The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The study of parables and their interpretation is all too easily drawn into the current materialistic worldview, for materialism, even if it is not so strongly felt and admitted by individuals, has taken hold of our entire age, of the whole way of thinking. Not only natural science, but philosophy and even theology have been affected to some extent. One kind of materialism can be easily cured, so to speak, because it is only theoretical and can easily be shown to be absurd. It is much more difficult with the materialistic way of thinking, which, for example, sees in Jesus nothing more than a selfless, pure human being and then has drawn this figure so completely down into the materialistic.

There were times when the parables could not be interpreted highly enough; in the first centuries, the interpreters of the Gospels did everything they could to identify the Christ in Jesus; today, on the other hand, we see that newer theologians have no inclination to see in Jesus anything other than an idealized person who, while being somewhat higher than Goethe or Schiller, may in no case, in their judgment, rise so significantly above humanity. For these modern theologians, Jesus is simply the simple man from Nazareth, and such a belittling of Jesus' personality is much worse materialism than the theoretical kind.

Things like the parables must not be reduced to the generally human, otherwise only pure materialism will be spread in the field of religious thinking. Salvation can only come from the fact that these documents do not contain mere facts, but universal truths. One must delve deeply into these truths in order to recognize the right intentions from them, and not speculate about them.

How, for example, has the Lord's Prayer been viewed in the esoteric, which I have already been able to talk to you about! Only those who go back to the occult schools can find the right thing.

So let us also draw from these right sources with regard to today's parable: It reads:

He spoke But he spoke also to his disciples, saying, There was a certain rich man, which had a steward; and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, and said unto him, How is it that I hear of thee? give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward. Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do, for my lord taketh away from me the stewardship: I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed. I will know what I may do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. So he called every one of his lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord? And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thine own bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to the other, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thine own bill, and write forty. And the lord commended the unrighteous steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in the least is unrighteous also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if you are not faithful in what is another man's, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. When the Pharisees heard all this they were mocking him. And he said unto them, “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men, but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” The law and the prophets were preached until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the law. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries a widow commits adultery. (Luke 16:1-18)

To understand this parable, it is first necessary to see where it is found; it is found in the Gospel of Luke. The apparent diversity of the four Gospels is due to the fact that their authors had not gone through the same mystery school. For example, the Gospel of John is based on the Greek mystery schools. Luke, on the other hand, drew from the deep mysteries of the therapists and Essenes, and that is why the Gospel of Luke has a completely different tone of explanation than that of John, for example. In this sense, everything cannot be lumped together.

The Gospel of Luke, as I said, was born out of the attitude of the therapists and Essenes, which consisted in pointing out to people in all their striving to the powers of their own soul. The keynote of this Gospel will only be grasped in the right way if one takes into account the saying of these Essenes: You shall bring to maturity the thoughts within you that take care of the poor, the afflicted, the laden. Luke's gospel is a gospel of poverty and is thus most intimately connected with the attitudes of the therapists and Essenes.

This noble brotherhood was the first to emphasize the equality of all people before God. They allowed their bodies only the most necessary nourishment, and of the greatest purity of morals. They were doctors of body and soul to their fellow human beings; no one was allowed to heal for the sake of reward. Their beneficial work extended to the huts of the poor as well as to the palaces of the rich. Those who are not familiar with the circumstances of this time do not realize what an eminent progress was associated with the appearance of this order, and only then do we understand why Luke's gospel has this particular tone. The confrontation between the rich and those who owe him money comes to the fore at first; it is not at all a matter of accusing the rich man in some way, but of putting the debtors, the poor, in the right light. Thus, it is not a good idea to want to recognize God, the infinitely rich, in the rich man; for it is simply said of the man that he is a rich man. But is his way of thinking also such that he wants to exploit people, or is it different, and would it not be possible that the steward's actions were based solely on the good intention of reducing the debts of the poor?

The steward had brought the economy into disarray; now he has to give account and fears that he will be dismissed and therefore he is trying to provide for himself. He cannot work, does not want to beg, but he wants to have a place to stay and he is now trying to find one with those whom he had wronged. It is his own fault that they were charged too much, so he says to the first one: You no longer owe me 100 tons of oil, but 50, and to the other: You no longer owe me 100 bushels of wheat, but 80, and with that the debtors are satisfied, he has eased the heavy burden on them as much as possible. So what did he do? He used his master's wealth to do justice to the poor, thereby doing them a favor.

That's what matters. Now let us remember that the rich man says to his steward, “You have acted wisely”; he does not want to be an exploiter, but thinks to himself, Now I like you.

Such an attitude was new to the scribes of the time; never before had anyone been induced to do good in this way. It achieved something that had previously been considered inadmissible, even impossible. The debtors, the poor, would have found no way out of their dire situation; here they are referred to as the children of light, that is, as those who accept the teaching of wisdom, in contrast to the children of the world. These, the Pharisees, are stingy and only act according to the rigid letter of the law; they do not want to help the poor, but the steward was always the one who did something for the poor.

And now we can also apply the parable to a higher truth and do not hesitate to describe God himself as the rich man who, although no one compares him to an exploiter, is always happy to give of his inexhaustible riches and praises the steward for using the divine riches to do good to the poor.

But the parable also becomes a universal truth through Jesus' subsequent words. Jesus says that the law and the prophets prophesied until John. (Luke 16:16) This is a reference to the higher spiritual truth; it refers to the great change that occurred through Christ Jesus. Before that, there was the rigid law, the wording of which people scrupulously adhered to, but which could not prevent the gap between the wealthy and the poor from growing ever wider, and the contradictions from developing into a harshness and acrimony that we can hardly imagine today. This state of affairs, carried to its extreme point, was finally resolved by the fact that Christ Jesus, although He rightly left the Law in full force, transferred its seat and its work into the souls of individual human beings.

As can be seen later, the Law not only does not lose any of its importance as a result, but it is intensified and refined in a way that was previously unimagined and unknown. In the serious and urgent admonishment that Jesus addresses to the Pharisees, who justify themselves before men, the parable of the prodigal son also passes before our soul. The son who always stayed at home is less favored by the father than the “prodigal” son who has undergone the test, who has returned to the fatherland, who has been resurrected. This is a perfect expression of what grace means, which paves the way from a loving heart to another loving heart. The law is the network that bound people together; grace flows into the inner being and becomes the living law in the soul. It is not for nothing that Jesus says, “I am the fulfillment of the law.” (Matthew 5:17-18) The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be forced; it does not come with external gestures; only those who try to reach it with the power of their soul will find it, and that is by Christ becoming alive in them.

In the successive periods, the most diverse impulses prevail in the soul. So what is the law in relation to grace? It is the one that did not come in through Christianity, but what was there through the steward. Before his appearance, Christianity was not yet the appropriate religion for people; they still needed the law, they still needed stewards.

This steward is replaced by the work of Christ on humanity and must give account. The law has become an unjust one over time, like all systems that are temporarily suitable for people. The oppression of the poor is mentioned again and again in the Gospel of Luke. Christ teaches a new way of thinking and acting in place of this way of thinking and acting. Now we understand when it says in this Gospel: “The law and the prophets were preached until John; and since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and people are forcing their way into it.” (Lk 16:16)

When interpreting the parables, nothing should be left out; only in this way will we gain the context. Now let us go one step further:

The law had led to the oppression of the poor; these, the children of light, heard that something new was to come, that they were to give account. They can now cite nothing but the innermost feelings of their hearts if they want to make some excuse. The oppressors have not heard the voice of charity so far, but now they are trying to give back the unjust mammon, the vague call for a new era has also reached them, in which injustice should not continue, the children of the world cannot indulge in hypocrisy, the new external and internal conditions of the world force them to behave differently than before. All this justifies that Christ Jesus can claim this change in the spirit of the time for himself. And I also say to you: “Make friends with the unrighteous mammon, so that when you now suffer hunger, they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:9) He can say: “You see from this steward how one should behave in the face of poverty, and you can truly take an example from it, but you must be urged to do so by the innermost impulses of your soul; then you will find enough for your needs when you are in need yourselves.”

In the old dispensation, the children of the world were wiser than the children of light, but that will be reversed later. You must not believe that it can only be beneficial to adhere strictly to the rigid letter of the law; the children of the world have generally always spoken of righteousness, but have not in reality kept to it in the slightest. From the steward's actions, we can see how the law should have been applied in its deepest inner sense.

"If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is yours?” (Luke 16:11-12) These words point to the replacement of the old era by a new one, a new social order is being introduced in which each shall receive what is his. And now, once again, the point is summarized: ”Be serious.” There the old attitude with its harshness according to the letter of the law, here the new attitude, which knows nothing but responding to the needs of the other, recognizing in this an equal entity, while at the same time being carried by the consciousness of serving God.

“You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13); mammon is the name given to the gods of obstacles, while Christ and wisdom bring forward. Mammon is the term used for everything that man wants to grab for the narrow circle of his “ego”; but this is only of secondary importance. This embodied selfishness is shown to us in the Gospel by Judas Iscariot, who contributes to Christ being led to his death.

“Old times - new times.” It is now understandable that the Pharisees mocked, of whom it says, “They were greedy.” (Luke 16:14) The translation is not quite correct; it would be better to say, “They had a mammonistic attitude.” Therefore, Christ Jesus says, “But God knows the hearts,” and that is what will matter, because what is high among men is an abomination before God; only true spiritual power determines the real order of rank. Charity is not against the law, but as an impulse for the fullest fulfillment of the law, of one's own free will. At the time of Christ, the moment had come when charity had to appear before the hearts of men hardened completely. But Christ Jesus continues: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail” (Luke 16:17); “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries her when she is divorced from her husband commits adultery.” (Luke 16:18) – If we now turn to Matthew, chapter 5, we find that Jesus says that true marriage must neither be broken nor divorced (Matthew 5:30-31). We who are present know the concept of marriage only according to the law, and of course the completely new concept of Jesus, which places the focus of married life so completely within the soul, is the greatest possible contrast. Such words must have seemed incomprehensible to most people because their hearts were hardened, as Jesus often emphasized in his speeches. Instead of being bound by the form of the law, here the circumstances are based on the power of the innermost impulses. Therefore, through the realization of Jesus' teachings, the most glorious conditions must arise from the heart. In the analogous passage in Mark (Mk 10:2-10), there is also talk of marriage and the possibility of divorce and the consequences, but the whole marital relationship is so delicate in reality that it cannot be transferred to another. The teachings expressed in the parable point to the change brought about by Christ Jesus. — Having considered the gospel in this way, we may also compare the rich man with the world ruler, who is always happy to give from his inexhaustible abundance and praises those who make use of this wealth to do good to others. You see, the parable is written entirely in the spirit of the Gospel of Luke, and so it should be observed, otherwise it would not be understood. As already mentioned at the beginning, when studying individual parts of the Gospel, it is always necessary to consider which evangelist wrote them, each of whom came from a different school.

There is not much left to explain about this parable. Theosophy is always a clear guide for such considerations. We should not brood and fantasize, but draw wisdom from these words ourselves, then we will find what remains hidden from the keen minds of liberal theologians and at the same time we will not run the risk of being drawn into the teachings of material fantasists who, despite their new teachings about the vortices of atoms, they cannot in their own way get any closer to the essence of phenomena.

At present, however, it seems as if humanity is guided by purely material profanes who accept nothing other than what can be perceived with the bodily senses. Holding on to phrases about harmony and universal brotherhood does not benefit the progress of humanity either. If I say to the stove, “Be warm,” it does not spread warmth because of that; you have to heat it, and only then will it become warm and warm others. So admonitions of brotherhood are of no use either; you have to give people wisdom, then brotherhood develops by itself.

The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte once said meaningful words about the interaction between two layers of the population in one of his inspiring “Speeches to the German Nation”. He said that the spiritual life of a nation can only be directly active if there is full understanding between the way in which the leaders at the forefront of this spiritual life express themselves and the way in which those who receive, who listen in their hearts and souls to what the leaders of the nation have to say, conceptualize and feel. And Fichte called those nations more or less dead nations in terms of their intellectual life, in which a stratum of learned education, a stratum of higher intellectual life, speaks a language and has a thought life that does not immediately find a living, full echo in those who are meant to listen to the voices of the leaders, to the voices of those who have something to proclaim about the highest questions of existence, about the riddles and the secrets of the world that are hidden in our existence.

What the philosopher and orator said at the time in relation to a nation, we can also apply to other forms of spiritual life, and indeed we see it confirmed more and more in what we experience in the field of religious coexistence between those who are supposed to listen, those who have a longing and a need to receive something, and the leaders in this field of spiritual life, in the field of religious life.

If we take a closer look at the last few decades, or perhaps the whole century, and survey these facts, we see how, in relation to those documents that have actually provided spiritual nourishment for thousands of years for broad sections of our population, how a scholarship is asserting itself in relation to these religious documents that is no longer directly understood by the broadest sections of the population, by those who are to be heard. We see how those who are scholars, leaders, and teachers in this regard have different things to say about the religious documents of Christianity and what is connected with them, and have different things to say about what has created a deep gulf between this scholarship and the immediate religious needs of wider and wider sections of the population: the two groups no longer understand each other properly. If you look at the matter with an unbiased eye, you will notice this very, very soon.

Theologians and other learned circles who deal with the Bible, whether scientifically or popularly, with that document that is the most important for our national life, have been led by their research to a way of understanding what these documents are , what value and origin they have, and of the content of the same, to a way of understanding them so that what they have to say no longer finds a living response, no longer can ignite the living life in the hearts of those who are supposed to listen.

When we take such popular writings on these matters into our hands, through which we are to educate ourselves, books that are distributed among the people in thousands and thousands of copies, when we look at them and ask ourselves: Is this scholarship such that what is spoken of it and distributed through thousands and thousands of channels into the people, is it such that it can satisfy the deepest religious needs of man, that the simple man, who seeks spiritual nourishment in religious documents above all things, seeks something that solves the highest questions of existence for him, the riddles of world life, is what is offered here such that this man can find what he seeks?

If we look at the facts at hand impartially, we have to say: little, very little, of real, truly deep religious feeling is to be found in our theological scholarship, and little, very little, of what comes out of this erudition, approaches us, little of it is suitable to penetrate the heart, to uplift and unfold the mind. We need only look around a little, and this will be confirmed.

Let us take a look at what has been developed in this direction over the last 100 years: The time is over when the Old and New Testaments were considered books in which truly inspired personalities once solved the riddles of existence under higher inspiration, as needed for the religious mind. For many, many centuries, there were times when the widest circles of the population listened so intently to the words of the Holy Scripture, as if the highest truths were proclaimed here, then, when they received it - not directly, but indirectly through the mouths of priests and sages, what the religious documents offer, that they then listened as if they were convinced that when the content was proclaimed to them, they were given the highest truths about the spiritual-divine realities underlying our everyday sensual life. There was a time when people were convinced that the Bible is no ordinary book, but that it originated from the very Being that has also brought forth all the phenomena that surround us. The Bible was spoken of as an inspired book, and it was felt to be a book whose words resounded from spiritual worlds themselves, whose words therefore proclaimed the eternal wisdoms that mankind needs on its path of development in the course of world evolution. In those ancient times, no one dared to think of criticizing this book in any way. That this book has been subjected to criticism is the result of 100 years of research by scholars. They no longer had the same reservations about accepting this book as it is, they asked themselves: Do the individual parts agree with each other, do they not contradict the scientific findings of other fields of research? Are they such that one could think it was an inspired book from beginning to end? The answer to these questions provides the basis for a critical work that has been done by the science of our time for 100 years. And what has come to light in the process? It is not necessary for our purpose – which is to consider the relationship of wisdom literature to the Bible – to talk about biblical criticism; we will say a few words about the spirit of this biblical criticism only in this introduction.

For example, it has been seen – I can only touch on what is important here briefly and summarily – that there is a peculiarity in the first parts of the Old Testament: two ways in which the divine presence in the world is named. It was noticed that in certain parts the divine presence is referred to as Yahweh, in other parts in a kind of plural: the Elohim.

And yet another observation has been made that seemed to point to something: that right at the beginning of the Old Testament, as is believed, a fact: the creation of man, is told twice. The creation is told in the seven-day work, and it is told how, finally, on the sixth day, man, as the crowning glory of creation, was created as it says, “male-female” (Genesis 1:27). Strangely enough, they say, this creation of man, and specifically of male-female man, is retold! Now the matter is presented as if man had already existed, as if no animals had yet been created around him. In short, critical research says that the same fact is being retold.

Furthermore, many passages were found in the writings named after Moses that could not be believed, and for which evidence was also believed to have been found, that they originated in the sense of the old opinion of the great inspired Moses himself, for example when it is said about the land of Canaan, so that it was seen: It could not be said in this old time, in which Moses lived, in this way about this land, but only in a later time. Then they examined the style in which it was written and found that the individual parts showed a great difference in expression; in one case they found it to be more popular, in the other more priestly and learned.

I would have to tell you much, much more in order to explain the spirit and meaning of this biblical research to you in detail. We do not need this, we just have to realize that under the impression of such critical research, scholars came to say: a unified meaning, a unified author cannot have written these so different, pieced-together parts that we call the individual books of the Bible. So they came to say to themselves: These most diverse parts originated at the most diverse times, formed in the most diverse manner among the people and were then collected. In particular, two parts were distinguished: a first part and a second, distinctly different part. Each of these parts was to have its special writer. The former was called the Jahwist. And to this Jahvist was attributed everything that seemed to be more original and imbued with popular force. Thus everything in the style of the Paradise Narrative, where Adam is led into paradise and Eve is created out of his own substance, was attributed to this source.

All of this was attributed to one source. On the other hand, everything that seemed more like speculation was attributed to another source. This source was called the so-called Priest Book, which alone was said to contain the more scholarly, priestly parts that were more speculative in character, like the six- or seven-day work. So, little by little, these stylistic and source investigations have been extended to the smallest individual parts, yes, one might say scraps, and traced back to their various origins.

Yes, today there are Bible translations, the so-called rainbow Bibles, in which the individual parts that are said to come from different sources are printed in different colors. Often you can even see the color changing in the middle of a line, in the middle of a sentence, for example, which means that this sentence is considered to come from different sources. The parts that are attributed primarily to the Yahwist are said to have originated in David's time, the others after the Babylonian exile. Thus the Old Testament gradually emerged as a collection, as something that had been compiled over a long period of time. In the way it was conceived, what was lost was necessarily that which, in its ancient greatness and significance as religious sentiment, was incorporated into what had been found in the Bible as revelation through centuries, even millennia.

Seen in this light, we have to say that the attitude of the broadest sections of society towards the Bible has changed more than people are usually willing to admit.

More than those who still have a deep religious fervor realize, this gap exists between those who are supposed to say what the Bible is actually about and those who are supposed to believe. And anyone who is able to look impartially into these circumstances, who has an unbiased view of the spiritual currents of our time, will see that the time is not far off when this gulf between theological scholarship and warm religious feeling among the people can no longer be bridged if things continue in this way, if nothing changes.

Religious life in the old way is no longer possible under these circumstances, and if you just don't want to close your eyes, you can see the time when Bible criticism – despite all the objections of those who want to cover up these facts , where this Bible criticism must have a killing effect on religious life, the gap will become unbridgeable if another spiritual current does not give the matter a completely different turn, a direction that brings about such a change. This spiritual current can only be one that has been referred to as theosophical wisdom for several decades.

Here in Munich, we have discussed the most diverse topics over the course of this winter; today and tomorrow, we want to consider the relationship between this theosophical school of thought and the view of this religious document, the Bible, which is so significant for our cultural life.

The theosophical approach to the world has to take a very peculiar attitude toward the Bible. Our conception of the Bible cannot and must not be something that is extraneous to the necessary historical course of our modern spiritual life, but something that is completely in line with the program of our modern spiritual life.

Theosophy seeks to renew and restore direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds. All those who have imbued their lives with this theosophical school of thought are firmly convinced that behind the world that our senses see there is a spiritual world, a world of spiritual beings. It is further the firm conviction of this same school of thought that this spiritual world is not something inaccessible and unsearchable for man, but something that man can search and recognize. Particularly under the influence of the materialistic school of thought in recent times, something like timidity, like hopelessness, has entered into our quest for knowledge: never in the development of the world has there been so much talk about the limits of knowledge as there is in our time, when people talk about the real why of existence, about the real creative and active entities that stand behind the world of the senses. Today, people easily say: Our powers of knowledge are not sufficient for this, we cannot explore this.

Our school of thought, however, spiritual science, says: We believe in development quite honestly and with all the consequences; not only everything else in the world, but also the human being develops, and the way he stands before us today, his development is not complete, he can continue this development at any moment, but especially the spiritual development. There are forces slumbering in him that can be drawn from his soul and then become active in higher knowledge.

To those who speak of the limits of knowledge, spiritual science says: Certainly, you are right, quite right, when you say that the source of existence cannot be explored with the powers of knowledge you are talking about. If you only speak of these powers you are quite right; but we, we do not speak of these powers in the field of spiritual science, but of powers which man does not have from the outset, but which everyone can have if he does not close himself to them by saying: I do not want to go further. Man lives in this world, which surrounds him with color and sound. Through his senses and with his mind limited to the world of the senses, he gains knowledge in it. In the same way, the higher worlds also surround him: but for them he has not yet brought any organs within himself into activity; he lives in these higher worlds like the blind man in the physical world of colors and light. But man can also live in this higher world as one who sees.

Just as the man born blind, when operated on, enters into a world that was previously unknown to him, while it has always been around him, so does the one to whom the spiritual eye is opened, to whom the spiritual senses are revealed, enter into a new world that has also surrounded him before, but which he could not perceive because he has not yet opened the organs for it. Only someone who does not want to think logically can dispute the possibility of such a higher world. Only someone who can see for himself is qualified to decide what it looks like in this world.

So what does this spiritual science have to say about religious documents? For anyone who really engages with the subject, it is a source of ever new and ever greater satisfaction and uplift. But before we discuss this in more detail, we would like to touch on something else.

In our time, there are four ways of relating to religious documents. These four types can be experienced by someone born into our time, who seeks out everything that seems capable of giving them satisfaction. Let us assume that a person is born and then introduced to a more or less naive religious life through school and family, so that he first receives the ideas of the Bible in a naive way, as the naive believer receives them. He believes in it for a while. Then, perhaps in our present time, the time comes for him when he becomes, as they say, as many people say, “enlightened,” when he becomes an “enlightened” person, and then he moves away from his old childlike faith!

What I am about to say is not meant as mockery, but as an expression of the truly tragic experience of many, many of our contemporaries. They come to the conclusion: When I look at modern science with its irrefutable results, which contradict so much of what I was taught and what I accepted with religious faith, I cannot help but have to give up my beautiful childhood faith. It is often tragic for such people to part with such beliefs; many cling to their old beliefs with all their hearts, but their sense of the truth of natural science separates them from them. They then become “enlightened people”; they try to be satisfied with what purely external natural science provides them with. These are the “clever people”, among whom many often look down with a certain arrogance and even some mockery on the naive believers.

Strangely enough, a group has now formed within these circles, within freethinking itself, which has come to the conclusion that these religious documents do not merely contain naive children's beliefs. They say to themselves: Admittedly, the things we are told here are not facts, but they are symbols for developmental processes - for inner development, if you like - and so now one person interprets these things in one way, the other in a different way, and so on. Recently a group has formed within the so-called freethinkers that has taken on the symbolic interpretation of the Bible. When you look at the work of this group, you have to say that you find many beautiful, spiritual things in it, they have thought about many myths and legends in an excellent way. But here the worst arbitrariness prevails. Everything depends on the interpreter's state of mind. One thinks more, the other less, into the things he wants to explain. What each one knows and is able to understand, that is just different. Some come to these points of view; but some can also shorten the way by leaving out one or the other of them.

Finally, after going through such preliminary stages, some people are able to truly penetrate the religious documents with the help of spiritual science, and there they notice something peculiar. They increasingly notice that what is written in the Bible can be taken literally, truly literally. It dawns on them like a new light, like a revelation, and on a higher level they come back to recognizing the value and significance of these religious documents. This is an experience that many have certainly gone through through theosophy. Starting out with a sincere striving for knowledge, they came to throw everything, absolutely everything, overboard. After a shorter or longer period of time, they came to Theosophy, guided by this striving for truth, and through it, the religious documents became valuable to them again, and what they once gave them, they have regained! The deeper one penetrates into the meaning of this wonderful book, the more one recognizes that everything, everything is as it is told to us there, and that precisely the passages that may have most provoked our disbelief, our criticism and our ridicule, can reveal the deepest spiritual truths to us.

The position of spiritual science in relation to the Bible and other religious documents will also be characterized from another perspective. You see, what Theosophy can be in relation to the Bible has long been established in another area of spiritual life, in the field of natural science, in order to determine its position in relation to another great document. What has taken place since Copernicus and Galileo in the field of external knowledge of nature is now taking place in our time in the field of religious knowledge and in relation to the religious scriptures through spiritual science, through Theosophy.

I would like to tell you a fact that will make this clearer: Throughout the Middle Ages, in all schools, what Aristotle had achieved was regarded as an incontrovertible fact with regard to the external knowledge of nature; for his time, he had been an important naturalist and collector of scientific knowledge. What he had compiled in his writings about nature is truly astounding. These were available as books, and at that time they were considered to be dogmatic documents about nature. Throughout the Middle Ages, teaching was based on these books; what he had to say about stars, plants, animals and human beings, and what they contained as a new revelation, was considered the ultimate authority. Then came Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and their great leader Giordano Bruno; a completely new position with regard to knowledge of nature took hold. These people turned their gaze to nature itself; they no longer asked, “What did Aristotle say about this or that organ of the human body?” Instead, they examined everything themselves, they looked at the objects of nature themselves with their instruments and methods; they wanted to see with their own eyes, and for them only what they had found themselves was considered the authoritative thing, and no longer what Aristotle had said.

A short story may show how difficult it was for them to overcome their old faith in Aristotle and how deeply rooted it was. Through his detailed studies of the human body, Galileo had found various things that could not be reconciled with Aristotle. It is interesting to note what an old Aristotelian, a friend of Galileo, once said to him in this regard. He was invited by Galileo and shown by him to a human organism, and shown that one of Aristotle's assertions turned out to be incorrect when observed on the human body. Galileo wanted to make it clear to his friend that the true source of science about nature is the direct knowledge of nature itself. This friend, then, looked at what Galilei showed him, and had to admit, like it or not, that Galilei was apparently right, but he continued to swear by Aristotle's claim as only some orthodox theologian can swear by the Bible today: “It's true,” he said, “the facts are like this, but Aristotle said it differently, and I believe Aristotle more than my own eyes.” Tradition and prejudice have such a strong effect on people.

But today we see something different, and we have to say: Such are the changes of the times; another fact has taken the place of those prejudices. Today we are imbued with the attitude that we must approach nature itself directly if we want to come to a correct understanding. We are aware that it is not old traditions that can be decisive for us, but our judgments and insights gained through our own observations. At the same time, however, we are learning more and more through science to recognize that people in those days had not yet understood Aristotle at all, but had misunderstood him completely. Today we have come so far that we are making the amazing discovery that Aristotle meant the right thing after all, if only we understand him correctly. Thus, it is only through the fact that we have gained access through the direct knowledge of the facts of nature that we have been given the opportunity to recognize tradition in its true value, in its true meaning.

