The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During this Winter we have prepared the ground in various ways in order to understand with greater exactitude than has hitherto been possible man's life between birth and death in the physical world on the one side and on the other between death and rebirth in the spiritual world. And there will be still more to say about this subject in the coming months.

Efforts will be needed to draw together a number of details that will contribute towards a thorough understanding of this subject and throw new light upon many topics we have already studied from a different point of view. Today, then, I will ask you to think, above all, of the course of man's physical life—about which something has also been said in my book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy—and of how it progresses in cycles: one from birth until about the seventh year, or until the change of teeth; a second cycle from the change of teeth until puberty at about the fourteenth year; then a third cycle, and so on in periods of seven years. Even to ordinary observation it will be clear that this systematic arrangement into periods of seven years is well founded, but on the other hand it will also be evident that in the actual life of the human being other facts of incisive significance cut across these seven-year periods. We ourselves have repeatedly considered a crucial occurrence in a man's life which eludes this division into cyclic periods. It is the point of time back to which a man's memory extends in later life, the moment when he begins to feel and know himself as an ‘I’, when Ego-consciousness dawns in him. This experience does not by any means occur at exactly the same point of time, but in most cases it may be said that Ego-consciousness flashes up in the human being at some point between birth and the seventh year. And something similar can be said to hold good in the later period of a man's life. Although with less abruptness than the sudden flashing-up of Ego-consciousness, there are other occurrences which as it were invalidate the regular seven-year cycle. We shall, however, always discover that whatever comes in this way into the life of man and cuts across the cyclic periods, occurs much more irregularly than the experiences connected with the actual seven-year cycles. You will hardly find two human beings whose memories go back to exactly the same point of time, that is to say who experienced the flashing up of consciousness of ‘I’ at the same age. Nor does the change of teeth occur at precisely the same age in different individuals. But why this is so in the latter case, we shall still have to consider.

When we study the cyclic periods already referred to and mentioned in my little book, Education of the Child, we shall notice that they begin in connection with the most physical, the most external member of man's being and are then concerned with the other, more inward members of his constitution. From birth until the seventh year development is connected primarily with the physical body, then for seven years with the etheric body, then for seven years with the astral body, the sentient soul, and so on. The evolutionary factors pass over more and more decisively from the external to the inner nature of man. That is essentially characteristic of the seven-year periods.

What, then, is there to be said about occurrences which cut across these seven-year periods? The flashing-up of ‘I’-consciousness during the first cycle is an emphatically inner event. For the sake of clarity, here let us consider something that seems to be in contrast with this flashing-up of Ego-consciousness. If we observe human life with discernment we shall find that the cessation of growth may be compared with some happening which cuts across the seven-year cycles of evolution. We will therefore think about the cessation of growth which after all occurs comparatively late in life, and study its implications.

The first seven-year period ends with the change of teeth. The appearance of the second teeth is, as it were, the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. It can therefore be said that when the human being enters into life through birth, his actual form is not complete. What happens is that the Spirits of Form continue their active intervention during the first seven years of life; the human being has then reached the point when his form merely needs to grow. The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being. The formative principle has now come to its conclusion. Were its activity to continue, the second teeth would inevitably make their appearance later than is now the case.

Here we may ask: When these Spirits of Form have worked on the human being until the seventh year of his life, does everything they do for him come to an end?

The answer is ‘No’, for the human being goes on growing and the basic principles of his form develop still further. If nothing else intervened, growth would be able to continue without interruption. If we think only of the principles of form that are active in the human being until the seventh year there is no more reason in the case of man than in that of other beings why these forms should not continue to grow if nothing were to intervene. But something does intervene. When the human being stops growing, certain principles of form still have an effect upon him. They have already been drawing near to him but now they unite in the fullest sense with his organism, lay hold of it, but in such a way that they now act as a hindrance, and further growth is prevented. The formative principles that are active until the seventh year of life allow the human being a certain elasticity. But at that point other formative principles approach him; their nature is such that they capture and confine what is elastic in the demarcated form, thus preventing any further growth. That is why growth stops at some point. When growth stops, this means that formative forces approaching from outside are at work. Whenever formative principles are active, whenever forms grow larger, provision must be made for the stoppage of growth by the appearance of counter-formative principles which oppose the first category as its polar antithesis. When man's form has developed until about the seventh year of life (indicated in the shaded portion of the diagram) this form can continue to grow.

The formative principles have been at work until the seventh year; these principles work from within. Then different formative principles work in opposition from outside, so that the human being can grow only to the limit indicated by the line b–b. It is really as if until the seventh year of his life the human being were given an elastic garment which he can constantly stretch and enlarge. But at a specific point of time he is given one that is not elastic; he is obliged to put it on, and thenceforth cannot grow beyond its limits.

We can therefore say that in the human being a confrontation takes place between two kinds of formative principles, one working from within and the other from without. The formative principles belonging to the first category come from the Spirits of Form, from those Spirits of Form who have passed through a perfectly normal process of evolution in the Cosmos. The formative principles working from without are not of the same kind. They come from Spirits of Form whose development has been retarded and who have acquired a Luciferic character. They are the factor which works in the purely spiritual domain, whereas the forces working in the material sphere have had a normal development; having evolved through the stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, they then pass to the Earth in the regular way and shape the human form from within. The ‘irregular’ Spirits of Form take what is presented to them and hold back its further development. Thus the process of growth in the human being is brought to a halt by these backward Spirits of Form. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have the most varied tasks, among them the one that has been characterised today.

We have now been able to consider many different aspects of the work of the ‘regular’ Hierarchies and also of the work of the backward spiritual Beings belonging to the different Hierarchies. In the book Occult Science—an Outline¹ you can read how the human being reached the stage where through the Spirits of Form he could be endowed with the germinal foundation for the ‘I’, the Ego. We know that man received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the ‘I’ from the Spirits of Form. Bearing this in mind we can say that man, in his outer stature, has been organised by the regular Spirits of Form into an Ego-bearing being and that this comes into manifestation in the first seven-year cycle of his life. But then the backward Spirits of Form who are the opponents of the regular Spirits of Form, put a stop to his growth. This is actually the antithesis of the first, most deeply inward experience in the human being, namely, the kindling of the consciousness of ‘I’—the Ego. This happens in the early years of life, in the innermost realm of being. The outermost manifestation, the form, is checked at a later age, as a final act. Thus we perceive two evolutionary—but antithetical—processes in the human being. Of the one I have said that it comes from without and moves inward, taking hold of the sentient soul and so on, in the twenty-first year of life. Then there is another evolution proceeding from within outwards until the growth of the physical form is checked. The one evolution, the regular evolution, proceeds from the spiritual to the corporeal, from within outwards and is of interest especially for education. The other evolution—which is a much less regular and also more individual process—proceeds from without inwards and, when the human being has reached a certain age, it comes to expression in the completion of the outermost principle—the physical body.

It is very important that teachers should have knowledge of these two antithetical lines of evolution. Hence in the book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy it was right to call attention to the first process of evolution which proceeds from within outwards, because it is only there that education is possible. On the other line of evolution—from without inwards—which is the line of individual development, it is impossible to make any actual impression. This is something of which account can be taken but which cannot be halted; neither can much be achieved in the way of education. And to be able to distinguish between where education is possible and where it is not, is of fundamental importance.

Just as the cessation of growth is caused by the backward Spirits of Form, the first actual manifestation of the ‘I’ in the human being during early childhood is the work of the backward Spirits of Will (Thrones). Between these two extremes there are other happenings which are to be attributed to backward Spirits of Wisdom and backward Spirits of Movement.

No adequate characterisation of man's life as a whole, including the existence between death and the new birth, is possible unless we take account of all the factors which have an effect upon him, and recognise that even in everyday life the influences of Luciferic beings take effect in many different ways. This influence is evident in other spheres as well. And as our endeavour in these lectures is to acquire a really fundamental understanding of man's life as a whole, we will not hesitate to think about matters which seem to be somewhat remote.

Attention shall first of all be drawn to a phenomenon from which it is evident that on the physical plane too, between birth and death, man's life has undergone essential changes in the course of evolution. If we realise this, it will, become evident that the life between death and rebirth has also changed. Those who think intellectually, but superficially, about life today may readily believe that, in essentials, things were always the same as they are at present. By no means was it so! And in certain cases we need go back only a few hundred years to find that conditions were very different. Thus at the present time there is something that has a very great influence upon man's life of soul between birth and death but that simply did not exist in its present form only a few centuries ago. It is what we today mean by the expression ‘public opinion’. Even as recently as the thirteenth century it would have been nonsense to speak of public opinion as we do today. A great deal is said nowadays against belief in authority, although in actual fact it exists in a much more oppressive form in our time than it did in these earlier, often despised centuries. In earlier centuries there were, of course, defects, but there was no blind belief in authority such as exists at present. This blindness of belief in authority is usually revealed by the fact that the authority in question cannot be specified. A person today will readily be floored when he is told that science has proved this or that. In earlier centuries, however, people attached more weight to authorities whom they encountered physically. Reference to an intangible ‘something’ is implied when it is said: ‘There is scientific proof of it.’ Such a saying urges belief in authority when confronted with something incomprehensible. Such belief did not exist in earlier centuries. People belonging to our civilisation usually concern themselves very little with matters about which the simplest, most, primitive human being in earlier centuries endeavoured to have some knowledge—matters relating, for example, to health and illness. Why, it is asked today, should anyone need to know about health and illness? The doctors know about these matters and the problems concerned can be left to them. This is also an example of what comes into the category of intangible but sovereign authority. But countless other influences make their way into life; from earliest youth the human being becomes dependent upon them and his trends of judgement and feeling force themselves into our life! These living currents swirling around among human beings are usually referred to as ‘public opinion’—and prompted the saying from philosophers: ‘Public opinions are mostly private errors.’ To realise this, however, is not as important as it is to be aware that public opinions exert tremendous power upon the life of an individual. It would be a complete misconception of history to speak about the influence of public opinion upon the life of an individual living in the thirteenth century. In those days there were single personalities who admittedly exerted a great deal of authority either in affairs of Government or in practical life, and in these spheres it was obeyed. But at this time there was nothing resembling what impersonal public opinion has become today. Anyone who is unwilling to believe this on the basis of the occult facts should study the history of Florence during those centuries and in later times too—when the government of the city passed into the control of the Medici. The tremendous power of individual authorities will then be apparent, but there was no such thing as public opinion. It first arose in an epoch preceding our own by four or five centuries and one can speak of its actual beginning. Such things must be regarded as realities, for a world of swirling thoughts does indeed exist.

What is the origin of this public opinion which we often accept as something that cannot be verified? What is public opinion in reality? You may remember that I have spoken of certain spiritual Beings belonging to the Hierarchy immediately above man—Beings who participate in various ways in the guidance and leadership of humanity. In my little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, you will find a great deal on the subject of spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Now we know that the mightiest incision in the evolution of humanity was made by the Mystery of Golgotha. In that event there came to pass something that was most wonderfully expressed in the esoteric teaching of St. Paul. Paul spoke in simple language but the actual way in which he spoke was rooted in profound esotericism. It was not possible for him always to give out openly what he, as an Initiate, knew; for in the first place he wanted to speak to a wider circle of people and, secondly, it was not possible in his day to give out everything he knew in the way of which he would have been capable. Nevertheless his very presentation was based upon profound esoteric knowledge. We find, for example, that there is a deeply significant truth in the distinction he makes between the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘higher Adam’—the Christ. According to Paul, the various generations of human beings are to be traced back to Adam, that is to say, the bodies of men descend from Adam. Hence it can be said that the physical increase of humanity over the Earth during the different periods, leads back finally to the physical body of Adam—Adam and Eve, naturally. We can then ask: What lies at the basis of the physical evolution of mankind from Adam onwards? Naturally, the evolution of souls! The physical bodies which have descended from Adam are the habitations of living souls. These souls had descended from cosmic worlds and had brought with them to the Earth a certain spiritual heritage, a spiritual endowment. But in the course of time this spiritual endowment had undergone decline. Individuals who lived, say, six or seven thousand years before the founding of Christianity had within them much stronger, more extensive spiritual forces than those who lived a mere thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual heritage which once came to the Earth with human beings had gradually withered away in the soul. Now the life between death and rebirth is of particular significance for this spiritual heritage. If we go back to the epoch long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that after death men had an active, inwardly illumined life of soul; but then this life of soul became dimmer and dimmer, darker and darker. An ever-fading life of soul came with human beings when they passed through death. This was particularly the case among the Greeks although they were the most advanced peoples then on the Earth, and their sages had every reason to say, in view of the stage reached in evolution: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ We know that this saying was true when applied to the Greeks who lived a fully satisfying life on the physical plane; but as soon as they had passed through the gate of death their life became dim and shadowy.

In the fullest sense it is true that the spiritual life which men had brought with them to the Earth and which manifested after death as a somewhat dim clairvoyant consciousness, had become even dimmer. And especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the spiritual life had reached the stage of its greatest darkness.

The all-important purpose of the Baptism by John the Baptist was that some of those who sought to be baptised should be made conscious of the conditions just described. The individuals baptised by John were completely submerged in the water. As a result, the etheric body of these individuals was liberated from them and for a short time, while under the water, they became clairvoyant. John was able to reveal to them that there had been such deterioration in the life of soul in the course of time that a human being now possessed very little of the spiritual treasure that he had once been able to take with him through the gate of death and that could give him clairvoyant consciousness. A man whom John baptised in this way became aware that a revitalisation of the life of soul was essential, that something new must radiate into human souls in order that after death there might be a life in the real sense. This new impulse streamed into the souls of men through the Mystery of Golgotha. You need only read my lecture-course entitled From Jesus to Christ and you will realise that a rich and abundant spiritual life streams from the Mystery of Golgotha into the souls of individuals who develop a relationship to that Mystery.

Hence Paul could say: just as the physical bodies of men descend from Adam, so will the content of their souls in greater and greater measure ‘descend’ from the Christ who is the second Adam, the spiritual Adam. It is a profound truth that Paul uttered here, clothed in his simple words. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, men would have become progressively empty in soul and would either have developed a longing only to live outside the physical body or to live on Earth with no other wishes or desires than for a purely physical life, and so would have become more and more materialistic. Because all development is a slow and gradual process there are still some peoples on the Earth who have not yet wholly lost the original spiritual treasure, who still retain some measure of it in spite of having failed to establish any relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. Individuals belonging to the most advanced peoples, however, can become conscious after death only to the extent to which they have learnt ‘to die in Christ’, as the second line of the Rosicrucian formula expresses it. And so in actual fact the Mystery of Golgotha has acted as illumination in men's souls.

With this clearly in mind we shall understand the gist of a question relating to man's evolution. It is the question: How came it that understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha enabled the content of man's soul to be carried into the sphere of his ‘I’, his Ego? How did this soul-content differ from what existed before the Mystery of Golgotha as an ancient heritage? The difference is that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, in respect of the content of their souls men were far less independent. They were under the direct guidance of the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men were under the leadership of the Beings of the nearest higher Hierarchies to a far greater extent than was the case after that event. Indeed the progress of these Beings themselves—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—consists in the fact that they have learnt to lead human beings in a way that respects their independence. Men were intended to live on the Earth in a state of greater and greater independence. The leading spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies have recognised this and therein consists their progress.

But it is possible for these Spirits too to remain behind in their evolution. Not all the Spirits who participated in the leadership of humanity have acquired through the Mystery of Golgotha the power to guide and lead men while ensuring their freedom. Among these Beings of the higher Hierarchies there are some who remained backward and have become Luciferic spirits. What we call ‘public opinion’ is an example of the way in which some of them are active. Public opinion is not created by human beings alone but also by a certain category of Luciferic spirits of the lowest rank—retarded Angeloi and Archangeloi. These spirits are only beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the ranks of the Luciferic spirits, but they are definitely Luciferic in character. With the eye of seership one can perceive how certain spirits of the higher Hierarchies did not keep pace with evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they adhere rigidly to the old kind of leadership and therefore cannot make any direct approach to men. Those who have kept pace with evolution can make regular and direct contact with men; the other spirits are incapable of this and they manifest their activity in the muddled, turbulent thinking that comes to expression as public opinion. The function of public opinion is intelligible only when it is realised that this is how it has made its way into human life.

Thus we have among us beings who abandon the regular course of evolution and become Luciferic in character. It is important that this should be known. The work of the Luciferic beings of whom we have already spoken and who now have great power, also began on a small scale. Indeed this is true in the case of the whole host of Luciferic beings. Admittedly, on the Old Moon there was no public opinion as we know it but something that can be compared with it—a kind of guidance of men. Some among this host of Luciferic spirits of whom we have spoken are powerful and important beings, for example backward Spirits of Form who surge in upon the human being with such violence that they stop his growth. The others are merely the recruits; nevertheless this is the beginning of the career of the Luciferic spirits, a career which later on will assume a quite different dimension because the spirits become more and more powerful. Public opinion, which under the guidance and direction of certain Luciferic spirits of the lowest order, influences human beings because they absorb it between birth and death, must necessarily have its counterweight during the life between death and rebirth. That is to say, because a human being in his life between birth and death has been caught up into the current of public opinion described, he must experience the counterweight in his life between death and rebirth. Otherwise the following would ensue.

The backward spirits who are responsible for the creation of public opinion have no significance or power whatever in man's life between death and rebirth. They have relinquished all possibility of working in that sphere because they are active here, on the physical plane, in a spiritual way—indeed in a way that is only possible in the form of public opinion. A man can take no iota of anything like public opinion with him into the spiritual world and whatever element of it he might want to accompany him into the life after death would be entirely out of place. It must be said, although it will seem strange to many people, that life in Kamaloka becomes very difficult for one who clings to public opinion or has been caught in the coils of his own judgement very early in life. This applies particularly to persons who believe that within the world of public opinion there can still be independent judgement—which is an utter impossibility. For such people Kamaloka is admittedly difficult. But when the period of Kamaloka is over, public opinion has no weight or significance whatever, and after death it is irrelevant whether people adhered to nuances of it, such as liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. This has no significance whatever in the different groupings of human beings and moreover exists on Earth solely for the purpose of hindering men from making progress towards illumination of consciousness after death. The beings behind public opinion resolved to forgo the progress made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Mystery of Golgotha will become of greater and greater importance for the Earth's evolution. We must clearly understand that the future of the Earth's evolution cannot be assured simply by rectifying phenomena such as public opinion and the like which are inevitable in the course of evolution. Men can, however, become better in their own inner nature, therefore the process of evolution must take root more and more deeply in their inner life. In the future, men will be still more exposed to the pressure of public opinion, but inwardly they will have developed greater strength. This is possible only through Spiritual Science. But if man is gradually to become a match for those spirits who are now exerting their influence in public opinion as recruits of the Luciferic beings, this will be possible only if, between death and rebirth too, he undergoes something that strengthens him inwardly, strengthens the principle in him that is independent of life on Earth. Whereas through the influence of public opinion he becomes more and more dependent upon earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth he must receive into his very self something that in the next life on Earth will make him ever freer from the influence of public opinion.

Connected with this is the fact that at the time when public opinion began to assume importance, the Buddha-realm was established in the Mars sphere—as we heard in the lecture at Christmas. Consequently between death and rebirth man passes through this Buddha-realm on Mars. Christian Rosenkreutz had entrusted to Buddha a special mission in the Mars sphere. And what would be futile on Earth, namely the desire to flee from the conditions of terrestrial existence—this is an experience which man must undergo between death and rebirth during his passage through the Mars sphere. Among other things he strips off the incubus of public opinion which takes effect only on Earth. Many, even more overbearing influences will come in the future and it will be more than ever necessary to undergo the experience that is possible for man as a pupil of Buddha in the Mars sphere. Here on Earth, men can now be pupils of the Buddha in the orthodox sense only if they refuse to participate in the progress made by the most advanced people on Earth. But between death and rebirth Buddha unfolds what has developed from the teaching he gave on Earth, which was that man should free himself from the need for further incarnations. This has been developed into a doctrine that is inapplicable to the Earth, where life must progress from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the doctrine preached by Buddha on Earth contained the seed of what man must acquire in the disembodied state of existence. In this advanced form, Buddha's teaching is right for the period between death and rebirth. The Buddha himself appeared in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel² and Christ Himself leads men between death and rebirth through the Mars sphere, enabling them there to receive the Buddha's advanced teaching. Thus in the Mars sphere men can be emancipated from the tendency to uniformity resulting from the effects of public opinion which are detrimental for their further progress on Earth. Whereas in earlier times Mars was said to be the planet of warlike traits, it is now the Buddha's task gradually to transform these warlike traits in such a way that they become the foundation of the sense for freedom and independence needed in the present age. Whereas nowadays men have the tendency to surrender their sense of freedom and succumb to the fetters of public opinion, on Mars between death and rebirth they will strive to throw off these fetters and not bring them again into the life on Earth when they return to new incarnations.

It seems to me that here we have something that characterises most wonderfully how wisdom holds sway in the world, how everything that progresses or remains backward is manipulated in such a way that the final outcome is harmony in the evolution of worlds. Man cannot achieve progress by keeping as it were to the middle line, although there are many who realise the uselessness of adopting a one-sided standpoint. Admittedly, we come across idealists, materialists and other ‘-ists’ who swear by their own standpoint, but truly great individuals such as Goethe do no such thing. They try to grasp material conditions by means of material thinking. When men of less eminence imagine that they have understood this, they say: truth lies in the middle, between two different standpoints. But that would be the same as if someone in practical life wanted to sit between two chairs! The truth cannot be found by a one-sided adoption of this or that standpoint but by applying the modes of knowledge appropriate either for materialism or idealism, The world does not progress by undeviating adherence to a middle course: a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognised as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scalepans are needed as well as the beam. Thus there must be a counterbalance to public opinion; and this is provided by Buddha's teaching in the Mars sphere—which would not be necessary if public opinion had never existed. Life needs antithesis; life progresses in and through polarity. Somebody might think that as the North and South Poles are antitheses, it would be better if neither existed! They are not, of course, antithetic in the sense implied by a certain Professor of whom it was said that because he had written his books in such haste he could not think about their contents and stated that civilisation could develop only in the middle zone of the Earth because at the North Pole people would freeze through cold and at the South Pole melt through heat! In another connection, of course, North and South Poles are genuine opposites and are necessary because progress is not achieved by adopting a neutral course but by the maintenance and harmonising of opposites. Thus what develops on Earth had to undergo a process that lies below the level of progress. Public opinion is of less value than the judgements which an individual can reach on a path of progress. Public opinion is sub-human and it is this sub-human influence that is counteracted by the Buddha-stream through which man passes between death and rebirth. Both influences are necessary and it is extremely important to bear this in mind in connection with evolution.

