The Rudolf Steiner Archive

After yesterday's introduction, we want to move on to discussing some very characteristic signs and symbols today.

We emphasized yesterday that only humans, as they live here on the physical plane, have an individual soul, an ego, and that the animals that surround us have a group ego, a group soul, which lives on the astral plane and can be found there as a closed entity. Thus, when we look at them spiritually, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom are on opposite sides, the animal kingdom as group soul or group ego and the human kingdom as individual ego. We must not imagine that there are no transitions between the individual entities in the universe. Although the saying that nature does not make leaps is not at all correct for the occultist, transitions can be found everywhere. And so you will also find a transition between the group souls of the animal kingdom and the individual soul of the human being. It would be wrong to imagine that a person, upon entering earthly existence, had a fully developed individual soul, and that this soul would then incarnate again and again in the same form here on earth. It is much more the case that the human being today is in a gradual transition from a group soul, which he had in ancient times, to the fully developed individual soul, which he still does not have today. He is only on the way to the complete integration of his individual soul into his physical body. He will only have this completed individual soul when the earthly existence is more or less complete. For the vast majority of people today, their ego is an intermediate product between a group ego and an individual ego. The further back we go in the past, the more the human ego is still a group ego. At the beginning of their existence on earth, when the souls first descended from the divine worlds into our physical plane, human souls were still group selves. Several people belonged together to a group that had a communal soul, a group self.

On the one hand, we want to hold on to that. On the other hand, we now want to take a closer look at the members of human nature itself. You are well aware, since it has been said over and over again, that man initially has four members of his being: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body and the I. And this I, when we look at it more closely, appears to us again divided into three parts, which we know under the names: sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul. In the sentient soul and in the mind or emotional soul, the independent I first dawns, and only in the consciousness soul do we have the first announcement of the self-conscious I. Only then does that which is called the fifth part of his being, the spirit self or manas, gradually shine into the human being. So, in today's human being, we have the following structure: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body; then, intimately connected with the astral body, the sentient soul, which is embedded in him; then the mind soul and the consciousness soul; and again in the consciousness soul, which is the actual I-soul, the spirit self or Manas is incorporated. This is roughly how we would have to imagine today's human being.

Now we must realize which of these human limbs is the most developed, the most perfect. Some of you have already heard me say that, as man is developed today, the physical body is the most developed, the most perfectly developed limb. One must not confuse “most developed and most perfectly developed” with “higher natured”. Certainly the etheric body and the astral body are of a higher nature than the physical body, but the etheric body and the astral body will only achieve the perfection of their development in the future. In its way, the physical body is the most perfect part of the human being today. Anyone who studies the physical body, not just anatomically and physically, but penetrating its mind and heart, will stand in awe of the tremendous wisdom built into the physical body. Our physical body shows us the perfect, wise structure in every smallest of its limbs. If you take just a piece of the thigh bone from this physical body, the uppermost part of the thigh bone, it is not a solid mass, it is a wise construction, wonderfully put together from small beams. If you study how the fine beams are joined together, you will find that everything is built to produce the greatest amount of force with the least amount of substance, so that the upper body can be supported by these two pillars of the thigh bone. Even the most accomplished engineering skill today cannot build a bridge or any kind of scaffolding with such wisdom, where such a small amount of material is used to develop such a large amount of strength. Human wisdom lags far, far behind the wisdom with which the human physical body is built. It is the same with all parts of the physical body. If you look at the brain with the nervous system, it is a miracle. And if you look at the human heart, which is only on the way to its perfection and which will reach much, much higher degrees of perfection – it is something wonderful! If you compare the perfection of the physical body with the astral body, with its drives, instincts and passions, we have to say: Although it will one day be higher than the physical body, it is still at a relatively low level today. In everything that man develops today in the way of desires for pleasures, he delivers hundreds and hundreds of attacks on the physical body. Everything that man desires and satisfies in pleasures that he procures for himself, such as alcohol and all kinds of other things, are basically heart poisons, with which he continually attacks the wisdom and wonder of his physical body. It will take a long time of development before the astral body has reached the level of perfection that the physical body has today.

From the doctrine of development, as given by our theosophical cosmology, you know that the physical body was already present on the old Saturn and underwent further degrees of perfection through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth. You know that in the second stage, on the old sun, the etheric body was added, which is therefore one degree lower in development than the physical body today. You know that on the old moon the astral body was added; it has only the moon evolution behind it and that part of the earth evolution that we have gone through so far. The I is only added on earth; it is the “baby” among the four members of human nature. Actually, the wisdom we spoke of yesterday, which permeates the group souls of animality, is imprinted in the physical body of the human being; it has passed over into the individual physical body of the human being, which is built full of wisdom. The etheric body of the human being is only on the way to its completion; in the course of its earthly development, it will absorb everything it needs to fulfill itself.

When the Earth has reached its goal, it will pass into the astral state and then into even higher states, and later transform into a planet that will replace the Earth and which we call Jupiter. Then the etheric body of man will be completed in its kind, as on Earth the physical body of man is completed in its kind. In the next incarnation of the Earth, which we are accustomed to calling the future Venus, the astral body of man will have reached its completion; it will then stand at the stage at which the physical body stands today and at which the ether body will stand in the next planetary state. And finally, when the Earth has reached the volcanic state, then our I will have reached its completion. So that we can actually say: On earth, only the physical body of man is human; in the next planetary state of our earth, the etheric body of man will become human; then it will be impregnated with what the earth can give to man: with love.

What the physical body of man carries today as its characteristic properties, it owes to the old moon. In occultism, the old moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom. Back then on the old moon, what you now find in the physical body of man was gradually prepared. And just as what our physical body is was imbued with wisdom on the moon, so what you will find in the later Jupiter state of the earth is being prepared through the Cosmos of Love: the etheric body is completely permeated by the element of love. And just as we today admire a piece of bone in the physical body in its wisdom, so will the people of Jupiter admire the etheric body, because it is permeated with love in the same way as the physical body on earth is shaped by wisdom.

If you hold on to this, you will come to the realization that only man's physical body is truly human, only truly at the human level. The human etheric body is not yet at the human level, it is still at the level of animality, and the human astral body is still at the level of plant-like existence. When you are sleeping at night and your astral body is raised out, then the physical and ether bodies sink into a dreamless sleep; this is the state that plants are in all the time. In relation to its state of consciousness, the human being's astral body is at the level of plant-ness. The I is only at the level of the mineral kingdom. The state of consciousness of the human being is definitely on the level of the mineral kingdom. Try to examine yourself according to this truth, to see what insights you can have; try to recognize them correctly. What can a person understand? He can understand the physical laws of the mineral kingdom, according to which he can build machines and factories, erect buildings and so on. All this happens according to the physical laws of the mineral kingdom. With plants, man rightly says that he cannot grasp life itself with the intellect. The time will come when man will understand plants just as he understands minerals today; then he will also be able to build plants as he builds his cathedrals and houses and machines according to the laws of the mineral kingdom. All the laws of the mineral kingdom are imbued with the I.

Science is waiting for its ideal to be fulfilled, to produce living beings in the laboratory. It will not be able to do so unless humanity has reached a certain necessary stage of moral development. It would be a bad thing if humanity were already able to do so today. Just as one makes a clock according to mineral laws, or builds a house, so in the future man will produce living beings according to the laws of the living. But then he must be able to impress life itself upon the living thing. Whoever stands at the laboratory bench must be able to transfer from himself those vibrations, let us call them, that are in his own etheric body, to that which is to be animated. If he is a good man, he transmits good; if he is a bad man, he transmits evil. But there is a law in occultism: the knowledge of the White Lodge, which is called the secret of generation, will not be delivered to humanity until man has learned the secret of sacramentalism.

“Sacramentality” is an expression of the fact that human action must be imbued with moral perfection, with holiness. Only when the laboratory bench where he does his work becomes an altar for him and his actions become sacred, only then will he be mature enough to receive this knowledge. Consider people today with all their materialism – how far removed their laboratory bench is from an altar!

You see how man's consciousness is raised from mineral consciousness to plant consciousness. Again it is an occult sentence: Man will only attain the state of plant consciousness when he is no longer able to separate his own good from the good of all other people. As long as the individual seeks his own good at the expense of other people, the condition has not yet been reached that consciousness could be raised one step higher.

Thus, with the physical body, we are only at the stage of the actual human being, with the ether body still at the stage of animality, with the astral body at the stage of plant-like existence and with the I at the stage of the mineral. Of these truths, we want to hold on to one: we stand with our ether body on the level of the animal. The ether body transforms itself more and more during our earthly existence to the level of the human being. More and more, it permeates itself with that love that can no longer separate the good of the individual from the good of others. Just as we first developed the physical body and brought it to the level of the human being, so now the ether body, and later also the astral body and the ego, will rise to the level of the human being. The ego is still at the mineral level; it has only been incorporated into the human being on earth.

Let us now consider the relationship between our soul, that is, our sentient soul, our mind or emotional soul, our consciousness soul and the spirit self or manas enclosed in the consciousness soul, and our etheric body. Our etheric body itself is at the level of the animal. Below (written on the board - see diagram: from bottom to top) at the level of the human being, we have the physical body. We will leave out the etheric body for the time being (see points in the diagram). Our astral body, in which the sentient soul is enclosed - this is the first link in our soul -, we have at the level of the plant; then we have the mind or emotional soul. All this is on the level of the plant. Further up we then have the I or consciousness soul, in which the spirit self or manas is included, insofar as it can already be found in humans today.

We have initially left out the etheric body at the level of the animal. Now we must be clear about the fact that in every limb of the human being, the other limbs are expressed in a certain way. Thus, the human physical body has expressed within itself the revelation of the physical body itself. We find the physical principle expressed in the physical body when we look at the sense organs. In the eye we have a kind of photographic camera, in the ear a kind of piano. In short, the physical principle expresses itself in the sense organs. When we look at the human glands, we find the etheric body expressed in them; in the nervous system we have the expression of the astral body, and in the blood we have the expression of the ego. “Blood is a very special juice!” Whoever has the blood has the human ego. If the devil has human blood, he has the ego.

In the same way, every other limb expresses itself in the physical body of the human being to the extent that it protrudes into it. The blood pulsates unconsciously because the I, to the extent that it is active in it, is unconscious of its physical processes. Just as the nature of the other limbs is expressed in the physical body, so too is it expressed in the etheric body, only there it is expressed not “humanly” but “animal-like,” and in the form of certain animals, in a form that bears a certain similarity to our outer animal forms. Thus, what lies beneath the etheric body, the physical body, expresses itself like a silhouette; this part of the etheric body, in which the physical limb of the human being expresses itself, is called the “human being” (it is written on the board). The astral body, the sentient soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body, is called the “lion” because of the similarity of its etheric form; the mind soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body is called the “bull” or the cow, and the consciousness soul with the spirit self is called the “eagle” because of the similarity that its etheric form has for the clairvoyant eye.

So here you have (in diagram form) the four signs of the apocalypse: man, lion, bull and eagle – as the four expressions of the human being in the etheric body. You can see from this that those of our ancestors who conceived these profound symbols, these animal images for the human being, did not create them out of their imagination, philosophy or speculation, or out of any kind of ingenuity, but out of the world of facts, out of the occult world of facts.

Now we must realize that these four expressions do not emerge in the same way in every person; one of the expressions predominates in one person and the other in another. However, we must consider the development of all humanity. If you look at where the physical body expresses itself most strongly, we find the strongest expression in the declining, red race, in the Indians, in the particular development of the bone system that prevails here. If you want to see where the etheric body physically expresses itself particularly, you have to look for it in another human race: in the black race, in the glandular system. In the secretion of carbon you find an expression of the plant nature. The people in whom the nervous system is particularly strongly expressed on the physical level and with it the sensitive, are to be found in the malatic race, and the race in which the blood system is particularly expressed is the Mongolian race. The part of man that begins to develop the principle of manas is found in the Caucasian race. Thus you see that the classification of the human races is based on occult truths. What is found in the present-day human being is distributed throughout humanity, with one or the other predominating or receding in one human species or another.

