain extent only by initiates in the depths of the Mysteries, so that they might then go forth and speak of these mysteries to their fellow men. To put the matter pictorially we might say:—We look back to the ancient temple of the Mysteries, we see the Heirophant performing the rites of initiation, so that the person initiated can look into the spiritual world, and can then go forth and teach others of this world. This had always been carried out gradually and in the secret depths of the Temple. Any talk of such things in the world outside the Mysteries, any talk concerning the spiritual world, was an utter impossibility. But now, what had often and often taken place in the depths of the Mysteries, had been transferred to the outer world, it took place in Palestine. There it was enacted as an historic fact, as the development of Jesus of Nazareth; it was enacted historically in the Mystery of Golgotha. And we have to accept this Mystery, set forth as it was historically before all the world, as forming the link between the Mystery of Golgotha and those ancient Temple-Mysteries of the past.

Writings descriptive of initiation, though dealing in essence with the same stages of development differed in certain particulars in different parts of the earth, and were suited to the differences in human individuals according to space and time. Knowing this let us endeavour to enter into the soul of one of those, generally called Evangelists, who concerned themselves with the writing of our Gospels. These men, through their own occult schooling, had some knowledge of the initiation literature of the various peoples and Mysteries. They knew what men had to pass through before it was possible for them to speak of the secrets of spiritual realms and spiritual Hierarchies. And now through the events that had occurred in Palestine, and through the Mystery of Golgotha, they were aware that what formerly had only been seen by initiates in the temple of the Mysteries, had been enacted openly on the plane of history before all the world, and that it would henceforth enter ever more and more deeply into the minds and souls of men.

The Evangelists were not biographers in the ordinary sense of the word when things are written which really do not concern the world, and which no one requires to know about any actively creative personality. They were not biographers like those who ferret out each private concern of the person they write of, but they were biographers in so far as they described the life of Christ by saying:—“Something happened at a certain time to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Christ entered, which we have seen happen again and again in the Mysteries; but there it was not compressed as a historic event into a few short years; here, on the contrary, it has become an event of history, yet is at the same time a repetition of Temple-ritual; we can therefore describe this life by describing the different stages formerly passed through during initiation.”

Thus were have to regard the Gospels as books of instructions concerning initiation. In them are found again the ancient directions for initiation, but so that we are shown in a certain way the reason why that which formerly occurred in the depths of the Mysteries now emerges on to the great plane of history. The Evangelist who begins his Gospel by stating the reason for this, who tells from the beginning why he is in a position to write of an historic event which, transformed into something greater, fulfils the instructions given for initiation, is the writer of the Gospel according to Mark. He tells from the first how man has evolved so that this great fact of the removal of initiation from the secret depth of the temples and the setting of it openly on the plane of history, might come to pass. He tells us from the beginning that this is connected with an event of immeasurably great importance to human evolution; an event foretold by the Hebrew Prophets. For what occurred in Palestine as the Mystery of Golgotha had been seen and spoken of prophetically by Hebrew Initiates and Prophets.

If we try to enter into the soul of such a man as the Prophet Isaiah, with whose words the Gospel according to Mark begins, we find that he declares somewhat as follows:—A time will come when the souls of men will perceive differently than they do now; this time is now being prepared for. (Isaiah refers here to his own day.) What is it he wishes to tell us? You know that the Gospel according to Mark begins with the introduction of a mighty saying of this Prophet. You know the words well, and how they are employed. I make use here of the ordinary translation of C. Weizsäcker:—

Behold I send my messenger before thee, he shall prepare thy way. Hark to the cry in the wilderness: Make ready the way of the Lord. Make his path straight.

Thus, it is fairly well translated in our Gospel literature. The Prophet refers in these words to the greatest event in history—to the Mystery of Golgotha.

You, know that in our studies of the other Gospels great trouble has been taken to translate important passages in a comprehensible way. What matters most in this, is not the giving of a correct verbal translation according to the dictionary, but in choosing words that reproduce the deep significance of the original and convey this to us in our own language; not only in presenting them theoretically to our understanding, but so that the whole feeling that accompanied the peculiar quality of the language of that day is also passed on to us. For speech at that time was totally different from the present manner of speech. I would like to impress this fact on you, that speech was then not so abstract, so trivial as it is to-day.

The whole manner of expressing anything was such that an ever deeper meaning, a richer significance and feeling-content was imparted to the listener along with the actual words, yet he knew most unmistakably what this feeling-content was. A whole WORLD was then heard in the spoken word compared with what is ordinarily heard to-day. This is a special quality of the Hebrew tongue, it is exceedingly rich in this power of concealing a very great deal behind the words, because the images employed were taken altogether from the sense-world. Expressions such as “prepare the way” or “make straight the path” are pictures drawn from the sense-world. It is as if the path were prepared with spades and shovels. But when such words were used, the peculiarity of this language compared with others was that behind the expressions employed to denote outward things, a whole spiritual world stood—it stood there so clearly and incontestably that no one could interpret it to their own liking, as is so often done with poetry, where all kinds of things are sometimes read into it. The reason for this was that in the ancient Hebrew language, in the personal use of the language, which cannot be shown in the script, it was possible for whole hidden worlds to be given in the tone. A feeling for such secret things existed.

In Greek, the language of the Gospel text, this is not nearly so much the case. All the same it was still possible, without occult knowledge, to obtain far better translations from the Greek than from the language used by the Evangelists.

As a matter of fact, one translator has merely copied another in this without going into the matter philologically or proving how the original compared with the Greek text. I will give you later a single example of how great were the errors that arose through this. To-day I will not interrupt the course of our studies, but will try, not philologically, but with the help of what can be learnt through spiritual investigations, to put before you some important things concerning the beginning of the Gospel of Mark.

I will start with this important passage from the prophecies of Isaiah, wherein he tries to show what is to come to pass through the Event of Palestine, so that you may discover through your feeling what it means.

The Greek text is as follows:

We must in the first place clearly understand that the word messenger or angel was only used in olden times in the sense employed by us when describing the Hierarchies, that is when we describe those Beings who stand immediately above man in the ranks of the hierarchies. We must feel when we read the words “his angel” that a Being belonging to this realm is meant. If this is not felt then the meaning of the whole passage is lost. Spiritual science alone can provide a foundation for such an understanding, and also for all it has to tell us about the Christ-Event.

What is the fact of greatest importance in the Christ-Impulse? The fact that through it full consciousness first entered the human soul so that a place might be prepared there for a self-conscious ego. So that there might gradually arise within this self-consciousness ego in the further course of earthly evolution, all the secret things (Geheimnisse) which formerly arose by a kind of natural clairvoyance within the astral body.

The present epoch was preceded by one in which men still carried over with them into post-Atlantean culture a natural clairvoyance which enabled them to look into the spiritual world. In certain abnormal conditions of soul the secrets of the spiritual world still poured down into men, and they were able to look up to the Hierarchies. They naturally saw more often, and for a longer period, the Hierarchy which stands nearest to man—The Hierarchy of Angels. They saw them as the Beings standing immediately above man. In the time of this ancient clairvoyance men were not aware that they possessed something within them that was to lead them to the spiritual world. They looked on it as a grace accorded to them from without, as something granted to their souls by spiritual powers. Therefore the Prophets looking to the future could speak as follows:—“A time is coming when man will be aware of his ego; he will then know that it is through the self-conscious ego that the secrets of the spiritual world will come to him.” All this was to come. A time was to come in which man would say: “When I have my ego in me, I shall be able through the power it brings, to penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.” This had, however, first to be prepared for.

Thus man, who is as it were, the lowest of the Hierarchies, had to he prepared for what he was to become by being equipped with something which as yet he did not possess. The messenger or Angel, announced that man would become an ego-being in the fullest sense of the word. While the mission of former Angels had been to reveal to man the spiritual world, a special Angel was now to receive a special mission. This Angel was to carry revelation a stage further, and make known to man that he was to enter consciously into his ego, while the revelations of former Angels had not been suited to a self-conscious ego.

So Isaiah announces:—“The age of the Mystery of the Ego is to come, and from among the host of Angels one will be specially chosen to declare to you this Mystery!” Only in this way can we understand what is meant when it says that the Messenger or Angel was sent before. Before whom was the Messenger sent? He was sent beforehand to those who were to attain their self-conscious ego, and was to come as a Being from the Hierarchy of Angels. No angel had as yet announced generally to men that it was foretold they were to receive a self-conscious ego. So this messenger of whom the Prophet Isaiah spoke came to tell them to prepare themselves inwardly, to create within their souls a place for the ego, to prepare for the full validity of the ego. What is most important in this passage is the reference to the great change in the evolution of the human soul; whereas formerly men had to go out of themselves in order to enter the spiritual world, from this time onwards they could continue within their ego, and could, through it, discover the secrets of that world.

Let us now compare a soul of olden times with one from the time when the Christ-Impulse was drawing near; picture a man of the earlier pre-Christian centuries. If wishing to enter the spiritual world he could not to do so and maintain his self-consciousness however highly he was developed. To do this he had to divest himself of his self-consciousness, had to pass into an unconscious condition; he had to rise into the world of the Hierarchies—the world of the spirit. His consciousness was lowered. This was an old feeling belonging to pre-Christian times. What then was the position of a man who did not altogether belong to the age when it was natural for him, on the withdrawal of self-consciousness, to find himself in the spiritual world; and what was the position of the man who did not live at a time when humanity was at the stage when his ego could be developed? The ego existed already in Atlantean times, but complete certainty that the greatest mystery of the spiritual world could well up within it came first to man through the Impulse of Christ. This was the feeling that caused men in the days of the old initiation to say:—“When I desire to enter the spiritual world and learn what these worlds can reveal to me, I have to suppress a certain part of me and stimulate and bring life to another part of my soul.” What had to be suppressed? And what had to be made especially alive? That part of his soul which was gradually to develop into the “I” had to be suppressed; this is what had to become darker, heavier. It could retain no memory. It had to become void and empty. On the other hand the astral body, the body which can give a certain degree of clairvoyance, had to be specially stimulated. When this happened ancient clairvoyant powers of perception entered the astral body.

I have said that the ego was already present to a certain extent, but man could not make use of it when he desired to investigate the secrets of the spiritual world. The ego had in this case to be suppressed and the astral body stimulated. This stimulation of the astral body had become ever more and more impossible. In ancient times suppression of the ego and stimulation of the astral body so that the secrets of the spiritual world could pour into it, was something that belonged to the elemental attributes of man. Advance in evolution consisted in the increasing incapacity of the astral body to receive the secrets of the spiritual world. At this stage men acknowledged:—“My astral body will become ever less able to attain what once was mine through the old form of clairvoyance, my ego also will cease to pass out of me in the way it was wont to do, and as yet it is unable to rise to anything of itself.” The most gifted clairvoyant was at most aware of something empty, something void, within his soul. Such was the ego to which as yet no Impulse had been imparted. At the same time men were aware it was not possible for them to enter the spiritual world through the ego.

From this you can gather what was the soul-attitude of those who desired to look into the spiritual realms at the time when the Christ-Impulse was approaching. They might have said:—“I can no longer develop in my astral body what formerly it was possible to develop; and no impulse has yet come to my ego; my soul is chaotic, I feel unable to rise to the spiritual world.”

Then as the time for the coming of the Christ-Impulse drew near certain methods were employed, men underwent a certain training, with the result that they made the acquaintance of those who were not as yet filled with the spirit. When seeking entrance into higher worlds they were told:—“Realise that thou canst not rise to these worlds through thy astral body; thou must first of all enter that inward place where thou feelest thyself as man, where thou art no longer conscious of the smallest connection with the outer world.”

This was how men felt as the time for the coming of the Christ-Impulse drew near. Everyone who sought for initiation realised that his astral body was no longer fitted to be the means for his entrance into the spiritual world; that the time for this was past; and that the ego was not as yet ready for it. But those who desired to receive the Impulse, who longed to leave the body and penetrate to spiritual worlds, divined (more than divine they could not) that there was some-thing in them that strove with all its might towards that Spiritual Impulse. This soul-experience which all passed through who sought at that time the path to spiritual illumination was called “the path of loneliness.” What, then, had the messenger to do who prepared the way for the Christ-Event? He had to tell those who desired to know of the approaching Impulse, about “the path of loneliness.” He had to know loneliness fundamentally. He had to be the preacher of this loneliness of soul. You will come to know, as you study the Gospel of Mark further, that in certain cases great Spiritual Beings through whom some important advance in human evolution was to be carried out found the instruments they required in living men, and that they entered into them so as to live within a soul in bodily incarnation. The “messenger” spoken of by Isaiah, who must not be accepted as a man quite in the ordinary sense, took possession of the soul of the re-incarnated Elias, lived in him and announced the approach of the Christ-Impulse. It was this messenger who spoke from the soul of John the Baptist. Whence came this voice? It sprang from what I have just described as a great loneliness of soul. We read of this in the Gospel according to Mark, it says:—“Listen to the cry of soul-loneliness.” The Greek word “ὲντηὲφήμ ω” should not be translated in a symbolic sense by “wilderness,” thus giving them an external meaning. In these words an image is presented to us by which the whole spiritual world may be grasped. Their real meaning is “in loneliness.”

To understand this expression better, we must occupy ourselves a little with the true meaning of what is felt by the word “κνφιος” or Lord, as it is usually translated in the lines “prepare the way of the Lord.” The true meaning is something we can still divine in the Greek, and is confirmed when we associate it with ancient tradition. In ancient usage this word had not the trivial meaning it has to-day.

In this materialistic age man has become a great Philistine in respect of language. Words are no longer “the bodies of soul-beings,” so that it is possible to sense a whole world in them.

What was felt in the Greek word “κνφιος” or Lord when spoken in the connection I have indicated? Men felt that it was an image of what went on within them, of what they sensed was happening in their soul-life. The uprising of the “I am” from the depths of the soul was felt as the coming of the “Lord” and “Ruler,” he who regulated and ordered the soul-forces and is used in the sense employed to-day when we say the various soul-forces possessed by man—thinking, feeling and willing, are the servants of his soul. But within the soul there is a master, the ego.

This is shown by the fact that whereas in old times men said “it thinks,” and in respect of feeling and willing “it feels,” “it wills within me”; men now say when the ego, the Lord of the soul-forces is in command and the mighty change in human evolution is felt, “I think,” “I feel,” “I will.” In earlier days the soul was to a certain extent unconscious, it was imprisoned and submerged within the forces that served it. But now the ego, the Lord of the soul-forces was to be born! The cry went forth:—“He who is Lord of the soul is coming!” No person or Being is meant by these words, but only the emergence of the ego as “Lord” of the soul.

This was taught in the Temples where preparation was made for what was to come to pass in human nature. With holy reverence and deep humility it was made known:—For a time the condition of souls was such that they had in them only the serving powers of thinking, feeling and willing; but now the “Ruler” was to be born.

This mighty fact is now proceeding; its development will go slowly on until the end of the earth-age, when it will have gained ever more and more power. Yes, this will come to pass! And it is the Christ who gives the first impulse to this development. This is the “Great Hour,” the turning point of the world's time-piece, the hour when Christ lived on earth. The hands of the world clock now point to the moment of the coming of the ego. As Lord of the forces of the souls it now begins to evolve ever greater power and will have reached its goal when the earth perishes and man passes on to still higher stages of development.

It is only when we try to feel, as people must have felt in those early days, that it is possible for us to form some idea of what Isaiah desired to say, and John the Baptist to repeat. Isaiah referred to the great event that was to take place within the souls of men, and to the course of the further development of these souls. But then we must not translate the word “λνφιοσ,” as “straight” as is usually done, nor as “level,” but as “open,” so that the road could be used.

It is then the “Lord” comes, he takes his way towards the human soul. But man must do something so that he can really take possession of the soul. The way must be made free, open. In short, if we translate this passage so that it means something, and if at the same time we hold to tradition, it must be done some-what as follows:

Take heed,¹ I send my Angel before the ego in thee, he shall prepare the direction (Richtung).

Hark to the cry in the (souls) loneliness, (the cry of longing for the Lord of the soul): prepare the direction for the (soul's) ruler; work that the way be open for him.

In this form of words you have approximately an idea of what can be felt in the words of Isaiah. These words or their content, was carried over by the Angel into the soul of the Baptist. Why could the Angel do this? To answer this question we must consider for a little the nature and method of the initiation of John the Baptist, and how this initiation affected his soul.

From former lectures you know that a man can either be initiated by descending into his own soul or by going forth from his soul, by liberation from the body and uniting his soul-forces with the cosmos. These two paths were followed by different peoples in the most varied manner. When a man desired to pour out his soul into the macrocosm, the twelve stages through which he had to pass to attain to this were “marked” by the twelve signs of the Zodiac; for his soul had to expand in certain clearly defined directions of the Macrocosm. Now a very great deal was already attained—something important that is for the historical evolution of the world—when any soul had evolved so far as to be able to receive into it all the macrocosmic forces springing from those hidden things which are the meaning of each of the constellations. As a rule the ancient rites of initiations were conducted so that the soul-expansion of one Initiate was directed to the macrocosmic secret, say of Capricorn, another to those of Cancer, of the Balance, and so on. I have explained on other occasions that there are twelve different possible ways of expansion into the Macrocosm, and that these are indicated symbolically by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Anyone attaining initiation through expansion of his soul into the macrocosm, and who does not attain at once to the highest—the Sun initiation—but only to a partial initiation, would have his soul-vision directed to the mysteries connected with some special constellation. To attain this he would have to turn his gaze away from everything of a material nature. This means, care would have to be taken that his gaze was directed, either through the rites of the Mysteries, or through John the Baptist by “Grace from above,” in such a way that he would have the earth between him and the special constellation. In other words, his glance had to be directed at night to the constellation through the earth. When a constellation is seen with physical eyes it is the physical constellation that is seen. But when a man's gaze can penetrate the substance of the earth, which is between him and the physical constellation, he does not see the physical but the spiritual part of the earth; that is he sees the mysteries (Geheimnesse) which the constellation expresses.

The training that John the Baptist had passed through had made it possible for him to gaze at night through the material earth upon the constellation Aquarius, the Waterman. He had received therefore (after the Angel had entered into his soul) the initiation of Aquarius. Thus, through all he knew and had felt, John the Baptist was able to put himself in touch with the faculties of the Angel, so that through this Being he could make the content of the “Waterman-initiation” known; and the information he gave respecting this was: that the lordship of the ego, the “Lord,” would enter men's souls. This is what the initiation of the Waterman gave.

But simultaneously the Baptist declared that the time had now come when a change was to take place in this initiation, it was to be replaced by another, one by which men would be able to understand the approaching lordship of the ego. Therefore he said to his disciples:—“I am he who, through the initiation of the Waterman has all the powers of his Angel at his disposal. But after me ONE will come who has at his command all the subsequent powers of his Angel!”

If you advance by day toward the sun from the constellation of Ares, through that of the Bull, the Twins and so on to Virgo, you must advance at night from the direction of the Waterman (Aquarius) to the constellation of the Fishes, that is, you must advance in the direction of the Spiritual Sun. John had received the Waterman-initiation, and he pointed out that he who was to come after him would be an Initiate of Picis, the initiation which follows on the initiation passed through by John, and was therefore of a higher order. The Baptist told his intimate disciples:—“Through the initiation of Aquarius I have only those powers at my disposal by which I can announce through my Angel that the Lord—the ruler—is coming, but after me One will come who has powers symbolised by the initiation of the sign of the Fishes. Into him the Christ will enter!”

In these words John the Baptist refers to Jesus of Nazareth. Ancient tradition has on this account assigned to Christ Jesus the symbol of the Fish; and as everything that occurs outwardly is symbolic of in-ward events—though these may occur outwardly—the helpers appointed to Him were fishermen. This is an external historic fact, at the same time as regards spiritual secrets it is profoundly symbolic. John declared “a higher initiation is to come to humanity,” and he described himself as a “Waterman.” This is absolutely clear. But we must learn to see ever more clearly how the images employed to express the hidden things of men are at the same time connected with astronomical and cosmic mysteries.

“I have baptised you with water,” said John. Water baptism was specially the baptism within the power of those who had received from heaven the initiation of the “Waterman.” But in that the Spiritual Sun progresses in the opposite direction to the physical sun, which advances from the sign of the Virgin to that of the Balance; the Spiritual Sun (as in the advance from John the Baptist to Jesus of Nazareth) progresses from the Waterman to the Fishes. And were anyone to appear in the world having experienced the initiation of the Fishes and able therefore to receive into him those spiritual forces, those spiritual impulses, which are the instruments of the Fish-initiation, then it would be possible for him to baptise not only as John did with water, but to baptise in the higher sense described by John as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

In this lecture I have put before you in a certain way a two-fold conception:—Firstly, I have shown that in the Gospel according to Mark facts of human evolution, historical events, are dealt with in which mention is made of a higher Power, of an “Angelic,” not a human power; and that this Power spoke through John the Baptist. On the other hand I have shown that in the accounts given here reference is made to heavenly events; namely, to the progress of the Spiritual Sun from the sign of the Waterman to that of the Fishes. Indeed the Gospel according to Mark contains in every verse something which can only be read aright, when, in the sequence of the words, we keep before us both their human and their cosmic, astronomical meaning, and when we realise that something lives in man, the true significance of which is only to be found in heaven. Only when this is done can the connection between the mysteries of the cosmos and the mysteries of human nature be more clearly understood. To-day, at the close of my lecture, I can but hint at what lies behind such things. I merely wished to-day to give you some premonitions of what lies in this direction. For we shall have to dive to very great depths in studying the Gospel of Mark, and you will have to ponder long and deeply if you are to attain to something more than “premonitions.” In what follows I will try to make clear to you the way this Gospel has to be read.

You all know the rainbow. To a child it appears as something real in the firmament. Until explained to him, he believes he can grasp it with his hands. Later, man learns that the rainbow does not depend on itself, but that it only appears when rain and sunshine stand related to each other in a certain way; when this relationship is changed it disappears. Thus it is not a reality; it is but an illusion. The realities as regards the rainbow are rain and sunshine.

If anyone has made a little progress on the path of occult development something is revealed to him which quite of himself he compares with the rainbow. Of this he says:—It is actually not true, it is but an appearance held together by things outside it. Do you know what this “appearance” is? It is man himself!

Man is only an appearance, a semblance, and if with his physical senses he regards himself as reality, he has given himself over to illusion—to Maya the great “Non est.” For the word “Maya” is compounded of “Mahat aya.” (Mahat=great, ya = Being, and a= not); signifying the great non-being. On the path of occult development man reaches a point where he compares himself with something resembling a rainbow; he realises he is but a semblance, a delusion, and that everything that is perceived by the senses is delusion also. The sun as physical globe is a delusion. What physical science describes as a ball of gas in space is quite correct for practical purposes, but anyone who regards this as reality is giving himself over to delusion—to Maya. The truth regarding the sun is that it is a meeting-place of the spiritual Hierarchies, whose deeds are expressed in warmth and light, and who approach us in the warmth and light of the sun. The warmth and light we perceive is illusion. All appearance is illusion.

A man thinks he has a heart in his breast, but this heart is a delusion, nothing more. It is like the rings we see round street lamps on a misty autumn evening. These rings are not reality, but are produced by clearly defined forces. So is the human heart. You can perceive this in the following way. Suppose that this circle I have drawn represents the vault of the heavens one kind of force streams into us from one side, other forces from other sides, these forces split up here in the centre where I have drawn a small circle.

Nothing of the forces that stream into man from heaven and split up there (sich schneiden) really exist where he thinks they do, in his heart. Think everything else away except the forces that meet in you, as light meets in the rainbow—what remains is the human heart. It is the same with our other organs: they are fragments of forces (Schnittkräfte) caused by the breaking up of world forces.

When you move from one place to another you say “There is an impulse in me to move from here to there.” In saying this you say something that appertains to Maya. Why? Because forces come from the Macrocosm, which are split up down here (sich schneiden), and these broken-up fragments give rise to: illusion concerning the power and direction in walking. The results met with down here are but fragments of cosmic forces. If we desire to know the truth we must ask:—What takes place in the Macrocosm? What do cosmic forces bring about, both the upper and the lower? They bring that about in us that makes it appear as if we had a heart, a liver, etc., or that has such an appearance that we say: I walk from here to there. If the truth regarding this were to be described, we would have to describe cosmic forces.

If we wish to describe what John the Baptist did when he baptised, we must describe what the Macrocosm, that is the forces represented by the sign of the Waterman, charged him to do. This was determined at one time within the great cosmic lodge, and the forces necessary for it were sent down into John. It is thus, in the language of the Cosmos, we must read what took place at a certain point of time. It was thus the writer of the Gospel according to Mark read the heavenly events corresponding with the earthly events that occurred in Palestine. He describes astronomical occurrences when he says:—“Understand what I have to say to you in this way: suppose there is here a wall on which visible shadows play. If you wish to know the real cause of these shadows you must consider the things of which they are the reflections. I describe what took place at Jordan, all the same they are but the instruments of something else; in reality I am describing what was brought about on earth through the astronomical forces of the Macrocosm!”

The writer of the Gospel of Mark describes cosmic forces. He describes the shadow-pictures or projections thrown by mighty macrocosmic events on to the screen provided by the small district of Palestine. We must realise this clearly if we are to enter into the full greatness and importance of the document we call the Gospel of Mark; but we must first try to form something of the nature of a divination of what it is that is here presented to us. We must endeavour to understand what it is we are told in the beginning of the Gospel. The Prophet Isaiah had foretold that the Lord of the soul-forces of mankind would come, that in John the Baptist the “messenger” would dwell, who would prepare man for the reception of this ruler of his soul-forces. This messenger had first to take as his dwelling place the body of one who had passed through the initiation of the Waterman, who was able therefore to lead men on the path that is connected on earth with such an individuality as Jesus of Nazareth; one who because he had received the Fish-initiation had prepared himself for the reception of the Christ.

All the events that take place on earth are the reflections of cosmic events, and are connected with cosmic conditions in the same way as the rainbow is connected with rain and sunshine, and as, if we wish to describe the rainbow, we must study rain and sunshine. If we wish to know what was in the heart of John the Baptist or of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ dwelt, we must study cosmic conditions. So far as man is concerned, the whole world is explained by what took place in Palestine and on Golgotha. He who does not read the Gospel of Mark otherwise than merely as a document, which provides him with groups of letters descriptive of great world events, is on a level with one who says:—“Here I have one group of lines and strokes, there another;” he has no conception of what is referred to in the word “Lord,” but thinks only of the black letters. It is mostly in this way that the Gospel of Mark is read in our day. For what is told in it is but the outer lettering of what it really contains. To understand this Gospel we must rise to the level of those things to which, as in a shadowy reproduction, the events in Palestine refer.

Try to get at the meaning of the words:—“Earthly events are the shadows of macrocosmic events.” When you have done this you will have taken the first step in the understanding of one of the greatest documents in the world—the Gospel according to St. Mark.

• 1. “Behold” is no longer correct.

In the last Lecture I began by giving some idea of the nature and character of the Gospel according to Mark. I showed that when this Gospel is studied something more can be gathered from it than from the other Gospels concerning the great laws both of human and cosmic development. One has to acknowledge that in what is indicated concerning the profundities of the Christian Mystery, an opportunity is here given us to enter perhaps most deeply into these mighty secrets.

I originally thought that it might be possible, in the course of this winter, to give intimate and important instructions concerning matters we have not heard as yet within our spiritual-scientific movement; or perhaps I should say concerning things that lie on the border of spiritual matters not as yet dealt with by us. But it has been necessary to abandon this scheme, for the simple reason that our Berlin Group has grown so enormously during recent weeks that it would not have been possible at present to bring to the understanding of its members all that I had intended to say.

It is necessary in the case of mathematics, for instance, or any other science, that preparation should he made for any special stage, and this is necessary to a still higher degree when we advance to the consideration of certain high spiritual matters. Therefore we shall leave to a later date the consideration of those parts of the Gospel of Mark which cannot be explained to so large a circle.

It is most necessary when a document like this Gospel is under consideration that we should clearly understand through what important factors the evolution of mankind has passed. I have always impressed on you—as a quite abstract and general truth—that in every age there have always been certain guides or leaders of men who, because they stood in a certain relationship to the Mysteries, to the spiritual super-sensible world, were in a position to implant impulses in human evolution which contributed to its further progress. Now there are two principal and essential methods by which men can come into relationship with super-sensible worlds. The one is that to which I have referred when indicating certain features of the teaching of that great leader, Zarathustra; and the other is one that comes before our souls when we study the special methods of the great Buddha. These two great teachers, Buddha and Zarathustra, differ very much as regards their whole method and manner of working.

We must realise that the entrance into that state which Buddha and Buddhism describe as being “under the Bodhi tree,” is a symbolic expression for a certain mystic enhancement of consciousness, and opens a path by which the human ego can enter into its own Being, its own deeper nature. This path, blazed by Buddha in such an outstanding way, is a descent of the ego into the abyss of its own human nature.

You will gain a more exact idea of what is meant by this if you recall that we have followed man through four stages of development, three of which are already concluded and the fourth is that we are in at present. We have traced human development through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; now it is passing through the Earth-evolution.

We know these three stages correspond with the upbuilding of the physical, the etheric, and the astral natures of man; that now during earthly evolution we are at the stage corresponding to the development of the human ego, in so far as this can be developed as a member of man's Being. We have described the human Being from various points of view as an ego enclosed within three sheaths: an astral sheath corresponding to the Moon-evolution, an etheric sheath corresponding to the Sun-evolution, and a physical sheath corresponding to the Saturn-evolution.

As normally developed to-day, man has no consciousness of his astral, etheric and physical bodies, he really knows nothing of them. You will naturally say: but man is aware to-day of his physical body. This, however, is not the case. What ordinarily confronts him as the human physical body to-day is only illusion, Maya. What he regards as the physical body is in reality the interblending activity of the four members of his Being physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego; and the result of this interplay, of these interblended activities, is what our eyes see and our hands grasp as man. If we really wish to see the physical body we must separate off three parts and retain one; as when analysing a chemical compound formed of four substances; we must separate the ego, astral body and etheric body, then the physical body remains. But this is not possible under present conditions of earthly existence. You might perhaps say this happens whenever a man dies. But this is not correct, for what a man leaves behind at death is not the human physical body but a corpse. The physical body cannot live when the laws present at death are active in it. These laws did not originally belong to the body, but are laws belonging to the external world. If you carry out these thoughts you must acknowledge that what is usually called man's body, is a Maya, an illusion, and what spiritual science calls the “physical body” is the combination, the result, within our mineral world of organic laws, which produces the physical body of man in the same way as the laws of crystallisation produce quartz, or those of emerald-crystallisation produce emeralds. This physical body of man as it works in the physical mineral world is the true human body. What man knows of the world to-day is but the outcome of observation made by the senses. But observation as it is made by the senses can only be made by an organism in which an ego dwells. The present day superficial method of observation states that animals perceive the external world, for example, in the same way as men do; through their senses. This is a most confused conception, people would be much astonished if they were shown, as must be clone some day, the picture of the world formed by a horse, a dog, or any other animal. If a picture were made of what a horse or a dog sees round it this would be very different from the picture of the world as seen by man. That the human senses perceive the world as they do is connected with the fact that the ego reaches out over the whole surrounding world and fills the sense organs, eyes, ears and so on, with the pictures it perceives. So that only an organism in which an ego dwells can have such a picture of the world as man has; and the human organism belongs to this picture and is part of it. We must therefore say: What is usually called the “physical body” of man is only the result of sense-observation and not reality. When we speak of physical man and of the physical objects around him it is the ego, aided by the senses and the understanding connected with the brain, that regards the world. Hence man only knows those things over which his ego extends, to which his ego belongs. So soon as the ego is not present the pictures the world presents to it are no longer there; this means the man is asleep. Then no pictures of the world surround him—he is unconscious.

Whenever you regard anything, at every moment, the ego is hound up with what you see. It is spread out over what you see so that you really know only the content of your ego. As normal human Beings you know the content of your ego, but of that which belongs to your own nature, into which you enter each morning when you wake—of your astral body, etheric body, and physical body you know nothing. The moment he awakes, the normal man of to-day sees nothing of his astral body. He would indeed be horrified if he did, that is if he perceived the sum of the instincts, desires and passions that have accumulated in him in the course of his repeated earthly lives. Man does not see these. He would not be able to endure the sight. When he does dip down into his own nature, into his physical, etheric and astral bodies his attention is at once deflected from this to the external world; he there beholds what beneficent Divine Beings spread over the surface of his sphere of vision, so that it is in no way possible for him to sink into his own inner nature.

We are correct therefore when in speaking of this in spiritual science we say: The moment a man awakes in the morning he enters through the door of his own being. But at this door stands a watcher, the “little guardian of the threshold.” He does not permit man to enter his own being, but directs him at once to the outer world. Each morning we meet this little guardian of the threshold, and anyone who on awakening enters his own nature consciously, learns to know him. In fact the mystic life consists in whether this little guardian of the threshold acts beneficently towards us, making us unaware of our own being, turning our ego aside so that we do not descend into it, or permitting us to pass through the door and enter into our own being. The mystic life enters through the door I have described, and this in Buddhism is called “sitting under the Bodhi tree.” This is nothing else than the descent of a man into his own being through the door that is ordinarily closed to him. What Buddha experienced in this descent is set before us in Buddhistic writings. Such things are no mere legends, but the reflections of profound truths experienced inwardly—truths concerning the soul. These experiences in the language of Buddhism are called “The Temptation of Buddha.”

Speaking of this Buddha himself tells us how the Beings he loved approached him at the moment when he entered mystically into his own inner being. He tells how they seemed to approach him bidding him to do this or that—for instance, to carry out false exercises so as to enter in a wrong way into his own being. We are even told that the form of his mother appeared to him—he beheld her in her spiritual substance—and she ordered him to begin a false Askese. Naturally this was not the real mother of Buddha. But his temptation consisted in this very fact, that in his first evolved vision he was confronted not by his real mother but by a mask or illusion. Buddha withstood this temptation. Then a host of demoniac forms appeared to him, these he describes as desires, telling how they corresponded to the sensation of hunger and thirst, or the instinct of pride, conceit and arrogance. All these approached him—how? They approached him in so far as they were still within his own astral body, in so far as he had not overcome them at that great moment of his life when he sat under the Bodhi tree. Buddha shows us in a most wonderful way in this temptation, how we feel all the forces and powers of our astral body, which are within us because we have made them ever worse and worse in the course of our development through succeeding incarnations. In spite of having risen so high Buddha still sees them, and now at the final stage of his progress he has to overcome the last of these misleading forces of his astral body which appear to him as demons.

What does a human personality find when through temptation it passes down through the realms of its astral body and etheric body into its physical body? That is, when it really gets to know these two members of human nature?

If we are to know this, we must realise that in the course of his descending incarnations on earth man has been in a position to injure his astral body very much, but has not been able to injure his etheric and physical bodies to the same extent. The astral body is deteriorated through the “Egoism of human nature,” through greed, hate, selfishness, arrogance and pride. Through all these, and through his lower desires man injures his astral body. The greater part of the etheric body is so strong that however much a man may try to injure it he is unable to do so, for the etheric body resists injury. A man cannot descend so deeply into his own nature with his individual powers, as to injure the etheric or physical body. It is only in the course of repeated incarnations that the faults he develops directly affect the physical and etheric bodies injuriously, and appear later as weaknesses and as dispositions to illness in the physical body. But a man cannot affect his physical body directly. If he cuts his finger, this is not brought about through the soul, neither is infection. In the course of his incarnations he has only become capable of affecting his astral body and a part of his etheric body; on his physical body he can only work indirectly, not directly. We can therefore say if a man descends into his etheric body on which he can still work directly he sees in this region all the things connected with his former incarnations, so that the moment he dips clown into his own being he also dips into his earlier, more remote incarnations. Man can therefore find the way to his former incarnation by sinking down into his own being. If this plunging down into his own being is very intensive, very thorough and forceful, as was the case with Buddha, the insight into other incarnations goes further and further back.