It can therefore be said with truth: yes, there are indeed backward spirits, but everything that remains behind on the one side and on the other outstrips the evolutionary process, is manipulated by the wisdom of the Universe in such a way that harmony is the final result. The backward spirits are utilised to constitute the opposite pole to the spirits who have progressed to further stages.

If we look at life in this way it will be clear to us that in the future course of Earth evolution the human being will bring into life more and more qualities which will have greater weight and influence than the purely physical qualities. And it will be increasingly apparent that qualities other than the purely physical will have to be taken into account. Physical qualities will be evident, which—although they become manifest only gradually—can be traced back to infancy; but there will be other qualities to which this does not apply and which show themselves in a marked form only comparatively late in life. A characteristic feature of evolution in the future will be the existence of an increasing number of individuals about whom it will inevitably be asked: What can have happened to that individual at a certain age in his life? He has completely changed; it is as though he has become a different being! Qualities that were completely absent in earlier life, that appear only when a certain age has been reached, will reveal themselves. This will happen in the case of souls who are the most highly developed and in whom a certain break in their life becomes evident. For the fact that an individual was a pupil of Buddha in the life between death and rebirth reveals itself only at a certain age. This would apply to persons of whom it can be said: Up to a particular point in their lives their individual qualities were in evidence; but then entirely new trends appeared and they were able to understand matters altogether different from those for which they had previously shown understanding. These will be individuals who in the future will be the vehicles of true spiritual progress although they may simply be regarded as late developers, manifesting these qualities only late in life. In truth, however, the reason why these individuals display these qualities only in later life is that in previous incarnations on the Earth they had established the causes which enabled them to experience the spiritual life in the Mars sphere with particular intensity and so to acquire qualities which enabled them to bring a new impulse into the evolution of humanity. True spiritual culture will more and more be in the hands of individuals of this kind, who in their youth showed little aptitude for the spiritual standpoint they adopt in later life.

We now see that this is the reason why a certain fact has always been stressed in the Rosicrucian line of thought of which we ourselves have heard in the past, although it could not then be substantiated because our studies were not as advanced as they now are. Representatives of the Rosicrucian principle of Initiation in the West have always emphasised that it is impossible to discover in their childhood those who are to become leading figures, because these are individuals who give evidence of that fundamental change in later life of which I have spoken. When a seer speaks of Buddha today, he knows that Buddha has faithfully adhered to what his teaching promised; he has continued to work for that in human nature which has no direct urge for physical embodiment and therefore does not appear at the beginning of life in a physical body but only when the physical body has undergone a certain development, when a certain stage towards spirituality has been reached. Then, at a later stage of life the gift of the Buddha to man becomes an effective influence.

All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the whole process of man's development. What it signifies for each individual in his life between birth and death—of this we shall hear later.

• 1. See pp. 180 onwards in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition.
• 2. See the lecture-course, The Gospel of St. Luke given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, September 1909, particularly lectures four to nine.

When with the normal perception belonging to outer existence we study human life in its relation to life in the rest of the Universe, we are observing only the smallest part of world-existence that is connected with man himself. In other words, what a man can observe if he is not prepared to penetrate behind the mysteries of existence, can throw no real light upon his essential nature and being. For when we look around us with the ordinary organs of perception, with the organ of thinking, we have before us only that which does not in any way contain the deepest and most significant secrets of existence. This fact will strike us most strongly of all if we succeed in developing, even to a comparatively small extent, the capacity to view life and the world from the other side, namely, from the side of sleep. What can be seen during sleep is for the most part concealed from man's present faculty of perception. As soon as a person goes to sleep, from then until the moment of waking he really sees nothing at all. But if and when in the course of development the time comes when observation is also possible during sleep, most of what a man sees to begin with is connected with him as a human being but remains entirely hidden from ordinary observation. It is easy to understand why this is so, for the brain is an instrument of judgement, of thinking. Hence we must use or at least activate the brain when in everyday life we want to think or form judgements, but for that very reason we cannot see it. After all, the eye cannot see itself while it is actually observing something, and the same holds good of the whole organism. We bear it about with us but we cannot observe it in the real sense, we cannot penetrate it to any depth. We direct our gaze out into the world but in modern life we cannot direct this gaze into our own being.

Now the greatest mysteries of existence are not to be found in the outside world but within man himself. Let us recall what we know from Spiritual Science, namely that the three kingdoms of nature around us owe their existence to a certain retardation in evolution. Mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom are, fundamentally speaking, entities attributable to the fact that something remained backward in the evolutionary process. Normal progress in evolution has in point of fact been made only by beings who have reached the stage of human existence during the Earth period. When a man looks at the mineral, plant or animal kingdoms, he is really observing in the world that which amounts in his own existence to what he ‘remembers’, to the content of his memory of his actual experiences; he is in fact contemplating what has taken place in the past and still enjoys a certain existence. But he is not experiencing the living, invisible soul-life of the immediate present when he concerns himself only with his memory. The memory with all its mental pictures represents something that has been deposited in our living soul-existence, is fixed there. All this is, of course, to be taken metaphorically, but the memories embedded in the soul are not the direct, basic elements of its life. The same applies to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms in outer nature. The thoughts conceived by divine-spiritual Beings in the past live on in these kingdoms and they continue into present existence, just as our memory-pictures continue into our present life of soul. Hence we have in the world around us, not the thoughts of the immediately present, living, divine-spiritual Beings but the memory-pictures, the preserved thoughts of the Gods.

As to the content of our memory, this may well be of interest because with our memory we grasp a tiny corner of world-creation, we grasp what has passed over from creation into existence. Our memory-pictures are the first, the lowest, the most fugitive stage of created existence. But when we waken spiritually during sleep we see something quite different. We see nothing of what is outside in space, nothing of the processes manifesting in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms or in the external aspects of the human kingdom. But then we know that the essential realities which we are there beholding are the creative, life-giving principles working on man himself. It is actually as if everything else were blotted out and as if the Earth, observed from the viewpoint of sleep, contained nothing except Man. What would never be seen by day, in the waking state, is revealed when contemplated from the viewpoint of sleep. And it is then, for the first time, that knowledge dawns in us of the thoughts which the divine-spiritual Beings kept in reserve in order to work at the creation of man, at a level above that of mineral, plant and animal existence.

Whereas through physical perception of the world we see everything except the real being of man, through the spiritual perception exercised from the viewpoint of sleep, we see nothing except man—as a creation, together with happenings in the human kingdom—that is to say, from the viewpoint of sleep we see everything that is hidden from the ordinary perception of waking life. This accounts for the element of strangeness that is present in our vision when we are contemplating the world from the viewpoint of sleep, in other words, when we become clairvoyant, having wakened spiritually during sleep.

Now the human body—and here I mean the physical and etheric bodies together—which lies in the bed during sleep, this human body itself has a singular appearance, a characteristic of which can be expressed in words somewhat as follows. Only in the very first years of a child's life does this human body as seen during sleep show a certain similarity with the weaving life and activity in the other kingdoms of nature. The body of a grown-up person, however, or of a child from a certain age onwards, when seen from the viewpoint of sleep, reveals a constant process of decay, of destruction. Every night during sleep the forces of destruction are ever and again subjugated by the forces of growth; what is destroyed by day is repaired during the night, but the forces of destruction are always in excess. And the consequence of this fact is that we die. The forces that are renewed during the night are never the equal of those that have been used up during the waking life of day, so that in the normal life of the human being a certain surplus of destructive forces is always present. This surplus accumulates and the natural death of old age ensues when the destructive forces eclipse the upbuilding forces.

Thus when we observe the human being from the viewpoint of sleep we are actually witnessing a process of destruction—but without sadness. For the feelings we might have in our waking life about this process of destruction are absent when we see it from the viewpoint of sleep, because then we know that it is the precondition of man's true spiritual development. No being who did not destroy his body in some measure would be capable of thinking or of developing an inner life of soul. No life of soul as experienced by man would be possible if the process of growth were not opposed by processes of destruction. We therefore regard these processes of destruction in the human organism as the precondition of man's life of soul and feel the whole development to be beneficial. Looked at from the other side of life, the fact that man's body can gradually be dissolved is felt to be a blessing. Not only do things look different when viewed from the other side of life but all our feelings and ideas are different; consciousness during sleep has always before it the spectacle of the body in decline—and rightly in decline.

Study of the life between death and rebirth, however, affords a different spectacle. A certain connection with the preceding life is experienced for a time after death. All of you are aware that this is the case during the period of Kamaloka; even after that period, however, the experience of connection with the previous life continues for a time. But then, at a certain point during the life between death and rebirth, a reversal of all ordinary vision and perception takes place, a reversal far more radical than takes place during sleep-consciousness. During existence on Earth we look out from our body into the world that is not our body; from the point of time to which I have just referred, between death and the new birth, we direct hardly a gaze to the universe around us but look with all the great intensity at what may now be called the human body; we discern all its secrets. Thus between death and rebirth there comes a moment when we begin to take special interest in the human body. It is extremely difficult to describe these conditions and it can really only be done with halting words. There comes a time between death and the new birth when we feel as if the whole universe were within us and outside us only the human body. We feel that the stars and other heavenly worlds are within our being, just as here on Earth we feel that the stomach, the liver, the spleen, are within us. Everything that here, in life on Earth, is outside us becomes in that other life an inner world, and just as here we look outwards to the stars, clouds and so forth, in that other life we gaze at the human body. At which human body?

To understand this we must be clear that the new human being who at his next birth is to enter into existence, has for a long time previously been preparing his essential characteristics. Preparation for a return to the Earth begins a long time before birth or conception. The conditions of central importance here are quite different from those accepted by modern statistical biology which assumes that when a human being comes into existence through birth he simply inherits certain traits from his father, mother, grandparents and the whole line of ancestors. Quite an otherwise attractive little book about Goethe has recently been published, in which his characteristic qualities are traced back to his ancestors. Outwardly speaking, that is absolutely correct in the sense I have often indicated, namely, that there is no contradiction between a scientific fact that is correctly presented and the facts brought forward by Spiritual Science. It is just as if someone were to say: Here is a man; how comes it that he is alive? It is because he has lungs inside him and there is air outside. Needless to say, that is quite correct. But someone else may turn up and say: This man is alive for an entirely different reason. A fortnight ago he fell into the water and I jumped in after him and pulled him out; but for that he would not be alive today! Both these assertions are correct. In the same way, natural science is quite correct when it says that a man bears within himself characteristics inherited from his ancestors; but it is equally correct to attribute them to his karma and other factors. In principle, therefore, Spiritual Science cannot be intolerant; it is external natural science alone that can be intolerant, for example, in rejecting Spiritual Science. Someone may insist that he has preserved the characteristics of his own ancestors. But there is also the fact that from a certain point of time between death and rebirth a human being himself begins to develop forces which work down upon his ancestors. Long before an individual enters into physical existence there is a mysterious connection between himself and the whole line of his ancestors. And the reason why specific characteristics appear in a line of ancestors is that perhaps only after hundreds of years a particular individual is to be born from that ancestral line. This human being who is to be born, perhaps centuries later, from a line of ancestors, regulates their characteristics from the spiritual world. Thus Goethe—to take this example once again—manifests the qualities of his ancestors because he worked continuously in the spiritual world with the aim of implanting into these ancestors qualities that were subsequently to be his. And what is true of Goethe is true of every human being.

From a specific point of time between death and rebirth, therefore, a human being is already concerned with the preparation of his later earthly existence. The physical body which a man has on Earth does not by any means derive in all details from the physical lives of his ancestors, nor indeed from processes that can operate on the Earth. The physical body we bear is in itself fourfold. It has evolved through the periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. Its very first foundation was laid during the Old Saturn period; during the Old Sun period the etheric body was woven into this foundation; during the Old Moon period the astral body was added and then, during the Earth period, the Ego, the ‘I’. As a result of these processes the physical body has undergone many changes. Thus we have within us the transformed Saturn foundation, the transformed Sun and Moon conditions. Our physical human body is the product of transformed physical conditions. The only part of all this that is visible is what has come from the Earth; everything else is invisible. Man's physical body is visible because he takes in the substances of the Earth, transforms them into his blood and permeates them with something that is invisible. In reality we see only the blood and what has been transformed by the blood, that is to say, a quarter of the physical human body; the other three-quarters are invisible. In the first place there is an invisible framework containing invisible currents—all this exists in the form of forces. Within these invisible currents there are also the influences exercised by one current upon another. All this is invisible. And now this threefold entity is filled out, permeated by the foodstuffs that have been transformed into blood. It is through this process that the physical body becomes visible. And it is only when we come to deal with the laws governing this visible structure that we are in the earthly realm itself. Everything else stems from cosmic, not from earthly conditions and has already been prepared when, at the time of conception, the first physical atom of the human being comes into existence. Thus what is later on to become the body of the human being has been prepared in past ages without any physical connection with the ultimate father and mother. It was then that the qualities transmitted by heredity were first worked into the process of development.

The human soul looks down upon what is thus being prepared from the above-mentioned point of time onwards between death and the new birth. It is the spiritual embryo, the spiritual seed of life. This is what constitutes the soul's outer world. Notice the difference between what is seen when we wake spiritually during sleep and have clairvoyant perception of the human body undergoing a process of continual destruction, and what is seen when our own inner organism is perceived as outer world. The outer world is then the inner man in process of coming into being. This means that we are then seeing the reverse of what is perceived clairvoyantly during sleep. During sleep we feel that our inner organs are part of the outer world, but otherwise what we see is a process of destruction. From the above-mentioned time onwards between death and rebirth our gaze is focused upon a human body in process of coming into being. Man is unable to preserve any remembrance of what he has seen between death and rebirth, but the spectacle of the building of the wonderful structure of the human body is veritably more splendid than anything to be seen when we gaze at the starry heavens or at the physical world with vision dependent in any respect upon the physical body. The mysteries of existence are truly great, even when contemplated from the standpoint of our physical senses only, but far greater still is the spectacle before us when, instead of external perception of our inner organs, we gaze at the human body that is in process of coming into being with all its mysteries. We then see how everything is directed to the purpose of enabling the human being to cope with existence when he enters the physical world through birth.

There is nothing that can truly be called bliss or blessedness except vision of the process of creation, of ‘becoming’. Perception of anything already in existence is trivial compared with vision of what is in process of coming into being; and what is meant by speaking of the states of bliss or blessedness which can be experienced by man between death and rebirth is that during this period he can behold what is in process of coming into being. Truths such as these, that have been revealed through the ages and grasped by minds adequately prepared, are indicated in words to be found in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ in Goethe's Faust:

Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
Erfistiget mit dauernden Gedanken.

May that which works and lives, the ever-growing,
In bonds of love enfold you, mercy-fraught,
And Seeming's changeful forms, around you flowing,
Do ye arrest, in ever-during thought!

(Tr. Anna Swanwick, L.L.D.,
Bohn's Standard Library)

The difference between vision in the world between birth and death and the world between death and rebirth is that in the former we behold what is already in existence and in the latter what is coming into being.

The thought might occur: Is a man, then, concerned only with the vision of his own being? No, that is not the case. For at the stage of coming into being this body is actually part of the outer world; it is the manifested expression of divine mysteries. And it is then that we realise for the first time why the physical body—which after all is only maltreated between birth and death—may be seen as the temple of cosmic mysteries, for it contains more of the outer world than is seen when we are within it during earthly existence. At that stage between death and rebirth what is otherwise outer world is our inner world; what is otherwise called Universe is now that of which we can say ‘I’—and what we then behold is outer world. We must not allow ourselves to be shocked by the fact that when we are looking at our body—or rather the body that will subsequently be ours—all other bodies which are coming into being must naturally also be there. This is of no significance because here it is simply a matter of number. In point of fact, differentiation between human bodies that can be of interest and importance to us has little significance until shortly before human beings enter into physical existence. For the greater part of the period between death and the new birth, when we are looking down upon the body that is coming into being, it is actually the case that the single bodies are differentiated only according to their number. If we want to study the essential properties of a grain of wheat, it will not make much difference whether we pick an car from a grain of wheat in a particular field or go fifty paces farther on and pick one there. As far as the essential properties are concerned, one grain is as good as another. Something similar applies when between death and rebirth we are gazing at our own body; the fact that it is our own has significance only for the future because later on we are to inhabit it on the Earth. At the moment it interests us only as the bearer of sublime cosmic mysteries and blessedness consists in the fact that it can be contemplated just like any other human body. Here we stand before the mystery of Number which will not be further considered now, but among many other relevant aspects there is this, namely, that Number—that is to say, multiple existence—cannot be regarded from the spiritual standpoint exactly as it is from the physical. What is seen in countless examples will again be seen as a unity.

Through the body we feel ourselves to be in the Universe and through what in physical life is called Universe we feel that we are living within our own Ego-hood. Such is the difference when the world is contemplated at one time from this world and at another from yonder.

For the seer, the most significant moment between death and the new birth is when the human being concerned ceases to concern himself only with his last life and begins to direct his attention to what is in process of coming into existence. The shattering impression received by the seer when, as he follows a soul between death and the new birth, this soul begins to be concerned with what is coming into being—this shattering impression is due to the fact that the soul itself at this moment experiences a severe shock. The only experience comparable with it is the coming of death in physical existence, when the human being passes over from life into being. In the other case—although it is impossible to describe it quite exactly—the transition is from something connected with a life that ended in death to experience of the process of ‘becoming’, of resurrection. The soul encounters that which bears a new life germinally within it. This is the moment of death in reverse. That is why it is so immensely significant.

In connection with these things we must turn our minds to the course of human evolution on the Earth. Let us look back to an age, for example the ancient Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when our souls, looking out through physical bodies, did not see the stars merely as material bodies in the heavens; spiritual Beings were connected with the stars—although this experience occurred only in certain intermediate states during the life between birth and death. The souls of men were deeply affected by this vista and in those times impressions from the spiritual world crowded in upon them. It was inevitable that in the course of evolution the possibility of beholding the spiritual should gradually cease and man's gaze be limited to the material world. This came about in the Graeco-Latin epoch, when men's gaze was diverted to an ever greater extent from the spiritual world and limited to the world of the senses. And now we ourselves are living in an era when it is becoming more and more impossible for the soul to see or detect spiritual reality in the life of the physical environment. The Earth is now dying, withering away, and man is deeply involved in this process. Thus whereas in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men still beheld the spiritual around them, they now see only what is material and actually boast of having established a science which deals only with what is physical and material. This process will go to further and further lengths. A time will come when men will lose interest in the direct impressions of the world of the senses and will concentrate attention on what is sub-material, sub-sensory. Today, in fact, we can already detect the approach of the time when men will be interested only in what is sub-sensory, below the level of the sense-world. This often becomes very obvious, for example when modern physics no longer concerns itself with colours as such. In reality it takes no account of the actual quality of colour but concerns itself only with the vibrations and oscillations below colour. In many books today you can read the nonsensical statement that a yellow colour, for example, is merely a matter of oscillations, wave-lengths. Observation here is already diverted from the quality of the colour and directed to something that is not in the yellow colour at all but yet is considered to be the reality. You can find books on physics and even on physiology today in which it is emphasised that attention should no longer be fettered to the direct sense-impression but that everything resolves itself into vibrations and wave-lengths. This kind of observation will go to further and further extremes. No attention will be paid to material existence as such and account will be taken only of the working of forces. Historically, one example suffices in order to provide empirical evidence of this. If you refer to du Bois-Reymond's lecture ‘On the Boundaries of Knowledge’, given on 14th August, 1872, you will find a peculiar expression for something that Laplace already described, the expression ‘astronomical knowledge of a material system’—that is to say when what lies behind a light- or colour-process is presented as something only brought about by mathematical-physical forces. A time will come when human souls—and some of those who are being educated in certain schools today will have the best possible foundations for this attitude in their next incarnation—will have lost real interest in the world of light and radiant colour and enquire only into the working of forces. People will no longer have any interest in violet or red but will be concerned only with wave-lengths.

This withering of man's inner spirituality is something that is approaching and Anthroposophy is there to counter it in every detail. It is not only our present form of education that helps to bring about this withering; the trend is there in every domain of life. It is in contrast to everyday life when with our Anthroposophy we want to give again to the souls of men something that fertilises them, that is not only a maya of the senses but springs forth as spirit. And this we can do when we impart to human souls knowledge that will enable them to live in the true world in their following incarnations. We have to speak of these things in a world which with its indifference to form and colour is in such contrast to what we ourselves desire; for it is particularly in regard to colours that the world of today is preparing souls to thwart what we want to achieve. We must work not only according to the concepts and ideas of everyday existence but with cosmological ideas. Hence it is not a mere liking on our part when we arrange surroundings such as those to be seen in this room¹ but it is connected with the very nature of Spiritual Science. Immediate response to what is presented to the senses must again be generated in the soul in order that active life in the spirit may begin. Now, in this incarnation, each one of us can assimilate Anthroposophy in the life of soul; and what is now assimilated is transformed into faculties for the new incarnation. Then, during his life between death and the next birth, the individual sends from his soul into his body that is coming into being influences which prepare his future bodily faculties to adopt a more spiritual view of the world. This is impossible for him without Anthroposophy. If he rejects Anthroposophy he prepares his body to see nothing but barren forces and to be blind to the revelations of the senses.