Where natural science stood at that time, today we stand in the presence of the spiritual science of the Bible. Through the stream of spiritual science that is brought to humanity today, the human being stands in relation to the spiritual world as the sensual human being of Galileo's time stood in relation to external, real nature. Just as there have been researchers since that time who approach the sensual facts of nature directly with their methods and instruments, so there will be more and more researchers who look directly into the spiritual worlds and directly recognize what is told in the Bible. This has been in preparation for a long time. It has been achieved for natural science; for spiritual science it must be achieved.

The Germans have a saga that points to this in its meaning: the Faust saga. Faust – it is said of him that he put the Bible behind the bench for a while. He no longer wanted to be a theologian, but a man of the world and a physician, because he put the Bible behind the bench for a while. He wanted to approach the secrets of nature directly and gain direct wisdom.

Thus, spiritual wisdom does not look to the Bible for the content and knowledge of the spiritual world, but independently of any tradition, it seeks to explore the factual content of the spiritual world and approaches the records with what it already has in order to test the records in its findings. If I am to characterize this position for you, I would like to do so with an example. What every schoolboy learns in geometry today was once discovered by ancient researchers. What schoolboys learn today is called Euclidean geometry, after that great Greek researcher to whom we owe the oldest work on these things. Is every schoolboy instructed to take the first work by Euclid and learn from it what he has to learn? The schoolboy knows nothing about these ancient documents; he learns from within himself, from his own ability to grasp the right thing, from the rightness, clarity and truth of the matter itself, and only much later, when he studies history, does it become apparent to him that the right thing is already contained in that work by Euclid and can therefore be found there.

Just as geometry is true in itself, so are the facts of the spiritual world true in themselves, and just as little as one needs the old documents to research the theorems of geometry today, so little does one need old documents to recognize the truths of the spiritual world. This is supposed to be the direct path, the immediate way into the spiritual world, which is shown by modern spiritual science. Here the Bible is the historical document that, like Euclid, is not necessary for understanding, but can confirm what has been found independently. So you see that spiritual science is as independent as possible of the Bible and is therefore also called upon to research it and recognize its real value. Let us ask ourselves: Who is actually called upon to recognize this? Our example can lead us to the answer: Only someone who is actually familiar with geometry can be called upon to recognize the value and significance of a work on geometry! Likewise, we must say: Only someone who is able to explore the content of the Bible from the spiritual world itself is called upon to judge and recognize its value and significance! As you can see, a completely new relationship to the Bible as a document has emerged through spiritual science.

Now, in the light of spiritual science, the things that “critical research” has brought to light about the Bible appear in a peculiar light! It seems relatively unimportant, quite unimportant and irrelevant when the individual pieces, parts of this document were written, created, we are only interested in this as a historical fact. But we gauge the value of the book itself as what we ourselves recognize as the content, by the correctness of the content.

Those who study this Bible from the point of view of spiritual science sometimes have the feeling when considering modern Bible criticism - I myself once had this feeling towards philological scholarship, sometimes towards this critical philology - because modern theology is, after all, only philology - a feeling that I will now describe to you.

It seems far-fetched, but there is a very beautiful prose hymn to nature by Goethe, which I have mentioned several times. In it, Goethe expresses his religious conviction in his enthusiastic way at the time:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms. ... People are all in her, and she is in everyone. ... Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most crude philistinism has something of her genius. ... One obeys her laws even when one resists them; one works with her even when one wants to work against her. ... It is everything. It rewards itself [and punishes itself], delights itself and torments itself. ... It has brought me in, it will also lead me out. I trust it. It may do with me as it likes; it will not hate its work. I did not speak of it; no, what is true and what is false, it has spoken everything. All is its fault, all is its merit.

And then he concludes with the words:

Her crown is love, and she holds a few sips from the cup of love harmless for a lifetime of toil.

This is an essay full of many pearls of wisdom steeped in enthusiasm. Goethe was once asked in his later years when he had written this essay. In response to this question, you will then find a second essay in which Goethe says that he no longer remembers when he wrote this first essay, and that he no longer remembers that he wrote it, but that it is entirely an expression of his views at the time, and that it is quite possible that he wrote it. What Goethe said here has given learned Goethe researchers much to think about and occasion for incredible research; there was a time when Goethe researchers spent long, long hours investigating whether this essay was written by Goethe himself or not.

When I was appointed to the Goethe Archive in Weimar years ago to reissue Goethe's scientific writings, I was once asked to examine this question as well, and I was asked to pay particular attention to clarifying this controversial issue. I came to the conclusion that I was now able to determine that at the time when the aforementioned hymn was written, Goethe often went for walks with a younger person, and that one day, during a walk along the Ilm, he recited this essay to this young person in those beautiful words. This person was a certain Tobler, who had an excellent memory and was able to write down this essay word for word from memory. So in Tobler's transcript we have a genuine Goethe essay.

With a kind of pedantic philological precision, I myself proved at the time that every sentence was written by Goethe, although it was written down by someone else. Shortly thereafter, I met one of the most well-known Goethe researchers [whose name I understandably do not mention]. He approached me with the following words: [You have truly earned recognition for what you have brought to light, because] now we finally know who wrote the essay, that it was not Goethe who wrote it, but Tobler.

This is an experience that can show us how today's biblical criticism is to be taken. It was not important to this gentleman where the spiritual source was, but only to determine who dipped the pen in the ink and ran it over the paper.

It may seem almost grotesque, but today's biblical criticism is basically taking the same approach. It is not important to them where the spiritual sources for what is told come from, but rather to show with meticulous precision – in a figurative sense – who ultimately put the pen in the inkwell, and that is exactly what these people want to do: to distinguish with colors what flowed from one pen and what flowed from another. Not the slightest criticism is intended here. The scholar was right at the time: Tobler had dipped that pen into the ink and written the essay. Therefore, not the slightest doubt is to be cast on the value of this research. That is not the point. Full recognition is to be given to the true and infinite diligence that is displayed here, because anyone who is familiar with it knows what diligence, what amazing diligence is applied to answering these questions. Perhaps everything this science finds is true, but the only question is: is it fruitful for the inner life of human beings, is it of value for those who hope for an answer to the great questions of existence from the depths of their hearts? One more thing must be pointed out for a better understanding of these lectures. The word inspiration, which played a major role when the concept of the Bible was discussed earlier: it was said that what is in the Bible arose from inspiration. The wisdom from the same spiritual sources that are related to creation and production in the world itself flowed into it – the Bible. Gradually, the materialistic age came; it could not believe in such inspiration. The moment humanity ceased to believe in the spiritual worlds themselves, this concept had to fall. Spiritual science now knows this concept and traces it back to its true content and true meaning.

Spiritual science first recognizes a world, a physical world, the world of our senses, which we perceive with our eyes, can grasp with our hands, which we hear when we direct our ear to something that makes a sound. This whole world of the senses and of the mind that comprehends this world is the only real one for the materialistic mind. The spiritual world is a second world for those who, with unprejudiced senses, want to penetrate it through spiritual science. As already mentioned, spiritual wisdom shows that there are abilities that usually lie dormant in people today, but that can be awakened and that then really let people experience the spiritual worlds. In the human organism, the eye developed only gradually; with the development of the eye, the surrounding darkness, light and color first penetrated it. With the formation of the ear, the world of sounds resounded to it. With the development of the brain, man became able to develop and recreate the sensory world in his mind, to grasp it spiritually.

Just as the eye once lay dormant in the human organism, so other spiritual organs lie dormant in the human spirit, in the human soul. These organs can be awakened from the soul and spirit by certain methods that spiritual science offers to man, and then there is a second and a third world in the same world that surrounds us. I will first characterize the second world in a few words. When a person, whose physical senses are merely unlocked, looks at any object, he sees that thing with a certain color. The surface of that being is afflicted with a certain color. He can then hear what emerges as a sound from the soul of that being, and so on, but within the limits of that being's skin, there is something else, but it is just as true and just as real as what he can perceive with his senses: Within this being is a sum of pain and joy, urges, desires and passions. You cannot penetrate into this second world with your senses.

But there is a way to open up the spiritual eye, then this inner soul world of the other being does not remain hidden from you, then it appears before you as these external colors and sounds appear to the senses. You can perceive as much of the world as you have senses for perception. We only recognize a certain amount of realities when we have senses for them. What all there is that would confront a person if only they had more senses, more abilities to perceive. We can experience it through what is called initiation, that the sense is open to us, not only for what the outer senses tell us about the outer world, but also for what is going on in the soul of a being within. It is possible for us to perceive the joy and suffering of a being with the open mind of a seer. A certain color sensation arises before the spiritual eye of the seer when a person stands before him with some inner experience, and the same inner color appears to him every time he has the same experience.

In the case of sympathy, for example, we see with a seeing eye how this sympathy takes on a certain color and form; antipathy and pain appear to us in such a world of images, in different colors and forms. This world of second sight exists; this world can be developed, it has always been known in spiritual science. This world is called the imaginative world, and the ability to see in this way is called imagination. The person who has these abilities encounters a strange being within himself with the sensation of his joy and suffering. He perceives the soul life of the other being in the image; at the same time, he is surrounded by the imaginations of the inner being, the inner life of this entity. This world, to which all this belongs, is also called the astral world. Once the eye is opened to this world, one perceives not only the soul experiences that are actually present in sensual beings, but one also makes the discovery that there are also soul entities in our environment that have no sensual expression. Such beings exist. Everyone who knows spiritual science as the chemist knows chemistry, knows this world of imagination, because if he develops further, if he applies the methods that spiritual science provides in the right way, then he enters this world of flowing colors, and if he now continues to progress further on the path of inner development, then what could be called clairaudience - in contrast to clairvoyance - approaches him and now gives him knowledge of the truly so-called spiritual or even heavenly world.

This further world is also referred to by the term used in theosophical literature as the devachanic world; the old Pythagorean school called this world the world of the harmony of the spheres: one hears the tones of the harmony of the spheres when one develops up to this region.

Thus we are surrounded by three worlds; by the sensual world, which we perceive with our outer senses, by the astral world, in which we encounter - when we penetrate into it - the images of soul entities. These imaginations are the expression of a much truer and more real world than the sensual world is. Then, when we penetrate even further, to clairaudience, we enter the world of inspiration. Spiritual science has known about these worlds since the earliest times, and they are to be made accessible to today's humanity again through the theosophical movement of modern culture. The realization of this spiritual world of Devachan, in the form of clairaudience, has been called inspiration at all times.

Man can reach yet another level, where he can see into yet another world, the world of intuition. This occurs when man sees not only that which is recognizable on the surface as astral, when he not only hears what emerges from their soul as sound, only when he can become one with the whole world. This characterizes it in a technical sense: in ordinary life, we stand outside of a thing – you stand outside of a plant or a mineral that you want to explore. But when you have reached this level of knowledge, your own being flows into the foreign object and you speak with your soul from within the object itself. There is no thing in itself outside of you, there you are in all beings, there you have become one with the whole environment; there the things themselves speak to us.

Through inspiration, the things around us express their essence in the harmony of the spheres. In the images of the imagination, they reflect their soul-like outer sides to us in colors and shapes. The spiritual researcher knows that there are three such worlds outside our physical world, that there are beings in these worlds that elude our physical sense world, that the creative entities of our sense world are contained in these higher worlds.

What created minerals, animals and plants is contained in these worlds, and what is contained in man as a real higher being is also a citizen of this higher world, which can only be seen in imagination. Man is not only enclosed in the world of the senses, no, he is something that has its home in the imaginative world and can only be properly recognized through imagination. And in all of us lives an innermost being – in ourselves – but only when we are able to step out of ourselves so that it seems to come to us in others and can be recognized in its real form, that is, only intuitively, in intuition. And if humanity is to be informed of those entities, which as the creating original entities underlie our world of sense facts, then people must bring the message out of their higher developed perception, out of their imagination, intuition.

When today man penetrates spiritual truth himself, when the spiritual researcher penetrates into spiritual realms, then he can proclaim from his own experience what the leaders of mankind once put into the religious scriptures, what they gave to mankind as a guide to higher development. In primeval times there was a kind of dim clairvoyance. This gradually disappeared, and our present-day “scientific”, critical awareness of facts took its place. This will be overcome by the fact that higher spiritual-scientific knowledge must in turn be added to this day-awake object consciousness.

For certain intermediate stages, the sense of the spiritual-scientific foundations of knowledge from the higher worlds had to be lost. In older spiritual times, however, it was generally known that those people who had struggled to achieve inspiration were inspired, that they had truly laid down their own experiences in the religious documents.

There will be more and more people who can recognize more and more directly – independently of these documents – what is true in these documents. The concept of inspiration will be rediscovered; then the time will come when there will be a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible. Everything that can be known about divine spiritual things can be directly researched using the methods of spiritual science, everything that has ever been brought in a religious document. Then the human being recognizes the truth of these documents again; when he can look into these worlds himself, then he experiences again that these things are all true, that there was indeed good reason why people could naively believe in all that is reported in such holy books for a time. The fact that this awareness can be regained will indicate a time when people, precisely by knowing something of the spirit that underlies all matter, will come to recognize again that those records are true that criticism cannot begin to understand, those records that this criticism has devalued in the eyes of many people today. Recognizing the Bible in its value as a book that emerged from inspiration will be a success of the theosophical movement, because one will again recognize what inspiration is, what inspired knowledge is. One will again be able to find wisdom in the Bible if one can independently recognize what is described in it and is to be given to people.

There will again be wise men who, from their own spiritual experiences, will be able to give an account of what the origins of existence look like and how the riddles of existence can be solved. And when there are such wise men who, from their direct knowledge, can say what the riddle is, then the gulf between those who are to be guides in religious knowledge and those who want to look up, who want to have content for their existence, who want something more than the most empty everyday life, who want to live a dignified existence at all, can be bridged. A connection between the broadest layers of those who want to listen and those who are to teach will again become possible. Then the ground will be laid for a healthy national life and for a healthy religious development. These two are connected: this healthy religious development will mean healthy national development.

In this way we shall learn to see deeply into many a thing and then recognize how literally we can take again many a thing that was no longer understood because the sense for spiritual research had been lost. We shall see that it is true: there is a naive relationship to that great religious document of which Goethe said that it must be a land register for the religious development of mankind for an incalculable time.

There is a certain justification for this relationship of doubt and rejection in our time, but those who say that true wisdom and knowledge of facts must necessarily lead away from what is given in this document are wrong.

So you then find more and more that you understand, and you are surprised that you criticized some things earlier that you just did not understand, and that now it appears to you in a completely new light. Then comes the point where one becomes modest and humble in the face of such a book, which not only contains human wisdom but goes far beyond everything human. Then one is inclined to say: Through spiritual science I have come to understand some things, have learned to appreciate some things – there is much I do not yet understand, but now I no longer criticize, but wait quietly and patiently until I too will one day understand the rest. There is no more beautiful sensation than this: to look into the source of wisdom with modesty and humility, because this looking is connected with a feeling of an opening up infinity of existence into an ever-widening perspective of wisdom. We have recognized some things, and the little we have learned has taught us the idea that, with increasing development, we will be able to unlock more and more, that the stronger and brighter light will come to meet us from the great religious documents of the human race, the more we approach the sources of the divine being from which we once sprang, unknowingly, and to which we will approach again in the course of our development. We see this goal as a flourishing, satisfying fact before us, inviting us to never cease in our efforts to perfect and spiritualize humanity in its development.

Yesterday we tried to penetrate the relationship between what is called wisdom in the spiritual scientific sense, immediate, direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds, and that religious document that is the most important for our culture, the Bible. Today, let us take a look at some specific facts that can illustrate this relationship to us, that can show us how, if we understand this relationship in this way, we can indeed arrive at a new understanding of this religious document. You will understand that it is impossible to even touch on such a broad subject in summary, considering all the things that could be considered. It will therefore be best if we try to pick out individual things in particular to see how certain things that are also told in this biblical document can be understood through direct insight into the higher worlds and how one can then find that which one can grasp so immediately and directly in this religious document.

I would like to start with a very specific individual fact, a fact that has already been touched on here in a different context. I would like to show you how spiritual science introduces us to a certain law of human development. Today, this law is even already suspected by the more materialistically colored natural science. Spiritual science has known the law for long, long times and regards life from the point of view of this law. If we want to characterize this law in one word, we say: This law expresses the development of the spiritual life of humanity. You know that the idea of development is something that has had a truly fascinating effect on the external science of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. You know that external science has been completely moved into this perspective and that as a result the development of the simplest living beings up to the most complicated ones has become understandable.

Spiritual science has always had this idea of development, only much more comprehensive, much more universal than this natural science of the nineteenth century.

Spiritual science says: Everything is in the process of development. Everything develops from simple, very simple forms in the distant past to those forms that are so intricately interwoven that humans are still far from being able to comprehend them today. Spiritual science speaks above all of a development of human consciousness itself, and it is important that we follow the development of this human consciousness through its various stages. For this will cast a spotlight on certain chapters of the biblical records. What the vast majority of individuals today call consciousness is, for spiritual science, a state of consciousness that has developed from other forms of consciousness. We describe this present human state of consciousness as the so-called waking daytime consciousness, or also the object consciousness. Why? If we want to characterize this consciousness that a person has today from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, we have to say: This consciousness acquires its knowledge as follows: First, it acquires its perceptions of the objects through the external senses, of the objects in space and in the time around us, and our mind, which is limited to the sensory world, processes the perceptions that the human being receives through the external senses; and through such perceptions and such processing of perceptions in our conscious mind, we form the treasures of our knowledge, which are stored in our memory and guide and accompany us through life.

However, there are other forms of consciousness besides this state of consciousness; this state of consciousness is one that humanity has not always had in the past, and we have to look back to recognize the development of this state of consciousness, to times in the distant, distant past, to times that lie far, far behind our own.

In the past, people had a different form of consciousness, and at one point a different state of consciousness. How we perceive today, how we think today, has developed from other forms of consciousness, and the state of consciousness that once existed in humanity, but which today's state of consciousness has replaced, is called pictorial consciousness, the imaginative consciousness of the distant past.

The higher imaginative consciousness of which I spoke yesterday is not meant here. If we want to understand how this earlier pictorial consciousness relates to the consciousness that the initiate, who has undergone the inner spiritual development, already has today and that all of humanity will have at some future stage, if we want to recognize the two levels of consciousness If we want to recognize the two stages of imaginative consciousness, these two phases of the development of our consciousness in their relationship, we have to say: what we will speak of here precedes our own and is a dim, more dream-like clairvoyance. In that very distant past, people had a dream-like clairvoyance, and from this, today's object consciousness has only just developed; and a future state of consciousness stands before our soul, which the initiate already has today and which all of humanity will have in the distant future, in that man will have today's object consciousness and clairvoyance, both in bright, clear clarity. Early man, our ancient ancestor, had a consciousness that could not yet calculate in the same way that today's consciousness can. But instead he had a kind of dull, dream-like clairvoyance. He could see more into the spiritual and soul-life of his surroundings, either continually or in specially evoked states. He could receive images of what was spiritually and soul-wise in his environment. Today's object consciousness only sees spiritual entities when they are physically embodied externally.

I can best describe the former clairvoyance to you by means of an example. A person approaches another; the second harbors feelings of antipathy in his soul towards the approaching person. Modern man can only guess at what lives in the soul from external sensory perceptions. In the dim clairvoyance that man of ancient times had, however, a picture in color and form appeared freely floating before the clairvoyant gaze, indicating to him what the other felt towards him. The innermost attitude of a being was clothed in a color and form floating in space for the spiritual eye, just as certain ether vibrations express themselves today for the physical eye through color and form.

There are times in the distant past when this clairvoyance was developed to a certain extent. Today, however, we can only look back in history to a time when the last remnants of this somnambulistic clairvoyance, so to speak, were still present in people. These remnants were present in times not much more than a thousand years ago. We find such dim clairvoyance in every people in its initial stage, and it is from this dim clairvoyance that the myths and legends and fairy tales that originated among peoples in the early days were born. These myths and sagas did not come into being through that abstract thing we call the child's creative imagination, but out of the remnants of this former clairvoyance, as a reproduction of what an original, dim clairvoyance originally saw in all, all peoples from whom today's humans descended. This dim clairvoyance is connected with other conditions in the development of mankind, and if we want to characterize this development that has taken place in the transition to our present object consciousness, then we have to point to an external event that has taken place in our physical world and that is an expression of this transformation of that consciousness into our present one. This found expression in what we can call the transition from near-marriage to distant-marriage. In ancient times, among the most diverse peoples, there was an age in which what we call consanguineous marriage was common practice, a matter of course. People lived in small tribes and married within these small tribes, and it was considered somewhat immoral and incorrect to marry outside one's tribe; so in those times, related blood mixed with related blood, and those times these times of close marriage prevailed were also the times when the last remnants of a dim form of clairvoyance were present.

It is an extremely important moment in the development of all peoples: the transition from close marriage to distant marriage. One could point out how this is expressed in the most diverse myths and legends, how the whole cycle of the Siegfried saga is connected with that transition from close marriage to distant marriage, but that would be going too far today. What is important for us is the effect of foreign blood on foreign blood, which is that the original clairvoyance is killed; and this consciousness, which we know today, which is characterized by calculating, combining, logical thinking, this achievement emerged from that mixing of foreign blood with foreign blood!

Thus, we can trace in all ancient times how a different form of living together is linked to a different state of consciousness and vice versa. It has also been pointed out that even today, under certain circumstances, the last vestiges of this clairvoyance remain; I have already referred to the conversation between Rosegger and Anzengruber. I will take it up again here: Rosegger, the amiable and significant descriptor of what he sees around him in farm life and elsewhere, is a descriptor based on external sensory observation. Compare this with Anzengruber, and you will see that Anzengruber is able to present figures from folk life with wonderful plasticity, so that they stand on their own two feet with wonderful truth and naturalness. Now Anzengruber never saw the things he describes with his senses, he never lived among the farmers. Now Rosegger said to Anzengruber: You know, it seems to me that if you went out into the farming world and observed what happens there, you would be able to describe it even better. Anzengruber, on the other hand, replied: No, then I probably wouldn't be able to describe it at all. I have never seen farmers, but my ancestors were farmers, all my ancestors were farmers, and so the peasantry still lives and stirs in my blood, and I describe what my fathers saw, my ancestors, it runs down to me in my blood, and that is how I describe peasant life.

There you have the last remnants of what was once present in a much higher degree in all humanity. If you realize this, you will have to say: the way Anzengruber worked had the effect that a dark power of consciousness lives down in the blood through his ancestors to himself, and that lives itself out in him. Imagine this state of consciousness intensified, intensified to such an extent that the son can really remember what the father experienced, yes, what the grandfather experienced, then you have characterized that dim state of clairvoyance after a certain side, which once belonged to all our ancestors. There is a much higher, a real memory in the blood of what the ancestors had experienced, and as true as it is that today's man with his object consciousness can only store what he himself has experienced since childhood, it is just as true, incredible and grotesque as it may appear to today's materialistic way of thinking, it is true that there was a time when there was a dim awareness that the following generations remembered what their father, grandfather, ancestor and great-ancestor had experienced. Not just a vague feeling of it rumbled in the blood that had come from marriage between relatives, it was a real memory of it. Now let's see: what was the result of such a very different state of consciousness? The result of this was a very different naming than what takes place within humanity today. Today, man calls his ego that which holds together the experiences of his person since his youth. It was different then. Imagine those people who had a clear memory of what their ancestors had experienced; they also used the term “I” to describe what had been experienced in their ancestors over the generations. So someone was telling the experiences of his grandfather as those of his own “I” – if you want to express it radically. So he said: My “I” does not end with my birth, it extends up the generations, and that is why in such distant times, of which, however, no reports and documents report, what was remembered was given a uniform name, and so we must first learn to understand the meaning of the naming for those ancient times. Names were not only given to individual persons in those days; the whole context of all experiences in which one was present had a name in one's memory. When we know that there were names that designated many generations that went back centuries, then we understand an important chapter in which the patriarchs lived through the centuries.

Adam is not a person like those who live today as personal human beings on our physical earth. Adam was that which lived through generations and found expression in the collective memory. He did not denote a tribe or race, but that which passed through the generations as a common memory of consciousness in the old dim clairvoyance.

Thus it becomes clear that we need only understand the naming of ancient times, then it becomes bright within us in what the documents of the Bible tell us from this chapter of the history of creation. In those ancient times of dim clairvoyance, man did not attach much importance to his own personal experiences; they were only a small part of that great circle of experience to which he felt he belonged. He spoke of that which his consciousness overlooked as a unified entity. And so, just as when you talk to another person today, that person appears to you as something real, and the succession of generations as a whole appears more or less abstract, so to those people the individual person was insignificant, and what was important to him was what held his consciousness, reaching back over generations, together. Thus, in the patriarchal names, we do not have names for individual personalities, but rather a designation of a sum of beings. Thus, something in the Bible shines for us, which we recognize in its true sense when we face it equipped with higher spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is the way in which the person who recognizes it can look at the Bible. He first sees how it was in ancient times, and then, when he can understand correctly, he finds that the description of the Bible is just the same, wants to say the same thing. At that time, those who wrote down these records simply described what they were aware of.

Another example: in spiritual science, we follow the human being in his development far, much further back than to the point in time we have just discussed. Since I have often spoken about the idea of development here, I hope I will not be misunderstood today. Spiritual science traces the human being far, far back, and when it traces the human being back, it always comes across such human beings through long, long periods of time, where the physical body of the human being is the expression of the soul living in the physical body of the human being. But then, going further and further back, we come to a point in human development when this is no longer the case, when we can see how, so to speak, the paths of physical development and of soul-spiritual development separate further backwards. The spirit and the soul of man are rooted in the spiritual world, and when I use the expression of descending from the spiritual world, those who have already penetrated deeper into theosophy know that this expression is only figurative, an expression for something spiritual in a language that is only suitable for the external material. We are coming to times in the development of humanity when we see how the human soul and spirit is still united with other spiritual and soul-like entities. Out of spiritual entities, man's soul and spirit are born. There is a point in our earthly development when these human soul and spirit have only just entered this physical body, but we must not believe that this physical body, as it has taken in the soul and spirit, has not also undergone a long, long development.

At this point, two developmental currents meet. One of these currents is that of the physical world: We see how physical entities – headed by the physical human body – develop up to a certain level of perfection. Then there comes a point in time when this physical human body has become so perfect that it is now able to accommodate this spiritual-soul entity, which has developed to such an extent that it could find expression in the physical human body. since that spirit, that soul, has moved within the human body from the imperfect form that that body had, up to the present human form, the soul and spirit itself has worked in the human body through long, long periods of time. And through the forces through which they worked, the soul and spirit within the human body developed this body ever higher and higher, to its present form. Soul and spirit are, so to speak, the transformers and redevelopers of the human body. From that time on, we can also characterize the form of the physical human body, as it existed at that time, suitable for receiving the soul-spiritual, today, without any religious document, but only from the developed abilities of the seer.

