The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us try to think once about the fact how many people are still able to evoke a clear, somewhat more in-depth idea in their souls walking through the streets and looking at the preparations of Christmas everywhere. There are slightly clear ideas about this festival today and they correspond less to the intentions of those—we are allowed to speak as theosophists this way—who once used these great festivals as symbols of the infinite and imperishable in the world. You can convince yourselves of it adequately if you have a look at the so-called Christmas considerations of our newspapers. There probably cannot be anything bleaker and stranger at the same time to that which it concerns than what is disseminated by the printed paper into the world at this time. Let a kind of summary of that pass before our souls that these various autumn talks on the spiritual-scientific horizon have brought us. It should not be a pedantic, schoolmasterly summary, but a summary of the kind as it can arise in our hearts if we link on Christmas from the spiritual-scientific point of view. The spiritual-scientific view of life should not be a grey theory, not an external confession, not a philosophy, but it should pulsate in our life directly. The modern human being is estranged to the immediate nature, much more than he thinks, much more than still at the time of Goethe.

On the other hand, does anyone still feel the whole depth of that saying by Goethe, which the great poet spoke when he entered the circles of Weimar and began a life epoch extremely important for him at the same time? At that time, he addressed a hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with her mysterious forces:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to come out of her, and unable to go deeper into her. Uninvited and not warned she takes us up in the circulation of her dance and drifts away with us, until we are tired and drop out of her arm.

She creates forever new figures; what is there was never, what was does not come again—everything is new and, nevertheless, always the old.

We live in the middle of her and are strange to her. She speaks continually with us and does not betray her mystery to us. We continuously work on her and, nevertheless, do not exercise power over her.

She seems to be out for individuality of everything and makes nothing of the individuals. She is always building and always destroying, and her workshop is inaccessible.

She lives in nothing but children; where is the mother? She is the only artist: from the simplest material to the biggest contrasts; by all appearance without effort to the biggest completion—to the most precise assertiveness, always covered with something soft. Any of her works has own being, any of her phenomena the most isolated concept, and, nevertheless, everything constitutes one.

She plays a game: whether she sees it herself, we do not know, and, nevertheless, she plays it for us who stand in the corner.

It is an everlasting life, becoming and moving in her, and, nevertheless, it does not move further along. It changes forever and no moment of standstill is in her. She has no concept of remaining and curses the standstill. She is firm. Her step is measured, her exceptions are seldom, and her principles are unalterable...

We all are her children. If we believe to act according to her principles least of all, maybe, we act most of all according to this big principle that floods through Nature and streams into us. Who does feel the other significant saying by Goethe so deeply even today with which Goethe tried not less to express the empathy with the concealed forces common to Nature and the human being, where Goethe approaches Nature not as a lifeless being like the modern materialistic thinking where he speaks to her like a living spirit:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me. In fire
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
And when the storm-swept forest creaks and groans,
when, as it falls, the giant fir strips down
and crushes neighbouring boughs and trunks, and when
the hill echoes its fall as muffled thunder,
you guide me to the safety of a cave,
reveal my self to me, and then my heart's
profound and secret wonders are unveiled.

(Faust I, Forest and Cave, v. 3217-3234)

Goethe tried out of his feeling of nature to refresh something of that, which flowed out of emotion and knowledge at the same time by this mood. This is the mood of the times in which wisdom still was in league with nature, when those symbols of empathy with nature and the universe were created, which we recognise as the great festivals from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Such a festival has become something abstract, almost uninteresting to the soul and to the heart. Today often the word about which we can argue to which we can swear weighs much more than that which should apply to this word originally. This external word should be the representative, the announcement, the symbol of the big creative word that lives in the outside nature and in the whole universe. It revives again in us if we recognise ourselves correctly, and all human beings have to become aware of it with those opportunities that are in particular suited to it according to the course of nature. This was the intention when the great festivals were established. Let us attempt to apply our knowledge we have got in the course of the spiritual-scientific talks to understand something that the old sages expressed in the Christmas.

Christmas is not only a Christian festival. It existed where religious feeling expressed itself. If you look around in old Egypt, thousands and thousands years before our calendar, if you walk across to Asia, even if you go up into our areas, again many years before our calendar, everywhere you find this same festival during the days in which also the birth of Christ is celebrated by the Christians.

What a festival was celebrated everywhere on earth since ancient times during these days?—We want to refer to nothing but to those marvellous fire festivals, which were celebrated in the areas of Northern and Central Europe in old times. During these days, that festival was mainly celebrated in our areas, in Scandinavia, Scotland, England, within the circles of the old Celts by their priests, the so-called druids. What did one celebrate there?

One celebrated the ending wintertime and the springtime announcing itself again bit by bit. Of course, we still approach wintertime advancing to Christmas. But in nature a victory has already announced itself there which can just be the symbol of a festival of hope for the human being, or better said—if we use the word that exists for this festival almost in all languages—the symbol of a festival of confidence, of trust and faith.

The victory of the sun over the opposing powers of nature: this is the symbol. We have felt the shorter and shorter growing days. This decreasing in length of the days is an expression of a decease, better said of the natural forces falling asleep up to the day at which we celebrate Christmas and at which our ancestors celebrated the same festival. During this day, the days start becoming longer. The light of the sun celebrates its victory over darkness. Today, this appears to us, thinking materialistically, even more than we believe it, as an event about which we do no longer think in particular. It appeared to those who had a lively feeling and wisdom connected with this feeling as a living expression of a spiritual experience, of an experience of the divinity, which leads our life. As if in the single human life an important event takes place that decides something, one felt such a solstice in that time as something important in the life of a higher being. Yes, even more: one did not feel this decreasing and increasing of the days immediately as an expression of such an event in the life of a higher being, but still more like a reminiscent sign of something much bigger, something unique. Thus, we conceive of the great basic idea of Christmas as a universal festival, a festival of humanity of the highest rank.

In the times in which a real secret doctrine one saw something occurring in nature at Christmas that was considered as a commemoration of a great event which had taken place once on earth. The priests, who were the teachers of the peoples, gathered the faithful around themselves during these days at midnight and tried to reveal a great mystery to them and spoke about the following. I do not tell anything sophisticated to you here, anything found by the abstract science, but I say something that lived in the mysteries, in secret cult sites, because the priests gathered their faithful around themselves by that which they said to them to give them strength for their teachings.

Today, they said, we see the victory of the sun over the darkness announcing itself. Thus, it also was once on this earth. There the sun celebrated the great victory over the darkness. This happened in such a way: until then all physical, all bodily life on our earth had almost only reached the stage of animals. What lived on our earth as the highest realm was only on the level to be prepared to receive the immortal human soul. Then a moment came in this prehistoric time, a great moment of human development, when the immortal imperishable human soul descended from divine heights. The wave of life had developed up to that time in such a way that the human body had become able to take up the imperishable soul in itself. Indeed, this human ancestor ranked higher than the materialist naturalists believe. However, the spiritual part, the immortal part was not yet in him. It descended only from another, higher planet to our earth, which should now become the scene of its work, the place of residence of that which is now undetachable to us, of our soul.

We call these human ancestors the Lemurian race. The Atlantean race and then ours, which we call the Aryan race, followed it. Within this Lemurian race, the human bodies were fertilised by the higher human soul. Spiritual science calls this great moment of human development the descent of the divine sons of the spirit.

Since that time, this human soul forms and works in the human body for its higher development. Unlike the materialist natural sciences imagine, the human body was fertilised by the imperishable soul at this time. At that time contrary to the view of the materialist naturalists, something happened in the big universe that belongs to the most important events of our human development.

At that time, that constellation, that mutual position of earth, moon, and sun gradually appeared, which made the descent of the souls possible. The sun became significant for growth and thriving of the human being and of the plants and animals belonging to him. Only somebody who realises spiritually the whole becoming of humanity and earth correctly sees this connection of sun, moon, and earth with the human beings living on earth.

There was a time—one taught this at these old times—, when the earth was one with the sun and moon. They were one body. The beings still possessed figures and appearances different from those living on earth today, because they were adapted to that world body which consisted of sun, moon and earth together. Everything that lives on this earth received its being because first the sun and then the moon separated, and that these heavenly bodies interrelated now externally with our earth. The mystery of the togetherness of the human spirit with the entire universal spirit is based on this relationship. Spiritual science calls the universal spirit logos, which encloses sun, moon, and earth at the same time. We live, we work and we are in it.

As well as the earth was born out of the body which enclosed sun and moon at the same time, the human being was born out of a spirit, of a soul to which sun and earth and moon belong at the same time. If the human being looks at the sun, at the moon, he should see not only these external physical bodies, but he should regard them as external bodies of spiritual beings. Modern materialism has admittedly forgotten this. However, who can no longer regard sun and moon as the bodies of spirits can also not recognise the human body as the body of a spirit. As true as the human body is the bearer of a spirit, as true the heavenly bodies are the bearers of spiritual beings.

The human being also belongs to these spiritual beings. As well as his body is separated from the forces which prevail in the sun and moon, and, nevertheless, as his external physical accommodates forces which are active in the sun and moon, the same spirituality, which rules on the sun and the moon is also active in his soul. While the human being became this being on earth, he became dependent on that effect of the sun, which it causes as a special body shining on the earth.

Our ancestors felt as spiritual children of the whole universe that way, and they said to themselves, we have become human beings because the spirit of the sun caused our spiritual form. The victory of the sun over the darkness signifies to us a memory of the victory, which our soul gained in those days, in the times in which the sun appeared for the first time in such a way as it shines now onto the earth. It was a victory of the sun, when the immortal soul entered the physical body in the sign of the sun, when it descended into the darkness of desires and passions.

Let us imagine the life of the spirit. The darkness precedes the solar victory. It followed a former solar time only. Thus, it was also with the human soul. This human soul originates from the original divinity. However, it had to disappear for a while in unconsciousness to build up the lower human nature within this unconsciousness; since this human soul itself built up the lower human nature gradually to inhabit this house built by itself. If you imagine that a master builder builds a house, according to his best forces, and enters it later, you have a right simile of the entry of the immortal human soul into the human body. The human soul could work only unconsciously in that time on its house. This unaware work is expressed in the simile by the darkness. The emergence of consciousness, the lighting up of the conscious human soul is expressed in the simile by the solar victory.

Thus, this solar victory signified to those who still had a lively feeling of the connection of the human being with the universe the moment in which they had received the most important of their earthly existence. This great moment was maintained in that celebration.

At all times one imagined the way of the human being on earth in such a way that this human being becomes more and more similar to the regular rhythmical way of nature. If we look from the human soul at that which encloses its life now, at the way of the sun in the universe and at all with which this way of the sun is connected, something becomes clear to us that is infinitely important to feel. It is the big rhythmical, the big harmonious in contrast to the chaotic, to the unharmonious in the own human nature. Look at the sun, pursue it on its way, and you see how rhythmically, how regularly its phenomena return in the course of the day and of the year. You see how regularly and rhythmically everything is connected in nature under the influence of the sun.

On occasion, I have already emphasised that everything is rhythmical with the beings ranking below the human being. Imagine the sun deviating for a moment, for a fraction of a second only, and imagine the unbelievable, indescribable mess, which would be caused in our universe.

The rhythmical life processes of all beings that are dependent on the sun are connected with this harmony. Imagine the sun in the course of the year how it evokes the beings of nature in the spring, imagine how little you are able to think that the violet blossoms at a time different from that when you are used. Imagine that the seeds are sown at another time and the harvest may take place at another time than it takes place. Up to the animal life, everything appears to you depending on the rhythmical way of the sun. Even with the human being, everything is rhythmical, regular, and harmonious, as far as it is not subjected to the human passions, instincts or even to the human mind. Observe the pulse, the way of digestion, and admire the big rhythm and feel the great, infinite wisdom that floods through the whole nature, and then compare the irregular, the chaotic to it which prevails in the human passions and desires and in particular in the human mind and thinking. Try once to let the regular of your pulse and your breath pass yourselves by, and compare it to the irregularity of your thinking, feeling and willing. They wander around aimlessly.

On the other hand, imagine how wisely the life powers are arranged how the rhythmical has to overcome the chaos. Which crimes do not all human passions and hedonism commit against the rhythm of the human body! On occasion I have already mentioned here how marvellous it is for him who gets to know the heart by anatomy, this wonderfully arranged organ of the human body, and must say to himself what has it to bear because the human being enjoys tea, coffee and so on that has an effect on the rhythmical, harmonious heartbeat. Thus, it is with the entire rhythmical, divine nature that our ancestors admired and the soul of which is the sun with its regular way.

While the sages and their followers looked at the sun, they said to themselves, you are the picture of that which is not yet this soul, which is born with you, but which it should become.—The divine world order presented itself to these sages in its whole glory. The Christian worldview also says that the glory is in the divine heights (Latin gloria in excelsis deo). The word “glory” means revelation, not honour, or splendour.

One should not say, glory to God in highest heaven—but God is revealed in the heavens today.—This is the true meaning of the sentence. In this sentence, one can fully feel the glory flowing through the world. In former times, one felt in such a way that one established this world harmony as a great ideal for that who should be the leader of the remaining humanity. Therefore, one spoke at all times and everywhere where one was aware of these matters of the “sun hero.”

In the temple sites where the initiation was carried out one distinguished seven degrees. I use the Persian terms of these degrees. The first degree is that where the human being went beyond the everyday feeling, where he came to a higher mental feeling and to the knowledge of the spirit. One called such a human being “raven.” Hence, the ravens are those, which announce to the initiates in the temples what takes place outdoors in the world. When the medieval poetry of wisdom wanted to portray an initiate in the person of a medieval ruler, for example, Barbarossa who should wait inside of the earth with the treasures of wisdom of the earth for that big moment when Christianity should rejuvenate humanity, it let the ravens be again the messengers. Even the Old Testament speaks of the ravens of Elias (Elia, Elijah).

The initiates of the second degree are the “occult.” The third degree is that of the “fighters,” the fourth degree is that of the “lions.” The initiates of the fifth degree are called with the name of their own people: Persian or Indian and so on, because only the initiate of the fifth degree is the true representative of his people. One called the sixth degree “sun hero” or “sun runner.” The seventh degree had the name “Father.”

Why did one call the initiate of the sixth degree a sun hero? Who had climbed up so high on the ladder of spiritual knowledge had to have developed such an inner life at least that it ran after the pattern of the divine rhythm in the whole universe. He had to feel, to think in such a way that anything chaotic, anything arrhythmic, anything inharmonious no longer existed with him. This was the demand, which one made on him in the sixth degree of initiation. One considered them as holy human beings, as a pattern, as ideals, and said about them, as big as the misfortune would be to the universe if it were possible that the sun deviated from its way for a quarter of a minute. It would also be a big misfortune if it were possible for a sun hero to deviate from the way of the big morality, from the road of the soul rhythm.—One called somebody a sun hero who had found such a sure way in his mind like the sun outdoors in the universe. All nations had such sun heroes.

Our scholars know so little about these matters. Indeed, it strikes them that sun myths about the lives of all great religious founders formed. However, they do not know that one was in the habit of creating the leading heroes sun heroes with the ceremonies of initiation. It is not miraculous at all, if that which the ancient peoples had attempted to put into them is found out again by the materialist research. With Buddha and even with Christ, one looked for such sun myths and found them. Here you have the reason why one could find this with them. They were put into them first, so that they showed an immediate imprint of the solar rhythm. Then these sun heroes were the big pattern that one should try to equal.

What did one imagine what happened in the soul of such a hero who had found such an inner harmony?—One imagined that in such a way that now no longer only a single human soul lived in him, but that in him something of the universal soul had emerged which flows through the whole universe. In Greece, one called this universal soul, which flows through the whole universe, Chrestós, and the most elated sages of the East know it as buddhi. If the human being has stopped only feeling as the bearer of his individual soul and if he experiences anything of the universal, then he has created an image of that in himself, which combined at that time as a solar soul with the human body; then he has reached something tremendously important on the road of humanity.

If we look at this human being with such an ennobled soul, we are able to put the future of the human race and the whole relationship of this human future with the idea, the image of humanity generally, before ourselves. As humanity faces us today, one can imagine only that certain matters are decided by the fact that people bring about a decision in quarrel and discord by a kind of majority, by a majority decision. Because where one still looks at such majority decisions as something ideal, there one has not yet understood what truth is. Where does truth live in us? Truth lives in us where we pledge ourselves to think logically. On the other hand, would it not be nonsense to decide by majority decision whether two times two are four or three times four are twelve? If the human being has recognised once what is true, then millions may come and say, it is different, nevertheless, he has his assurance in himself.

So far, we are in relation to the scientific thinking, to that thinking, which is no longer affected by human passions, desires, and instincts. Where passions, desires and instincts play a part, the human beings are still in quarrel, in confused mess as the instincts form a wild chaos generally. However, if once the desires, instincts, and passions are purified, have become what one calls buddhi or the Chrestós, if they are developed up to that height on which today the logical thinking is without passion, then that the human ideal is attained which shines to us in the old religions of wisdom, in Christianity, in the anthroposophic spiritual science. If our thinking and feeling is so purified that that which one feels harmonises with that which our fellow men feel, if on this earth the same epoch has arrived for the feeling and the sensation, as it has come for the equalising intellect, if buddhi is on this earth, if the Chrestós is embodied in the human race, then the ideal of the old teachers of wisdom, of Christianity, of anthroposophy is fulfilled. Then one needs to vote just as little about that which one regards as good, noble and right as one needs to vote about what one has recognised as logically wrong or right. Everybody can put this ideal before his soul, and doing this, he has the ideal of the sun hero before him, the same that all esoteric teachers also have who are initiated in the sixth degree.

Even our German mystics of the Middle Ages felt this, while they pronounced a word of deep meaning, the word deification or apotheosis. This word existed in all religions of wisdom. What does it signify? It signifies the following: once also those at whom we look today as the spirits of the universe passed a chaotic stage which humanity experiences today. These leading spirits of the universe brought themselves up to their divine stage where their manifestations of life sound harmoniously through the universe. What appears to us today as the harmonious way of the sun in the course of the year, with the growth of the plants, in the life of the animals, was once chaotic and brought it to this great harmony. Where these spirits stood once, the human being stands today. He develops from his chaos to a future harmony that is modelled after the present sun, the present universal harmony.

The anthroposophic mood of Christmas results from this, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a living feeling lowered into our souls. If we feel it so sure that the splendour, the revelation of the divine harmony, appears in the heights of the heavens, and if we know that the revelation of this harmony sounds once from our own soul, then we feel the other that will happen within humanity due to this harmony. Then we feel the peace of those who are of good will (Latin: et pax hominibus bonae volutatis). Thus, two feelings are connected as Christmas feelings. If we look into the divine world order, into the revelation, at its splendour in the heights of the heavens, and look at the human future, we can already feel that harmony in advance which takes place on earth in the human beings in the future who have the feeling and the sensation of it. The more that lowers itself into us what we feel outdoors in the world as harmony, the more peace and harmony will be on this earth.

Thus, the great ideal of peace places itself as the highest feeling of nature before our souls if we feel the way of the sun in nature in the right way during Christmastide. If we understand the victory of the sunlight over the darkness during these days, we take the big confidence, the big trust from it that connects our own developing souls with this world harmony, and then we let that be known not for nothing, which lives in this world harmony in our souls. Then something lives in us that is harmonious, then the seed falls into the soul that brings peace on this earth, in the sense of the peace between the religions. Those human beings are of good will who feel such peace, such a peace, as it spreads over the earth if that higher stage of the unity of feeling is attained which is attained only in the equalising intellect today. Then love flowing through everything replaces quarrel and discord. Goethe said in the same hymn I have quoted that a few swallows from this cup of love compensate a life full of trouble.

That is why Christmas was a festival of confidence, of trust and hope in all religions of wisdom because we feel during these days that the light must be victorious. Out of this big universal feeling, the Christian church determined in the fourth century to reschedule the birthday celebration of the Saviour on the same day in which with all great religions of wisdom the victory of the light over the darkness was celebrated. Until the fourth century Christmas, Christ's birthday celebration was completely variable. Only in the fourth century, one decided to let the Saviour be born on that day when this victory of the light over the darkness has always been celebrated.

Today we cannot deal with the Christian teachings of wisdom, which will be an object of a talk next year. But one thing should and must be said already today that nothing was more justified than to reschedule the birthday celebration of that divine individuality in this time, which offers the guarantee, the confidence to the Christian that his soul, his divinity will carry off the victory over everything that is darkness in his only outward world. Thus, Christianity is in harmony with all great world religions. When the Christmas bells sound, the human being may probably remember that during these days this festival was celebrated all over the world. Everywhere it was celebrated where one had understood the true big progress of the human soul in this world, where one knew something of the significance of spirit and spiritual life, where one tried to practice self-knowledge in the practical sense.

We have today not spoken of an uncertain, an abstract feeling of nature, but we have spoken about a feeling of nature in any lively spirituality. If we go back to the word of Goethe: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by her” and so on, we may be clear in our mind that we interpret nature, not in the materialistic sense, but that we see the external expression and the physiognomy of the universal divine spirit in her. As the physical is born from the physical, the mental and spiritual from the divine-mental and divine-spiritual, and as the physical, the body combines with merely material forces, the soul combines with the spirit.

The great annual festivals are there as symbols for humanity to feel this in connection with the whole universe and to use our knowledge, our thinking to feel one with the whole universe not uncertain but most certain. If one feels anything about it again, these festivals will be different from today, then they will plant themselves again vividly in soul and heart, then they will be to us that which they should be really to us: nodal points of the year, which connect us with the universal spirit.

If we have fulfilled our duties, our tasks of everyday life all the year round, at these points of the year, we look at that which connects us with the everlasting. Even if we know that we had to grind out quite a few in the course of the year, during these days we get a feeling of the fact that there is peace and harmony beyond all fight and chaos. Therefore, these festivals are annual festivals of the great ideals; and Christmas is the birthday celebration of the greatest ideal of humanity, the ideal that humanity must gain if it wants to reach its destination generally. The birthday celebration of that which the human being can feel and want is Christmas if one understands it properly.

The anthroposophic spiritual science wants to go making understandable this festival again. We want to announce not a dogma, no mere doctrine, or philosophy to the world but life. This is our ideal that everything that we say and teach, and is included in our writings, in our science passes into life. It passes into life if the human being practices spiritual science also in the everyday life everywhere, so that we do no longer need to speak of spiritual science, if from all pulpits spiritual-scientific life sounds through the words, which are spoken to the believers, without saying the word theosophy or spiritual science. If at all courts the human actions are considered with spiritual-scientific feeling, if at the sickbed the doctor feels spiritual-scientifically and heals spiritual-scientifically, if at school the teacher develops spiritual science for the adolescent child, if in all streets one thinks, feels, and acts spiritual-scientifically, so that the spiritual-scientific doctrine becomes superfluous—then our ideal is attained, then spiritual science will be mundane. Then, however, spiritual science will also be in the great festive turning points of the year. The human being connects his everyday tasks with the spiritual using the spiritual-scientific thinking, feeling, and willing. On the other hand, he lets the everlasting and imperishable, the spiritual sun shine in his soul at the great annual festivals. They remind him that in him a true, higher self is, a divine, a sun-like, a light that will forever win over all darkness, over all chaos, that gives a soul peace, that will always compensate all fight, all war and strife in the world.

The world appears in bewildering variety to the human being looking around at first, both the external nature and the human life. He directs his look up to the starry heaven and tries to fathom the sense of the marvellous, but at first mysterious variety of the stars of the luminous sky. The thoughtful human being will probably try to recognize the sense of the ways of the stars and the elements working during the day.

If we look down at our earth,

If we try to understand our mountains with their coloured variety of rocks, woods and vegetation,

If we try to understand the things that surround us as plants, animals, and human beings, and try to see in the phenomena of nature that approach us more or less dark, briefly,

If we try to see reason and sense in everything,

Then we probably feel a kind of faint at first towards all bewildering, which faces us. However, the most bewildering is that for us which faces us in the real life of the human being, in the historical development of the human being since millennia. Science, religion, and other human striving, feeling, intellect, and reason have always tried to introduce sense and coherence into the coloured variety of the stars, into life and into the activities of the beings on our earth.

Who could deny that the human mind has brought it so far in this respect and that it can hope to go farther and farther. However, also a legitimate sense, a kind of spiritual coherence is included in it what we call human development in history. Nevertheless, this seems to somebody rather doubtful, if he looks at the course of destiny with all misery which single human beings, tribes and peoples experience undeservedly, with all luck which meets the single or also many apparently undeservedly, with all sequences of historical experiences of the single peoples, races and nations. If we look into all that, then it probably appears to us as the pure chaos sometimes. There some people probably believe to look in vain for sense or coherence, believe to be unable to understand all that.

Great, astute spirits never doubted that the human mind is able to find sense and reason, lawful necessity also in the course of the historical events. I need to draw your attention only to the fact that our great German poet and thinker, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781), in the testament of his life, in his last work, explained this human development as an education of the human race. He represented the antiquity as the childhood of humanity with the Old Testament as the first elementary book, the following age as a kind of youth from which we have the possibility to look at the future that should bring us something mature and male. I would still like to remind you that another great German thinker whom, admittedly, only a few know, even those who are destined to study him, the great German philosopher Hegel (Georg Friedrich Wilhelm H., 1770-1831) called history an education of the human being to become conscious of freedom. We could still add a hundred examples, and we would see everywhere that those human beings who look ingeniously into this activity, in this bewildering, apparently chaotic activity never doubted that there is also a lawful necessity, above all a higher order than outdoors in nature, in the world of the stars, plants, animals and physical beings generally.

If we let our eyes wander over the development of humanity, one thing faces us that is no longer felt with that liveliness with which it should be felt: a duality, a drastic division in two parts. It is this apparently something quite trivial that it seems so trivial, however, because the human beings are used to it. We reckon with the long period before Christ's birth and with the long period after Christ's birth. One no longer feels this as anything significant because humanity is used to it. However, is it not anything significant in the highest sense that our whole history was split after this sole event in two parts? That anything must have worked so incredibly as a strength that it was recognised by a big part of humanity? The fact that this could happen shows us that something of the consciousness of the unique, immense significance of the action of Christ Jesus is deeply hidden in the human breast. Who could deny, however, that today this significance has become somewhat questionable to many people, so that few of those who count themselves to the most sophisticated persons can really account to themselves why this is in such a way from which infinite depth, actually, humanity was induced to this division of history?

This question should occupy us today, the Christian doctrine of wisdom from the point of view of a detailed spiritual worldview. Among other things, the theosophical movement that spreads out more and more since thirty years in the educated world also tries to deepen the Christian doctrine of wisdom. Those who have already occupied themselves a little bit with the anthroposophic spiritual science know that the second principle of the spiritual-scientific movement is to search for the core of wisdom in all great religions. Just concerning the anthroposophic view of Christianity there are the conceivably biggest misunderstandings, and among those who are called to teach and explain Christianity are just only a very few who show real understanding of the anthroposophic striving. One said repeatedly, anthroposophy wants to transplant some Eastern teachings, a new Buddhism to Europe. This would be the most un-anthroposophic that one can imagine. If we mean it sincerely with the principle of searching for the core of wisdom in all religions, then we must be aware that we have to search for this core of wisdom in Christianity above all, in the religion by which the whole culture of Europe was created and from which the noblest currents of the West originated.

Who does not understand Christianity today, does not understand himself, and if Christianity has to perform anything great for Europe in the future, it has to be deepened. If spiritual science shall have a share of this big achievement, it has the task to penetrate into the depths of Christianity and to search there for those springs which are able to flow in the future which are able to wake cultural hopes for the future.

When I spoke in a city of South Germany some time ago (Colmar, 21st November 1905, no transcript) about the teaching of wisdom of Christianity, about our subject today, also various Protestant pastors and Catholic priests were there. After the talk, the Catholic priests said to me, what you have said to us is the choicest Christianity, but it is only for the choice ones who want to have Christianity in such detailed way. However, we announce Christianity in a form in which everybody understands it and which it is accessible to all.—There I said, if you were right, you could be sure that it would never have occurred to me to speak about the core of wisdom of Christianity, because I would consider it as superfluous in the world. If you were right, could then there be a human being who felt compelled to secede from the way you teach? Then the number of those people could not increase with every day who find no satisfaction with the way you teach. Indeed, there are many for whom you can speak today. However, the fact that it is possible that numerous human beings do no longer find their satisfaction with you proves that there are human beings to whom one has to speak differently. It does not depend on the fact that we imagine that we find the way to everybody. We can do this easily and mean that we communicate in such a way that we find the way to everybody. However, it does not depend on it which opinions we have about what we regard as the right way. It depends not on our imaginations, but on the facts. If you observe this and let not speak what you put as your subjective confession, then you realise that you do no longer speak to many people. To those one has to speak in a new form. They are those to whom the spiritual scientist speaks.

However, spiritual science has not only to speak to those. It will also speak to those who remain in full Christian devoutness in old Christian traditions, and to those it will be a deepening, a spiritualisation of the truthful teachings of Christianity. The spiritual-scientific saying, nothing is higher than truth, is surely often misunderstood by such like the priest whom I have quoted. One believes, it is sufficient if one only has the belief that something is true. No, that is not enough that we have the subjective conviction and imagine we would have the right way. Just the spiritual-scientific world movement should overcome this. Truth is not in our opinion, but in the facts. The observation of the facts must be higher for us than our belief. This is the sense of the saying. What we believe is our personal affair. Transpersonal is that which speaks to us by the world of the facts. We have to submit to it, we have to follow it.

Indeed, it is true that the human development was split by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, and, hence, we have to look a little deeper into this way of the human development. Who penetrates only somewhat into a spiritual investigation of existence will soon recognize how vapid and superficial any materialist worldview is, that any material is only the expression of the spiritual, that the spiritual is the origin and spring of any external sensuous existence.

The earthly human being as this sensuous being, who developed since the times about which history, the human thinking generally reports, is only the expression of a supernatural spiritual being. I do not have the time today to explain these great thoughts in a complete, possibly scientific way. This has oftener happened here in these talks. Today I can show it only figuratively, and Christian and pre-Christian thinkers showed it always figuratively in such a way that the supersensible human being who was not yet touched by the matter descended and embodied himself in the sensuousness. We consider that human being who comes from other spiritual worlds into this sensuous world as the Adam Kadmon of the Jewish secret doctrine, the kabbalah. This coming in is called “fall.” However, you must not misunderstand this. Great Christian authors understood this as a fall, and the action of Christ Jesus was understood as a rise from this fall to a new spiritual height. We shall still see how Paul's remark that Christ Jesus is the reverse Adam has a deep spiritual sense (1 Corinthians 15:44ff). If we understand the human being quasi—I ask you not to tip the scales at the word “quasi” because it should be only an indication of the true relation—quasi descended from spiritual heights and embodied in the sensory world, then we also understand which task the human being had initially in the first times of historical development.

What had the human being to do on this earthly scene in the first times of historical and prehistoric development? His sensuous members were the tools whose use he had to learn in the first times. Now the high spiritual human being was embodied in the sensory world. He learnt there in the first epoch of his existence, which I would like to call the instinctive epoch of human development, to use his own tools. This was the first task of the first quarter of human development—we do not want to go back to the very old times.

The human being gradually learnt to use his hands and the remaining limbs; he learnt to fit into the world and nature surrounding him. He needed no intellect for that; this was an instinctive empathising and settling in existence. When humanity learnt to control itself and acquired the use of the limbs as tools, it lived in the tribal history. The people were that within which the human being lived. It was a natural coherence, which was given by blood relationship. A sort of an animal instinct kept humanity together. Only the great masters were beyond the instinctive life. In the most different way, the human beings learnt to use their limbs, according to the state of the countries, regions, and times in which the peoples lived. The development generated a big variety in the human structure. That which was given to the human being developed most diversely. We can go back everywhere: we find this instinctive epoch of development with all peoples.

Then we find the second epoch. There the human being learns something that the Bible and other worldviews comprise with a certain word, with a word that is exceptionally important to understand properly. We understand this word properly if we realise what the first period of human development preferably had to produce. The instinct had taught the human beings most diversely to use their limbs, in one area in this way, in the other that way. People developed in the hot zone with a rampant plant growth where without effort the food was supplied, another developed in a cold, inhospitable area where it had to produce his food and create the conditions of existence with big trouble and that is why the human being had to form his limbs with big trouble. Because the human beings had so little intellect, they faced each other as it resulted from the different instinctive development. Something new took place due to the law, which the intellect created. The instincts of the peoples are different, the intellect is the same, and at the moment, when the uniform intellect was applied to the human living together, that appeared in the world which also the Bible calls the law.

