The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Christ works as a macrocosmic Power and is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity. He has united Himself with the Earth, as a reality, as power, as very life.

The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in His full reality of being; again in the post-Christian era they point to Him as a Power Who is now united with the Earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas work both before and after Christ's physical life on Earth. He who was born as the son of a King in India, 550 years before Christ, lived and taught for twenty nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the Earth in a body of flesh but from then onwards he worked from the spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva had become Buddha, he was succeeded by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the Earth. About the year 105 B.C. there was living in Palestine a man greatly defamed in rabbinical literature. His name was Jeshu ben Pandira and he was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an essentially different being, in that when he (Jesus of Nazareth) reached the age of 30, he became the bearer of Christ, at the Baptism by John in the Jordan. It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew, and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature, although the information is either misleading or deliberately falsified. He bore within him the Individuality of the new Bodhisattva and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew passed over to later pupils. The content of the Gospel known by that name had already been in existence since the time of the first Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the ancient Mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus, the essential content of these Mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What were previously only pictures from the Mysteries, seeds as it were of subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the ceremonies of the ancient Mysteries, before it became, once and once only, an actual event on the physical plane.

It is also necessary for us to know that one of the characteristics of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is that in his youth he cannot be recognised as such. Between his thirtieth and thirty-third years a great revolution takes place in the soul and the personality is fundamentally transformed. For example, a Moses- or Abraham-Individuality can take possession of the personality of a Bodhisattva at this time of his life.

About 3,000 years after our present time, this Bodhisattva will become the Maitreya Buddha. And then his influence from the spiritual world will flow into the hearts of men as a magic, moral power. The stream going forth from the Maitreya Buddha will unite with the stream of Western spiritual life connected with Christian Rosenkreutz.

The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the Earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which cannot, as yet, be completed. Although its consummation can already be foreseen by clairvoyance, there exists no larynx capable of producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental occultism, therefore, it can be said: 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next 3,000 years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in the future, he becomes Buddha, the words of his speech will contain the magic power of the Good. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come, will be a Bringer of the Good by way of the word. He will then be able to teach men of the real nature of the Christ Impulse and in that age the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so can the Christ Mystery be truly understood. So mighty and all-pervading was the Impulse poured into the evolution of mankind that its waves surge onwards into future epochs. In the fourth epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation this Impulse was made manifest in the incarnation of Christ in a human, physical body. And we are now going forward to an epoch when the Impulse will manifest in such a way that human beings will behold the Christ on the astral plane as an Ether Form.

Yesterday we heard that in still later epochs men will be able to behold Him in even higher forms in the aesthetic and moral spheres. But when we speak in this way of the Christ Impulse we are concerned with ideas which will be resolutely opposed above all by the Churches of Christendom. Great and incisive measures have been and are necessary in the onward progress of human evolution in order to promote increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse. Hitherto, indeed, such understanding has been lacking. And anyone who casts an eye at modern theology will perceive not only the futility of the attitude maintained by the opponents of Christianity, but also by those who claim to be steadfast adherents. The theosophical Movement in the West should have become that stream of spiritual life which out of true and genuine sources awakens understanding for Christianity in the modern age, but such endeavours met with strong opposition.

It is important to understand the real sources of Christianity, but owing to lack of time they cannot all be mentioned today. We shall speak only of those which have been accessible to mankind since the thirteenth century.

Since the thirteenth century, the Movement connected with the name Christian Rosenkreutz has been an integral part of the spiritual life of mankind. Spiritual measures of a very definite kind were necessary in the thirteenth century to enable the influence connected with this name to become part of the spiritual life of the modern age. At that time, when the spiritual world was entirely shut off from human vision, a “College“ of twelve wise men came together. All the spiritual knowledge of the world and its secrets then existing was gathered into this College—distributed as it were in different sections. By means of certain occult processes there had been transmitted to seven of these twelve wise men, the wisdom that had passed over from Atlantis into the holy Rishis. In four others lived the wisdom of the sacred mysteries of the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Graeco-Latin epochs respectively. And what existed in those days of the kind of culture which was to characterise the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch—this constituted the wisdom of the twelfth. The whole range of spiritual life was accessible to these Twelve.

Now it was known at that time that a certain Individuality who had been a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha, was to be born, again as a child. Meanwhile, through a number of incarnations, this Individuality had unfolded a power of deep and fervent piety, devotion and love. The College of the twelve wise men took this child into their care soon after he was born; shut off from the outside, exoteric world, he came under no influence save theirs; they were his teachers as well as caring for his bodily needs. The manner of the child's development was altogether unique; the profound spirituality he bore within him as the fruit of many incarnations came to expression, too, in his outer, bodily form. He was a weak and sickly child, but his body became marvelously transparent. He grew up and developed in such a way that a radiant, shining Spirit indwelt a body that had become transparent. Through the processes of a profoundly wise form of education, all the wisdom from the ages preceding and during post-Atlantean times which the twelve wise men were able to give forth, rayed into his soul. By way of the deeper soul-forces, not by way of the intellect, the treasures of all this wisdom united in the soul of this child. He then fell into a strange condition. For a certain period of time he ceased to take nourishment; all external functions of life were as though paralysed, and the whole of the wisdom received by the child rayed back to the Twelve. Each of them received back what he had originally given, but now in a different form. And those twelve wise men felt: Now, for the first time, the twelve great religions and world-conceptions have united into one interconnected whole, have been given to us! And henceforward there lived in the twelve men what we call Rosicrucian Christianity.

The child lived only a short time longer. In the external world we give the name Christian Rosenkreutz to this Individuality. But it was not until the fourteenth century that he was known by this name. In the fourteenth century he was born again and lived then for more than a hundred years. Even when he was not incarnated in the flesh, he worked through his ether body, always with the purpose of influencing the development of Christianity in its true form as the synthesis of all the great religions and systems of thought in the world. And he has worked on into our own time, either as a human being or from his ether-body, inspiring all that was done in the West to establish the synthesis of the great religions. His influence today is waxing and growing greater all the time. Many a person of whom we do not expect it, is a pupil chosen by Christian Rosenkreutz. Even today it is possible to speak of a sign by means of which Christian Rosenkreutz calls to one whom he has chosen. Many people can apprehend this sign in their life; it may express itself in a thousand ways, but these different manifestations all lead back to a typical form which may be described as follows.—

The choice may, for example, happen in the following way.—A man embarks upon some undertaking; he spares no effort to make it successful and forges straight ahead towards his goal. While he is ruthlessly making his way in the world (he may be a thorough materialist), suddenly he hears a voice saying: “Stop what you propose to do!” ... And he will be aware that this was no physical voice. But now suppose that he does abstain from his project. If he has actually done this he may realise that if he had continued ruthlessly towards his goal, he would certainly have been led to his death. These are the two fundamentals: that he knows with certainty, firstly, that the warning came from the spiritual world, and secondly, that death would have come to him had he persisted in his undertaking. It is therefore revealed to one who is to become a pupil: You have actually been saved, moreover by a warning proceeding from a world of which, to begin with, you know nothing! So far as circumstances of the earthly world are concerned, death has already come to you and your further life is to be regarded as a gift ... And when the man in question realises this he will be led to the resolve to work in a spiritual movement. If the resolve is taken, this means that he has actually been chosen. This is how Christian Rosenkreutz begins to gather his pupils around him, and many human beings, if they were sufficiently alert, would be conscious of such an event in their inner life.

The human beings of whom it can be said that they were, or will now be, united in this way with Christian Rosenkreutz, are those who should be the pioneers of a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. This stream of spiritual life connected with Christian Rosenkreutz provides the highest means for enabling the Christ Impulse to be understood in our present time. The beginning was already made long, long ago—a hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, through Jeshu ben Pandira whose essential mission was to make preparation for the coming of Christ. He had a pupil, Matthew, whose name subsequently passed over to a successor who was living at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. The greatest deed wrought by Jeshu ben Pandira was that he was the originator and preparer of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The content of this Gospel derives from a ritual of Initiation and passages such as that concerning the Temptation, and others, too, originate from enactment's in the ancient Mysteries. All these processes in the evolution of humanity were to become fact on the physical plane too. And this was what was written down, in outline, by the pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira.

Jeshu ben Pandira was not spared from the hard fate he himself predicted; he was stoned and his corpse suspended on a cross. The original chronicle was preserved in the hands of a few of his adherents, in deep secrecy. We can best realise what happened to it later on, from what the great Church Father Jerome himself says, namely that he had received the document of the Matthew Gospel from a Christian sect. The original record was held at that time in the secret keeping of a small circle and through certain circumstances came into the hands of Jerome. He was charged by his Bishop with the task of translating it. Jerome himself narrates this; but he says at the same time that because of the form and manner of the transcription, it should not pass into the hands of the outside world. He wanted to translate it in such a way that its secrets would remain secret—and he says, furthermore, that he himself does not understand it. The character of what came into existence in this way was such that in secular language one man could express it in one way and another in a different way. And this is how it has come down to posterity. In reality, therefore, the world does not yet possess the Gospels in their true form. There is every reason and justification for spiritual research today to shed new light upon the Gospels. Spiritual research goes back to the Akasha Chronicle because there and there only are they to be found in their original form.

Let there be no mistake about it.—Christianity in its true form has yet to be raised from the ruins. One sign among many others indicates how necessary this is. For example, in the year 1873, in France, a count was taken of those who could be said to belong inwardly and genuinely to Catholicism. They amounted to one-third; the other two-thirds proved no longer to be adherents in the real sense—and these two-thirds were certainly not composed entirely of people who never feel the need of religion! Life today is such that the religious longings of men do indeed incline towards Christ; but the true sources of Christianity must be rediscovered. And it is to this end that the stream of spiritual life going out from Jeshu ben Pandira flows into unity with the other stream which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is connected with the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science is based on occult science, as we have often emphasised, which brings us knowledge of the forces underlying the various epochs, and also enables us to understand what is at work in the cultural periods of our own epoch. So we must speak of these inner forces of our own time, whenever and wherever we meet, in order to understand the tasks of Spiritual Science in relation to what is at work beneath the surface of life, and so that occult research can help us direct our lives in harmony with the great goals of mankind.

In order to speak about contemporary occult trends it would be a good thing to start from the point where deep, occult research can lead us to what is also taking place in the super-sensible world in our time. By way of introduction we must also take into account what we have right in front of us at present, though we can only give a general sketch of it and not go into any details. Many things can only be spoken of without embarrassment in Anthroposophical gatherings, for ours is a time of dogmatism and abstraction. The strange thing is that this basic characteristic is not recognised in exoteric life, and people believe generally that their thoughts and actions are free from dogma, when in fact they are extremely dogmatic. They think they are basing themselves on reality, although they are really lost in the wildest abstractions. Therefore it is worthwhile bringing Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science, with its realities, to the attention of wider circles, to open up the possibility for an understanding of our epoch, though it will probably be a long time before the outside world wants to develop a deeper understanding for these things. We do not see how tied up in dogmas and abstractions our civilisation is, until we stop looking at it from the abstract point of view and begin seeing it in a really living way. One then finds a trend of thought whose chief characteristic consists in the laying down of ready-made dogmas that enlightened people are required to accept, whilst imagining they are being genuinely discriminating. Something of the sort is evident in the so-called monistic movement, though it is not justified in calling itself monistic. It gets its chief dogmas from modern natural science, in fact that particular branch of it which, strictly speaking, likes drawing its knowledge by means of purely external methods. If this natural science were to keep to its own field of activity, it could do important work; instead of this it leads to the formation of a new religion. Men take the facts of materialistic natural science and turn them into abstract dogmas. And anyone who is of the opinion that he is right because he is convinced of these dogmas himself, believes that the others have lagged a long way behind. They completely ignore the whole life of human individuality, and strive only to cram their heads with what the external world outlook considers as dogmas, and to regard the conclusions drawn from abstractions as the most important thing. This leads to the formation of sects whose adherents cling to expert opinions, principles and dogmas which they then advocate as the thing.

All that comprises the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement represents the opposite of this. This movement does not set out to follow a number of doctrines but to place the worth of the human individuality in the foreground.

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science leads to the kind of social life that is based on a mutual interchange founded on the sort of confidence that each personality has in the other. Human beings should and will come together who have trust in one another. And in joint tasks one ought to say: You are the right person, not because you adhere to this or the other principle, but because you can achieve this or that and do not disturb the other people in the course of your work. Nothing could be worse than this, that the bad modern habit of forming sects should take hold of Anthroposophical life. It is not only when you are in full agreement with your neighbour that you should listen to him, but, if you are not, you should still reserve freedom and mobility for yourself and for him, and, with this recognition of individualities, work educationally in the Anthroposophical movement. Our time has very little understanding for this sort of thing. It aims at generalities. What is right for one can make the other man appear a fool. In the Anthroposophical movement we must make a clean sweep of that. If this attitude were not prevalent in the outside world of materialism, men would hasten of their own accord to understand human individualities in our own way, and then a scientific spirituality would soon appear that would be bound to lead to a world conception of a spiritual kind. But men are rigid with dogmas and therefore cannot reach it.

If you look into the principles that are upheld in monistic gatherings, you would soon see that none of these principles and dogmas are based on the outlook and results of present day science but on those of fifteen to twenty years ago. Thus, for instance, a personality distinguished in modern scientific circles said at a recent scientific meeting in Koenigsberg: ‘Facts of physics are all tending in a certain direction. People always used to speak of the ether as being in matter and outside, and it was taken for granted without taking the other known material sciences into account. But, after all, this has gradually met with justified doubt, and therefore we must now ask what the physicists should assume to be there in place of the ether.’ The answer was: Purely mathematical constructions, Hertz' and Maxwell' equations, conceptual formulae. According to these, light does not spread through space by means of ether vibrations, but, assuming them not to be there, it overcomes the non-material space as a vacuum in the sense of the equations referred to, so that according to this the transmission of light appears to be bound to concepts and ideas. It could quite easily happen that anyone who pointed to such hypotheses of the most up-to-date science in a monistic meeting could be mistaken for a mad theosophist, making the absurd proposition that thoughts are the bearers of light. Yet Max Planck³⁷ of Berlin, a respected authority on natural science, declared this to be his scientific opinion. If, therefore the monists wanted to make progress in science, they would also have to accept this opinion of the experts. As this is not the case, a monistic religion will only be possible if its supporters believe they have a scientific basis, but do not know that their assumptions have long been superseded. People who think in a monistic way are only held together by the results of so-called intellectual research and its world conception, or the biased dogmas arising out of this. Whereas the Anthroposophically orientated theosophist complies with facts that cannot deprive anyone of his freedom or lead to the formation of sects, and each individuality can remain free.

An important aspect of the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement is that it gives an impulse for self-education in a way that hardly has its equal at the present time. We must understand what we ourselves are as a movement, and realise that this movement is based on foundations that can only be found within this movement and nowhere outside.

Facts of real life can show us this. There are many people who think we ought to take what Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science has to offer and give it out in philosophical terms, in the style of official science, to make Spiritual Science more acceptable to the representatives and followers of officialdom. But that cannot be done, because it is impossible to make compromises between the occult stream of Spiritual Science and any other movement that arises out of the characteristic outlook of our times, like the monistic one, for instance—that is, one that has a completely different basis. To bring about compromises between the two, even if only in form, is impossible. It is much more a matter of aiming at bringing a new impulse into the culture of the times. The others cannot even understand or explain their own basic facts, nor judge them one single step ahead, because they lack the courage to draw the conclusions arising from these facts. On closer examination we find incomplete thought processes in every sect, including scientific circles, and Spiritual Science must see these for what they are, for we know that a half truth or a quarter truth is worse than a total fallacy because it deceives the outside world which is not competent to judge. The Anthroposophist must enter the very nerve of the spiritual movement in order to understand the materialistic movement that sets the pace in the outside world, because it sometimes works with facts that are tending in the direction of spiritual truth, but are not fully developed.

If the medical branch of natural science means to go seriously into bodily research, it cannot ignore the sphere, the concepts and the results of occult investigation. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud³⁸ in Vienna, which enjoys a large and still growing circulation, gives us an instructive example of the difficulties arising in this sphere. It began by investigating the life of the soul in both the physically and the mentally ill, in an attempt to discover certain psychic causes there, in the long-forgotten early years, for example, because there was a definite feeling that what is still there in the unconscious has its lasting effect on later life too. An ingenious doctor of this school, Dr. Breuer,³⁹ tried to put the patients into a condition of hypnosis, and then let them make a kind of confession, so that he could probe into the depths of their souls. You all know that it is a great relief to talk about what is oppressing you. People were often cured by these hypnotic confessions, or they were well on the way to it. Even without hypnosis Freud often achieved the same results by means of well chosen questions. Apart from this he discovered that happenings of a largely unconscious kind are revealed in dream life, and out of this a kind of dream interpretation arose in the school of psychoanalysis. If someone were now to say that here is a good opportunity to strike a compromise between Spiritual Science and the results of these efforts, such an opinion can only be called a fallacy, because despite the quarter truth contained in it he would soon become aware that the direction in question leads to the wildest errors and that it would be preferable to keep to purely materialistic interpretations. Spiritual Science, when properly understood, has to reject such things. The point is that the ideas about the soul's dream life and the resulting theory are steeped in coarse, sense-bound thinking, and it is therefore not possible on this basis to turn it into a spiritual truth. For in order to do that one needs the spiritual foundations that Spiritual Science has to offer, otherwise one gropes around in obscure hypotheses and theories and explains them in a materialistic way. And that is the way things have turned out in the Freudian school. They certainly got as far as the symbolism of dreams, but wove into them the thoughts of the materialistic age, whilst Schubert's⁴⁰ and Volkelt's⁴¹ correct conception could be started on in Leipzig but not developed. They thought of the dream as a symbol of sexual life, because our time is incapable of realising that this area is the lowest revelation of innumerable worlds that rise far above our world in spiritual significance. By so doing they are turning it into something that gives an irresponsible flavour to a whole field of investigation, and, in consequence, brings about the most serious errors. Therefore the only thing that Spiritual Science can say about the Freudian school is that it has to reject its research on the grounds that it is dilettante. If it would first of all make itself thoroughly acquainted with spiritual investigation, these truths would produce quite different results. People would then begin to see that our age is an intellectual age, an age of dogma, that drives people into a wild chaos of instincts and passions and is satisfied with what is merely intellectual and abstract.

In the example of the Freudian school therefore, we see an area of soul life being shown in a wrong light and dragged down by the worst kind of materialism by trying to relate all the phenomena to sex, a procedure of which one could say that it arose out of the personal inclination of the scientists themselves, only they are not conscious of it, and it is dilettante into the bargain.

We must feel how necessary it is that spiritual investigation rejects half and quarter truths and only adopts those it can defend with its own principles, for we realise that Spiritual Science can work out of its own strength. It is important to stress that my first books did not grow out of theosophy, yet people outside find it strange that I nevertheless became a theosophist later on. That is a short-sighted, narrow-minded view, however. The books have this about them that despite their strictly scientific attitude they do not have dealings with what is regarded as official science, or assume the style that believes itself capable of making general definitions.

Spiritual Science should draw abundant life from the foundations of occultism, make no compromises and show a courage that is lacking in the domains outside. Whoever refuses to make any compromises of this kind, acquires a reputation of being inadequate in the eyes of those people who always want one to give way, but do not do so themselves. As opposed to this, Spiritual Science stands in the world as a spiritual movement firmly established on its own basis, and its members must always be conscious of this fact, and see it to be a vital element of this spiritual movement. It sometimes happens that people with special interests come into Spiritual Science, but where Spiritual Science and spiritual investigations are concerned it is not a case of special interests. Each individual can follow these up for himself, and he should not expect Spiritual Science to follow after him. Spiritual Science must penetrate into our whole cultural situation and have the courage to carry out its task in life with consistency in an age that is justifiably called intellectual.

But do not let us imagine that this intellectuality ought to merge, as such, with spiritual life, for we have to take our start from facts that are reached by clairvoyant means. We find, then, that the life of the soul has three basic elements. There is, firstly, the life of concepts, intellectuality, which to begin with only comes to expression in perception. When we consider intellectuality by itself, we notice that it is bound in the widest sense to the material world from which man draws his mental images. These images themselves, of course, are super-sensible. From the very connection between the life of mental imagery and the life of perception we see that the former is connected with the physical plane. If we involve ourselves in difficult thoughts and think to such an extent that we get tired, then we sleep well, provided that only the life of thought and not the life of feeling was engaged in the activity. Therefore we can grasp the statement that the life of thought is a super-sensible process, and is connected with the next element, the astral world. It is from the astral plane that those forces come that awaken and maintain the life of thought in the human soul.

The second element consists of the waves of feeling that pass through our soul, such as pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sorrow, love, dislike, and so on. The flow of thought and feeling is intimately connected with our ego, and these rob us of our sleep because their emotional unrest prevents us entering the astral plane. We can understand therefore that this brings us into connection with lower Devachan, which does not accept our emotions if they are impure but rejects them from that part of the astral world that is lower Devachan.

Morality and will impulses are the third element. The man who can look back on good deeds in his day's review can experience a moment of bliss before falling asleep. He is in the pleasant situation in which he can say: If only it were possible to prolong it, to enjoy the enlivening power of it, and that it could take hold of our whole soul life as a fructifying force! This enables us to understand what occult investigation tell us: That will impulses refer us to higher Devachan, where they are accepted only if they issue from a pure will and are suitable for this spiritual world. Thus our life of mental images and concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral world, our life of feeling with lower Devachan and our life of will with higher Devachan.