You also find such differences in the etheric body of humans. When the clairvoyant gaze looks at the etheric body, as the physical gaze looks at the physical body, it finds humans divided into human-humans, lion-humans, bull-humans, and eagle-humans. Their group ego is astral in nature. On the astral plane, the clairvoyant finds the human group ego standing between the animal group ego and the human individual ego. The further back in time we go, the more we find that people take on one of these four forms in relation to their etheric body, and we assign one human group soul to each of these four soul groups: a human group soul to one, a lion group soul to the other, a bull group soul to the third, and an eagle group soul to the fourth. You would only get a wrong idea of these if you were to press these names, which are taken from physical animal forms, too hard. This etheric body of the lion people is much more similar to the group soul of the lions than to the individual lion here on the physical plane. Christianity has been presented by the evangelists as not being like ordinary human souls, but as comprising whole groups of people. This is due to the similarity that Christian esotericism attributed to the souls of the individual evangelists. We shall understand this more clearly when we see that the human being is on the one hand in a descent and on the other hand in an ascent. Here on earth, at the lowest point of materialism, the human being acquires the disposition of the individual soul. Man has descended from the ancient times when the individual group souls were more distinctly distinguished: man-man, lion-man, bull-man, eagle-man. When people ascend again in the future, they will retain their individual soul and develop it to a higher level with a higher consciousness of what they previously only had in a dim consciousness, the four group souls. That is why in Christianity the evangelists are given these qualities.

Let us hold on to this concept of the group souls of people for a while longer. These group souls lived much more in space than in time. When we look at animal group souls, we say that when we take a group of lions or a group of whales, they have their common group soul on the astral plane. But when we look at human group souls, we have to consider time more. A human group soul is born in the etheric, so to speak, at the boundary between the physical and the astral planes at a certain time and in turn transforms itself in a certain time. These four types of group soul that we have discussed are only the four main types, but there are countless intermediate stages. We have only indicated the most characteristic forms of man, lion, bull, eagle, which can occur in all possible mixtures.

Let us consider a group of people, say, for example, a tribe; let us take any of the old Central European tribes, for example the tribe of the Cheruscians. Such a tribe comes into being once, and then it passes away. The materialistic world observer sees in what the tribe of the Cheruscans is actually only something abstract, a concept that holds them together. But that is something unreal. The occultist sees in the tribe of the Cherusci a group soul, which comes into being, is born, at the time when the tribe of the Cherusci enters history; it grows as the power of the Cherusci grows, and it dies when the Cherusci disappear from history. Behind the developing tribe of the Cherusci, the occultist sees an evolving etheric being. Now there is a difference between an etheric being and a physical being here on earth. A physical being is born on the physical plane, grows, reaches a peak in life and dies again. Birth and death is the characteristic of the beings on the physical plane. This is not the case with the beings that live on the higher planes. If we follow animal group souls on the astral plane through thousands of years, their arising and passing away cannot be expressed by the words 'birth' and 'death'. Something quite different underlies it. It is based on transformation, metamorphosis. If you, with clairvoyant powers, were to encounter an animal group soul on the astral plane today and remember one of its previous embodiments, how it was with this animal group soul 1500 years ago, it will not appear to you as it would if you were to look at a younger person. You will, however, see the group soul passing through youth, middle age, and old age, but it does not give up consciousness in old age; it does not die. It is constantly transforming itself without passing through death. You can trace the animal group soul back to times immemorial – you will only encounter metamorphosis, not birth and death.

Something similar is the case with group souls such as that of the Cherusci tribe. When the Cherusci tribe appears on the physical plane as a number of physical people, the Cherusci soul has just formed; but it has not been born, but has transformed itself from another time, transformed. It grows with the power of the Cherusci, reaches its peak when the Cherusci tribe reaches its peak in history, and when the Cherusci tribe degenerates and disappears on the physical plane, the Cherusci soul rises anew in youth to become the soul of another tribe; it metamorphoses. Physical birth and physical death do not exist when we consider souls on higher planes. Birth and death, as we know them, only exist on the physical plane, not on the higher planes. Occult wisdom has expressed this well and has paid great attention to numbers. They have tried to determine an average number of times that a group soul, as it belongs to a particular human community, arises, metamorphoses out of another, grows and reaches its peak, only to undergo a descending development and then transform into another group soul. If we assume an average human lifespan of 75 years – calculated in lunar years – and multiply it by seven, we get the lifespan of a human group soul in its four types until its next transformation. Seven here refers to generations. Taking into account that we are dealing with lunar years, we arrive at a figure of approximately 500 years. And so it was said in occultism: The life of a group soul lasts 500 years; after 500 years it becomes another, it gives birth to itself anew without losing its consciousness.

If we look at the ego of such a group soul and look for a means of expression for the ego externally in the physical, it is indeed the blood. For the occultist, blood is the expression of fire: a substance glowing with fire. Just as the human physical body is the expression of the earth, the etheric body the expression of water, and the astral body the expression of air, so the I, not yet chained to selfishness, is the expression of fire. We therefore say – we will discuss this further tomorrow – that through selfishness, blood has found death. The human ego “consumes itself in its own fire,” through itself. This is an occult expression. Only when man overcomes egoism does he attain immortality. The human group ego is consumed by its own fire. When 500 years have passed, it burns and creates a new form out of itself. In occultism, this was represented in such a way that the group ego generally lives for 500 years, then it burns and is reanimated from its own fire, and this was called the “bird Phoenix”. The beautiful saga of the bird Phoenix has its factual background here. The Phoenix is the group ego with the characteristics of the four types, which burns itself after seven generations and is restored - one generation calculated at 75 lunar years of age.

This is the real background of the Phoenix legend. Here you have new proof that such ancient legends as that of the Phoenix are created from the deepest occult facts. It is not intended to speculate here, but to show what has been taught in the occult schools throughout the centuries, and what is a real actual experience, for which the occult signs and seals are the expression.

Again and again, when we hear such expressions of occult truths and compare them with what humanity has preserved for us in its signs and symbols, we are reminded of how much human consciousness had already created before it became mind-consciousness. Man likes to believe that we have come a long way today. But his intellect lags behind the creative consciousness of the pre-world, which, however, only the initiates had, and they hid it in the legends. The symbols of the four animals are not invented; not the thought is the starting point, the origin of it, but the vision.

When I say that the group soul is in the etheric at the boundary between the physical and astral planes, you must not imagine a boundary line. If we start from the physical plane, we have (as shown here) seven subdivisions of the physical plane; then there are seven subdivisions of the astral plane. Of these, the three lowest correspond to the three highest of the physical plane. We must consider the astral plane and the physical plane pushed together in such a way that the three uppermost parts of the physical plane are at the same time the three lowest parts of the astral plane. We can speak of a fringe zone, which is the one that our souls cannot leave after death if they are still tied to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka.

So we have definitely seen in the occult signs, symbols and seals, which we have chosen here as the first examples, something gained from the depths of the occult facts, and you would be quite mistaken if you were to ignore the deep wisdom of the past in the occult schools or to consider it in any way superseded by our modern wisdom. Where the wisdom of occult teaching comes to you in signs or symbols, it will always present itself in such a way as to be confirmed by immediate occult observation. An example of how the teaching of occultism has worked in comparatively recent times is that symbolic meanings have been read into names and words, but in such a way that there was a real meaning underlying them: facts of the higher world. We will not go back to the origin of word formation in the sense of philology; what I am about to say is not something that you could verify with philology. Even if philology were to find it wrong, the word symbolism would still be right.

The further you ascend from the physical plane through the astral world to the devachan world, the more everything presents itself to you as a mirror image of the physical plane, which you first have to learn to read. The easiest way for the student to learn this is by numbers. Suppose you have the number 543 here on the physical plane, this number can be read as a mirror image on the astral plane, i.e. 345. Likewise, all other things and events are to be read as mirror images. I will give you a blatant example: Here on the physical plane, you can see how the old chicken lays the egg and how the young chicken develops from the egg. If you look at the same event on the astral plane, you have to go backwards: first you see the young chicken, then the chicken gets smaller and smaller and finally merges with the egg. Time also runs backwards. You can see how extremely confusing this must be for the student at first glance. The passions that emanate from the person are seen as in a tableau; they radiate from the center. The reflected passions appear as if you were being stormed by animals. The lower passions man sees as all kinds of wild animals, as mice, rats and so on around him. If the student has not learned this, and the first experience of it comes to him when he sees his own passions rushing at him as mice and rats, then pathological conditions such as persecution mania and so on can easily occur.

What I have now expressed as a fact about the relationship between the higher and lower worlds was symbolically expressed in the theory of evolution in a play on words. When human beings entered into their existence on earth, they entered from a spiritual state into a sensual state - through Eve. In Eve, people saw the state where spiritual humanity became physical, and therefore sinful. If humanity is now to be led back up to the spiritual, and if the opposite is to be expressed to the woman who brought mortality into the world, then that which is to bring the immortal back into humanity must be expressed in reverse; the name must be reversed. Therefore the Angel of God addresses Mary with the words “Hail Mary!” Eve becomes Ave; this reversal has a symbolic character. Whatever a more or less incorrect philology may say about it, it does not matter. What matters is to show how the symbolic in the wording can work in occultism. The aim of this wording was to make the person, by pronouncing the words, aware of the occult fact that the physical and spiritual worlds have opposite directions in their currents.

This has a very deep meaning. Do not see anything arbitrary behind it. The best you can see behind it is that people were taught to recognize occult laws in their language. By letting people do such exercises to recognize the occult laws in language, they are consciously or unconsciously working on their occult training. The principle of symbolism is at the same time a principle of training.

We need only recall the fact that the physical and etheric aspects of the human being, as he stands before us today, are denser forms of the astral. Man was previously a purely astral being before he became an etheric being and then a physical being. In truth, all the denser substances, that is, the etheric substance and the physical substance, are differentiated out of the astral substance, just as ice is differentiated out of water. Just as water condenses and becomes ice, so the astral substance becomes 'condensed into etheric and then into physical substance. In the time when man was still a being like you are today, when you sleep, where you are outside your physical and etheric body, the forces that shaped his astral substance were pure powers of sensation and imagination. The astral substance works quite differently from the etheric or physical substance. The astral substance is in perpetual motion. Every passion, every instinct, every desire is immediately realized in the astral substance, so that in the next moment it is of a completely different form, if it is the expression of a different passion. Today, the mental no longer has such an easy effect on the dense physical body of man. Nevertheless, the mental and the emotional still have an effect on the physical body of man. You only have to observe that when a person is frightened or afraid of something, they turn pale. This means that the entire blood mass is moving differently in the body than in a normal state. It pushes the blood mass from the outside inwards. Or take the blush of shame, where the blood is driven from the inside to the periphery, outwards. These are only slight effects that the soul still has on the body today. But if you consider long periods of time, you will find much more significant effects of the soul and the mind on the body. If you could follow the human forms through the millennia, you would see that the shape, the whole physiognomy, everything about the human being changes. This happens in such a way that the soul and spiritual processes are there first. Man has certain ideas, and as he forms his ideas, so in the course of millennia his physical form and physiognomy are formed, even if this is not immediately noticeable to an external biological observer. Everything is formed from the inside out. Our external materialistic science is still far from understanding how these effects relate to each other over the course of millennia. But they are there.

To make it clear to us what such connections are like, let us just recall the first appearance of Gothic architecture, where certain processes in the development of humanity were expressed for the first time in Gothic architectural forms. Those people who devoted themselves to prayer in rooms built in the Gothic style experienced the thoughts that were the inspiration for the Gothic buildings. These thoughts, which were active in the souls of men, formed the souls, the inner powers of man, right into the etheric body; they reshaped the powers of man. And after centuries, as a consequence of these impressions received by the senses, and the ideas formed after these sensory impressions, that mystical movement emerged, which we find in Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and others. In what they devised, we have the after-effects of what their ancestors had received as impressions from Gothic buildings. And those higher individualities who lead humanity in its development consciously guide this process of human development. They consciously look ahead into the centuries and millennia, and at a certain time humanity is given what is to develop these or those qualities. Thus we see how, here in the course of a few centuries, by looking at the external forms of Gothic architecture, the pointed arch style, that mysticism striving towards heaven is expressed in Meister Eckhart, Tauler and so on. If we were to consider millennia instead of centuries, we would see how even the human body forms according to the thoughts and feelings and ideas that people had millennia ago; and the great leaders of humanity give people the right ideas at the right time in their development, so that even the human form is transformed.