And now something shall be said that enables a seer to form a judgement of the mission of Anthroposophy.

When a seer today directs his gaze to the life between death and the new birth of souls who have already passed beyond the above-mentioned point of time and are contemplating the body that is coming into being for a further existence, he may realise that this body will afford the soul no possibility of Developing faculties for the comprehension of spiritual truths. For if such faculties are to be part of life in the physical body, they must have been implanted before birth. Hence in the immediate future more and more human beings will be devoid of the faculties needed for the acceptance of spiritual knowledge—a state of things that has existed for some time already. Before the seer there will be a vista of souls who in previous lives deprived themselves of the possibility of accepting any knowledge of a spiritual kind. In their life between death and rebirth such souls can indeed gaze at a process of development, but it is a development in which something is inevitably lacking—that is the tragic aspect. These vistas lead to a grasp of the mission of Anthroposophy. It is a shattering experience to see a soul whose gaze is directed towards its future incarnation, its future body, beholding a budding, burgeoning process and yet being obliged to realise: something will be lacking in that body but I cannot provide it because my previous incarnation is responsible. In a more trivial sense this experience may be compared with being obliged to work at something knowing from the outset that ultimately it is bound to be imperfect. Try to be vividly aware of the difference: either you can do the work perfectly and be happy in the prospect, or you are condemned from the outset to leave it imperfect.

This is the great question: are human souls in the spiritual world to be condemned in increasing numbers to look down upon bodies which must remain imperfect, or can this be avoided? If this fate is to be avoided, souls must accept during their life in physical bodies the proclamation and tidings of the spiritual worlds.

What those who make known these tidings regard as their task is verily not derived from earthly ideals but from the vista of the entire span of life, that is to say, when to life on Earth is added the period of existence between death and the new birth. Herein is revealed the possibility of a fruitful future for humanity, the possibility too of militating against the withering of the souls of men. The feeling can then be born in us that Spiritual Science must be there, must exist in the world. Spiritual Science is a sine qua non for the life of mankind in the future but not in the sense that is applicable to some other kind of knowledge. Spiritual Science imparts life, not concepts and ideas only. But the concepts of Spiritual Science, accepted in one incarnation, bring life, inner vitality, inner forcefulness. What Spiritual Science gives to man is an elixir of life, a vital force of life. Hence anyone who regards himself as belonging to a Movement for the promulgation of Spiritual Science should feel Spiritual Science to be a dire necessity in life, unlike anything that originates from other unions and societies. The realisation of being vitally involved in the necessities of existence is the right feeling to have in regard to Spiritual Science.

We have embarked upon these studies of the life between death and rebirth in order that by turning our minds to the other side of existence we may receive from there the impulse that can kindle in us enthusiasm for Spiritual Science.

• 1. Dr. Steiner recommended that restful and refreshing colours should be displayed in lecture halls and rooms used for the presentation and study of Spiritual Science, also in rooms for the sick.

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

We have undertaken to study the life between death and rebirth from certain points of view and the lectures given during the Winter¹ endeavoured to present many aspects of this life; moreover it has been possible to make important additions to the more general descriptions contained in the books Theosophy and Occult Science—an Outline Today we shall occupy ourselves chiefly with the question: How is the information given, for example, in the book Theosophy on the subject of the life between death and rebirth related to what has been said in the course of the lectures given during the Winter?

In the book Theosophy there is a description of the passage of the soul after death through the Soul-World. This Soul-World is divided into a region of ‘Burning Desires’ (Begierdenglut), a region of ‘Flowing Susceptibility’ (fliessende Reizbarkeit), a region of ‘Wishes’ (Wunsche), a region of ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ (Lust und Unlust), and then into the higher regions of ‘Soul-Light’ (Seelenlicht), of ‘Active Soul-Force’ (tatige Seelenkraft), and the true ‘Soul-Life’ (das eigentliche Seelenleben). That was how the Soul-World through which the soul has to pass after death was described. Thereafter the soul has to pass through what is described as the Spiritland and this sphere, too, with its successive regions, is described in the book Theosophy by using certain earthly images: the ‘continental’ region of Spiritland, the ‘oceanic’ region, and so forth.

In the course of these lectures descriptions have been given of how the soul, having passed through the gate of death, lays aside the physical body, then the etheric body, and then expands and expands, lives through regions which for reasons that were explained may be called the region of the Moon, then that of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, and then of the starry firmament itself. The soul or, let us say, the actual spiritual individuality of the human being concerned, continually expands, lives through these regions which enclose ever more extensive cosmic spaces and then begins to contract, becoming smaller and smaller, in order finally to unite with the seed which comes to it from the stream of heredity. And through this union of the human seed which the individual acquired through heredity with what has been absorbed from the great macrocosmic spheres, there arises the human being who is to embark on the course of earthly life, the being who is to live through his existence between birth and death.

Now as a matter of fact, what was said in the book Theosophy and in the lectures was fundamentally the same, and your attention has been called to this. In Theosophy the description was given in certain pictures more closely related to inner conditions of the soul. In the lectures given here during the Winter the descriptions dealt with the great cosmic relationships connected with the functions of the several planets. It is now a matter of harmonising the two descriptions.

During the first period after death the soul has to look back upon what was experienced on Earth. The period of Kamaloka, or call it what you will, is a period during which the soul's life is still concerned entirely with earthly conditions. Kamaloka is fundamentally a period during which the soul feels bound to disengage itself gradually from any direct connections still persisting from the last incarnation on Earth. In the physical body on Earth the soul has experiences which depend upon the bodily life, indeed very largely upon sense-impressions. If you ‘think away’ everything that sense-impressions bring into the soul and then try to realise how much still remains in it, you will have a picture of a very meagre content indeed! And yet on final consideration you will be able to say: When the soul passes through the gate of death, everything given by the senses comes to an end and whatever is left can at most only be memories of earlier sense-impressions. If, therefore, you think about how much of what is yielded by sense-impressions is left in the soul, it will be easy for you to form an idea of what remains of these impressions after death. Recall any sense-impressions experienced, for example, yesterday, while they are still comparatively vivid, and you will realise how pale they have already become compared with their former vividness; that will give you some idea of how little of what the sense-impressions have conveyed is left to the soul as remembrance. This shows you that basically all the soul's life in the world of the senses is specifically earthly experience. When the sense-organs fall away at death, all significance of the sense-impressions falls away as well. But because the human being still clings to his sense-impressions and retains a longing for them, the first region through which he passes in the life after death is the region of Burning Desires. He would like still to have sense-impressions for a long time after death, but this is impossible because he has discarded the sense-organs. The life spent in longing for sense-impressions and being unable to enjoy them is life in the region of Burning Desires. It is a life that does actually burn within the soul and is part of the existence in Kamaloka; the soul longs for sense-impressions to which it was accustomed on Earth and—because the sense-organs have been laid aside—cannot have them.

A second region of the life in Kamaloka is that of Flowing Susceptibility. When the soul lives through this region it has already ceased to long for sense-impressions but still longs for thoughts, for thoughts which in life on Earth are acquired through the instrumentality of the brain. In the region of Burning Desires the soul gradually realises that it is nonsense to wish for sense-impressions in a world for the experience of which the necessary sense-organs have been discarded, a world in which no being can possibly have sense-organs formed entirely of substance of the Earth. The soul may long since have ceased to yearn for sense-impressions but still longs to think in the way that is customary on Earth. This earthly thinking is discarded in the region of Flowing Susceptibility. There the human being gradually recognises that thoughts such as are formed on Earth have significance only in the life between birth and death.

At this stage, when the human being has weaned himself from fostering thoughts that are dependent upon the physical instrument of the brain, he is still aware of a certain connection with the Earth through what is contained in his Wishes. After all, wishes are connected with the soul more intimately than thoughts. Wishes have their own distinctive colouring in every individual. Whereas thoughts differ in youth, in middle life and in old age, a particular form of wishing continues throughout a man's earthly life. This form and colouring of wishes are only later discarded in the region of Wishes. And then finally, in the region of Attraction and Repulsion, man rids himself of all longing to be connected with a physical body, with the physical body which was his in the last incarnation. While a man is passing through these regions, of Burning Desires, of Flowing Susceptibility, of Wishes, of Attraction and Repulsion, a certain longing for the last earthly life is still present. First, in the region of Burning Desires the soul still longs to be able to see through eyes, to hear through ears, although eyes and ears no longer exist. When the soul has finally cast off any such longing, it still yearns to be able to think by means of a brain such as was available on Earth. Having got rid of this longing too, there still remains the desire to wish with a heart as on Earth. Finally, the human being ceases to long for sense-impressions or for thoughts formed by his brain or for wishes of his heart, but a hankering for his last incarnation on Earth taken as a whole, still lingers. Gradually, however, he then rids himself of this longing too.

You will find that all the experiences in these regions correspond exactly with the passage of the expanding soul into the region called the Mercury sphere, an expansion through the Moon sphere into the Mercury sphere. On approaching the Mercury sphere, however, the soul encounters conditions described in the book Theosophy as a kind of spiritual region of the Soul-World. Read the description of the passage of the soul through this region and you will see from what is said about the kind of experiences undergone there that what is generally called the unpleasant element of Kamaloka already comes to an end in the region of Soul-Light. This region of Soul-Light corresponds with what I have said about the Mercury sphere. If you compare what was said about the life of the soul when it has expanded to the Mercury sphere with what is contained in the book Theosophy about the region of Soul-Light, you will realise that endeavours were made to describe this region first from the aspect of inner influences of the soul and then from the aspect of the great macrocosmic conditions through which the soul passes.

If you read what is said in Theosophy about the ‘Active Soul-Force’, you will realise that the inner experiences undergone in that region are in keeping with what is decisive during the passage through the Venus sphere. It has been said that if the soul is to pass in the right way through the Venus sphere it must have developed certain religious impulses during earthly life. In order to progress through the Venus sphere with companionship and not in compulsory isolation, the soul must be imbued with certain religious concepts. Compare what was said about this with the description given in the book Theosophy of the region of Active Soul-Force and you will find that they agree, that in one case the inner aspect of the conditions was described, in the other, the outer aspect.

The highest region of the Soul-World, the region of pure Soul-Life, is experienced by the soul in passing through the region of the Sun. So we can say that the sphere of existence in Kamaloka extends to and somewhat beyond the Moon sphere; then the more luminous regions of the Soul-World begin and extend to the sphere of the Sun. The soul experiences in the Sun sphere the region of true Soul-Life. We know that in the Sun sphere after death the soul comes into contact with the Light-Spirit, with Lucifer, who on Earth has become the tempter, the corrupter. When the soul has expanded into the cosmos it comes more and more closely into contact with those forces which now enable it to develop what is needed for the next incarnation on Earth. Not until the soul has passed through the region of the Sun has it finished with the last earthly incarnation. As far as the region of Attraction and Repulsion is concerned, that is to say the region between the Moon and Mercury, the soul is still burdened inwardly with yearning for the last life on Earth; moreover even in the regions of Mercury, Venus and the Sun the soul is not yet completely free from the ties of the last incarnation. But then it must finally have finished even with everything that transcends merely personal experience; in the Mercury region with whatever moral concepts have or have not been acquired, in the region of Venus with whatever religious conceptions have been developed, in the region of the Sun with whatever understanding has been acquired of the ‘human-universal’ quality in existence—that which is not confined to any particular religious creed but is concerned with a religious life befitting all mankind. Thus it is even the higher interests that can develop in the further evolution of humanity with which the soul has finished by the time it enters into the region of the Sun.

Then the soul passes into cosmic-spiritual life and finds its place in the Mars region. This region corresponds with what is described in Theosophy as the first sphere of the ‘Spiritland’. This description portrays the inner aspect of the fact that the soul is spiritual to the extent of being able to behold as something external to itself the ‘archetype’, as it were, of the physical bodily organisation and of physical conditions on the Earth in general. The archetypes of physical life on Earth appear as a kind of ‘continental’ mass of the Spiritland. The external configurations of a man's different incarnations are inscribed in this ‘continental’ region. There we have a picture of what, in terms of cosmic existence, the human soul has to experience in the Mars region. It might seem strange that this Mars region which has repeatedly been described in these lectures as a region of strife, of aggressive impulses until the beginning of the seventeenth century, should be said to be the first region of Devachan, of the true Spiritland. Nevertheless this is the case. Everything that on Earth belongs to the actual material realm and causes the mineral kingdom to appear as a purely material realm is due to the fact that on Earth the forces are engaged in perpetual conflict among themselves. This also led to the result that at the time when materialism was in its prime and material life was assumed to be the sole reality, the ‘struggle for existence’ was regarded as the only valid law of life on Earth. That is, of course, an error, because material existence is not the only form of existence evolving on Earth. But when the human being assumes embodiment on Earth he can only enter into the form of existence that has its archetypes in the lowest region of what is, for the Earth, the Spiritland. Read the description of the lowest region of Spiritland as given in the book Theosophy. I want to quote this particular chapter today in connection with our present studies. Towards the beginning of the description of the Spiritland you will find the following passage.²

“The development of the spirit in Spiritland takes place through the man throwing himself completely into the life of the different regions of this land.”

Thus as the result of our studies in the course of the Winter we could now say that from the Mars region onwards the human soul begins to live more deeply into spiritual conditions of existence.

To continue:

“His own life as it were dissolves into each region successively; he takes on, for the time being, their characteristics. Through this they permeate his being with theirs, in order that his being may be able to work, strengthened by theirs, in his earthly life. In the first region of the Spiritland, man is surrounded by the spiritual archetypes of earthly things. During life on earth he learns to know only the shadows of these archetypes which he grasps in his thoughts. What is merely thought on the earth is in this region experienced, lived. Man moves among thoughts; but these thoughts are real beings.”

Again, a little later:

“Our own embodiments dissolve here into a unity with the rest of the world. Thus here we look upon the archetypes of the physical, corporeal reality as a unity, to which we have ourselves belonged. We learn, therefore, gradually to know our relationship, our unity, with the surrounding world, by observation. We learn to say to it: ‘That which is here spread out around thee, thou art that.’ And that is one of the fundamental thoughts of ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom. The sage acquires, even during his earthly life, what others experience after death, namely, ability to grasp the thought that he himself is related to all things, the thought, ‘Thou art that’. In earthly life this is an ideal to which the thought-life can be devoted; in the Land of Spirit it is an immediate reality, one which grows ever clearer to us through spiritual experience. And man himself comes to know more and more clearly in this realm that in his own inner being he belongs to the spirit-world. He is aware of himself as a spirit among spirits, a member of the Primordial Spirits, and he will feel in his own self the word of the Primordial Spirit: ‘I am the Primal Spirit.’ (The Wisdom of the Vedanta says, ‘I am Brahman’, i.e. ‘I belong to the Primordial Being in Whom all beings have their origin’.)”

From this passage it is clear that when, during the life between death and rebirth man enters into the Mars region, he grasps the full significance of the saying, ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, and of the other saying, ‘I am Brahman’. ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, is only an earthly rendering of what is a self-evident experience in the Mars region, the lowest region of Spiritland. If we now ask whence the wisdom of ancient India derived the deeply significant affirmations, ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, ‘I am Brahman’, we have now identified the region in question and those Teachers in ancient India are revealed to us as beings belonging to the Mars region but transferred to the Earth. To what was said years ago in the book Theosophy about the Mars region, the lowest region of Devachan, there can now be added what we have heard in these lectures. Namely, that at the dawn of the modern age the Buddha was transferred to this same region, the Mars region. Half a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Buddha—regarded as one who was to prepare spiritually for this Mystery—had come to the Earth, to the territory where Mars wisdom had been proclaimed since times primeval. And centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha he was, as we know, sent by an act of Rosicrucian wisdom to the Mars region in order to continue working there. (See Lecture Five.) In ancient times Brahmanism belonged intrinsically to the Mars region of the Cosmos. At the beginning of the seventeenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, Brahmanism passed over into the Buddha-impulse and the reflection of this on Earth was the absorption of Brahmanism into Buddhism in the cultural life of India.

What takes place on Earth, therefore, is in a wide and ample sense an image of happenings in the Heavens.

If you have read the chapter in Theosophy which deals with what you now know to be the Mars region and in which a self-evident expression is the ‘I am Brahman’, you will be able, if you read that chapter again, to picture how an event here on Earth is also an event in a region of the Cosmos, how this event can be understood, and how the Buddha-impulse as a cosmic happening is related to the circumstances described in the relevant chapter of that book. We shall realise that our studies during the Winter were closely linked with the theosophical work we began more than ten years ago. We then described the ‘Spiritland’ and a ‘continental’ mass of Spiritland; the lowest region of Spiritland was characterised in relation to the inner life of the soul. The description given was such that if you have understood it, you will realise that the Buddha-impulse has its place in the lowest region of Spiritland as described in these lectures. Here is an example of how the details of spiritual research harmonise with each other.

If we now pass on to consider the cosmic aspects of the second region of Spiritland as described from the inner point of view of the soul, we shall find that this second region, the ‘oceanic’ region of Spiritland corresponds with the Jupiter region. Further, if we pass to the third region of Devachan, the ‘Airy’ region of Spiritland, we shall find that it corresponds with the influences of the Saturn region. What was described in Theosophy as the fourth region of Spiritland already extends beyond our planetary system. There the soul expands into still wider spaces, into the starry firmament itself. From the descriptions that were given from the inner standpoint of the soul, it will be quite clear to you that the experiences of the soul in the fourth region of Spiritland could not be undergone in any realm where the spatial relationship to the Earth is still the same as that of the planetary system. There is something so utterly foreign in what is conveyed by the fourth region of Spiritland that it can never correspond with what can be experienced even within the outermost planetary sphere, the Saturn sphere.

Therefore the soul passes into the starry firmament, that is to say into distances more and more remote both from the Earth and also from the Sun. These distant realms are described in the account of the three highest regions of Spiritland traversed by the soul before it begins to draw together again and to pass, in the reverse order, through all the preceding conditions. On this journey the soul acquires the forces by means of which it can build up a new life on Earth.

In general it can be said that when the soul has passed through the Sun region it has finished with every element of ‘personality’. What is experienced beyond the Sun region, beyond the region of Soul-Life in the true sense, is spiritual; it transcends everything that is personal. What the soul then experiences as ‘Thou art that’—and especially in our time as the Buddha-impulse in the Mars region—is something that seems strange here on Earth, though it is not so on Mars; it is the impulse denoted by the word ‘Nirvana’. This means liberation from everything that is significant on the Earth, for the soul begins to realise the great cosmic significance of universal space. In living through all this the soul emancipates itself entirely from the element of personality. In the Mars region, the lowest region of Spiritland, where the soul acquires understanding of the ‘Thou art that’, or, as we should put it today, receives the Buddha-impulse, it frees itself from everything that is earthly. After the soul has become inwardly free of this—and the Christ Impulse is needed here—it also liberates itself spiritually by recognising that all ties of blood are forged on Earth and therefore belong by nature to the Earth. But the soul then passes on to new conditions.

In the Jupiter region, conditions which force the soul into some particular creed are dissolved. We have heard that the soul can pass through the Venus region with companionship only if it had adopted a creed; without religion in some form it would be lonely and isolated. We have also heard that the soul can pass through the Sun region only when it has learnt to understand the creeds of all religions on the Earth. In the Jupiter region, however, the soul must liberate itself entirely from the particular creed to which it belonged during life on Earth. This was not an essentially personal attachment but something into which it was born and was shared in company with other souls. Thus the soul can pass through the Venus region only if it has acquired religious ideas in earthly life; it can pass through the Sun region only if it has developed some measure of understanding of all such beliefs. The soul can pass through the Jupiter region only if it is able to liberate itself from the particular confession to which it belonged on Earth; merely to understand the others is not enough. For during the passage through the Jupiter region it will be decided whether in the next life the soul will have to be connected with the same creed as before, or whether it has experienced everything that can be offered by one particular creed. In the Venus sphere the soul garners the fruits of a particular faith; in the Sun sphere the fruits of an understanding of all forms of religious life; but when it reaches the Jupiter region the soul must be able to lay the foundation for a new relationship to religion during the next life on Earth.

These are three stages experienced by the soul between death and the new birth: first it experiences inwardly the fruits of the faith to which it belonged in the last life; then the fruits of having developed the capacity to appreciate the value of all other religious beliefs; and then it must free itself so completely from the beliefs held in the last life that it can wholeheartedly adopt a different religion. This cannot be achieved by attaching equal value to all creeds; and we know that on its return journey through these regions the soul comes once again into the Jupiter region and there prepares the traits enabling it to live in the fullest sense in a different religion in the next life. In this way the forces which the soul needs in order to shape a new life are gradually impressed into it.

If you now read what is said in the book Theosophy about the third region of the Spiritland, the ‘airy’ or ‘atmospheric’ region, you will find again what has been said here in connection with the Saturn region. In this region, companionship and the avoidance of terrible loneliness is possible only for souls already able to exercise a certain degree of genuine self-knowledge, of completely unbiased self-knowledge. Only by being able to put self-knowledge into practice can the soul find entrance to the regions beyond Saturn, therefore even beyond our solar system and leading into that cosmic life from which souls must bring the qualities that ensure progress on the Earth. If souls were never able to live in companionship in realms beyond the Saturn region progress on Earth would not be possible. Think, for example, of the individuals sitting here today. If the souls incarnated in the world at the present time had never passed beyond the Saturn region between death and rebirth, culture on Earth would still be at the stage reached, for example, in the epoch of Ancient India. The Ancient Indian culture was able to progress to that of ancient Persia only because in the intervening periods souls had passed beyond the Saturn region; and again, the progress from Ancient Persian culture to Egypto-Chaldean culture was made possible by impulses for progress brought into the Earth from the realms beyond the Saturn region. What human beings have contributed to the progress of culture on Earth has been gathered by their souls from realms beyond the Saturn region.