Originally man was a spiritual being, the sheaths that envelop his spiritual nature only gathered round him at a later day. Man came forth from Spirit, and everything external has condensed, as it were, out of Spirit. So that in sinking down into his own being man enters into the Spirit of the world. This sinking down, this breaking through the sheaths of the physical body, is one path into the spiritual framework of the world.

In the information handed down to us concerning Buddha (and these are no mere legends) we learn of the different stages he attained in the passage through his own being, of which he says:—“When I had got as far as to the attainment of illumination”—that is when he felt himself to be a part of the spiritual world—“I beheld the spiritual world as a cloud spread out before me; but as yet I could not distinguish anything; I felt I was not as yet ready for this. Then I advanced a step further. There I no longer merely saw the spiritual world as a widespread cloud, but could distinguish separate forms, although I could not yet see what these forms were, for I was not yet sufficiently advanced. Again I rose a step higher, there I perceived not only separate Beings, but I knew what kind of Beings they were.”

This continued so far that Buddha even beheld his own archetype, that which had passed down from generation to generation, and he saw it in its true connection with the spiritual world. This is one path, the mystic path, the path leading through a man's own being to the point where the boundaries are broken down beyond which lies the spiritual world. By following this path certain leaders of humanity attained what such individuals had to have in order that they could give the necessary impulse to the further development of mankind.

It is by quite another path that personalities, such as the first Zarathustra for instance, attained what enabled them to become leaders of humanity. If you recall what I said about Buddha you will realise that in his former incarnations when he was a Bodhisattva he must have already risen through many stages. Through illumination—that which is known as “sitting under the Bodhi tree”—I described in the only way it can be described how an individual can gradually rise through his personal merit to heights whence he can behold the spiritual world.

If humanity had only had such leaders to look to, it could not possibly have advanced as it has. But it had also other leaders. Of these Zarathustra was one. (I am not speaking now of the “individuality” of Zarathustra, but of the personality of the original Zarathustra who taught concerning Ahura Mazdao.) In studying this personality in the parts of the world in which we find him, we must realise, that at first no individuality was in him as had risen so high through his own merit as Buddha had done; but he had been set apart to be the bearer, the sheath one might say, of a higher Being, of a spiritual entity, who could not himself incarnate in the world, but could only illuminate and work within a human form.

I have shown in my Rosicrucian Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation,” how when it is necessary for the further evolution of the world, a human Being is inspired at certain times by some higher Being. This is not intended as a mere poetic image, but is an occult truth presented poetically. The personality of the original Zarathustra was no such highly evolved Being as the Buddha, but was chosen as one into whom a high individuality could enter, could dwell, and inspire him. Such persons were mainly found in olden times, that is in pre-Christian times, in the civilisations that evolved in North-Western Europe and Mid-Western Asia, but not among the peoples that in pre-Christian times evolved in Africa, Arabia, and the districts of Asia Minor extending eastwards into Asia. In these countries that kind of initiation was found which I have just described in its highest development as that of Buddha; while the other I am now about to describe as that of Zarathustra was more suited to northern peoples. The possibility of anyone being initiated in this way has only existed, even in our part of the world, for the last three or four thousand years. The personality of Zarathustra was selected somewhat in the following way to be the bearer of a higher Being, who could not himself incarnate. It was ordained from the spiritual worlds that a Spiritual Being should enter into some child, and when the child had grown up should work within this human being making use of the instruments of his brain, his will, etc. In order that this might take place something quite different had to happen than would otherwise happen in the individual evolution of this human being. Now the events I am about to describe did not happen in any such physical way throughout the life of this highly evolved human being as they otherwise should; though, naturally, people who follow the life of such a child with ordinary perceptions do not observe this. But those who have higher perception see that there is conflict from the beginning between the soul-forces of this child and the outer world, that it is possessed of a will, of an impulsiveness that is in apparent contradiction to all that goes on around it. The fate of this divine, spirit-filled personality is that it grows up as a stranger, that those about it have no idea, no feeling, by which they can rightly understand such a child. As a rule there are few, perhaps only one person, who is able to divine what is developing within this human being. Conflict with its surroundings is apt to develop, and then occurs (but not till later years) what I described as happening when dealing with the story of the temptation of Buddha, when a man descends into his own being.

In normal life a man's individuality is born in him by means of the “sheath-nature” he receives from his parents or his nation. This individuality is not always in entire harmony with its sheaths, and on this account such a man feels more or less dissatisfied with the way fate has treated him. But so heavy, so mighty a conflict as occurred in Zarathustra's case is not possible if a man's individuality develops as it does in ordinary life. When a child like Zarathustra is observed clairvoyantly it is seen that he has feelings, thoughts, and powers of will very different from the feelings, thoughts and will-impulses developed by the people about him. We are shown (and indeed it is always to be seen, only nowadays people do not notice spiritual, but only physical facts) that the people around such a child know nothing of his nature. They feel on the contrary, an instinctive hatred for him, no matter what may be developing within him. To clairvoyant vision the sharp contrast is revealed that such a child who is really born for the salvation of mankind is surrounded by storms of hatred.

This has to he. It is because of this contrast that great impulses are born into humanity. Similar things are then told concerning such personalities as are told of Zarathustra.

One thing we are told—that Zarathustra could do at birth which otherwise only occurs weeks later. We are told he looked on the harmony of the world in such a way that he evolved his “Zarathustra smile.” This smile is described as the first thing which showed him to be quite different from the rest of mankind. The second thing is that there was an enemy, a kind of King Herod, in the neighbourhood where Zarathustra was born. His name was Duranasarum, and after he had been informed of the birth of Zarathustra, which had been divulged to him by the Magi, the Chaldeans, he tried single-handed to murder the child. The legend goes on to tell how, at the moment he raised his sword to kill the child, his Hand was paralysed, and he was forced to let it go. These are pictures perceived by spiritual consciousness, pictures of spiritual realities. Further, we are told how this enemy of the child Zarathustra, unable himself to slay him, had him carried away by his servant to the wild beasts of the wilderness so that he might be devoured by them; but when people went to look for him no wild beast had harmed him, the child was found sleeping peacefully. As this attempt failed his enemy had the child placed where a whole herd of cows and oxen would pass over him and trample him to death. But the first beast, so we are told, took the child between its legs and bore it away, so that the rest of the herd might pass by; it then set him down uninjured. The same thing was repeated with a drove of horses. And the final attempt of this enemy was that he was given to some wild animals after their young had been taken from them. Now it happened when his parents sent people to look for him, they found that none of these animals had harmed him, but as the legend relates “the child Zarathustra was nourished for a considerable time by a heavenly cow.”

We need see no more in all this mass of evidence than that through the presence of the spiritual individuality that had been introduced into such a soul, very exceptional powers had been aroused in the child which brought it into disharmony with its surroundings, and that this was necessary in order that an upward impulse could be given to human evolution. For disharmonies are always necessary if true progress towards perfection is to be made. The nature of these forces is thus revealed, in spite of so great a Being making use of such a child they were required to bring it in touch with the spiritual world into which it was to enter. But how did the child experience this conflict? Picture to yourselves the entering of the soul into its own being at a moment of awaking. When the soul is able to experience the physical body and etheric body it then passes through the evolution I described in respect of Buddha. Now think of falling asleep as a conscious process. As things are to-day man loses consciousness when he falls asleep, instead of the ordinary pictures of the world a blank surrounds him. But suppose that a man could retain his consciousness when falling asleep, he would in that case be surrounded by a spiritual world—the world into which he pours his Being when sleep overtakes him. But here also there are hindrances. When we fall asleep a guardian of the threshold stands before the door through which we would have to pass. This is the Great Guardian who prevents our entrance into the spiritual world so long as we are unripe. He prevents our entrance because if we have not made ourselves inwardly strong enough, we are exposed to certain dangers when we allow our ego to pour forth over the spiritual world into which we enter when we fall asleep. The danger consists in this, that instead of seeing what is in the spiritual world objectively, we only see what we take there through our own fanciful imaginations, through our thoughts, perceptions and feelings. In this case we take what is worst in us, what is not in accordance with truth. Hence an unripe entry into the spiritual world indicates that a man does not see reality but imaginary forms, fantastic images which are described technically in spiritual science as “non-human visions.” If a man would see objectively in the spiritual world he must rise to a higher stage where “human” things are seen. It is always a sign of a fantastic vision when animal forms are seen on rising to the spiritual world. Such animal forms represent the man's own fantasy, and are owing to his not being strongly enough established in himself. What is unconscious in us at night must be strengthened so that the surrounding spiritual world becomes objective, otherwise it is subjective, and we take our fantasies with us into the spiritual world. They are within us in any case; but the Guardian preserves us from seeing them. This rising into the spiritual world and being surrounded by animal forms which attack us and desire to lead us astray is a purely inward experience. We have only to encompass ourselves with greater inward strength, we can then enter the spiritual world.

When a child is filled by a higher Being, as was the young Zarathustra, his bodily nature is naturally unripe, and has first to become ripe. The human organism, that is the understanding and sense-organisms, are disturbed. Such a child is in a world which is rightly described as “being among wild animals.”

We have often shown that descriptions like this, which are both historical and pictorial, only represent different sides of the same matter. Events then happen so that spiritual powers, when represented as hostile forces, make their influence felt as did King Duranasarum in the case of the child Zarathustra. The whole thing exists in its archetypal form in the spiritual world, and external happenings only correspond with what takes place there. Present day methods of thought do not grasp such ideas easily. When people are told that the events connected with Zarathustra are of importance in the spiritual world they think—“Then they are not real.” But when they are shown to be historic, the man of to-day is then inclined to regard everyone as only evolved so far as he is himself.

The endeavour of present day liberal theologians, for instance, is to present the figure of Jesus of Nazareth as being similar to, or at least as not far surpassing, what they can picture to themselves as their own ideal. It disturbs the materialistic peace of their souls when they have to picture great individualities. There should not be anyone in the world, they think, so very much exalted above the modern Professor of Theology.

But when dealing with great events, we are concerned with something that is at the same time both historic and symbolic, so that the one does not exclude the other. Those who do not understand that external things indicate more than appears on the surface will not attain to the understanding of what is true and essential.

The soul of the young Zarathustra really passed through great dangers in his early years, but at the same time, as the legend tells, the heavenly cows stood at his side helping and strengthening him.

We find similar things happening to all great founders of religions through all the regions of the Caspian Sea and even into Western Europe. We find people (without their having raised themselves through their own development) who are ensouled by a spiritual Being so that they can become leaders of mankind. Numerous legends and sagas exist among Celtic peoples, They tell of a founder of religion, one Habich, he was exposed as a child and was nourished by heavenly cows, hostile forces appeared later on and drove away the animals—in short, the accounts of the dangers to the Celtic leader Habich are such that one can almost say they were extracts from certain of the miracles of Zarathustra. While we recognise Zarathustra as the greatest of these personalities, certain features of his miracles are found everywhere, all through Greece and as far as the Celtic countries of the West. As a well-known example we have only to think of the story of Romulus and Remus.

This is the other way in which the leaders of mankind arose. In speaking of it we have described, in a deeper sense, what we have often considered before: the two great streams of civilisation of post-Atlantean times. After the great catastrophe of Atlantis one of these streams continued to spread and develop throughout Africa, Arabia and Southern Asia; the other, which took a more northerly course, passed through Europe and Northern Central Asia. Here these two streams eventually met. All that has come to pass as a result of this is comprised in our post-Atlantean culture. The northern stream had leaders such as I have just described in Zarathustra; the southern, on the other hand, those such as we see in their highest representative in the great Buddha.

If you recall what you already know in connection with the Christ Event you might ask:—How does the Baptism by John in Jordan now strike us? The Christ came down and entered into a human being—as Divine Beings had entered into all the leaders and founders of religions—and into Zarathustra as the greatest of these. The process is the same, only here it is carried out in its sublimest form: Christ entered into a human being. But He did not enter this human being in childhood. He entered it in its thirtieth year, and the personality of Jesus of Nazareth had been very specially prepared for this event. The secrets of both sides of human leadership are given us in synthesis in the Gospels. Here we see them united and harmonised. While the evangelists, Matthew and Luke preferably, tell us how the human personality was organised into which the Christ entered; the Gospel according to Mark describes the nature of the Christ, tells of the kind of Being he himself is. The element that filled this great individual is what is especially described by Mark. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke give us in a wonderfully clear manner a different account of the temptation from that given in the Gospel of Mark, because Mark describes the Christ who had entered into Jesus of Nazareth. Hence the story of the temptation has here to be presented as it occurred formerly in the childhood of such great persons: the presence of animals is mentioned and the help received from spiritual powers. So that we have a repetition of the miracles of Zarathustra when the Gospel of Mark states in simple but imposing words:

“And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness (loneliness). And he was there in the wilderness with the wild beasts; and the angels (that is Spiritual Beings) ministered unto him.” (Mark I, 12-13).

The Gospel of Matthew describes this quite differently, it describes what we perceive to be somewhat like a repetition of the temptation of Buddha; this means the form temptation assumes at the descent of a man into his own Being; when all those temptations and seductions approach to which the human soul is liable.

We can therefore say the Gospels of Matthew and Luke describe the path the Christ travelled when He descended into the sheaths that had been given over to him by Jesus of Nazareth; and the Gospel according to Mark describes the kind of temptation Christ had to pass through when He experienced the shock of coming up against His surroundings, as happens to all founders of religions who are inspired and intuited by Spiritual Beings from above.

Christ Jesus experienced both these forms of temptation, whereas earlier leaders of mankind only experience one of them. He united in Himself the two methods of entering the spiritual world; this is of the greatest importance; what formerly had occurred within two great streams of culture (into which smaller contributory streams also entered) was now united into one.

It is when regarded from this standpoint that we first understand the apparent or real contradictions in the Gospels. Mark had been initiated into such mysteries as enabled him to describe the temptation as we find it in his Gospel; the “Being with wild beasts,” and the ministration of spiritual Beings. Luke was initiated in another way. Each evangelist describes what he knows and is familiar with. Thus what we are told in the Gospels are the events of Palestine and the Mystery of Golgotha, but told from different sides.

In stating this I wish once more to put before you, from a point of view we have as yet not been able to discuss, how human evolution has to be understood; and also how we must understand the intervention into it of such individuals as are passing on from the evolution of a Bodhisattva to that of a Buddha. We have to understand that the main thing in the evolution of these men is not so much what they are as men, but what has come down into them from above. Only in the form of Christ are these two united, and it is only when we realise this that we can rightly understand this form. We can also understand through this the many inequalities that must appear in Mythical personalities.

When we are told that certain Spiritual Beings have done this or that, in respect of what is right or wrong, and have done, for instance, what Siegfried did, one often hears people exclaim:—“And yet he was an Initiate!” But Siegfried's individual evolution does not come under consideration as regards a personality through whom a Spiritual Being is working. Siegfried may have faults. But what matters is that through him something had to be given to human evolution. For this a suitable personality had to be found. Everyone cannot be treated alike; Siegfried cannot be judged in the same way as a leader who belonged to the southern stream of culture, for the whole nature and type of those who sunk down within their own being was different. Thus one can say:—A Spiritual Being entered the forms belonging to the northern culture, compelling them to transcend their own nature and rise into the Macrocosm. While in the southern stream of culture a man sank down into the Microcosm, in the northern stream of culture he poured himself forth into the Macrocosm, and by doing so he learnt to know all the Spiritual Hierarchies as Zarathustra learnt to know the spiritual nature of the Sun.

The law contained herein can be summed up as follows:—The Mystic path, the path of Buddha, leads a man so far within his own inner being that breaking through this inner being he enters the Spiritual World. The path of Zarathustra draws a man out of the Microcosm, sending his being forth over the Macrocosm so that its secrets become transparent to him. The world has as yet little understanding of the mighty Spirits whose mission it is to reveal the secrets of the great universe. For this reason very little real understanding of the nature of Zarathustra has spread abroad, and we shall see how greatly what we have to say concerning him differs from what is usually said of him.

This lecture has again been an Excursus concerning those things which should gradually reveal to you the nature of the Gospel according to St. Mark.

If you continue reading the Gospel of Mark from the verses we endeavoured to explain in the last lecture, you come to a remarkable passage similar in every way to what we are told in the other Gospels, but the full meaning of which can be best studied in the Gospel of Mark. This passage tells how Jesus Christ, after He had received baptism in Jordan and passed through the experiences met with in the wilderness, went into the synagogue and taught. The passage is generally translated as follows:—“And they were astonished at his doctrine: for He taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes.” What more does this sentence mean to the man of to-day, however much he may believe the Bible, than the somewhat abstract statement: “He taught with authority and not as the scribes?” If we take the Greek text we find for the words “For he taught with authority”—“He taught as an Exusiai” and not as the “scribes.”

If we enter deeply into the meaning of this important passage, it leads us a step further towards what may be called the secrets of the mission of Christ Jesus. For I have already remarked that the Gospels as well as other writings that spring from inspired sources are not to be understood so simply as people think, but that we must bring to the understanding of them everything in the way of thoughts and ideas concerning the spiritual world that we have been able, to acquire in the course of many years. Only such thoughts can show us what is meant in the Gospel where it say:—For he taught those who sat in the synagogue as an “Exusiai,” as a Power, and not as those who are hero called “scribes.”

If such a sentence is to be understood we must recall the knowledge we have acquired in recent years concerning the super-sensible worlds. We have learnt during this period that man as he lives in this world is the lowest member of a hierarchical order; it is here we must place him. He is a part of the super-sensible world, a world where, in the first place, we find Beings called in Christian esotericism, Angeloi or Angels; these are the Beings standing next above man. Above them come the Archangeloi or Archangels, then the Archai or Spirits of Personality. Above these again are the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, and still higher are the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. We have thus a Hierarchical order of nine kinds of Beings one above the other, the lowest of which is man. Now we ought to understand how these many different spiritual or super-sensible Beings intervene in our lives.

Angels are those who, as messengers of super-sensible realms, stand nearest to man as he is on earth; they constantly influence what may be called the fate of individuals on our physical plane. As soon as we mention Archangels on the other hand, we speak of Spiritual Beings whose activities cover a wider span. We can also call them “Folk-Spirits,” for they order and guide the concerns of whole nations or groups of peoples.

When a “Folk-Spirit” is spoken of to-day people generally mean so many thousands of people who are guided by this spirit merely because they live within the same territory. But when a “Folk-Spirit” is spoken of in spiritual science, we mean the individuality of the people, not such or such a number of people, but a real individuality, just as we speak of the “individuality” of separate men. And when speaking of the spiritual guidance of the individuality of a people this guide or leader is called an Archangel. In speaking of these exalted Beings we speak of real super-sensible entities having their own spheres of activity. The Archai (called also Spirits of Personality or first Beginnings) are spoken of in spiritual science as being again different from “Folk-Spirits.” We speak, for instance, of a French or an English or a German “Folk-Spirit,” and in doing so speak of something allotted to different parts of the earth. But there is something that unites all men, at least all western humanity, something in which these people feel at one. This, in contradistinction to the separate “Folk-Spirits,” we call the “Spirit of the Age or Time-Spirit” (Zeitgeist), there is a different “Time-Spirit” or Zeitgeist for the time of the Reformation from that of pre-Reformation times, and again a different one for our own day. The Beings we call “Time-Spirits” or Zeitgeists have therefore to be ranked above the separate “Folk-Spirits”; in fact the name Archai is given to these leaders of succeeding epochs, but all the same they are “Time-Spirits.”

When we rise still higher we come to the Exusiai, here we have to do with a quite different kind of super-sensible Being. In order to form an idea of how the Beings of the higher Hierarchies differ from the three just mentioned—the Angels, Archangels, Archai—think how similar members of one group of people is to another. As regards their external physical constitution—as regards what they eat and drink for instance—we cannot say they differ very much in anything outside the realm of the soul and spirit. Even in respect of succeeding epochs of time we must allow that the spiritual guides of humanity are connected only with the things of soul and spirit. But man does not consist only of soul and spirit, these influence mainly his astral body, but within his Being are also denser parts, and these, as regards the activities of the Archai, Archangels and Angels, do not differ much from each other. Creative influences are however at work on these denser members of man's Being, and this creative activity of Hierarchical Beings beginning with the “Exusiai,” continues upwards.

We have to thank the “Time-Spirits” Zeitgeister or Archai, and the “Folk-Spirit” or Archangels, for ideas connected with time and for speech, but human nature is influenced also by other things, by what lives in light and air and in the climate of particular districts. The humanity that flourishes at the Equator is different from that which flourishes at the North Pole. We do not perhaps quite agree with a well-known German professor of philosophy who states in a widely read book that “Important civilisations must develop in the temperate zone, for all those great Beings who have introduced important civilisations would have frozen at the North Pole and been burnt up at the South Pole!” We can say however, food, etc., is different in different climates, and this affects people differently. External conditions are by no means unimportant to the character of a people, whether this people dwells, for instance, among mountains or on wide plains. We observe how the forces of nature influence the whole constitution of man, and as students of spiritual science we know that the forces of nature are nothing else than the result of the activities of Beings of a spiritual nature. For we hold that super-sensible spiritual Beings are active in all the forces of nature and make use of these to influence man. We therefore distinguish between the activities of Archai and of Exusiai by saying:—Angels, Archangel and Archai do not influence man by making use of the forces of nature, but they make use of that which affects his spiritual nature, his speech, and the ideas that connect him with epochs of time. The activity of these Beings does not extend to the lower members of his organism, neither to the etheric nor yet the physical body. In the Exusiai, on the other hand, we have to recognise those higher Beings affecting mankind who work through the forces of nature, who are the bringers to man of the different kinds of air and light, of the various ways in which foodstuffs are produced within the different kingdoms of nature. It is they who control these kingdoms of nature.

What comes to us in thunder and lightning, in rain and sunshine, how one kind of food grows in one region, other kinds in other regions—in short, the whole distribution and organisation of earthly condition we ascribe to spiritual Beings that have to be sought among the higher Hierarchies. So that when we look up to the nature of the Exusiai we do not see the result of their activities in any such invisible way as in the case of the “Time-Spirits” for instance; but we see in them that which works on us in light, and that also works on the plant creation as light.

Let us now consider what was given to man as “culture,” what he had to learn in order to progress. Every man receives in his own age what this age has produced, but he also receives to a certain extent what former ages have produced. This can, however, only be preserved historically, can only be the result of historical teaching and learning. This is derived from the lowest of the Hierarchies, and reaches as far as to the “Time-Spirit.” What comes to man on the other hand from the kingdoms of nature, cannot be preserved in records or traditions. Yet those who are able to penetrate to super-sensible worlds pass beyond the sphere of Archangels to still higher revelations. Such revelations are perceived as carrying more weight than what comes from the realms of the Zeitgeists, they affect mankind in a quite special way.

Every clear thinking man should occasionally turn back and seriously ask himself—“Which has the greatest effect on my soul, that which I have learnt from the traditions of different peoples and ‘Time-Spirit’ since history began, or a lovely sunrise; that is, than the revelations of spiritual worlds presented to me by nature itself?”

Such a man feels that the grandeur and beauty of a sunrise reveals infinitely more to his soul than all the sciences, learning, and art of the ages. What nature reveals can be felt by anyone who having visited the Art Galleries of Italy and seen what have been preserved to us of the works of Michelangelo, of Leonardo da Vinci, or Raphael, and having allowed the power of these to act on him has then climbed one of the mountains of Switzerland, and viewed the marvellous spectacles provided by nature. He might then ask:—Who is the greater painter, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, or those Powers who paint the sunrise as seen from the Rigi? And he would be obliged to answer:—However much we may admire what man has achieved, what is here presented to us as the divine revelation of Spiritual Powers appears to us infinitely the greater!

When the great spiritual leaders of men appear whom we call Initiates, who speak not according to tradition but in an original way, their revelations resemble the revelations of nature itself. But what we feel in a sunrise would never have the same effect on us if it were something merely repeated. Compared with what we have received as the communications of Moses and Zarathustra, when these were traditional and had been handed down as the external culture which the “Time-Spirits” and “Folk-Spirits” had preserved and then passed on—compared with this what nature has to give is infinitely greater. For the revelations of Moses and of Zarathustra only worked as powerfully as nature's revelations when they sprang directly from the experiences of super-sensible worlds.

The grandeur of the original revelations made to man is seen in their power to affect him in the same way as the revelations of nature itself. But this only begins where, as lowest among the Hierarchies controlling nature, we divine something of the Exusiai.

What then was felt by those who sat in the synagogues when the Christ appeared among them?

We are told by the “Grammarians” that until then they had experienced those things which the “Time-Spirits,” “Folk-Spirits” and others had communicated to them. People had got accustomed to this; but now One had appeared who did not teach as those others, but so that His words were a revelation of the super-sensible Powers in nature itself, or of the Powers working in thunder and lightning.

Therefore when we know how the greatness of the Hierarchies increases as they ascend, we can understand such a saying in the Gospels and accept it in the full depth of its meaning. This is how we must feel about these words in the Gospel according to Mark, and even in such human endeavours as have come down to us in the works of art of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone with a feeling for the super-sensible quality lying behind these is aware—even in what remains—of all they originally presented to us. So that it is in all great works of art, in all great works of genius. Something continues to affect us in these like an echo of those others (the Hierarchies); and if we are able to see what Raphael, for instance, put into his pictures, or if we are able to pour fresh life into the works of Zarathustra, we can hear in them something of what streams down to us from the realms of the Exusiai. But in what was taught by the scribe in the Synagogue, that is, by those who accepted what originated from the “Folk-Spirits” and ”Time-Spirits,” nothing could be heard that agreed in any way with the revelations of nature.

We are justified therefore in saying, a sentence like this shows that men began at that time to have a feeling, a presentiment, that something entirely new was speaking to them; that through this man who had appeared among them something made itself felt that was like a power of nature, like one of those super-sensible powers that stand behind nature. Men began gradually to divine what it was that had entered into Jesus of Nazareth, and was symbolised in the baptism in Jordan. In reality, they were not far from the truth when they said in the synagogue: we feel when He speaks as though one of the Exusiai spoke—not only an Archai, or Archangel, or Angel.

It is only through what spiritual science has given us that we can fill once more with living sap these modern translations of the Gospels that have become so thin and meaningless; only then are we able to learn how very much goes to a true understanding of what is contained in the Gospels. It will take many generations to fathom, even approximately, all the depths of which our present age is only beginning to have some perception.

What the writer of the Gospel according to Mark desired especially to point out was really a further development of the teaching of Paul, who was one of the first to grasp the nature and Being of Christ through direct super-sensible knowledge.

Men had now to understand what Paul taught to all, what it was that all men could receive into them through the revelation of Damascus. Although this event is described in the Bible as a sudden illumination, yet those who know the truth regarding such occurrences know that it can happen at any moment to one who desires to rise to spiritual realms; and that through what such a man experiences he becomes a changed Being. With regard to Paul we are amply told how he became an entirely different man through the revelation made to him on the way to Damascus.

Even a superficial study of the letters of St. Paul will prove to anyone that he saw in the Event of Christ and in the Event of Golgotha the central point of our whole human evolution; that he associated this directly with that other event spoken of in the Bible as “the first creation,” the first Adam, so that he might have spoken somewhat as follows:—

What we describe as the true man, the spiritual man (of whom in this world of Maya only a Maya exists) came down in ancient Lemurian times to this world of illusion and to all he had to experience in the flesh in successive incarnations. He became man, as this was understood in Lemurian and Atlantean times, and up to the time of Christ. Then came the Event of Golgotha. All this was firmly fixed in the mind of Paul after the vision of Damascus. He realised that in the Event of Golgotha something was given which is comparable with the descent of man into the flesh. With this was given an impulse by which he could gradually overcome those forms of earthly existence which had entered into him through “Adam.” Hence Paul calls the humanity that began with Christ, the “new Adam,” the “Adam” that everyone can put on through union with the Christ.

We have therefore to see in the man of Lemurian times, and on into pre-Christian humanity, a slow and gradual descent of man into matter (whether he be called Adam or not). Then came the power and impulse that enabled him to rise again; so that along with all he acquired in earthly life man was able to return to his original spiritual state, that state in which he was before he descended into matter. Unless we misunderstand the true meaning of evolution we must now ask “Could man not have been spared this descent? Why had he to enter a fleshly body and pass through many incarnations, only then to rise again to what he had been before? Such questions can only spring from a complete misunderstanding of the spiritual nature of evolution. For man takes with him all the fruits and experiences of his earthly evolution, and is enriched with the results of his incarnations. These are results—contents, which he did not have previously. Picture to yourselves a man entering into his first incarnation: in it he learns certain things; he learns more in the second incarnation, and so on through all his subsequent incarnations. The course of these is a descending one; he is entangled more and more in the physical world. Then he begins to rise again, and is able to rise so far that he can receive within him the Christ-Impulse. One day he will again enter the spiritual world, but will have taken with him all he had gained on earth.

Paul saw in the Christ the true central point of the whole earthly evolution of man; he saw what gave man the impulse to rise to super-sensible worlds enriched by all the experiences he had gained on earth.

How, from this standpoint, did Paul regard the sacrifice on Golgotha, the actual crucifixion? It is not easy to bring these facts, these most essential facts of human evolution clearly before modern minds, in the sense in which Paul saw them. For this sense is also that of the writer of the Gospel of Mark. Before we can do this we must make ourselves familiar with the thought, that in man, as he comes before us to-day, we are concerned with a microcosm, a small world, and we must study everything that this idea brings with it.

As man comes before us to-day in the course of his evolution between birth and death in one re-incarnation, two parts of his development are presented which differ greatly from each other; only this difference is not noticed as a rule. I have frequently spoken about these fundamentally different parts of man's life (for our whole spiritually scientific endeavour has a more systematic construction than is often supposed), one of these parts or periods is that between birth and the moment to which at the present time memory extends. If we trace our life backwards, a point is finally reached beyond which all memory ceases. Although you were present, and have perhaps been told by parents or relatives of things you did, and so have knowledge of them, you have no recollection of them, memory does not reach beyond a certain point. Under favourable circumstances this lies round about the third year. Up to this period the child is specially active and impressionable. How much he has learnt during this period, during his first, second and third years! But of how things impressed him he has not the least recollection.

Then follows the time through which the thread of conscious memory extends smoothly.

These two parts of his development should be carefully considered, for they are of very great importance when man is studied as a whole. Human evolution must be followed carefully, and without the prejudices of modern science. The facts of modern science certainly confirm what I have to say; but if we are not to wander far from the truth we must not follow the prejudice of science. Observing human evolution closely we say:—Man's life among his fellows as a social being can only be lived in accordance with conditions regulated by memory, which begins as a rule about his third year. Of all that concerns this we can say: it is under the direction of our conscious life; all the things we consciously accept as laws according to which we guide our impulses, etc., and that we feel to be worthy, all this is contained in memory. Of what lies before we are unconscious so far as ego consciousness is concerned.

The threads of memory which belong to our conscious life do not reach to this period. There are therefore certain years of our conscious life during which the surrounding world works on us quite differently from how it does later. The difference is a most radical one. Were we able to observe a child before the period to which at a later age its memory extended, we should see that it then feels itself to he much more within general macrocosmic spiritual life; it is not yet separated from this, is not yet isolated within itself, but reckons that it belongs rather to the whole surrounding universe. It does not express itself as others; it does not say:—“I will,” but “Johnnie wills.” It only learns later to speak of itself as an ego; modern psychologists criticise such facts adversely, but this in no way denies the truth, but only their own powers of insight.

In its early years a child still feels within the whole surrounding world, feels that it is a part of this world. Memory first begins when it separates itself as an individual from the world around it. We can therefore say, the laws a man accepts, and which form the content of his consciousness, belong to the second part of his consciousness, to the second part of his evolution, the part we have just described. A quite different relationship to his environment belongs to the first part, he then feels far more a part of, far more within, the environing world. What I wish to say can only he clearly understood if you imagine hypothetically that the consciousness which gives man this direct contact with the surrounding universe in the first years of childhood, were able to continue. In that case his life would be entirely different, he would not feel so isolated, but would feel in later life that he was a part of the whole macrocosm, that he was within the great world. At present he loses this. He has no later connection with that world, he feels cut off from it. If he is a man belonging to ordinary life this feeling of isolation only comes to him in an abstract way. For instance, it enters his consciousness for the most part when egoism increases, when he shuts himself up, as it were, more and more within his own skin. Opinions limiting his life to what is contained within his skin are but half baked opinions, in fact nonsense, for the moment man exhales breath, the breath he had drawn in is now outside of him. So that even as regards our in-breathing and out-breathing we are continually in touch with our whole environment. The way man regards his own being is an absolute illusion, but his consciousness is such that he must live in this illusion. He cannot help himself. For we are really neither suited, nor are we ripe enough, to experience our own Karma at the present day. If, for example, someone wishes to close the window, we are apt, because we regard ourselves as separate beings, to feel injured and annoyed. But if we believed in Karma we would feel that we belonged to the whole macrocosm, and would know as a fact that it was really we who had closed the window, for we are interwoven with the whole cosmos. It is absolute nonsense to think we are enclosed within our skins. But the feeling of being one with the macrocosm is only retained by the child in its early years, it is lost from the point of time to which later its memory extends.

Things were not always thus. In former times, which do not lie so very far behind us, man was still able to a certain extent to carry this consciousness of his early years on into later times. This was in the days of the ancient clairvoyance. With it was associated a quite different kind of thinking as well as a different way of expressing facts. This is something belonging to human evolution that it would be well the student of spiritual science should understand.

When a man is born among us at the present day, what is he? He is in the first place the son of his father and of his mother. And if in communal life he has not got a certificate of birth or baptism showing the standing of his father and mother by which he can be identified nothing is known of him, and his existence is ignored. According to the ideas of the present day, a man is the physical son of his father and of his mother.

This is not how men thought at a time not so very long ago. But because the scientists and investigators of to-day do not know that in former times men thought differently, that their words and their relation-ships to each other were different from what they are now, they have therefore arrived at interpretations of ancient communications that are also quite different. We are told for instance, in these ancient communications of a Greek singer, Orpheus. I select him because he belongs to an age immediately preceding that of Christianity. It was Orpheus who inaugurated the Grecian Mysteries. The Greek age falls within the fourth period of post-Atlantean civilisations, so that in a way the Greeks were prepared by Orpheus for what they were to receive later through the Christ Event.

What would a modern man say if confronted by a person like Orpheus? He would say:—He is the son of such and such a father and mother, modern science might perhaps even look for “inherited attributes” in him. There exists to-day a large volume treating of all the inherited characteristics of the Goethe family, and would present Goethe as the sum of these inherited attributes. People did not think in this way at the time of Orpheus, they did not then regard external man and his attributes as what was most essential. The most essential thing in Orpheus was the power by which he became the inaugurator, the true leader, of pre-Christian civilisation in Greece. They recognised quite clearly that his physical brain and nervous system were not what was most important in him. They considered this to be far more the fact that he bore within him an element that had its direct source in super-sensible worlds, that through it, all he experienced in these worlds came in touch, by means of his personality, with a physical sensible element, and could then express itself in the various stages provided by a physical personality. The Greeks saw in Orpheus not the man of flesh descended from father and mother, even perhaps from grandfather and grandmother, this was not to them the main thing, it was only his shell, his outer presentment. For them the essential thing in him was what had descended from a super-sensible source, and had entered into a sensible being on the physical plane.