Now let us imagine ourselves in the period of transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period. We know that our ancestors, indeed our very souls, lived in other bodies, in ancient Atlantis. In the last days of Atlantis, this continent, especially the northern parts, was largely covered by masses of fog, and everything that lived on the earth, on this continent, was shrouded in dense fog. And if we go back even further, we come across times when there were not only masses of fog, but where our air circle is today, there were masses of water trickling down. The first Atlantean man was even more of a water creature. It was only gradually during the Atlantean period that he transformed into an air being. At that time, man had a completely different distribution of his etheric and physical bodies. Today, the etheric body and the physical body are distributed in such a way that they are almost the same in shape and size in the upper parts. This is by no means the case with other beings. If you were to look at a horse's etheric body, you would see the horse's etheric head shining out far above its physical head. In humans, too, the etheric body of the head used to extend far beyond the physical head, and it was only towards the end of the Atlantean period that the two parts merged. A point that is now within the head used to be outside it, and only gradually was it drawn in. These two points drew closer and closer together, and in the last third of the Atlantean epoch they coincided. That was the time when the pre-Semitic race descended from the northeast of Atlantis, from the area of present-day Ireland. At that time, man acquired the ability through which the two points coincided and came to overlap. Due to the etheric body of his head being outside, the Atlantean man had a kind of misty clairvoyance. He could not calculate or count, nor develop any kind of logic of thought. This is only a result of the post-Atlantean time. But they had a kind of primitive clairvoyance because they were much more out of their heads than in them with the ether part of the head. At that time, when this ether part of the head was outside the physical head, the thoughts and feelings of the astral body also had a much greater influence on this part of the ether body and thus on the formation of the physical body. That which first lived in the astral body as feelings, sensations and thoughts continued as a process of movement in the etheric body and shaped the physical body into its present form.

Where did the present length, width and height of the physical body actually come from? It is an effect of what was first present in the astral body and in the etheric body. First there were thoughts, images, sensations and so on. You will be able to understand this better if you remember the process that occurs immediately after physical death; the physical body is first left by the etheric body and then by the astral body. During sleep, only the ego and the astral body go away, while the etheric body and the physical body remain in bed. Death differs from sleep in that the etheric body also leaves with the astral body and the ego. A peculiar phenomenon occurs, something that could be described as a sensation, but which is linked to a certain idea. The person feels as if he were growing, as if he were expanding in all directions; he takes on dimensions in all directions. This expansion of the etheric body, which it takes on immediately after death, this seeing of the etheric body in large dimensions, is a very important concept. In the ancient Atlantean man, this idea had to be awakened when the etheric body was not yet as closely connected to the physical body as it is today. The fact that it was awakened, that man was introduced to the magnitude that he feels today when he grows after death, is how the cause, the thought form, was formed to bring the physical body into the form that it has today. When, in those days, when the physical body and etheric body were still more separated, man was presented with these forms, these measurements, it stimulated the physical body to take on the form it has today. And these forms were suggested by those who are the leaders of human evolution. In the various flood legends, especially in the biblical flood legend, there are traces of precise details. If you imagine the human being surrounded by the forms that his etheric body must have in order for the form of the physical body to be formed in the right way, then you have the size of Noah's Ark. Why does the Bible state that Noah's Ark was 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits high and 300 cubits long? Because these are the proportions that a person needs in the transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period in order to form the right thought form, which is the cause that the body of the post-Atlantic person was formed in the right way in length, height and width. In Noah's Ark you have a symbol for the proportions of your present body. These proportions are effects of those thought forms which Noah experienced and which he had built into the ark in such a way that by looking at them the world of thought was created according to which the organism of the post-Atlantean man was to be built. Mankind was educated through effective symbols. Today you carry within you the proportions of Noah's Ark in the dimensions of your physical body. When a person stretches out their hands upwards, the dimensions of Noah's Ark are contained within the dimensions of the human body.

Thus man has passed from the Atlantean era into the post-Atlantean era. In the sixth cultural epoch, the epoch that will follow our own, the human body will be shaped quite differently again. Today, too, people must experience the thought forms that can provide the basis for the human body to take on the right proportions in the next cultural epoch; this must be demonstrated to people. Today man is formed according to the measurements of 50 : 30 : 300. In the future he will be formed quite differently. How is the thought-form given to man today, through which the future form of man will be formed in the next race? It has already been said that this is given in the measurements of Solomon's Temple. The measurements of Solomon's Temple are a profound symbol of the entire organization of the form of man as he will be in the next, the sixth race.

All the things that are effective in humanity happen from within, not from without. What is thought and feeling in any one period is external form in the following period. And the individualities that guide the development of humanity must implant the thought forms into humanity many millennia in advance, which are to become external physical reality afterwards. There you have the function of thought forms, which are stimulated by such symbolic images as Noah's Ark, the Temple of Solomon, and the four apocalyptic figures of man, lion, bull and eagle. They have a very real significance. We have thus already said something about the images that guide the human being when he devotes himself to them. Yesterday we also mentioned images in the four forms of man, lion, bull, and eagle; and today we are talking about images. Images lead the human being to an interest in the world that directly borders his own.

When we ascend to an even higher world, we no longer deal with mere images, but with the inner relationships of things, with what is called the sound of the spheres, the music of the spheres, the world of sounds. When we travel through the astral plane, we essentially have a world of images that are the archetypes of our things here. The higher we ascend, the more we enter into a world of sounds and tones. You must not imagine, however, that the world of sounds is a world of sounds in the external sense. You do not hear the devachan world with the outer ear. You cannot compare the essence of the sounding spiritual world with our physical sounds, which are only an external manifestation of the devachanic world of sound. The spiritual tones are substances of the devachanic world, of the spiritual world, which begins where the world of images passes into the world of sounds. These worlds are thoroughly interwoven. Here, around the physical world, is both the astral and the devachanic world; one permeates the other. It is the same as if you were to lead someone born blind into this illuminated room; the colors and the burning candles are around him, but he cannot perceive them; only when he acquires sight through a successful operation can he also perceive what has been around him all along. Likewise, the astral and spiritual worlds around us are only perceived when the senses are opened to them; then it is also perceived that these worlds do not border on each other, but penetrate each other. One can perceive everything that is in one world in the other worlds.

What spiritual music is in the Devachan world is reflected in the astral world and expressed through numbers and figures. What is called Pythagorean music of the spheres is usually taken as an image by abstract philosophers. But it is a true, genuine reality. The sound of the spheres is there, and the one who trains his hearing - the expression is not quite correct, but we have to use it - in order to perceive in the higher worlds, perceives not only the images and colors of the astral world around him, but also the sounds and harmonies of the spiritual world. Just as the things around us on the physical plane are revelations of the astral world, so they are also revelations of the spiritual world, which express themselves through the mediation of the astral in the physical. The spiritual world expresses itself in all our physical things, and the more uplifting and meaningful the sensual things are, the clearer, more beautiful, more magnificent they also show themselves as expressions of the spiritual world. If we take an insignificant thing of our physical plane, it is usually very difficult to trace it back to its spiritual archetype. On the other hand, when we look at more significant, uplifting things in the physical world, the spiritual archetypes reveal themselves with great beauty. For example, we have given an expression of the spiritual world in the interaction of the planets of our planetary system. What is present in our planetary system in the most diverse forms can be traced back to what is called the harmony of the spheres for those who can recognize these things. The movements of our planets are such that he who is able to perceive this in the spiritual world 'hears' the mutual relationships of the movements of our planets. For example, from the point of view of higher worlds, Saturn moves 2 1/2 times faster than Jupiter. This movement of Saturn is perceived in the spiritual world as a correspondingly higher tone, “with spiritual ears,” as Goethe puts it.

Let us visualize the relative speeds of the planets in our solar system. If you take the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to Jupiter, then Saturn moves 2 1/2 times as fast as Jupiter, that is, at a ratio of 2 1/2: 1, and the speed of Jupiter's movement in relation to Mars is 5 : 1. For the spiritual ear, the movement of Jupiter in relation to the movement of Mars is therefore perceived as a much higher tone. If you take the speed of the movements of the Sun, Mercury and Venus, which is approximately the same, this stands in relation to the movement of Mars at 2:1, so it is just twice as fast. If you take the movement of the Sun, Mercury and Venus in relation to the Moon, this ratio is 12:1, so the speed is twelve times as great. From a spiritual point of view, if you consider the movement of all the stars visible to us in relation to their background, the starry sky advances by one degree in one century. And the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to the starry sky is 1200:1.

We therefore have

Saturn: Jupiter = 2½ : 1
Jupiter : Mars = 5 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Mars = 2 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Moon = 12 : 1
Saturn: Starry sky = 1200 : 1

These ratios are expressed for spiritual perception through tones that can be perceived in the spiritual world by the spiritual ears. These are the real backgrounds of what is called “music of the spheres”. These numbers actually indicate harmonies that really exist in the spiritual world. So you see, just as the clairvoyant sees images and colors in the astral world, so the clairaudient hears the spiritual harmonies of things in the spiritual or Devachan world. For the one whose spiritual ear is trained for it, everything that manifests itself here in the physical world has tones as a spiritual background. Thus, for the occultist, the four elements of earth, water, air and fire produce different tone relationships that are quite beyond the perception of the ordinary person. The initiates have recreated tone relationships in the physical world that they could hear from the spiritual background of earth, water, air and fire. And the result of these tone vibrations has been captured in the original tuning of a musical instrument, the lyre. The lyre's string vibrations correspond to the notes that the initiates recognized as the four elements. The bass

string corresponds to the Earth
the D string to Water
the A string to Air
the G string to Fire.

In this way we would be able to understand much if we could go back to times long past, and we could then see how many things in culture that today are taken for granted by man have been developed out of observations in the spiritual world. The physical tones of the lyre are modeled on what first existed spiritually as the relationship of the four elements to one another.

The fundamental idea underlying this is that everything that happens in man, in the microcosm, should be modeled on what lives in the macrocosm. When everything in the microcosm resonates with the macrocosmic spiritual events, then the world and man are in harmony; and because there is no disharmony, man can truly connect with the evolution of the world and feel at one with it. But when man leaves this harmony, when he does not join the world-sounds, then his outer condition also becomes disharmonious, and it becomes impossible for him to go on with the course of the world.

All this should give us an idea of how the symbols were created out of the higher worlds, which are real facts in these higher worlds. Many of the things in our culture are symbols, symbols to be realized, through which it is ensured that the human being can be prepared to develop in the future on the physical plane that which is only on the higher planes today. It is the course of evolution that everything that is in the higher worlds today descends into the physical world. Since man is called upon to help create the outer world, he must descend with his thoughts into the physical world. He forms the world around him, and he also forms what is in his own physical being. Through Theosophy, man must develop a feeling for the fact that everything he does, feels and thinks in one time continues to have an effect in another time, in the future. When man builds temples, works of beauty, or when he creates statesmanship for the social coexistence of people, these are all things that have significance for the future. What man builds today with the help of natural forces, he forms the natural products of the future. When man builds a Gothic cathedral, for example, he assembles it according to mineral laws. It is true that the substance, the materiality, the bricks and stones, of which the cathedral is composed, will disintegrate. But the fact that the form once existed is not meaningless. The form that was imprinted on the matter by human beings remains, it is incorporated into the etheric and astral body of the earth and develops as a force with the earth. And when the earth has passed through the present stage of development and the pralaya and reappears as Jupiter, this form will grow out of the earth as a kind of plant being. We are building the works of art and beauty today, we are not building the works of wisdom in vain on our earth. We are shaping them so that they will later merge with the earth as natural products. And just as we build cathedrals and houses today whose forms are lasting, which combine with the earth and will emerge again in the future as a kind of plant, so too have our present-day plants and crystals been shaped by what our predecessors built in the pre-world, by the gods and spirits that preceded us. Everything that man incorporates into the earth from the point of view of knowledge, wisdom and beauty and of true social life, everything that he brings into the outer world in the form of symbols, even if he only forms them in his thoughts, becomes a great, joyful, progressive force for the further development of the earth; they will be real forces and forms of the future. Our machines and factories, however, everything we make to serve external utility, the principle of utility, will be a harmful element in the next embodiment of our earth. If we imprint symbols on matter that are expressions of higher worlds, they will have a progressive effect; our machines and factories, on the other hand, which only serve external utility, will have a kind of demonic, corrupting effect in the next incarnation of our earth. Thus we ourselves shape our good forces and also the demonic forces for the next age of humanity.