The external progress of mankind originates in the new impulses brought from beyond the Saturn region; in this way the various culture-epochs progress and new impulses take effect. But as well as this there is the stream of inner experiences which is to be distinguished from the progress of external culture and has its ‘centre of gravity’ in the Mystery of Golgotha. When we know that the stream of experiences in man's inner life of soul on Earth has its centre of gravity in the Mystery of Golgotha, while on the other hand this Mystery of Golgotha is connected with the Sun region, a question arises; it is a question that might well occupy our minds for a very long time but we will at least consider it today. It is good that on the basis of what can already be found in lectures and lecture-courses, we should be able to form our own thoughts about such questions—thoughts which can then be rectified by reports of investigations given here.

On the one hand we have the fact that Christ is the Sun Spirit who united Himself with the life of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. You will find the most detailed account of this in the lecture-courses entitled The Gospel of St. John—in its Relation to the Other Three Gospels, particularly to the Gospel of St. Luke, given in Kassel, and From Jesus to Christ. And now we have heard of the other fact, namely that all external progress on Earth from one culture-epoch to the next is dependent upon influences from beyond the Saturn region. A question arises here: Progress on Earth from one culture-epoch to another is dependent upon influences connected with a world beyond the Saturn sphere—a world altogether different from the one where progress is brought about by the stream of spirituality that flows through the evolution of humanity, that approached humanity in ancient times, has its centre of gravity in the Mystery of Golgotha and thereafter took its course in the way often described. How do these two facts harmonise? The truth is that they harmonise completely.

You need only picture to yourself that our Earth evolution as it is today was preceded by the earlier incarnation of the Earth, namely Old Moon. Now think of Old Moon as we have often described it, followed by the present Earth. Midway in the process of evolution between Old Moon and Earth something like a condition of cosmic sleep took place. During the transition from Old Moon to Earth, everything that had existed on Old Moon passed into a kind of germinal state from which, at a later stage, everything in existence on Earth came forth. But all the planetary spheres also came forth from that cosmic sleep. During the epoch of Old Moon, therefore, the planetary spheres were not in the state in which they exist today. Old Moon passes into the cosmic sleep and out of this condition the planetary spheres develop into what they now are. Everything that evolved in the Cosmos between the era of Old Moon and that of the Earth is contained within the range of the Saturn sphere. The Christ Impulse, however, does not belong to what evolved in the Cosmos during the period of transition from Old Moon to Earth, but it already belonged to the Old Sun and remained in the Sun sphere when Old Moon eventually separated from it. The Christ Impulse continued to evolve onwards towards the Earth but remained united with the Sun sphere after the Saturn sphere, the Jupiter sphere and so forth, had separated from it. And so, in addition to what the human soul was, before the Mystery of Golgotha, it now has within it something that is more than all that is contained in the planetary spheres, something that is founded in the depths of the Cosmos, that does indeed come over from Sun to Earth but belongs to far deeper regions of the spiritual world than do the planetary spheres. For these planetary spheres are a product of what took place when Old Moon evolved to become Earth. What streams to us from the Christ Impulse, however, comes from Old Sun which preceded Old Moon.

From this we realise that external culture on Earth is connected with the Cosmos, whereas the inner life of soul is connected in a much deeper sense with the Sun. Thus in all these connections—in their spiritual aspect too—there is something of which the following can be said: When we look out into the stellar spheres there is revealed to us, as it were outspread in space, a world that is embodied in culture on Earth because souls of men have entered into these stellar spheres between death and rebirth; but when we gaze at the Sun we behold something that has become what it is today because behind it there is an infinitely long period of evolution. In an age when it was not yet possible to speak of a connection between culture on Earth and the stellar worlds as can be done today, even then the Sun was already united with the Christ Impulse. Thus everything brought from the stellar worlds for the promotion of culture on the Earth is to be regarded as a kind of Earth-body which needed to be—and actually was—ensouled by what came to the Earth from the Sun, namely by the Christ Impulse. The Earth was ensouled when the Mystery of Golgotha took place; it was then that culture on Earth received its ‘soul’.

The death on Golgotha was only seemingly a death; in reality it was the birth of the Earth-Soul. And everything that can be brought to the Earth from cosmic expanses, also from beyond the Saturn sphere, is related to the Earth-Sphere as the Earth-Body is related to the Earth-Soul.

These reflections can show us that the presentation given in the book Theosophy—in rather different words and from a different point of view—contains what has been described as the cosmic aspect in the lectures given this Winter. You need only be reminded that in the one case the account is given from the point of view of the soul, and in the other from that of the great cosmic conditions, and you will find that the two descriptions are in complete harmony.

The conclusion which I should like to be able to draw from these lectures is that you realise how vast is the range of Spiritual Science and that its method must be to gather from every possible side whatever can throw light on the nature of the spiritual world. Even when additions are made to what had been said years ago, there need be no contradiction, for what is said is not the outcome of any philosophical argument or reflective thinking, but of occult investigation. Yellow today will still be yellow ten years hence, even though the essential quality of yellow as a colour is grasped for the first time ten years later. What was said years ago still holds good, although light is shed upon it from the new points of view which it has been possible to contribute during last Winter.

• 1. As well as referring to Chapter III in the book Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man in connection with this lecture, students are advised to turn to Occult Science—an Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition, Chapter III, pp. 74–101. (Note by translator.)
• 2. See Section III.4 in Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1963.

Eight days ago, we discussed important connections between the human organization, the physical build and the astral world on the basis of the Germanic creation myth. We have seen the interesting connection between the twelve pairs of cranial nerves and the twelve currents that our ancestors saw through their kind of clairvoyance in the astral plane, and which are nothing other than the inflows of that which then forms the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human being. We have also seen how the softer parts of the human body, so to speak, what belongs to the larynx, what belongs to the heart and to the lower organic parts, how all this is connected with the roots of the world ash - which is of course an astral phenomenon - and how the formation of the human brain is connected with the treetop and branches of the world ash. Here we have looked deeply into the connection between what the myth tells us and what we can acquire through our knowledge. We have also seen that the signs and symbols that the myth offers us are not things that have been thought up or invented by the imagination, but that they correspond to real observations in the astral world. This must be emphasized again and again, that all the beating about the bush with regard to symbols and signs that comes from the intellect and from speculation is worthless. For the real symbols that play a role in occultism are renderings of experiences and encounters in the spiritual world.

Today we will take an even deeper look into this area. We will come to a chapter that can really only be discussed in a working group that has been dealing with these questions for some time. Now, younger members are still being added to such working groups. They have to get used to hearing things that may still be shocking to them. But we would not make any progress if we did not want to discuss what applies to the advanced. This does not mean advanced in terms of study and knowledge, but what is meant by “advanced” is that the members who have been here for a long time have acquired a certain feeling that one of other worlds in the same way as if they were things or people that one encounters in the physical world, and with whom one can, under certain circumstances, associate and converse as familiarly as with the beings one encounters when one steps outside into the street. In this sense, I mean “advanced” so that they are not shocked when the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants are spoken of in an unbiased way. And the younger members may at least for the time being have the good will to listen to such a thing and accept it as naturally as a story from the ordinary sensory world. The composition of the lecture today will also be somewhat colorful. But that does not matter. We will get an overview of an important chapter of the spiritual world on the one hand and on the other hand we will get the connection with our own human physicality.

You know that within our sensual world there is a second world that we call the astral world, which initially presents itself as a flowing sea of light, in which colors and forms flow. For the researcher in the astral world, these color formations arrange themselves into certain entities, which he recognizes as astral entities, which are just as real there as plants and animals are here in the physical world. Then there is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of Devachan, which can be recognized by clairaudience. We will discuss this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to the astral world from a few points of view.

Anyone who studies the astral world with the means that those who study these things in depth can gradually learn through their own development will find that this world is much, much more populated than our physical world. For the astral world has a property that the physical world does not have, and in occultism this property is called 'permeability'. Astral beings can pass through each other; physical beings cannot do that. From this you can already see that the astral world can be much more populated, can contain many more beings than the physical world. This is also the case.

Just think back to the time when a large number of people were still able, even without occult training, to see into the spiritual world through their natural abilities. You will get a slightly different idea of some of the old pictures that earlier painters have painted. I would just like to remind you of the 'Sistine Madonna', which is in Dresden. Even if some have not seen the Sistine Madonna themselves, they are at least familiar with the good engravings that exist of it. You will have seen that in the background the whole atmosphere is filled with the heads of angels or genii. Just as the observation of nature otherwise makes cloud formations grow out of the air, so here angelic or genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy, but something that is a complete reality for those who can see the astral world. The astral world, which surrounds us as a surging sea of light, is filled with beings that, as it were, spring from space at every point with infinite vitality. This is how the astral plane appears in every respect; it is a moving spiritual life. Now it is not to be said that the painters who lived at the time of Raphael had this full understanding. That would be too much to say; but there were great predecessors of these painters, whose works have long since been lost, who in some respects were real clairvoyants, who, from their clairvoyance, indicated the tradition in such a way that a painter like Raphael, even if he was not clairvoyant, knew from tradition: this is how it is, and was therefore able to reproduce it appropriately. Even more appropriate are older pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries. If you go back to a time that is best known through the painter Cimabue, you will see how the strange phenomenon of the gold background appears in the pictures, and how angelic or genie-like figures emerge from it. This, too, corresponds fully to the reality of the astral vision. Down to the golden background, this corresponds to reality. For indeed, when we enter the higher regions of the astral plane, the flowing sea of light, which shines and is illuminated in other color tones, transforms into such a flowing sea of light that appears to be glowing with gold. This is beautifully depicted in a painting by Raphael, in a fresco, the “Disputa”, opposite another painting called “The School of Athens”, a name that should actually be crossed out. In the “Disputa” you have at the very bottom the disputing people - who are believed to be church fathers, popes, doctors of the church - then the region of the apostles and prophets begins, and then the region that Raphael depicts in the heads of the genii is divided, which is the region that we can call the lower astral plane. Higher up on the same picture, you can see the region of the higher astral plane, glowing with gold. That is why the pictures of these old painters are so convincing, because those who know these things find the truth of the inner vision reflected in them. They are also convincing for those who do not know this, because they can feel in their subconscious the deep truth from which these things are created. I mention this to draw attention to the way in which people in earlier times were aware of these higher realities and also reproduced them in pictures.

Today we want to discuss something about this world, which we have now tried to characterize as the painters have reproduced it in pictures. Today we want to draw attention to very specific entities that the clairvoyant person encounters in the astral world, partly in the lower, partly in the higher astral world. There are such entities that are shaped like a very complicated bird body, but of tremendous beauty, endowed with mighty wing-like organs and with a head similar to the human head; that is how they appear formed and shaped. These are definitely realities of the astral plane. The great teachers of the religions, who were able to see into it, were well acquainted with this type of being. And when in the most ancient times one tried to depict these beings - the cherubim, or the somewhat less correct, but at least well-intentioned griffins - then one painted such strange figures, which are something between a genius and a mythical creature.

If we recall the old legends, we see in them an attempt by people to recreate these higher, genially beings. They are shaped in the most diverse ways, and those who worked in the secret schools and knew them have, as it were, characterized this choir of beings. These types of entities are grouped into six classes. There are six regents, six leaders of these hosts. They have been named in various ways, these six main geniuses of the higher astral plane, the golden region. The Persian Secret Doctrine calls them “Amshaspands”; it speaks of the six Amshaspands.

A second type of such astral entities, occurring in a somewhat lower region, looks different; it does not at all resemble forms that exist here on the physical plane. But one can at least make oneself understood by trying to express their forms through those of the physical plane. This is what the secret teachers did when they gave the mythologies to the nations and the art of which we have spoken, which emerged from the secret teachings. There are no figures that look exactly like these beings, so we can only characterize them by depicting them as having a kind of human body with all kinds of different animal heads. The Egyptians, who knew a great deal about this area of the astral plane and were quite familiar with the spiritual beings of this sphere, tried to recreate this category of astral plane spirits in the various forms, such as human forms with the head of a sparrowhawk or human forms with other animal heads. These are not arbitrarily invented fantasies either, but rather forms with which one can interact on the astral plane just as one can with humans and animals on the physical plane.

Then there is a third kind of entity. There are now innumerable such beings, and it is no longer really possible to characterize them by drawing comparisons from the animal or human world, but rather by trying to draw the plant kingdom or the lower animals for their physicality and the human head as their head, so that the whole is somewhat similar to a plant body from which a human head grows, or a fish body with a human head. All this roughly gives a picture of the beings that are present on the astral plane.

As I have told you, there are six types of such genies, which the Persians called “Amshaspands”. You now also know the second type, which is best characterized by human form with an animal head; they are formed in the most diverse ways. If you go through these figures, you get about twenty-eight to thirty-one groups, and each of these groups is headed by a regent, so that you have twenty-eight to thirty-one such entities as regents in the astral plane. The Persian secret teachers called these regents the twenty-eight or thirty-one “Izards”. Those beings that I have discussed as the third category, they called “Farohars”. These are innumerable, and one would not be finished if one wanted to divide them all into classes according to their number. Today we are only interested in the six Amshaspands with their hosts and the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards with theirs, because they have a very remarkable significance for all human life. Those who have insight into the spiritual world can answer the question that someone might ask: What do these beings of the astral plane actually occupy themselves with? What do they do all the time? It would be quite wrong to believe that these geniuses and spirits are only there to form groups. One could easily think, if one takes certain poetic descriptions, that they are only assigned to the different spheres to form groups. That would, of course, be a very boring existence for these spirits. The formation of living groups is not an issue in the spiritual world. All these beings have their mission in the world plan. These entities, which the Persians called Amshaspands and Izards, were also known to the ancient Germans, the ancient trotters and druid priests, they only list them differently. According to some traditions there are twenty-eight, according to some thirty or thirty-one. We will hear in a moment why the number is uncertain. Those entities that the Persians call Amshaspands are higher spiritual entities that preside over and guide the natural forces around us. The natural forces, that which causes plants to grow, animals to flourish, and humans to live, these forces that are around us, that we call light, heat, electricity, magnetism and so on, nervous energy, blood power, reproductive power – call it what you will – are not merely unspiritual forces. It is a superstition to think that they are unspiritual forces. These forces are the external expression of spiritual entities. The great forces of existence, light, air, warmth, electricity, and the great chemical forces that permeate the world, they are all the external expression of the working Amshaspands and their hosts. There they work within. If I may express myself trivially: they “boil” in the world. For the senses they are behind the scenes. But you can still get an idea of them if, for example, you think of them as in a puppet theater, an actor, a performer who is not visible himself, but can be recognized by the way he works through wires and strings. Just as in a puppet theater the actor works behind the figures, so the spiritual beings stand behind the forces of nature. It is bad for a materialistic superstition if it only sees the puppets and is unaware that spiritual entities are behind them. This is the business of the Amshaspands, the six great genii who, as the Persian doctrine of the gods says, stand by the good god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd as executive genii.

They are assisted by the twenty-eight Izards. What is the significance of these? This is best revealed by direct clairvoyant observation, observing them day after day. You will understand me best if I talk quite bluntly about these twenty-eight Izards. If the six Amshaspands were to work with light, air, warmth and so on without the Izards, this world structure of ours would not come about as it is. There must be a lower level of assistance for this world to come about. There must be subordinate, executive spirits. These are the twenty-eight Izards. And there is a very curious hierarchy to be observed. If you observe the way they work, day after day, you will see that the six great group genii, the Amshaspands, work constantly, continually, evenly. They are tireless. But the subordinate twenty-eight Izards have a substantially shorter working time. They relieve each other, so that on one day you see one category of Izards as helpers, on the second day the second category, and on the third day the third, and so on. This is what makes it possible for the world to move forward at all. When a certain type of plant comes up in spring, the Amshaspands are at work. Although they are always working tirelessly, one of them takes the lead for a period of time; this one is the most active. The others are also active, but they are not in the lead. After some time, another one takes the lead. When a plant species emerges in spring, the Amshaspands work in the manner of the great natural forces, and the lower forces, the Izards, work in such a way that everything fits and is right on a specific day. For example, one category of Izards ensures that the climate is right, that the temperature is just right on that particular day. Plant growth would not be able to continue if another category of Izards did not arrive on the other day. After twenty-eight days, however, the first category arrives again, and so it continues. This is actually the mechanism in the spiritual order that underlies nature. There we look right into the workings, we see how the work is done on the astral plane.

Let us now recall what we said eight days ago. We said that the part of the Germanic myth that we discussed then ties in with the exodus of the chosen few near present-day Ireland, which was once part of Atlantis, whose population had advanced in development and then moved east. What is called the more advanced race of the Atlanteans founded the eastern cultures. The story of the World Ash expresses the becoming of the new man as it was seen in the astral world at that time. It was seen how the twelve currents, which we described last time, flow down from the north and have been flowing in for a long time. These twelve currents are really present on the astral plane, even today. If you follow the twelve pairs of nerve cords that pass through your head and extend the lines further out into the world, they all merge with the twelve basic currents that are present on the astral plane. They actually flow in through the six openings of the head, through two eyes, two ears and two nostrils. Inside, they become twelve currents again, two and two. And who sends them in there? After light and air, which work outside as natural forces, are directed by the six Amshaspands, at the highest level of human formation these twelve currents are sent into our head to form our head nerves. The secret teachers saw this in the six Amshaspands. They saw the six directing spirits sending the twelve currents into the head, so that man acquires the ability to perceive the world through his nervous system. So you see the human head as being connected to these six genii as in a kind of telephone or telegraphic connection. You have them to thank for the ability to perceive through your senses. Thus man stands as a microcosm, as a small world, in connection with the great world, the macrocosm.

And what do the subordinate spirits do, the twenty-eight Izards? You see, before man was ripe to receive the high powers of the Amshaspands within himself, he was already ripe to receive the powers of the Izards, which express themselves in his lower nerves. Just as the above-mentioned currents flow into the nerves of the head and build them up, so the currents of the twenty-eight izards flow into the human trunk, which was built earlier than the head. Before man was able to absorb the forces of the amshaspands and form the head from them, man's trunk was able to absorb the inflows of the twenty-eight izards. Does he also have the powers of the Izards within him now?

If we examine the human spinal cord, we find that it passes through the spine in a nerve cord that has a whitish matter on the outside and a gray matter on the inside, whereas in the brain the inside is white and the outside is gray, exactly the opposite. This has a special significance. It is interesting to note that nerve cords extend from the spinal cord along the entire length of the backbone, supplying the lower functions of the body. They extend downward from above and spread throughout the entire body. How many such nerve cords are there? If we want to understand how many there are, we must first answer the question: Where do they come from? — These are the cords that are formed by the influxes of the twenty-eight Izards; therefore, there are twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of such left and right nerve cords. You know that before man was formed on earth, he went through a moon formation. During the moon formation, only twenty-eight such nerve cords were initially formed as a disposition. Then, as the moon developed towards the earth, two to three new ones were added. Therefore, the number of the original twenty-eight Izards, which already served the higher genii on the moon, was increased by three. Because the higher education of man had to be prepared on earth, three more Izards had to be added. These latter three are Izards that only affect man; they have no function in nature outside of man. This is very interesting to survey.

Now it is even more interesting to follow all these processes in such a way that we observe them not only in man, but also outside in the great nature. For man has been formed little by little according to the constellations of the great nature outside. If our Earth were not in the vicinity of the Sun, around which it moves in one year, if the Moon were not in its vicinity, moving around it in one month and showing itself in four phases, then man would be different, because all these things are strictly connected. Light and air have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a certain point in the sky, and they have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a different point. Why is that so? Because the apparent progress of the sun is precisely connected with the fact that the Amshaspands take turns in governing. From month to month, through six months, the Amshaspands take turns in governing. This is connected with the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. After every six months, it is the turn of another Amshaspand, so that we have one reign of the Amshaspands in the months of summer and the other in the months of winter. Each year, an Amshaspand has to rule for one month twice, and during this reign the Izards take turns, they take turns exactly with the change of the moon. Therefore, the moon needs twenty-eight days to return to its original form through its four phases. The orbit of the moon regulates the work of the Izards, and the orbit of the sun regulates the guidance of the Amshaspands.

And so the formation of the human brain with its twelve pairs of nerves is connected with the course of the sun over the year and with the twelve months. What the twelve months are outside in nature, that the twelve pairs of nerves in our head are inside, and what the twenty-eight lunar days are outside, that the twenty-eight nerves of the spinal cord are inside. And because it was necessary that a new order emerge from the old lunar form when our Earth was newly formed, three new izards were added, whereby the order was established in which the months with thirty or thirty-one days must necessarily vary. Today's astronomical division is not quite exact, because the three supernumerary izards have a special effect on humans and less on nature. If a month always had thirty-one days, then all thirty-one Izards would actually work on the human being. They regulate the functions of the organic body below the head, and so these functions of the organic body are actually connected with the different reigns of the Izards, even if they shift in the individual human being. Originally they are connected with the arrangement of the great nature.

Here you can see deeply into the connection between the inner human structure and the spiritual world of the astral plan. In the various popular theosophical works, one speaks of the “formers”. Here you can see them at work, how they work into you from the outside and build you up; here you can also see what a complicated being man is, what kind of beings are at work so that man, this complicated being, can be built up. Six categories of spirits must be present so that his cognitive head can be built; and twenty-eight to thirty-one lower spirits must be present so that his trunk and all the functions of his trunk can come about. That is a wonderful connection between man and the spiritual world. Now you will understand that it is not enough for the knowledge of the relation of man to the Infinite to just prattle about the fact that man is built out of the spiritual world, but that we must patiently study what it is like. Occultism knows the entities of every organ that is in man, which have built the organ together from the outside. This is an occult anatomy that leads you from the effects in the sensory world to the causes in the spiritual world. The effects can be seen by anyone who looks at the world with an open mind; but the only way to learn to recognize the causes is through occultism. From this you can see that we are not trying to provide abstract proof of the existence of a spiritual world with all kinds of logical conclusions. Because anything that can be proven can also be refuted. You can object to anything. That is not the point. But if you piece together the individual insights so that the things match the effects that are present in the sensory world, then you can come to recognize as true what is recognized by the occultist, how the human being is constructed from the spiritual world. It did not occur to the Persians to count the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord; they saw the twenty-eight Izards at work. You can find the whole human being in the mythologies and legends. That is what gives the real occult study of the world of legends its great appeal.

