The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The sermon on the mount (Matthew 5) is the most significant revelation of the Christian faith. It is usually thought of as a sermon Jesus gave to the people, speaking from a mountain. But ‘to go up the mountain’ is an ancient key term found in all occult languages. ‘To love’ is another occult key word. ‘The disciple whom the Lord loved’—and ‘Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus’, ‘See how he loved his friend’.⁹⁴ It always has to be realized that the disciple whom the Lord loved was the writer of John's gospel. His name never appears in the gospel, however, not even at the crucifixion. There we read: ‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there ...’⁹⁵ This term ‘love’ has profound significance. The pupil of a master who has been received and taken most deeply into occult knowledge was called ‘the disciple whom the Lord loved’. To ‘go up the mountain’ means to enter into the deepest mystery and teach words which the disciples will then speak to the people. People do not read the Bible properly but literally skip over the words.

Properly translated, the first verse reads: ‘And seeing the multitudes, he went away and up a mountain and sat down, and his disciples came to him.’ Jesus therefore actually went away from the people and spoke only to his disciples. Jesus Christ always had to speak in two ways. He would speak in parables to the people, and he would explain the occult meaning of the words to his disciples when he was ‘up the mountain’ with them.

Verse 3: ‘Blessed are the souls who are beggars for the spirit, for they will find the realms of the heavens in themselves.’ The words, even the letters, all have deep occult meaning. Our German ich [meaning ‘I’], with the letters I, C, H, contains the initials of Jesus Christ: I-Ch. The great initiates guided the word so that it would be ich, Jesus Christ. Only one nation would be able to find the birth of the name Jesus Christ out of the I—and that is how Christian mysticism developed in Germany. Other words also have profound occult meaning. An example is ‘holy’, to be whole or healthy. To be selig [blessed] is to be full of soul [Seele], finding the content of the soul in oneself. Blessed are those who have the urge, the drive to let the soul come more and more to the spirit. People often say ‘We have to look inside ourselves to find God’, but that is not right. For if we look only inside ourselves we find only whatever there is inside us. We must watch our desire; our individual nature must go beyond itself. This is what the words ‘Know yourself’ mean. The authority given to human beings is to give us a stimulus, not certain knowledge.

Verse 4: ‘Blessed are those who accept suffering, for they will find consolation in themselves.’ Suffering is one of the greatest riddles in the world. The ancient Greeks, an independent, happy people who were greatly attached to earthly existence, with sensual pleasure the breath of life to them, had Silenos the Wise answer, when he was asked what was the best thing for mankind: ‘Miserable race that lives for but one day... The very best is utterly beyond your reach—not to be born, not to be, but to be nothing. The second best things for you is—to die soon.’⁹⁶ On the other hand Aesop said that we learn through suffering.⁹⁷ And Job, having much suffering imposed on him, came to the conclusion: ‘Pain purifies, it takes man to a higher level.’ Why do we leave the theatre feeling contented when we have been listening to a tragedy? The hero overcomes his suffering. There is a connection between man ascending higher and the pain that has to be borne. The soul's suffering and pain are apparent in the physiognomy to one who is able to read it. Man must create an organ that will enable him to bear the pain. Just as the eye was created by light and the ear by sound, so do pain and suffering create organs for themselves. Man bears in him the consolation that comes when he recognizes that suffering can be borne. Man enters into higher development through suffering.

Verse 5: ‘Blessed are those of a gentle spirit, for they will have the earth for their own.’ Two powers are active in the world—on the one hand egotism, and on the other love and compassion. If love is to grow, egotism must wane. Sensual love must develop into a higher love that is of the spirit. This is also expressed in the third sentence in Light on the Path: ‘Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound’.⁹⁸ If our approach to everyone else is a loving one, so that the voice no longer wounds, we are gentle in spirit, which is the meaning of the term in the sermon on the mount. Love is the goal and purpose of earth evolution; it will make the earthly realm its own.

Verse 6: ‘Blessed are those who hunger for justice, for they will have their hunger satisfied out of themselves.’ Here the Christ is presenting the whole significance of the deeper, inmost powers of the human soul to the disciples—to give love to others, not seek love; love will become general if everyone does it himself.

Verse 7: ‘Blessed are the compassionate, for they will gain compassion out of themselves.’ We must enter into the feelings of every individual person, then the compassion we have shown in our doing and giving will shine out to us from the others.

Verse 8: ‘Blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they shall find the power in themselves to see God.’ This is an instruction in mysticism. We must cleanse and purify our hearts. The heart is the eye with which to see God. It is the organ of the future, not the brain. It is to God as unclouded eyes are to the light.

Verse 9: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will find the power in themselves to be God's children.’ The soul comes from God, and goes through the human being to God. Souls were peaceable and peace is the way by which we return to the divine spirit.

Verse 10: ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for the realm of heaven is theirs.’ Christ Jesus asks human beings to demand justice of themselves, and justice will quench their thirst. Things demanded on earth and those demanded by heaven are always kept clearly distinct.

Verse 11: ‘Blessed are you if people revile and persecute you for my sake and say evil things about you in a lying way.’ Christianity must not be confused with other religions. In Buddhism it is important to do everything the Buddha taught. It is the same with the teaching Hennes gave in Egypt, Zarathustra in Persia, and so on. The Christ was there in person. The disciples were called on to bear witness—We have heard him speak, have put our fingers in the imprint of the nails. John the evangelist said most about Christ Jesus in his gospel. Christianity must believe in Christ Jesus himself not only his teaching. The logos came down to human I-beings, the word became flesh in a human being and has truly dwelt among us. All are blessed if they believe in the one and only one in whom the logos itself was embodied. Only one was able to say: ‘Blessed are you if people persecute you for my sake.’

Verse 12: ‘Be of good cheer and wholly comforted; it will bear fruit for you in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets.’ This refers to I-human beings inspired by God.

Verse 13: ‘You are the salt of the earth.’ It is salt which gives the earth wisdom.

Someone might refer to the end of chapter 7, verses 28 and 29: ‘And it came to pass, when Jesus had said these things, that the people were appalled at the things he taught, for he spoke with great power and not like the scripture experts.’ One might think, therefore, that Jesus did speak to the people after all. But these verses do not at all relate to the sermon on the mount, which is actually the opposite of the things which in the meantime had caused uproar among the people. The people were appalled at a talk given by Jesus, but this was a completely different one, not the sermon on the mount, and it had caused tumult and uproar among the people. One has to follow the things that happen in the Bible carefully and know how to read the words correctly. Then new insight is gained for many things which one has so far simply passed over when reading.

Questions and Answers

What can be said about the two evildoers who were crucified with Jesus?

We must above all consider that symbolic interpretation does not mean something did not also happen. Some people want to go by the letter, taking Jesus to have been someone who really lived, and cannot believe that there is also a deeper meaning behind it all. Others, however, want to interpret everything in an occult way and cannot believe in the historical reality. The fact of Christianity can only be grasped if it is taken as something real. The secret of human evolution: the Christ between the two criminals, one who repents and one who remains unrepentant. Again we have the balance between egotism and love. Love is based on blood relationship, and self seeking wants to separate people. The Christ wants to balance this out; that is the meaning of the three crosses on Golgotha. The one is the principle of goodness, the other of evil. ‘Truly I say to you, today you'll be with me in paradise.’⁹⁹ Paradise is a key term, meaning that you'll be with me in a place that lies beyond the ordinary day. Before man fell into sin he was in the keeping of the godhead. How can he regain the right to be God's child again? With peacefulness. How does one move away from it? With selfishness!

Do other nations also have the I-CH initials in their word for ‘I’?

This applies only to the German language. The German ich gives power to the soul. The fact that these letters are the initial of the Christ's name should bring the word alive in us. The Christ is with us all days and alive in all languages. The further east we go the richer the language, the further west, the poorer it is, America is therefore the poorest, its vocabulary being most limited. Prayers in the ancient languages lose their power when they are translated into more modern languages. The Latin words of the Lord's Prayer have much more power in them than our own version. The original language of this prayer was Aramaic. People who said it in Aramaic felt its magic powers. We need to gain the right approach again that will allow the power of words to come alive in language again. The four sentences in Light on the Way do not have the same power in English, for instance, as they do in German. These four sentences sound more beautiful in German than in any other language; the German translation is the most beautiful.

Third question could not be heard.

Those earlier naturalists had a great reverence for the Bible. Pastor X. said that Moses either knew just as much as modern scientists do, or he was inspired. Pastor X altogether has a brilliant, fine way of expounding the Bible. Reverence and respect for the Bible came to be lost when biblical criticism developed. But nothing will ever come of biblical criticism. One thing is characteristic of the science of the spirit, and that is its approach to things. And what is this approach? We have our own particular approach to the natural world, but we do not criticize it. With the science of the spirit we seek to understand things in the world of mind and spirit, doing so without bias and with real understanding, and look at everything in life. Understanding is the keynote in the science of the spirit. If one seeks to use the methods of modern science to study the life of mind and spirit, one learns things.

The Bible should be a book we do not approach in a critical mood. If we read it in the right way and without prejudice, we find that we begin to get a feeling for it that we would not have dreamt of before. We then discover profound wisdom where before we put obstacles in our own way. The science of the spirit must provide the key to reading the Bible in the right way. And we shall find that key. Bible criticism will then give way to deep, profound exposition. Modern science deals only with material phenomena, leaving aside the fact that they have arisen from a spiritual process of evolution. The work that needs to be done in the science of the spirit is to investigate the essential nature of the human being and the evolution of man in the universe. The science of the spirit begins where conventional science stops, for modern scientists see only the outer aspect, they want to study the atoms. But the very things which they cannot explain may be found there. Haeckel's work is the truth for someone working in the science of the spirit in so far as it describes external things. But someone working in the science of the spirit wants to look back to the subtle beginnings, using higher, spiritual eyes, and discover the spiritual realities that go hand in hand with external realities. If you observe with the eyes of the spirit and the ears of the spirit, you perceive the principle of the human being that goes beyond anything perceived with the senses.

What we perceive of the outside world depends on the number of sense organs we have. Someone who objects, saying: ‘Only what I can see with my physical eyes does exist,’ has not yet developed his powers of mind and spirit. Every time we gain a new organ we perceive a new world. Eyes and ears of the spirit can be acquired. Anyone with sufficient energy and patience can become an initiate. Anything an initiate sees with eyes of the spirit has to be expressed in images belonging to the physical world. This is what Goethe, who was an initiate, meant when he said: ‘All things transient are but parables.’¹⁰⁰ To find suitable images for great spiritual truths is a process known as ‘imaginative perception’. The science of the spirit thus does not take us away from the material world. Matter is seen as condensed spirit, which is to matter as ice is to water.

The seven days of creation reflect great spiritual realities. Once you have the key to reading the Bible, you can always take it literally. No other document contains the truths of theosophy more perfectly than the Bible. In the science of the spirit the aim is to explain the Bible and offer a way of understanding it without bias. The division of the story of genesis into two¹⁰¹ can be understood if one learns to distinguish the human being who is sexless—this is the spiritual, astral human being. Then a reversal occurred and the sexless spiritual human being became physical and bisexual. This is why there have to be two stories of creation. You often hear it said that the letter kills but the spirit makes alive, with each person meaning his own spirit. Goethe wrote:

So long as you don't have it, this word: ‘Die and become!’ you're but a miserable guest here on this earth.

This ‘die’ has nothing to do with killing the physical body but with giving birth to a new human being out of yourself who will give you the tool you need for the world of the spirit. It is to be a tool of strength. ‘Die and become’ is something we must also say to the letter. Everything has its value in the science of the spirit, even the smallest thing reflects condensed spirit. Anyone who goes against the Bible does not understand it; he is going against the figment of his own deluded imagination. Many people presume to found a religious confession. It is small and indeed immodest then to stop and say: ‘It's glorious how far we have advanced!’¹⁰² The science of the spirit helps us to go more and more deeply into things, lovingly enter into the letter of the word and open up a path for the soul to the divine world.

• 94. John 11: 1-45.
• 95. John 19:26.
• 96. See Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music). Publications from the literary estate 1869-73, Bd 1, S. 62 f., Leipzig 1924.
• 97. Aesop said: paqhmata maqhmota. Fable no. 232, ‘The dog and the cook.’
• 98. Collins, M. Light on the Path. London: The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd. Rudolf Steiner wrote an exegesis on this book in Steiner R. Guidance in Esoteric Training (in GA 245). Tr. C. Davy, O. Barfield. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• 99. Luke 23: 43.
• 100. Faust 2, 12
• 101. See also Steiner R. Foundations of Esotericism (GA 93A), lecture of 2 Oct. 1905. Tr. V. & J. Compton-Burnett, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1982.
• 102. Goethe, Faust 1, 573.

Today, we want to look at some details of the occult world. Some of what will be said today will build on the observations we made last time. Some of it is meant to broaden your perspective in the direction we headed the last time, allowing us to see more and more how the space around us is alive and spiritualised by supersensible facts and supersensible beings.

Last time,¹ we observed how the different realms of nature that surround us—the mineral, the plant, and the animal kingdom—contain beings who we can call group-Egos. We have explained how underlying the animal world are group-Egos, self-contained individualities, or, one could say, personalities, who can be found on the astral plane and how they, as it were, encircle the Earth.

We have seen how the plant-Egos are located in the centre of the Earth. We did not name a particular location where the group-Egos of the minerals are located, as they reside in the higher regions of Devachan.

From this you will have seen that beings are constantly around us, through which we walk all the time, who penetrate us, and who live in the same space as we do. For example, an animal group-soul that belongs to a whole group of similarly shaped animals is able to pass through us. This is because in the astral the principle of penetration, of permeability, holds sway, in contrast to our physical world where the principle of impermeability prevails.

First, I would like to add a note in order to expand on what was said before. Previously, you have seen that we have to think of a plant’s root as its head stuck in the ground; then the stem grows out of it and develops leaf by leaf, and so on. Depicted schematically, we would have to search for the group-Egos at the centre of the Earth. What we see with our eyes is the plant’s physical body. This is embedded into what we call the etheric body of the plant. What is the characteristic of the plant’s etheric body? Everything we know as the etheric body has, as a characteristic, the property of repetition. Where the etheric body as such is active, the principle of repetition rules. We see how in the plant, growth leaf by leaf is repeated. Why? Because underlying this repetition is the power of the etheric body. In a human being too, this principle of the etheric body holds sway. For example, we find it in the spinal cord, where it attaches itself ring by ring. Indeed, when the clairvoyant observes the plant in its entirety, he sees the etheric body underlying the whole plant, but above it, the plant is enveloped by astral clouds. Thus, we see the physical body of a plant, which consists of roots, leaves, and so on, saturated by the etheric body and surrounded from above by a kind of glow-light, or astral light. And the astral that works on the plant produces its completion in blossom and fruit. If the etheric body only had an effect, then the plant would endlessly unfold leaf by leaf; the astral body brings this to a close. The etheric body will be subdued, so to speak, by the astral. Clairvoyantly, we can see the Ego of the plant as if it were a sheath² that extends to the centre of the Earth.

When you approach the plant from the outside, you will first see only the physical and etheric bodies. The glow surrounding the plant is part of the astral atmosphere of the whole Earth. Thus, you can see how the spiritual, as it were, washes around the globe. The sequence of the spinal marrow vortices, is the effect of the etheric body principle that you have within yourself. This is brought to a close by the strongly intervening astral force which surrounds the spinal cord. As the astral body unfolds, the spinal vortices are closing themselves off as cranial bones. Thus, one could actually track the collaboration of the etheric with the astral everywhere in the world. Underlying this is a mystery, namely the secret that everything alive must be dampened, or, as it were, killed by the astral. The purpose of this killing in the astral is to bring the etheric to a close. If we imagine it as a powerful effect, then it is called Azote.³ Thinking spiritually, Azote means the force in the cosmos that prevents the etheric unfolding with an overabundant power without ever coming to an end. The call to that which is alive to become conscious, is based on the power of Azote, for without the astral there would be no consciousness.

Everything spiritual also has its expression in the physical, just as for a spiritual observer all physical matter is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit. Spiritually speaking, we have now seen the collaboration of the continuously developing etheric, and the astral that holds back the etheric, and contained in the holding back is consciousness.

If you observe the interaction of the two substances contained in our air, oxygen and nitrogen, you will find the physical expression of this as it applies to humans and animals. The oxygen in our air is the embodiment of the etheric, the great life-body of the Earth. You would devour yourself in a vehement life if you breathed only oxygen. You would be old right away after your birth, so to speak. Consciousness as such couldn’t develop in the way it exists for human beings and animals. Therefore, the developing life, the oxygen principle, must be subdued. It is being subdued by the admixture of nitrogen. This regulates and limits the effect of oxygen. If you only breathed nitrogen, you would die instantly. The interaction of both creates the balance that moderates life so that it can become conscious. The physical embodiment of Azote is the power that finds its expression in nitrogen. Thus, you are learning the spiritual background of what you continuously take in and what you give out.

You now have an example of how all life comes into being through the establishment of a balance between opposing powers. This equilibrium between two powers can also be seen in the larger cosmos, for example in our solar system. Thus, we arrive at a chapter where we can point out that our solar system does not only represent a range of bodies of physical substance, but that all those bodies that belong to our system, are in the physical world solely as an expression of something spiritual. Just as you have a physical body that belongs to a soul, likewise, every planetary body belongs to something of “soul” and of “spirit”; and the spiritual sheaths of the individual world bodies are very varied.

If one could look at our Earth clairvoyantly from the outside, one would see not only rocks, and so on, of material substance, as well as animal and human shapes walking around in between, but above all, the group-souls of plants, animals, and so on. This is already a spiritual population on our Earth. Furthermore, the clairvoyant would see the individual human souls, the folk-soul, and so on. In any case, one must not imagine the spirit of a celestial body simply as a sphere in space with a spirit and a soul, but rather as a complete spiritual population that forms an entity and resides on this celestial body. And all these individual spirits, group-souls and so on are, in a sense, subordinate to one we can call a leader. And all of this together corresponds to the total spirit of our Earth, to the one we call the Earth-spirit.

Even from these hints, you can see that the spiritual life of a planet is complicated. We now endeavour to delve deeper and deeper into the details of the spiritual life of a planet. You must be patient; we will always progress a bit further.

Today, we can follow our planetary system a bit further, remembering that our Earth was not always like it is now and that it only became so through slow evolution. As you are aware, Earth was a different planet prior to becoming Earth. We call the earlier embodiment of our Earth the “old Moon.” This is not our current Moon, which is only a fragment of it. Even earlier, the Earth was what we call the Sun-planet. This does not, once again, refer to the current Sun. Even earlier, our Earth was Saturn. What is the relationship of our current Sun to the old Sun, when our Earth was still the Sun?