When the Greeks confronted Orpheus they hardly considered his descent from father and mother, what mattered to them was the fact that his soul qualities, the qualities through which he had become what he was, sprang from a super-sensible source that till then had never had any connection with the physical plane, and that through what this man was, a super-sensible element was able to work within his personality and be united with it.

Because the Greeks saw, as what was most essential in Orpheus, a pure super-sensible element, they said of him:—“He is descended from a Muse.” He was the son of the Muse Calliope; he was not the son of any mere earthly mother, but of a super-sensible element that had never had connection with sensible things. Had he been the son of Calliope alone, he could only have given information concerning super-sensible worlds. But because of the age in which he lived he was ordained to give expression also to that which would be of service to his age physically. He was not only an instrument for the voice of the Muse Calliope, as the Rischis at an earlier day had been the vocal instruments of certain super-sensible forces, but he was able to express super-sensible things so vividly in his own life that the physical world was influenced by him. Because Orpheus had a Thracean river God for his father, what he taught waS closely associated on the other side with nature, with the climate of Greece, and with all that external nature gave to the river god, Oiagros.

We gather therefore that the soul-nature of Orpheus was considered the most important part of him. It was in respect of their souls men were described long ago, not as became customary later when people were described by saying: he is the son of so and so, and was born in such a town, but they were described according to their spiritual values.

It is extraordinarily interesting to note how intimately the fate of a man like Orpheus was felt; a man who was descended on one side from a muse and on the other from a river god. He had within him not merely super-sensible qualities as the prophets had, but to these he had added sensible qualities. He was therefore exposed to all the influences exercised on man by the physical sensible world.

You are well aware that the nature of man is composed of several members. The lowest of these is the physical body, then comes the etheric body (concerning which I told you that it comprises the opposite sex), then the astral body and the ego. A man like Orpheus was still able to look on one side into the spiritual world because he was descended from a Muse (you now know what that means), but on the other side the capacities by which he could live in the spiritual world were undermined owing to the life he led on the physical plane, and because of his descent from his father, the Thracian river god. Through this his purely spiritual life was undermined. In the case of all the earlier leaders of mankind in the second and third periods of post-Atlantean culture, by whom only a verbal teaching concerning the spiritual world had been imparted, conditions were such that they were conscious of their own etheric body as something separated from their physical body. When in the civilisations of ancient Greece, and also in those of the Celts, a man was empowered to perceive what he had to communicate to his fellow-men, these revelationscame to him because his etheric body extended beyond his physical body. It became in this case the hearer of forces which entered into the man. If the person giving out these revelations was a man and his etheric body therefore female, he perceived what he had to communicate from the spiritual world in a female form.

Now it had to be shown that where Orpheus came into purely spiritual relationship with Spiritual Powers, he was exposed, owing to his being the son of the Thracian river god, to the risk of not being able to retain the revelations that came to him through his etheric body. The more he entered into the life of the physical world and expressed what he was as a son of Thrace, the more he lost his clairvoyant powers. This is shown in the fact that Eurydice, she through whom he revealed himself, his soul-bride, was removed from him, and was taken to the underworld. This occurred through the bite of an adder. He could only receive her hack again by passing through an initiation. This he now did. Whenever we are told of anyone “going into the underworld,” it means an initiation, so he had to pass through an initiation before receiving his bride back again. But already he was too closely interwoven with the physical world. He certainly did attain powers by which he was able to penetrate to the underworld, but on his return, as he again beheld the light of the sun, Eurydice disappeared from his sight. Why? Because when he beheld the light of day he did something he should not have done—he looked back. That means, he overstepped a law strictly laid on him by the God of the underworld. What law is this? It is, that physical man as he lives on the physical plane to-day must not look back beyond that moment of time I have already described, within which lie the macrocosmic experiences of childhood, and which, when extended into later states of consciousness, gave him the ancient form of clairvoyance. “Thou shalt not desire to unravel the secrets of childhood,” said the God of the underworld, “nor remember how the threshold was crossed.” If he did this he lost the faculty of clairvoyance. Something infinitely fine and intimate in Orpheus is shown us by this loss of Eurydice, one result of which is the sacrifice of man to the physical world. With a nature that is still rooted in the spiritual world, he is directed to what he has to become on the physical plane. Through this nature all the powers of the physical plane rush in on him, and he loses “Eurydice” his own innocent soul, which must be lost to modern humanity. The forces among which he is then placed lacerate him. This in a certain sense is regarded as the sacrifice of Orpheus.

What did Orpheus experience as he lived on from the third to the fourth period of post-Atlantean culture? He experienced in the first place that stage of consciousness which the child leaves behind—he experienced connection with the Macrocosm. This does not pass over into his conscious life. Therefore, as we see him, he is swallowed up, slain by life on the physical plane, which really begins at the point of time of which we have been speaking.

Consider now the man of the physical plane, who is normally only able to carry his memory back to a certain point of time, before which lie the first three years of childhood.

The thread of memory so entangles Orpheus with the physical plane that with his true nature he could not abide in it, but is torn to pieces. Thus it is with the spirit of man to-day; we see how profoundly the human spirit is entangled in matter. This is the spirit which, according to the Christianity of St. Paul, is called the “Son of Man.” You get this conception of the “Son of Man” who is in man from the point of time to which memory extends, along with all that he has gained through culture. Keep this man before you, and then think what he might have been through union with the Macrocosm, if there had entered into him all that streamed towards him from the Macrocosm in the early years of childhood. In these early years what comes can only form a foundation, for the evolved human ego is not yet present. But if it entered into an evolved human ego there would then take place what occurred for the first time through the baptism in Jordan at the moment when “the Spirit from above” descended upon Jesus of Nazareth. The three innocent stages of childhood's development would blend with all the rest of the human being. The consequence would be as this innocent life of childhood sought to develop on the physical earth, that it could do so only for three years (as is always the case):—it would meet its end on Golgotha. This means it cannot mingle with what man becomes at the moment when he achieves his egohood, at the point of time to which later his memory extends.

If you ponder this; if you ponder what it would mean if all the connections with the Macrocosm were to meet in one man; if everything that approached him in a vague, uncertain way in his early childhood streamed into him, but could not really dawn in him because the evolved ego was not present, were you to carry this thought further and picture it dawning within a later consciousness, something would be formed in man, something would enter into him, which did not spring from a human source, but from the vast world-depths out of which we are born You would then have the interpretation of the words uttered in connection with the descent of the dove:—“This is my well beloved Son; this day have I begotten Him!” This means: Now is the Christ—incarnated—“begotten” in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ was actually born in Jesus of Nazareth at the moment of baptism in Jordan. He then stood at the summit of that consciousness, which otherwise man only enjoys in the early years of childhood, but He was aware at the same time of this union with the whole cosmos. A child would also have this feeling of union if it were aware of what it felt during those three early years. In this case other words heard at that time would acquire a different meaning:—“I and the Father (the cosmic Father) are one!”

When you allow all this to affect your souls you will be conscious of something within you that is like an echo of what Paul felt, the earliest initial element of that which came to him in the revelation of Damascus, and experienced in the beautiful words:—“Unless ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” This saying has manifold meanings, among others this—Paul said, “Not I, but Christ in me!” This means a being having the macrocosmic consciousness a child would have were it to experience the consciousness of its three early years along with that of a later day. In the normal man of to-day these two kinds of consciousness are separate, they must be separate, for they are not compatible. Neither were they in Jesus Christ. For after these three years death had necessarily to follow under such circumstances as occurred in Palestine. It was not by chance these occurred as they did, but because two factors lived in one Being: the “Son of God”—which man is from the time of his birth until the development of his ego-consciousness, and the “Son of Man” which he is after this ego-consciousness has been acquired. Through the union of the “Son of God” and the “Son of Man” all those events came to pass which later led to the Events of Palestine.

For the goal we have set before us, which is connected with the study of the Gospel of Mark, is to be pursued further, it must be grasped in its widest meaning. It may perhaps be only after a considerable time that the reason will appear why one or another line of study has been pursued, and what connection these have with our subject. We will have to speak to-day, for instance, of certain things which apparently are far removed from our theme, but which will be of great assistance to us in our later studies.

Allow me to say in the first place that those who are outside our movement will always have difficulty in understanding certain things connected with the direction of the theosophical spiritual movement so long as they do not inform themselves intimately with what concerns the central nerve of this movement. Such things, for instance, as: what meaning and value have “clairvoyant investigations” for those who have not yet attained clairvoyant powers. The objection might be made:—“How can a faith or conviction concerning spiritual truths be developed by those who cannot see into the spiritual world?”

Here attention must be drawn to the opposite—that as long as our clairvoyant eyes remain unopened we cannot see into the spiritual world, although from this spiritual world all the results and revelations it contains are derived. When it is stated as a result of clairvoyant investigation that man consists of four members—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—the person who holds aloof from such investigation might perhaps object:—“I only see the physical body, how can I convince myself of the existence of these higher members of my Being before my Karma makes it possible for me to see them and realise the truth of what I am told concerning them.”

It is easy for anyone, if he so wishes, to deny the existence of the astral and etheric body, but he cannot by decree annul the processes that go on in them, for they are seen in human life. I would like, in order that you may enter into the whole composition of the Being of man, as revealed by many of the expressions found in the Gospels, to show how clearly the results of processes within the etheric and astral body can be seen in our ordinary life on the physical plane.

Let us, in the first place, consider the difference between a man who is full of idealism and sets up high ideals, and one who is disinclined to do this, who acts according to instinct, who eats when he is hungry, sleeps when he is sleepy, does this or that when moved by desire for one thing or another. Naturally there are all kinds of intermediate stages between these two types; between the one just described and others whose thoughts and ideals rise far above what they are able to attain in ordinary life. Such idealists are always in a peculiar position regarding life. They must always try to convince themselves of the truth of the saying that it is not possible really to satisfy their highest ideals in any domain of the physical plane. Idealists constantly state:—“My deeds ever lag behind my ideals.” We must therefore acknowledge when speaking strictly: in a man's ideals—in what he thinks or feels, there is always something greater than in his deeds. According to spiritual science this is the outstanding feature of the idealist. Keep this clearly before you: the idealist is one whose intentions and thoughts are always greater than what he is able to accomplish on the physical plane. Of the man whose life we have described as being the opposite of this we can say: his thoughts and views are narrower, more restricted than his deeds. Anyone who acts only from instinct, passion, or desire, has not thoughts capable of grasping the result of his actions at any given moment, the things he does far exceed his power of thought. His intentions and thoughts are therefore narrower, more restricted, than his deeds on the physical plane.

The clairvoyant has something to tell us concerning these two types. When we do something, when we carry out some piece of work that is greater and more far-reaching than our thoughts, this activity always casts a reflection into our astral body. We do nothing in life that is not reflected or imaged in our astral body. This image is imparted later to the etheric body and as it is imparted so it remains in the Akashic Chronicle and can he seen there by the clairvoyants as a picture of what the man has done during his life. In the same way images remain behind in the astral body and are later projected into the etheric body, thoughts that are greater than the fulfilment of them. This means thoughts that are the outcome of idealism, that are reflected in the astral body and continue further into the etheric body.

There is a great difference between the reflected images of actions that have sprung from instincts, desires, passions, etc., and the reflected images of deeds that are the outcome of idealism. The first contain something that remains as a destructive element during a man's whole life. They are those images, those con-tents of the astral body which gradually affect the entire human being so that it is slowly destroyed. Such images are closely connected with the way human life on the physical plane is gradually prepared for death. But those other reflections springing from thoughts which transcend our actions, have life-giving qualities. They are specially stimulating to our etheric body, for they continually bring new vital forces to man's whole being.

Thus, according to clairvoyance, we have destructive forces within us on the physical plane and at the same time forces that continually impart fresh life. As a rule the effect of these forces on life can be easily seen. We meet people who are gloomy, hypochondriacal, of a sombre temperament, people who are not happy in their soul life, all this works back on their physical organism. They become nervous, and one observes how nervousness, if it continues, undermines the health of the physical organism. Such men become melancholy in later life, are discontented with themselves, and in various ways are unbalanced natures. If the cause of this is investigated we find that such persons have had little opportunity in the earlier periods of their physical life of transcending action by idealistic thought. In ordinary life such things are not noticed; but their results are clear! Many people feel these results strongly, they feel them as an attitude of soul and of life, and perceive them also in bodily conditions.

So, though the astral body may be denied, its consequences cannot be denied, for they are felt. And when life reveals the things I have just described people are forced to acknowledge that we are not so very foolish when we declare that we have proof of them. For though spiritual happenings can only be seen by the clairvoyant, the results can be seen by anyone.

On the other hand we find that thoughts which are more noble than the actions connected with them, leave impressions which appear in later life as courage, confidence and calmness. These continue to work even into the physical organism, but the connections are only noticed when a man's life is observed over long periods of time. The mistake of many scientific observations is that people are apt to judge results immediately in the course of the first few years, whereas the results of many things are only apparent after decades.

Now, we must realise, there are not only people of a purely idealistic nature whose thoughts transcend their various experiences, and others whose thoughts lag behind their experiences, but we have a large number of experiences which our thoughts only grasp with the greatest difficulty. Eating and drinking are things that spring anew each day from instinct, and it takes a long time before those who are going through a spiritual training learn to connect such things with spiritual life. It is precisely everyday things that are the most difficult to connect with spiritual life. We have first done this as regards eating and drinking when we have discovered why, in order to serve the progress of the world, we have to receive physical substances into us regularly, and what connection these physical substances have with spiritual life. We then learn that digestion is not merely a physical process, but that there is something spiritual in its rhythm. In any case there is a way of gradually spiritualising those things which are not demanded purely by external necessity; it is possible so to regard them that we say:—We eat this or that fruit, and through our spiritual knowledge can always form an idea of how an apple, or any other fruit, is related to the universe as a whole. This, however, takes a long time. For we must in this case accustom ourselves to allow eating to be no mere material fact, but to observe the connection between the spirit and the ripening of any fruit by the rays of the sun.

In this way we spiritualise the most material, most everyday processes, and acquire power to enter into them with our thoughts. (Here it is only possible to hint how thoughts and ideas can be brought into this realm.) It is a long road, and very few men in our age can arrive at thinking perfectly as regards eating.

Thus there are not only people who act instinctively, and others who act idealistically, but with everyone life is partitioned so that one part of a man's actions is carried out in a way that thought cannot follow, and others so that thoughts and ideas have a wider range than actions. We have one set of forces within us which lead our life downhill, and operate so that our physical organism through internal causes is gradually prepared for death; and another set of forces which bring life to our astral and etheric bodies, and dawn continually like a new light within these bodies. These are the life-giving forces within our etheric body.

When after death we forsake our sheaths with the spiritual part of our being we still have the etheric body about us for a few days, and because of this we have that backward vision of our whole life of which I have often spoken. The best of what now remains to us is something inwardly constructive, the life-giving forces just mentioned, that rise within us because our ideas transcend the sum of our actions. These continue to work in us after death, and contain the life-forces necessary for our following incarnation.

The life-giving forces we implant in us remain within our etheric body, they are forces of enduring youth, and though we cannot lengthen our life through them we can so shape it that it retains the freshness of youth for a longer time. We do this by acting in such a way that our thoughts surpass the measure of our deeds.

When a man asks himself:—“How can I gain those ideals which best transcend my actions?” We answer:—This is possible when people give themselves up to spiritual science which directs their thoughts to super-sensible worlds. When they learn, for instance, from spiritual science of the evolution of man, these communications stir up forces in the higher members of their being, and they gain through them at the present day the most certain, most concrete idealism. And when questioned further:—“What specially does spiritual science do compared with other sciences?” We answer:—“It pours into our astral and etheric bodies, fresh, youthful, life-giving forces.”

People are related to what we call spiritual science in so many different ways, not because as men of to-day they are non-clairvoyant, but because they do not observe things in ordinary life with sufficient care; otherwise they would see the various ways in which what we call the man of soul and spirit reveals himself, even within his organism.

Those who live in the world and only approach spiritual science as thorough unbelievers may hear it said:—“This science holds, that the human physical body is filled by various higher members, it sums these up as the soul- and spirit-man. But the materialists of the present day do not wish to believe in this man of soul and spirit. They believe only in the physical man, and for this reason they are materialists. Under the term materialists people frequently understand only theoretical materialists, those who only believe in matter! But as I have often said—these theoretical materialists are not the worst, for such a materialist might he one who created ideas merely through his understanding, and such ideas are usually very short-sighted, a materialism that springs only from ideas is not necessarily very harmful. But when it is fortified by other things it can be very harmful for a man's whole life, especially when with the innermost spiritual kernel of his being he is attached to his material side. And how dependent people are to-day on what is material!

It may be misleading to assert that there are theoretical materialists as regards thoughts, and that some thoughts are fatal to our souls; but our external life is also greatly influenced by the fact that in the practices of life there are so many materialists. What do I mean by this? I mean a man who is so dependent on physical things, that he can only spend a few months in his office in winter, and in the summer must go to the Riviera. Such a man is entirely dependent on materialistic arrangements and combinations; he is a materialist as regards the practices of life; he is entirely dependent on material things; his soul is forced to run after the wants dictated by life. This is a different kind of materialist from the one who lives only in thoughts which are materialistic. A theoretical idealism may yet lead to the conviction that theoretical materialism is a mistake, but the practical materialist can only be cured by entering profoundly into spiritual science.

If people would only think, that is, if their thoughts did but spring, not merely from understanding, but from a connection with reality, they would recognise from quite ordinary facts that there is a great difference between the various parts of man's being.

I will first point out the difference between the hands and, let us say, the shoulders.

If we investigate physical man in an entirely external way, we find physical differences, for instance, in the way the nerves behave. Yet we must remember that we can exercise a certain influence on this. If the behaviour of our nerves was the absolute and only authority for the soul, we should be dependent on the activity of substance, for the behaviour of the nerves is an activity of substance. This we most assuredly are not; for we are able to influence the state of our nerves, and we do so in the most varied way, especially through our etheric and astral bodies; that is through our soul and spirit. We must not simply say:—“The physical body is filled by the etheric and astral body,” for this varies according to the part we are considering, whether it be the head or the shoulder or some other part. Different spiritual parts act differently. It is easy to convince ourselves of this. We must, however, realise that what takes place in life is in accordance with reality, and cannot be studied without thought. If our breath is not drawn correctly the physiologist discovers by physiological laws why it did not reach the place intended.

And why do people not ponder the profound significance there is for life in the fact that they wash their hands more often than any other part of their body? (It may seem strange that such things should be mentioned, but it is precisely by everyday events that the communications of the clairvoyant can be verified.) In any case this is a fact. And it is also a fact that some people wash their hands more frequently and more gladly than others. This fact so apparently trivial is really connected with the highest knowledge. When a clairvoyant observes the hands, they are for him wonder-fully different from all the other members, even from the face. From the fingers luminous projections stream forth from the etheric body, sometimes glimmering feebly, sometimes piercing surrounding space. They stream forth differently according to whether the person is joyful or sad, and differently from the inner surfaces than from the backs of the hands. For anyone who can observe things clairvoyantly the hand, more especially in its etheric and astral parts, is a most wonderful formation.

Everything around us even if material, is a revelation of spirit. Matter has to be thought of in regard to spirit as ice is to water; matter is formed out of spirit. If you like you may call it consolidated spirit. Therefore if we come in contact with any substance, we contact the spirit in that substance. Any contact we make with substance, in so far as this is material, is Maya (illusion). In reality it is the spirit we encounter.

The way we come in touch with the spirit in water, when we wash our hands for instance, is seen—when life is observed with sharpened senses—to have a great influence on our whole disposition, however often we wash them. There are natures that have a certain preference for washing their hands, they must wash at once if they touch anything dirty. These natures are related in a quite special way to their surroundings. They are not restricted merely to what is material, for it is as if a fine force within the material substance begins to affect them, and that they have established the connection I mentioned between their hands and the element of water. Such people are even seen to possess, in an entirely healthy sense, more sensitive natures, finer powers of observation than others. They know at once, for instance, if they encounter anyone of a brutal or of a kindly nature. Whereas those others who endure dirt on their hands are actually of a coarser nature, and show by such ways that they have raised a wall between themselves and the more intimate relationships with the surrounding world. This is a fact and, if you like, it can be proved ethnographically. Pass through and observe the various countries of the world. You are then able to say:—“Here or there people wash their hands more.” Observe the relationship between such people, observe how different the relationship is between friend and friend, between acquaintance and acquaintance, in regions where hands are more frequently washed than in regions where walls have been raised between them owing to this being done less frequently.

Such things have the value of natural laws, Other connections can cancel them. If we throw a stone through the air, the line of its flight describes a parabole. But if the stone is caught by the wind the parabole is not there. This shows that we have to know the conditions before certain relationships can be observed correctly!

Whence does this knowledge come? It comes from clairvoyance, for it is revealed to this consciousness how finely the hands are permeated by soul and spirit qualities. This is so much the case that a special relationship of the hands to water is apparent, greater than in the case of the human countenance, and greater still than in respect of the surface of other parts of the human body. This must not be understood as an objection in any way to bathing and washing, but rather as throwing light on certain relationships. It is only to show how very differently man's soul and spirit-nature is related to his various members, and how differently this is impressed on them.

You will find it hard to believe, for instance, that anyone could suffer injury in his astral body through washing his hands too frequently. But this must be considered in its widest aspect. It depends on the maintenance of a healthy relationship between man and the surrounding world—that is, between the astral body of man and the surrounding world—through the relation-ship of his hands to water. For this reason excess in this is hardly possible.

If people think only in a materialistic way, clinging with their thoughts to what is material they say:—“What is good for the hands is good for the rest of the body.” Showing that they do not note the fine differences between them and the other members.

The result is one that is seldom noticed; namely, that as regards certain things all of the human body should not be treated alike. For instance, as a specific cure children used to be ordered frequent cold baths and friction. Fortunately, because of certain results on the “nervous system” physicians have found these methods unwise. For, owing to the special relationship between the hands and the astral body, what is in some ways suitable for them, may soon prove harmful where the body stands in a different relationship to the astral body. Where a healthy sense of perception towards the surrounding world is evoked through frequent handwashings, an unhealthy, hyper-sensitiveness is often the result of an exaggerated cold water treatment; and this, especially if employed in childhood, may last during the whole life.

It is therefore most necessary that the limits should be known, and this is only possible when people acknowledge the fact that the physical body is closely linked with the higher members of man's Being. People will then realise that the more physical part of us—the physical instrument—must be treated quite differently from the soul and spirit-nature. They must also realise this in connection with the glands which are instruments especially of the etheric body, while everything connected with the nerves and the brain is intimately associated with the astral body. If these things are not understood, neither will certain other appearances ever be understood. Materialists err most in this, because they always look to the instrument and not back to the cause. Everything we experience is experienced in the realm of the soul, and that we are conscious of these experiences depends on our having an instrument of reflection in the physical body. In it everything is preserved, but the physical body is only the instrument. This is often brought to our notice in a remarkable way. I need only mention the thyroid gland. This you know is regarded as a meaningless organ, and in cases of illness is removed, but the patient may sink into idiotcy. If only a part of this gland remains the danger is avoided. This shows that the secretions of this gland are necessary for the development of certain things in the life of the soul. Now the strange nature of this organ is further revealed in the fact that if the secretions of the thyroid gland of a sheep are given to the patient who has lost his own gland, the tendency to idiotcy is lessened, but the contrary if the secretions of the sheep are withheld. Materialists find great satisfaction in this fact. Spiritual science is able, however, to estimate it in the right way. We are faced with the strange fact that we are here concerned with an organ, the products of which we can trace directly to our organism. Activities such as occur in the thyroid gland are only possible when there is a certain connection with the etheric body. Where a similar connection exists with the astral body these activities are not possible.

I have known more or less feebly endowed men who have eaten sheep's brains, yet have not become clever! This shows the great difference there is between different organs. This difference is only so considerable because one group of organs have connection with the etheric body, others with the astral body. From this another very remarkable fact is disclosed to spiritual observation.

It seems very strange that a man becomes feeble-minded when his thyroid gland is removed, but can be restored to cleverness by having the extract of the same gland administered to him. It seems strange because it cannot be discovered that his brain is affected thereby. This is again a point where ordinary human observation is of necessity led to spiritual scientific methods of observation, for spiritual science shows that the man did not become the least feeble-minded when his thyroid gland was removed. “But,” you say, “the facts show that the man was feeble-minded I” In reality men do not become idiotic because they are wanting in understanding, but because the possibility of making use of the instrument which gives them “awareness” is wanting. They do not become idiotic through any loss of understanding, but because contact with their surroundings is blunted, and bluntness is different from the loss of understanding. Understanding is not lost if through want of awareness it has never been developed. If you are unable to think about a thing, you cannot ex-press yourself regarding it; you must first think of it before any contact with it can be established. The “power to participate,” the living interest in things is undermined when the thyroid gland is removed. Men become indifferent to such an extent indeed, that they cease to employ their understanding.

From this you can see the great difference between the employment of an instrument of understanding like the various parts of the brain, and of an instrument connected with a gland such as the thyroid gland. In this way we are able to throw light on the different ways in which our physical body is an instrument, and when this is understood we can distinguish between the different parts of human consciousness.

Even in respect of the ego we can say that it is related in the most varied way to the surrounding world. We have here to consider things connected with the ego which I have described elsewhere from different aspects, showing how man either enters more within himself with his ego, strives to become more aware of himself, or he turns to the outer world striving rather to find his connection with it. We become in a certain sense conscious of ourselves when we turn our glance inwards—when we devote ourselves to the thought of what life gives us, what it holds for us. We are then conscious of our ego. We can become conscious of it when we come in contact with the outer world; for instance, when we knock up against a stone, or if we can-not solve a calculation we are conscious of our ego as something feeble compared to conditions in the external world. In short, both within ourselves and also in the external world we can become conscious of our ego. We become aware of our ego in a very special way when those magic connections between man and the surrounding world arise which we describe as feelings of sympathy or compassion. Here it is clearly seen that a magic activity passes from soul to soul, from spirit to spirit. For whatever takes place in the world is felt by us; what is there felt or thought, is experienced again within us, we experience it as something inward, some-thing of the soul and spirit. We are then inwardly intensified; for compassion and sympathy are experiences of the soul. And if our ego is not sufficiently developed for these experiences and requires strengthening, this is expressed in a purely spiritual way through sorrow and in a physical way through tears. Sorrow as a soul-experience brings greater strength to the ego in respect of outward experience than does indifference. Sorrow is always an inner enhancement of the ego. Tears but express the fact that at the moment the ego strives to experience more than it would through indifference.

In this connection we are forced to admire the poetic fantasy of the young Goethe, closely connected as it was with profound facts of human nature. It is where he allows the weakness of Faust's ego to lead him so far that he feels at first constrained to extinguish this ego physically, he feels driven to suicide.; then the Easter bells ring out, and at the sound the ego of Faust begins to gather strength, so much so that tears spring—the sign of this in the soul of Faust:—“Tears start, earth holds me once more,” he cries.

This means that what belonged to earth was strengthened through the shedding of tears, the increased intensity of the ego found expression in tears.

In mirth and laughter we again have what is connected with the strength or weakness of the ego in its relationship to the external world. These show that the ego feels strong as regards its understanding of things and events. In laughter our ego draws together, and its intensity is strengthened.¹ This finds expression in mirth, in the way we show our amusement. With this is associated the fact that sorrow is fundamentally something that should be so experienced, at least by the healthy man, that what occasions this sorrow is real to him. What affects us in this reality, so that in sharing it we feel we must enhance the inner activity of our ego, brings about a feeling of sadness. But when sorrow depends on what is unreal and is expressed merely in an artistic sense, the man of sound thought will feel that he requires something more. He feels that to the cause of his sadness a certain conviction must be added that sorrow can be overcome by something able to conquer misery. Therefore we demand from the drama that it should represent the victory of the person who is overtaken by misery. It is no aesthetic representation of life that sets only its trivial elements before us; in a man who trusts entirely to his healthy nature, the ego is not satisfied when confronted with misery that is counterfeited.

The whole weight of reality is required before our ego can rise to compassion.

Now, do you not feel in your souls how different it is as regards anything comic? It is in a certain extent inhuman to laugh at a simpleton, but it is quite sound to laugh at one when represented on the stage. Burlesques and comedies are a healthy means of showing how the folly of men's actions leads to absurdities.

When our ego is able to rise to laughter over what is generally recognised as folly, it is strengthened, and there is no healthier laughter than that evoked through such artistic presentations, though it is inhuman to laugh at what actually befalls our fellow men, or at a real simpleton. Thus different laws come into operation whether these things affect us as representations or in actual life. We must allow that if our ego is to be strengthened through compassion this is best done when we are actually confronted with the fact that moves us to compassion. On the other hand as healthy men we demand from misery that is counterfeited, that we should find in it the means of overcoming it. In the dying heroes of tragedy, where death is actually enacted before our eyes, we feel that the victory of the spirit over death is symbolised in these deaths. The whole matter is re-versed when the ego is brought in touch with the world around us. We then feel that faced with reality we can-not attain to mirth or laughter in the right way, that we are best able to laugh at those things that are more or less removed from reality.

When a man meets with some misfortune, which does not specially injure him and is not closely connected with the real facts of life, we may well laugh at his misfortune. But the nearer this experience is to reality the less can we laugh at it when we understand it. From this we see how varied are the relationships of our ego to reality, but in all this variety of facts we recognise everywhere a link with what is greatest.

From many lectures you have learnt that in ancient initiation there were two ways of gaining entrance to the spiritual world. One method was by sinking deeply within one's own being—within the Microcosm; the other was by passing out into the life of the Macrocosm or great world. Now everything which comes to expression in great things is revealed also in the smallest. The way in which a man descends into his own inner being in daily life is shown by his sadness; and the way in which he is able to expand into the life of the outer world is shown by his ability to grasp the connections of such events as he there encounters. In this is seen the supremacy of the ego. And you have heard that if the ego is not to be lost it must be guided by the initiation that leads into the outer world; otherwise it loses itself, and instead of going forth into the outer world it is brought to apparent nothingness.

The smallest things are connected with the greatest. Therefore, in Spiritual Science, where we have so often to rise to the highest spheres, we must sometimes concern ourselves with what belongs to the most everyday things. In the next lecture, when once more we shall occupy ourselves with higher spheres, we shall make use of some of the things dealt with to-day.

• 1. See Paths of Experience: the Chapter on Laughing and Weeping, where this subject is fully explained. – Ed.

When aided by spiritual science we give ourselves up to the study of the Gospels, we are at once aware of powerful experiences coming to us from them. And we venture to say that people will first gain some idea of all that has been poured into the Gospels by those who wrote them, when spiritual science has been popularised somewhat as is the fashion to-day. Many things will then be recognised as belonging to the Gospels that are not found directly in these documents, but are only discovered when the four Gospels are studied side by side.

I should like, in the first place, to say that in the Gospel of Matthew the true history of the Christ Impulse is put before us in the story of a child. Beginning with an account of the ancient Hebrew people—or rather of their first ancestor—the account of the Christ-Impulse in this Gospel only goes back to the origin of the Hebrew people. In this Gospel we learn to know the bearer of the Christ Being as he developed out of the Hebrew people. When we pass on to the Gospel of Mark we meet with the Christ-Impulse directly. Here all mention of the life of the child is at first disregarded. After being told that John the Baptist is the great prophet who foretold the coming of the Christ-Impulse, it describes the baptism by John in Jordan.

Then from the Gospel of Luke we receive a new history of the childhood of the bearer of the Christ-Impulse, but this time it goes much further back as regards the origin of Jesus of Nazareth—it goes back to the beginning of mankind upon the earth. The descent of Jesus of Nazareth is traced back to Adam, and then to one who it states “was God.” Therefore, this story of his childhood clearly indicates that the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth can be traced back to a point of time when man first came forth from Divine Beings. The Gospel of Luke takes us back to a time when man can no longer be regarded as a Being incarnated in the flesh, but as a Spiritual Being, a Being that had come forth from the womb of divine spirituality.

In the Gospel of John the great facts are put before us so, that again without giving any account of the childhood or the destiny of Jesus of Nazareth, we are introduced directly, and in a very profound sense, to the very Being of Christ. In the course of the spiritual development we have ourselves passed through in recent years we sketched out a certain path as regards the study of the Gospels; our design was to begin first with the Gospel that gives us the most exalted outlook into the abstract spirituality of Christ—the Gospel according to John.

This was to be followed by the study of the Gospel of Luke, in order to show how the highest degree of spirituality possible in man becomes apparent when the life of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is traced back to the point of time when as earthly man he came forth from the Godhead.

The study of the Gospel of Matthew was to follow, so that we might understand the Christ-Impulse as this passed through the ancient Hebrew people.

The Gospel of Mark we reserved to the last. Why this was done will be rightly understood when much that has been touched on recently as general spiritual science is connected with things you have known for long, and also with others that are comparatively new. This is why I have spoken recently of many things in human life, and in the composition of the members of man's being, and shall speak of similar things to-day, which may serve as an introduction to certain facts of human evolution. For it becomes ever more necessary that the conditions of human evolution should be recognised, not recognised only, but kept constantly before us.

As we advance towards the future, mankind will become ever more self dependent, ever more individual. Belief in external authority will be replaced more and more by the authority of the individual soul. This is the necessary course of evolution, but in order that it may bring well-being and blessedness, man has to know his own nature. We cannot say that as a whole we are far advanced in the estimation and understanding of human nature. For what, among much else, is taking place in the history of man to-day? All kinds of programmes, all kinds of so-called ideals for mankind are certainly not wanting at the present time. One can almost say that not only a man here and there, but every man might come forward to-day as a little Messiah with a special ideal for our humanity; might construct out of his head and heart an ideal by which well-being and blessedness might be attained. Nor are societies and associations wanting that suggest one thing or another which they think necessary to introduce into our culture. These we have in great measure, and faith in them is not wanting. The strength of conviction in those who put forward such programmes is so great that it will shortly be necessary to form councils to establish the infallibility of each. In speaking of such things we mention what is deeply characteristic of our age.

Spiritual science does not keep us from thinking of our future, but points to certain fundamental tendencies and laws which cannot be disregarded if anything is to be gained from its impulse.

For what does the man of to-day believe? He takes counsel with himself; an ideal rises in his soul and he believes he is capable of making his ideal actual. He does not pause to think that perhaps the time is not ripe for its introduction, that the picture he has formed may perhaps be a caricature, and that it may possibly only reach fruition in a more or less distant future. In short it is very difficult for people to-day to understand that every event must be prepared for, that owing to the general macrocosmic relationships of the world these are ordained to take place at fixed times. It is exceedingly difficult for present day humanity to grasp this. All the same it is a universal law, and holds for each individual as well as for the whole human race.

We can recognise the working of this law as regards individuals, when we observe their lives by means of spiritual science. Here we have to consider the smallest, most intimate things that rise within the soul.