These two human body in such a way that the human body as yet without a human soul was certain — I know how I shock all those who have only a materialistic way of thinking; but that does not matter; but if we want to know the truth, we have to tackle this great difference . The reasons why materialistic science may find this strange and grotesque are already known to the spiritual researcher himself, he has already dealt with them, otherwise he would not dare to tell such things – they are formed quite differently than he later became. But the earth was also shaped quite differently in those ancient times.

I will speak only of a single thing in the human body and its transformation at that time. Before that time, it was necessary for the human body to have an organ that still exists today in a last rudiment and remnant, in the swim bladder of fish. Since the physical human ancestor had to move by floating and swimming on the earth, he needed such a organ. The physical human ancestor had this organ in ancient times. This organ has transformed itself in the course of human physical development into the lungs. This has enabled man to breathe in and process the air as he does today. Connected with this is what we know about other processes in the body that have some kind of relationship to this lung breathing. We see the transition from the old gill breathing, which is still present in human embryonic development, to lung breathing, which is the preparation for red blood, which plays such an important role in human beings as well as in the life of nations. This moment of capturing the oxygen in the air through the lungs is also the moment of the human being being endowed with a human soul. Only then was he a suitable vessel for what we call a human soul.

These things took place over long, long periods of time: the transformation of the swim bladder into lungs that are able to process the oxygen in the external air. Now, if an observer wanted to describe this important moment of development in emotional and sensory terms, he could have said: “With the inhalation of the air, we breathed in the divine soul.” That is indeed how our ancestors felt, they gratefully felt the breath as the inspirer. You see, that is why the legends and myths of all peoples saw the body of the deity in the air, which had given man his individual consciousness. In the drifting air, the one who sees out of dull clairvoyance or out of the developed consciousness of the seer, sees the body of the animating deity, that deity of which his individual soul is a part. Imagine that all this extended over long, long periods of time, what was expressed pictorially in such legends and myths.

This image for all that I have described to you can be found again in the biblical record: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.

Yes, why then clothe such a powerful fact, which goes through millions of years of development, in such an image? Yes, it is not unimportant in which image such a fact is presented to the consciousness at a particular stage of development. In the form in which it was expressed just now, it would not have been understood by anyone at that time. At that time it was necessary to speak in images, in imaginations. Everything, absolutely everything is in development! You will only understand what that means when I tell you how it all affects you.

Those who have already delved deeper into the theosophical teachings know that the human soul is not embodied only once, but passes through human bodies over and over again, going through many, many lives. They know that That which is in you today as soul has developed over and over again through life and life; that which is able to understand and comprehend this great law of becoming human in you today would understand nothing, absolutely nothing, would not have the ability to grasp such concepts if you had not also listened before or more often to how others have described this same process of becoming world in images and imaginations. Only this enabled this soul to understand the concept of it in today's incarnation.

Everything that only later appears in concepts must first be brought to humanity in imaginations, in images. The wisest of humanity, the leaders of the people, have known all that we describe today. But for the majority it had to be brought in images, because they had a dim clairvoyance and could not yet absorb these things in concepts, but only in images, and that was to be given in this form: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7)

Let us now ask ourselves: What does Jahve, Jehovah stand for? Jehovah is the expression for that which we perceive as the individual, the I-giving. At the same time, it has the secondary meaning “the blowing one,” “the one blowing in the air,” and there you have the Yahweh himself, that is, the deity who gave man the I: “I am who am” (Ex 3:14). And if you go from there up to the Central European old legends and myths, you will find that there you also have the Wotan, who rides in the air storm, the Wotan who blows. Thus, the blowing spirit, the spirit that blows in the air, was always felt to be the bringer of human consciousness.

This is only one of the concepts we can develop. Going further back into the distant past, we would arrive at the line of development of the spiritual core of the human being, and from there to spirit itself. Even in those ancient times, the old consciousness looked back to the time when the soul and spirit were still united with the original divine spirituality; our spiritual-soul human ancestor was within this. What you call your self today, your most intimate inner being, was at that time, when it had not yet united with your body, was at that time in that divine primordial being within it. Above all, it was in a state that we must describe as being without gender. Spirit and soul have no gender. They acquire gender when they take on a physically formed body, but their innermost being is not gender-related. This soul also underwent development, and every spiritual researcher looks back on this as well, and saw man and woman united in one before the two genders appeared to us in the outside world. The spirit of man, the spirit that was not yet sexual, united both sexes within itself.

Thus we have the one point of the incarnation of man in the sense of the soul, the spirit, entering the physical, appropriately prepared body, and an earlier, equally salient point: the incarnation of the soul, the spiritual man himself, and how from an even earlier spiritual state the asexual, spiritual-soul man emerged from the one original spirituality.

Thus we see the incarnation twice: once above in the spiritual world, once below on the physical plane. This twofold human becoming for our Earth appears to us in the mirror image in the description in the biblical document; we see it truly in that twofold human becoming in biblical history.

First, the human becoming in the spiritual-soul world: the biblical writer says of that time: man came into being as a male-female being. (Genesis 1:27) And then this male-female being, which was of a spiritual and soul nature, came down into the physical world, and there we are dealing with the physical body, which now simultaneously begins to breathe. Thus we see how a twofold form of human incarnation entered into the Bible. We now recognize that if one wanted to describe the truth, then this is how this twofold human incarnation would have to be described.

Now let us consider another case that comes closer to what touches us even more intimately, which introduces us introduces us to the New Testament and familiarizes us with the mystery of Golgotha, with Jesus Christ. You will easily be able to see that another element remains that is still present as a shared humanity that will not be destroyed if close marriage is destroyed. It is true that the love that attaches people to close marriage can only exist through shared blood, but there is a love that is more comprehensive and higher than that of blood. Thus there is something in humanity that is truly common, that exists as a common bond of humanity, even when that bond is severed, a bond that is more comprehensive than the love that is woven through blood relationship. When that human ancestor looked back at the time of the near marriage, it was a generational, tribal self that he designated as I. The boundaries of the tribes stretched further and further; tribes became nations, and the consciousness of the tribes was destroyed, and a common bond, which was no longer so strong, embraced the people, a national consciousness. It was most clearly and distinctly evident in that body of people who are called the Hebrew.

The tendency to expand the national consciousness to include that which holds all humanity together, the force that brings people together beyond the nation state, only came to Earth with the appearance of Christ Jesus. Even today man cannot clearly recognize what lives in all men as a common bond, but a future will come, still far distant from us, in which the consciousness will be so vividly present in a large number of people, the consciousness of brotherhood without blood. And to prepare this consciousness to act as a real power in preparation for this brotherhood, that is the mission of Christianity. If, therefore, the God who was felt in ancient times as the blowing one is also called the one who gave the I, then we must call the God who lives in that consciousness, which is not so dimly , but which will develop to feel and clearly recognize that which is common to all of humanity, we must describe this human consciousness and describe it, when we speak in the Christian sense, as the Christ consciousness. The Christ consciousness denotes, as it were, an I that embraces all of humanity in a common consciousness. There is a sentence: “If anyone does not leave wife and child and mother and brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) This must not be understood in a trivial, ascetic sense. It must be understood in such a way that Christianity paves the way for an all-encompassing human brotherhood, which is not based on blood ties, but on the fact that a person says brother to every human being, not in the everyday sense , but to gain an awareness that is not enclosed and limited within the blood ties, that gradually extends to more and more people in our later life, and is ultimately able to embrace all of humanity. Therefore, if one calls Jehovah the god of the people, then one comes to call Christ Jesus the god of humanity, the god of all humanity, the “Son of Man”. He, the Master, had to prepare the bond of love for all mankind.

If Jehovah is called a national god, then the Christ, who was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, must be called the Son of Man, as He called Himself. Thus you see the truth of the word “Before Abraham was, I Am” or, better, “I AM” (John 8:58), who has brought the forces of humanity for the first time, which embrace all of humanity, who is able to bring about all of humanity's brotherhood.

How did this great event come about through external real facts, through real events? The Son of Man has been embodied in a human personality. Spiritual science points this out to us again. It points out to us, if we understand it correctly, what is called prophecy, that which underlies all of this. Only the initiate can and can clearly recognize this, but humanity can have a feeling for it, an awareness of it, since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth.

What is prophecy? Do not believe that what the Christian can know since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth has only just begun in those times. The one who is a true Christian and does not want to stop at what Christianity, for example, tells its believers today, knows that he is one with what Augustine said. That which is called Christianity today is the religion that has always been called the true religion in ancient times. But not all people have been able to understand this religion since ancient times; in ancient times there were always only a few who were chosen to be initiated into the great mysteries. They became the prophets of a certain time, able to see what must happen in the future. Initiation means: to develop those higher abilities in man that lie dormant in every human being!

And now a law that tells us: That which moves down into the physical world in the future is already present today in the spiritual world, and that which lives today in the spiritual world will one day descend into the physical regions. But because the one who becomes an initiate already ascends today into the spiritual regions, he can perceive in spirit today that which will descend into the physical world in the future. He can see it today from above and now say: This will happen in the future. Initiation is now attained in a certain sequence, only according to the methods prescribed in spiritual science and also in all great religions. There have been such methods of initiation in all times, just as there have been initiates in all times.

There is a tremendous difference in the initiation principle between those ancient pre-Christian times and the post-Christian times. In those pre-Christian times, much less of those methods was written down, but they were passed on through the tradition in those schools, which are called the mystery schools. Those who were recognized as being ready to be accepted into these schools were introduced to them in stages, undergoing severe tests, and were initiated into what what is called a mystery, a thing from which two things developed in the future: the school on the one hand and the church on the other – science and religion.

So you have a rough idea of those ancient wisdom schools where initiates were initiated, but it was prescribed step by step what the one who wanted to be initiated had to do first, and what he then had to go through as a second step, up to the highest step of the spiritual worlds.

You now have an idea of those wisdom schools, in which those entities work that underlie our physical world. There were ancient initiation rites, a canon of initiation in each school of initiation. Those who were deemed suitable to become students of the sacred mystery doctrine were accepted into this school of initiation and went through the stages that led them up into the spiritual worlds. The life of such a person was strictly prescribed. Imagine this life: Once he had been initiated into the mysteries, he had to lead a life in which everyday experiences were of no significance, while what he experienced in terms of the initiation methods was of great importance for the life of such a person.

Those who had reached a certain level of initiation was called a sun man, because his life had to be lived in such a regulated way that he could not stray from his path; just as the sun cannot deviate from its path, so the one who has made it to the level of a sun hero on his path of initiation is just as sure. He shares the truths of the spiritual world from his own experience; he is a leader of humanity.

The myths and legends contain this and tell us again and again about sun heroes, and when they speak of such people, when they agree with each other even among the most diverse peoples, what is described to us is what made him a sun hero. Then such a story seems to us like a repetition of the canon of initiation, and so in those ancient times a principle was formed in relation to the life of the initiate that is just the opposite of the principle of the biographers of today. For those who told something about the lives of the great leaders of humanity in ancient times, it was important to blur what made them appear as special beings, what made them become solar heroes, what they had to go through according to the initiation rite, and what all of them went through in the same way. The goal of this initiation was also to develop in those initiated a living vision of the all-human ego, of the unified consciousness, but the chosen ones only had it.

Only a few people could achieve this. Now, in the course of time, an event was to occur in development that what could be achieved individually in the old days, within the mysteries, could now be achieved by all of humanity in general. And this event was precisely the Mystery of Golgotha. How did that come about? We will understand this if we look into the mysteries: then, when he had experienced all these things at first hand, which one had to experience before that great final moment of initiation, then the time came when he was placed by the initiating priest-hierophant in such a state that he could experience in the clearest clarity of vision that which raised him above his tribe and people, and into what he has in common with all humanity.

You know from other lectures that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I and its higher members. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and during sleep the astral body with the higher limbs of human nature is out. Then, when the etheric body also separates from the physical body, death occurs. That is the spiritual difference between sleep and death. But then, when the person to be initiated had come so far that he could undergo the last stage of initiation, the hierophant, the initiating priest, led him to it, so that for a short time of three and a half days the etheric body could also leave, so that the physical body was in a kind of state of death. The result of this was that someone who had been prepared through the necessary stages could experience everything that was prepared for him in his own vision, and he could experience the higher worlds in real vision. Then, after three and a half days, the one to be initiated was called back to the ordinary physical, and now he was one who could proclaim, from his own experience, the secrets of the higher worlds to those who wanted to hear it. From his lips flowed the word of the spiritual world; he had become a witness that there is a spiritual world, that life in the spirit can conquer death. For he himself was in that world in which one gains the conviction that life will always conquer death. And again and again, the one who had thus traversed the spiritual worlds in three and a half days, again and again the initiate came back when he was awakened, with an exclamation that would be something like in German: “My God, my God, how You have glorified me.”

In ancient times, anyone who wanted to become such a proclaimer of spiritual wisdom from their own experiences had to enter into the mysteries and experience them outside of their physical body. Only in this way could it be done in the ancient, pre-Christian times. This is the world-historical moment of Christianity: that in the one event of Golgotha, everything that the one to be initiated experienced during the three and a half days was drawn into the physical world as a historical fact of physical reality. The Mystery of Initiation has become physically real in the Mystery of Golgotha. The sequence of initiations could be physically experienced in the physical world by the one who had the consciousness of the unity of humanity, the Son of Man. Physically, he could experience what was only possible for people to experience outside of their physical body before his appearance.

Thus, the mystery of initiation, having become physical, shines out to us from the event of Golgotha. So how will those who wanted to describe this mystery present the special events of the life of Christ Jesus? They knew that the one who, as the Son of Man, brought the secrets into the physical world, also had to experience these stages of initiation in the sense of the initiation canon here in the physical world, which the one to be initiated had always experienced outside of his physical body. Thus, the life of this unique being, who appeared only once in the development of humanity, had to be described in such a way that it was, of course, a reflection of the ancient initiation canon.

Now the various forms had been written down, fixed in different ways, in different forms of ritual, of rite, but all leading back to a unified mode of development. This mode of initiation, which also represents the life of Christ Jesus, was one that underlay all mystery schools, and it is only natural that it was applied to the external physical life of Christ Jesus, for this is truly how it happened. They describe to us something which they have taken from the old initiation canon, as they had received it in the mystery schools. Therefore, we find in the Gospels various outwardly seemingly divergent forms of the initiation canon, which appear as the biography of Christ Jesus.

Thus, we see in the Gospels the fixed initiation canon , and in Christ Jesus, whom they describe, we see the only Son of Man who presents that which others could only experience within the mysteries, outside of them in the physical life, in order to make their blessings accessible to all people. The sentence that life conquers death, which the initiate had experienced in the higher worlds, was outwardly manifested by Christ Jesus in the physical world, and is now accessible to all people in the same way.

Spiritual science knows that the gospel is history, extraordinary history, and at the same time a symbol. That is precisely the essential point, that here the symbol has become outer reality, that what had previously only taken place symbolically in the higher worlds, that it has become outer historical truth in the Mystery of Golgotha. Very few people want to understand that historical Christianity is so historical, and that it is also symbolic. Once this is understood, one can penetrate deeply into the spirit and meaning of the New Testament, and then one sees that the spirit and meaning of these documents is so infinitely deep that one can only gradually penetrate into its deepest depths. Let us look at a few more passages in this light. We recognize the three and a half days in the three and a half days, as it is reported (John 11), that Lazarus had already been dead when the Lord resurrected him, and we recognize again in another place those words – for that is how they should actually be translated – that Christ Jesus speaks on the cross at the moment when he arrives at the last act of his life in the physical body: “My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me”, for that is what these words should mean — and not “how hast Thou forsaken me” (Matt. 27,46, cf. Psalm 22,1; Mark 15,34), which is only an inaccurate rendering.

Thus we see that spiritual science, in its turn, becomes acquainted with initiation, experiences that life in the spirit conquers death, that this life, this wisdom, in its turn, makes understandable makes the deep meaning of the New Testament understandable, and so the wisdom-filled deepening of humanity within the theosophical movement will again lead to an appreciation, to a valuation of the biblical documents, of both parts of them.

Precisely because this wisdom will testify to the truth of this testament independently of it, it will have such a significant effect when you rediscover this truth in the Bible.

Thus will the man who penetrates it through theosophical study rediscover the value of this book, which could no longer be appreciated by someone who had lost touch with the spiritual world. And so no other biblical research, criticism, and so on, will be able to bridge the gap between scholars and believers than this spiritual science or and it will bridge this gulf and will bring a wisdom that will understand everything, everything that is expressed in the mighty words of the biblical documents. It will bring the solution to the great riddle of existence that is sought by the intellect and the mind in the Bible. And this will be recognized in the Bible, that it was and is the actual basis for the actual culture of humanity. Thus the Bible will again become a book that will be recognized in its full significance and value, and one will no longer be able to approach it indifferently, but with awe for the great, infinite sources of wisdom that bubble forth in it.

Thus, who is able to penetrate into the spiritual world independently will be filled with ever deeper and deeper awe in the face of this book, and it will become for him in turn a book of proclamation, which must be understood ever deeper and deeper, and a book in which the greatest riddles of man and of the development of humanity find their solution. Thus the Bible will rise higher and higher in value through wisdom, and if this movement succeeds in pointing people to the direct path to knowledge, then this reference will at the same time be something of immense value for the whole religious life of the broadest humanity.

The conquest of wisdom will at the same time be a reconquest of that charter which after all underlies our culture, that is to say, of that which lives as the spirit of our culture.

Then this penetration into wisdom, this conquest of the spiritual worlds through wisdom, will at the same time be the conquest of these valuable sources for wisdom, the conquest of the Biblical charters themselves.

Certain duties imposed on me from the spiritual world have made it necessary for me to research some things regarding the life of Christ Jesus in recent times. You know that it is possible to gain access to events that took place in the past through the so-called Akashic Records research. So an attempt was made to gain access to the most important event in the evolution of the earth, the event that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. A number of things have emerged that can complement the more spiritual scientific explanations that have been given to you on various occasions about the Mystery of Golgotha. What has now emerged from the Akasha Chronicle research is of a different nature; it is, so to speak, more concrete, a sum of facts related to the life of Christ Jesus. It is hoped that these facts will, over time, come together to form a kind of fifth gospel, and we will talk about why it is necessary in our time to extract from the occult sources what can be described as a fifth gospel in a certain respect.

Today I will begin by telling a few stories that relate to the youth of Jesus of Nazareth and that will culminate in an important conversation that he had with his stepmother or foster mother. Some of what will now be discussed as the Fifth Gospel has already been communicated to some of you by Miss Stinde; but for the sake of the context I shall also have to briefly mention the things that have already been presented to some of you.

I would like to begin my story today with the event that I have already described to you several times, with the passing over of the Zarathustra ego into the physical form of the Jesus child who descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David. I will briefly mention that, according to the Akasha Chronicle research, two Jesus children were born around the same time. One was born out of what we can call the Solomon line of the House of David, the other out of the Nathan line of the House of David. The two were very different in terms of their entire childhood. The body that descended from the Solomonic line of the House of David contained the same ego that once walked the earth as Zarathustra. This ego had advanced to become a spirit that, as is often the case occurred in such cases, he appeared childlike during the first twelve years, but he proved to be endowed with the very highest gifts, and he learned with great rapidity everything that human cultural development had produced up to that age. We would call a boy of the highest talent, according to what emerges from the Akasha Chronicle, this boy from the Solomonic line of the House of David. We cannot address the other Jesus boy from the Nathanic line with such predicates. He was basically untalented for everything that can be learned through the achievements of the earth sciences and arts of man. He even showed a certain reluctance to learn anything of what mankind has achieved. On the other hand, this Jesus-boy showed the most profound genius of the heart; even in his earliest boyhood he radiated the warmest love imaginable, and in human and earthly terms he absorbed everything that could lead to the development of a life of love.

We also already know that after the two boys had turned about twelve years old, the ego of Zarathustra emerged, as sometimes happens in the occult processes of the evolution of humanity on earth. It emerged from the body of the Jesus-child of the Solomonic line, and passed over into the bodily sheaths of the other Jesus-child. The Gospel of Luke indicates this by telling how this Jesus boy then sat among the scribes and gave astounding answers and was hardly recognized by his own parents. Thus, from the age of twelve, we have come to know this Jesus child, with the genius of the heart, who had united within himself the sum of all human gifts related to feeling and the soul; we have the union of Zarathustra's ego with this Jesus child, who at that time did not yet know what was happening to him: that it was the ego of Zarathustra that left the body of the Solomonic Jesus child and moved into him and already worked in his bodily shells, so that both elements gradually permeated each other to the highest perfection.

We also know that the biological mother of the Nathanian Jesus child soon died, as did the father of the Solomonian Jesus child, and we know that a family was formed from the two families from which the two Jesus so that the Nathanian Jesus from the other family got step-siblings and the natural mother of the Solomonian Jesus boy became his step- or foster mother. In this family he now grew up in Nazareth. The extraordinary talent which he had shown when he gave those great and powerful answers in the temple among the scribes, astonishing everyone, increased further. Something wonderful took place in the soul of this Jesus child of Nazareth, in whom was contained the ego of Zarathustra, from the age of twelve until about the age of eighteen: something emerged from the depths of his soul life that no one else at that time was able to experience; a tremendous maturity of spiritual judgment, alongside a deep originality of his soul abilities, asserted itself. To the amazement of those around him, that mighty divine voice from the spiritual regions, which in the Hebrew secret teachings was called the great Bath-Kol, spoke ever more clearly and distinctly to his soul. But differently than to the scribes, the great Bath-Kol spoke to this adolescent boy in a sublime way. It came up like an inner, wondrous illumination. So it came about that even in his youth, Jesus of Nazareth could say to himself in a sad mood: What has become of Hebrew humanity since those times, since this humanity heard the old prophets, those old prophets who themselves still received the spiritual secrets from higher worlds through their inspirations and intuitions? Then it dawned on Jesus of Nazareth through inner illumination that there had once been a close communication between the old Hebrew prophets and the divine spiritual powers; that the greatest secrets were revealed to the old prophets through the holy, solemn voice of the great Bath Kol. But times had changed until the present day, when Jesus of Nazareth lived. There were scholars and scribes, and some prophets, who could only grasp the echoes, the faint echoes, of what the great prophets had once received as revelation. But all that could be attained in the present time was only a shadow of the old teachings. But what was preserved in the scriptures as tradition, Jesus felt and sensed - now that he received it through his direct inner inspiration, through lights that shone more and more brightly in him from day to day, that it was there, but that the present was no longer suited to understand it. His life was powerful in these inspirations.

One gains an immensely strong impression when one directs one's spiritual gaze to this point in the evolution of the earth, when one sees again, in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, what was revealed in ancient times, as it were, to the patriarchal prophets, and one sees how lonely he stood in humanity, which was without understanding for what he experienced. He had to say to Himself: Even if the great Bath Kol spoke loudly and clearly from heaven, there are no people here who could understand it. What has become of humanity? This weighed heavily on his soul as an enormous pain. So we see the boy growing into young adulthood. From week to week, new insights arose for him, but each new insight was linked for him to an ever-increasing suffering, to deep, deep pain over what humanity has forgotten, what it can no longer understand. The entire descent of humanity was borne by the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. One learns many things about the pain and suffering that people in the world have to endure when one focuses one's spiritual vision on the evolution of humanity. But the impression that one receives from that soul, which out of pure compassion for humanity felt the most intense pain at the descent of humanity, at what humanity was no longer able to receive of what was prepared for it from spiritual worlds. This pain increased all the more because in the whole environment of Jesus of Nazareth, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, there was no one with whom he could have spoken about it in any way. Even the best disciples of the great scholars, such as Hillel, did not understand the greatness that was revealed in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. He was alone with his revelations and alone with his infinite pain, embracing humanity in boundless compassion. Above all, I would like to characterize this mood of his soul in Jesus of Nazareth. While he was going through all this inwardly, while worlds were unfolding within him, he worked unpretentiously on the outside in his father's business, which was a kind of carpentry. And so he matured until he was eighteen years old. Then, according to the will of the family, he was to go on a kind of journey through the world, moving from place to place to work there for a while. So he did. And this brings us to a second period in the youth of Jesus of Nazareth, which lasted from about the age of eighteen to twenty-four.

He traveled to many places, both within and outside of Palestine. He came into contact with Jews and Gentiles in all kinds of Gentile regions. One could discern something remarkable about this personality, which will always be among the most instructive aspects of any attempt to explore the secrets of the human depths: One could see that the immense pain he had experienced in his soul had been transformed into immense love, as it often does when he is selfless, into a love that works not only through words but also through his mere presence. When he entered the families in whose midst he was to work, they knew from the way he presented himself, from the way he was, that the love that can only come from one person radiated from this soul; a love that did everyone good, in whose atmosphere everyone who was aware of it wanted to live. And this love was transformed pain, was the metamorphosis of pain. Many things happened that gave the people among whom he lived the impression that they were dealing with a person unlike any who had ever walked the earth. By day he worked; in the evenings the families gathered at the places where he worked and there he was among them. Everything that could radiate from his love lived in such families. People felt that they were more than mere humans when he spoke his simple words, but they were imbued with what he had experienced from the age of twelve to eighteen. And then, when he had moved away from the place, it was as if these families felt him still among them, as if he had not left at all. His presence was still felt. Yes, it happened again and again that they all had a real vision: while they were talking about what he had said, while they were inwardly rejoicing in what they felt of his presence, they saw him come in through the door, sit down among them, feel his loving presence, and hear him speak. He was not there in the flesh, but there was a vision shared by all.

And so, in many regions, a sense of community gradually developed between Jesus of Nazareth and the people with whom he came into contact over the years. And everywhere people talked about this man of great love. Many scriptures were applied to him. The scriptures were not understood, and he was also understood little with the mind; but with the heart, one felt all the more deeply his love, the extraordinary of his existence and his effect. He came not only to Hebrew but also to pagan areas, even outside of Palestine. Strangely enough, his path also led him to such pagan areas where pagan teachings had declined. He got to know some pagan places whose old places of worship had fallen into disrepair.