The position of the Sun in the cosmos was not like it is nowadays, because then a sun, separate from the Earth, did not exist. That which you all were at that time was the preparation for the current physical, etheric, and astral body that lived within the old Sun itself. The first rudiments of the physical body had been given on Saturn, the rudiments of the etheric body on the Sun, the rudiments of the astral body on the Moon, and then it is on the Earth that the Ego is added. If you put this together with the current state, then you will understand how you have lived on the old Sun. Your life consisted only of a physical and an etheric body. Your Ego was not yet in the body and neither was your astral body. If you wish to imagine the old Sun-life, you will gain an idea of this if you imagine that all of you here have suddenly fallen asleep. The physical and the etheric bodies will remain seated on the chairs, while the astral body and your Ego floats in the air above you. The conditions on the Sun were permanently like this—that’s how it used to be on the old Sun. You floated around the Sun, following behind your Ego and your astral body, governing and leading from above what was below. Your physical body, of course, was not like it is today. If you imagine it like today’s plants, you will gain an idea of what the physical body was like. Flesh, in the present sense, didn’t yet exist. What you had was a kind of plant life. But it was impossible for the Sun to hold onto such a shape because then an Earth with such human beings as you are today could never have emerged.

During the transition to the Moon, those beings capable of bearing the solar existence needed to split off from the Earth, because the solar existence was swift and fast-paced. As a result, the Sun, with all of those substances that necessitated a fast-paced, rushing life, split itself off from the Earth. Hence, the Sun took along with it all those substances and beings that developed swiftly, and Earth was left behind with all those beings that were not able to cope with the rapid pace. The human being was one of those beings. The best of all beings and substances on the old Sun separated and took on a life of their own. We see, in the fiery, gaseous masses of the current Sun, the bodies of highly exalted beings, who have developed far beyond human beings. They are able to endure today’s Sun-existence because they are already so far advanced that they no longer need to live within a body. The Sun is an existence that developed out of a planetary existence—it is a fixed star, as it is called in occultism.

A fixed star is an advanced planet that has ejected anything that couldn’t keep up. The higher entities have founded an existence for themselves on the fixed star. Each fixed star has arisen from a planet. Advancement, or upward movement, is also taking place in the cosmos. Our Earth, too, will go through the following embodiments: it will become Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. On Venus, Earth will have already reached a kind of fixed star existence. We will transform ourselves, together with the Earth, into beings of a higher kind, who will be able to endure the fixed star existence.

As we have seen, a fixed star comes into being by a planet expelling its bad materials and beings and retaining the better substances and beings to lead them upwards to a more exalted existence. You might ask: if such a fixed star continues to advance upwards, what will become of it then? What will become of the Sun with all the sublime beings?—First of all, there is still a while to go, because what happens next will be that our Earth will once again unite with this Sun. But then there will be a further separation because our Earth will gradually become a fixed star. Once our Earth has reached its Venus or Vulcan-existence, then, what the Sun is today will also slowly have become something different. What will become of a Sun?—A sun becomes what we see today glittering down from the sky as the Zodiac. The higher stage of development of a Sun is that it unfolds into a Zodiac. A Zodiac consists of twelve constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. For the materialistic astronomer, these are simply group pictures. Though the clairvoyant knows, that they have not simply been placed into space, but that their constellations correspond to spiritual beings who are grouped around in this belt in the sky. Once beings have completed their sun-existence, they will become such a Zodiac. This too goes through a kind of evolution.

The Zodiac is known today as a particular spatial order of certain stars, which is related in a certain way to our life and existence—but it was not always this way. It has developed out of a type of nebulous substance. Imagine the old Saturn that once represented the Earth, then evolved into the Sun, the Moon, and finally became today’s Earth. Saturn was already surrounded by our Zodiac, but the stars in our Zodiac were not distinct then, and the matter was like foggy rain. With the advancement of Saturn to the Sun and to the Moon, the matter grouped itself together and the constellations lit up.

Where did this Zodiac, that surrounded Saturn at that time come from, and which will vanish because it will have served its purpose as soon as our Sun becomes a Zodiac? Now, you can imagine that Saturn was preceded by other evolutionary stages. An earlier Sun, that shone above the earlier embodiments of our Earth when it was Saturn, had sacrificed itself and had become this Zodiac. When we look from an occult perspective at this Zodiac, we can see that it has only come about through a great sacrifice. Substances and beings that preceded our existence have sacrificed themselves and formed this Zodiac, initially as a nebulous formation of matter and then as a grouping of stars. That which was described to you as the creative entities of our beings, all of that was united with the old Zodiac when Earth was still Saturn. All those sublime beings, who had already passed through a higher stage before, had to work downwards; they streamed out the rudiments of the physical body. This is what exists as the secret of the genesis of the world: that all beings will ascend from beings that receive, to become beings that produce and create. It is the aim of beings to become creators.

Once they have ascended from “receiving” to “giving”, the beings gather together in a Zodiac. The matter for the first rudiments of a human being’s physical body flowed from the Zodiac. Thus, we learn to look more and more into the cosmos and at what floats through it. And the physical bodies appear to us to be only the physical expression of higher spiritual beings. Those higher spiritual beings have exuded matter through their will. This is the powerful, magical work where the will becomes so strong that it can pour out substance. The substance that rained down out of these beings, who were called upon to create this matter on the old Saturn, has transformed itself over time into our present physical body. We call those exalted beings the Thrones or the Spirits of Will, who have developed to such a height that they were able to trickle down the cosmic rain that was the first rudiment of the physical human body.

This is another new point we would like to capture, there will come a time when a confluence of all these viewpoints comes about. But one must have patience to discover all the details, so that by and by a more complete picture of the greatness of the cosmos emerges.

We now move on from these global spaces to another chapter. We will return to that point in our Earth’s evolution where the Sun has separated itself off from our Earth—to where once, in the pre-historic past, the Sun and Earth were still forming one body. The Sun, together with the higher developed beings, left our Earth behind as a setting suitable for us slower-developing beings. The Sun then shone on the Earth from the outside. The Sun beings are sublime and powerful beings, but they are creative in a different way than the Thrones, the spirits of the Zodiac. What streams from the Sun to the Earth is light. This is also an enormous deed, but it is cosmically less than the trickling down of matter itself.

What we call the Moon today was originally still united with the Earth. Our Moon was created by the shedding of less developed substances and beings that were still connected with the Earth. If Earth had kept the Moon in itself, then our development would also not have proceeded correctly. The development would have become too slow. Earth would have become, so to speak, mummified like a statue. Life would have perished. Too much would have been killed off, and eventually, the Earth would have become a field of the dead. That is why the Moon had to depart, and the Earth, which remained, was able to maintain balance. As a result, the Sun and Moon are now affecting the Earth from the outside; they maintain the Earth’s equilibrium so that human evolution can take place. Everything is kept in balance through opposing forces. Only by both opposing forces, those of the Sun and of the Moon influencing Earth, was the human Ego able to gain a foothold in mankind. And now recall our first elementary description of the human being. A human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an Ego. The Ego works on the astral body and transforms it into Manas, the etheric body into Buddhi, and the physical body into Atma or Spirit-Man. But it would have been impossible for this development to happen right from the start. Here, the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul had to insert themselves. These sheaths that lie between the human body—the physical, the etheric, and the astral body—and the spirit—Manas, Buddhi, and Atma, were temporary transformations. Now the Ego, at its level of spiritual development, integrates the Spirit-Self, Manas, into the astral body. Everything that happens now is purely the work of Manas or the Spirit-Self. But that was not long ago—we did not start doing this until the Atlantean era. However, it had been prepared earlier, albeit unconsciously, through the three middle sheaths: the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul.

When the human being came over from the Moon to the Earth, he consisted of only three bodies: the physical, the etheric, and the astral body, and a bridge had to be built. The human being was not able to build such a bridge by himself; he needed help. In Lemurian and Atlantean times, work on it had already been done unconsciously, as you are now working consciously on this. First work was undertaken on the astral body, and the Sentient Soul emerged. Then work was done on the etheric body and the Rational Soul emerged. Finally, work was even done on the physical body out of which the Consciousness-Soul unfolded, which came about by enabling the physical body to drive its physical organs outwards. With this development, the clairvoyant stage of Atlantean consciousness transitioned into today’s consciousness. Thus, as a manifestation the Consciousness-Soul will be lit up last.

Only in the old Atlantean times did man gain the maturity to work on himself. Who helped him during that time when the human being wanted to evolve out of a being that had a physical, etheric, and astral body into someone who possessed a Sentient-Soul, a Rational-Soul, and Consciousness-Soul? We will understand who helped when we look at our Earth-development, how it happened through the Sun, Moon, and so on. As you know, Earth has separated itself from the Sun and has sent out the Moon. The Sun had highly exalted beings who were so advanced creatively that they were able to send light into the cosmos. I have often mentioned that not only may one have to repeat a grade in school, but also in cosmic development. The human being had come so far as to be able to endure on Earth, and the higher beings had come so far that they could endure life on the Sun. The beings who live on the Sun today had a human existence previously. But during this initial development, some beings had fallen behind, for whom it was impossible to complete their set tasks. They could not yet readily live on the Sun. If they had gone there, they would have fared badly—the human being also would not have been able to endure it. However, these beings stood between the Sun-gods and human beings. For this reason, they had to obtain a different world body where the conditions were suitable for their existence. In fact, these beings were also taken care of during cosmic development. Even before our Sun separated Earth from itself, our Jupiter separated himself from the Sun at about the same time. Later, after the Sun had already released the Earth, our current Venus separated itself from the Sun, and even later, our current Mercury separated from the Sun.

Thus, for those beings who had not kept up, planetary existence stages were created, and they now inhabit those planets. At the time when the Moon also separated from Earth, a very occult process took place in our karmic development, called the Passage of Mars through our Earth, which is very difficult to explain. Indeed this process is extremely difficult to explain because when the Earth was still connected with the Sun, the Mars substance was within the Earth. The Sun then separated itself from the Earth, and Mars stepped out, leaving behind the substance known as iron on Earth. Mars, too, became a location for those beings who had fallen behind. These Mars beings are the initiators of the development of the Sentient Soul. If they had not exerted their influence on our planet, then the Sentient Soul would not have been able to form itself. This illustrates to you the importance of those beings who we pointed out at the beginning of this lecture, and who spiritually belong to the physical substances of the solar system and stand in an interrelationship with what we have within ourselves.

Just as the Sentient Soul has been stimulated by the Mars beings, so has the Rational Soul been stimulated by the Mercury beings, and the Consciousness Soul by the Jupiter beings. Already at the time when the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul were stimulated, the impulse was given to set Manas into motion. Because this too still needed an initial impulse. Once it was in flow, the human being could, so to speak, take his development into his own hands.

This happened in the last third of Atlantean time. The initiators were those beings who resided on Venus. Thus, you will be able to gain an idea of the interactions between the various parts of our planetary system. We must remember that the human being has brought along his physical body, his etheric body, and his astral body. Then three more sheaths develop: the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul, and eventually Manas. The Consciousness Soul has its strength from Jupiter, the Rational Soul has its from Mercury, the Sentient Soul has its from Mars, and the Spirit-Self has received its impulse from Venus. Thus, you must look up at the relevant stars if you want to track down the forces within yourself. Man is a complicated being; he has come into being because the powers of the cosmos have converged within him. Finally, all of this shall be presented in a picture. Imagine, someone would see here on the wall a small Sun spectrum, a rainbow, i.e. the colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Imagine that this is not projected onto the wall but only visible in the sun-dust. This is what you would look at first. Then, when you investigate how this comes about, you would see how the sunlight enters the room through a crack and that through different contraptions, through a prism, or through another type of light-breaking substance, this spectrum, this “spectre” comes about. You cannot remove it, but if you take away the separate parts of it that are outside the spectrum, then the spectre disappears. Take the outer light away—gone is the ghost—take away the prism, the wall with the light—and the ghost disappears. It had formed itself purely as a result of outside influences.

When a clairvoyant looks at a human being, it is the same with him as it is here with the spectrum. Man is actually nothing in and of himself, for what the clairvoyant sees, where the human being stands, are forces from Venus, from Mercury, and from Mars. Take away the Venus forces—and the human being vanishes. Take away the influences of Mercury and Mars—and the human being vanishes. The clairvoyant sees the human being as a convergence of cosmic forces. For the clairvoyant, the only thing that solely remains real in this spectre is the “Ego”. This working “Ego” is the true reality; it is the reason for everything flowing together; it works on the absorption of all such influences. Under the gaze of the clairvoyant, all converging streams disappear, leaving solely the “Ego” behind as the only truth. This Ego, that so few people nowadays recognise as reality, is the only thing that remains. What the physical perception considers to be a human being, is in reality only a ghost whose individual parts are held together by the almost magnetic force of the Ego. Everything about the human being, apart from the working Ego, is an optical illusion.

Now we have gone through a thought process together. Please, now transform this into a feeling, because only then will this become truly valuable. Go through the world with this feeling. Imagine our earthly beings dissolved into ghosts, apart from the Egos working within. When you feel this, you feel what the materialistic mind calls existence, reality, dissolve like a mist, and you will see the true reality in the spiritual Ego. Only then will you feel something of what, in the Oriental world-view, is meant by the expression “Reality is Maya.” All other talk is just phrases. If one starts right away with the phrase, “The world is Maya”, then this is an absurdity. We do not even want to say the word Maya without first having gained this kind of sentiment through such an observation.

You will now have gained a certain idea about what true occult training with its long preparation aims for. You see, it is actually quite a blatant phrase to tell people that existence is only an illusion. First, such contemplations need to proceed patiently and calmly so that the spiritual sensations become ignited. First, we all want to learn to pronounce the words we need in the proper way. To a large extent, our words are spoken only like empty sounds by people, whilst these words indeed, when they were spoken in those cultures where they originated from, were connected with deeply meaningful feelings.

Such an observation that shows us what Maya is, and that shows us the true reality inside the illusion, first pours into our soul what we must extract as a feeling from Theosophy. Therefore, it is necessary that you not only leave with knowledge but also with an emotional tone, with this emotional colour that falls on such a word. In this way, the imaginative observation joins with what we take along into life, what lives within our soul as an emotion, as a feeling.

• 1. In the lecture dated 7 December 1907, GA98-02-03—The relation of the Human Being to Nature.
• 2. Re: “like a sheath” refer to the drawing: “Astral substance above the plant” in a previous lecture, dated 6 December, evening, GA98-02-06.
• 3. Azote: Expression for nitrogen (N), ‘Azote” French for Nitrogen, from the Greek “A” = not and “zoe” = life.

Last Saturday, we’ve looked into remote worlds. Today, we would also like to immerse ourselves a little into spiritual worlds, yet in a slightly different way. When I call lectures, like the ones I am giving today and gave last week, suitable for those who have progressed, what I mean is not so much progress in intellectual comprehension. I refer to a different kind of understanding that we gain by immersing ourselves more and more into the spiritual worlds, and developing habitual feelings and emotions that will enable us to believe that things, like those we shall talk about today, exist in the world around us.

The occupation with Theosophy brings the human being to a point where he will gain a feeling for the spiritual world. Spiritual worlds and spiritual facts are around us, as was often emphasized. By following our path through the world, we are not only walking through physical air, but we are constantly also walking through spiritual beings and facts. The first things that someone ascends to in whom the gift of clairvoyance slowly dawns, are those spiritual worlds that are somehow connected to tangible things—to what a human being is able to perceive with his ordinary senses. Everything that the senses perceive is related to the spiritual worlds. We know that underlying our whole animal world, as it physically exists, is an array of animal group-souls. These live on the astral plane, and one who obtains clairvoyance on the astral plane, will meet these group-souls there as self-contained personalities, just like the human being here on the physical plane meets physical personalities. They really are distinct personalities. Simply said, one can meet group-souls on the astral plane, just like people here. However, in some ways, those group-souls are different from human beings. As strange as it may sound, they are wiser than human beings; their deeds are the wise arrangements of animal burrows and also include everything related to the necessities of animal life.

A further type of being the clairvoyant meets on the Devachan plane is connected to plants. The plant-Egos are on the Devachan plane. And in the higher areas of Devachan, that we call Arupa,¹ are the group-Egos of the minerals. For all these entities there are connections, as it were, on the physical plane. The astral and Devachan plane are all around us, as are all the group-Egos, who have tangible revelations and manifestations in the physical world also.

Someone who, as a seer, gets to know these worlds—the Devachan and the Arupa—also gets to know other quite different entities whose physicality is not so openly expressed in the physical world, but they also intervene in fate in a certain way, even if not as tangibly as the others. On the astral plane we find very strange-seeming beings. They reveal themselves initially only through their influences—we only perceive their effects. Many such beings are teeming around where, for example, somnambulism occurs in mediumistic personalities, in all states of diminished consciousness, and especially during quite ordinary full-moon nights. But we only perceive their effects. It is a strange feeling to observe such beings clairvoyantly. To use a rough comparison, it seems as if they would stretch out their hands from far away to here, as if you were in Cannstatt² and had such long hands that you could work with them in Stuttgart. Then you would see those hands here in Stuttgart. You would see the effect of their work, but if you wanted to see the people themselves, you would have to go to Cannstatt.

Of course, no such physical beings exist, but there are astral beings like that. We discover their effects here on Earth. But if we wish to get to know them as self-contained personalities, then we have to visit them in their proper home which is the Moon. There on the Moon, these beings even possess a corporeality, albeit such a very fine one that would not be visible even under a microscope. They do not become very tall, but they are well known to the clairvoyant. They will not get taller than, say, a 7-year-old child. A peculiarity of them is that they possess a terribly roaring voice. Their roars are not individual ones, but an expression of the climatic conditions on the Moon. Depending on whether it is a full Moon or a new Moon, the Moon-beings either roar or keep silent as they extend their activities into the Earth. As said, it is precisely the human being who is dependent on these beings. Especially for human life, these beings are of great importance. One learns to know their effects by practising a little of what is called occult anatomy.³ We have often looked at the human being—today we want to examine him by probing into his juices.

There are three juices that we wish to focus on today. The first one is the chyle, or nutritive juice. Food gets from the stomach into the digestive tract and then is absorbed through the intestinal walls by the human organism.

A second juice flows through the lymphatic vessels, that criss-cross the whole body. This juice has a similarity to the white blood corpuscles in the blood. In a way, the lymphatic vessels accompany the blood vessels; they are partly destined to pick up the chyme and lead it to where it can enter into the blood. The protein substances and fats are prepared in the lymph vessels for passing into the blood. Substances that are being absorbed directly by the blood do not pass through the lymph vessels first. Therefore we have a transitional juice, in between the chyle and the blood, flowing through our body.

The third juice is the blood itself, which streams through the blood vessels and is consistently renewed by the breathing process, by provision of oxygen, and so on. These juices represent three states of liquids that a human being contains. Chyle is sort of the rawest liquid, the lymph is finer, and the blood is the most refined human liquid.

Now you are aware that the blood is the outer material expression of the Ego, that the Ego, so to speak, lives and pulsates in the blood. When the blood runs through the body, it is not only the material matter, but also the Ego that runs through all parts of the body. Of the three juices, the blood is the only one that is so intimately connected with one’s own spiritual nature. Man is most likely to become master of his blood. Today, only very few are so far advanced that their Ego has become master of their blood, but man will gain more and more influence over it.