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch, we are most deeply immersed in matter and creating the worst demonic forces for the next epoch. Where we transform the ancient and sacred into physical and mechanical things, we are working down into the physical plane. What man fashions in this way will become the underworld. It must be clearly understood that the evil powers of the earth's evolution must also be integrated. At the time when they must be overcome, man will have to expend a tremendous amount of energy to transform evil and demonic forces back into good. But his strength will grow as a result, because evil is there to steel the strength of man by overcoming it. All evil must in turn be transformed into good, and it is providentially designed to develop strong, energetic effects in man, much higher than if he never had to transform evil into good.

All the things we think up in the physical world with our minds have a spiritual background, and we can see these things in the spiritual world. I would now like to give an example of how something that is conceived on the physical plane expresses itself in the spiritual as a figure: the Caduceus, the rod of Mercury.

Our present consciousness is the so-called bright day-consciousness, where we perceive through the senses and combine through the mind. This day-consciousness has only developed to its present level. It was preceded by another consciousness, a dream-like pictorial consciousness. At the beginning of the Atlantean period, man still perceived the world and its spiritual and soul entities clairvoyantly in astral and etheric images. Today's dream is still a last remnant of this atavistic pictorial consciousness. Let us draw a picture of this. First we have the bright day consciousness. This was preceded by consciousness, which today only plants have, which we can call sleep consciousness in humans. Then there is an even duller consciousness, as our physical minerals have it today; we can call it a deep trance consciousness. (During these explanations, the following was written on the blackboard, from bottom to top: day consciousness, image consciousness, sleep consciousness, deep trance consciousness. See drawing next page.) We can connect these four consciousnesses with a line (drawn as a straight line from top to bottom). However, man does not develop in this way. If man were to develop in the same way as the straight line, he would start from a deep-trance consciousness, then descend to the sleep consciousness, then to the image consciousness and finally to today's day consciousness. But it is not that simple for man; instead, he has to go through various transitional stages. Man had a consciousness of deep trance on the first earth embodiment that we can trace, on Saturn; there he developed this consciousness to various degrees. We draw it here in such a way that we let consciousness develop in this line. Man separates himself from the straight line and reconnects with it on the sun, where he undergoes the sleep consciousness, then continues as this spiral line shows to reach the image consciousness on the moon. And today, after various transformations, man stands at the level of bright day consciousness. Man now retains this clear day consciousness for all subsequent periods, and consciously acquires for himself the states of consciousness which he had in a dull form on earlier levels. In this way he consciously acquires for himself the pictorial consciousness again on the Jupiter condition of the earth; this will enable him to perceive again soul-life around him. This development takes place, however, in such a way that his clear day-consciousness is not weakened or dulled, but that on Jupiter he will have the image consciousness in addition to his day-consciousness. One could say: the day-consciousness brightens up into the image consciousness (see drawing: broken line). Then he will again have the sleep consciousness that he had on the sun when the earth was in its Venus state; this will enable him to look deeply into the beings, as today only the initiate can do. The initiate goes the straight way; he develops in a straight line, whereas the normal development of man is a winding one. And then, ascending, man also regains on Vulcan the first consciousness, the consciousness of trance, while retaining all the other states of consciousness. Thus man undergoes an evolution in a descending and one in an ascending line. You can see this line recurring again and again. This path of descent and ascent is a real line that has found expression in the Caduceus, in the staff of Mercury.

[The following section is only incompletely reproduced in all the lecture notes.] Thus we see how the symbols that we obtain in this way are deeply rooted in the whole essence of our world process. And a line like the Caduceus also has an educational significance for people when they devote themselves to this figure in meditation. No one can memorize this figure without it having a profound educational effect on them. The seer brought this line out of the spiritual worlds to give people something that would make them future seers. What one must develop when meditating on this line are certain sensations. At first you feel a dull darkness. You stare into the darkness, and gradually it begins to brighten and take on a violet color, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and now back, with a certain reflection of the evolution taking place, until you have risen again to violet. As you follow this shaded line, your feelings will change from the quality of the color nuances to moral feelings. If you do not perceive this line merely as a chalk or pencil line, but, by looking into the black, try to imagine the dark before your soul, and at the violet imagine the devotion, and so on through the other colors, blue, green, yellow, orange, then call the joyful before your soul with the red, then your soul will go through a whole gamut of sensations, which are first color sensations and then become moral sensations. By reflecting the form of the staff of Mercury in sensations, something is incorporated into the soul that enables it to develop the higher organs. Through the real symbol, it is transformed so that it can receive the higher organs within itself.

Just as the influence of outer light once magically transformed indifferent organs into eyes, so too does devotion to the symbols of the spiritual world magically transform the organs for the spiritual world. It is quite impossible to say: I still cannot see what is to arise there. That would be just as if the person who had not yet had eyes had said: I do not want to let the light work on me. We must first be taught what can lead to the development of the inner organs, then we can perceive the secrets of the spiritual world around us.

I would like to discuss some more characteristic symbols and signs today, so that we can become clearer and clearer about the actual basic theme of our lectures, which should consist of showing how signs and symbols relate to the astral and spiritual worlds, also called the devachanic world.

We have seen that the symbols and pictures and the numerical and formal relationships really taken from the nature and essence of the higher worlds, when absorbed by the soul, evoke in it real soul forces in the form of perceptions, thoughts, ideas and feelings, which have a formative effect. Yes, we could even see that Noah's Ark was formative for the present physical body of man, and that the Temple of Solomon, when it works in its forms on the people of the present, will have a great significance for the shaping of man in the sixth race. From these statements you can already see that the path taken by the guides of humanity, who are constantly working on the course of human development, is actually similar to that taken by the individual in the elementary secret schools. There, too, we are dealing with a concentration of sensations, thoughts, images, and so on - many other things are added - that are effective and formative for the human being.

In many cases, the various occult currents of the present day are of the opinion that in our time there may be an ascent into the higher worlds by other means than through the application of imaginative and symbolic ideas. And for people of the present day, ascending into the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If you raise the question: Are such states of fear justified?, then you can say: Yes and no. In a certain respect they are justified; in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really go up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world. It is a mistaken assumption if someone thinks that he can pass through the astral world blindfolded. You must realize, however, that the spiritual world as such has different regions. Man has descended from the spiritual world into the physical world, and he must ascend from the spiritual world back into the spiritual world. What must be avoided is that man, in his development, falls back into earlier states. Man must never fall back into earlier states. Every mediumistic state is a falling back into an earlier state, whereas true secret schooling is an ascent into higher states. Man must ascend through the astral world with full, bright day-consciousness in order to reach the higher regions of the spiritual world. Whatever longings, passions, instincts today's man carries within himself is anchored in the astral body, of which the astral body is the carrier. If a person wants to ascend to higher worlds, he must work with feelings and sensations; there is no other way. But the point is that he should never try to ascend to the higher worlds other than by fully maintaining the achievements of our physical world, that is, never with a damping of consciousness. When we look at mediums, we always find that they are thrown back into an earlier state of consciousness. Their bright day consciousness is dampened down, weakened, and an earlier state of consciousness, which the person has already overcome, is evoked. Anyone who wants to become a clairvoyant in the modern sense must retain their present bright day consciousness and take it with them. He can only do this by passing through the point of “sensuality-free thinking”, and nothing can ever happen when a person passes through sensuality-free thinking. Let us be quite clear about what this means.

Sensual thinking and imagining is anything that starts from the sensual perception of the objects around us. If you form your ideas in such a way that you first look at an object, perceive it, and then keep it in your memory, and your thoughts are such that you are stimulated by such ideas, then you have sensual thinking. This thinking fills by far the greatest part of the soul experiences of the present human being. And when a person examines himself to see how much remains to him when he throws out of his soul all ideas that are caused by sensory perception, then he will first become aware of what content is still there in the soul. When the ideas that were stimulated by external impressions have been removed, then he will grasp what the Greek philosopher Plato meant when he wrote over the entrance to his school, “No one unfamiliar with geometry shall enter.” This means that no one should enter who has not been able to rise to thinking free of sensuality. He did not demand ordinary geometry. Nor is it required today by those who want to ascend to higher worlds. Nor would it be necessary today for intrinsic, objective reasons. But from geometric representations one can form an idea of what thinking is that is free of sensuality. If you put three beans here, add three more beans, and another three beans, then you can learn from this sensual impression that 3 times 3 = 9. The child or primitive man learns it by the fingers. This is sensual thinking. When you no longer need the fingers or the beans, but when you learn the same thing through pure mental contemplation, then it is sensual-free thinking. The child starts learning from a bridge [beans or fingers] and only later rises to sensual-free thinking. If we draw a circle on the blackboard, it is not really a circle; what we draw there is a collection of little chalk mountains. You will not be able to grasp what a real circle is with sensory perception alone. Only the spiritually viewed, inwardly constructed circle is free of sensuality.

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.

Let us make a schematic drawing for ourselves. Some things become unclear due to incorrect symbolic drawing. So, although it is sufficient for understanding certain relationships if the physical plane, the astral plane and the devachan plane are drawn on top of each other, it is more correct to imagine the physical world as a self-contained sphere, where the astral is all around, and the devachanic is around that again. Instead of drawing horizontal layers, it is good to draw it this way (see drawing), because this provides a way to distinguish two areas of the astral plane from each other. If we look into two very specific areas of the astral plane, which we indicate here with arrow 1, we see that in the astral world, what we call the male and the female here on earth are the two opposites of “form” and “life”. Form and life are opposites on the astral plane. Now, if we want to encounter form and life on the astral plane, we will only encounter them if we go in that direction (from the center upwards, see arrow 2). If we go in the other direction (center downwards, see arrow 3), we will by no means encounter the beneficial contrast of form and life, but rather the contrast of “decay” and “disease”. So if we start from the physical world, we encounter the opposite of form and life on the astral plane above; this corresponds to the opposite of decay and disease in the astral world below, i.e. going down below the physical plane. Whenever we go to one side, where we see beneficial properties for the physical world, these correspond on the other side to destructive, harmful influences for the physical world. We now have an opportunity to distinguish between the parts of the astral plane. There are actually two quite different areas of the astral plane that affect the human soul. If we want to form an idea of how these two very different areas affect the soul, we have to imagine that in a human being we have: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body; and depending on their development, which has been described many times: manas or spirit self, budhi or life spirit, and atma or spiritual man; and in between we have, filled by the I, the soul. So that we can distinguish in a certain respect: body - which actually includes the three bodies -, soul and spirit. Now the three lower members, astral body, ether body and physical body, are reflected in the soul. Insofar as the physical body, ether body and astral body are reflected in their original nature, they introduce lower, downward-pulling qualities into the human soul. But that which is higher is also reflected in man: manas, buddhi, atma, and thus we also have uplifting, purifying elements in the soul. In strict Christianity, people also knew about this twofold way of being reflected in the human soul. One saw that the higher human nature was reflected in the soul, or the lower nature was reflected in the soul. Many sensed this, even if they were not esotericists. That is why it was said: When a person dies, he perceives the reflection of the spiritual world as the collection of laws of Moses; and when the lower nature is reflected in the soul, the devil reads the record of sins to the soul in death.

This means that the soul is presented with all the qualities that adhere to it: That which is reflected from above is held up to it as the tablets of the law of Moses; and that which is reflected from below is described by saying: the devil reads the soul's record of sins to it. If the soul does not take the right path, it can indeed sink into its lower passions; that can happen. But this must not be presented to man as a deterrent.