The human being learnt to control his whole body as his tool first. Then the lawful period occurred where the human being tried to harmonise and order his community where he tried to compensate the instincts in the mutual action where he wanted to create conditions on this earth as they correspond to the intellect. The intellect was introduced by the way how the human being lived together. Thus, humanity developed in the first two quarters of existence. However, humanity was there not without guidance. The instinct developed to bigger and bigger brightness, until the law took on the form of the intellect widespread in the farthest circles.

Where from did all that come? Humanity would never have come so far without such brothers who were way ahead of their fellow men. At all times, always and everywhere there have been human beings, who developed the stages of existence faster to be able to lead the other human beings. Spiritual science calls such personalities, such individualities the guardians of wisdom, the guardians of human progress. There were always such guardians of human progress. Even today, there are some. These great persons, these personalities who have arrived at a stage of existence today where the majority of humanity will come only in a very distant future existed also in the pre-Christian times, in the first two quarters of human development.

They led the world; they were the shepherds of humanity and introduced order and coherence into humanity. Where from did those leaders of the human race get their knowledge, their wisdom? What did this wisdom consist of?—One led the visible by the invisible, the sensory by the extrasensory. One led the material connections by that which slumbers invisibly in the material. Does it slumber invisibly in the material? A simple reflection can convince you. Look up at the cloud. It appears bright and dark to you. It announces a thunderstorm. Moreover, while you are still looking upwards, the flash streaks through the cloud, the thunder rumbles. Where was the flash, where was the thunder? They slumbered; they slept as concealed material forces. As well as flash and thunder slumbered, a lot of concealed forces slumber in the visible as something invisible, in the sensory as something extrasensory. As well as our external civilisation has reached its present state, because the human being has learnt to wake up forces and abilities slumbering in the matter, the great spiritual culture comes from the fact that the guardians of humanity are able to wake up the supersensible forces slumbering in the sensuous and to control the lower by the higher.

As well as the master builder uses the force of gravity to lay the beam on the column, so using a force slumbering in the matter to erect our buildings by the different combination of columns and beams,

As the electrician controls our engines and other electric apparatuses with the invisible electric power,

The guardians of wisdom and human progress control the earthly forces by that which is not perceptible by the senses.

The visible is controlled not by the visible, but by the invisible. None is unworldly who rises by the invisible above the visible, but someone who is stuck in the visible. The true realist is that who controls the world by that which slumbers in him, so that he forms and builds up reality and introduces it into the service of human progress. As well as the master builder and the electrician use the forces slumbering in the matter to build houses, to create mechanical civilisation, the great guardians of wisdom and human progress use the forces existing in humanity to lead the human beings to their aim to order that which whirls chaotically in the outside world and to give it significance. Never was the advancement sensory from the instinctive, then lawful periods up to ours.

However, the wise guardians of humanity had to find out and to experience this at first; they had to be steeped in it completely, not due to blind faith, not due to vague convictions, but due to spiritual experience. They had to be clear in their mind

That there is something extrasensory, something extrasensory inside and outside the human being

That that which happens between birth and death is only one side of our existence and

That an essence outreaches birth and death

That there is something in the human being that is more comprehensive than all sensuous and is the creator of the form and the preserver of everything sensuous, and this not based on a supposition, but based on the immediate extrasensory, everlasting view.

Out of this view, the guardians of humanity had to act, then out of the knowledge that death is to be defeated, that a consciousness is to be gained that there is something that lets death appear as an event like other events of life. Only from such an experience the force arises to the human being to control the sensory from the extrasensory, the visible from the invisible. Had I to say with few words what the big secret of the great guardians of humanity is, I would say, these guardians of wisdom and human progress knew that there is something in the human being that defeats death.

They had to go behind the scenery of existence, to look behind the regions of existence, which the human being enters after death. What exists behind the sensuous had to be accessible to the students by experience. They learnt to know that in the temples of initiation of the ancient Egyptian priests and teachers of occultism, in the Eleusinian and other Greek schools or temples of initiation. Those who were mature to acquire these convictions were initiated into these secrets. Only with few words—I explain the other matters in the next talks—I can indicate what was imparted to the human beings in these temples of initiation, in these high schools of spiritual life.

There the human being went through death at first; he already experienced within this life that rise which takes place in the human being if he passes the gate of death. If he passes the gate, which leads to the other world with his natural death, he enters another land, the land on the other side of existence. One can enter it also already during this life, one can enter it by another state of consciousness, awakening the abilities which slumber in the human breast, which enable us not only to experience the unconscious state during sleep in the spiritual environment, but to enter the beyond using the spiritual qualities, to be a citizen of the spiritual world. One called this death, resurrection, and ascension.

They experienced the great initiates. If I may express myself in such a way, they experienced death with the living body, for three and a half days, they were dead, so to speak, they came out of their physical bodies and experienced the facts of a higher world, a spiritual world, that world to which the human being belongs according to his deeper nature. This happens to that part of the human being that enters the extrasensory existence. After the human being had passed this higher world, those who were already initiates recalled him to his earthly existence. Then he was a new human being whom one called a risen one. As a symbol of it, he got a new name that had a deeper meaning. Such a human being who had come into the mysteries and the temples of initiation to behold spoke a new language, and in his words, the spiritual world sounded which he had experienced during his initiation. He was a messenger of higher worlds, his words had wings because of the experiences in the spiritual world, and he spoke another language. He was one of those who talk the language of the gods, as one said, he talks the wisdom which the gods know. This is fundamentally theosophy, the divine wisdom.

One called such a human being a blessed (German: selig) one if one translates the word in German. The words have a deep meaning if one understands them in the right sense; they did not originate by chance. About such a man, who felt sympathy for the spiritual world because he had beheld it, one said, he is blessed. Those who know something about that great bliss, about those marvellous experiences of another world tell about it, even if they write profane writings about it. The most important of these matters was never written down and can never be written down.

However, those who tell and write down something of it write about it in tones that sound quite different from those who say something about a sensuous existence. Those who knew something of initiation speak of a renewal of the whole human being. One of them said, that only has become a human being in the true sense of the word who was blessed with his everlasting essence in the mysteries, while the others have still to wait, until they also get this mercy.—Plato, the unique Greek philosopher, says: those walk in the mud who got to know nothing of the divine of initiation.

Thus, we could still state many voices of antiquity and of the pre-Christian time, which emphasise the holiness, the power, and greatness of initiation, so that it resonates in our souls. Only a few, choicest ones could be blessed with the higher spiritual life in such a way, immediately beholding. The crowd received nothing but the announcements of such initiates.

Then Christianity appeared and changed these conditions completely. The depth of this change of humanity is expressed in a powerful saying, and that is: “Happy (Blessed) are they who find faith without seeing me” (John 20:29). The secret of Christianity is contained in this saying, and we understand it only if we take it as literal as possible. What does it mean? We know that somebody who had experienced initiation in the temple knew that he defeated death that he took part in the entombment and was blessed by the vision. Now a great individuality came who carried out this great event on the external plane of history in front of all, as far as they wanted to see it or could take up it by faith, by the union with the unique personality. That happened once on the historical plane, which had often happened to the initiates in the deep darkness of the mystery temples. This event took place in Palestine in the year 33.

What was received and protected till then more or less symbolically in the depths of the temples had become historical truth, historical reality on the big stage of life. One must understand this, because this is important. I entitled my small writing about Christianity really with full care not Mysticism of Christianity but Christianity as Mystical Fact (CW 8). I wanted to show not the mysticism of Christianity, but Christianity itself should be understood as a mystical fact. It should be understood that the event in Palestine is a fact of deep symbolism and at the same time something that is actual reality, actual truth. We should understand each other just concerning this point, because it belongs to the most important points of the knowledge of Christianity. If one speaks of the fact that in Palestine the event of death, resurrection, entombment and ascension took place as a historical event in 33 and says that this event has happened also before so and so often in the mystery temples, then one does not regard that as something real, then one does not believe in the real Christ. On the other side, other people who believe in Christ think that death, entombment, and resurrection are profound symbols. It is hard to understand that something can be fact and symbol at the same time.

Somebody never understands who explains history “really” and considers it indifferently that a fact also has deep symbolic significance. He has never grasped that there are high and low mountains in history, high mountains that outreach the high that they are facts and symbols at the same time. That is the point. Now we have put an event before all human beings, which pronounces before them that death can be defeated and that there is a spiritual life, which outreaches death, because the only One had defeated death. In front of all human beings, he had experienced what the initiates experienced in the mysteries. Now, one did no longer need to go into the mysteries to behold, now, one could believe and feel connected with Him who experienced the great event of the victory of life over death in the physical world. Now, one could believe even if one did not behold. That understands the religious books correctly who brings himself to a literal understanding again. Beholding means literally the beholding in the mysteries, and faith is the faith in the fact that death was defeated by Christ's life. Hence, we are allowed to say that the greatest teaching of wisdom of Christianity is that the teachings of wisdom of the various religions became fact in Christianity.

What were the teachings of wisdom of the various religions? Deepening really in the spiritual-scientific teachings you can convince yourselves that the religions comply with each other concerning their teachings. Take the teachings of Hermes, Pythagoras, and Zarathustra or also of other religious founders: in that which they expressed and taught one can find a deep consistent core of wisdom. All teachers who announced the great teachings of wisdom could say, I am the way and the truth.—For truth flowed out of their mouths; that truth which they had experienced in the mystery temples, they had become messengers of the divine truth. With Christ Jesus, it was another matter.

He could say more of himself. He became that which is expressed in the great and beautiful saying: I am the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). He taught that in front of everybody, which the other religious founders said, living concealed to the rest of humanity in the twilight of the mysteries. The life by which experience was won inside of the mystery was invisible. It became visible because of the event in Palestine.

Thus, Christianity outranks the old pre-Christian religions. That wisdom which was won by the concealed life of the initiate came out to the public, and we have in the newer time in Christianity the truth that became person, life, and existence. Hence, it does often not depend with the old religions on telling how the religious founders lived. We do not hear telling, how the Egyptian Hermes, the Indian Rishis, how Zarathustra, how Buddha lived. If we receive the teachings and raise our hearts and our senses in them, the blessing flows from them to us. However, if we want to understand Christianity, we have to consider that Christ did not speak only that way, but also that he went his own way. Hence, no book by him, but only books about him are preserved. The good news, the Gospels, is not the wise language of Jesus. They are the stories of the life of Jesus. Others spoke about him. If the disciples of Buddha and Hermes spoke, they would say, we have heard this, these are his holy words, and we want to echo them to you.—However, if the disciples of Jesus moved into the world, they emphasised that He was there that they were connected with Him that they were His companions. They attempted to keep up the tradition, to reproduce it from generation to generation: we ourselves heard the word on the holy mountain together with Him; we laid our hands in His wounds.—It was the truth element of the living together that should transfer the liveliness to the future generations. This is somewhat different from that which existed before in the other religions. This is new.

If we want to imagine the whole significance of this new, we have to realise the difference that existed between the first quarter of human evolution and what happened now. What happens now? What does Christianity prepare humanity for, actually? Why had somebody to experience the great event in such a way that the human beings could look at him, could look up at him as evidence of the victory of life over death? One needed such evidence because now another historical epoch of humanity began, because now the intellect, the strength of mind was used for something different for centuries, even for millennia. With the propagation of Christianity, that approximately begins which we can call the triumphal procession of humanity about our material world. Christianity had to prepare for it first. In the middle of the Middle Ages, the material victory of humanity begins, the laws become more and more perfect with which the human beings found it. The human being becomes the master of nature by the perfection of his mechanisms, establishes a big system of, traffic and trade. The human intellect wins over our earth.

That did not exist in the pre-Christian times. Try to realise how our science begins in the times when also Christianity arises. You know that Thales (~624-~547 B.C.) was the first philosopher. Then Christianity prepares the ground for the use of the human strength to control the external nature. It was necessary that the conviction of a spiritual life comes from quite a different side so that humanity is not completely isolated from spiritual life. Now the efficient personality had to be used to conquer the globe in a material respect. Hence, science had to separate from the feeling, from faith. It was the characteristic feature of those who were initiated into the mysteries that science and faith, feeling and faith were one. For that who comes out of the material there is no separation between faith and knowledge, between truth and feeling. The forms in which the stars were arranged were the letterings of the godhead with the Chaldean initiates. This had to change in the new time. At first, the human being directed his look up at the starry heaven, and a science divested of divine feelings encompassed the skies and the earthly existence in all its phenomena. The knowledge of the world could no longer go the same way as faith and wisdom.

Because both had to separate, an event had to take place that guaranteed faith that founded such a firm feeling in humanity that faith could found itself besides the material science and that faith lived on throughout the material time. Thus, we have the firmly founded faith and science side by side, which does not have faith, but looks at the personality, at Christ. A personal relationship to the only One establishes itself besides the material striving. Thus, that which was put in Palestine in 33 was the bulwark to preserve the everlasting, the consciousness of the spiritual during the development of humanity towards materiality. Those had to be blessed who could believe in the only One, while they had to use their looking for the achievement of the material life. Thus, the second epoch of antiquity points prophetically to Christ Jesus. Not without good reason the teachings of the Old Testament are interpreted as predictions of Christ Jesus. Any initiation was such a prediction. What the initiate experienced, he experienced it spiritually first, then symbolically, then it was there in the world. Then it was a fulfilment, the fulfilment of the Old Testament was the New Testament. In addition, this word appears to us in its full significance if we grasp it in its depth. Thus, I have described three epochs of human evolution that go side by side, of faith, knowledge, and wisdom.

Let us carry our mind back to the times in which the poor Egyptian slaves dragged the big, massive boulders and worked themselves to blood on huge stone giants. The modern worker cannot imagine that labour. Bliss and contentment were the feelings, which penetrated the soul of the wretched slave. However, this slave knew one thing. He knew that the life that he lived in such a hard work was one life of many. The initiate often said it to him to make humanity aware of the fact that the human being embodies himself repeatedly and that he experiences that which he prepared himself, and that he is recompensed in future lives. Thus, the riddle of human destiny is solved for him really. Among the hard working slaves, bliss and religious feeling prevailed. The slave said to himself, he who commands me today was once as I am and I become once, as he is if I carry out all that now.—The prudent men who conquered the material world later, who dealt with the merely material science would not be able to achieve this, as overwhelming the teachings of Galilei and Copernicus, the teachings of the modern investigation of the sensory material existence may be.

Indeed, nothing should be said against these teachings and nobody can estimate its greatness and power more than I do. Nevertheless, it is true and one has to say also that the materialistic researchers could not find those fiery words, that spirit which opens the souls which gives the human being hope forever which gives the human beings the certainty of the mental-spiritual life. However, this certainty came from the personal connection with the unique Christ. The external science was also gradually deepened again. Science became wisdom bit by bit again, and the result of the fact is that this external science claimed to appear again as founder of a religion. What then are the enlighteners, the freethinkers? What do they want? They are, actually, religious natures. They want to found a religion; they want to conjure up such a religion from the modern science. In particular, Moleschott (Jacob M., 1822-1893, Dutch physiologist and philosopher), Haeckel and others with their books which founded a kind of materialistic Gospel for many are nothing else than founders of a materialistic religion. Because the worldly-sensuous has won such an immense strength and authority that the human being wants to gain the highest by science and its wisdom, the scientists have turned away from Christ Jesus, also those who feel only a bit of the power of science and have something to inform of the greatness and the power of science. Thus, we have the separation of science. However, Jesus spoke a word, a word that we cannot grasp deeply enough, and this is, I will be with you always, to the end of time (Matthew 28:20).

We do not need to borrow this wisdom only from traditions and books, but if we rise into the higher worlds, we have the greatest experience in ourselves again, which can be experienced only in the higher worlds beyond the gate of death. Then He speaks again to us, then He shows us that He is there today that we can hear Him immediately in the present. Hence, we need such a deepening of humanity again that the human being has the experience of Christ in himself and that the human being can find out something similar like the initiates in the ancient mysteries again in himself. At least a reflection of the great, significant experience of the mystery temples should be delivered gradually to those who turn to anthroposophy. They enter the spiritual region, the other side of life already here during this life. Thus, they can experience what Goethe expressed significantly in his poem, which begins: “Tell nobody except the wise, because the mob is immediately scornful,” and closes: “And so long as you don't have it, this “Die and be transformed!,” you will only be a gloomy guest on the dark earth.”

Today it concerns this passing away and becoming. There are methods of spiritual development with which we can wake the inner divine essence in ourselves, with which we can outgrow into the spiritual world. Our eyes are opened there for the spiritual world; our ears become active, so that we hear something higher speaking. We are able to become citizens of a higher world; we find that Christ is with us to the end of the world. Then we can also hear that language again, which spoke to the disciples on the mountain. This is indicated in the deepest mystery of Christianity.

Let us consider this great mystery at the end. Christ had initiated pupils too; he also led them away from the crowd. When he wanted to explain what he had said to the crowd in parables, he led his three initiated disciples: Peter, James, and John on the Mount Tabor. They beheld the transfiguration there (Matthew 17). Who understands the transfiguration recognizes the deepest mystery of Christianity. The disciples are translated from the sensuous existence. What faces them? Elijah and Moses. Elijah is the word meaning way or aim, Moses is simply the esoteric word meaning truth, and Jesus is life. While eternity appeared to them in temporality, while those who are dead long since appeared to them, before their spiritual eyes, it means that they had ascended to the spiritual world. Peter says to Jesus, it is good that we are here. Would you like me to make three shelters...? You can read the expression “make shelters” where a pupil attains the second stage of chelahood. One says of him that he makes shelters in the beyond.

The great truth in the religious documents is recognized everywhere by that who recognizes the so-called key words. The saying “I am the way, the truth and the life” faces you there. When they descended from the mountain, Jesus forbade them to tell anyone about the vision, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. They questioned themselves: what is “rising” from the dead?—They said to Jesus, the scribes say that Elijah must come first.—He answered, Elijah is to come and set everything right.—The disciples, in the most intimate sanctum, speak here about reincarnation as about something that is a matter of course to them. The Lord Himself spoke about it like about a matter of course, saying, Elijah has already come, John the Baptist is Elijah, but they failed to recognise him.—This is the testament on the mountain. “Mountain” is the key word for initiation. Where initiation is concerned, the term “on the mountain” is applied. What means: do not tell anybody that I come again? That is, until I speak again to you, until you yourselves are there again in such figure that humanity can again perceive the word of truth. Christ Jesus was as a deputy on earth. Looking at his death, humanity should feel the victory of life over death. The faith by which even the Egyptian slave knew of the beyond should be substituted by the faith that the everlasting is in the essence, which passes through the physical. Now they had to start the triumphal procession through the world. Nothing material remains to us of that which is wisdom, immediate knowledge of the beyond. Nothing of reincarnation should be taught to humanity during the following two millennia. Jesus determined this as his testament. Not before the human beings have gone through the third epoch of development, they have gained this material victory over the globe; they will have applied intellect and reason to the external civilisation. Then only a new epoch is permitted to begin, then wisdom can understand that again which lived uniquely. Then Christ appears again on earth, so that He can be grasped immediately.

Then the human being does no longer need the life on Tabor, and then he experiences the initiation in himself, finds the divine human being in himself. Then he will look up again at the divine life that was common property of humanity in the pre-Christian times. The anthroposophic teaching has introduced this new epoch. What Christ left on the mountain Tabor, the spiritual-scientifically striving human beings feel this as their mission, as their vocation. Christian mystics of the Middle Ages already indicated this. You find it expressed by Angelus Silesius, the great Silesian initiate: “If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you still are lost forever.” As the blind person experiences the awakening of light, somebody who arrives at the new condition can experience the apparition like that on Tabor. This is the future. Thus, we had a Christianity of faith in the third epoch of humanity, and we shall have a Christianity of wisdom in the fourth epoch. What did humanity perform in the third epoch? The instinctive period is the pre-Christian time. We have had the period of the external material civilisation, and now we enter the fourth period of human development.

The human being has encompassed the world with industry and trade; without distinction of nation and race industry and trade work. The machine prepares the same goods in Japan, Brazil, and Europe. The same railways cross the globe in all areas without distinction of race, nation, and class. The differences within humanity have fallen in our civilisation. The cheque, which is written here in Berlin, can be redeemed in Tokyo. Everything in our civilisation has taken place in such a way that we can put up as a principle of the third period what no one could have put up as a principle in the starting point of our civilisation: we want to found a civilisation that encompasses the globe, without distinction of race, gender, occupation, and confession. This material civilisation has encompassed the world under this motto. This civilisation must receive soul. It is the task of the fourth epoch of humanity; it is the task of anthroposophy and of our lifestyle to introduce this cultural soul into humanity. We have a material civilisation, and we need a spiritual culture with the same qualities. The human beings are strong where they founded the moral connection. The Japanese trader understands the traders of all other countries. The human beings must understand each other in their souls.

This will be if these achievements are also made fruitful for the human science. The cultural body has three epochs. It needs a soul. The fourth epoch has to bring cultural spirit. This is the great basic idea, the big aim, which the big cultural movement must have, if it wants to be something else than a mere play for those who deal with nothing but brooding over mystic thoughts. If the Theosophical Society continues to exist, it manages this. Hence, it has to understand Christianity in its deepness. It has to understand its deepest teachings of wisdom and must also have the strength to practice these teachings of wisdom not in old traditional form, but to reshape them so that they live on usefully at all times. With it, Christianity is not anything past, but has the living strength to work on future more and more. Thus, anthroposophy, the anthroposophically understood Christianity is no doctrine, no dogma, no sectarianism, but it is something else. It is something that makes hearts leap for joy in the best sense of the word; it is something that raises the soul to the biggest tasks of the present because the biggest tasks can only correspond to the beneficial hope for the future.

Then we have understood Christianity if it gives us life for the future. Then we understand the high spirits correctly if they become our future teachers. We are their right pupils if we do not want to reproduce authoritatively what they themselves had said, but if their words, their actions have become the energy for the new that we create. This is the great secret, the big lawfulness and necessity that shall fulfil us in the progress of human evolution and that shall constitute our life in the highest sense of the word. This is the true education of humanity that we receive the strength of creating in the future and the hope for a beneficial effect in the future from a real knowledge of the great actions of our ancestors.

There are riddles of the world in which somebody takes an interest who wants to deeper penetrate into the structure and texture of our existence. Such riddles of the world are, for example, these: where from do materials and forces come, where from does life come into the world? Where from the purposiveness of nature, where from consciousness? How have we to assess the question of the origin of language, how the question of the riddle of the free will? These questions force themselves to somebody who wants to deeper penetrate into the understanding of existence indeed, questions which are not far from an advanced, educated intelligence. But before these questions there are more obvious, big human questions which have no theoretical, no scientific value at first, but which force themselves, which allow us to look up from the works and efforts of life at that which we want to call the imperishable compared to the transient. These questions are connected with that which meets us wherever we go, with that which must face us everywhere in the world as a riddle. These are questions on whose reply not only the satisfaction of our theoretical or scientific interest depends, but it also depends on them whether we have strength, courage and assurance in life, whether we have hope for a prosperous future of the human race and the single human being.

Such vital matters face us if we turn our look at the immediate existence of the human being, if we see how one is equipped at his birth with a low ability and strength and is inclined by these dispositions and talents. With it, we can foresee how he is condemned to a wretched, miserable existence that he has to carry on between birth and death. He may be born into a family so that he seems to be condemned to misery already without any guilt due to the circumstances and facts. The other is born into a family which makes sure from the start that he has a happy existence full of joy; he has talents and abilities so that we can say, he accomplishes something great and significant in his life. All that and other things embrace the big and immediate riddles, if we consider life, as it faces us, impartially. The great worldviews and their preachers always tried hard to solve these riddles of existence. However, in every new time the riddles of existence need a new solution. Not as if the old truth is no longer true, it does not concern this, but the fact that thinking and feeling of the human beings change, that the feeling of the soul changes more than one assumes usually, that one does not put other questions, but that one puts the old questions differently. The theosophical or spiritual-scientific approach to life, spreading out for thirty years in educated cultures, tries to solve the riddles of existence in such a way that the modern human being can be satisfied with such a solution.

There are two spiritual-scientific concepts that should form the object of our issue today and give answer to the raised questions: the idea of reincarnation or of the repeated earth lives, and the idea of karma or the big principle of existence. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to answer the riddles of existence with these both ideas as the physical researcher answers his questions from knowledge, not from mere belief. What the spiritual-scientific worldview wants to give has the same character as what the remaining research wants to offer. The only difference may be that for the understanding of the scientific truth preconditions are necessary. A certain scientific basis also belongs almost to the complete popular scientific representation. However, the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview is understandable for every human being. It satisfies every human being, from the simple, naive mind which is only able to follow the questions and answers with sensation and feeling up to the most sophisticated sage who approaches these matters with the biggest doubt at first and who—if he only has the patience and perseverance to come to grips with these matters—finds his satisfaction. They all find not only satisfaction, not only that releasing feeling which approaches us in the soul if we have longed a long time for getting an answer to any question—who knows this feeling knows something about the intimate happiness of the soul—, but also concerning the vital matter it gives something quite different. There does not come into consideration what satisfies our thirst for knowledge, but something that gives us the assurance of life, something that should not give an answer only for single but for all soul forces.

Because we deal with so important and basic questions today, let me say first, in which sense the spiritual-scientific answers are to be understood based on life. One often counters the spiritual scientist, out of an entire misunderstanding: bring forward proof of that which you state there if we should believe you what you say about higher, spiritual worlds and about matters that are inaccessible to the usual senses of experience at first.—The spiritual scientist can appropriately answer only: nobody needs to believe me, from nobody I ask more than trust in my assertions, because there cannot be such proofs of the spiritual-scientific truth as one normally demands them. Who demands them does not understand the character and the sense of the spiritual-scientific truth.

Life delivers the proofs of the spiritual-scientific truth and life delivers them if not only we look with the senses here within that which our own eyes, ears, and our sense of touch teach us, but life in its entirety up to the highest spiritual parts of life. If anybody comes and says: I do not believe what you tell there, because this may be anything that you have devised, this may be fantasies—, and one can answer: well, believe it, believe that the spiritual scientists are the biggest swindlers of the world. However, something else is between belief and disbelief. This is an impartial listening.—Take a drastic proof. Take a map of Asia Minor. A man says, this is no map of Asia Minor, you have thought up this.—One can only answer to him: well, never mind, but remember what I have shown to you on this map, take note of it, and memorise it. If you come to Asia Minor once, you see that it is right.—The same applies to the spiritual-scientific teachings. No one needs to believe them. If only we want to observe carefully and impartially, there are enough proofs of it in life, also for that life when we have passed the gate of death, when we are on the other side.

One has to answer the old questions in a new way. Still in the 17th century, it was not only a superstition of the big mass, but also a common conviction of all learnt people who believed to understand something of natural sciences that not only quite low animals, but also even earthworms can grow out of ordinary river mud. One thought this generally. One did not have the conviction that an earthworm must come from an earthworm, but one believed that it originated from mud. The Italian scientist Redi (Francesco R., 1626-1697) put up the sentence: life comes only from life. Never comes life from lifelessness. The earthworm originates not from the mud, but by a reproduction of an earthworm.—So young is this conviction! Thus, the human race advances concerning truth. Everybody would be regarded as a fool today who believed that earthworms could grow out of mud. What Redi expressed at that time—who escaped the destiny of Giordano Bruno by the skin of his teeth—, applies to the spiritual-scientific worldview today. As well as it was contrary to the ways of thinking at that time to admit that life must come from life, the teaching of reincarnation is contrary to the present ways of thinking.

Some run literally wild by the spiritual-scientific truth as in those days the human beings ran wild if anybody stated that the earthworms do not grow out of mud. In the same sense, like that which I have stated now the spiritual-scientific worldview says, spirit and soul come only from spirit and soul. If folly does not win over reason, there is no doubt that in two centuries exactly just as the scientific truth, the spiritual-scientific worldview will have seized all circles.

What does it mean that spirit and soul come only from spirit and soul? Spirit and soul face us if we consider the destiny of the human being how it depends on external facts, on dispositions and abilities, on the overall character. Only someone who is not able to observe the fine, intimate peculiarities of a human soul in its becoming, who only has a sense of the coarse physical can deny that we see something growing up in the child that can be explained just as little from a non-mental, a non-spiritual as the earthworm from mud. Schiller's nose, Schiller's red hair and some other of his physiognomy are indeed explicable by bodily inheritance, exactly as the carbon particles and the oxygen particles in the earthworm come from other carbon particles and oxygen particles of the surroundings.

The lifeless parts of the earthworm come from the lifeless parts of the surrounding nature and the physical parts of our body come from the physical surroundings. However, we can explain Schiller's abilities and talents from the surroundings just as little as the earthworms from the mud. Nevertheless, it does not depend on Schiller. He is given only as a radical example. It applies to every human being, also to the simplest, that he develops gradually from the type. It is impossible to derive the individual from the physical inheritance. One can see that easily. Try to understand once how Goethe's saying applies here,: “Nature, mysterious in day's clear light, lets none remove her veil, and what she won't discover to your understanding you can't extort it with levers and with screws” (Faust I). This is nothing for pliers and microscope. Have a look at the child how it faces you in the first months and years. On its face expresses itself what it has from father, mother, and ancestors. The general-human expresses itself, the type, the character of the clan, of the family. We often say, the mild trait of the child comes from the father, from the mother, from uncle or aunt.

However, when we see the child growing up, a strange change takes place that is visible to a subtler sense. What we can perceive as the confluence of father, mother, grandmother et cetera like an imprint changes and takes shape from its inner being. What lives in the core one cannot derive from father and mother expresses itself gradually in the traits. The more something individual is in the soul that is above the type, the more the soul creates in the body from inside and transforms it. How could one explain the face of a great thinker, of a great world benefactor by inheritance who works from his inside and enriches the world with anything new? From the face, you can see how the human being outgrows the mere type. In every human being, just a spiritual essence reveals itself, which is not born out of physical inheritance, but is born into it. If you cannot lead back this spiritual core to father and mother, to the ancestors, we must be able to lead it back to something spiritual. Soul and spirit come from the soul and spirit. There is only the idea of development, the idea of repeated incarnations. The being that impresses its traits to the child already existed, was already repeatedly in a body. There you find an explanation of soul and spirit just as you find an explanation of the earthworm if you say, the earthworm has originated from an earthworm and not from mud or sand. Once there was something imperfect, however, we cannot go into it in this talk.

How does spiritual science explain the perfect and the imperfect in the mental-spiritual realm? As well as the small plasmodium originated, according to Haeckel from simple living conditions, and as the following animal formed bit by bit by the development of the external physical figure, we can say about a perfect soul that it gradually formed from an imperfect soul which became more perfect bit by bit. The imperfect savage with his childish soul has preserved that figure of our soul through which we had to go to raise ourselves to the spiritual figure of our soul. On the other hand, compare the soul of an average European with the soul of a human being as Darwin still met one. The soul of a modern human being has concepts of good and bad, of right and wrong, of false and true.

Darwin wanted once to make clear to a savage who was still a cannibal: you are not allowed to eat a human being, because it is bad.—The savage looked at him peculiarly and said, why? Where from can you know this without having eaten him? If we have eaten him, we know whether he was good or bad.—Thus, you have an imperfect soul that develops more and more completely. Our soul comes into the world not as a baby, but this soul has developed in imperfect incarnations first where it had understood nothing of good and bad but the pleasant and the disagreeable to the palate and the like. It developed through such stages and advanced to our level through many incarnations. We carry our soul in ourselves with the abilities and forces, which we have, with the destiny, which it experiences. We see more precisely if we come again in another incarnation on earth; we appear more perfect on earth, until that stage is attained on which we are able to ascend to a higher and more divine existence of which we do not need to speak today. There are indeed still other explanations of existence than the teaching of reincarnation, but this can solely solve the riddles of human existence.

A core of existence faces us in that human being about whom we say that he goes through many lives, through repeated lives. The materialistically minded says to us that mind and soul are only attachments to the body, developed only from the body; the thoughts and language are only higher forms of that which we meet also in the physical-animal realm. The materialist brings us to mind that our most elated moral ideals, our holiest religious feelings are nothing but the results of our physical organization. On the contrary, the spiritual-scientific worldview shows us that everything that rests in our souls is our everlasting essence, which formed its body step-by-step. The physical-bodily comes from the spiritual-mental: this is the teaching of the spiritual-scientific worldview, which becomes clearer and clearer, the more you immerse yourselves in it. It is a teaching that is not based on blind faith, although—if one wants to show it popularly in one short hour—one can outline it only briefly and cannot introduce in it extensively. However, it is a teaching that is founded as certainly and firmly like any scientific teaching. It works with the same methods, only in the spiritual realm, as the sensuous science in the physical realm.