These phenomena that we have studied can be found everywhere in the secret schools from Persia to the Druids in Central Europe. Whether you call the supreme spirit presiding over the Amshaspands, Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd, or Huu - as he was called in the Druid schools - does not matter. The spiritual beings that were given to humans in the mythologies were known. The individual gods and spirit figures are not fantastic inventions of a popular imagination. Anyone who speaks of “popular imagination” has a certain right to do so, but the imagination does not lie with those who gave the figures to the peoples, but the imagination lies with our present-day scholars, who speak of a popular imagination that does not exist at all. And in many cases, scholarship is a much worse superstition than what scholarship designates as superstition. In myths and legends, a much, much deeper wisdom can often be found, because they go back to the origins of things that were in the invisible beyond the sensual. When one engages in such contemplation, it is as if one were to cease being confined to one's own skin and one's existence were to continue from the inside out. One becomes familiar with the beings that are in the spiritual world; they have put one together and one can come into relationship with these beings again. For it is a real coming into relationship with these entities, which we attain through the path of knowledge that leads to the higher worlds. We ascend from the effects visible to the senses to the supersensible, invisible causes. Through the path of knowledge, man becomes one with the universe again.

We could cite many, very many more examples along these lines, but today we will conclude this reflection - so as not to prolong it too long - with a fact from Germanic mythology that will show you how, on the one hand, things happen in the development of humanity, and how, on the other hand, these events are preserved in myth, how many things are preserved in simple popular belief.

What is physical today was entirely spiritual in the beginning. Before these twelve brain nerves took shape, there were only the astral currents that entered them. Before the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord were formed, the corresponding astral currents were there. How do these nerve deposits arise in the human being? In the following way: Imagine that originally there was a watery, muddy fluid. Think of the brain in this way. You can still see this today in the part of the brain that has remained fluid and watery; if it remains too strong, a so-called hydrocephalus develops. Our brain emerged from such a watery brain and then became gelatinous. At first astral currents coming from outside flowed through this watery mass in all directions, and along these astral currents the gelatinous mass became structured and hardened, and nerves developed. Where nerves run today, there were originally astral currents, then etheric currents, and finally they became physical nerves. Imagine man gradually hardening. The mass was hardly cartilaginous when the first rudiment of the backbone appeared. The bony covering was still soft. The astral currents flowed in on the right and left, which later became the spinal nerves. We are looking back to an ancient time when the twenty-eight Izards began to send their currents - first astral - into man.

The twenty-eight Izards also had a leader, a controller who had a dignity between the Izards and the Amshaspands in the middle; this leader of the Izards was a kind of foreman, a divine spiritual being. When we look back into the ancient times, we see him working in such a way that he commanded the twenty-eight Izards and directed them to channel the astral currents into human beings. The whole earth was surrounded by this astral sphere; and just as today the winds flow through the earthly atmosphere, so the astral currents flowed into the human bodies. The old clairvoyants really saw these currents flowing into the heads and spines of people in the Atlantic Age. That was a living astral image. When the physical nerves gradually formed, this image disappeared, and that meant: their origin was forgotten, it was forgotten how the currents had been directed into the body.

The leader of the twenty-eight Izards initially commanded the forces of nature as they worked day after day. In the great course of the year, all this worked rhythmically and harmoniously. In the course of the day, it worked somewhat irregularly. Terrible lightning, thunder, and storms flashed through that air in the earth's orbit, which still had the astral in it. Then the god, the leader of the Izards, who had been working out there, changed his scene and worked inside, in the twenty-eight nerve currents of the spinal cord. He went out of that spiritual earth orbit and finally unfolded his powers in man. Germanic myth calls this god Thor or Donar. He is the same according to the Germanic view, who is later called Jupiter according to the Roman view. He is correctly worshipped as the thunderstorm god who caused the storms. He is also seen as being married to Sif, the astral earth atmosphere; these two now have a daughter who is something very special. How does this daughter come about? Because Thor has withdrawn into the inner being of the person and works through the twenty-eight nerve cords. Through the twenty-eight nerve cords, people do not perceive the astral on the outside, but in certain states of emergency they do perceive it, for example in a dream-like state of sleep. Those who were particularly predisposed to perceive this then said according to popular belief: “I am being pressed by Thrud” – and this is none other than the daughter of Thor. There people still knew that Thrud was born where Thor lives with his wife. That is why they called it “Thrudheim”.

You see, that is how closely folk tales are related to the occult truths. In this way, little by little, we can gain a deep insight into that wonderful structure that has been built by so many beings, into the human being. How childish and small a materialistic science appears to us, which wants to understand this wonderful structure in such a trivial way. In older times, this was felt quite differently. They expressed what modern science knows through realization with feeling. And when the old poet looked around and sensed how man, as the wonderful final structure, stands among the beings he sees on the physical plane, as the work of so infinitely many entities, he was allowed to speak the beautiful grand word that emotionally expresses such a deep truth:

Many powerful things live,
but nothing is more powerful
(than what can be seen)
than man.

It has been requested that we also talk about what is usually called “white and black magic” and that this be linked to some other concepts that theosophists are familiar with.

Now, what needs to be touched upon here is a very wide-ranging and extensive field of occult and spiritual-scientific observation, and it will therefore only be possible to touch on a few elementary things in this area, so to speak. But even these presuppose that what we are now considering is taken up as if it were meant only for students of spiritual science and not for anyone else who is not equipped with a spiritual scientific attitude and way of thinking. Certain conditions must be met if one is to speak about such a subject.

The words “white and black magic” are often used in theosophical circles, and we are confronted with the term “black magician” as an accusation all too often, even from those who work in the theosophical tradition. Some of you will have heard it said with a light heart that this or that is “black magic”. Yes, it has even happened that after reading our “Mitteilungen” - as it seems to me it was the first issue - people in one place said: What happened at that general assembly and was reported in the “Mitteilungen” is black magic. At the time, some people had actually claimed that an evil spell must have been cast over the proceedings of that general assembly. This is just one example of something that occurs more often and that stems from a rather trivial conception not only of the term “black magic” but of the term “magic” in general.

We must first be clear about what is meant by “magic” in order to then understand what is meant by “black magic”. Many people believe the following: They say that occult powers can be acquired, and usually have in mind quite inferior, elementary occult powers. This is because those who talk about such things usually know nothing about higher occult powers; they generally have no idea at all of what occult powers actually are. Usually people then add that someone is practising black magic if they use such powers in the service of personal selfishness. Such a statement is one of those of which it cannot even be said that it is wrong. But it does not matter much that it is said to be right, because nothing special is said with it. It is the outgrowth of a completely abstract way of thinking. He who wishes to speak of such things must, above all, stand firmly on the ground of reality, whether it be physical or spiritual reality; he must know what is real, and then he will no longer prattle about all kinds of things that have no connection with reality.

Does such a statement, that occult powers should not be used for personal selfish ends, not in some respects represent an impossible demand for people in the present day? This question must be answered first. Of course, those who say this make “Thou shalt not be selfish” their first commandment! That is certainly a supreme commandment. But for the real thinker, the question is not whether such commandments should be established, but whether such commandments can be fulfilled at all. And anyone who believes that the commandment not to be selfish can be fulfilled by people of the present day without further ado is labouring under a very great illusion. He who recognizes it as his duty to dispel illusions must also dispel the illusion that such a commandment can easily be fulfilled.

Perhaps someone will say: I want to work in the world in an entirely selfless way! - At first he cannot know that among the forces with which he works, there are a great many occult forces. Occult forces emanate from every human being. If someone says they want to work in the world in a selfless way, that is a very, very beautiful ideal. But if you try to ask further: Why do you want to be selfless, why do you impose this commandment on yourself, to be selfless? - you will get strange answers, for example: Through selflessness I gradually ascend to higher levels of perfection; I cannot bear to be a worthless person; I want to be a person who is valuable in the world. If you were to analyze this feeling, you would discover that behind the reasons for selflessness there is often the most incredible selfishness, often much greater selfishness than is found in people who do not want to be selfless at all, but simply give in to their selfish instincts. Imagine the thought, and you will see how much selfishness there is in the urge for selflessness.

And how could it be otherwise? Selfishness is a force that was not planted in human nature by the gods for man to so readily deny or negate. Selfishness is one of the most essential things through which man works. When we inquire into the reasons for selfishness, when we ask ourselves why the gods, the kind gods, have implanted selfishness in man, Since this is something so abominable in the opinion of so many people, we are born out of real occultism the answer that selfishness is a very powerful protection against what would happen to man in the world if he did not have this selfishness. Do you know what best protects man from using certain rather evil powers, which we will talk about in a moment? It would be easy today for someone who wanted to practice black magic themselves to take on a student and teach them certain techniques and machinations of real black magic; they would be able to work in the most horrific ways in the world. But most people won't do that without further ado. And do you know why not? Not for the simple reason that they are afraid, because they fear for their personality. They perceive a little of the consequences in spirit and fear selfishly. And that is quite good, that they are afraid and therefore leave it at that. If, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people had received everything that exists in terms of forces to affect the astral, the etheric and the physical body, then these people would have done terrible things in the world. But selfishness was given to them, and that causes man to first take care only of himself, and to be completely absorbed in caring for himself. The gods have erected selfishness around people like a protective wall. It is selfishness that veils man's insight into the things that lie behind the world of appearances. It is extremely important to consider this. It is one of the wise brakes that the gods have set up so that man does not intrude too quickly into the spiritual realms. So that is egoism; it is a good protective device.

So we should not be throwing words around like that, because there is still a long way to go before man can become selfless, before he can become ripe for selflessness. There is no need to point out how all preaching of selflessness looks so strange in our age, in the age of the most potent egoism, where everyone wants to grab as much as they can of what is established in the social order. So this “selflessness” leads to surrounding oneself entirely with a whirlwind of illusions. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't think about it thoroughly, how people today wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions, how, in particular, “theories” allow our contemporaries to wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions. Social theories are being shaped and preached by professors and non-professors alike. But a large part of the theories about the social remedies of the social body are nothing more than an expression of “professorial psychopathy”. You can see it in practice, how people think and act wrongly. Wherever you go, in any society or community, you will find people pondering this or that remedy, for example against unemployment. When there is unemployment, there is hunger. But how do we go about remedying this? Then the decision is made: people have to be given work. And now we invent something to give people work, to keep them busy, so that they get money and can buy what they want. This seems to be a very effective way of averting social damage: giving people something to do. But giving people work at any price is a very dangerous strategy, as long as we don't distinguish between productive and unproductive work. As long as this distinction between productive and unproductive employment is not made, this is even a terrible means in its effect on society. Imagine the radical case: someone wanted to quickly provide work and bread to a number of people in a certain area because a new machine had been invented that had left a number of people without work. He invents an article in which he uses worthless waste products for toilet articles. The people can then earn something and buy bread. But this is only a means of transferring poverty from one side to the other, because nothing is produced in this way, nothing is created. Everyone can consider the following case for themselves: someone sits down in a restaurant in the countryside and says, “Waiter, give me ten postcards!” and sends them off without considering how many postmen have to go up four or five floors to deliver them, and without considering that this does not set any real power in motion in the world. No thought is given to the fact that nothing real is achieved that benefits the mind and body. If you tell the person concerned this, he will of course have an excuse. He could say, for example, that new postmen could be hired, thus giving more people work. But no thought is given to the fact that if new people are hired, nothing new is created by their work, but that poverty is only redistributed. This shows that people must first know something about the distribution of work on earth before they can begin with the smallest idea of reform. In the context of the world, ignorance that wants to reform is terrible. It is terrible that people often do not have the patience to wait until they have learned to have an overview of how to help, but instead engage in clubby activities to get this or that done. These are all illusions with which people shroud themselves. And it is also an illusion when people speak of selflessness in trivial theosophy. If we want to teach ourselves about white and black magic, we must first bring to mind some of the concepts of “magic”, of which those who have heard the last lectures already know something. I have also touched briefly on the nature of magic in public.

What is magic? In all the old occult schools, there were three ways of ascending to the highest realms of knowledge. The first way was that of the initiate, the second way was that of the clairvoyant, and the third way was that of the magician. These are three fundamentally different things: initiation, clairvoyance and magic. Let us first make clear to ourselves, by means of a simple comparison, what an initiate, what a clairvoyant and what a magician is. Imagine some region where no one has ever heard of railways, steamships and so on, where people live without railways and without steamships. In such a region, the fact that there are railways and steamships is pure occultism. Occult means something like secret, something that people know nothing about. Now when someone from the area where there are no railways and so on travels to another area where he sees railways and steamships, and then returns to his homeland, he tells his people that there are railways and steamships. He knows it from his own experience, because he has seen into a world that is still a secret for others.

Anyone who is introduced to the higher worlds through occult training is, in this respect, a clairvoyant. He knows from his own experience that there are spiritual worlds and beings, spiritual forces. The spiritual worlds have different levels. A person at one level can be clairvoyant, can see some phenomena but not others. Now you have to remember something that has been said here often: to find and independently explore occult truths, clairvoyance is needed. But clairvoyance is not needed to understand these truths. For that, ordinary human understanding is sufficient, if it is only applied correctly in a sufficiently comprehensive way. Anyone who says that they can only understand what is communicated in occult reports if they are a clairvoyant is simply not using their mind sufficiently. Man cannot find the occult truths with the mind, but he can see them. Everything that is told from spiritual research can be understood if one is willing to think about it thoroughly. However, one cannot find the occult truths without clairvoyance; clairvoyance is needed for that. So what is proclaimed by Theosophy can also be understood by those who think about it thoroughly.

You can receive the stories up to the highest realms of occult experiences, and then you can understand them. So there were always clairvoyants in the occult schools who learned to see into the spiritual worlds through the methods that were used. These were often very lengthy methods. But besides these clairvoyants, there were always initiates. These were those who, through their comprehensive and willing application of their powers of mind, had come to understand the facts and laws of the higher worlds. These were initiates. Today, this relationship between initiates and clairvoyants is hardly possible anymore because today every person is afflicted by the great selfishness of wanting to see for themselves. People today can hardly imagine the love and trust that prevailed in the occult schools of the past. There was the clairvoyant, who perhaps through incarnations, in a self-denying way, applied the methods and trained himself to look into the higher worlds, who could see much in these higher worlds, and who refrained from learning the laws of these higher worlds, in order not to be held back by laws, but to prove a greater service to humanity through a more rapid development of clairvoyant abilities. This renunciation is not to be taken lightly. It is a great and mighty step when anyone decides to become a seer without at the same time becoming acquainted with the whole system of laws in the higher worlds; and if he waits, perhaps for thousands of years, before he attains this, he can only do so on condition that he places himself under the strict care of a chosen guru or teacher. For if he approached the things of the spiritual world as a mere clairvoyant, without knowing its laws, he would soon go astray and into the most dreadful errors if he did not accept the guru's advice in all important matters.

There were others who renounced the development of higher clairvoyant gifts altogether because they wanted to be initiated into the laws of the higher worlds. They trusted in love and devotion what the seers told them, but they knew the laws. To explain this, one can cite an example from the ordinary world. Imagine a person who sees extremely well, who can see all kinds of phenomena with his eyes, but who understands nothing of the laws of light phenomena. And imagine another person who is very short-sighted and can hardly see a few centimetres in front of his eyes, but who is well acquainted with the physical laws of light phenomena. The two can work well together, one person knowing the laws and the other not knowing them at all, but instead seeing the phenomena. And this applies even more to the higher spheres. It is possible for one to become an initiate of higher degrees without laying claim to clairvoyant powers. In the old occult schools it was quite usual for these two classes to be side by side. Clairvoyants willingly accepted the advice of initiates who were not clairvoyant at all. This was especially necessary for cases where a high degree of clairvoyance and a high degree of initiation were required, for example, for everything related to the astrological field. It was the case that those who wanted to fully comprehend the complicated laws of astrology usually had to do without the high level of clairvoyance that the astral clairvoyants had to acquire. They complemented each other. Only in recent times, when man thinks and feels in a materialistic way, must it be realized that it is impossible to separate these two fields strictly, and therefore no distinction has been made between the two classes since the fourteenth century, so that the teacher gives no one an initiation without at the same time giving a certain degree of clairvoyance. This is necessary because it cannot be reconciled with the selfishness and lack of trust that prevail today. Therefore, no distinction is made between the two, because people today cannot be selfless.

Now, however, the magician differs from both the clairvoyant and the initiate. For someone who can see into the higher worlds, it does not follow that he can already control and apply the forces that are at work in the material world. Or do you think that a person who has brought knowledge of the locomotive, the steamship and the steam engine to a region could also build such a machine? He can tell them what such things look like, but he will not immediately understand how to build them. The fact that the clairvoyant can see into the higher worlds does not yet mean that he also knows how to control and apply the forces that work in the sensory world. Only he is a magician or adept who knows how to apply the higher forces, of which all physical events are an expression, in the world here, who is thus able not only to call upon the physical forces and powers when something is at stake in his actions, but who can set the higher forces in motion. In our time, it is no small thing to be a magician or adept. There has never been a time in the development of humanity when the path of the magician or adept was so completely opposed to our own as it is today. And today, under certain circumstances, one best serves humanity by limiting oneself to spreading the knowledge of the higher worlds, and even - perhaps with a bleeding heart - refraining from it in cases where the application of magical powers might be appropriate. For today's public life is so alien to the concept of magistery that under certain circumstances the influence of higher worlds on this world would mean a setback if magical powers were applied directly. He who has practised the use of these powers to a certain extent, and who has acquired the knowledge of the mechanism as well, must in certain cases refrain from using these powers, for the simple reason that it is impossible today to go against the current of the world. Not only clairvoyance and initiation belong to the magician, but also practice. That is what it is all about. The magician must practice certain tasks with great dedication over a long period of time. Just think about how much you can know - even in the physical world - without being able to actually do what you can talk about, what you know something about. You can be initiated into many things. You can know exactly how a locomotive is constructed, but without anyone giving you the order to build a locomotive, because he would risk throwing the money out the window. It is the same in the higher realms. Practice makes the magician, perception in the higher worlds makes the clairvoyant, knowledge and realization of the laws in the higher worlds makes the initiate.

In times gone by, it was absolutely forbidden to perform any magical operation without being in harmony with the leaders of the world, the “earthly government”, also known as the great masters of the so-called white lodge. All occult schools, all schools that exist at all and all teachings can only be the lowest step towards higher development; on this step, higher and higher steps must be built up, right up to the actual leaders of earthly development. Those who not only know wisdom but also “rule” the earth in its development, who let wisdom flow into earthly evolution, are on the highest level. They alone are able to indicate for each individual action, based on spiritual forces, whether it disturbs or does not disturb in the whole context. When you build a house and lay out the plan for the house, each individual workman on the house must work in harmony with the plan. And if someone comes along and decides to make a window different from what is provided for in the plan, no matter how beautiful and magnificent that window may be, the whole house is disturbed. If anyone in the world wants to accomplish something through spiritual powers, no matter how significant and grandiose it may be, if it does not fit into the original plan of earthly development, it disturbs earthly development and sometimes throws it back for a long time. A man who applies no spiritual forces can never disturb this plan of earthly development. And why not? Because in relation to spiritual forces, what people do without knowledge of the higher worlds is to natural phenomena as a house is to a house. Whatever is ruined by the weather, by heat and sunlight, must be ruined; that is self-evident in a certain sense. So it is with the intentions of those who have no connection with the higher world. But the actions of those who have some connection with the higher worlds behave, when they do something that is not in harmony with the spiritual world, like someone who hits something with a hammer. So what is necessary for the progress of the human race to take place? When occult forces are applied, it is absolutely necessary that the connection with the central spiritual powers of the world be maintained, and it is absolutely necessary that the spiritual forces not be delivered to anyone who does not want to seek this connection. It is connected with this that in all real occult schools a secret is held over the imparting of spiritual forces, and that no secrets are delivered to anyone who does not undertake to maintain the connection with the leading spiritual entities. Only the “central government” of the earth has the possibility of knowing what is at stake. And this must be known if one is to apply spiritual forces. If one imparts anything to another in an unauthorized manner, whereby this other person can oppose the great plan of earth development, then one commits the first kind of black magic act. Therefore, the following is a basic principle: The first black magic act is the betrayal of occult secrets. Gossip and divulging of occult secrets is the first case of black magic, because in doing so you surrender the occult secrets to those who oppose the central leadership of the earth's development because you do not know the context. Where does this occur, where does it become real? It becomes real wherever occult secrets are used in the service not of the entire earthly leadership but of some limited body that does not want to have any connection with the earthly leadership that serves humanity. If, for example, a person receives the things that he is only allowed to use when he has overcome all national and racial prejudices, earlier delivered, he uses them before he has overcome these prejudices and before he has an idea of what it means to be a “homeless person”, then exactly the same thing that is otherwise white magic goes into the service of black magic. Exactly the same. If that which is intended to serve humanity is used in the service of a separate race, for example to give that race supremacy over the earth, then on a large scale that is black magic, because it does not happen in accordance with the way the earth is run. It is the first requirement: to go beyond what connects us only to one part of humanity. For a modern white magician, this is the first principle. Man should not strive for unselfishness, but for love for all mankind. He can extend the field of his love. He can do that, and that is what it is all about.