I am not now dealing with general ideas, but will keep rather to what has been observed in particular cases. In the first place let us suppose that we have someone before us who has been able to grasp some idea in his soul most intensely; that he has been so fired by it that it assumed a distinct form in his soul and he desires earnestly to make this idea actual. Let us suppose then that this idea first arose in his head, and was then filled with impulses of feeling from his heart. Such a man would not be able to-day to wait, he would set about at once giving reality to his idea.

Suppose that at first this was quite a small idea concerned with some scientific or artistic fact. Will an occultist who knows the laws put such an entirely strange idea at once before the world? We are assuming that the idea is quite a small one. The occultist knows that it appears first in the life of the astral body. This can be observed even outwardly through the fact that enthusiasm dwells in the soul. It is pre-eminently a force of the astral body.

It is as a rule harmful when people do not allow the idea at this stage to rest quietly and not set it at once before the world; for the idea has first to follow a clearly defined course. For instance, it must enter ever deeper and deeper into the astral body and then impress itself, as a seal does, on the etheric body. If the idea is a small one this process may take seven days. But this time is necessary. And if the man goes ahead hurriedly with his idea, he is apt to overlook one important fact, namely, that after seven days a quite clearly defined experience of a very subtle kind takes place. If these things are noticed he may have this experience, but if he goes madly ahead saying:—“Out with it into the world!” The result is that his soul is not disposed to listen for what may happen on the seventh day. With a small idea it always happens on the seventh day that the person does not rightly know how to carry it out, that it vanishes again within the soul. The man is restless, perhaps even frightened, oppressed with doubts, yet all the time in spite of feeling perturbed he is attached to his idea.

Enthusiasm now changes to an intimate feeling of love. The idea is now within the etheric body. If it is to prosper and thrive it must lay hold of the outer astral substances with which we are always surrounded; thus from our astral body it must first pass into our etheric body and thence into the external astrality. To accomplish this another seven days is necessary. And if the man is not such a tyro that when the idea begins to trouble him, he says:—“Away with you!” But if he pays heed to the way life progresses he can see that after this period something comes to meet his idea from outside which can be expressed somewhat as follows:—“It is well to have waited fourteen days, for now I am no longer alone with my idea. It is as if I had been inspired from the macrocosm, as if something had entered my ideas from the outer world.”

A man then feels for the first time that he is in harmony with the whole spiritual world, that it brings something to meet him, when he has something to give to it. A certain soul-satisfying feeling arises after a period of about twice seven days.

This idea has then to follow the path backwards, it has to enter the etheric body again by way of the external astrality. We are then aware of it quite objectively, and the temptation is very great to give it to the world. This must again be resisted with all our power; for there is a danger, while the idea is still in the etheric body, of its entering the world in a cold way, of being communicated to the world in a cold and icy way. But if you wait for a further period of seven days the coldness leaves it and it is filled again with the warmth of the individual astral body; it takes on the character of the personality. Thus what we gave birth to in the first place, and then allowed to be baptised by the Gods, we are now able to hand over to the world as our own. Every impulse we feel in our souls must pass through these three stages before it becomes ripe within us. This holds as regards small ideas.

For more important ideas longer periods of time are necessary, but these always pass in a rhythm of seven and seven. In this way not weeks but months are built up, and then again years in the same rhythm. We can have a rhythm of seven to seven weeks, and of seven to seven years.

From this you can see that the important thing is not so much what the man of to-day thinks, or what impulses are in his soul, but that he has the power to bear these impulses with patience to allow them to be baptised by World-Spirits, and then emerge when they are ripe. Other laws of a similar kind might be added to this, for what is called the “development of the soul” is full of such ordered arrangements.

When, for instance, on a certain day, and such days are very rare in men's lives, you have the feeling:—“To-day I feel as if blessed by the World-Spirit, ideas arise in me!” It is well to receive these quietly, to know that after nineteen days a process of fructification such as I have described will take place in the soul. The evolution of the human soul is full of such ordered arrangements. Now man has an instinctive feeling not to overvalue these things, and for this we should be very thankful, not to allow himself to be too much uplifted by them. He takes note of them, especially those men whose aim it is to develop and ripen their higher natures, take note of them without really knowing the law. Thus it is often noticed that artistic natures reveal certain periods in their creative activities, that there is a rhythm in them according to days, weeks, and years. This is easily seen in artists of the first rank, in Goethe, for instance. We note how something rises in Goethe's soul, and that only after four times seven years is it really ripe, and then it emerges in another form from that in which it first appeared.

People might easily remark here in accordance with the inclination of to-day:—“Yes, my dear spiritual investigator, such laws there may be, but why should people trouble so much about them? They note them instinctively!”

Such a remark has reference to a time that is past. Because people are becoming more self-reliant, because they harken more and more to their own individuality, they must try to develop within them an inner calendar. Just as an outer calendar is of importance in external affairs, so in the future, when the intensity of man's soul has increased, he will feel “inner weeks” he will feel an inward ebb and flow in his life of feeling and experience, inner Sundays. Men will progress in accordance with this inwardness. Many things felt by man formerly in the partitioning of his life according to number will be experienced at a later day inwardly; this will be the dawn of what is macrocosmic in the souls of men. It will then be for him a self-understood duty not to bring tumult or disorder into human evolution by overstepping the sacred laws of the soul's development. He will come to understand that it is but a refined form of egoism to desire to communicate immediately what is taking place in the soul.

Men will come of themselves to experience the spirit within them, and this not abstractly as is done to-day, but they will perceive how this spirit works regularly and according to law in their souls. When something happens to them, and they wish to communicate this to others, they will not let this loose headlong on humanity like a mad bull, but will listen to what the spirit-filled nature within them has to say.

What importance will it have for men when they learn to value more and more and to harken more and more to what emerges in this way as law out of the inner spirituality of the world, and when they allow themselves to be inspired by it? Men in general have little feeling for such things. They do not believe that Spiritual Beings enter into our inner being and work there according to law. They will for long regard it as foolishness, even where culture is well advanced, when the ordered activity of the Spirit is spoken of. And those who from spiritual scientific knowledge believe in the Spirit, will experience through the deep antipathy of the times that are approaching what is said concerning our day in the Gospel of Mark:

“And when they shall lead you (away) and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither premeditate, but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour that speak ye; for it is not ye that speak but the Holy Ghost.”—Mark XIII, 11.

We must endeavour to understand a sentence like this which has such special reference to our day, because of the value it acquires through its connection with this Gospel—not with the other Gospels.

As regards the Gospel of Mark you see that in a general way it contains what is also to be found in the other Gospels. But one passage found in this Gospel is remarkable just because it is not found in the other Gospels. This passage is especially remarkable because commentators have said some really very silly things about it. It is where Christ Jesus came out from preaching to the people, and where, after he had chosen his disciples, we are told:—

“And they went into an house. And the multitude cometh together again so that they had not roam so much as to eat bread. And when His friends heard of it they went out to lay hold of Him, for they said: He is out of His senses, He is beside Himself.”—Mark III, 19-21.

This passage is not found in the same way in the other Gospels. When we realise that the future course of human evolution will be such, that the saying of St. Paul:—“Not I, but Christ in me!” will become ever more and more true, that that human ego alone is fruitful which receives into it the Impulse of Christ, we ought to feel that this passage refers in a most outstanding way to our own day. The fate experienced through the events of Palestine by Jesus Christ, as a representative, will be lived through by the whole of humanity in the course of time. In the near future men will divine more and more that wherever Christ is taught from an inward understanding of Spiritual Science, great antipathy will be manifested by those who turn from this teaching instinctively. It will not be at all difficult to see that those things will come to pass in the future which are described in prophetic images as the Events of Christ in the Gospel according to Mark.

The outward behaviour of many people, as well as much that is produced as art, and especially what is widely circulated to-day under the guise of science, will clearly show that those who speak of the Spirit in the sense in which Christ spoke of it will say in the near future:—“There are many among them who appear to be out of their senses, ‘beside themselves’!

It has to be stated again and again that the most important facts of spiritual life, as put forward by Spiritual Science, will be regarded in the future as fanciful tales by the greater part of humanity.

From the Gospel of Mark we should be able to evolve the necessary strength to stand firm against all the opposition that will be stirred up against the truths to be discovered in the domain of the Spirit.

If one has a feeling for the finer differences of style found in this Gospel from those found in the other Gospels, one notices spiritual scientific differences here also; we find in it things not found in the other Gospels. One notices in the construction of its sentences, in the exclusion of many sentences found in the other Gospels, that many things which might be accepted quite abstractly take on a special shade of meaning. When one has a feeling for this, one notices also that in the Gospel of Mark we are given an incisive, a most pregnant teaching concerning the ego. One sentence only need be noted for this to be made clear, one sentence, the special feature of which consists in certain things being omitted that are found in the other Gospels. If one has such perception, one realises the deep significance of the following passage:—

And Jesus went out, and His disciples into the towns of Cesarea, Philippi, and by the way He asked His disciples, saying unto them, “Who do men say the ‘I’ Is? What do people recognise as the?” And those who were round about Jesus answered and said: “The people say that in the true ‘I’ must live John the Baptist.” But others say this ‘I’ must be filled with Elias, that Elias must live in the ‘I’; others again say, another of the Prophets must be so worked on that the “I” says: “Not I—but the Prophet works in me.” But He said to those who were with Him, “What do you say that the ‘I’ is?” Then Peter answered: “We understand the ‘I’ so that we grasp it in its spirituality as Thee, that is as the Christ.” And He charged them that they should not tell ordinary men of this! For this mystery they could not understand.

But to those who had been moved by His words He began to give the following teaching: “That which is the outward physical expression of the ego-nature in man must suffer many things if it is to attain full development; and so it came to pass that the most ancient masters of mankind and those who knew the content of the holiest wisdom could say: The form in which the ego dwells at present serves it no longer; in this form it shall be slain, and after three days, in accordance with the ordered rhythm of universal connections, it will rise again in a higher form.”

And they were all amazed that He should speak these words openly before all men.

Here I must remark that up to that time such words could only have been spoken in the Mysteries. It was a secret that until then was only mentioned in the temple of the Mysteries—the secret that men had to undergo “death and birth” (Stirb und Werde) in the course of initiation and after three days had to rise again. Hence we are told:—

Peter was amazed, took the Christ aside and pointed out that such things should not be spoken of openly. Then the Christ turned Himself about and said: “In speaking thus Peter, thou givest thyself over to Satan; for stating this truth as thou dost is not for our time, but belongs to the past.” These things were in those days confined within the temple. In the future, in view of the superlative Mystery of Golgotha they will gradually become the possession of all men. Thus it is ordained in the divine guidance of earthly evolution. Those who say otherwise do not speak in accordance with the divine wisdom men had in the past, but gave a temporal form to the wisdom of the gods.

It is somewhat in this way we have to understand this passage that meets us in all the grandeur of its clear-cut phrases in the Gospel of St. Mark. We have to realise that the Impulse of Christ according to the Gospel of Mark consists in our receiving the Christ into our ego, so that the saying of Paul:—“Not I, but Christ in me,” may become ever more actual; and not the abstract Christ only, but He who sent the Holy Spirit, the concrete Spirit, who in an ordered and regular manner (as we have described to-day) works inspiringly with his inward calendar in the souls of men.

In pre-Christian times people only attained knowledge through being initiated into the Mysteries, when for three and a half days they remained in a death-like state after having endured the tragic suffering of one who, while living on the physical plane, tries to raise himself to spiritual heights. There they learnt that this earthly man must be slain, that a higher man must rise again in him—that is, he must experience “death and birth.” What formerly had only been experienced in the Mysteries now became an historical fact through the Mystery of Golgotha. If they felt united with this Mystery it provided the possibility by which all men could become pupils of this greater wisdom.¹

Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha was therefore the most important understanding. It was only possible for earthly man to acquire an understanding of what was to enter more and more into the human ego after the coming of the Christ-Impulse.

We can now receive inspiration in a certain way from the Gospels. For the time in which the Christ Event took place, the Gospel of Matthew was a good “book of initiation”; for our day this holds good more especially with regard to the Gospel according to Mark.

You all know that this is the age in which the consciousness-soul is to be especially developed, in which it is to be separated in isolation from its milieu. You know that we are now summoned to direct our attention not so much to the fact that we belong to any special race, but to what is to be born in us, and is described in the words of St. Paul:—“Not I but Christ in me!”

Our fifth post-Atlantean period is that specially inspired by the Gospel according to Mark. The task of the sixth post-Atlantean period on the other hand, will be gradually to fill the whole of humanity with the spirit of Christ. Thus while in the fifth period of civilisation the Being of Christ will be an object of study, of deep inward penetration, in the sixth men will receive His nature into their whole being. Added to this, what we have learnt to recognise as the inner nature of the Gospel of Luke is of great value, for it is the one which reveals fully the origin of Jesus of Nazareth, as does also the Gospel of Matthew, which leads us back to Zarathustra, just as the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke leads us back to Buddha and Buddhism. For in our studies of the Gospel of Luke we realise that Jesus of Nazareth is presented to us throughout the course of his long evolution in such a way that we are led back to the divine spiritual origin of mankind. Through this man will be able to realise more and more his own divine nature, and because of this must fill himself with the Christ-Impulses. This stands before us as a wondrous ideal, but it will only become concrete when, through the Gospel of Luke, we rise to a true understanding of the physical man of the sense world as a divine Being with a spiritual origin.

And for the seventh post-Atlantean period of civilisation, and on until the next great catastrophe, the Gospel of John will be the book of inspiration, as for the man of to-day it is a guide for his spiritual life. In that period many things will be of service to man which he has learnt in the course of the sixth epoch. But much of what is believed to-day will have to be unlearnt—fundamentally unlearnt. This will not be difficult, for scientific facts indicate that we will have to overcome many things. Thus many things are so regarded to-day that they are called “of the senses,” things which inform us concerning such self-understood wisdom, as that the terms “motor” and “sensory nerves” are pure nonsense. There are no “motor nerves.” There are only nerves of perception. Nerves that control movements are also nerves of perception, only their purpose is to bring to our perception the corresponding movement of the muscles. It will not be so very long before people realise that movement is not conveyed to the muscle by means of the nerves, but by the Astral body, and indeed by that within our astral body which in the immediate future will not be directly perceived to be what it is. For there is a law which lays down that what is active (operative) is not recognised immediately for what it is. What calls forth movement in the muscles is connected with the astral body, and indeed in such a way that in the astral body itself, by the movement of the muscles, a kind of resonance or tone is developed.

Something of the nature of music permeates our astral body; and finds expression through the movement of the muscles. It is really the same as in the case of the well-known Chladnic tone-forms, when a fine powder scattered on a metal plate can be set in motion if this is stroked by a violin bow; certain figures then appear in the powder. Our astral body is filled with nothing but such forms which are at the same time tone-forms, and their united activity is what causes our astral body to assume its special aspect (Lage). All this is imprinted in the astral body. People can convince themselves of this in a quite trivial way. If the biceps or the muscles of the forearm are tightly braced and then laid against the ear this tone can be heard; but the exercises must be done in the right way, the muscles must be stretched and the thumb laid on them. This is no real “proof,” but only a means by which what is here mentioned can be illustrated in a trivial manner. We are permeated by music and reveal it in the movement of our muscles, and we are endowed with “motor-nerves” as they are wrongly called, so that we may know something concerning the movements of our muscles.

This is but one form of those truths that will convince people more and more that man is really a spiritual being; that he is really interwoven with the harmony of the spheres—even to his muscles. And spiritual science, whose task it is to prepare the sixth epoch in respect of the spiritual understanding of the world, will concern itself in every particular with such truths as deal with man as well as with spiritual Beings. Exactly as tone in one connection rises to a higher sphere when from musical sound it becomes the spoken human word, so it is in cosmic relationships. The sphere harmonies become something higher when they become the cosmic word or Logos; and this they are when all that is active as sphere harmonies becomes Logos.

Now in the physical organisation of man the next thing higher than the muscles is the blood. In the same way as a muscle is attuned to the sphere harmonies, the blood is attuned to the Logos, and can become ever more and more an expression of the Logos as it has been, unconsciously, since the beginning of man.

This means there is a tendency on the physical plane for the blood of man which is the expression of his ego to become the conscious expression of the Logos. And when in the sixth period of civilisation men have learnt to recognise themselves as spiritual beings, they will no longer hold to the fantastic idea that muscles are moved through motory nerves, but will know that they are moved by sphere harmonies which have become personal.

Then in the seventh period of civilisation men will feel that even to their blood they are permeated by the Logos—they will then feel for the first time the real content of the Gospel of John. The science of this Gospel will be first understood in the seventh period, and people will come to feel that every book of physiology should begin with the opening words of the Gospel of John. What our attitude to it should be is well expressed in the following words:

“Much of this Gospel we can understand now, but for long there will be much more that we cannot understand!” It stands before us as a high ideal.

From all I have said to-day you will gather that the Gospel of Matthew has to be regarded as especially inspiring for the fourth period of post-Atlantean civilisation, and for our own day the Gospel of Mark must be considered especially inspiring. For the next period, the sixth, the Gospel of Luke is important, and we must prepare ourselves for it, because the seed of everything that is to come to pass in the future must have existed already in the past. And everything that is to come to pass in the further course of human evolution, everything that is to develop in the seventh period up to the time of the next catastrophe comes fully to light in the Gospel of John if we can but understand it. It is therefore specially important that we should understand the Gospel of Mark as a book that can give us guidance in much that we have to practise, and much we have to guard against. Especially those short sentences which in their pregnant style impart to us the meaning of the Christ-Impulse for the human ego. It is very important we should realise that our task is to grasp the Spirit of Christ; and that we should realise how He will reveal Himself in the different periods of the future.

We have attempted to present this as regards our day in the words of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation” as put into the mouth of the seeress Theodora. In the scene referred to we have something like a repetition of the Event of Paul on the way to Damascus. It is but a sign of the materialism of our day when people think that the Christ-Impulse could reveal itself again within a physical human form. That we have to guard against such a belief we learn from the Gospel of Mark, which holds a special warning for our day. If much that is found in this Gospel has reference to what is past, yet one sentence, in the higher moral sense just mentioned, has meaning for the near future. When considering spiritual realms the eye of the spirit can see that the influence proceeding from Spiritual Science is a necessity. When the deep spiritual meaning of the following passage is understood we shall connect it with our age and with the one shortly to follow:

“For in those days shall be affliction such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created until this time, neither shall be.”

We have to direct men's attention to these words. All kinds of afflictions await those in the future who desire to give expression to spiritual truth in its true form:—“And except that the Lord had shortened those days nothing of spiritual nourishment would have been left, but for the elect's sake He has shortened those days!”

And then we are told:

“If in that time anyone shall say to you, ‘Lo, here is Christ, or Lo, He is there, believe Him not.’ ”

The Gospel here refers to an eventual materialistic acceptance of Christ.

“For false Christs and false Prophets shall rise and shall show signs and wonders to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold I have foretold you all things!”—Mark XIII, 19-23.

The attacks of materialism will be so strong that it will be necessary for men to acquire sufficient strength of soul really to endure what is expressed by the words:—“False Christs and false Prophets will appear.” And when they are told:—“Lo, here is the Christ!” those who have come under the influence of Spiritual Science will be able to accept the warning given in the Gospel of Mark.

When men say to you “Lo, here is the Christ,” believe it not!

• 1. See Christianity as Mystical Fact,” by Rudolf Steiner.

Our talk today must bring to a temporary conclusion the studies which, during the last few weeks we have connected in a somewhat loose and irregular way with the Gospel according to Mark.

In the lectures you have heard during this winter we have tried to make you realise that we stand to-day at a period of transition. Even by those who consider spiritual life in a somewhat external way, it can be noticed that a new order of ideas and thoughts is gradually emerging, though the people living within the new order may themselves be unaware of it. It will therefore be well if such a stimulus can be given to your thoughts this evening as will enable you to carry somewhat further the spiritual scientific matter already imparted to you.

In speaking of periods of transition, it is helpful to recall the great “period of transition” through which human evolution passed, often mentioned by me as the great incisive moment of the Event of Palestine. What this moment meant we know from many things that have been spoken of here.

When we try to form a conception of how this most important “idea”—for so we may call it—the Christ-idea, developed out of the thoughts and feelings of the age immediately preceding it, it is well to remember that the Jahve or Jehova-idea meant as much to the ancient Hebrews as the Christ-idea does to the believers in Christ. From other lectures you know that for those who enter deeply into the essence of Christianity Jahve did not really differ very greatly from the Christ Himself. We must realise far more clearly the inward connection between the Christ-idea and the Jahve-idea. It is very difficult to give, in a few words, the whole connection between these two ideas which has been developed by me in many lectures and cycles in recent years, but it is possible to show in a parable how this connection has to be thought of. We have but to recall the symbol of the sunlight to which your attention has often been directed; how this comes to us either directly from the sun or reflected back from the moon at night, especially when the moon is at the full. Sunlight comes to us from the full moon, but reflected sunlight, which is somewhat different from direct sunlight. Were we to compare the Christ with direct sunlight, then Jahve might be likened to sun-light reflected from the moon; this represents exactly what is met with here in the evolution of mankind. Those who understand such things can feel the passing over of the reflection of Christ into Jehova, or of Jehova into Christ, as men feel the difference between moonlight and sunlight—Jahve being an indirect and Christ a direct revelation of the same Being. But in thinking of “evolution,” we must think of things side by side in space, and following each other in time. Those who have to speak of such things from the occult point of view say:—If we call the religion of Christ a “sun-religion” (and we can use this expression when we remember what has been said concerning Zarathustra) then the religion of Jahve can be called a moon-religion.

So in the period preceding Christianity, we have a sun-religion prepared for by a moon-religion. What has just been said will only be rightly appreciated by those who know that symbols are not chosen arbitrarily, but are deeply rooted in the things they represent. When any religion or world-faith is represented by a symbol, this represents, for those who know how to interpret it, the essential thing in that religion. Perhaps men have lost understanding to-day to a certain extent of a symbolism which sees the moon as representing the religion of Jahve, and also of the connection between the Christian religion and the symbol of the sun; but where thoughts are completely filled with the meaning of such symbols they have to be considered.

Call to mind how I have described the whole course of human evolution. First we have a descending evolution which began when man was first driven out of the spiritual world and entered ever more deeply into matter. This is a descending path. When we picture the general course of human evolution we think of the deepest point as having been reached at the time the Impulse of Christ entered, and that through this Impulse the descending direction was gradually changed to an ascending one.

In human evolution we have at first a descending path, then after the deepest point is reached the Christ-Impulse begins to affect it and will continue to do so till earth reaches the end of its mission.

Now evolution occurs in a very complicated way; certain conditions of its progress are the result of Impulses which had been given at an earlier time. It was an evolutionary event such as this that took place through the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse was poured forth at the beginning of our era and advanced in a direct line, and growing ever more and more powerful it will permeate all human life until earthly evolution has reached its goal. This is an impulse that was imparted once, and we have to picture it as advancing in a straight line; any evolution that arose later, is seen through it to be at a higher and more perfect stage. There are many such impulses, and also others, affecting the evolution of the world which work differently, and cannot he said to advance on straight lines. We distinguished in post-Atlantean evolution the ancient Indian civilisation, following it the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, then the Greco-Latin; and in the middle of this period the Christ-Event took place. In the fifth post-Atlantean age, in which we are now living, certain things are repeated which occurred in the third age—the Egypto-Chaldean—but a somewhat different way, and so that between them and maintaining a certain relationship between the third and the fifth ages we have the Christ-Impulse. This relation-ship is maintained in the same way between the sixth age and the second, and between the seventh and the first. We are here concerned with powerful factors of evolution which are revealed in such a way that in referring to them we can make use of the Biblical expression:—“The first shall be last.” The primeval Indian age will reappear in the seventh age in another form—yet so that it will be recognisable.

There is another way in which an earlier is seen to affect a later, and this is shown through the fact that we can distinguish smaller epochs. Thus, what took place in pre-Christian times during the ancient Hebrew civilisation appears again in a certain way in post-Christian times—overpassing the Christ-Impulse as it were-ideas which had been prepared within the religion of Jehova appeared again, and, in spite of other factors being present, had an effect on these later times.

Were I to explain symbolically what I cannot deal with adequately to-day owing to the short time at my disposal I might say:—If we feel that the religion of Jehova is represented by the symbol of the moon in contradistinction to the sun, we might expect that a similar belief, overpassing Christianity, would re-emerge at a later day. This did occur, and if such things are not accepted in an external sense or smiled at for they are deeply connected with the symbolism of religions—we may say that the old moon religion of Jehova appeared again in the religion of the half-moon, the Crescent, that its influence, which had preceded the Christ-Event, was carried over into post-Christian times. The repetition of an earlier age in a later is seen with overwhelming results in the last third of the Greco-Latin period, which is reckoned by us in an occult sense as continuing to about the 12th-13th century. This means that after having been separated from it by a period of six hundred years, we have a kind of repetition of the moon religion of Jehova in the religion brought by the Arabs from Africa into Spain. It is not possible to specify here all the characteristics it brought with it. But it is important that we should impress on our souls the fact that in the religion of Mahomet the Christ-Impulse was at first disregarded, that in it we have really a kind of revival of the religion of Moses—the religion of the one indivisible God. Only into the idea of this indivisible God-head something was introduced that had come over from the other side—from the Egypto-Chaldean view-point—which preserved very exact traditions concerning the relationship of the starry heavens to worldly events. Hence many of the thoughts and ideas found among the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Assyrians are found again in the religion of Mahomed, but permeated in an extra-ordinary way with what we might call the teaching concerning the indivisible divinity of Jehova. Speaking scientifically what meets us in Arabism is a synthesis of all that was taught by the priests of Egypt and Chaldea, and in the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrews.

In a union of this kind there is not only a compression, but there is also always something excluded and left behind. Everything which led to clairvoyant perception was excluded from it. What remained was merely a matter of intellectual research, of a combining of thought, so that all the ideas connected with the Egyptian art of healing and Chaldean astronomy, which both among the Egyptians and the Chaldeans was the outcome of ancient clairvoyance, is found in an intellectual and individualistic form in the Arabism of Mahomet.

Something filtered into Europe along with the Arabs by which all the old ideas that had prevailed among the Egyptians and Chaldeans were stripped of their clairvoyant imaginative content and given abstract forms. From this sprang the marvellous science which the Arabs brought from Africa to Europe by way of Spain. If Christianity brought an impulse mainly for the souls of men, then the great Impulse for the human head, for the intellect, came through the Arabs. Those who are not fully acquainted with the course of human evolution have no idea what the mental outlook, which appeared anew under the symbol of the moon, gave to humanity as a whole. Keppler and Copernicus would not have been possible without this Impulse which the Arabs brought to Europe. The whole method of thought, the manner in which different religious views were connected with the laying aside of the old clairvoyance, is seen again in our modern astronomy and modern science when the third period of culture celebrated its revival in our fifth age. Thus we have to see the evolution of man progressing on the one hand, so that the Impulse of Christ reaches the people of Europe directly by way of Greece and Italy; and, on the other hand, we see it taking a more southernly route which, leaving Greece and Italy on one side, unites with what came to us through the Arabs.

By the union of the religion of Christ with that of Mahomet there arose, during this most important period with which we are dealing, what really forms the content of our culture. From causes which cannot be gone into to-day, we must reckon a period of from six to six-and-ahalf centuries for such an impulse to develop; so that the renewed moon-culture actually arose, spread, and entered Europe six hundred years after the Event of Christ, and until the thirteenth century it enriched that Christian civilisation which had received its direct irnpulses by other paths. Even those who only observe the external course of events know that, however much they are opposed to Arabism, Arabian thought and science entered even into the cloisters of Western Europe, and up to the middle of the thirteenth century (which again indicates something important) we have a blending of these two impulses—the Arabian and the direct Christ-Impulse.

We may say that the sun-symbol and the moon-symbol were merged into one from the fifth and sixth centuries until between the twelfth and thirteenth, this being again a period that lasted for about six hundred years. After this direct union had reached its goal some-thing new arose which had been in gradual preparation since the twelfth and thirteenth century. It is interesting to note that even external sciences recognise that some-thing inexplicable passed through the souls of the people of Europe at that time. External science calls it “inexplicable,” but occultism says that, following the direct Impulse of Christ, there was poured by spiritual means into the souls of men what the fourth period of post-Atlantean culture had to give. The age of Greece threw up a following wave of culture called the culture of the Renaissance, it enriched everything that already existed through the centuries that followed. This was because the age of Greece, which occurred in the middle of the seven periods of post-Atlantean civilisation, underwent a certain renewal in the culture of the Renaissance.

This points again to a period of six hundred years—that is up to our own time—in which this wave of Greek culture has to a certain extent been exhausted. We are living within this period. We are living to-day in an atmosphere (as we are again at the beginning of a sixhundred-year-long wave of culture) into which some-thing new is pressing; an age which must again be enriched with something new from the Christ-Impulse. After the Moon-cult had its revival in the religion of the Crescent during the Renaissance, the time is now come when the Christ-Impulse, which continued as the direct stream, has to receive into it a neighbouring stream. Our age is powerfully attracted towards this neighbouring stream; only we must clearly understand what the addition of it to our civilisation means. All these things are absolutely in accordance with the correct progress of an occult system.

If we think of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, according to the old-not the new sequence—we may expect, after the renewal of the Moon-wave during the Renaissance, the influx of another stream to which we can quite correctly assign the symbol of Mercury. We might therefore say theoretically when this symfiol appeared that we were confronted with the influx into our culture of a wave of a kind of Mercury-influence, just as the wave of Arabism was called a Moon-influence.

If we understand the evolution of our own time aright we may describe Goethe as the last great mind who united in himself the fullness of science, of Christianity, and of the culture of the Renaissance; and we might expect that his soul would reveal a beautiful union of these—intellectualism enriched as it had been by Arabism and Christianity. If we study Goethe as we have been accustomed to do for some years past, it is easily seen that these elements did indeed meet within his soul. But in accordance with what has just been announced concerning the repeated cycle of six, and again six centuries, we might expect that nothing of the Mercury element could have appeared as yet in Goethe's soul, that could only appear as something new after his time. Now it is interesting to note that Goethe's pupil, Schopenhauer, reveals this Mercury influence. You can learn from some of my publications that Eastern wisdom entered into Schopenhauer's philosophy, especially in the form of Buddhism. Mercury was regarded as the symbol of Buddhism, and following on the age of Goethe we have a revival of the Buddha-Impulse (in which Buddha stands for Mercury and Mercury for Buddha) in the same way as the moon is symbolic of Arabism. We can now give a name to this neighbouring stream that entered the direct Christ-Impulse as a new tributary at the beginning of a new six-hundred-yearly epoch. We have to see in this neighbouring stream a revival of Buddhism only with the restrictions I explained in my public lectures on Buddha.¹

We now ask—which is the direct stream of the culture of the future? The Christ-stream! It advances in a direct line. And what neighbouring streams are there? We have first the Arabian stream, which flowed into the direct stream, paused for a time, and then received purification through the culture of the Renaissance. At present we are experiencing a renewed influx of the Buddha stream. When these facts are seen in their right light, we realise that we have to absorb certain elements out of the Buddha-stream which until now could not be received into our Western civilisation. We have to see how these elements of the Buddha-stream must pass into the spiritual development of the west. Such things, for instance, as the idea of reincarnation and Karma. These must be accepted. But one fact must be firmly impressed on our souls:—All these neighbouring streams will never be able to throw light on the central facts of our spiritual science. To question Buddhism or any other pre-Christian oriental religion that may have appeared as a revival in our time concerning the Christ, would be as sensible as for a European Christian to have questioned the Arabs of Spain concerning the nature of Christ!

The people of Europe were well aware that no conception of the Christ could come from the Arabs. If they had anything to say their ideas would not accord with the real Christ-idea. The various prophets who arose as false Messiahs up to Schabbathoi Zewi were really the outcome of Arabism, and had no knowledge of the Christ-Impulse. We must understand that the neighbouring stream of Arabism had to he made fruitful by quite other elements, not by solving in any way the central mystery of Christ. This must also be our attitude towards the stream which approaches us to-day, as the renewal of an ancient one, bringing us understanding of reincarnation and karma, but being incapable of imparting understanding of the Christ-Impulse. For this would be as absurd as to think the Arabs could impart a right conception of Christ to the people of Europe. They imparted many ideas concerning false Messiahs to Europe up to the time of Schabbathoi Zewi, and such things will occur again, for human evolution only progresses when strengthened by seeing through such deceptions. We must penetrate ever more deeply and consciously into these connections. Facts will show that the spiritual science founded by European Rosicrucians, with Christ as its central idea, will be established in the souls of men against all opposition and all misleadings.

How the central-idea of the Christ must enter men's souls, how the Christ must be interwoven, not only with the general evolution of man, but with the whole world, can he gathered from my book on Outline of Occult Science.

From it you can find which is the direct, the forward path. Everyone has the possibility of hearing of this path who understands the words from the Gospel of Matthew quoted at the end of the last lecture:—“False Christs and false prophets will appear when people will say unto you: Lo, here is the Christ or lo, there! believe it not.”

Alongside the Buddhistic stream of thought is another far removed from it, which thinks it is better in-formed regarding the Christ than the western spiritual science of the Rosicrucians. It brings all kinds of ideas and teachings into the world which have developed quite naturally out of the neighbouring oriental Buddhist stream. It would show the worst kind of weakness in western souls if they were unable to grasp the fact that the Buddha, or Mercury-stream, has as little light to throw on the direct course of the Christ-idea as Arabism has. This is not put forward from any spirit of dogmatism or fantasy, but from knowledge of the objective course of the evolution of the world. It can be proved by figures or by the trend of civilisations if you wish to follow them up, that things must be as is taught by occult science.

Added to this there is also the necessity to distinguish between an ancient orthodox Buddhism which seeks to transplant a non-progressive Buddhism into Europe, and out of it to develop a “Christ-idea;” and a truly progressive Buddhism. This means, there are people who speak of Buddha as follows:—“Look to Buddha, who lived some five to six hundred years before our era! Look to what he taught!” What such people say is comparable with what spiritual science says in a Rosicrucian sense:—“It is your fault, not Buddha's, that you speak as if Buddha had remained at the same stage at which he stood five to six centuries before our era I Can you not think or imagine that Buddha has progressed?” When speaking thus, these people refer to a teaching suited to a time long past; of a teaching given by Buddha five to six centuries before our era. But we look to a Buddha who has advanced, and who from spiritual realms exercises his enduring influence on human culture. We look to the Buddha we presented to you in our studies on the Gospel of Luke, whose influence came from the Jesus of the Nathan line of the house of David; we look to the Buddha as he has evolved further in spiritual realms, and who imparts truths to us to-day concerning the things of which we are speaking.

Something very curious has happened to dogmatic Christianity in the West; through a strange concatenation of circumstances it has come to pass that a Buddha-like form has appeared by chance among Christian Saints.

You will recall how once I spoke of a legend told all over Europe in the Middle Ages, the legend of Balaam and Josaphat. It was somewhat as follows:—There was once an Indian king on earth. He had a son. This son was brought up at first far removed from all human misery; from all external life. He lived in the king's palace, where he saw only what conduced to human happiness. He was called Josaphat; the name has been much changed and has assumed various forms—Josaphat, Judasaph, Budasaph. Josaphat lived up to a certain age in the palace without learning anything of the world. Then one day it happened that he left his father's palace and learnt something of life. He first saw a leper, then a blind man, then an aged man. We are then told that he met a Christian hermit called Balaam. By him he was converted to Christianity.