And then one day he came to a place that had suffered particularly from the decline of the old pagan places of worship, the old pagan priesthood. The pagan places of worship were, after all, an external expression of what had been practiced here and there in the mysteries. The ceremonies in the places of worship were images of the mysteries. But all this was in decline, had fallen into disrepair in many areas. Then Jesus of Nazareth came to a place of worship where, for reasons unknown to him, the outer buildings had also fallen into disrepair. I still do not know the location of this place of worship. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to determine the exact location and name of the place in the Akasha Chronicle; for some reason, the impression of the place has been blurred on the map of the earth, so to speak. What I am telling you is absolutely correct, in my opinion, but it is not possible to indicate the location; for some reason it cannot be found. But it was a pagan place, a dilapidated place of worship, and all around it the people were sad and sick and burdened with all kinds of diseases and hardships. Because they were burdened with such diseases and hardships, the priesthood had left and fled. The place of worship had fallen into disrepair. The people felt unhappy because their priests had abandoned them. There was tremendous misery when Jesus entered this pagan place of worship. As he approached, he was noticed by some and immediately it spread like wildfire among the people: here comes someone who can help us! Because of the power that radiated from his love, which had already become a kind of sanctifying love, people felt as if someone special was approaching, as if heaven itself had sent them another of their cult priests. They flocked there in great numbers, hoping that their cult would now be performed again. Jesus of Nazareth was not inclined to perform the pagan cult, as is understandable; but when he looked at the people with his gaze, which had now been heightened to a kind of clairvoyance, born of pain and love, he already understood something of the essence of the decline of paganism. Then he learned to recognize the following: He knew that in ancient times, when the still good priests served and sacrificed, good spiritual beings from the sphere of the higher hierarchies bowed down at these places of worship for the pagan sacrifices and rituals. But little by little – that dawned on him – paganism had fallen into decline. Whereas in the past the rivers of mercy and grace of the good gods worshipped by the heathens had been sent down to the sacrificial altars and united with the sacrifice, now demons, emissaries of Ahriman and Lucifer, had descended. He saw them among the people and realized that these demonic entities were actually the cause of the evil diseases that were raging among the people, who now pitied him in their deepest souls. And when he perceived these mysterious connections, when he thus came to understand the secret of the declining paganism, he fell down as if dead. This occurrence had a terrible effect on the people, who believed that a priest had come down from heaven. They saw the man fall down and flee, flee in terror from the place to which they had just flocked. With the last glance that he cast, in his ordinary consciousness, at the fleeing people, Jesus of Nazareth saw the demons fleeing with the people; but other demons still surrounded him. Then the everyday consciousness receded and he felt as if he had been transported into a higher spiritual world, from which the blessings of the pagan gods had once flowed, which had united with the sacrifices. And just as he had otherwise heard the voice of the great Bath-Kol, so now he heard the sounds from the divine-spiritual realms, from those hierarchies to which the pagan good gods belonged. He heard human primordial revelation in this enraptured state.

I have tried to put into German words what he heard there; as well as I could, to reproduce what he heard. And it is characteristic: I was able to share these words first at the laying of the foundation stone of our Dornach building. It is like the reverse of the Christian Lord's Prayer, which he only had to reveal much later in the well-known form. But now it impressed itself on him as it might have been revealed in the beginning of the evolution of the earth as a cosmic Lord's Prayer. This is how it sounds when translated into German:

Amen

Evil rules
Witnesses of dissolving egoity
From other selfhood guilt
We experience in our daily bread
in which heaven's will does not prevail
in which man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgotten your name
you fathers in the heavens.

So then:

Amen
Evil reigns
Witnesses of the disintegration of the ego
Of the guilt of selfhood owed to others
Experienced in the daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
In which man has separated himself from your kingdom
And forgotten your name
you fathers in the heavens.

What spoke to him from the regions from which the gods of the heathens had once worked was like a great, powerful revelation to him. These words, which at first sound simple, in fact contain the secret of the whole incorporation of man into physical earthly corporeality. They contain this secret. One comes more and more to realize, as I have convinced myself by gradually meditating on these words, what tremendous depths are contained in them. One would like to say that the whole ancient pagan heaven, which expressed itself in this mystery of the Incarnation as in a macrocosmic Lord's Prayer, once worked on the fallen Jesus of Nazareth, who was in a raptured state. And when he came to again, he still saw the last fleeing demons, who had taken the place of the old good pagan gods, and in the far distance he saw the people fleeing. But he had suffered not only from the pain caused by the revelations of the Bath-Kol, for which humanity was no longer ripe, but now he had to suffer the second pain, because he had to recognize: Even that which had once been spoken to paganism, even that which were divine-spiritual revelations for paganism, is now in decline. Even if all the voices of the heavens were to resound today, humanity would not have the capacity to receive them. — So he had to say to himself.

It is a tremendous impression to see how much pain had to be accumulated in a soul for the Mystery of Golgotha to be prepared. It is a tremendous impression to realize, through these things, what pain had to be poured into that impulse which we call the Christ impulse for the further development of the earth. In this way, Jesus had also come to know the essence of paganism and the essence of its decline.

When he was about twenty-four years old, he went home; it was around the same time that his biological father died. He was now alone with his siblings, who were all his step-siblings, and his foster or stepmother. Now something strange happened: little by little, the love and understanding of the stepmother or foster mother for him grew more and more, while his brothers and sisters did not understand him. Something like a genius of the heart blossomed in her. She was able to understand the lonely man, who carried the suffering of humanity within him, little by little – even if only little by little – while his brothers did not care.

But first he would get to know something else: the community that showed him, so to speak, the third aspect of the decline of humanity. He would get to know the Essene community. This Essene community, which had its main center at the Dead Sea, was widespread throughout the world at that time. It was a strict, closed order that strove to ascend again through a certain regulated, renounced life to those levels above which humanity had descended in its decline ; to ascend by spiritual exercises to that spiritual height where something could be heard again of—no matter whether it was called in the Jewish sense, the great Bath-Kol, or in the heathen sense, the old Revelation. The Esseneans sought to achieve this through strict training of the soul and isolation from the things that otherwise characterized humanity. What they strove for had attracted many. They had various possessions far and wide throughout the land. Whoever wanted to become an Essenean had to give up what he had inherited or could still inherit to the common possession. No one was allowed to keep property for himself. Many Essenes had a house or a country estate here or there, which they dedicated to the order. As a result, the order had scattered settlements throughout the Near East, especially in Palestine, including Nazareth. Everything had to be in the public domain. The Essenes performed great deeds of charity. No one owned anything for themselves. Everyone was allowed to give away from the common property to anyone they considered poor or in need. Through spiritual exercises they attained a certain healing power, which had an enormous beneficial effect. They had one principle that would be impossible today, but which was strictly observed at that time: anyone could support people they considered worthy from the common fund, but never their relatives. They had to free themselves from all the ties of the senses that connected them to the outside world.

Jesus of Nazareth did not actually become an Essene, like John, whom he briefly met among the Essenes; but because of the enormity of what his soul held, he was treated with great trust in the order. Much of what was otherwise only known to members of the higher degrees was discussed with him in confidence, based on the way his soul worked. In this way he learned to recognize how they were striving upwards again along a steep path to the heights from which men had descended. Often it seemed to him as if he could say: Yes, there are still people among us who are ascending again to that which was once revealed to mankind in primeval times, but which mankind in general does not understand today.

Once, after he had had a profound conversation about the secrets of the world within the Essene community, he had a great, powerful impression. As he walked out through the gate, he saw two figures in a vision. He recognized Ahriman and Lucifer and saw them flee from the Essene gates. He knew that they fled into the rest of humanity. He often had such a vision from then on. It was the custom of the Essenes not to pass through the ordinary gates of a city or house of that time that were somehow decorated with sculptures. They had to turn back at such gates. But since there were so many Essenes – there were as many Essenes as Pharisees in Palestine at that time – they were taken into consideration and had their own very simple gates built. So the Essenes were not allowed to go through any gate that had any images on it. This was connected with their entire spiritual development. Therefore, there were special Essene gates in the cities. Jesus of Nazareth had often passed through such Essene gates. He always saw how Lucifer and Ahriman in a particularly threatening way for humanity departed from the gates. Yes, you see, when you learn about such things in theory, they certainly make an impression; but when you learn about them as you can learn through a glimpse into the Akasha Chronicle, when you really see the figures of Lucifer and Ahriman under the same conditions as Jesus of Nazareth saw them, then it makes a completely different impression. Then you begin to grasp the deepest secrets not only with your mind, with your intellect, but with your whole soul, you not only know them, you experience them, you are one with them.

I can only stammer with poor words what now, as a third great pain, was discharged onto the soul of Jesus: He recognized that it was indeed possible in his time for individuals to separate themselves and achieve the highest insight, but only if the rest of humanity is all the more cut off from all development of the soul. At the expense of the rest of humanity, such people seek the perfection of their soul, and because they strive for such a development, through which Lucifer and Ahriman cannot approach them, they must flee. But as these individual people break free, Lucifer and Ahriman flee to the other people. These are plunged into decadence all the more, the more such people rise in their isolation. This was indeed a terrible impression for Jesus of Nazareth, who felt undivided compassion for all people, who could not feel without the deepest, most profound pain that individuals should rise in their soul development at the expense of humanity in general. And so the idea formed in him: Lucifer and Ahriman receive in general humanity an ever-increasing power precisely because individuals want to be the pure, the Essene. That was the third great pain, even the most terrible pain; for now something like despair of the fate of mankind would sometimes break out in his soul. The secret of this fate of mankind came over him terribly. He carried this fate of the world, crowded together in his own soul.

So it was in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year, so it was after the mother, who was his stepmother or foster mother, had more and more of an understanding for him that one day, when they both felt that their souls could understand each other, he entered into a conversation with this stepmother or foster mother, into that conversation which was so infinitely significant for the development of humanity. Now, during this conversation, Jesus of Nazareth realized how he could truly pour into the stepmother's heart what he had experienced since he was twelve years old. Now he could gradually put into words to her what he had been through. And he did so. He told her what he had felt about the decay of Judaism and paganism, about the Essenes, about the hermitage of the Essenes. And it was so that these words, which passed from the soul of Jesus to the soul of the stepmother or foster mother, did not work like ordinary words, but as if he could have given each of his words something of the full power of his soul. They were inspired by what he had suffered, what had come directly from his suffering for love, for the holiness of the soul. He was so connected with his suffering and love that something of his self floated on the wings of his words into the heart and soul of this stepmother or foster mother.

And then, after he had told her what he had gone through, he brought up something else that had come to him as an insight and which I will now summarize in words that we have gained in spiritual science. What Jesus of Nazareth said to his stepmother or foster mother will only be said in accordance with its actual meaning, but I will choose the words so that you can understand them more easily than if I were to speak directly in German the words that came to me from the pictures in the Akasha Chronicle. Jesus of Nazareth spoke to his stepmother or foster mother, as in all his pain he had come to understand the secret of the evolution of humanity, how humanity had developed. And so he said to her: I have recognized that humanity once went through an ancient epoch in which, unconsciously, it received the highest wisdom in the freshness of childhood. With these words, he hinted at what we refer to in spiritual science as the first post-Atlantic cultural epoch, when the holy rishis of the ancient Indian people were able to impart their great and powerful wisdom to humanity. But these teachings were seen by Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that he could say to himself: How were these teachings received by the holy rishis? What forces were active in the souls of the rishis and in the entire ancient Indian people? They were forces that otherwise only prevail in childhood, between birth and the seventh year, but which then died away for the individual human being, but were poured out over the entire human age. Because the childhood forces were spread over the entire human age, these ancient, sacred, divine truths flowed down into the human mind, inspiring and intuiting. But with the passing of this first epoch of humanity in the post-Atlantean era, which we call the ancient Indian cultural epoch, which Jesus of Nazareth compared to the first childhood to his mother, the possibility of preserving the forces of childhood until later in life also passed. They faded away and therefore humanity was no longer able to absorb and preserve within itself that which had once been revealed to it. Jesus of Nazareth further spoke of the fact that an epoch then followed which can be compared to the human age from seven to fourteen years, but where the forces that are otherwise only present from seven to fourteen years of age were poured out over the whole of human life, so that people still experienced them as old men. Because this was the case, and because these forces could still be present at later ages, it was possible in this second, the primeval Persian epoch, to attain the wisdom that we recognize as the wisdom of Zarathustra, which Jesus of Nazareth now saw rejected by humanity due to a lack of understanding. In the third epoch, which Jesus of Nazareth could look back on and spoke of to his mother, what is otherwise experienced between the fourteenth and twenty-first year was poured out over all generations, so that even at fifty or sixty years of age people still had the powers that otherwise only last until the age of twenty-one. Thus accessible for this third epoch were those great sciences of the workings of nature that we so admire when we penetrate into Egyptian, into the ancient Chaldean science, into the true foundations of their astrological knowledge, that deep knowledge that deals not only with the earth, but with the secrets of the world in their effect on people, and of which later humanity could understand only a little. But the third age also saw Jesus of Nazareth fading away. Just as the individual human being grows old, he said, so has humanity grown older.

The greatest impulses for Greek culture came from the mystery wisdom, which caused a high point of philosophical thought and art in it, but also brought about the transition to the fourth cultural period in which we ourselves live, which already appeals to the independence of the human being and creates new social structures that break with the dependency on the old mystery being. The decline of the old mysteries begins with the rise of the new state system and its rivalries among itself; but its rapid intellectual ascent is also connected with this. The forces that can only grasp the slightest when they are poured out over the entire human lifespan are now there. We live within a humanity that can only grasp with the powers that are inherent to humanity between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight. But when this cultural period has faded away, humanity will have reached its middle age; a certain peak will have been reached that cannot be maintained. The descent must begin, albeit slowly at first. Humanity is entering an age in which the forces are dying, in a similar way to the age that the individual reaches in his thirties, from which the descent begins. The descent of all mankind begins with the next age, so said Jesus of Nazareth, as all the pain of this future decline of mankind passed through his soul. Humanity itself, he said, is entering the age when the original forces have died. But while for the individual, as it were, the forces of youth can still continue to work, this cannot be the case for humanity as a whole. It must enter an invincible age of old age if no new forces come into it. He foresaw the desolation of earthly culture if no young forces came into it. The natural forces have dried up as humanity enters the age that, for the individual, runs from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five. If no other sources then open up, humanity will grow old.

Summarizing this, Jesus of Nazareth said to his mother: “What will become of all mankind if it is subject to the fate of the individual?” Faced with the force of this question, Jesus and his stepmother felt the need for a new spiritual impulse. Something had to come that could only come from outside, that was not in humanity itself, because after this middle age something new in inner human powers, not connected with the sense world, could no longer unfold freely in man. Something had to be expected from outside, which otherwise grows from within in the time between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth year of life. And with an enormous force, which cannot be compared to anything, the soul of Jesus of Nazareth was wrung from the pain that there was nothing in the environment that could pour the forces of renewal into decaying humanity.

That was how the conversation went, and with each word something flowed from one's own self into the stepmother or foster mother. The words had wings and in them it was expressed that they were not just words, but that something was wringing itself out of the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth, which was precisely like his self, which had become one with his pain and his love-power. In that moment, as his self was wringing itself free, it shone in him for a moment what this self truly was: the consciousness of one's own ego as that of Zarathustra. He felt himself to be Zarathustra's ego, shining for a moment as if shining. But it seemed to him as if this ego went out of him and left him alone again, so that he was again the one, only greater, grown, who he had been in his twelfth year of life.

A tremendous change had also taken place in his mother. If one researches in the Akasha Chronicle to find out what was happening there, one comes to the conclusion that soon after Jesus of the Nathanic line had reached the twelfth year and the Zarathustra ego had become indwelling in him, the soul of his physical mother had ascended into the spiritual regions. Now she descended again as a soul and inspired his stepmother, who was thereby rejuvenated. Thus the stepmother or foster mother, who was the biological mother of the Solomonic boy Jesus, was now spiritualized by the soul of his own mother. So now the soul of the physical mother of the Nathanian Jesus child also walked again on earth in a physical body, in the body of the mother of the Solomonian Jesus child. But he himself was as if alone with his three bodies, but most highly spiritualized by all his experiences, alone with his physical, etheric and astral bodies; the self, however, had gone away. For in this physical, etheric and astral body dwelt all that came from the ego of Zarathustra. Although the Zarathustra ego had withdrawn, all its impressions had remained. This had the effect that in this remarkable personality, which Jesus of Nazareth now was, after the ego of Zarathustra had departed from him, something very special was. And what was in it, that presented itself to me, when I could see the further progress in this Fifth Gospel, as I describe it.

After the conversation with his mother, something stirred in Jesus of Nazareth, from whom the ego of Zarathustra had gone. It seemed like a mighty cosmic urge that pushed what was now there to the banks of the Jordan, to John the Baptist. On the way there, this strange being met—for that is what Jesus of Nazareth was now, a being who wore the highest humanity, as it is otherwise only compatible with fully developed four human limbs, only in three human covers across the ground, a being who felt inwardly different than a human being, but who had the human form on the outside. After the conversation with his mother, when he had felt the urge within himself to go to the Jordan to John the Baptist, he encountered this being, two Essenes, two of those Essenes who knew Jesus well. Of course, they found what was said in his features strange; but they still recognized him by his outward appearance, which had not changed and which was clearly recognizable. But they found him strange. The change that had taken place in him had given his eyes a very special expression. Something spoke from these eyes, like an inner light that shone gently, like the light embodied, not earthly, but heavenly, love of man. The two Essenes saw him as an old acquaintance. They felt that they could not escape the tremendously mild, infinitely mild gaze of Jesus, as he now was. But then again, when they looked into those eyes, they also felt something like a reproach that did not come from him, that was something like a force that welled up in their own soul, radiated into his eyes and back, like a mild moonlight, but like a tremendous reproach about their own being, about what they were.

Only with such words can I describe what can be seen by looking into the Akasha Chronicle, what these Essenes saw in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, which they felt through his body, that is, through his physical, etheric and astral body, which they saw looking at them, which they heard. His presence was hard for them to bear; for it was an expression of infinite love, but at the same time it was something of a reproach to them. They found his presence deeply attractive, but at the same time they felt the urge to get away from it. But one of them pulled himself together, since they both knew him from the many conversations they had had with him, and asked him: “Where are you going, Jesus of Nazareth?” — I could translate the words that Jesus then spoke into words of the English language something like this: “To where souls of your kind do not want to look, where the pain of humanity can find the rays of the forgotten light!” They did not understand his speech and realized that he did not recognize them, that he did not know who they were. From the strange way he looked at them, which was not at all like the way he looked at people he knew, from his whole behavior and from the way he spoke the words, they realized that he did not recognize them. And then one of the Essenes pulled himself together again and said: “Jesus of Nazareth, don't you recognize us?” And this one answered with something that I can only express in the following words in German: “What kind of souls are you? Where is your world? Why do you wrap yourselves in deceptive covers? Why does a fire burn inside of you that is not kindled in my Father's house?” They did not know what was happening to them, did not know what was wrong with him. Once again, one of the two Essenes pulled himself together and asked, “Jesus of Nazareth, don't you know us?” Jesus replied, “You are like lost lambs; but I was the shepherd's son, whom you fled. If you recognize me, you will soon flee again. It has been so long since you fled from me into the world. — And they did not know what to think of him. Then he spoke further: You have the tempter's mark on you! He has made your wool glisten with his fire. The hairs of this wool pierce my gaze! — And they felt that these words of his were something like the echo of their own being from his being. And then spoke Jesus further: The tempter met you after your escape. He has saturated your souls with pride! Then one of the Essenes took courage, for he felt something familiar, and spoke: Did we not expel the tempter? He has no more part in us. Then spoke Jesus of Nazareth: You did indeed expel him; but he went to the other people and came over them. So he is not around you, he is in the other people! You see him everywhere. Do you believe that you have elevated yourselves by expelling him from your gates? You have remained as high as you were. You seem to have become high because you have humiliated the others. By belittling the others, you have seemingly come up.

Then the Essenes were frightened. At that moment, however, when infinite fear came over them, it seemed to them as if Jesus of Nazareth had dissolved into a fog and disappeared before their eyes. But then their eyes were transfixed by this vanishing being of Jesus of Nazareth and they could not avert their gaze from where it was directed. Then, as if in cosmic distance, their gaze fell on a huge apparition that looked like the face of Jesus of Nazareth, enlarged to an excessive size, which they had just seen. What had spoken to them from his features now spoke with gigantic size from these enlarged features, which captivated them. They could not avert their gaze from the apparition, whose gaze was fixed on them as if from far away. As a result, something like a reproach settled in their souls, which seemed to them to be deserved on the one hand, but unbearable on the other. As if transformed into a mirage in the distant sky, the Jesus appeared to these two Essenes, enlarged to gigantic proportions, and the circumstances that lay in the words also appeared to be magnified to gigantic proportions. Out of this vision, out of this countenance, there sounded the words which can be rendered in the German language in something like the following way: “Vain is your striving, because empty is your heart, you who have filled yourselves with the spirit, which deceptively shelters pride in the garment of humility.

These were the words spoken by the being to the Essenes he encountered, after the ego of Zarathustra had detached itself from the physical shell of Jesus, who in turn had become only what he had been in his twelfth year, but now imbued with all that the ego of Zarathustra and all the experiences of which I have told you could sink into this peculiar body, which had already announced its uniqueness by being able to speak wonderful words of wisdom in a language only the mother's heart could understand.

That is what I wanted to give you today in a simple story that first takes us to the path that Jesus of Nazareth took after his conversation with his mother to John the Baptist at the Jordan. The day after tomorrow, we will continue the story and try to build a bridge to what we have tried to grasp as the meaning of the mystery of Golgotha.

Before I continue to share some more of the Fifth Gospel with you, please allow me to make a few remarks about the announcement of this Fifth Gospel. The significance of what is to be brought to our time through occultism and spiritual science is by no means fully understood in the broader context of the present day, because there is still far too little inclination in wider circles to deal with those cultural elements of our time, namely the spiritual cultural elements and those that signify an ascent and are, so to speak, the beginning of a renewal of our spiritual life, and which yet can take no other form than that which leads to an acquaintance, however much it may still be frowned upon today, with the facts of concrete occult research.

Above all, I would ask you to bear in mind, in connection with the above, that such communications from concrete occult research must still be treated with a certain reverence today. Our time is not at all inclined to accept such things readily, and only by living with them, by feeling with them from the life impulses that we absorb in our anthroposophical togetherness, do our souls become suited to see these things in the right light. But if they are transferred to the unprepared, then what had to be handed over through the pressure of the public about the two Jesus boys shows how wild even the most well-meaning became. I will completely disregard the numerous foolish attacks that are directed against such things. How wildly and passionately such things have been received! Today it is inconceivable that knowledge can be gained from the spiritual world that is not abstract but is of such a concrete character as the research results communicated the day before yesterday. This is connected with the fact that our contemporary world-view literature has been seized by a superficiality of thinking and imagining.

Not to be unnecessarily critical, I mention one or the other of our branches in particular, but to draw our friends' attention to how miserable the situation is with pure logic of thought in our time. In our time, there is no discernment. More than one might think, especially since people are always complaining about the emancipation from all authority, people accept everything willingly and with pleasure on authority, especially in circles that often consider themselves the most educated today. One experiences such things again and again, which must be mentioned, even if only by taking up time that would otherwise be better used. I experienced something like this in Berlin at a lecture I gave in a worldview about Giordano Bruno, and where I had to mention - it was a long time ago - how little our time is suited to really getting into the thought structure of great personalities like Giordano Bruno. At the time, I drew attention to the aberration of thought, which is connected with an aberration of feeling, in a then famous book, in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”.

In my public lecture yesterday, I pointed out that when I mention something in order to refute it, I do not mean to imply that the capacity or scientific nature of this personality is to be judged disparagingly. I just want to show how something significant can have a devastating effect through its suggestive power. So it was that in those days one of the most famous theologians of the present time recognized this writing, 'The Essence of Christianity', as something very significant. I will not go into details. For example, this writing defends the view of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, which goes something like this: Whatever may have happened in Palestine at the time, we can no longer know today, so there is no need to reconstruct the concept of resurrection; but the belief in the resurrection originated from this fact in Palestine. This belief is held, regardless of what may have happened that could have led to this belief.

The chairman of this Weltanschauungsbund told me after the lecture that he had read Harnack's “Essence of Christianity” carefully, but that he had not found this passage in the book. That would be a Catholic view. The Catholics say: It does not matter whether it is the Holy Robe in Trier or not, but it is the faith that it is the Robe that counts. He objected to it, but explained that it was not in the book. The next day I wrote him the page where it is of course stated. The learned gentleman simply skims over it. Everything that works as an authority by suggestion is so devastating today that people do not notice it, but those who truly call themselves anthroposophists must notice such things, because it is the most devastating thing in today's spiritual culture.

The name Eucken is known as the restorer of idealism. He has been awarded a famous prize. He should not be envied for that. He wrote a book entitled: “Can We Still Be Christians?” On one page, it says: “We, as educated people of the present, can no longer accept such things, that people speak of demons as they did in the time when Christ walked the earth. No educated person of the present can believe in demons.”

When a “educated” person of the present reads this, he feels very flattered. The man who paid him this compliment is his colleague. Does this educated person realize that a few pages further on in the same book, there is another sentence, “The contact between the divine and the human generates demonic powers”? That is so nicely accepted. If you quote this as nonsense, you hear the answer: He does not mean that in the sense of the demonic. When one hears this answer, one must be particularly saddened, because from this answer it becomes completely clear that today people use words in an unscrupulous way, without thinking about giving them the meaning that they should have. That is the terrible thing.

Therefore, it is only to be expected that such a distressing phenomenon has come to light as the book, which, despite being three thick volumes, is already experiencing a second edition, the book “Kritik der Sprache” by Fritz Mauthner, who, by writing a large philosophical dictionary, has become the man for many. Such phenomena must be discussed today, even if it is not pleasant. The “Critique of Language” is supposed to be the last significant critique of all philosophical worldviews. The book is quite significant in the sense of its external cleverness in the present. It is not disputed that it is an important book, full of witty aperçus. The whole of humanity's past worldviews are being lectured to. In his denunciation of a school of thought, with which I cannot sympathize either, the critic uses the following image in all seriousness: He who speaks of this school of thought is like a clown who climbs a free-standing ladder and then, having reached the top, wants to pull it up to himself. He will tumble down. — But I beg you: How do you do that if you have set up a ladder vertically and climbed up it and then pull it up to you and then tumble down? How do you carry out such a thought without being thoughtless? Most people do not notice this hollow thought because today there is little practice in logic. Otherwise one would notice that today in every second book on every twentieth page such unthoughts are found. This must also be mentioned because it is characteristic of how people think today, how thinking is suggestively influenced. I have given this example not without significance, because for those who can think, the whole book is written with the same logic, but one does not notice it. Many will not even notice the impossibility of this thought, but rather, as intellectual life is now, such a literary phenomenon will be trumpeted as something tremendously significant and many will believe that this is the case, study it, and from the sum of those who can think in such a way, the opponents of spiritual science are recruited.

I find it brutal that I am compelled to say this, but it must be said, because you should not be unaware of what is happening today. Even if not many will read the book, but what comes from it finds its way into many books and lectures and figures as logic. That is why it is so infinitely difficult, in view of the immature thinking of our time, not only to come up with spiritual-scientific thoughts, but also with the positive results of Akasha research, of which I spoke last time. This compelled me to utter the words that have just been used, that our friends should really feel the need to thoroughly and deeply penetrate each other's views – especially when it comes to dealing with things where ordinary thinking can no longer suffice – with the realization of the necessity of a strictly trained thinking. Otherwise it will, of course, take a long time before we can get through to the thinking fog of our time, which behaves so critically, with positive occult research. Of course, this can only be taken up by someone who has first prepared his soul through the results of spiritual science, which can be more deeply imprinted in thought. Only to such people can one speak of things that cannot be reached by mere thought, but which must be related as they result from Akasha research. Not incoherent, although they are only narrations, what I gave as the Fifth Gospel, they are related with what spiritual research has to give in strict thought structure, even if it does not appear so immediately.

The rejection of these concrete research results stems from nothing other than the fact that modern thinking is too dull to really penetrate the results of spiritual research. One should recognize that it is natural that a person who can form such thoughts as they have been mentioned is not at all able to really penetrate spiritual science. This is the guideline we should follow in the face of the many philosophical and ideological works that are currently being published. When dealing with such matters, we must be imbued with the idea that such things must reach at least a few souls in the present time, so that they may gradually find their way into the spiritual life of the present age.