The Ego has less influence over the lymph. Spirit also pulsates through the lymph. Precisely with the lymph, you have a juice in which the beings, described earlier as Moon-beings, exert their influences. The lymph is pulsating up and down within you, and within it the effect of the Moon-beings is pulsating within your body. There you can see what you have locked in your body.

Another type of being, that also exerts an influence on the lymph, has its home on Mars. The Mars beings, as they can be perceived by clairvoyance, are very peculiar beings as well. They have a certain type of speech, very soft speech, that easily and supplely expresses what these beings wish to express. When you come across such Martian beings, they appear to have an expression of their inner being, of their soul, on their face. A malicious Mars being will have a mean facial expression. But when the Mars being is a good one, it will carry the expression of that goodness as beauty on its face. Their soul being is visible at the surface of their corporeality.

These are beings a clairvoyant meets when advancing to Moon and Mars. He will learn to know their deeds by way of assessing the composition of the lymph and by gauging whether the speed of its flow is faster or slower. This is because underneath each soul experience, the lymph has a different kind of its own nature. This temperament, or character, is associated with the composition of the lymph. Only someone who gets acquainted with these Mars- and Moon-beings will be able to realise, through the spiritual foundation of the lymph, what really is happening within a human being.

In the same region where the group-souls of plants reside, in Devachan, other beings are found by the clairvoyant, beings that also exert influence on the Earth and on whom the fate of mankind depends. Their real home is on Venus, where they can be found in the Devachan area. Their effects and deeds are expressed by deeply affecting the chyle. Whether you eat one thing or another determines whether good or bad entities from Venus will gain influence on you. There are beings that are good, gentle and mild who have developed to a high degree a religiousness like that which appears in Christianity here on Earth. But there are also beings of bad character, predatory beings who destroy everything. Between those two radical extremes, beings at all possible stages are present on Venus, expressing their activities in the human digestive juice.

Now you can imagine how another heavenly body and its beings play into the human body and into the whole human existence. Remember how humanity is distributed all over the Earth. People live in a region where certain foods are grown, elsewhere completely different foods are grown. Depending on what food a person consumes, certain beings will assert themselves in that person. This is the reason for the diversity of human character. A clairvoyant sees quite different influences from these beings in people who eat different things than others do. Now you can comprehend why, from a spiritual viewpoint that pays attention to human nature, value is placed on eating certain foods. Any recommendation made by occultists, in regard to food products, has been researched in relation to those beings. That which occultism is able to offer in regard to practical life depends upon such complicated issues.

There are further beings that also exert their strange effects on our Earth, however, they are not as hands-on as the group-souls. These are entities that the clairvoyant sees when ascending to the Saturn existence. Their workings can be found in the higher Devachan and have a deeply intervening influence on human beings. With this we enter a chapter where we are no longer concerned with the juices, but with much more subtle things. To a clairvoyant investigating them, those beings will appear to be very strange in themselves, because they are endowed with a magnificent power of invention. They really are in every moment of their lives, inventors. However, they do not need to think about their inventions. They look, and by looking at things the thoughts appear to them that things should be different, and they immediately remodel them. Thus, they are beings that are engaged in continuous revolutionary activity. Everything they see will be changed by them at once in the most inspired way. Their sensory perception and spiritual invention are instantaneous. They do not want to have anything to do with thinking, logic, and such things. They are reformers and revolutionaries as far as the sense-impression is concerned, where they change everything immediately.

These beings also exert their influence on our Earth. They creep into our inner being through our sensory perceptions. The spiritual effects of those Saturn entities creep into a human being with everything he perceives through his senses—with colour, sound, smell, taste, and feelings of warmth. They walk through the world and exert their influence in abundance on whatever you perceive with your senses. How dry and sober, indeed, how ridiculous seems what an ordinary anatomist examines materialistically! Because with a flash of lightning, the effects of those beings are penetrating the eye. It is not unimportant to know such things for practical life. Actually, a person who doesn’t know this, doesn’t know the most important thing about life. The worst—and under certain circumstances also the best because they are the strongest—are the influences of the Saturn beings in so far as they make themselves known through the sense of smell.

Through the smells, their influences are continuously penetrating us. There are smells through which downright infernal effects of these beings penetrate into us. If a human being knows such things, he gains an understanding of what he is doing to his fellow human beings when he forces them to breathe in all sorts of horrible perfumes. For example, through Patchouli, he gives the saturnalian spirits of the worst kind access to humans. Influencing his fellow beings through smells belongs to the worst kinds of black magic.

I could tell you about long periods of history where intrigues were played at certain Courts by people, knowledgeable about the effects, who used scents for the purposes of gaining influence and power. For long periods of time, intriguers existed who more or less consciously ruled in this way. Such magic tools have often played an important role in history. An example from more recent history might be of interest: A Minister at a small European Court wrote his memoirs about his time there.⁴ He did not know anything about all these things, but in his naive way, he tells very nicely how such things played out at a certain small Court, at which at the time a sensational catastrophe had happened. There was a female personality, who understood all the arts of influencing people through scents. When the minister appeared before the Queen⁵ in question, all sorts of perfumes would waft towards him, and so he knew he had to leave because she understood something about the use of scents. Through this experience, he realised that a game was being played. He didn’t know about occultism. Whoever reads such chapters as an occultist looks deeply into this and sees how human beings are influenced.

You may now want to think a bit about how occultism is related to true knowledge of reality. People will have to shine a light more and more often from an occult perspective onto the immediate human life. It would be bad for humanity if such a pseudoscience continued to be practised, which attempts to find the truth by way of cutting and slicing. Only the most distorted truth can be found through anatomy. Precisely such knowledge will never be of practical value and, unless it is arrested by spiritual insights, will bring disaster to mankind. Currently, we are standing in a high tide of materialism. In legislation, it sneaks in everywhere and has enormous effects. Church and religion are intolerant like never before. How intolerant is the materialistic medicine today! They are not going to burn their opponents, but they will do something different. They want to save themselves from the bad reputation that burning would bring. Therefore, they make sure that people are unable to do things for which they would have been burned in the past. Today, the adversaries are not even able to sin. Burning was certainly something terrible, but before that at least people were able to do what they were burned for!

People don’t understand this because they do not have the attention span to follow one train of thought to the next. It is important for people to once again obtain healthy thinking through spiritual knowledge. Here is another example: I told you that fat and proteins go through the lymph vessels and that sugar goes directly into the blood. The ego, as it lives in our time, is the carrier of the pure power of deduction, of egoism, because in our European culture it focuses primarily solely on utility. Whoever can observe life will be able to derive from this the large role that sugar plays in the life of a human being. Precisely where egoism is most active, namely in its sophisticated forms—where it appears as scientific criticism that occurs purely rationally—you will also see, everywhere, in a mysterious relationship, diabetes! But you should not think that the individual who gets diabetes should be looked at from this perspective. The individual doesn’t really live as an individual. And you should understand that you cannot simply help an individual. Imagine a person who lives in a marshy area; he can only become healthy once he leaves the marshy area. One must take into account that the human being lives within his environment.

This is why, above all, we must realise that we have to become selfless because Theosophy is there for all humanity. It is very important to understand this thoroughly. Only when more and more people decide to devote their efforts to the whole of humanity, will there be an atmosphere in which the individual will be set free. If an individual innocently becomes diabetic, this is not an instance of the general knowledge that has been correctly presented by Theosophy. Diabetes is connected with the increased prevalence of egoism.

You can cast a probing glance across two different regions of Europe. Look towards Russia and the farmers, where the Ego-feeling exists only in germinal form—and look to England, where a strong Ego-feeling holds sway. This is not meant to be a criticism. It is only meant to establish facts. And now have a look at the sugar consumption; how much more sugar is consumed in England than in Russia. Now, one or another can say, “So, what should we do? Do we have to recommend to someone to eat less sugar, because it is the right thing to do, and so that he becomes selfless?” The truth is not that convenient. Man would like it best to have firm rules for every situation—a kind of fixed marching route. There are people who, due to their psychic and spiritual constitution, tend to lose themselves easily in a pious form of devotion. This is something good. It helps them reach the highest bliss of knowledge. But this must have a counter pole—such people need to eat a lot of sugar. So that they stand firm on Earth, one has to give them lots of sugar. In contrast, there are others who are always out to assert themselves; they are the opposite of a devotional nature. To those, one could recommend to practise asceticism when it comes to sugar consumption. Thus we can see that we have to gain from Theosophy the ability to take all sides into consideration, and not rashly judge something based on an abstraction.

From today’s explanations, once again you have learned about other kinds of beings who are intimately connected with our lives. You may feel a bit timid about all these worlds we have discussed today. Perhaps you think it would be better not to know anything about them. But consider how not knowing would be like the ostrich hiding his head in the sand, because these things exist! And because you will never be able to free yourself by closing your eyes, but only through getting to know things. If you arrange your life in such a way that, starting from the I, you gain more and more control of your bodies, then you will drive all these beings out of your lives. Realisation and truth are the means to becoming free, and it is true, what is stated in a religious scripture: “You will realise the truth⁶ and the truth will set you free.”

• 1. The Arupa mental plane: the upper or higher spiritual world.
• 2. Bad Cannstatt - nowadays a municipal district of Stuttgart.
• 3. Refer to An Occult Physiology, (Prague) 1911, GA 128.
• 4. Presented in more detail in The Influence of Spiritual Beings upon Man, GA 102, Lecture 1.
• 5. Draga Maschin, Queen of Serbia, was killed together with her husband, Alexander I, in 1903.
• 6. The Gospel of John, 8:32.

We have often spoken of the great and far-reaching significance of the Christ Impulse for the evolution of humanity on earth, and we have tried to characterize the whole essence of this Christ Impulse, which we usually summarize in the words “the Mystery of Golgotha,” from the most diverse angles. Recently, it has been my task to research some very specific and concrete aspects of this Mystery of Golgotha and its related matters. These investigations have presented themselves to me in such a way that I feel it is my duty to share the results of these investigations with our circle of friends, especially now, in this time of ours. I have succeeded in extracting some important information from what is called the Akasha Chronicle, and which we have often spoken about, with regard to the life of Christ Jesus.

We have already spoken at length during our last meetings about the radical changes that are taking place in the development of humanity in our time, and it is precisely in connection with these changes that it is necessary to convey to individual human souls, who have come together in the anthroposophical movement as we understand it, new data about the life of Christ Jesus. I only ask you to treat what I have to say in this regard with particular discretion and to keep it within our branches. Because even the little that has had to be published so far about the Christ Jesus life and what was not known from the gospels or tradition has already caused a certain wildness, a wild passion, and I don't even want to talk about the strange critics who are against our current , but even among those who have at least once shown goodwill towards this current, has caused a certain wildness, a wild passion, such as the story of the two Jesus children. Nothing seems so repulsive to our time, so inwardly repulsive, than drawing attention to the real results of spiritual research, to specific individual results of spiritual research. One still accepts it when the spiritual in general is spoken of, even when individual remarkable abstract theories about spiritual life are put forward. But one no longer wants to accept it when details from the spiritual life are presented in the same way as one presents details from the life of the physical plane. Much that must be said in connection with what I have to present will still be said. Now I would like to begin with the narrative itself, starting from a particular point, and I ask you to accept this narrative as a kind of fifth gospel that falls into our time as the four other gospels fell into their time. This is the only introduction that will be given. We will discuss further motivation tomorrow.

I would like to begin with the point in time that is indicated in the Gospel of Luke as the appearance of the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem among the scribes, where he attracts the attention of these scribes with the great, powerful answers he is able to give them. And so, as related in the Gospel of Luke, his relatives, who had lost track of him, find him. We know that this appearance is based on the fact that a great change in the life of Jesus had taken place, which can only be understood with the help of spiritual science. We know — and this may be briefly repeated — that approximately at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children were born, that one of them descended from the so-called Solomonic line of the House of David, and that in this Jesus-child was incarnated the spirit or the I, we may say, of Zarathustra. We know that this Jesus child grew up with a great gift, which must seem understandable when one knows the fact that this Jesus child carried the ego of Zarathustra within him. We know that the other Jesus child was born at about the same time from the Nathanic line of the House of David, and that this child had entered the physical plane with very different character traits than the Jesus child from the Solomonic line. While the boy Jesus of the Solomon line showed a special talent for everything that came from his environment and showed that it originated from human culture, up to the point where human culture had come at that time, the other Jesus boy was actually untalented in relation to everything that humanity had achieved in its development. He could not really relate to what he was supposed to learn about all that people had conquered in the course of historical development. Instead, this boy Jesus showed a wonderful depth and abundance of heart and mind, such a wealth of feeling that he cannot be compared to any other child when looking at the point in our human development where this child can be found and observed in the Akasha Chronicle.

Then the two boys grew up, and at the very moment when they were both about twelve years old, the ego of Zarathustra passed from one Jesus boy to the other, and it was the Jesus boy from the Nathanic line, with the ego of Zarathustra within him, who gave the great, powerful answers before the scribes in Jerusalem. So it was that the peculiar nature — one cannot say it any other way — of the Jesus child of Nathan and the I of Zarathustra had united. We know then — and this has been presented by me on earlier occasions — that the physical mother of the Jesus child of Nathan soon died, as did the father of the other child, and that now from the mother of the other Jesus child — the Solomonian Jesus child also soon wasted away because he was actually without an ego, withered away —, that now from the mother of the Solomonian Jesus child and the father of the Nathanian Jesus child a family became. The step-siblings, who were descended from the mother and father of the Solomonic line, also came over and now lived in Nazareth, and within this family, that is, with his stepmother or foster mother, the Jesus child with the Zarathustra ego now grew up within him, without his knowing, of course, at this age, that he had the ego of Zarathustra within him. He had within him the capacities that the ego of Zarathustra must have; but he did not know how to say: I have the ego of Zarathustra within me.

What now emerged, what had already been announced in the great answers he had given to the scribes, but what emerged more and more, that was - so I have to describe the life of this Jesus boy, the life from about the twelfth to the eighteenth year of life - that something like an inner inspiration asserted itself in his inner being , a direct knowledge that arose in him, a knowledge of a very peculiar kind, a knowledge that was so natural to him that he perceived something in his own soul, as the ancient prophets in the primeval times of Judaism had received their divine-spiritual revelations from divine-spiritual heights, from spiritual worlds. They had been accustomed to describe in their memory the message that once came to the ancient prophets from the spiritual world as the great Bath-Kol, as the voice from the spiritual world, the great Bath-Kol. As if the great Bath-Kol had risen again in him, but now in him alone, it seemed to the twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, eighteen-year-old Jesus, a rare, wonderful maturity of inner inspiration, a revival of those inner experiences that only the ancient prophets had.

What is particularly striking when one focuses on this point in human development in an Akashic chronicling manner is that within the whole family and within the whole environment in Nazareth, this boy was alone and lonely in relative youth with his inner revelation, which went beyond everything that others could know at that time. Even his stepmother or foster mother at the time understood him very poorly, and the others even less so. And it is less important when judging this boy Jesus to form all kinds of theories, but rather to have a sense of what it means to be a mature boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen, to feel something completely alien within oneself feelings of revelation that were impossible for anyone else at the time, and to stand alone with these revelations, unable to speak to anyone, and what was even more, to have to feel that no one would understand if you spoke to them. It is difficult for a man to endure such things; to experience such things between the ages of twelve and eighteen is something monstrous. And to this monstrosity was added another.

He had an open mind, this boy Jesus, for what a person in his time was capable of receiving. Even then, with the eyes of his soul open, he saw what people, by virtue of their nature, were able to absorb and process spiritually and soulfully, and what they had received over the centuries from the ancient prophets revealed to the Jews. Deeply pained, with the most profound sorrow, he felt: Yes, it was so in primeval times, so the great Bath-Kol spoke to the prophets; that was an original teaching, of which scant remnants have remained among the Pharisees and other scribes. If the great Bath Kol were to speak to any human being now, there would be no one to understand the voice from the spiritual world. Humanity has changed from the time of the old prophets. Even if those great, those glorious revelations of primeval times were to resound today, the ears to understand them would be missing. This came to the soul of this Jesus child again and again, and with this suffering he was alone.

It is impossible to convey the depth of feeling that turned to what suffering, so characterized as I have just done, befell this Jesus child. And it may be said without fear of contradiction: No matter how much we may have said in theory about the Mystery of Golgotha, the magnitude of the cosmic or historical aspects is not at all overshadowed when we consider the individual concrete facts more and more as they present themselves in their factuality. For it is only by observing these facts that one can fully appreciate the course of human development, how an ancient wisdom was also present in the Jewish people and how impossible it was to understand this ancient wisdom at the time when it only, one might say, tentatively in a single soul between the ages of twelve and eighteen, but only caused this soul agony because no one could have understood how this Bath-Kol had expressed herself, how this revelation was only there for this soul to suffer endlessly. The boy was completely alone with these experiences, which, so to speak, represented the suffering of the historical development of mankind in such a concentration.

Now something developed in the boy that, I would like to say, can be observed in its rudiments here and there in life, which one must think of only infinitely magnified in relation to the life of Jesus. Pain and suffering experienced from similar sources to those described here are transformed in the soul, so that the person who experiences such pain and suffering within himself naturally transforms into goodwill, into love, but not just into feelings of goodwill and feelings of love, but into the power, into an enormous power of love, into the possibility of living this love spiritually and emotionally. And so, as Jesus grew up, something very peculiar developed in him.

Despite the hostility of his brothers and sisters and his immediate surroundings because they could not understand him and regarded him as someone who was not quite himself, it could not be denied that, as it showed up at the time for the physical eye, it now shows up for the Akashic Records that wherever this young lad went, if he spoke to anyone, even if they could not understand him, they at least responded to what he said, there was something like an actual overflow of a certain something from Jesus' soul into the other soul. It was like the passing over of a fluid of goodwill, of love, that was what radiated. It was the transformed suffering, the transformed pain. It came to those who came into contact with Jesus like a soothing breath of love, so that one felt one had something special in front of one, by being in some way in his presence. It was as if he were a kind of carpenter or joiner, and Jesus worked diligently in the Father's house. But in the hours when he came to himself, what I have just characterized took place. These were the inner experiences of Jesus of Nazareth, let us say between the twelfth and sixteenth or eighteenth years of his life.

Then, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, he began a kind of wandering. He wandered around a lot, working here and there in the trade he practised at home, coming into contact with Jewish and pagan areas. Even then, something very strange was already showing in a peculiar way in his dealings with the people he met, as a result of his experiences in his earlier years. And it is important to bear this in mind, because it is only by taking this into account that we can penetrate more deeply into what actually happened back then in the development of humanity.