In addition to these we have our life of sense perception on the physical plane. These four elements develop at a different rate in human incarnations during the various cultural epochs.

When we consider the occult background, we see how the life of perception comes to the fore in the Greco-Roman era, how the Greek and the Roman was completely attuned to the physical world that he esteemed so highly. Our time, the fifth cultural epoch, is that of thinking, of intellectuality. This is why the abstract sciences are flourishing. The coming sixth age will retain intellectual life, in the same way as we in the fifth have retained the life of perception, and will in addition express itself in the feeling life of the soul. The environment will affect people so that it causes them pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, to a degree that as yet can only be felt by the occultist who is capable of overcoming mere intellect, and understanding certain connections of life with real feeling, without lengthy logical reasoning. The occultist feels displeasure over illogical things, joy and peace of soul over logical things. If he defends something that he immediately sees to be right, he has to prove it nowadays with a lengthy argument, in order to be understood. The occultist feels pain especially vividly when he reads the newspaper, because it is just in the daily papers that one frequently finds illogicality incarnate. You have to read them, nevertheless—choosing as carefully as you can—in order to keep in touch with the outside world. You should not choose in the way the professor of the Chinese language did, who told his colleague one day, in a great state of agitation: I have just this moment discovered—it was the year 1870–71—that Germany has been at war with France for half a year, because I only read the Chinese newspapers.

In the last post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh era, the sense for morality will develop, that is, the sense for the will impulses. Remarkable progress will come about through this. Occult investigations, even those of the present-day, show us that someone can be very clever and intellectual without being moral. Nowadays intellectuality and morality exist alongside each other. Little by little, however, the curious fact will emerge that a person's cleverness will be killed off by his immorality, so that in the far future an immoral person will actually be stupid or will have to become so. A moral era is coming in which the morality of our whole soul life and the intellectuality of those later times will become one.

Although man has within his soul all the four elements mentioned, sense perception predominated over all others in the Greco-Roman era, and intellectuality is added to this to a greater degree in the present; in the one before the last, the sixth period, emotion will predominate, and in the seventh, the last cultural epoch, it will be morality, and in a way we can only dream of today. We cannot even imagine what it will be like as Socrates could, who considered that virtue could be both taught and learnt. All this, however, will become reality by the seventh epoch, for the tendencies that are already clearly perceptible in occultism foretell this.

Intellectuality, then, is the chief spiritual characteristic of our age, but there is a difference between the way it comes to expression in the materialistic thinking of the world and in Spiritual Science. Man is connected through his intellect with the astral plane, but he will only be conscious of this—and he will only make the right use of it—when he has developed clairvoyance. This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years. In bygone times, however, when man was mainly connected with the physical plane, Christ could only appear in physical incarnation. In the present age of the intellect He can appear only in etheric form. Spiritual Science wishes to prepare mankind for this in such a way that it acquires a proper understanding and makes proper use of the clairvoyant faculties that are slowly appearing and will be used for vision later on, in the course of natural development. And this will ensure that in the second half of our intellectual age the Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in His etheric form.

The age of feeling will develop the soul further in a different respect, enabling it to enter the lower Devachanic world in a conscious way. Christ will appear as a form of light to a number of human beings in the lower Devachanic world, revealing Himself through sound, and from His astral body of light He will fill their receptive souls with the Word that was active in astral form in the beginning, as is expressed by John in the opening words of his Gospel.

In the age of morality a number of human beings will perceive the Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true Ego that surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral impulses. Such is the connection between the impulses of the different cultural epochs and the soul of man. From higher and ever higher worlds will come the forces that flow into man and become active within him.

Perception in the physical world is wonderful indeed; even more wonderful is the intellect when it attains predominance and forms a connection with the astral world, and even greater still are the feelings and morality that are connected with the Devachanic world.

Thinking this through logically you will realise the logic in this course of development, because life confirms it on all sides. The Anthroposophist faces these stages of development consciously, not only in broad sweeps and universal truths but also in the individual details of human development. In the abuses of the outer world the striving towards dogma of the intellectual element is very prominent, but in spiritual knowledge the intellect has to become spiritualised so that it can understand the more advanced results of occult investigation. This is more clearly illuminated in the fact that in the Greco-Roman era, through the Mystery of Golgotha, we are presented in physical form with that which then developed further so that with its impact on the human soul it could lead humanity upwards. It is necessary above all that man learns to understand what this Christ Impulse signifies for our world. It has to be stressed that this Christ Impulse is a living reality that is streaming into mankind, and that Christ did not give the world a doctrine or a theory but the impulse for new life. Let us take a serious look at this.

Since the Saturn stage, throughout the Sun and Moon stage, man has developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. The ego could only appear on earth in a body that was sufficiently prepared for it and then develop further under the nurturing influence of the Christ Impulse because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is to us microcosmically. The four principles of the macrocosm are connected in manifold ways with our four lower principles including the most important of these, the ego. In our present cultural period the higher human principles can already be glimpsed in our development. Life-spirit, spirit-self and spirit-man will be developed in us out of the higher spirit worlds through the macrocosmic principles. Not through the fourth macrocosmic principle, however, but through the help of beings that have no macrocosmic significance of their own but only microcosmic significance, really working as teachers among mankind, as they have themselves advanced by one or more principles beyond man himself. On the other hand Christ is a macrocosmic being at the fourth stage of His macrocosmic development, as man is microcosmically at the fourth stage.

So you should keep macrocosmic and microcosmic principles apart, but be clear about the fact that the four first macrocosmic principles include of course all the higher microcosmic principles. Thus the microcosmic beings work as teachers and seek to carry mankind forward through their teaching, whereas Christ, working as a macrocosmic reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity, for He united Himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as very life.

The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the so-called Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in His full reality of being; again in the Christian era they point to Him as a power Who is now united with the earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas work both before and after Christ's physical life on earth. He, who was born as the son of a king in India 550 years before Christ, lived and taught for twenty-nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the earth in a body of flesh, but from then onwards he worked from the spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva became Buddha he was succeeded in that very moment by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the earth, for about the year 105 BC. there was living in Palestine a man still to this day defamed in rabbinical literature, Jeshu ben Pandira, and he was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an essentially different Being, in that when He reached the age of thirty He became the bearer of Christ at the baptism by John in the Jordan.

It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene⁴² teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew, and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature, although the information is either misleading or deliberately falsified. He bore within him the individuality of the new Bodhisattva and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew passed over to later pupils, and the content of the Gospel known by that name had already been in existence since the time of the first Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the ancient mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus the essential content of these mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What were previously only pictures from the mysteries, seeds as it were of subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the ceremonies of the ancient mysteries, before it became, once and once only, an actual event on the physical plane.

The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which cannot as yet be completed. Although its consummation can already be foreseen by clairvoyance, no larynx exists that is capable of producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental occultism, therefore, it can be said: Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next three thousand years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in the future, he becomes Buddha, his spoken words will contain the magic power of goodness. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come, will be a bringer of goodness by way of the word. He will then be able to teach men the real nature of the Christ Impulse, and in this age the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so can the Christ Mystery be truly understood.

• 37. Max Planck: 1858 – 1947, founder of the quantum theory. ‘Die Stellung der neureren Physik zur mechanischen Naturanschaung’ (The Position of Modern Physics with respect to the Mechanical World outlook), lecture held on 23.9.1910 at the 82nd session of German natural scientists and doctors in Konigsberg; Leipzig, 1910.
• 38. Sigmund Freud: 1856 – 1939, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 39. Dr. Breuer: Joseph Breuer, Viennese surgeon. See Rudolf Steiner ‘An Autobiography’, Steinerbooks, New York, 1977, and also lecture of 10th November 1917 in ‘Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy’, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1946.
• 40. Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert: 1780 – 1860, natural philosopher. ‘Die Geschichte der Seele’ (History of the Soul) Stuttgart. 1839.
• 41. Johann Volkelt: 1848 – 1930: ‘Die Traum-Phantasie’ (Dream Pictures) Stuttgart 1875. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘Riddles of Philosophy’, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 42. Essene teachings: Essenes, Jewish secret Order, about 150 BC. to 70 AD. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘The Fifth Gospel’; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1968.

Yesterday [Public lecture, Munich 19th November 1911, ‘From Paracelsus to Goethe’. (Not published in English.)⁴³ we heard that in still later epochs men will be able to behold Him in even higher forms in the aesthetic and moral spheres. But when we speak in this way of the Christ Impulse we are concerned with ideas which will be resolutely opposed above all by the churches of Christendom. Great and incisive measures have been and are necessary in the onward progress of human evolution in order to promote increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse. Hitherto, indeed, such understanding has been lacking. And anyone who considers modern theology will realise not only the futility of the attitude maintained by the opponents of Christianity, but also by those who claim to be its steadfast adherents. The theosophical movement in the West should have become that stream of spiritual life which out of true and genuine sources awakens understanding for Christianity in the modern age, but such endeavours met with strong opposition.

It is important to understand the real sources of Christianity, but owing to lack of time they cannot all be mentioned today. We shall speak only of those which have been accessible to mankind since the thirteenth century.

Since the thirteenth century the movement connected with the name of Christian Rosenkreutz has been an integral part of the spiritual life of mankind. Spiritual measures of a very definite kind were necessary in the thirteenth century to enable the influence connected with this name to become part of the spiritual life of the modern age. At the time when the spiritual world was entirely shut off from human vision, a council of twelve wise men came together. All the spiritual knowledge then existing, of the world and its secrets, was gathered from their separate different spheres into this council. By means of certain occult processes, the wisdom that had passed over from Atlantis to the holy Rishis had been transmitted to seven of these twelve men. In four others lived the wisdom of the sacred mysteries of the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Greco-Roman epochs respectively. And what existed in those days of the kind of culture which was to characterise the fifth post-Atlantean epoch constituted the wisdom of the twelfth. The whole range of spiritual life was accessible to these twelve.

Now it was known at that time that a certain individuality who had been a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be born again as a child. Meanwhile, through a number of incarnations, this individuality had unfolded a power of deep and fervent piety, devotion and love. The council of the twelve wise men took this child into their care soon after he was born; shut off from the outside, exoteric world, he came under no influence save theirs; they cared for all his bodily needs and were also his teachers. The manner of the child's development was altogether unique; the profound spirituality he bore within him as the fruit of many incarnations came to expression, too, in his outer, bodily form. He was a weak and sickly child, but his body became marvelously transparent. He grew up and developed in such a way that a radiant, shining spirit indwelt a body that had become transparent. Through the processes of a profoundly wise form of education, all the wisdom from the ages preceding and during post-Atlantean times which the twelve wise men were able to give forth, rayed into his soul. By way of the deeper soul-forces, not by way of the intellect, the treasures of all this wisdom united in the soul of this child. He then fell into a strange condition. For a certain period of time he ceased to take nourishment; all external functions of life were as though paralysed, and the whole of the wisdom received by the child rayed back to the twelve. Each of them received back what he had originally given, but now in a different form. And those twelve wise men felt: Now, for the first time, the twelve great religions and world conceptions have been given to us, united into one interconnected whole. And henceforward what we call rosicrucian Christianity lived in the twelve men.

The child lived only a short time longer. In the external world we give the name Christian Rosenkreutz to this individuality. But it was not until the fourteenth century that he was known by this name. In the fourteenth century he was born again and lived then for more than a hundred years. Even when he was not incarnated in the flesh, he worked through his etheric body, always with the purpose of influencing the development of Christianity in its true form as the synthesis of all the great religions and systems of thought in the world. And he has worked on into our time, either as a human being or from his ether body, inspiring all that was done in the West to establish the synthesis of the great religions. His influence today is increasing all the time. Many a person of whom we do not expect it, is a pupil chosen by Christian Rosenkreutz. Already today it is possible to speak of a sign by means of which Christian Rosenkreutz calls to one whom he has chosen. Many people can discover this sign in their life; it may express itself in a thousand ways, but these different manifestations all lead back to a typical form which may be described as follows.

The selection may, for example, happen in the following way. A man embarks upon some undertaking; he spares no effort to make it successful and forges straight ahead towards his goal. While he is ruthlessly making his way in the world (he may be a thorough materialist), suddenly he hears a voice saying: ‘Stop what you purpose to do!’ And he will be aware that this was no physical voice. But now suppose that he abstains from his project. Then he will be able to realise that if he had continued ruthlessly towards his goal, he would certainly have been led to his death.

These are the two fundamentals: that he knows with certainty, firstly, that the warning came from the spiritual world, and secondly, that death would have come to him had he persisted in his undertaking. This is therefore revealed to one who is to become a pupil: You have actually been saved, moreover by a warning proceeding from a world which, to begin with, you are not within. So far as earthly circumstances are concerned, death has already come to you and your further life is to be regarded as a gift. And when the person in question realises this he will be led to the resolve to work in a spiritual movement. If the resolve is taken, this means that the choice has been accomplished. This is how Christian Rosenkreutz begins to gather his pupils around him, and many human beings, if they were sufficiently alert, would be conscious of such an event in their life.

The human beings of whom it can be said that they were, or will be, united in this way with Christian Rosenkreutz, are those who should be the pioneers of a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. This stream of spiritual life connected with Christian Rosenkreutz provides the highest means for enabling the Christ Impulse to be understood in our time. The beginning was already made long, long ago—a hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, through Jeshu ben Pandira, whose essential mission it was to make preparation for the coming of Christ. He had a pupil, Matthew, whose name subsequently passed over to his successor who was living at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. The greatest deed wrought by Jeshu ben Pandira was that he was the originator and preparer of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The content of this Gospel derives from a ritual of initiation, and passages such as that concerning the temptation, and others, too, originate from enactments in the ancient mysteries. All these processes in the evolution of humanity were to be enacted on the physical plane too. This was written down in outline by the pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira.

Jeshu ben Pandira was not spared from the hard fate he himself predicted; he was stoned, and his corpse was suspended on a cross. The original chronicle was preserved in the hands of a few of his adherents, in deep secrecy. We can best follow what happened to it later on when the great Church father Jerome⁴⁴ himself says that he had received the document of the Matthew Gospel from a Christian sect. The original record was held at that time in the secret keeping of a small circle and through certain circumstances came into the hands of Jerome. He was charged by his bishop with the task of translating it. Jerome himself narrates this; but he says at the same time that because of the form and manner of the transcription, it should not pass into the hands of the outside world. He wanted to translate it in such a way that its secrets would remain secret—and he says, furthermore, that he himself does not understand it. The nature of what came into existence in this way was such that one man could express it in one way and another in a different way in secular language. And this is how it has come down to posterity. In reality, therefore, the world does not yet possess the Gospels in their true form. There is every reason and justification then for spiritual research today, in shedding new light upon the Gospels, to go back to the Akashic Record, because there and there only are they to be found in their original form.

Let there be no mistake about it. Christianity in its true form has yet to be separated out from the trash. One sign among many others indicates how necessary this is. For example, in the year 1873 in France a count was taken of those who could be said to belong inwardly and genuinely to Catholicism. They amounted to one third; the other two thirds proved no longer to be adherents in the real sense—and these two-thirds were certainly not composed of people who never feel the need of religion! Life is such that the religious longings of men do incline towards the Christ, but the true sources of Christianity must be rediscovered. And it is to this end that the stream of spiritual life going out from Jeshu ben Pandira flows into unity with the other stream which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is connected with the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.

It is also necessary for us to know that one of the characteristics of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is that in his youth he cannot be recognised as such. Between his thirtieth and thirty-third year a great revolution takes place in the soul and the personality is fundamentally transformed. For example a Moses or Abraham individuality can be possessed by the personality of a Bodhisattva at this time of his life.

About 3,000 years after our present time this Bodhisattva will become the Maitreya Buddha. And then his influence from the spiritual world will flow into the hearts of men as a magic, moral power. In this way the two streams work together, the stream of the Maitreya Buddha and the Western stream connected with Christian Rosenkreutz.

• 43. Yesterday we heard: in the public lecture in Munich on 19th November 1911 ‘Von Paracelsus zu Goethe’. There is no transcript of the lecture. See the corresponding lecture given in Berlin on 16th November 1911 in—‘Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung’ (Human History in the Light of Spiritual Research) GA 61 Dornach, 1962.
• 44. when ... Jerome himself says: see Rudolf Steiner ‘From Jesus to Christ’, Carlsruhe, October 1911; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.

IT is necessary that we speak somewhat further this evening concerning the nature of Christ Jesus. This necessity arises from the fact that at the present time there is much discussion of this subject, especially in Theosophical circles, and on that account the need confronts us in a very real sense to come to complete clarity upon many a point in this domain.

Today we shall have to discuss an aspect of the question which to many may perhaps appear somewhat strange, but it is very important nevertheless. We shall start with the evolution of man. We know, of course, that this has progressed in such a way that the whole of humanity within our Earth evolution passes through certain cyclic epochs. And we have often spoken of the fact that we can distinguish five cultural periods, up to and including our time, since that great catastrophe which we call the Atlantean catastrophe, through which life on the old Atlantean continent was transformed into life on the new continents—that is, our life. We speak of the first, the ancient Indian cultural epoch; of the second, the great ancient Persian epoch; of the third, the Egypto-Chaldaic-Babylonian; and of the fourth, the Greco-Latin, which, for a more comprehensive world view, only receded, let us say, between the eighth and the twelfth Christian century; and then we speak of our own, the present, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, since 1413.

Now, human souls—hence the souls of all of you sitting here—have gone through various incarnations in these successive cultural epochs up to the present time, one soul in many embodiments, another in a relatively smaller number. These souls, according to the characteristics of the epochs, appropriated this or that from their experiences, brought it with them from the earlier into the later incarnations, and then appeared as souls at a stage of development dependent upon what they had previously experienced in the different cultural epochs.

But now we can also speak of the fact that, of the various members of man's nature, generally one or another, but usually a definite member, was formed and developed in each cultural epoch—but note well that this was only generally the case. Thus, we can say that if human beings permit to work upon them all that our epoch of civilization can give, they are especially called in our time to develop what in our spiritual scientific movement we call the consciousness soul; whereas, during the Greco-Latin epoch the intellectual or rational soul was preeminently developed; during the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epoch, the sentient soul; during the ancient Persian, the sentient or astral body; and in the old Indian, what we call the etheric or life body. These various members of man's nature have come to their corresponding development in connection with individual souls passing through these cultural epochs, in one or, in most cases, in several incarnations. And in that epoch which will follow our own as the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, that member will be especially developed which we characterize as Spirit-Self, and which in theosophical literature has been designated Manas; and in the last, the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, that which we characterize as Life-Spirit, and which in Theosophical literature is called Budhi; while Spirit-Man, or Atma, is to be evolved only in a far distant future, after another catastrophe.

And so in the present and the near future, we are in the midst of the development through our environment, through the normal conditions of our civilization, of what is called the Consciousness Soul.

But now we know that this entire development of the human being, this evolution of the individual soul members as we differentiate them, is essentially bound up with something else—is essentially bound up with the gradual incorporation of the human ego. For this incorporation of the human ego into the nature of man is the whole mission of the Earth evolution. So we have, as it were, two intermingling evolutionary streams, in that we must go through the Earth evolution, following that of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and that as earth humanity we bring to development especially this fourth member, the Ego, and join this Ego to the other principal members of human nature, upon which preparatory work was done earlier: namely, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. You must now distinguish this great, most important evolutionary stream, which is connected with the great embodiments of our earth planet itself, from the smaller evolutionary stream, which I have previously characterized as playing its part within so short a time as the post-Atlantean period.

No one who has understood the matter up to this point should ask the question: Then how does it happen that man had already developed the etheric or life body, on the old Sun, and that now a special development of the same body should take place during the ancient Indian epoch? Anyone who has understood really should not ask this question; for the facts are these: To be sure, preliminary work was done upon the etheric or life-body during the old Sun; man came upon the earth already in possession of an etheric body. But this body can now be more finely formed; it can be worked upon by the later members which man has developed. So that naturally man's etheric body is at a relatively high stage when he is incarnated in an ancient Indian body, but in this post-Atlantean period he works upon his etheric body with the ego which he has acquired—with all that the human being has meanwhile gained for himself, he works upon it and refines it. And it is essentially a refining of the various members of man's nature which takes place in our post-Atlantean period.

If you now take the entire evolution and consider what has just been said, the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin, will appear to you quite especially important; for what we call the Rational or Intellectual Soul had then to be worked upon and brought to a more refined form within the human being. But by that time the Ego, which belongs to the greater evolutionary stream, had already undergone a particularly high development. So we can say that up to the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin time, this ego of man had evolved to a certain stage, and it was incumbent upon it then to work upon the Rational or Intellectual Soul; and in our time upon the Consciousness Soul.

You see in a certain sense there now exists an intimate relationship between the human ego and the three members of man's soul nature: the sentient soul, the rational or intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul. Chiefly within these three members the human ego lives its inner life; and in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch it lives in the consciousness soul, and will live most deeply in it, because in the consciousness soul the pure ego can come to expression quite unhindered, so to speak, by the other members. Indeed we live in our time in an epoch in which this ego has the great and special mission of developing itself, of building upon itself.