I have often referred to the Mystery of Golgotha, to those moments of it which must be comprehensible to the most rigorous thinking if it is to engage in the contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. We do not really have a contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. Today we have no history, no insightful penetration into what has happened. Once we have that, then it will be recognized how, in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, human development was indeed a descending one, and how through Golgotha an impulse occurred that gave humanity that rejuvenation that influenced the aging cultural forces. Contemplation of the specific events that took place in Palestine does not in fact detract from this general idea, but on the contrary elevates it by recognizing the specific events that took place.

The day before yesterday, I got to the point where Jesus of Nazareth, after the conversation he had with his foster mother and where the ego of Zarathustra had detached itself from the three bodies, which were then in a strange combination without a human earth ego, met the two Essenes. I have endeavored to describe this scene; I have described it up to the point where Jesus, after speaking to them, stood before them as if dissolving, and they beheld him like a mirage, from which the words resounded: “Your striving is in vain because your hearts are empty, because you have filled yourselves with the spirit that deceptively hides pride in the guise of humility.” When they had heard this, these two Essenes, their eyes were clouded for a while. They saw him again only after he had gone some distance. I could ascertain from the Akashic Records that the two Essenes were deeply affected by what they had experienced, and became silent from that day on and told the other Essenes nothing.

As Jesus walked a little further, he encountered a person who appeared to be in the deepest sorrow, oppression and distress. With bowed head and a physically oppressed body, the man approached Jesus. Then he heard the Being, which I characterized the day before yesterday as Jesus at that time, speak words to him that sounded as if they came from the deepest source of that Being. This oppressed man heard Jesus say: Why has your soul led you on this path? I knew you once, thousands and thousands of years ago, you were different then. — This man felt impelled to say certain things to this being, for as earthmen we cannot describe a being such as this, which consisted only of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, with the after-effect of the Zarathustra ego in these three bodies. We can only call it an entity. The despairing man felt impelled to say to this entity: 'In my life I have attained high positions and whenever I rose to a new position I felt very much at home in my element and often the feeling came over me: “What an extraordinary person you are, that your fellow human beings hold you in such high regard, that you have been able to achieve so much on earth. What a rare person you are! I was happy about everything. But then it happened quickly that I lost that happiness. One night it happened. And just when I had fallen asleep, a dream came over me that I brought into the dream the feeling that I was ashamed of myself for dreaming something like that. I dreamt that a being stood before me and asked me: Who has made you so great, brought you to such high honors? I was ashamed that such a question could be addressed to me in a dream, because it was so clear to me that I was a rare person and that I had naturally come to these honors through my great virtues. And when the being had spoken to me in this way, I was seized in my dream by an ever-increasing sense of shame before myself, in my dream – so said this despairing man. Then I fled, but no sooner had I escaped than the apparition stood before me again in a changed form and said: I have exalted you, brought you to honor. Then I recognized him as the tempter of whom the Scriptures tell that he was already the tempter in paradise. Then I woke up and since that moment I have had no peace. I left my dignity, my home, everything, and since then I have been wandering around the world without doing anything. And now, as a beggar, I come before you, a wandering man. And at that moment, when the man had spoken – so it says in the Akasha Chronicle – the apparition was before him again, introducing itself as Jesus of Nazareth, who at that moment again disappeared before his eyes. Then the apparition dissolved, and the man was left to his fate.

Jesus continued on his way. He then met a leper and, when the man approached him, had to say the words: “Why has your soul led you this way? I saw you differently thousands and thousands of years ago, many thousands of years ago. Yes, you were different then. The leper said: “Men everywhere have rejected me because of my leprosy. Therefore I had to wander around in the world and no one took me in. I was glad when they threw out scraps at my door or at my window, which gave me meager nourishment. But I could not sit still anywhere; I had to wander from place to place. Once, in the night, I came to a forest. There, as if from afar, a tree, shaped like a flame, glowed towards me. The light attracted me. As I drew nearer and nearer, a figure in the shape of a skeleton emerged from the glowing tree and spoke to me the terrible words: “I am you! I am consuming you. Then I was overcome by the most terrible fear; and since it permeated me so that I felt on me, as the leprosy scabs clashed and crackled together, the being felt what was happening to me and said: Why are you so afraid of me? You have lived many a life before, when you loved the pleasures of life, when many things created desires in your life, which brought you the joys of everyday life, when you revelled in the pleasures of everyday life; then you loved me, you loved me, you loved me deeply. You did not always know it, but you loved me, and because you loved me so, your soul was attracted to my nature. I became you and now may feed on you. - And my fear became even greater. Then the skeleton transformed into a beautiful archangel; I looked at him. Yes, he said, you loved me once. - Then I sank into a deep sleep and in the morning I found myself lying at the tree, awakening, and wandered further in the world, and now I find you. Since this apparition came to me, the leprosy has become ever worse. As he spoke, the skeleton of the dead man stood there again and covered Jesus, who disappeared and had to continue on his way through the urge that ruled in him. The man also had to go on.

After these three encounters – with the two Essenes, with the despairing man and with the leper – which Jesus of Nazareth had in the form of which I told you last time, he continued on his way and came to John at the Jordan. What is known from the other gospels took place: the Christ-being descended from cosmic heights, took possession of the three bodies of Jesus, in which the Christ-being was to remain for three years.

The next thing I have to tell is the story of the temptation. Here the Akasha Chronicle presents the matter in more detail than the other gospels. I must just mention in advance that I shall relate it as it presented itself to me, but that it may very easily be — because it is difficult to investigate such matters and one must be careful — that later on a correction might be necessary to modify the three stages of the temptation that I shall relate. Because the sequence can sometimes be easily mixed up when observing the Akashic Records, and I am not completely sure of the order. I will only tell the story to the extent that I know it exactly.

After Jesus Christ – for now the Christ was in Jesus – had withdrawn into solitude, the first being to approach him was Lucifer, as Jesus immediately sensed, for two important perceptions first played out in his soul. He remembered how Lucifer and Ahriman had fled from the Essene Gate to join the other human beings when he had stepped through the Essene Gate after a conversation with the Essenes. He had to think of that. The second sensation that passed through his soul reminded him of the desperate man he had met on the way to the Jordan, whom this figure hid and forced him, Jesus, to go on. He now knew how to recognize such things in occult perception: it was Lucifer whom I saw fleeing with Ahriman before the Essene gate; Lucifer stood between me and the despairing man; it is he who now stands before me again.

This story can give us an idea of how occult perceptions are made when they relate to the past. They are truly not something that can be received with the same cold objectivity as other things that are told. These things express deep secrets of the world, enter into all the powers of our soul life and touch not only our imagination and ordinary understanding. That is why it is so difficult to put the words at such a distance from the corresponding occult perceptions, from these researches, that one does not need to remain silent, but can still express the shattering result of the research in words of ordinary language. Only when it is necessary to communicate such things are they communicated.

So Lucifer stood before Christ Jesus. What took place can be expressed with the words of the other gospels – they are descriptions of spiritual processes: “If you acknowledge me, I will give you the kingdoms of this world.

Thus spoke Lucifer to Christ Jesus, in whom, to be sure, the divine essence of the Christ was now present, who could understand Lucifer, but in order to understand, had to make use of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, as it had developed through the Zarathustra ego, which had permeated the astral body of Jesus, so that he could use it as a tool. Therefore, he did not hear the words as a god, so to speak, but only as a human being inspired by God: “Do you recognize me, then my angels will guard your every step.

We must now resort to what I once said in a lecture series, which has now also been published in print: that even in the old solar age, Lucifer was a being who, at that time, was equal to the Christ Being, so that So the Christ-being, who had now descended into a human body, had to feel the high cosmic rank that Lucifer had and had to feel him as an equal despite everything that had happened to him until he became the tempter. So that it can already be understood how Lucifer could address the demand to him: Recognize me. — When Lucifer speaks something like this, really says it in such a way that it pours into the human soul through occult channels, then all the forces of pride and arrogance that live in the human soul swell up powerfully. Therefore there is no other means – when the strongest temptation to succumb to feelings of arrogance and hidden pride arises – than to resist it with the most concentrated soul power.

“If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the realms that you now see around me.” These are vast realms of great splendor, these are whole worlds that Lucifer can spread out in such moments. These realms have only this one peculiarity: one can only feel desire for them out of the justified or unjustified arrogance of the soul. And one escapes only in the same way as Christ Jesus escaped in the past: by realizing this. For in that moment one feels nothing but the arrogance and pride that is in the human soul; all other feelings are paralyzed. But Christ Jesus escaped this temptation and pushed Lucifer away.

Then came the second attack. Now there were two of them. Once again, Christ Jesus had the feelings that allowed him to recognize who they were. The sensations arose again, as they had arisen in him at the two fugitives before the gates of the Essenes, and on the way to the Jordan at the appearance in conversation with the desperate and the skeleton image that had turned into the archangel. He knew that he now had the two tempters before him. The challenge, which the other gospels also correctly reproduce, was to him: “Throw yourself down, nothing will happen to you!”

In such temptations, courage that overcomes all fears speaks in a grandiose way in man, which can also make man willful. Christ Jesus was also able to beat back these two tempters.

Then came a third attack. It proceeded from Ahriman alone. He now stood alone before Christ Jesus. And there came the temptation, which can be expressed in turn with the words of the other Gospels: “Make these stones become bread with my power.”

What was to be said in answer to this question of Ahriman – this is what distinguishes the further course of events in the Fifth Gospel from the way it is related in the other Gospels – could not be answered by Christ Jesus. This question remained partly unanswered, remaining as the last unsolved remnant of the temptation. From this arose an impulse that remained effective for the further experience of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he could not fully answer the last question of Ahriman during the temptation in solitude established the connection between Christ Jesus and the earthly events that are connected with Ahriman.

If you remember how Ahriman is the lord of death, how he spreads materiality before the soul through the kind of deception he creates, so that the soul accepts the material in the deception, if you remember what was said this summer about the deeds of Ahriman in the evolution of the earth, you will find it understandable that the deeds of Ahriman are embedded in the evolution of the earth. And so it happened that a connection was created by the unanswered rest of this question between the earthly walk of Christ Jesus and the whole evolution of the earth. As it were, connected with the evolution of the earth, in so far as Ahriman is interwoven with it, was Christ Jesus through this unanswered question.

Sometimes one has to describe things in trivial terms; but they are not meant to be trivial. Ahriman makes everything appear in the material world and is preserved in it. But the fact that he handles things in this way means that an event such as Christ Jesus turning stones into bread was not possible. Ahrimanic activity prevented it. It is the same phenomenon that makes it necessary for certain stages of earthly development, in so far as they are connected with Ahriman, to be overcome only in the course of time and with the complete penetration of earthly evolution by the Christ.

What is said in the Cosmic Lord's Prayer: “Self-debts incurred by others, experienced in daily bread,” is expressed in the Ahrimanic powers, of which it is said in this Lord's Prayer: “In which heaven's will does not prevail,” but Ahriman's will, so this must be treated within the earthly lawfulness and cannot be treated merely spiritually. These things are connected with this daily bread. In the outer social world this expresses itself in the fact that we actually need material things in the form of money, of mammon, the crudest image of the Ahrimanic fetter, which then prevents stones in the social life from becoming bread, and makes it necessary for man on earth to remain connected with the Ahrimanic, with the material.

You must develop this thought further yourselves: how the injunction 'Turn stones into bread' is connected with the function of money in the social order. But the fact that the Ahrimanic power remained connected with the earthly change of Christ Jesus in this way enabled Ahriman to later flow into the soul of Judas, and to lead indirectly through Judas to the events related in the other Gospels, which then, indirectly through Judas, made Christ Jesus recognizable to his persecutors. Ahriman in Judas actually brought about Christ's death, and the fact that he was able to do so stems from the question at the temptation that was not fully answered.

But now, in order to understand the whole of Christ Jesus' earthly life, one thing must be taken into account. The Christ-being had entered the three bodies, but not in the same way that the Christ-ego is connected to these three bodies as a human ego is connected to them. At the beginning of the three years of earthly life, the Christ-entity was only loosely connected with the three bodies of Jesus, and then it was drawn more and more into the three bodies. The development in the three years consisted in this, that slowly and gradually this Christ-entity, which at first only permeated the Jesus-entity like an aura, was more and more pressed into the three bodies. This Christ-entity was only pressed into the three bodies as tightly as a human ego shortly before His death on the cross. But this pressing in was a continuous sensation of pain throughout the three years. The process of this complete humanization, which lasted three years and led to the Mystery of Golgotha, was this being pressed into the three bodies. It was the pain of God that had to be felt on earth so that what was necessary could happen to introduce the Christ impulse into earthly evolution. What I said about Jesus' pain and suffering in His youth must be added to this.

When one speaks of divine pain, it could easily be that one is poorly understood today. Maeterlinck, for example, who says many a beautiful thing in his book “On Death,” which is sure to become famous, and who, after all, strove to explain things of the spiritual life with the means he had, could say that a disembodied soul cannot have pain, that only the mortal body can feel pain. That is the height of nonsense, for a body feels no pain, any more than a stone does. Pain is felt by the astral body with the I inside the physical body; besides, there are also mental pains and therefore pain does not stop after death. They can only no longer be caused by disturbances in the physical body, but for the soul they need not stop as a result.

What took place when the three bodies of Jesus were forced through with the Christ-Being, that was for the Christ-Being the highest pain. It will gradually become necessary for humanity to understand that in order to continue the evolution of the Earth from Golgotha, this Christ-Essence had to enter the aura of the Earth through pain, and humanity will have to feel its destiny connected with this Christ-pain. The connection of humanity with the Christ-pain will have to become more and more concrete. Only then will one understand how this pain continued to work in the earth aura in rejuvenating forces for the development of the earth since the mystery of Golgotha.

To understand this mystery of Golgotha better and better will be the task of progressive spiritual development. Some things that play a major role in present-day culture will indeed have to be overcome. We are currently facing a crisis in our understanding of Christianity, a real crisis. Of course, I am not talking about what can be said about Christianity by this or that popular theology. I would just like to draw attention to elementary events of incomprehension in the present. At one of those meetings in 1910, where the historical Christ was discussed, a much-talked-about theologian spoke to emphasize that the words of Christ Jesus' teaching were only summarized teachings that had existed before: “I will be grateful to you if I can be shown just one sentence among the sayings of Jesus Christ that was not already there in some form or other.” If a liberal theological investigator can prove today what that person claimed, he is a great man for our contemporaries, because how convincing it must be if one can really prove that all of Christ's sayings were said earlier by others, that they were therefore nothing new. To the one who sees things through, such a saying appears in a different light. Imagine that Goethe had made a poem, not yet written it down, only spoken it, and a child who was listening had shouted: These are all words that I have already heard. The theologian who hears nothing but what he already knows and does not realize what is important, because that stands above the sayings that were there before, as a Goethean poem stands above the individual words that the child has already heard. If one does not know what to consider the main thing, and believes that one is doing real theology today by adhering to words in this way, adhering to what is true, that the sayings have already “been there,” it is implied that we are in a deep crisis with regard to the understanding of Christianity, from which one can already understand that a real understanding of Christ can only come into the world when today's theology, which has the public office of watching over the understanding of Christ, first dies. That is what matters: that one learns to sense the full magnitude of the facts that took place around Golgotha.

The Akasha Chronicle shows us yet more significant things: Since the Christ-Being was not immediately closely connected with the bodies of Jesus, but only loosely and externally, the following could occur in the early days: At times the Christ-entity was externally connected with the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, was in such connection among the disciples and nearest followers, spoke with them. But that was not always necessary. The outer covers could be in any place and the Christ-entity could go away from them; it could then appear as a spiritual entity far away here or there. Many appearances of Christ are such that only the Christ-being appears to the disciples, the followers and also to others. Later, he often walked around the country with the disciples, teaching, speaking, healing. While he was walking with ten or fifteen or even more followers, and the Christ-being pressed more and more into his bodies, another phenomenon emerged. It was repeatedly shown that one or other of the disciples suddenly felt inspired. Then his face changed so that you could see from the outside how he took on a completely different physiognomy. And when something like that happened and he spoke the most glorious words of Christ, the actual outward appearance of Christ Jesus changed so that he looked like the simplest person in the group.

This was repeated over and over again. This is how it appears in the Akashic Records. As a result, the persecutors never knew who in the wandering group was the one they were actually looking for, so they faced the danger of seizing someone who was not the right one. Then the right one would have escaped. That is why the betrayal of Judas was necessary. As it is usually told, it is not very ingeniously told. For if you think about the situation, you ask yourself: Why was Judas' kiss necessary? It was only necessary for the reason I just hinted at.

Much that is mysterious is connected with the Christ's earthly human walk, but what makes the most harrowing impression shows when one turns one's gaze to his death. Here it must be said, and I say it without fear, because it is a fact for occult knowledge, that at the most important points in historical-spiritual events, the moral and physical world orders, which otherwise flow separately, touch each other again. When this was most strongly the case in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

When Christ was nailed to the cross, a widespread eclipse occurred. It was not yet possible to determine from the Akasha Chronicle where it had come from, whether it was of earthly or cosmic origin. But it was there, and what such an eclipse means can be observed occultly during a solar eclipse. I do not want to say that it was a solar eclipse at that time; it could also have been a significant cloud eclipse. But it is different when the sun is eclipsed in the sky during the day than when it is simply night. But the effect of such a general eclipse can already be seen in the case of a solar eclipse caused by the moon, for example. During such an event, great occult changes take place in all living beings, humans, animals and plants; the entire structure, for example, between the physical body and the etheric body of plants changes, the whole world looks quite different and with it the earth aura. The last time it happened, it made a particularly moving impression on me when I was able to observe it during a solar eclipse during a short lecture cycle in Stockholm. It is a fact that great changes are taking place in that part of the Earth's aura where the eclipse is at its greatest. And it was through such a part of the Earth's aura that the Christ Impulse flowed into the evolution of the Earth at the time of the death of Christ Jesus on the cross. That is the wonderful, sacred event of the eclipse around the cross on Golgotha.

The other thing is what I already hinted at in Karlsruhe and what is also in the printed cycle of Karlsruhe, which is also shown in the Fifth Gospel, how the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was, as it were, was absorbed by the physical earth, for when the body was laid in the tomb, an earthquake-like shaking of the earth did indeed take place, combined with a storm, so that a fissure in the earth opened up and received the body. The storm whirled in such a way that the peculiar winding and position of the cloths actually resulted, as described in the Gospel of John. The cleft caused by the earthquake closed up, and so the body could not be found, of course. Only the answer from occult regions could be given to those seeking: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” A similar event occurred later, when many in Europe set out as crusaders to seek the memory of Christ at Golgotha. They too received the answer, albeit not audibly, “He whom you seek is no longer here.”

For the Christ Impulse spiritually permeates the souls of men, and as a fact it also works in those who do not understand it. One should not speak only of the great teacher. What happened works as a fact and gave the great impulses for the further development of humanity. The task of true occult research in this field will be to learn to understand better and better how to seek the Christ differently, so that one would not have to be given the answer: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” But if one wants to seek Him in an ever more spiritual way, one will be able to find the true answer that corresponds to reality.

This is what I wanted to tell you today, and I believe that these communications are of great importance for the description of the mystery of Golgotha in contrast to the abstractions of theologians. The way these facts appear in the Akasha Chronicle shows that something very important happened at that time.

The occultist is convinced of the following: Once the minds of humanity have risen somewhat above all that now dominates souls with so much pride of knowledge and illogicality, as I had to characterize it at the beginning, once the minds of right thinking have become interwoven, then - despite what some might believe: What has thinking to do with receiving such communications and trying to recognize them? — then the mind will prepare itself to truly understand even those things that seemingly have nothing to do with thinking, because it is precisely through true thinking that the soul is imbued with the genuine sense of truth, which does not perceive what is given in these two lectures as ridiculous, but strives to accept it as carefully conducted research from the Akasha Chronicle.

One of the great men whose busts stand before you here, the German philosopher Hegel, summarized his conviction of the essence of human development in the words: this development is a progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom. And with this he wanted to imply that the development of humanity is not a repetition, a succession of the same facts, the same events, but a constant and continuous progress; that from epoch to epoch humanity rises to ever higher and higher levels.

Those who look at human evolution from a spiritual point of view will find a deep truth in Hegel's saying. This is not to say that there are not also temporary epochs of decline within the ascending course of human development; but it means that the great development of our race is viewed from a small point of view if one does not see the continuing ascent on a large scale in the face of temporary epochs of decline. Only those who are unable to see into the depths of the process of development have the idea, which is so frequently encountered today, when we look further back in time or even look ahead into the future, as if everything, man himself in his form or the natural kingdoms around him, were still roughly similar to what they are today. Even when we speak of development, the spirit, which lives only on the physical plane, usually has no conception of the tremendous differences that exist between the individual epochs of the human spirit and advancing culture. It often seems grotesque to the spirit when the great differences between the nature kingdoms in the past epochs are described to it or when one prophetically points to the future epochs.

Only when we observe the differentiated development of humanity does it present us with the configuration of the higher worlds on the physical plane. Only he recognizes his epoch who knows where he stands in the development of humanity. We have to look around a little to see where we stand – which level our present human development corresponds to. What is called occult wisdom teaches us that on a descending path of development, what we call the spirit in the German language is not the other parts of the human being. It is the spirit that has descended the furthest onto the physical plane in our epoch. Since the last third of the 19th century, it has been, as it were, on the way up again, and anyone who recognizes the configuration can only express it by saying that within this epoch the deepest entanglement of spirit with matter has been the characteristic; now it is striving to ascend again. And all who strive spiritually strive to escape from this entanglement.

For a long time such an important crossroads of human development has been in preparation. If one examines occultly how long this has been in preparation for what emerged as an important turning point in the spiritual development of humanity in the 19th century, one comes back to the time when the human spirit descended from those insights that were still more or less born of the astral plane, and one comes to a special mission in the evolution of humanity for the last four to five centuries. We can pinpoint the most important point at which human evolution moved down from the astral to the physical plane and spiritual knowledge passed into the material realm as the time when the old Ptolemaic worldview, which is not nonsense but a projection of astral knowledge onto the physical plane, was brought down to the physical plane by Copernicus. This realization then penetrated more and more into the later stages of development, until in the 19th century it was taken even lower, when people even wanted to grasp the spirit materially. Those who understand the theosophical movement in the right sense do not criticize what has brought humanity so low. That would not be an active theosophical life. The active theosophical life rather asks: How do we get out of the bonds of the physical plan? — and it tries to recognize what purpose this descent into the physical plan served.

We look back to Egyptian wisdom, to the wonderful Chaldean-Babylonian wisdom and ask ourselves: What is the difference between what the Egyptian priest, the servant of Hermes, saw when he looked up at the starry sky, or what the Chaldean astronomer saw in the stars, and what today's science sees? One does not get a proper idea of what was going on in those wise men when they looked up at the vault of heaven through materialistic science, but one does get it through an analogy when one looks at a human being.

We do not look at a person just by looking at the physiognomy of his face. When we see the tears rolling down, we do not just observe how they move downward under the force of gravity – in fact, if an angel were to come from heaven today, we would first calculate its rate of fall – no, through the rolling tears we see the suffering and pain of his soul. And when he smiles, we see in his smiling countenance what lives in his mind as joy. We know that original elementary sensations take place in man.

This seeing through from the material to the spiritual-soul content of the soul is what the Hermes servants meant when they said: “Down below, everything is like up above!” No material thing that is not the outer expression of a spiritual-soul! Just as ice is only water in a different form, so all matter is only spirit in a different form. If someone came and showed us a piece of ice and we said, “This is condensed water,” but he denied it, we would say to him, “You are naive, you are wrong, this ice is only condensed water. It is just something else, new, when we look at the form. So matter is just the transformed, condensed spirit. But it is not enough just to know that; we must absorb all knowledge into our soul. And spiritual life demands that everything that lives in our soul comes into activity; it is not enough what lives in our soul as ordinary thoughts, feelings, and will impulses. But if we awaken an inner life in us, then we can feel how the Egyptian Hermes servant or the Chaldean astronomer looked up at the starry sky: Mars, Venus, the Moon or Mercury, all were only the expression of the spirit living in the star. In times of spiritual life, one did not describe what today's astronomer understands by the stars, but by the name Mercury, for example, the old wise man, who lived in the spiritual life, imagined the soul, the spirit that lives through Mercury, just as the soul lives in your body. And so he taught everyone who listened to his word. Now imagine vividly how a person looks out into space and sees the stars. It is not an abstract but an intimate spiritual life that connects him to the world. It is spirit that he saw, and in the spiritual realm he himself floated and felt that he was a part of the world, just as a finger is only a part of my hand. If you separate his being from the universal spirituality, it dies and no longer exists, like the finger if you cut it off. Compare this with what today's astronomer sees. For him, physical globes fly around. He lacks the living feeling [for their spiritual essence]. But this living feeling is not so easy to achieve. Perhaps he is a spiritualist in theory; but it is more difficult to be a spiritualist of the whole soul, of the whole life, than to be a spiritualist in mere theoretical terms. Now man lives in a purely physical environment; he no longer finds the living harmony between the divine and the physical. But it is right and of great importance that it came to this.

Let us compare the achievements of people on the physical plane with the high spiritual wisdom of the priests. In ancient times, primitive culture prevailed. When we see the endless labor and effort that has gone into making every single object around us a spiritual creature of the last four centuries, let us not forget that this is thanks to the human spirit of the last centuries. But even that could not be there if the spirit had not descended to the physical plane. Thus, each epoch has its task. And because this was particularly the case for the last epoch of world history, those sources from which spiritual life always flows had to send the spirit down to the last epoch of humanity, to those who wanted to receive it in devotional spiritual work.

If we go back four or five centuries before the descent [of the spirit on the physical plane], and then another two centuries for the preparation, we find a current that, despite the descent, has ensured that the spirit can find its way back; to give the spirit, which necessarily had to descend to the physical plane, means to rise again. This current is called the Rosicrucian current. And just as in ancient times people had to be led up to the eternal, so it is that today man must seek the way to the modern, to the Rosicrucian initiation. It is not to be asserted here that there are different truths in the course of human development. Truth is one, like the sun that illuminates the whole of the physical orbit of the earth; but the paths to truth are different. Imagine, for a moment, comparing the point of view you would have attained with the summit of a mountain; at the top, one would have an unobstructed view in all directions, however one came up. But would you not call it foolish if someone were standing down below on the left side of the mountain and could find a way up on the left side of the mountain, and then would go around the mountain to find a way up on the other side that is not on the side where he is standing? So it is with the evolution of humanity. The starting points of the civilizations are like the paths on the mountain; the different peoples have to move up the different paths. The truth - spiritual realization - is one and the same. Only those who believe that the same thing is repeated in different races can claim that the paths of initiation were the same. But just as the human body that is born fifteen centuries from now is different from the human body that is born today, so must the treatment for the student who wants to go up the path be different. And in certain periods, there must be a renewal of methods, an adaptation to the peoples - to what man has become - even if the structural conditions elude the ordinary eye. But occult physiology and anatomy know that the structural conditions of the physical brain had to change if man was to conquer the physical plane. The physical structures are only the lower facts of what is spiritual above. And so today there is a Rose Cross initiation.