Spiritual science speaks of the fact that the human being consists of a higher and a lower nature, and that his lower nature—when he walks through the gate of death—is given back to those elements, which it belonged to. The body is handed over to the earth; other parts are handed over to other elements. However, an everlasting essence is in the human being that always takes on a new human figure and form like the lily as a species always takes on new forms, while it goes repeatedly through the grain to come to a new life.

This teaching of reincarnation of the being, which shows us the development in the spiritual realm as the higher counter-image of the development in the sensory realm, leads us to see those finer, more intimate things in the human being. We speak of the fact that this essence of the human being contains a triple basic being, that it is of triple nature. We speak of the fact that something exists in the deepest inside of the human beings that is quite undeveloped with the normally educated people, exists only embryonic. We call this innermost essence of the human being atman or spirit man. With the most human beings, it is not even visible by vision.

The second member of this spiritual essence of the human being is the buddhi. In English, we would call it life spirit. This second element in the human soul is something that is expressed with the most developed human beings, with the leaders of humanity in a certain way. We can describe this life spirit in a certain way. This buddhi of the highest glory and sublimity inhabited the old religious founders, Hermes, Buddha, Zarathustra and—in the extreme—Christ Jesus. If I make clear what this buddhi signifies in the spiritual realm, I can do it only by a symbol. One must behold the spiritual either, or one has to sum up the everlasting in a symbol, like Goethe does who says: “All that is transitory, is only a symbol.” I would like to give such a symbol of buddhi. If you imagine the usual productive strength in the usual sensuous life, combined with love, but not with receptive love, but with devoted love: this is buddhi. There is in nature no other symbol than the hen, which sits on the egg, conjuring up a new life with its own warmth, sacrificing its own existence in love for the new life. Now imagine this transferred to the spiritual, imagine an individuality who produces the big, propelling forces, the spiritual impulse in the human nature for the further development in such a way as I have just described, then you have it.

The element of Christian feeling and sensation had been a basic strength since two millennia. It flowed as blessing through the Western hearts and fulfilled them with bliss. Did Christ not generate it and did it not exist in Christ? Was it not brought into this world with the highest glory, showing that spiritually, which lives in the sensuous, the devoted love which creates—which does not create a human being, but spiritual love which brings forth the universal wisdom, for centuries? Imagine this element in the human nature, and then we have what we call Christ in the Christian mysticism, Chrestós in the Greek mysticism, buddhi in the Eastern mysticism, the life spirit in its highest potentiality. Everybody who feels something of that which it means to produce spiritually what is incorporated as a force in the human development, everybody who feels something of it has a feeling of spiritual, bright clearness like that which expresses itself here below by a symbol, the true blissful sensation with which the chicken sits on the egg. This is buddhi. It exists in every single human being to a certain extent, at least as disposition.

The third soul force is that by which we understand the world. It would be brainless in the highest degree to believe that one could get water out of a vessel if no water is in it. However, such brainless people are those who say that they can get the wisdom of the world if it is not there. The astronomer tries to calculate and to understand the wisdom in the universe. The world is to be understood only by wisdom. Would it not be the biggest folly to want to take wisdom from the universe unless wisdom were in it? If not wisdom were given, we could never get wisdom there. The universe is created by the same wisdom by which we want to understand it. This is the third element that flows through the whole world. This is the manas. In English, it is translated best of all saying: wisdom is born out of the world, our spirit self is this third element. If you take these three things: atman, buddhi, manas, and then you have the deepest essence of the human being. Then you have what walks from incarnation to incarnation what is imperfectly formed with the savage where this triad also exists on a low level, up to where we see it with the modern human being, up to the great leader of humanity. The human being walks from incarnation to incarnation, from the cultured man up to the spiritually not only ideal, but also holy leader of humanity, up to Francis of Assisi, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) or others. The student can completely get to know the passage through the repeated earth-lives by the way the human beings stand side by side in this development.

What I have stated expresses itself in the whole human being to somebody who sees more intimately. I have said, this essence of the human being exists only as disposition with the normally educated person. It becomes perfect. However, what we form from our essence today formed and created us from the outset. Thus, we see this tripartite being, this essence working in the human being unconsciously at first and then consciously. Just now I have only mentioned an example how the inner being expresses itself in the physiognomy of the thinker. Not only in the steady physiognomy, but also in the gesture and in the mobility of the traits the essence expresses itself. They are accordingly formed bit by bit, depending on the essence growing out with the child. Spiritual research, occultism gives you the coherence of this tripartite being of the human being and that, which is expressed externally in his body, in his instrument. The so-called occultist says, with the man the spirit self-expresses itself in the traits at first. Buddhi develops in his organ of speech, lives in his voice, preparing future levels. The third force, atman, lives in man's gesture, in the movement of his hands. I said, in the organ of speech and in the voice the second member, buddhi, or Christ, lives as you have seen just now. The Christian mysticism expressed this the deepest in John's Gospel where you read: “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God's presence, and what God was, the Word was.” John directly calls the speech Christ. In the female nature, it is somewhat different. Of course, I would like to say nothing against the absolute gender equality practiced in theosophy. Atman, buddhi, manas are the same with the man and with the woman. They have nothing to do with the gender, however, with the external figure. With the woman manas comes into its own in the speech, buddhi in the gesture of the hands, and atman appears in the whole body. These are the so-called occult differences between the male and the female figures, not between the essence of man and woman.

What is now this idea of reincarnation compared with the principle of karma? Karma comes from or is connected at least with the Sanskrit word karnoti that means acting, doing, and working. It is exactly the same stem like in Latin “creare,” create. Creare, do and create is the same. Karma and creating is the same, expressed only in two different languages. Now we want to realise what one calls karma. Karma is called, in English expressed, activity, becoming, and action. With a simple example, let me make clear what one calls karma. Imagine, you work on anything from morning to night. Then you go to bed, sleep the whole night through, and get up in the morning again. If now you say to yourself, what I have worked yesterday does not concern me, I start afresh today, and then you are brainless, are you not? Nevertheless, the only possibility is that you take up in the morning again, what you have left in the evening, saying to yourself, this is my work and where I have stopped yesterday, I must resume today. What does that mean? That only means that my destiny of today is determined by my work of yesterday. Yesterday I have created my destiny of today. With it the whole concept of karma is given. Every being makes his future destiny.

Take another example. Once animals walked into dark caves. Something peculiar occurs to these animals. They lose their sight. The food juices move to other parts of the body that they need them more than the eyesight. The result is that the faculty of seeing withdraws, the animals become blind. What do we have before ourselves if we see these animals producing blind generations repeatedly? There we must say, in the blindness of the animals we have the effect of the fact that the animals have moved into dark caves. By which have these animals created their present figure? By their preceding action. Nothing else is karma, as if one prepares his future destiny by his work in the past. Cause and effect are always connected. If the human being goes through a life on earth between birth and death, he commits a number of actions. He goes in the interim through death and new birth and enters a new life then. It is as well as if we wake up and take up again what we have left in the evening. What we have sowed in the past life on earth, we harvest this as a fruit in the new life on earth. If we he have made a bad, disgusting destiny in the past life, the effect of our own actions faces us in the new earth-life.

If we have caused anything bad to a person, he appears to us in the new life again and causes something bad to us as compensation. If a person faces me and commits anything bad to me, I can suppose that I had already been together with him in a previous earth-life and caused that which he now does. Thus, the destiny of the single human being becomes more transparent and explicable with the help of the big principle of karma, and the biggest riddle of life, which meets us at every turn, receives light and solution. Now I get an explanation why one is born in the deepest need and misery and why such a disgusting destiny affects him apparently undeservedly. It is the same as if someone has not done his work properly. He is condemned by the bad preparation of yesterday to do bad work again today. Thus, the same applies if I say that anybody who lives in need and misery now himself caused it in a previous life. I also know that nothing remains without effect. That has its effect in the coming life, which I do well or wrongly. The effect in the world is connected with the cause, the observation of the stars and the sun teaches that. The same applies also to the astral and spiritual worlds. What we do now is compensated in a later life. The biblical saying is right: “God is not to be fooled, everyone reaps what he sowed” (Galatians 6:7).—

Paul as an initiate knew why he especially pronounced such words. This is the big world principle that leads the human destiny. Now I know very well that it is also necessary to get an idea how this principle works, and about which I would still like to say some words. Who has heard some of my talks, already knows what I want to indicate herewith. If we look at the human being with spiritual sense, he does not face us as this physical body, but we know that this physical body is only one part of the big being, that behind him something is that Paul calls the spiritual body and that the spiritual scientist calls the etheric body. The etheric body is like a portrayal of the physical body, or better vice versa, the physical body is a portrayal of the etheric body. This is the second member of the human being, the etheric body. The third member is the astral body, that which the human being bears in himself as joy and sorrow, instincts, desires, passions, everything that faces us if a human being faces us that we do not see or perceive, however, with sensuous-physical means. What do we see if a human being stands in front of us? We see the skin, its colour and so on.

The anatomist can look with physical means still at bones, at muscles, nerves et cetera, but the desire and pain, instincts, and passions that are also in the same room are not sense-perceptible. One calls this the astral body and in it only the spiritual being of the human being exists which we call our ego, the bearer of our self-consciousness. While we have this, we become on our part again the bearers of atman, buddhi, manas, of that which I have described as spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man.

The animal already has the astral body. It has desire, joy, and pain. What exists, however, in the highest configuration with the leaders of humanity and exists as disposition with all human beings is the everlasting essence of the human being who advances from incarnation to incarnation. If now the human being dies, what remains there and what passes? The physical body, what one sees with eyes and can feel with hands is handed over to the earth. The etheric body is merged in the general life ether, namely not long after we have gone through death. The third member is the astral body on which the human being has already worked. Take such a soul that lives in the civilised human being, there you have the inner essence and the sum of his desires and passions. With the savage, on the first stage of incarnation, atman, buddhi, manas have worked a little on the instincts. Hence, they are still animal. What does the spiritual essence do? It works perpetually, while it improves the animal passions. The civilised human being differs from the savage because his astral body is no longer animal. Then the human being dies and goes to the astral and spiritual worlds.

One sees there what was still in him as desire from the first-time incarnation. If the human being enters incarnation for the first time, the animal passions are not purified. He eats his fellow men et cetera. Then the results appear. He starts roughly understanding something. We suppose the radical case that he says to himself if I can eat the other, he also can eat me. He understands that he can be also eaten up. The consequence becomes clear to him at the last minute, and there the first moral consciousness dawns on him. Then he purifies his desire by the judgement that he has formed, and this judgment comes from his spiritual essence. His judgment appears with the second incarnation as disposition. He has become somewhat nobler. He is now purifying his passions and desires more and more. He enhances them from incarnation to incarnation. That really happens if the human being dies. The physical body is delivered to the earth; the etheric body is merged in the life ether. What happens now with the human being, what takes place now?

Not only the ability to look clairvoyantly at the world but already the intellect could teach somebody who thinks deeper what must happen. The human being is disembodied, he has no physical body. What has he done, however, throughout his whole life? He has the conveniences of food by the sense of taste throughout the whole life.

This convenience of food, the taste of the dishes, the palatal pleasure is mental. The palate itself is physical. If the human being did not have the physical, he could not get the mental pleasure. If he had no physical ear, he could not hear, had he no physical eye, he could not see. We perceive everything that we perceive with the physical senses at first. The modern human being can perceive nothing without his physical senses. He is used to them. He is used to satisfying such wishes that can be satisfied by the sense organs. The habit to have wishes, to have pleasures, remains, the means by which he can satisfy them disappear; tongue, eyes and ears disappear. He does no longer have them. Now he misses them after death. He is still thirsting for the pleasure, which can only be satisfied by the sense organ. The result is that the human being comes to a state of consciousness after death, which consists in breaking the habit of being satisfied only by the sense organs. The soul must stop asking for sensuous satisfaction, has to purify itself beyond that which satisfied it on earth and can be satisfied only by sensuous, physical means. That is kamaloka in the theosophical worldview. We know it as the purgatory. One can compare that not improperly, which the human being experiences there, to a feeling of burning thirst, to a kind of burning privation. This is the state after death. The suitable means is not there sensuous-physical after death; the organ is not there by which the thirsting soul can be satisfied. If a soul has finished this connection with the physical in the course of years in the kamaloka, it lives in the spiritual world, to which it belongs as soul. It takes that along into the spiritual world. The spiritual-scientific worldview calls this spiritual world devachan or spirit land. What does the soul take along?

The purified desires and passions are now spiritualised. If the human being was incarnated on earth, he takes what he has gained to the devachan and processes it there for a new earth-life. A strength of life has to emerge from his experience. It is not enough that the human being experiences anything. Consider the difference between the experience and strength of life exactly. If an undeveloped soul finds out by consequence that it is impossible to eat his fellow man without putting himself in danger and damaging himself, if this faces the soul as experience, then it is this experience that must be transformed into strength, so that an inner voice exists: you are not allowed to eat a human being.

This becomes will, the voice of conscience, which becomes more and more perfect, the more embodiments we have experienced. Experience changes into will, in the voice of conscience in the course of our incarnations. You know now what the human being does in the devachan. In the kamaloka, he purifies himself, in the devachan; he transforms the experiences, which he had, to strength for the next earth-life to appear as a powerful, inner, individual nature. Hence, you can perceive it if an undeveloped soul appears in the savage; you can perceive this in his gestures and traits, in the movements of his hands as something typical. The more incarnations we have lived through, the more our individual comes out. What is elaborated? The experiences of his former incarnations which become his character.

You can raise another question: why does the human being not remember his former incarnations?—This question has little sense if it is put in such a way. You immediately realise this. It is in such a way, as if anybody comes and says: the human beings are called human beings, and a four-year-old child stands before us which is innumerate—, and now he says: this child is innumerate, however, it is a human being, so the human beings are innumerate.—However, this is a question of development. Every human being arrives at that level once where some advanced persons have already arrived who can remember their former earth-lives. If he cannot remember, it is because he must acquire this ability to himself first, as the child acquires the ability of reading, calculating, and writing. The human being is not allowed to let destiny pass himself in dullness if he wants to achieve the point of view by these experiences to remember his former earth-lives. How does this recollection of the former earth-lives appear?

This life is bound to the fact that the human being has developed as much as possible of his inner spiritual essence. The more free and independent from sensuousness the human being has become in this life, the more he lives in the soul, the less he is dependent on the pleasures provided by the senses, the more he approaches the state where he recognises himself in the former states. However, how should such a human being remember former earth-lives? Examine only once what normally fulfils a usual human being. Only that which the sensuous view offers! Of course, this disappears, because a recollection of former earth-lives is not possible. Not before the human being leads a life in his divine self, he remembers in the same extent what he has experienced in his former incarnations, and those who become engrossed in the spiritual life are certainly reincarnated with a recollection of the spiritual life.

Another objection is normally done against the teaching of karma. One says, well, it is the old principle of fate. Now one says, the human being has prepared everything for himself in his former earth-life. Destiny and character are thereby determined irreversibly. There is no longer freedom nor free will. There we are subject to fate.—If anybody said so, this would be as clever, as if anybody wanted to say: here I have a cashbook. On the left, I have all debits, on the right all credits. If I add both sides, a certain number results. If I subtract both figures, the profit or the loss arises as a result. If I add this on one side again, we have a balance.—Indeed, this is also with a life balance. The good actions are on one side, the bad and foolish actions on the other. There is also a life account with the life balance as there are accounts and balances in the accounting. Imagine now a businessman who said, my annual accounts are done, I am no longer allowed to register anything, I am no longer allowed to bargain, because everything that I am still allowed to do is predetermined by the previous registrations.

The same would be if the human being said, I am no longer allowed to commit new actions. The registrations and the balancing do not forbid him this. Just as little as the accountancy forbids the businessman to do new deals, just as little the karma forbids him good or bad actions. At every moment, we can register new posts; at every moment, we can increase the debit side and the credit side. Some people also say, if I help anyone who is in need and misery, I intervene in his karma. However, I am not allowed to do this.—This is not true. You can help the person to register new and good posts in his karma and to transform his life account to a favourable one. What you register as laziness, neglect, and fatalism is not connected so positively with the principle of karma. However, something else is connected with it.

If you see a chemist going to his laboratory, he will maybe go in with the idea: if I bring together sulphur, oxygen, and hydrogen in a certain way, sulfuric acid originates according to an irrevocable principle. Nothing is to be argued against this principle. However, the chemist can also omit to carry out the mixture, he can do it or not. The principle does not impair his free will at all. Nevertheless, the principle gives him the certainty that that really happens which shall happen. You cannot get carbonic acid one time and sulfuric acid the other time from the same mixture. The principle allows us to build on a certain effect. That also applies to karma. The principle of karma can keep us from no action, but there is the certainty that a right and fair balance must take place in life that every good action must have its good effect and every clever action its corresponding effect. The fact that everything happens according to a spiritual principle gives us the certainty. It shows us that nothing is accidental that we do but that everything we do is done in such a way that we can build on a right world connection.

Thus, this principle of karma is not only a scientific principle, not something that satisfies the theoretical interest only, but something that contains the solution of the riddle of life, the riddle of the world. It gives strength and certainty in life, it works in such a way that we know that everything in this life is connected according to a principle that is recognised more and more that we interpret unconsciously at first and then more and more consciously. Not only is the urge for knowledge satisfied with the spiritual-scientific worldview. Something else is given, namely strength, courage, and certainty. Not only one tells something of our determination to us, but at the same time we get the possibility to live according to our determination, to live in such a way that we advance to a more and more perfect existence. The solution of the riddle of life is not dogmatic and doctrinal, but full of life and mind-impregnated because of the facts of the principles of karma and reincarnation.

All those who looked deeper in nature, in the nature of the spiritual life found more or less this principle of karma and reincarnation. Giordano Bruno was a supporter of the principle, and when from a dullness a new intellectual culture emerged, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781, writer, philosopher, dramaturg) concluded his wisdom in the teaching of reincarnation. I know that many people do not want to criticise Lessing. However, if one likes to praise him, they will not go along. It is strange towards a great man that one only accepts from him what suits one. This also applies to Giordano Bruno and Goethe with whom one regards these ideas as senility or the like. We see that also our German theosophy is deeply penetrated by this view. Only today, only since some decades it is possible again to inform in public about this view. For the centuries of the new development, this was not possible because the human culture had another task as I have already explained.

The teachings of karma and reincarnation appeared in the dawn, and also these great spirits were only able to announce them figuratively, symbolically, they understood them full of life. Where life could become explicable to them in its deepest depths, they often pointed with big life humour to this truth, to this everlasting principle of reincarnation that determines what we now experience between birth and death. Goethe pointed to it when he wanted to explain his deep soul friendship to Mrs. von Stein saying, “Oh you were my sister or my woman in past times.” However, Goethe also expresses the principle of karma like other great spirits. He expresses the fact that we enter the world according to our disposition following the principle of cause and effect like everything in the world in the nice words:

As on the day that lent you to the world
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You instantly thrived and continued to do so
In accordance with the law by which you made your appearance.
Thus, you must be, you cannot escape yourself,
Thus, sibyls and prophets have already spoken,
And no passage of time nor any can break into bits
A moulded form that develops as it lives.

(From: Primal Words. Orphic. Daimon)

However, he said the deepest what he had to say figuratively, among other things, in the beautiful poem where he compares the human soul with the water and the human destiny with the wind. He compares with that which flows along from embodiment to embodiment in the life stream; and the destiny is the wind, which lets the soul surge up and down in perpetual waves. As every following wave is dependent in its figure on the preceding one, the soul is depending on its previous figure, and as well as the wind becomes always new, in the life account of the human being always something new is registered. “Soul of man, how you resemble water! Destiny of man, how you resemble the wind!” he says at the end of the poem where he downright shows the reincarnation in the earth-life. “The soul of man resembles water, it comes from heaven, it rises to heaven, and it must descend back to earth, in eternal alternation.” Goethe shows the soul that way. It comes from the spiritual world, descends to the earth, goes back to heaven and comes again in a new incarnation

The soul of man
resembles water:
it comes from heaven,
it rises to heaven,
and it must descend
back to earth,
in eternal alternation.

The pure jet
streams from the lofty,
steep rock wall,
then falls as charming droplets
in cloudy waves
on the smooth rock,
and, gently received,
it bubbles with a veil of mist
and a quiet murmur
down to the depths.

If cliffs loom up
to meet its plunge,
it foams indignantly,
in stages,
into the abyss.

In its flat bed
it moves quietly down the meadowy valley
and in the smooth lake
all the heavenly bodies
cool their faces.

Wind is the wave's
amorous lover
wind stirs foaming waves
up from the very bottom

Soul of man,
how you resemble water!
Destiny of man,
how you resemble the wind!

The Persian legend speaks of two contrary divinities, of Ormuzd, the good god, and of Ahriman, the bad god. Both divinities battle for the human being, generally for everything that develops here on earth as life. One holds out in prospect that once the good divinity wins the victory over the bad divinity.

Whatever one thinks about this legend, everybody sees a portrayal of this idea in nature, in the surrounding world. To get an example, look at the fire on one side. We owe our culture to it, our comfort and our advancement here within our life, and on the other side look at the destroying power of the forces related to the fire in any respect as for example the earthquakes and the volcano eruptions. So, on one side, beneficent, preserving, life-sustaining, and life-giving powers prevail, and, on the other side, life-destroying and hostile powers. The scene on which the fights of these both powers take place is not only the external human being but also the internal one. The human soul is torn between hostile powers: between pain, evil, grief, and the beneficent powers of existence, fulfilling us with joy, raising our hearts and pointing us to the spiritual spheres of heaven.

Deeper natures have always seen the unity, basically, the harmony between these two contrary powers. I need only to remind of something completely known and you imagine how a choice spirit of our own German culture expressed the unity and uniformity of these contrary powers. Schiller's Song of the Bell contains the nice words just in this regard:

Benevolent is the fire's might,
If man tames and watches it,
For what he builds what he creates,
He owes to this heavenly power;
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off the shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own,
This free daughter of nature.

The same under two different points of view!

If we look at the external and internal human being in such a way, we see reluctant powers in him everywhere. One of these powers of which since ancient times prudent and not prudent people have spoken shall be an object of our today's consideration: that power which one always called Lucifer.—Not only from the scientific, historical point of view, but also from the internal, the so-called esoteric point of view we want to deal with this subject.

The word Lucifer means light bearer (Latin: lux—the light, fer, ferre—bear). If we keep this word in mind, we must already say to ourselves, those who named this power could impossibly mean only that which various positive religious convictions summarise as the destroying, grief, and downfall bringing power that they see in the symbol of the snake and the evil dragon.—However, the religious system best known in Europe, the Christian one, complies with what in the vernacular one calls devil or Satan, whom one regards as the life-destroying power and as that power which draws us down. You all know the snake as the seducer of humanity. You can read it at the beginning of the Genesis, the Bible, and it lives in the consciousness of many people that way.

Not always and not in all confessions the snake was regarded as the symbol of the evil, as the ruining power, as power that draws us down. If we look at the Christian-Jewish myth, it cannot appear to us completely that way. For who would today count that power which brought the knowledge of good and evil to the human beings, of which one says that it opened men's eyes, absolutely to the hostile powers? A big change has taken place just in the last century.

We only need to remind of the name of the great genius Goethe to say which changes have taken place in the course of the last centuries. You all know that Goethe transformed the medieval Faust legend, not only covered it anew. If you pursue this medieval Faust legend, Faust stands there as the representative and type of the human striving, of the striving that is built on freedom and independence and on science, not of that which should be built on revelation, on faith.

Even in the 16th century, the folk spirit represented this Faust, this genius of the liberal striving for human knowledge so that he must absolutely become a slave of the evil, life-hostile powers. Faust must go to ruin because he turned away from the faith, from the tradition of the millennia, from revelation. One tells of him that he did no longer want to be a theologian; one says of him that he laid the Bible behind a bank and became a worldly person. A worldly person was such a person who wanted to found his existence on own knowledge and on own insight of the forces. Such a person had necessarily to become a slave of the evil forces, according to the point of view at that time. Goethe shows us this fight in a new way. How does he close Faust's destiny? He lets the choir of angels sing: “For him whose striving never ceases we can provide redemption.” In addition, here, Faust makes the pact with the powers that are connected with Mephistopheles, but he is redeemed, although he founds himself on freedom and self-determination. Faust reaches to the pacification of his existence. This soul change took place there. Lucifer is no longer recognised in the old way as fateful.

If we look around in the old religions, Lucifer was not always fateful. In the old Indian religions. One called the sages, the leaders, those who illuminated the human beings with spirit “snakes.” It is similar in many religions. Why? What does Lucifer represent in these old religions? What does he represent, finally? This and the like shall occupy us today. What does he represent to the occultists, the explorers of the forces slumbering in nature, of the deeper forces of nature who speak about Lucifer in the sense of this knowledge as that who shall bring the light to the human being who builds on himself and does not build on revelation and faith, but on knowledge and science?

If we want to penetrate into this matter, we must touch something that leads us to bygone times of human existence, so to speak, to the starting point of human evolution. This object, which can only be touched here at the beginning, occupies us completely when we speak about the evolution of the planets. Nevertheless, we have to start already today from this time of human evolution. Evolution is that which appears to us today as a magic word and wants to make the human existence comprehensible, what faces us today in certain perfection and completion and from which we hope that it advances to higher and higher levels of perfection. We attribute everything that lives round us to a development from imperfect to the perfect. That applies to the human being also, to the human being who enters existence according a deeper teaching of development before ancient times in which our earth still did not look like today and in which its natural forces worked quite differently. In the sense of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview, we also speak about this starting point of human evolution, but we speak of an evolution that leads us back to times that are even more distant and to a starting point, which are before our earth evolution. I can only indicate this.

When the human being entered into existence, he was alone, so to speak, with and among the physical realms in the world. If we look at the human being in such a way, he appears to us as the highest member, as the last link in a developmental chain compared with the remaining physical realms, compared with the mineral, plant and animal realms. However, as foolish as it would be if a plant, a stone, or an animal spoke: with me the development ends—, as foolish and senseless it would be if the human being spoke of himself: with me the development ends, I am the highest of the beings, which are possible here on earth.—We must look up at other beings, which we cannot reach with the sensuous eyes, which we reach, however, if the slumbering deeper, spiritual forces are woken if the spiritual eyes are opened.

The theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview has to bring a consciousness of these advanced beings again who are related to the human beings as the human being to the lower realms of nature. When the human being entered into existence, he was not created from nothing, but he originated from former developmental links. In addition, other beings went through such developments. They outranked the human being. The religion, also the Bible speaks of these beings. It speaks of beings who could feel as perfect at that time as the human being feels once when he has finished his present development on earth. We say in the spiritual-scientific worldview, in the human being, in his deepest inside a god is originating. With the Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages we speak that the human being can rise to realms which stand above those in which he lives today. The Christian mystic Angelus Silesius says this: “If you rise above yourself and let God prevail, your spirit experiences Ascension.” Then he does not merely receive from the creative powers like today, but he is then a creative, a spiritualised and deified being.

At the starting point where the forces, which have reached certain levels of perfection today, were still in their childhood, there were beings beside him who had already gone through such stages which he has to finish today. They were that—if we understand the Bible rather internally—from which the gods descended. The gods have also developed, even in the sense of the Bible. The Elohim are not something that simply stands there, but they are something that has become and has developed to that height. They stood on that level in the past to which the human being develops once. These gods have reached a certain completion. However, as well as on the stages of our present existence beside more developed human individuals also those are who have only reached a lower degree of perfection, at that time still beings also stood between human beings and gods who were higher than the human beings, but lower than the creative gods. I know how ambiguous such things are, even if one takes them seriously. I know that the materialistic worldview almost forbids, because it regards it as superstition, to speak of developmental stages of such beings.

However, this cannot prevent us from facing the truth and from speaking of developmental stages of the human being. The gods were in lofty heights above the human beings, and immediately about these were beings who stood in their development between the gods and human beings, but did not complete it at that time. They went through their development among the human beings, because they were closer to them. These beings made up as it were on our earth within their development for that which they had omitted earlier. The secret doctrine, occultism complies with the old religions and the deeper profundities of our time. They subsume these powers as Lucifer. The theosophical worldview shows that a god lives in the human being who expresses himself in the slumbering dispositions that are, however, divine dispositions one day, that the human being has developed at the end of the evolution, but also the luciferic principle lives in the human being and belongs to his soul.

After we have made this clear to ourselves, we are free to speak of gods and luciferic powers, of the divine and of the luciferic principles in us as the physicist speaks of electricity and magnetism. The gods stood there as elated beings. Now we must realise both—gods and luciferic powers—as the big principle which lives in any development and work. Look once at nature round yourselves. As the lowest of a sequence the lifeless world of the mineral, then the plants, then the animal and finally the human realms face us; and then even further up the realms of the higher beings. If the plant could open the eyes and look with bright, clear knowledge around it, then it would say to itself, I owe my existence to this mineral realm, which lives round me; if it were not, I could never be. From it, I get my vitality. This realm forms the ground, from which my roots grow. Without this realm, I could never be there.—Again, if the animal could look at the lower physical realms in the same way, it would be the same. It would have to look down at the lower plant realm and say: I have grown out of it, I owe my food to it; if the plant realm did not exist, I would not be.—

It is the same with the human being. He also has to say to himself: I have grown out of these lower realms of nature, I owe my existence to them; if they were not, then I would not be. There the higher realm faces the lower one again and helps, so to speak, to further its existence. Imagine only once that the mineral realm would only have developed on earth! What would the earth have become? A rigid, lifeless body that hurried through the space. Life would have remained in the mineral realm like slumbering in a grave. Now this life has escaped, so to speak, to a higher realm, to the plant realm, and the mineral realm on earth is made again a living one by the plant realm. The mineral holds and carries the plant realm; the plant realm transforms the mineral perpetually in the living circulation. Consider what the plant makes with the mineral forces on earth! If there were no plants on earth, the substances of the mineral realm rested in the dead rock. However, because there is a plant realm, it soaks up the substances, revives itself with them, and returns them. The lower realm offers the basis and forces to the higher one, and the higher realm helps again to preserve the existence of the lower one. Thus, it is with any next higher realm. The animal realm lives together peacefully with the plant realm, it inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid; the plant builds up its body from the carbon and delivers oxygen for it.

What is about the human being? He also lives by means of the lower realms of nature. There we gradually come up to the human being who approaches the spirit, subsists on the spirit. If we go over to the spiritual powers, there is exactly the same relation between the gods and the human beings as between the lower realms of the universe, a relation, similar to that between the plants and the minerals or between the other higher realms of the universe. We know what the plant contributes to the formation and stimulation of the mineral realm, what do the spiritual realms contribute, what do the gods do with the human being at the starting point of development and in its progress? What did they do with the human realm?

The gods have completed their development. They have no immediate interest in the human realm—if we want to speak here evidently, even if not quite appropriately. However, they have an indirect interest; they give it the forces, which bring the slumbering and solidified life in the human being back to existence, as well as the plant gives the dead stone life. Have a look at the mineral, the plant, and the animal realms. How are they opposing each other? The esoteric who investigates the deeper forces of nature says, the mineral, the plant, and the animal realms face each other like wisdom, life, and love.—Try to understand that!

If you look at the mineral realm as it faces us in nature: everywhere you try to understand it with your intellect and wisdom. You investigate the stars and their orbits, the physical principles of the mineral world. The plant pulls wisdom and the world regularity out of the mineral world. We say without thinking, wisdom, regularity rests in the mineral realm; it is the embodied wisdom. However, poor, sober, and dead would this mineral realm be with its wisdom unless the plant world had come along and its stimulating principle had woken the sprouting life in this slumbering wisdom. Love and wisdom exchange the forces with each other, while the plants and minerals interact with each other. In a similar way, it is also between the gods and the human beings. When the human being began his development on earth, life rested in him at first; the gods stoked it up again for a new earthly development. What is associated with this earthly development? Again, the human realm and the divine realm are related to each other like wisdom and love.

Hence, esotericism, all deeper confessions—also Christianity—speak of the fact that God or the gods are love, the stimulating principle. This principle causes the sensual love at first. That is why Jehovah is shown in the Jewish religion of the Old Testament as the bringer of the sensual desire, as the giver of growth and reproductivity. In the sensual desire lies the principle of the further development that drives from the imperfect to the perfect that is the development from the animal realm up to where love founds states. In this love, which appeals, so to speak, the human beings for communities, which penetrates what is solidified in the human being with sprouting life, as the plant appeals the stone for life, we have the revealing, original divinity in it at first. This is the case in all religions and in the esoteric science too. Now we must take stock of the fact that we have here to see the divine driving forces in the human evolution. The human being had forever to regard that which propels him, which furthers him, as a gift, as a revelation of a divine principle.