Now it happens very often that people try to force through some machinations to get something that can never be communicated to them otherwise. Now we come to the actual methods, to the machinations that are necessary to carry out in order to gain possession of black magic powers. This is something that can be described in great detail. You have seen the first means, the first way to gain possession of black magic powers; it is to let the appointed powers and beings communicate the means to you. Yes, what are they then, these magical means? They are the means by which we can use the spiritual powers to work here in the world of the senses, to achieve results and success here. These are such means. But there are no other effects in the material world than those that emanate from the spiritual worlds. All effects, successes and deeds in the material world emanate from the spiritual worlds. Therefore, anyone who does not want to come to these things by the rightful way of slow study - through those who are initiates or clairvoyants or even adepts or magicians - can only choose another way, and that consists in , instead of turning to those who are the embodiments of higher spiritual entities, he turns to nature itself and tries to eavesdrop on nature and to discern how the spiritual forces have flowed into it. For everything in nature flows into it from the spiritual worlds, and we can again divine these spiritual forces through certain machinations and activities. But the moment we do not let nature act in regard to what we do not know, but instead carry out what we want ourselves, thus acting where we know nothing, in that moment we are also able to obtain forces from the realm of black magic. If we do not want to obtain the inner forces of nature indirectly through wisdom and insight, and if we avoid everything that happens through wisdom and insight on the path of developing inner forces, but choose other means, then we are always on the way to black magic through these other means.

You see, anyone who wanted to become a black magician today would have a large fund for black magic activities from the outset if they were a terrible coward and had a dreadful fear of everything that could happen to them. Such fear within a person is a very good starting point for a black magician, because this fear is only compressed selfishness. Suppose a person intends to practice black magic on a large scale. He would first look around in the world for individuals who are as cowardly as possible. For this stock of fear is a good material that can be so transformed and converted that the cowardly individuals in question acquire certain other powers and strength, without knowledge or insight, to a much greater extent than a person can otherwise have. What would such a magician have to do who wanted to have such arts? He would first have to set up a laboratory in which he trained these cowards to do so. I am speaking radically, but it will be most clear to you this way: to harden themselves completely by the means of constantly cutting into living flesh and seeing blood run. What the hare foot has to a high degree in terms of fear as a certain outward force can be converted into something opposite if one teaches people to harden themselves by cutting into living flesh. For a person who has no fear, this procedure would be of no use at all.

This is, so to speak, the ABC, the very first thing done in black magic. And when that was done, what had formerly been fear in man would change into powers by which he could indeed gain a certain influence over his surroundings; and he who would make use of such assistants would be able to perform the most incredible atrocities in the world. But he who, without assistants, wants to become a great black magician himself sometimes does something quite different. Such a black magician once wanted to become a man of the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, whom the profane world called “Knight Bluebeard”. This man sought to gain powerful occult powers, not by the rightful path of learning, but by transforming certain deeply-held selfish feelings. At the same time, he was an excellent observer of himself. Please excuse me if I use a word that will sound strange. This man was what one might call 'the most radical Christian egoist' or 'egoistic Christian'. There have been and still are people like that. They are the kind of people who see Christianity above all as a bridge to gain as much as possible for themselves, because it is clear to them that a good Christian can go far in bliss. Through self-knowledge he noticed this in his nature and when he had noticed it in himself, he already knew the best means by which one could transform this into incredible magical powers. He was indeed stopped early. He was put on trial and it was shown that the man had started to murder one child after another in 1432 in order to develop his special occult powers. He saw the destruction of life as a special means of extracting from nature the knowledge that he could not obtain himself. During the trial it came to light that the man had murdered 800 children in a short period of time. Now some of you who have read the novel by Mabel Collins, Flita: True Story of a Sorceress, will understand why there is a murder at the beginning. It is part of it. The novel “Flita” was written by someone who knows this. What the black magician wanted could only be developed under the influence of this murder, which is at the starting point of the story.

And now take a serious look at this story and ask yourself what could protect most people from these procedures that I have mentioned, and through which man could certainly be led to the mastery of black magic powers. Selfishness is a very good means of protection against it. Not everyone will be able to overcome themselves to cut into living flesh; most people would faint, and fainting is nothing more than an expression of selfishness. So, in its physical effect, it is a good means of being deterred from practising black magic. It is also difficult to become a Bluebeard; most people are protected from that by their perfectly healthy selfishness; it acts as a barrier to putting oneself in the shoes of the means of acquiring black magic powers.

Well, you see, I just wanted to mention that so as not to use empty phrases. That is not my style. I prefer to talk about real facts. I wanted to show you by example what the acquisition of machinations in the field of black magic consists of. The betrayal of occult secrets to the profane is the first and simplest kind. But the actions I have just characterized are among the teaching methods of black magic, they are, so to speak, the ABCs. And what comes after these ABCs, in which black magic students are taught to “read” – if I were to tell you about that, several of you here would probably faint. So we will stop at this first stage. These things are not at all something to be trifled with, not even in words; they are something most serious; and they are, unbeknownst to people, unfortunately all too widespread in the world. Most people do not even have the will to consider how these things are spread in the world.

Now the development of such things is intimately connected with the whole evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of a planet, and we understand such a thing in the right way only when we have an idea of the fact, a planet spiritually affects its successor, the next planet, how, for example, the moon affected the earth, and how, in turn, the earth affects its successor, Jupiter. You all know that the Earth is, in a sense, led by the so-called 'white lodge', in which certain highly developed human individuals are united with individuals of an even higher kind. What are they doing? They are working, they are guiding the evolution of the Earth. While guiding the evolution of the Earth, they are working out a very specific plan. It is actually the case that a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers during the evolution of each planet. While the Earth is evolving, the plan for the details of how Jupiter, which is replacing the Earth, must be, is being drawn up in the so-called “white lodge” of the Earth. The entire plan is developed in every detail. And herein lies the blessing and the good fortune of progressive development: that we act in accordance with this plan. When a planetary development comes to an end, when our Earth has reached the end of its planetary development, then the Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations will also have completed the plan they have worked out for Jupiter.

And now, at the end of such a planetary development, something highly peculiar happens. This plan is simultaneously infinitely reduced and infinitely multiplied by a procedure, so that an infinite number of copies of the entire Jupiter plan are available, but in miniature. It was the same on the moon. The plan of the evolution of the Earth was there, infinitely multiplied and infinitely reduced. And do you know what it is that was worked out by the Masters of Wisdom on the Moon at that time? These are the atoms, the atoms of the Earth. And it is the atoms of the Jupiter evolution whose plan is being worked out by the leading “white lodge” on our planet. That is the real atom, and all other talk about an atom is nothing. Only he recognizes the atom of a planet who recognizes in it the reduced plan of the evolution of the planet. If you want to gradually recognize this atom, which underlies the earth, then the very measures that emanate from the great magicians of the world will confront you with the knowledge of this atom. Now, of course, we can only hint at these things, but we can at least get to know something that gives us an idea of what this is about. In a certain sense, the Earth is composed of these atoms of hers, and every being, all of you yourselves, are in a sense composed of such atoms; and you are in harmony with the whole evolution of the Earth in that you carry within you, in infinite numbers, the reduced-scale plan of the Earth planet, which was worked out earlier. This plan for the earth could only be worked out on the preceding planetary state of our earth, on the moon, and thus on the planet that preceded our development on earth, through the activity of leading beings in harmony with the entire planetary development of Saturn, the sun, the moon, and so on. Now, however, the point is to give the infinite number of atoms that which brings them into the right relationships, arranging them in the right way. The leading spirits of the moon were only able to give them this if they steered the development of the earth in very specific directions. I have already described the paths into which they steered the development of the earth. When the earth emerged again after the development of the moon, it was actually not yet our present earth. It was the earth plus the sun plus the moon. These were one body. If you were to mix today's Earth with the Moon and the Sun and make a single body out of it, you would have what the Earth was at the beginning of its development. First the Sun separated from the Earth, and with it all those forces that were too thin, too spiritual, for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualized too quickly. If man had only been under the influence of the forces contained in this sun-moon-earth body, he would have spiritualized very quickly, he would not have developed down into physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain a self-awareness, an I-consciousness, which he had to attain.

You all know that there is imaginative knowledge and occult characters [in which imaginative knowledge is expressed]. I can only give you two occult characters now. To discuss further would take us too far. The occult symbol for those forces that would have worked and given direction to the whole evolution of the earth if the sun had remained united with the earth, the occult symbol for those forces that would have spiritualized the earth too soon, is this: in this symbol, the one who is a student of occultism can recognize the forces that quickly lead humanity to spirituality. On the other hand, if humanity had separated from the sun with the whole earth but remained united with the moon, it would very quickly have become ossified and hardened. If the earth had kept the moon within itself, people would very soon have become a kind of puppet, a marionette. They would have descended too deeply into matter, as on the other hand they would have spiritualized too quickly, if the Sun had remained connected with the Earth. Therefore the Moon had to come out of the Earth. And all those forces that have been transported out and that today rule from the Moon and work in from the outside on the Earth, all these forces are represented together in this sign, which looks like a double hook. This is the sign of the beast or the lamb with two horns from the Apocalypse.

The one symbol is called Nachiel, the other Sorat. This second symbol is also called the symbol of the demonic element on earth. All the forces that the black magician develops by using such hideous methods lead to an occult increase on earth of the forces that belong to the demonic nature of the earth and that lead to the hardening of the earth. If many people became black magicians, the result would be that the earth would become more and more like the moon, while through the forces of white magic the earth would become more and more like the sun, like the forces that are in the sun's rays.

So what would an increase of black magic on our earth lead to? It would lead to the hardening of the globe, to the globe becoming a moon. The same forces that were eliminated with the moon, that had developed out of the substance of the earth, are still present in the layers of the earth as an inclination. In addition to all the forces that have the good inclination to become solar forces, the forces that have the inclination to become lunar forces are also still present. Through white magic the earth is more and more approximated to the nature of the sun; through the forces of black magic it is approximated to the nature of the moon. Through white magic everything must be conquered that does not lead to the control of spiritual forces on the path of enlightenment, of wisdom. For all such procedures, such activities, as they have been called, do not lead to the mastery of spiritual forces on the path of wisdom, of insight, not by really looking into them, but they are the nature of the trickery and procedures by which forces are to be gained without enlightenment. Thus the apocalyptic seal is at the same time the sign for the conquest of black magic by white magic. Through the human powers that are transformed, solar powers are born of man himself, so that the lunar powers lie at man's feet.

That is the path the magician must take on our Earth. Then, through the nine steps, which you will get an idea of if you read my 'Theosophy', the forces become the nine stars. So what must the true black magician say to his disciple? Very simple:

Despise reason and science alone,
Let the lying spirit only encourage you
In works of deception and magic,
Then I have you absolutely already!—
To him fate has given a spirit
That always presses forward, unrestrained
And whose hasty striving
skips over the joys of the earth.
I drag him through the wild life,
through shallow insignificance,
he shall fidget, stare, stick,
and his insatiability
shall make food and drink float before greedy lips:
He will beg for refreshment in vain,
And even if he had not given himself over to the devil,
He would still have to perish!

And even if he had not given himself over to the devil, It would be easy, tremendously easy, and here we come to a very subtle chapter on the one hand of human development and on the other of magic - it would be easy to simply wait until all people would be able to see things correctly, which they must first see before they can progress on the path of magical development. That would be quite easy under certain circumstances. But then one would delay the course of human development. It must be possible in some way to put people in charge of the dissemination of occult truths — and in a sense this is always something of the dissemination of occult powers — and to use these so that they have the right effect in the world. People must be given more occult truths and teachings so that they can, in a sense, become occult teachers. |

Now one might ask: But is not everyone who spreads occult teachings in some way a black magician? It is absolutely true that someone who spreads occult teachings today can easily become a black magician. This is the case when he is unable to grasp the full scope of the effects of his occult teachings. Therefore, the occult schools must ensure that no one spreads real occult teachings who is not able, through his own development, to grasp the scope and effect of occult truths. Today, occult teachings can be spread by one disciple repeating them to another or copying them from him. If the person wants to be a disciple or a disciple, that is all right, because in that way he spreads the original from which he has heard. But let us talk about the case when someone would spread occult teachings independently and even add his own judgment. If someone wants to spread occult truths in an independent way, then, above all, precautions must be taken to ensure that this person has the maturity to spread occult truths independently, and that does not depend on intellectual training, but the occult schools make it dependent on something quite different, namely on how the individual members of human nature develop gradually.

You know from the essay on “The Education of the Child” that at birth the physical body is born, that by the age of seven the etheric body comes out, by the age of fourteen the astral body, and by the age of twenty-one the I comes out. We can follow this up and see that by the age of thirty-five, or rather between the ages of thirty-five and forty, the etheric and astral bodies of the human being are so free that only then can the human being have the necessary sense of responsibility for the dissemination of occult truths. Therefore, all occult schools have the strict law that no one may act as a teacher of occult truths before reaching this age. And it is this law that the great poet Dante set forth when he says right at the beginning of his Divine Comedy: “It was in the middle of life that I lost my way in the forest...” and so on. If you do the math: In 1300, Dante was thirty-five years old. All these great things happened to his soul.

This is a strict law. If you look at this strict law and consider some of what is happening in the present, then you will simply know from this point of view that much of what is being spread does not come from occult sources. No occult school allows people to independently spread occult truths that have not reached that age. Of course, this does not mean that one cannot start learning something early enough. But to act as a teacher of occultism, one cannot start late enough. Much, much evil would be avoided if people really knew the occult and the strict laws that prevail.

These are things that must be considered in connection with the subject of “white and black magic,” which is not so easy to treat, and of which I have really only said a few words. If you take up some of the things that could only be hinted at here and develop them further in your meditation and serious study, you will see that even these imperfect suggestions provide the initial steps for many paths to further knowledge. Above all, you will have convinced yourself that one cannot talk about such things as white and black magic at all with ordinary, trivial terms, that one must even first formulate new terms if one wants to talk about such lofty or such hideous things. It is important today to know such things, because there is much in the world of which the ordinary person knows nothing, but which he should know in order to save himself from the influences of magical arts. People are also aware of some of it, but see it as something harmless. But it is not harmless at all.

We can only make a start when we discuss such a topic, and then we will make progress in this area. The beginning is best made when a sense of the seriousness and importance of such a matter could be awakened. Even though the presentations could only be incomplete in the short time available, I still hope that the fact that they were spoken in real terms has passed some of it on to you, in order to encourage you to consider the matter with the utmost seriousness.

On several Mondays here in the Besant-Zweige, an attempt was made to characterize the occult basis of Germanic myths, and on the last Monday an expansion of the entire mythical material was begun, as it extends in a broad spiritual belt from Persia through the East of Europe and through Europe itself. It might not be appropriate today to continue exactly there, because many of our friends who are present today were not present then. And so we will try to make today's lecture more independent; we will try to present some of the circle of European myths in general, without the prerequisites of the last two lectures. This means, of course, that today we have to treat some things very aphoristically in our consideration.

I would like to remind you that the number twelve of the higher gods, which is only the double number six, as we found it last time in the Amshaspands, also recurs in the Germanic number of gods, the number of gods whose meaning we learned eight days ago. Today we want to highlight only a few gods and only a few of their attributes to show the occult foundations of such gods and such divine qualities. We have recognized the relationship between Germanic mythology and Persian mythology. We have rediscovered how the same thing is presented in the mythology that originated in Asia as in the Central European myths. In the forces of the six Amshaspands, we recognized the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head, and in the twenty-eight Izards, we recognized the forces that emanate from our spine.

You all know that Wotan-Odin belongs to this Germanic circle of gods as a kind of supreme god; furthermore, we have shown Thor and his daughter, the Truth, in their occult significance; and we have touched on Tyr, who was a kind of slaying deity, a god of war, but a strange god of war, and in some ways corresponds to the more southern Mars or Ares; it corresponds to him to the extent that Tuesday, as Tyrstag or Tiustag, is also dedicated to this god. But it is strange that we are told of other spiritual beings that play a certain role in the events that take place between the Germanic gods, and there a remarkable god, or let us say a family of gods, that of Loki, is brought into a certain relationship with Tyr. You know – and the occult basis has been explained to the members of the Besant Branch – that this Loki, who stands alongside the other Nordic gods, is descended from those fire powers whose southern origin we have characterized. While the Nordic gods are descended from the union of the fire element from the south and the cold, misty element from the north, in Loki we have an older god or at least an offshoot of an older deity, a kind of fire god. We may therefore say that Loki, who develops so much enmity towards the other gods, belongs to an older race of spiritual beings who had to cede their rule for a while to those to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong. Therefore, he has declared war on them and lives in conflict with the Aesir, with those gods who only came to power when the Atlantean human race developed out of the earlier conditions and evolved into the post-Atlantean human race; that is when the Aesir became important. The spiritual beings to which Loki belongs come from much earlier times. Among others, this Loki has three offspring of a very strange kind from his wife Angrboda, who came from the race of giants: the Fenris wolf, the Midgard snake and Hel, the goddess of the underworld. These three beings, which can be traced back to earlier times, must first be tamed by the new gods, the Aesir, so that the new states of consciousness can develop in humanity. The Midgard Serpent is tamed by being forced down into the sea and wrapped around the continents, so that it bites its own tail and is powerless for the time during which the new gods, the Aesir, rule, having replaced the earlier gods. The Fenris wolf is tamed and bound by all sorts of means, but it is precisely this that gives rise to a certain relationship between the god Tyr, the imperious god of war or battle, and his family and Loki. The god Tyr has to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf in order to be allowed to bind himself, and thereby loses his right hand. This is a very remarkable feature of Germanic mythology, which can only be understood from the occult point of view. We will visit this hand of Tyr later and see where it actually is. Hel, however, was banished to the underworld of Niflheim or Mistheim, where all those who did not fall on the battlefield had to come to her. Those who fell on the battlefield were reunited with the family of the gods; the Valkyrie appeared to them at death and took them up to the Aesir themselves. They died honorably. Those who have died the so-called death on the straw, who have fallen victim to an illness or old age, have a different fate; they must go down into the realm of Hel, where sorrow, deprivation, hunger and torment prevail. The dead who died on the straw were of no use to the realm of the Aesir, they were banished to Hel so that there would be peace during the reign of the Aesir. In this way, the children of Loki were shut out from the rule of the Aesir. Loki himself, however, was tricked and captured by the gods when he had transformed himself into a salmon. He was chained to three rock slabs and suffered great torment.

All these sagas take on a special coloration due to the fact that a remarkable tragic trait, which we have spoken about several times, is poured over all this divine existence of the Aesir. Those who have heard the lectures on Norse mythology know that this tragic trait was very much in evidence in the initiation sites of the Nordic mysteries. It was also transplanted into the myths of the gods. The Nordic gods, the Aesir, live in constant fear of their destruction, for they know that their realm will one day come to an end. We are confronted with a tragic element that tells us why this realm will come to an end. This tragic feature is that since the beginning of war and discord on earth, the seeds have been sown for what will one day be the great devastating world conflagration, when everything that the gods once bound will break free, when the Fenris wolf, the Midgard serpent and Loki himself will be freed and prepare the downfall of the Aesir. A particularly outstanding spirit from the realm of fire will come, Sutur, and the Aesir will have to yield to his power. The twilight of the gods will have come, and out of the world-fire of the old the new world will arise. Again, there is a strange feature which the saga tells us: when the Fenris wolf is released, it will open its jaws so wide that the upper jaw will reach up to the sky and the lower jaw will sink into the earth; its breath will burn up the whole world.

You all know this mythology. And now let us look at the occult basis of the traits we have just mentioned. In doing so, we will once again recall the fact that the Aesir, the gods to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong, have taken up their rule, have become world-ruling powers, after man in the late Atlantean period made the transition from an earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness, where he could still see into the spiritual world, to the post-Atlantic state, where he was only in the sensory world, in the world of externally, physically visible facts. We know that the first little group of people formed at the exact point on the Earth where warmth and cold met. We know that the ancient Atlantis was a land where the air was still completely filled with masses of haze and fog, with widespread water vapors. If we were to research the early times of Atlantis, we would recognize two regions: dense, cooler water vapors in the north and hot water vapors rising from the south. The Atlanteans had a very special memory of this time. This is evident in the part of the saga that alludes to the clash between the cold Nordic and the hot southern. As I have shown, this equalization of forces made it possible for that atmosphere to arise from which emerged what became the post-Atlantean spirituality. What the ancient Atlanteans had, spiritual perception, has departed from human beings; it has come to the gods. The gods, of course, have preserved the old clairvoyance, but they can only speak to people from the outside and influence them because people themselves no longer had clairvoyance. What people used to have themselves, clairvoyance, they now only attributed to the gods, who live far from them, above them.

Let us now recall how the heavy masses of fog from ancient Atlantis gradually descended, how Atlantis was flooded by great masses of water, and how gradually the physical emerged from the purifying air. Let us remember how that came into being which had never existed before, which could only come into being when the downpours ceased and the air gradually cleared: the rainbow arose. The rainbow was a phenomenon that people saw for the first time with the sinking of Atlantis. As the old clairvoyance of men vanished, they saw the rainbow rising for the first time, which had to form the bridge between them and the gods. That is the bridge Bifröst. All this men really saw, and the sagas only relate what they saw.

What have people lost as a result of this discovery? They have lost what they used to receive from the surrounding waters of wisdom. When the waters still filled the air, they whispered wisdom to people. The trickling of the springs, the rustling of the wind, the lapping of the waves – all this whispered wisdom to them. All this was understood by men; all was a language of spiritual beings, and this was now sunk down into the sea, into the rivers. This had been a different spiritual world from the world of the Aesir; it was a world which still contained within itself the last remnants of man's origin from the spiritual. All that had filled the air had sunk down into the sea. Wisdom had sunk down with the waters. This is a real fact. In the waters that had wrapped themselves around the continents and touched each other, the ancient ancestors of the Central European population saw the Midgard Serpent. It preserved the old wisdom that had sunk down, that people had possessed in the past and that they could no longer possess now. The power of clairvoyance had to disappear from the human race. The gods could never have ruled from without as long as the humans themselves were still clairvoyant. The Midgard Serpent, a daughter of the fire powers, had to be cast down into the sea.