All imagistic, pictorial representations educate the human being in order to gradually bring him to that point in the development of life where he learns to look more and more into the higher worlds. Pictorial representations, such as the image of the old moon, are a powerful educational tool in this direction. Through such images, the idea of development is introduced to the human being in the right esoteric way. If one only presents dry, abstract concepts to the human being, he remains on the physical plane with his thinking, because ordinary thinking as such never comes from the physical plane. It is indeed a reflection of the Devachan plan; but the thought that the human being entertains is something that belongs to the physical plan, it is only a shadow image of the higher processes. No matter how fine your conceptions may be regarding the process of development, how a being on the first step of existence differentiates itself, descends and envelops itself, these are all only conceptions that give you ideas of the physical plan, but do not help you in your development. Only concepts and ideas that are both sensual and supersensible can gradually help you to really advance one step. First, you have to transform the concepts into images, into imaginations, and then repeat this process over and over again.

If one were to express this process, which was taught, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools, in a dialogue between teacher and student, one could put it like this: - In reality, such a dialogue never took place in this way, but we can present it in this way to show what the student had to go through step by step in long, drawn-out experiences. The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant and see how it directs its root into the earth, how it grows towards the sun with its stem and blossom, and how it develops its fruit organs. And now imagine the human being in contrast. The human being is poorly compared to the plant when one compares his head with the flower and his reproductive organs with the root of the plant. Even Darwin, the great naturalist, used this comparison correctly by comparing the head of the human being with the root of the plant, so that even for Darwin, the plant is the human being turned upside down. What the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam, its reproductive organs, man directs to the center of the earth. Thus, in man we have to think of an inversion of the plant, in that he freely directs all the forces that in the plant are directed toward the center of the earth to the sun-filled cosmos, and shamefully directs those organs that the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam toward the earth. The animal stands in the midst of it.

If we therefore want to draw the real directions of power that exist in the world, we can do so as follows: the true esoteric meaning of the sign of the cross is a sum of forces. One direction of force goes downwards: the plant being is directed by this force. In the human being, it is directed in the opposite direction. The animal has a horizontally aligned spine, and in it this force is manifested as orbiting the earth horizontally. The soul principle ascends from plant existence to animal existence to human existence. And Plato, who so often expressed things that originated in the mysteries, spoke the beautiful sentence: The world soul is crucified on the world body. That is, the world soul passes through the plant, animal and human; it is crucified in the forces of the three realms: plant, animal and human. And if we thus inscribe the cross into the three natural realms, then the cross becomes for us the sign of the direction of development.

Now the teacher said to the student: You have to imagine how the plant stretches its calyx towards the sunbeam, how the fruit organs reach maturity when the plant is kissed by the sunbeam. - The development into a human being happens through the fact that the pure, chaste plant substance is permeated by desires, instincts and passions. In this way man conquers his consciousness, in this way he becomes human by passing through his animal nature. By interweaving the lower nature of desire into the pure plant nature, man has ascended from the dull plant consciousness to the bright consciousness of day.

From this level of present-day man, the teacher pointed the student to a higher level. Just as man has developed from a state similar to that of a plant, so too will he purify his instincts and desires to a higher, chaste level. The teacher showed the student the structures in the physical body of man through which the higher levels of consciousness can be attained and human substance can in turn become a substance similar to that of plants. Every being must use a physical body if it wants to appear on earth. But the body of man will change more and more in the future. We distinguish between a descending and an ascending development with regard to the human organs. Some human organs are in a state of descending development; in the course of time, which admittedly counts in millennia, the human being will discard them. Other organs are in the process of becoming; in the future they will undergo an upward development, for example the human larynx; it is only at the beginning of its development. The human heart will undergo a further upward development, becoming a completely different organ in the future. While other organs have already passed their zenith, becoming detached from human nature and withering away, we have an organ in the heart that is only at the beginning of its development.

We can distinguish between striated and longitudinally striated muscles in the human body; these are voluntary and involuntary muscles. The voluntary muscles of the hand, for example, are striated. The muscles of the intestines, on the other hand, which involuntarily push food forward, are longitudinally striped. The heart is an exception here, and this is a crux for today's physiological and anatomical scientists. The heart belongs to the involuntary muscles, but it has striated musculature. Therefore, our anatomists cannot understand the heart either. They consider all organs to be the same. If we consider the organs spiritually, they may well consist chemically of the same components, but one may be in a descending development and the other in an ascending one. The heart is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle in the future; its anatomical structure already bears the characteristic features for this. Today, however, it contributes to the effect of emotional experiences on the blood. You can see how, when you feel fear, the blood mass withdraws from the periphery of the body and moves inward, or how, when you feel shame, the blood is driven from the center of the body to the periphery. In the future, in addition to the transformation of the heart, there will also be a transformation of our larynx. Today, the larynx serves to translate my thoughts into words by making the air vibrate. You can pick up and hear my words with your ears; this is caused by the vibrations of the air. The present human larynx is capable of transforming into air vibrations what is going on in the soul. The human body of the future will transform its larynx into a fertilizing organ, and the word, which today only creates in the air, will in the future become creative in our environment. Reproduction will then take place through the larynx, which will create the race of the future.

Just as the teacher pointed out to the student the chaste chalice of the plant, and how he pointed out to the human being who, in descending, has permeated his plant substance with the lower nature of passions, desires and instincts, but But in exchange for this, has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, the teacher showed how the present human being will ascend to higher states of consciousness, and how the future human being will transform the substance, filled with desires, back into pure and chaste organs. The pupil's attention was drawn to the past, present and future. Just as the chalice of the plant extends chastely towards the sun and its fruit organs grow towards the sun, this will be there again on a higher level, where man will offer his larynx as a chalice to the spiritual sunbeam. This spiritual chalice, the transformed organ of speech, was called the Holy Grail. This is a real ideal. The beginning, middle and end of human development: here you see the idea of human development transformed into a picture.

Through the feelings that we develop from these pictures, the forces flow to us that truly open up the higher worlds for us. All this takes place without magic. The images stimulate the feelings that lead the human being into the higher worlds. Feelings and sensations lead the human being into the astral world, just as the will leads him into the devachanic or spiritual world. Thinking corresponds to the physical world, feeling to the astral world, and the purified will to the devachanic world.

If we look at the plant in its original chaste substance, we find green as the color in the life of the plant. The plant is permeated by chlorophyll, by what is called chlorophyll, in those parts where the etheric body is actively alive. The etheric body has a basic law, which is the law of repetition. If only the etheric body were active in the plant, then one and the same form would be repeated again and again; leaf by leaf it sets in. But when the astral body of the earth begins to affect the plant, it completes growth and sets in the flowering. The effect of the etheric body is revealed in the repetition. This principle also applies to human growth. The etheric body shows its influence in the formation of the spinal vertebrae, but this only goes as far as the arching of the cranial vault, where the astral body begins to take effect. We can therefore only influence the etheric body through the principle of repetition. When you think and comprehend, you only affect the astral body. But when you pray or meditate, for example, and repeat the same prayer or meditation every day, you have an effect that extends into the etheric body. The way it is in the cosmos is that the principle of repetition first manifests itself in the deeds of the etheric body, then the principle of closure through the astral body. Where the astral body withdraws, the principle of repetition naturally reappears. This is how your hair and nails grow, because the astral body has withdrawn there. It doesn't hurt when you cut your hair, because pain is an expression of the astral body.

We initially have the pure, chaste plant substance, where the plant, subject only to the law of the ether body, adds leaf after leaf. Now this pure, chaste plant substance is increasingly permeated by what is called kama in theosophy, the realm of instincts and feelings, the realm of desires, right up to the images. And now, in man, that which has developed in him since he had a plant nature is to be overcome again. As man developed, he took in the red blood. The red blood brings about in the human being that which makes him self-conscious. The chlorophyll of the plant, permeated by astral substance and the I, has been transformed into the red blood. If you could permeate the green plant substance with the I and the astral substance, you would get the red blood. Now think of the image of the cross. In the image of the cross you also have something that points to the future of man. Where does man's future lie? He is to regain his plant nature, but connected with the higher level of consciousness that today's man has already gained. The red roses of the Rose Cross signify what has been gained through blood, but also what he had as plant nature and is to have again. This is prefigured in the rose. It has a plant nature, and it also has the red color of blood. The etheric body is active in the green leaves, and the astral body is active in the red blossom, where the closure is; the rose blossom owes its red to the most intense effects of the astral body of the earth.

In the future, the human being's astral body will become free and consciously active from the outside, from outside the physical body, just as the earth's astral body now acts on the rose. Then what is now present as a plant rose at a lower level will appear at a higher level as the human rose. Thus, in the wreath of roses surrounding the black wood of the cross, we actually have a sign of the development of the human being. In the black wood we see what dies; it is an image of what will also die in man. And in the red rose we see what will continue to develop until it becomes that chalice which, like the chalice of a plant towards the sun, holds out towards the spiritual sun-rays. And the rose cross, where the red roses surround the black cross, presents this process to us in an image.

The important thing about the symbols is that we do not merely think them, but that we feel and sense them. For only when we feel that the red rose is saying: that is what you will become one day, that is what the goal of human development represents to us – and when our hearts open and our feelings become pure, then the forces within us are released that lead us up into a higher world. Thus these symbols are workers at our soul. They permeate and interweave our soul; they are the greatest and most effective educators of our human race.

Just as we place images and imaginations before our soul here, so in still higher spheres the inner forces of numbers are placed before man. Man must learn to feel the inner relationships of numbers like spiritual music. One can describe the relationships of the physical body, ether body, astral body and I to one another by attempting to provide images of the relationship between these four aspects of human nature. In doing so, one experiences a kind of imagination. Thus, one can describe the relationship between the physical body and the etheric body by saying: the physical body comes into being because all the forces and substances that are spread out in the mineral kingdom are connected by the etheric body; it would disintegrate if the etheric body did not permeate it; the etheric body is an inner fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. In this way we work our way up to an image of the etheric body.

And if we try to gain a pictorial representation of the astral body, we imagine how it moves out at night and works on the etheric and physical bodies from the outside, by removing the fatigue substances. Let us make this clear to ourselves pictorially. But there is an even higher way of imagining this relationship; here one has to imagine the inner value of certain numbers. You have to recognize that the ratio of 1:3 is something quite different than the ratio of 1:7. This is not irrelevant. With the ratio of 1:3, you have to imagine that the 3 is differentiated within itself, and you have to imagine the interrelations of the individual quantities to the others.

But what is important is the ratio of 1:3:7:12. If you understand the relationship between these numbers as a tone ratio, in that you imagine that a tone makes three vibrations in a certain time, another seven vibrations in the same time, and yet another twelve vibrations, then you have expressed in these numbers the ratio that indicates the ratio of the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in spiritual music.

I = 1
astral body = 3
etheric body = 7
physical body = 12

There is good reason for this in the existence of the world. If we were to follow the development from the oldest Saturn existence to the present earthly existence, we would soon be able to find how this is rooted in the human existence. The Earth, in its first, in the Saturn embodiment, was surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. They provided the first germinal formation of the physical body. Through the influence of the corresponding signs on the body, this relationship of the number twelve to the individual limbs of the physical body came into being. The seven planets influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was a sun, the other planets were around it, and so the number seven influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was in its lunar embodiment, it was first affected by the Sun. But then, as a result of the Sun and then the Moon separating from the Earth, three bodies emerged from one body, and so the number three was effective in the formation of the astral body. And when the I came down from the higher worlds, this was expressed in the number one. The ratio of 1:3 gives you the ratio of the I to the astral body, to 7 the ratio to the etheric body, and to 12 the ratio to the physical body.

1:3:7:12 thus denotes the ratio of the four elements of human nature, which you must feel inwardly. It is not easy to awaken the sensations that one has to imagine the physical body as the most perfect of the four parts, the etheric body as the less perfect, the astral body even less perfect, and the I as the “baby” among the four members of human nature. We must think of the physical body as being twelve times more perfect than the I, the etheric body as being seven times more perfect, and the astral body as being three times more perfect. These numbers indicate the degrees of perfection for the four aspects of human nature. These numbers are therefore profound symbols for the real conditions.