The luciferic principle enters among him and the gods. Thereby he is enabled to take charge of that which lives unconsciously as a divine principle in him, in his unaware desire of reproduction and development. Thereby he ascends to independence and freedom in his development. Why this? Because that which lives in Lucifer is closer to him, so to speak, is a younger brother of the divine principle. When the development was still in an older phase, the gods were on the level of humanity; there they looked for their own development independently within the human level. However, after they have developed, the human being is a creature among them; they control the human being and work in him. Now the luciferic principle comes along. This still has a more familiar and more intimate relation to the human being; it has not yet completely outgrown the level of humanity. It is something that rises above the present point of view of humanity, but is associated intimately with it, so that it melts more together with the human being and works as own desire in the human being to further himself. These are three levels, which work in the human being as his developmental forces: his humanity, the luciferic principle, and divinity. If we want to understand the human being, as he faces us on the present level of development, then we must see in the sense of the spiritual-scientific worldview that he has developed the so-called four lower principles. At the same time, I assume something that the theosophical worldview teaches. I want only to give a short explanation of it.

At first we have the physical body of the human being, then the principle of the etheric body, the stimulating one, the formative one, then his desires and passions, the animal in him; this has awoken to independence due to the fourth principle, to the real ego of the human being with which he has outgrown the animal. This human ego is that which develops, actually. This ego lives in three lower principles. It is the fourth. Within this fourth principle, the divine powers work which have already passed the fourth principle in their development and control it from above. We have the luciferic powers still associated with the fourth principle. The gods have ascended from the level of egoity to unselfishness, to devotion and to the overcoming of any special existence. The luciferic in the human being is enclosed with the bigger part of its being still within the ego; it is still within the human interests. With it, we see that everything that lives as unselfishness and willingness to make sacrifices in the human being is the divine principle in the human being, and that beside this divine principle another driving force is in him. Who practices true introspection learns to recognise the other principle. It is the luciferic one.

It strives for divinity, not only in complete devotion sacrificing its self, but it strives for the high stages of perfection, with enthusiasm, indeed, but just from the deepest interest of the self: not only because I love it, but because the higher perfection coincides with that which I must love. I want to strive for it as a human being in divine freedom. The divine powers do not strive for this perfection. By the luciferic striving, however, I make the divine perfection my very nature.

That is why we can say, if this luciferic principle were not in the human being, the gods would him leave in a certain passiveness, in a certain idleness, and they would lead him to. He would be in the state of being a child of the gods. Indeed, his being would strive to perfection, but not he would be that who strives in such a way but the God in him.—Besides, the other, the luciferic strength is added. It makes this striving its own issue. It sets itself the goal of perfection. The biblical myth also shows this also wonderfully. The gods created Adam and Eva, fated to be led by the divine powers to divine perfection without any own activity. However, because the snake comes that gives knowledge and freedom and thereby the possibility of perfection, it brings the possibility of the bad too.

Because the decision between good and bad is now laid in the man's own hand and knowledge, the desire, the love is made the bearer of an unaware, but divine striving for perfection. Everything that should live in this striving for perfection should be aglow with this love, with that which reveals itself to the human being in this love. On the other side, that power opposes it leading the human being, while it takes possession of this fourth principle, of the ego, it wakes him for own choice, gives him light to own knowledge, so that he walks to perfection in the light. Thus, we have the bearer of love and the bearer of light as two real forces prevailing in the human being.

I have expressed in modern form what you can find in all confessions, in all occult worldviews as the divine principle and the luciferic principle. Only those confessions which have gone over more and more to founding themselves only upon revelation, only on faith have felt what works in the human being and lives as own principle of perfection as the bearer of the bad. Therefore, Lucifer, the light bearer, became the seducer from that who invokes the human being for freedom, for independence, for the bright, clear knowledge.

This is one side. All those religions which have left their starting point—for they all have the right view of God and Lucifer at their starting point—which only search for the God who leads the human beings in unconsciousness to bliss, at the same time they all feel that in which the God himself works also as something causing ruin. They feel nature as sin; they feel the mind, the bright, clear knowledge as the perverting Lucifer. Goethe pronounced this, “Nature is sin and Intellect the devil, hermaphroditic Doubt their child, which they together foster” (Faust). Yes, it is true, very true that the doubt is between divine revelation and striving for freedom. However, it is also true that this doubt is necessary to the human being if he really wants to strive for godliness from his own ego by his own merit. We have to go through the doubt, and not before we can doubt all truth, we are able to take possession of truth really. Who has never doubted does not know how the human being is connected with truth. However, who overcomes the doubt gains higher knowledge than if it has become his possession out of blind revelation. This is the pedagogic value of doubt. Therefore, it stands rightly between the divine that cannot be separated from nature and is regarded as sin, between that which is diabolical, is luciferic and the level of perfection.

Considered this way, the human development seems to be put in a certain perspective. The whole development of the Old Testament appears to us in such a way that the God prevails as love in the progress of the human race, in the sensuous love and in everything that it founds: blood relationship, family, clan et cetera. We have perfect with the Jewish people in Jehovah. He is nothing else than the personified power of nature, if one notes how he prevails in the mineral realm, in the sprouting plant realm, in the animal realm feeling joy and sorrow, and in the human being himself. The human God, the Christ impact allows the mineral to form the crystal, it makes the plant sprout and the animals go through the instinctual life, and it leads the human being from the imperfect to the perfect. Ascended the human being to the higher realms, he would remain a mere nature being unless the other spirit, but the spirit beneficent to the human being, Lucifer, prevailed in him who evokes selfishness, indeed, but also independence and freedom. He makes the human being his own being, a special being and raises him above the mere power of nature that way. As true, as it is for the feeling of the servant of Jehovah that Jehovah himself is the basis of the human world that he is the godhead, as it is true that Lucifer rebels against this power of nature and leads the human being to knowledge, calls on him for a clear consciousness.

Thus, the human being raises himself to independence. He releases himself from the ties of the blood relationship, of the clan and the people. He becomes gradually a personality, indeed, an egoistic personality. There Jehovah approaches him out of the same spirit, the governor of the higher life, who regulates the development by law, by commandment. If we have the god working in nature by the sensuous love with necessity, we have him as legislator now, as the god of the Ten Commandments. We have him as Jehovah, who gives the human beings the law, which they have to obey, which shall arrange the awaking personality, which shall harmonise and balance it. What is sensuous love below is a commandment of morality above. That should also be raised which works not only as a physical power, as a commandment which strives not only out of divinity to perfection, but it should also be raised to the human ego. Thus, the general physical lawfulness gives that the mere power of love changes into the principle of spiritual love that Christ originates from the sensuous Jehovah. This spiritualised love does no longer work only in the physical instinct but spiritualises life, which once law could only control.

Thus, Christ becomes the founder of the law that does not approach the human being from without like the usual law, but becomes a soul force like the innermost desire of morality. If Jehovah gives the commandment, Christ gives the power of working. If the god Jehovah determines what is good, Christ prevailing in the human being gives birth to the good out of the strength in the human being himself. The forces of nature are raised to the soul; what was sensuous love becomes spiritual love due to Christ. The law itself is warmed up by the divine, it works in the world as divine grace—using a Christian term.

Thus, we see with the big progress in the turn of the eras the sensuous love, the principle of the natural force only imagined as divine, being refined and spiritualised to the mental love, to the power which does no longer work on the physical plane but on the moral plane.

At first the Christian caritas, the Christian love is the refined power, which produces a moral coherence among the human beings. This coherence considers the human beings strictly as human beings and makes them all equal compared to the highest perfection. It immerses morality in love, as instincts were once immersed in love. This is the first time of Christianity. Hence, the Christian virtue became the virtues of community, the virtues of the harmony of the human souls. The god who brings together the human beings wanted to work in mental love, and this is the principle of the Christian religion. As once, body found body in the natural principle, now in Christianity soul meets soul in the higher love due to the Christ principle. As the Jehovah principle created human communities based on blood, based on family, clan, and people, Christ was called to cause that souls find souls without mediation of the blood. The sensuous love is refined to the self-sacrificing devotion; the physical power is refined to the moral action of the god. As well as in the course of the Old Testament the other principle worked, the luciferic principle, as a divine natural force penetrating the human beings bringing them independence and freedom, in the newer times this principle penetrates the human development as a bearer of light, as bearer of freedom. It is not the opponent; it is the necessary supplement of the Christ principle. It is connected with this Christ principle in a unity, as well as all reluctant forces of nature are imagined as connected by those who have understood nature and universe. As well as Schiller speaks of it:

Benevolent is the fire's might,
If man tames and watches it,
...
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off the shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own,
...

It is the same here. On one side, the Christian caritas, the Christian love, the divine that leads soul to soul and, on the other side, the bearer of light, the bearer of independence and freedom.

By the soul love, humanity would also live only in an unconscious perfection. However, because the soul is impregnated and warmed up, is illumined with the bright, clear knowledge, warmed up by the light of the spirit, because in the human being the bearer of light lives and works, the Christian love thereby works on the free development of the human being also in future. Thus, both powers—revealed wisdom and science gained by the human being—face each other. Soul and consciousness face each other in such a way: the soul glows in spiritual love, and the consciousness penetrates and illumines this spiritual love with the principle of clearness and freedom. Thus, the human being lives between these poles of his being; he works and lives between these powers. To somebody, who looks deeper at the things, Lucifer, the bearer of light, is no hostile power. Lucifer—even if he himself casts off his shackles and strides along his own track, as a free will of the universal power—, always creates the good—to speak with Goethe's words—even if he wants the bad. Lucifer opposes us inevitably as that which must complement another principle in the human being. He proves to be the close friend of the human being who faces him as a brother, whereas on the other side the human being looks up at the elated gods to whom he obeys in quiet devotion, who bear him in their love.

Thus, life appears really as a fight between light and love. It is that way in the present stage of development. As well as the physicists put positive and negative electricity, positive and negative magnetism as two poles, which belong together inevitably, light and love in the higher area of human life belong together like two poles of human existence. Never there originates only one kind of electricity; if you rub a glass rod with a cloth, it becomes positively electric; however, the cloth becomes negatively electric. That applies everywhere. Never can work only one force in the development of life, always the other force must be added as necessary complement. In the human life, the two poles are love and light. The one is not possible without the other.

As well as the old law, the commandments of Jehovah, which he gave symbolically on Sinai, changed because of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, love also changes. Love is something mental that appeared as a higher stage of the physical power in the sensuous love. That is why it is also possible that on the higher stage something clearer appears, namely knowledge.

What was knowledge? It was, if you look back, something that is similar to Jehovah's law, the Ten Commandments, and it has to be remelted. As by Christ's death the love of the sensuous stage was remelted to the mental stage, the principle of mere knowledge, the luciferic knowledge, has to be transformed into a higher one.

We are included in this change today. In certain respects, we experience such a renewal of that which took place in Christianity. As the law changed into grace, science has to change into wisdom. As grace must be borne by our own soul, wisdom has to be borne by the human soul. As Christ is the god who can also prevail in the human being and enables him to become his own legislator in grace, wisdom is born out of the human science. As our science is built on external experience which is given from the outside like the Jews got the commandments on Sinai, this science will be born in wisdom as the law has been born anew by and in Christ. This is the spiritual-scientific striving. We have science given from without, given by the senses, up to now and this has reached the highest level in our cultural life in certain respects. The future must bring that the human being produces this science from his inside as his very own possession, that he changes Lucifer into that who lives and works from the human being. Spiritual science wants nothing else than such a deepening of knowledge. Just as the law or commandment became internal in the Christian virtue and as in the Christ virtue the human development advances in love in the soul life, our material science will progress emotionally if it is reborn from the soul. Spiritual science should aim at this rebirth.

There is a quite analogous event of the human development: Christianity has put up moral virtue instead of the mere physical power in love. The future development brings inner virtue by evoking inner, concealed forces in the human being. As we look back to a development that brought internalisation, law, we see back in the external academic life to a scientific striving, which brings internalisation. As the law was deepened to grace, science will be deepened to wisdom. That means, however, to look for inner development. The law was transformed into the soul by Christian grace. Our science is transformed out of the strength of the own soul into human skill and achievement. Spiritual science wants to rouse the inner, slumbering abilities.

If the Christian works out of the love of his soul compared to the servant of Jehovah, somebody who recognises works out of the wisdom of his heart in the future and attains an even greater deepening of the human development with it. Christianity also promises development of the external soul life. Christianity promises a citizen of the spirit, who connects human being with human being externally without distinction of race and gender. This striving will make the human being such a citizen in the higher spiritual worlds by inner esoteric development.

This is the relation between spiritual science and the external Christianity: the external Christianity looks for external virtue to gain the spiritual with it; the occultist rouses inner virtues slumbering in the human being to gain the even deeper sense of the higher spiritual worlds. What we are talking about is only a deepening of Christianity itself. The Christian principle deepened the law; the spiritual-scientific principle will deepen science. We have the luciferic principle in the entire human development not as an enemy, but as a pole belonging inevitably to the other pole. We have put it to Christianity, as it was up to now. However, just there we have recognised that the principle of the light bearer associates with the principle of love to a higher unity. If inner spiritual abilities are added by the development of the only external Christian virtues, we have an even deeper Christianity, a Christianity that cannot be dictated by the church but that everybody develops by the abilities still slumbering in himself today. Everybody develops the god by own strength, and all souls co-operate in free striving. Lucifer adds freedom, science, and independence to love and goodness. Only that who wants to stop at an epoch of human development can bring himself to turn away the look from that auspicious future perspective.

Any past would be infertile unless it contained a new higher future within itself. The understood spiritual science makes hearts leap for joy and fulfils them with another enthusiasm. What could be achieved by the external institutions up to now could be forced upon the human being in noble, but external kind. The human being once produces that out of the strength of his own soul. An inner church, an inner temple will be there that transfigures and spiritualises the external one. Everybody will be a Christian because Christ shall awake in him, because the inner Christ lives in him and comes along to the Christ who released humanity as a whole. Christ redeemed this humanity as a whole; the human being will understand this if he is internally free and redeemed, if he believes not only in the redemption, but relives this redemption.

Those remind us always who want to point us to Christianity: you aim at self-redemption, but you misunderstand what Christ did. That is not right with which spiritual science is confronted. Spiritual science is not an adversary, but a friend and co-worker of Christianity; not of the Christianity of the last time, but of that Christianity, which knows what Jesus said, “I will be with you, to the end of time” (Matthew 28:20), of that Christianity, which develops to higher and higher perfection. Spiritual science is not hostile to the redemption principle of Christ, because it does not stand on the one-sided point of view that every human being should do something only for himself. This would be the most destructive egoism, even if the human being wanted to strive only in himself for the noblest forces. Humanity is a whole, and if a single—Christ—accomplishes the death of redemption, this death of redemption is for the whole humanity. However, one has to penetrate it with consciousness; any single human being has to relive it. The redemption itself must be reborn in freedom. The principle of St. John's Gospel of the new birth of the human being also applies to it. Anybody is no real human being who is not reborn in spirit and in truth. Christ Jesus said this. He still lives according to his sentence today, he says in no uncertain manner about his own death of redemption, indeed, I died once for the whole humanity to bring humanity the certainty that death can be defeated by life, but this death must be reborn in the soul of the single human being. The redeemed human being is really redeemed only if he has also reborn the redemption in himself.

This is the living Christ principle, deepened by spiritual science. Thus, the soul is in every single human being that develops love with the noblest ideals of humanity. This love is added to the mere sensuousness as spiritual love and leads the human being to divine perfection. On the other side, the Lucifer principle is illumined by science, freedom, and independence. Love in bright clearness, the consciousness is added to the soul. The soul brings the strength of love, and consciousness penetrates and illumines this strength of love with bright clearness. The human being walks through the soul and consciousness to perfection.

He would progress to divinity by a trial not clear to him if he were only a feeling soul; he would rise to the cold, only reasonable perfection if he were only consciousness. Nevertheless, soul and consciousness have always to penetrate each other. Therefore, someone who strives for spiritual science looks back and forth. He looks at the soul with its feeling and its sensation, and he looks at the consciousness with its light and wisdom and says to himself, I want to be not the human being living in dullness, but the human being prospering in bright clearness.—Those virtues have to be added to all other virtues that are founded on science, freedom, and independence. However, freedom has to be deepened by love; otherwise, it becomes arbitrary and brings the human being only nearer to his instincts.

On the other side, love must deepen science: then it becomes wisdom, true spirituality carried by action. Otherwise, it gets cold, desolate, and abstract. Independence must also combine with love, otherwise, it becomes blind egoism, and otherwise, it becomes rigid. This is the deeper truth of life of the spiritual scientific worldview and lifestyle that again three virtues must completely develop as the necessary principles of the human soul: science, freedom, and independence, which must be deepened, however, by the strength of love. Then love transforms science into wisdom, freedom into willingness to sacrifice, into the devotion and admiration of the divine, and independence into unselfishness, into that principle in the human being that overcomes the special being and is merged in the universe and gains divinity in freedom this way.

A week ago, I spoke before you about the idea of Lucifer. In connection with the last talk, I would like to explain something about the same idea and its significance for the human evolution and I may connect with an excellent piece of art, with The Children of Lucifer (1900) by Édouard Schuré (1841-1929, French writer, theosophist).

Someone who regards theosophy only as a sum of teachings and dogmas or the Theosophical Society only as a sect that deals with particular religious-philosophical or other ideas and aims at a corresponding lifestyle that is maybe somewhat surprised about the subject of this talk. However, who regards theosophy as something that one has to regard as deepening of our whole spiritual life, even more, as deepening of our whole culture, finds it comprehensible that theosophy is not only looked for within the narrow borders,, but in all regions, in all branches of life and, hence, also in art above all.

Many people have a point of view that leads them to believe that theosophy is something unworldly, even somewhat life-hostile. Those who believe in such a way have not yet adopted the real basis of the theosophical world movement.

Just a piece of art like Édouard Schure's The Children of Lucifer shows us that the living creating of the artist not only is not impaired by the theosophical deepening, but that the true theosophy and the true theosophical life is just able to inspire art in the most eminent sense and give it exceptionally strong impulses.

Indeed, I would like to link to this drama The Children of Lucifer. However, if we just embark on the mode of formation of this dramatic poetry in our time and on the peculiar structure of the spirit out of which this piece of art has arisen, we are able to look deeper at the theosophical life at the same time.

Schuré has probably drawn the best forces of his work just from the theosophical worldview, and he belongs certainly to the most exquisite authors in the theosophical field. Who wants to find access to the theosophical life from any other point of view than that of the known compendia and smaller manuals can do it with the help of Schuré's works. Already the characteristic how Schuré came to that which should inspire his mind to express artistically what we have in The Children of Lucifer is theosophically extremely interesting.

It is told to us in the fine monument he erected in honour of somebody who had influenced his soul life the conceivably deepest. An extremely interesting fact of the modern cultural life confronts us here. Édouard Schuré published a book and provided it with an introduction that comes from a personality who had deeply looked into the secrets of existence. It is a book in which one recognises the artist. In this book a spirit breathes, which differs from that which we can find, otherwise, in similar writings, a spirit that has immediately processed and taken up real theosophy in himself as life. Schuré calls this personality—Marguerita Albana Mignaty (1827-1887), who wrote about Corregio (Antonio Allegri da C., 1489-1534. Italian painter)—his leader during her life, he calls her the spirit of his soul after her death. One cannot express that more appropriately than he did if one looks into the psychology of Schuré's creating.

In the last third of the 19th century it was granted to some deeper inclined natures to look into true spiritual life once again, after one had understood the word spirit hardly as anything else than a sum of abstractions long time, after one did not connect, actually, anything real with the word spirit long time.

If—on one side—we delve into Schuré's creating and—on the other side—into the mind of that personality which he calls his leader, we are immediately recalled of that which was understood within the Greek mystery view in the aurora of our western cultural life by the concepts of god and of the divine life. The word theosophy originated later. The first to use it was the apostle Paul. However, it was a common property of all deeper recognising people. We need to get involved only in that which existed within the spiritualised Christianity as theosophy, as a divine concept, as a concept of the divine life, and you are able to grasp the fact of the spirit immediately in another way than it is possible with the modern concepts, as they are still quite usual. The Greek understood by god, by the divine being still nothing else than such a being that surmounts the human being, indeed, concerning his qualities, concerning his abilities, but that is similar to the human being. He calls the human being a becoming god, and he understands any god in such a way that he has once gone through the school of humanity. If the Greek looked up at his god, he said to himself, the gods once went through the sufferings and joys, the experience of life, which I have to go through now. They once went through this school of life, which I have finished now, and I soar those spheres of creating later, on which the gods are today.—The Greek calls his gods older brothers in the entire cosmic evolution, and regarded the human being himself as a draft that should become the same once as the gods are today.

This gives another relation to the divine than that which only looks up at something divine, only foresees something in the beyond. As well as here in the physical world for the Greek the external physical realms establish, the sensory physical realms, from the mineral, to the plant and animal realms up to the human realm, the hierarchy, the sequence of the gods outranked the human. He considered the realms beyond the human one as the world of the gods. He did not call that which the Greek should experience in those schools—which were cult sites at the same time, which one called mysteries—abstract, only scientific knowledge of some higher principles, of some forces of nature. The Greek did not understood it symbolically but as something real that the human being associated with the gods in the schools. The mystery pupil did not feel towards the gods, unlike the child feels if it looks up at the adult who has already reached what it itself reaches in a future life epoch. Something completely real was this experience to the Greeks. Hence, theosophy was for those, who coined the word first, not knowledge of the gods, but the knowledge that was obtained in this peculiar way by the contact with the higher spiritual beings. Anybody who was initiated into the mysteries not only obtained knowledge, but he was enabled to associate with the gods, with the spirits, as well as he associates here on our earth with human beings. One called natural knowledge that knowledge that the human being acquires with the senses.

However, one called that knowledge, which one received from the gods, divine knowledge: theosophy. I know very well that the most people of those who think from the modern point of view regard such a phrase, as I have just used it, as nothing but an only poetic picture, as a symbol or something extremely fantastic and superstitious. It is neither this nor that; it is something that the human being can really experience. The human being can bring himself to turn his look to the spiritual beings outranking him as he directs his look to the sensuous beings. These spiritual beings avoid the sensuous eye, like all senses, because they have accomplished the stages of spirituality and do no longer have any existence for the senses. The mysteries of the Greeks aim at this: a development of the human being to get contact with the higher beings.

In the last third of the 19th century, it was granted, as I said, again to some deeper natures to understand something of that which is meant, actually, with such a thing. Above all, a person was part of it like Marguerita Albana. However, I would like to say that such a personality was not initiated by means of that big spiritual art which somebody had to go through who wanted to maintain the contact with the gods within the Greek mysteries. Such a personality was an initiate by nature as there are poets by nature. However, I cannot get involved further in the fact that a soul, which is initiated by nature in the former stages of existence, is already over some experiences, so that that which it experiences now is only recollections of former stages of existence. However, the possibility to behold in the higher world, transforming particular lower forces of our existence, forms the basis of such a spiritual person like Marguerita Albana. What does that mean?

Any means of higher knowledge are transformations of subordinated forces. What still the undeveloped human being had in far-away prehistoric time as undeveloped vague senses can be transformed into the eye which opens the splendour of the sunlight to us. On the other hand, visualise once how imperfect the organ of the ear is on the lower developmental stages! All higher organs that open the marvellous nature round the human being are transformations, metamorphoses of lower forces. Human forces can also today be transformed into higher senses.

Thus, some human beings were equipped with higher senses just in the last third of the 19th century. That is why they could behold into the spiritual environment. What other human beings have only in abstractions or notions, the reality of the divine existence, was to them as certain as the sensuous things to the other human beings. Such personalities could give information of the higher worlds. Just such persons could inspire the receptive nature of Édouard Schuré to the nicest and biggest. Édouard Schuré combined soul, mind, and deep esoteric knowledge with a real Schillerean diction and strength of language in this drama, whose translation you can receive from Marie von Sivers here. The drama The Children of Lucifer is something that is created not only out of the spirit of the present, as it is embodied in few people now, but it is created almost out of the spirit of the next human future. In this work, those who have the disposition and talent may develop something according to the highest and most significant theosophical ideas. Édouard Schuré just realised what took place in the Greek mysteries and in those acts of consecration.

You all know that also within the German cultural life in the last third of the 19th century a breath was to be felt that originated from a kind of understanding of the Greek mysteries. Richard Wagner (1813-1883, German composer) and his circle was inspired by the spirit of the Greek mysteries in certain ways. We still have to speak something about this chapter in the next talks. You know also that one of those spirits who were close-knit with Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher), wrote his first work about the Greek tragedy and that he wanted to show how this Greek tragedy came into being from an ancient spiritual life. He did not go as far as Édouard Schuré, not into the mysteries, however, to the gates of the mysteries when he wrote the work The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1869).

Two words faced his mind: the Apollonian, on the one side, and the Dionysian, on the other side. What did Nietzsche mean with these words? He understood two spiritual currents by them.

The Dionysian, he says, is that which completely lives in that element of the human cultural life, which is at one with the cosmic spirit all around. The Dionysian is to Friedrich Nietzsche a rapture that the human being experiences if he completely penetrates his being with that core of the highest spiritual life, which flows through the whole universe. Nietzsche anticipated such a thing that the Pythagoreans called music of the spheres, something of that old choir of which also Goethe speaks while he lets his Faust begin with the words:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with tread of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

Nietzsche anticipated something of that mysterious hearing and listening to that which flows through the universe, which makes the planets dance around the sun, which animates the spheres. He anticipated that in this dance something divine enjoys life and that the human beings can penetrate themselves with the breath of the divine, and that the human being then feels at one with the whole universe. Then, Nietzsche thinks, the human being lives in a kind of rapture, then he experiences what flows through the whole universe, then an echo of that god whom the Greek calls Dionysus lives in him.

As to Nietzsche, this god is that who poured out into the material world round us who is buried in the material world and who celebrates his resurrection then in the human mind, in the human soul. So that the disciple of Dionysus accomplishes his songs, his inspirations under the influence of this god and allows to flow out what one calls the immediate Dionysian art arisen from the divine. Thus, the Dionysus dancer and Dionysus singer was the representative of the divine Dionysian principle in the world. Nietzsche regards this Dionysus drama as the original drama, the later drama originated only from the fact that an image was created, a quiet, dreamlike image of the original Dionysian rapture. The Dionysus disciple receives what arises before his senses, and he can mirror this in serene Apollonian kind. Thus, the Apollonian art is something that was created afterward as an image of the Dionysian art. It is the image, the notion of something that lived in old Greece. Nietzsche pointed already to the primeval times, in which the Dionysus disciples did not only speak of the god, but lived the divine in their movements, in their voices and works as the original artists. Any later art appeared to Nietzsche only as a late echo of this old art. Any science appeared to him only as a shadowy image of the forces represented once by the human beings.

In Richard Wagner's art, Nietzsche saw a renewal of that great art which connects the human beings again with the divine. Therefore, it was clear to Nietzsche that Richard Wagner could not bring human figures on the stage, but that he needed supernatural figures which did not show only what happens in this world, but also what works behind this world in spirit. As well as in the Dionysus drama the Greek artist was able to do it, Richard Wagner's figures, put down on the stage, had also to have outgrown the usual human in the sense of Nietzsche, so that they can embody something about which the human being can say, they are there to that which comes once. In his book Le drame musical. Richard Wagner, son Suvre et son idée (1875), Schuré also created out of this spirit which was round Wagner, and he represented the idea of the musical drama greatly; for Marguerita Albana had introduced him in the true spiritual world, in the spiritual reality. Inkling became reality to him, and with it, he could find the key to the inside of the Greek mysteries. Better than someone else, he was capable to illumine what took place within the holy mysteries of Greece. In his work Sanctuaires d'Orient (1898), he was able to rebuild the so-called Greek original drama with great ingenuity. What was now the Eleusinian original drama?

It is a reproduction of an experience which cannot be experienced at all within the sensuous world which can be experienced only if the human being himself develops to that level where higher senses awake in him where he realises that all physical principle, which he get to know, are real thoughts of the beings whom the Greeks called gods. As well as the human being creates with his thoughts today, and as he puts his thoughts into his works, his older brothers, the gods, put their thoughts into the world of existence.

Let us get into the mind of such a Greek mystery pupil who has been initiated. He said to himself if he could have spoken with our words: look at a piece of art, at a machine, what are they? They are works of human beings, formed according to human thoughts. If you stand before the piece of art, before the machine, you see also the artist, the mechanic through their work, and I understand the work if the principles are disclosed. What are these principles? They are what lived first in the head, in the spirit of a human being.

The thoughts of the mechanic, of the artist are crystallised as it were in the material tool, in the marble piece of art. As I look from the piece of art and from the machine at the artist and at the mechanic, the Greek artist looked from the earth at the higher beings. If he wanted to understand the principles that build up an animal, he said to himself, thoughts of beings of divine nature are therein. As well as the thought of the mechanic is in the machine, the thoughts of a creator, of a god are in the animal, in the crystal, in the starry heaven.—This god is to him a being to whom he feels related, who is on a level that the human being himself reaches once. The Greek regarded the god as a being, which has arisen from a human level, and the human being is a being that once attains a divine level. Thus, he associated with the gods in the mysteries. He associated with the gods like with older brothers, and the feeling, which expresses itself in it, is something quite natural. One has only to settle in such a kind of thinking. From such a kind of thinking, the mystery pupil looks up at those beings that are slumbering, as it were, or are embodied in their thought in the whole nature surrounding us.

The mystery pupils saw the slumbering divine thoughts in the whole nature. The being of the divinity poured out into it, and the human being is there only, so that in him these divine thoughts can recover their very own existence. All thoughts in the soul of the human being are the resurrection of the god in the world. Placed in the universe in such a way, the own human life appears as an after-image of the descent, the suffering and death of the godhead and the grave of the godhead in the matter. The human being is called to redeem the gods again from the matter. This is the way of Dionysus, the way that all gods have taken. Thus, the gods live in their thoughts.

Theosophy calls Dionysus the last-born of the gods. You know that in the legend he is a son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. One says that his divine father snatched him from his mother when Zeus struck her with a streak of lightning. Then, however, the mother of the gods, Hera, became inflamed with jealousy against this child not stemming from her. She set the titans against the child who tore it and scattered the pieces all over the world. Pallas Athena saved its heart only and brought it to Zeus who formed Dionysus anew.

We realise that this god was there already before, and we realise that this divinity has a special relation to the world. What is it? It was shown in the mysteries as the creator of that in the human being, which humanity attained last. The human being appears partially as originating from the hands of the gods. In the first years of his life he also faces us in such a way, because he has not yet formed own existence. Bit by bit he matures and becomes independent. Then he works and forms on his own existence. More and more the strength awakes in him that makes him the creator of his innermost being, the creator of his soul strength and mental power. Now one says within the mystery schools that as it were the last step in the life that the human being receives from nature or from God is connected with the god Dionysus.

There we touch one of the deepest secrets of the Greek mysteries, namely the sexual maturity of the human being. The time, when he comes out of the undifferentiated sexual life to the differentiated one of man and woman, is still the last step which nature accomplishes with the human being leading him to this maturity, where in him the desire awakes for the other sex. What he then makes of this desire, how he refines it, how he penetrates it with soul, and what he makes of love in spiritual respect, this is the own work of the human being. The last step that the gods accomplish with the human being is that they develop him to the young man and woman during puberty. The force that expresses itself everywhere in nature, in any knowledge, in any sensuousness and in all mental forces on the different levels, the mystery pupil also recognises it now in the proclivity of one sex for the other.

How does the human being perceive any way, the Greek mystery pupil asked himself, how does any being perceive anyway? If we imagine an animal eating the plants instinctively, which are useful and necessary for its prosperity, it is a kind of perception. Nevertheless, it is a higher level of percipience if our eye turns to the light and soaks it up as it were. Sensuousness is percipience, vision is percipience, and it is percipience if one sex inclines towards the other. Then the transformation of the lower forces to higher and higher ones takes place. The last step which nature, or God, spoken in the freer sense, has undertaken with the human being can also be transformed. Sensuousness changes into love. It spiritualises itself; it ensouls itself. Dionysus was the god who represented this strength of sexual maturity to the Greek of the mystery. Dionysus did not only have this function with it, because the sexual maturity is still connected with something quite different. Dionysus is understood as the last-born of the gods only with it.