The last descendant of these fire powers was Loki. Loki was the enemy of the gods. He had given people what was left of their clairvoyance: the Midgard Serpent, which was now bound. But Loki had given people something else, something else came from the old original fire beginning of the human race in the land of the Lemurians, which, however, could only develop in the land of the Atlanteans. What had gradually developed there as people developed from clairvoyance to reason? Language! We have often spoken about this. While man gradually learned to walk upright - that was in the Atlantean time - language also developed, little by little it developed, so that it was only finished at the end of the Atlantean time. When the Atlanteans, with their well-developed minds, moved east, language was already developed. But as long as it was the language of the Atlanteans, it was a unified language that was based on the unified sounds of nature itself. It was an imitation of what the Atlanteans had heard during their periods of clairvoyance and clairaudience, from the trickling springs, the roaring winds, the rustling of the trees, the rolling of the thunder, the lapping of the waves. They translated these sounds into their language, and that was the common language of the Atlanteans. It was only in the post-Atlantean period that what one might call the difference between the individual languages and idioms, the elements of the different languages, developed and became structured. The old Atlantean language, which was taken from the elements of nature, from those forces with which Loki is so intimately interwoven, had to take on different forms when the Aesir became rulers and men divided into nations and tribes. The separation of men into nations and the struggle of the individual nations among themselves led to what is called war. What was this war waged for? Why did it come? Through speech, man was given something for his development, through which he can turn his innermost feelings outward. From the occult point of view, it is one of the most important advances in evolution when the soul comes to utter its own pains, joys and desires in sounds. Language, when articulated from within, when it makes the soul resound, is something that gives man a mighty power. This power had to be suppressed by the Aesir, otherwise they could not have ruled. How did the Aesir suppress the old unified language? They did so by splitting people into different tribes and thus into different tongues. The undivided nature of the language was a mighty power – the Fenris wolf. To prevent this power from asserting itself on the stage of the Aesir, the Aesir had to tame the Fenris wolf, that is, they had to dismember the language, they had to make the language different so that they could rule over men. In doing so, they created war. War is connected with this diversity of languages. But one thing was necessary for the Aesir to become rulers: the god of war had to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf, and he had to leave his hand there. The hand of Tyr, the god of war, is stuck as a tongue in the jaws of the Fenris wolf. It is the human tongue that causes the different languages. The human tongue had to form in such a way that the old unity of language was lost. It is the individualization of language that is indicated in this profound myth of the Fenris wolf. In the myth, every organ is associated in some way with the influences of the gods from without. Here you have the organ of the tongue and the way in which the progressive organic development of man is expressed in images.

Something else occurred when the Atlanteans were gradually being prepared for the later post-Atlantean epoch. The individual states of consciousness of man were quite different at the time of ancient Atlantis than they are today. We have already mentioned that a certain degree of clairvoyance still existed; but this meant that the Atlanteans did not know the difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking as we know it today. The great difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking only arose in the post-Atlantean period. Of course, it was slowly preparing itself, but the preparation only gave the basis for what the change between waking and sleeping meant in the post-Atlantean period.

The old Atlantean dreamed during the day and dreamed at night. The dreams of the night corresponded more to reality than the dreams of today's man. And the dreams of the day were a real perception of the spiritual world that lived around the Atlantean people, especially in the early days of Atlantis. But it was only with the onset of this sharp change between the waking state of consciousness and the completely unconscious state of sleep that what is connected with the relationship of the astral body to the other bodies actually gained its full significance. Human illnesses in their present form only gained their significance in the post-Atlantic period. In the first Atlantic period, these illnesses did not yet exist; then, little by little, the illnesses that people got got worse and worse. You all know the healing influence of the astral body when it is outside the physical body during sleep. During the Atlantean period, the astral body was no longer completely outside the physical body, but it was still more outside than in the case of present-day man, and therefore it was still able to exert its healing influence. It was precisely through the penetration of the astral body into the etheric body and the physical body that completely new and different conditions arose between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and this is how the diseases we know today were created. The diseases only gained their significance when the astral body could no longer work on the physical body even during the day.

This is also expressed in the myth. Only those who fall on the battlefield die in such a way that they do not fall prey to the powers of the underworld; they still belong to the higher powers, and may go up to the gods in Valhalla. But the others, who succumb to the forces of disease, must go down to Hel, which is black on one side and white on the other, clearly expressing the change between the states of consciousness of day and night. The Aesir save themselves by taking up only those who, through death on the battlefield, can unite with the astral world, while the others must go down to Hel, who leads them into her realms. This is a profound feature of Norse saga, and this feature, too, is thoroughly based on fact.

Now all legends that are based on occultism, and all really great legends have emerged from the secret schools, always contain prophecy. Here, too, we have a reference to a future state in the development of humanity and the earth. Man will only be afflicted with seeing only the external sense world for a time. But he will ascend again to the perception that he originally had. In the distant past he was clairvoyant, but he had to descend to physical perception in order to become self-aware, and he will ascend again to clairvoyant vision. This coincides remarkably with the entire constitution of the human being. You know, at least those of you who have followed the earlier lectures, that the legend ascribes the gift of the nervous system, the ability to perceive external things as they are perceived by today's human beings, to the influx of divine powers through the gates of the senses. But you now have a very remarkable difference in your senses, which is magnificently reflected in the legend. If you take the sense of hearing: its tool is a single organ, it is localized in the ear; if you take the sense of sight: its tool, its organ is localized in the eye; if you take the sense of smell: its tool is localized in the mucous membranes of the nose; taste is localized in the tongue and palate. But now let us take the sense of feeling, the sense of warmth; where is it localized? It extends over the whole body. It differs quite essentially from the other localized senses. The organ by which man perceives warmth is curiously distinct from the other sense organs.

Let us take this sense of the saying that the forces of the gods enter through the individual human sense organs. We must say to ourselves: the forces that live in the world of sound enter man through the ear; the forces that live in the world of light enter through the eye, and so on. But the forces that live in the all-animating and all-pervading warmth fill the whole human being; they have the whole human being as their organ of perception. When the human being emerged from the bosom of the deity at the beginning of his development, it was quite different. Then the human being had no senses for perceiving the environment. First, that peculiar organ of feeling developed in him, which one would wrongly call an eye; that organ developed from the radiations and inflows into the upper layers of his being. This organ was a continuation of the human being outwards; you can still feel the soft spot in the skull of a child today, where this organ protruded, like the hole that was open where these currents entered. This organ was then the localized sense of warmth, which is now spread throughout the entire body of the human being. Man had this organ in ancient Lemuria, the hot land of fire. He could use it to find out where he could go, he could use it to feel whether the temperature was agreeable to him or not. Today this organ has shrunk and become the pineal gland. In the future, what is now spread over the whole body will reappear in a transformed form at a higher level, localized in a certain other organ.

You see this expressed in the myth through the rule of Sutur in the southern region, in Lemuria. The power of fire is represented by Sutur. You see hinted at in the myth how Sutur comes under the rule of the other gods, the Ases, whose power flows into people through the localized senses. But Sutur will return and rule in the place of the Ases. Man will return to the elemental forces of fire, and the sense of warmth will no longer be spread over the whole body, but will again be localized in one organ. The saga wonderfully reflects what also corresponds to the facts that we know through spiritual science. What has man retained from that ancient world of fire, from that fire and warmth environment, which he perceived with his ancient organs, what is it? It is not the Sutur itself. For in order to enliven this area, in which the Sutur was, man needed his old organ, the organ of feeling, which protruded like a lantern from his head. It is that “descendant” of the old sense of feeling that must experience the destinies of the whole human body, that is completely interwoven with the destiny of man, and that is the son of Sutur, Loki. Loki is chained to the triple rock of the human head, the human torso and the human limbs, so that he cannot move and is therefore exposed to all human torments and sufferings.

This leads you even deeper into this world of Germanic myths, which are of an almost impenetrable depth. You really have to dig very deep to see what kind of enthusiasm, for example, seized an artist like Richard Wagner and drove him to his work. It should never be said that Richard Wagner could have specified the individual legends in the same way as it happens through occultism. But the spiritual powers that stood behind him and inspired him directed and guided his artistic inspirations so that his art became the most beautiful expression of what the myth is based on. That is the great thing, that one does not see in the work of art what is behind it, everything has flowed out in sound and word. A remarkable instinct - if one wants to call it trivial, otherwise one would have to call it artistic inspiration - prevails in Richard Wagner. It was like a spiritual hearing of those ancient modes of speech that arose in him. He sensed those most ancient modes of speech very well and [that caused him] not to remain in the end rhyme, for that belongs to a later stage, a stage of understanding, but to choose that stage of speech development that is an echo of the the rushing waves that splashed out of the mists of ancient Atlantis: that is alliteration, that is trochee, which, for those who can feel it, repeats in sound what can be called the music of the waves.

In Germanic mythology, it is prophesied that the twilight of the gods must come because the cause of the wars has arisen. Because Tyr lost a hand in the jaws of Woltfes, the seeds of the later downfall of the gods developed. The prophetic view of the Germanic saga of the twilight of the gods points to the state where people will understand each other again, where they will no longer be separated by languages. The saga tells us that after the Atlantean population had moved east, it split up and fragmented. Only those peoples who descended from the Mongolian race and who came under Etzel or Attila - Atli, the Atlantean - have retained something of the old Atlantis. They alone have preserved the life element of the Atlanteans, while the other peoples who had remained in Europe have developed out of the old blood community through splitting and have fallen apart into wars between the individual tribes. Thus these peoples in the West are always divided and at war. They are unable to withstand the impact of the Mongolian element, which has retained the old Atlantean foundations of life. Attila's or Etzel's march is not stopped by the Germanic tribes, because the individual tribes are something that cannot impress Attila, who has retained his old great spirit - a kind of monotheism. What opposed him as individual tribes could not stop him. A remarkable feature of the saga is that Attila was immediately persuaded to turn back when he was confronted by something that went beyond blood relationship, when he was confronted by Christianity, personified in the then Pope. Then Attila saw the spiritual powers that will unite men again, and that is what the Atlantean initiate bows down to. Christianity is to prepare the way for that state of humanity when Sutur will reappear and, regardless of the differentiation of people into individual tribes, will bring peace to the world. Thus, to the people of that time, Christianity seemed like a first announcement of the twilight of the gods and the return of the old days, when people were not yet divided, not yet divided and divided by wars. This is how Christianity was perceived, especially in the very first centuries of its spread, when it was not yet Christianity that was proclaimed from Rome, but when it came from the north and west through secret Christian societies that originated in England and Ireland, and later also in France, and which were completely independent of the external authority of Rome. It was Winfried, Boniface, who emerged from the ranks of those western secret students and made his peace with Rome, whereby Christianity could then gradually adopt the special coloration of the Roman-Christian Church.

Thus we see what forces were at work in the spread of Christianity out of the memory of an ancient time and as a prophetic indication of a later future. What first appeared in Christianity in Central Europe were the feelings that lived in those people at that time and filled the outlook of those people who belonged to the secret schools and who had been taught and inspired by the secret schools.

Let us pause for a moment at this phase of Central European spiritual development and visualize what Europe was like at that time, when the old world of the gods - as described in the Germanic sagas - was gradually dying away in the twilight brought about by the religious world of Christianity. The advent of Christianity was felt to be a harbinger of the great twilight of the gods, the twilight that would one day sweep away the powers of the old gods. Christianity brought about the fading of the old world of gods, the downfall of the old gods themselves will bring the great twilight of the gods, which will then bring as reality what Christianity only brought as faith. This is how it was felt.

Now let us put ourselves in this mood, which was there. The tribes of the Goths, the Franks and so on, were all under the impression of the approaching Mongol tribes, the Hun king Attila or Etzel, on the one hand, and the gradually spreading Christianity, on the other. As a result of the events we have characterized, they were divided into different tribes; they spoke in different tongues, they had fallen apart among themselves. In the end, of all these tribes, only one actually survived: the Franconian tribe; it remained, in name and in significance. What remains to remind us of all the tribes that once roamed here, if not history: the Lombards, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, the Cherusci, the Heruli, and so on? The Franconian tribe was actually the one that triumphed over the others. But how did those feel who belonged to the dying tribes? These feelings were most vividly felt by the secret schools and the knowledgeable of these dying tribes. Let us take a look at one such tribe, the Visigoths. They lived in northern Spain and southern France, although they had once migrated far to the east. As you know, the westward migration was only a retreat. The abilities they had were still an echo of the ancient Atlantic times. When these tribes had migrated from the east to the west, they had lost the old abilities during their wanderings, but a kind of clairvoyance still lived in people as an echo of those old abilities. These people were no longer completely clairvoyant, but at certain times they could still see into the spiritual worlds. However, they often experienced this as something unknown and oppressive, and that is where the name 'Alp' comes from. Alp – what kind of being is that? It is an astral being that people sensed but no longer really knew, that they had known in Atlantean times, in the days of old seeing and clairvoyance, and that now appeared like an intruder into the world, like the Truth that we got to know last time. Nevertheless, some people felt it as the looking in of a higher, astral world into the physical one. Especially with those tribes that could not adapt to the new conditions, one felt “when the nightmare came and oppressed” that one could look into the higher worlds. In all tribes, especially the Goths, but also the Burgundians and other Germanic tribes, there were always individuals who could withstand such states of emergency and interpret them as the astral world reaching into the physical world. One such man was the Goth King Alphard, who is mentioned in those times when the Goths inhabited southern France. He was King of Aquitaine and ruled there at the time when Attila was undertaking his march from east to west. Alphard's son was the legendary Walther of the Walthari Lay. It presents us with a true transition from that time when people still knew something from their fathers about the old abilities and the connections between the old tribes. How the tribe and tribes belonged together in ancient times - the fathers knew it; therefore, the father of Walther, Alphard, had long since discussed with the king of the Burgundians that his daughter Hildegund should become the wife of Walther, in order to bridge the threatening gap between the peoples. But the tribes were unable to withstand the onslaught of the Huns, who still possessed the old vitality that they themselves had lost. Therefore, Walther, the son of Alphard, Hildegund, the daughter of the Burgundian king, and Hagen of Tronje, a hostage from the Frankish court, were forced to go down to the court of Etzel, the king of the Huns. Because Gunther, the son of the King of the Franks, Gibich, could not yet be given as a hostage, Hagen, the descendant of the old Tronje line, had to be given as a hostage. We need not relate the content of the Song of Walthari further. At the court of King Etzel, they distinguish themselves as capable warriors, but there is one thing they cannot do: they may well be able to conquer what elevates man to the ego, but what brings the ego back to peace, they cannot acquire that, it is impossible for them. Each individual was efficient in his own place, and so they are efficient warriors even in the land of the enemy, at the court of Etzel or Attila. But when Gunther came to power in the Frankish Empire and no longer maintained a friendship with Etzel, they could no longer stand their ground and had to flee. Now something remarkable occurs. There is an older version of the Song of Walthari, in which Walther, after fleeing with Hildegund, fights against the pursuing Huns. This version comes from the Franconian region. We then have a later version, which was mentioned yesterday, that arises from purely Christian intentions; it was last brought into its present form in the 10th century by Ekkehard I, a monk at the monastery of St. Gallen. The two versions differ greatly from one another. The older version originated in the land of the Franks. It comes from those who were influenced by the current in which the original Christianity still lives as a secret Christian current, which wanted to teach: Turn to the new ideas, and you will overcome what is still in you of the old that confronts you physically in the Huns. This interest could only have been taken by someone who came from the land of the Franks. But the man who reinterpreted the saga in the monastery of St. Gall to teach Christians no longer had this interest. He had a different goal; he wanted to tell people: If you stick with the old conditions, you will consume yourselves. He showed them vividly how they were consuming themselves. And indeed, it was not the Huns who consumed them. When Walther and Hildegund return to their country, it is Gunther himself who confronts them with Hagen of Tronje. Now it is the three representatives of Germanic tribes themselves who tear each other apart in battle, leaving the leg of one, the eye of another and the hand of a third on the battlefield. Walther was cut off his hand, Gunther lost his leg, and Hagen lost an eye. The one who wrote down the saga knew why he had the hand cut off the one who descended from Alphard. He represents the discord between tribes and peoples. The cutting off of the hand is meant to remind them of what happened to Tyr, the god of war. Where tribes fall out, the individual loses his hand. This motif continues down to Götz von Berlichingen, who also loses his hand; it is the same motif that appears in Germanic mythology. Thus Ekkehard wanted to say to his people: If you cling to these old views, you will tear each other apart, for discord has been brought into your midst. What can bind you together is the spirit of Christianity. He presents to them in such a way as to evoke in their souls a feeling of repulsion. That was Ekkehard's Christian intention.

In the face of this Walthari-lay, one must be especially careful not to speculate or interpret anything into it. The individual traits: the striking out of the eye, the cutting off of the hand, the cutting off of the leg and similar traits are such that something of the type and form of the saga continues to work in them, and that returns when it seems necessary. It was rightly said yesterday that the person who wrote this Waltherilied is an initiate. But it must also be emphasized that it was a Christian initiate who wanted to present a very specific Christian teaching to people.

Thus we see how spiritual science can help to clarify these phenomena of human intellectual life, and how we can shed light on areas that are still little understood by today's philology. And if you have seen this morning the way in which spiritual science can intervene in everyday life, and add to what has been said now, then this will be proof to you of the inner truth of the spiritual facts brought down from the higher worlds. Our world needs such a deepening again. But you can also see from this the way in which we have to work, and that external agitation cannot be what can really bring the theosophical world movement into the right channel. If you just come with dogmas and want to explain them to people, then they have every right to tell us that this is all fantasy. Only he who penetrates deeply into what the theosophical stream can offer, and who penetrates into it from all sides, will gradually see the theosophical truths. We need not be surprised if followers of materialistic currents find what we say foolish. How should they understand it otherwise? And how can we succumb to the delusion that Theosophy could be something that can be spread by external propaganda, like popular monism? Only through positive work, by spreading the teachings as best we can, only in this way can Theosophy become established. No matter how many failures we have, we must not let them hinder or disconcert us in any way. Therefore, the Theosophical Society can be nothing more than a place within which theosophical work is carried out. The Society can never be the main thing; the main thing must be our spiritual science itself. Perhaps the Society will even be only - to use the Nietzschean word you have probably heard before - a “bridge” and a “transition to a higher” level, to a free theosophical current in the world. At present, however, we need this place from which we can work, and without which we cannot let spiritual science flow into the world. But we must adopt the liberal view that distinguishes the human being and the cause, and that puts the cause above any institution that comes from external organization.

This brings us to the end of our program for our time together.

During the last evenings of our study group, we dealt with the occult explanation of Central European legends and myths and saw the deep truths and insights contained in these legends and myths. Just two weeks ago today, when we were able to draw attention to the very deepest and most important of such truths, we were able to take a look at a related mythology, the Persian one, which originated over in Asia and which is quite similar to what we have on European soil as Germanic or similar mythologies. We have seen what is hidden behind the name of the Persian Amshaspands and behind the name of the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards. We have rediscovered the forces emanating from these spirits of the astral realm in the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head and in the twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of nerves that emanate from our spine.

In Germanic and European mythology, we are told that the three gods Wotan, Wili and We - who also sometimes appear under other names - created man. As they once walked on the seashore, they found two trees there, and from these trees, Ask and Embla, they created the first human couple. Wotan gave these first humans spirit and the general soul life, Wili gave form, understanding and movement, and We gave countenance, speech, hearing and sight. If we hear this in European myth and have already been able to convince ourselves of the deep meaning of the other myths, then we may certainly also seek something deeper in this triad and in the endowment of man with various characteristics through the triad of gods. But we would do well to link the story of the creation of man as told in the Central European myth with the way in which the creation of man appears in the related Persian mythology. There it appears in a much larger context. At the same time, something very special can unfold for us about the spiritual power of human beings that forms myths and about the essence and nature of the human being and his connection to the earth. We know, of course, that myths and legends must not be interpreted through speculation, that their meaning must not be sought through speculation, but that we must try to clarify the origins of human knowledge and insight for ourselves, as they appear to us in the legends, in the original creative folk spirit on the one hand and in the gifts of the initiated priests on the other.

Legends and myths are nothing other than astral, spiritual perceptions. We have seen how the ancient Teuton or member of the old European population really saw the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, on the astral plane, how he heard the twelve currents that entered his head as forces and formed his twelve main nerves. We have come to know all of this as astral influences and not through some fantastic, ingenious speculation.

Now, let us first briefly and sketchily visualize the Persian myth of the origin of the world and the destiny of man. But let us bear in mind that the ancient Persian people – not the people you have met in history, but the ones from whom these legends of the gods actually originated – belonged to the most advanced part of the masses of peoples who migrated eastward from ancient Atlantis. When the old Atlantis was swept down, it was the peoples who later moved down to India and mixed with the peoples living there, and those who settled on the soil of present-day Persia, Bactria, Media, who moved furthest east; the other peoples had remained on the soil of present-day Europe.

In all these peoples, myths and legends took shape in the most diverse forms and guises, and in all of them, what was told in the images of their mythologies was nothing more than what individuals could see, either permanently or in special states, with their weak but still present clairvoyant abilities. People saw what the myths and legends tell. From this astral point of view, the members of this part of the population, which extended over the area of present-day Persia, told what they saw and what the great religious founder Zarathustra then clothed in a certain form and rounded off. Let us briefly sketch out what the people told. They traced everything that exists back to a unified cosmic ground, which they called “Zaruana Akarana”. This was a common source from which, according to this view, everything has arisen, everything that is mineral, plant, animal and human, but also everything that is higher spiritual, insofar as it is perceptible to humans. If one wanted to translate this expression “Zaruana Akarana”, one would have to do it with “luminous source” or “luminous background”. Now out of this “luminous source” emerged a deity with qualities of goodness, with qualities of intellectual spiritual perfection, a wise, good, spiritual being, Ormuzd, and another being that was opposed to this good spirit Ormuzd. This other spiritual entity is usually called Ahriman. So within the Persian myths and legends we have these two spiritual entities: Ormuzd and Ahriman; a good deity and an evil opposing deity. Ahriman could be translated into English with the term 'the resistive' or 'the opposing-minded'; that would be the sense of this term.