He came, I would say, working from place to place and there to the families. After work, as we would say today, he sat with the families, and there one sensed everywhere that train of goodwill, of love, of which I spoke. You felt it everywhere, but you felt it, so to speak, through action; because everywhere he went, in the years when he traveled around between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, you had the feeling: There really is a special being sitting here. They didn't always express it, but they had the feeling: There is a special being among us. And that expressed itself in the fact that when he had moved away from the place, it wasn't just that they talked about what had happened between him and the others for weeks, but often it turned out like this: When the people sat together in the evenings while he was away, they had the feeling that he was entering the room. It was a shared vision. They had the feeling: He is among us again. And that happened in many, many places: that he had gone away and yet was still there, appearing spiritually to people, living spiritually among people, so that they knew: we are sitting with him.

As I said, in terms of the subjective it was a vision; in terms of the objective it was the tremendous effect of the love that he had expressed in the way described, and which expressed itself in such a way that the place of his appearance was in a certain sense no longer bound to the outer physical space, to the outer physical space conditions of the human physical body. It is tremendously helpful for understanding the Jesus figure to see again and again how indelibly he is imprinted in the minds of those to whom he once came, how he, so to speak, remained with them spiritually and returned to them again. Those who once knew him did not lose him from their hearts.

Now, during this wandering, he also came to pagan areas, I said, and in a pagan area he now had a very special experience. This experience makes a particularly deep impression when considering the Akasha Chronicle of this point in human development. He came to a pagan area. At this point, I would like to make it very clear: if you ask me where this was, where he came, I still have to tell you today: I don't know. Perhaps later research will reveal where it was, but I have not yet been able to find the geographical location. But the fact is absolutely clear. There may be reasons why one cannot find the geographical location, but why the fact itself can be absolutely clear. In fact, precisely by telling you these things, I do not want to withhold from you at any moment the admission of what has not yet been investigated in this matter, so that you can see that I am really concerned in this matter with communicating only what I am fully able to vouch for.

So he came to a pagan place. There was a dilapidated place of worship. The priests of this place had long since left the place; but the people all around were in deep misery, afflicted by diseases. Precisely because an evil disease was raging there, the pagan priests had left the place of worship for this and other reasons. The people felt not only sick, miserable, burdened and laden, but also abandoned by the priests who had performed the pagan sacrifices, and suffered terrible torments. Now he came here to this area. It was around the time of his twenty-fourth year. Even then, he was already to a great extent characterized by the fact that he made a very special, a tremendous impression by his mere appearance, even if he did not even speak, but only when he was seen approaching. There is really something very special about this appearance of Jesus for the people of that time among whom he appeared. One felt something quite incredible when he approached. One must bear in mind that one is dealing with people from a completely different age and a different region. When he approached, one could see people feel: There is something very special here, something radiates from this being that does not radiate from any other person. Almost everyone felt this, some sympathetically, others without sympathy. It is not surprising that it became known and spread like wildfire: a special being is coming! And those around the altar believed that another old pagan priest had come or had sent someone to perform the sacrifice again. And the crowd that gathered became more and more numerous; for like wildfire it spread that a very special being had arrived. Jesus, when he saw the crowd, had infinite compassion for them, but he did not have the will, although they stormily demanded it, to perform the sacrifice again, not the will to perform this pagan sacrifice. But when he saw this crowd, his soul was filled with the same pain over the decayed paganism as it had been filled with the pain over the decayed Judaism in the years from the twelfth to the sixteenth, eighteenth year of his life. And when he looked at the crowd, he saw demonic elemental entities everywhere among the crowd, and finally also at the sacrificial altar where he was standing. He fell as if dead; but this falling occurred only because he lapsed into a state of being removed from the world due to the dreadful sight he had witnessed.

While he lay there, as if dead, the crowd was seized with fear. The people began to flee. But he, while lying there in a different state, had a vision of the spiritual world that illustrated to him what ancient paganism was like when the original wisdom of paganism was still present in the sacrificial rites of the pagans in the ancient mysteries in their original sacred form. It revealed to him what paganism was in primeval times, how it had revealed itself to him earlier in a different way, what Judaism was like. But just as this happened in a spiritual-soul, invisible way, just as what arose in inspiration, just as it had come to the old prophets, wanted to speak to him, so he had to experience the greatness of paganism in a different way, had to see what can only be described by saying that he saw, as he lay there, the pagan places of sacrifice, which were so arranged in their cultic furnishings that they were a result of the original mystery revelations, and were actually like the external representation of the mystery ritual. At these sacrificial sites, when the sacrifices were performed, the prayers of the people were accompanied, during the ancient times when this still existed in its original form, by the infusion of the powers of those spiritual entities from the ranks of the higher hierarchies to which the heathens could rise. As if he saw a vision before his mind's eye: Yes, when sacrifices were once made at such an altar, in the times when paganism was in its old glory, then the forces of the good pagan gods flowed into the sacrificial acts. But now - now, not through an inspiration, but through an immediate imagination - he had to experience the decline of paganism in great vividness. He now had to experience this, the decline of paganism too! And instead of the good powers flowing into the sacrificial acts as they had done in the past, demonic elemental entities now came to life, all kinds of elemental emissaries of Lucifer and Ahriman. He saw them now, and that was how the descent of paganism appeared to his mind's eye.

That was the second kind of great pain that he could feel: once the heathens had cultic rites that connected humanity with the good beings of certain hierarchies. This has become so decadent, so corrupt, that there are places like this where all good forces have been transformed into demonic forces, that it has come to such a pass that the people around them have been abandoned by the old pagan gods. So in a different way, the decline of paganism came before his soul than with Judaism, in a more inward, much more vivid way.

Indeed, one must know a little about the difference in feeling and sensing between when this feeling and sensing is the outflow of such direct imaginative experience or of theoretical knowledge. By fixing one's gaze on this point in the Akasha Chronicle, one indeed gets the impression of an infinitely meaningful but infinitely painful experience of the developmental history of humanity, which in turn is compressed into this imaginative moment.

He knew now: Divine spiritual powers once lived among the heathens; but if they lived now, there would be no people and no possibility for people to truly restore that ancient relationship. He now experienced this misery of humanity, concentrated and compressed into a brief experience. And as he rose to perceive what had once been revealed in the good, in the best old days of paganism, he heard words – so one can say – which felt to him like the secret of all human life on earth and its connection with the divine spiritual beings. I could not but express in words of our German language what had been spoken to the soul of the fallen, as if dead, Jesus, who at that very moment began to come to himself again. And for certain reasons I had to communicate these words first to our friends who were gathered at the time, when we laid the foundation stone for our building at Dornach. What was heard at that time, as primeval wisdom, is expressed in German words as follows:

Amen
The evils prevail
Witnesses of dissolving unity
Of selfhood guilt incurred by others
Experienced in daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
Since man has separated himself from your kingdom and forgotten your names, you fathers in the heavens.

You see, my dear friends, it is something similar to an inverted Lord's Prayer, but that is how it should be.

Amen
The evils
Witnesses of selfhood that is released
From the guilt of selfhood owed to others
Experienced in the daily bread
In which the Will of Heaven does not rule
Because man has separated himself from your kingdom
And forgot your names
You fathers in the heavens.

After this had appeared to him as the secret of man's existence on earth and his connection with the divine-spiritual being, he came back to himself and still saw the fleeing demons and the fleeing people. He now had a great moment of life behind him. He now also knew how it stood with the development of mankind in relation to paganism. He could say to himself: Even in the wide fields of paganism there is a descending development. He had not gained this knowledge through external observation, but through observation of the soul, this knowledge which showed him: paganism, like Judaism, needs something quite new, a quite new impulse!

We must firmly grasp that he had these experiences. He had the Zarathustra-ego in him, but he did not know that he had it in him, not even then. So he had experiences as experiences, because there was no teacher who could have explained it to him theoretically; he had these experiences as experiences.

Soon after he had had this experience in relation to paganism, he began his journey home. It was around the age of twenty-four when he came home. It was around the time when his father died, and now he was living with the family and with the stepmother or foster mother in Nazareth again. The strange thing was that everyone around him seemed to understand him less and less. Only his stepmother or foster mother had gradually developed a certain understanding of the tremendous — albeit incomplete — emotional and loving process taking place in this soul. And so it happened that sometimes, even though the mother was still far from understanding him intimately, they would exchange a few words, even if they were still superficial in relation to what Jesus felt, so that the mother grew more and more to what lived in the soul of Jesus.

During this time, however, he had another special experience, which brought him the third great sorrow. Between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, he became more and more involved with a community that had formed some time before, the Essene community. This Essene community consisted of people who recognized that there was a certain crisis in human history, that Judaism and paganism had arrived at a point in their descending development where people had to seek a new way to find union with the divine spiritual world again. And in relation to the old mystery methods, it was basically something new, which lay in the way of life that the Essenes sought in order to come up again to the union with the divine-spiritual world. These Essenes had particularly strict rules of life, in order to seek union with the Divine-Spiritual again, after a life of renunciation and devotion, after a life that went far beyond mere mental and intellectual perfection.

These Essenes were actually quite numerous in those days. They had their headquarters at the Dead Sea. But they had individual settlements in various regions of the Near East, and their numbers increased to such an extent that here and there someone was seized by the Essene idea, by the Essene ideal, through circumstances that always arise in such areas, felt impelled to join the Essenes. Such a person then had to give up everything that was his to the order, and the order had strict rules for its members. A person who was in the order could not keep any individual property. Now one person or another had this or that small property here or there. When he became an Essene, this property, which might be far away, fell to the Essenes, so that the Essenes had such properties everywhere. They usually sent younger brothers there, not the one from whom the property originated. From the common property, everyone could support anyone who was deemed worthy, a measure that best shows that at different times, different things benefit humanity, because such a measure would be extremely harsh in our time. But there was such a thing for the Essenes. This consisted in the fact that everyone was authorized to support from the common fund people whom he considered worthy, but never those who were related to him. That was strictly excluded, not close or distant relatives. There were different degrees in the order itself. The highest degree was a very secret one. It was very difficult to be admitted to it.

It is really the case that at that time, with regard to Jesus' life, Jesus was already so that to an enormous degree what I have described as a fluid emanating from him, which had an effect on people like embodied love itself, one might say. This also had an effect on the Essenes, and so it came about that he, without actually being a formal Essene, was drawn to the Essene community. Between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, he became so familiar with the Essenes that we can say that he had learned many of the things he experienced and discussed with them, which were their deepest secrets.

What once was the glory of Judaism, he learned between the ages of twelve and eighteen; what the secret of the Gentiles was, he learned between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. So now, by dealing directly with the Essenes and letting him partake of their secrets, he came to know the secret of the Essenes as it developed up to a certain union with the divine spiritual world. He could say to himself: Yes, there is something like a path to find the way back to the connection with the divine spiritual. And one really sees, after he had been tormented twice, in relation to Judaism and paganism, how it sometimes dawned on him while he was among the Essenes, something like a cheerful confidence that one could indeed find a way up again. But experience was soon to disabuse him of this cheerful confidence.

Then he learned something that was not learned theoretically, again not learned as a doctrine, but in direct life. Once, after he had just joined the Essenes, he went through the Essenes' gate and had a powerful vision that deeply affected his soul. He saw in the immediate vicinity how two figures fled from the Essenes' gate, and he already knew in some way that they were Lucifer and Ahriman; they fled from the Essenes' gate, as it were. He then had this vision more often when he walked through Essene gates. Essenes were already quite numerous at that time, and one had to take them into consideration. Now the Essenes were not allowed to go through the usual gates that were painted. This was connected with the way they had to shape their soul. The Essenes were not allowed to go through any gate that was painted in the manner of the time. He was only allowed to go through unpainted gates. There was one such gate in Jerusalem, and in other cities as well. The Essene was not allowed to go through a painted gate. This is proof that the Essenes were quite numerous at that time. Jesus came to some of these gates, and very often the same apparition repeated itself to him. “There are no pictures there,” he said to himself; ‘but instead of pictures, I see Lucifer and Ahriman standing at the gate.’ And so it formed in his soul – which one must take only from the point of view of spiritual-soul experience in order to fully appreciate it; by saying it that way, describing it theoretically, it is of course easy to accept, but one must consider how the experience of the soul takes shape when one experiences these things in direct spiritual reality. It was through this experience that he developed, let me repeat the word I have already used: the conviction of experience, which can only be expressed in such a way that he could say to himself: It seems as if the Essene way is the one, as has been shown to me in various ways, by which one can, through the perfection of the individual soul, find the way back into the divine spiritual worlds; but this is achieved at the expense of the Essene setting up their way of life in such a way that they keep away from everything that would in any way allow Lucifer and Ahriman to approach them. They set everything up so that Lucifer and Ahriman could not reach them. So Lucifer and Ahriman had to stand outside the gate. And now he also knew, by following the whole thing spiritually, where Lucifer and Ahriman always went. They went to the other people outside who could not make the Essene way! That struck terribly at his mind, giving a stronger sorrow than the other experiences. It weighed so heavily on him that he had to say to himself: Yes, the Essenes could lead individuals upwards, but only if these individuals devoted themselves to a life that could not be granted to all mankind, that was only possible if individuals separated themselves and fled from Lucifer and Ahriman, who then went to the great multitude.

So it lay on his soul, how a few could experience again what the old prophets had experienced from the great BathKol, what appeared to the heathens at the ancient sacrifice. If what the descendants of the heathens and Jews can no longer experience, if the individual would attain on the Essene way, then the necessary consequence would be that the great remaining mass would be all the more afflicted by Lucifer and Ahriman and their demons. For the Essenes achieve their perfection by sending Lucifer and Ahriman, who flee, to other people. They attain their perfection at the expense of others, for their path is such that only a small group can follow it. This was what Jesus now learned. This was the third great pain, which became even more pronounced for him because, as if emerging from his Essene experiences and entering into the community of the Essenes themselves, he had something like a visionary conversation with the Buddha, whose community, a closer community, much in common with the Essene movement, only centuries older. The Buddha revealed to him from the spiritual world: Such a community can only exist if only a small group of people participate in it, and not all people. It seems almost primitive when one says that the Buddha revealed to Jesus that the Buddha monks could only go around with the offering bowl when there were only a few such monks and the others were, so to speak, paying for it with another life. It sounds primitive when you put it that way. But it is different when the responsible spiritual power, as here the Buddha, reveals this in a situation in which Jesus of Nazareth now finds himself.

And so, in the life between the twelfth and thirtieth year of life, Jesus of Nazareth had experienced the development of humanity in threefold suffering, right down to the last detail. What now lived in his soul, what had been crowded together in this soul, he was able to develop in a conversation with this mother after the age of twenty-nine, after his stepmother or foster mother had gradually come to understand his nature and had become close to him. And important, infinitely important, was a conversation between Jesus of Nazareth and his stepmother or foster mother around the time of his thirtieth year, a conversation that was conducted in which everything that Jesus of Nazareth experienced during those years was truly poured out, as it were, into a few hours, and which became significant because of it. There are few spiritual experiences that are as significant, at least for a certain level of spiritual experience, as the one that one has when one focuses one's gaze on what Jesus of Nazareth had to say to his stepmother or foster mother.

Today we first have to talk about Jesus' conversation with his foster mother, who had gradually come to an understanding with her son. A tremendous change had taken place in her. The spirit of the other Mary, the physical mother of Jesus from the spiritual worlds, had descended upon her. She now carried it within her. The conversation between Jesus and his mother proves to be of great significance for the real understanding of the mystery of Golgotha from the point of view of spiritual scientific research. The mother understood Jesus better and better. It was a kind of intuitive understanding. Now Jesus was able to speak about the threefold pain he had experienced. What he said was like a kind of summary of what had been going on in his soul since the age of twelve. He spoke to his mother about his experiences from the age of twelve to eighteen. He spoke of the great teachings of Bath-Kol. He spoke of how no one had been able to understand him, how he could not speak of what was pushing him to tell someone. He told his mother that even if the old teachings had been there, the people to understand them would have been lacking.

Then he spoke of the second kind of painful experiences. He spoke of those events before the ruined sacrificial altar, he spoke of how he had penetrated into the old mysteries, in which the divine spiritual beings had descended directly, and how a descent had taken place in this respect as well. Instead of the good old pagan gods, demons were present at the sacrificial feasts. He spoke of the great cosmic events, of the Our Father in reverse, as it were. It was an extraordinary conversation he had with his mother. He spoke of how he had had to recognize how Lucifer and Ahriman fled before the gates of the Essenes and came to the other people who could not follow the strict rules of the order. He spoke of all this. It was like a retelling of his life so far. It was a conversation that was shaped by the fact that the words were not just words of the narrative, that the words did not just contain what usually lies in words, but what he said was the innermost experience expressed in words, pain and suffering expressed in words, transformed into infinite love, pain that had been transformed into love and goodwill. These words flowed over to the mother like realities. It seemed like a piece of the soul itself that passed from Jesus to the mother. In just a few hours, everything that was more than a mere experience came together. It was a cosmic experience in the truest sense of the word. Jesus of Nazareth could only speak words, but a part of his soul lay in these words. And much would have to be related if one wanted to characterize what the Akasha Chronicle gives. So it came about in the course of this conversation that it stood clearly before Jesus' soul at which point the development of mankind had arrived. Now it dawned on him with an ever clearer awareness that the Zarathustra soul was in him. Thus he felt how he, as Zarathustra, had gone through the development of humanity at that time. What I am saying to you now were not the words that Jesus spoke to his mother, but he expressed himself in a way that she could understand. What he felt there made the secret of human development clear to him. The impression of how Jesus feels and experiences this inwardly while speaking to his mother is incomparable. He speaks to his mother about how each human age has its own particular powers and that this is of great importance. There was once a human age, the ancient Indian culture, when people were particularly great because their whole lives were glowing with the childlike, sun-like powers of early childhood. Today, we still have some of these powers in us from our first to seventh year.

Then there was a second period, the ancient Persian time, which was inspired by the forces that now work in humans between the ages of seven and fourteen. Then Jesus turned His attention to the third age, the Egyptian time, in which the forces ruled that now work in man from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, when the sentient soul plays a major role in the individual development. In this Egyptian time, the astronomical and mathematical sciences were cultivated.

And now the question arose in Jesus: In what age do we now live, what can a person experience between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight? And he sensed that what dominated the outer life were the forces that had been poured out over Greco-Latin culture, but that these were also the last forces. The meaning of the individual human life stood in its full impact before the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth. From the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year, man then passes the middle of life and begins to live towards his old age. There are no new life forces left; the inherited forces of the gods are exhausted. The ascending forces are there up to this point, they are consumed up to the middle of life. What now? Nowhere was there anything new to be seen from which forces for humanity could arise. Humanity would wither away if nothing new happened. Jesus had to live through this crisis for a certain time, and then the Zarathustra ego, whose possession had only recently flashed before him, dissolved. He had identified himself so completely with the evolution of humanity that the Zarathustra ego left him during his words to his mother. Only the three veils remained, and Jesus became again what he had been at the age of twelve, but with everything that he had been able to absorb through his experiences as Zarathustra. Now it was like an impulse that drew him to the Jordan to John the Baptist. And there descended into Jesus of Nazareth that which had to flow rejuvenatingly into the process of humanity so that humanity would not wither away: the Christ-Being. This Christ impulse moved in at a time when people were least prepared to receive it. With their minds, people could feel drawn to Christ, but there was no longer any of the wisdom and power of the earlier ages. So Christ initially only worked as a power, not as a teacher. But even today, humanity is not particularly far in its understanding of the Christ impulse.