Occult schools provided instructions for gradually becoming familiar with the numerical values. For example, the significance of the number three was taught by saying: “Let us consider the development of a plant and pay attention to three things.” Let us start with the plant germ. You have an inconspicuous, small plant germ, from which the plant gradually develops. We can depict this in a drawing by letting the plant germ diverge in a radiating manner, up to the leaves, flowers and fruit. Now the germ has become a plant and then the plant germ has become a plant again. What has diverged in the plant to become leaves, flowers and fruit is all wrapped up together in the germ; it has, as it were, slipped into the germ. In a developed plant, everything is revealed in the senses. Then the senses enter into a completely different realm, into the germ. There we have in the germ the senses as small as possible and the spiritual as large as possible.

But a third thing also takes place. While the germ is forming out of the plant and the new plant is developing out of this germ, elemental forces from the environment are continually acting on the plant from the outside. The germ is there, which developed from the plant, and out of it the new plant develops again; but the third comes from the whole surrounding world; and it is this third that changes each plant again a little. The higher a being stands, the more the influence of the third changes it.

Let us now turn again to the human soul and consider how it lives between birth and death. There it spreads out what it has brought with it as the fruits of a previous embodiment. Just as external influences affect unconscious plant life, so man consciously experiences the most diverse influences from outside in the life between birth and death. And everything he experiences there was not yet present in the seed; it is something entirely new, an enrichment, the fruits of which the person takes with him into a later life, into a following incarnation. What was present in the old plant continues to work in the new plant; but in the development of the new plant something else appears that was not present in the old plant.

Thus, in all development, we have three aspects to consider: first, the unfolding from a, as it were, wrapped-up state; we call this development or evolution. Then, what lies in the germ must come into being through the reverse process, the wrapping or involution. These two processes alone, however, do not yet give progress. Only when a being is able to take in influences from outside and process them into inner experiences can something new and progressive come into the world. That is the third thing; it is called creation out of nothing. You are constantly developing what is predisposed in you from the past, constantly taking in something from your environment that you transform into experiences, and then you carry that into a new embodiment. In all life, the trinity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing is at work. In the case of human beings, we have this creation out of nothing in the work of their consciousness. They experience the processes in their environment and process them into ideas, thoughts and concepts. Dispositions come from previous embodiments, but all progress in life is based on the production of new thoughts and new ideas. The circumstances of the environment are “consumed”, and the inner experiences lead to new thoughts and ideas. Therefore, three is the number of life, it is called the number of creation or of action.

On the other hand, another number is called the number of revelation. You can easily imagine which number is called the number of revelation. If you look at anything in the world, it must always reveal itself in a duality. As we cannot perceive light without darkness, so we always encounter an attenuated or opposite aspect of every real concept. Light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. Duality reigns in all that is revealed. Therefore, the number two is the number of revelation. Opposites are only united in the realm of the occult, which lies beneath the revealed. Therefore, the number one is the number of unity. Evolution and involution are not contradictions, because they would always unfold in the same way without the third - from germ to plant and from plant to germ. Only in connection with the third, creation out of nothing, does the new arise, which is expressed by the number three.

Thus, in the first three numbers you have important symbols of the spiritual world. It should be indicated to you by individual examples how that which is called symbols relates to the higher worlds, and how, for example, symbols such as the Holy Grail or the Rosicrucian in the picture express higher development.

Another beautiful symbol is the image of the mirror. We often call that which surrounds us a mirror of the spiritual, because in truth nothing external shows us anything other than the reflection of spiritual beings. You can observe this yourself in physical life. When you perceive a physical object, what does your eye see? Your eye would not see the object at all if the sun's rays did not fall on it and reflect off the object into your eye. In truth, your eye does not see ordinary objects, but the sunlight reflected from the objects, and that is how an object appears to you in a certain form. In truth, you do not see yourself when you look in the mirror either, because your spiritual part is outside of your physical being. What you see in the mirror is the reflection of the rays that fall on you from the spiritual world. What you see reflects the light of the spirit just as ordinary objects reflect sunlight. The outer body of man is actually the mirror in which his true being is reflected.

In the Atlantean period, man did not see objects outside at all. He knew that he was in a spiritual substance and therefore could see spiritually inwardly. Only in the last third of the Atlantean period did the spiritual light go out, and man only saw the reflected rays of the spiritual light. Imagine looking into a glass pane and being aware of your own spiritual qualities. Now someone applies a mirror substance to the back of the glass pane; as a result, you no longer see your own being in the glass pane, but only the image reflected by the mirror. Man now sees his image; and now the illusion arises for him that what he sees there is his ego. This illusion is wonderfully expressed in the Bible. Man lost Paradise when he became so absorbed in sensuality that he saw himself. Before that Adam and Eve had not “seen”; now “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” And because here an illusion actually occurred, legend attributes the fact of the externalization of objects to the Luciferic principle.

In Eastern Europe there is a folk tale that tells of a monk who wanted to test whether the biblical saying was based on truth: Those who seek will find, and to those who ask, it will be given. He wanted to test whether this was really true, so he prayed for what he wanted to beg for. He wanted nothing more nor less than the king's daughter herself. He proposed to the king's daughter. She told him that she would be his on one condition: he had to bring her an instrument in which she could see herself from top to bottom. This was at a time when there were no mirrors. So he went off searching, and met the devil, who told him the secret of the mirror principle. When he returned with this, he received the princess's hand in marriage; however, he later renounced her. So in order to obtain the mirror, he had to resort to the devil.

In the manifold signs and symbols that have come to us in these lectures, we have been able to see the real meaning of these images. Sensory perception is the content of the physical world. Images and imaginations are the expression of the astral world. Harmony of the spheres, sound of the spheres is the expression of the spiritual world. Those who ascend to this spiritual world perceive its inner spiritual sonority, it penetrates into them. Inspiration is the vital element of the spiritual world, just as imagination is the vital element of the astral world. A truly inspired world is created out of the spirit. IV

Cologne, June 10, 1908

My dear Miss Stinde!

According to our established program, E.S. remains on Sunday mornings and Loge on Sunday evenings. Now I would like to add a philosophical lecture on Sunday at around 5 p.m. for the listeners from before at the philosophical lecture and for those whom you consider suitable. But it should all be arranged according to your discretion. This time, Stockmeyers are to be admitted into F.M.¹ It will probably not work to have a short preliminary celebration on Monday for the F.M.. Stockmeyer urgently wants to be admitted just in time for his 50th birthday. Of course, he cannot be admitted until Tuesday, the day after his birthday. However, we could hold a special preliminary celebration on Monday, just before his admission, without the lodge trappings. But if it means too much trouble for you, then Stockmeyer can wait until Tuesday. I would also like to hold a session for advanced esoteric students during the course of Monday.

Warmest regards to you and the Countess

Yours

Dr. Rudolf Steiner

I will be able to arrive at the earliest on Saturday evening from Eisenach, where the lodge is to be opened.

• 1. F.M. = Freemasonry, or the section of the Esoteric School of Rudolf Steiner that is cult of knowledge, see GA 265.

Notes from Memory by Mathilde Scholl.

John the Baptist foretold Christ Jesus in the middle of the fourth sub-race. Now, on the other hand, the individuality of the Master Jesus guides humanity over from the fifth to the sixth sub-race – again to John the Baptist, to Aquarius. Christ Jesus is the living word. All beings of nature converge in man and form the word in him. That is the ego in man – Jesus Christ. Man becomes Christ when he experiences inwardly that the whole world flows together in him, is one with him. The time when Christ first appeared among men was when He was the first of mankind to embody the ego. That was the seed from which all self-consciousness, all personal consciousness, sprang up.

But he gave his I back to the world. In doing so, he showed people the way of de-selfing.

On Judgment Day, when all will rise again, it will be seen whether man has led the I only to egoism or to de-selfing. Then the separation between people will take place. Those who have developed to the point of selflessness, their awakening, their waking up in the I contains the future seeds of humanity. This is the sixth sub-race, from which the sixth root race will descend. Those who have developed their ego only as far as selfishness will not experience a real resurrection. They have the germ of death within them. This will become the seventh sub-race, which will develop into the kingdom of evil and become dross. This is the chaff that is thrown into the fire. The sixth sub-race is the wheat from which something new can sprout.

This separation is now being prepared. Through the principle of brotherly love, which has its representative in the Master Jesus, the unification of humanity into the sixth sub-race is brought about, which, based on this principle of brotherly love, grows into the future.

When the sixth sub-race has reached perfection, the Word, the Christ, will be present not only in one individuality but in all, and the individual human beings will then together form the letters of this Word, the new Christ, who will then be the Risen One in an entirely different sense. As I was already in the third root race, His life was sunk into humanity. He will arise in full development in the sixth root race, in the totality of humanity.

Those who do not connect with the spiritual world are like a sleepwalker who, without consciousness, performs all sorts of things in his sleep by means of higher (subconscious) powers. There are two friends, one of whom always feels fresh and strong, vigorous for work in the morning, while the other is usually tired and listless. One day the strong man says to the weak man: “It is no wonder that you feel miserable in the morning, because you always go out at night and work at your desk for several hours.” And sure enough, when they checked, they found the task that the weak man had to solve worked out on the desk.

In his subconscious, the person was guided by higher powers to do what he felt too weak to do in his waking life. The religious beliefs did something similar for humanity. Without being aware of it, she was led by leading powers into the spiritual worlds and to spiritual insights. Of course, the result was not achieved that was the case in much earlier times, that the most mundane was, as it were, spiritually consecrated. No stone was hewn without a certain rhythm, blow upon blow, and this rhythm was felt as an echo of the music of the spheres of the higher worlds.

Today there are only meagre remnants of this, for example when grain is threshed in rhythm in the countryside. It all depends on one's perception. Take children, for example, who look forward to Christmas. They have been told that at night the Christmas angel or Santa Claus secretly comes and places the presents on the floor. Then the child, driven by a materialistic sting, wakes up and sees the parents, who are people living on the physical plane, laying the things down. His faith in higher spiritual beings is destroyed. But one can also look at it from the parents' point of view. They can feel that they are mediators through whom higher powers can flow to the children through the gifts and benefits.

Nowadays, the world is simply de-divinized, and it is difficult to speak of divine guidance and government of the world. Think of those who built and sailed the Titanic. ¹

But the higher powers were always active on the physical plane as well, in order to let spiritual forces flow into human life, especially in the mysteries. One could go back to Atlantis in this regard, but let us talk about the post-Atlantean mysteries. Pupils were drawn to them so that they could be gradually introduced to the secrets of the universe and the development of humanity. The students were so worked on that fear and terror befell them. Some of them became free, courageous and strong as a result, and in this incarnation attained union with the supersensible world; but the others, who were overwhelmed and proved to be too weak, felt: You are still too weak to ascend into the supersensible worlds, but you will still benefit when you pass through the gate of death from this attempt to reach the higher worlds. Later, great initiates such as Ormus and Mark, the writer of the Gospel of Mark, conveyed the fruits of the Christ impulse in the Mysteries of Humanity; then the Culdean monks, who incorporated spiritual wisdom into the Gothic cathedrals. ² And time and again there were occult brotherhoods that, under various pseudonyms, guided people in the physical world to the higher worlds. One example is the Arthurian Brotherhood, to which Parzival belonged and which later operated under the name of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. The Round Table of King Arthur represented the youthful natural forces, which then, in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, were transformed into conscious spiritual forces. Here we have the union of the old occult wisdom with the new Christian wisdom. For the legend tells that a stone fell out of Lucifer's crown when he fell from heaven, and that this stone was worked into the Grail Cup, the sacred and noble chalice in which the blood of Christ was caught at Golgotha. ³

The mature human being, like Parzival, came to the decisive question through the guidance of higher powers, which opened the gate to initiation for him.

Today there is great resistance to such occult brotherhoods, especially from devout Christian circles, who seek to ascend to the higher worlds with the help of the Christ impulse. They resist them as if they were Satan incarnate, because they say one loses the Christ through them. Herein lies not merely ill will or a principled dislike of the occult, but the dimly sensed, thoroughly correct realization that only he finds the Christ in the higher worlds who brings him up there as a memory from the physical plane. For only here can the Christ be grasped, and it is quite right that those who enter the higher worlds without a knowledge and realization of the Christ, and are unstable, may lose their way.