Among the various types of initiation, we need only mention the three most prominent ones. People know what is meant when the Yoga path, the Christian Gnostic path and the Rosicrucian path are mentioned. You all know the Yoga path from literature. The Christian-Gnostic path is the one taught in Christian esotericism - in the early days when Christianity was spreading - by Dionysius Arcopagita. Scholarship speaks of him as a pseudo-Dionysius, who is said to have lived in the 6th century and written all the great books. Christian tradition dates this back to the time of the Apostle Paul. Scholarship only asks: When were these scrolls written?, but Christian esotericism knows that this Dionysius Areopagita was a disciple of the Apostle Paul and was specially commissioned by his master to found the esoteric school of Christianity. For countless people, this Christian esotericism has become truth. Today it is hard to imagine the sources from which some of the words of a Christian teacher came to us. This source was the Christian Initiation. To the materialistically-minded, this Christian Initiation appears to be a figment of the imagination. But for people at that time, it was direct and immediate life. We distinguish seven stages in it, which everyone who wanted to achieve the Christian Initiation had to go through. I will only mention the seven names for them:

the washing of the feet
the scourging
the crowning with thorns
the crucifixion
the mystical death
the burial and resurrection
the ascension of the soul.

These are the seven true stages that had to be gone through in the Lehtrstätten, where the Christian initiation was at home. At least two of these stations, the first and the fourth, I will characterize for you to understand.

When the Christian disciple had reached the point where what is called morality in ordinary life had been purified and raised to a higher level, when one could take it for granted that he would no longer stray from this higher morality, then he was received by his master of the Christian initiation, and he should now experience something within himself that I can only describe to you in the form of a dialogue, although it never took place in a dialogue.

After the student had been disciplined in this way, he was told by the teacher:

Take a look at the plant world. It grows out of the mineral kingdom. If it were not for the mineral kingdom, the plant could not flourish, even though it is at a higher level. If the plant could think, it would have to say: You may be lower in the hierarchy of the natural kingdoms than I am, but I could not be without you. In humility I bow down before you!” And then the disciple was led to recognize this humility in all the kingdoms of nature. The animal would have to bow down humbly to the plant and man in turn to the animal and say: Without you I could not be! And man, who stands on a higher level, would have to bow down in humility before those who are not yet so far; for no one can stand higher without the others. When man understands this ladder, he looks down with humility on those below. In this way the disciple learned to understand what it means in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John that the Highest, although the twelve are lower than He, bows down in humility before them and washes their feet. Those who have been educated in this way [to higher morals] in the sense of esoteric Christianity, only then understand the inner meaning of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is a book of initiation about the methods of initiation, the apocalypse about the content of initiation.

When the student had progressed so far that this humility had become second nature to him, the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John became truth for his soul. Then the teacher could lead him to experience very specific feelings. The student could feel and recognize that he now had the opportunity to ascend to a higher level. He felt - and this was a common feeling of all who had received the Christian initiation - as if his feet were standing in the water, as if the waters of the spirit were lapping at him. And the inner symptom that arose as an image each time was that the disciple, when he was ready, had the image before him, from within, through an inner power, which is presented in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is not just an external-historical, but a spiritual image that anyone can have: on the astral plane, he sees the image of the washing of the feet spread out before him.

Just to make ourselves understood, I will also mention the fourth stage - the crucifixion. When the third stage was over, it was made clear to the disciple that he no longer had to count his body as part of himself. He had to feel his body as an object, as something outside of himself. The ordinary person thinks that his body is his ego. But anyone who wants to reach the fourth stage of Christian initiation must be able to make his body no more precious to him than any chair or table around him. The ordinary person says: I enter through the door. But it is natural for the initiate to say: I carry my body to the door. Then two more symptoms arise: the arbitrary production of the so-called blood sample is the symptomatic expression of the fourth stage of initiation. Exactly at the points of his body called the stigmata, he is able to produce redness of the skin through the inner power of his spirituality. The stigmata appear on the palms of the hands, on the feet and on the right side of the chest. This is accompanied by the inner symptom that the disciple on the astral plane sees himself as on the cross.

One does not speak of the dangers of this development. What matters is the degree of inner development, and then one no longer speaks of dangers in it. But anyone who wants to do this without the advice of a teacher is certainly in danger. But he who patiently and humbly surrenders himself to the leadership will, only by undergoing his martyrdom, be all the more a useful member of human evolution. However, he should not take this upon himself until he feels the obligation within.

Christian initiation was also the foundation and source of the outer Christian life. This Christian initiation had to be passed over into the somewhat different form of the Rose Cross initiation about two hundred years before the descent of the Spirit upon the material plane.

The Rose Cross initiation is not an un-Christian one. It is a further development of the Christian initiation. But the one who receives it does not step out of the physical environment, as the purely Christian initiation demands - at least for a time. Whoever wants to live as a worthy member of human evolution today must take part in the work on the physical plane. It would be sinful to withdraw from the physical world. We must only understand it and be equal to it. If the Christian initiation had retained its earlier form, man would have risen high spiritually and soul-wise, but would have remained weak on the physical plane. Think of the conquest of the physical plane, of the great inventions, the art of printing and so on. What is flooding in from the other planes... [gap in the transcript]. For this, a completely different inner configuration is required. This requires the ability to develop other strong impulses within oneself in order to channel what comes from material development in the right way. The Rose Cross initiation is one that enables people to use all the means of modern culture. It teaches the spirit to grasp in matter, in that man recognizes the connection of even the most material with the spiritual, so that he can let the spiritual flow out into the material.

The Rose Cross initiation is born out of the necessity of the time. It also has seven levels.

The first is what is broadly called study; the second, the acquisition of imaginative knowledge; the third, the acquisition of occult writing; the fourth, the production of the philosopher's stone - that is the technical word for it -; the fifth, the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm; the sixth, the absorption in the macrocosm; the seventh, beatitude. You must not imagine that each pupil has to pass through these stages in succession, so to speak; but the teacher must select from each chapter that which is suitable for each pupil according to his individuality. First each pupil must study, but then the material must often be organized in quite different ways. And now we will discuss it in detail.

Study in the sense of the Rosicrucians is not what is called study in ordinary life. In the sense of the Rosicrucians it is what should really be called: living in pure thought. What this means is not at all easy to grasp at the outset. Hegel, on the other hand, spent his whole life trying to teach the Germans what it means to live in pure thought. And ten years after his death, what Hegel contributed to the Germans' deepening had been completely forgotten. Today we have not yet reached the point where Hegel would be understood again. And yet his works would be a good means of showing what it means to live in pure, sensuality-free thought. The more recent philosophers, for example Eduard von Hartmann, deny altogether that we can form a thought that is not influenced by sensuality. They swore that nothing is in the intellect that was not in the senses. What is not of the senses is not real. If these words were true, there would be no mathematics. The Gnostics called the life of the spirit a “mathesis,” not because they imagined it to be mathematics, but because on the higher planes there is pure thinking and knowing, as there is in mathematics, in terms of forms, a thinking free of sensuality. This pure thinking does not proceed from objects, but flows from thought to thought. For those who want to immerse themselves in a completely sensuality-free thinking, I tried to write a book like my “Philosophy of Freedom”. It is not a personal work. It has come into being like an organism: it is a thought organism, and a guide to what is called study in the Rosicrucian sense. Certainly, many do not go through something like that. For most people who cannot undergo something like this, the simple Theosophical teaching is enough. It is sensual thought; no one can hear or see it. If you study Theosophy, it corresponds to the first stage of the Rosicrucian training. Theosophy is itself Rosicrucian study if you pursue it in the right way. There is no need to lose yourself in philosophical heights. The humblest soul can immerse itself in it.

Imaginative knowledge is the second step in the Rose Cross initiation. It is achieved when a person learns to transform thought into image. This is a real fact. A man who knew about Rosicrucianism once uttered the words, “All that is transitory is but a parable!” Then one comes away from the physical plane. I would like to show you how this can be achieved by means of two examples. Take the three Logoi. Everything that has been mentioned so far as a study relates solely and exclusively to the physical plane. Only imaginative knowledge lifts us higher. If you describe the three logos schematically, if you speak of projections, then one can form an idea for the physical mind, even if you say that the second logo vibrates differently from the first. But all this is only for the consciousness of the mind. We cannot take with us to the higher planes anything that relates to three-dimensional space, but only that which is not conceived spatially. A “tone or color quality is indeed built into the space, but it is not spatial. The astral space is a flowing sea of color and light. There you will encounter on the astral plane what you have perceived here as a color quality and a tone quality. What is physical here in color and tone, you lift up to the higher planes; only we must purify and cleanse it in order to lift it up. Therefore, the teacher says: Take away the sensual quality for everything you want to see directly; imagine how a color stands out. Then that is the method for developing the imagination. And anyone who wants to achieve this level confronts the outside world in such a way that these isolated images present themselves in such a way that when one speaks, for example, of the three Logoi, one no longer perceives them as quantity but as quality. Then he feels the third Logos as something that resounds through the world – he feels it as sound; the second, insofar as it appears as an astral projection, as flooding light; and the first Logos as the aroma of the world, as an aroma flying through the world, purified to the most perfect purity. This is how the Rosicrucians felt everywhere. These are images, imaginations, not descriptions, for these come from the physical plane.

Another image, which presents us with a more mundane phenomenon, has been preserved in a wonderful myth, the myth of the Holy Grail. This is also an experience for the Rosicrucian disciple, which he perceives as a real fact of his inner soul life. The Master says to the disciple: “Take a look at the plant; it lives with the root in the ground, sends the stem upwards and has its calyx - that which produces a plant again - turned towards the sun. Even the more recent materialistic scholarship has again pointed out that if we compare the plant with the human being, we must compare the root with the head. The plant is, as it were, a human being turned upside down. Evolution consists in the image being reversed: what the plant opens up chastely before the world, is directed downwards in the human being. What the root is in the plant, striving towards the center of the earth, is directed upwards in the human being. In the human being, the head reaches out into the space of the sun. Between the two, on the inside, is the animal world, whose backbone is directed horizontally. Now the pupil was told: Imagine the plant, the animal and the human being and you have the world cross. The cross was the image of the evolution of the world beings up to the human being. The plant only produces when it is touched by the sunbeam, which was called the “holy lance of love”. When it is touched by this, it fulfills its task. Now imagine the human being with the Kama that has seized him; the lower organs must be purified and cleansed and must appear again at a higher level, so that in the course of evolution this chalice opens. When man has transformed himself, when he has purified this chalice, which the plant has at a primitive level, then he will have it in his hand again, that he will be touched by the holy lance of love – then he will have the purification of man in his hand – not only astral or etheric, but even physical. Thus evolution is imaginatively presented. Those who live in this way will have the astral plane revealed to them.

The third is the attainment of occult writing. It is not a writing like our present-day abstract writing. One appropriates the harmony of the qualities. The teacher says to the disciple: “If you ascend higher, until you attain knowledge of occult writing, you will hear what was called the harmony of the spheres in the Pythagorean school. This is a reality for the initiate, not a mere allegory. What today's science has to offer when it speaks of number systems is often as far removed from the harmony of the spheres as if one wanted to describe a symphony as a wave motion in the air. The occult disciple learns to hear the sounds in the spiritual world. Goethe also knew about this when he said: “The sun resounds in the ancient manner in the brother spheres of song.” And in another place: “The new day is born sounding for spiritual ears.” What happens, what is audible to spiritual, not physical ears, are the events of the spiritual plan, are the harmonies of the spheres. And the signs of occult writing are real cosmic forces, and he who knows them feels the stream of cosmic forces in his organism down to the physical organism. I will give you only one example: four numbers. When I tell you, they are somewhat abstract; but if you were to perceive the music spiritually, you would perceive the relationship of the four lower human limbs. These numbers are: 1, 3, 7, 12. This is how the four lower limbs of human nature sound together harmoniously in the spiritual world. This is the secret of Pythagorean number theory: that it can be transformed into spiritual music.

The fourth is the creation of the philosopher's stone. Modern scholarship has turned it into a fairy tale. But in a way it is right, because if it were really as science imagines it, it would be a childish thing. But it is the highest goal to which man aspires. At the end of the eighteenth century, some of the Rosicrucian secrets were revealed. We find something there that we could say: People have heard something ringing there. We find a remarkable passage in a German newspaper! It says about the philosopher's stone: It exists. If you can recognize it in its full value, you possess the secret of immortality. Actually, the vast majority of people know it. Many have it in their hands every day. The man who wrote this had no idea what it was about, but he had received a message that contained something true. We need to consider nothing other than the process that maintains human beings cosmically in this present epoch: the breathing process. We breathe in and out. We breathe in the oxygen of the air and give back to the surrounding world the carbonic acid, a poisonous gas in which we could not live. The plant absorbs it continually, retains the coal from the carbonic acid and builds up its own body from it. But it gives the oxygen back to animals and humans. Thus, plant, animal and human form a whole, as far as we look at the breathing process. Today, humans need plants. The corpse of the plant as black coal, when you dig it out of the earth, or as a transparent diamond, is something we have within us; but we cannot use it. We have to give it to the plants as air for life. The plant builds its body out of carbonic acid itself. It can do something that man cannot yet do today, but will be able to do later. Imagine this process: the plant taking in carbonic acid and emitting oxygen – transferred to the inside of the human being... [gap in the text] Thus, by merging with the plant world and taking it into human nature, we build up within ourselves a pure, chaste body, as the plant does today. Man is on the way to becoming a being who can consciously carry this out; and then he will be able to develop within himself the chalice of the Holy Grail. The breathing process is not a closed one; it is in the process of becoming more perfect and of performing within man that which today takes place outside of man, and of transforming the human substance, which is permeated by Kama, into pure, chaste substance. This is real alchemy. Then man will have mastered alchemy, by means of which he will also learn to transform the cosmos. The symbol for this is the Holy Grail. We must not reject the lofty ideal because it is still millions of years away from us, but must be attained according to the principle: constant dripping wears away the stone. Thus, he who rhythmizes the breathing process will gradually achieve his goal. The philosopher's stone is coal, it is the substance for building the human body in the future. This process of transformation is alchemy in the Rosicrucian sense. Of course, the intimate instructions are given only from teacher to student.

The fifth, the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm, is the learning of the correspondence of what we have within ourselves with the outer macrocosm. Paracelsus once said: “Let us look at the animals, plants and minerals - everything is in some way also in the human body. Man is like a confluence of everything that is also in nature outside. Nature is, as it were, the dismembered human being. Nature is like the letters, but the human being is the word that is composed of these letters. When this realization dawns on the consciousness, the student sees how the eye was formed from the light. The eye is formed by the light. Our organism emerged from another that did not yet have eyes; but the light brought forth the eye. This state of consciousness has long since ceased to exist. Man today knows nothing more about it, but the seer on the astral plane sees it. There you get to know again what is weaving within the cosmos as in your own nature. Then you get to know the cosmos through your individual limbs: from the eye the light, from the ears the sound, and the other as it can only be given from the teacher to the disciple.

When a person has come so far that he has learned the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, then he can ascend to the sixth: to merging with the macrocosm. Then you have a relationship of friendship with every thing in nature. There is then something like a loving relationship with every being in nature, something like what remains in the love between man and woman. The sunflower appears different, the violet different, the lion and the tiger different, this and that different. The whole cosmos appears as differentiated as love between man and woman. Our inner being flows from the inside out, and this is connected with a transformation of the heart: the etheric and astral bodies transform the heart so that it becomes an arbitrary muscle. Here, the occult teaching, if it perfects itself even more, will spread light. Today, the heart is a crux for physiologists. It is an involuntary muscle, but in terms of its striation it is an arbitrary muscle; for it is transversely striated. All voluntary muscles are transversely striated, while the involuntary muscles are longitudinally striated. The heart is transversely striated because it is on the way to becoming an arbitrary muscle. Today it is endowed with the potential to become one. If in the future man is able to create from the spirituality of the cosmos, he will be able to move the heart as he is able to move the hand today. And so I could give you a hundred and a hundred examples where occult science sheds light on what physical science cannot unravel.

When man gradually attains this personal, intimate relationship with the whole of his environment, when he no longer has to use the physical powers of the brain, then, the teacher says, he can only understand what the Rosicrucian calls divinity, where the independence of man is preserved, but the highest is felt.

I have only been able to sketch out a few ideas today; but the Rosicrucian training has much to give here. Much can also be objected to; one can point out the dangers that can arise in the process. Only one thing can be pointed out: if a person does not strive towards the ideal out of egoism, but feels integrated, if he does not feel the urge for development as a desire but as a duty, if he wants to be a servant of evolution, if he purifies everything that needs to be purified, then there is no danger at all. And the Rosicrucian training in particular will also bring about a moral purification. The disciple must have the intention of merging his soul completely in the pure thought, for the pure thought is a mighty moral purification. Then he is prepared for the six steps.

All striving for occult development must proceed under the principle of conquest, which Goethe also expressed in one place. Only when we have conquered ourselves may we develop higher. This must become our fundamental ideal, for conquest is the fundamental ideal of the Rosicrucians:

From the fetters that bind all beings,
The man who overcomes himself is free!

Yesterday I spoke to you about initiation in the sense of the Rosicrucian spiritual world current, about the stages of knowledge, of feeling, of will impulses, of activities that a person has to undergo if they want to move up the path of knowledge and towards higher levels of humanity. Today let us try to deal with a chapter of this Rosicrucian theosophy ourselves. Not that this Rosicrucian wisdom is anything but the common spiritual wisdom of all peoples and times, as must be emphasized again and again. It is only adapted to our modern way of thinking, to the modern temporal need. It is born out of the realization that our epoch needs a special way of speaking in order to proclaim the eternal truths of all times, so that they can live themselves into the very configuration of today's humanity in Europe and America.

It is perhaps a very distant chapter that is chosen here, yet it is one of the most essential. For nothing shows us man's origin and goal as much as the realization of this chapter and at the same time points us to the forces that we are to unfold in ourselves in order to become co-workers in the service of human evolution. We cannot look at the great evolution of the cosmos any other way than by starting with the human being and his or her essence. And I will say nothing other than what is a common theosophical and Rosicrucian wisdom, what anyone would say who speaks from these sources. There is no contradiction. Many already know what I would like to say here again.

We distinguish seven members of human nature. This morning we heard that one could also take another number as a basis: three times three. It does not matter that I will combine the three middle members into one name today, and if you summarize these three members under what I will call the fourth today, then the explanations will be completely consistent.

We divide the human being in such a way that we say that the human being first has his physical body; it is what hands can touch and eyes can see, what the human being has in common with all of nature and what is subject to physical and chemical laws. The second is the so-called etheric or life body. It is that which the chemical and physical forces and substances call to life and which leaves the connection of physical and chemical substances in death. Occultism says: The human physical body is such a combination of substances and forces that it cannot exist as a physical body by itself; only by having an etheric body inserted into it and as long as it is inserted, it is protected from the disintegration of physical substances and forces. In the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical forces, death occurs, the physical body is a corpse. Therefore, it is also said that the etheric body is what protects us from death at every moment. In every moment, there is a great struggle in the etheric body against that which would otherwise cause our chemical substances to disintegrate. The third link is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, feelings and emotions, which we call the astral body. It is the link of the human being that man has in common with animals, just as he has the ether body in common with the plant and animal world and the mineral body with the whole outer world. The name astral body has been in use since the earliest times. There is no more appropriate name for this part of the human being than astral body. And there is perhaps no better definition of why this body is called the astral body than the one given by the great theosophist Paracelsus. Just as the etheric body leaves the physical body at death, so the astral body leaves the etheric body some time after death. But the astral body also leaves the physical and etheric bodies every night. Then it is outside of us. Where is it then?

Paracelsus rightly asks: Where is it, and what does it do during the night? Does it rest, does it have a task? Yes, it has a task. Although those who do not have clairvoyant powers cannot see into the activity of the astral body during the night. But everyone feels the consequences of this activity. They all go to bed tired in the evening. The fatigue is an expression of disharmony in the composition of our physical and etheric bodies. It must arise if the astral body does not have the power to bring harmony into the other two, the physical and etheric bodies. And as man is today, such disharmony must necessarily arise during the waking hours of the day, were our physical and etheric bodies merely under the control of the astral body - how the forces are to be joined together - then there would always be harmony in our etheric and physical bodies. But as it is, not only does the astral body live in the physical body, but at the level of consciousness that humanity has reached on the Earth, the whole environment of physical, sensually perceptible objects has an effect on the human being. Impressions from the eye and ear and the other senses flow into it from the outside. During the waking hours, disharmony will inevitably arise in every person who has not yet reached a certain higher level of spiritual development. If this astral body could never dwell in any other place than in our physical and etheric bodies, it would itself become disordered. Then its power currents would not remain as they should be if a real etheric and physical body is to be formed. During the day, the inner harmony of the astral body is disturbed, and the expression of this disorder is fatigue. The moment you feel tired, the inner disharmony is there. Where is the astral body during the night?

Paracelsus rightly said: When the lines of force that connect it to the physical body during the day begin to loosen, it then comes into contact with the entire harmonious system of forces that flows through the starry sky. At the moment when a person falls asleep, he rests in the harmony of the spheres, and from there he brings the forces to balance what has been used during the day. Thus, the astral body rests during the night in the world of the stars; that is its true home. And when it returns, it brings with it the powers of the stars to help remove the substances that cause fatigue. That is why sleep is a good doctor, because order and harmony can then be restored when the astral body rests again for some time in the world that contains the laws for the starry sky, and these are the laws for the spiritual world in general. If a person does not sleep, their health will be undermined because the astral body has not rested in the starry world for a while. That is why the astral body has been given this name. In the past, names were not given that did not correspond to the essence of the matter. And before we correct occult names and designations, we must first think about the name, why it was given. Today, when a comet or a minor planet is discovered, one opens a mythology encyclopedia and gives the star a name. The principle of naming in spiritual times was to let the essence of the thing itself resonate in a name: it sounded in the name of the connection with the world.

In the fourth aspect of his being, man has something that makes him the crowning of earthly creation of planetary existence. Follow me for a short time in a subtle observation. In the whole range of the German language, there is a name - and in other languages it is similar - that is fundamentally different from all other names. Each of you can say “table” to the table, “picture” to the picture, and so on. But there is one name which we cannot use in the same sense, and that is the name I. None of them can say “I” to another. Each one is a “you” to every other, and you are a “you” to everyone else. If this name is to describe ourselves, no sound in the external world can embody it; it must resound from within ourselves. This has been felt at all times by those religions that had an impulse from the secret teaching. In the secret teaching, therefore, one says the name for the being, and in the Hebrew secret teaching, the unpronounceable name of God, the name of Yahweh, is nothing other than the name for the ego. In truth, the name of Yahweh is the name for that which begins to hold a monologue in the soul - to live in its self. It was felt that in those worldviews and religions that were built on spiritual foundations, one said: In the I, in the innermost part of the soul, God begins to speak. It is a beginning, but it must be made, and this I - this single central point - is what makes up the most essential distinguishing feature of man from all the beings that surround us on this planet. Sensible people have always felt this. Jean Paul tells us how, as a very young child, he stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and he knew exactly how he first felt: you are a self-being! And he adds that there is no possibility of error and that others have added something to this memory. Because at that time, says Jean Paul, I looked into the hidden holy of holies of my inner being; at that time I knew that I was immortal because I had found the connection with God.

If we now go outwards from the I, we come to the point where we can consider the mutual relationships of the human being. Human evolution consists in the I working on the three bodies, within which it appears like the core of a fruit in its shell. And how does this I work?

If we want to understand this, we must remember primitive peoples. Take a people who today stands at a lower level of culture. You see that this people is ruled by its feelings and instincts, by drives and passions, much like the animal: they devour each other. Now compare this savage with the members of a more highly developed culture, with a Francis of Assisi. What is the difference between the two forms of development?

If we want to answer this question, we must be aware that the human being – through the many incarnations through which he develops – does his work from his I: first on the astral body, then on the etheric body and then also on the physical body. This is human development: this emanation of the I into the three bodies. The savage follows all the instincts and passions that live in him. The cultured man says to himself, “I must not follow certain instincts”; he denies himself certain instincts and passions. The still higher idealist not only denies himself, but out of himself generates ideals that add something new to what the instincts of the astral body constitute at a primitive level of culture. Thus, in the clairvoyant view, we see the astral body as consisting of two parts: what was originally in it and then what the ego itself has made of it. If you look at a highly developed idealist, this part [it is drawn] is larger than in others due to the work of the ego, and in a person like Francis of Assisi you can see how little is left of what the person called his own when he embarked on his first incarnation. In Theosophy, this practically transformed part of the human astral body, over which man has gained control, is called the German word “Geistselbst”, which is otherwise referred to in Theosophical literature as “Manas”; it is a transformed part of the astral body.

But the human being also works on his etheric body from his I. What does it mean to work on the etheric body? Let us make this clear with an example. You can do this in your own development. Remember what you knew as a seven-year-old child in terms of concepts and ideas, and what you know today, what you have learned and changed in your imaginative life. You will find a great deal. But now compare what you have learned with what has changed in other things that are also in you, in temperament, memory, certain basic characteristics of human nature. If you were hot-tempered as an eight-year-old child, this hot temper will still show through at times. If your temperament was melancholy, then perhaps this coloring will remain throughout your life. So that we can say comparatively: what a person actually learns moves forward like the minute hand of a clock; but what a person's basic inclinations are, that moves forward more slowly, like the hour hand. And as slowly as the hour hand of a clock, the etheric body transforms. The etheric body is denser than the astral body; therefore, the work of the ego on the etheric body is essentially more difficult than the work on the astral body. And only when the ego not only works on its intellectual ideas but begins to transform its temperament, then this is accompanied by a transformation of its etheric body. For many, this is only possible during the transition from one incarnation to another. But that is precisely the essence of occult training: everything you can learn is only preparation for occult training, and you have done more if you have tried to get rid of any basic mood, for example, if you have transformed your melancholy temperament into a harmonious one. The moment we begin to change not only our feelings and impulses but our fundamental nature, we begin to work on the etheric body. The part of the human etheric body that has been reshaped by the ego in this way is in turn a new link in human nature. Today, very few people can consciously bring about this transformation of the etheric body, but only those who are in occult training. For example, one of the laws of the Pythagorean school was that the astral body must first be completely purified before work on the etheric body could begin. But one must distinguish between conscious and unconscious schooling of the etheric body. The part that is permeated by the work of the ego is called the “life spirit” in the German language; it is the same in its fundamental essence as what is called “buddhi” in theosophical literature.

The third and most significant thing is when the human being not only begins to become master over the forces of his etheric body, but when he begins to work down into the physical body. It might seem as though the work of the I on the physical body is the basest; but it is in fact the highest. And the work on the physical body is more difficult than the work on the etheric body. When a person consciously begins to work on mastering the forces that work in the physical body through the I, then something else occurs to him. What works in the physical body are the same forces that work in the cosmos. When a person learns to control the forces of his blood and his breathing, he learns the magic of the cosmos. Then what he can do flows out of his physical body and into the universe, and that is a real, true work that can only begin when a person has reached a certain level of work on the etheric body. And because we begin with the regulation of our neighbor, with the regulation of breathing, the name breathing is also taken from 'Atma'. The more a person transforms in his inner physical nature, the more there is of the 'spirit man', of 'Atma'; there is a part of spirit matter in him that has been transformed.