The effectiveness of Christ did not initially depend on the understanding that was shown to him. For three years, the Christ essence descended upon Jesus of Nazareth. That a God entered a human body was not only a matter for human beings, it was also a matter for the higher hierarchies. Until then, no God had experienced being incarnate in a human body. That is the staggering thing: the life of a God in a human body during these three years. But it was necessary for the advancement of humanity to become possible again.

At first the Christ-Essence was only loosely connected with the man Jesus of Nazareth, but more and more densely it united with his body until the crucifixion in a continuous development. Since then, humanity has not increased in understanding of spiritual things. Otherwise, a contemporary event such as Maeterlinck's book “On Death” would be impossible. That is a foolish book. It says: When man is disembodied, then he is indeed a spirit, then he can no longer suffer. — That is just the opposite of the truth. It is always the spirit that must suffer, not the body. As the individuality increases, so do the pains, the feelings. It is therefore impossible for today's man to understand the pain suffered by the embodied God.

One of the women wanted to look for Jesus in the grave. He was a spiritual body. Christ was not to be sought with physical senses. The Crusades in the Middle Ages were a repetition of this search. It was the same vain search. And it was precisely at the time of the Crusades that German mystics arose who sought to reconnect with Christ in the right way. Christ also worked where his teaching was not; he worked as a power in all of humanity. After the baptism in the Jordan, the Christ was still loosely bound to the body of Jesus. The first to meet him was Lucifer. He brought into play all the powers that can be developed in an entity in terms of inciting pride. “If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the kingdoms of the earth.” This attack was quickly repulsed. For the second temptation, Lucifer and Ahriman came together, wanting to evoke fear and anxiety in Christ with the words, “Throw yourself down.”

The third time Ahriman appeared alone with his demand: “Say that these stones become bread.” This question of Ahriman left an unresolved remainder; it was not completely answered. That this could not happen is connected with the innermost forces of the development of the earth, insofar as human beings are part of it.

There is something here like the money question. This is connected with the Ahrimanic question. Ahriman retained some of his power over Christ Jesus. This was shown in Judas Iscariot. This unresolved question is at work in the betrayal of Judas.

It was also mentioned that it was only possible in the darkness for the Christ impulse to communicate itself to Earth at the crucifixion. Whether it was a solar eclipse or whether the darkness came from something else cannot be said with certainty today. Finally, a very urgent request for these revelations to be kept secret.

In the process of human evolution a certain definite connection exists between the past and the future. Study of this connection sheds a great deal of light upon questions such as: What devolves upon us as men belonging to a particular epoch?

When we were together here some little time ago, many things were said about the past evolution of humanity, and to-day I will add something about the connection between the past and the immediate future. At the end of the lecture yesterday attention was called to a significant sign, telling us as it were from the heavens that humanity needs a spiritual impetus, something like a new impulse for the age. [Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon, Stuttgart, 5th March, 1910. See also footnote near end of present lecture, p. 79.] Understanding of how this impulse must work is possible only when we study the last millennia prior to the founding of Christianity in a certain connection with the millennia after it, with the millennia, that is to say, in which we ourselves are living.

There is a law in accordance with which certain happenings are repeated in the process of man's evolution, and we spoke of them in the last lecture-course given here in Stuttgart. [Universe, Earth and Man. Eleven lectures, 4th–16th August, 1908.] Today I want only to emphasise that when reference is made in Spiritual Science to these systematic repetitions in the course of human evolution it must not he imagined that they can be worked up by the intellect; they must be investigated in detail and confirmed by spiritual research. Attempts to construct new repetitions according to the pattern of others can lead one very far astray. There is, however, one repetition which does, in fact, resemble another, the form it takes being that happenings of crucial importance before the founding of Christianity come to pass again afterwards in a certain way.

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age—Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C. With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture. Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised. The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present. In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. It is the last that is of particular interest to us to-day. The earlier ages take us back to old Atlantis. In very ancient times, vestiges of the ancient clairvoyance still survived and prior to the Dark Age man was directly conscious of the presence of a spiritual world because he was able to gaze into it. But this consciousness of the spiritual world withdrew more and more from man's vision and speaking generally we can say that the development then begins of those faculties of soul which on the one hand confine his power of judgment to the sense-perceptible world, while, on the other, they promote his self-consciousness; all these powers begin to operate in Kali Yuga. And whereas during this age man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds, the firm centre we call the knowledge of self-consciousness developed all the more strongly within him. But do not imagine that even now this knowledge of self-consciousness is already highly developed; it has yet to reach many further stages. But it could never have been experienced by man if there had not been this “Dark Age”.

Thus during the three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity man was losing his connection with the spiritual world to an increasing extent and indeed had no direct perception of that connection.

On the occasion of my last visit here we heard how, at the conclusion of the first millennium of Kali Yuga, a kind of substitute was given for vision of the spiritual worlds. This substitute was made possible through the fact that a particular individual—Abraham—was chosen out because the special organisation of his physical brain enabled him to have consciousness of the spiritual world without the old faculties. That is why in Spiritual Science we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human ego-consciousness. In the first millennium of Kali Yuga—which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch—the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.

This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements. And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes—lightning, thunder, and so on—are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego. We must, however, clearly understand in what way this denoted an advance.

Before the Abraham-epoch and before Kali Yuga, we find that through the direct vision of the spiritual worlds made possible by the remains of the old clairvoyance, men beheld the spiritual, as indeed was the case in all these ancient times. We should have to go infinitely far back to find anything else. Men actually beheld the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga, beheld it as a multiplicity of Beings. You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates. But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain—a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham—confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.

A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch. Thus the three millennia before the founding of Christianity can be distinguished by calling the first millennium by the name of the individuality who appears and then works on into the second: the Abraham-epoch. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham men are being prepared to recognise the One God behind the manifestations of Nature. This possibility begins with Abraham. In the Moses-epoch the One God becomes the ruler of the manifestations of Nature and is sought for behind them. All this is then intensified in the Solomon-epoch, and we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.

In contemplating this subject from the spiritual-scientific point of view it must be firmly realised that in this respect the Gospels are right: Christ may not be distinguished from Jahve otherwise than that the light of the sun reflected by the moon is to be distinguished from the direct light of the sun. Where is the light that floods a bright moonlit night? It is actual sunlight, only it is reflected back to us from the moon. So we can have this sunlight directly by day or rayed back by the moon on bright moonlit nights. What manifests thus in space also manifests in the following way: what was finally to appear in Christ as a Spirit-Sun was revealed beforehand in reflection. Jahve is the reflection which precedes Christ in time. Just as the moonlight reflects the sunlight, so was the Christ Being reflected for Abraham, Moses, Solomon. It was always the same Being. Then He Himself appeared as the Christ-Sun at the time of the founding of Christianity. The preparation for this great event was made in the Abraham-epoch, in the Moses-epoch, in the Solomon-epoch.

A repetition of these three pre-Christian ages takes place in the Christian era, but now in reverse order. The essential and fundamental trend of the Solomon-epoch is repeated in the first thousand years after Christ, in that the spirit of Solomon lives and is active as an impulse in the most outstanding minds of the first Christian millennium. And fundamentally speaking it was the wisdom of Solomon through which men endeavoured to grasp the nature and essence of the Christ Event. Then, following the Solomon-epoch, came the era that can be called the revival of the Moses-epoch ... and in the second millennium after Christ the best minds of this era are permeated by the spirit of Moses. The spirit of Moses does indeed come to life again in a new form. In the pre-Christian age the spirit of Moses had been directed towards the outer world of physical Nature in order to find the Divine World-Ego as Jahve, the World-Ego manifesting in lightning and thunder, in the great revelation from the Elements of laws for men. Whereas the World-Ego streams into Moses from outside, is revealed from outside, in the second millennium after Christ the same Divine Being announces Himself within the soul. The experience which came to Moses as an outer happening when he withdrew from his people in order to receive the Decalogue this significant happening is repeated in the second Christian millennium in the form of a mighty revelation from within man.

Repetitions do not take the same form but what comes later manifests as a kind of polarity. It was from the Elements, from outer Nature, that the God revealed Himself to Moses; in the second millennium after Christ He reveals Himself from the deepest foundations of the human soul. And how could this be presented to us more impressively than in the story of a great, supremely gifted man of whose preaching it was said that he proclaimed mighty truths from the very depths of his soul! It can be taken for granted that this man was steeped through and through in what can be called Christian mysticism. Then, to the place where he is preaching comes a seemingly unimportant layman who at first listens to the sermons but then turns out to be one who need not be considered a layman but can become the instructor of the preacher—Tauler—and induces him, despite his renown, to suspend his sermons for a time because he does not feel inwardly imbued with what is living in the layman. And when Tauler, after having received the inspiration, ascends the pulpit again, the overwhelmingly powerful impression made by his sermon is described symbolically by saying that many of his listeners fell down as if dead—meaning that everything of a lower nature in them was killed.

This was a revelation of the World-Ego from within—working from within with a power as great as that of the revelation from the Elements to Moses in the second millennium before Christ. Thus we see a revival of the Moses-epoch inasmuch as the spirit of Moses illumined and imbued with life the whole of Christian mysticism, from Meister Eckhart down to the later Christian mystics. Verily the spirit of Moses was alive in the souls of the Christian mystics! This was in the second millennium after Christ when there was a revival of the whole character of the Moses-epoch. Just as in the first millennium of the Christian era the repetition of the Solomon-epoch was responsible for bringing to expression the inner content of the Christian mysteries—for example, the Christian teaching concerning the Hierarchies, the detailed wisdom concerning the higher worlds—so was the second Moses-epoch particularly responsible for the essential character of German mysticism: a deep, mystical consciousness of the One God who can be awakened and resurrected within the human soul. And the influence of this Moses-epoch has persisted in all the endeavours made since that time to fathom the nature of the World-Ego, the Undivided Godhead.

But the course of the evolution of humanity is such that from our time onwards a renaissance of the Abraham-epoch will take place as we pass slowly into the third millennium. In pre-Christian times the sequence is: Abraham-epoch, Moses-epoch, Solomon-epoch; in the Christian era the order is reversed: Solomon-epoch, Moses-epoch, Abraham-epoch. We are moving towards the Abraham-epoch, and this will inevitably bring momentous consequences in its train.

Let us recall what was of essential significance in the pre-Christian Abraham-epoch. It was the fact that the old clairvoyance had disappeared, that there had been bestowed upon man a consciousness of the Divine closely bound up with human faculties. Everything that humanity could acquire from this brain-bound consciousness of the Divine had by now been gradually exhausted and there is very little left to be gained through these faculties. But on the other hand, in the new Abraham-epoch exactly the opposite path is taken—the path Which leads humanity away from vision confined to the physical and material, away from intellectual inferences based upon material data. We are moving along the path leading into the regions where men once dwelt in times before the Abraham-epoch. It is the path that will make states of natural clairvoyance possible for man, states in which natural clairvoyant forces will be in active operation.

During Kali Yuga itself, Initiation alone could lead into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Initiation does, of course, lead to higher stages that will be accessible to men only in the very far distant future; but the first signs of a natural faculty of clairvoyance will become evident fairly soon, as the renewal of the Abraham-epoch approaches.

Thus, after men have acquired ego-consciousness, after they have come to know the ego as a firm inner centre, they are led out of themselves again in order to be able to look with an even deeper vision into the spiritual worlds. The ending of Kali Yuga has to do with this also. Having lasted for five thousand years, Kali Yuga ended in A.D. 1899. This was a year of crucial importance for the evolution of humanity. Naturally, it is again an approximate date, for things happen gradually. But just as the year 3101 B.C. can be indicated as a point of time when humanity was led down from the stage of the old clairvoyance to physical vision and intellectuality, so the year 1899 is the time when humanity received an impetus towards the first beginnings of a future clairvoyance. And it is the lot of mankind, already in this twentieth century before the next millennium—indeed for a few individuals in the first half of this century—to develop the first rudiments of a new faculty of clairvoyance that quite certainly will appear if men prove capable of understanding it. It must, however, be realised that there are two possibilities. It belongs to the very essence of the human soul that natural faculties of clairvoyance will arise in the future in a few people during the first half of the twentieth century and in more and more human beings during the next two thousand five hundred years, until finally there will be a sufficient number who, if they so desire, will have the new, natural clairvoyance. A distinction must, of course, be made between cultivated and natural clairvoyance.

But there are two possibilities. The one is that although men have indeed the aptitude for this clairvoyance, materialism may triumph in the next decades and humanity sink in its morass. True, even then there will be individuals here and there who assert that they see in the physical man something like a second man; but if materialistic consciousness gets to the point of declaring Spiritual Science to be sheer craziness and stamping out all consciousness of the spiritual world, then these incipient faculties will not be understood. It will depend upon humanity itself whether what will then take place turns out to be for the good or ill, because what ought to come about might pass unnoticed.

Or the other situation is possible, where Spiritual Science is not trampled underfoot. Then men will understand how to cultivate such faculties not only in the secret schools of Initiation but also to foster them when, towards the middle of this century, they appear like delicate buds of the life of soul in individuals here and there. They will say, as if from a power that has awakened within them: I see as a reality something that is described in Anthroposophy as the second man within the physical man. But still other faculties will appear—for example, a faculty that a man will notice in himself. After he has performed some deed, there will appear before his soul a kind of dream-picture which he will know to be connected in some way with what he has done. And from Spiritual Science he will realise: When an after-image of my deed appears in this way, although it is essentially different from the deed itself, it reveals to me what the karmic effect of my deed will be in the future.

This understanding of karma will develop in certain individuals during the middle of our century. The explanation is that Kali Yuga has run its course and that from epoch to epoch new faculties appear in men. But if no understanding is developed, if this particular faculty is stamped out, if those who speak about faculties of this kind are put away as if they were insane, disaster is inevitable and humanity will sink in the morass of materialism. Everything will depend upon whether understanding is awakened for Spiritual Science, or whether Ahriman will succeed in suppressing its intentions. Then, of course, those who are choking in materialism may say scornfully: They were fine prophets who stated that a second man will be seen beside the physical man! Nothing will be apparent if the faculties for seeing it are crushed out. But even if these faculties do not become evident in the middle of the twentieth century, this will be no proof that the rudiments of them are not within man, but only that the seed of the young buds has been crushed. The faculties that have been described to-day exist and can be developed, provided only that mankind is willing.

This stage of evolution therefore lies immediately ahead of us. We are, as it were, retracing the path of development. In Abraham, consciousness of the Divine was brought down into the brain; in passing into a new Abraham-epoch, consciousness of the Divine will in turn be brought out of the brain, and during the next two thousand five hundred years we shall find more and more human beings who possess knowledge of the great spiritual teachings of the cosmic secrets yielded by the mysteries of Initiation. Just as the spirit of Moses prevailed in the epoch that is now over, so in our time the spirit of Abraham begins to prevail, in order that after men have been led to consciousness of the Divine in the material world, they may now be led out of and beyond it. For it is an eternal cosmic law that each individuality has to perform a particular deed more than once, periodically—twice at all events, the one as the antithesis of the other. What Abraham brought down for men into the physical consciousness he will bear upwards again for them into the spiritual world.

Thus it is obvious that we are living at a vitally important time and that to disseminate Spiritual Science to-day is not a matter of preference but something that is demanded by our age. To prepare mankind for great moments in the process of evolution is among the tasks of spiritual investigation. Spiritual Science exists in order that men may know what it is they are seeing. Anyone who is true to his age cannot but be mindful of the fact that spirit-knowledge must be brought into the world to prevent what is coming from passing by humanity unnoticed.

These things are connected with others. In certain other respects everything is renewed in similar repetitions. A time is approaching when more and more of what existed in pre-Christian centuries will be renewed for humanity, but everything will now be steeped in what men have been able to acquire through the mighty Christ Event. We have heard that the great impulse experienced by Moses through the vision of the burning thorn bush and lightning on Sinai was experienced again inwardly, in its Christianised form. For men such as Tauler and Eckhart knew with all certainty that when there dawned within them the power known to Moses as Jahve, that power was the Christ, no longer the reflected Christ but the Christ Himself, arising from the depth of the heart. What had been experienced by Moses was experienced by the Christian mystics in a Christianised form, in a form changed through the Christ Impulse. And what was experienced in the pre-Christian age of Abraham—that, too, will be experienced in a new and different form. And what will this be? All things, all events that come about normally in the evolution of humanity cast their lights in advance (instead of the trivial saying, “cast their shadows”, I prefer to say, “cast their lights”). Thus in certain respects a light indicative of future happenings was cast in advance by the event of Damascus, the conversion of Saul into Paul.

Let us be clear what this signified for Paul. Up to then he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Hebraic secret doctrines. From these teachings he knew that some day an Individuality would descend to the earth, representing to humanity the One who conquers death. He knew: an Individuality will appear in the flesh, showing through his life that the spirit triumphs over death so completely that for this Individuality in his earthly incarnation death has no more significance than any other physical happening. Paul knew this. And he knew something else as well from the ancient Hebraic teachings, namely that when the Christ, the Messiah who was to come, had lived in the flesh, when He had resurrected and had won the victory over death, the spiritual sphere of the earth would be transformed and clairvoyance would undergo a change. Whereas before then a clairvoyant would not have seen the Christ Being in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, but only when he looked upwards to the Sun Spirit, Paul knew that through the Christ Impulse there would take place in earth-existence a change signifying that, having gained the victory over death the Christ would be found by clairvoyant vision in the sphere of the earth. When, therefore, a man was clairvoyant, he would behold the Christ in the earth-sphere as the living spirit of the earth. But that of which Paul, while he was still Saul, could not be convinced was that the One who had lived in Palestine, had died on the Cross and was said by his disciples to have been resurrected, was indeed the One to whom the ancient Hebraic doctrines referred.

The salient point is that Paul had not been convinced by what he had seen physically of the things narrated in the Gospels. Conviction that the Christ was the predicted Messiah first came to him when the light cast in advance revealed itself to him, when as though by Grace from above he became clairvoyant and, finding Christ in the sphere of the earth, was compelled to say to himself: He has been here in very truth and has risen! It was because Paul himself had beheld Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth that he knew: Now He is here! And from that moment he was convinced regarding Christ Jesus.

The essence of what happened at Damascus, therefore, was that Paul had discovered Christ Jesus clairvoyantly in the sphere of the earth. Thus, if he had not, for example, heard tell of the deeds of Christ in Palestine, if he had not himself actually heard the stories told in the Gospels but had lived somewhat later, he might have experienced the Christ Event of Damascus only later: but even so he would have arrived at the same conviction. For this event revealed to him the reality of Christ's presence! He knew: He who is now revealed in the sphere of the earth is the One of whom the ancient Hebraic secret doctrine tells.