In our occult brotherhood, as in all, there is a hierarchy instead of democracy, because not a referendum can decide what truth is, but only those who have been given the only correct knowledge by spiritual powers can decide on this. A deification of work and life, wisdom and the warmth of love is attained, and each person recognizes in the other, as a brother striving for the same goal, the divine essence.

In the three lower degrees, all the knowledge that can be gained from the world of higher beings and forces is symbolically experienced. In the six higher degrees, one then becomes more intimately acquainted with the occult forces themselves.

Promise Formula

Two handwritten templates by Rudolf Steiner from notebook archive number 611

I

I try to understand how I can find development in the service of my self in Misraim and approach the holy secret that demands reverent silence. I want to try to open up the cultivation of this development to my fellow human beings by caring for the symbolic sanctuary and to understand the inner nature of human wisdom by preserving the sense of the degrees of truth.

I will try to preserve my self from all influences that diminish its fully conscious freedom and rob it of its inner light and self-determination through hypnosis, suggestion, etc. at any stage of life.

A soul can only find a goal and destiny in the realm of duration, direction and growth in the realm of time: those who attempt such.

I perceive that such is proclaimed as a doctrine by those whom I hear called the knowing ones, who are said to have the key to hidden secrets.

II

I ---- born in ----- residing in ---- do hereby vow and promise to faithfully keep and follow the rules of the genuine and true Misraim service; to keep the holy secret strictly, to take care of and advocate for the preservation of the sanctuary to the best of my ability, and to unreservedly recognize the Grand Master as the highest decision-making authority in all Misraim matters. I also vow and promise that I will not allow myself to be put into a state of bondage through hypnosis, suggestion, etc., so that everything that will ever affect me in life will find me in a state of wakefulness, so that the secrets of the great service can never be betrayed to outsiders through me.

Should I ever break this solemn vow of mine, may my soul wander restlessly without purpose or destination in space, may it be without direction in immeasurable time.

This I vow by the wise masters of the East, who may turn their eye to my deeds.

• 1. The English express steamer “Titanic” was on its maiden voyage shortly before this address on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic with about 1500 people. People were so convinced of the absolute safety of the ship that they ignored the iceberg warnings. Cf. Walter Lord, “The Sinking of the Titanic”, New York 1955.
• 2. Culdean = old Irish ascetics, in spiritual communities since the 8th century, who are said to have had great influence on Freemasonry, architecture and customs. See Joseph Schauberg, op. cit., vol. I, p. 503.
• 3. Regarding the connection between high-degree Freemasonry and the legend of the Holy Grail, see the lecture given in Berlin on January 2, 1906.

Notes by Amalie Künstler

There are entities that permeate our physical body, our etheric body and our astral body. Entities of a gnome-like nature permeate the physical body of a person, those of a ghost-like nature permeate the etheric body and those of a demon-like nature permeate the astral body of a person.

They saturate themselves, they suck themselves full of what the person gives them, they live off of it. Behind these entities, which permeate the physical body of the person and which play a very special role in our time, are particularly prominent and are gaining more and more influence, stand the Asuras. We are living in a particularly important time because these entities are threatening to gain a predominant influence, just as such entities, which permeate the etheric body, gained a predominant influence around the middle of the Atlantean period.

As soon as a person strives for spiritual development, his thoughts and feelings have a completely different effect on his various bodies. And what used to feed these entities no longer nourishes them, because what the soul's spiritual direction brings about in the various bodies of a person deprives them of their nourishment. This puts the person in a dangerous position. Because if he merely kills these entities by depriving them of their nourishment, he is taking the first step towards black magic. He thereby turns these entities into machines that he can use for his own purposes. This is not right. Man must transform them. We must not kill them, transform them into machine-like creatures.

The materialist is completely surrounded by such beings, who have been frozen by the outpourings of materialism. They are not dead, only frozen. Our task should be to dissolve the rigidity of these beings through our spiritual powers and transform them. That was the task of the Manicheans in particular.

The Molten Sea, if it had come about, would have made the earth a transparent, clear planet. Now the three journeymen have destroyed the casting. Doubt, superstition and belief in the personal self have clouded the casting. In the human etheric body, there are three points - heart, spleen and back - that are particularly significant. The one on the back means the brazen sea in the microcosm. In a person who still has doubts, superstition and a belief in the personal self, this point is clouded, with clouds passing through it like a smoky topaz. Our task is to transform it into a radiant, clear one.

Cain, at the center of the earth, who still possesses the pure divine Elohim power. Hiram Abiff descends to him and receives the original creator word written on the golden triangle.

Notes A from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede

Through spiritual science, we get to know the human being, and through such knowledge we can develop further. A spiritual being accompanies us when we pass through the gate of death, and it shows us the way into the spiritual world, even in Kamaloka, just as we were supported and guided by our parents and the wider environment during our earthly existence so that we could find our way here. This angelic being gives us spiritual instruction, shows us our mistakes from a previous incarnation, points out how to correct them, and ultimately the person longs to descend back into the physical world to make up for what they previously lacked. We can call this angelic being our spiritual father, the fatherly element of our supersensible being.

But we also have a maternal element in the spiritual world, and that is the essence of all the forces from the spiritual hierarchies that enable us to surround ourselves with the forces - or to draw the forces to us - that we need to transform our shortcomings into abilities of the soul.

With this maternal shell and the paternal element, we have a shell in the spiritual world, a spiritual body, which becomes more pronounced the closer we get to the moment of our birth through our physical parents in the physical world, where we envelop ourselves with the inherited qualities of the physical line of our generation, within which we come into the world.

During the first years of childhood, the paternal and maternal elements work undisturbed in us, the paternal in the structure of our brain and nervous system, the maternal in our heart and blood system until the moment when the ego awakens in us, until we begin to feel like an independent being. Then we come into opposition to our spiritual father, then we no longer want to obey him, then we want to go our own way, then we betray our spiritual leader. And then we no longer follow the maternal element either, which wants to help us to achieve our moral improvement, to arrive at higher insights, but then we start to listen to the inherited qualities of our physical parents, then we follow our lower instincts. In doing so, we cause our spiritual mother suffering, constant gnawing pain; we are her pain child in the truest sense of the word.

From the seventh year onwards, our physical body already begins to decay because we then reject the spiritual healing powers. And even if we continue to grow, there is still decay. When we have reached our youth and conquered a place in the physical world, and usually united with another person with whom we think we complement each other, then we have arrived at the peak of our lives and know nothing of all the spiritual pain that is suffered on our behalf. For our spiritual father and our spiritual mother continue to look down on us and pass on the impulses that are usually not felt, but are never absent.

So we continue to decline and seek opportunities to take with us at death those powers that are supposed to ensure us an eternal existence. If someone does not encounter the Christ Impulse in his further life – if he absorbs nothing of it within himself – he has during his life absorbed only death-bringing forces, and in future incarnations he will be born with disease-causing forces of decay.

How will he be able to resist these forces of decay? Only the power of Christ can give him the incentive to stand up against these forces and show him the way to do so. Before the Christ descended to earth, it was a sad world on earth, and six hundred years before the birth of Christ it was not yet certain that he would descend. The Buddha sensed this, and so he was able to proclaim that the world was like a charnel house, that everything would be suffering, pain, and so on. And it was again the Buddha who showed himself when the Christ Child was to be born, in order to receive the Christ Being, who settled in the astral body of the Luke-Child Jesus, and it was his voice that called: Glory to God in the highest heavens, peace on earth!

He who takes in the power of Christ, which will one day permeate everything, will be born with the ability to take in redemptive powers, through which he will ultimately be able to achieve his goal as a human being.

What has been communicated here in this way is nothing other than the content of the Parzival saga. Where Parzival leaves his father, where he disobeys his mother Herzeleide and follows his own inclinations and enters the world to gain experience, where he participates in Arthur's Round Table, that is what has been explained here before. King Arthur's Round Table represents the forces of decay, and only when one has realized this, when one encounters the fatally wounded Amfortas and becomes aware of what one has failed to do in life, only then is it possible to absorb the redemptive forces symbolized in the Holy Grail cup and to participate in the redemption of the earth.

Recordings B by Alice Kinkel, Second and Third Degree

We have been told in lectures and writings that man has a guide throughout his life who leads and guides him according to his karma. Now we add: This guide does not leave man when he passes through the gate of death. His angel also accompanies him into the spiritual world, so that man also has a guide between death and a new birth.

The relationship between this guardian angel and the person is paternal from birth to death. And the work that the angel does for the person is that it mainly forms our brain and nerves. Until the first years of childhood, our relationship with our angel is also unclouded. But then – from the moment we say “I” – comes the time when we betray the Father more and more!

And a maternal force also works on us, is in us, which forms the other organism, the blood and heart circulation – and which we condemn to suffering and pain with every movement, with every heartbeat.

We absorb destructive forces into ourselves throughout our lives in the physical body and are unable to transform them into forces of life. It is these forces of death that condemn our father and mother within us to suffering and pain. (I am not sure if this is correct.)

Everything that affects us from the outside world are destructive forces.

The path of man now goes so that he must become a disciple of a disciple of Arthur. If he can become a Parzival disciple and unites both together in himself, he will find the right way into the spiritual world.

In the thirty-third year, for example, the time will come for him to recognize what is necessary for his spiritual development and what sacrifices must be made for him by divine spiritual beings from the time of his birth until his death. 1912

Notes C by Amalie Künstler

If we look back to the early days of human development, we see that the human being, with his will and emotional impulses, was not yet in an earthly physical body as an ego-being. He was in a spiritual world as an ego-being. He could only arise as an individual ego-being after the father and mother were there to bring about an earthly body. When that was the case, he entered into earthly embodiments.

From that life in primeval times, where he was completely in the spiritual world, he always has a spiritual leader, a guardian angel, an Angelos, who guides the spiritual self of the person. This is his spiritual father. When a person passes through the portal of death, he is received by this being and guided in the spiritual world so that he can use the powers that have become his from his embodiment in a suitable way to build a suitable physical shell for himself for a new earthly embodiment. It is a relationship like that between a child and a father between the human being and this being.

This paternal power works in the new incarnation in such a way that it has a constructive effect on the brain and nervous system during the first years of childhood [approximately] up to the age of five. From then on, an inner ego power develops more and more in the human being, repelling this spiritual fatherhood. The human being betrays his father by increasingly absorbing what comes to him on the physical plane.

But the human being also has a spiritual mother. While still in the realm between death and birth, she forms a spiritual shell, astral body and etheric body, around the human ego before he enters physical existence. This spiritual mother works during life in the heart and blood system. She builds with spiritual forces on the human being. She herself comes from the worlds of the highest hierarchies. This spiritual mother suffers pain and sorrow through the human being when he enters into physical existence with his ego consciousness and absorbs into his soul the forces from this physical existence that kill and consume his body.

Man is a child of pain for this spiritual mother. She suffers through all the forces of death that man takes up in himself and that displace the forces she wants to give to man. These are the forces that come from heredity. These are the forces of original sin.

At the time of the change of teeth, around the seventh year, the human being has developed his physical form to such an extent that the etheric forces, acting from within, actually only expand the form, puffing it up. However, due to the impact from the physical world, these forces have become Luciferic forces, forces of death. And so, at this point, the dying of the human being actually begins from one side, while the spiritual mother forces always work against these dying forces.

In the middle of life, however, the forces of death have the upper hand. From then on, the human being just plods through life, towards death. He has received the mortal wound that he carries throughout his life because of the betrayal of his spiritual father and the pain and suffering he has inflicted on his spiritual mother.

Only through the Mystery of Golgotha can the strength be found to save man from falling more and more prey to these forces of death in the further course of his incarnations. There, at the Mystery of Golgotha, the new spiritual life force descended upon the earth; the Christ brought the spiritual power of the sun down to earth and gave it to the earth and to humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha.