If we take a sort of prophetic glance into the future, at what is to come, if we say that man will develop the Spirit-Self, or Manas, in the next, the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, then we recognize that Spirit-Self, or Manas, really lies above the sphere of the ego. As matter of fact, man could not in this future develop the Spirit-Self out of his own forces; but if he is to develop his Spirit-Self, he must be helped in a certain way by that which flows to the earth through the forces of higher Beings. Man has come to that stage in the evolution of his ego where, out of his own forces, he really can develop only up to the consciousness soul; but this development would not be complete if he should not anticipate in a certain sense that which will reach its true, complete, self-impelled human evolution only upon Jupiter, the next embodiment of our planet. Up to the end of the Earth evolution man should develop his ego; and he will have had opportunity to accomplish this development within the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. But the actual Spirit-Self is to become the human possession only upon Jupiter; only there will it become the fitting human endowment. On Jupiter man will have about the same relation to the Spirit-Self that he has to the ego on earth. If then the human being develops the Spirit-Self during the earth-period, he cannot relate himself to it as to the ego. Of our ego we say: We ourself are that; it is ourself in reality. When in the next epoch, the sixth post-Atlantean, the Spirit-Self shall have come to expression, then we shall not be able to address this Spirit-Self as ourself; but we shall say: Our ego has developed to a certain stage, so that our Spirit-Self can shine into it, as from higher worlds, as a kind of Angel Being, which we ourselves are not, but which shines into us and takes possession of us. Thus will our Spirit-Self appear to us; and only upon Jupiter will it appear as our own being, as our ego now is. Human evolution moves forward in this way.

Hence, in the next, the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, we shall feel as if drawn upward to something which shines into us. We shall not say: Thou Spirit-Self within me ... but we shall say: I, partaker in a Being who shines into me from upper worlds, who directs and leads me, who, through the grace of higher beings, has become my guide! ... That which will come to us only upon Jupiter as our very own, we shall feel in the sixth epoch as a kind of guide shining upon us from the higher worlds ... And thus it will be later with the Life-Spirit, or Budhi, with the Spirit-Man, and so on ... So a time will come when man will speak of himself otherwise than he does now. How does one speak of himself now when he speaks in the sense of spiritual science? He says: I have three sheaths, my physical body, my etheric body, and my astral body. Within these I have my ego, the essential earth possession, which is evolving within these three sheaths. These sheaths are, as it were, my lower nature; I have grown beyond it, I look down to this, my lower nature; and I see in what my ego has become a preparatory stage of my own being, which will grow and evolve further and further ... In the future man will have to speak otherwise; then he will say: I have not only my lower nature and my ego, but I have a higher nature, to which I look up as to something which is a part of me in the same way as my sheaths, which I have from earlier stages ... So in the future the human being will feel that he is placed midway, so to speak, between his lower and his higher nature. The lower nature he already knows now; the higher will in the future appear as if standing above him, just as now the lower is below him. So we may say that man grows from his fourth to his fifth, sixth and seventh principles during the Earth evolution, but his fifth, sixth and seventh principles will not be his direct possession during the actual Earth evolution, but something to which he will gradually attain. The matter must actually be conceived in this way.

We shall have to experience a time when we shall say: Certainly it was our earth mission to develop our ego. But with prophetic anticipation we see something which is to come to development in us on Jupiter. What we are now experiencing during our Earth evolution: namely, that we permeate ourselves, so to speak, with a human ego nature; and that during the past earth-time up to the present we have developed a finer fashioning of our lower principles; and that we shall perfect the higher principles in the future—all that we as human beings experience on earth, more advanced beings whom we designate as Angels, or Angeloi, experienced upon earlier planetary embodiments. But also the higher members of the Hierarchy, the Archangels, or Archangeloi, and the Archai, have had this experience upon the earlier embodiments of our earth planet, upon Moon, Sun and Saturn. For them also there was at that time a kind of fourth member which they developed; and then in the second half of the corresponding planetary embodiments, they anticipated that which actually is to come to full development in them upon the earth, as with us the Spirit-Self will come to development on Jupiter. They had not at that time fully embodied it within themselves as their possession, but they looked up to it.

If in the first place we look back to the old Moon evolution, we must speak of beings who during that time should have reached their seventh principle, in exactly the same way that we human beings during the Earth evolution come to the seventh principle—that is, not to embody it completely, but to look up to it. When we speak of Luciferic beings, we refer to those who during the old Moon evolution remained in the condition in which a man would be who, during the Earth evolution, had not brought to full development his fifth, sixth and seventh principles, but had turned aside from such development; who perhaps had stopped with the fourth or with the fifth. That is, those beings who were at the very diverse stages of Luciferic beings were not fully evolved. So we can say that human beings came over from the old Moon evolution to Earth evolution. They came over in such a way that those who completed the Moon evolution brought with them a normal development: their physical body, etheric or life body, and astral body; and on the earth, quite properly, they should develop the ego, into which they should then take up the other principles. Other beings who stand higher than man should already have developed on the Moon what for them corresponds to the human ego. But they could have brought this Moon ego to full development only if they had anticipated what for them would be fifth, sixth and seventh principles, of which they should have fully developed the fifth on earth. They should have reached their seventh principle; but these Luciferic beings did not do so. They barely evolved the fifth or sixth; and thus did not stop with the fourth, but they did not bring the fourth to full development, because they did not anticipate the fifth, sixth and seventh principles, but stopped with the fifth or sixth.

We distinguish then two classes of these Moon beings: First, those who had developed only their fifth principle, so that they were as we human beings would be if we should develop the Spirit-Self in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, and then stop, and not develop the sixth and seventh principles. Let us keep in mind this one class, who as Luciferic beings had developed their fifth principle; and then note another class of Moon beings of the Luciferic sort who had developed their sixth principle but not their seventh. There were such at the beginning of the Earth evolution, when man began the development of his ego. So we can ask: What was the situation as regards these beings at the beginning of the Earth evolution? There were beings there who eagerly expected to develop their sixth principle during the Earth evolution, beings of a Luciferic kind, who upon the Moon had evolved only as far as their fifth principle and wished to develop their sixth upon the earth. And there were beings of the second class, who had already developed their sixth principle on the Moon, and who wished to develop their seventh on the earth. They expected that of the Earth evolution. Then there was man, who came over with three principles, to develop his fourth.

So we can distinguish human beings waiting for opportunity to develop their ego, Luciferic beings expecting to evolve their sixth principle, and the Luciferic beings who would evolve their seventh. We shall disregard those who were ready to develop their fifth, but there were such.

Now you see we have distinguished three classes, so to speak, of microcosmic earth beings, three classes of beings who arrived upon the scene of Earth evolution. Of the three classes, however, only one could win a physical body for itself on the earth; for the conditions which the earth presents for the development of a physical fleshly body can be furnished only in conformity with its entire earthly relationship to a fourth human principle. Only that being could acquire a physical body for himself who wished to develop his fourth principle as ego. The other beings, who wished to develop a sixth and a seventh principle, could not get physical bodies for themselves. For there is no possibility on the earth for the direct acquisition of physical human bodies for beings who come into this Earth evolution so unadapted to it. The possibility does not exist for the direct acquisition of such a physical body. What did these beings have to do? They had to say to themselves: Of course we cannot have direct access to a human physical body consisting of flesh and bones, for such bodies are for human beings who wish to develop their ego. Hence we must take refuge in a kind of substitute physical body; we must search for human beings who belong to the most highly developed, that is, those who have evolved, let us say, their fourth principle. We must creep into these human beings, and in them our nature must work in such a way that they will be enabled to form their sixth or seventh principle ... The consequence of this was that among the ordinary human beings of ancient times some appeared who could be possessed by higher Luciferic beings. These naturally stood higher than man, since they were to form their sixth or seventh principle, and man only his fourth. Such higher beings of a Luciferic kind went about on the earth in earthly human bodies. They were the leaders of earth humanity; they knew and understood much more, and could do much more than other men. We are given accounts of these beings in ancient tales and legends, and it is told of them that here and there they were founders of great cities, were great leaders of peoples, and so on. They were not merely normal men upon earth, but they were men who were possessed by such higher beings of a Luciferic sort—possessed in the best sense of the word. We can only understand human earth evolution when we take account of such things.

But especially the less highly evolved of these beings, because they cannot get human bodies for themselves, are always trying to continue their evolution in the bodies of human beings. And that is just what we have been able to characterize. Luciferic beings always had the longing to continue their evolution in the way described, by possessing human beings; and they are still doing that today. Lucifer and his hosts work in the human soul; we are the stage for the Luciferic evolution. While we human beings simply take the human earthly body in order to develop ourselves, these Luciferic beings take us and develop themselves in us. And that is the temptation of human beings, that the Luciferic spirits work in them.

But meanwhile these Luciferic spirits have advanced, just as human beings have advanced; so that very many of them who, let us say, when man entered upon the Atlantean time, stood on the threshold ready to evolve their sixth principle, are now already forming their seventh, although of course this evolution on the earth is abnormal. Such a spirit accomplishes this in the following way: He takes possession of a man, perhaps for only a few years, in order to make use of the experiences of this man, who on his part is thus furthering his own evolution. This is nothing evil in human nature; for since we can bring the consciousness soul to expression in our time, we can be possessed by Luciferic spirits who are evolving their seventh principle. What does a person become when he is possessed by such a lofty Luciferic spirit? A genius! But because as man he is possessed, and the real human nature is irradiated by this higher being, he is impractical for ordinary accomplishments, but works in some one realm as a pioneer and a leader.

One may not speak of the Luciferic spirit as if he were something altogether hateful; but because he develops himself as a parasite by entering the human being, he causes the man possessed by him and under his influence to work as a man of genius, as if inspired. So the Luciferic spirits are absolutely necessary, and the gifted men of earth are they in whom the Luciferic spirit is working diligently—generally only for a couple of years. If that were not the case, Eduard Schuré would not have been able to describe Lucifer sympathetically (see Note 1); for Lucifer is actually assigned a share in the great cultural progress of the earth, and it is narrow-mindedness in traditional Christianity to see in the Luciferic being only the wicked devil—this signifies nothing less than gross Philistinism ... “Nature is sin, Spirit is devil; they cherish between them Doubt, their deformed bastard child,” we read in Faust. Certainly it is fitting for the narrow, traditionally-formed Christianity to call Lucifer the devil, and to hate him; but he who has an understanding of human evolution knows that the Luciferic principle works in the genius. It is fitting for the spiritual scientist to look these things straight in the face. And we should have no inducement whatever to rise to our fifth and sixth principles, if these spirits did not push us forward. It is the Luciferic spirits to whom we really owe the forward thrust, given because they seek thereby their own evolution, and through which we ourselves are enabled to grow out beyond our ego. It is said trivially that poets and geniuses and artists grow above the narrowly confined human ego.

So we look up to the Luciferic spirits in a certain way as to leaders of men. We must free ourselves from narrowness, from all orthodox Christianity which calls Lucifer only a devil worthy of hatred. We must recognize the liberating character of the Luciferic principle, which has also been ordained by the good gods; for it drives us out beyond ourselves during the Earth evolution, so that we prophetically anticipate what will come to us as our own possession only during Jupiter, and so on. Thus there actually exists upon earth a reciprocal influence of microcosmic beings, who were present at the beginning of the Earth evolution—such a reciprocal influence that human beings are led forward, while they are developing their own ego, by beings related to them in such a way that it must be admitted that they are higher than man, for they have evolved their fifth principle and are developing their sixth, or are already evolving their seventh, while man is working only upon his fourth. So in these Luciferic beings we see superhuman beings—microcosmic superhuman beings.

And now we will turn aside from these spiritual beings whom we regard as Luciferic, and consider the nature of Christ.

The Christ is quite radically different from other beings who share in the Earth evolution. He is a Being of quite another order; He is a Being who remained behind, not only during the Moon evolution, as the Luciferic spirits did, but who, foreseeing the Moon evolution, actually remained behind still earlier, namely, during the old Sun evolution; and it was from a certain assured wisdom far above the human that He remained behind during the old Sun evolution. We cannot regard this Being as microcosmic in the sense which applies to the other beings we have been considering; for we have to regard as microcosmic beings those who were connected with this Earth evolution from its beginning. The Christ was not directly connected with the Earth evolution, but with the Sun evolution. He was a macrocosmic Being from the beginning of the Earth evolution on, a Being who was exposed to entirely different conditions of evolution from those of the microcosmic beings. And His evolutionary conditions were of a special sort; they were such that this macrocosmic Christ Being evolved the macrocosmic ego outside earthly conditions. For this Christ evolution it was normal to bring to ego-perfection, outside the earth, an ego of a macrocosmic sort, and then to descend to earth. And so for the evolution of the Christ Being it was normal, when He descended from the macrocosm to our earth, to bring into it the great impulse of the macrocosmic ego, in order that the microcosmic ego, the human ego, might take up this impulse, and be able to go forward in its evolution. It was normal for the Christ to have the macrocosmic ego-impulse—not the microcosmic ego-impulse—just as much evolved as man upon the earth had developed the microcosmic. Thus the Christ Being is a Being Who in a certain sense is like the human being, only that man is microcosmic and has brought his four principles to expression microcosmically, and hence has his ego also microcosmically as earth-ego—but the Christ as Cosmic Ego. His evolution was such that He was great and significant because of the perfect development of this ego, which He brought down to earth. And He had not the fifth macrocosmic principle, and not the sixth, for He will evolve these on Jupiter and on Venus, in order that He may give them to man.

The Christ, then, is a four-membered Being, including His macrocosmic ego, just as man himself is microcosmically a four-membered being. And as man during the earth time has as his mission the development of his ego, in order to be able to receive, so the Christ had to develop His Ego, in order to be able to give. When He descended to earth His whole being was employed in bringing His fourth principle to expression in the most perfect possible form. Now each macrocosmic principle has an inner relationship to the corresponding microcosmic principle; the fourth macrocosmic principle in the Christ corresponds to the fourth microcosmic principle in man, and the fifth in the Christ will correspond to the Spirit-Self in man.

Thus the Christ entered upon His earthly course in that He brought down to man out of the macrocosm what man was to evolve microcosmically—only the Christ brought it as a macrocosmic principle. He entered the earth evolution in such a way that during its course He would not have a fifth, sixth and seventh principle as His personal possession, just as man in his way does not possess them.

The Christ is a Being Who had evolved macrocosmically up to the fourth principle, and the evolution of His fourth principle during the earth course consists in His bestowing upon man everything which will enable him to evolve his ego.

If we take a complete survey, we have at the beginning of Earth evolution three classes of beings: human beings who were to bring their fourth principle to full development on earth; a class of Luciferic beings who were to evolve their sixth principle; and a class of Luciferic beings who were to develop their seventh principle—beings who, because they were ready to develop their sixth and seventh principles, stood higher than man,—in fact, ranged far above man in this respect. But they also ranged above Christ in this regard; for the Christ was to bring His fourth principle to expression on the earth, in devotion to humanity. It will not be the Christ, let us say, that will quicken man in the future to bring to expression something other than the true ego, the innermost human being—to reach ever higher and higher stages. It will be the Luciferic spirits who will lead man out beyond himself in a certain sense.

Anyone who looks at the matter superficially can say: “Of course then the Christ stands lower than, for example, the Luciferic spirits.” ... because the Christ came to earth with something which is fully related to man's fourth principle. For that reason He is not at all fitted to lead man above himself, but only more deeply into his own soul being; He is fitted to lead the individual soul-being of man more and more to itself. The Luciferic beings have evolved the fourth, fifth and sixth principles, and hence in a certain way stand higher than the Christ. Practically, that will work out in the future so that through the admission of the Christ principle into human nature, this human nature will become more and more deepened, will take up more and more light and love into its own being; so that the human being will have to feel Light and Love as belonging to his very self. The immeasurable deepening of the human soul—that will be the gift of the Christ Impulse, which will work on and on forever. And when the Christ shall come, as that coming has been represented in many lectures, then He will work only upon the deepening of human souls. The other spirits who have higher principles than the Christ, though only microcosmic principles, will in a certain sense lead man out beyond himself. The Christ will deepen the inner life of man, but also make him humble; the Luciferic spirits will lead man out beyond himself, and make him wise, clever, talented, but also in a certain sense haughty; will teach him that he might become something superhuman even during the Earth evolution. Everything, therefore, which in the future shall lead man to rise above himself, as it were, which will make him proud of his own human nature even here upon earth—that will be a Luciferic impulse; but what makes a man more deeply sincere, what brings his inner life to such depths as can come only through the complete development of the fourth principle—that comes from the Christ.

People who look at the matter superficially will say that Christ really stands lower than the Luciferic beings, for He has developed only the fourth principle, and the others, higher principles. Only the difference is that these other beings bring the higher principles as something parasitic, grafted upon human nature; but the Christ brings the fourth principle in such a way that it penetrates human nature, takes root within it, and fills it with power. As the fleshly body of Jesus of Nazareth was once permeated and empowered by the fourth macrocosmic principle, so will the bodies of those who take the Christ into themselves be permeated by the fourth macrocosmic principle. Just as the fourth macrocosmic principle is the gift of Christ, so will the sixth and the seventh principles be the gifts of the Luciferic spirits. So that in the future—and such time is now being prepared for—we may experience that people lacking in understanding will say: If we examine the Gospels, or otherwise allow to work upon us what Christ gave to humanity, we see that in regard to His teaching He does not at all rank as high as perhaps do other spiritual beings who are connected with humanity ... They are higher than man in a certain way. They cannot penetrate the entire man, but they take root in his intellect, they make him a genius! And one who observes only outwardly says that these beings stand higher than the Christ ... And the time will come when the most powerful, the most significant of these Luciferic spirits, who will wish to lead the people out beyond themselves, so to speak, will be extolled, and looked upon as a great human leader; and it will be said that what the Christ was able to furnish was really only a bridge. Now already there are people who say: What do the teachings of the Gospels amount to! We have outgrown them.—As has been said, men will point to a lofty, versatile spirit, a spirit of genius, who will take possession of a human fleshly nature, which he will permeate with his genius. It will be said that he surpasses even the Christ! For the Christ was one who gave opportunity to develop the fourth principle; but this one gives opportunity during the Earth evolution to attain to the seventh principle.

Thus will the Christ Spirit and the spirit of this being face one another—the Christ Spirit, from whom humanity may hope to receive the mighty macrocosmic impulse of its fourth principle, and the Luciferic Spirit, who will wish in a certain way to lead humanity beyond this.

If people would agree that we must acquire from the Luciferic spirits only that to which we can look up in the same way that we look down to our lower nature ... then they would be doing right. But if people should come to say: You see the Christ gives only the fourth principle, while these spirits give the sixth and seventh ... people who think thus concerning Christ will worship and extol ... the Antichrist.

Thus will the position of the Antichrist towards the Christ make itself felt in the future. And with the outer intellect, with the outer wisdom, one will not be able to challenge such things; for it will be possible to produce much which from the point of view of the intellect and talent will be more clever in the Antichrist than that which will more and more flow into the soul from the Christ, as the highest human principle. Because Christ brings to man the fourth macrocosmic principle—since it is macrocosmic, it is infinitely more important than all microcosmic principles; it is stronger than they, even though it is related to the human ego, stronger than all others which can be gained during Earth evolution—still, because it is only the fourth principle, it will be thought of as lower than the fifth, sixth and seventh, which come from the Luciferic spirits; and especially lower than that which comes from Antichrist.

It is important that, upon the basis of spiritual science, it should be perceived that this is so. In regard to the Copernican theory, which has set the earth in motion, as it were, has snatched it from the repose in which it had earlier been placed, and has led it around the sun; which has shown how the earth is a grain of dust in the universe—in regard to this theory it is asked: How can the Christian idea exist alongside this! A contradiction is constructed between the Christian thought and this natural science, because it is said that in olden times men could look up to the cross on Golgotha and to Christ; for the earth seemed to them as the place chosen out of all the universe, and the other cosmic bodies seemed small to them, and really existing for the sake of the earth. The earth then appeared to man—so it could be said—worthy to bear the cross of Golgotha! But when the Copernican theory laid hold upon the spirits of men, they began to scoff and to say: The other cosmic bodies must have at least an equal significance with the earth, so the Christ must have passed from one cosmic body to another; but since the other world bodies are much larger than the earth, it would really be strange that the God-man should accomplish His work of redemption on the little earth! A Scandinavian scholar actually said this. He was of the opinion that, with the Christ drama, it was just as if a powerful drama were presented on a little stage in a suburb, or in a village theater, instead of being presented on a great stage in a capital city. He said: “It is absurd that the greatest drama in the world should not be performed upon a great cosmic body. It is exactly as if a great production should not be given in a splendid theater, but in a miserable village theater!”

Such a speech is, of course, very peculiar, but we can reply that the Christian legend has taken care that nothing so foolish could be said; for it has not even laid the scene of this drama in a splendid place on earth, but only in a poor stable. That fact already shows that no such objection should be made as that of the Scandinavian scholar. People do not consider how inconsequential they are with their peculiarly wise thoughts. The idea has no effect in the presence of the great simple truth which is given in the Christian legend. And if this Christian legend lays the scene of the birth of Jesus, not in a splendid, important capital city of the earth, but in a poor stable, then it does not seem absurd that, in contrast to the greatest cosmic bodies, the earth should have been chosen as the place to bear the cross. In general the method by which the Christian teaching in its way sets forth what the Christ had to bring to humanity, is an indication of that great teaching which spiritual science is to give to us again today. If we allow the Gospels to work upon us—we can search there for the deepest truths of spiritual science, as we have often seen—but how are these great truths contained in the Gospels? Well, I might say that if those people who have not a spark of the Christ Impulse in them are to rise to an understanding of what is in the Gospels, they must absolutely rack their brains—there must even be a certain genius developed! From the fact that so few people understand the spiritual scientific interpretation of the Gospels, even in the smallest degree, it can be gathered that the normal human consciousness is not capable of it. Through Luciferic forces, with the development of genius, the Gospels can be understood in a purely superficial way; but as they are presented, how do these truths confront us? They come to us as if they gushed forth—the most perfect and highest good—directly from the Being of Christ—without effort or exertion of any kind—and speaking in such a way to hearts which allow themselves to be permeated by the Christ Impulse, that souls are illuminated and warmed through and through. The way in which the greatest truths are there presented to man is the opposite of the clever method. The method in the Gospels takes account of the fact that in the direct, original, elemental way in which these truths gush forth, perfect, from the fourth macrocosmic principle in Christ Jesus, they pass over immediately to the people. Indeed care has even been taken that the cleverness of man, the sagacity of all the Luciferic in human evolution, shall give much sophistical explanation of these words of Christ, and that we shall only gradually be able to win through to their simplicity and grandeur, to their fundamental character. And as with the words of Christ, so also with the facts concerning Christ.