If we look at the human being as he faces us today, we have a being before us in which the more astute human being—and someone who embarks on the theosophical worldview is led to this deeper look bit by bit—sees something that has become man and woman gradually. You need only to read Plato and to take him seriously in order to understand the Greek kind of view and you find how he points to a time when there was not yet man and woman, while the human being was still man and woman at the same time. The biblical legend points also to such an undifferentiated human race, and the Fall of Man is nothing else than the symbolic representation of the sexual differentiation. If we understand that the human being, as he faces us, originated from a bisexual being, we say to ourselves, in the course of evolution, the human being acquired his one-sided sexuality. He developed from the double sexuality to uni-sexuality. He lost half of his productive power. This half has awoken on the other side as the strength of our soul, as the strength of our mind. So that the human being became unisexual—a deeper look into nature shows this—, the human being became productive spiritual-mentally because he has given away half of his physical productive power.

Thereby the human being became capable of self-consciousness and could say to himself “I”, he is an independent being that—if we may express ourselves figuratively—was dismissed from the hands of the gods and became his own creator. Thus, it is connected in the development that the human being feels that strength which forms, indeed, the basis of his egoism that makes him, however, a free, self-conscious being. Hence, on every stage the emancipation of the human being recurs where sexuality finds its further development in any way.

The god Dionysus is the last-born of the gods. That means that the Greeks imagined that he developed the human being up to his present independence. Zeus, Cronus, the older gods, created the human being up to the point when he was a double-sexual being that lived in a vague consciousness, when he was not able to say “I” to himself, when he was without self-consciousness and without freedom. The creator of independence is Dionysus. With it, the divine principle poured out uniformly into the whole nature up to the point when the human being became independent. Then the human being faces us in countless individuals.

Let me illustrate this. If we put back ourselves in the time when the human being was not yet independent when he was still a double-sexual being with dim consciousness. There one could say, as well as my hand is a limb of my own organism, the human being was a limb of the whole divinity in those days. His consciousness still rested in the bosom of the divine consciousness. One could still see through the human being to the divine soul. Now, after the human being became independent, was separated from the divine consciousness, this soul is divided in as many individuals as there are human beings. This was greatly symbolised in the divided god Dionysus, who was dismembered by the Titans. Pallas Athena was the symbol of the human wisdom. We felt her with our hearts, with our higher minds as the common consciousness of the whole humanity. While we feel at one again, a mind of the same kind develops in the whole humanity, the heart of the god Dionysus is saved and again carried upwards to the dwelling of the gods. Thus, the Greek imagined that the god Dionysus led the human beings up to the separation of the sexes and, finally, to sexual maturity. One regarded the proclivity of one sex to the other as one of many forces, which come from the god Dionysus. Then two spiritual currents work on the human being, who stands in the world as a creature of the god Dionysus. These spiritual currents are the starting point of our own culture.

One current is that where the spirit works in the external, serene form and in wisdom to develop the beauty of the external form and the order in the sensuous urge. It should not work fiercely and irregularly, by which Dionysus brought the human being up to the present level, but it should comply in harmony and order. One sees this principle of the external formal creation of Dionysus best of all in the Greek and Roman art, in the Greek beauty and in the Roman statecraft. They introduced order and beauty in the social life of the human beings created by Dionysus as independent beings. The soul which animates and ensouls this urge was refined and deified by Christianity; everything that regulates the human community in such a way that not blind urge, but spiritualised, deified urge prevails is caused by the understood Christianity. Spirit and love are two currents in the human development.

The present development and that of the last millennia face the poet of The Children of Lucifer. He considers what Greek spirit and Roman statecraft created as a living and uplifting principle of the Dionysian human being and on the other side the deepening of the principle of love by Christianity. Now we also understand how Édouard Schuré got around to processing these ideas in a piece of art that he called The Children of Lucifer.

In Dionysia, a city of Asia Minor, the following happened. This city had a cult that was dedicated to the god Dionysus. These Dionysian mysteries were celebrated in Dionysia and had there a mystery site. Then this Dionysian current was intermingled with the second current. It was in the fourth century of the Christian calendar. It was the Roman world domination and made those who were worshippers of Dionysus, who knew that a spark of a divine soul lives in them, members of the Roman statecraft. Now the Greek spirit and the Roman statecraft conflicted with each other. The original spirit must revolt. Why must it revolt? It must revolt because the external form wants to integrate the independent. This can easily become an external order. That which should make order, harmony, and unity easily becomes that which suppresses and subjugates the human freedom and independence. This also applies to the Roman spirit—which was born out of the Dionysian spirit—in the fourth century. These two currents of the human spirit face us in Dionysia: on one side the spirit, on the other side the stiffened state formalism. These are two currents that extend via the Dionysian mysteries to Christianity, which should spiritualise the drive of the human being to the other human being, which should refine the actions of Dionysus and put them in a higher light purifying the mere desire.

However, it degenerated in that time, in the fourth century, to an external formalism that subjugated and suppressed what it should refine. Thus, we look at the subjugating Caesar on the one side and on the other side at the subjugating Christian priest who does not get love out to refine it, but to deaden it. We see how in Édouard Schuré's drama two persons as representatives of the Greco-Roman spirit meet, on one side a young man, who is called Theokles first and then Phosphorus, and on the other side a virgin who was consecrated to the service of Christianity as chaste sacrificial virgin. We see Phosphorus revolting who wants to originate the Dionysian human being in the highest refinement against the solidifying, the Caesar principle, and on the other side the Christian virgin who is not so spiritualised that she is world-enraptured but so spiritualised that she herself is called to work and create in this immediate world. These two persons deepen each other. How nicely, greatly and tremendously the development of these persons is shown. Phosphorus sees the Caesar principle subjugating his hometown on the one side, the Christian principle subjugating it on the other side. On one side, he sees the divine Caesar, on the other side the merely good, world-enraptured shepherd and those who should adore him. He is led to an old person, whom one calls the old man of the unknown god in Greek.

It is a big transformation that our Phosphorus experiences. In a distant canyon, he looks for a landmark, and he encounters one of the temples, which were considered as initiation temples. He meets an old priest there, one of the sages of the unknown god. Which god? That god whom one does not confess whom one does not revere in this or that figure. That god who does not answer if one asks him because everybody must answer to himself what is not to be put into words what lives, however, as a spark in every human being. As true as it is that the human being becomes aware of the divine spark, he can also realise that he is on the way to the big god all his life through. This god forms the basis of that which lives in the stars which is in the human breast, and what still forms the basis of everything that the human being performs on his higher level. For he is not a god of the past, but a god of the future, not a god of the thought of the past or the present, but a god of the thoughts, which the human being once is able to think as the highest on the current developmental level.

That is why he is called the unknown god because the human being cannot serve a god who gives him a completed existence, but because he wants to serve a god who can stand there in perfect figure only in the future. Therefore, the free human being adheres to the divine spark in his breast; therefore, he adheres to that which exists as the dismembered Dionysus at first in the world outdoors. Then he cannot find strength from anything else than from this separated divine spark, the strength of the upward development, then, however, he also knows that this upward development is connected with the passage through knowledge and suffering, with the passage through the bad because the human being is detached, according to his inner spirituality, from the divine. Hence, free forces must emerge in him to lead back this spark to divinity. If we had remained in the bosom of the gods without splitting in the sense of the Dionysus legend, the divinity itself would lead us to godliness. Thus, we appear like apostatised sons of god. This strength in us, which should lead us as sons of Dionysus to this godliness, is Lucifer's strength, the luciferic principle, that light, which the human being freely kindles in himself, in order to find the whole god as a part of the divine being once.

The strength that works in him is the light. Lucifer, the bearer of light, is the teacher and leader who bears the light in the human being and in the whole humanity. All those who develop such an attitude like Phosphorus are the children of Lucifer. Thus, they are not anti-Christian. They are so minded that they say: in Christ, the god appeared who became a human being who descended and enjoyed life in the human body. However, the human being has to develop so that he unfolds the god in himself in such a way that the deified human being meets the incarnate god that the human being who ascends from below finds a similar being. As Christ is now that who descended the deepest from above as the revealing god, Lucifer is the god whom the deified human being meets. Christ and Lucifer belong together, understood in the right sense. Thus, we find Phosphorus, while any Caesarism cannot keep him by any suppression of the free Dionysian principle in the world from rushing to the temple of the unknown god to receive the light that carries him upwards to become a son of Lucifer that way.

As well as Phosphorus pursues this way and raises his mind up to that view which recognises Lucifer as the developmental principle, Kleonis develops from a Christian virgin to a universal principle. She should solely direct her love to the incarnate god. She develops to such a degree that she anticipates that love can be refined in the human being in such a way that the divine love of the incarnate god combines with the human love in the human nature itself. Thus, the Christian virgin soars the point where she can meet the unknown god. Christ has come to life in the Christian virgin because she joins not only in the view and in admiration with the divine, but achieves that she rises to the Christian love. Phosphorus has ascended to the point where the spirit shines to him in the light. With it, the mind of the man and the soul of the woman are on the same level. They now work together on the same level, namely in such a way that always instead of Dionysus the free human couple stands at first which embodies the inkling of a future which should still arise once. Christianity and Caesarism developed to that which unfolded in Dionysia: it subjugated and enslaved the human beings. However, they both stand there upright and freely.

They are expelled. They cannot save the old Dionysia. The old Dionysus, who perishes in Romanism and in the external Christian formalism at first, cannot host both who have got free; they are expelled. While they show the life of the future in the present, they must live in the present. They find the way to the unknown temple again. Where Phosphorus was consecrated, where the star of Lucifer appeared to him, the clear star of Lucifer appears to them in the hour of death, both ways uniting. Lucifer leads the human beings in freedom to the highest development, and we attain the cross of Christ, the symbol of redemption, if the incarnate god touches the deified human being.

Thus, both who got free have to save at death what they have achieved. They cannot save Dionysia. That is the course of human development. This was something that one already experienced in the Greek mysteries in a higher life: that life forever overcomes death, that death is only something apparent with the single human being and something apparent in the entire human culture. Thus, we anticipate at the end of Schuré's drama that that which they both gained in themselves has an everlasting significance beyond the grave. The whole drama ends magnificently, in the sure certainty that the spirit must overcome matter.

As well as death is the winner over life here, one can represent it only if one knows anything about the true and real life of the spirit and knows that death is only something apparent. Someone who does not know that everything dead is something apparent must say to himself, if death were anything real to the noble pair that gained freedom because it was expelled and driven out by the enslaved Dionysia that would perish which they both have taken along. For all those who remained in Dionysia are slaves of a dying human epoch. Apparently, nothing is left. If this semblance were reality, we could no longer believe anyhow in the fact that it has a significance if anybody has purchased a higher life with death. For then this drama would close with nothing. Solely the belief and knowledge that the spirit is real carries this drama, and that from the death of the freed couple a real spiritual blossom sprouts which later works and lives in humanity which has remained, which is planted in the whole spiritual human development. From the death of Kleonis and Phosphorus, a spiritual human flower grows which is there then.

That which the human being experiences by the light and what he recognises lives on. Schuré owes this certainty to the fact that the former Greek world had arisen in him due to Marguerita Albana. He owes to Christianity that he was not only an external artist, but also that he can have a deep look into the spiritual development of humanity. He has shown this sight in his book The Great Initiates. There he has spread out the historical tableau of humanity from Rama (seventh incarnation of Vishnu), Krishna, Hermes, Plato and other initiates up to Christ Jesus. He has shown this human tableau, this spiritual development.

With it, he has delivered a historical consideration which is theosophical in the most eminent sense and which has led countless people in Europe to the theosophical worldview. Out of the spirit of his consideration he created The Children of Lucifer, this little marvellous dramatic work in which in every line and in every scene theosophical spirit lives. Thus, the theosophical worldview becomes life; art becomes the expression of the theosophical spirit if the truth of the spirit is mirrored to us as beauty.

The human beings can create three things at first, Édouard Schuré says. At first, we are concerned with ontology. It leads us to the big principles of the world, but now we look at them—if we are deepened theosophically—not as anything dead, but as abstract divine thoughts. Then we are concerned with mysticism that leads us to the gods and higher beings whom we recognise as our older brothers. Then we are concerned with symbolism that shows us the god in the external sensuous picture and as a shadowy reflection in art. Thus, Édouard Schuré is a real theosophist and a real artist and shows more than all theosophical dogmatics what a theosophical world task consists in.

It is typical that under the title Lucifer the first theosophical journal appeared which we have renewed in our German magazine Lucifer-Gnosis where the whole way of thinking, the future task of the theosophical worldview has been expressed clearly, as it lives artistically in the drama with the title The Children of Lucifer. Only those who regard art as something external misjudge that in this piece of art something lives in the highest degree that has not missed the creative power because of its deepness. If this drama satisfies the artist completely, something of that impetus flows from this drama to the unknown god who works in us all and whose name theosophy just bears. Thus, this drama is the expression of that theosophical attitude which takes the true deepening and the human freedom seriously.

No one can be free in the highest sense of the word who does not find the divine in himself, who is not an associate, not a brother of the divine being. If the human being becomes this, he himself becomes a part of that force which is a bearer of the light that is Lucifer. Then he becomes a child of Lucifer. Those who understand something of the mysterious force working in the universe that one cannot see only with the eyes and perceived with instruments, of the forces that flow through the moral and religious life and work in our whole universe. Those who know a little bit about it speak of the forces that one calls the astral light.

The experts describe it in such a way that it flows through the space like other forces, like gravity, and works on the beings. The astral light flows through all beings; it lives in the higher animals and in the human being generally. If the human being does something and says, I act, or I am driven instinctively—it is in truth the astral light which works and lives in him. He can dedicate himself to this astral light, unconsciously, with dim consciousness. This always happens if passions and instincts press the human being. However, this does not happen if he becomes the bearer of own light if he connects himself with the force of Lucifer. Then he changes this astral light, this creative force in the world into a conscious, creative force in himself. Then he becomes a citizen in the higher spiritual worlds. If he leaves himself to the astral light with dim consciousness, he can say, indeed, the gods live, and they flow through me, but I am destined to emerge from unconsciousness, to let the light appear as something free, to illumine my actions independently with divine forces.

Everything that originates from the twilight of the consciousness, what the bearer of the light does not cause hampers our development. What leads to the aim and to the true human ideal is that which comes from the light, from the real knowledge. Therefore, the human being is only allowed to throw himself really into the stream of life if he has grasped the god in himself if the god is his leader. Theosophical attitude means waking the divine consciousness in oneself and becoming mortal with the aid of the forces which are in the own breast. Marguerita Albana whom Édouard Schuré calls his leader expresses that in a short saying which could be regarded as a motto of the theosophical attitude and which should also close our considerations today:

Trust in the god in your breast, and then leave everything that is in you to the stream of life
(Crois au Divin qui est en toi, et puis prête l'oreille au fleuve de la vie).

Many a time I have already pointed here to the fact that it is a prejudice if one declares the present theosophical movement in the strict sense of the word as a Buddhist or neo-Buddhist one. Theosophy or spiritual science does not want to implant a foreign worldview from without, but to show how also within our European culture deeper teachings of wisdom form the basis of the striving of humanity that express themselves most distinctly. Next time I venture to show how in a newer epoch of the German spiritual life theosophical feeling and thinking were expressed in a quite extraordinary measure, I would like to say, in its intellectual purity around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, however, I would like to show—as far as I can press it in a single talk—how within the Germanic-German folk culture an impact exists which goes back to views that we meet in theosophy.

A careful comparison between the basis of the European religious and worldview with that which has been expressed over there in the East in such a peculiar, spiritual way will show us how little the misunderstanding is justified that the theosophical spiritual current wanted to force something completely strange on the European life. We have to characterise—if we want to carry out this comparison really—the basic view of the so-called theosophical worldview with a few words at least. If only just, let us once visualise the often-discussed basic view of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview.

The human being is, according to this theosophical worldview, at first a being who has a double nature as basis, namely a transient so-called cover part, an external member of his nature, and an imperishable everlasting essence. The external cover is as it were the sheath or the tool of the human being with which his immortal essence works and is active in this world. This cover is clearly divided into four members. The first member is the so-called physical body, the body that one can see with the eyes and perceive with the other senses. The second member is the so-called etheric body. Life lives in this body. It has the same figure approximately as the physical body, but it forms the basis of the physical body as the bearer of the life principle. The third member is the bearer of the feelings, of joy and sorrow, of the instincts and passions. We call it the astral body, because the forces, which are effective in it, prove to be to someone who can deeper look into the world the forces that live outdoors in the starry heaven, in the astral, and are essential. We call the fourth member the real human ego. We call it in such a way because the human being has the three other members, physical body, etheric body, and astral body in common with the remaining beings, which are round him.

Every mineral has a physical body. The plant has a physical body and etheric body, the animal has a physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The human being besides has a fourth member to live within this world that enables him to say to himself “I.” This ego is the final member, the final point of the development of the three above-mentioned bodies that they have striven for since primeval times. It lives in the three covers, which surround it not like onionskins, but they interact regularly, penetrate each other powerfully, and take shape. At the same time, the ego is the bearer of a higher tripartite nature we call spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man best of all. These members are today included only as gifts in the majority of the human beings. The Eastern mysticism calls the spirit self “manas,” the life spirit “buddhi,” and the highest, innermost member “atman.” It is the real spirit of the human being, the innermost core, the immortal within the human nature. With it, we have seven members of the human nature as we have seven tones of the musical scale or seven colours in the rainbow.

The lower members are a confluence, an essence of the three realms, which surround us: the mineral, plant and animal realms. The higher members, manas, buddhi, and atman are not to be perceived by the senses, they are of divine nature. The human being has these members also in common with higher realms of existence, as he has his lower members, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body in common with the realms of nature surrounding us on earth. As he extends with these three lower bodies into the earthly existence, he strives with the higher spiritual members of his nature up into the realms of the divine that is tripartite like the external nature. Thus, the human being is rooted in the earthly and he extends with his branches into the spiritual-divine world. As he developed out of the earthly world from lower beginnings, he develops spiritually upwards, becoming more and more similar to the higher spiritual beings. Therefore, we can also say, the human being is divided in three parts.

While we connect the lower members and the upper ones, we have the ego in the middle. It has a share of both, of the earthly and the divine. It penetrates the etheric body and the astral body. We call this ego soul. We call the real immortal inside of the human being, atman, buddhi, and manas, mind or spirit. By these three members of his nature, the human being is a citizen of three worlds at the same time. He is a citizen of the usual physical world here. When he has left the physical world here, when he has left his physical body, also the etheric body, he enters another world, a kind of intermediate world, an astral world, as we say, the soul world. At first immediately after death, he has to purify himself for a number of years from that, which still adheres to him from the connection with the earthly-physical world. We call this state kamaloka or stay in the astral world. This is no place, but a state. The disembodied human being, as long as he still has certain effects of his physical nature in himself, stays in the soul world and ascends then to a still higher world that we call devachan or the world of spirit.

You know now that the spiritual-scientific worldview assumes not only a one-time stay of the human being in this physical world, but that it knows that the human being has to go through repeated earth-lives. His immortal essence can deify itself more and more only thereby, can ascend to spiritual regions going through experiences, through lessons in the earth-life repeatedly. Thus, the human being returns to the physical world when he has gone through the worlds of soul and spirit, then he returns again to the spiritual world and so on. These repeated incarnations are held together according to the so-called principle of karma, according to the law of cause and effect. If a human being, after he has gone through repeated earth-lives, appears again, he is born with dispositions and abilities, which he has appropriated in the former lives by experience, and with the guilt, which he has burdened himself in former lives. Thus, the one appears happy, the other unhappy and miserable because he himself has prepared this. What we have compiled here appears in the future earth-life again. The human being thereby ascends and descends, goes to and returns from the three worlds: physical world, astral world and devachan world.

The human being is not only a being, which belongs to these three worlds, but he also has companions in these three worlds. Someone, who searches spiritual-scientifically in the other worlds, not only in the physical world, which the human being perceives with his senses and can seize with hands, knows that there are not only such beings which have the three members of the human nature: body, soul and mind. However, there are also beings, which are lower than the human being is, and beings, outranking the human being. How we have to imagine the beings, which are lower than the human being is? We have to imagine them in such a way that they have not a spiritual core as the highest like the human being, but they have a mental one only. As well as the human being has mind, soul and body, the lower beings only have soul, body and something that is lower than the body. If you like, we call this unknown third world the underworld and we can say, such beings have a tripartite nature, too, whose lowest member is the underworld whose middle member is the physical world and whose uppermost member is the soul world.

However, there are also beings who have two members in the spiritual and a third member beyond the sphere of devachan, beyond the sphere of the spiritual. Thus, you see that you can construct a whole number of beings to yourselves. Such beings really exist as experience shows. The human being belongs to the three worlds. Such beings also belong to the three worlds and as well as the human being is developing from a level on which his soul was his uppermost being in which the spiritual core was implanted, these other beings are also developing perpetually. You see that those who have experience of such things must say to themselves that the human being—after he has left this physical body and ascends to the worlds of soul and spirit—is just the companion of other beings, of beings whose lowest member is the mental nature.

This is the outline of the worldview that is not only spread about any part of the world civilisation, but forms the basis of all deeper religions and should be only renewed by the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview. However, at the same time this also is a worldview which is in perpetual development, not a worldview which one has to consider as something that was once determined in the abstract, but a worldview, which develops through the various states of human development most differently.

The human being becomes more and more mature in the course of development, which is also arranged variously. Now, however, the human being takes not only share in this development, but the basic teaching of all world cultures shows that certain single human individuals can go through a faster development that they can ascend quicker to higher levels of perfection that they are able to rush ahead of their fellow men, so to speak. Then they have already attained, while they are still in the sensuous body, an insight into those worlds, which the human being enters when he has passed, otherwise, the gate of death. All religious cultures preserve this as a secret that the human being is capable to behold into the worlds, which are closed to him while he lives in the sensuous body. However, the human being can already cross the gate of death in this life and get a sight of those worlds which he has later to enter developing upwards. As well as the human being rushes ahead of the animal, such persons rush ahead of the remaining humanity. All deeper teachings of the world culture call these persons initiates. You see, there we get really the sequence about which I was speaking already last time in the talk on Lucifer. We get a whole sequence of beings, which puts the human being wonderfully, however, comprehensibly in the quite natural spiritual world. Thus, the principle forms the basis of every religion and every bigger worldview that there are divine natures beside and above the human beings that, however, these divine natures have gone through the stages in bygone times, which the human beings go through today. They have gone through them under other conditions and in another way; for nothing recurs in the universe.

So we can say, those who today are gods were once human beings, and the human being develops up to divine nature in future. He is becoming a god, and the gods are nothing else than perfected human beings. This is the basis of any secret doctrine as one calls it. Understanding this sentence in its entirety means just to be an “initiate.” However, one must not understand this only in the abstract with the intellect, but in the experience. The ray of spirit accessible to the human being now is necessary to it. Then only one knows which big, infinite significance this sentence of any secret doctrine has, this sentence, which, so to speak, penetrates all worldviews as a leitmotif.

Allow me now to look at the different images of the Germanic and German prehistoric time, partly until the present time. Perhaps, I am allowed to go back to the fact that science has only taken a little into consideration, unfortunately, how these things are. At the end of the eighties, a book by my dear friend Ludwig Laistner (1845-1896, novelist and literary historian) appeared—its title is The Riddle of the Sphinx (1889)—, a nice, two-volume work. It does not deal with some exceptionally high teachings, but starts from the very simple. It starts from a quite simple fact that takes place within our present folklore still in numerous forms. There still exists, for example, the folk legend of the Lady Midday with the Wends (Slavic people in Germany). It runs as follows: if certain people who work in the field outdoors do not break off for lunch, but remain on the field between twelve and two o'clock, the Lady Midday comes and puts questions to them. She asks, for example, the flax farmer about the linen weaving or something else. The people must answer these questions. If they stall with a question, it is all up with them. Until two o'clock, they must come through with the answer. If they cannot properly give an answer, the Lady Midday strangles them or cuts off their heads with her sickle. The farmers use different means against her. The person concerned must be able to pray the Lord's Prayer inversely. If he is able to do this, the Lady leaves him; otherwise, she offends or kills him.

You see a legend researcher, Ludwig Laistner, starting from simple legends. Then he investigates similar legends. Still today, they are to be found in our folklore. He visits them in the manifold regions and thinks at the same time that this is a simple example of the so-called interrogative torment, of the dilemma in which the human being is placed by the fact that spiritual beings ask questions he has to answer. He shows how in another legend forms the same thing becomes more and more complex, until one ascends to the riddle which the sphinx puts to the human beings, and which Oedipus solved. Laistner explains this nicely where he shows how the legend of the Lady Midday relates to the complex question of the human riddle, put by the sphinx.

Laistner then shows something else. I must tell this because you learn from it how exceptionally important it is for theosophy. He started, like most legend researchers, from the different concepts of god, and he got around to seeing symbols in them. You know that some gods are understood as symbolic representations of the clouds, the sun, the moon et cetera. This is a widely ramified view you can find everywhere. But it is put up by such people—Laistner has exactly got to know in his own personality—who do not know in reality, how the imagination of the people works, who do not know that it is far from the imagination of the people to make up gods from wind and weather, from flash, thunder, sunshine, and rain. Laistner also already realised this when he was still dependent on the academic life that there can be no talk of it. Now in the book of the sphinx he asked, what is there, actually, if the Lady Midday comes and torments everybody with questions?—There is—and Ludwig Laistner proved it almost exactly—that these things have arisen from another state of consciousness, the dream state. He proved that the Lady Midday is nothing else than the product of a dream experience which those have had who slept during noon on the field. Not the day consciousness fantasised, but the dream has become symbolic. Laistner distinguishes sleeping in a room and sleeping on free field. As well as the human being can dream with the blanket in the hand of a frog which he holds in the hand, the outside world symbolises itself in the Lady Midday. This has arisen from a dream experience. Laistner tried to develop this thought. He did not yet know spiritual science. Hence, he had to point to the fact that important components of our legend poetry have arisen from real dream experiences.

However, dream experiences are only rudiments of another state of consciousness. Someone can attain this other state of consciousness that goes through a certain inner development about which we still speak in the talk of 19 April. Who has visited these talks knows that if he goes through certain exercises, trains himself spiritually, he can transform the usual chaotic dream world into a quite regular world which does not show him only parts of the usual reality as memories, but introduces him also in the higher spiritual world which he can then take along in reality. This is the higher state of consciousness; this is the astral or imaginative consciousness. It begins with the fact that the dream experience becomes regular and that the person concerned realises one day that he experiences a new reality. Then he can rise to a still higher spiritual reality.

That the human being rushes ahead of his fellow men, that he can already reach what the future gives all human beings that he can look into the worlds of soul and spirit, this was there in a certain way in past times. Because the human development consists of the fact that he develops from one level of consciousness to the next higher one. The present human consciousness where he perceives with external senses and works on the sensory impressions with his reason only originated from a consciousness, which was not the same, but was similar to the dream consciousness. This dreamlike consciousness was somewhat darker. However, the human being did not perceive immediate impressions but symbols. What took place in life expressed itself as pictures in the human being. He lost this consciousness and bought the clear day consciousness for it. At that time, he did not have the present clear consciousness. He could not perceive with the senses, could also not see the daylight. He had to see this consciousness sinking in darkness to attain the present consciousness of the bright day. In future, he attains a consciousness where he has both, the imaginative consciousness, which leads him into the astral world, and furthermore the bright, clear day consciousness. These are the contents of all secret doctrines, which form the basis of any culture.

Thus, the human being can look at a time in which he can say to himself, at that time I saw the world around myself as a soul world. It caused a pictorial consciousness in me. This was internally bright and clear. No external sun appeared to the external eye, but an internal light illumined the mental all around. This inner light descended into the darkness, and the external light ascended which the human being perceives with the external senses. As rests, as rudiments of all things remain, rests exist with those classes of the population, which have lagged behind, which have not sharpened their intellect so much, which have forced back not so much what the picture consciousness answered to them, which deduced less, which are less prudent. Thus, their dream consciousness is much brighter. There they experience not only chaotic dreams, but they also experience higher truth for which perhaps they cannot account to themselves properly. They experience just like the clairvoyant, and they experience another astral world if the inner consciousness has awoken. They get to know beings that do not exist here and have a certain relationship to the human inner nature. It is more or less clear to the usual people, and they only experience the picture of the Lady Midday.

However, others have a more developed imaginative consciousness. They experience still more. In present primitive legends, rests of an ancient astral consciousness are preserved. We look back at a human past, in particular here in Central Europe and in Western Europe, at a past, in which—the further we go back—more and more of that consciousness exists which was substituted by the present bright day consciousness. Only that remained to the people as recollection of bigger or lower clearness, the disappearance of the astral consciousness in a dark past, in darkness. Of course, I do not say, the thoughts of the people, but I say, something that lives in the people and that I want to grasp in thoughts only.—That is which the human being of the people says to himself without realising that: I have to move the consciousness away from the day view; I must sleep, then I get entrance in that world again which my forefathers experienced, in a world which disappeared to the human beings. I do not experience it as a clear image, but as an obscurely assembled recollection.

Such a thing lives in the people, and, hence, people know that the astral experiences were richer and richer; the further one goes back in the past. What did the people experience whose scanty rests they have today like the questions of the Lady Midday? This is the recollection of beings that inhabit the astral world; this is the recollection of the old gods. The images of the gods are taken from them. Now you remember that I have emphasised as especially noteworthy that one should pray the Lord's Prayer inversely. Those who have heard me occasionally here know that one must read everything inversely in the astral. One must read the number 341 in the imaginative world as 143. This applies to our passions, too. The passions that go out from us appear—if the astral world has opened to us—as beings which hurry towards us. This is very painful for those who did not prepare themselves before. Everything that flows from us flows apparently to us. Hence, they see animals and all possible beings rushing towards themselves. With pathological conditions, for example, with insanity, you notice that there suddenly beings appear in the form of animals. These are beings living in the person concerned flow out of him and appear reflected in the form of animals.

Something that moves in the sensuous world from behind forwards moves in the astral world inversely. One has to pray the Lord's Prayer from behind forwards to satisfy the Lady Midday in the world in which she is. You can see how the legend adheres this. Now we could go through the entire Germanic world of gods and we would find that that is reflected in it, which I have shown at the beginning of the talk as the secret doctrine of all cultures. What I have shown in great thoughts and outlines as the worlds which apparently pile on top of each other—in truth, they are in each other—all that is reflected popularly in the Germanic world of gods. When the human being lived once in a world in which he still had a picture consciousness in which he had not yet advanced to the present deducing intellect, his ego was not yet as powerful as today. Indeed, he did not think and act as an animal, but the lower members: physical body, etheric body, and astral body prevailed in him. The ego did not yet have senses. It still lived an inner life; thereby he still controlled the external. It was another form of human beings, they could not yet think with that consciousness we have today.

The human beings were much more imperfect than the present ones, but they were more perfect concerning the lower members. They had developed them more powerful and more varied. Hence, they did not yet belong to the spiritual world. They were soul beings in certain respect whose highest member belonged to the astral world whose middle member was also mental, and the third member was still lower. The imaginative consciousness meets such beings on the astral plane; there it discovers their highest essence. These beings, in certain respect ancestors of the human beings, are reflected in the Germanic folk consciousness as the giants. They are nothing else than predecessors of the human beings. Then the world developed. The human beings developed up to higher spheres. They received their thinking and became companions of spiritual beings that are finer organised in certain respect than the giants are because they took part in the higher spiritual worlds. These beings are reflected in the Germanic folk consciousness as the Æsir. The original Germanic mythology did not see anything miraculous in all that, but it saw in it an expression of the sentence, which I have stated: the human being is a becoming god, and the gods are those whom one can call perfect human beings, deified human beings. Gods are beings who have gone through their human level in bygone times. Thus, you see that the sequence of the beings of the Germanic mythology also expresses itself in the difference between the giants and the Æsir.

Still more expresses itself in it. It expresses itself in the fact that the development of such beings definitely takes place in the same sense as the human development. The present human beings—the Germanic mythology understands it that way—learnt from Wotan what they learnt. Who was Wotan originally? We hear that our ancestors learnt the runes, the art of poetry, and still other things from Wotan. However, one always attributed this to the great initiates. Thus, an individuality expressed itself in Wotan whom we had to call a great initiate just now in the sense of the secret doctrine, a being who rushed ahead of humanity and who had already gone through the stages which humanity has to go through only now.

How did Wotan become the great teacher of the prehistoric times? Like other initiates in the other secret doctrines. There are initiates in all secret doctrines. Today these experience the same as at that time, while they outgrow their lower ego, develop the spiritual essence in themselves, and become citizens of a higher world already in this life. At the same time, however, it is made clear to us that at a certain hour the lower nature faces them. In every human being is a sum of passions, desires and wishes, which cling to his lower nature. From all that the human being has to come out first. Then it appears like a being before him. If the human being rises up to his higher nature, his lower nature is like something that is outside of him, while he is, otherwise, embedded in the desires and passions. Just as little anybody can lay his brain on a plate and look at it, just as little you can see your inner life, your inner lower nature. One calls this detached being the guardian of the threshold.