This is not an ascetic escape from the physical world; rather, we have the task of entering the physical world in order to transform it into a spiritual one. That is the great law of redemption. This physical body is a part of the spiritual body that has become what it has become so that we could reach our present stage of development. We now have the task of spiritualizing this physical body again, of redeeming it. This principle lies behind the word redemption. There you have the mutual relationship of the seven members of human nature, as one must have them if one wants to utilize them in practical theosophical work.

Now let us consider the evolution of man. A materialist, who, being acquainted only with the physical body, has only an abstract idea of the evolution of man. But he who realizes how complicated man is, also sees how complicated the evolution of man is. Which of these four members is the oldest and most perfect? Some may be surprised to hear that the oldest and most perfect link in the human being is the physical one; it is the one that took the longest time to develop. The etheric body is younger, and the astral body is even younger. The baby is the I. It is only unfair to call the physical body an imperfect part of the human being. Just consider, for example, the structure of the thigh bone: a wonderful work of art. The beams are laid with such wisdom that no human engineering could achieve it, and they are laid in such a way that the upper body is supported with the least expenditure of energy. Let us now move from this limb to the construction of the human heart. Anyone who delves into what our physiologists teach us about the heart and also about the other organs knows that these limbs are so wisely constructed that no human wisdom can even penetrate these physical forms. The physical body would be good for all people. But now let us look at the astral body, which it does throughout life. Through the activity of its astral body, man continually introduces heart poisons to the physical body, for example to the heart; but the heart is so wisely constructed that it can withstand the attacks of the astral body for quite some time. Only in the future will the astral body be found just as wise as the physical body is today. The physical body is the oldest part of the human nature, which required the longest time to evolve. The parts of the human nature are, however, connected with the whole environment. Just as a single finger can only exist if it is a part of the whole hand, so man is only conceivable in connection with the whole cosmos. If you lift him a few miles above the earth, then he will experience the same fate as the finger if you cut it off. And just because man can walk around on the earth, this dependence is not admitted.

Look back at times long past! And when you look ahead to future times, you see that the shape of its limbs is constantly changing. But they can only change if everything around the person changes. Just because man, despite his advanced science, looks back over such a short span of time, he believes that things have always been as they are. But anyone who looks further knows that our planet must change from form to form if we ourselves want to change. But it is not enough just for the changes that the earth itself is undergoing to happen, but in a certain respect man was already there before the earth could be called “earth” in the cosmos. As man progresses in the cosmos, so do the planets or the beings that inhabit them. Our planet is the reincarnation of another planetary state, and we can trace three preceding incarnations of our Earth and look forward to three subsequent ones. What we call planetary evolution is nothing more than an analogy to our human evolution. The three preceding planetary states through which our Earth had to pass are called in Rosicrucian terms Saturn, Sun, Moon, so that we have to imagine: the Earth was, before it became Earth, Moon, and before it became Moon, it was Sun, and before the Sun it was Saturn; and the later states, which we are looking at, are called Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. What does it mean that the Earth has passed through these states?

We are today in the fourth incarnation of our own planet, and this is intimately connected with human evolution. On the first planetary form - that is, on Saturn - the first structures of the human physical body were already present. At that time, however, the human physical body was such during the entire Saturn development that no independent etheric body was yet incorporated into it. Through the stages of the sun and moon, down to the stage of the earth, this physical body became more and more perfect, so that we can say: the physical human body today stands on the fourth stage of its development, it stands today at the point of the earth's development. It was only in the second incarnation of our earth that an independent ether body was incorporated into this physical body. The physical body became more perfect, as it were, through the working of an etheric body within it. Then the third reincarnation of the earth — the moon — led to the incorporation of the astral body into the two others, so that the inhabitant of the moon, the ancestor of today's earth man, consisted of three bodies — the physical, the etheric and the astral body. And the meaning of evolution on Earth is this: to integrate the I into these three members, the worker, who then begins to transform what has come to him from the past. Thus we see that the physical body is older than the others, and the I is only at the first stage of its development. One can even know from the configuration of the physical body what comes from the state of Saturn in us. The highest part of our physical body is the sensory organs, and the germ of our sensory organs was laid on Saturn. And so limb by limb was built up, becoming more and more perfect in stages with the other limbs of human nature.

What is called Saturn and Sun here is not the present-day Sun and Saturn, but rather denotes phases of development. Nevertheless, what our Earth has gone through in its development is related to present-day Saturn. Present-day Saturn is to the Earth as a boy is to an old man. The same conditions that Saturn is going through today are the same conditions that our Earth went through in the past. This is why in real occultism we do not speak of Saturn, the Sun and so on, but of a Saturn, a Sun and so on. Our Earth is an older Saturn.

Now we must still be clear about the meaning of this whole development. If we look back to that Saturn development, where man was still without etheric body, astral body and I - insofar as they were independent beings -, we get the best difference of those ancient conditions from today's by referring to the “consciousness”. A state of consciousness is connected with every state of development. There are seven states of consciousness. The present human being is in the fourth; no being can have this state that cannot say “I” to itself. Therefore, the human being developed the form of consciousness that he now has only on earth. The purpose of evolution on Earth is to develop the waking consciousness. On the earlier planetary conditions, there were only imperfect states of consciousness for humans. On Saturn, the human ancestor in his primitive form had a consciousness like that of minerals, or rather: the human physical ancestor is that consciousness. We can hardly find words for it easily; we can only hint at it. This consciousness is a very, very dim, deep trance-like, sleepy consciousness, dull and dusky, but which in a way had an advantage: it encompasses a much larger scope, is much more universal; a mineral consciousness knows of the whole solar system.

Then this consciousness was narrowed down to that of the plant. But it is now a somewhat brighter consciousness than that of the mineral. Man was in this consciousness when the earth was in the sun. The third form of consciousness is pictorial consciousness, also called primary psychic consciousness. It differs from the present one in that it works in images, but in such a way that it conveys the psychic of the other. Imagine a being - and the human ancestor on the moon was like that - that does not yet have sensory consciousness and can cover objects with colors when it wakes up: you have a last remnant of such consciousness in the dream world. The dream world is not the astral consciousness. The present dream consciousness is to the moon consciousness what some atrophied limb is to the form it was in when it still had its tasks in the human being; for example, certain muscles that could move the ears have lost their purpose in the human being. The present-day world of dreams has remained as a vestige of the astral pictorial consciousness of the moon; that is why it also works in the same way as the astral imaginative consciousness works. Imagine someone dreaming that he is catching a tree frog. He sees it jump and grabs it. Then the sleeper wakes up and sees that he had the corner of the bed cover in his hand. Or another dream that really happened. A farmer's wife dreams that she is going to church. She listens devoutly. Then the pastor moves his arms violently and, lo and behold, he gets wings. It was not too strange for the pious farmer's wife that a pastor who preaches from heaven occasionally gets wings too. But what happens? The pastor begins to crow loudly in the pulpit. At the same moment, the farmer's wife wakes up and outside in the yard, the cock crows.

What has happened here, where a whole dramatic action is taking place? In the symbolic image, something is expressed that you would have perceived as an external object in the waking day consciousness. Something is formed symbolically that is not present in this way. But if you retain the symbol in form – think that people use it to have perceptions of the real psychic world, then you have what I am talking about now. A symbolic consciousness that is true and real was the consciousness of the moon. Imagine a human being without our present-day object-consciousness. He approached another being. He does not see the limited form in this being, but a color formation appears before him. When there is sympathy, he sees a very definite color, and likewise when there is antipathy. This is something other than color today: it is the expression of sympathy or antipathy for the other being. And someone who has moon consciousness does what corresponds to moon consciousness: he bases his actions on the symbols. If he perceives a certain color, he knows that something hostile is happening, and he will withdraw.

A later stage of development is that which develops under the influence of the ego, where consciousness no longer perceives the psychic phenomenon, but where what has arisen as a coloration is superimposed over the objects. The colors that you see spread over the objects today are the old colors that once arose as psychic phenomena.

If modern man had, in addition to today's consciousness, that of the moon, so that he fully perceives the psychic world as well as the physical, he would have expanded the present consciousness into the imaginative one. A higher form would be if he had added to this the consciousness that plants have today and that humans had dimly and dully during their solar incarnation. And the highest form would be where man would also have the consciousness that the mineral has today, which in turn would enable him to merge into the universal cosmos. This last consciousness hovers before us as the ideal of man, and it is called spiritual consciousness.

The purpose of planetary evolution is therefore that states of consciousness succeed one another; but for this to happen, the planetary arena must also change completely each time. However, we only understand the complete evolution if we know that within each planetary state, seven stages must be traversed. Thus Saturn, Sun, Moon and now Earth had to cover seven stages. These are called “rounds” in Theosophy, “realms” in Christian esotericism. Each of the planets that the Earth passes through has seven smaller cycles; for each consciousness, if it is to ascend, has degrees, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. They are also called states of life. Each of these realms or states of life, however, must in turn pass through seven different states of revelation or seven states of form: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, spiritual (archetypal).

Thus we have 7 times 7 times 7 = 343 states; they describe the 343 planetary incarnations in their entirety. The development of one state of consciousness encompasses 49 of these states. So you can see how we can glimpse into an enormous cosmic development.

When man still lived on the sun and had only developed his etheric and physical bodies, he was still a completely different being. One could not call him a plant, but in a certain figurative sense one could say that he was then in the plant existence. In relation to his position on earth, he was turned around: what today projects freely into the ether, the head, was then directed towards the center of the earth. The development of consciousness is simultaneously linked with the reversal of the entire human form. This is why the sun man is also called a man directed towards the center of the earth, and in the same sense the man of the moon age is called an orbiting man. If one had drawn a tangent to the moon's surface... [gap in the transcript]. And the earth man is the reverse of the sun man.

Thus everything moves forward. When we look back at lunar evolution, we must realize that what we call affects today could only develop on the moon as an astral impact. But at that time the I had not yet developed. Because the ego did not develop until the earth, the moon man did not yet feel pain as his individual pain; it was the pain of the moon. This physical-etheric-astral moon ancestor was not independent. Unindividual passions, affects and pains arose from this. For example, it was so on the moon — one may express it today, even if so few believe it — that at certain seasons of the year the whole world, all living beings, began to scream, to utter sounds, surrounded by an astral body; this was connected with a certain development in animal life. A vestige of this can still be seen in the mating call in the sexual life of certain animals, where cries are associated with it at certain times.

Now the law of evolution is such that in later states certain earlier ones are always repeated. Thus the earth had to go through the repetition of the Saturn, Sun and Moon existence. Now the earth is in its most essential existence. You can get an idea of what was called the sun here if you stir all the beings that are on the sun, moon and earth today into a pulp; all of this once existed on the sun. During the solar age, the sun, moon and earth were one body. Then the sun had developed into the moon's existence and only then were the sun and moon divided. And during the repetition on earth, first the sun and then the moon separated again, and the actual becoming-ego of the human being is linked to the separation of the moon. The moon contains the forces that prevent the other parts of the human being from becoming the carrier of an ego. I can only suggest that the point in time that occurred for our earth's development in the ancient Lemurian period could only occur because first the sun broke away and then the moon. When the earth had become independent, it could only then bring forth the human form from which today's human being has developed.

Thus, human evolution is most intimately connected with cosmic evolution. If you look back to the ancient Atlantean times, the predecessor of our present time, when man lived on Atlantis – which science has at least already discovered for the animal world – you have the human ancestor who does not yet possess the same consciousness as the human being of today, who can calculate and manufacture industrial objects. But another faculty was highly developed. The Atlantean man had an excellent memory, of which one can no longer really imagine today. Something else was connected with this. You would find that physically, too, this old Atlantis differs quite considerably from the configuration of the earth today. What we call air and water today was not yet there. All the air was filled with a fine water vapor. The water was still dissolved. That is why the old German saga has preserved the name 'Nifelheim'. It means that people in those days lived in a kind of water-laden air, and only in such an air could the image consciousness of man at that time live. The myths and legends of Germanic mythology arose out of this consciousness. Anyone who really knows the people knows that they do not create poetry as today's scholarship claims. The myths and legends were the remnants of an ancient ethereal pictorial consciousness, the expression of an ancient, dim clairvoyance, and people have only forgotten their origin after they have advanced to today's bright day consciousness.

So you can see how the development of mankind is tied to the cosmos. On a round earth, where the air is saturated with water, man perceives the world quite differently. For the Atlanteans, the sound of the wind was a language they understood. There were no commandments or laws in those days. There were still times when, if man wanted to know how he should behave, he went out and listened to the spring as it trickled: that told him something. And when he went out to listen, he listened to a fundamental and underlying tone that was present like a musical keynote that the Atlantean understood. It is a simple, multi-syllabic syllable; it lived in the entire environment of the Atlantean; it went through everything, and the Atlantean said to himself: “In this fundamental tone, the god speaks to me.” And when he wanted to address his prayer to his God, it was in this fundamental tone. The wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans had to change into our own in order for man to progress. But in the process of development we will again have to gain the consciousness of the Atlanteans, in addition to our own. Sometimes we have to make the sacrifice that the old must lie dormant for a time.

Thus the evolution of man is connected with the evolution of the cosmos. Just think how far man has strayed from the sources of wisdom that lie in the world itself! How far he has strayed from direct contact with nature! But what we have lost we shall regain in what we have conquered. This consciousness that we have arises from the consciousness of the individual, concrete facts that in the Rosicrucian method were designated as the “wisdom of the world”. It permeates the whole life of man. If we imbibe it, we feel what the teacher wanted, to whom the name “Rosenkreutz” is linked, who, as a leading individuality, guides and directs the spiritual movement through the centuries.

It seems far-removed when we consider the human being in the context of the whole world; but if it penetrates our hearts, it becomes a force within us that will bless us if we want to work on the transformation and transformation of the cosmos. One has the duty to integrate oneself into the cosmos. Just as a single stone does not seek to dispense itself from the house, so man must not dispense himself from the Cosmos. One must recognize that it must be one's duty to serve within the great evolution of the world. Then that which is eternal in us will integrate itself into the world existence. There will be a reflection of it in our most everyday life, so that man can express this wisdom in every movement of his hand. Then the Cosmos will truly partake of the human being, for everything is in the process of transformation. Everything must be transformed again through beings who are placed in the movement of the world. If we work in this way, we will feel vividly how true it is. And truth will be the impulse for our actions. Thus a beautiful saying of a highly inspired poet will be fulfilled:

Time is a blooming meadow,
Nature is one great living being,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed!

I would like to say a few words about the color in which we have held our meetings here. There is good reason for this being red. When we see red on the outside, it forms its counter-image on the inside, because the eye has the tendency to create the greenish-blue from within when it sees red in front of it: this is the inner activity of the eye. With children, a great deal depends on how the body responds to external impressions. I refer here to what I said about the color red when we were discussing education. The eye responds to a red environment with a tendency towards green-blue activity, and this inner work is calming. Therefore, the color red in the environment has a calming effect on excited children. If you remember that later stages of human development always lead back to the childhood stage at a higher level, you will understand why the color was chosen for a place – which, even if it is not a place of initiation, should remind us of it through its symbols – that triggers the color in the child's body that is directed towards the sacred. It is not without reason that the Bible says: Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Our inner being must become as pure as the ether of the cosmos, which meets us in blue. The education for this is expressed in the red color of our environment. If red surrounds us externally, the contrary color lives within us. This explains the red in all esoteric cult sites, while exoteric sites, where the secret teachings are spoken of externally and in symbols, are blue. The Rosicrucian worldview expresses the esoteric in the color red. If the room is fully furnished in the sense of the Rosicrucian worldview, then blue arches should still rise above.

What do the two columns mean to the Rosicrucians? If one wants to explain these two columns standing here before us, one must start from the so-called Golden Legend. This says:

When Seth, the son of Adam – who had taken the place of Abel – was ready, he was allowed to gain an insight into Paradise, allowed to pass the angel with the sword whirling in the fire, into the place from which man had been expelled. There Seth saw something very special. He saw how the two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, entwined each other. Seth got three seeds from these two entwined trees, took them with him and put them in the mouth of his father Adam when he had died. A mighty tree then grew out of Adam's grave. This tree appeared to some who had psychic senses, as if it were glowing with fire, and this fire coiled itself for him who could see into the letters B, the first letters of two words that I am not authorized to pronounce here, but the meaning of which is: “I am who was, I am who is, I am who will be.” This tree divided into three limbs. Seth took wood from it, and it was used in many ways in the evolution of the world. A staff was made from it; the magic wand of Moses, legend says. It was the same wood that was used to form the beams of Solomon's Temple. They remained there as long as people understood the ancient secrets. Then the wood was thrown into a pond in which the lame and the blind were healed at certain times. After it had been taken out again, it formed the bridge over which the Redeemer passed as he made his way to the cross. And finally, so the legend goes, the cross itself, on which the Redeemer hung, was made from the wood of this tree, which had grown out of Adam's mouth after the seeds of the entwined trees of life and knowledge had been placed in his mouth.

This legend has a deep symbolic meaning. Remember the process, the transformation that the disciple must think of when he goes through the fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training: the production of the philosopher's stone. We remember that it has to do with a certain treatment of our red blood. Let us think of the significance of this red blood, not only because Goethe's saying, “Blood is a very special fluid,” points us to it, but because occultism has taught it at all times. The way this red blood appears is a result of breathing oxygen. We can only touch on this briefly. When we are now referred to such an important moment in the legend and in the Bible, to the re-entry of Seth into Paradise, we must remember what caused man to be driven out of Paradise. He was driven out of Paradise, man's ancient state in the bosom of the higher spiritual world, by the following, which is already hinted at in the Bible as the physical process that goes hand in hand with the descent. Those who want to understand the Bible must learn to take it literally. It says: “God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” This breathing in of the breath was a process that is here expressed figuratively and that extended over millions of years. What does it mean?

In the development of mankind, in the formation of the physical body, there were times when there were no lungs in the human body, so that oxygen could not yet be inhaled. There were times when man more or less floated in liquid elements, when he had an organ, a kind of swim bladder, from which the lungs later developed. This swim bladder of the past has been transformed into the lungs, and we can follow the process of transformation. When we do this, it shows itself as the process that the Bible expresses with the image: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” It was only with this breathing of the breath that the production of red blood became possible. Thus the descent of man is connected with the production of the red blood tree in his inner being.

Imagine that the human being stands before you and you can only follow the trickling of the red blood: you would have before you a living red tree. Of this the Christian esoteric says: It is the tree of knowledge. Man has usurped it, he has enjoyed the red blood tree. The erection of the red blood tree, which is the true tree of knowledge: that is sin. And God drove man out of paradise so that he would not also enjoy the tree of life. We have another tree in us, which you can imagine in the same way as the other. But it has red-blue blood. This blood is the stuff of death. The red-blue tree was implanted in man at the same time as the other. When man rested in the bosom of the Godhead, the Godhead in him was able to interweave what his life and his knowledge meant. And in the future lies the point in time when man, through his expanded consciousness will be able to transform the blue blood into the red blood; then he will have within himself the source for the blue blood tree to be a tree of life. Today it is a tree of death. In this image, there is both a retrospective and a prospective view! You see that in man a red blood tree and a red-blue blood tree are entwined. The red blood is the expression of the I, it is the lower part of the knowledge of the I. The blue blood is the expression of death. As a punishment, the blue blood tree was added to the red tree of knowledge as the tree of death. In the distant future, this tree of death will be transformed into the tree of life, just as it was originally a tree of life. When you imagine man as he stands before you, his whole life is based on the interaction of these two trees.

The fact that Seth was allowed to enter Paradise again means that he was an initiate and was allowed to look back on the divine-spiritual state where the two trees were intertwined. And he put three seeds of the entwined trees into Adam's mouth, from which a tree divided into three arose. This means: the tree that grows out of man, Manas, Buddhi, Atma, these three parts that make up the upper part of man, are found in him by nature. The legend thus indicates how the trinity of the divine is already present in the human disposition, even in Adam, how it grows out of him and how it is initially seen only by the initiate. Man must go his course of development. All the things that have taken place in the development of mankind and that lead to initiation are further expressed to us by the legend.

From the realization that the threefold tree rests within us, the tree of the eternal, which expresses itself in the words: “I am that was - I am that is - I am that will be!” we gain the power that moves us forward and gives us the magic wand. Hence Moses' wand. Hence the wood of the tree growing out of the seed is taken to build the temple of wisdom. Hence the cross is hewn out of it, that sign of initiation which signifies the overcoming of the lower limbs in man by the three higher ones.

Thus this legend shows how the initiate looks forward to a future state where the tree of knowledge - the red blood tree - and the tree of life - the blue-red blood tree - will be entwined, where they will intertwine in man himself. Now, the one who wants to develop inscribes in his heart what the two columns – the red column on the one hand, suggesting the red blood column; the blue-red, suggesting the blue blood column – want to tell us. Today, both are separate. Therefore, in the hall, the red column stands on the left and the blue-red column on the right. They want to challenge us to overcome the present state of humanity, to direct our path to the point where, through our expanded consciousness, they will intertwine in a way that is called: J-B. The red column is designated J, the blue-red column B.

The sayings on the pillars will help you to visualize the connection between the individual pillars. The words on the red pillar are:

In pure thought you will find
The Self that can sustain itself.

Transform your thoughts into images,
And you will experience creative wisdom.

Those who meditate on this will, through the power of their thoughts, instill in their red blood column the power that leads to the goal: the wisdom column.

The power needed for the life column is instilled when one devotes oneself to the thought that stands on the other, the blue column:

When you condense feeling into light,
You reveal the forming power.

You objectify the will into being,
Thus you create in the world's being.

Some words relate to knowledge, others to life. The formative power first “reveals” itself in the sense of the first saying; it only becomes “magical” in the sense of the second saying. The transition from mere cognitive power to magical action lies in the transition from the power of the saying on the first column to that of the saying on the second.

Thus you see how what these symbols, the two pillars, mean, is directly related to the ideals and goals of the Rosicrucian student. In some esoteric societies, these two pillars are also erected. The esotericist will always associate the meaning that has been attached to them.

The seven images that adorn the hall are symbolic expressions of very specific ancient wisdoms. They represent the so-called seven seals of ancient and ever-new wisdom. The Apocalypse of John also talks about it, and this apocalypse is also a kind of interpretation of an occult sign language. Those who study it will recognize these very seals in the visions of the writer of the Apocalypse.

Every letter, every color of the images means something. If we look at things in the right way and sense the context, then very specific feelings are triggered that can become the creators of inner strength. The point is that we are not dealing here with leather allegories, but with a living expression of what anyone [initiate] can experience as real facts on the astral plane.

The first picture is the man with the fire sword in his mouth. This sword – and this one move is crucial – is connected with a secret of development. Speech has always been compared to the sword. But this is not just a poetic image. In occultism, everything is to be taken literally. One must only understand it.

There is a certain mysterious connection between what lives in our language, what expresses itself through our larynx in our words, and today's lower human drives of reproduction. The human form is undergoing transformation. Some can already see on the astral plane today what will be physically available in the future. In such a picture, the seer sees a state that man will one day reach, as in the first of the seven. This picture is an astral one today. It expresses a state of evolution of the physical human body in the future.

If we want to imagine this state, we have to think of it in this way: through his present, lower reproductive power, man exercises a production in the involuntary and unconscious. Through the reproductive instinct he can bring forth forms filled with matter. Now there is another power in man that does not yet enable him to produce lasting forms: that is the power of his speech. By speaking here, I also produce something. If you follow what is happening in this room while I speak, you can follow oscillating air waves. These are nothing other than words set in motion: movement. In the distant past, such words set in motion were also what is expressed today in the reproductive life. What is condensed today was, when it was still spirit, a word set in motion. What man today can only do out of his word as movement will later become truly reproductive power. Imagine you were able to freeze my words in a moment, so that the solidified air waves would fall down. You would find a special form for each word: a different one for “and” than for “God” ; a shell shape, for all I care. When I say “God”, other forms would be there than when I say “and”. Occultism shows us that everything around us in the form of physical objects has really come into being in this way. The spirit of the Logos resounded into space and matter took shape; the rest is a process of solidification. What is around us today are formed words, condensed divine word. The forces within us are condensed divine forces. What was once created through the word is now being transformed into natural forms. Thus, in the course of evolution, the human larynx will become a reptile-reproducing organ. We will not only be able to create movements, but the larynx will become the true reproductive organ. What is language today will become the creator of its own kind. The larynx is the future organ of reproduction, elevated to spirituality; hence, in man, the parallel in sexual development and laryngeal development can already be seen. The transformation of the voice at sexual maturity points to the creative power that will one day develop from the human voice. The true power of reproduction will arise from speech, the conscious power of human beings to bring forth. And just as you know that we give the name fire spirits to the spirits who were our ancestors because they were related to fire as we are to air, so we will develop from an air spirit to a fire spirit again as we ascend. Not only will the one power flow from the larynx, but also the power of the fire spirits.

You can see this expressed in the first picture, in the fiery sword of the one who represents the eternal essence of man that continues through all incarnations. This eternal element in man is at the same time the divine creator. It is true that what passes through our incarnations as our eternal essence is of the same nature as that which created the sevenfold planetary series. Therefore, the man in his right hand holds the symbols of the seven planets.

The second picture shows the so-called apocalyptic animals: the lion, eagle, bull and human. We get an idea of them when we remember that the animal today does not have an ego soul like we do. The animal does not have its ego soul on the physical plane; the individual animal relates to the ego of a group like a limb of the human being relates to the whole ego. Therefore, we speak of group souls in animals, and if you investigate these group souls, you will find them on the astral plane. Now everyone will realize that man, in his evolution, has also gone through conditions where that which was on the physical plane did not yet have the I-soul. Man also went through conditions where he had a group soul. At the same time — which is called the Lemurian Age — that the soul descended into physical corporeality, the group soul transformed into the individual soul. In the distant future, man will again rise to the state of the group soul, only consciously, in a higher sense. The symbol for that higher group soul is the second picture. The unity in the distant future is represented by the outer forms of those group souls that humanity had in the past. These group souls, from which the human individual soul has emerged and to which it will return, are divided into four typical groups. These are four real astral groups. One is characterized by the group soul as it is still embodied today in rudiments of the soul of Taurus; the other as it develops in the soul of Leo; the third as in the soul of the bird; but the soul that elevated man, allowed him to enter into individuality, is called the human being. Man emerged from these four group souls and into them he will return. The group soul that is the most advanced, which is already individualized on the astral plane as a human soul, we see in the middle of the symbol. It is the Christ-soul, symbolized by the lamb. It complements the four other group souls.

Then you see here in the rainbow, which surrounds the whole in the seven colors, the creative world principle in a second form. It is the sevenfold creative principle that effectively underlay the inner, human path of evolution when man was still at that stage. And regarding the numbers I to XII, which can be read like the numbers on a clock on the colors of the rainbow, we must remember that the earth, moon and sun were once one body.