The Christ Event is not confined to one point of time only. In the case of Paul it came very early, in order that through him Christianity might pursue its course.

Now, as long as Kali Yuga lasted—this was until the year 1899—the evolution of humanity had not reached the stage at which Paul's experience could be repeated without more ado; human faculties were not mature enough for that. Hence there was one who experienced it through Grace; and others, too, experienced similar events through Grace. But we are living now in the age when there is to be a revolutionary change: the first rudiments of natural clairvoyance are developing. We are passing into the Abraham-epoch and are being led out into the spiritual world. This means that it will be possible for a certain number of human beings, and more and more in the next two thousand five hundred years, to experience a repetition of the event of Damascus. The great and momentous feature of the coming era will be that many human beings will experience this event. The Christ, now to be found in the spiritual sphere of the earth, will be perceptible to those faculties which, as we have said, will make their appearance. When men become able to see the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, as did Paul. This is what is beginning as the characteristic trait of a new age, and between the years 1930-40-45 it will already become evident in the first forerunners of human beings possessed of these faculties. If men are alert they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual vision and therewith clarity and truth concerning the Christ Event. A remarkable parallelism of happenings will come about.

During the next two decades men will be more and more inclined to abandon the texts of the Gospels because they will no longer understand them. Superficial scholars are everywhere at pains to “prove” that the Gospels are not historical records, that there can be no question of any historical Christ. The historical documents will lose their value and the number of people who deny Christ Jesus will steadily increase. Men who may still believe that these events can be substantiated by history are short-sighted. Those who mean well by Christianity will not reject understanding of the spiritual proof of the existence of Christ Jesus, for this spiritual proof will be provided through the cultivation of the faculties which enable men to behold the Christ as a real Presence in His etheric body. Those who place reliance only on documents may call themselves good Christians, but in point of fact they are destroying Christianity; however vociferously they proclaim the knowledge they have gleaned about Christianity from documentary records, they are destroying it because they are rejecting a spiritual teaching through which, in actual vision, the Christ will become a reality for men in our century.

When the Christian era began, men had been descending into the Dark Age for more than three thousand years, had been thrown back upon the faculties of their outer senses. At that time Christ could not have revealed Himself to the faculties necessary for the evolution of humanity in any other way than through physical incarnation. Because man's physical faculties had then reached the peak of their development, Christ was obliged to appear in a physical body. But no progress at all would be possible unless with higher faculties men were able to discover Christ as a reality in the higher worlds. Just as Christ had once to be discovered with purely physical faculties, men will find him with the newly developed faculties in that world where etheric bodies alone are to be seen. There can be no second physical incarnation of Christ. He came once in a physical body of flesh because it was at one period only that human faculties were dependent upon His presence in such a body. But now, with the higher faculties, men will be able to perceive the etheric body of Christ as an even greater reality.

The momentous event in store for us can be called: the Reappearance of Christ Jesus ... a gradual reappearance, to begin with for a few and then for more and more human beings. It is an event that has significance not only for those who will then still be incarnated in bodies of flesh. A number of human beings living to-day will still be in incarnation at the time of the Christ Event ... they will experience it in the way that has been described. Others will have passed through the gate of death. As we once heard in a lecture here, [This reference is to a lecture given 14th November, 1909: The Tasks and Aims of Spiritual Science.] the Event of Golgotha was an event that affected not only the physical world; its influences reached into all the spiritual worlds. Christ's descent into the underworld was an actual fact and the effects of the Christ Event that is to take place in our century will also work—though not in the same form as on earth—into the world in which man lives between death and rebirth.

But there is one essential. The faculties by means of which men will be able, between death and rebirth, to behold the Christ Event, cannot be acquired in that world; they must be acquired on the physical plane and carried from there into the life between death and a new birth. There are faculties which must be acquired on the earth, for we have not been placed on the physical earth for nothing. It is an error to believe that there is no purpose in living on the earth. Faculties have to be acquired there that can be acquired in no other world—they are the faculties for understanding the Christ Event and the events that will follow it. Those human beings who now develop these faculties on the earth through the teachings of Spiritual Science will carry them through the gate of death. It is not through Initiation only, but through a clear-minded acceptance of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that the faculties are acquired which make it possible also to be aware of the Christ Event in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. But those who turn deaf ears to this knowledge must wait until a later incarnation to acquire the faculties that must be acquired here on earth in order that the Christ Event may be experienced in yonder world. Therefore let nobody imagine that the announcement of the Christ Event—an event which the teachings of Spiritual Science alone can make intelligible—will bear no fruit for him if he has already passed through the gate of death. It will indeed bear fruit.

Obviously, therefore, spiritual research prepares the way for a new Christ Event. But those who receive into themselves the essence of the teaching of the spirit as part of their whole life of soul, as a quickening, vital force, must then grow on to a spiritual understanding of these things, realising that through Spiritual Science they must learn to understand our newly dawning age thoroughly and fundamentally. We must come to realise that in the future the most important events must be sought, not on the physical plane but outside and beyond it, just as Christ must be sought in the spiritual world when He appears in His etheric form.

What has here been said will be repeated again and again in the coming decades. But there will be people who misunderstand it and who will say: So Christ is to come again! Because this view will be tinged with the belief that this is a physical return, such people will support all the false Messiahs who will appear. And in the middle of the twentieth century there will be plenty of them, making use of the materialistic beliefs, the materialistic thinking and feeling of men in order to proclaim themselves as Christ. There have always been false Messiahs. For example, in the South of France, before the Crusades, there appeared a false Messiah whom his followers regarded as a kind of Christ incarnate in a physical body. Before then a false Messiah had appeared in Spain, attracting a large number of followers. In North Africa, a man who announced himself as the Christ created a great sensation. In the seventeenth century a man who appeared in Smyrna, alleging himself to be the Christ, drew a vast crowd of followers; his name was Shabbathai Zewi. Pilgrims journeyed to him from Poland, Austria, Spain, Germany, France, from all over Europe and from wide provinces of Africa and Asia.

In past centuries this kind of happening was not so deplorable, for the demand to distinguish the true from the false had not yet been made of humanity. Only now are we living in the age when disaster might befall if men were not equal to the spiritual test. Those will be equal to it who know that human faculties develop to higher stages, that the faculties on account of which it was necessary for Christ to be seen physically were dependent upon a physical manifestation at the time of the founding of Christianity but that no progress would be made if in this present century men were not to find Him again in a higher form. Those who are striving in the sense of Spiritual Science will have to prove that they are the ones able to distinguish the false Messiahs from the One Messiah who does not appear in the flesh, but appears as a spiritual Being to the newly awakened faculties of men.

The time will come when men will again see into the spiritual world and there behold the land whence flow the streams of true spiritual nourishment for everything that happens in the physical world. Again and again we have heard that it was once possible for men to look with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. Oriental writings also contain the tradition of an ancient spiritual land [See note 1 at end of lecture.] into which men were once able to gaze and whence they could draw the super-sensible influences that were available for the physical world. Many descriptions of this land, that was once within reach of men's vision but has withdrawn, are full of sadness. This land was indeed once accessible to men and will be so again now that Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, is over. Initiation has always led thither, and it was always possible for those who had achieved Initiation to guide their steps into that mysterious land which is said to have disappeared from the sphere of human experience. Deeply moving are the writings which tell of this ancient land, whither the Initiates repair ever and again in order to bring from there the new streams and impulses for everything that is to be imparted to mankind from century to century. Those who are connected with the spiritual world in this way resort again and again to Shamballa—the name of this mysterious land. It is the deep fount into which clairvoyant vision once reached; it withdrew during Kali Yuga and is spoken of as an ancient fairyland that will come again into the realm of man. Shamballa will be there again when Kali Yuga has run its course. Mankind will rise through normal human faculties into the land of Shamballa, the land whence the Initiates draw strength and wisdom for the missions they are to fulfil. Shamballa is a reality, was a reality, will be a reality again for humanity. And when Shamballa reveals itself again, one of the first visions to come to men will be that of Christ in His etheric form. Into the land declared by Oriental writings to have vanished there is no Leader other than Christ. It is Christ who will lead men to Shamballa.

We must inscribe into our souls what can come to pass for humanity if the omen [See note 2 at the end of this lecture.] referred to in the lecture yesterday is rightly understood. If men realise that they dare not allow themselves to sink more deeply into matter, that their path must be reversed, that a spiritual life must begin, then, at first for a few and in the course of two thousand five hundred years for a greater and greater number of human beings, there will arise the experience of the land of Shamballa—woven of light, shone through with light, teeming with wisdom. Such is the event which for those who have the will to understand, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, must be described as denoting the most momentous turning-point in the evolution of humanity at the dawn of the Abraham-epoch in the Christian era. It is the event through which men's understanding of the Christ Impulse will be enhanced and intensified.

Strange as it may seem, wisdom will thereby lose nothing of its value. The more insight men achieve, the greater and mightier will Christ appear to them to be! When once their gaze can penetrate into Shamballa, they will be able to understand much of what is indeed contained in the Gospels but for the recognition of which they will need to experience a kind of event of Damascus. Thus at the time when men are more sceptical of the original records than they have ever been, the new form of belief in Christ Jesus will arise when we grow into the realm where He will first be encountered: the mysterious land of Shamballa.

Halley's Comet. The following passages are from the lecture to which Dr. Steiner is referring: Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon. “... Halley's Comet has a quite definite task and everything else that it brings with it is definitely related to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing human nature as a whole in such a way that human nature and the human being always take a further step in respect of the development of the Ego when the Comet comes near to the Earth. It is the step in development which leads out the Ego to concepts connected with the physical plane. ... When it is said that Halley's Comet may be an omen, that its influence, working alone, might make men superficial and lead out the Ego more and more on to the physical plane, and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—it is not said for the purpose of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can come about only by a spiritual view of the world like that of Anthroposophy taking the place of the trend of evolution brought about by Halley's Comet ...”

See also, Lecture-Course 17, The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness. Lecture 5.

In the first lecture of this course we shall try to give, by way of introduction, an outline of the subject before us. We shall not as yet enter fully into this, but will first give an outline of those things of which we shall speak during the next few days. We have a very extensive theme before us; Universe, Earth, and Man, and I propose to give a brief sketch of all the knowledge we can acquire concerning the visible and invisible worlds.

Our feelings are borne into the farthest distance of the cosmos when, in the deepest and most worthy sense, we make use of the expression “Universe.” “Earth” indicates the field of action upon which humanity is now placed, upon which we are to work and live, and the mission of which we ought to understand. Lastly, the word “Man”—a word we here wish to understand in its occult sense indicates that which the mystics of all ages meant when they made use of the expression, “O man, know thyself!”

We also have a sub-title to our subject. Having set ourselves such a highly important task, this sub-title is in a certain way justified; for when we consider the connection between that wonderful pre-Christian civilization—the Egyptian—and our own, we see how mysterious are the forces permeating human life. Three ages of human effort and research, of human development, morals, and life, rise before us when we consider Egyptian civilization and that of our own day. When we speak of Egyptian civilization in the occult sense we mean the civilization that had its seat in the north-east of Africa, on the banks of the Nile, which lasted for thousands of years and terminated in the eighth century before Christ. We know that this civilization was followed by another which we call the Greco-Latin. This was centred on the one hand in the wonderful Greek race, with their highly cultivated sense of beauty, and on the other hand in the powerful state of Rome. We also know that in this age occurred the mighty event in earthly evolution which we know as the advent of Christ Jesus. Then followed the age in which we are now living.

First the Egyptian age with all that belonged to it—and a great deal belonged to it—then the Greco-Latin age with its great results—the rise of Christianity—and then our present age. These are the three ages which come before our mental eyes when we consider the sub-title of these lectures.

It will be shown that there was an interplay of mysterious forces between the age of civilization first mentioned and our own. It is as if in the Egyptian age certain seeds were sown in the breast of gradually developing humanity, seeds which remained hidden during the Greco-Latin age and have reappeared in a special manner in the present one. Much of that which buds in our souls today, much of that which surrounds us, and of which people speak and dream, has sprung like seed from the ancient Egyptian civilization without our people being aware of it.

You are all more or less acquainted with the telegraphic apparatus. You know that wires connecting the different apparatuses extend from one place to another, and without having any deep knowledge of these things you understand that the force which sets the apparatus in motion has something to do with the force which flows through the wires. You perhaps also know that there is a connection down in the earth, that the ends of the wires are connected with the earth; but this subterranean connection is invisible because it is made by more or less mysterious forces produced by the earth itself. Something similar exists as a deep mystery in the development of man. In history we see threads being spun which lie within the invisible world. By means of history and of occultism we can trace out that which took place in ancient Egypt. We see how the threads of culture stretch from the Greek age, the Roman, the Christian, down into our own age. All these are guided by a kind of connection that takes place above the earth, but there is also a hidden, a subterranean force which works more or less directly from the ancient Egyptian age into our own. Many a remarkable secret is revealed to us when we follow these connections and examine them thoroughly.

To begin with I shall indicate briefly the special facts referred to in the sub-title of our theme. When we look back to ancient Egypt and observe a few of the mighty records there we are struck by the Pyramids, for example, and also the Sphinx—that wonderful and enigmatic figure. Then we let our glance pass on to ancient Greece. Here the Greek temple appears with its unique architecture, we can see and admire what we know from history of this wonderful land; we see its sculptures, those great, ideal, and perfect human forms described as gods: Zeus, Demeter, Pallas Athene, Apollo. Then we turn to the ancient kingdom of the Romans. Something remarkable appears when we thus allow our vision to sweep from the ancient Grecian peninsula to the Italian. Before us appear the figures of ancient Rome, many of which are still preserved; we see forms clothed with the toga, which is indeed more than a mere outer dress. What do we feel with regard to these Roman figures? One might say regarding certain of those belonging to the Roman Republic that one feels as if the ideal forms of the Greeks had descended from their pedestals and had appeared before us as men of flesh and blood. What we are made to see is their inner power; we recognize what lies in this inner power when we compare that which developed in ancient Rome with the feeling, the thought, the content of a figure belonging to the Grecian States—that of a Spartan or an Athenian, for example. We feel what this figure contains. The men belonging to Sparta or Athens felt that they were first of all Spartans or Athenians. Being provided in a certain way and to a certain degree with a common soul, the Spartan or Athenian felt more what we might call the Greek spirit than his own personality; he felt himself more as a Spartan or as an Athenian, than as an individual human citizen; he felt the power that worked so strongly in him proceeded more from the common spirit of the people than from his own personal power. The Roman on the contrary appears to us as being placed somewhat more exactly upon the centre of his own personality. Hence in the Roman kingdom there appears something very special, namely the comprehension of the rights of the citizen. All that lawyers dream regarding the origin of “justice” previous to this is very different from what in times of better research was rightly called “Roman Law.”

In ancient Rome man learned to regard himself as an individual, he stood upon his own two feet, no longer as one belonging to a certain town, but as a Roman citizen; that is to say he felt himself placed upon the centre of his own human nature. With this feeling of individuality the time came when what was spiritual in man descended to earth. Previously it was perceived as hovering, so to speak, above him in spiritual regions. There is something unique in Roman law and in Roman civilization. Let us consider the circumstance that the Greek felt himself primarily as a Spartan or as an Athenian. What was the spirit of Athens or of Sparta? For us Anthroposophists this was no abstraction, but something like a spiritual cloud, which in its turn was the spiritual expression of a spiritual being in which the town of Athens or Sparta was embedded; but this being was not visible upon the physical plane. The Greek looked primarily not to himself, but to something above him, the Roman looked primarily to himself. It was he who first recognized man as the highest creature that can take on fleshly form upon the physical plane. The spirit had come completely down into humanity. This was the time when the Divinity Itself could descend into human evolution and incarnate in Jesus Christ.

The manner in which Egyptian civilization extended into the Greco-Roman age was a very wonderful process. We recall how Moses, when he received in Egypt the commission from higher realms to guide his people to the “One God,” asked God—“What shall I say to my people when they ask who sent me?” And how God answered (and we shall see what deep truth lay hidden in the statement)—“Say to those to whom I send thee, ‘I AM’ hath sent me unto you. Thus ‘I AM’ is the name of an individual God who worked and ruled at that time as the Christ Principle in spiritual heights, and who had not yet descended to the physical plane. To whom did this voice belong which could make itself perceptible to the initiate Moses, saying to him, as it were from spiritual worlds, “I am the ‘I AM’”? It was exactly the same Being (and this is the secret of the ancient Greek Mysteries)—it was the same Being who appeared later in the flesh as the Christ: only afterwards He was visible to those around Him, while previously He could speak only through Initiates from spiritual heights.

Thus we see the Deity—that which was Spiritual—gradually descending after humanity had been prepared, after it had learnt in the Roman age the importance of embodiment in the flesh and its manifestation on the physical plane. We see how a whole series of the results of civilization develop in an exceedingly profound way from out of that which man received as a new gift at that time. We see how the form of the Pyramids and the Temple change to that of the Roman church—another record of inner human creative work. We see how from the sixth century the Cross with the dead Jesus makes its appearance; and how by degrees out of the stream of Christianity a remarkable figure evolves whose mysteries are very deeply veiled. We need only call up this figure before our eyes in the wonderful form given to it by the painter's art in the Sistine Madonna, by Raphael.

Everyone knows this wonderful figure of the Virgin in the centre of the picture, carrying the child in her arms, and we have certainly all experienced a corresponding emotional thrill when confronted by it. I would ask you, however, to note one thing with regard to it which expresses the spiritual striving of humanity at the stage with which we are dealing—the three civilizations mentioned above. It is not for nothing that the artist has surrounded the Madonna with a cloud out of which develop a great number of similar little children, a crowd of angelic forms. Let us now allow our feeling to be completely absorbed by this picture of the Madonna. Anyone whose emotion is sufficiently deep for him to be able to do this will feel and perceive that there is here something very different from what an ordinary profane intellect will see in the picture. Do not these cloud-angels surrounding the Madonna say something to us? Yes, they say something of the greatest significance if we do but consider them deeply enough. When we allow ourselves to sink deeply into this picture, something whispers in our soul, “Here before us is a miracle in the best sense of the word.” We do not think that this child whom the Madonna bears in her arms is born in the ordinary way from the woman. No! These wonderfully delicate angel-forms we see in the clouds seem to be in process of development, and the child in the Madonna's arms seems to be only a more condensed manifestation of them, like something that had crystallized somewhat more than these fleeting angel-forms, which seems as if brought down from the clouds and held fast in her arms. It is thus this child appears to us, and not as if born from the woman. We are directed to a mysterious connection between the child and the virgin mother. If we call up the picture thus before our souls, another virgin mother appears to our mental vision: the ancient Egyptian Isis, with the child Horus, and we may become aware of a mysterious connection between the Christian Madonna and the Egyptian figure on whose temple was written the words, “I AM, which is, and which was, and which is to come my veil no mortal can raise.”

That which we have hinted at as a miracle in the picture of the Madonna is also revealed in the Egyptian myth, for it there describes Horus as not having been born through conception, but tells how a beam of light fell from Osiris upon Isis, a kind of miraculous birth took place, and the child Horus appeared. Here again we see how threads connect one thing with another; what we are here able to investigate is without any earthly connection.