His lower nature stands as a being beside the human being, and he must say to himself once, that are you! You must detach this!—In all initiations, one calls this the descent into hell. One has to become a companion of the infernal powers, to descend into the depths of the world because the human being is simply embedded in them and his higher nature lives only halfway in him. One calls this being the guardian of the threshold because the human beings who do not appropriate courage and presence of mind do not overcome that. Those are called initiates who have crossed this threshold. Gradually the human being goes through development. He overcomes a stage at first where the human being becomes aware of his lower nature. Whereas he identifies himself with it, is embedded in it, it faces him like something else, as well as the table stands before me now. In all initiations, one calls this stage crucifixion. The human being is crucified to his own body because it is to him as irrelevant as an external cross to which he is nailed. If he has overcome this stage, he ascends higher. Then he became wise. One calls him with a symbolic expression “serpent” for the same reason, because generally the serpent is the symbol of wisdom. There he drinks from the springs of wisdom in the world. Then he still goes through a third stage.

One has to go through this stage in the different religions most variously. Look at Wotan. What is shown to us by him? These three stages of initiation are shown to us. One tells us first that Wotan would have had to hang once on the holy wood. During nine days, he suffered there and shouldered the sufferings of the world. There the giant Mimir came to him and gave him a drink from the cup of wisdom. He was released from the holy wood. This was the first initiation of Wotan. After he had gone through this, he was longing for the cup from which the potion can flow, which his uncle Mimir had given him at the gallows. Then, however, one further says that this cup of wisdom is protected in the abysses of the mountains and that Wotan crept in the figure of a serpent through the abysses to Gunnlod in order to seize the cup of wisdom. This was the second initiation.

The third stage is that where one tells us—and this is something very significant—that Wotan himself went to the spring of that wisdom which is the wisdom of the present and is to be found with that spring which is in the root of the world ash Yggdrasil. There lived the giant Mimir. Wotan here attained the initiation that enabled him to be the teacher of the prehistoric time, namely the present wisdom. Once he had attained wisdom from the abysses of the mountains, from the higher worlds. However, he should become a teacher of our wisdom, of that wisdom which is obtained by the senses and by the mind. He obtains the strength to this here. This was expressed in a nice symbol. One says that he lost an eye. What is the eye that he must leave behind to find the present wisdom? This is the astral eye. Now, because he should take up the wisdom of the runes, the wisdom of the present, he loses the astral eye, so that he can be a leader on the sensuous plane to which humanity has developed. These things show in no uncertain manner how in these three successive pictures the secret doctrine, which forms the basis of all religions, is also expressed in the Germanic mythology.

In another way, deep truth is expressed if we look, for example, at the legend of Baldr who is killed by the blind Hodur with the mistletoe at Loki's instigation. Loki is the adversary of Baldr. If we consider this legend, we realise that many people say that Baldr symbolises the sun, the setting sun. They say this without having an idea of the fact that no people write that way. The people experienced in the primeval times on the astral plan in pictures what we have got to know as the basis of the secret doctrine at the beginning of this talk. What did the folk experience in this respect? I have already pointed to the images that appear like obscure recollections, but not in the clear consciousness, I have pointed to the astral light disappearing in darkness, so that the present sensory life originated. The former astral consciousness, Baldr, is killed by the present darkness, mental darkness, by the present sensuous looking which Hodur symbolises, namely at the instigation of Loki. Who is Loki?

Loki's name is already connected with the fire. What, however, is the fire in the secret doctrine? It is not the physical fire. The physical fire is only the external expression of an internal one, of that which the secret doctrine knows as the soul of the fire. This also lives in the human being in certain ways as his desires and passions. Only that separated itself during the further development that lives in the human being as desires and passions. It is no longer connected with the external fire, but the secret doctrine points to that. You get to know this more and more if you get involved with the occult side of theosophy or spiritual science. It shows how passions and desires are connected similarly with the fire as the positive and the negative poles of a magnet: the passions are one pole and the physical fire the other, however, they belong together. With the iron, you have both poles unseparated. This seems absurd to the materialistic worldview, I know this well. However, everything seems to be absurd to that who does not want to get involved with the depths of occult science. The look goes back to those times when one speaks of figures, as Loki is one. This being had an original existence and an immense strength when passion and fire were not yet separated when the passion still flowed through the seething fire. Such a fire being was Loki. Then the world developed further in such a way that from Loki, the fire, the lower nature formed and from the Æsir the higher nature. Both have arisen from Loki's nature.

This forms the basis of the Germanic legend. This is the secret of the Germanic mythology, that the world of the gods originated, while the beings developed further in the passionate primordial bases as well as in the spiritual. One tells us of three children of Loki. The first child is the Fenriswolf, the second is the Midgard Serpent, and the third is the goddess of the dead, Hel, who is bright on one side and has a black body on the other side. What does she show? She shows the lower human nature, which causes birth and death. Hence, Hel appears black and white. The Midgard Serpent that entwines the continents of the present world represents the etheric body that is tied to the present lower human nature. The third member represents what has arisen from the lower passions. Loki has remained from a former development. He had to deliver his children, so that the present world could originate which is thereby provoked to opposition and falls a victim to that which was the view of the former world.

Baldr has to descend to Hel, into the depth. The depth symbolises the usual physical human nature. What is Baldr? Baldr exists as sub-consciousness if, for example, in trance the usual surface consciousness is extinguished and the old consciousness is roused again. Baldr is killed for us now. However, with Hel he still exists as the strength, as the strength of passion connected with the nature of fire.

Thus, we could call every member of the Germanic world of gods an external expression of this secret doctrine. You would see if we had fifty talks instead of one that all that is wonderfully right in the minute details, that we are concerned with a secret doctrine, which forms the basis of the pictorial ideas of the Germanic mythology. We also here find initiates, sages, who knew what I have told at the beginning of the talk. However, the people got to know beings of other worlds by means of various rests of their consciousness. They ranked these folk spirits in the world of the old gods. That is why the Germanic mythology appears as born out of the folk consciousness. How Siegfried, who is overcome, finds his higher self, this presents itself to us as an expression of deep secret teachings. This is not contrived, but it becomes completely certain that it is so to someone who is able to go back in such way in the spiritual depths of the prehistoric time. If we go through the Germanic mythology, we get a pictorial impression.

If we look at the East, we see the same secret doctrine as I have explained it at the beginning of the talk. However, we see it differently formed. With few sentences, we can characterise it. Not with Buddhism and not with Hinduism we want to get involved. We only need to know that they revere the brahma as a spiritual original being that forms the basis of all. The main ability of brahma is the creative knowledge, called vidya. Imagine a person standing beside a machine and studying it. He has a receptive knowledge. Imagine, however, the inventor who made the machine originally, he composed it from single parts. He had creative knowledge first. Such a creative knowledge, spread about the world surrounding us, is vidya, and the receptive knowledge is avidya. Thus, there are different gradations of vidya and avidya. However, brahma is the owner of all that is subsumed in vidya and avidya. Everything is born out of the thought and the human being himself is born out of it. But he has to develop again back to vidya, to the creative knowledge. This is the sense of human development.

The human being is led again through three places that the Indian doctrine calls loka. When the human being has died, he must stay in Bhurloka for a while, it is the same as kamaloka. The highest world is the spiritual world, Svargaloka. It is the devachan. From there he goes back again to the Bhurloka and back to the physical world. Thus, one sees how he takes up the most various forces and materials in the physical world. These came into being from Vidya of the enclosing Brahman. There we have the finest material world on top, the world of the Akasha. Akasha is only a material expression of Indra, which is the soul of this world. Then we come to the world of fire, to Agni. This is the material expression of the god Agni and the same as the god Loki in the Germanic mythology, only in another shade. Then we come down to the air, Vayu, then to the water and, finally, to the solid. Thus, the Indian doctrine imagines the construction of the external world. The Indian cult is the external symbolic expression of this secret truth.

If we ask ourselves which characteristic the Indian secret doctrine has that it developed other pictures, we can say that it bears a less symbolic character, but a more conceptual one. This is generally the difference between the Indian and the Germanic secret doctrines. Internally they are the same, an external difference exists, however, because the external religions in Europe have taken on a pictorial character that corresponds more to the beings of the astral plan, while the Indian people advanced a further step and gave them characters reminding of external impressions. We must indicate this as a difference of the Germanic and Indian doctrines that the Germanic doctrine is closer to the astral, the Indian one, however, to the thinking. Hence, it is also clear that the Indian doctrine is closer to that which the human being regards today as his innermost possession that one understands it easier than the world of the Germanic gods that has faded away into the unknown.

These doctrines were differently developed. As we see two configurations in Europe and India, we see one more, in the middle, so to speak, in Greece. We can see that two quite different forces in nature cause the Indian and the Germanic characteristics. The Indian characteristic approaches more the present ego. Hence, the Indian looked for his higher consciousness in the contemplation in his inside. He attempted to advance from Avidya to Vidya, from the receptive knowledge to the creative knowledge. A science of knowledge, a higher doctrine than a doctrine based on astral pictures is the Indian doctrine, and a doctrine based on astral pictures is expressed in the Germanic mythology. Why is this the case? The Germanic mythology gives us a great and fine answer. The higher consciousness that the human being should attain is represented in all secret doctrines as the female principle, as the soul. What is taken up from the outside what fertilises the soul is shown as the male principle. We have there the female soul that is fertilised by wisdom, by the spirit of the outside world. Thus, the human being moves up if he develops spiritually, figuratively spoken, to the higher female principle in his nature. Goethe means that saying: “The eternally-female pulls us upwards.” You must not understand this pedantically, because you read it in the “Chorus Mysticus” (Faust II). If we understand this that way, we understand what the Teuton means if he says, if the warrior is killed on the battlefield, the Valkyrie meets him, there he reaches the higher mental.—The mentality of a warlike people, the passage through the gate of death and the attainment of a higher consciousness is symbolised by the approaching Valkyrie, taking up the soul in Valhalla, the connection with the higher consciousness, with the Valkyrie. The highest god is in the original Germanic the god Ziu (Týr) from whom Tuesday has its name. This is the same god as Mars in the Roman and as Ares in the Greek mythologies. Mardi (French) is the day, which is consecrated to the god of war, Mars. It was a warrior religion and it differs from the internal religion of the Indian.

Who lives in the inner world develops the passions less that live in the astral world and are expressed in it. Thus, the consciousness, the warlike nature of the Teutons is reflected in the world of their gods. The Valkyrie is the higher consciousness naturally. Because the passion of war was here the creator of the mythology, the world of the gods was expressed in astral pictures; because over there in Asia, in India the creator was the introversive sense, therefore, a more spiritual religion was expressed. Both worldviews found their higher unity, their harmony when the Germanic one got the inside from Christianity.

Thus, you see that a deep internal sense forms the basis of the human development, and that one must look for this deep internal sense. Then one comes to the profundities of the world development, and then one does not stop at abstractions, as if one single figure of humanity formed the basis, but one understands that it is a variform wisdom. The secret doctrine had to be different in India, different in Europe, different with a warlike people, and different in Greece, with the people endowed with art. Humanity develops through the most various forms of cultural existence—the course of this world development always forward and always upward at the same time.

It is a frequently mentioned fact that it is exceptionally difficult to obtain an understanding concerning the spiritual-scientific movement with our academic leaders in scientific circles. This is a fatal fact that science is today surrounded by such a big belief in authority. Everything that is scientific exercises such an impressive power in all directions that a spiritual movement has a hard furrow to plough if the predominating part of the scholars, one can say, almost any academic circle treat such a movement like our spiritual-scientific one in such a way, as if it were dilettantism, blind superstition or anything else.

It may be deplorable, but understandable in any case, if one hears the judgements of such academic circles about theosophy or spiritual science. If one examines these judgements, it is obvious that they belong to the judgements that were obtained without any expertise. If we then still ask the so-called public opinion, as it is expressed in our journals, we need not to be surprised, if it faces the theosophical movement not quite understanding. For this public opinion is controlled completely by the impressive power of the scientific authority and is completely dependent on it.

There are different reasons, which make this clear to us. We can see one of these reasons concerning the German cultural life simply in the fact that the academic circles, actually, left an important impact on our German cultural life, a culminating point of our deepest life of thought completely out of consideration. Indeed, you find some notes about this in any manual of philosophy, in any history of literature; but a really penetrating understanding of this most significant side of our cultural life and of that which around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries the most important German thinkers performed does not exist. In particular, there is a lack of understanding how these results of the German life of thought are rooted in the general German cultural life a hundred years ago.

If this fact were not such a one, if our academic circles were concerned with that deepening of the German life of thought around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, there would be, for example, an understanding of Fichte's, Schelling's, and Hegel's great life of thought among our philosophers. The compendia of philosophy would not contain only single inadequate extracts of the works, but one would know what generally thought achieved in Germany. Then one would also obtain access to the spiritual-scientific movement from the point of view of scholarship.

Of all pre-schools of theosophy or spiritual science which one can go through today this school of the German thought of the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries is the very best for the present human beings. Indeed, it is not accessible to anybody, because how should the bigger national circles understand the great German thinkers really if the university circles, the academic circles lead the way to this understanding so little, if they do so little to cause a real popularity of these thinkers. One is not allowed to reproach the big audience, those who should turn to theosophy that they are not able to do it. To those, however, whose occupation it would be to let flow in the spiritual treasures of the West in the national culture, to those must be said that they fulfil their obligations in this respect in no way.

I do not name unknown names to you, but I maybe have to represent the peculiar fact that one can relate names, which you find in every philosophical compendium, with theosophy. It is peculiar that one likes to say that it is senseless to use the title “Secret Doctrine.” The Western researchers, for example, who concerned themselves with Buddhism, have repeatedly denied that Buddhism contains a secret doctrine that anything would exceed what you can read in the books.

It is not at all surprising that such academic circles assert such things. For one can conclude from it that the most important things have remained a secret doctrine to them. How should they know that there is a secret doctrine, because they have never found access to it! The most important that was performed in connection with the great German thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte is to the majority, also even today, a deep secret doctrine. It is true, as deplorable as it may appear, the German spiritual life of the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries originated from the so-called Enlightenment. We may characterise this Enlightenment with a few words. It was a necessary event in the modern spiritual development. The most significant spirits of the 18th century had taken up the cause of it. Kant says, enlightenment simply means what can be summarised in the sentence: “Dare to use your own reason” (first by Horace: sapere aude). This enlightenment was nothing else than an emancipation of the personality, the relief of the personality from the traditions. What one has thought for centuries, what everybody has taken up from the common spiritual substance of the people should be checked. Only that should be valid which the single personality affirms. You know, great spirits developed from the Enlightenment. One only needs to remind of the name Lessing to call one of the best. Everything that is connected with the name Kant is nothing else than a result of the Enlightenment.

Someone who has broken with this Enlightenment in a peculiar way is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If I say, he has broken in peculiar way with this Enlightenment, and then you do not believe that I am determined to represent Fichte as an opponent of the Enlightenment. He has broken in the way that he examines all results of the Enlightenment and has continued building on its basis, but Fichte went quite thoroughly beyond that which is only enlightenment, beyond the trivial. Just Fichte gives somebody who has the possibility to become engrossed in his great lines of thought something that one can obtain among the newer spirits only from him.

After we have heard many merely popular talks, we want to hear a talk today, which seems to be far off the usual way, which our spiritual-scientific talks take in this winter. I will endeavour to show something as comprehensibly as possible that took place in the German life of thought, actually, at that time, around the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries. It can only be sketchy what I have to say. At first this German life of thought impeded the access to the real spiritual world and then to the living and immortal essence of the human being. Today I cannot go into the worth or worthlessness of Kant's philosophy. The official philosophy calls Kant the destroyer and regards his system of theories as a philosophical action first-rate. Today I would like only to remind of a word which is known perhaps also with those who do not have the opportunity to penetrate deeper into the matter, to the word of the “thing in itself.”

The human cognitive faculties are limited in the sense of Kant's philosophy. They cannot penetrate to the “thing in itself.” Whichever ideas and concepts we form, whatever we get to know in the world, we deal with phenomena and not with the true “thing in itself” in the sense of Kant's philosophy. This is always concealed behind the phenomena. With it, blind speculation is encouraged—and we have seen it in the spiritual development of Germany very well—which wants to define and restrict the human cognitive faculties in all directions. However, at the same time the trend of the human being to penetrate to the true, to explore the depths of existence should be stopped.

It should be shown that the human being cannot automatically approach the primary sources of existence. Now it may be true that such an attitude was necessary in the course of the spiritual life of the 18th century. However, Kant's philosophy put big obstacles in the way of the further development of the spiritual life. Indeed, I know very well that there are people who say, what did Kant different from all those great spirits who have always emphasised that we deal with phenomena that we cannot come to the “thing in itself!” That is apparently right, however, it is wrong. The real spiritual researchers of all times state quite different that the world only consists of phenomena.

No true spiritual researcher has ever denied that in such a way, as we investigate the world with senses, understand it with the intellect, it offers us only phenomena. However, higher senses are to be woken in us that go beyond the usual, which penetrate deeper into the sources of existence, can, and must lead slowly and gradually to the “thing in itself.” No Eastern philosophy, no Platonic philosophy, no self-understanding worldview penetrating into the spirit has ever spoken of the world as Maya in another sense. They always said only, to the lower human cognition, a veil is before the “thing in itself,” to the higher human cognition this veil is torn, the human being can penetrate into the depths of existence. The Enlightenment reached a blind alley concerning the question in certain respects, and this is characterised best of all with a remark which you find in the preface to the second edition of Kant's main work Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and with which the Enlightenment can be caught at its despondency because it does not want to advance further.

One reads: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith.” This is the nerve of Kant's philosophy and of that thinking to which the 18th century came and beyond which our philosophical scholarship has not yet come which still suffers from it. As long as it suffers from this illness, philosophy is never destined to understand theosophy. What does that mean: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith”? Kant says, the thing in itself remains concealed, consequently also the thing in our breast. We do not know what we ourselves are; we can never come to the true figure of the things. As from uncertain worlds the so-called categorical imperative sounds: you shall do this or that.—We hear it, we cannot prove it, however. We just have to believe it. We hear about the divine being. We have to believe it. Just as little as we know about the destiny of the soul, about immortality and eternity. We must believe them. There is only faith in these matters that connect the human being with the divine, because no knowledge can penetrate into the divine. The human being believes knowledge if he presumes to penetrate into the divine. This divine is thereby falsified, is cast in a wrong light due to wild speculation.

Therefore, Kant wanted to save all spiritual for the mere faith and apply cognition—what one can know—only to the external impressions, to the appearance. Whatever you may read and study, otherwise, about Kant's philosophy, this thought is the essentials that it depends on. This thought became the essentials in the further development of Kant's thinking. However, someone who broke with this thought definitely out of a courageous attitude was Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

It is a peculiar thing that the theosophical thinkers of modern India, the renovators of the Vedanta philosophy made an astounding discovery—namely that the Germans have a great thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. An Indian says this who writes under the name Bhagavan Das (1869-1958). I have got to know German theosophists who have only found out from him that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is a deep German thinker.

You can experience a lot in this regard. Weeks ago, I was in a South German city. One of the theosophical friends there said to me, now we have a university lecturer here who means, it would be good if people studied Fichte, because he got the idea that many deep thoughts were in Fichte.—That is a strange confession of a German university professor! If more than one century after Fichte a German university professor makes the discovery that Fichte achieved something great, throws a characteristic light on this kind of German scholarship.

Fichte represented the doctrine of the ego, of the human self-consciousness not speculatively, but out of the whole depth of his being, among his Jena students in the last decade of the 18th century. He did not represent it in the same way as we do it today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. He represented it in such a way that a number of persons would have come to theosophy if they had educated themselves according to his great conceptual demands; they would have come to it in a healthy way, illumining the real inside brightly. Not without reason his speeches inspired the Jena students in those days. For the following lived in him. Although he walked on the heights of thought, although he spoke in the purest, clearest, and logically sharpest thoughts, a quite warm and deep immediate personality and being expressed themselves in his thoughts at the same time. He himself pronounced the word that characterises him deepest that everyone has a philosophy, depending on which sort of a person he is.

If one expresses this trivially, one could say, it does not depend on whether anybody can think logically well or badly, because one can reason a hollow philosophy very logically, it does not depend on astuteness but on the internal experience, on that which one has fathomed with all his soul forces. This expresses itself in the language. If one is also a flat materialist, nevertheless, he can be a sharp logician, and on the other hand, someone can be a spiritualist and be logically weak. One proves no worldview, but the worldview is the expression of the innermost human being, the inner experience. Fichte pronounced this not only, but lived it also. Kant stimulated him. However, as one is stimulated by that to which one can add the drawback in his inside—because there the deepest organs emerge in the human being—, nevertheless, this was clear to Fichte.

Now follow me, I would like to say, for a short moment into the icy, but not less important regions of thoughts from which Fichte got the being of self-consciousness. I do not describe with his own words, because this would be too difficult here, but in outlines, which do not contain less truth. I would like to say what he conjured before his Jena students at that time: there is one thing for everybody in which the “thing in itself” announces itself to him, in which he expresses himself. That is his own inside. Look into it and you discover something that you can discover nowhere else at first.—We see that Fichte knew that not anybody discovers what he has to discover there, because he says a very nice word, even if it is rude to most human beings. He says, if the human beings were able to come to real self-knowledge, they would find the most significant in themselves. However, a few are successful, because they rather regard themselves as pieces of lava on the moon than as self-conscious beings.

What is self-consciousness for our time? One shows it as a conglomerate of cerebral atoms. However, one does not strive for recognising himself; one does not do this. There is no great difference whether one says that it is a conglomerate of cerebral atoms or molecules or a piece of lava on the moon.—Here Fichte draws attention clearly to the fact that that knowledge of the inside which only wants to observe how it is not the right knowledge of the inside. For the nature of the human being differs in its inside from any other being. By which does it differ? It differs by the fact that decision and action belong to the nature of the human being. From this icy region of thoughts, we want to come to flowery fields soon. Fichte calls self-knowledge not brooding in oneself, not looking into oneself, no, Fichte regards it as action. This word leads you from the wrong self-knowledge to the true self-development. The human being is not able to look simply into himself in order to recognise who he is. He has to give that to himself, which he shall become. He must become engrossed in the divine of the world and get the sparks from the divine with which he has to kindle his self perpetually. We look at a stone. It is what it is. We recognise it. We look at the plant. It is what it is. We look at our own body, our etheric body, and astral body. They are also that which they are. The human being is only that which he makes of himself, and self-knowledge is an intimate activity, no dead knowledge. While Fichte uses the (German) word “Tathandlung” (~ self-conscious action and result of the action), he says something that only the old Vedanta philosophy says in this significant kind. He reached the point that just the theosophists seek again. Often and often, I have said here that theosophy wants to show how the human being soars the divine, how it should stimulate the divine strength slumbering in the human being with which then he also becomes aware of the divine round himself. Fichte completely strives for the same. The wrong self-knowledge, he says, consists of the fact that one says, look into yourselves and you find the god in yourselves.

The right self-knowledge says something completely different. It says, if you brood in yourself, it is in such a way, as if you look into your own eye. However, this is not the task of the eye. We get to know the light with the eye. Thus, we also get to know the light of the ego with the soul. One can compare the eye with waking the inner self. As little as you find the soul in the organism, the light in the eye, just as little you find the god in yourselves. However, we find the possibility to develop the organs to find this god. The activity in the ego, which develops our spiritual organs, is the being that the human being gives himself. This is the “Tathandlung,” this is Fichte's self-knowledge. From this point, Fichte advances gradually. If you completely settle down, you educate yourselves to his thoughts, then you find a healthy access to theosophy, and nobody has to regret it one day if he settles down into the clear lines of thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he finds the way to the spiritual life.

However, there is a peculiar fact. When Johann Gottlieb Fichte has ascended to these etheric heights of thought, he lacks the view to which he did not come at that time, which the spiritual-scientific worldview brought back like a solution of the world riddle: the teaching of karma and reincarnation. If you see this, then you know to apply it to your own development. The human beings would like to judge all times, according to the same pattern. However, the human spirit is in perpetual development, and every age has other tasks. That century whose end forms in conceptual respect Johann Gottlieb Fichte had the task to emancipate the human personality. This was the good side of the Enlightenment. However, the personality is that member of the human nature, which just does not return, as well as it is. Our deepest essence that expresses itself within the personality returns in the various earth-lives. However, the single life on earth expresses itself in the personality.

Let us consider the being of the personality properly. We have four human covers basically that are not to be imagined, however, like onion skins: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and in them that which the human being works for, his refined astral body, that part on which the human ego has already worked. We have these four covers. However, in them only the imperishable everlasting essence of the human being, the so-called spiritual triad exists: manas, buddhi, and atman—spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. These go from earth-life to earth-life and ascend then to higher states of existence. The last external cover expresses itself in the personality. It has still another importance and it has received it more and more in the human development. If we go back to the old times, we find that the human beings appreciated the individuality during the former centuries less and less; instead, the personality became more and more powerful. Today one easily confuses the concepts of individuality and personality. The individuality is the everlasting that runs through the earth-lives. Personality is that which the human being develops during an earth-life.

If we want to study the individuality, we have to look at the bottom of the human soul. If we want to study the personality, we have to observe how the essence expresses itself. The essence is born into the people, into the occupation. All that determines the inner being, it personifies it. With a human being who is still on a subordinated level of development one can perceive a little of the work on his inside. The mode of expression, the kind of the gestures and so forth is just in such a way as he has them from his people. However, those are the advanced human beings who give themselves the mode of expression and gestures from their inside. The more the inside of the human being is able to work on his appearance, the higher this develops the human being.

Now one could say, the individuality is expressed in the personality. Someone, who has his own gestures, his own physiognomy, has a peculiar character in his actions and in relation to the surroundings, has a distinct personality. Is that lost at death forever? No, this does not get lost. Christianity knows for sure that this is not the case. What one understands by resurrection of the flesh or of the personality is nothing else than the preservation of the personal in all following incarnations. What the human being has gained as a personality remains to him because it is attached to the individuality and this carries it further into the following incarnations. If we have made something of our body that has a peculiar character, this body, this strength, which has worked there, resurrects. As much we have worked on ourselves, as much we have made of ourselves, we do not lose it. Generating awareness of this knowledge is something that has not yet happened. This happens by theosophy. However, it was the task of the Enlightenment to acquire an uncertain feeling. It showed the task of the personality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte has put the idea of the personality in its everlasting importance in his construct of clear ideas. There the right thing immediately emerges for the epoch of the recognition of the everlasting and imperishable in the personality. Fichte accomplished that.

One has often said, the great human beings have the big mistakes of their big virtues, and because Fichte was able to measure out the personality with the thought uniquely, he did not penetrate to the individuality; also not his successors. However, they have implanted the thought in the personality. Someone who finds it there carries it in a healthy way through the repeated earth-lives if he approaches spiritual science. It does not depend on dogmas, but on the education that we can obtain in his spirit. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an educator in the proper sense.

It does not depend on the fact that we become servile students of such a man, but that we also go through that strength which he went through. Then we may get other thoughts by his forces in another age. One faces such a spirit in this way. This was expressed in a certain way at his time. His personality can educate us and find pleasant expression in the distant future.

Spiritual science is so little dogmatic that it leads to the great human beings and shows that we can learn from them even more than what they have said. The expression of that which they are is the language. However, more than the expression lives in every human being, the immortal soul lives in them to which we can rise as to the true essence. Therefore, Fichte was already in the highest degree stimulating for those, at the end of the 18th century, who were sitting at his feet and listening how he measured out the human personality with world-spanning lines of thought. He inspired them to penetrate conceptionally to the soul and to acquire still quite other treasures from it than Fichte himself did.

One of those who sat at Fichte's feet and looked reverentially to him, one of those who got out the philosophical ideas, was the young short-lived German theosophist Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, German Romantic poet and author, 1772-1801). He died around the turn of 18th to the 19th century, not yet thirty years old. Who becomes engrossed in his works goes through the finest training of theosophy. Perhaps it could be to that who is educated in the western science a much better elementary training to go through his tremendous light flashes, than through the Bhagavad Gita or similar writings that remain more or less strange to the West. Just now, it is possible to become engrossed completely in that which this great soul achieved.

He wrote a book in which he describes how a young person is introduced in the subterranean structure of the earth, in the geologic layers of the rocks and minerals by great geologists and mineralogical works. There he readily gets thoughts such as, you, rocks, I look only for you, however, what you say I look for continually.—Runes, letters, words were the stones to him, which he investigated as a miner underground; spiritual beings created in the earth and produced every single rock. He saw the spirit and soul in the earth, and every stone was to him the expression of that which the earth has to say to him. Mineralogy and geology became a runic science to him, and he attempted to penetrate to the spirit of the earth, while his great teacher made the layers and resemblances of the rocks clear to him. Just those who work in the depths of the earth are often led to deeper worldviews. Not least, miners did deep looks into the spiritual world. Staying underground has a peculiar effect on the spiritual experience.

However, something else appeared with Novalis. To understand it we only need to remember that at the front gate of Plato's school one could read the words: let none but geometers enter here.—The Platonic school demonstrated its elementary knowledge in geometrical forms, and Novalis, who illumined the secrets of existence with so big light flashes, revered mathematics like a religion. It is something sacred to him. Take this as a psychological phenomenon of peculiar kind. These strange human beings are able to feel something sacred and something like music with the abstract lines of mathematics and geometry. How circles and angles form a group together, how the different forms like polyhedra, dodekahedra and such build themselves up, then one can feel something that comes from Novalis speaking about mathematics. However, you can only take up that if you do not take up it in such a way as in our schools, but if you become engrossed in the inner music of space. Mathematics is the access to the infinite truth.

Then he heard Fichte, and from him the great truth of the ego as a personality. Then we see in this strange spirit almost the whole occultism reflected in certain ways. For someone who has knowledge in this respect Novalis is a peculiar personality. He is a personality who had already experienced the deepest initiation in former incarnations. Everything was a recollection that he experienced in the last, the third decade of his life. It becomes apparent in his life that it was more recollection of former incarnations than of the current one. This comes out in his imagination. The former incarnations completely became imagination in Novalis because they cast their shadows and found their expression as pieces of art.

Thus, we have to understand Novalis as a peculiar, tender, and intimate being. If Fichte arranges his razor-sharp thoughts and carries us off by this sharpness, then Novalis is wonderfully gentle and shows the spiritual life from a completely different side. Thus, he is the necessary supplement for someone who wants to go through the German preliminary stage of theosophy. Our best went through this pre-school in those days. We can call names of many people who attempted to penetrate in their kind, according to their character in those days into the truth which spiritual science gives humanity back today. These are names that are known more or less, however, whose bearers one has to deeper consider.

At first, we have Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch., German philosopher, 1775-1854). If we open ourselves to his youth writings, where he became independent, he works so strongly on that who gets involved with him because he expressed a thought of Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, German-Swiss physician, occultist, 1493-1541) in the way usual at that time. This thought was expressed not only by Schelling, but also by the great Steffens (Henrik St., Danish philosopher, 1773-1845), and in particular by the naturalist Oken (originally Lorenz Okenfuß, 1779-1851), by the great predecessor of the modern theory of evolution and founder of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians. This thought is an eminently theosophical one.

It was usual in natural sciences, also in the philosophy of Schelling and Steffens, also in that of Novalis. These thinkers said: if we look out at the world, we see a number of animals. Every animal shows certain human qualities one-sidedly developed. What the amphibians have, what the snails have is also found in the human being. Those snails, amphibians and so on have something one-sidedly physical. If one makes, however, a whole of it, one gets the harmoniously developed human body that summarises everything that is spread out outdoors. As Paracelsus says, we find letters outdoors in nature, and if we compose them, they yield a word and this word is the human being. A great theosophist—not a German one—of the 18th century (presumably Claude de Saint Martin, 1743-1803) just took this principle as the basis of his theosophical investigating. Therefore, he came so far to say, if we look at the human being, we see the remaining animal realm. This is the opposite principle of that how one studies these things today. The theorists of evolution of that time said something different from those of today.

They said, if you face a person about whom you do not know that he is, for example, a great watchmaker, and then you are not able to recognise the person. At first, you have to become engrossed in his astuteness that makes him create what he produces. What he produces, that is the point. However, nature has produced the human being as a keystone. There you have the compendium of the whole nature. If you understand this in such a way, you understand nature.—One must recognise the remaining nature from the human being and not the human being from nature. If you carry out that really, you also understand how it could emerge as a certain reflection with Schelling and Oken. With Schelling and Oken you can read, the snail is a groping animal, the insect is a light animal, the bird a hearing animal, the amphibian a feeling animal, the fish a smelling animal. Thereby they express how the senses are spread over the single animals. They are harmoniously contained in the human being. One only needs to distribute the qualities of the human being to understand the remaining nature.