If we present such a fact, let us say, as the Resurrection, by means which spiritual science provides, what strange fact do we there confront? A very important German Theosophist said, even in the third decade of the 19th century, that it can be seen how the human intellect is being more and more permeated by the Luciferic principle. This was Troxler. He said that the human intellect was utterly Luciferic in all that it comprises. It is generally difficult to make direct reference to the deeper theosophical truths; but those of you who attended my course of lectures in Prague (see Note 2) will recall that I referred to Troxler at that time, in order to show how he already knew what can now be taught concerning the human ether body; he said that the human intellect is permeated by the Luciferic forces. If we today, disregarding the Luciferic forces, will to comprehend the resurrection with good theosophical forces, then we must point to the fact that at the baptism by John in the Jordan something significant occurred: that then the three bodies of the Luke Jesus boy were permeated by the macrocosmic Christ Being, Who then lived for three years on earth, and then these bodies passed through the Mystery of Golgotha with this Christ Being. The development of Christ Jesus during the three years was naturally different from that of other men. We must inquire concerning this development, so that, going into fundamental facts, and with the principles of spiritual science, we may comprehend what the resurrection actually was.

Jesus of Nazareth stood by the Jordan. His ego separated from the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, and the macrocosmic Christ Being came down, took possession of these three bodies, and then lived until the 3rd of April of the year 33—as we have been able to determine. But it was a different kind of life; for, beginning from the baptism, this life of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth was a slow process of dying. With each advancing period of time during these three years, something of the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth died away, so to speak. Slowly these sheaths died, so that after three years the entire body of Jesus of Nazareth was already close to the condition of a corpse, and was only held together by the power of the macrocosmic Christ Being. You must not suppose that this body in which the Christ dwelt was like any other body—let us say a year and a half after the John baptism in the Jordan (see Note 2); it was in such a state that an ordinary human soul would have felt at once that it was falling away from him—because it could only be held together by the powerful macrocosmic Christ Being. It was a constant, slow dying, which continued through three years. And this body had reached the verge of dissolution when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Then it was only necessary that those people mentioned in the narrative should come to the body with their strange preparation of spices and bring about a chemical union between these special substances and the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in which the macrocosmic Christ Being had dwelt for three years, and then that they should place it in the grave. Very little was needed then to cause this body to become dust; and the Christ Spirit clothed Himself with an etheric body condensed, one might say, to physical visibility. So the risen Christ was enveloped in an etheric body condensed to physical visibility; and thus He went about and appeared to those to whom He could appear. He was not visible to everyone, because it was actually only a condensed etheric body which the Christ bore after the resurrection; but that which had been placed in the grave disintegrated and became dust. And according to the latest occult investigations, it is confirmed that there was an earthquake. It was astonishing to me to discover, after I had found from occult investigation that an earthquake had taken place, that this is indicated in the Matthew Gospel. The earth divided and the dust of the corpse fell in, and became united with the entire substance of the earth. In consequence of the violent shaking of the earth, the clothes were placed as they were said to have been found, according to the description in the John Gospel. It is wonderfully described in the Gospel of St. John.

In this way we must understand the Resurrection occultly, and we need not at all come into contradiction with the Gospels. I have often called attention to the fact that Mary Magdalene did not recognize the Christ when He met her. How could one possibly fail to recognize again some one whom he had seen only a few days before, especially if he were such an important personality as Christ Jesus was? If it is said that Mary Magdalene did not know Him, then He must have appeared to her in another form. She recognized Him only when she heard Him speak. Then she became aware of Him.

And all the details of the Gospels are entirely comprehensible occultly.

But some one might say that Thomas was challenged by the risen Christ, when He appeared to the disciples, to feel the scars with his hands ... then it must be supposed that the scars were still there—that Christ had come to the disciples with the same body which had been resolved to dust. No! Imagine that some one has a wound: then the etheric body contracts in a special way and forms a kind of scar. And in the specially contracted ether body, from which were drawn the constituents of the new ether body with which the Christ clothed Himself, these wound-marks were made visible—were peculiarly thickened spots ... so that even Thomas could feel that he was dealing with a reality.

This is a remarkable passage in the occult sense. It does not in any way contradict the fact that we have to do with an etheric body, condensed to visibility by the Christ force; and that then also the Emmaus scene could occur. We find it described in the Gospel, not as an ordinary receiving of nourishment, but a dissolution of the food directly by the etheric body, through the Christ forces, without the cooperation of the physical body.

All these things can be understood today through occult principles, on the basis of spiritual science. Apart from the poorly translated passages, the Gospels can be understood literally in a certain way. Everything becomes clear in a wonderful way, and any one who has grasped this will say to himself, when he notices a contradiction: “I am too stupid for this.” He does not feel that he is so clever as the modern theologians, who say: “We are not able to comprehend the Resurrection as it is described in the Gospels!” ... But we can comprehend it exactly thus, when we understand the principles.

How does all that has now been said work upon the human reason? Well, it affects people in such a way that they say: “If I am to believe the Resurrection, then I shall have to set at naught all that I have gained up till now through my reason. That I cannot do. Therefore the Resurrection must be effaced.”—The reason which speaks thus is so permeated by Lucifer that it cannot comprehend these things. Such a reason will come to reject more and more the great, effective, elementary language and facts of earlier times, and those connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. But spiritual science will be called upon to comprehend these things, even to the smallest details. It will not reject that which, as fifth, sixth, and seventh principles, can transcend the fourth macrocosmic principle. Nevertheless, it will see in the fourth macrocosmic principle the greatest impulse which has been given to the Earth evolution.

But from this you see that in a certain way it is not exactly easy to understand the Christ evolution within the earth, because in a sense the objection is justified that particular spirits, Luciferic spirits, lead up to other principles—but only to microcosmic principles. I expressed that earlier when I said: The Christ is a sort of focal point, in which the Being works through His deed, the Being works through that which He is. Round about the Christ sit the twelve Bodhisattvas of the world, upon whom streams what flows from the Christ, and who elevate it, in the sense of increased wisdom, to higher principles. But it all flows from the fourth principle—even upon the higher principles—in so far as these are evolved on the earth. On this account there is much error with regard to the uniqueness of the Christ, because there is not a clear understanding that in the Christ we have, to be sure, to do with the fourth principle, but with the fourth macrocosmic principle, and even though higher principles can be developed, these are only the microcosmic principles of beings who have not come to full development on the Moon, but who in their way transcend the human. Because they came to unfoldment during the Moon evolution, they developed on their part upon the Moon what human beings must evolve only upon the earth.

We must rise to an understanding of such things if we would comprehend the true place of the Christ principle within our Earth evolution, if we would clearly see why the Antichrist will in the future be regarded more highly in many respects than the Christ Himself. The Antichrist will perhaps be found to be more clever, possessed of more genius than the Christ; he will win a powerful following; but spiritual scientists should be prepared in advance, so as not to be deceived by what has now been characterized. More than all else it will be necessary to be firmly established in the good principles of spiritual science, in order not to he deceived in this realm. It was the foremost mission of that esotericism which has been developed in the Occident since the 12th century, and about which much has been said, to work out clearly what is to be said about the nature of the Christ in this regard. So that he who is firmly established in this esotericism will recognize more and more clearly that it is a focal position which the Christ occupies in the Earth evolution. And concerning all so-called reincarnations of the Christ on our earth, one can bring forward this quite simple comparison: Just as a balance must be supported at only one point, and not at two or several, so must the Earth evolution have one basic impulse. And anyone who admits several incarnations of the Christ makes the same mistake as he who supposes that scales to function properly must be supported in two places. When this is done, they are no longer scales. And anyone who went about on earth in several incarnations, would no longer be Christ. That is a fact which each well-instructed occultist will urge concerning the nature of Christ. Thus by a simple comparison we may always point to the uniqueness of the Christ nature; and here the Gospels and Spiritual Science are in complete accord.

Note 1:

Drama of Eduard Schuré: Die Kinder des Luzifer. Presented in German by members of the Anthroposophical Society, in the presence of the poet, Munich, 1909 and 1910.

Note 2:

Occult Physiology, 1911.

Our task here is to talk about some things that will lead to an understanding of our own era. We know that the development here on earth takes place in such a way that man can undergo new experiences and gain new insights in each of his embodiments on earth. Therefore, the events of our earthly development are arranged in such a way that man does not encounter the same conditions twice in two successive incarnations; that is to say, the earth changes in the epoch between the two incarnations. But external knowledge does not look at this in sufficient depth to see how everything changes fundamentally over long periods of time. But from this we can also conclude that we can only understand ourselves thoroughly if we know what the age of the development of the earth is in which we live, and if we can form a picture of the near future of the earth. We will have to take into account that man, as he faces us in life, having developed over infinitely long periods of time, is a very complicated being.

The human being as a waking being is fundamentally different from the human being in a state of sleep. We know that during sleep the four elements of his being are split into two groups, so that the physical and etheric bodies lie in the repository and the astral body and the I move out into the spiritual world to live according to the laws of that spiritual world. We have already learned that the physical and etheric bodies could not exist in their present form if they were completely abandoned by the astral body and the I, without something else being able to replace them. Without this possibility, the sleeping human being would be of no more value than a plant. A plant is indeed capable of life as a self-contained organism, but not the sleeping human being, because the latter has arranged his physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they must be permeated by his astral body and his ego. So while the human ego and the astral body leave the person, during this time another entity of the same value, a divine spiritual astral body and a matching ego, permeates the physical and etheric body at night. That which remains dormant in the human being is left to the external spiritual powers of the world. That which is in the physical world is thus incorporated into the great spiritual powers of the macrocosm, and all spiritual beings belonging to it work unimpaired by the human ego and astral body.

Today we want to get to know some of these forces of the great world that affect human beings. These conditions are intricately complicated in their interaction between the spiritual forces of the world and the human being. The latter is indeed a small world, and during sleep something flows from the great world into this small world like a mirror image. We can only understand all this if we penetrate into the deep secrets of the world.

In today's humanity, this or that truth is found by science, and one then believes that one possesses this truth as such securely. But the anthroposophist should also develop a feeling for the weight of this or that truth, whether one or the other is essential or inessential, whether it is a cheap, obvious truth or whether it leads us deep into the secrets of the world. This lack of understanding can be seen when undoubted truths are presented that are supposed to be decisive for important conclusions, for example, in the number of bones and muscles of humans in comparison to higher animals. Whether this truth is important or unimportant for the position of humans in relation to animals is not readily apparent from the fact itself. Another important truth, which we should actually come across directly every day, is that, in comparison to all other creatures on earth and in contrast to them, man can look freely into space with his face in the physical sense, to raise himself with his thoughts, his ideas, to what does not belong to the earth. The animals cannot rise from the earth, cannot free themselves from it. And no matter how much the similarity of the development of apes to that of man is emphasized, it is immediately apparent that the ape has not succeeded in straightening its posture when walking and standing. Therefore, we must regard this rising of man from the earth as a very important truth in a spiritual sense. Everything we find in man is a microcosmic imitation of the great world. Man's free elevation is expressed in the relationship of the head to the other limbs of the human being, as a relationship in a microcosm. But the same thing can be found outside in the great world, namely in the relationship between the sun and the earth. By letting this sink in, we get the feeling that the animal is already determined in its organization by the earth alone, but that the sun has determined man in his free outlook, in his feeling and thinking. This contrast cannot be understood at first go, so let us approach it slowly.

We feel our belonging to the universe when we know that it is the sun that sends certain forces to the earth so that man could develop into the organization he now has. From the forces of the sun, he is directed with his head upwards, while the earth pulls him downwards with his limbs. The limbs receive their orders from the head, just as the earth receives its guidance from the sun.

Today we want to highlight another contrast. In what has been said so far, all people are equal. There is no distinction between women and men. But the human organism does show the contrast between man and woman. In view of the analogies we have indicated, we ask: Is there in the great universe a contrast such as that between man and woman, just as there is between the head and the limbs? It must be particularly emphasized here that spiritual science has nothing to do with the representations that would like to extend the contrast between the masculine and the feminine to the whole great world. These are emanations of a schematic materialism of our time. Our present remarks are not meant that way; it is only a naughtiness of our present science. What is meant here is that the opposition between man and woman is only the lowest expression of an opposition in the macrocosm. In earthly existence, we must first point out that when we speak of the opposition between man and woman, we can only speak of the two outer covers, the physical and etheric bodies. For the astral body and I have nothing to do with this opposition, and therefore nothing to do with the following discussions.

Let us first note the fact established by clairvoyant insight, that basically only the head and limbs can give a true impression of a person. Since the spiritual is involved in everything physical, we must pay attention to the extent to which the physical can be an expression of the spiritual, and whether a true or false picture is given. Only the head and limbs give a true picture. Everything else does not correspond to the spiritual; this also applies to the male and female in man. Only the head and the limbs are recognized by the spiritual researcher as a true reflection of the spiritual; everything else is distorted. This is due to the fact that the separation into man and woman can be traced back to the Lemurian period, when a single form united within itself all that we now see as separate. This separation occurred in order to make it possible to connect an ever more material becoming with further development. Thus, man has increasingly materialized his form from an original spiritual form. For in the form of the neutral sex, he was still a form closer to the spirit. With the further development that then occurred in the direction of the feminine, this retained, as it were, an earlier form in which man was still more spiritual. The female form retained this more spiritual form and did not descend as deeply into the material as would have corresponded to the normal development. Thus woman has retained a more spiritual form from an earlier stage of development. She has thus preserved something that is actually untrue. She is also supposed to be the image of the spiritual, but she is distorted in the material sense. It is exactly the opposite with man. He has skipped the normal point of development, thus reaching beyond it, and forms an outer shape that is more material than the shadowy shape behind him, which corresponds to the normal mean.

Woman stands before this true mean; man has gone beyond it. Neither of them represents the true human being. Therefore, it is not the highest, most perfect thing we find in the human form. That is why people tried to add to it what is formed in the old priestly robes to make the human form, especially the male one, appear more true than it is by nature. They had a sense that nature can also record something. The female form leads us back to an earlier stage of existence on earth, to the old lunar age. The male form leads us beyond the earth's time into the Jupiter existence, but in a form that is not yet viable for it.

Now there is also an opposite in the macrocosm that corresponds to the opposite of the masculine and feminine, namely in what we see in the cometary and lunar, which shows itself as the opposite between the comets and the moon. The moon is a piece of the earth that separated from it later than when the sun broke away. What the earth could not use was eliminated, because otherwise the human form would have ossified and become woody in its development. The moon would have closed human development too quickly. It now represents, completely withered and frozen, that which will only be viable again later as a Jupiter being, but which is now as good as dead.

The comet represents something that protrudes from the old moon existence into our earth existence, something that is held back in its development and thus has not developed as far as the earth, something that remained at a higher, more spiritual level. The moon, on the other hand, emerged from our earth and went beyond it. The earth itself stands between the two. Thus, comets and moons, like female and male forms, are to be regarded as having remained behind and progressed beyond the normal process of development. In a certain sense, the comet behaves like the female nature in the human being. We can make ourselves still more clearly understood by comparing what the comet means for the development of the earth. If we realize that this follows the development of the moon and precedes the existence of Jupiter, we must be aware that the laws of nature on the old moon were different from those on the earth, and we can see this to some extent in the comets. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that the existence of comets is an example of how science later confirmed what I said in my lecture at the Theosophical Congress in Paris in June 1906: that comets preserve the earlier natural laws of the old moon. Among other things, certain carbon compounds, cyanic and prussic acid compounds, played a role on the old moon. It should therefore be possible to detect these cyanic and prussic acid compounds in the comet. And indeed, spectral analysis has since proved that there are prussic acid compounds in the comet. Thus the indications of spiritual science agree with the facts found by material science.

What does the cometary existence mean for the earth? What mission is associated with it? The answers to these questions should at least be given comparatively, and it should be pointed out that two different lives take place on earth in the contrast between man and woman. First, there is the course of everyday events in the family from morning to evening, with a regularity like summer and winter, like sunshine and storms and weather and hail. This can go on for a while. But then something happens that makes a significant and lasting change, and that is when a child is born. This interrupts the conventional course of things, and something new remains in the lives of the man and woman. We can compare this with the task that the comet has as a task for life on earth. It brings into our earthly life what comes from the female element of the cosmos. When the comet appears, it causes a jolt in the further development of humanity. Not so much in the actual progress itself, but in everything else that is instilled into humanity. We can observe this in Halley's Comet, in the spiritual forces behind it. Something new for the development of the Earth has always been associated with its appearance. At present it is about to reappear. With this, a new stage in the materialistic sense will be initiated and born. This can be seen from the last three appearances in the years 1682, 1759 and 1835. In 1759, the forces and spiritual powers that brought the spirit of materialistic enlightenment were at work. What had developed in this sense, at the suggestion of the spirits and powers behind Halley's comet, was what, for example, so annoyed Goethe about the “Système de la nature” by Baron von Holbach and the French encyclopedists. When Halley's Comet reappeared in 1835, materialism was quite conspicuously reflected in the views of Büchner and Moleschott, and these were then adopted in the materialism of the second half of the 19th century in the widest circles. In the present year, 1910, we are witnessing a new apparition of the old comet, and that means a year of crisis with regard to the view just discussed. All the forces are at work here to give birth to an even more superficial, worse sense in the human soul, a materialistic swamp of world view. Humanity is facing an enormous test, a trial in which it will be a matter of humanity proving that, in the face of the threat of the deepest fall, the impulse to ascend is also strongest in all respects. Otherwise it would not be possible for man to overcome the resistance that materialistic views place in his way. If man were not exposed to materialism, he could not overcome it by his own efforts. And now the opportunity arises to make a choice between the spiritual and the materialistic direction. The conditions for this year of crisis are being sent to us from the cosmos.

Spiritual science is something that is read from the great signs of heaven and brought into the world by those who know how to interpret these great signs, these mighty characters. So that humanity is warned against taking the materialistic path, which is outwardly recognizable in the appearance of Halley's Comet, a counter-impulse must be given by spiritual science. Thus, the forces for the upward path are also sent to us from the cosmos through other signs.

At the time of the event of Golgotha, the vernal point of the sun had been in the sign of Aries for some time. This point moves through all twelve constellations of the zodiac in the course of 25,920 years. The advance has now occurred in such a way that we have now entered the constellation of Pisces with the vernal point. By the middle of the twentieth century, we will have reached a certain point in this constellation. The constellation of Aries now marks the end of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, which, according to Oriental philosophy, began in 3101 BC. At that time, the vernal point of the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus. This event was depicted in the Persian Mithras bull and the Egyptian Apis bull. We find depictions of the passage through the constellation of Aries in the legend of the Argonauts with the Golden Fleece, and then in Christ as the Lamb, as the first Christians usually depicted him at the foot of the cross.

The age of Kali Yuga came to an end in 1899. It lasted from 3101 BC to 1899 AD, for 5000 years, during which time people had to rely on their physical senses alone to observe what was happening on the physical plane, without the ability to use clairvoyance to help them. Now the abilities are beginning to prepare themselves, which will be able to lead human nature back to spiritual development. It was only in the Kali Yuga that the ego could and had to develop into the consciousness that is its own, in the only way possible during this time. From now on, a clairvoyant consciousness can join this sense of self, which will develop within the next 2500 years, whereby a spiritual grasp of the world will then be added to the physical-sensual one. To make this possible, the powers will be sent to us around the middle of the 20th century, so that people will then begin to see the etheric and astral bodies, and in such a way that this will already occur as a natural ability in some exceptional people. When a person then wants to carry out a preconceived plan, an intention of some kind, a kind of vision will appear to him, which is nothing other than a preview of the karmic fulfillment of the deed that has been done. In the meantime, humanity can plunge into the quagmire of materialistic worldviews and views of life. But then it will easily happen that the weak abilities of clairvoyance that show up during this time will be ignored as such, and people who already possess them will be regarded as fools and fantasists. For anyone who has never heard of spiritual science will not recognize these delicate abilities. But nevertheless these signs are true. However, if the spiritual world view triumphs, humanity will carefully cultivate the abilities hinted at, so that the persons endowed with them will be able to bring spiritual truths down from the spiritual world.

Under such circumstances, we can say: We are standing before an important point in the evolution of the world, which we must prepare, so that in its arising, our Earth will not be trampled to death with rough feet, when it wants to cover itself with a new faculty. What will then be seen as the spiritual world, with spiritual organs, as a spiritual atmosphere, is something that today only the initiated can recognize. But it will take a considerable time before the first tender abilities have developed to this degree or even to the height at which ancient humanity knew them in their ecstatic states, albeit only in their dream-like clairvoyance. But like a spiritual shell, this constantly developing ability will be spread around our earth. The Oriental scriptures, especially the Tibetan, speak much of a land which has disappeared, and they speak with sadness of Shamballa, a land which disappeared in the age of Kali Yuga. But it is rightly said that the initiates can withdraw to Shamballa to get from there what they need to further humanity in their development. All Bodhisattvas draw strength and wisdom from the land of Shamballa. For the average person, it has disappeared. But there are prophecies that this land of Shamballa will return to humanity. When the delicate powers of clairvoyance show themselves and become more and more intensified and widespread, and when these, as the good forces that come from the sun's existence, are received and allowed to work instead of the forces from Halley's Comet, then Shamballa will return. We are in the period of preparation for Humanity for this unfoldment of a new clairvoyance, which will take place during the next 2,500 years, a preparation which will steadily continue both in the time between birth and death and in the time between death and a new birth. What will then take place will be the subject of the next lecture.