Let us now pass on to where our own age begins. Let us think of the Gothic cathedral with its wondrous construction of pointed arches, let us call to mind what took place there in the Middle Ages, in gatherings where true believers met true priests. Think of the effect of this Gothic cathedral with its many coloured panes of glass through which the sunlight penetrates; think, how many of those who were able to speak of the deeper secrets of the world's evolution could let tones ring forth, whose outward image was the wonderful light split thus into varied colours. Again and again it happened that the priests showed how the common power of the Divine Being was imparted to humanity in separate rays of power, split up like the light which streamed in through the coloured windows. The partition of the light was placed before men's senses, and in their souls was aroused that which lay spiritually at the back of this symbol. In this way the Gothic cathedral pervaded the powers of perception, and of feeling, of the worshippers.

Let us now enter more deeply into what is thus pictured in our minds. Let us first consider the Egyptian Pyramid—a most characteristic form of architecture! We must exert ourselves mentally in order to discover what it has to say to us. By degrees we shall see how in the pyramid the secret of the World, Earth, and Man is expressed; we shall see that there is expressed in it what the Egyptian priest felt according to his form of religion. Later we shall penetrate deeply into all these things; today we will only notice what such a priest felt, and imparted to his people in pictures. The wisdom expressed in the Egyptian form of religion was very profound; it was the direct result of ancient tradition; it was like a memory, and the Egyptian sage in his meeting with Solon could say with truth: “Oh ye Greeks, ye remain children all your lives, and in your childish souls is none of the ancient truth!” He refers here to the age of wisdom in Egypt. From whence came this wisdom?

Our present humanity was preceded, as you know, by another which dwelt upon a continent over which the billows of the Atlantic Ocean now roll. When the great Atlantean flood took place, the knowledge of the Atlanteans was carried towards the East across present-day Europe. The northern myths have remained behind as remembrances of the wisdom of Atlantis. We know that the successors of the Atlanteans carried the wisdom of ancient India and Persia into Asia. We also know that Egyptian wisdom was partly re-animated by Asia, but that it also streamed directly from the West, from Atlantis, towards Africa.

Now what sort of wisdom was it that was referred to by the ancient sage when he spoke of the “ancient truth”? This will be disclosed if for a moment we pause to consider the difference between life today and life in ancient Atlantis. At that time man was gifted with a dim clairvoyance, around him he saw beings who are also around us today, but whom present day man sees no longer. The earth does not contain only plants, minerals, and animals; spiritual beings are also around us, but these are visible only to clairvoyant eyes. In Atlantis at that time man was normally clairvoyant, divine beings were his companions, he lived with them as we now live with human beings. There was not as yet that sharp distinction between day-consciousness and night-consciousness there is now. At the present time when man enters in the morning, with his astral body and ego, into physical life physical objects are around him; and when at night he rises out of his physical body this world becomes dark and dim to him. This is the case today with the normal human being; but in Atlantis it was not so, particularly in its earliest periods. When at night man stepped out of his physical and etheric body darkness did not then spread around him; he entered a world of spiritual beings and he saw these divine spiritual forms just as he now sees fleshly forms. He saw Baldur, Wotan, Zeus, and Apollo—who are not imaginary, fanciful figures, but are the expression of real beings who, at the time of which we are speaking, had not taken on bodies of flesh, but possessed as their densest form transparent etheric bodies. When at night man withdrew from his physical body these were around him as etheric forms; and when in the morning he again drew into his physical body he was in the world of reality which today is for him the only world; he left for a time, one might say, the world of the Gods and dipped down into the world of physical, fleshly existence. There was no strict boundary between his day perception and his night perception, and when in those times the Initiate spoke to ordinary people of these Divine Beings he was not speaking of something that was strange to them. It was the same as when today we speak of men and call them by their names; the Initiate spoke of such Beings as Wotan and Baldur, for they knew them as divine etheric Beings.

The remembrance of that ancient wisdom and of these experiences was carried with them by those who journeyed towards the East; and from them sprang these remembrances which were connected with something else which developed in the peculiar constitution of the Egyptian people—the conviction that an eternal spiritual part dwells in man, and that when his body becomes a corpse it has been forsaken by this divine spiritual part. This conviction is expressed in numerous symbols and teachings which the Egyptian priests gave to the people; it was not merely an abstract truth to them, it was a truth in which they lived, and which they experienced directly.

Let us describe what the Egyptian perceived. He said, “I see here a corpse, the dust of a man who was the bearer of an ego; I know—for I know it from ancient tradition and from the experience of my ancestors—that there is something else, a spiritual part, which passes into other worlds. This could not fulfil its task were it to live solely in that spiritual world. A connecting link must be formed between this spiritual part and the earthly world; we must form a magnetic link for the soul which passes at death into higher realms, in order to arouse in it a feeling of permanence, so that it may return again, and appear once more on this earth.”

We know from the teachings of Spiritual Science that humanity of itself takes care that the soul shall return again and again to new incarnations; we know that when man passes at death into other spheres, during the period in kamaloka (that period during which he weans himself from what is earthly) he is still chained by certain forces to that which is physical. We know that it is these forces which do not allow him to rise at once into the regions of Devachan, and that it is they also which draw him down again to a new incarnation. But we are a people today who live in abstractions, and who represent such things as theories. In ancient Egypt all this lived as tradition. The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker; he wanted to see with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms, he wanted to have this constructed before him. These thoughts he embodied in the pyramids; the way the soul rises, how it leaves the body, how it is still partly fettered, and how it is led upwards to higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramids we can see the fettering of the soul to what is earthly, we can see how kamaloka with its mysterious forms comes before us, and we can say that, considered externally, it is a symbol of the soul which has left the body and is rising into higher realms.

Let us endeavour to understand these ancient traditions. In the Atlantean age man still saw around him much that is completely hidden from him today. You will recall from previous lectures that in Atlantis the etheric body of man was not so intimately bound up with the physical body as it is now, the etheric head projected far beyond the physical head. In animals this formation has remained to the present day. When a horse is observed clairvoyantly the etheric head may be seen towering upwards as a form of light above the horse's nose and in the case of an elephant a truly remarkable structure can be seen above the trunk. In Atlantean humanity the etheric head was in a somewhat similar position, although not quite so far outside. Later it gradually drew more and more into the physical head, so that now it is about the same size as the latter. On this account the physical head—which was at first only partly governed by the etheric head and still had many forces outside which are today within it—was not yet human to any high degree; it was only in course of development, and still possessed a somewhat lower animal form.

What did the Atlantean see when he looked at a companion during the day? He saw a man with a very receding forehead, very protruding teeth—something that reminded him of an animal but at night when he slept clairvoyant consciousness began, the animal-like form became less distinct, and out of the physical head grew the etheric head, which already had a human form and indeed a very much more beautiful form than we see today. In still more remote times the Atlantean clairvoyant could look back to a period when man's physical form was yet more animal-like though he possessed an etheric body which was entirely human; far more beautiful indeed than the present physical form, which has adapted itself to coarser, denser forces. Now imagine this memory of the Atlantean placed consciously yet symbolically before the people of Egypt. Imagine the Egyptian priest saying to the people: “In Atlantean times your own souls, when you were awake, beheld the human figure with an animal form, but at night there grew out of it an exceedingly beautiful human head.” This memory, presented in sculpture, is the Sphinx. It is only thus that these forms can be understood; we must realize that they are not merely thought-out forms, but realities.

Let us now pass from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. This temple will only be understood by those who are able to feel that there are forces in space. The Greek possessed this feeling. Anyone studying space from the standpoint of Spiritual Science knows that it is not the absolute void of which our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream, but that it is differentiated. It is something that is filled with lines, with lines of force in this direction and in that, from above downwards, from right to left, straight and curved lines going in every direction. Space may be felt, it may be penetrated with feeling. He who has such a feeling for space knows why certain old painters could paint the floating angel forms in the pictures of Madonna in a way so wonderfully true to nature; he knows that these angels mutually support each other, just as the planets do in space by their power of attraction. It is quite different when we consider Bocklin's picture “Piety.” Nothing is said here against the excellence of this picture otherwise, but anyone who has preserved the living feeling for space has the sensation that those remarkable angel forms may fall at any moment. The painters of olden times had the perception that belonged to earlier clairvoyance. In modern times this has been lost.

When art still possessed occult traditions these mutually supporting forces which existed in space, which streamed hither and thither, were recognized. They were perceived by those in whose minds the thought of the Greek temple originated. They did not think out these forms, but they perceived the forces streaming through space, and filled them with stone; that which was already there occultly they filled with substance. Hence the Greek temple is a material presentation of actual forces existing in space; a Greek temple is a crystallized space-thought in the purest sense of the word. The result of this was very important; by giving material expression to force forms in space the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that Gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among men on the physical plane.

Just as today parents place the physical form, the body of flesh, at the disposal of the child, in order that the spirit can express itself on the physical plane, so something similar took place in the case of the Greek temple. The opportunity was provided for divine spiritual beings to stream down and incarnate in the architectural structure. That is the secret of the Greek temple. God was present in the temple. Those who felt the form of the Greek temple aright felt that there need be no human being anywhere near it, nor in the temple itself, and yet it would not be empty, for God was really present there. The Greek temple is a whole; it is complete in itself, because it has a form which magically draws God into it.

If we now consider a Roman church, especially one with a crypt, we shall see a further development. In the Pyramid we see presented the path the soul takes after death, the outer architectural form for the soul when departing; the Greek temple is the expression of the divine soul which likes to tarry upon the physical plane; the Roman church with its crypt corresponds to the Cross upon which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity at this stage had progressed to an advanced consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bond to what is earthly, the period in kamaloka, is represented by the Pyramids; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death, is expressed in the Cross, and reminds us of the spiritual victory of Christ over death.

Again, a further step is taken to the Gothic Cathedral. Without the pious congregation within, it is incomplete. If we wish to feel it as a whole, then to the pointed arches must be added the folded hands and the upward-streaming feelings they express; not such feelings as are in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death is preserved, but victorious feelings, such as the soul perceives who already in the body has felt that it is a victor over death. The soul, victorious over death while in the body, belongs to the Gothic building, which is incomplete if it is not filled with such feelings.

The Greek temple is the body of God; it is complete in itself. The Gothic church is something which requires a congregation; it is not a temple but a “Dom,” a cathedral. The German word “Dom” appears in the English suffix “dom” in the words “kingdom,” “Christendom,” for example. It also lies at the root of the Russian word “Duma.” A dome, or dom, is something in which individual members are gathered together into one congregation. From this we can see how in time human thought and human perception progresses from the Pyramid to the Greek temple, then to the Roman church with its crypt, and afterwards to the Gothic cathedral.

Thus we arrive gradually at our own age, and we shall see how the forces of evolution are at work not only on the surface, but that mysterious occult currents are active also beneath, so that what is taking place today in our civilization appears as a re-embodiment of much that was sown within humanity in ancient Egyptian times.

We will close with a thought which hints at this mysterious connection. What constitutes the materialism of our present civilization? What is the special characteristic of the man who, when he wishes to see something spiritual, has lost the harmony that reconciles faith and knowledge? He sees nothing! He regards the gross, material, physical part of the world; he feels it to be real, that it exists, and he even comes to deny what is spiritual. He believes that man's existence is finished when his corpse lies in the earth; he sees nothing rising up into the spiritual worlds. Can a conception such as this be the outcome of something that was sown at a time when there was a firm faith in the continued life of the soul, such as existed in Egypt? Yes, for it is not in Civilization as in the vegetable kingdom, where like things spring forth again and again from the seed. In civilization one characteristic alternates with another which is apparently dissimilar to it—and yet there may be deeper and more intimate similarities.

The vision of man is confined today to the physical body; he regards this as a reality; he cannot raise himself to that which is spiritual.

The souls who now regard their physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians; all that exists in our souls today is the result of what we acquired in previous incarnations.

Imagine your soul back in its Egyptian body. Imagine your soul after death being led up again by way of the Pyramid into higher spheres—but your body held fast as a mummy. This fact had an occult result. The soul had always to look downwards when its mummified body was below; its thoughts were hardened, solidified, they were attracted to the physical world. It was forced to look down from the realms of the spirit upon its embalmed physical body, and in consequence the thought became rooted in it that the physical body had a higher reality than it actually had. Imagine a man, in his soul, looking down at that time upon his mummy. Thought regarding the physical hardened; it passed through repeated incarnations, and now is such that man cannot extricate his thoughts from the physical bodily form.

Materialistic thought is often the result of the embalming of the body.

Thus we see how thoughts and feelings work from one incarnation to another; how civilizations are continued through repeated incarnations, and how they reappear later in entirely different forms. This ought to arouse a faint idea of the countless occult threads which are hidden below the surface.

In this lecture we have indicated briefly the subjects to be dealt with in subsequent lectures. In them our vision shall sweep upwards to the highest regions of those worlds beheld by the Egyptian priests; we shall have to direct our attention to the nature, the goal, and the destiny of man; and we shall understand how such problems as these are solved when we realize that the fruits of one age of civilization reappear in a wonderful and mysterious manner in a subsequent one.

Ancient Wisdom and the new Apocalyptic Wisdom. Temple sleep. Isis and the Madonna. Past stages of Evolution. The bestowing of the Ego. Future Powers.

We shall enter best into our subject if in the first place we try to form a clear conception of the two extremes which have to be considered when Universe and Man are brought into relationship with each other. These two extremes are the spirit-soul and the psycho-material. We will endeavour to discuss these, starting with a phenomenon which, to the man of the present day, is more or less of a riddle, but which is found in the ancient Egyptian conception of the world and life. I mean what is called “temple-sleep.”

The unique fact lying at the foundation of temple-sleep is that among the Egyptian priests, and in ancient civilizations in general, wisdom was held to be very closely bound up with the art of healing and with health.

The man of today has but a dim conception of those ancient ideas regarding the inner relationships between wisdom and health, between science and the art of healing; and it will be the task of the Anthroposophical movement to direct humanity once more to that conception of the spiritual through which wisdom and the art of healing will be brought again into close connection. This recalls what was said in the last lecture. It recalls that ancient figure of which we were reminded when we looked at the picture of the Madonna and child, as painted by Raphael—it reminds us of Isis with the child Horus, the Goddess on whose temple was inscribed the words: “I AM, who was, who is, who will be; my veil no mortal can raise.”

This Goddess was mysteriously connected with the art of healing; she was regarded as the teacher of the Egyptian priesthood in this respect. There is a remarkable statement taking us back to the very earliest ages of antiquity that shows how Isis was particularly interested in the health of mankind at the time when she was placed among mortals.

This points to a very mysterious fact.

We must now sketch in a few words, and bring before your souls, the nature of temple-sleep, which was one of the remedies employed by the priests of Egypt. Anyone who had suffered loss of health in any way in those days was not treated as a rule with external remedies; there were only a few of these, and they were seldom used. Sufferers were in most cases taken to the temple and there put into a kind of sleep. It was not an ordinary sleep, but a kind of somnambulistic sleep which was so intensified that the patient became capable of having not chaotic dreams merely but of seeing orderly visions. During this sleep the patient perceived etheric forms in the spiritual world, and the wise priests understood the art of influencing these etheric pictures which passed before the sleeper; they could control and guide them.

Let us suppose that an invalid was put into a temple-sleep. The priest skilled in medicine was at his side when he fell into this somnambulistic sleep, the invalid then entered a world of etheric forms, and the priest, because of the power he possessed through his initiation (and which was only possible in those ancient times when conditions of existence were such as no longer or very seldom exist today), was able to control the entire sleep. He formed and fashioned the etheric visions and beings in such a way that there actually appeared before the sleeper, as if by magic, those forms which at one time the ancient Atlanteans had looked on as their Gods. These Divine forms—concerning which the various peoples still possessed a remembrance, in the German and Norse, and the Greek mythologies—were now placed before the soul of the person who was in the temple-sleep. He saw in particular certain figures which were connected with the healing principle.

Had the patient remained conscious, as in the waking consciousness of today, it would not have been possible for such forces to act upon him; this was only possible in somnambulistic sleep. The wise priest guided this dream-life in such a way that powerful forces were liberated during the etheric visions, and these restored to order and harmony the forces of the body which had fallen into disorder and discord. This was only possible when the self-consciousness of the patient had been suppressed. Temple sleep had therefore a very real significance, and we can see how the healing art of the priests was connected with knowledge only accessible to man through initiation. The connection lies clearly before us. It was the priests who, through the revival of the ancient vision of higher worlds, possessed in their wisdom the forces which came from these worlds, whereby spirit could work upon spirit. They acquired the capacity of allowing spirit to work upon spirit, and through this wisdom was brought into inner connection with health.

In the uplifting of the self to what was spiritual there was, in ancient times, a healing element, and it would be well if man were to learn to understand this again, for he would then understand the great mission of the Anthroposophical movement, which is to lead man up to the spiritual world, so that he may again enter those worlds from which he has descended. It is true that in future people will not be put into a somnambulistic condition; self-consciousness will be fully maintained, all the same, strong spiritual forces will become active in man, and the possession of wisdom and insight into higher worlds will then be capable of acting on human nature to harmonize and heal. Today this connection between spirituality and the healing art is hidden, those who are not initiated into the deeper wisdom of the Mysteries cannot discern the connection, they cannot even observe the more subtle facts that confront them. Those who look more deeply know upon what profound inner conditions a case of healing may depend. Let us suppose for example that a certain illness befalls a person and that it has an inner cause, not a fractured thigh-bone or a disordered stomach, for these are external causes.

Anyone wishing to go deeply into this will very soon find that in the case of a person who occupies himself much with mathematical ideas conditions of health are very different to the case of another who does not occupy himself with such things. This fact indicates the remarkable connection between the mental life of a person and the state of his external health. It is not, of course, as if mathematical thinking healed the man. Let us look at this more closely: that different conditions of healing are necessary in the case of one applying himself to mathematics and one who does not. Suppose two people have exactly the same illness—in reality this never happens, but we may suppose it. One of them does not care to know anything about mathematical ideas; the other is intensely interested in them. It might happen that it was quite impossible to cure the non-mathematical person whereas it might be possible to heal the other with suitable remedies. What I have stated is an actual fact.

Take another example. We have two people before us; one is an Atheist in the worst sense, the other a deeply religious man. Again it might happen that if both have the same disease and the same remedy is used that the religious man can be cured and the other not. These are things which to modern thinking—at least to the greater part of humanity—will seem absurd; however, they are not so. How is this? It depends on the fact that an entirely different influence is exercised upon human nature by so-called “sense free” ideas, and by those filled with sense perception. Think for a moment of the difference between a man who likes mathematics and one who does not. The latter says: “I ought to think about these things! but I only want to think of things which I can perceive with my senses!” Nevertheless, it is of great use to the inner being of man to dwell on conceptions of that which cannot be seen. Hence it is useful to have religious conceptions, for these also relate to things which cannot be grasped with the hands, nor have any connection with outer, material things—in a word with things which are sense-free. These are matters which one day, when man will look up more to that which is spiritual, will have a great influence on educational principles.