In 1809, Schelling published a writing, which is of big significance for theosophy. He had got to know the deep German thinker Jacob Boehme. He became engrossed in him, and thus he got to know the nature of the bad and its coherence with freedom. You find this in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom. There he shows that God is the light and that from the light everything comes that shines that, however, the light has to shine into the darkness and that where light is shadow originates. Only by this comparison, one can realise what one reads in this writing. If you let the sun shine into darkness, there originates shadow; shadow must appear if the light is there, but the light does not generate it. Hence, he says, from the divine primal ground of the light everything great arises in the world. However, as well as the light is opposed to the darkness, the non-ground faces the primal ground, and from this the shadow of the good emerges, the bad. This is the indication of an infinitely deep involvement. Again, you can educate yourselves to the theosophical life if you take up that in yourselves.

Another writing by Schelling is still significant: Bruno or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things (1802/1843). In pleasant dialogue form, like with Plato, he discusses here about the coherence of soul and spirit in the theosophical sense. Therefore, Schelling would be able to become a theosophist. He understood how to practice inner sight. Schelling was also an eager teacher at the Jena University first, and then he worked still at other sites and, finally, withdrew completely. In Munich, he lived a long time and was together with Baader (Franz Xavier von B., philosopher and theologian, 1765-1841), that spirit who renewed Jacob Boehme in such a fine way in the 19th century again. He stimulated Schelling. He wrote scarcely anything in that time. In 1809, his writing about freedom originated. Then he wrote almost nothing up to his call to Berlin by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who may be challenged in certain ways, who is not yet appreciated enough concerning insights into big, deep, and internal spiritual connections. In 1841, Schelling was appointed to Berlin. He should explain before the students what he had lived through such a long time.

He held two courses of lectures: about the Philosophy of Mythology (1856) and about the Philosophy of Revelation (1858). There he led into the essence of the old mysteries and showed how Christianity originated from them and what Christianity concerns. Then we who live more than half a century later are led automatically to reincarnation and karma. If you become engrossed in the philosophy of mythology and in the philosophy of revelation, you find, this is theosophy. However, all trivial people of that time railed against that. They could not understand what Schelling reported at that time. If the theosophists wanted to become engrossed in these writings, they would see from which depths all that is taken.

Fichte could speak of a special spiritual sense because he was one of those who wanted to open the eyes of the human beings. Fichte gave the definition of theosophy already in 1813. He said, “Appear as a sighted man in a world of blind people and speak to them of colours and light. Either you talk to them of nothing—and this is the more fortunate case if they say it, because in this way you soon notice the mistake and stop talking without success—or the more gifted people say, you are a daydreamer.”—All those experience that who are gifted with a special sense. They appear like among blind people. However, this sense can be evoked with everybody, slowly with the one, faster with the other. By the special sense, Fichte shows quite clearly that he knew what depends on in theosophy. This was the real definition of theosophy. Others scooped from such sources, from such currents of the spiritual life.

However, I would like to remind of Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich H., 1770-1831, philosopher) above all. I cannot get involved to explain Hegel's peculiar view. I would also like to remind of the name of an exceptionally gentle person, of Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860, physician and naturalist), who wrote books about the essence of the soul. Schelling wrote to Schubert still in 1850 when the sixth edition of a book about the essence of the soul had appeared: you are, actually, in a more fortunate position than I am. I must get involved with the world-spanning thoughts, which introduce in the spiritual life. However, you live the intimate side that the human being meets if he investigates all intimacies of the soul.

Schubert studied that soul life which is the border area between consciousness, semi-consciousness and unconsciousness, but also the border area between everyday consciousness, dream, and clairvoyance. With Schubert, you already find explanations about the principle that controls the dream world. About that, you can find a lot with him. He studied Swedenborg (Emanuel S., 1688-1772, scientist, philosopher, and mystic) in the time in which it was possible to point to these characteristics of the human spiritual life with great thoughts in a healthy way. He represented the view that there is an etheric body and an even higher etheric body than that which decomposes after death with every human being. Schubert already pointed to that which the Vedanta philosophy calls the “fine body” (sukshma-shariram). He wrote a very nice consideration about this higher body of the human being. You can find there fine remarks with him.

You can see how at that time already the single currents flowed into each other, you can see this with a poet who interlaced these things in his poetries, with Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who represented a peculiar prince in his Prince of Homburg and created Katie of Heilbronn, a peculiar figure, too. He was stimulated to them by talks on somnambulism and on higher spiritual life.

Schubert speaks of a pre-being of the soul; he also discusses the question of reincarnation. At that time, he did not yet regard it as Christian. However, he speaks of a pre-being whose destiny he exactly pursues. Then from this, the brilliant book originates by Justinus Kerner (1786-1862, practical physician, poet and writer): The Seeress of Prevorst (1829). When in the 19th century the book about this strange woman appeared, he used a lot of theosophy for its explanation. The occultist already recognises Justinus Kerner as an expert in the basic definition that he gives about this seeress (Friederike Hauffe, 1801-1829). He was an expert because he lived in the time, which had such thoughts as I characterised them. He says of the seeress of Prevorst—she had two children and was somnambulistic in the extreme—that the mental-spiritual world was open round her and that she could observe the spiritual side of the human beings. He describes her in such a way: imagine somebody retained at the moment of death, so that the peculiar state continues for some years; the emergence of the etheric body and the odd relationship of the astral body to the etheric body lasted for years. Because her soul condition was in such a way, she was able to behold the still existing part of the etheric body of someone who had lost a limb. She could also perceive many things besides. Kerner gives appropriate explanations even if they are not at the height of our time.

You can find explanations also with Eckartshausen (Karl von E., 1752-1803, philosopher, mystic) who also wrote about the inner spiritual development. Kosti's Journey or also The Hieroglyphics of the Human Heart are writings that are adapted to open the human soul to a higher vision. He also described what he calls a soul body appropriately. Another writer is sometimes rather stimulating: Ennemoser (Joseph E., 1787-1854, physician, mesmerist) who wrote theosophy, too, informed a lot of animal magnetism and the mysteries in his works, and contributed much to show the Greek mythology in the right light.

Thus, you see a painting of the first time of the 19th century, from the first thoughts that can work educationally on the human being up to the facts that bring theosophy together with immediate spiritualistic experiences. At that time, you find everything in a pure and sometimes nobler way expressed than it was shown later by the respective authors. You can learn much more about magic spiritual life there than in that which was published by Schindler (Heinrich Bruno Sch., 1797-1859, physician and author) and Albertus (?, perhaps hearing defect, probably Carus, Carl Gustav C., 1789-1869, physician, scientist, and naturalist).

Later the interest changed more and more into an interest, similar to curiosity, the mere urge for knowledge. In the first half of the 19th century, even such spirits who could not go very deeply had the desire of ascending to spiritual heights, developing inner soul organs, and knew something concerning self-knowledge and self-development. Novalis knew how to speak in miraculous tones in his Heinrich of Ofterdingen about that all. He put the big treasure of former initiation memory in that which he has like a recollection of former lives. In the Novices of Sais he shows how Hyazinth gets to know the girl Rosenblüth (rose flower). Only the animals of the wood know something of this extremely subtle love. A wise man comes and tells about the magic life, about spiritual secrets. Hyazinth and Rosenblüth get the desire to walk to the initiation temple of Isis. However, nobody can give some indication, which is the right way to the temple. He walks and walks. There he sits down, tired among nice physical things, in particular also because of that which nature speaks to him. He drops off to dream in a ghostly way.

The temple is round him. The curtain is lifted from the veiled picture, and what does he see? Rosenblüth. He lovely describes how Rosenblüth is that feeling of unity, that uniform idea of the whole nature, how it extends over the whole nature, and how he looks for the hidden secret that life often shows to us that we only need to understand. This is wonderfully indicated. Thus, you can prospect with Novalis wonderfully if you get yourselves in how intimately he expressed the experiences of the world at that time.

I was allowed here to speak about Goethe, Herder, and Schiller and to show how they were theosophists. In a theosophical way, Novalis just pronounces what is a characteristic trait of that time what controlled it like a theosophical motto spiritually. It is included in the words: “Someone succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais.—However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself.”

Thus, the human being comes out, after he has developed the spiritual organs in himself, and searches for himself all over the world. He does not search for himself in himself, he searches for himself in the world, and with it, he searches for God. This search of God in the world, as he expresses it so nicely in this saying, is theosophy.

It was something of a surprise when, in the 18th century, German scholars rediscovered the ancient saga of the Nibelungs. In fact, this saga, to which we owe the thoughts of European peoples about their origin, was forgotten for centuries. The Germans' ancient tales of the dawn of their existence were hardly known, hardly known at all, from the 12th to the 18th century. And spirits such as Goethe, who were able to recognize the full significance of such a discovery for the spiritual life of the German people, attributed the greatest importance to the Nibelung saga in particular. Then people realized that what had been extracted from manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries were only later versions of an even much older folk tale. In the Eddalieder, these older figures of German legend from prehistoric times were found, which, as it were, fled northward, but then made their way back again – first through scholarship – and in the second half of the 19th century, provided the basis for the truly great renewal of art through the poet and musician Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner sought to bring about the renewal of art by not taking the figures he had express the deepest foundations of human destiny, or who could gain our interest through a special destiny that reaches beyond the everyday, from everyday life, but instead he took the figures of prehistoric times, idealized into the superhuman. He knew full well that the secrets harbored by the human heart and soul cannot be explained by figures or events of everyday life; he knew that myth and legend are precisely the reflection of what takes place in the depths of the human soul. Everyday life already shows us how every person is actually a mystery and contains infinitely more than we can perceive with our ordinary senses and minds. We know that we have an obligation – if we recognize such an ideal obligation – to look at people as such a mystery, never to conclude with our judgment of them. When we allow a person to resonate within us, then their figure indeed grows into the superhuman. We can only depict it by enlarging the features, and enlarging them in the right way, by emphasizing the characteristic without distorting it into caricature. That is the true art of inner human characterization.

Just as Wagner was clear that humanity may one day — though not yet, admittedly — be capable of expressing the very highest through ordinary language, and that one must resort to the elevated element of expression, to music, in order to bring forth the deepest of the soul, so he was also clear that he must rise above everyday life to the mythical. The power, inner feeling and reality that lives in this myth is revealed to us in a surprising way by this renewal of art. It is precisely through Wagner's art that much has been done to deepen this world of legends. Today, too, we will try to penetrate the reality of this seemingly unreal world from the point of view of spiritual science, and you will see that theosophy or spiritual science will have much to say about the deeper core of these legends. For from Nietzsche to the other Wagner interpreters, many have got stuck in the symbolic interpretation of the legend. This is due to the fact that in our time of materialistic thinking it is actually something quite great to recognize in the myth allegorical references to great inner human truths. It is of course impossible for me to cover the whole question of the Siegfried myth with you today; I will only be able to give a few points of view to show how, from the point of view of a deeper spiritual knowledge, this myth gains life and reality.

The figure of Siegfried is known to us primarily from the German version of the Song of the Nibelungs. You know that Siegfried was able to make himself invisible. He was in possession of the Nibelung hoard, the gold that is associated with many things: earthly fortune, but at the same time a curse, a fate. You also know that he became engaged to Brunhilda. This is a trait that is not present in Germanic mythology, but without which Germanic mythology can hardly be understood. They know that by entering into his marriage bond with Kriemhilde, he then acquires Brunhilda for Gunther by means of a deception, namely by appearing in the guise of another, which then becomes his undoing and leads to his death. They know that Siegfried is avenged by his wife at the court of the Huns, at Etzel or Attila.

These are the main features of the Siegfried figure. The traits in the German saga are substantially deepened in the Nordic saga, which tells us something quite different. In the German saga, we find Siegfried in possession of the magic hood that allowed him to make himself invisible. In the Nordic saga, we are introduced to the world of the gods through the figure of Siegfried or Sigurd. This myth of the gods is full of mysteries and secrets. We learn — and I can only hint at the very outermost outlines here — that the gods themselves were forced to give the gold they acquired from the Nibelungs to the giants as payment for a debt they had incurred. A giant in the form of a Lindworm now guards this treasure. It is a significant trait that Siegfried, the offspring of the old gods and, so to speak, related to Wotan himself, is destined in his youth to overcome the Lindworm, the guardian of the gold. This gives him the power by which he attains his might. By bringing a few drops of the blood of the Lindworm to his lips, he is able to understand the language of birds; he is thus able to take a deep look into nature and absorb hidden wisdom. Through this perfection he is able to approach the Valkyrie Brunhilda, who is surrounded by fire and flames, and to become engaged to her, he who has conquered the Nibelungen treasure himself in the fight against the Lindworm.

Siegfried is a type of hero that appears in many of the great epics of the world. He is the slayer of a dragon, he is imbued with the dragon's blood and thereby attains special powers, he acquires the power to make himself invisible and to approach a female figure who can only be penetrated by fire and flames. In the individual phases of descent from the gods, very significant ancient beliefs are hidden, some of which even elude any public discussion because they lead into areas that belong to the very depths of occultism.

Scholarship has often seen in Siegfried the symbol of a solar hero, and in fact in the way that scholarship understands such symbols: the sun as conqueror of the clouds and so on. As I pointed out a fortnight ago, such external symbolism can hardly be appropriate, as has been made clear by Ludwig Laistner's research into the riddle of the Sphinx, which shows that the people do not symbolize in this way. We can only understand the Germanic world of gods and the Siegfried saga if we also assume here that experiences of the gods are expressed in all these relationships.

A fortnight ago we saw that there was something of an experience of higher spiritual and mental worlds in Germanic prehistory and how the development of man has consisted in man's development from the astral vision of prehistoric times, from looking into the spiritual world, to our ordinary everyday views, which look at things with the outer senses. For our Central European ancestors, the time when people could see into the spiritual world was but a distant memory. This world has now been plunged into darkness and gloom, since outer physical vision has become more and more refined in humanity. What still lives today as legend and myth is the remnant of such a higher spiritual perception. The gods are higher experiences, are real figures of the world into which man lives when he has attained higher senses. There is a straight line from the dream to the highest astral-spiritual experiences of the soul. To make this clear to us, let us take a look at the difference between the so-called night and day consciousness. The day consciousness of the normal human being, through which culture has been created, is acquired. It comes about through the soul perceiving the external world through the senses and processing it with the intellect and imagination. But when the soul frees itself from the body at night, the gates of the senses are closed, the soul is within itself, then it lives in a different spiritual environment, but it cannot perceive because it has no senses for it, just as a person who has lost eyes, ears, in fact all senses, could still live, but would perceive nothing of the environment. Once the soul had the ability to see into the world into which the human being descends when he surrenders to sleep. He saw into the spiritual world, and the images of the spiritual world lie in myth and are real experiences. That is why it seemed to people in Central Europe that they had once perceived a light that had now sunk into the darkness of night. There is a light that can illuminate the night, a light that makes it possible to see spiritual and soul entities, those things that are found in mythological legends. This sinking down of astral consciousness is beautifully and powerfully depicted in the figure of Baldur. It is only a fantasy of German scholarship to claim that Baldur is the sun. Baldur is the ancient astral light that looks into the spiritual and soul world, but which died out in the course of evolution when a race arose for whom the spiritual light was immersed in darkness. This race, of which the ancient Germans could truly have said: though the lights shine in the darkness, but the darkness knows not the lights —, is the race of the Nibelungs, the dwellers of Nifelheim. What is meant by this race, for whom the spiritual is dark and only the sensual is light? What has changed with them?

The ancient powers that glowed in space and lived in everything, the powers of love, from which everything emerged, were, as people remembered, the deeper source of life at that time when they could still see into the spiritual world and lived quite differently. In place of love, which ruled everything, elevated all intercourse between beings, led beings to beings and established all relationships between them, selfishness arose with the emergence of the external sense world. A generation that still had insight into the spiritual world now clung to purely external physical things, physical possessions, physical property: the desire to possess some piece of the sensory world. That is the “gold”, the external, physical possession. Even in small circumstances, there was always something reminiscent of it in the German people, of the time when the land still belonged to the whole village community. Those who lived on such property were naturally united; in those days blood still established kinship. Now a different time came. The common property, which at the same time produced a certain sense of community, a common love, was transformed into private property, into the urge and drive to possess. The ancient Germans also went through this development, which almost all peoples went through. Thus they felt the new conditions to be in contrast to the old ones, as if the external had taken the place of the internal, as if in the past one had followed the urge that lived within, love, and now one followed selfishness. Now, too, what brought people together had to be regulated by contracts and legal provisions, instead of by natural degrees of kinship as in the past. A new world order arose, with new gods, corresponding to the outer reality of the senses. Such were our gods of ancient times. But these gods also appeared again in a new form, as it were, as those who extracted the better part, the essence, from the old, like supersensible powers above sensual time.

People appeared to be entangled in sensuality. But he who wanted to be a leader, a guide for humanity, was also an initiate within Germanic prehistory, as he was everywhere else, one who saw deeper into the sources of existence and was able to penetrate to the divine, creative powers. Such an initiate must have overcome what connects man to the sensual, he must be able to attach all his thoughts and desires only to what lasts, to what is behind the sensual things. He must withdraw from the struggles of everyday life. Now every human being is involved in these struggles with desires and everyday ideas. He must overcome all this; otherwise a real, deeper insight into things is not possible. Because this is so little understood today, people cannot grasp what real and true wisdom is. Otherwise, they would also know that before one can ascend to this knowledge, one must first make oneself worthy of it, one must feel that what mind and reason can grasp, what we can think, that these are divine thoughts, according to which the world is built. What matters is not what the initiates know, but how they know it, and they become knowledgeable because they have overcome the lower nature in man. Through this knowledge, which is linked to the transformation of the whole soul, knowledge becomes wisdom.

The nations had different initiates according to their respective character. We understand this when we grasp the meaning of initiation. What exactly is the task of the initiate? Above all, it was the initiates who gave the nations the certainty of the immortality of the human soul. To rise to wisdom means to experience that the soul is reality. One really gets to know it when one looks into the world illuminated by the astral light. There the immortality of the soul proves to be an attribute of the soul. Because the initiate can enter these worlds, in which there is eternal life, already in this existence, he can give an account of the destiny of man before birth and after death. The task of the initiated at all times has been to clarify how the soul is distinguished from the perishable sensual existence. Wherever there is a belief based on deep knowledge and experience, something similar to what is being said again for the first time in modern times by the theosophical or spiritual scientific movement is said. The more man transforms his sensual existence by developing the most diverse virtues and abilities, the more he passes over into another existence, which is everlasting. The Greeks called the soul a bee that flies out, gathers honey and then returns to the hive. That is exactly what the soul does. It flies in the physical world, gathers experiences and brings them back to the spiritual world, where they become its permanent possession. Wherever mystical facts are at hand, the soul has been imagined as something feminine, for example, as the “eternal feminine” in Goethe, the soul that constantly absorbs from the environment and is fertilized by it. On the other hand, the cosmos is male when viewed in relation to the soul. For the soul, every event in its dealings with the external world is a form of fertilization. Therefore, to the person who can see it, the soul's upward striving toward immortality appears as a kind of union, for it connects with its higher nature, which, as it were, comes to meet it when it has worked its way up to this higher level. Thus in Germanic mythology, because bravery was the highest virtue for the Germanic people, the acquisition of immortality appeared, for the warrior falling on the battlefield, in the approach of the Valkyrie; the Valkyrie is nothing other than the immortal human soul. When the warrior has practiced the virtue that leads to immortality, he unites with the Valkyrie; those who did not fall on the battlefield died a death on the straw and had to go down into the realm of Hel, where the spiritual light did not shine.

An initiate is one who has an encounter with the soul during his lifetime. Thus Siegfried is the initiate of Germanic prehistory, who overcomes the lower nature, the dragon, who ascends and acquires the right, like every initiate, to see into the world that people will enter when they pass through the gate of death. Such initiates were always invisible to the physical eye of men; they always had a cloak of invisibility on. It is obvious to everyone that if an initiate like, for example, the Christ Jesus were to appear in any modern city today, he would remain fairly hidden as such. For even if he were not imprisoned, what can only be perceived with the spiritual eye would at least be perceived as something quite outrageous. This is the case with all initiates, including Siegfried. Anyone who strives for a higher knowledge of wisdom must not only overcome the dragon, but also pass through many dangers to a higher consciousness. The flames and fires surrounding the Valkyrie are very real. Before man is able to see into the higher world, the higher nature is always mixed with the lower; it keeps the lower in check and guards what wants to emerge from the lower stormy passions. But when the higher nature stands out, the lower nature is initially left alone. Therefore, those who have not thoroughly strengthened their character beforehand, but who have attained clairvoyant ability and want to ascend into the spiritual world, are often subject to a transformation for the worse. The fire of the passions easily begins to burn. The higher consciousness causes the flames to form, and the initiate must first go through this flames. Here you have the initiation ceremonies of Siegfried. There were such initiates in those days; they were old priest-wise men who combined bravery and wisdom, being kings and priests at the same time. That was the ideal of man that lived in the memory of the ancient German and stood before his soul at the moment when this poem was created like a memory. That has now changed. Valor is no longer subject to initiation and wisdom is assigned to a secular estate; instead of a warrior-hood that was at the same time a priestly knighthood, there is now a priesthood that knows nothing of initiation.

The attainment of this higher consciousness of the initiated priest-wise is shown in the fact that Siegfried, who was already betrothed to the Valkyrie Brunhilda, drinks the potion of forgetfulness, that is, he is placed into the world that no longer knows anything of the old times, and that he acquires Brunhilda for one who is no longer a priest-sage, who has laid aside the one side, courage, that is, that with which the higher soul is acquired. Brunhilda was to be acquired for one who was no longer an ancient offspring of the gods, that is, an initiate.

Thus the evolution of spiritual culture is wonderfully expressed in the saga of Siegfried. The times are past when bravery and the deepest wisdom were combined in the initiates. Union with the Valkyrie is no longer tied to initiation; they are, in a sense, those who fell away from the ancient past and now achieve immortality through bravery. Thus the connection with the old world of the gods was lost; only the sensual life, bound to gold, remained. For such a time — at least this much was clear to mystical thinking in this period — higher consciousness is something dangerous. The initiate who has conquered the dragon has the possibility of uniting with the higher consciousness and allowing himself to be filled by it. The lower nature cannot tempt him, because he has laid it aside. But for him who still has to undergo this and has not overcome the lower nature, the same can be dangerous. This should be made clear to the old Germans. For the union with the Valkyrie has a destructive effect if it is not linked to inner worthiness. She becomes a corrupting power when she acts for herself. Thus Brunhilda acts for herself by having to belong to the man who had not gone through the initiation, to whom she was unlawfully assigned. Therefore, the higher consciousness must have a corrupting effect. This also explains what ultimately brings about Brunhilda's downfall. Brunhilda, the higher consciousness that came from the old gods, must drag the old gods themselves down with her into ruin. The god's offspring was her equal. In ancient times it was right that Valkyries descended upon the warriors because there were initiates among them who, through a victorious life, had earned the right to unite with Brunhilda. This consciousness, the gift of the old gods, which they originally gave to the initiated, had later also come to those who were not initiated, where it could have a destructive, dissolving effect, and then necessarily had to drag down the old world of the gods itself: the twilight of the gods.

It is no mere accident, but the outcome of profound wisdom, that in the German form of the Nibelungenlied, too, where the folk go down to King Etzel's court to meet their doom, the new Christianity also makes its appearance. Christianity shines into the old world, but the world started from love. Symbolically, an ancient love was remembered that had been replaced by the statutes founded in gold. The time of gold has brought it about that the higher consciousness of Brunhilda has had a destructive effect. And the point in time when the old gods sank down is cosmically represented with the time when astral vision gave way to physical vision, which thereby becomes a reflection of the cosmic process.

Love instead of statutes should arise as a new element. Even this is indicated allegorically by myth, and in this fact it emerges even more intimately: when Siegfried was to be betrayed, his wife marked the spot where he could be wounded with a cross. Every initiate is spiritually invulnerable to the earthly sensual, even if his body is torn to pieces. The soul has been living into the higher life. But there is one thing the initiate has not yet been able to achieve. Siegfried remained vulnerable at the point where moral lawfulness, refined into the divine, is to flare up in love. This flaming up of moralizing in love, becoming divine, is the essence of Christianity. This did not yet belong to the initiation of Siegfried. After the twilight of the gods is over, another hero enters among the old fighters, who stands higher than Siegfried, who is invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable. The cross that Kriemhilde can only sketch, the great one has carried on his back. You see what a deep substratum, what a spiritual picture of life is contained in this saga of prehistoric times. The riddle of humanity resounds around us.

You all know that Richard Wagner was not satisfied with the Siegfried figure of the Song of the Nibelungs, but that he went back to the Nordic saga, even though he changed the individual motifs and personalities somewhat. He presents Siegfried as the soul that has passed through initiation through the killing of the Lindworm, as a being that understands the language of birds, that thus sees and hears not only through the gates of the sense world. And in Götterdämmerung, he allows us to see the connection that is symbolized in Brunhilda as the ancient world of the gods, which plunges down into the depths, and from which Christian love then rises, which has taken the place of the ancient world of the gods.

I do not wish to claim that Richard Wagner had these thoughts in an abstract way; but that need not be the case with an artist. One speaks so glibly of the artist's “unconscious” work. That is not a good word. While man thinks in abstract terms, in shadowy images, the artist works in forms. It is a kind of high-flown impudence of the vanity of learning and intellect to call this life and activity in the imagination and in forming “unconscious”. There is something else at the bottom of it. What is art with its creative forming, with its letting in of a higher world? It is deeply significant that it is just through the renewal of myth that a renewal of art has been brought about. If myth is only a symbol for the ordinary person, for the initiate it is spiritual reality, the expression of the experience of a higher spiritual world. It is such a full consciousness that the ordinary bright day consciousness is unable to grasp it. A shadowy reflection of this has remained in myth, and we have something similar when we imagine how an initiate introduced his students to the ancient mysteries, be they Greek, Persian, Egyptian, or those of which a German prehistory tells us. There we have the initiate who has the power to open the eyes of his disciples to this higher world. They gaze into this spiritual world; scenes of a higher experience play out before them, not between people, but between gods. A later time has captured the form of this play of scenes as in a shadow play, and in art. Art is like a dream or like a shadow play as a memory of an earlier clairvoyance and a prophecy for a later clairvoyance of all humanity.

It was a great epoch when the last echoes of those ancient times in German myth were brought out again by Richard Wagner, in order to find the union between art and vision again. Thus the products of Richard Wagner's art have a prophetic significance. They are an eminent and great means of education for our time. They will renew the myth for man through the sound of the music and the superhuman that unfolds before his eyes, and help to awaken the powers of the soul. And the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view, which is working towards that future of humanity, may regard this art, reborn out of the myth, as a true sister. Thus it is possible, in a way, to gain a further deepening of Richard Wagner's art from spiritual science. The living quality of spiritual penetration, which spiritual science strives for, will have to take the place of the mere abstract scholarship that has taken hold of the old legends and myths. Myth is a portrayal of profound truths, of lofty spiritual experiences, and by awakening consciousness of these spiritual experiences, spiritual research, which is a different kind of research from ordinary research, will also make it possible to understand myth in its depths again. Then the legends of the dawn of humanity will be able to come to life again in their essential core. Men have expressed the truth in the most diverse forms. But only he understands the form of the truth who has a sense for the core and the living source of the truth. To seek the core of this truth is the task of the spiritual-scientific world view, and through this attitude, which constitutes the essential in the spiritual-scientific field, the best of the past spiritual treasures of mankind will be able to come to the surface of today's cultural life.

Eight days ago I was allowed to speak to you about the esoteric core, about the spiritual contents of those great legends in which Central European thinking and feeling express themselves in the first third of the Middle Ages with the renewal of which Richard Wagner achieved something prophetic for our art at the same time. Today another legend type has to occupy us, two legends that Richard Wagner also renewed and which were made accessible to art significantly in our time. The Parzival and the Lohengrin legends should occupy us today. With both these legends we touch a land different from that was which occupied us eight days ago. I want to characterise in a few words once again, what takes, actually, the Siegfried and the Nibelungs legends up and what lives in them. The old spiritual experience of the ancestors expresses itself in the consciousness of the Central European population. This consciousness is sunken in the darkness of the time, and the usual sensory view has already substituted it in the epoch in which these legends originated. It was the old spiritual experience, which still lived like an echo, just as the world of the gods or legends.

The legends of the Nibelungs and of Siegfried are echoes of the ancient pagan time with its secret doctrines, with its views of the initiation of the old leaders of the people, and we have found Siegfried as such a great initiate of the Teutons. However, Lohengrin and Parzival are individualities of quite different type. We enter that time with them when Christianity, a worldview completely new to Central Europe, had spread out and won influence. Now the whole being of the newly emerging Christianity and everything that is connected as a result with it lives in these both legends, in the Parzival and in the Lohengrin legends. We want to imagine how the being of medieval-European development expresses itself in this legend world at first. We have emphasised eight days ago that to us the legends of Siegfried and the Nibelungs point to an ancient prehistoric time in which a kind of natural ties of love connected the single tribes, the single parts of the population. Something like an echo of this time is contained in that which Tacitus reports when he says that the Germans still revered an old tribal god at whom they looked up like at a father with whom they were connected by family ties, which extended to tribal communities.

The blood, the natural relationship gave that love. Every single tribe had such a tribal divinity that had a kind of ancestor again. This natural love is a result of the blood relationship, resting like a breath on these old times, and just the recollection of these old times and tribal communities, of this old love, based on blood relationship, is expressed in the legend type of the Nibelungs. We have seen that the legend type of the Song of the Nibelungs originated in a time in which the tribal love had already withdrawn. Something else replaced it: greed, everything that is symbolised by the gold that is connected with egoism and is based on it. The old love based on blood relationship was no longer authoritative, but new connections that were based on statutes, contracts and laws. This reversal is reflected in the legend of the Nibelungs.

Later, other aims replaced these old communities, which were based on gold, so to say, on possession and mere warlike knightly bravery, which were out for possession. Other ideals gradually appeared with Christianity. The inner being of Christianity maybe was nowhere expressed as magnificently and tremendously as in the legends into which we settle down bit by bit and in which the task of Christianity within Central Europe is represented allegorically: in the Lohengrin and Parzival legends.

What did Christianity have as its elixir of life? The absolute equality of all human beings. One felt Christianity that way at least at that time. One felt freedom, equality before the highest that the human being can imagine as the jewel, as the real mission of Christianity. The ancestors of the Teutons were proud of the name of their ancestors, of the name of a tribe or of a family name. They referred to it if they wanted to assign value to themselves in the world. They referred to the law, to titles and names in the time, which had superseded the family love. Now both should no longer be valid, but simply the human being had to be important who felt intrinsically in his core. The human being without title, without name was the Christian ideal. Something great was said with it. The Lohengrin and the Parzival legends express this.

How do both legends express this? If we take the Parzival legend, we need only to visualise the structure of the Parzival legend how it lived in the Middle Ages, lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach (~1170-~1220). We have to deal with a young person who grows on, torn out from any community, torn out from that which gave distinction and weight to the human beings at that time. The mother Herzeloide experienced that sufferings, pains could be connected with the old order that was based on titles, distinctions, and names. In the old order, her husband was led to the East where he had an accident. Now she wants to bring her son up far from all those things. He should know nothing about the striving of the worldly knights. However, one day he sees such worldly knights. There he decides to depart, and he starts hiking. We know that this hike leads him to two places that we must consider as something particularly important for the spiritual perception in the middle of the Middle Ages.

The first place to which the Parzival comes is the Round Table of King Arthur; the other place is the castle of the Holy Grail. What are these? In the Middle Ages one imagined the Round Table of King Arthur as a community from which all spiritual strength goes out for that which existed in the Middle Ages before the influence of Christianity as worldly knighthood, generally as all worldly. We come back to ancient times, to those times to which we could point already last time in the talk on the Song of the Nibelungs. We know that the Teutons, the ancestors of the German and Anglo-Saxon tribes took an area in possession that other tribes inhabited, the Celts in primeval times. The Celts: one only knows a little about them; history tells a little only about these past times of Europe in which these strange people had big influence which was pushed then by the invading Teutons to the west, but was also forced back there as people. The Celts were forced back as people. Their influence has remained. A spiritual sediment of this old Celtic time exists in Europe. In this Celtic time people still beheld clairvoyantly into the spiritual regions. Ideas of the spiritual world remained from that.