If we now want to relate the Amshaspands and the Izards to these spiritual beings, then we have to imagine that the higher spiritual beings, which we have come to know as Amshaspands and Izards, radiated and emanated from Ormuzd. They are the hosts through whom Ormuzd works, so that he is the supreme ruler who assigns them their places, dividing them according to the twelve months of the year and the twenty-eight or thirty-one days of the month, after which they change their dominion. But now the Persian myth of Ahriman tells us: He also descends from the general “illuminated source”, but from the very beginning he showed himself unruly and rebelled, opposing the six Amshaspands with his six evil spirits, the Devas or Devs, lower and higher. So you have to imagine that each of the Amshaspands has an adversary, and just as the Amshaspands belong to the regent Ormuzd, so these Devas, in the sense of the Persian myth, belong to the following of Ahriman. He has set up his hosts so that they may constantly confront the good hosts of the Amshaspands in a long-lasting battle. And likewise he has arrayed his countless hosts of the lower devas against the hosts of the Izards.

This Persian myth thus shows us all the events of the world in a certain way entangled in a long-lasting struggle. Everything that happens today is to be seen in the sense of this Persian myth in such a way that it is the outflow of this struggle. What is happening should actually be presented in such a way that in such an event in the world, on the one hand, the forces of good emanating from the Amshaspands and the Izards are on one side, and on the other hand, the forces of evil emanating from the Devas are on the other. Only when we understand the interaction of good and evil forces will we understand, according to the Persian myth, the events and facts of the present world.

We must now ask ourselves: Are the stories that confront us in these images also astral perceptions? We will see that they are, down to the last detail. To understand this fact, you will be helped by the circumstance that a certain role in ancient Persian worship is played by what could be called the worship of fire. This worship of fire should not be imagined as worship of physical fire; that is not the case. It is not worshiped, nor is there any special cult associated with physical fire. For Persian myth and Persian cult, physical fire is nothing more than a symbol, an outward expression of a certain spiritual power that reigns in fire. For the spirit of fire, the external, physical fire is the expression.

Now let us see where this fire worship comes from. It has a deep occult origin. Let us recall how, in our theosophical world view, the origin of the world is told. We know that our Earth was once united with what now accompanies it as the Moon, and that the Moon only separated from it after a certain time. We know that in even earlier times, our Earth was united with what is now the Sun. These were the two important cosmic events that preceded the evolution of man. These three cosmic bodies – the sun, moon and earth – once formed only one single body, which we can imagine as if we mixed the sun, moon and earth together and formed a single large cosmic body out of them. First the sun separated out, and while it had previously given its light to the beings from inside the earth, it now sent it to the earth and its beings from the outside. That was at the time when the earth still had the moon within it. It was the moon that had the bad forces within it, and these bad forces had to come out. If the moon had remained inside, the earth would never have been able to undergo the development that allowed it to become the setting for present-day humanity.

When the moon had separated, man was not yet on earth in his present form; he was not yet endowed with a soul, insofar as he existed at all as a physical being. Immediately after the moon had separated from the earth, this human form still led a plant-like existence. In this human form, which was present on the earth that had been abandoned by the moon, there was nothing more than the potential for today's physical body and today's etheric body. That which is present in man today as the astral body was not yet united with the earthly. Just as clouds float in the air today, so the astral bodies floated around in those days, and later sank into the physical human bodies. And the human bodies that walked around as the physical ancestors of today's man were in a state of perpetual sleep. Just as plants are in a perpetual state of sleep, so man at that time was in a kind of sleep state, he was endowed only with the physical and etheric bodies. Up to that time there was no being on earth at all that had the most important quality for today's humanity and higher animal world, the quality of red, warm blood: inner warmth.

If you would go back in time with me and examine the creatures of the old moon, you would find that all these creatures of the old moon, on which the ancestors of present-day man were already present, still had the warmth of their surroundings, just as the lower animals that have retained this stage still have today. They had, as one says, body fluids that could change their temperature, they had the warmth of their surroundings. What occurs as internal warmth in humans and higher animals, and what belongs to it, the red blood, was by no means present in the beings of that time.

But now we have heard that at the same time as the separation of the Sun and the Moon from the Earth, another cosmic event took place: the passage of Mars through the Earth. The substances of the two cosmic bodies, Mars and Earth, were so thin at that time that Mars was able to pass through the Earth's body in terms of its substance. It left behind a substance that the Earth had not had before: iron. The Earth only incorporated iron after the passage of Mars, and this iron was the necessary precondition for the formation of red blood. What was the consequence? When the Moon moved away from the Earth and the Earth remained alone, the Earth was in a kind of fiery state; it was surrounded by a warm atmosphere. And now we come to an idea that I ask you to grasp very precisely. Imagine all the warmth that is inside the bodies of the millions of warm-blooded humans and animals that inhabit the earth today, imagine that it lived as a warm atmosphere around the earth: then you have approximately the state in which the earth was immediately after the moon had gone.

The beings did not yet have the inner warmth; the warmth immediately surrounded the entire globe, it was still outside. So we can imagine the earth at that time as a still liquid body, in which the metals were dissolved in the most diverse ways, and which was surrounded by this sea of fire or warmth. Into this sea of warmth the sun, which was outside, sent its rays of light. For the occultist, light is by no means merely physical light. Rather, this physical light is the bodily expression of spirit. Thus, with the sun's rays, the essence of the spirits of the sun streamed down to earth. Light as an expression of the spirituality of light streamed into the fiery atmosphere, into the warm atmosphere of the earth. Imagine this vividly. You have the Earth, it is surrounded by the atmosphere of warmth, and falling into it are the rays of the sun, which for us are rays of spirit. Through the fact that these sun spirits in the sun's rays fall into the warmth of the Earth, the collective soul was formed first, the collective astral body of all humanity and of the higher animals. Down on the ground, there were these sleeping human plants, which had an etheric body and a physical body. And just as it would be today if all of you sitting here were to suddenly fall asleep – which, of course, is not desirable! -, then all your astral bodies would leave your physical bodies and mix with each other, so it was in those days; only then they mixed even more, they were an undifferentiated mass when they had the common warmth, into which the light of the sun, which was the expression of the spirit, shone. As is well known, the astral body of modern man is also called an aura because to the modern seer it appears as a halo of light surrounding the human being, somewhat like an oval, egg-shaped form of light radiating from all sides of the human being. In those days, the human being's astral body was contained in this warm atmosphere of the earth; it was not yet divided into the individual astral bodies; and the light of the sun, which was the bearer of the spirituality of the sun, shone into them.

Now imagine your own cosmic-universal development at that time. What is today your physical and etheric body, was then a plant existence, and grew, as it were, out of the earth. And what lives in you today as soul and spirit came from the atmosphere surrounding the earth, and was gradually absorbed by your physical and etheric body. And this had been prepared in the common aura of the earth, which must be conceived in physical terms as a common warmth, permeated and suffused by the sunlight filled with spirit. Thus you have absorbed the warmth that once enveloped the earth. What lives today in your warm blood is part of this primeval fire that flows around the earth. If it were possible today to draw all this warmth out of the bodies of animals and human beings, it would be possible to restore the ancient state of the primeval fire. The warmth that lives within us today is the divided warmth that once surrounded the earth as a sea of warmth, and the light flowed into this common blood body. This light, too, has been divided, little by little, and has created man's higher spirituality. Naturally, only dull, lower spirituality was present in the merely physical-etheric bodies. What is rooted in the human mind today, the higher spirituality, that which has been formed by the influx of the Amshaspands, comes from the spiritual forces of the sun.

And now imagine yourself in the astral vision of the clairvoyant. What does he see? He sees how the earth is formed, how the moon separates; the earth is surrounded by fire mist, by the collective warmth, into which radiates, wonderfully illuminating it from within, the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world, which comes from the sun, transforms the sun-drenched earth into the earth aura. This is seen by the astral clairvoyant. And the old Persian clairvoyant called this “Aura Mazda”, the great aura, Ahura Mazdao, the great aura of wisdom from which the individual auras of human beings have emerged. Ormuzd is only a transformed expression for Ahura Mazdao, the great aura.

Now let us go a little further. How could this state, which the astral clairvoyant must perceive in such a great and powerful way when he transports himself back to this time, this state that is described in the Persian myth, which is, after all, a retelling of the results of astral clairvoyance? This condition is brought about by the fact that spiritual entities are also linked to the sun. For the materialist, only physical rays stream forth from the sun. But for the one who sees things occultly, it is the case that with the sunlight, the forces of the spiritual inhabitants of the sun stream down to the earth. Just as the earth is inhabited by people, the sun is also inhabited by mighty beings, who differ from the earthly beings in that they are much, much more developed than people. The Genesis, the Old Testament, calls these sun dwellers the Elohim, light beings. Just as people have a body of flesh, so these sun dwellers have a body of light. They are light beings. And their powers are not limited to a confined space; they can radiate out to the Earth. The deeds of the sun spirits, the Elohim, flow to all earthly beings with the sunlight. In every ray of light, in every ray of sunshine, we see the deeds of the sun dwellers. Human beings will only reach this level when the Earth has reached the state of Vulcan. You know that the evolution of the Earth proceeds from Saturn via the Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter and Venus to Vulcan, which we indicate as the last embodiment of the Earth. When the Earth has developed to the state of Vulcan, then human beings will have reached the stage that the present inhabitants of the Sun have reached in their evolutionary process today. This is also where we find the Amshaspands living today. Their actual home is in the sun, and from there they send us their deeds through the sunlight.

This is how the deeds of the Amshaspands could come into being in humans, as I have described to you. They sent their twelve currents into the human head and thus brought about the development of thinking and spirituality in humans. On the moon, the Izards had worked on the human being first and developed the twenty-eight spinal nerves. Then came the endowment of the human being with the twelve nerves of the head, which came from the Amshaspands, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao. But each time, certain entities were left behind in the evolutionary process of a world body. They do not come along. Not only high school students are left behind, but also world beings remain at a level that the others have already surpassed. During the moon phase of the earth, the Elohim, the sun-light spirits, have risen to the level that allows them to live in the sun and send their deeds to the earth and to earth humanity. Other spirits, who were already on the same level as the Elohim at that time, remained behind, “stayed seated”; they were unable to bring their development on the old moon so far that they could begin a higher existence with the sun as their arena. It was therefore not initially destined for these lagging spirits to work in the sun's rays, to work from the outside in. Rather, in their further development, they had to seek what they had not yet experienced on the moon in a lower existence, one connected with the earth itself, with the earthly sphere.

What was the new condition that now emerged on earth, giving the beings new characteristics? It showed itself in the fact that the warm atmosphere, the warm environment, now entered into the blood. Warm blood was created. In this state, the retarded spirit hosts sought to make up in their development what they had previously been unable to achieve. They sought to carry the deeds that they could not place in the sun's rays into the warmth, which was transformed into inner life.

Let us visualize this vividly, as it can be seen with clairvoyant vision. [During the following explanations, a drawing was made on the blackboard, but the scribes did not record it.] We see that the deeds of the Amshaspands and the Izards, which emanate from Ahura Mazdao, flow into the head and spine of man, while the inside of man is filled with warm blood. The human body, as it were, absorbs the warm blood; it is conducted from all sides from the outside into the interior of the body. And if we examine the occult anatomy of man, we find that each such stream, sent from the regions of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, was accompanied by another stream of warmth flowing in from without, and this accompanied the nerve current. With this incoming warm blood, the forces of those spirits who had been left behind entered the human being; these were the hosts of Ahriman, who now, with warmth, sent their forces into the human being just as the Amshaspands sent their light force. So it is that we have sent a blood stream in the opposite direction to each of the currents of the Amshaspands. In this red blood stream, which flows parallel to the nerve currents, the opposing forces of the devas also flow. In the red blood flowing to the Amshaspands, what comes from the opponents of the Amshaspands and Izards, from the devas, the hosts of Ahriman, flows in the opposite direction. And now we feel pulsating in the blood that which came from the hosts of Ahriman.

That which the clairvoyant can see flowing into the physical body on the astral plane is reflected in a profound and inspired way in the Persian myth. We see the interaction of the great light of Ahura Mazdao with the incoming warmth that makes blood the power in man that it is. Now we know that blood is the expression of the I. And so we see how everything that flows out of the great wisdom, out of Ahura Mazdao, is accompanied by egoism, because it is confronted by the currents of Ahriman in the blood. Egoism flows into all of the spiritual activity of the human being. We see it flowing in properly when we devote ourselves to this imagination. In this way, you must work your way up to a true visualization of what has happened on our earth.

And now we remember that these spirits, who had remained behind from the lunar existence and did not make it to the solar existence, that these spirits on the moon were the same kind of beings as the sun spirits, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao, who had reached beyond the lunar existence. On the moon they had reached the stage of the I; they only remained behind and just preserved this stage. As long as they were on the moon, the spirits of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, and the spirits of Ahriman were on the same level, of the same kind, they were of an ego-like nature. This ego, the original ego, Zaruana Akarana, is the divine ego that has not yet entered the body, that still rests in the bosom of the deity. Where this ego had developed to the point that it could have a solar existence, it formed an astral body that is under the rule of Ormuzd. But a lower power is incorporated into this, the power of the retarded hosts of Ahriman.

So you have now seen the emergence of this fourth link of human nature, the I, and the third link of the human being, the astral body, which is spiritualized by two entities. Incorporated into it are the good powers of Ormuzd and the powers of the egoistic nature, of Ahriman. The ego is placed in the struggle raging in one's own astral body between the good and the evil forces; it is the original entity Zaruana Akarana that splits into the good, true forces of the astral body and the opposing forces that are the forces of Ahriman. Ahriiman or Angramainyu means something like the one who resists or the spirit of opposition. Thus we understand how such a myth is actually nothing more than the retelling of what the ancient astral clairvoyants have seen.

Now let us take a closer look at these forces radiating from the Sun to the Earth and to man. What the Persian myth calls Ormuzd or Ahura Mazdao is actually an expression for “great soul”; it is the same as what the Hellenes call Psyche; and what we understand by the human astral body is the “little soul”. The human soul is composed of thinking, feeling and willing. These are the three basic powers of the soul, which for the occultist are actually three independent entities; we will learn more about this later. Just as the human soul is divided into these three parts, so is the great soul, the great aura, divided into three parts. This same trait can be found in Persian as well as in Central European myths. The Central European myth now calls these three basic forces Wotan, Wili and We, with Wotan representing the thinking, Wili the willing and We the feeling force.

We can immerse ourselves deeply in the whole astral contemplation of these ancient times when we see how the syllable “We” resonates with an original designation for the feeling force. In fact, all higher feeling, even when it is full of relish, has emerged from sorrow and pain. And why? Imagine once more the original human form, which, as it were, sprang out of the earth, the plant-human being with a physical body and an etheric body. Just as it sprang out at that time, the senses were only present as an inclination, just as a blossom is already contained in the plant germ. Man could not yet see. Eyes such as we have today only arose after a long, long process of development. These eyes, which today see the glory of sunlight, how did they arise according to occult physiology? Originally, when only the physical body and the etheric body were present, there was nothing here in these places where the eyes are now. However, these places proved to be particularly sensitive to the sun's rays sent to the earth. And what the sun first caused as an impression was pain. Two suffering points arose on the human body at these points, pain points that were constantly being injured. It was exactly the same as if you cut yourself and a scab formed at that point. So too, scabs formed at those sensitive points, and from these scabs the magnificent miracle of the eye gradually formed; albeit after a long, long development. What pain had torn out of the body became the glorious eye.

Nothing can arise in the world as enjoyment, as pleasure, that does not have pain as its basis. Just as satiety, with its enjoyment, has hunger as a prerequisite, so all knowledge and also all joy has pain as its basis. That is also the reason why, in tragedy, pain satisfies us like the presentiment of an expected release. Everything that will achieve perfection in the future undergoes a state of pain and suffering in the present. But this offers us consolation because we know that what is pain and suffering today will be states of perfection in the future. Overcome pain will become perfection in the future. The perfect eyes of today owe their existence to the earlier painful points on the human body; pain that has been overcome. This is what the initiate Paul meant when he uttered the mighty word: “All creatures groan in pain, awaiting adoption as children,” or “All creatures are afraid in the pain of existence and await adoption as children,” which expresses nothing other than the longing for a relationship of childship to God that will one day be attained again. He who comprehends existence sees pain flooding through all existence.

Now let us imagine the good spirits, whether we call them Ormuzd, as in the Persian myth, or Wotan, Wili and We, as in the Germanic myth, and see how these solar powers stream towards us. When the waters of Atlantis had been lost and the sun had been released, they worked in the sun's rays and permeated the air. That is why the light spirits are also air spirits, which were described as Wotan's wild army; these spirits were felt in the three parts Wotan, Wili and We. We want to get an idea of how it presents itself to the astral clairvoyant. Take the human being; when he was still a plant-human being, consisting of a physical and etheric body. The sun's power was at work through Wotan in thinking, through Wili, who gives everything will-like, and through We, who gives everything feeling-like; everything feeling-like rests in Weh, we feel this from the name.

How must this now be told if it is to be told appropriately? Wotan, Wilii and We were walking on the seashore; they found plants there and endowed these plants with their powers: Wotan with spirit and the general soul life, Wili with form, mind and movement, with everything rooted in the will, We with countenance and color, with speech, hearing and sight, with everything rooted in the feelings. Thus the first humans came into being. In these pictures of the Central European myth of the walk of the three gods on the seashore, of the finding of the trees and the bestowing of the divine powers and qualities upon them, we recognize how these spirits living in the sun gave their powers from their great aura and let them flow into the individual human aura. Through occultism we can take things literally again. We see how the images of mythology are based on real facts; and we look deep into the clairvoyant visions of the wise man who taught in the mystery schools and who, through his astral perception, was able to tell the people, who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance, about these visions in imaginative images. He gave the people truths that he experienced in a half-awake, clairvoyant intermediate state. He knew that he could count on understanding from those people who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance. If we immerse ourselves in the soul of such ancestors from the point of view of occultism, our view expands. Never can the arrogance and conceit of the Age of Enlightenment come over us, saying: How have we come so gloriously far! Is it not a terrible arrogance, the conceit of the people of the 19th century, that in the face of the truths that the 19th century has found, everything that people knew before is only childish fantasy, and that what is found today must apply for all time? Is it not a terrible arrogance when those who preach today from the lecterns of the universities and courtrooms, and those who tinker around, claim that the only form of truth is that which the last decades have produced? They consider themselves humble, but there is the worst kind of arrogance in this attitude. Beyond this attitude, the spirit-seeker is brought to the realization – which must seize his heart, his thoughts and his soul – that other times have also possessed the truth, only in a different form, that there are many forms of truth. And he also overcomes the other pride, that what is said by today's scholars should apply for all eternity. Just as the forms of knowledge have changed since our ancestors, as they told stories in pictures, which we today proclaim in a different form, in the form of occultism, so future times will proclaim the truth not in our forms, but in other forms that will have grown far beyond our own. We know that truth is eternal, but we also know that it flows through human souls in the most diverse forms.

One thing is that our view broadens; and the other is how such insights must flow into our inner being in a living way. We will realize this when we consider the following: What actually is this astral body that we carry within us? It is a part of that great wisdom aura, a part of the aura of Mazda, which is the body of wisdom of the whole earth, and to which forces flow from the sun. Thus we walk about on the earth and feel that we are the bearers of the sun's forces, which have been absorbed into the earth's aura. Our feeling grows for something that we have to develop: that this human body and these human bodies have been given to us by the great wisdom of the world, the great spirit of the world. In occultism, the human body is also called a temple. And we are responsible for bringing back to the radiant source what we have received, back in a corresponding refinement, purification and perfection. In this way we learn to feel at one with the existence of the world. Not in a fantastic way, but bit by bit we learn to be a note in the great orchestral music that resounds through the cosmos and which we call the music of the spheres. Our sense of responsibility grows, along with a certain elation, but combined with feelings of humility in the right balance. This is what theosophy teaches us: it teaches us in a precise way, not just that we are human beings and what kind of human beings we are, but it makes us spiritual people who know our place in the spiritual and cosmic existence. This is the ethics, the moral teaching, that flows from knowledge. When we grasp this, then moral feelings pulsate through us that have nothing of sentimentality and philistinism. A natural moral teaching passes through us when we perceive the moral teaching as a direct consequence of knowledge. Theosophy, when properly understood, cannot help but bring people the highest moral concepts, because it brings knowledge, the realization of how man is placed in the whole context of the world. Theosophy will never stoop to admonishing or preaching. No one becomes better when admonished: Be good! or: Do this, for it is good! - because that leads people to sentimentality and philistinism under all circumstances. Theosophy shows us what man is and how he is connected with the whole world, and it regards it as somewhat unseemly to approach man with moral principles, because man is so constituted that he follows the right morality all by himself out of knowledge - when he knows himself. Not in the lower, but in the higher sense, the occultist feels it as a violation of spiritual shame if he were to address himself directly and immediately to the feelings of men. He addresses himself directly to the intellect, but he presents the knowledge in such a way that the feelings attach themselves to it. He presents the objective facts to man, and then the feelings come of themselves. He does not approach man because he has the greatest respect for man, and because he has the sense that in every man the perfecting man is to be respected and esteemed. When a person learns the truth, he becomes good, because the soul of truth is kindness. When a person absorbs the knowledge of the truth, he absorbs kindness with it. This kindness does not follow from lower knowledge, but it follows from higher knowledge. Therefore, basically, the will to knowledge should flow into people through the theosophical current, because that is the sure path to perfection, to goodness.

And so we have seen at the same time how a directly practical question of life arises for us from such considerations, and how spiritual wisdom is incorporated into our culture and into our whole life.

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.