Last time we sketched out a mental picture of the moment indicated by those meaningful words of the Bible: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. They allude to an event which we can see as the recapitulation at a higher level of an earlier stage of evolution. I must keep on using the illustration of the man who on awakening calls up in his mind a certain content; it is in some such way that what had slowly and gradually been built up during the course of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions springs to life again from the soul of the Elohim in a new form, a modified form. In fact all that is narrated in the Bible of the six or seven “days” of creation is a reawakening of previous conditions, not in the same but in a new form.

The next question which we have to ask ourselves is this—what kind of reality are we to attribute to the account of what happened in the course of these six or seven “days?” It will be clearer if we put the question in this way. Could an ordinary eye, in fact could any organs of sense such as we have today have followed what we are told took place during the six days of creation? No, they could not. For the events there described really took place in the sphere of elementary existence, so that a certain degree of clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception, would have been needed for their observation. The truth is that the Bible tells us of the origin of the sensible out of the super-sensible, and that the events with which it opens are super-sensible events, even if they are only one stage higher than the ordinary physical events which proceeded from them and are familiar to us. In all our descriptions of the six days' work of creation we are in the domain of clairvoyant perception. What had existed at an earlier time now came forth in etheric, in elementary form. We must get a firm grasp of that, otherwise we shall be all at sea over the true meaning of the impressive words of Genesis. Thus we must expect to see all that had gradually evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions emerging in a new form.

Let us begin by asking ourselves what were the special characteristics of each of these three planetary forms? On Saturn everything was in a kind of mineral condition—you can read about it in my Occult Science. What was there as the first rudiment of man, which really constituted the whole substance of Saturn, was in a kind of mineral form. But in saying this we must not think of the mineral of today, for Saturn had nothing in it either of liquid or of solid; Saturn was nothing but interweaving warmth. But the laws which prevailed in this planet of warmth, and which brought about and organised the complicated differentiations within it, were the very same laws which obtain today in the solid mineral kingdom. So that when we say that both Saturn and man himself were in a “mineral” condition we must remember that it was not the mineral of today, but a state of inweaving warmth governed by mineral laws.

Then comes the Sun condition of the planet. Here we must never forget that there was as yet no separation of the part which later became the earth. What today has become sun and earth was then a common body, a single cosmic body. In contrast to the earlier Saturn, a denser, gaseous element developed in the Sun, so that in addition to the interweaving warmth we have a transfluent gaseous or airy element, setting hither and thither in accordance with its own laws. But at the same time we have a new formation in the ascending mode, a kind of rarefaction of warmth towards the luminous, a radiation of light into space. Our planetary evolution, as I have called it, advanced during the Sun period to the stage of the plant. Again we must not imagine that there were plants on the old Sun in their present form; it is only that the same laws were at work there in the elements of warmth and air as rule in the plant kingdom today, those laws which determine that the root shall grow downward and the blossom upward. Obviously there could be no solid plants; one must think of the forces which send blossoms up and roots down, weaving in an airy structure, so that the Sun flashes forth blossoms of light in an upward direction. Imagine a gaseous sphere, and within it weaving and sprouting light, living light, which causes the gaseous vapour to shoot and sparkle in radiant blossoms, while at the same time below there is an effort to check these luminous outbursts, an effort to make the Sun cohere round its centre. Then you have the inweaving of light, warmth and air in the ancient Sun evolution. The laws of the mineral kingdom are repeated and the laws of the plant world are added, and so much of man as is already there has itself only reached a plantlike condition.

Where today should we find anything in the least comparable to that plantlike weaving in the air-warmth-light sphere of the Sun? With the senses of today we should search the whole of cosmic space in vain. At a certain period of the Sun evolution these conditions did obtain, even physically—that is to say, physically to the density of air. Today they cannot exist physically at all. The form of activity which at that time actually existed in the physical mode can only be found today by directing a faculty of clairvoyant perception towards that region of the super-sensible world where are the spiritual Beings who lie behind our external physical plants, those Beings whom we have learnt to know as the group-souls of the plants. Today they can only be found by clairvoyant consciousness in spiritual realms. The group-souls of the plants do not subsist in individual plants, such as we see growing out of the soil, but there is one group-soul for each species of plant, such as the rose, the violet, the oak, and so on. For the poverty-stricken, abstract thinking of today, plant species are just abstractions, notions. They were already so in the Middle Ages; and it was because at that time men no longer knew anything of what weaves and activates in the spiritual as the basis of the physical, that there arose the well-known conflict between realism and nominalism—the dispute as to whether species were merely names, or whether they were real spiritual entities. For clairvoyant consciousness there is no sense whatever in this dispute, for when it directs its attention towards the plant-covering of our earth, it pierces through the outer forms to the spirit region where the group-souls of the plants actually live as real Beings. And these group-souls are one and the same reality as what we call species. At the time when the air, warmth and light sphere of the Sun was in its full splendour, when light, playing in the surface of the airy globe, threw off the sparkling blossoms of plant existence, these physically gaseous forms were actually the same as the plant species which can still be found today, though only in spiritual realms. Let us hold firmly in mind, then, that the plant “species” which cover our earth today with foliage and blossom, with trees and shrubs, pervaded the Sun actually as group-souls or species.

So far as man had evolved at that time, he too was to be found in a plantlike condition. He was unable to awaken mental images within himself, unable to awaken in consciousness what went on around him, any more than the plants today can do so. Man was himself living a plant existence, and his bodily form was among those light forms in continuous play in the gaseous globe. The emergence in the cosmos of even the most primitive forms of consciousness involves very special concomitant conditions. So long as our terrestrial substance was still united with the solar substance, so long as the sunlight did not fall upon the terrestrial globe from without, nothing of what we term consciousness could develop in it; nor could an astral body, which is the basis of consciousness, penetrate the physical and etheric bodies. For consciousness to arise, a separation or fission had to take place, something had to be split off from the Sun. And that happened during the third stage of our earth's evolution, during the Moon epoch. After the Sun condition came to an end, and had passed through a kind of cosmic night, the whole formation appeared again; but now it had become sufficiently mature to manifest as a duality, sufficiently mature for all the Sun elements in it to withdraw into a separate cosmic body, leaving behind the Moon, upon which the elementary conditions of only water, air and warmth were to be found. The Moon was the earth of that time, and it was only because the beings living upon it could receive the forces of the sun from without that they could take into themselves astral bodies and so develop consciousness, reflect in inner experience what went on around them. An animal nature, an inwardly living animal nature, a nature capable of consciousness, is dependent for its existence upon separation between sun and earth elements. The animal nature first appeared during the Moon evolution, and man himself—the body of man—was then developed to the animal stage. You will find this more closely described in my Occult Science. Thus we see that the three epochs which precede that of our own earth, and condition it, are linked together by certain laws. And on the Moon a fluid element is added to the gaseous—a watery element on the one hand, and an element of sound on the other, such as I described yesterday when speaking of the rarefaction of light. That is a very summary account of the course of evolution.

Now what had taken place during these three epochs emerged again in the recollection of the Elohim—at first, as I said yesterday, in a state of confusion which is described in the Bible by the words tohu wabohu. The stream of forces which moved from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery back again to the centre at first embraced the interactivity of all three elementary conditions—air, warmth and water. These three elements were now undifferentiated, though previously the gaseous and the warmth elements on the Sun, and the three forms, warmth, gas and water, on the Moon, had been distinct from one another. Now, during the tohu wabohu, they were all in motley confusion, gushing into and out of one another, so that in the early stages of earth development it was impossible to distinguish between what was watery, what was gaseous, what was warmth. They were all mixed up.

The first thing which then happened was that the element of light broke into all this; and out of the psychic or spiritual activity which I have described as cosmic musing there then came to pass a separation of gaseous from fluid. I will ask you to hold very clearly in your minds this moment which followed the coming into being of light. In dry prose, what happened was this: after the light had penetrated into the tohu wabohu, the Elohim caused what had once before in the past been the gaseous element to separate from what in the same way had been the watery element, so that it was again possible to differentiate between the gaseous and the watery. Thus in the chaotic mass compounded of the three elementary states, a separation came about, but in such a way that elements of two different natures emerged—one of the nature of air, with a tendency to expand in all directions, the other of the nature of water, with the tendency to cohere. But the two were not yet in a condition comparable to the air or water of today. The “water” was very much denser—we shall presently see why this was so. On the other hand, to get an idea of the constitution of “air” at that time, we cannot do better than look up from the earth to where, in the region of air, the water turns to vaporous formations, and has the tendency to rise into clouds, only to fall again later as rain. Thus the one element was an ascending, the other a descending one. There was a quality of water in both of them, but the one kind of water had the tendency to become vaporous, to rise upward as cloud, and the other the tendency to pour downward and assume a level surface. Of course, that is only a comparison, for what I have been describing took place in the elementary world

Through their cosmic musing the Elohim brought it about that a separation took place in the tohu wabohu between two elementary conditions. The one had the tendency to press upward, to become vapour; that is, the watery transforming itself to the gaseous; the other had the tendency to discharge itself downward; that is, the watery condensing and cohering. That is the course of events which is expressed in modern languages in words somewhat like this: “The Gods made a something between the waters above and the waters below.” I have just described to you what the Elohim did. Within the “waters” they brought it about that one element had the tendency to spread outwards, to expand, the other to contract towards a centre. The something between is nothing tangible, it is just a way of saying that a separation has been brought about between the two forms of energy which I have just described. You could also put it this way, that the Elohim so acted on the waters that on the one side they took an upward direction, showed a tendency to cloud-formation, a tendency to stream out into space; on the other side they showed a tendency to accumulate upon the surface of the earth. The “partition” was really more like a notional one, and the word in Genesis which expresses this process of separation must be so understood. You know that the Vulgate uses the word “firmament”¹ for this. The Hebrew word is rakia. This word means something which should not be interpreted in a phenomenal sense—it simply means the separation of two directions of force.

With that we have reached what is described in Genesis as the second “day”; and if we want to put it into our own words, we should have to say, “within the vortex of elementary states the Elohim first separated the airy from the fluid nature.” That is a quite exact rendering of what is meant; the Elohim separated what tends to become air, which of course includes watery vapour, from what tends to contract and become denser. That is the second “day” of creation.

We go on to the next “day”! What happens now? What has been sent outwards, what radiates out and tends to form clouds, has reached a stage which in a certain way is a recapitulation of an earlier condition; it is a repetition in a denser form of what took place on the Sun. That which has a tendency to contract, which in a way repeats the condensation to water on the Moon, is now further differentiated, and this further separation constitutes what comes to pass on the third “day” of creation. We may say that on the second “day” the Elohim separated the airy from the watery. In the same way on the third “day” they separate, within the watery element, what we today know as water, from something which had not been there before, something which was a further densification—the solid element. It is only now that the solid comes into existence. During the Moon evolution this solid, earth element was not in existence. Now it is precipitated out of the watery element. Thus on the third “day” of creation we have a process of condensation, and we have to say that, as the Elohim on the second “day” separated out the airy element from the watery, so now on the third “day” within what was in effect the Moon-substance, they separate off a new watery element from the earth element, which now emerges as something completely new. Everything which I have hitherto described had already existed before, though in another form. The first thing which is entirely new is the earth element, the solid, which appears now on the third “day.” This earth element, separated out from the water, this is the new arrival. But this also makes it possible for what was already there to assume a new form.

What is it which now first begins to form? It is something which had already taken shape on the Sun, it is what we have described as the sprouting plant nature in the tenuous airy element of the Sun—which had then reappeared on the Moon in the watery element—though of course there were still no plants in the sense of today. And it is only on the third “day” that there is a recapitulation of this in the earth element. What is first repeated in the earth element as the plant nature is wonderfully described in the Bible. I will deal later with the question of how we should understand the “day” of creation; for the moment I am concerned with the irruption of light and of air from without, of the separation of water from solid. The solid now brings forth a recapitulation of the plant nature out of itself. That is very clearly described in the Bible, when it says that after the Elohim had separated the earth from the water, the plant life springs forth from the earth. Thus the sprouting of plant life on the third “day” of creation is a recapitulation in the solid element of what had already existed during the Sun evolution; it is as it were a cosmic memory. In the cosmic musing of the Elohim there arose the plant life which had been present on the Sun in gaseous form, but which emerges now in the solid state.

Everything repeats itself in a new form. The plant life is still in a state which is not individualised as on our earth today. I have expressly called attention to the fact that separate plants such as we see around us in the sense-world today were not to be found on the Sun, nor on the Moon, nor even on the earth at the moment when the plant nature emerges again in the earth element. What were there were the group-souls of the plants, what we today call the species, which to clairvoyant consciousness were no abstractions, but something actually present in the spirit realm. At that time there was a re-emergence in a super-sensible realm of what we call plant species. And that is what the Bible says. It is strange how little Biblical commentators are able to make of the words And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind. One ought to say, instead of after his kind, “in the mode of species.” What it means is that the plant nature was there in the form of group-souls, in the form of species; there were no individual plants such as there are today. You will not understand the description of the springing-up of plant life on the third “day” of creation unless you think of the group-soul nature. You must clearly understand that no plants, as we understand the term today, sprang up at that time, but that out of a psychic activity, out of a cosmic, musing activity, sprouted species, in other words the group-souls of the plant kingdom.

Thus, when on the third “day” of creation we are told that the Elohim separated out from the fluid the solid, the fourth elementary condition, we find that in this “solid” state—which of course in its original elementary form would not yet have been visible to an external eye, but only to clairvoyant sight—there was a reappearance of the forms of the plant species.

This was not yet possible as regards the animal nature. We have already described how the animal nature made its first appearance during the Moon evolution, after a duality had come into being, after the sun had begun to operate from without. Hence a repetition of this event (the separation of the moon) had to take place before evolution could advance from the plant to the animal nature. Therefore after the third “day” it is pointed out how in the environment of the earth the sun, moon and stars now come into activity; how there begins to take effect something which radiates from without, which sends in its forces from without. Whereas hitherto we have seen the effect of a sprouting activity within the planet itself, now, in addition to this, we see something which comes from the heavenly spaces, radiating inwards. In other words, in addition to the forces of the earth itself, which could only recapitulate what it had produced as a unitary body at an earlier stage, the Elohim in their cosmic musing brought into action the forces which streamed down upon the planet from outer space. Cosmic existence was added to earthly existence. To begin with, let us see nothing but this in what is described as taking place on the fourth “day.” What was the result of this irradiation from without? It enabled processes to be recapitulated—though in a different form—which were already to be found in the Moon evolution. During the Moon evolution there had developed as much of an animal nature as could live in the elements of air and water. It was only now that this could reappear. Therefore Genesis tells us, in wonderful accord with the facts, how on the fifth “day” of creation the teeming multitude in air and water comes into existence. It describes a recapitulation of the Moon epoch, now in a new form, at a higher level, in the earth element.

My dear friends, at the contemplation of such things this ancient record fills us with awe; it is wholly in the spirit of our anthroposophical outlook that we are able to feel the deepest reverence for it. What is experienced by clairvoyant consciousness is recorded in this document in impressive words, in words full of power; we find there again what we already know—that after the irradiation from without had taken place, a recapitulation became possible of what had existed in the airy and the watery elements of the Moon evolution. In the light of such a soul-stirring discovery how can we attach any importance to intellectual criticisms of these things? What nonsense it makes of the argument that this document was written in primitive times, when human knowledge was still at a very childish level! A fine “childish level,” when we rediscover in it the highest knowledge to which we can raise ourselves! Must we not ascribe to those who have handed down to us this ancient record the same spirituality which alone today enables us to rise to this revelation? Does not this document, bequeathed to us by those ancient seers, bear witness for them? The content of this record itself testifies that its writers were inspired. Truly we need no historical proof, the words furnish their own proof.

When we understand the matter in this way we realise that it was only after the fifth “day” of creation that anything new could happen. For all the necessary recapitulation had now taken place. Now the earth itself, which had emerged as a new element, could be populated with animal life, and with whatever might develop as new formation. Hence we find described in impressive detail how creatures appeared on the sixth “day” whose existence was bound up with the new element of earth. Up to the fifth “day” we have a recapitulation at a higher stage in a new form of what had gone before, but on the sixth “day” the earth-nature comes into its own for the first time, and something is added which has only been made possible by the earth conditions.

I have now given you an outline of the six “days” of creation. I have shown you how those who shrouded their deep wisdom in this narrative must have been fully conscious of what was emerging as new. Further, they must have been fully aware that it was only within this earth element that what constituted the very core of man's being could enter in. We know that all that man went through during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions amounted to preparatory stages for the real human incarnation. We know that during the Saturn period the first rudiments of a physical body had been laid down in man; during the Sun evolution the rudiments of an etheric or life body were added; during the Moon evolution the rudiments of an astral body. What was recapitulated up to the end of the fifth day contained an element of astrality. Everything which has being has astrality. To infuse the ego, the fourth member of human nature, into a being in this whole evolutionary complex was not possible until the conditions for the earth had been fully created. So the Elohim prepared the earth by recapitulating the earlier stages at a higher level throughout the five “days” of creation. It was only then, only because the recapitulation had taken a new form, that they had at their disposal a fit vessel, a vessel into which they could impress the human form; and that was the consummation of the whole of evolution.

Had a mere repetition taken place, evolution as a whole would only have been able to advance to the animal, to the astral stage. But because all the time, from the beginning and throughout the periods of recapitulation, something was being infused into evolution which finally revealed itself as earth, at last there came something into which the Elohim could pour all that was in them. I have already described how it lived in them—it was just as if there were seven men in a group, each one of whom has learnt something different, each of whom has a different capacity, but all of whom are working towards a common end. They all wish to make one and the same thing. Each has to contribute what best he can. Thereby a work in common arises. No single individual has the skill to produce this object alone, but together they are able to achieve it. We could say that their product bears the impress of the joint idea they had formed of their work. We must bear in mind throughout this special characteristic of the seven Elohim, that they all worked together in order to bring about at last their crowning achievement—in order at last to pour human form into what had been brought about by a recapitulation of earlier conditions, because the whole bore the stamp of something new.

Hence suddenly we begin to hear quite a different language in the Genesis account. Earlier it says “the Elohim created,” or “the Elohim spoke.” There we have the feeling that we are dealing with something already determined. Now, when the consummation of earth existence is about to be achieved, we read: Let us make man. That sounds as if the Seven were taking counsel together, as one does when one is trying to bring to fulfilment a work in common. And so, in what emerges as the final consummation of the work of evolution, we have to see a product of the combined effort of all the Elohim; we have to see that they all contribute, each as he is able, to this their work in common, and that at length the human etheric form appears as an expression of the capacity and skill acquired by the Elohim during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.

In saying this we have drawn attention to something of immense importance. We have touched on the question of what we may call human worth. In many epochs the impression made upon religious minds by certain words brought their consciousness far nearer to the truth than is the case today. It was so in the case of the Hebrew seer. When he looked up to the seven Elohim, what he experienced obliged him to say to himself, in all humility and reverence, that man must be something mighty in the world, if the differing activities of seven Beings had to combine in order to bring him into existence. The human form on earth is a goal of the Gods! I ask you to feel the immense significance of this statement, and you will say to yourselves that each one of us has a tremendous responsibility for the human form, has an obligation to make it as perfect as possible. Perfection became a possibility from the moment when the Elohim resolved to bend all their united capacities towards the achievement of the one goal. This divine heritage has been entrusted to man, in order that he may develop it ever higher and higher into far distant times. Our study of cosmic evolution in relation to the tremendous opening words of the Bible must lead us in all humility, but also in strength, to a consciousness of this goal to be achieved. It is our origin that these words unveil. At the same time they point us to our goal, our highest ideal. We feel ourselves to be of divine origin; but we feel too what I tried to show in my Rosicrucian Drama, at the point where the initiate passes a certain stage, and feels himself in the resounding “O Man, experience thyself!” To be sure, he feels his human weakness, but he also feels his divine goal. He is no longer lost, no longer inwardly shrivelled, but on the contrary he feels uplifted; in the moment of experiencing his true Self he feels that he is being experienced. When he is able to experience himself in that other Self, something streams through him which is akin to his soul, because it is his own divine destination.

• 1. So does the English Authorised Version, which reads as follows: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

We have pointed out that in the Genesis account of the coming into existence of the earth, there is first of all a recapitulation of those earlier stages of evolution which today can only be reached through the clairvoyant investigation which we recognise as the source of our anthroposophical world outlook. If we recall what we have learnt from that source about the conditions of evolution in periods prior to the existence of our earth, we remember that what later became our solar system was contained in a planetary existence which we call Saturn. We must be quite clear that this ancient Saturn consisted solely of interrelationships of warmth. If anyone, from the standpoint of modern physics, raises an objection to my speaking of a cosmic body consisting only of warmth, I must refer him to what I said two days ago—that I could myself raise all the scientific objections against the things said here today or at any other time. But there is really not time in these lectures to touch on what this gullible modern science has to say. Faced with the sources of spiritual scientific investigation, the whole range of modern scientific knowledge seems pretty amateurish. I do intend one day to deal with many of the objections raised. I shall probably begin next spring at the time of my lecture cycle in Prague; and I shall there speak not only of the whole basis of Anthroposophy, but in order to satisfy contemporary minds, I shall speak also of the arguments against it. My Prague cycle will be preceded by two public lectures, of which the first will be called: How can Anthroposophy be refuted? And the second: How can Anthroposophy be substantiated?¹ Later I shall repeat these lectures at other places, and people will then see that we are fully aware of the objections which can be made against what is taught in Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy has a firm foundation, and those who think they are able to refute it do not yet understand it. Time will show in the long run that this is so. As to Saturn's state of warmth, let me once more draw attention to certain observations in my book Occult Science, which may also help to satisfy those who are prompted by their scientific training to object.