You will not fail to notice that this legend has a strong resemblance to the legend of Buddha. But you will also notice that something is added to this legend of the Middle Ages with which Buddha cannot be charged; namely, that he allowed himself to be converted to Christianity. This legend gave rise to a certain consciousness among Christians—among some of them at least—who had made calendars of the saints.

People knew that the name Josaphat or Budasaph is connected with the name “Bodhisattva.” Budasaph passes directly over into Bodhisattva. So that there is here an extraordinary and deep connection between a Christian legend and the figure of Buddha. The oriental legend, as we know, represents Buddha as entering Nirvana and passing on the Bodhisattva crown to his successor the Maytreya-Buddha, who is now a Bodhisattva, and will later become the future Buddha of the world. Buddha appears again in the legend as Josaphat. The connection between Buddhism and Christianity is described marvellously by someone who said:—Josaphat is a saint, and Buddha was himself so holy that according to the legend he was converted to Christianity from being the son of an Indian king; so he can be ranked among the saints although from one side he was regarded as a heathen.

You can see from this that it was known where the later form of Buddhism, or rather of Buddha, has to be sought. Buddhism and Christianity have meanwhile flowed one into the other in the hidden worlds. And Salaam is that strange figure who made the Bodhisattva acquainted with Christianity, so that when now we trace the course of Buddhism as an enduring world-movement in the sense of this legend, we can only see it in the changed form in which it exists at the present time. We are obliged to speak of Buddha as he exists for us to-day, when clairvoyantly we understand what he reveals to us.

Just as Arabism was not Judaism, and the Moon of Jehova did not reappear in Arabism in its old form, so neither does Buddhism reappear in its old form when it returns to enrich the culture of the West, but changed. For a later never appears as an exact replica of an earlier.

These short detached remarks are intended to act as a stimulus to thoughts on human evolution, which you can develop further for yourselves. And I assure you if you accept all the historical knowledge that it is possible to discover, and are really able to follow the spiritually scientific development of Europe, you will see that we are standing at present at the point where Christianity and Buddhism flow one into the other.

Just as at the time of which I have been speaking a union of the Jahve-religion with Christianity occurred, so to-day a union of Buddhism with Christianity is taking place. Test this by accepting all that the historians of Europe are able to give you! Test it, but not as they are wont to do, take all the factors into consideration; you will then find confirmation of what I have said. Only we should have to speak for weeks if we were to give out all that reaches us from the direction of European Rosicrucianism.

But it is not only in history that proof can be found, if you go to work in the right way you can find it also in natural science and in allied realms. You have only to look in the right way to find that new ideas appear everywhere sporadically at the present day, and that old ideas become useless and disappear. Our thinkers and investigators seem to work with ideas that have become ineffectual, because in the widest sense they are incapable as yet of accepting and making use of other lines of thought, such as those of reincarnation and karma, and all that theosophy has to give. You can search the modern literature of the various departments of science, there you will find what is so painful for those who know how fact after fact appears in scientific life and nowhere are ideas capable of grasping them. There is one such idea that plays an important part in science to-day—the idea of heredity. (These things can only be hinted at here.) The idea of heredity as it is put forward in various departments of science and even in popular literatures to-day is simply untenable.

People must learn facts, for the understanding of which other kinds of ideas are required -such, for instance, as those entirely useless ideas concerning “heredity” that are common to-day. Certain facts, well known to-day concerning heredity in man and in other creatures, will only be understood when quite different ideas prevail. When heredity is spoken of to-day, people seem to think that any faculties that appear in the human being can be traced to his immediate forefathers. The idea of rein-carnation and karma will first make it possible for clear ideas to emerge instead of the present confusion. It will be realised that a great part of what is found in human nature has nothing to do with what is called the mutual co-operation of the sexes—for a confused science still teaches that all man is to-day comes from the union of the male and female elements at conception. It is not at all true that all the things appearing in a man have to do with physical inheritance. These matters must be gone into more thoroughly. I only put them before you to-day as a stimulus to further thought.

When you consider the physical body of man you know that it has a long history behind it—it has passed through the Saturn epoch, the Sun epoch and the Moon epoch—now it is passing through the Earth epoch. It was only during the Moon epoch that the influence of the astral body appeared. This did not exist previously, and the physical body has naturally been very much changed by it. Hence we do not see the physical body as it was under the forces of the Saturn and Sun epochs, but only as it has become under the influence of these forces added to those of the astral body and the ego.

Only the physical body can be inherited through co-operation of the sexes, for this depends on the influence of the astral on the physical body; everything appertaining to laws going back to the Saturn and Sun epochs has nothing whatever to do with this. One part of human nature is received directly from the cosmos, not from the opposite sex. This means that what we have in us does not spring altogether from the union of the sexes, for this is dependent on what comes from our astral bodies, but a large part of our human nature—that which comes from the mother for example—is received directly from the macrocosm.

We have therefore to distinguish one part of our human nature as being the result of the intercourse of the sexes, and another part as received directly by the mother from the macrocosm. Clarity will only be reached in respect of this when we succeed in distinguishing the separate parts of human nature, concerning which there is the greatest confusion at the present day. The physical body is not something shut off within itself, but is formed from the combined activity of the ether body, astral body and ego; again we distinguish the forces that have to be ascribed to the direct influence of the macrocosm, and others that have to be ascribed to the co-operation of the sexes.

But something is also received from the paternal nature that has nothing to do with physical inheritance. Just as certain organs and laws having nothing to do with physical inheritance are received directly from the macrocosm, and are implanted in the organism by means of the mother; other laws are received from the macrocosm through the instrumentality of the father's organism and follow a spiritual path. It can be said of that which is received by way of the mother—her organism provides the moment of contact (Angriffsmoment). But this that is active in the organism of the mother has not its source in any co-operation of the sexes, but it co-operates with what comes from the father, and this also does not spring from any union of the sexes, but from the paternal element. It is therefore a world event—a macrocosmic event that takes place, and finds expression in a physical way. People are entirely mistaken when they describe the development of the human embryo as being only the outcome of heredity. It is the result of what is received directly from the macrocosm.

I have spoken here of facts that far transcend the ideas of science; they are ideas originating from very ancient epochs. Does anything show us this? Popular literature tells us very little about it, but it is clearly evident on the plane of occult endeavour. I should like here to tell you something. I can indeed only hint at it, but would like to point out what a remarkable difference there is between two natural scientists and thinkers of the present day who had, however, been brought up in different circles and with widely different ideas. The characters of the two men are clearely revealed in what follows.

We have in the first place Haeckel, who because he elaborated his marvellous facts with most primitive ideas, led everything back to heredity and presented the whole embryonic evolution as dependent on heredity; opposed to him is the investigator His, who held more to facts, concerning whom it was objected, with a certain amount of truth, that he thought too little. His was a Zoologist and Naturalist. Because of the special way he traced out facts, he was constrained to oppose the heredity theory of Haeckel, and pointed out that certain organs and organic formations in man can only be explained when we turn away from the idea that we have to thank the co-operation of the sexes for our origin, Haeckel makes fun of this and writes:—“Therefore Herr His ascribes the origin of the human body to a certain ‘virginal’ influence that does not depend on the co-operation of the sexes!”

This is absolutely correct. For scientific facts force us to acknowledge to-day that what is brought about through co-operation of the sexes has to be kept apart from that which comes directly from the macrocosm, which, naturally, for wide circles is an absurd idea.

From this it can be seen that even on scientific grounds we are driven towards new ideas. We are placed in the midst of an evolution that says:—If the facts that have been imparted to you are to be rightly understood you must acquire a whole host of new ideas, for the ideas that have come down from olden times do not reach far enough.

From what I have said you will see that a neighbouring stream must enter our culture—this is the “Mercury stream”; its presence is revealed through the fact that those who go through an occult development, such as has frequently been described by me, evolve towards the spiritual world, and by doing so experience many new facts. These facts stream towards them, they stream into their souls. We might compare the entrance of man into another world with the passing of a fish from the water into the air; the fish has first to be prepared for this by changing its air bladders into lungs. This resembles the transition from sense perception to spiritual perception, whereby a man's soul is made capable of employing certain forces in a different element. Many things are then revealed to him.

The air is full of thoughts to-day which make it necessary for us to grasp the new facts of science now appearing on the physical plane. As investigator of the super-sensible one participates in things pressing in from all sides. This could not have been before the entrance of the new stream of which I have spoken. When these facts are rightly understood, it will be realised we are living in an extraordinarily important age, one in which it is quite impossible for us to continue to live unless some such change takes place in human thought and feeling as I have declared to be necessary.

Man must learn to live in a new element just as the fish that is accustomed to live in water has to learn to live in a new element when compelled to live in air. We must learn to live with our thoughts within those facts which the physical plane produces. Anyone who rejects these thoughts is like a fish taken out of the water. Man must not remain in the water. If he did, his later life would be “airless” as regards spiritual ideas—he would gasp for air. Those people who desire to live within the monism of to-day resemble fish who have exchanged their watery abode for an airy one, but would like to retain their gills. Only human souls who have changed their faculties, whose thoughts have evolved to a new wait of accepting facts, will grasp what the future has to bring.

So with full understanding we feel we are standing at the confluence of two world-wide streams of thought—the one should bring us a deeper comprehension of the Christ-problem and of the Mystery of Golgotha; the other new conceptions and ideas concerning reality. They must of necessity flow one into the other in our day; and not cease to do so even though they encounter the worst of obstacles. For the periods in which such streams of thought meet are fraught with many checks and hindrances. In some respects it is the people who rely on spiritual science who find themselves in a position to understand such things.

Many of our members might perhaps say with reference to the teaching given here:—What you tell us is difficult of comprehension, we have to work at it for a long time. Why can you not give us a more comfort-able diet, that we might absorb more easily what is able to convince us of the spiritual nature of the world? Why do you lay such stress on understanding the world?” Many might say this and add:—“How much more beautiful it would be if we might believe in a Buddhism that has come down to us from the past; if we did not have to think of the Christ-Event as the single point on which the balance rests, that no other is to be compared with it, but might think that a Being like the Christ would incarnate again and again as other men do. Why do you not say—here or there such a one will appear in the flesh! Instead you say men must make themselves capable of experiencing a renewal of the event of Damascus. If only you would say:—‘One will come in the flesh,’ then we could say:—‘Behold, He is here!’ We could then see Him with our physical eyes! This would be much easier to understand!”

That such things have been said is the concern of others. The task of western spiritual science is to make the truth known; to declare the truth with full responsibility and understanding of what lies within the evolution that has brought us thus far.

Those who desire to be comfortable in the spiritual world must seek spirituality along some other path. But -those who desire the truth, such truth as is required in our day—which has need of all the intelligence won in the time of old clairvoyance and preserved until the dawn of the new clairvoyance—will, I am very sure, follow the path indicated in the words spoken to-day and on many other occasions.

What is most important is not that we should say in what form we desire truth, but that we should know from the whole course of human evolution that the truth must necessarily be spoken at a certain point of time. O! there are many other things that must be said! But for these things you shall not go unprepared.

Therefore again and again within our Rosicrucian spiritual movement things will be said which stand at the very summit of the spiritual knowledge of our day. You need never accept what is said here or elsewhere with blind belief, blind belief is never appealed to here. In your intelligence, in the employment of your own understanding you have the means for testing what is said. You may frequently hear it said: Take the whole of life, all science, everything you are able to experience, and test them by what is given out within the stream of Rosicrucian spiritual life. Do not fail to ex-amine everything—you will find it stands the test! You who live within our movement know this, but you must not fail to apply the test. For it is precisely where opposition stirs, when on the ground of true spirituality perhaps, the direct opposite appears, that belief alone does not suffice. Everything that rests on blind belief is sterile and stillborn. It may be easy to build on blind faith, but those who belong to the spiritual life of the West renounce it. They build on that which the human intellect can scrutinize.r Those who are in touch with the sources from which our Rosicrucian spiritual teaching comes say of it:—After scientific examination, this is how things are found to be! The edifice of spiritual science is raised on a foundation of truth I This is a foundation of no easy belief! Our edifice is raised on the foundation of a carefully tested if perhaps difficult truth, and the prophets of a blind and comfortable faith are in no way able to shake the foundations on which the edifice of Spiritual Science is raised!

• 1. "Buddha," is a public lecture given in Berlin on the 7th of may, 1911, see "Paths of Experience"

It is easy to see how the conceptions of spiritual science that have been voiced for some years within our circle, and in the German section generally, are spreading more and more in the world, that understanding of them is beginning to find its way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries. It is naturally not possible, although it might be a help to present day understanding, to speak casually of introducing the ideas, feelings, and knowledge of our spiritual movement into the modern world. Many of you might be glad to know how the spiritual nourishment you have received has affected other souls at the present time. It is only on certain occasions that we can speak of the spread of our spiritual ideas, but it may fill you with a certain satisfaction to know that we can see again and again how in different countries and in different hemispheres the spirit which inspires us is gaining a footing—more in one place, less in another. When I was in Triest a short time ago trying to arouse some comprehension of our point of view, I could see how the ideas we hold were gaining ground. And when from that southern city I passed northwards to Copenhagen, where, in a recent course of lectures, I tried to arouse some interest in the hearts of my hearers, it could be seen there also how the spirit we cherish under the symbol of the Rosy Cross is entering into them more and more. Taking together these separate facts one sees that a need and a longing for what we call “spiritual science” does exist at the present time.

That we should not carry on any agitation or propaganda is a fundamental principle of our spiritual movement; we should rather listen attentively to what of the great wisdom of the world the hearts and souls of the men of to-day required, so that they may have both the possibility and the certainty of life. We may therefore add to the thoughts put forward in a general lecture like this, one more—that we consider it a kind of duty at the present time to make of these spiritual. thoughts nourishment for other souls. This depends upon the whole manner in which we enter into the life of our time.

You have doubtless already accepted sufficient of the great law of Karma to know that it is not a matter of chance when an individual feels constrained at a certain point of time to assume a physical body and come down in the physical world. All the souls gathered here have felt a longing to assume a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because they desired to experience in their own souls all that was being prepared and carried out in their physical environment at this time.

Let us now consider our own age as it appears spiritually to souls, which, like our own, are born in it. Things were very different in the spiritual world, as well as in the external world, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to what they were even fifty or sixty years earlier.

The person who is making progress—and you are all in this position—is trying to learn something of the spirit, and of the spiritual guidance of the world; of what fills surrounding space as the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, and of what enters into our own souls. For the past half century souls longing for the spirit found extraordinarily little true spiritual nourishment where they hoped to find it. This longing for the spirit exists deep within the souls of all men, it is easily silenced for it does not speak loudly, but the longing is there, and each one whatever he is, or does in life, can receive true spiritual nourishment. Whatever department of science people take up to-day, they only learn from it external material facts which serve to further the progress of civilisation in a bright and clever way, but they learn nothing of what is revealed to man through the spirit. Whether he works as an artist or in some practical walk of life he finds little of what he has need, nothing that can enter his soul, his head, or his hands, to give him power and impulse for his work, and also assurance, solace, and power in life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people had already come to the conclusion that in the near future little of this would be found. Many a one said to himself in the first half of the nineteenth century when some remnants of the old life still remained even if in another form:—“There seems to be something in the air; it is as if the ancient treasures of the spirit that have come down to us from olden times were disappearing. It is as if the expected advance in culture of the nineteenth century had entirely wiped out the spiritual communications that have been handed down to us from ancient times.” Many such voices were,heard,in the first half of the nineteenth century. To show what I mean I will mention but one example. There was a man living at that time who knew the old kind of Theosophy well; he knew also that this old form would completely disappear in the course of the nineteenth century, yet he was firmly convinced that a future was coming when the old Theosophy would surely return. The passage I am about to read was written in the year 1847, when the first half of the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. He who wrote it was a thinker such as is no longer met with to-day, for he was still conscious of the last echoes of those ancient communications which have long since been lost to us:—

What Theosophy really desires is often difficult to discover from the older theosophists, and this is even less clear to-day, because on its present path theosophy can attain to no scientific existence, and therefore cannot have any great results. It would be most premature to conclude from this that it is a passing phenomenon without scientific justification. History loudly proclaims the opposite. It tells how it can never get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon which breaks out unnoticed again and again, and whose changing forms are preserved by the links of a never-dying tradition. At all times there has really been little that has connected this vital, speculative need, with vital religious needs. It is only for these last that theosophy exists. The main thing is, if it might one day become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it would become popular and come to be accepted generally, and in this way bequeath these truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves. But all this rests within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate; for the present we are thankful for the beautiful writings of Oetinger, which can certainly reckon on a large circle of sympathisers.¹

From this we see how the theosophic spirit was regarded in 1847 by a man like Richard Rothe of Heidelberg.

What kind of spirit is the theosophic spirit really?

It is a spirit without which true culture would never have taken place. When we think of what is greatest in this, we think of the spirit without which there would have been no Homer, no Pindar, Raphael or Michelangelo, without which there would have been no deep religious feeling in man; neither spiritual life nor external culture. Everything a man creates must be created by the spirit; if he thinks he can produce anything without it, he is unaware that his whole spiritual endeavour would in that case fail for a certain time. The less spiritual the source from which anything comes the sooner it dies. Anything having enduring worth must have its source in spirit. The smallest creative act, even in everyday concerns, has an eternal value and connects us with what is eternal; for everything done by man is under the guidance of spiritual life. We know that theosophical life as cultivated by us is founded in Rosicrucianism, and it has often been explained that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom had been preparing what has come to pass since the end of the nineteenth century and will go on further into the twentieth. What was indicated by Rothe as a “future” he hoped and longed for, has already become “present” for us to-day, and will continue to become so more and more. This had long been in preparation by those who allowed this spiritual influence to pour, at first unconsciously, into mankind.

What in a special sense we have called the “Rosicrucian path” has been consciously accepted within our theosophical movement since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and what the spirit has imprinted as science on the people of Europe, has since then flowed into our hearts.

Can we form an idea from what has taken place in our civilisation of how this spirit works?

I have said that since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it has “worked” as the true Rosicrucian spirit, but it was always there, and has only assumed this last form since the dates mentioned. This spirit that is active at present as the Rosicrucian spirit goes back to very early ages of humanity. Its mysteries existed in Atlantis. The activity it has recently developed, becoming ever more and more conscious, streamed not so very long ago in an unconscious way into the hearts and souls of men. Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit entered man unconsciously.

We meet together here, and our studies show us how the human soul has developed in this or that, till it has gradually attained to a region where it understands spiritual life, where it may even perhaps see spiritual life. Many of you have striven for years to fill your souls with thoughts and ideas which can set the spiritual life before your eyes. You know the way we regard the secrets of the world. I have often explained the different stages of development the soul passes through, and how it rises to higher worlds. You know that we have to distinguish a higher from a lower part of the self; that man has come over from other planetary conditions and has experienced the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. During these his physical body, etheric body and astral body were formed; he then entered on his earthly development. You know that something dwells within us that passes through its training here so as to rise to higher conditions. You have heard that certain Beings remained behind on the Moon as Luciferic Beings, and these later approached the human astral body as tempters, giving to humanity in this way what they had to give. Then we have often spoken of how man has to overcome certain things in his lower self, that he has to conquer them before he can enter those spheres to which his higher self belongs—that in order to reach these higher regions he has to fulfil the saying of Goethe:—

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

“So long as thou hast not experienced death and becoming, thou art a gloomy (sorry) Guest upon a dark earth.”

We have also said that the human evolution possible to-day, and that can give us power, certainty, and real content in our lives, is only to be attained when we learn, for instance, of the manifold natures of man, and that this man is not put together in any chaotic manner, but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. This must not be accepted merely as words, but by describing different temperaments, by studying the education of man, we have presented clear conceptions of these things, showing how up to his seventh year he is concerned with the development of the physical body, up to his fourteenth year with that of the etheric body, and up to his twenty-first year with the astral body. And we learnt from our studies dealing with the mission of truth, of devotion, of anger and so on that what we describe as physical body, etheric body, and astral body, feeling-soul, rational-soul and consciousness-soul are no abstract ideas, but that they impart life to our whole mental outlook, making everything around as clear and full of meaning.²

It is possible by such ideas to gain understanding of the secrets of the world. And if there are many who consciously or unconsciously persist in their materialistic opinions, there is also a certain number of souls who feel it as a necessity of existence to listen to such statements as we are able to give. Many of you would not have shared in what has been practised herefor years if it were not a necessity of your life. Why are there souls present to-day who understand the views and ideas evolved here, and who conduct their lives in accordance with them? Because, as you have been born into the world with longings such as I have described, so your forefathers (which means many souls present here to-day) were born in past centuries into other surroundings and into another world than that of the nineteenth century. Let us look backwards to the sixth and seventh, or to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when many who are here now were incarnated, and let us see what these souls experienced at that time.

There was no theosophical society in those days where people discussed things as we do here, but souls then heard something quite different from the people about them. Let me try to call up before you what these souls heard. They did not travel from place to place in order to hear lectures on spiritual science, but they heard rhapsodists who passed from village to village, from place to place, declaring things concerning the spirit. What did these people say? Let us recall a single instance of this. People did not then say:—“We have a Theosophy, a teaching concerning the lower and higher ego, that deals with the different members of man's Being and so on,” but rhapsodists travelled through the land, men who were called by the spirit to declare somewhat as follows:—(I am now repeating some of the things that were spread abroad through Middle and Eastern Europe at that time).

There was once a king's son. He rode forth and came presently to a deep ditch, he heard moaning proceedi.ng from it. He followed the course of the ditch to discover the cause of the moaning, and there he found an old woman. He left his horse, descended into the ditch, and helped the old woman out. He then saw that she could not walk for she had injured her leg, so he asked her how this accident had come about. She then told him:—I am an old woman and I must rise early soon after midnight in order to go to the town to sell eggs. On the way I fell into this ditch.” The king's son said:—“Thou canst” not now reach thine own dwelling. I will set thee on my horse and take thee there.” This he did. The old woman said:—“Although of noble birth thou art a kind and good man, and because thou hast helped me, thou shalt receive a reward from me.” He now guessed that she was something more than an old woman. Then she said:—“Because of the kindness thou hast shown me thou shalt receive the reward that thy good soul deserves. Dost thou desire to marry the daughter of the Flower-Queen?” “Yes,” he said. Then, she continued:—“To do so thou hast need of what I can easily give thee.” And she gave him a little bell, saying:—“When this is rung once the king-eagle will come with his hosts to help thee, whatever the position in which thou mayst be, when thou ringest twice the king of the foxes with his pack will come to help thee, wherever thou art, and if thou ringest thrice the king of the fishes will come with his hosts and will help thee wherever thou art.”

The king's son took the little bell and returned home and said that he was going to seek the daughter of the flower-queen, and rode forth. He rode a long, long time and no one could tell him where the daughter of the flower-queen dwelt. His horse was by this time worn out and broken down, so that he had to pursue his wanderings on foot. He met an old man and asked him where the dwelling of the flower-queen's daughter was. “I cannot tell thee,” said the old man, “go on further and ever further, and thou wilt find my father, and he will perhaps tell thee.” So the king's son went on further, and at last found a very ancient primeval man of whom he asked if he could tell him where the flower-queen dwelt with her daughter. Then the old man said to him:—“The flower-queen dwells afar in a mountain that thou canst see in the distance from here. She is, however, watched over by a savage dragon. Thou canst not reach her, for the dragon never sleeps in these days; there is only a certain time in which he sleeps, and this is his waking time. But thou must go still further to another mountain, there lives the dragon's mother. Through her thou will reach thy goal.” Courageously he went on. He reached the first mountain, then the second mountain; there he found the dragon's mother, the archetype of all ugliness. But he knew it depended on her whether he would find the daughter of the flower-queen or not. He then saw near the first, seven other dragons who all desired to watch over the flower-queen and her daughter, who had long been held prisoners and who were to be liberated by a king's son. He said to the dragon's mother:—“O, I know that I must be thy bondsman if I am to find the flower-queen!” “Yes,” she answered, “thou must be my bondsman,” and thou must do me a service that is not easy. Here is a horse, thou must lead him out to pasture the first day, the second and the third day. If thou bringst him home safe then on the third day perhaps thou mayst attain thy desire. But if thou doest not bring him safe home the dragon will eat thee—we shall all eat thee.” The next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to the pasture, but soon the horse escaped from him. He sought it but could not find it, and was most unhappy. He remembered the little bell the old woman had given him. He drew it forth and rang it once. Then many eagles appeared led by the king-eagle. They found the horse, and he was able to lead it back to the mother dragon. She said:—“Because thou hast brought it back I will give thee a mantle of copper; with it thou canst take part in the ball that is to be given tonight in the circles of the flower-queen and her daughter.”

On the second day he was again to take the horse to the meadow. It was given to him, but soon it escaped again, and nowhere could he find it So he drew forth the little bell again and rang it twice. Immediately the king of the foxes appeared with a large following. They found the horse, and he was able to restore it to the dragon's mother. She then said to him:—“To-day thou shalt receive a silver mantle with which thou canst again attend the ball that takes place tonight in the circle of the flower-queen and her daughter.” At the ball the flower-queen's daughter said to him:—“Demand on the third day a number of these horses, with them thou canst rescue us and we shall be united.” On the third day the horse was again handed over to him so that he could take it to the pastures. At once it escaped again, for it was very wild. He drew forth his little bell and rang it three times. The fish-king then appeared with his following. They found the horse and he took it back a third time. He had successfully performed his task. The dragon mother then gave him as recompense a mantle of gold as his third covering; with it he could take part on the third day at the ball at the flower-queen's dwelling. Besides this he was able to bring as a fitting present to her those horses that he had taken care of. With them he could carry the flower-queen and her daughter to their own fortress. And round this fortress which all the others wished to steal from her they allowed a thick hedge of bushes to grow so that the fortress could not be taken.

Then the flower-queen said to the king's son:—“Thou bast won my daughter, thou shalt have her by and by, but only on one condition. Thou shalt only have her for half the year, the other half she must withdraw from the surface of the earth so that she may be with me; only thus is it possible for thee to be united with her.”

In this way he won the daughter of the flower-queen and lived with her always for half the year; during the other half she was with her mother. This and other stories entered into very many souls. They listened to them, but did not interpret them allegorically after the manner of the strange theosophists of recent times; for these things have no value as symbolic or allegoric statements. No! people accepted them because they found pleasure and joy in them, they felt warm life flow through their souls when they listened to such tales.

There are many souls living now who heard such tales and accepted them with joy. And when received in this way they continued to live within these souls, they turned into thought-forms, into feelings and perceptions, thus they became something different than they were before. This produced results, it imparted powers to such souls, and these powers were changed, they were transformed into something else. Into what were they changed?

They were changed into that which lives in men's souls to-day as longing for a higher elucidation of these same secrets, a longing for theosophy. The rhapsodist did not tell of people who strove towards their higher self, and to attain it must conquer the lower self which held them down, but they told of a king's son who, as he rode forth through the world, found an old woman in distress, and did a good and kindly deed! To-day, we say:—People must do good deeds, deeds of love and sacrifice. At that time men spoke in images. To-day we say:—Men must feel within such sympathy for the spirit that they divine something of the spiritual world, something that connects them with it, and enables them to develop forces that can put them in touch with it. In earlier times men were told in parables of the old woman who gave the king's son a bell. To-day they are told:—Man has taken all the other kingdoms of nature into himself, what lives scattered in them is united harmoniously in him. But he must understand how something lives in him which lives in all surrounding nature, that he can only overcome his lower nature when this is brought into right relationship with himself so that it can help him.

We have often spoken of the evolution of man through the Saturn, Sun and Moon epochs, how he left the other kingdoms of nature behind him, retaining the best out of each, so that he might rise to something higher. By what means has he evolved? By means of that which Plato uses as a symbol—the horse; on this he rides forward from incarnation to incarnation. At that time the image of the bell was used; it was rung to summon the kingdoms of nature through their representatives—the Eagle-king, Fox-king, and Fish-king—so that he who was to become the ruler of these kingdoms might be brought into right relationship with them.

The soul of man is untamed, and only when love and wisdom control it is it brought into the right relationship. At one time this was brought to man's notice in pictures; his soul was guided so that he could understand what to-day is told us differently. At that time he was told:—When you ring the bell once the Eagle-king comes, when you ring it twice the Fox-king comes, and when you ring it three times the Fish-king; these brought back the horse. This means the storms which rage in the human soul must be recognised, and when we recognise them we can free it from the lower disturbances and bring it into order.

Man must learn to know how his own passions, anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven years to another seven; he must learn to know the threefold nature of the human sheaths. In former days we were presented with a wonderful picture. Every time the king's son rang the bell (that is when by his own power he had subdued one of the kingdoms) he acquired a covering, a sheath.

To-day we say:—We study the nature of the physical body; at that time an image was used, the dragon-mother gave the man a mantle of copper. To-day we say:—We study the nature of our etheric body; then it was said:—The dragon-mother gave him a silver mantle. Again we say:—We learn to know our astral body with all its surging passions. At that time they said:—The dragon-mother gave him on the third day a golden mantle.

What we learn to-day concerning the threefold sheath-nature of man was brought to people at an earlier day through the image of the copper, silver, and golden mantles. And to the souls that then received the thought-form of the copper, silver, and golden mantles, we say to-day:—What brings you understanding of the dense physical body, is related to the other bodies as copper ore is to silver and gold. To-day we say:—Backward Luciferic Beings of seven different kinds remained behind on the moon and worked upon the human astral body. The rhapsodists said:—When the king's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the flower-queen's daughter, he met seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his day's task. We know that if our evolution is not carried out aright it is owing to the power of the seven different kinds of Luciferic Beings. To-day we say:—In carrying out our spiritual development we find our higher self. Formerly, people were presented with a picture. The king's son they were told united himself with the flower-queen's daughter. We say:—The human soul must attain to a certain rhythm.

In one of the earlier lectures in this course I said:—When an idea rises in a man's soul he must allow it time to mature, he will then observe a certain rhythm. After seven days the idea has entered deeply into his soul; after fourteen days, the idea now being more mature, is able to lay hold of the outer astral substance, and to allow itself to be “baptised by the universal spirit”; after twenty-one days it has matured still further, and only after four times seven days does it reach the stage where he can give it to the world as his own personal gift. What I have described is an inner rhythm of the soul.

A man can only create successfully when he has no desire to impart hurriedly to the world what has chanced to come to him, but knows that the orderliness of the external universe must enter in his soul. We must live so that we repeat the macrocosm microscopically in ourselves.

These pictures which were told everywhere—and hundreds of them could be cited—stimulated the powers of the human soul by means of thought-forms, so that such souls are to-day ripe enough to listen to the other form of instruction, the form cultivated in spiritual science. But the longing for this had first to become very strong. All the conscious striving of men's souls had first to disappear from the physical plane. Then with the coming of the second half of the nineteenth century materialistic culture arose, and all was desolation as regards spiritual life. But the longing, on the other hand, grew ever greater and greater, the more the ideal of a future spiritual movement grew. There were but few remaining in the first half of the nineteenth century who felt, as in a faint memory, and experienced in silent martyrdom, how the ideas which were once perceived, discussed, and developed, still existed; but were in decline.

In 1803 a man was born in whose soul some echo of the wisdom of an earlier day still remained. Something dwelt in him that was closely related to our theosophical ideas. His soul was filled with longing to solve the secrets of spiritual science—his name was Julius Mosen. His life could only be preserved by spending the greater part of it in bed. His soul no longer suited his body, for owing to the way he had grasped these things, yet was unable spiritually to enter further into them, he had drawn his etheric body out of his physical body, and consequently he had become an invalid. He had, however, risen spiritually to considerable heights. In the year 1831 he wrote a remarkable book called “Ritter Wahn.” He knew of a wonderful legend in Italy about the Knight Wahn, and when studying it he said to himself:—Something of the spirit of the universe lives in this legend, this saga has arisen in the way it has, these pictures have been formed as they are, because those who formed them were filled with the living spiritual guidance of the world. What was the result? In 1831 he wrote a most wonderful dramatic work. It has naturally been forgotten—as everything is that originates in this way from greatness of spirit. Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death. On the way he meets with three old men. It occurred to Julius Mosen strangely enough to translate the name of one of the old men, it Mondo, as Ird (earth), for he knew something special lay in translating it thus into German. The name of tile three old men whom Ritter Wahn met when he set out to conquer death were Ird, Zeit, and Raum—earth, time and space. The three could not help him for they were subject to death. Ird (earth) is that which is subject to the laws of the physical body, and therefore to death; Zeit (time), the etheric body, is transient; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the impression of space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation, but that by which we are fixed within our three sheaths according to this Italian legend is Ird, Zeit and Raum (earth, time and space). What is the Ritter Wahn?—Illusion.

We have often spoken of what enters us as Maya. We ourselves are it; we who go on from incarnation to incarnation look out on the world, and are confronted with the great illusion. Each one of us is a “Ritter Wahn” and each one goes forth, if we live in the spirit, to conquer death. In this life we meet the three old men, our sheaths. They are very old. The physical body has existed since the age of Saturn, the etheric body since the Sun-age, the Astral body since the Moon-age, and that which dwells in man as the “I” has been united with him since the coming of the Earth-age. Julius Mosen represents this in such a way that the soul, by which Ritter Wahn would conquer death, first storms out into the world as a rider, thus employing the Platonic image which was prevalent all over Central Europe and far beyond it. So Ritter Wahn rides forth, and would conquer heaven with the aid of materialistic thoughts—as people do who trust to the senses—thereby remaining entangled in delusion and Maya.

But when at death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is beautifully described by Julius Mosen—life is not exhausted, souls long to return to earth to carry out their further development. Ritter Wahn comes down to earth again. And as he sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul as it is stirred by everything earthly—just as was the flower-queen's daughter—and revealing its union with everything that can only come to man through earthly schooling, there when united with the beautiful Morgana, when again united with the earth, death falls away from him. This means he passes through death in order to raise his own soul (represented by Morgana) ever higher, to purify and develop it further in each incarnation.

From images like these, which bear the stamp of many centuries, ideas enter into man and are aided by artists like Julius Mosen. They sprang in his case from a soul too great to live healthily in a body belonging to the age of materialism that was approaching, therefore, owing to the greatness of his glowing soul, he suffered a silent martyrdom. This was in the year 1831. All these thoughts lived in the soul of a man in the first half of the nineteenth century. They must rise again, but now so that they will kindle human powers, human forces. Yes, they will rise again This gives us some understanding of what is meant when we speak of a theosophical spirit, the spirit of Rosicrucianism which must enter into mankind.

We now divine that what is cherished in our movement has existed always. We fall into the illusion of Ritter Wahn if we imagine anything can prosper without active co-operation of this spirit.

Whence came the Rhapsodists of the seventh to the twelfth century; the men wandered through the world giving rise to thought-forms so that souls might comprehend things somewhat differently.

From what centre did they come? Where had they learnt how to present such pictures to the souls of men They learnt this in those temples, which we recognise as the schools of the Rosicrucians. The Rhapsodists were pupils of the Rosicrucians. Their teachers told them:—You cannot go forth to-day and speak to mankind in ideas as will be done later; to-day you must speak to them of the king's son, of the flower-queen, of the three mantles. By this means thought-forms are built up which will live in men's souls, and when these souls return they will understand what is necessary for them for their further progress.

Spiritual centres are continually sending their messengers out into the world, so that in every age that which lives in the depths of the spirit may be brought near to the souls of men.

It is a trivial point of view when people think they can construct such tales as I have been describing from fancy. Ancient legends which express the spiritual secrets of the world arise because the men who compose them have harkened to and been purified by those who impart these secrets; the whole form of the legends is constructed in accordance with these spiritual secrets. The spirit of all humanity—both of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm—lives in them.