And man, when he unites with the forces of Golgotha, can receive these new spiritual powers in his physical and etheric bodies. These powers are contained in the Holy Grail.

The resurrection body of Christ is composed of these forces. And this resurrection body of Christ is given for humanity in the times following the Mystery of Golgotha until the end of the development of the earth, like a seed, so to speak, for a renewed earth and humanity.

It is said that this seed is hidden in the Holy Grail, in the vessel into which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of Christ that flowed from the wounds on the cross. From this vessel, Christ gave the disciples the bread and wine at the Last Supper. And this vessel was lifted up from the earth into the spiritual heights of the ether. This vessel, the Holy Grail, was then carried by angels to Europe. This points to the mission of the European peoples, who were to be the first bearers of the Christ impulse.

All that I have just mentioned is enshrouded in the mystery of the Parzival saga. Parzival is abandoned by his father. His mother, the sorrowful mother, heartache, wants to keep him from the forces of the outside world that belong to heredity. He breaks away from her when he sees the knights and follows them. He comes to the court of King Arthur. This is what lives in the physical culture. Arthur is a historical fact, but spiritually he is to be understood in such a way that he symbolizes the pure physical. Parzival marries the daughter of King Arthur. But then the longing of his soul drives him to the Grail.

Six hundred years before, the descent of the Christ from the spiritual realm of the sun had not yet been fully determined in the spiritual world, however strange that may seem. Hence the sorrow of the Bodhisattva, who had become Buddha, and the instruction to save himself as quickly as possible through reincarnation. For if the Christ did not come, he would have to look upon an Earth world that would increasingly become a field of corpses, where only the forces of death prevail. That is what would have happened without the Christ Impulse. That is why Buddha says: old age is suffering, death is suffering, and so on.

We are now at the beginning of a time when humanity will divide into two parts: those who have taken up the Christ impulse, even if only initially through feeling and sensation, and thereby will have brought fresh life forces to themselves, which will carry them through the gateway of death. For only the mineral physical body falls away at death; the spiritual powers of the physical body remain with the person. He takes them with him into the spiritual world, and out of these human powers, quickened by the Christic forces, the soul then builds in the spiritual world, with full consciousness, the new body for the following incarnation. A body that is more and more a true servant and tool for the work within the physical world. It will be a healthy and powerful body.

But those who have not taken in the new spiritual life forces, who have not overcome the forces of death, who have not transformed them in this life on earth, will also be unhealthy, withered and powerless in their bodies.

Notes by D. Elisabeth Geering-Christ

When the human soul leaves the physical plane after death, it is guided by a spiritual guide, since without one it cannot find its way either into Kamaloka or into the spiritual world afterwards. This spiritual guide has a relationship with the human soul that is similar to that of a father with his child on the physical plane. This spiritual guide is identical with the being referred to in ancient religions as a guardian angel.

In the very earliest years of childhood, the soul continues to have the same relationship with the spiritual guide as it had before re-embodiment on the physical plane. This relationship continues until the moment when the child experiences its first sense of self-awareness and from that moment on is able to remember. Then the soul betrays the spiritual guide by rebelling against the guide and striving to go its own way, as the clairvoyant can observe.

At this point, the peak of physical growth coincides with the beginning of decadence, i.e. the process of dying. The first beginning of this process can already be seen when the teeth change.

Consequently, the spiritual “mother” experiences heartache at the same time, worry about the child's future. Everything related to the brain for the edification of the physical body or nervous system is fully realized under the spiritual guidance of the “father”. Everything related to the blood system, with its seat in the heart, comes from the power of the spiritual mother. Man would fall completely into decadence if he did not seek the healing powers capable of transforming the dead matter into new life by other means. These powers must be sought in the event of Golgotha and were brought to the Occident through the secrets of the Holy Grail and preserved by it. The Parzival legend is nothing more than the imprint of what has just been said.

Titurel is the guardian of the Holy Grail, the spiritual guide of whom was spoken at the beginning. Amfortas, as uncle - our sufferings, which can only be healed by the secret of the Grail. The Grail saga indicates the path we have to follow. We ourselves must become Parzival in all things of existence, bringing the activity of Arthur into our spiritual life. We must become Arthur-Parzival brothers and thus join this Rosicrucian, Grail brotherhood. (That is why Parzival's mother's name was Herzeleide.

Notes by E. von Rudolf Meyer

When a person passes through the gate of death, they must also have a guide there. He is not alone, but precisely as he is here our human spirit, he is after death. He finds there a leader commensurate with his individuality, a guardian angel, whom he also has here in the physical life; and he is with him in the spiritual world all the time, even very soon during the Kamaloka period.

When a person is now ready for a new incarnation, and if he has a strong will to do so, because he is driven to make amends for many things, he draws forces from the astral and ethereal world and descends to the parental couple, thereby attracting whatever inherited qualities are present - that is the concept of original sin.

Just as we can now describe the guardian angel as the paternal element, so the forces from the astral and ethereal world are the maternal element. Much higher spiritual hierarchies work in this element, which the guardian angel also brings with him, than in the paternal element. Thus man passes through birth into existence, and we see how he, as a child, lives entirely in the pure supersensible forces until the time when he begins to slowly unfold his own ego. Then, little by little, the child's own ego rebels more and more against the guardian angel; this betrays the child, the paternal element.

It absorbs more and more of what is around it, what is imprinted on it through education and so on. There is now a constant rebellion against the guardian angel, against the paternal forces.

We now know that the paternal forces build up the physical body, the brain and the nervous system, while the maternal forces build up the blood circulation, the heart and everything connected with it.

The fact that from a certain point onwards the human being is constantly rebelling against the paternal element brings suffering and pain to the maternal element.

It is a faint reflection on the physical plane when a mother has a problem child.

This rebellion continues until the time when man again begins to slowly develop the descending forces in himself. He does not know this outside in life, and if he knew it, he would be close to despair; therefore it is hidden from him by the Guardian of the Threshold. He is again heading towards decay, and we can see how, from the middle of his life onwards, man just plods along and is no longer able to absorb anything small.

From a certain point onwards, the dying forces within a person become like a mortal wound.

What have I actually given you here? Nothing other than the Parzival legend. We see young Parzival entering life, soon to be without a father. His mother is called Heartache, which is the painful spiritual world of the human being. He takes up life, betrays his father, causes his mother heartache and follows the knights, that is, the external forces that come from heredity. And then he comes to the court of King Arthur, that is, he gets to know the outer world. He marries the daughter of King Arthur, that is, he loses himself completely to the outer world.

Then comes the moment when he sees and recognizes all the sins he has committed: he has betrayed the paternal element and caused the mother heartache. This is how he becomes Parzival, a disciple of the Grail, bearing the mortal wound of dying forces.

Through spiritual science, people are now to take on new strength in order to bring stronger forces with them for the next incarnation, forces that are more suited to physical life; for all the illness and weakness of the body that is present now comes from these dying forces from previous incarnations.

If human beings were only exposed to these forces, they would soon live in a world completely doomed to death. Six hundred years before Christ, it was not yet determined even in the spiritual world whether the Christ would really come to earth.

When Buddha taught: “Old age, sickness and death are suffering,” he foresaw a field of corpses on which later humanity would have to live. But then the Christ came and descended in the Jesus of Nazareth, and the individuality of the Buddha reappeared, as we know, not in the flesh, but it outshone the Jesus child of the Gospel of Luke, and the shepherds as a symbol proclaimed to men the revelation from on high: And peace to those of good will.

And then came the Mystery of Golgotha, which planted in the earth the impulse for humanity to absorb new forces and conquer death.

The physical body as such is only Maya. Reality is the spiritual forces that build it up; these are the life forces. The physical body contains the bodies of death. Man can receive these spiritual powers, the life forces, through the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. Even when the physical body falls away at death, these spiritual powers remain with man, and from these he consciously builds the new body for the next incarnation, which then works in this incarnation and gives the strength to consciously master life on the physical plane.

People should build railways, airships and so on, but with the forces of life, with soul-pure powers. They should not only be Parzival, but also Arthurian knights, also take in the outer environment, but carry out of the spiritual world that which is true life.

Notes by Mrs. Margareta Morgenstern

In Cologne in 1913, Rudolf Steiner told an inner circle that one and the same master was behind four individualities and had inspired all four: Bacon, Shakespeare, Jakob Böhme and the Jesuit poet Jacobus Balde (Baldus).

In front of the statue of Jakob Böhme in Görlitz, a professor says that he looks just like Shakespeare. An enfant terrible answers: “You don't even realize that you have just said something very clever.”

Cologne, May 11, 1913

Notes from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede First degree

If we look back at the way in which souls celebrated the summer solstice festival before the Mystery of Golgotha – what we now call around St. John's Day – and at how they felt and experienced that time, we arrive at very different feelings from those which the souls of the present experience at this moment of the year. In the past, the souls – and these are, after all, our own souls – lived with nature as a reality. The falling of snowflakes, the whispering of the wind in the forest, the light that flashes from lightning, the rolling of thunder, the patter of rain, all this was the speech of the gods for the souls of that time; and they understood that language and lived the life of the gods. When the sun barely showed itself during the winter around Christmas time, it also became lonely and dark inside them, and with the falling snowflakes they felt how they were cut off from the activities of the gods. And when spring came and everything began to sprout and sprout, the souls themselves came to life again, and it became warm in the souls. And in proportion as the sun sent its rays to the earth, they could again listen to the conversation of the gods; then they felt at one with nature and with everything that spoke from it. But the same souls can no longer hear the same, no longer experience it. The gods are becoming more and more silent, and we see the seasons changing without feeling more connected to them. Why is that?

This is because, after the mystery of Golgotha, everything had to change. That which used to affect people from the outside is now supposed to work within the person themselves. All those forces that once worked directly on people in nature are still working, but now they work on people from within. With our inner soul forces, which are to become stronger through the descent of the I into us, we must find the forces within ourselves that once spoke to us from outside in thunder and lightning, in rain and wind. Now they speak to us in our knowledge, now they bring forth moral strength and wisdom in us, now they warm us inwardly and enable us to understand all people, to speak from person to person and to establish the love that shall bind all souls together, so that humanity will rediscover itself as one great unity, since the whole of humanity lies spread out in each person's heart.

The festivals that people now celebrate with the changing seasons are no longer external festivals, where people cheered or became silent together with nature, but have now become internal celebrations. And the hope arises that one day, in full realization, we will fully experience them. When the young green sprouts up and all spring shoots awaken, then the feeling awakens within us that the slumbering seed of the spirit will awaken in us, and we celebrate Easter in this warming hope. And when we approach the Feast of Pentecost and thus the high point of the year, we expect that this spirit, as the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of Truth, will come into us and bring us knowledge and wisdom. Those people who set the dates of the holidays in the post-Christian era did so out of the deepest wisdom and intuition.

The Luciferic spirits wanted to give man that which they already had on the old moon, the spirit self or the fifth principle, before man was quite ready with the development of the fourth principle or the I. Thus, man received the fifth principle in an immature state. The true form of the fourth principle is shown to us by Christ, and this is indicated to us in the forty days, or four times a small cycle of ten days, which elapse between the resurrection and the ascension. Only then can the fifth principle come to people in the right way. And that is indicated in the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, which in turn comes ten days later - or as a fifth cycle - after the Ascension.

We know that the Elohim want to give us the powers of the ego on earth, through which we can absorb spiritual wisdom into our minds. However, this can only happen slowly and gradually, and all further development will be available for this purpose. The Luciferic spirits, who had already absorbed the powers of the I in the ancient world and were therefore far ahead of man, now want to give man the fifth principle. They do this by directing attention to the possibilities of the earth that can be fully grasped by the intellect. All arrogant natural science comes from Lucifer's will. He wants to permeate man with the fifth principle, bypassing the fourth. The ego-powers are used to sharpen the intellect for earthly purposes; they lead it further and further away from contact with the gods, who want to impart their wisdom to us, just as it now flows down from the occult world in the theosophical teachings. If we absorb the teachings that are issued from this temple, then the wisdom that they contain will gradually be able to be processed by our minds and the powers of our ego will grow, so that we will increase in inner moral strength, which will bring us true freedom, which is determined from within the human being.