Having said this, I feel free to resume my exposition from the anthroposophical standpoint, without further reference to well-meant objections. In Saturn, then, there was an interweaving of varying conditions of warmth. Let us get hold of that quite clearly. The Genesis account describes a repetition within the developing earth of this ancient Saturn state, these relationships of warmth or fire. That is the first thing in the elementary existence which we have to hold fast to. But mark, please, in what sense we speak of warmth or fire in the case of such a lofty existence as that of the Saturn evolution. We shall not get anywhere near it by striking a match or lighting a candle and examining the warmth of physical existence. We have to think of it as much more spiritual—or perhaps better say more psychic. Feel your way into yourself as a warmth-bearing being—and this feeling of your own warmth, experience of your own soul-warmth, will give you a proximate idea of that interweaving warmth in Saturn.

Then we pass on to the Sun, the second phase of the evolution of our planet, and speak of how in elementary existence warmth condensed to the gaseous or aeriform. Thus in the elementary existence of the Sun we have to distinguish between warmth and the gaseous or aery. We have already pointed out that together with the condensation of warmth into air—that is to say, with the descent of the elemental consistency in the direction of density—there is a corresponding ascent towards a more rarefied, more etheric condition, so that if we call “air” the elementary condition next below warmth, we must call the condition next above warmth, light, or light-ether. Thus, if we look at elementary conditions as a whole during the Sun evolution, we shall say that in the Sun there is an interpenetration of warmth, light and air, and all life during that time manifested itself within this condition of warmth, light and air. Now we must once more make clear that if we take into consideration only these elementary manifestations of warmth, light and air, we are only considering the outer aspect—the maya, the illusion—of what is really there. In reality spiritual Beings are announcing themselves externally by means of warmth, light and air. It is somewhat as if we were to stretch out our hand into a heated space and say to ourselves: “Since there is warmth in this space, there must be a Being who disseminates this warmth, and finds thereby means of manifestation.”

When we pass on to the Moon, there again we have warmth as the middle condition, condensing below into air or gas and still further below into water. Light once more makes its appearance above. Then, above the light, we have a finer, more etheric state. I have already said that we may give the name “sound-ether” to what works within substances as an organising principle, causing chemical combinations and chemical analyses; it is something which man can only recognise with his external senses when it is transmitted by the air, but it lies spiritually behind all existence. We might call it “ringing” or tonic ether. Alternatively, because this spiritual sound organises material existence according to number and weight, we might also call it the ether of numbers. Thus we rise from light to sound, but we do not confuse this sound with the external sound which is carried over the air, but recognise it as something which is only perceptible when the clairvoyant sense is in some way awakened. Thus both in the Moon itself and in what works upon it from without we have to see, in elementary form, warmth, air, water, light and sound.

When we reach the fourth condition, and with it the coming into existence of the earth proper, a further stage of condensation and a further stage of rarefaction are added—below, the earthy or solid; above, the life-ether, which is a still finer ether than the sound-ether. So we may describe the elementary existence of the earth in this way. Warmth is again the middle state; as denser conditions we have air, water, solid; as rarer conditions we have light, sound and life ethers. In order to be quite sure that nothing is left vague in this exposition, I will once more state explicitly that what I describe as “earth” or “solid” must not be confused with what modern science calls earth. What is described here is something which is not directly visible around us. Of course, what we tread upon when we tread the earth's soil is earth, in so far as it is solid; but so are gold, silver, copper and tin, earth. Everything of a solid material nature is earth in the sense of occultism. The modern physicist will of course say that there is nothing in this distinction—that he himself differentiates between our various elements, but that he has no knowledge of any primeval substance lying behind those elements. It is only when the clairvoyant eye penetrates the external elements—some seventy of them—and seeks the basis of solidity, when he looks for the forces which organise matter into the solid state, it is only then that he discovers the forces which construct, which build, which combine solid, liquid and gaseous. That is what we are referring to here, and that too is what Genesis is referring to. We shall, then, expect to find that according to Genesis the three earlier conditions are in some way recapitulated in earth existence, but that the fourth state appears as something new.

Let us check the account by the same method that we used in earlier lectures. In the coming into existence of our earth we should expect to find a repetition of the Saturn state. In other words we should expect to find the Saturn warmth working as an expression of a soul-spiritual. And this is what we do find, if we understand the account rightly. I have told you that the words which are usually translated And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters really mean that the soul-spiritual of the Elohim expanded and that a warmth element—the kind of warmth we conceive to be rayed down from the hen to the egg in the act of brooding—penetrated the existing elementary condition. In saying “The spirit of the Elohim radiates as a brooding warmth through the elementary existence, or the waters,” you indicate the recapitulation of the Saturn warmth.

The next condition has to be one which represents a recapitulation of the Sun evolution. For the time being let us ignore the condensation process which goes on from warmth to air, and let us turn our attention to the process of rarefaction, to the element of light. Let us take the fact that during the solar period light penetrates into our cosmic space, and then the recapitulation of the ancient Sun evolution will be the permeation by light of our developing earth. That is announced in the mighty words: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

The third recapitulation, considered with reference to the finer elementary states, must consist in the fact that the organising, tonic or sound-ether permeates our nascent earth. Let us then ask ourselves whether there is in fact any indication of such a recapitulation of the Moon evolution in the Genesis account. What should we expect to find? We should expect the sound-ether to set to work to organise the elementary substance, rather as the fine powder spread on a plate is organised when we pass across the plate the bow of a violin, and the sound-forms of Chladni appear. There would have to be a recapitulation which would be recorded somewhat like this: “The tonic or sound-ether set to work to organise matter in a certain way.” But what is actually reported about the moment of creation which followed upon the coming into existence of light? We are told that something was stimulated by the Elohim in the material elementary mass which caused it to radiate in the upward direction and to gather itself together, to contract, in the downward direction, as I described to you yesterday. A force enters into the elementary matter and organises it, just as sound takes hold of the powder and brings about the Chladni figures. Just as the powder is organised, so the elementary mass is organised through the radiation upward of part of it, and the concentration downward of the other part. The word rakia, which is used to indicate what the Elohim introduced into the elementary matter, is difficult to translate, and the usual translations are inadequate to render it correctly. Even when one takes into account all that can today be contributed towards its elucidation, including what philology has to say, one is bound to confess that neither the translation “firmament” nor any of its variants takes us very far. For there is an element of activity, of stimulation in this word. And a more precise philology would find that there is contained in this word what I have just indicated—that the Elohim stimulated something in the elementary matter which may be compared with what is stimulated in the powder ofthe Chladni sound-figures when sound sets to work to organise it. As the powder is organised in the case of the Chladni sound-figures, so the elementary mass is disposed upward and downward on the second “day” of creation. Thus, in the Genesis account, following the intervention of the light-ether, we see that of the sound-ether, and the second “day” of creation gives us, quite in accordance with the facts, what we must understand as a recapitulation of the Moon evolution.

You will soon see that these recapitulations cannot come about in an entirely straightforward manner, but that they overlap one another. And the apparent contradiction between today's exposition and that of yesterday will soon be explained. The recapitulation takes place in such a way that first there happens what I am now describing, and then there is a more comprehensive recapitulation, such as I described yesterday.

After the moment when the sound-ether has so disposed the substances that some radiate upward, and others accumulate below, we should expect to find that something sets to work as a still finer condition, one which we must call the earth element proper—what we have called the life-ether. After the second “day” of creation something should happen which would indicate to us that life-ether was streaming into the elementary mass of our earth, just as previously light and organising sound had poured in. There should be some phrase in Genesis to indicate that life-ether thrilled through the mass and caused life to stir, caused life to unfold. Look at the Genesis account of the third “day” of creation. It tells us how the earth causes green things to grow, the living element of tree and herb—as I said yesterday, in the mode of species—after his kind. There we have a vivid description of the instreaming of the life-ether, which evokes everything that is said to have come into being on the third day.

Thus in Genesis we find all that clairvoyant investigation can bring to light—which is what we should expect, if it really derives from occult knowledge. It is all there if we know how to interpret it. It is a wonderful experience to find confirmed in Genesis what we have first discovered by independent investigation. I can assure you that in the description I gave in my Occult Science of the coming into existence of the earth as a recapitulation of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, I quite deliberately and scrupulously ignored anything which could have been learnt from Genesis. I only described what I was able to discover quite independently of that ancient record. But if you then compare these independent findings with the Genesis account, you see that the latter says just what our independent investigation has enabled us to say. That is the remarkable consonance to which I called attention yesterday, when what we can say of our own accord comes sounding back to us from the spiritual faculties of seers who speak to us across thousands of years.

Thus, in the first three “days” of creation, we see as regards the finer elements of the earth's nature a successive activity of warmth, light, sound-ether and life-ether, and in what these activities stimulate and enliven we see at the same time the development of stages of densification—from warmth to air, then to water and finally to solid, to the earth element, in the way I have described. The processes of densification and of rarefaction interpenetrate one another and together they give us a unified picture of the coming into existence of our earth. Whether we speak of the denser states—air, water, earth—or of the more rarefied states—light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—we are concerned with manifestations, with the outer garments, as it were, of soul-spiritual Beings. Of these soul-spiritual Beings the first to appear before the mind's eye in the Genesis account are the Elohim, and the question arises: what kind of Beings are the Elohim? So that we may know where we are, we must be able to give them their proper place in the order of the hierarchies. You will no doubt remember, from the various lectures I have given in the course of years, or from what you have read in my Occult Science, that in the hierarchical order going from above downward, we distinguish, first, a trinity which we call the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. You know that then we come to a second hierarchy which we call the Kyriotetes or Dominions,² the Dynameis or Mights, and the Exusiai or Powers, or Revelations; when we come to the lowest trinity, we usually make use of Christian designations, and speak of Archai, or Principalities, or Spirits of Personality; of Archangeloi or Archangels; of Angeloi or Angels. Those in this lowest group are the spiritual Beings who stand nearest to man. Only then do we come to man himself, as the tenth member within the hierarchical order. Now the question is, where within this order do the Elohim belong?

We find them in the second of these trinities, and identify them with those Beings whom we call Exusiai or Powers, or Spirits of Form. We know from what we have been taught for years that during the Saturn evolution the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, were at the human stage, the stage at which we ourselves now stand. During the Sun evolution the Archangeloi or Archangels had their human stage; and during earth existence it is man who is at this stage. One grade above the Spirits of Personality we have the Spirits of Form, the Exusiai, who are also called Elohim. Thus the Elohim are lofty, sublime spiritual Beings who had advanced beyond the human stage before the time of Saturn, when our planetary existence began. We get an idea of the sublimity of these Beings if we bring home to ourselves that in the order of the hierarchies they stand four stages above the human. The spirituality which was weaving in this realm—which was, so to say, practising cosmic meditation, cosmic musing—and out of this cosmic meditation brought about our earth existence, was four stages above the human stage. Spiritual Beings at this stage can through their meditation work creatively—they are not, as men are, limited to the creation of thought forms. Because the meditative activity of the Elohim is four stages higher than human thinking, it is not merely an organising, a creative activity within the sphere of thought, but it forms and creates existence.

Having said this to begin with, the question now arises, what of the other hierarchies? First we should like to know what part was played in the Genesis account by the Beings whom we have called the Archai, or the Spirits of Personality. They constitute the next lower rank in the hierarchies. Let us once more remind ourselves that in the Elohim we have highly exalted Beings, Beings who at the time of the Saturn evolution had already risen above the human stage. They were active throughout the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, creating and organising, and they are at work too in the earth evolution. Should we not expect to find the Spirits of Personality, the hierarchy next below that of the Elohim, mentioned in the Genesis account? Since we know what lofty, sublime Beings the Elohim are, we should expect to find the Principalities, or Spirits of Personality, at work in their service. Is there any indication in Genesis that after the Elohim had unfolded the main creative activity they made use of the Archai or Principalities as their servants in lesser activities? We know that the chief, the most comprehensive activity is undertaken by the Elohim themselves; but after they had laid down the main lines, so to say, after they had exercised their great creative forces, did they not appoint other Beings such as the Archai to represent them on the spot?

To find the answer to this question we must first learn to understand Genesis in the right way. There is a passage in the Genesis account which has been a veritable stumbling-block to all the commentators, because for centuries they have completely ignored what occult investigation has had to say about the real meaning of the words with which our Bible opens. If you are at all familiar with modern Biblical criticism, you will know what difficulty this point has caused the commentators. There is a sentence in Genesis which is rendered And God divided the light from the darkness, and it is then made to appear that light and darkness alternated. I shall come back again to a closer examination of the words. For the time being I will make use of a translation into modern speech—it is not correct, and I am only using it provisionally. At a certain point it says: And the evening and the morning were the first day. And further: And God called the light Day. This is a real stumbling-block for the world of letters! What then is a “day” of creation? The naive intellect regards a day as lasting twenty-four hours, as something which alternates between light and darkness, as does our day, during which we wake and sleep. Now of course you all know how much scorn has been heaped upon this naive idea of the creation of the world in seven such days. You perhaps also know how much labour—how much fruitless labour-has been applied to the task of identifying the seven days of creation with longer or shorter periods—geological epochs and so on—so as to make a “day” of creation signify some longer period of time.

The first difficulty arises of course when one comes to the fourth “day,” when Genesis first speaks of the setting up of sun and moon as directing time. Now every child today knows that the regulation of our twenty-four-hour day depends upon the relationship of the earth to the sun. But since the sun was not there until the fourth “day,” we cannot speak of a twenty-four-hour day earlier than that. Thus anyone who tries to adhere to the naive belief that the day of the creation story is a day of twenty-four hours has to do violence to the Genesis account itself. There may of course be such people; but it must be objected to them that in insisting that Genesis refers to days such as ours they are certainly not supported by revelation. As to the vagaries of those who try to find a way out by giving a geological meaning to these “days” of creation, they are really not worth bothering about. For in the whole range of the literature of the subject there is not the slightest evidence that the word yom (יוֹם) signifies anything resembling a geological epoch.

What then is the meaning of the word yom, which is usually translated as “day”? Only those can form a judgment about this who are able to transport themselves in feeling, in attitude of soul, into ancient methods of naming things. The process of nomenclature in ancient times needed quite a different kind of feeling from what we have today. To avoid too great a shock, let us take it step by step. Let me first draw your attention to a doctrine held by the Gnostics. They spoke of spiritual powers who played a part in our existence, who entered successively into the development of our existence, and these powers, these Beings, they called Aeons. By these Aeons they do not mean periods of time, but Beings. They mean that a first Aeon acts, and, having executed the work of which he is capable, is succeeded by a second Aeon, and after the second has exhausted his capacities, a third takes over, and so on. When the Gnostics spoke of Aeons, they meant Beings guiding development in succession, one taking over from another. It was only very much later that the purely abstract concept of time was associated with the word “Aeon.” Aeon is a Being, a living entity. And just as “Aeon” expresses “living entity,” so too does the Hebrew word yom. It has nothing to do with a merely abstract designation of time, but conveys the quality of being. Yom is a Being. And when one is dealing with seven such yamim following one another, one is dealing with seven consecutive Beings or groups of Beings.

We find the same thing elsewhere concealed in a verbal resemblance. In the Aryan languages there is a connection between deus and dies—god and day. There is an essential inner relationship between this pair of words; in earlier times the connection between “day” and a Being was clearly felt, and when one spoke of weekdays, as we speak of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and so on, one did not mean simply periods of time, but the groups of Beings working in Sun, Moon, Mars and so on. Let us then understand the word yom, which is usually rendered “day,” to mean a spiritual Being; then you have the hierarchical Beings one stage lower than the Elohim, Beings whom the Elohim used as subordinate spirits. After the Elohim through their higher organising powers had brought light into existence, they then appointed to his post Yom, the first of the Time-Spirits, or the Archai. Thus the spiritual Beings whom we call Spirits of Personality, or Principalities, are the same as those called in Genesis, Time-Intervals, Days, Yamin. They are the servants of the Elohim. They carry out what the Elohim direct from their higher standpoint. Those of you who heard the lectures which I gave recently in Christiania³ will remember that there too I called the Archai Time-Spirits, and described how they still work as Time-Spirits today. They were the servants of the Elohim. They were appointed by the Elohim to carry out the plans for which they themselves had laid down the main lines. In this way everything fits together into one great system, even for our understanding. But of course it is only when you have followed up what I am saying for years that you will acquire a real grasp of how everything without exception falls into place.

The exalted Beings of the Elohim entered into this interweaving of the several ethers, and of air, water and earth, and appointed Beings below them in rank as their servants. They gave these Beings their orders, so to say. In the moment when the Elohim had poured light into existence, they passed over to these Beings the task of carrying out in detail what had been set going. Thus we may say that after the Elohim had created the light, they appointed the first Time-Spirit to represent them. It is this Spirit who is hidden behind the customary phrase “the first day.” We shall only understand the still deeper meaning of this first day when we also understand what lies behind the verse: And the evening and the morning were the first day. The first of the Time-Spirits entered into activity, and with this activity was associated what can be described as an alternation of ereb (עֶרֶב) and boker (בֹּקֶר). Ereb is not the same thing as evening, and boker is not the same thing as morning. An appropriate translation would be: “There was ereb, confusion; and there followed boker, organisation.” There was a state of disorder, and it was followed by a state of order, of harmony, brought about by the work of the first of the Time-Spirits.

• 1. These lectures were in fact given in Prague in March 1911, and repeated in Stuttgart in November of the same year, and again in Munich and Berlin in 1912. Only the Berlin lectures have been published. (Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, Basle, 1941.) They have not been translated.
• 2. Colos. 1:16 and Eph 1:21.
  
  The “Dynameis” of Dionysius the Areopagite is sometimes translated “Virtues.” Cf. Milton's Paradise Lost.
• 3. The Mission of Folk-Souls See footnote, p. 71.

If we recall what we have learnt so far about our earth's beginnings, we find many things which still need to be explained. What we have so far learnt does, however, make clear that we have to look for much more reality—many more Beings—in Genesis than the usual translations convey.

We pointed out yesterday that the word yom does not indicate the abstract period of time which is what the word “day” means now, but refers to the Beings whom we call Spirits of Personality, Time-Spirits, Archai. This discovery enables us to enter more deeply into what I have already repeated several times: that behind the weaving life of elementary existence described in the Bible account of the creation, soul-spiritual Beings are everywhere to be seen. We may now see Being instead of empty abstractions behind much else that comes before us in the Genesis account. Of course it is easy to see Being when the Bible is referring to the Spirit of the Elohim—Ruach Elohim¹—but if we wish to grasp the sense of the ancient tradition we have to look for Being not only in those expressions where probably even modern minds would be prepared to recognise it; we must be prepared to find it everywhere. For example we should be quite justified in raising the question in connection with such expressions (to use my own words) as “The inner activity was tohu wabohu” and “And darkness was upon the elementary material existence.” Have we not perhaps also to see something of the nature of Being behind what is described as “darkness”? We cannot understand the Genesis account unless we can answer such questions. Just as we have to see manifestations of the spirit behind all that appears in the positive direction, such as light, air, water, earth, warmth, so we shall perhaps have to see manifestations of a deeper spiritual nature in the more negative expressions.

To get to the bottom of this, we must again go back to the earliest point we can reach in the development of our planet. As we have often said, we must think of the ancient Saturn existence as a condition of pure warmth, and that with the transition to the Sun there then took place on the one hand a densification to air or gas, on the other hand a rarefaction in the direction of the etheric, to light-ether. We have said that the passage in which the words ring forth And God (the Elohim) said, Let there be light; and there was light is describing a kind of repetition of this coming into existence of the light-ether.

Now we may ask: Was the darkness there of itself; or does spiritual Being lie behind this also? If you read the relevant passages in my Occult Science you will come across something extremely important for the understanding of all development—the fact that at each stage of evolution certain Beings remain behind. Only a certain number of Beings reach their goal. I have often used a singularly bald illustration, pointing out that not only are some schoolboys backward, to the sorrow of their parents, but in the cosmic process, too, certain Beings do in fact lag behind, do not attain their appropriate goal. Thus we may say that during the ancient Saturn evolution certain Beings did not reach their proper goal, they lagged behind. During the Sun evolution they still remained at the Saturn stage.

How could one recognise on the Sun the Beings who were still really Saturn Beings? By the fact that they had not acquired the light nature, which was of the very essence of the Sun state. But because these Beings were nevertheless there, the Sun, which I have described as an inweaving of light, warmth and air, had darkness as well as light in it. And this darkness was the mark of the Beings remaining at the Saturn stage, just as the weaving light indicated the Beings who had progressed regularly to the Sun stage. Thus, there was an interweaving of Beings who were still at the Saturn stage of development with Beings who had progressed normally to the Sun stage. From the inner aspect these Beings moved in and out among one another; and outwardly they manifested themselves as an interplay of light and darkness. We can call the manifestation of the more advanced Beings, light, and the manifestation of the Beings remaining behind at the Saturn stage, darkness.