The Rhapsodists were sent to spread their meaningful legends through the world from the same temples whence originates the special knowledge of to-day; knowledge that entering into men's hearts and souls makes the culture they demand possible. In this way the spirit that is deeply implanted in humanity passes on from epoch to epoch. And in this way the great Beings, who in pre-Christian times instructed individualities within the holy temples concerning the things they had brought over with them from earlier planetary conditions, strengthened this teaching by introducing into it the Christ so that their work might continue in accordance with this superlative Being—the Christ who had now become the great leader and guide of mankind!

When I tell you that the tales which have endured for so many centuries and called forth thought-forms in Western culture came from the same source, and expressed the same things—only in pictures—that we tell the world to-day concerning the Christ; you will realise how in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual guides of humanity did in fact further arid support the teaching of Christ in their centres of learning. All spiritual guidance is connected with the Christ. When we are aware of this connection we catch a glimpse of the light we must have, and must make use of, more especially in respect of the things our souls longed for when they came into incarnation in the nineteenth century. If we allow those forms to affect us which can inform us regarding the longings of earlier days, we feel we can rely upon our souls and can say—those others waited so that we might accomplish what they longed for. What spirits like Julius Mosen had longed for, because they felt within them all that the messengers of the Holy Temples had related in countless pictures, so as to prepare souls for times to come; what these souls longed for is set forth in the words of Richard Rothe, who, when speaking of theosophy in 1847 at Heidelberg, says:—“Would that one day it might become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it might become popular and be generally accepted; for only in this way can it bequeath those truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves.”

In those days Rothe felt this longing—not only for himself but for his contemporaries—he found resignation in saying:—“All this lies as yet within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate!” Those who knew the secrets of the Rosicrucians did not speak in 1847 so that these could be perceived in an external way. But what rests within the womb of the future comes to life when a sufficient number of souls are found who realise that knowledge is a duty. We dare not give back our souls unevolved to the Spirit of the Universe, for in that case we would have deprived the Spirit of something He had implanted in us. When souls are found who realise what they owe to the Spirit of the Universe because of their strivings to solve the secrets of the world, they will have fulfilled the hopes cherished by the best men of an earlier age. These men looked to us who were to come after them and said:—“Once this knowledge becomes scientific it must become popular and lay hold of men's hearts.”

But such hearts must first exist, they must be there I This depends on those who have joined our spiritual society realising:—“I must gain spiritual illumination, I must learn the secrets of existence I” It depends on each separate soul within our society, whether the longing I have described is to be but a vain dream of those who hoped for the best from us, or a worthy dream that we can realise for them.

When we perceive the emptiness in modern science, in art, and in social life, we feel there is no need to be lost in this desert, we can get out of it. An age has once more come round in which the Holy Temples speak, not now merely in images and parables, but in truths, which, though still regarded by many as theoretical, will become ever more and more a source of life, and will pour living sap into the souls of men.

Each one can determine with the best powers of his soul to receive this living sap into himself.

These are the thoughts we would impress on your souls at the present time, being the sum of all we have received concerning the true meaning of the spiritual guidance of mankind. When we allow such thoughts to work within our souls we have a lively stimulus for future endeavour, and we see how much of constructive force they contain that is quite independent of the actual words with which these thoughts have been expressed.

However imperfect my words may be, it is the reality that matters, not the way the thoughts are expressed, and this reality can live in every soul. For the sum of all truth dwells in each separate soul like a seed which can blossom when this soul accepts it.

• 1. From the introduction by Richard Rothe to “The Principles of Theosophy according to Frederick Cristopher Oetinger,” Tubingen, 1847.
• 2. “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume One,” and “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume Two,” (see Book Catalogue).

The light of the sun is flooding
The realms of space;
The song of birds resounds
Through fields of air;
The tender plants spring forth
From Mother Earth,
And human souls rise up
With grateful hearts
To all the spirits of the world.

Those of you who were present at the performance in Munich will remember that this children's song was the prelude to the Rosicrucian Mystery. Tonight, something of a spiritual scientific nature should unfold itself to us in connection with the content of this drama and with what, one could say, has come to life in it.

If I may, I would like to touch on the long, slow spiritual path that led to this Mystery Drama. When I think about it and look at it, its origins go back to the year 1889, twenty-one years ago; it is not approximately but exactly twenty-one years that bring me back to the germinal point of this drama. In these matters, absolute exactness can be observed. The direction has been quite clear to me in which, in 3x7 years, these seeds have grown (without any special assistance, I can say, on my part), for they have led their own individual life in these 3x7 years. It is truly remarkable to follow the path of such seeds to what may be called their finished form. Their progress can be described as a passage through the Underworld. It takes seven years for them to descend; then they return, and for this they need seven more years.

By then, having reached more or less the place where they first engaged a person before their descent, they must go in the opposite direction for seven years toward the other side; one could even say, onto a higher level. After twice seven years, then, plus seven more years, it is possible to try to embody them, foreseeing that whatever has been right in their development can take on a distinct form. If I were not convinced that within the Rosicrucian Mystery an individual organism has lived and grown for 3x7 years, I would not venture to speak further about it. I feel not only justified in speaking, however, though this is not really the question, but also in a sense obligated to speak about what lives in this Rosicrucian Mystery, not only between the lines, between the characters, in the What and the How, but what is alive in everything in the drama and what must be alive in it.

In various places since the performance of the drama in Munich, I have stated the fact that many, many things of an esoteric nature would not need to be described, that lectures would be unnecessary on my part, if only everything that lies in the Rosicrucian Mystery could work directly on your souls, my dear friends, and on the souls of others, too. I would have to use the enormous number of words necessary in my lectures and speak for days, for weeks, even for years, in order to describe what has been said and what could be said in the single drama. Everything you find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,¹ which is written in a somewhat tentative style—and in esoteric matters it is certainly correct to write thus as a description of the path into higher worlds—combined with what was said in Occult Science,² can be found, after all, in a much more forceful, true-to-life, and substantial form in the Rosicrucian Mystery. The reason is that it is more highly individualized. What is said in such a book as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds about human development had to be applicable to every individual who wishes to direct his path in some way into higher worlds, applicable to each and every person. Because of this, the book takes on—even with as much concreteness as possible—a certain abstract character, or you might call it a semi-theoretical character. We must hold fast, however, to this point: human development is never merely development in general. There is no such thing as development per se, no such thing as common, ordinary, orthodox development. There is only the development of this or that particular person, of a third, fourth, or twentieth human being. For each individual in the world, there must be a different process of development.

For this reason, the most honest description of the esoteric path of knowledge must have such a general character that it never in any way will coincide with an individual development. Should one actually describe the path of development as seen in the spiritual world, one can do it only by shaping the development of a single human being, by altering for the individual whatever is universally true. The book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, contains, to a certain extent, the beginning of the secrets of all human development. The Rosicrucian Mystery contains the secrets of the development of a single individual, Johannes Thomasius.

It was a truly long descent from all the occult laws of development down to a single, actually real human being. In this process, on this path, what has a tendency to become theory in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds had to be turned almost completely upside down. If it was to go beyond mere theory and particularly if it was to enter the artistic sphere, it had to be completely reversed, because the laws of art are quite different from any others. Just as there are natural laws, so there are also artistic laws, and these cannot be manipulated by the ordinary human consciousness, for then only dry-as-dust allegories would be the result.

Artistic laws must be handled just as Mother Nature handles her own laws when she lets a child, a plant, or an animal come into existence. If everything we can know about the world of nature is to be seen from the one direction that reveals its laws and secrets to the beholder, then whatever is to be revealed in art—any kind of art—must be seen from the other side, from just the opposite point of view. Therefore, it would be the worst imaginable interpretation of a work of art to start from ideas, concepts, or laws we have picked up somewhere, when we approach, say, a poem. Whoever thinks of explaining a work of art by means of abstract or symbolic ideas cannot be considered artistic. The poorest method of looking at a piece of work from the past in which true esoteric power has been invested, for instance, Goethe's Faust, would be to search within this work of art for the ideas and concepts one already has. Bad habits of this kind once prevailed in the theosophical movement in the most horrible way. I can remember something that happened just last year when we were performing Schuré's play, The Children of Lucifer. How shocking it was to the dramatist, who is an artist in the best sense of the word, when someone came up to him to ask, “Does this character represent Atma, this one Buddhi, a third Manas, or maybe this one is Kama Manas?” etc., etc. This kind of allegorizing is simply impossible in a truly creative, artistic process, and it is just as impossible in an explanation or interpretation. Therefore, it can now be said that no one should be pondering the anthroposophical meaning of Johannes Thomasius. To this question there is only one answer: as the main character in the drama, he is nothing more than Johannes Thomasius. He is nothing more than the living figure, Johannes Thomasius, in whom nothing more is portrayed than the mystery of development of one man, Johannes Thomasius.

If one speaks in too general a way about the various characters, one thing will be missing, which is hinted at in the words of the drama itself:

There forms itself out of this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.

There is no development evolving at any point of human history without the knotting of threads within that development, “spun by karma in world becoming.” And no individual development can be described without showing what is at work in the realm of the occult, that is, in the physical environment one looks at with the forces lying behind that physical environment. Therefore, Johannes Thomasius must be placed in the human surroundings out of which his development is proceeding in the real world of physical men and women.

For this reason, the drama has to have a double introduction. The Prelude shows how the cosmic world in which the threads are knotting together for Johannes, threads that “karma spins in world becoming,” how this world confronts the ordinary outside world. One can certainly ask if this must be shown, if there must be a Prelude to show how this cosmic world looks from outside. Yes, it has to be shown. Something would be lacking if it were not so presented. The world in which karma spins its knots was quite different in 5000 B.C., for instance, from the world in 300 B.C. or in 1000 A.D. or today. The exoteric, ordinary, outside world is always changing, too, and its own karma is connected with the environment of a person who wishes to develop himself. Thus, the circle is drawn from outside inward. On the inside is the small circle in which Johannes Thomasius stands: the second Prelude. In the ordinary world outside there are trivial waves touching the shore; in the small circle, great waves are surging high. They show their turbulence, however, only within the soul of Johannes. That is why we are introduced first to the physical plane, and it is shown to us in such a way that the threads, which karma is spinning everywhere within this physical plane, are pointed out.

When you look with occult vision at any group of people, you will find that there are strands extending from one person to another, tangled in the most astonishing way. You see human beings who apparently have little to do with each other in ordinary life, but between their souls are flung the most important, most vital connections. Everything so tangled together has gradually to be illuminated, with the focus on one particular knot. Sometimes, however, whatever is in the process of becoming must be hinted at more subtly. These delicate tones had to be sounded in Scene One, where the action is taking place on the physical plane and people with a wide variety of interests are coming together. Outwardly, they chat about this or that. As they talk, however, more or less on the surface, they are revealing karma. Everyone we first meet in Scene One on the physical plane is bound to the others by destiny. What is most fundamental is how they are bound by destiny. None of the connections have been simply thought out; they are all based on esoteric life. All the threads can come to life, and each thread is quite unique.

The remarkable character of these connections you can guess at when you find such figures as Felix and Felicia Balde meeting with Capesius and Strader. What they say is not the important thing; it is that just these persons say it. They are living persons, not invented characters. I, for one, am well acquainted with them; by that I mean they are not thought out but fully alive. They are real. I have taken especially the figure of Professor Capesius, who has grown quite dear to my heart, directly from life. The extraordinary scene of the seeress Theodora had to be brought into this setting of our ordinary world. She, as one who sometimes looks into the future, now foresees the event that is to happen before the end of the twentieth century, the coming Christ event. It is a future event that can be explained karmically, although it would be wrong to interpret other events so precisely.

Then there is the karmic relationship existing between Felicia Balde and Professor Capesius, which we find hinted at by the peculiar effect on Capesius of Felicia's fairy tales. When, too, we see Strader deeply moved by the seeress Theodora, it suggests that karmic threads are arising in Strader's heart, connecting him to her. These are all threads that lie occultly behind the physical occurrences, and they seem to be spun by karma and directed toward one point, Johannes Thomasius. In him they come together. While so much is being spoken about on the physical plane, a light begins to radiate in Johannes' soul, a light that arouses terrible waves within him. At the same time, however, this light kindles his esoteric development; as a distinctly individual development it will cross his own karma with world karma. We see, therefore, what a strong impression the happenings around him on the physical plane are making on him and how the unconscious greatness in his soul is striving upward to higher worlds.

The journey into higher worlds, however, should not take place without a compass; there must be guidance and direction. Into the midst, then, of these many relationships comes the one who is described as the leader of the group. He is also the one who understands the cosmic relationships and discerns therefore “the knots that karma spins in world becoming”; it is Benedictus, and he becomes Johannes' guide. The karma working in Johannes Thomasius, which perhaps otherwise would have to work another thousand or even thousands of years, is kindled and set ablaze in one particular moment through a karmic relationship between Benedictus and Johannes, lightly drawn in the Meditation Room scene (Scene Three). There we find ourselves at the point where a human being, destined by karma to develop himself, begins to strive upward into higher worlds. In order not to do so blindly, he will be led by Benedictus in the right direction. These thoughts will become clearer when the following passages of Scene Three are presented.

A room for meditation.
Benedictus, Johannes, Maria, and a Child.

Maria

I'm bringing you the child.
He needs a guiding word from you.

Benedictus

My child, from now on you shall come
to me each evening to hear the words
that then should dwell with you
before you enter the soul realm of sleep.
Will you do this?

Child

I'll do it gladly.

Benedictus

This evening fill your heart,
till sleep enfolds you,
with strength from these few words:
‘The heavenly powers of light are carrying me
into the spirit's house.’

(The Child is taken out by Maria, who then returns.)

Maria

And now that this child's destiny shall in future flow
within the shadow of your paternal care,
I too may ask your guiding counsel,
for I've become his mother
through powers of destiny,
if not by blood.
You showed me how
to bring him up
from that first day
when I discovered him,
left by his unknown mother at my door.
And all your rules
I followed for his guidance
worked wonders on my foster child.
For every force could come to light
that in his body and his soul lay hidden.
It soon was clear that your advice
sprang from the realm
which sheltered this child's soul
before it built its body's sheath.
We saw it hopefully unfold
and shine more brightly each new day.
You know how hard it was for me at first
to gain the child's affection.
He grew up in my care,
yet nothing more than habit
first joined his soul with mine.
He looked at me, perceiving only
that I gave him all he needed
for the well-being of his body and his soul.
Then came the time when in his heart
love was enkindled
for me, the foster mother.
An outer cause brought forth this change.
The seeress came into our circle.
The child became attached to her
and learned, enchanted by the way she spoke,
one or the other charming word.
Then came a moment when exaltation
laid hold of our strange friend;
our child could see
the glimmering light within her eyes.
He felt his young soul shaken to the core
and, frightened, rushed to me.
From this time on
the child has been devoted
to me in warmest love.
Yet since he now received his care from me
not just through natural impulse
but with awakened feeling—
since his young heart stirs warmly
whenever he looks lovingly at me—
the treasures of your wisdom
have lost their fruitfulness.
And withered now is much
that had already ripened in the child.
I saw revealed within his being
what for my friend has proved so terrible.
I'm ever more a dark enigma to myself.
Do not deny my asking this grave question:
why do I ruin friend and child
when lovingly I try to do for them
the work that spirit guidance
lets me perceive within my heart as good?
You've shown to me the lofty truth:
illusion's veil is covering the surface of our life.
Yet I must have clear knowledge,
if I must bear this destiny
which is so cruel and which works such evil.

Benedictus

There forms itself within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
O friend, your sorrows
are part of such a knot of destiny in which
the deeds of gods entwine themselves with human life.
When on the pilgrimage of soul
I had attained that stage
which granted me the honor
of serving with my counsel in the spirit spheres,
there came to me a higher being
which should descend into the realm of earth
to take up its abode within a human body.
Man's destiny is now demanding this
at such a turning point of time.
A great step forward in our evolution
is only possible when gods
unite themselves with man's own lot.
For spirit eyes, which should awake
in human souls, can only be evolved
when first a god has laid the seed
within a human being.
The task was now assigned to me
to find that human being
who might be worthy to accept within his soul
the seed-force of the god.
I had to link a deed of heaven
unto a human destiny.
My spirit's eye made search—
it fell on you.
Your course of life had fitted you
as mediator for new healing forces.
In many lives you had acquired
an openness for the nobility
alive in human hearts.
The precious quality of beauty,
the highest claim of virtue,
you carried in your gentle soul
as spirit heritage.
What your eternal ego
brought down into this life through birth
matured to ripened fruit
in your first youthful years.
You did not scale too soon
the lofty spirit heights.
The longing for the spiritual world
did not arise in you
till you had fully grasped
the senses' innocent delights.
Your soul encountered love and anger while as yet
your thought was far away
from all desire for spirit.
To drink the joy of Nature in her beauty
and pick the fruits of art
was all you wished to find as riches in your life.
And you could gaily laugh
as only a small child can laugh
who has as yet no knowledge
of life's grey shadow side.
You learned to fathom human happiness,
and mourn men's pain, in times
when not an inkling had yet dawned
of questioning the roots of joy and sorrow.
The soul who shows such character
encounters earthly life
as the ripe fruit sprung from many lives.
Its childlike nature is its blossom, not
its root of being.
It was this soul alone that I could choose
as mediator for that spirit
who should attain to active power
within our human world.
So comprehend now that your being
must change into its opposite
when pouring forth from you to other beings.
The spirit in you works
in everything that can grow ripe in man
as fruit for realms eternal.
And therefore much it must destroy
that only has its place within the realm of time.
Its sacrifice in death, however,
is seed of immortality.
What flourishes for higher life
must bloom from death of lower being.

Maria

So this is how it stands with me.
You give me light,
but light that robs me of the power of sight
and tears me from myself.
Am I then nothing but a spirit's mediator
and not my own true being?
No more will I endure
this form of mine,
which is a mask and not the truth.

Johannes

Dear friend, what is it?
Your gaze has lost its light.
Your body's turned into a pillar.
I take your hand—
and it is cold as death.

Benedictus

My son, you've had to meet with many trials;
but now you stand before the hardest one.
You see her body's covering.
And yet before my gaze
her Self soars into spirit spheres.

Johannes

O see, her lips begin to move.
She speaks ...

Maria

You gave me clarity,
yes, clarity that shrouded me
in darkness on all sides.
I curse your clarity,
and you I curse
who made of me
a tool of those wild arts
through which you seek to misguide men.
Not for one moment have I ever doubted
how high you stand in spirit.
Yet now one single instant has sufficed
to tear all faith in you out of my heart.
And I must recognize that they are hell-born beings,
the spirits whom you serve.
I had to mislead others
because you misled me!
I'll flee from you to regions
wherein no word of yours can penetrate,
and yet be near enough
so that my curses can still reach you!
The fire of my blood
you've torn away from me
and given to your own false god
what must be mine.
The fire of this blood,
O may it burn you!
I had to trust
in lying and deceit,
and to accomplish this
you had at first to make of me
a phantom form.
I've often had to see
how deeds and thoughts of mine
were changed into their opposite.
So now let all
that once was love for you
be changed into wild hatred's fire.
I'll hunt through all the worlds
to find that fire
that can consume you.

I cur ... ah ...

Johannes

Who is it that is speaking here?
I do not see my friend—
I see a gruesome being!

Benedictus

Maria's soul is hovering in the heights;
she's left behind her here with us
her mortal semblance only.
And where a human body
is left without a spirit,
there's room which then
the enemy of good seeks out
to step into the realm of visibility.
He finds a body's covering
and through it he can speak.
Just such an adversary spoke
who strives now to destroy the work
I must fulfill
for many human beings' future,
for you as well, my son.
For could I take these curses,
just spoken by Maria's vacant shell,
as other than the tempter's guile,
you should not follow me.
The enemy of good was at my side;
and you, my son, have seen
plunge down into the darkness
the temporal part of her
to whom your whole love radiates.
Because so often spirits
have spoken to you through her lips,
world karma has not spared you
from hearing through them also
the prince of hell.

Now you can seek her finally
and learn to know her being's core.
For she shall be the image of that higher man
to whom you shall aspire to raise yourself.
Her soul is soaring forth to spirit heights
where men can find their being's primal form
that in itself is rooted.
You now shall follow her to spirit realms
and see her in the Temple of the Sun.
There forms itself
within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
My son, you have stood firm so far;
you will progress still further.
I see your star in its full radiance.
There is no place in sense existence
for battles such as men must fight
who strive for consecration.
What sense existence hides as riddles
which can be solved by intellect,
what human hearts receive from such existence—
no matter if it comes from love or hate
or whether it bursts forth with frightful power—
this for the spirit seeker must become
a field on which he, uninvolved,
directs his vision from without.
For forces must unfold themselves for him
which are not found upon this field itself.
You had to wrest your way through trials of soul
which only come to those
well-armed to meet those powers
belonging to the spirit worlds.
And had those powers not found you ready
to tread the path of knowledge,
they would have had to lame your feeling
before you were allowed to know
what now has been revealed to you.
The beings who can gaze at world-foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.
You have sustained your Self, my son,
when powers of the heights have shaken you
and spirit forces shrouded you in dread.
Your Self has strongly battled its way through,
when doubts were wrestling in your breast
and sought to give you over to dark depths.
You have been my true pupil only
since that portentous hour
when you, despairing, felt
that you yourself were lost,
and yet the strength in you still held you firm.
I was allowed to grant from wisdom's treasures
what gave you strength
to hold yourself,
though you believed no longer in yourself.
So was the wisdom which you conquered
more truthful than the faith
bestowed on you.
You are now found mature.
You now may be released.
Your friend has led the way.
In spirit you will find her.
I can still further give you the direction:
Call forth the fiery power of your soul
with words which, uttered through my mouth,
give you the key to spirit heights.
They will accompany you
when nothing longer guides you
which eyes of sense can still behold.
With your whole heart now willingly receive them:

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both, the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

O spirits who can be perceived by man,
quicken with life the soul of this our son.
Let shine in him
what can illumine
his soul with spirit light.
Let sound in him
what can awaken
his self to joyous spirit growth.

Spirit Voice (behind the scene):

Thoughts now guide him
to depths of world-beginnings;
what as shadows he has thought,
what as phantoms he has felt
soars out, beyond the world of forms—
world, of whose fullness
men, when thinking,
dream in shadows;
world, from whose fullness
men, when seeing,
live within phantoms.

(As the curtain falls slowly, the music begins.)

Those last tones of music, composed by our dear friend, Arenson,³ bring to expression what is echoing from higher worlds into Johannes Thomasius' soul in the drama. It follows the solemn experience he has had in the Meditation Room, which proved him genuinely mature and strong enough to ascend into these higher worlds. At the end of the scene just recited, we hear words actually sounding out of the spiritual worlds in a completely real way, into a soul that up to a certain level, if I may so describe it, has stood the test. The imponderable had to be touched on gently with words that are more meaningful than one at first believes.

It must be quite clear that the knot spun out of the threads of world karma presents to Johannes Thomasius a fact of the most sublime and powerful nature in that solemn place. What is actually happening?

Johannes Thomasius has to perceive a soul to whom he is joined karmically in a wonderful way (as shown later in Devachan, Scene Seven), ascending directly before him into the spiritual world. It is a unique moment in world history when such a soul enters divine worlds. Naturally, not everything connected with this moment can be fully described, but it is definitely a real happening that anyone conversant with occult life will recognize in its frightening and powerful interweaving of light and shadow.

Such a person knows, too, what happens in the physical world at the shattering moment when a soul disappears into the spiritual world, not with the gradual step of individual karma but suddenly, challenged by world karma. These are moments that are vital for the evolution of mankind. They are also moments when the real, ever-present forces of temptation, peering into our physical world out of the spiritual world (just as the powers of good do), have the strength to take possession of deserted physical sheaths and use them as platforms for their guile and powers of deception. The body is the point from which they launch their attack. Immediately, then, the situation will show itself as maya, illusion, of the worst kind.

Confronted with the small deceptions of karma, a person who is not far developed will be unable to withstand temptation. Confronted with much greater deceptions of karma, something that at a certain stage of development one would no longer have believed to be possible, a soul will recoil terrified, unless it has already gone through certain tragic depths of life experience. One can imagine some people saying that they, too, could have withstood what happened in the Meditation Room—but they should really find themselves sometime in the same situation! The reality is far different from what we might think it to be. In a spiritual reality, strange forces are at work. If someone does not believe this, he should just consider whether or not he has had any genuine experience with a human physical body abandoned by its own soul. Human beings know only ensouled bodies. In this case quite different forces come into play, and it is against these forces that Johannes Thomasius has to stand firm, having been guided to this moment in world karma.

Now two things come into question. Johannes Thomasius first has to endure what is usually known as kamaloka, the world in which there appears to us as a mirror image what we ourselves truly are. Again, this sounds milder when spoken about than it is in reality. When it appears in its reality, there is not merely a picture limited in space to tell us what it is, but it intones this from every corner of the world around us. The whole world is we ourselves. For this reason, when you hear in Scene Two how Johannes Thomasius descends into the depths of his soul where he is “among rocks and springs,” it is not a single mirror image he conjures up, speaking to him out of his soul, but it sounds to him from everywhere around him, out of the rocks and springs, out of his whole surroundings. At such a moment, words that were tame enough as they came out of world theories or philosophical works, or even spiritual scientific writings, suddenly grow into terrifying power, for they sound forth out of the whole world from every side as though, reflected from unending space, they are caught up in the various processes of nature.

O man, know thou thyself!

Thus, they sound when they become audible after living year after year within the soul. The soul then is left, lonely and forsaken, and stands before its Self. Nothing is there but the world—but this world is one's own soul; it contains everything the soul is, what its karma is, everything it has perpetrated.

In a poetic work, only a special theme can be singled out—for instance, an action far in the past, the desertion of a woman—but this comes fully alive to confront Johannes Thomasius' soul. I can say only a few words about this. When it happens, Johannes loses what is necessary for him to lose: confidence in himself, in his strength, even in the ability to find in loneliness the healing for what brings him such agonizing pain on the physical plane when experiencing it there. The following words, therefore, I beg you to take as they should be taken, that is, as shaking the soul and filling it completely. When Johannes Thomasius hears from all the world around him the words, “O man, know thou thyself,” his soul answers, as though his ego were not present:

For many years these words
of weighty meaning I have heard.
They sound to me from air and water;
they echo up from depths of earth.
And just as in the acorn secretly
the structure of the mighty oak is pressed,
within the power of these words
there is contained
all that my thought can comprehend
about the nature of the elements,
of souls as well as spirits,
of time and of eternity.
The world and my own nature
are living in the words:
O man, know thou thyself!

This is answered powerfully “from the springs and rocks.” Then his whole inner being is turned outward:

And now! within me
it is becoming terribly alive.
Around me darkness weaves,
within me blackness yawns;
out of the world of darkness it resounds,
out of soul-blackness it rings forth:
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:
O man, know thou thyself!)

You must try to imagine how the Self joins the cosmic process outside. Usually, we stand still or go about our hourly tasks and fail to see what is happening out there. We have no idea of it and believe that we are within our own inner being. But Johannes is following consciously what is going on. Consciously, he keeps pace with the power of all the elements, moves with the hours of the day and transforms himself into the night.

The earth I follow in her cosmic course.
I rumble in the thunder,
I flash within the lightning.

All this leaves the impression with him: I am. This is the moment, however, when the I am becomes the Daimon of his own soul. In the process, man's self-assertion is completely silenced. One can scarcely try to speak out, “I am,” but the soul replies:

... But oh, I feel
already separated from my being.

Then Johannes' own being appears in a limited, constrained form:

I see my body's shell.
It is an alien being outside myself;
it is remote from me.
There hovers nearer now another body ...

Now he can no longer speak with his own mouth but with the mouth of another person. It is the woman to whom he has done a wrong:

‘He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.’

Then he returns to his own body:

She whom I left, unhappy one,
I was now she herself,
and I must suffer her despair.
Self-knowledge lent me strength
to pour myself into another self.

At this point a path is begun that is afterward described at the close of the scene in the words showing the effect of the world and the effect of solitude. In the world everything that streams in from outside works in the most frightful way. What comes from within works in such a way that the solitude is absolutely filled with people. This is a test, a test designed for the purpose hinted at in the words recited to you earlier:

The beings who can gaze at world foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.

At this moment Johannes Thomasius would have lost consciousness and been flung back into the sense world if he had not held his ground in Scene Two, the scene we have been discussing in which he confronts his Self. Two things then became clear: his Self, as far as it is aware, has little strength; this deprives him of self-confidence. But the eternal “I” within him, of which he as yet knows nothing, has immense strength. It buoys him up and helps him to surmount the experience in the Meditation Room when Maria's soul departs. He needs, therefore, only the words of Benedictus, the force of those words, to guide him upward.

In the lines read to you, you must sense a Mystery of Words. What this means is not merely something written down in a play. In these lines, cosmic forces are actually contained, down to the very sounds. Indeed, the sounds cannot be changed. The opening of a door into the spiritual world is provided by these words; therefore, they must be heard just as they are spoken. Anything of the nature of the following lines cannot be put together in an arbitrary manner:

Des Lichtes webend Wesen, es erstrahlet
Durch Raumesweiten,
Zu füllen die Welt mit Sein.
Der Liebe Segen, er erwärmet
Die Zeitenfolgen,
Zu rufen aller Welten Offenbarung.
Und Geistesboten, sie vermählen
Des Lichtes webend Wesen
Mit Seelenoffenbarung;
Und wenn vermählen kann mit beiden
Der Mensch sein eigen Selbst,
Ist er in Geisteshöhen lebend.

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

Only after this can there sound from out the other world what is to sound into the soul. These are only hints, as has been said before.

Johannes Thomasius is then really impelled into the spiritual world. He cannot, however, rise directly into this world into which every person must go; he must first pass through the astral world. In Scene Four you have the astral world represented as Johannes Thomasius perceives it on the background of his own particular, individual past experience. It is not a universal description of this world but rather a description of what, for example, Johannes Thomasius had to experience there. The astral world is quite different from the physical. It is possible to meet a person there and see him as he was decades before, or to see a young man as he will become in future years. They are both realities. In your soul nature, you are still the same today as you were as a child of three. What you see in the soul world is by no means what is shown in man's outer physical form. The physical appearance conceals at every moment what was true before and what will come as truth in the future. When we look into the astral world, it is first of all necessary to overcome the primary maya of the sense world in order to understand the illusory power of time. For this reason, Johannes Thomasius sees in the astral world the person he has met on the physical plane, Capesius, as he once was as a youth, and he sees the one he knows as Strader just as he will be as an old man. What does this mean? Johannes knows Strader as he is now in the sense world with the forces present in his soul on the physical plane. But already within Strader are the conditions for what he will become after several decades. This also has to be included in our knowledge of a human being. Thus, time is rent asunder. It is really so that time is quite elastic in its nature when one enters the higher worlds. In the physical world Johannes Thomasius knows Capesius as elderly, Strader as young; now they stand together in the astral world: Capesius young, Strader old. It is not that time is stretched forward and backward but that one man is shown in his youth, the other in his old age. It is an absolutely real fact.

Something more is shown in this scene, something people react to with adolescent scorn. This is the fact that our soul experiences are greater than we usually think they are, that good and bad have their consequences when experienced within the soul. For example, if we think thoughts that are cruel or even false, they stream into the depths of the world and back again; we are closely connected in our soul experiences with the elemental powers of nature. This is no mere image. From the esoteric point of view, for example, it is a reality when Capesius is brought before the Spirit of the Elements, who leads every human being into existence. Actually, Capesius is confronting what the Spirit of the Elements is concerned with—and concerned with in such a way that when we experience anything in the soul, it is related to the elemental forces of nature. Johannes Thomasius is shown that both Capesius and Strader, out of the depths of their souls, can arouse the opposing powers of the elements. In that world, therefore, thunder and lightning follow what they have felt in their souls as pride or haughtiness, error, truth or lies. In the physical world, the error or lie a person has in his soul is quite peculiar. Someone can stand before us with error and lying in his soul and may appear to be quite innocent. But the moment we look at him with astral vision, we can see raging storms that otherwise are represented on earth only as a picture by the most terrible convulsions of the elements. All this Johannes has to experience and everything, too, that in the astral world can show him the remarkable connections he did not recognize when he met them on the physical plane.

The names given in this Rosicrucian Mystery are not given just by chance. Names such as “the Other Maria,” and so on, all point to definite relationships, so that the “one” and the “other” Maria are not merely “two Marias” but present themselves as Maria-forces to the other characters. “The Other Maria,” the mysterious nature figure, is revealed to Johannes Thomasius as the soul living below the ordinary conscious soul quite inaudibly and imperceptibly as long as man lives only in the physical world. But you must not take these relationships and characters as symbols. The Other Maria is absolutely a real person, a reality, just as the first Maria is. They should be taken for what they really are.

Everything that Johannes Thomasius has experienced passes before the eyes of his soul. He has experienced the astral world. This he can now bring into his consciousness by saying:

In realms of soul I find again
the human beings who are known to me.
The man who spoke about Felicia's fairy tales:
I could behold him here
as in his younger years;
and also he who as a youth
had chosen to become a monk:
here as an old man he appeared to me.
And with them was the Spirit of the Elements.

(End of Scene Four)

Johannes Thomasius has passed through what wipes out time before his eyes, because he has now become mature, sufficiently mature to see into the astral world. Is this world free from error? No, it is not. But in the astral world one thing can become a certainty for man. It will become a certainty for him, if he enters it in purity and without guilt, that there is a higher world shining into the astral world, just as the astral world shines into the ordinary physical world. The only question is whether or not he can see this as it actually is. People who go about in this physical world are themselves only a kind of illusion, in that they have something behind them leading them into the higher world. They stand in contrast to what they have perhaps been in distant or more recent times and what they will become in the future. But certain errors do not show us the astral world in which one is quite entangled in the world of the senses. For instance, they do not show the relationship of the three great forces of our existence: Will, Love, and Wisdom. This is so difficult to discern and understand in its reality that it remains hidden for a long time in the astral world. It is not an easy matter to discover it there. Besides, some relationships that are errors in the sense world are continued on into the astral world.

The working together of will, wisdom, and love, which at this point can only be touched on, takes place in the physical world through human beings. In the higher worlds, it takes place through the beings who expend their forces whenever, on the physical plane, the forces of supersensible beings descend into human souls. This happens through initiates in those temples where there are human representatives for the single world-forces, where human beings have come so far as to renounce the desire to portray the whole human being as he is but limit themselves to portraying a single force. It is the representatives who have taken over. But when man looks into the astral world, those holy places of the representatives of the powers of will, wisdom, and love are shown to him in a picture filled with maya. Therewith is woven a fearful web between the illusion of the sense world and of the astral world.

Now, I should have to talk for weeks if I wished to explain how it is with that figure of the higher powers shown as the initiate of the powers of will; he has met Johannes Thomasius on the physical plane, and there he really seems to be an ordinary, superficial fellow. In such a case the question can arise: are the primal forces of will supposed to work through such a person? Yes, they are. We can perhaps understand that the force manifesting the powers of will can permeate just this kind of less developed human being in the same way as the radiance of wisdom enters a man like Benedictus. We must grasp the following. If we have a beautiful flower in full bloom and place a seed beside it, it may be that the seed when developed will bring forth a still more beautiful flower. The flower can at this moment be considered quite perfect, but, according to cosmic reality, the seed is actually something more perfect. Hence, we have these opposites: Benedictus, the eminent bearer of wisdom, and the man who on the physical plane behaves in such a strange way toward everything said about the spiritual worlds and in such a strange way rejects it all. When in a group of people he hears talk about the spiritual worlds, he says, as if he were unwilling to listen:

I cannot find the bridge that leads across
from mere ideas to actual deeds.