Among the Celts, the old clairvoyance was preferably home, the immediate consciousness that one could have experiences in the divine-spiritual world. The stories and dramatic actions are an echo of the instructions that the initiate Celtic priests gave to their pupils and via the pupils to the whole people. There we refer to those primeval times of Europe, when there were real initiates, initiates of the old Celtic paganism on European territory.

What I have told to you about the initiation of Siegfried, of Wotan and so on, all that leads back to the old initiations of the old Celtic priests. These old Celtic priests were of the same spirit as in ancient Egypt, in ancient Chaldea or ancient Persia the priest sages were as rulers. They were the rulers. Everything that happened in the world that belonged to the external organisation was done according to the instructions of the priest sages. Everything public, everything common was controlled by the wisdom of these original scholars of Europe.

King Arthur about whom one says that he withdrew with his Round Table to Wales and lived there was nothing else than the learnt lord of these sages who formed a spiritual centre, a kind of spiritual monarchy. One felt that this spiritual centre, I would like to say of “original scholars,” with his choice twelve companions was there. This has good reasons. Thus, one tells that King Arthur was nothing else than the successor of that directing scholar of the old Celtic priests in Wales. With it, we immediately recognise that there was something in Europe that we call a Grand Lodge in spiritual science.

Let us now realise the concept of a Grand Lodge. You know that we think seriously of development, that humanity develops, that humanity ascends higher and higher, that every single human being can ascend the path of knowledge up to those stages where he himself beholds into the spiritual worlds, where the primal ground behind the world manifests to him.

If we speak of the possibility of development of humanity, it is also not abstruse to realise that there are higher developed individualities in humanity already today who have run ahead of the remaining humanity and have walked the paths of knowledge and wisdom due to a life full of renunciation, so that they can be leaders of modern humanity. Today where one levels everything, where one does not want to recognise anything, where one talks of development, but does not want to believe in development, one does not accept this. However, in the times when one knew something of it one really spoke of the existing development.

According to a natural principle, we find twelve different forces of the spirit. I have said about Goethe that he himself talks about such a secret brotherhood that he considers as Rosicrucians. One spoke of such a Grand White Lodge in the Middle Ages. From this, the strands went out which controlled life. One recognised that who directed all that in King Arthur, who lived concealed in Wales. Around him were his knights who were, indeed, no longer at the height of the priests of the old Celtic time for whom the time of love had transformed into a time of egoism when one attempted to conquer countries with the sword in the hand. However, they were still under the guidance of the White Lodge.

Indeed, the question immediately suggests itself: if there are such lodges—also even today—, why do they not appear?—I have said often enough that it depends not only on the fact that somebody appears, but also on the fact that he can be recognised. Today also, Jesus would probably not be recognised. It is hard to recognise a sage within his time. It belongs just that to it which theosophy or spiritual science wants to bring again to humanity. If it finds its way, one understands such a thing as the Round Table of King Arthur, the directing white lodge.

This was the one: Arthur. The other is the castle of the Holy Grail. Only by way of a hint, we can deal with it. One says that the Holy Grail is the chalice in which once Christ Jesus with his disciples took the Last Supper, the wine, and in which his blood was then collected. Then the lance was also brought to Europe with which the side of Jesus was pierced. The chalice of the Holy Grail is on monsalvaesche (mons salvationis = mountain of salvation) where a holy castle was built up. The Holy Grail has the capacity to give everlasting youth, the force of everlasting life generally to somebody who is familiar with its miracles who lives with its sun of grace.

Again, these are twelve, but Christian spiritual knights now. The old Templars guard the Holy Grail, and they used the forces, which they suck from this guard to pour out the spiritual knighthood of the heart, of the inner life, over Europe. Thus, one countered the white lodge of the worldly knighthood that moved to Wales with the spiritual knighthood in the castle of the Holy Grail, which is placed on the Spanish mountain monsalvaesche.

Which task did the knights have who were in the castle of the Holy Grail? The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was not to make conquests, not to acquire external possession, not to appropriate seigneuries; their task was to make the conquest of the soul life. One tells to us about the treasure of the Nibelungs, about the gold as a symbol of possession, as an aim worth striving for by the Nibelungs, the Holy Grail is the spiritualised treasure of the Nibelungs, the treasure of the soul. What is the strength that goes out from the Holy Grail in reality? What do those twelve knights work who are in its castle? A spark of the divine lives in every human being, as often the theosophical worldview emphasises. The mystics of the Middle Ages had their great ideas in the same time in which also these legends originated. They spoke of the fact that the human being is a fourfold being. There is at first the external physical human being who lives here in this world who strives for possession who is on the lookout for gold. The second one is the mental human being who suffers and is glad who has instincts, desires, and sensations who must be gradually improved. The third human being is an even more internal one. He is a spiritual human being who attains admission to the spiritual world bit by bit. The innermost human being is the divine human being. This is that who today and this was felt in particular in the Middle Ages—is only in the earliest stages. To develop this disposition of the divine spark more and more, to raise the human being to the higher worlds, this one had aimed at in the initiation of the old paganism. One aims at this now within the Christian world in a new way. In addition, the Christian initiation was internalised.

You remember from the former talks how the initiation ceremonies were in the old times how the human being had to go through procedures that lifted out the internal soul from the physical body, so that the human being was enraptured to the higher world and could witness the qualities of the higher world. An external procedure belonged to it to go through all that. Christianity should bring an initiation that takes place only in the deepest inside, in the concealed sanctum of the soul. There the god should be searched for, the god, who brought salvation to Christianity by pouring his blood; every single human being in his soul should find this god. The single human being should really be able to attain that which Angelus Silesius, the great Christian mystic, later expressed with the words: “If you rise above yourself and allow God to prevail, then ascension takes place in your mind.” The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was to develop the internal vital spark in the human being.

The Holy Grail was nothing else than the deepest inside of the human nature, and it was something uniform because the internal human nature is a uniform one, because a life spent in the pursuit of wisdom raises hope that one could understand what is meant with the big unity, with the big divine spark. They were there as the brothers of the Holy Grail. Parzival wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail. The legend tells now that when he came to the Holy Grail, he found King Amfortas bleeding at that time. One had said to him to ask not much and nothing wrong. Hence, he did not ask for the wounds of the king and not for the meaning of the Holy Grail. That is why he is cast out. He should ask for the qualities of the Holy Grail and the wounds of the king. This belongs to the experiences that are to be done in the divine life that one must ask for it. He must long for it. The Holy Grail exists; one can find it, it is bestowed on everybody, but it does not impose itself. It does not come to us; we must feel the longing for the Holy Grail, the internal sanctum, the divine vital spark in the human soul. We must have the desire to ask for it. If the human soul has found the path up to the god, the god descends to it. The secret of the Holy Grail is the descent of the god who descends, if the human being develops up to the divine.

John the Baptist shows this following the baptism of Jesus: a dove came down and sat down on the head, and a voice spoke from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; in you I take delight” (Mark 1:11). The Holy Grail is shown in the figure of a dove allegorically.

Parzival was not yet ripe with his first visit in the Grail castle to experience what we have just described. When he felt cast out, something came to his soul that must come to every soul once if it should really become ripe for the last stages of knowledge. Doubt, disbelief, inner mental darkness come to Parzival's soul. Indeed, someone who wants to ascend to knowledge must go through the hard school of doubt once. Not before one has doubted and has gone through the tortures and everything that doubts may bring along, he has acquired that certainty in his inside that he will never lose knowledge again. Doubt is a bad brother, but a purifying brother. Parzival goes through these doubts now, and he brings himself to that knowledge which consists of something else than of intellectual knowledge. Richard Wagner expresses this knowledge with magnificent correctness, maybe not quite philosophically or psychologically correctly but analogously, while he calls Parzival (Parsifal) the “pure fool” who becomes knowing by compassion.

Thus, we come to the description of the way that someone has to go through who still has to struggle through to the stages of higher knowledge. You know that it is the path of the pupils and that one distinguishes there three stages. If anybody has acquired the qualities that constitute the preparatory path, if he has purified himself of the uncontrolled ideas and leads a pure life, then he becomes ripe for chelahood, then he becomes ripe to get the guru, the spiritual leader. The first stage of the path to higher knowledge consists of the fact that one learns to behave quite impartially to the world, to practice love without the slightest trace of any prejudice from the inside. Why do the human beings love in the usual life at first?

Because they have a blood relationship, because they have been connected by any ties for long. This is right. However, who wants to go the path of knowledge must penetrate to another form of love. Nothing that ties me together with a human being in a special way is allowed to prefer him regarding my love. I am only allowed to ask for that which is outside me. Has my brother or my brother-in-law any advantage? No! With it, I say nothing against the love for our relatives; it should concern only the traits of the human being. Even if he is quite foreign to us, we recognise that he is worthy of our love, then we love him like one who is connected with us for long. Such a human being is on the first level of chelahood. We call him the homeless human being because he has lost what one calls home in the ideal sense. This is also meant by the sentence you find in the New Testament: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine” (Luke 14:26). This sentence means the same, and one felt Christianity that way in Central Europe. No name and no title should give a preference of love. Someone who ascends the path of knowledge should found love for any human being on his innermost worthiness and value.

If the human being has climbed up the first steps of the path of knowledge, the hard moments of doubt come. While we get to know the world more and more and delve into love more and more, the more we also get to know the black and bad side of the world. These are the hard days of the initiates. The initiate struggles upwards bit by bit. Then there awakes that soul light which like an internal sun illuminates the spiritual things and beings. We see the objects round ourselves with eyes because the light shines on these objects. Actually, we see the rays only which are reflected by the objects to us. We do not see the spiritual things because no spiritual light shines on them.

However, who has advanced so far that the so-called kundalini light shines to him is on the second stage of the path of knowledge. Someone has arrived at the third stage who has succeeded in feeling his ego without preference, who does not esteem himself higher than other human beings, who finds his higher ego in the love to all beings. Who does no longer hope for his own selfish ego, but hears the properties of the beings speaking has arrived at the third stage of the path of knowledge. We call him a swan in the secret doctrine, and this is a term that is used all over the world where there is spiritual research.

What does this degree bring? It brings the effluxion about all beings. There we are no longer concluded like within a skin from the world. Foreign pain is our pain, foreign joy is our joy, and we live and are active in the whole existence. The whole earth belongs to us. We feel in everything. Then one does no longer know that one looks at the objects from the outside, then it is, as if one is in them, as if one had penetrated into them by love and thereby knows them. By compassion, by this empathy all knowledge has originated.

A hermit, Trevrizent, initiated Parzival in this wisdom. The fact that he is a hermit is typical. He is somebody who is lifted out of the remaining humanity who has really left everything behind: father, mother, brother, sister, and has become a disciple of that who does not know such differences. There Parzival is informed of the higher virtues, and there he becomes ripe for entering the castle of the Holy Grail and for asking which the miracles of the Holy Grail are. He is taken up; he releases the wounded Amfortas and becomes Grail King. An internal, human way, the way that the secret doctrine prescribes all over the world, transferred into the Christian, a way on which Parzival is described. Lohengrin belongs to the Grail Table. He is the son of Parzival. Whereas the passageway of the human being to the higher self is described in Parzival, a historical-social mission of the middle of the Middle Ages is described in Lohengrin.

Initiates led the medieval folk consciousness, it was not blind as the scholars imagine. This folk consciousness recorded an important epoch in the middle of the Middle Ages. What happens there? Briefly: an important historical event happened, the so-called urban civilisation started. The old feudal time experiences a mighty revolution. Whereas one dealt once only with land ownership, only with a rural population, now we see in Germany, France, Belgium, in Russia everywhere single cities originating. Cities are founded; one notes a jerk forward in the human development. What had happened there in these foundations of cities? The human beings were torn out from the connections to which they have belonged once. Everybody who felt enslaved went to the city. There he was on his own. There he was only as much worth as he could achieve. The bourgeoisie came into being in the middle of the Middle Ages. This mighty reversal is expressed in the legend of Lohengrin.

Whereas Parzival shows how the human being finds a higher ego in himself, how he dedicates himself to the pilgrimage to the higher ego, Lohengrin shows how the medieval folk goes through a tremendous epoch of human development, namely the human being is freed and his personality comes to light from the old organisations.

If we want to understand the connection of this historical event with the legend of Lohengrin, we have to know that in all mysticism this stage is symbolised by a female personality. Therefore, Goethe also spoke at the end of the second part of his Faust of the fact that the everlasting-female draws us upwards. This must not be interpreted trivially. In truth, the human soul is meant which pulls up the human being. In the general, the soul is shown as female and that which surrounds the human being from without as male. The striving soul is always shown as female.

In the secret doctrine, one knows that the great leaders of humanity, the initiates, further humanity always to a higher stage. Lohengrin is the herald of the Holy Grail. The medieval consciousness regards him as the great initiate leader who furthers humanity to a higher stage in the middle of the Middle Ages. He was the bringer of the urban civilisation, who inspired the bourgeoisie in its originating. This is the individuality of Lohengrin. Elsa of Brabant is nothing else than the symbol of the medieval folk soul which has again to make a developmental step forward under the influence of Lohengrin. This progress in the history of humanity is nicely and tremendously shown in the legend.

We have seen that the pupil initiated in the third degree is called a swan. The master who is deeply initiated rises higher, he rises into the transcendent world, in those worlds, to which the human consciousness does not extend. He knows everything that expresses itself in humanity only in his inside. One cannot ask him, where from you are, which name do you have?—It is the swan that brings him from even higher spheres. Hence, the swan brings Lohengrin into the epoch of urban civilisation. Look at the progress, which has been made in the old Hellenism. The gods in Greece are nothing else than deified initiates. Take Zeus, who consorts with Semele; from this affair Dionysus originates. The Greek culture arises from it. All great proceedings of humanity are shown in this way. Elsa should not ask for the name and origin of that who leads her and becomes her husband. It is with all great masters that way; they go unrecognized and unnoticed through humanity. If one asked them, they would be shooed away from humanity. It is necessary that they save the sanctum from profane looks and questions. This would be also the case if one gave people an understanding of the being of such an initiate. At such a moment, such a being would also disappear as Lohengrin also did. Lohengrin is called a son of Parzival. That means that the liberation of the medieval bourgeoisie took place under the influence of Christianity.

Thus, we look into the legends of the Middle Ages and see how nicely the facts of the spiritual life are expressed in both legends. The mission of Christianity for the medieval culture became with it the mission of the liberation of the human being from the earthly human body. This mission was shown in both legends. It worked on Richard Wagner in particular. He always tried to show the pure love that makes the human being clairvoyant. Already in 1856, he started a drama, called The Victors: a Jandala girl loves Ananda, a Brahmin young man. However, Ananda is far separated from the love of the Jandala girl because of the caste division. He is not allowed to pursue the love of the Jandala girl. He becomes a victor about his nature becoming a pupil of Buddha. As adherer of Buddha, he finds the victory, there he finds himself again, and there he overcomes the human affection. One tells that the Jandala girl was a Brahmin girl in a former life and rejected the love of a Jandala young man. Then she also becomes a victor and is spiritually united with Ananda, the Brahmin. Later, Wagner wanted to use the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in a drama.

He had in mind the complete inner nature of Christianity and the teaching of the free human being who is not bound to title and to anything else. The Holy Grail seeks in the inside of the human soul. In 1857, on Good Friday—Wagner tells—he faced a wonderful nature in Zurich. There something flowed out to him for a moment that expressed the whole mood in him that penetrated the whole knighthood and the Christian knighthood. He says to himself, like by an inspiration, at that day when Christ Jesus died, no one is allowed to bear weapons.

At that time, he realised the whole greatness of the figure of Parzival who attained knowledge becoming engrossed in humanity and in all beings. Now he resumes his incomplete piece The Victors in a Christian-modern way. He shows Parzival as somebody who leaves his home who knows nothing about names and titles, about ties and nothing of father and mother. He meets, on one side, the magic castle of Klingsor and the enchantress Kundry. Meeting Kundry he experiences the whole significance of the earthly sensuous life and what it means if the human being gets to know it only by desires. On the other side, he realises in that moment when Kundry kisses him that this sensuous appears in its true acceptation in the human being only if it is free of desires. Richard Wagner nicely shows the sensuousness free of desires how it is gained by the internal strength of the spirit, the Parzival spirit that he calls the Christian one. He shows how it is gained on one side by the Holy Grail and on the other side in the magic castle. On one side by overcoming it, on the other side by deadening it. These are two sides, which are used to ascend to the spirit. The ones deaden the sensuous living ascetically; they take the organs away from themselves in order not to become addicted to weakness.

The others remain human beings, they do not want to ascend to higher knowledge this way, but they want to develop the higher to a bigger strength in themselves. Parzival recognised this way as the right one. One has to become stronger as strong as the temptations may be. Then it is that time to be taken up in the Holy Grail. Now he asks correctly and is initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail, he is ripe for becoming the Grail King.

Wagner endeavours to show the Holy Grail. For years, he pursued studies, not academically, but fulfilled with artistic and visionary gifts. He pursued studies, while he complied with the spirit of the medieval legends, so that he really expresses that guidance caused by initiates of the Middle Ages where the old order is represented by Ortrud, the new order by the emerging consciousness of the people which wants to free itself. This consciousness, which the swans introduce, the chelas of the third degree, is symbolised quite appropriately by Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin.

Wagner appropriately shows the greatness that is in it. The renewal of art was crucial to Wagner. He wanted to make something out of art again that came close to religion, he wanted to embody moods with his pieces of art that lead the human beings again to the divine by which he wanted to make the artists religious leaders. Wagner needed topics that led beyond the usual life. He also wanted to represent the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of love for humanity artistically. He felt deeply and seriously, how in the newer time the spirit of egoism, the spirit of the external possession, substituted the spirit of love. He describes that which developed as social order and with which he went along intensively and radically, as pursuit of gold, as a time the real Christian spirit of love must supersede again. He wanted to represent something like love flowing in a world where the gold rules in his music dramas with the means of the supernatural and divine living in the human being. Hence, he also resorts with these questions to the great legends of the Middle Ages. This lived in Richard Wagner.

You can realise how theosophy or spiritual science approaches with its view of the myths the art of Wagner. The theosophist realises above all that we have to see in the legends nothing else than pictures and expressions of great truth. The pictures of the development of the external life and the soul were given to the ancient peoples. In the Lohengrin legend, something is made clear, so that the human being knew what happens to him if he has arrived at certain stages. Truth is announced to people in such a way that they can grasp it. There were and there are tribes and peoples that can grasp the great truth only in legend form. Today we are no longer talking pictorially. Spiritual science contains the same truth that was put before the folk in magnificent legends, which Wagner tries to renew. Spiritual science speaks in another way, but what it lets stream into the world is the same spirit. Thus, we feel that not only that is true which Schopenhauer says that the great spirits like Plato and Spinoza, Buddha and Goethe, Giordano Bruno and Socrates, Hermes and Pythagoras understand each other, talk with each other, communicate mentally. Not only this is true, not only the choice individualities understand each other, but also that which lives as truth in the spirit of the people. This sounds together for a big historical sound of the spheres, and we feel this if today we realise what lives in the legends and myths, if we let it rise for the higher soul of the present. Truth lives at all times and expresses itself in the most various forms. If we penetrate into this truth, we understand how the peoples and times speak in these single forms, and we hear it echoing how in the manifold tones the one truth announces itself to all peoples, to all human beings.

Goethe expressed a certain feeling, which he often had, in the most different way. He said, if I look at the inconsistency of the human passions, sensations, and actions, I feel attracted to the all-powerful nature and I want to draw myself up at her consequence and logic.—What humanity expressed in the festivals since the oldest times is based on the aspiration to look up from the chaotic life of the human passions, desires, and actions at the big consistently uniform facts of the big nature. It complies with these big facts of the big nature that great festivals are connected with characteristic phenomena in nature. Such a festival that is connected with a phenomenon in nature is the Easter festival, which is for the Christian of today the celebration of his Saviour, which was committed from time immemorial as the awakening of something particular for the human being. We look at the ancient Egypt with her cult of Osiris, Isis, Horus, which expresses the continual rejuvenation of the immortal nature. If we look at Greece, we find a festival to honour Dionysus, a spring festival that is brought together with the awaking nature in spring in any way.

In India, there is a spring festival of Vishnu. Brahmanism divides the divine in three aspects, in Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva. One rightly calls Brahman the great master builder of the world, who causes the order and harmony in the world. One calls Vishnu a kind of saviour, liberator, awakener of the slumbering life, and Shiva is that who blesses the slumbering life woken by Vishnu and raises it to the heights to which one can absolutely raise it. Something like a festival was consecrated to Vishnu. One said, he falls asleep at the time of the year when we celebrate Christmas and awakes at the moment of the Easter festival. Who call themselves his servants celebrate this whole time in a significant way: they abstain from certain dishes, beverages, and meat. Thus, they prepare themselves to get an understanding of that which takes place when at the Vishnu festival the resurrection is celebrated, the arousal of the whole nature. Also Christmas builds in a significant way on big physical facts, on the fact that the strength of the sun becomes weaker and weaker, that the days become shorter and shorter and that from Christmas on the sun emits bigger heat again, so that Christmas is a festival of the reborn sun. The Christians felt it as something like that, this festival of the winter sun.

When in the sixth and seventh centuries Christianity wanted to go back to old, holy events, the birth of Christ Jesus was rescheduled to the day when the sun ascends again. The spiritual significance of the world Saviour was associated with the physical sun and the awaking and resurrecting life.

In spring, one also builds on a certain sun event with the Easter festival, like with all similar festivals, which is also expressed in external customs. In the first century of Christianity, the symbol of Christianity was shown in the cross at whose foot lies a lamb. Lamb and Aries signify the same. In the spring, the sun appears in that time in which Christianity prepared in the sign of the Aries or lamb. The sun goes through the signs of the zodiac; every year it moves forward a little distance. About from 600 to 700 BC, the sun moved forward to this sign of the zodiac. For 2 500 years the sun moves on in this sign; it was in the sign of the bull before. At that time, the peoples celebrated that which seemed to them as important in connection with the human development, by the bull because at that time the sun stood in the sign of the bull.

When the sun entered the sign of Aries or Lamb, there the ram appeared also in the legends and myths of the peoples as something significant. Jason gets the fur of the ram from Colchis. Christ Jesus calls himself God's lamb, and he is shown in the first time of Christianity symbolically as the lamb at the foot of the cross. Thus, one can connect the Easter festival with the sign of the Aries or Lamb, and considers this festival, therefore, as the resurrection festival of the saviour because the saviour causes everything to a new life, after it has died in the winter months.

With it, Christmas and Easter do not separate so distinctly, because the sun gains strength again since the own resurrection festival, Christmas. Something different must be expressed in the Easter festival. The Easter festival is felt in its deepest meaning always as the festival of the biggest human mystery, not only as a kind of festival of nature that goes back to the sun, but it is substantially still more: it is suggested in the Christian meaning of the resurrection after death. The awakening of Vishnu points still more to the awakening after death. The awakening of Vishnu takes place in the time when the sun begins its rise in winter again, and the Easter festival is a continuation of the increasing strength of the sun, which increases already since Christmas. We have to look deeply into the secrets of human nature if we want to understand which sensations the initiates had if they wanted to express that in the Easter festival.

The human being appears to us as a double being, connecting a mental-spiritual being with a physical being. The physical being is a confluence of all remaining natural phenomena that are in the surroundings of the human being: they all appear as a fine essence in the human nature in which they have flowed together. Paracelsus shows the human being significantly as a confluence of that which is spread out outdoors in the world: Nature appears to us like letters, and the human being forms the word that is composed of these letters.—The biggest wisdom is contained in his construction; he is physically a temple of the soul. All principles that we can observe in the dead stone, in the living plant, in the animal filled with joy and sorrow are joined in the human being; they have coalesced to a unity filled with wisdom.

If we look at the wonderful construction of the human brain with its countless cells, which co-operate in such a way that all this can be expressed which the thoughts, the sensations of the human being are, what permeates his soul anyhow, we recognise the supreme wisdom in the organisation of his physical body. In the whole environment, if we look out we recognise crystallised wisdom. If we penetrate all principles of the environment with our knowledge and look then back at the human being, we see the whole nature concentrated in him, we see him as a microcosm in the macrocosm. In this sense, Schiller said to Goethe, “You take together the whole nature to understand the single; in the all-ness of her phenomena, you look for the explanation of the individual. From the simple organisation you go up, step by step, to more developed ones to build up, finally, the most complex of all, and the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole building of nature.”

Due to the wonderful construction of the human body, the human soul is able to direct its look at the environment. The mental human being looks at the world through the senses and tries to fathom that wisdom bit by bit with which the world is built up.

If we look at a still rather undeveloped human being from this point of view, his body is the most reasonable which anybody is able to invent; there the divine reason has flowed together in this human body. However, a rather childish soul lives in it that can hardly develop the first thoughts to understand that mysterious force which prevails in the heart, in the brain, in the blood. Quite slowly, the human soul develops up to understand that gradually which has worked on the human body. However, this bears the imprint of a long past in itself. The human being stands there as the crown of the remaining creation. Aeons had to precede until the universal wisdom was summarised in this human body.

However, in the soul of the undeveloped human being the universal wisdom starts growing. There it hardly dreams of the great thought of the universal spirit that has built up the human being. However, the human being understands the mental-spiritual in future that lives still like sleeping in himself. The universal thought has worked for countless years, he has created in nature to form the crown of all this creating, the human body. In this human body, the universal wisdom now slumbers to recognise itself in the human soul, to form an eye in the human being to grasp itself. Universal wisdom outdoors, universal wisdom inside, creating in the present like in the past, creating in the future, which we can only anticipate in its sublimity. The deepest human feelings are called if we look at the past and at the future in such a way.

If the soul starts understanding the miraculous that the universal wisdom built up, if it gets the prudent clearness about that, the enlightening heart knowledge of it, then the sun is the most marvellous symbol, which expresses this inner awakening, which opens the access to the outside world to the soul through the gates of the senses. The human being receives the light because the sun illuminates the things. What the human being sees in the outside world is the reflected sunlight. The sun wakes the strength in the soul to look at the outside world. The awaking solar soul in the human being, which starts recognising the universal thought in the seasons, sees its liberator in the rising sun.

If the sun again begins its rise, if the days increase again, the soul looks at the sun and says, to you I owe the possibility to see the universal thought spread out in my surroundings that sleeps in me and in all the others.—Now, the human being looks at his former existence, at that which preceded the groping feeling of the universal thought. The human being is much, much older than his senses. Spiritual research lets us reach that time, in which the senses of the human being existed only as rudiments. We come to the time when the senses were not yet the gates through which the soul could perceive the surroundings. Schopenhauer felt this and characterised the turning point where the human being reaches the sensuous perception of the world. He means this if he says, this visible world only originated when an eye was there to see the world.—The sun formed the eye, light formed light. Once when such an external vision was not yet there, the human being had an internal vision. In the primeval times of human development an external object did not stimulate the human being to perceive, but from the inside images rose in him: the old vision was a vision in the astral light. At that time, the human being had a vague, twilit clairvoyance.

In the Germanic world of gods, the human being also saw the gods in vague, twilit astral vision and took his images of the gods from it. This vague clairvoyance descended into darkness and disappeared completely bit by bit. The strong light of the physical sun extinguished it, which appeared in the sky and made the physical world visible to the senses. Thus, astral vision of the human being disappeared. If he looks at the future, then he realises that this astral vision has to return to a higher stage: what was extinguished because of the physical vision, so that the full awake clairvoyance of the human being could be caused, has to revive. An even brighter, more luminous life of the human being is added to the day consciousness in the light of the future. To the physical vision, the vision in the astral light is still added.

The leaders of humanity are those spirits who were able—due to an earthly life full of renunciation—to bring that condition about already before death which one calls the passage through the gate of death. He encloses those experiences in himself that are bestowed on the whole humanity once when it has acquired the astral vision, which makes the mental and spiritual perceptible. The initiates always called this making perceptible of the spiritual-mental around us the awakening, the resurrection, the spiritual rebirth that adds the gifts of the spiritual senses to the gifts of the physical senses. Someone who feels the new astral vision awakening in himself celebrates an internal Easter festival.

We can understand this way that the spring festival always carries such symbols that remind of death and of resurrection. The astral light is dead in the human being; it sleeps. However, this light will resurrect in the human being. A festival that points to the awakening of the astral vision in the future is the Easter festival.

The sleep of Vishnu begins around Christmastide when the astral vision fell asleep and the physical light awoke. If the human being is successful to renounce the personal, then the astral light awakes again in him, then he can celebrate the Easter festival, then Vishnu is allowed to awake again in his soul.

Out of cosmic knowledge, the Easter festival is tied not only on the awakening sun, but on the emergence of the plant realm in spring. As well as the sowing corn is immersed in the earth and must rot to awake anew, the astral light must slumber in the human body to be woken again. The symbol of the Easter festival is the sowing corn, which sacrifices itself to let arise a new plant. It is the sacrifice of a phase of nature to let arise a new one. Sacrificing and coming-into-being—this is concentrated in the Easter festival. Richard Wagner felt this idea as something great. He was in the Villa Wesendonck at the Zurich Lake in 1857; there he looked out at the awaking nature. With the idea of it, he got the idea of the dead and resurrecting World Saviour, of Christ Jesus, and the idea of Parzival who seeks for the holiest in the soul.

All leaders of humanity who knew how the higher spiritual life of the human being awakes from the lower nature understood the idea of Easter. Hence, Dante (Dante Alighieri, ~1265-1321) also showed his awakening at Good Friday in his Divine Comedy. Immediately at the beginning of the poem, this becomes clear to us. In the 35th year of his life, Dante has this big vision, which he describes. In the middle of his life, he lets it take place. The normal human life counts seventy years, 35 years is the middle. He reckons 35 years for the physical experience in which the human being still takes up new physical experiences. Then the human being is ripe that the spiritual experience is added to the physical one. Then he is ripe for the perception of the spiritual world. If all the growing forces of the physical are united, the time begins when the spiritual is woken to life. Therefore, Dante let this vision take place at Easter.

The original growing of the solar strength is celebrated at Christmas. Easter is tied on the middle of the growing solar strength. We are in the centre of spring, at the Easter point where Dante believed to stand in the middle of human life when he felt the spiritual life rising in him. The Easter festival is put with reason in the middle of the rise of the sun, according to the time when in the human being the slumbering astral light is revived. The strength of the sun wakes up the slumbering seed, the grain resting in the earth. The grain has become a picture of that which takes place in the human nature, if the astral light awakes in him. It is born inside of the human being. The Easter festival is the festival of the resurrection inside of the human being. The thought of the redeeming Christ was connected with the cosmic thought.

A kind of contrast was felt between the Christian view of the Easter festival and the spiritual-scientific idea of karma. It seems to be a contrast, this idea of karma and that of the redemption by the Son of Man. People who do not understand a lot of the basic view of the spiritual-scientific thought see such a contradiction between the redemption by Christ Jesus and the idea of karma. They say, the thought of the redeeming god contradicts the self-redemption by karma.—They understand neither the Easter thought of redemption in the right sense, nor the thought of karmic justice. It would not be right if anybody saw a fellow man suffering and said to him, you yourself have caused this suffering—and, therefore, he did not want to help him because karma should have its effect. He misunderstands karma. On the contrary, karma says, help that who suffers, because you are there to help. You improve the karmic account of necessity, while you help your fellow man. Thereby, you give him the possibility to bear his karma. Then you appear as the saviour from suffering.—Thus, one can also help a whole circle of persons instead of a single one. One fits thereby into the karma of these persons, while one helps them. If a mighty individual comes to the assistance of the whole humanity like Christ Jesus, his sacrificial death has an effect on the karma of the whole humanity. He could help to bear the karma of the whole humanity, and we may be sure that the redemption by Christ Jesus was taken up in the karma of humanity.

Just the thought of resurrection and redemption is only correctly understood by spiritual science. A future Christianity combines karma and redemption. Because cause and effect are connected in the spiritual life, this big sacrificial action must also have its effect on the human lives. Spiritual science also deepens this festival idea. The knowledge of spirit deepens the idea of Easter that seems to be written on the starry firmament, which we believe to read on the starry firmament. Also in the future emergence of the spirit, which will take place in the human being, we see the depth of the Easter thought. The human being lives now in the middle of his life in disharmonious, bewildering conditions. Nevertheless, he also knows: as the world has arisen from the chaos, the harmony will once arise from his chaotic inside. As well as the regular orbits of the planets around the sun originated, the internal saviour of the human being will arise who will mean the uniform, the harmonious compared with all disharmony. Everybody should be reminded by the Easter festival of the resurrection of the spirit out of the present darkened nature of the human being.