If we know this, we shall expect the relationship between advanced and backward Beings to reappear during the recapitulation of the Saturn and Sun epochs in earth evolution. And because the backward Saturn Beings represent an earlier stage of evolution, they will appear earlier than the light in the recapitulation also. Thus, quite rightly, in the first verse of Genesis we are told that darkness prevailed over the elementary substances. That is the recapitulation of the Saturn existence, now a backward one. The Sun existence has to wait; it comes later, it comes at the point where the Bible says: Let there be light.

Thus we see that the Genesis story is in complete accordance with the recapitulation described in my Occult Science.

If we would understand existence, we must be clear that what emerged at an earlier stage does not just go on for a time and then disappear. Something new is continually arising, but the old remains actual alongside the new and continues to work within it. And so even today we have co-existing the two stages of evolution which we can call light and darkness. Light and darkness permeate our existence.

Here we come to a rather thorny subject. Possibly some of you may know that for the last thirty years or so I have been trying at intervals to show the deep significance and value of Goethe's Theory of Colour. Of course, anyone who supports this theory today must make up his mind that he will not gain the ear of his contemporaries. For those whose knowledge of physics would qualify them to understand its significance are today wholly unprepared for it. Modern physics, with its fantastic nonsense about ether vibrations and so on, is utterly incapable of penetrating to the real heart of Goethe's Theory of Colour. For this we shall still have to wait for several decades. Anyone who treats of the subject knows that. And the others—forgive me for saying this—those whose knowledge of occultism would perhaps equip them to understand the essential nature of the Goethean theory, know too little about physics for me to be able to discuss the subject in detail. Thus there is today no proper basis for such a discussion. The fundamental content of Goethe's theory of colour is the mystery of light and darkness, working together as two real polaric entities in the world. The concept of matter which is put forward today is simply a fantasy; it is an illusion. Matter is in reality a soul-spiritual being, which is to be traced everywhere where the polaric contrast of light and darkness is effective. The physical notion of matter which is generally accepted is, in truth, a chimera. In the regions of space where, according to physics, we are to look for a sort of apparition called “matter,” there is in actual fact nothing else but a certain degree of darkness. And this dark content of space is filled out with something of a soul-spiritual nature, something akin to what is intended in Genesis in the passage where “darkness” (the word used to denote the collective whole of this soul-spiritual entity) is described as weaving over the elementary existence. All these things are much more profound than modern natural science dreams! Thus when Genesis speaks of darkness, it is speaking of the manifestation of the backward Saturn Beings. And when it speaks of light, it is referring to the advanced Beings. They interact and interweave with one another.

We said yesterday that the main lines, the main features, of evolution were laid down by Beings at the stage of the Exusiai, the Spirits of Form, so that these Beings plan the general direction of the activities of light. And further, we have seen that they make use of the Spirits of Personality as their servants, and that behind the expression yom, day, we have to see a Being of the rank of the Archai, appointed under the Elohim. We may also assume that, just as on the positive side these servants of the Elohim, these Spirits of Personality indicated by yom, are active, so also the backward spiritual Beings, who work in opposition to them in darkness, play their part. Indeed we may say that darkness is something that the Elohim find already there. Light is something they bring into being through their musing, their meditation. When they think out the two complexes from what has remained over from the earlier existence, it comes about that darkness is interwoven therein as the expression of the backward Beings. They themselves bestow the light. But just as out of the light the Elohim appoint the Beings represented by yom, day, so out of the darkness come Beings who are of the same rank as these, but Beings who have lagged behind at an earlier stage. Thus we can say that all that manifests itself as darkness stands together on one side in opposition to the Elohim And now we have to ask, who are the Beings who oppose the Archai, servants of the Elohim, the Beings indicated by the word yom? Who are the corresponding backward Beings in opposition to them?

To avoid misunderstanding, it would be as well to clear up first another point—whether we have always to look upon these backward Beings as evil, as something wrong in the world-context. It is easy for the abstract man, the man who is concerned only with concepts, to feel something like indignation over the backward Beings; or he can make the mistake of being sorry for the poor things! We should not harbour feelings and ideas of such a kind as regards these tremendous realities of the universe. That would lead us completely astray. On the contrary we should remind ourselves that everything happens out of cosmic wisdom, and that whenever Beings remain behind at a particular stage of development, it means something; it has significance for the whole for Beings to remain behind, just as it has for them to attain their goal; in other words, there are certain functions which cannot be carried out by the advanced Beings, functions for which Beings are needed who remain at an earlier stage. They are in their proper place in their backwardness. What would become of the world if all those who ought to be teachers of young children were to become university professors? Those who do not become professors are much better where they are than the professors would be. Those who occupy academic chairs would probably turn out to be very badly suited for the instruction of seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds! Something of the same kind is true in cosmic relationships. There are certain tasks for which those who attain their goal would be little fitted. For certain tasks those who have remained behind—we could equally well say those who have renounced progress—must take their place. And just as the advanced Spirits of Personality, the Yamim, were given their task by the Elohim, so the backward Archai also, those Spirits of Personality who reveal themselves not through light, but through darkness, are made use of in order to evoke the laws of earthly development. They are allotted their proper place, so that they may make their contribution to the orderly development of our existence.

How important that is we can see from an illustration borrowed from everyday life. The light of which Genesis speaks is not the light which we can see with our physical eyes—that is a subsequent form of light. In the same way what we designate as physical darkness, what surrounds us at night, is a later form of what is called darkness in Genesis. None of you will doubt that the physical daylight which we see nowadays is important both for man and for other living things. Take for example the plants! If you remove them from the light they deteriorate, become stunted in their growth. Light is an element of life for every living thing, and, so far as their external physical existence is concerned, it is a necessity for men too.

But something else is also necessary as well as light. To understand what this is, we have to consider the rhythmic alternation of sleeping and waking. What does it really mean to be awake? All the activity of our souls, all that we develop in our thinking and feeling, all the ebb and flow of our passions—in short, all that happens through the fluctuating energies of our astral bodies and our egos, constitutes a continual using up of our physical bodies during day life. That is a very ancient occult truth, a truth to which even modern physiology comes if it knows how to interpret its own findings properly. What the soul unfolds as its inner life in the waking state continuously uses up the forces of the external physical body, the first rudiments of which were bestowed during the Saturn existence. The life of the physical body is quite different in sleep, when the astral body with its fluctuant inner life is outside it. Whereas in waking life there is a continuous consumption, or even a continuous destruction, of the forces of the physical body, in sleep these forces are being restored, being renewed and built up again all the time. So that in our physical and etheric bodies we have to distinguish destructive processes and processes of renewal—destructive processes which take place during waking life, processes of renewal which take place during sleep. But nothing which happens anywhere in space is isolated, it is always related to existence as a whole. And we must not think of those processes of destruction, which take place in our physical bodies from the time we awaken to the time we go to sleep again, as being confined within the limits of our skin. They are closely bound up with cosmic processes. They are merely a continuation of what flows into us from outside, so that during the waking life of day we are connected with the destructive forces of the universe, and during sleep with the forces of renewal.

This destruction of our physical bodies which goes on during the waking life of day could not have happened during the Saturn evolution, otherwise the first rudiments of our physical body could never have been formed. For obviously one can build up nothing if one starts to destroy it. The Saturnian operation on our bodies had to be a constructive one. The destructive process takes place in the daytime under the influence of light, but on Saturn there was no light. Therefore the Saturn activity on our physical bodies was an up-building one, and had to be maintained at least for a time, even into the later period, when on the Sun light appeared. Then the up-building activity could only be maintained through Saturn Beings remaining behind to care for it.

It was necessary for the Saturn Beings to be kept back in cosmic evolution, so that they could undertake the rebuilding of the physical body during sleep, while there was no light. Thus the backward Saturn Beings have their part to play in our existence; without them we should be exposed to nothing but destruction. There has to be an alternation, a co-operation, of Sun Beings and Saturn Beings, of light and darkness. Thus if the activity of the light Beings is to be rightly guided by the Elohim, they must inweave into their own work in an orderly fashion the work of the Beings of darkness. There can be no stability in cosmic activity unless the force of darkness is everywhere interwoven with the force of light. And in this complication of the forces of light and darkness lies one of the secrets of cosmic existence, of cosmic alchemy. This secret is touched upon in the seventh scene of my first Mystery Play, where Johannes Thomasius enters Devachan, and where one of Maria's companions, Astrid, is given the task of weaving the dark into the light. Throughout the conversation between Maria and her three companions you will find many cosmic mysteries concealed, which can well be pondered for a long, long time.

Thus we must never forget that the interplay between the forces of sun-light and Saturn-darkness is a necessity of our existence. When therefore the Elohim placed the Spirits of Personality as their deputies in charge of the weaving of the light forces, of the work which is performed upon us men and upon other earthly beings while the light is affecting us, they had also to appoint the backward Saturn Beings as fellow-workers; they had to see that the whole work of the universe was carried on by the normally advanced and the backward Archai together. The backward Archai are active in the darkness. Hence the Elohim employ not only the Beings designated by yom, day, but they set in opposition to them Beings who weave in the darkness. And the Bible says with a wonderfully realistic description of the facts: And God called the light Day (yom), and the darkness He called Night (lay'lah).² And lay'lah does not mean our abstract night, but lay'lah are the Saturn Archai, who at that time had not advanced to the Sun stage. And to this day it is they who are active in us during sleep, when they work upon our physical and etheric bodies, building them up. This mysterious expression lay'lah, which has given rise to all kinds of myths, is neither our abstract “night” nor is it anything which need lead to myth-making. It is simply the name of the backward Archai, who unite their activity with that of the advanced Archai.

Thus we have paraphrased the appropriate words in Genesis somewhat as follows: The Elohim planned the main lines of existence; they deputed the advanced Archai to work under them, and appointed to help them those Archai who in resignation had remained in darkness at the Saturn stage, in order that existence could come about. Thus we have yom and lay'lah as two contrasted groups of Beings, who help the Elohim and who are at the stage of the Time-Spirits, the Spirits of Personality. We see existence being woven out of the Spirits of Form and the Spirits of Personality, out of advanced Beings and the backward Beings of these two hierarchies.

Now that we have found an answer to these questions which satisfies us up to a certain point (there is of course much more behind all these things), another question will be on the tip of all your tongues. What of the other hierarchies? We distinguish among the hierarchies in descending order from the Spirits of Form, first the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, then the Archangeloi, the Archangels, or Fire-Spirits. Does Genesis say nothing of these? Let us look more closely to find out what the position is with regard to the Fire-Spirits. We know that they reached their human stage during the Sun evolution. They have advanced through the Moon stage to that of earth. They are the Beings who are inwardly connected with everything of a sun nature, for it was during the Sun evolution that they reached their human stage. And when during the Moon evolution it became necessary for the Sun to separate from the earth, which was at that time of a Moon nature, then these Beings, who had gone through their most important stage of development on the Sun, who were, so to say, by their very nature associated with the Sun, naturally remained united with the Sun. When therefore the Moon (later to become earth) separated from the Sun, these Beings remained, not with the separating Earth-Moon, but with the Sun. They are the principal Beings who work upon the earth from without.

I have already indicated that in the evolution from Saturn to Sun, the highest form of life which could be reached on the Sun was the plant species. Before an animal nature with an inner life could come about there had to be a separation, a cleavage. Thus it was not until the Moon evolution that anything of an animal nature could arise. An influence from without was needed. Now in Genesis we are not told of anything being active from without up to the end of the third day of creation. The transition from the third to the fourth day is an important one, for we are told that on the fourth day light forces, Beings of light, began to be active from without. So that, just as in the Moon period the sun shone upon the Moon from without, so now both the sun and the moon shone upon the earth from without. It amounts to no less than this—up to this point all those forces which were themselves within the earth element could take effect. Up to this point it was possible for there to be a recapitulation of earlier stages of evolution, and for forces centralised in the earth itself to arise anew. Thus we saw yesterday how in the Spirit of the Elohim who brooded over the waters the warmth state was recapitulated; how in the moment designated by the words Let there be light the entry of light was recapitulated; how at the point where the forces of the sound-ether broke in and separated the upper from the lower, the sound-ether stage was recapitulated. That was on the second day of creation. Then we saw how the life-ether intervened on the third day, when out of the earth element, out of the new condition, there came forth all that can be brought about by the life-ether—the sprouting green. But in order for anything animal to find a place on the earth there has to be a repetition of the “being shone upon” (if I may use the expression), an influence of forces acting from without. Hence it is quite in accordance with the facts that there should be no mention in Genesis of anything of an animal nature until after we have been told of forces working upon the earth from cosmic space. Up to that time Genesis speaks only of the plant nature; all the beings on the earth were at the plant stage. The animal nature could not begin until light Beings were influencing the earth from its environment.

What then came about is described in Genesis in words of which various translations exist. [The English Authorised Version is: And God said, ... let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.]

Now there are some commentators, some exegetists, who have begun to think. But at the present day, when people scorn to penetrate to fundamental realities, it is the wretched lot of commentators that they begin to think, but cannot think anything through to the end. I have known some of these commentators who have reached the point of acknowledging that the usual rendering is nonsense. I should like to meet the man who can really make any sense of these words. What really lies behind them?

If we wish to render this passage faithfully with a real sense of the associations which the words would have had for the ancient Hebrew sage, and with philological thoroughness, we shall have to say that once more it is not a question of signs, but of the activity of living Beings making themselves known in the form of successive events in time. A correct translation would be: And the Elohim appointed Beings to regulate the course of time for the beings on earth, to regulate specific divisions of time (the word “day” is not mentioned at all), larger or smaller periods (usually given as “year” and “day”). Thus the reference is to those Beings who stand next below the rank of the Archai and who regulate life. The tasks performed by the Time-Spirits, the Archai, lie a stage lower than the tasks of the Elohim. Then come the regulators, the sign-fixers, for what has to be regulated, grouped, within the activity of the Archai. But these are none other than the Archangels. Thus we may venture to say that in the moment to which Genesis refers, when not only is something taking place in the body of the earth, but when forces are working into the earth from without, it becomes possible for Beings who are already united with the sun existence—the regulating Archangels, who are one stage lower than the Archai—to intervene. While the Archai themselves are still active as Aeons, for the deployment of their forces they make use of the Archangels, the light-bearers, who act from the circumference. That means that through the constellations of the light-Beings surrounding the earth, the Archangels work out of cosmic space in such a way that the great ordinances laid down by the Archai may be carried into effect.

Those who were present at the course of lectures I gave in Christiania will remember that even today the Archai are still behind what we are accustomed to call the Spirit of the Age. If we look around at the way our own world has been organised, we find that each age has a number of peoples over whom for a specific period a Time-Spirit holds sway. Side by side with him and subordinated to him work the several Folk-Spirits. And just as today the Spirits of the Age or Time-Spirits are in control, and behind them are the Archai—I described that in my Christiania lectures³—so behind the Folk-Spirits are the Archangels; in a certain way they are the Folk-Spirits. Genesis points to the fact that even in times when man himself was really not yet there, these spiritual Beings were the organising powers.

Thus we must say that it was the Elohim who brought light into existence; they manifested themselves through light. But for lesser activities within the light they appointed the Archai, who are indicated in Genesis by the word yom, and who ranked next below them among the hierarchies; and they placed beside the Archai the Beings who must of necessity be woven into the web of existence, in order that the requisite activity of darkness can come into association with the activity of light. Side by side with yom they placed lay'lah, which is usually translated “night.” Then it became a question of how to progress further and into greater detail. For this, other Beings from the ranks of the hierarchies are chosen. Thus when it has been said that the Elohim or Spirits of Form manifested themselves through light, and placed the affairs of light and darkness in charge of the Archai, one has to add that now they took another step and, specialising further, appointed the Archangels to activities which not only call an external plant life into existence, but which are now to call forth an inner life, an inner life capable of reflecting the outer; they entrusted to the Archangels the activity which has to stream upon our earth from without, so that not only can the plant species shoot up, but also the animal nature, weaving its inward life of image and sensation.

Thus we see how, when we know how to interpret it, the Genesis account refers to Archangels too, quite in accordance with the facts. When you turn to the exegesis of the general run of commentators you will always feel dissatisfied. But if you turn for help to the same source from which the Genesis account came, if you turn to Occult Science, a flood of light will be thrown upon that account. It will all appear to you in a new light. And this ancient document, which otherwise would inevitably remain incomprehensible, because of the impossibility of translating the ancient living words into our language, will endure as a document which speaks to mankind for all time.

• 1. According to the Authorised Version: and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
• 2. The “y” is consonantal, as in the word yellow.
• 3. The Mission of Folk-Souls in connection with Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology. Eleven lectures by Rudolf Steiner given at Oslo in June, 1910. (English translation, 1929, out of print.

During these lectures I shall try to throw light on the Genesis story of creation from many different aspects. Of course you must never lose sight of our essential preoccupation as Anthroposophists, which is with the facts of spiritual life. All our lectures are concerned first and foremost with the circumstances of spiritual life, of spiritual evolution. So too what is of primary importance as regards the Genesis story is to ascertain what were the super-sensible events, the super-sensible facts, which preceded the visible course of our earth's evolution. Only after that do we think it specially important to find confirmed in ancient documents of various ages and various peoples what we have first established independently of any documents, out of spiritual investigation itself. It helps us to acquire the proper feeling, the right attitude of reverence for what resounds in our hearts from far-off ages. We are able to come to an understanding with those times, which we ourselves have lived through in other bodies; we are able to form a link with what must have affected us in past epochs. This is how we have to understand the underlying purpose of this course of lectures.

We tried in the preceding lectures to form an idea as to how spiritual Beings, whom we know from Spiritual Science, are to be rediscovered in Genesis. We have already partly succeeded. We have borne in mind throughout that in what confronts us in the outer world, even in what we meet in the lower stages of clairvoyant consciousness—and in Genesis we have to do with facts of clairvoyant consciousness all the time—we are dealing with maya, with illusion; we have borne in mind that our usual interpretation of the sense-world, as it presents itself primarily to our faculty of knowledge, is maya, or illusion. That is a statement which is familiar to anyone who has anything to do with Spiritual Science. Moreover, the fact that the lower region of clairvoyance, all that has to do with the etheric and astral worlds, in a higher sense also belongs to the sphere of deception, cannot remain hidden from anyone who has familiarised himself with the spiritual scientific outlook for any length of time. We strike, as it were, the true ground of existence—so far as it is attainable by us—only when we have pushed beyond these regions to its deeper source. We must always bear this in mind. And we must not be content to voice it as a theory, but the conviction must pass over into our flesh and blood, that in clinging to external existence we are surrendering to illusion. On the other hand, to ignore external existence, to prize it too lightly, is also one of the great illusions into which men can fall.

Let us consider the elementary existence which has been so often mentioned in these lectures, and which is the nearest realm attainable behind our physical existence, behind what we perceive with our senses. Spiritual Science characterises it as the existence lying behind earth, water, air and fire or warmth, light, sound-ether and life-ether. We try to acquire ideas about the nature of earth, water, air, and so on, and to grasp them firmly. We have not done very much if, with a certain intellectual superiority which can easily become rife among anthroposophical devotees, we just say “that is all maya, illusion”; for it is nevertheless through this maya that the real Beings reveal themselves. And if we scorn to look at the manifestations, if we scorn to get to know the tools and instruments through which they reveal themselves, we have no means of making existence comprehensible. We must be clear that when we say “water,” “air,” and so on, we are referring to expressions, to manifestations, of real spiritualities, but that if we refuse to have anything to do with this maya, we can acquire no ideas of what lies behind it.

Now let us consider the nature of the earth element. We know well by now that there was no question of such an earth condition during the Saturn, Sun or Moon evolutions. We know that evolution had to wait, we know that it was not until the time of our own planetary existence that the earth element could be added to the warmth of Saturn, to the aeriform element of the Sun, and to the water element of the Moon. We know that each advance in evolution can only take place through the work of spiritual Beings. To include what we today call our physical body, the lowest member of our human being, and to give it its place in this elemental existence, we may say that from the first rudiments which it developed on Saturn it too has struggled through all these conditions. Thus we have in our own outer physical bodies something of which we can say that it has passed through an existence in pure warmth, an existence as a body of air, an existence as a body of water, and has risen to an earth existence. We know too who were the Beings on Saturn who participated in the first stages of the work on the human physical body. You will remember that I said in Occult Science—and I have frequently said it elsewhere—that to begin with, certain spiritual Beings worked on Saturn who had passed through their lower stages of evolution in a long distant past, and who were already so far advanced that they were able to sacrifice their own corporeality to supply the foundation, the basic substance for Saturn. In the order of the hierarchies these spiritual Beings are none other than those whom we call the Spirits of Will. Into the substance thus provided, which had been offered as a sacrifice by the Spirits of Will, the other hierarchies then worked. Into this substance the Spirits of Personality worked, and imprinted in it their own “humanity.” It was this will-substance which worked in Saturn as the warmth element, and it was in this that the first rudiments of the human physical body were formed.