This unity is connected with conditions as shown here. This form of cosmic order was necessary for man to be a group soul. Our present time division is connected with the position of the world bodies. In that very distant past, when there was not yet an earth revolving around the sun, all time relationships must have been different. In those days there was no day and hour. The sun itself made its way, and there was a great cosmic clock face. This represented the places the sun passed through. The hour hand on our clocks passes the clock twice a day; so in that ancient cosmic calendar, the sun did not pass through the zodiac once, but twice, through a period of brightness and darkness. This double passage, this double passing through these stations, is called passing by the elder brothers of the cosmic order. They are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. Hence a kind of world clock is arranged.

If we look at the distant future, you will see cosmic, future states expressed in the sixth picture, where man will have risen again in his outer form; we see that the earth and sun will be united and what is eliminated will be eliminated as a moon body. Remember that Goethe calls the highest thing the soul can strive for the eternal feminine. What overcomes the unusable substances in human nature is called feminine. When the earth has united with the sun, then man himself will be the sun-woman; man will have created the union. The unusable substance is represented as the moon, which is trampled underfoot. What must come out when the earth becomes the sun again is represented by the dragon. It will be overcome when the earth becomes the sun again.

The third image shows an open book, surrounded by bowls and angels blowing trumpets, surrounded by flowing light and colors.

The trumpeting angels express the harmony of the spheres. When one ascends from the astral plane to the devachan plane, one experiences the floating world of light and color of the astral plane being permeated by the harmony of the spheres. That which can be seen within the astral plane as floating light and color begins to resound, revealing itself as an expression of the essence of the mental plane. The Pythagorean school called this harmony the music of the spheres. Goethe also speaks of it when he says: “The sun sounds according to ancient ways...” and “The new day is already born sounding for spiritual ears!”

The bowls signify the so-called bowls of wrath, that is to say that the human being will have attained the spirit when he has overcome and transformed what is called wrath. All that is wrathful must be cast out; therefore the bowls of wrath are poured out.

The book is not intended to imply anything other than that man himself, in his development, if we know how to solve his secrets correctly, represents an image of the eternal evolution of the world. When he recognizes this, that man is an image of the evolution of the world, then he can read himself, he has become a book to himself. Then the moment will arrive of which it says in the Apocalypse that John must devour the book. This is explained in more detail in the next seal.

The two columns of the fourth picture represent the devouring red and blue blood tree. The cloud is the present-day air, which the larynx only controls. From this, the productive power of man, which creates into the solid, will arise in the future. Above the two blood columns, the initiated human being who has devoured the book will emerge. And man generates within himself the power that will transform the earth into the sun. This power is characterized in the face that is born out of the sun. When man has reached this stage, his vision is a vision into the astral world. This is indicated to you in the rainbow above the face of the sun. This rainbow indicates the power that man will have acquired when he himself becomes a cosmic creator being.

In the fifth picture we have a being that conquers the dragon. This is the future human being who will have completely subdued what is called the lower self. This is connected with cosmic conditions that arise when what is called Kama is trampled underfoot.

The state that will occur when this has happened is symbolized in the Holy Grail of the narrated image. The transparent cube below represents a transparent diamond cube made of pure carbon. When man has progressed to the point where he uses carbon itself to build his body - without the help of plants - he will create the cube. This cube of crystallized pure carbon is the best indication of the future state of man. Man will have progressed so far that he will not only recognize the three dimensions, but also the oncoming contra-dimensions: hence the three other dimensions meet the three in the mirror image. These counter-dimensions represent what man will one day achieve when he has overcome the physical in spirit. The serpents signify the upward development to the higher. This is indicated in the seal in violet-bluish coils as a luminous image. This luminous image of the serpent signifies the devoted nature of knowledge. Only this devoted nature can grasp the world spiral in the Caduceus, which will then be fiery, which winds itself out of pure knowledge. Then it transforms into the downward-pointing pure chalice. The chalice of the plant is today directed upwards, pure and chaste; in man it is the other way round. But the human chalice will again be chaste and will turn downwards - that is why the Grail is represented here as a chalice turned downwards. The pure man, the man who has become innocent, is represented by the dove. The rainbow indicates the sevenfold creative man.

Thus the entire evolution of humanity is indicated in the seven seals. Contemplation of such images is intended to evoke the feelings that we must gain and that themselves represent effective evolutionary moments.

The program book is inscribed with the signature of the Rosicrucian school: E.D.N. I.C.M. P.S.S.R. This means:

Ex deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The seven seals express the secrets of initiation; in the seven pillars, they are expressed in planetary terms. These pillars support the heavens, that is to say, all evolution. The capitals have their own specific meaning in all their individual features. If you feel vividly how the upper part slopes towards the lower, feelings are triggered in you that give an account of the currents in the respective states of these world bodies. The motifs of the first column have simple inclinations and curvatures. Contemplation of them evokes a feeling of the currents that permeated the Earth when it was embodied in its first state, which is called the Saturn state. That is why this is the Saturn pillar.

When you feel the progression of the motifs when looking at the second column – the lower part is structured like the ovary of a plant, and from above it is structured in such a way that it can become a calyx – feelings are triggered in you that correspond to the currents that flowed through the earth when it was in the sun state. That is why we speak here of the sun column. And so it is with the consideration of the third, fourth and further pillars. When one passes from one to the other, different currents of feeling develop again and again.

The first half of the evolution of the earth has its special peculiarity from the influence of Mars. Now, in the second half, it is under the influence of the power that the occultist sees emanating from Mercury. The evolution of the earth is therefore divided into the two halves of Mars and Mercury. If we now omit the volcanic state as a kind of octave of the Saturn state, the following series of states in the evolution of the earth emerges: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

In the Mercury column, the Saturn motif is interwoven with the Mercury motif. The snake staff emerges organically from what has gone before. It develops further. And as we delve into the motifs of the other capitals, we sense the earth currents that arise from further development. In the last one, we have the goblet shape again.

The secret of the seven planetary states of our earth has been incorporated into the names of the seven days of the week. They are: Saturday, Samedi, Samstag; Sunday; Monday, Monday; Martian Day: Mardi or Ziu, Tuesday; Mercury Day: Mercredi (Wednesday is a profane name); Jupiter Day: Jeudi, Thor, Donar, Thursday; Venus Day: Vendredi, Freya, Friday. The names of the days of the week are deeply symbolic. In their succession, we see something by which the initiates wanted to say: Remember that you have been placed in the living evolution of time. This is how the highest teaches us to understand the very nearest, that which is in our immediate surroundings.

The idea of the evolution of humanity was to be hinted at in the pillars. It is expressed as it has always been expressed in occult symbolism. The sites of occultism were symbolically structured and designed. One should see what lives in the soul in form, in image, in color. What lives in the soul should shine out to us from the outside, then one has worked in the sense of world evolution. Above all, it is our task to think selflessly about this great evolution. It will be fulfilled when we allow the inner life to flow into the outer life completely.

An Introduction to the Portfolio with Fourteen Images

The fourteen plates presented here are reproductions of the “seals and symbols” used to line the interior of the building where the Congress of the “Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society” took place on May 18, 19, 20 and 21, 1907 (in Munich). They are not arbitrary “symbols” that can be interpreted rationally, but spiritual-scientific “characters” that must be taken as befits true spiritual science. These do not invent such “signs” out of their own minds or arbitrary imagination, but only reflect in them what is really present as a vision to the spiritual perception in the supersensible worlds. No speculation, no intellectual explanation, however ingenious, is appropriate in the presence of such signs, because they are not invented, but merely provide a description of what the so-called “seer” perceives in the invisible worlds. The signs reproduced here are a description of experiences in the “astral” and “spiritual” (devachanic) worlds. The “seals” of the first seven tablets represent such real facts of the astral world and the seven “columns” represent similar facts of the spiritual world. However, while the seals directly reflect the experiences of “spiritual vision”, this is not the case with the seven columns. For the perceptions of the spiritual world cannot be compared to “seeing”, but rather to “spiritual hearing”. In this, it must be borne in mind that one should not think of it as too similar to “hearing” in the physical world, for although it can be compared to it, it is nevertheless very unlike it. The experiences of this spiritual hearing can only be expressed in an image if they are translated from “sounding” into form. This has been done with these “columns”, but their essence can only be understood if the forms are thought of as plastic (not painterly).

In the sense of spiritual science, the causes of the things of the physical world are to be found in the supersensible, invisible. What manifests itself physically has its archetypes in the astral world and its spiritual primal forces (primal sounds) in the spiritual world. The seven seals give the astral archetypes of human development on earth in the sense of spiritual science. When the “seer” on the “astral plane” follows this development into the distant past and distant future, it presents itself to him in the given seven seal images. He has nothing to invent, but merely to understand the facts he perceives spiritually.

SEAL I comprehensively represents the entire evolution of man on earth. This seal, as well as other seals in the series, can also be found, in a sense, described in the “Revelation of St. John” (Apocalypse). For anyone who is able to understand this writing in a spiritual-scientific sense sees in it nothing other than the description given in words of what the “seer” perceives in an archetypal way as the development of humanity on the astral plane. Thus, such a person also understands the first words of this writing, which (approximately correctly rendered) read as follows: “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God has offered him to illustrate to his servants how the necessary events will shortly take place; this is sent in ‘signs’ by God's angel to his servant John. He has expressed the 'Word' of God and its revelation through Jesus Christ in the way he saw it.” The ‘signs’ that he saw have been depicted by the recorder of the ‘secret revelation.’ — One can see that the following seals are in many ways similar to what is described in the Apocalypse, but not quite. For our pictures are based on a spiritual-scientific method which, although it is in harmony with all traditions, has been developed in its own form since the 14th century in those circles that have had the task of cultivating these things since that time, in accordance with the modern spiritual needs of humanity. Nevertheless, the description here, where it matters, is given with reference to the “Revelation of St. John”. It should be expressly noted that some of the seven seals have already been published in this or that work of modern times; but the initiate in such matters will be able to find that these other renderings differ in some respects from the form given here, which seeks to present the genuine spiritual-scientific basis.

The description of the first seal can be compared with that in the Apocalypse. “And I turned to hear the sound that came to me; and I saw seven golden lamps, and in the midst of the lamps the image of the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot and girded about the loins with a golden girdle. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. And his feet were like glowing coals of a fiery furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. And in his right hand were seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face in its brightness was like the shining sun.” In general images, the most comprehensive secrets of human development are pointed out. If one wanted to present in detail what the seer can see from these images, one would have to write a thick book. Only a few hints are made. Every sign, every form on the seal images is meaningful, and what is said here can only be a little of much. Among the organs and means of expression in the human being, there are some which, in their present form, represent the downward stages of development of earlier forms, and which have thus already passed their degree of perfection. Others, however, represent the initial stages of a development that moves in an ascending direction. Such members in the human being are still imperfect today and will have to fulfill completely different, higher tasks in the future. The organ of speech represents an organ that will be something much higher and more perfect in the future than it is at present, with all that belongs to it in a human being. In touching on this, one touches on a great secret of existence, which is also called the “mystery of the creative word”. This gives a hint of the future state of this organ, which will one day, when man has spiritualized, become a productive (creative) organ.

In myths and religious stories, this future spiritualized form of production is indicated by the appropriate image of a fiery “sword” coming out of the mouth. The first stages of man's development on earth took place at a time when the earth was still “fiery”; and it was out of the element of fire that the first human embodiments took shape; at the end of his earthly career, man himself will radiate his inner being creatively outwards through the power of the element of fire. This progressive evolution from the beginning to the end of the Earth is revealed to the “seer” when he beholds the archetype of the evolving human being on the astral plane, as depicted in the first seal. The beginning of the evolution of the earth is represented by the fiery feet, the end by the fiery countenance, and the complete power of the “creative word” to be attained last of all by the fiery sword that comes out of the mouth. During this process of development, the becoming of the human being and the powers that are thereby unfolded are successively influenced by forces that are expressed in the seven stars of the right. Thus, each line and each point in the picture represents something that is connected with the comprehensive developmental secret of the human being.

SEAL II represents one of the first developmental stages of humanity on earth, with everything that goes with it. In distant prehistoric times, the human being on earth did not yet have what is called an individual soul. In those days, what was present in him was what animals, which are still at an earlier stage of human development, still have today: the group soul. When, through imaginative clairvoyance, human group souls are traced on the astral plane in retrospect to prehistoric times, it becomes clear that the various forms of these can be traced back to four basic types. And these are represented in the four apocalyptic animals of the second seal: the lion, the bull, the eagle and that figure which also approaches the individual soul of the present man as the group soul and which is therefore also called: the “human being”. This touches on the truth of what is often so dryly allegorized in the four animals.

SEAL III represents the secrets of the so-called harmony of the spheres. Man experiences these secrets in the interim between death and a new birth (in the “spirit realm” or what is called “Devachan” in the common theosophical literature). However, it should be noted that all these seals only represent the experiences of the astral world. But other worlds than the astral world itself can be observed in it. Our physical world can be observed in its astral-plane counterparts. And the spiritual world can be seen in its after-images on this plane. Thus, the third seal represents the astral after-images of the “spirit world”. The angels blowing trumpets represent the spiritual primal beings of the world phenomena; the sounds of the trumpets themselves represent the forces that flow from these primal beings into the world and through which the beings and things are built and sustained in their becoming and working. The “apocalyptic riders” represent the main points of development through which an individual human being passes in the course of many embodiments, and which are represented on the astral plane by the riders on their horses: a horse shining white, expressing a very early stage of soul development; a horse of fiery color, pointing to the warlike ; a black horse, corresponding to that stage of the soul where only the outer physical perception of the soul is developed; and a green shimmering horse, the image of the mature soul, which has mastery over the body (hence the green color, which results as an expression of the life force working from the inside out).

SEAL IV represents, among other things, two columns, one rising from the sea and the other from the earth. These columns hint at the secret of the role played by red (oxygen-rich) blood and blue-red (carbon-rich) blood in human development. The human 'I' undergoes its development in the cycle of the earth by physically expressing its life in the interaction between red blood, without which there would be no life, and the blue blood, without which there would be no knowledge. Blue blood is the physical expression of the powers that give knowledge, but which in their human form are connected with death; and red blood is the expression of life, which in its human form could not give knowledge by itself. Both in their interaction represent the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, or also the two columns on which life and the knowledge of the ego develop further to that degree of perfection where man will become one with the universal earth forces. This latter state of the future is shown on the seal by the upper body, which consists of clouds, and by the face, which has appropriated the spiritual powers of the sun. Man will then no longer absorb “knowledge” from outside into himself, but will have “swallowed” it into himself, which is indicated in the book in the middle of the seal. Only through such “devouring” on a higher level of existence do the seven seals of the book open, as they are also indicated on Seal III. In the “Revelation of St. John” we find the significant words about this: “And I took the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it...”

SEAL V represents a higher stage of human development, which will occur when the earth has united with the sun again and man will no longer work merely with the forces of the earth, but with the forces of the sun. The “Woman who gives birth to the sun” refers to this future human being. Certain forces of a lower nature, which live in man and prevent him from fully developing his higher spirituality, will then have been expelled from him. These forces are represented in the seal, on the one hand, by the beast with the “seven heads and ten horns” and, on the other, by the moon at the feet of the solar man. For spiritual science, the moon is the center of certain lower forces that still work in the human being today and that the man of the future will subjugate.

SEAL SIX represents the purified human being, not only spiritualized but also having become strongly spiritual, who has not only overcome the lower forces but transformed them so that they are at his service in an improved form. This is expressed by the tamed “beast”. In the Book of Revelation we read: “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, who is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.”

SEAL VII is the reproduction of the “mystery of the Holy Grail”. It is the astral experience that reflects the universal meaning of human development. The cube represents the “space world”, which is not yet permeated by any physical being or physical event. For spiritual science, space is not just the “void”, but is the carrier that holds the seeds of all physicality in an as yet invisible way. Out of it, the whole physical world precipitates, as a salt precipitates out of a still completely transparent solution. And what, in relation to the human being, is formed out of the world of space, undergoes a development from the lower to the higher. Out of the three spatial dimensions, which are expressed in the cube, the lower human powers first develop, visualized by the two serpents that give birth to the purified higher spiritual nature, which is represented in the world spirals. Through the upward growth of these higher forces, the human being can become a recipient (chalice) for the reception of the pure spiritual world, expressed by the dove. Thus man becomes the ruler of the spiritual powers of the world, of which the rainbow is the image. This is only a very sketchy description of this seal, which contains within itself immeasurable depths that can reveal themselves to him who, in devoted meditation, allows it to take effect upon him. This seal is circumscribed by the truth saying of modern spiritual science: “Ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus,” “From God I am born; in Christ I die; through the Holy Spirit I am reborn.” In this saying, the meaning of human development is fully indicated.

In the congress hall, one of the seven columns reproduced in the second series of pictures was placed between every two of these seals. As already indicated above, the capitals of these columns depict the experiences of the “seer” (which is actually no longer an appropriate name in this field) in the “spiritual world”. It is about the perception of the primal forces that exist in spiritual tones. The plastic forms of the capitals are translations of what the “seer” hears. But these forms are by no means arbitrary, but rather as they naturally arise when the “seeing man” allows the “spiritual music” (harmony of the spheres), which flows through his entire being, to act on the forming hand. The plastic forms here are truly a kind of “frozen music” that expresses the secrets of the world. That these forms appear as column capitals seems self-evident to anyone who understands the situation. The basis of the physical development of earthly beings lies in the spiritual world. From there it is “supported”. Now all development is based on a progression in seven stages. (The number seven should not be understood as the result of “superstition”, but as the expression of a spiritual law, just as the seven colors of the rainbow are the expression of a physical law.) The earth itself passes through seven states in its development, which are designated by the seven planetary names: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. (For an understanding of this, see my “Occult Science” or the essays “From the Akasha Chronicle” in “Lucifer-Gnosis”. But it is not only a heavenly body that advances in its evolution; every evolution passes through seven stages, which, in the sense of modern spiritual science, are designated by the terms for the seven planetary conditions. The spiritual supporting forces of these conditions are reflected in the forms of the Capitals of the Columns in the manner described above. But we shall not arrive at a true understanding of this matter if we base our observation of the forms only on a rational explanation. We must look into the forms with a feeling and intuitive perception and let the capitals act on us as forms. If we fail to do this, we shall believe that we have before us only allegories or, at best, symbols. We shall then have misunderstood everything. The same motif runs through all seven captains: a force from above and one from below, which first strive towards each other, then, reaching each other, work together. These forces can be felt in their fullness and in their inner life and then the soul itself can experience how they expand, contract, embrace, devour, unlock and so on, in a lively, formative way. We will be able to feel this complication of forces, just as we feel the plant's “shaping” from its living forces, and we will be able to sense how the line of force first grows vertically upwards in the column, how it unfolds at the bottom in the plastic forms of the capitals, which open and unlock to the forces coming towards them from above, so that a meaningful capital becomes. First the power from below develops in the simplest way, and you strive just as simply towards the power from above (Saturn column);

He who can feel all that is expressed in these “columns” of world events feels the all-embracing laws of all being, which solve the riddles of life in a very different way from abstract “laws of nature”.

These pictures are intended to show how spiritual insight can take shape, come to life and be artistically expressed. Note that the pictures depict living forces of existence in the higher world; and these higher spiritual forces have a profound effect on the observer of the pictures. They act directly on forces that, corresponding to them, lie dormant in every human being. But their effect is only right if one looks at these pictures with the right inner soul disposition. Those who look at the pictures with theosophical mental images and theosophical feelings in their hearts will receive the most sacred from them. If you want to hang them anywhere or put them anywhere, where you will encounter them with everyday thoughts and feelings, you will feel an unfavorable effect, which can go as far as a bad influence on your physical life. You should act accordingly and only enter into a relationship with the pictures that is in harmony with a devotion to the spiritual worlds. Such pictures should serve as decoration for a room that serves a higher life; they should never be found or viewed in places where people's thoughts are not in harmony with them.

It is commonly believed that there are so many diseases, but only one health. This is nonsense, however, because in reality there are as many types of health as there are people. Health is something entirely individual and ultimately different for each person. However, we only have a very general idea of what it is to be healthy, and anything that does not match this image is considered an illness. We should endeavor to enable the patient to lead the best and most comfortable life possible despite the abnormality of the disease, as if he did not have this abnormality at all. But we should not want to reduce him to the general template that we have somehow created and now want to impose on everything.

Of course, some people need a certain abnormality. This does not mean that we should now let the diseases take their course. If we want to take the concept of “health” seriously, we have to consider a different concept of development in all its depth and meaning.

Animals in their natural environment never overeat themselves, but this often happens when they are adopted into civilization. In this care, they contract a variety of diseases. Animals also develop certain diseases as soon as they are captured, while they did not suffer from them in the wild. Certain mental illnesses are virtually a consequence of the culture of a particular stage.

Physically and chemically, the animal body is an impossible mixture. The life body is therefore a necessary link for its sustenance. The astral body contains the causes of what happens in the physical and etheric bodies. The astral body in an animal has no such wide-ranging potential for individual development as it does in a human being. It is a tightly closed circle of animal instincts, desires and passions. The animal fits perfectly into its circumstances, and that with its physical, etheric and astral bodies. The captive animal can only be taught different habits with regard to the physical and etheric bodies, but it is not possible to influence its astral body. This is why the animal cannot integrate itself into new circumstances in a healthy way, because this would have to start from the astral body.

In the case of human beings, too, far-reaching changes have to start with the astral body. If we want to remain healthy when transitioning from simpler to more complicated circumstances, we first have to adapt to those new circumstances from the inside out, from the I and the astral body. This adaptation is a work of the I on the astral body, and only it brings health to the etheric body and the physical body.

Man is absolutely designed for this development right into his physical body. Not every phenomenon means the same in all kingdoms of nature, as the materialistic way of thinking believes. This is the case, for example, with the softening of the bones, rickets. Man is in a state of progressive development with all his parts and members. The body has developed from very different, earlier forms to its present shape. The I and the astral body will continue to transform the human organism. In his bone system, the human being must still have the possibility of softening, so that he can also develop there. In the human being, on the one hand, there are tendencies towards softening and, on the other hand, towards hardening, so that he does not have to remain in a stationary state. The inner human being, his I and the astral body, properly guided by the I, must direct such transformations. Rickets is a premature remodeling of the bones because it is not properly guided by the ego.

Spiritual science must intervene in the area of disease predispositions, correcting medicine here and steering it in the right direction. Each person has their own specific place in existence and must accordingly remodel their organs in their own individual way for their personal health.

Paracelsus taught profound truths in this regard and was far ahead of his time. He believed that health is an entirely individual matter and cannot be considered and corrected in any stereotypical way when a disturbance occurs.

What criteria does the self use to maintain health? This cannot be studied empirically. The important thing is to recognize the right criteria for health in the sense of inner harmony, contentment, the joy of being, and an untroubled and undisturbed zest for life. This feeling of contentment is worth much more than all the external anointing and tanning from the sun. Wherever you find joy in flowers, trees and sunshine, wherever your zest for life is heightened and your love of life is strengthened, you will stay healthy or be able to restore balance to your disturbed health. A healthy soul also creates a healthy body. On the contrary, external concoctions and procedures can rob a person of their health. So, it is primarily a matter of keeping the soul healthy. “Mens sana in corpore sano!"

This saying can only be understood correctly with this in mind. A healthy body also indicates a healthy soul. On the other hand, a healthier soul can never be created by external transformation of the body.

But how does this attitude go together with the teaching of asceticism, as it is, for example, accused of theosophy? Theosophy is misunderstood if it is thought to preach mortification. The theosophist does not mortify himself; on the contrary, he would mortify himself if he had to take part in all the social hustle and bustle, for example, sitting down to dinner or going to a music hall. In the light of correctly understood Theosophy, it is nonsense to say that something or other is prescribed for man, that he must live in such and such a way. Theosophy has no dogmas in this sense, and no agitation for vegetarianism. Meanwhile, individual Theosophers come to refrain from eating meat through their feelings and intuitions.

For others, however, eating meat is still a necessity. It is also possible to develop the view that eating meat is no longer desirable in an even higher sense. A doctor who was not a theosophist answered the question of why he did not eat meat by saying that he was simply disgusted by the idea of eating cat or horse meat, just as most people would be. For those who advance in spiritual development, the desire for certain things no longer arises by itself. Their instinct for certain foods has simply changed. Those who still cling to the Tingeltangel must be left there, and those who have no desire for it should not go there. It is the sublimation of instincts and desires that keeps the physical organs healthy and makes them healthy.

Thus the spiritual-scientific world view wants to give people the ability to direct their astral body in such a way that it comes into harmony with the law of advancing humanity. One does not just occasionally stop in recognition, but also in the experience of one's life.

The ego of many people often follows the will-o'-the-wisps and thus generates selfishness, the spirit of lies and error, thus generating erring temperaments and passions. If the ego is not in harmony with the order of the world, it will stray restlessly and follow all the will-o'-the-wisps that appear. It is important to familiarize oneself with the erring temperaments and character traits. Few people today can be completely honest and truthful. But this shortcoming causes illness and infirmity. Some people can no longer be helped in some respects because they are caught up in overly complicated relationships with communities, so that they are unable to break away from them. Often, in a community where sick people live alongside healthy ones, the actual causes of illness lie with the healthy and not with the sick. And the more receptive natures absorb these illnesses, which are basically the fault of the strong natures. Keeping oneself healthy is therefore a duty towards all fellow human beings. Some people carry an illness from their neighbor without having caused it themselves.

By keeping ourselves healthy, we have the opportunity to align ourselves with the great laws of the world and thus make our own and other people's illnesses disappear. However, this requires people to work together properly. Only in this way is it possible to guarantee general health.

Short-sightedness, for example, is due to the fact that in our current education system, the eye has to remain passive for too long, always receiving impressions only from the outside, but not being prompted by the soul to look and observe in the open air, where there are near and far objects. This adaptation must be brought about by the soul. Where this does not happen, the eye loses its ability to adapt.

A world view that allows everything to be dictated from the outside is extremely unhealthy, whereas one that drives and creates from within is a truly healthy world view. The constant absorption of impressions from the outside has the same effect as what we have described as myopia in the eye.

One must form one's world view in an open-minded love. Today's books are often written in such a way that the truths are smeared into people's mouths, so to speak. However, those books that require long study and reflection to grasp their content are the truly good books in the theosophical sense. They are designed to stimulate inner productivity.

In the classroom, you can dissect plants with children, but when you are out in nature with young people, you should bring them closer to the whole of living nature. In this context, analyzing and destroying would be inappropriate. Love, in whatever form it appears, has a healing effect on people because it produces noble feelings and gives something out of itself. It is also healthy to produce in art and science or in similar behavior. Anything that encourages people to work independently is healthy. Theosophy aims to ennoble and harmonize people's inner emotional life by showing them the developments in the outside world and pointing out the harmony that prevails in it. This makes our mind productive and creates health in soul and body. A worldview such as this makes people capable of creating counterweights within themselves against all external influences, thus arming themselves against hypochondria and hysteria. Where this fixed point is developed within, the person is then stabilized for every external situation. They can then also give themselves over to pleasure without being harmed by it. It becomes an expression of their deep and true health.

When Theosophy is introduced into life in this way, it proves itself in our lives, and thus its validity is also proved, without objections having to be logically refuted.