(Romanus, Scene One)

He is a man who finds elsewhere what leads to deeds; to him, any talk about the spiritual is simply empty talk. You could tell this fellow beautiful things about theosophy; to the man he is, now, on the physical plane, it is nothing but words. What he finds worthwhile is the working of machines. When he hears about the Other Maria, how spiritual power has become part of her, kindling a strength of feeling and love in her so that she can perform healing deeds, he is the one who rejects all this, saying merely, “That comes from her having a good heart!” He remains wholly on the physical plane, where he is indeed a philistine, an ordinary fellow, but also at the same time an energetic, determined man of will. Hence, he says:

If this good person has achieved so much
the impulse lies
in her warm heart.
When work is done, men surely need
refreshment and renewal from ideas.
But only training of the will,
combined with skill and strength
in all the genuine work of life,
will further human progress.
When whirr of wheels
is humming in my ears,
and when contented human hands
are labouring at machines,
it's then I feel the powers of life at work.

This is the man of will, the man of action. If you were to talk to him day in and day out about the spirit, his only response would be, “You can't turn a winch with that; meanwhile, what are people going to eat?” This amounts to saying, “Turn your winches all day long, and then, if you have a little spare time, talk about the spirit for amusement!” Here are the forces still latent in the seed, and they are good forces, important forces. Through the powers of will they stream into the world. When people hear about spiritual worlds and receive what is said, each in his own way, this must not be judged theoretically, for it is extremely difficult to arrive at the truth. If you do not understand that a seed must be looked upon as the counterpart to such a person as has just been described, you will be experiencing the same kind of illusion as the one presented by the Subterranean Temple. There it is an astral maya. There is reality in what Johannes Thomasius perceives in the scene with Capesius and Strader when he sees them at different ages. But in Scene Five a maya, a Fata Morgana of the spiritual world, is pictured, from which, after it has been experienced, the soul must free itself. Therefore, you have to take Scene Five as justified only by the fact that reality is intermingled with the maya.

No part of this scene would contribute to Johannes Thomasius' development unless it bore the same relationship to astral experience that the concepts and ideas of the physical world bear to our understanding of the world. What scientific knowledge is for the physical plane, the “Maya Temple” is for the astral world. The “Maya Temple” is no more a reality rooted in the spiritual world than a concept is something we can eat. But concepts must live in the world for an understanding of the world to be possible. Only in this way can there play in from another world what is profoundly illuminating for Johannes Thomasius, that is, to recognize the definite knot in world karma formed when Felix Balde comprehends that in solitary wanderings about the world he must not bury his soul treasures but must bring them to the temple.

Then, for the first time, it is possible for Johannes Thomasius to perceive relationships in the spiritual world that are, so to speak, much more real, and of a more delicate and intimate nature. For example, the projection of the astral world into the physical world takes place when such a thing happens as the inspiring of a man like Capesius by someone who does not really know, herself, how much is living in her soul. In the Mystery Play, Felicia Balde does not know this. In the case of a man of intellect, a man who works intellectually, everything passes through his intellect. There is nothing whatever in the intellect that can give us strength while it instructs us about the world. This lies outside the capacity of the intellect. In a person of exceptional intelligence, a force coming from the spiritual world may pass through the intellect and then continue. At this point, he will be able to speak of the spiritual world in splendid, theoretical terms. The mind, however, does not influence the degree of inner esoteric life or the content of the soul. What comes from theories may reach the soul even without passing through the intellect; it can discover a person who is receptive to the fountainhead of spirit and who can summon up something there that Capesius, for instance, describes on the physical plane. This is clearly shown in his words about Felicia Balde, who lives out there in the solitude with Felix, and what she really means to him—when he says how gladly he listens to her because she speaks out of the most profound, age-old wisdom. It is important for us to grasp fully what Capesius is saying: on the physical plane, there is a woman to whom he likes to listen and from whose lips come things welling up from occult sources. She cannot clothe them in elegant words, but when her words reach the ear of Capesius, he can say:

I must allude
if I'm to tell about it,
to something which in truth
seems far more wonderful to me
than much that I have heard of here,
because it speaks more to my heart.
I scarcely should be able in another place
to bring the words across my lips
which here I find so easy.
I feel my soul, at times,
as though entirely empty and exhausted;
it is as if the very fountainhead
of knowledge had run dry within me,
as if I could not find one word
that seems worthwhile to speak or to be heard.

(Scene One)

Such things exist. Such people, however much they know, feel at these times as if they could get no further.

And when I feel such barrenness of spirit,
then I escape and go where these good people
have their refreshing, quiet solitude.

Then his soul begins to open out, because that is for him the door into the occult world.

And there Felicia tells me many a tale
in pictures fabulous,
of beings dwelling in the land of dreams
and in the realm of magic fairy tales,
who live a motley life.
The tone in which she tells of them
recalls the bards of ancient times.
I do not ask the sources of her words,
but this one thing I clearly know:
that new life wells and flows into my soul
dispelling its paralysis.

The reality of all this Johannes Thomasius can observe on the physical plane, for he is present, but to be able to explain it to himself he has first to look into the astral world. In Scene Six then, in the astral world, Felicia Balde appears to him “just as she is in life.” She gives the Spirit of the Elements one of the hundreds of fairy tales she has told Capesius. Now, however, comes the reciprocal movement to what takes place below the threshold of consciousness.

Felicia has told Capesius her fairy tales. When she tells one that she herself does not understand, the forces arise in his soul that banish his mental paralysis; then he can, in turn, relate something to his audience. It sounds, however, quite different from what Felicia has related. Mysterious forces are active even in Capesius. When one seeks to discover them, he will find their origin in the astral world, where it can be seen how they call forth countercurrents. Wherever there are elemental powers, they call up the kind of reverberations that Felicia's words awaken in the soul of Capesius. The same kind of thing occurs in our brain. A little spirit lives there who perhaps thinks out the most wonderful things. When we try to discover how he comes out of the macrocosm, we are likely to find the Earth-brain, which thinks thoughts on quite a different scale from those appearing in the small human brain. A man will often assert something he does not see in his own brain, but it will look grotesque when it is reflected in the giant Earth-brain. This has to be reflected; hence, the relationship of Gairman, who appears on the physical plane and then as the Spirit of the Earth-brain. About this, too, one could speak for a long time. Were we to look with soul vision at what takes place in the lonely cottage when Felicia tells her fairy tales and afterward behold the Spirit of the Earth-brain, we would discover many a secret, as, for instance, how ironical this Spirit of the Earth-brain is and how often he mocks. Ridicule has to be a concern of his, because he finds much to laugh at in what human beings do.

From an artistic point of view, it is justifiable that the moment this mockery is out of place, Gairman appears in the role he has so often to play and shows himself in his true guise. We see then, after Felicia Balde has told one of her fairy tales before the Spirit of the Elements in Scene Six, how an abnormal effect is produced on the Spirit of the Earth-brain, who translates the tale in quite different words. Felicia relates the story:

... Once upon a time
there was a Being
that flew from East to West,
following the journey of the sun.
It flew on, over lands and over seas;
and from the heights it watched
the busy life of men.
It saw how men love one another,
and how in hate they persecute each other.
Nothing could hinder
this Being in its flight;
for hate and love create
always the same a thousandfold.
But over one house on its way
the Being had to pause.
Within, there was a tired man
who pondered over human love
and pondered, too, on human hate.
His pondering had carved
deep furrows on his brow,
had turned his hair quite white.
In its concern for him,
the Being lost its guide, the sun,
and stayed at this man's side.
It was still in his room
at evening when the sun went down;
and when the sun returned,
the Being was once more
caught upward by the spirit of the sun.
Again it saw the many people in love, in hate,
continue on their earthly course.
And when it came a second time
above the house, still following the sun,
its gaze fell there
upon a dead old man.

The Spirit of the Earth-brain responds in a way that is naturally not at all justifiable:

Once upon a time there was a man
who tramped from East to West;
the urge for knowledge lured him on
to travel over lands and seas,
and by his rules of wisdom
he watched the busy life of men.
He saw how men love one another
and how in hate they persecute each other.
At every single instant
he saw himself at all his wisdom's end.
For how it is that hate and love
forever rule the earthly world
could not be brought into a law.
He noted many thousand cases,
yet lacked a comprehensive whole.
This dry researcher
encountered on his way
a Being of the Light,
upon whom life weighed heavily,
for it was in a constant battle
with a dark shadow-form.
‘Well, who are you?’
inquired the dry researcher.
‘Oh, I am Love,’
one being answered.
‘In me behold dark Hate,’
so spoke the other.
The man, however, could
no longer hear these beings' words.
As deaf researcher, tramped on
from East to West, this man.

These things are distinct experiences of the astral world. Johannes Thomasius has to pass through them in order to ascend into the spiritual world.

Today I will only say briefly that it is necessary for Johannes Thomasius, in order to reach the spiritual world itself, to make a real connection with that world on threads already woven in the physical world. As you will hear later in the recitation of Scene Seven, his connection with the spiritual world arose out of the karma encompassed by incarnations, and this could be revealed only to Devachanic vision. Devachanic elements actually have to play their part. Therefore, I ask you to notice how everything is alive in the living, weaving Devachanic ocean. This can be described, but the details must more or less be hinted at. For a real description, we must go further. Let us not think that we know anything of higher worlds by speaking about them with the words sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, alluding to Philia, Astrid, and Luna. These three figures are in no way personifications of the three soul principles, nor are they symbols for them. Listen to the vowels with which each of these characters describes her activities. Try to hear what lives in the vowels. Then you can follow how the sequence of single vowels and single words make clear what is given in a different way as sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you delete any part of it, it will no longer be intact. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to the words when, for instance, Luna speaks, so as to get an understanding of the Devachanic element in the consciousness soul:

Ich will erwärmen Seelenstoff
Und will erhärten Lebensäther.
Sie sollen sich verdichten,
Sie sollen sich erfühlen,
Und in sich selber seiend
Sich schaffend halten,
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
Der suchenden Menschenseele
Des Wissens Sicherheit erzeugen kannst.

I will enwarm soul-substance
and will make firm life-ether.
They shall condense themselves,
they shall perceive themselves,
and in themselves residing
guard their creative forces,
that you, beloved sister,
Within the seeking soul
may quicken certainty of knowledge.

(Scene Seven)

In the movement of the words can be heard in this description of Devachan what otherwise cannot in any way be expressed. This, too, must be taken into consideration. When speaking about higher worlds, we are definitely obliged to speak in many different ways. What I could never say theoretically about the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls you may perceive, if you have the desire to understand it, from the characterization of the three figures, Philia, Astrid, and Luna. But you must understand that these three are not symbols or allegories of the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you ask, “What are these three?” the answer would be, “They are persons who are alive; they are Philia-, Astrid-, and Luna-people.” This always must be kept firmly in mind.

How karma, finally intertwining and twisting itself together, can display in a picture what as microcosm Johannes Thomasius experiences in his soul—this was portrayed in the whole closing scene of the Munich performance. Showing how karma is at work, the various characters stood in their places. Each had his position according to his relationship to another person. If you imagine this actually mirrored in the soul of Johannes Thomasius, you will then have more or less what is contained in this picture of the spirit realm in Scene Seven, which could only with great difficulty be given verbal expression.

(There followed a recitation of Scene Seven by Marie von Sivers, accompanied at the beginning and end by the music of Adolf Arenson.)

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, reprinted 1983.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1979.
• 3. Adolf Arenson (1855-1936) composed the music for the four Mystery Dramas at the request of Rudolf Steiner.

Let us consider today the second Mystery Drama, The Soul's Probation. You will have noticed that in our various stage performances, and especially in this play, an attempt was made to bring the dramatic happenings into connection with our anthroposophical world view. In this play in particular, we wanted to present on the stage in a very real way the idea of reincarnation and its effect on the human soul. I need not say that the incidents in The Soul's Probation are not simply thought out; they fully correspond with observations of esoteric study in certain ways, so that the scenes are completely realistic in a definite sense of the word. We can discuss this evening first of all the idea that a kind of transition had to be created, leading from Capesius' normal life to his plunge into a former life, into the time when he lived through his previous incarnation.

I have often asked myself since The Soul's Probation was written, what enabled Capesius to build a bridge from his life in a world where he had known—though certainly with a genial spirit—only what is given by external sense perception with a world view bound to the instrument of the brain; how it was, I say, that a bridge could be created from such a world to the one into which he then plunged, which could only be revealed through occult sense organs. I have often asked myself why the fairy tale, with the three figures at the rock spring (Scene Five) had to be the bridge for Capesius. Of course, it was not because of some clever idea or some deliberate decision that the fairy tale was placed just at this point, but simply because imagination brought it about. One could even ask afterward why such a fairy tale is necessary. In connection, then, with The Soul's Probation there came to me certain enlightening points of view about the poetry of fairy tales in general and about poetry in relation to anthroposophy.

A person could well put into practical use in his life the facts implicit in the division of the soul into sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls, but when he does, riddles of perception will loom up in a simply elemental- emotional way with regard to his place in, and relationship to, the world. These riddles do not allow themselves to be spoken out in our ordinary language, with our ordinary concepts, for the simple reason that we are living today in too intellectual a time to bring to expression in words, or through what is possible in words, the subtle distinctions between the three members of our soul.

It is better to choose a method that will allow the soul's relationship to the world to seem diversified and yet quite definite and clear. What moves through the whole of The Soul's Probation as the connecting link between the events themselves and what is significant in the three figures, Philia, Astrid, and Luna, had to be expressed in delicate outlines; yet this had to call up strong enough soul responses to bring out clearly man's relationship to the world around him. It could be presented in no other way than to show how the telling of the fairy tale about the three women awoke in Capesius' soul, as a definite preparation for his development, the strong urge to descend into those worlds that only now are beginning to be perceived again by human beings as real.

There will now be a recital of the fairy tale, so that we can reflect upon it afterward.

(Scene Five: Tale of the Rockspring Wonder)

Once upon a time there was a boy
who lived—the only child of a poor forester—
within a woodland solitude. He knew
besides his parents hardly any other people.
His build was slender,
his skin almost transparent.
One could look long into his eyes:
they treasured deepest spirit wonders.
And though indeed few people entered
the circle of his life,
he never was in need of friends.
When in the nearby mountains
the golden sunlight glowed and glimmered,
the boy's rapt, musing eye drew forth
the spirit gold into his soul
until his heart resembled
the morning brightness of the sun.—
But when through darkening clouds
the morning sunrays could not pierce
and dreariness hung over mountain heights,
the boy's eye, too, grew dull;
a mood of sadness filled his heart.—
The spirit weaving of his narrow world
took hold of him so fully
that it was no less strange to him
than were his body and his limbs.
The trees and flowers of the woods
were all his friends:
there spoke to him from crown and calyx
and from the lofty tree-tops spirit beings
and what they whispered, he could understand.—
Such wondrous things of worlds unknown
unlocked themselves before the boy
whenever his soul conversed
with what most people would regard as lifeless.
At evening his anxious parents
from time to time missed their beloved child.—
The boy was at a spot nearby
where from the rocks a spring burst forth,
and waterdrops, dispersing thousandfold,
were scattered over stones.
When moonlight's silver glance,
in sparkling colours' sorcery,
was mirrored in the water's misty spray,
the boy could sit for hours on end
beside the rock-born spring.
And figures, formed by spirit-magic,
arose before his youthful vision
in rushing water and in moonlight's glimmer.
They grew into three women's forms
who told him of those things
toward which his soul's desire was turned.—
And when upon a gentle summer night
the boy was sitting at the spring again,
one woman of the three caught up a myriad of drops
out of the glittering spray
and gave them to the second woman.
She fashioned from the tiny drops
a chalice with a silver gleam
and passed it to the third.
She filled it with the moonlight's silver rays
and gave it to the boy,
who had beheld all this
with youthful inner sight.—
Now in the night
which followed this event,
he dreamed that he was robbed
by a fierce dragon of the chalice.
After this night the boy beheld
just three times more the wonder of the spring.
Henceforth the women came no more
although the boy sat musing
beside the rock-born spring in moonlight's silver sheen.
And when three hundred sixty weeks
had run their course three times,
the boy had long become a man
and left his parents' home and forest country
to live in a strange city.
One evening, tired from the day's hard toil,
he pondered on what life had still in store for him,
and suddenly he felt himself a boy,
caught up and carried to his rock-born spring.
Again he could behold the water-women
and this time heard them speak.
The first one said to him:

Remember me at any time
you feel alone in life.
I lure man's eye of soul
to starry spaces and ethereal realms.
And whosoever wills to feel me,
I offer him the draught of hope in life
out of my wonder goblet.—

And then the second spoke:

Do not forget me at the times
when courage in your life is threatened.
I lead man's yearning heart
to depths of soul and up to spirit heights.
And whosoever seeks his strength from me,
for him I forge the steel of faith in life,
shaped by my wonder hammer.—

The third one could be heard:

To me lift up your eye of spirit
when your life's riddles overwhelm you.
I spin the threads of thought that lead
through labyrinths of life and the abyss of soul.
And whosoever harbours trust in me,
for him I weave the living rays of love
upon my wonder loom.—

Thus it befell the man,
and in the night that followed this
he dreamed a dream:
a savage dragon prowled
in circles round about him,—
and yet could not come near him.
He was protected from that dragon by
the beings he had seen beside the rock-born spring
and who with him had left his home
for this far-distant place.

It seems to me that the world of fairy tales can quite rightfully be placed between the external world and everything that in past times man, with his early clairvoyance, could see in the spiritual world; with everything, too, that he can still behold today if, by chance, either through certain abnormal propensities or through a trained clairvoyance, he can raise himself to the spiritual world. Between the world of spirit and the world of outer reality, of intelligence, of the senses, it is the world of the fairy tale that is the most fitting connecting link. It would seem necessary to find an explanation for this position of the fairy tale and the fairy tale mood between these other two worlds.

It is extraordinarily difficult to create the bridge between these spheres, but I realized that a fairy tale itself could construct it. Better than all the theoretical explanations, a simple fairy tale really seems to build this bridge, a tale that one could tell something like this:

Once upon a time there was a poor boy who owned nothing but a clever cat. The cat helped him win great riches by persuading the King that her master possessed an estate so huge, so remarkably beautiful that it would amaze even the King himself. The clever cat brought it about that the King set forth and traveled through several astonishing parts of the country. Everywhere he went, he heard—thanks to the cat's trickery—that all the great fields and strange buildings belonged to the poor boy.

Finally, the King arrived at a magnificent castle, but he came a bit late (as often happens in fairy tales), for it was just the time when the Giant Troll, who was the actual owner of this wonderful place, was returning home from his wanderings over the earth, intending to enter his castle.

The King was inside looking at all its wonders, and so the clever cat stretched herself out in front of the entrance door, for the King must not suspect that everything belonged to the Giant Troll. It was just before dawn that the Giant arrived home and the cat began to tell him a long tale, holding him there at the front door to listen to it. She rattled along about a peasant plowing his field, putting on manure, digging it in, going after the seed he wanted to use, and finally sowing the field. In short, she told him such an endless tale that dawn came and the sun began to rise. The wily cat told the Giant to turn around and look at the Golden Maid of the East whom he surely had never seen before. But when he turned to look, the Giant Troll burst into pieces, for that is what happens to giants and is a law they have to conform to: they may not look at the rising sun. Therefore, through the cat's delaying the Giant, the poor boy actually came into possession of the wonderful palace. The clever cat at first had given her master only hope, but finally, with her tricks, also the great castle and the vast estate.

One can say that this simple little tale is extremely significant for its explanation of fairy tale style today. It is really so that when we look at men and women in their earthly development, we can see what most of them are—those who have developed on earth in the various incarnations they have lived through and are now incarnated. Each one is a “poor boy.” Yes, in comparison to earlier historical epochs, today we are fundamentally “poor boys” who possess nothing but a clever cat. We do, however, it's true, have a clever cat, which is our intelligence, our intellect. Everything the human being has acquired through his senses, whatever he now possesses of the outer world through the intelligence limited to the brain, is absolute poverty in comparison to the whole cosmic world and to what man experienced in the ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs. All of us are basically “poor boys,” possessing only our intelligence, something that can exert itself a little in order to promise us some imaginary property. In short, our modern situation is like the boy with the clever cat.

Actually, though, we are not altogether the “poor boy”; that is only in relation to our consciousness. Our ego is rooted in the secret depths of our soul life, and these secret depths are connected with endless worlds and endless cosmic happenings, all of which affect our lives and play into them. But each of us who today has become a “poor boy” knows nothing more of this splendor; we can at best, through the cat, through philosophy, explain the meaning and importance of what we see with our eyes or take in with our other senses. When a modern person wants somehow to speak about anything beyond the sense world, or if he wishes to create something that reaches beyond the sense world, he does it, and has been doing it for several hundred years, by means of art and poetry.

Our modern age, which in many ways is a peculiarly transitional one, points up strongly how men and women fail to escape the mood of being “poor boys,” even when they can produce poetry and art in the sense world. For in our time (1911), there is a kind of disbelief in trying to aim toward anything higher in art than naturalism, the purely external mirroring of outer reality. Who can deny that often today when we look at the glittering art and literature expressing the world of reality, we can hear a melancholy sigh, “Oh, it's only delusion; there's no truth in any of it.” Such a mood is all too common in our time. The King of the fairy tale, who lives in each one of us and has his origin in the spiritual world, definitely needs to be persuaded by the clever cat—by the intelligence given to man—that everything growing out of the imagination and awakened by art is truly a genuine human possession. Man is persuaded at first by the King within him but only for a certain length of time. At some point, and today we are living just at the beginning of such a time, it is necessary for human beings to find once more the entrance to the spiritual, divine world. It is today necessary for human beings, and everywhere we can feel an urgency in them, to rise again toward the spheres of the spiritual world.

There has first, however, to be some sort of bridge, and the easiest of all transitions would be a thoughtful activating of the fairy tale mood. The mood of the fairy tale, even in a quite superficial sense, is truly the means to prepare human souls, such as they are today, for the experience of what can shine into them from higher, supersensible worlds. The simple fairy tale, approaching modestly with no pretension of copying everyday reality but leaping grandly over all its laws, provides a preparation in human souls for once more accepting the divine, spiritual worlds. A rough faith in the divine worlds was possible in earlier times because of man's more primitive constitution, which gave him a certain kind of clairvoyance. But in the face of reality today, this kind of faith has to burst into pieces just as the Giant Troll did. Only through clever cat questions and cat tales, spun about everyday reality, can we hold him back. Certainly, we can spin those endless tales of the clever cat to show how here and there external reality is forced toward a spiritual explanation.

In broad philosophical terms, one can spin out a long- winded answer to this or that question only by referring to the spiritual world. One still keeps all this as a kind of memento from earlier times; with it one can succeed in detaining the Giant for a short time. What is with us from earlier times, however, cannot hold its own against the clear language of reality. It will burst into pieces just as the Giant Troll burst, on looking at the rising sun. But one has to recognize this mood of the bursting Giant. It is something that has a relationship to the psychology of the fairy tale. Because I find it impossible to describe such things theoretically, I can get at this psychology only through observing the nature of the human soul. Let me say the following about it.

Think for a moment how there might appear livingly, imaginatively, before someone's soul what we recently described in the lectures about pneumatosophy,¹ depicting briefly some details of the spiritual world. In these anthroposophical circles, we certainly speak a good deal about the spiritual world. Before a person's soul, it should come at first as a living imagination. There would be little explicit description, however, if you intended only to describe what urges itself forward toward the soul, even toward the clairvoyant soul. A queer sort of disharmony comes about when one mixes such truths as those about ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, as described in our last three anthroposophical meetings,² into the dismal, ghostlike thoughts of modern times. Over against those things raised up before the soul, one is aware of man's narrow limits. Those secrets of divine worlds have to be grasped, it would seem, by something in us resembling a troll. A swollen, troll-like giant is what one becomes when trying to catch hold of the pictures of the spiritual world. Before the rising sun, then, one has voluntarily to let the pictures burst in a certain way in order for them to be in accord with the mood of modern times. But you can hold something back; you can hold back just what the “poor boy” held back. For our immediate, present-day soul to be left in possession of something, you need the transformation, the matter-of-fact transformation, of the gigantic content of the world of the imagination into the subtlety of the fairy tale mood. Then the human soul will truly feel like the King who has been guided to look at what the soul, this “poor boy” soul, actually does not possess. Nevertheless, it does come into possession of riches when the gigantic Troll bursts into pieces, when one sacrifices the imaginative world in the face of external reality and draws it into the palace that one's phantasy is able to erect.

In former times, the phantasy of the “poor boy” was nourished by the world of the imagination, but in view of today's soul development this is no longer possible. If, however, we first of all give up the whole world of the imagination and press the whole thing into the subtle mood of the fairy tale, which does not rely on everyday reality, something can remain to us in the fairy tale phantasy that is deep, deep truth. In other words, the “poor boy,” who has nothing but his cat, the clever intellect, finds in the fairy tale mood just what he needs in modern times to educate his soul to enter the spiritual world in a new way.

It therefore seems to me from this point of view to be psychologically right that Capesius, educated so completely in the modern world of ideas, though certainly with quite a spiritual regard for this world, should come to the realm of the fairy tale as something new that will open for him a genuine relationship to the occult world. So there had to be something like a fairy tale written into the scene to form a bridge for Capesius between the world of external reality and the world into which he was to plunge, beholding himself in an earlier incarnation.

What has just been described as a purely personal remark about the reason I had for putting the fairy tale at this very place in the drama coincides with what we can call the history of how fairy tales arose in mankind's development. It agrees wonderfully with the way that fairy tales appeared in human lives. Looking back into earlier epochs of human development, we will find in every prehistoric folk a certain primitive kind of clairvoyance, a capacity to look into the spiritual world. Therefore, we must not only distinguish the two alternating conditions of waking and sleeping in those early times, with a chaotic transition of dream as well, but we must assume in these ancient people a transition between waking and sleeping that was not merely a dream; on the contrary, it was the possibility of looking into reality, living with a spiritual existence. A modern man, awake, is in the world with his consciousness, but only with his sentient consciousness and with his intelligence. He has become as poor as the boy who had nothing but a clever cat. He can also be in the spiritual world in the night, but then he is asleep and is not conscious of it. Between these two conditions, early man had still a third, which conjured something like magnificent pictures before his soul. He lived then in a real world, one that a clairvoyant who has attained the art of clairvoyance also experiences as a world of reality, but not dreamlike or chaotic. Still, ancient man possessed it to such a degree that he could encompass his imaginations with conscious clarity. He lived in these three different conditions. Then, when he felt his soul widening out into the spiritual cosmos, finding its connection with spiritual beings of another kind close to the hierarchies, close to the spiritual beings living in the elements, in earth, water, air, and fire, when he felt his whole being widening out from the narrow limits of his existence, it must have been for him, in these in-between conditions, like the Giant who nevertheless burst into pieces when the sun rose and he had to wake up.

These descriptions are not at all unrealistic. Because today one no longer feels the full weight of words, you might think the words “burst into pieces” are put there more or less carelessly, just as a word often is merely added to another. But the bursting into pieces actually describes a specific fact. There came to the ancient human being, after he had felt his soul growing out into the entire universe and then, with the coming of the Golden Maid of the Morning, had had to adapt his eyes to everyday reality, there came to him the everyday reality like a painful blow thrusting away what he had just seen. The words really describe the fact.

But within us there is a genuine King, which is a strong and effective part of our human nature; he would never let himself be prevented from carrying something into our world of ordinary reality out of that world in which the soul has its roots. What is thus carried into our everyday world is the projection or reflection of experience; it is the world of phantasy, a real phantasy, not the fantastic, which simply throws together a few of the rags and tatters of life, but it is true phantasy, which lives deep in the soul and which can be urged out of there into every phase of creating. Naturalistic phantasy goes in the opposite direction from genuine phantasy. Naturalistic phantasy picks up a motif here and a motif there, seeks the patterns for every kind of art from everyday reality and stitches these rags of reality together like patchwork. This is the one and only method in periods of decadent art.

With the kind of phantasy that is the reflection of true imagination, there is something at work of unspecified form, not this shape nor that, and not yet aware of what the outer forms will be that it wants to create. It feels urged on by the material itself to create from within outward. There will then appear, like a darkening of the light-process, what inclines itself in devotion to external reality as image-rich, creatively structured art. It is exactly the opposite process from the one so often observed in today's art work. From an inner center outward everything moves toward this true phantasy, which stands behind our sense reality as a spiritual fact, an imaginative fact. What comes about is phantasy-reality, something that can grow and develop lawfully out of divine, spiritual worlds into our own reality, the lawful possession, one can say, of the poor lad—modern man—limited as he is to the poverty of the outer sense world.

Of all the forms of literature the fairy tale is certainly least bound to outer reality. If we look at sagas, myths, and legends, we will find features in all of them that follow only supersensible laws, but these are actually immersed in the laws of external reality as they leave the spiritual and go into the outside world just as the source material, historical or history-related, is connected to a historical figure. Only the fairy tale does not allow itself to be manipulated around real figures; it stays quite free of them. It can use everything it finds of ordinary reality and has always used it. Therefore, it is the fairy tale that is the purest child of ancient, primitive clairvoyance; it is a sort of return payment for that early clairvoyance. Let old Sober-sides, the pedant who never gets beyond his academic point of view, fail to perceive this. It doesn't matter; he needn't perceive it. The simple fact is that for every truth he hears, he asks, “Does it agree with reality?”

A person like Capesius is searching above everything else for truth. He finds no satisfaction in the question, “Does it agree with reality?” For he tells himself, “Is a matter of truth completely explained when you can say that it accords with the external world?” Things can really be true, and true and true again, as well as correct, and correct and ever correct, and still have as little relationship to reality as the truth of the little boy sent to buy rolls from the village baker. He figured out correctly that he would get five rolls for his ten kreuzers, but his figuring did not accord with reality; he practiced the same kind of thinking as the pedant who philosophizes about reality. You see, in that village, if you bought five rolls, you got an extra one thrown in—nothing to do with philosophy or logic, just plain reality.

In the same way Capesius is not interested in the question of how this or that idea or concept accords with reality. He asks first what the human soul perceives when it forms for itself a certain concept. The human soul, for one thing, perceives in mere external, everyday reality nothing more than emptiness, dryness, the tendency in itself continually to die. That is why Capesius so often needs the refreshment of Dame Felicia's fairy tales, needs exactly what is least true to outer reality but has substance that is real and is not necessarily true in the ordinary sense of the word. This substance of the fairy tale prepares him to find his way into the occult world.

In the fairy tale, there is something left to us humans that is like a grandchild of the clairvoyant experience of ancient human beings. It is within a form that is so lawful that no one who allows it to pour into his soul demands that its details accord with external reality. In fairy tale phantasy the poor boy, who has only a clever cat, has really also a palace obtruding directly into external reality. For every age, therefore, fairy tales can be a wonderful, spiritual nourishment. When we tell a child the right fairy tale, we enliven the child's soul so that it is led toward reality without always remaining glued to concepts true to everyday logic; such a relationship to reality dries up the soul and leaves it desolate. On the other hand, the soul can stay fresh and lively and able to penetrate the whole organism if, perceiving in the lawful figures of a fairy tale what is real in the highest sense of the word, it is lifted up far above the ordinary world. Stronger in life, comprehending life more vigorously, will be the person who in childhood has had fairy tales working their way into his soul.

For Capesius, fairy tales stimulate imaginative knowledge. What works and weaves from them into his soul is not their content, not their plot, but rather how they take their course, how one motif moves into the next. A motif may induce certain powers of soul to strive upward, a second motif persuades other powers to venture downward, still others will induce the soul forces to mingle and intertwine upward and downward. It is through this that Capesius' soul comes into active movement; out of his soul will then emerge what enables him finally to see into the spiritual world. For many people, a fairy tale can be more stimulating than anything else. We will find in those that originated in earlier times motifs that show elements of ancient clairvoyance. The first tales did not begin by someone thinking them out; only the theories of modern professors of folklore explaining fairy tales begin like that. Fairy tales are never thought out; they are the final remains of ancient clairvoyance, experienced in dreams by human beings who still had that power. What was seen in a dream was told as a story—for instance, “Puss in Boots,” one version of which I have just related. All the fairy tales in existence are thus the last remnants of that original clairvoyance. For this reason, a genuine fairy tale can be created only when—consciously or unconsciously—an imagination is present in the soul of the teller, an imagination that projects itself into the soul. Otherwise, it is not a true fairy tale. Any sort of thought-out tale can never be genuine. Here and there today, when a real fairy tale is created, it arises only because an ardent longing has awakened in the writer toward those ancient times mankind lived through so long ago. The longing exists, although sometimes it creeps into such secret soul crevices that the writer fails to recognize in what he can create consciously how much is rising out of these hidden soul depths, and also how much is disfigured by what he creates out of his modern consciousness.

Here I should like to point out the following. Nothing put into poetic form can actually ever be grounded in truth unless it turns essentially to such a longing—a longing that has to be satisfied and that longs for the ancient clairvoyant penetration into the world, or unless it can use a new, genuine clairvoyance that does not need to reveal itself completely but can flash up in the hidden depths of the soul, casting only a many-hued shadow. This relationship still exists. How many people today still feel the necessity of rhyme? Where there is rhyme, how many people feel how necessary it is? Today there is that dreadful method of reciting poetry that suppresses the rhyme as far as possible and emphasizes the meaning, that is, whatever accords with external reality. But this element of poetry—rhyme—belongs to the stage of the development of language that existed at the time when the aftereffects of the ancient clairvoyance still prevailed.

Indeed, the end-rhyme belongs to the peculiar condition of soul expressing itself since man entered upon his modern development through the culture of the intellectual or feeling soul (Verstandes- oder Gemütsseele). Actually, the time in which the intellectual or feeling soul arose in men in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch (747 B.C. to 1413 A.D.) is just the time when in poetry the memory dawned of earlier times that reach back into the ancient imaginative world. This dawning memory found its expression in the regular formation of the end- rhyme for what was lighting up in the intellectual or feeling soul; it was cultivated primarily by what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

On the other hand, wherever the culture of the fourth epoch had penetrated, there was an incomparable refreshment through the effects of Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha. It was this that poured into the European sentient soul. In the northern reaches of Europe, the culture of the sentient soul had remained in a backward state, waiting for a higher stage, the intellectual soul culture that advanced from the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. This took place over the whole period of the fourth epoch and beyond, in order that what had developed in Central and Southern Europe, and in the Near East, could enter into the ancient sentient soul culture of Central Europe. There it could absorb the strength of will, the energy of will that comes to expression chiefly in the sentient soul culture. Thus, we see the end-rhyme regularly at home in the poetry of the South, and for the culture of the will that has already taken up Christianity, the other kind of rhyme—alliteration—as the appropriate mode of expression. In the alliterations of Northern and Central Europe we can feel the rolling, circling will pouring into the culture of the fourth epoch at its height, the culture of the intellectual or feeling soul.