But you must not think that such Beings as the Spirits of Will finished their work at a specific stage. Although they performed their main task on Saturn, yet they have continued to work during the whole course of development on Sun, Moon and earth. They have retained a certain connection with the substance for which they made their self-sacrifice. We saw that during the Sun evolution the warmth element transformed itself in the downward direction, that is, in the direction of densification, into the element of air. Such a process as the densification of warmth into air, which we can follow in its external manifestation—such a process is just maya; it gives us the illusion of densification. Within the process itself lies spiritual weaving, spiritual being, spiritual activity. And anyone who wishes to get to the bottom of things has to ask himself which of the hierarchies has brought it about that out of the more rarefied warmth-substance, the denser air comes into being. It is those very Spirits of Will who sacrificed the warmth-substance out of themselves who have brought this about! We may describe their activity by saying that during the Saturn evolution they were so advanced as to be able to allow their own substance to flow out as warmth, so advanced as to be able to offer their own substance as a sacrifice, so advanced that their fire streamed into the planetary existence of Saturn. Then during the Sun evolution they condensed this, their fire, into the gaseous element. But it was also they who during the Moon evolution condensed their gaseous element to water. During the earth evolution they have further condensed their watery element into the earth element, into solid. Thus, when we look upon the solid matter in the world, we have to say to ourselves that in this solid matter forces are at work which alone make its existence possible, forces whose very being flowed out from Saturn as warmth and whose effluence has become denser and denser until it has now reached the solid state, held together by their power. And if we would know who it is that brings this about, if we would look beyond the maya of solid matter, we should have to say that behind all this solid matter which we encounter there work and weave the Spirits of Will, the Thrones. Thus the Spirits of Will are still present in earth existence.

What we are told in Genesis now appears to us in a new light. When we are told that what is expressed in Genesis as bara is a kind of meditative activity of the Elohim, we have to say that through their meditation the Elohim recreated, as out of memory, something which I have described as a complex of existence. But in a certain way there happened to the Elohim what happens to us when we try to create something out of memory, though we, of course, unfold our activity at a much lower level. Let me give you an example. A man goes to sleep at night. His world of thought and feeling sinks into oblivion, he passes into the condition of sleep. Suppose that the last thought he had before he fell asleep in the evening was of a rose beside him. This thought sinks into oblivion. In the morning the thought of the rose emerges again. Even if the rose no longer remained by him, the thought would be there. You must distinguish between two things. The one is the calling up in memory of the idea of the rose, which could occur even if the rose had been taken away. But if the rose is still there, he also perceives the actual rose. That is the other thing. In the same way you should distinguish two things in what I have described as the cosmic meditation of the Elohim. When we are told that on the third “day” of creation a cosmic meditation took place, that the Elohim made a division between the fluid and the solid, that they separate off the solid and call it earth, in this we must certainly think of the cosmic act of meditation of the Elohim from whom this creative thought springs; but in what arises to meet their musing we have to think of the Spirits of Will at work, now bringing forth once more the objective in its own substantial nature. Thus work the Spirits of Will, and so they have worked from the very beginning in everything of an earth nature.

You must make yourselves familiar with such ideas. You must get used to the thought that in what lies nearest to us, and which we often regard as very lowly, we sometimes meet very high and exalted Beings. It is easy to say of the solid element that it is only matter. Perhaps some may be tempted to say that it is no concern of the spiritual investigator—that matter is a low level of existence. Why should we bother with it? We pass beyond and above matter into the spiritual. Anyone who thinks in this way forgets that through countless ages high, exalted spiritual Beings have worked in the object of his contempt to bring it into this solid state. Actually, when we penetrate through external matter, through the elementary covering of the earth, to what has made this earth covering solid, it would be natural to feel the deepest reverence for the exalted Beings we call the Spirits of Will, who have laboured so long in this earth element to build up the solid ground upon which we tread, and which we ourselves bear within us in the earthly constituents of our physical bodies. It is these Spirits of Will, whom in Christian esotericism we also call the Thrones, who have in fact constructed—or rather condensed—the solid ground upon which we walk. The esotericists who gave names to what the Spirits of Will brought forth within our earth existence called these Spirits Thrones, because they built thrones upon which we are all the time being supported, as upon a solid ground, and upon which all the rest of our earth existence continues to base itself as upon firm seats. These ancient expressions contain something worthy of tremendous respect, something to which our feeling can fully respond.

If we now reascend from the solid to the watery condition, we may reflect that it took longer to build up and densify the earth element than the watery. Hence we have to look for the fundamental forces of the watery element in Beings of a lower hierarchy. For the condensation of the watery element, as it is at work around us in the elementary state, it needed only the activity of the Spirits of Wisdom, the Kyriotetes, the Dominions. Thus behind the solid basis we see the Spirits of Will, and, not behind physical water, but behind the forces of fluidity, we have to see the activity of the Spirits of Wisdom or Kyriotctes. When we ascend to the airy element, here we have to see a still lower hierarchy at work. In the airy formations around us, to the extent that they are brought about by forces lying behind them, we have also to see the effect of the activity of certain spirits of the hierarchies. Just as the Spirits of Wisdom work in the water nature, so the Spirits of Movement—the Dynameis, the Mights, as we are accustomed to call them in Christian esotericism—are at work in the aeriform. And when we come to the warmth nature, to the next stage of rarefaction, then it is the next lower hierarchy, the Spirits of Form—the Exusiai—who live and weave within it, the very spirits whom we have been speaking of for days as the Elohim. Up to the present we have, from quite a different direction, characterised the Spirits of Form as the Spirits who brooded in the warmth element. When we trace the order of the hierarchies in the downward direction from the Spirits of Will, through the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of Movement, we come back to our Elohim, to the Spirits of Form. You see how everything fits together, if the threads are woven in the right way. If you now try to bring sensitive and perceptive feeling into all this, you will say that behind all we see around us through our senses there lies an elementary existence—an earth element, but within this element in truth there live the Spirits of Will; a fluid element, in which in truth live the Spirits of Wisdom; an airy element, within which in truth live the Spirits of Movement; and a warmth element, wherein in truth live the Spirits of Form, the Elohim.

We must not think that we can make a clear separation between these spheres, that we can draw hard and fast boundaries between them. Our entire earth subsists in the fact that watery, aeriform and solid are working one within another, and that warmth permeates everything. We find warmth everywhere within the other stages of elementary existence. Hence we can also say that we find everywhere the activity of the Elohim, the real force behind warmth; it has poured itself out into everything. Although it necessarily required the activities of the Spirits of Will, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Movement in order to display itself, nevertheless throughout earth evolution this element of warmth, which is the manifestation of the Spirits of Form, permeated all the lower stages of existence. Thus in the solid element we shall find not just the substantial basis, the body of the Spirits of Will, but the body of the Spirits of Will permeated and interwoven by the Elohim themselves, by the Spirits of Form.

Now let us try to find the outer expression in the sense-world of what we have just been talking about. We have been describing what is in the super-sensible—an interweaving of the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, with the Spirits of Form, the Elohim. That is something which lies in the super-sensible. But everything super-sensible casts its shadow into the sense-world. What is the shadow in this case? That which in effect constitutes the body, the phenomenal existence, of the Spirits of Will is matter, outspread solid matter. The commonly accepted idea of matter is illusion. When the seer turns his attention to the places where matter is supposed to lead its dubious existence, he does not find the fantastic apparition of physical matter, for that is an empty dream. Matter as conceived by the physicists is pure fantasy. So long as these concepts are merely used as calculating devices it is all right. But when men think that they have discovered something self-existent and real, then they are dreaming. The theories of modern physics are in fact dreams. In so far as physicists take note of facts, describe facts—the real and actual which the eye can see, and what can be deduced from that by calculation—they are dealing with reality. But as soon as they begin to speculate about atoms and molecules, as if these were simply material entities, then they begin to spin a dream-universe; and one which reminds us of Felix Balde's ducats in my Mystery Play, when he says in the temple: “Fancy telling a man from whom you wanted to buy something: ‘I won't pay for it in solid coin, but I promise to condense some ducats out of some mist!’” This crude simile really does give a fair idea of the sort of physical theory that gaily assumes whole universes to have been constructed out of cosmic mist. It is pure fantasy to take the existence of atoms, as envisaged today, to be real. So long as atoms are looked upon merely as counters, or shorthand notes for what the senses actually show, we remain on solid ground. If one wants to penetrate behind the sense-perceptible basis, then one has to rise to the spiritual, and then one reaches the living movement of a basic substance which is none other than the body of the Thrones, permeated by the activity of the Spirits of Form. And how is that projected into our sense-world? In the sense-world it becomes the expanse of solid matter, but matter which is at no stage amorphous. The amorphous, the formless, only results from the fact that all existence which tends towards form gets crushed or ground down. None of the dust which we find in the world is dust by natural tendency. It is stuff which has been worn away. Matter has the tendency to take form, to become crystalline. Solid matter tends towards the form of the crystal. So we can say that it is the substance of the Thrones and of the Elohim which compresses itself into our sense-existence to become revealed as the solid matter we see around us. In the act of making manifest what we call matter, it announces itselfas the essential Being of the Thrones; in so far as this basic substance takes on form, takes on shape, it announces itself as the external revelation of the Elohim.

Look with what spiritual insight names were given in ancient times! The seers of old said to themselves: “If we look upon the material substance around us, it speaks to us in the Being of the Thrones; but it is permeated by an element of force which tries to bring it all into form, hence the name Spirits of Form.” In all these names there is a hint of the reality they stand for. If we look at the tendency towards crystalline form around us, we have at a lower level a manifestation of the forces which weave and hold sway in the substance of the Thrones as the Spirits of Form, as the Elohim themselves. That is their field of action. They are the smiths, forging in their warmth element the crystalline forms of the different earths and metals, out of the formless matter of the Spirits of Will. They are the Spirits who in their activity of warmth at the same time constitute the form principle in existence.

When we look at things in this way, we gaze into the living, moving being which stirs beneath our existence. And in this way we must accustom ourselves to see maya or illusion in all that we encounter in outer life. But we must not stop short at the empty theory that the external world is maya. To say that gets us nowhere. It only has meaning when we can penetrate through all the details of that maya to the real being behind it. Then it is useful. So let us accustom ourselves to see in all that happens around us something which, though certainly illusion, is at the same time truth. An appearance is precisely an appearance. As such it is a fact; but we do not understand it if we stop short at its apparition. We can only appreciate it and give it its proper value as appearance, if we go on beyond the appearance.

In our modern abstract way of looking at things everything gets mixed up. The seers of old could not confuse things in this way. They could not be content to see everywhere the same superficial forces as the modern physicist sees, who insists on embracing meteorology as well as physics within his sphere. For who today doubts that the same forces which are at work in elementary life—in the solid, the fluid and so on—are active too within the atmosphere, when water masses into cloud. I know quite well that the modern physicist cannot help assuming that, as physicist, he can aspire to be a meteorologist too, and that for him nothing makes sense unless he applies the same laws to the formation of the clouds around our earth as he applies to things on the earth. To the seer things are not so simple as that. As soon as things are traced back to their spiritual sources, the same thing is not seen everywhere. Different forces are at work when a gas condenses to liquid actually on earth, and when the gaseous, vaporous tendency in the environment of the earth forms watery cumuli. When the seer contemplates the way in which water arises in the atmosphere around us, he cannot say that it comes into being in the same way as on the ground; he cannot say that the water hovering above us comes into existence in the same way as the water which condenses in the soil, on the ground. For the truth is that the Beings who play their part in cloud formation are different from those who are at work in the formation of water on the earth. What I have just been saying as to the participation of the hierarchies in our elementary existence only applies on the earth from its centre point up to the surface where we ourselves are; the same forces do not extend as far as the formation of the clouds. There other Beings are at work. The scientific theory derived from modern physics is based on a very simple hypothesis. First it discovers certain physical laws, and then it says that these laws apply to the whole of existence. It overlooks all the differences in the different spheres of existence. It acts on the principle that in the night all cows are grey; but things are not the same everywhere, they are very different in different spheres!

Anyone who has become aware through clairvoyant investigation that on our earth the Spirits of Will or the Thrones hold sway in the earth element, the Spirits of Wisdom in the element of water, the Spirits of Movement in the aeriform element, the Elohim in the warmth, gradually attains to the knowledge that in the gathering of the clouds, in that unique process which goes on around the earth wherein the watery vapour becomes water, Beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Cherubim are at work. Thus in the solid matter of our elementary earth existence, we see a co-operation of the Elohim with the Thrones. In the element of air, in which the Spirits of Movement hold sway, we sec the Cherubim too at work in order that the water mounting upward from the realm of the Spirits of Wisdom may be enabled to accumulate into clouds. In the environment of our earth, the Cherubim hold sway as truly as do the Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of Movement within the elementary existence of our earth. And now if we look to the moving being of these cloud formations, we find hidden within them something still deeper, which only occasionally reveals itself—the thunder and lightning which bursts forth from them. This is not something which comes from nowhere. The seer knows that the Spirits whom we call the Seraphim move and have their being in this activity.

Within the limits of our earth sphere, if we include the atmosphere around us, we have now found every one of the hierarchical ranks. Thus, in what we experience with our senses we see the manifestation of hierarchical activity. It would be utter nonsense to regard the lightning flashing forth from the cloud as the same thing as what one sees when one strikes a match. Quite different forces are at work when the element of electricity, which prevails in the lightning, comes forth out of matter. There the Seraphim are at work.

Thus we have rediscovered the totality of the hierarchies in the earth's environment, just as we can find them in the cosmos without. The activity of these hierarchies is extended to all that we find in our immediate environment.

When you go through the pages of Genesis, when you contemplate the mighty course of world evolution depicted there, you discover that it is a recapitulation of the previous stages of evolution, a recapitulation of what evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and that finally man emerges as the crowning achievement of evolution. We have to understand from this Genesis account that the whole being and activity of the hierarchies is engaged in what is there taking place, that all is concentrated upon this last product of creation, upon this super-sensible being of whom it is said: The Elohim made a decision, saying Let us make man. In order to do this they wove together all their separate talents into one common activity. All the capacities which they had brought over from earlier stages they combined together, so as at length to produce man. Thus all the hierarchies which preceded that of man—hierarchies to which we give the names Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Spirits of Wisdom, Spirits of Movement, Spirits of Form, Archai or Spirits of Personality, Fire-Spirits or Archangels, and Angels—moved and had their being in this existence; and if we follow the Genesis account up to the crowning of the structure on the sixth “day” of creation with the appearance of man, if we pass in review the whole of the weaving essence of pre-human earthly evolution, we find all the different hierarchies already there. All these hierarchies had to work together to prepare for what at last emerges in man.

Thus we may venture to say that the seer or seers who were responsible for the Genesis account were aware that all the hierarchies we have mentioned had to work to make preparation for man. But they must also have been aware that for the creation of man himself, for the crowning fulfilment of this entire hierarchical order, help had to come from yet another quarter, from a source in a way still higher than any of these hierarchies. Thus we look up beyond the Seraphim to a divine Being unknown, only dimly sensed. Let us follow up the activity of some member of the hierarchical order, say of the Elohim; so long as they had not decided to put the finishing touch to their work by fashioning man, it sufficed for them to work in harmony with the other hierarchies up to the Seraphim. But then help had to come from a realm to which we can only raise our spiritual gaze in dim apprehension, it has to come from a sphere really above that of the Seraphim. For the Elohim to raise their creative activity to these dizzy heights, for them to obtain help from this source, something had to happen of which we must try to grasp the significance. They had, so to say, to grow beyond themselves. They had to acquire a greater ability than was theirs during the preliminary stages. To crown their work they had to unfold still higher powers. The Elohim, as a group, had to grow beyond themselves. Let us try to get an idea of how such a thing could happen. Let us start with an illustration from everyday life, to help us to form some idea of this. Take the development of a human being.

When we look at a tiny child on the threshold of earthly life, we know that a unitary consciousness has not yet been developed in him. It is only after some time that a child even utters the “I” which holds consciousness together. It is only then that the contents of his soul-life become knit together in a conscious unity. The human being grows to a higher stage through the bringing together of activities which in the baby are still decentralised. Thus, in the human being this concentration signifies an advance to a higher level. We can think of the progressive development of the Elohim as analogous to this. During the preparatory stages of man's development they practised a certain activity. This activity has taught them something, has helped to raise them to a higher stage. They have now acquired a certain unified consciousness as a group. That is as much as to say that they have not remained simply a group but have become a unity, and a unity possessing real being. What I am here saying is extremely important. Hitherto I have only been able to say that the several Elohim each had his own special capacity. Each of them was able to contribute something to the common resolve, the common picture of the human being they wished to form; and at the same time this human being was only an idea, upon which they could co-operate. To begin with, it was not real. Something real was first brought into existence after they had created the common product. But in the course of this work they themselves developed to a higher stage, developed their own unity to a reality, so that they were no longer seven, but a sevenfold whole. We can now speak of an “Elohimhood,” which reveals itself in a sevenfold way. This unity of the Elohim had first to come into being. It is something to which the Elohim work themselves up. The Bible is aware of this. The Bible is acquainted with the idea that the Elohim were first separate members of a group, and that they then form themselves into a unity; that to begin with they co-operate as members of a group, and later become directed out of a unified organism. This real unity, in which the Elohim act as the organs of a body, the Bible calls Jahve-Elohim.

That gives us a much deeper conception of Jahve, of Jehovah, than has so far been possible. That is why the Bible begins by speaking simply of the Elohim, and then, when the Elohim themselves have reached a higher stage, when they have advanced to a unity, it speaks of Jahve-Elohim. That is the deeper cause of the sudden emergence of the name of Jahve at the end of the work of creation.

This shows how necessary it is to have recourse to occult sources if one wishes to understand things. What does the biblical criticism of the nineteenth century make of this? It says: “We find in one passage the name Elohim, in another the name Jahve. Clearly the two passages derive from different religious traditions; we have to distinguish between what has come down from a people who worshipped the Elohim, and what has been handed down by a people who worshipped Jahve. And whoever wrote the account of the Creation which we possess merged the two traditions. We must separate them again.” This line of research has gone so far that today we have Rainbow Bibles, with what is said to derive from the one source printed in blue, and what comes from the other in red. There are such Bibles! Only, unfortunately, the division has to be so made that part of a sentence has to be blue and the other part red, because the first clause is said to derive from one people, and the second from the other. It is astonishing that the main and subordinate clauses should fit so beautifully together that it only needed a collator to join up the two traditions! Immense industry has been expended upon this biblical exegesis of the nineteenth century, perhaps more than on any other scientific or historical research; and it fills us with melancholy and a deep sense of tragedy. The very thing which should enlighten humanity upon the most spiritual matters has lost its connection with spiritual sources.

It is as if someone were to say: “Of course, if we compare the passage where Ariel speaks in the second part of Faust with the doggerel in the first part, the style is quite different. It is not possible that the same man could have written both, and Goethe must therefore be a mythical figure.” Through being cut off from occult sources, the fruit of this immense labour, this devoted industry, is worth just about as much as the conclusion of someone who denied the existence of Goethe because he could not believe that two such different things as the style of Faust in its first and second parts could emanate from the same man. Here we get a glimpse into one of the deep tragedies of human life; here we see how necessary it is that minds should again turn to the sources of spiritual life. Spiritual knowledge is only possible when men again seek for the living spirit. They will do so, for to do so is an irresistible urge of the human soul. And the whole strength of our anthroposophical inspiration rests upon our confidence that there is something in the human soul which draws men's hearts to seek once more for a connection with spiritual sources and which will lead them to understand the true basis of religious documents. Let us imbue ourselves with this confidence and we shall reap the true fruits of a theme which should guide us into the spiritual life.

In our efforts to understand existence it is our practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually associated with it today—for instance, we must apply it to the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the lower animals and draw the conclusion—even from the standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one—that the human has evolved out of the animal—as if the higher could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution, that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today, was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to the Moon evolution.

The most outstanding difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.¹ There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When we have an object in front of us—let us say a rose—we say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction. Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it, but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.” Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below, but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it was throughout the Moon evolution.

Another quality of this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light. It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated with the quality of inwardness.

There was yet another essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects would have been there at all as they are for our present earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was there—on a lower, dreamlike level—was something similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to develop clairvoyance.

Such a training progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play, Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius. These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane—Maria—that he is able to look back again and to discriminate between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.

The stage of consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you. Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself. To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes. And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes. Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external presence of spiritual Beings.

It would be a still greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour, usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.

I have often called attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect of the truth is that without light the eye could never have developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which weaves and floods throughout the cosmos—that is the cause of the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up; then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing. They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage, through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness. The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way, it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him, but it was reflected in pictures from without.

But on the Moon such a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them, called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that our present objective consciousness could develop.

Such a consciousness as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men—that they experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human, earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought this earth about were needed—for that purpose man had to be there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say: “Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say: “We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through space with this light.” But they could never have said: “We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.

When at a certain stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said, Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them, to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies, is simply that something new has come about.

Moreover it does not say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was beautiful—or good.² Note that in the Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and “good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful” covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in the external.” This is the significance of the word “beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations are nothing but tiresome pedantry.

Let us go a step further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth; we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes about through the severing of what was previously a unity.

We have seen that the earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether; then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth. Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in so far as the Beings in its environment—or if you like the bodies in its environment—take part in the life of the earth. Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the three higher elementary states—light-ether, the ether of spiritual sound, and life-ether—we must place them in the sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.

The Sun separated off for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the light was for the first time active from without, but not then as light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light, but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be reflected by objects.

It was natural that this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light. Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say “they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived. The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with what can be observed through Spiritual Science.

Thus the seer who wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second “day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...

Now look at Genesis. On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light, that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual scientific method.

Here again is a knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have not known what to make. There have been commentators who said: “What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted? The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have another example—I could quote many—of what fills us with immense reverence for such ancient records.

We could learn much from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally that nothing essential must be omitted.

We have now gained an insight into the composition of what are called the first and second “days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him—a feeling such as should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.

• 1. Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in book form as Atlantis and Lemuria (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).
• 2. The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”