It is astonishing that poets who want to bring to life, out of primeval soul forces in themselves, the memory of some primeval force in a particular sphere sometimes point back to the past in a quite haphazard fashion. This is the case with Wilhelm Jordan.³ In his Nibelungen he wished to renew the ancient alliterations, and he achieved a remarkable effect as he wandered about like a bard, trying to resurrect the old mode of expression. People did not quite know what to make of it, because nowadays, in this intellectual time of ours, they think of speech as an expression only of meaning. People listen for the content of speech, not the effect that the sentient soul wants to obtain with alliteration, or that the intellectual soul wants to achieve with the end-rhyme. The consciousness soul really can no longer use any kind of rhyme; a poet today must find other devices.

Fräulein von Sivers [Marie Steiner] will now let us hear a short example of alliteration that will characterize how the artist, Wilhelm Jordan, wished to bring about the renewal of ancient modes.

Und es nahten die Nomen, von niemand gesehen,
Zu geräuschlosem Reigen und machten die Runde
Um diese Verlobten. Ein leiser Lufthauch,
Das war die Meinung der Minneberauschten,
Winde sich murmelnd herein zum Kamine;
Doch hinunter zur Nachtwelt, zu Nibelheims Tiefen,
Und hinauf zu den Wolken zu Walhalls Bewohnern
Erklang nun für andere als irdische Ohren
Vernehmlich wie Seesturm der Nomen Gesang:

Dein eigen ist alles,
Dein Heil wie dein Unheil,
Dein Wollen und Wähnen,
Dein Sinnen und Sein.
Wohl kommen, gekettet
In ewige Ordnung
Die Larven des Lebens,
Die Scharen des Scheins.
Sie ziehen die Zirkel,
Sie zeigen die Ziele,
Sie impfen den Abscheu,
Sie wecken den Wunsch;
Doch dein ist das Dünken,
Und wie du geworden,
So wirst du dich wenden,
Wir wissen die Wahl.

Rough English Translation

And the Norns then came nearer but no one could see them;
In soft silent steps they circled and swayed
Around the Betrothed—who, burning with love,
Thought a breath of sweet air was blowing about them;
While down to the night-world, in Nibelheim's nethermost,
And high in the heav'ns to the hosts of Valhalla
The Norns sang their song, for other than earth-ears
As clear as the clamorous raging of sea storms:

All is thine own:
Thy healing or hating,
Desires or delusions,
Thy thought and thy life.
Chained will come, cheerless,
In order eternal,
The hosts of the hidden,
The Larva of Life.
They mark out their measures,
They forecast fulfillment,
They implant raging passion,
Awaken the will.
Yet thine is the thinking,
The fashioning, forming,
The testing and turning:
We challenge thy choice.

Wilhelm Jordan really did bring the alliteration to life when he recited his poetry, but it is something that a modern person no longer can relate to completely. In order to agree sympathetically with what Jordan proposed as a kind of platform for his intentions,⁴ one has to experience those ancient times imaginatively in those of the present. It is much like bringing to mind all the happenings of these last few days in our auditorium in the Architektenhaus during the Annual Meeting,⁵ and perceiving them shrouded in astral currents that make visible what was spoken there. Then one can also discover that what in these days repeatedly played into our efforts for knowledge and understanding is the pictorial expression of a Jordan idea; that is, one could rightly understand what he set up as a kind of program to revive a mood that had held sway in the old Germanic world:

... der Sprache Springquell ...
Bedarf nur der Leitung, um lauter und lieblich
Mit rauschendem Redestrom bis zum Rande
Der Vorzeit Gefäße wieder zu füllen
Und new zu verjüngen nach tausend Jahren
Die wundergewaltige uralte Weise
Der deutschen Dichtkunst.

(The source of speech requires only guidance to fill again to the brim the ancient vessels with rushing streams of verse, sonorous and beautiful; and after a thousand years to bring anew to life the wonder and the power of the ancient German art of poetry.)

But to attain this goal, an ear is needed that can perceive the sounds of speech. This belongs intrinsically to the imaginations of the ancient clairvoyant epoch, for it was then that the feeling for sounds originated. But what is a speech sound? It is itself an imagination, an imaginative idea.

As long as you say Licht (light) and Luft (air) and can think only of the brightness of the one and the wafting movement of the other, you have not yet an imagination. But the words themselves are imaginations. As soon as you can feel their imaginative power, you will perceive in a word like Licht, with the vowel sound “ee” predominating, a radiant, unbounded brightness; in Luft, with its vowel sound “oo,” a wholeness, an abundance. Because a ray of light is a thin fullness and the air an abundant fullness, the alliterating “I” expresses the family relationship of fullness. It is not unimportant whether you put together words that alliterate, such as Licht and Luft, or do not alliterate; it is not unimportant whether you string together the names of brothers or whether you put them together in such a way that the hearer or reader feels that cosmic will has brought them together, as in Gunther, Gemot, Giselher. Such an ancient imagination the sentient soul could perceive in the alliteration.

In the end-rhyme the intellectual soul could recognize itself as part of the ancient imagination. When language is made alive, its effects can be felt in the soul even into our dreams, where it can secrete certain imaginations for a person to become aware of in dream. These imaginations appear also to clairvoyance, correctly characterizing, for instance, the four elements. It does not always hold good, but if someone truly feels what, for example, Licht and Luft are, and lets this enter into a dream, there often blossoms out of the dream-fantasy something that can lead to a characterization of those elements, light and air. Human beings will not become aware of the secrets of language until it is led back to its origin, led back, in fact, to imaginative perception. Language actually originated in the time when man was not yet a “poor boy” but also when man had not yet a clever cat. In a way, he still lived attached to the Giant, imagination, and out of the Giant's limbs he was aware of the audible imagination imbuing each sound. When a tone is laid hold of by the imagination, then the sound originates, the actual sound of speech.

These are the things I wanted to bring to you today, in a rather unpretentious and disconnected way, in order to show how we must bring to life again what mankind once lost but that has been rescued for our time. Just as Capesius wins his way to it, we must win it back, so that human beings can grow rightly into the era just ahead of us and find their way into higher worlds, thus truly to participate in them.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1971.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Realities of Evolution, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1953.
• 3. Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904), Nibelungen, Canto One, Sigfridsage.
• 4. In the 1925 German edition of this lecture there is the following footnote: “Translated into the language of spiritual science, one could say that Jordan wished instinctively to revive for the consciousness soul as poetry what the sentient soul had earlier developed quite naturally.”
• 5. December 10, 1911. Discussions took place on December 12, 14, 15.

When we wander at this time of year through the streets of large cities, we find them full of all sorts of things which our contemporaries want to have for their celebration of the approaching Christmas festival. Indeed, it is one of the greatest festivals of the year which humanity can celebrate: the festival which commemorates the most powerful impulse in the evolution of mankind. And yet, if we contemplate what will take place in the coming days in large cities such as ours, we may well ask: Does all of this correspond rightly to what is meant to flow through the souls and hearts of man?

If we don't give ourselves up to illusions but simply face the truth, then perhaps we cannot help but admit to ourselves: All these preparations and celebrations of the Christmas festival which we see in our time fit in very poorly on the one hand with all other happenings of modern civilization around us; and on the other hand they fit in equally poorly with what should live in the depth of the human heart as a commemorative thought of the greatest impulse which humanity received in the course of its evolution.

So it is perhaps no overstatement if we express the following view: There is a lack of harmony in what our eyes perceive, when we wish to permeate ourselves with the Christmas mood, and wish to receive this Christmas mood from what we can see in today's environment. There is a discord in seeing the streets bedecked with Christmas trees and other decorations in preparation for the festival, and then seeing modern traffic rushing through the midst of it all. And if modern man does not feel the full extent of this discord, the reason may well be that he has disaccustomed himself to be sensitive to all the depth and intimacy which can be connected with this approaching festival. Of all that the Christmas festival can do to deepen man's inner nature, basically no more is left today, especially for the city dweller, than a last faint echo. He is hardly in a position to feel even vaguely its former greatness. His habits prevent him from perceiving this greatness any longer, a greatness to which humanity had become accustomed in the course of centuries.

It would be totally wrong if we would look with pessimism at the fact that times have changed, and that in our modern cities it has become impossible to develop that mood of profound intimacy which prevailed in earlier times with regard to this festival. It would not be right to allow such a pessimistic mood to arise, for at the same time we can feel an intimation—in our circles this feeling should certainly be present—that humanity can once again come to experience the full depth and greatness of the impulse which belongs to this festival. Seeking souls have every reason to ask themselves: “What can this ‘Christ festival’ mean to us?”. And in their hearts they can admit: Precisely through Spiritual Science something will be given to humanity, which will bring again, in the fullest sense of the word, that depth and greatness which cannot be any more today. If we don't succumb to illusion and phantasy we must admit that these can no longer exist at present. What has become often a mere festival of gifts cannot be said to have the same meaning as what the Christmas festival meant to people for many centuries in the past. Through the celebration of this festival the souls used to blossom forth with hope-filled joy, with hope-borne certainty, and with the awareness of belonging to a spiritual Being, Who descended from Spiritual heights, and united Himself with the earth, so that every human soul of good will may share in His powers. Indeed, for many centuries the celebration of this festival awakened in the souls of men the consciousness that the individual human soul can feel firmly supported by the spiritual power just described, and that all men of good will can find themselves gathered together in the service of this spiritual power. Thereby they can also find together the right ways of life on earth, so that they can mean humanly as much as possible to one another, so that they can love each other as human beings on earth as much as possible.

Suppose we find it appropriate to let the following comparison work on our souls: What has the Christmas festival been for many centuries, and what should it become in the future? To this end, let us compare, on the one hand, the mood which social custom creates nowadays in certain parts of the world around us, with the mood that once permeated the Christmas festival. On the other hand, let us compare this mood of the present time with what can come about in the soul as a renewal of this festival, made as it were timeless, through Spiritual Science.

For a modern urban dweller it is hardly possible to appreciate truly the full depth of what is connected with our great seasonal festivals. It is hardly possible to experience that magic which like a gentle breeze permeated the mood of soul of those who believed that they bore the Christ in their hearts during the great festivities surrounding Christmas or Easter. Today it has become very difficult indeed, especially for the city dweller, to sense anything of this magic, which permeated humanity like a gentle spiritual breeze during those seasons. For those who have had the opportunity of experiencing even a little of this magic wind which permeated the soul mood in those times this will most certainly be a wonderful, glorious memory. As a young child I was able to behold the last remnants of such a magic wind as it permeated the souls, the mood, of country folk in certain remote German villages. When the Christmas season approached I could behold how something arose in the deepest, innermost soul life of young and old, which differed essentially from the feelings and sentiments that prevailed during the rest of the year. When Christmas approached this could still be sensed quite distinctly in certain farming villages as recently as a few decades ago. The souls had then a natural way of making themselves inwardly beautiful. And they really felt something like this: “Into deepest night-enveloped darkness has the physical sunlight descended during autumn. More outer physical darkness has come about. Long have the nights become, shortened are the days. We must stay home much of the time. During the other seasons we used to go outside, to the fields, where we would feel the golden rays of the morning sun coming to meet us, where we could feel the warmth of the sun, where we could work with our hands during the long days of summer. But now, we must sit inside much of the time, we must feel much, much darkness around us, and we must often see, as we look outside through windows, how the earth is being covered with its winter garment.”

It is not possible to depict in detail all the beautiful, the wonderful soul moods which awoke in the simplest farm homes on Sunday afternoons and evenings as the Christmas season approached. One would have to depict very intimate soul moods. One would have to tell how many, who had been involved in a good share of fights and mischief during the rest of the year, would feel a natural restraint in their souls, as a result of being filled with the thought: “The time of Christ draws near.” They would feel: Time itself is becoming too holy to allow mischief to occur during this season.—That is only a minor aspect of what was extensively present in past centuries, and what could still be seen in its last remnants in those remote villages in recent decades. When the celebration of Christmas retreated into the homes as a family festival you would see there no more than a little display representing the stable in Bethlehem. The children would enjoy everything connected with it, as they saw Joseph and Mary, with the shepherds in front, and the angels above, sometimes done in a very primitive way. In some villages you would find such a display of the “manger” in almost every home. What had thus retreated into the homes was more or less a last echo of something which we will touch upon later.—And when the main days of the Christmas festival, the 25th and 26th of December, had passed and Epiphany, the festival of the Three Kings, approached, you could still see a few decades ago small groups of actors wandering from village to village—the last actors to present plays of “the Holy Story.” The actual Christmas plays had already become quite rare, but a last echo of “The Play of the Three Kings” could often still be seen, as it might be even today (1910) in some remote villages. There were the “Three Holy Kings”, wearing strange costumes, different for each one, with paper crowns and a star on their heads. Thus would they move through the villages, seldom lacking humor, but with humor and reverence together. With their primitive voices they would awaken all those feelings which the soul should feel in connection with what the Bible tells of the great Christ Impulse of human evolution.

The essential thing is that a mood prevailed during the Christmas season, the days and weeks surrounding the Christmas festival, to which the heart was given over, a mood in which the whole village would participate, and which enabled people to take in with simple immediacy all the representations that were brought before their souls. Grotesque, comedy-like presentations of sacred scenes, such as have become customary in our time in imitation of the Passion Plays of Oberammergau, would have met with no understanding in those days. The memory and the thought of the great periods of humanity were then still alive. It would have been impossible to find anyone willing to experience the events of the Holy Night and of the Three Kings during any other days of the year. And it would have been just as impossible to accept the Passion story at any other time but Easter. People felt united with what spoke to them from the stars, the weeks, the seasons, what spoke out of snow and sunshine. And they listened to tales of what they wanted to feel and should feel, when the so-called “Star-Singers” went around, wearing paper crowns on their heads, and lately wearing simply a white jacket. One of them used to carry a star, attached to a scissor-like device, so that he could project the star some distance out. Thus they would wander through the villages, stopping at various homes, to present their simple tales. What mattered most was that just at this time people's hearts were rightly attuned, so that they were able to take in everything that was supposed to permeate their souls during this season. I myself have still heard quite a few times these “Star-Singers”, reciting their simple poems as they wandered through the villages, and this is for me still a beautiful memory. An example follows *:

In God's Name now our tale begins.
From Orient came the Holy Kings.
They ride with speed on distant ways,
Four hundred miles in thirteen days.
They ride by Herod's palace-walls
As Herod from his window calls:
Whither go ye, relax your speed!
To Bethlehem our journey does lead.
Ye Holy Three Kings be guests of mine,
I will draw plenty of beer and wine,
I will serve venison roast and fish;
To know of the newborn king is my wish.
In truth, we cannot tell just where;
We have to follow the star we bear:
Over the house the star will shine bright.
Over the mountains the holy men ride.
There found they Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Who is the Savior of all the world.¹

The whole village would take part in such things. As certain lines were recited the star would be projected far out. This star of Christmas, of the Three Kings, was an expression of the consonance of the season, the festivity, and the human hearts. That was a great thing, which had spread through centuries like a magic breath of air over large parts of the earth and into the simplest hearts and minds. We must try to place something like this before our souls. As seekers after spiritual knowledge we are able to do so, because through our years of contemplative work on this great event we were able to develop again a feeling for the real power which was thereby given for all of mankind and for the whole evolution of the earth. And it is to this event that our thoughts should be directed during this festival season.

So we may expect to gain some understanding of how in times past the whole Christmas season was immersed in a festive mood, especially among the people of Germany and Western Europe, and how this festive mood was achieved by the simplest means. But perhaps only the spiritual seeker can understand today what was essential in those ancient Christmas plays. What I have presented to you just now as the “Star-Song” is, in fact, only a last remnant, a last ruin. If we would go back several centuries we would find vast regions where Christmas plays were performed when this time approached, in the presentation of which entire villages took part. As regards our knowledge of these Christmas plays we may well say that we were merely in a position of collecting something that was rapidly vanishing.

I myself had the good fortune of having an old friend who was such a collector. From him I heard many stories of what he encountered as a scholarly collector of Christmas plays, especially in German-Hungarian regions. In certain “language islands” in Hungary the German language had been kept alive both as a mother tongue and for colloquial speech, up to the time of the so-called magyarization in the fifties and sixties of the nineteenth century, when the Hungarian language was imposed. There one could still find many of the Christmas plays and Christmas customs which had vanished long ago into the stream of oblivion in the German motherland. Individual colonists, who migrated into Slavic regions during the previous centuries, had preserved their ancient heritage of Christmas plays, and they renewed them, whenever they could find the right people to play the parts, always recruiting the players from among the villagers themselves. I can still well remember—and perhaps you will take my word for it—with how much enthusiasm the old professor Schröer spoke of these Christmas plays, when he told of having been present when these people performed these plays during the festival season.

We can say without exaggerating, that an understanding of the inner nature of the artistic element in these plays can only be reached by actually visiting these village people and witnessing how they have given birth to the simple artistry of such Christmas plays out of a truly most holy mood. There are people today, who believe that they can learn the art of speech and recitation from this or that teacher. They will go to all sorts of places in order to learn certain breathing exercises which are considered to be the right ones for this purpose. And there exist nowadays dozens of “right” breathing methods for singing and for declamation. These people believe that it is essential for them to make a real automaton of their body or their larynx. Thus they cultivate art in a materialistic way. I would only hope that this strange view will never really take root in our circles; for these people have no idea how a simple, yet true art was born out of a most reverent mood, a prayerful Christmas mood.

Such art was actually performed by village lads who engaged in good-for-nothing pranks and behaved in a very loose way during the rest of the year. These very same lads would act in the Christmas plays with a most profound Christmas mood in their souls and hearts. For, these simple people, who lived beneath their thatched roofs, knew infinitely more about the relation of the human soul, even the whole human being, and art, than is known today in our modern theaters or other art institutions, no matter how much ado surrounds these things. They knew that true art has to spring from the whole human being; and if it be sacred-art then it must spring from man's holy mood of devotion. That, indeed, these people knew! And this can be seen, for example, in the “four principle rules”, found in those regions which Schröer could still visit.

As the months of October or November approached, in the regions of Upper Hungary, one person who knew the Christmas plays would gather those people who he felt were suitable to perform them. These plays were passed on by oral tradition. They were never committed to writing. That would have been considered a profanation. And during the Christmas season some people were considered suited, of whom one would perhaps not have thought so at other times: really roguish good-for-nothing lads, who had been involved in all sorts of mischief during the rest of the year. But during this time of the year their souls immersed themselves in the required mood. The participants had to abide by some very strict rules during the many weeks of rehearsals. Anyone who wanted to take part had to adhere strictly to the following rules.—Try to imagine life in these villages, and what it would mean not to be allowed to participate in these Christmas plays. “Anyone wishing to act in the plays must:

1. stay away from the girls,
2. sing no bawdy songs during the entire Holy Season,
3. lead a decent life,
4. obey my orders.

A fine will be levied for all violations, and also for each error in memorizing your lines.”²

Do you recognize in this custom something like a last echo of the kind of consciousness that prevailed at the holy sites of the ancient mysteries? There too, one knew that wisdom cannot be achieved by mere schooling. Likewise, an awareness prevailed here that the whole human being, including his mind and morals, must be cleansed and purified, if he wished to partake in art in a worthy way. These plays had to be born out of the whole human being! And the attunement to the Christmas mood brought about something like this, brought about that devotion and piety would take hold even of the most roguish lads.

These Christmas plays, of which I have just told you, and which Schröer and others could still observe and collect, were the last remains of more ancient plays, indeed, merely the last ruins. But through these plays we can look back into earlier times, into the 16th, 15th, 14th century and even further, when the relations between villages and cities were quite different. Indeed, in the Christmas season the souls of village people would immerse themselves into an entirely different mood through what these plays would offer them, as they presented with the simplest, most primitive means the holy legend: the birth of Christ with all that belongs to it according to the Bible. And just as Christmas day, the 25th of December, was preceded in the church calendar by the “Day of Adam and Eve”, so what was considered the actual Christmas play was preceded by the so-called Paradise play, the play of Adam and Even in Paradise, where they fell victim to the devil, the snake. Thus in the most primitive regions where such plays were performed, people could gain an immediate insight into the connection between the descent of man from spiritual heights to the physical world—and that sudden reversal which was bestowed on man through the Christ Impulse, upward again towards the spiritual worlds.

Suppose when reading the Epistles of St. Paul you would sense the greatness of the Pauline conception of man, who descended as Adam from the spiritual world to the world of the senses, and then, of the “new Adam and Christ, in whom man ascends again from the world of the senses into the world of the spirit. This can be sensed and felt in Paul in a grandiose way. The simplest people, even down to the children, could sense this in an intimate, loving, fulfilling way in the depth of their hearts and souls when they beheld in this season in succession first the fall of man in the Paradise play of Adam and Eve, and then the revelation of Christ in the Christmas play. And they felt profoundly the mighty turning point that had occurred in the evolution of humanity through the Christ Event. A reversal of the path of evolution, that was the way the Christ Event was experienced! One path, that led so to say from heaven to earth, was the path from Adam to Christ; another path, that leads from earth to heaven, is the oath from Christ to the end of earth time. That is what many thousands of people felt in a most intimate way, when the two plays which I have just characterized were so primitively performed before their eyes. These people really could then experience the complete renewal of the human spirit in its very essence through the Christ-Impulse. Perhaps you can feel in all of this a kind of echo of something that was once felt in regard to this reversal of the entire progress of humanity through certain words which have come down to us from very ancient times, from the first Christian centuries. These words were often spoken, even in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, in those regions of Europe where Christianity had spread. There people felt something tremendous when words such as these were spoken:

Ave maris Stella
Dei mater alma
Atque semper virgo
Felix coeli porta

Sumens illud Ave
Gabrielis ore
Funda nos in pace
Mutans nomen Evae!

Ave (I greet you) star of the sea
Divine youthful mother³
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave” (greeting)
From the mouth of Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

When these words were spoken people felt man's path from heaven to earth through the Fall—and the ascent of man through Christ from earth to heaven. They felt this even in the names of the two female characters, the name Eva (Eve) and the name they associated with the mother of Jesus, with which one greeted her so to say: Ave! Ave is the reverse of the name Eva. When you spell Ave backwards you have Eva. That was felt in its full significance. These word; express what people sensed in the most elementary phenomena of nature, and at the same time, what they saw in the human elements of the Holy Legend:

Ave, star of the sea,
Divine young mother
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave”
As a greeting from Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

In such simple words one felt the greatest mysteries, the greatest secrets of human evolution. And in the reversal of the name Eva to Ave people would feel in a subtle way that same truth which we can learn in a grandiose way from the Epistles of Paul when we read his words about Adam, the “old” Adam, and Christ, the “new” Adam. This was the mood in the days of the Christ-festival when these plays were performed one after the other in that primitive way: the “Paradise play” which shows us the Fall of man, and the “Christmas play” which awakens the hope for the future, in which each single human soul can share by taking up the force that lies in the Christ-Impulse. But it should be perfectly clear that to feel this requires a mood, an inner attunement, which simply cannot exist in this way anymore today. Times have changed. Back then it was not as impossible to look towards the spiritual worlds as it is today. For, that fundamentally materialistic trait, which permeates today the minds of the simplest as well as the most sophisticated people did not exist then. In those times the spiritual world was accepted as self-evident. And likewise a certain understanding was present of this spiritual world and how it differs from the world of the senses. Today people can hardly conceive how one could feel spiritually as late as the 15th or 16th century, and how an awareness of spirituality was present essentially everywhere.

We intend to present such a Christmas play in our art center. It is one from the region known as the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz). If we succeed, understanding can again be awakened, also in the outer world, for the spiritual mood that lives in such plays. For us, certain lines in such a Christmas play should become signposts, as it were, by which we recognize the spiritual sensitivity of the people who were to understand the Christmas play at the festival season. For example, if in one or another Christmas play Mary, expecting the Jesus-child, says, “The time has come, I see a little child”, this means she clairvoyantly beheld the child in a vision in the days preceding the birth. Thus it is in many Christmas plays. And I wonder where you could find a similar tale today for such an occasion. The time when a conscious connection with the spiritual world was present is no more. You should appreciate this fact neither with optimistic nor with pessimistic feelings. Nowadays you would have to go very far afield, to the most remote and primitive rural areas, to find instances of a vision of the child that is to be born in a few days. But it does still happen!

What people brought to the Christmas season by these primitive memories and thoughts of the greatest event of human evolution, this could only be carried by a mood such as we described. Therefore, we must find it quite understandable that in the place of this former poetry, this simple primitive art, we have today the prose of electric railways and automobiles, speeding forth so grotesquely between rows of Christmas trees. An aesthetically sensitive eye must find it impossible to view these two kinds of things together: Christmas trees, Christmas sales, and cars and electric trains running through their midst! Today this impossible situation is naturally accepted as a matter of course. But for an aesthetically sensitive eye it remains nevertheless something impossible. Even so, we want to be friends of our civilization, not enemies. We want to understand that it must be so as a matter of course.

But we want to understand too how much this is connected with the materialistic trait which has pervaded not only those who live in the city, but those who live in the country as well. Oh, by listening carefully, we can actually detect how this materialistic mood has taken hold of human minds. When we go back to the 14th or 13th century we find that people knew full well that something spiritual is meant when such a thing as the tree of knowledge in paradise is mentioned. They understood rightly what was presented in the Paradise play. When they were shown the tree of knowledge or the tree of life they knew to what to relate it spiritually. For in those days superstition about such matters had not yet spread to the extent it did later, in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. In fact it can be historically documented that already in the 15th century, in the vicinity of the city of Bamberg, people went out into the apple orchards on Christmas night because they expected to see physically, materially, that a specially chosen apple tree would bloom that night. Thus people's minds became materialistic, in the period beginning in the 13th or 14th century and extending into the 16th and 17th century. This happened not only in the cities, but also in the souls of simple country folk.

Even so, much of the ancient poetry found its way into the homes, with the Christmas tree. But what wafted through the ancient villages as a most sacred mood, like a mystery, has become merely external poetry, the poetry of the Christmas tree, still beautiful, yet merely an echo of something much greater.

Why is this so? Because in the course of time humanity must evolve, because what is most intimate, what is greatest and most significant at one time, cannot remain so in the same way for all times. Only an enemy of evolution would want to drag what was great in one time over into other times. Each period of time has its own special mission. In each period we must learn how to enliven in ever new ways what should enter the souls and hearts of man. Our time can only appreciate that real Christmas mood, which I have sketched here in brief outline, if this mood is seen as a historic memory, a thing of the past. Yet, if we do accept the symbol of the Christmas tree also into our own festival gatherings, we do so precisely because we connect with Spiritual Science the thought of a new Christmas mood of mankind, of progressively evolving mankind. For Spiritual Science means to introduce the secrets of Christ into the hearts and souls of man in a way that is appropriate for our time. Even though modern conveyances rush past us when we step outdoors, or perhaps will even fly away with us through the air—and soon these things will awaken humanity quite differently to the most sobering and terrifying prose—nevertheless men of today must have a chance to find again the divine-spiritual world, precisely by an even stronger and more meaningful deepening of the soul. This is the same divine-spiritual world which in bygone centuries appeared before the eyes of those primitive minds when they saw at Christmas time the Holy Child in the manger. Today we need other means to awaken this mood in the soul. Certainly we may like to immerse ourselves in what past times possessed as ways to find the Christ Event, but we must also transcend what depends on time. Ancient people approached the secrets of Nature by merging with her through feeling. That was only possible in a primitive time. Today we need other means.

I would still like to give you some idea how people felt their way into nature when the Christmas festival approached. They did this quite primitively, yet they could speak in a very real and living way out of their sensing and feeling of the elements of Nature. If I may share with you a little “Star Song”, you will perhaps feel only through one single line, how the elements of Nature spoke out of the soul—the rest of the song is rather primitive. But if you listen more carefully you will be able to observe this Nature mood in several other lines.

Namely, when the one who gathered his actors for the Christmas play, or for the Three Kings play, would wander with them, and when they would then perform at some place, they would first extend a greeting to those who were assembled there. For, the sort of abstract attitude which prevails today between actors and audience did not exist in those earlier times. People belonged together, and the whole gathering was enveloped by an atmosphere of community. Therefore the actors would start by greeting in a primitive way those who were present, as well as those of the community who were not there. This really would bring out the Christmas mood.

The Star-Song

The star singer:

Beloved singers mine, let's gather as a clan
Like fritters in a frying pan,
Beloved singers mine, take up your place,
We want to pass our while with singing in this space.
Beloved singers mine, so strong and smart,
With greetings do we want to start.
Let us greet God-Father on His highest throne
And let us greet also His only Son.
Let us greet the Holy Spirit by name
And then greet all three together again.

Joseph and Mary enter the stage.

Let us greet Joseph and Mary mild,
And we also greet the little child.
Let us greet the ox and also the ass,
Which stand near the crib with straw and grass.
Let us greet them through sunlight and moonshine
That shine on the sea and the river Rhine.
Let us greet them through foliage and grassy blade,
Through the holy rain that has wet us all made.
Let us greet the emperor and his crown,
And him who made it, a master of great renown.
Let us greet the squire, Sir Palfi by name,
Also his officers we greet the same.
Let us greet our fathers of the church, so stern,
Because this play they allowed us to learn.
Let us greet the judge and the jury elect
With worthy honor and respect.
The whole honored community we greet
All who together here we meet.
Let us greet the honored council of this place
By God ordained to serve in this space.
Let us greet them through the roots, large and small,
Which are in the earth, many and all.
Beloved singers mine, turn now to another thing.
To greet the star we shall now sing.
Let us greet the slats, so carefully matched,
To which our star is then attached.
Let us greet the scissors that can stretch out far
By which can wander around the star.
We greet all the little slats of wood
As many as make our star look so good.
Beloved singers mine, harken well to my words
We sang to the star and to all of its parts.
Now we greet our master singer with glee
And also his hat which here you see.
Let us greet our teacher, who indeed,
With God's help taught us what we need.
Beloved singers mine, note well this thing,
To all of these we did now sing.

Now I ask you, please notice what this means: to call upon Nature in such a way that one greets everyone whom one wishes to greet with a certain mood in one's heart, a mood which arises from: “the roots, large and small, which are in the earth, many and all.” That is empathy for Nature's own mood.—Thus we must recognize that people in those days were connected with all that was holy, with all that was great and spiritual, right down to the roots of trees and grass. If you can enter into such a feeling, then, through a line such as the one I have just cited, you will feel something grandiose in the secrets of the evolution of mankind. The times are past when such feelings were naturally present, when they were a matter of course. Today we need to make use of other means. We need ways which will lead us to a well-spring in human nature that lies deeper, to a wellspring of human nature which, in a certain sense, is independent of external time. For the course of modern civilization makes it impossible for us to be bound by the seasons. Therefore, if you truly understand the mood which was felt in olden times as the Christ mood of the holy Christmas night, you will also be able to understand our intent, as we attempt to deepen artistically what we can gain from Spiritual Science. We strive to enliven that well-spring in the human mind which can take in the Christ Impulse. No longer can we awaken this great impulse directly within our souls during the Christmas season, even though we would be happy if we could. Yet we constantly search for it. If we can see a “Christ-festival of the progress of humanity” in what Spiritual Science is intended to be for mankind, and if we compare this with what simple people could feel when the Child in the crib was displayed during the Holy Christmas Night then we must say to ourselves: Such moods and feelings can awake in us too, if we consider what can be born in our own soul when our inner-most wellspring is so well attuned to what is sacred, so purified through spiritual knowledge, that this wellspring can take in the holy mystery of the Christ Impulse.

From this point of view we also try to discover true art which springs from the spirit. This art can only be a child of true devotion, a child of the most sacred feelings, when we feel in this context the eternal, imperishable “Christ festival of humanity”: How the Christ-Impulse can be born in the human soul, in the human heart and mind. When we learn to experience again through Spiritual Science that this Christ Impulse is a reality, something which can actually flow into our souls and hearts as a living strength, then the Christ Impulse will not remain something abstract or dogmatic. Rather this Christ Impulse, which comes forth from our spiritual movement, will become something able to give us solace and comfort in the darkest hours of our lives, able also to give us joy in the hope that when Christ will be born in our soul at the “Christmastide of our soul”, we may then look forward to the Eastertide, the resurrection of the spirit in our own inner life.

In this way we must progress, from a material attitude which has entered and taken hold of all minds and hearts, towards a spiritual attitude. For, that renewal, which is necessary to counterbalance today's prosaic ways of life, can only be born out of the spirit. Outside, the traffic of cars may move by, electric trains may speed on, perhaps even balloons may fly across the sky. Nevertheless, in halls such as these, it will be possible that something of a holy mood lives and grows. This can however only happen as a result of what has flowed to us from spirit knowledge throughout the entire year. When this fruit of the entire year brings Christ closer to us, as could happen in former times in a much more childlike mood, then we may rightly hope that in a certain sense these halls will be “cribs”. We may then look upon these halls in a similar way as the children and the grown-ups used to look on Christmas eve upon the cradle that was set up for them at home, or in still earlier times, in the church. They used to look at the little Child, at the shepherds before Him, and at “the ox and also the ass which stand near the crib with straw and grass”. They felt that from this symbol strength would stream into their hearts, for all hope, for all love of man, for all that is great in mankind, and for all goals of the earth. If on this day, which shall be consecrated and dedicated to remembering the Christ Impulse, we can feel that our earnest spiritual scientific striving throughout the entire year has kindled something in our hearts, then on this day our hearts will feel: “These our meeting halls are truly cradles! And these candles are symbols! And just as Christmas is a preparation for Easter, so these cradles, by virtue of the holy mood that fills them, and these candles, through the symbolism of their light, are meant to be a preparation for a great era for humanity, the era of the resurrection of the most Holy Spirit, of truly spiritual life!”

So let us try to feel that in this Christmas season our meeting halls are cradles, places in which, secluded from the outer world, something great is being prepared. Let us learn to feel that if we study diligently throughout the year, our insights, our wisdom, can be condensed on Christmas eve into very warm feelings, which glow like a fire, fueled by what we have gained throughout the whole year by immersing ourselves into great teachings. And let us feel that thereby we nurture our remembrance of the greatest impulse in human evolution. Let us also feel, therefore, that in these halls we may have faith that what now begins to burn within such a confined cradle as a holy fire, and as a light, filled with certainty of hope, will find its way to all mankind at some future time. Then this fire and this light will be strong enough to extend its power even to the hardest, most down to earth prose of life, to permeate it, to enkindle it, to warm it, to enlighten it! Thus can we feel here the Christmas mood as a mood of hope in anticipation of that World-Easter-mood which is to express the living spirit, needed for a renewal of humanity.

We best celebrate Christmas when we fill our souls in the coming days with this mood: In our Christmas we spiritually prepare the “Easter festival of all mankind”, the resurrection of spiritual life. Yes indeed, cradles shall our places of work become at Christmas time! The child of light is to be born, whom we have nurtured throughout the entire year by immersing ourselves into the wisdom-treasures of Spiritual Science. In our places of work Christ is to be born within the human soul, in order that spiritual life may be resurrected at the great Eastertide of humanity. In its very essence humanity must come to feel spirituality as a resurrection, by virtue of what streams forth as Christmas mood from our halls into all humanity, in the present time as well as in the future.

• 1. From “Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungarn”, described and communicated by Karl Julius Schröer, Vienna, 1862, “Oberschützener Sternsinger” (The Star-Singers of Oberschützen), p. 160.
• 2. See “Weihnachtspiele aus altem Volkstum; Die Oberufer Spiele” (G.A. 43, Dornach 1965), Christmas Plays from Oberufer, translated by A.C. Harwood, Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 3. A more conventional translation of alma is ‘bountiful’, but Rudolf Steiner translates it as ‘young’.