For example, let us take the simple conception 3 x 3=9. Children form such a conception best when they do it without the help of anything material. It is not good when they put 3 x 3 beans next each other for too long, for then they do not rise at all above the sense conception; but if you accustom children, to begin with, not for too long, to count on their fingers, and then follow it with pure mathematical thinking, such thought has a curative, harmonizing effect upon the children. How little people of the present day understand such things can be seen from the fact that in their system of instruction the exact opposite occurs. Has not the abacus been introduced into our schools whereby addition, subtraction, etc., are made clear to sense-eyes by means of different coloured balls? In this way that which ought to be comprehended purely in the mind is said “to be made clear” to the senses. It may be convenient, but those who consider this to be educational know nothing of that deeper curative education which is rooted in the power of the spirit. A man who from childhood has been accustomed to live with sense conceptions will not, because his nerve system has lived under sickly conditions, be able to be cured as easily as one who from his youth has been accustomed to sense-free ideas. The more a person is accustomed to think apart from objects the easier it is to cure him.

In ancient times when a person was ill it was customary to place before him all kinds of symbolic figures, triangles, and combinations of numbers. The object, besides the other value these things possessed, was to uplift him from the mere outward vision of things. If I place a triangle before me and merely look at it, that has no particular value but if on the other hand I see it as the symbol of the higher triad of man it becomes a healing conception of the mind.

Observe how the conceptions of Spiritual Science lead us to the vision of things Spiritual. We are led from what takes place on earth to what has taken place on the ancient Sun, Moon, and Saturn. With physical eyes we cannot see the events of those times, nor with sensely hands can we reach up to the ancient Moon or ancient Sun; but without the aid of the external crutches of our senses we can uplift ourselves to the things which existed once upon a time; we can acquire conceptions which have an equalizing and harmonizing effect upon our whole life and likewise upon our body.

Spiritual Science will again prove to be a great, a universal remedy, as it was formerly in the hands of the Egyptian priests; at that time, however, it necessitated the suppression of the ego, as in temple-sleep. The spiritual conception of the world is a curative conception.

Many people will say in answer to this assertion: Are all Anthroposophists healthy people? Are there no invalids among them?

We must understand that fundamentally the individual can do very little for his health and his sickness. A large proportion of the causes of disease lies outside the individual personality. A person may have the healthiest ideas, which, if he were to live under quite healthy conditions, would result in his never being ill from internal causes; but there are other causes lying outside the power of the individual of today, the secret causes of heredity for example, the influences passing from one human being to another, the influences of unnatural environment, etc. All these influences, which, in a hidden way, are external causes of disease, can only be done away with gradually by a healthy Anthroposophical method of thought. Although we may observe that a person who is inwardly most healthy may fall ill, even dangerously ill, we must not regard this as a sign that Spiritual Science will fail to act curatively upon humanity in the course of centuries—I say centuries, not thousands of years. There is a future before spiritually thinking men, in whom no inner cause of sickness will exist for those able to provide the inward and outward conditions of Spiritual wisdom. External causes there will always be, these can only be eradicated as a spiritually scientific art of healing gains more and more ground.

When we rightly understand the effect of that which is Spiritual we find that temple-sleep is not unintelligible to us. What was it that was conjured up before the sleeper in the temple in his etheric visions? It was the picture of the Atlantean Gods whom we once knew as etheric forms; among whom we once lived, when we were able to be conscious outside the physical body and could exercise etheric clairvoyance. If we go still farther back in human evolution, far beyond the Atlantean epoch, we reach a period in which man first became what he now is, when he first appeared as the individual personality he is today. This period is called the Lemurian epoch. The Atlantean continent, from which the people spread to Africa, Europe, and Asia, came to an end through mighty water catastrophes.

Lemuria, which was that portion of the earth upon which humanity dwelt before the Atlantean epoch, was destroyed through the forces of fire, by volcanic catastrophes. It was during the Lemurian epoch that man first gained consciousness of his ego. This was a mighty impulse in the evolution of man.

How was it that man attained to his “I” or ego consciousness?

It is very difficult for the materialist thought of the present day to imagine this ancient condition of humanity. Were you to imagine the man of that time as similar to the man of today, with flesh and blood, bones and muscles, your idea would be entirely wrong. At that time man possessed a far more impermanent, a far softer form; his body was comparatively fluidic. That which later became muscles and bones has only grown hard in the course of time. At that period also the propagation of humanity was entirely different. Man lived more in the surroundings of the earth—in the atmosphere, which at that time was not pure air as it is today, but was filled with all kinds of vapours. In this man lived as a true airy form, and the currents surrounding the earth passed in and out of him. Man's form was almost the same as some cloud we see today which continually changes its form, only the form of man at that time was firmer and more defined. There appeared then, also for the first time, what are now described as the sexes; at that period of evolution an ancient, non-sexual kind of propagation was replaced by a sexual one.

This took place, however, millions and millions of years ago.

Simultaneously with sexual reproduction came the embodiment of the earliest germ of the ego. Previous to this man was impelled to produce his like from himself through external influences which lay in the sphere around him. That was the form of reproduction at a time when man did not as yet possess an ego, when he still had a dim clairvoyant consciousness, when he rested “Entirely in the bosom of the Deity,” and could not say, “I am.” His perception was somewhat as follows: he was aware that when he did anything it made an impression upon his spiritual environment, and he felt his existence to be within this environment. He was not able to say: “I am here,” but “my environment lets me be here.” He lay within the bosom of the living earth, and the living forces of the earth streamed out and in of him. At that time there were no unhealthy forces; disease did not exist; there was no death such as we know it. It was only when, with sexual reproduction, man was endowed with his ego, that sickness and death entered. At that time the human being was not fertilized by his like but just as today he breathes, so he then absorbed substances from his environment, and in this environment the fertilizing forces were to be found; that which then entered into him fertilized him, and caused him to bring forth his kind.

These forces in man were healthy, and so was that which, as his kind, he produced.

The priests of ancient Egypt knew this, and they said: The further we guide man's vision back into previous conditions the more do we bring him into conditions in which there is no disease. The vision of the old Atlantean Gods acted curatively, and this was still more the case when the priests guided these visions so that the temple-sleeper had before him those primeval forms which were fertilized, not from their like, but from that which was in their environment. The invalid who lay in the temple-sleep beheld the form of her who was the mother of her kind without having received fertilization from her kind. Before him stood the generating woman, the woman with child, yet who is virgin; the Goddess who in the Lemurian epoch was the companion of man, and who has since disappeared from the sight of man. In ancient Egypt she was called Holy Isis.

Isis could only be seen by men in a normal way when death had not as yet appeared on earth. At that time men were, in normal consciousness the companions of such forms as floated around them, and they brought forth their kind virginally.

When Isis was no longer the visible companion of humanity, when she was withdrawn into the circle of the Gods, she continued to interest herself in the health of man from the Spiritual World so said the priests—and when a person was raised to the vision of those ancient forms in an abnormal way, as in temple-sleep, the pictured Isis still acted curatively on him. She is that principle in man which was present in him before he received his mortal covering. HER veil has no mortal raised, for she is the form which was there when death had not as yet come into the world. She is the ONE ROOTED IN THE ETERNAL; she is the great HEALING PRINCIPLE to which humanity will again attain, when it steeps itself anew in Spiritual Wisdom.

We see what has remained of this in the wonderful symbol of the Virgin Mother with the child; speaking from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we say with emphasis that we see it in many pictures of the Madonna. We assert these pictures have a curative effect; for, within the limits which have been discussed, a picture of the Madonna is a means of healing. When it is viewed and studied in such a way that it has an after effect upon the human soul, when this human soul can dream during sleep about the Madonna picture, it then possesses a healing power even today.

Let us now ask what were the fertilizing forces at a time when the human being was not fertilized by his own kind?

Think of our earth at that time as being a solid kernel surrounded by all kinds of viscous, seething, substances, mingled with vapour, and in this half-watery structure dwelt Lemurian humanity. The earth was shone upon by the sun, which could not then be perceived by human eyes, because our sense organs had not developed; the sun's influence, however, penetrated through the veils of mist and cloud, and with the power of the sun's rays the earth received also powers of fructification. The earth did not only receive the forces of warmth, but at the same time the forces which today live in the power of fructification. That which the human being absorbed streamed to the earth from invisible Spiritual Sun-beings. Such was the relationship between sun and earth. The power which acted at that time upon those sexless self-propagating human forms was perceived as a masculine power. This was poured out over the whole earth as a product of the sun. Such were the conditions during the early part of the Lemurian epoch.

Let us now go back still further, to a period in which the conditions were again quite different, to a primeval past when the sun, which is now separate, was bound up with our earth. At one time the earth and the sun formed a single body. All the finer and more etheric parts were still within this common body. We will consider this body at the time when the two were connected as somewhat resembling in shape a fancy biscuit, one part, a smaller globe (namely the earth-plus-moon) hanging as it were on to the other.

We must imagine the sun as a vast etheric body on which earth-plus-moon hung. The rays of force from the sun still mingled with the earth, they passed from the sun to the earth and back from earth to sun—for the two were in a certain way one body. We shall best understand the purpose of this development if we enquire: What would have happened if, without anything further taking place, the sun had turned entirely away from the earth after the separation, and had no longer sent its beams and currents to the earth? All life upon the earth would in this case have dried up and hardened. It was necessary to the earth that the fertilizing influences from the sun should remain. We have to regard this interaction between sun and earth as the interaction between two principles: one leading to destruction, the other giving life. This was also the case later; invigorating life flowed continually from the sun to the earth.

We have now briefly recapitulated the various stages in the evolution of our earth. First there was a primeval past when the earth was still within the sun-body; then a second stage in which the earth was more loosely connected with the sun; then a third, when the two bodies were completely separated from each other. It was only in this third epoch that the ego really entered into man and at this stage sexual reproduction began. Then followed the fourth epoch, the Atlantean, and lastly the post-Atlantean epoch, that in which we are now living. To those who look more deeply into the structure of the world, all that happens visibly, all that is external, takes place under the influence of Spiritual Beings. At one time the sun and the earth were one. (We will go into the Moon development later.) This common body was then permeated with harmoniously working Divine Spiritual Beings. Such lofty beings were necessary to govern the forces that at that time were still undifferentiated.

Now think of development as having progressed: the sun withdrew. What took place then? With the sun went forth the highest beings and the finest substances; henceforward they worked upon the earth from outside. Beings who represented truly living ever-accelerating life, dwelt upon the sun; and on the earth the beings who, if they had been left to themselves, would have suffered stiffening, darkness, destruction. At this second stage of evolution light and darkness were both at work.

At the third stage of evolution the earth-man is endowed with his ego, and the time begins when his self-conscious “I” dwells within him. He becomes aware of this ego by its opposite, and he gradually passes into one condition in which he has a clear consciousness, and into another in which he has a dim consciousness; the first comes to him from the sun, and the other preferably from the earth. The ego, the eternal germ, has to alternate between two forms, one an eternal form, and the other a form which can be born and can die. Those beings, who always possess what man has only occasionally, have forsaken their earth bodies. First that being who brings about fertilization, who lives principally on the sun, went forth from the moon-earth, then the being who makes the human form static or more permanent goes forth with the moon.

Sun and moon gradually separated from the earth. With the sun went forth the beings who, had they remained united with it, would have brought a too precipitate life to earth; and with the moon all those forces withdrew which would have brought about a hardening and stiffening; everything which would have tended to make form permanent. The earth remained in the midst, as it were between the two. Man on earth alternates between these two, he is influenced on the one hand by the sun, and on the other by the forces of the moon. The beings who were previously man's companions had now withdrawn, some to the sun and some to the moon.

In the fourth epoch of the earth's evolution, those companions of man were met with who had condensed so far as to an etheric body, and they were in certain respects subject to human weaknesses. These were the etheric Gods with whom men lived during the Atlantean period. In post-Atlantean times he lost his connection with these etheric Gods, he entered entirely into the physical world and the door leading to spiritual worlds was shut.

There remained to man, however, from these ancient times something that was like a remembrance of the spiritual worlds, and, in accordance with the law of repetition everything he had passed through in life at one time woke up within him later as knowledge.

Man had lived through numerous epochs in which he was variously related to the Gods. He now passed through the same stages again, but with knowledge.

After the great Atlantean flood, in the first holy ancient Indian civilization, man passed once again in soul and spirit through that epoch when earth and sun were united. The very exalted Deity who guided and adjusted everything that man experienced in the first post-Atlantean civilization was called by a name which remained, as a tradition, into later times. Man called this Deity Brahman, the All-One.

This Deity actually dwelt among men at one time—in the first epoch of the evolution of our earth man was the companion of Brahman, who was reverenced in the ancient Indian civilization, and was known to man when in a higher state of abstraction.

Then followed the Persian civilization during which mankind experienced consciously the second epoch, when the sun with its all-invigorating forces separated itself from the forces of darkness. Therefore man perceived a duality in the Godhead in the second age of civilization, and this duality is represented as the opposition of Ormuzd, the good Deity, and Ahriman, the destroying Deity. This was nothing but a repetition—but in knowledge—of that which man had passed through in fact in earlier ages.

We then come to the memory of the epoch when the sun and moon went forth from the previously united celestial body, the sun with its fertilising forces and the moon with forces which gave form: to man a transitory form, and to the Gods a permanent one. In the Egyptian age this difference was perceived in the opposition of earlier forces to those still at work, but now their opposition was in a different form. In Egypt the solar forces were perceived as the forces of Osiris. Osiris was the power of the sun as it worked in the third epoch of earthly evolution, and the religion of Osiris arose and flourished in this age. Isis represents the power of the moon before its complete separation from the earth, before the division of sex, when the virginal power of reproduction was still operative. Later Isis escaped to the moon, where she became numb—congealed.

In the fourth age, that of the Greco-Latin civilization, humanity experienced in polytheism a remembrance of the Atlantean epoch with its numerous etheric figures of the Gods.

In our age of civilization, the fifth, we have nothing to repeat. Let us bring this thought before our minds: we have nothing to repeat, no ancient remembrances. We have given birth to a fifth age of civilization, one whose results will be seen in the future, while the four previous ages were repetitions of the four preceding cosmic epochs. Our age must give birth not merely to an ancient wisdom, but to a new wisdom, a wisdom which points not only to the past, but which must work prophetically—apocalyptically—into the future. In the mysteries of past ages of civilization we see an ancient wisdom preserved, but our wisdom must be an apocalyptic wisdom, the seed for which must be sown by us. Once again we have need of a principle of initiation so that the primeval connection with spiritual worlds may be renewed.

The task of the Anthroposophical movement is to supply this principle. No wonder that wisdom has been lost to so many, for without the principle of initiation it is very difficult nowadays to obtain wisdom, more difficult than formerly, when the memory of ancient experiences had only to be refreshed, and when the results of earlier development could be brought to the consciousness of man. Today this is difficult; therefore we can understand that the sense-world seems to be without a God, and to be barren and empty; but although it appears as if the ancient spirit-world had died out, it is there; it is working and fructifying, and if man wills he can find connection with the spiritual world.

Care was taken, precisely at the moment when the ancient memories seemed to be disappearing during the Greco-Latin age, that a wonderful new seed for all future time should be laid within the cold ground of the earth; this seed is what we describe as the Christ-Principle. The apocalyptic wisdom, the true new Spiritual Wisdom, will be found in conjunction with this Christ Principle, which does not point back only to memories of past epochs, but prophetically to the future, and precisely through this it summons man to action, to creative work. This productive wisdom has sprung freely from seed that was sown in the past. So we see a far horizon of the future rise before us when we speak of Universe, Earth, and Man. In what follows we shall have to speak not merely of the past, but also of the forces of the future. The world is not merely concerned with what is past, it evolves towards the future, and our epoch has still a long period to pass through before it comes to an end. Man will, however, live on after the earth has disappeared, and, if we are to know him completely, we must look not to the past alone, but must study what is active today, and what will go on working into the great tomorrow of the world.

The Kingdoms of Nature. Group-egos. The Centre of Man. The Kingdoms of Higher Spiritual Beings.

If we are to bring the relationship of Universe, Earth, and Man before our minds in the following lectures, it will first be necessary to gather together many things that will furnish us with some kind of foundation. At the same time we must remember that if we only use our external senses and the intellect that is bound up with these, we shall see very little; this applies to the Earth as well as to man, and in a still higher degree to the Universe. We must realize that the greater part of what is most essential is hidden from the outer senses, and also from external intellectual observation. Therefore to begin with we will point out a few things appertaining to the beings that surround us, but which are hidden from view. Much will have to be said which many of you know already, but in order to grasp our vast subject thoroughly it will be necessary to recapitulate to a certain extent. We must in the first place consider the planet on which we live, and which forms the centre of our studies.

Yesterday we considered one portion of the earth's evolution in connection with the whole.

We saw how beings have been active in various ways, from the time when earth and sun still formed one body up to our own day. We saw also that in the various ages of the Post-Atlantean epoch man has repeated in knowledge and in religious consciousness all that the earth has passed through in the course of its evolution.

We will now go more deeply into the various conditions on this our earth. We are surrounded in the first place by the four kingdoms of nature; the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms. Man is not the mere material physical being of which the outer senses inform us, and which the scientific intellect describes and explains but he is a complicated being made up of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. All this we know. When we allow our gaze to sweep over the beings of the other kingdoms of the earth we must be fully aware that the expressions physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego are by no means meaningless in respect of them also. When dealing with the physical world we have to allow that of all earthly beings man alone possesses an ego-nature; he alone in this physical world has a self-conscious ego. With animals it is quite different; the ego of animals is not in the physical world in the same way man's ego is.

If we consider the difference between animals and man we must acknowledge that whereas every human being has its individual “I” enclosed as a single individuality within its skin, not every animal has an “I,” but that certain groups of similarly formed animals have one “I,” or ego, in common. For example, all lions, or all bears, have a common ego, hence we call such an ego belonging to the animal kingdom a group-ego. The human ego is found in the physical world; although we may not see it with our eyes it is present within the skin of every human being. This is not the case with animals. We do not find their group-ego in the physical world. In order that you may form an idea of such a group-ego imagine that there is a partition before me, and in this partition ten holes. I put my ten fingers through the holes and move them. You see my fingers but not myself, and without much deep thought you say that these ten fingers do not move of themselves, but something hidden must be causing the movement; in other words you think of a being that belongs to the fingers. This comparison brings us to the group-nature or soul-nature in the case of animals.

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The various lions on the physical plane are beings which, in a certain sense, have also something hidden behind them. Just as the central being belonging to the ten fingers is hidden by the partition, so something is also hidden which is common to all lions. It is hidden because it is not present at all in the physical world. The same ego-nature which in the case of man is present in the physical world is to be found in the case of animals in the astral world. The group ego of animals is in the astral world. From each single animal there stretches a sort of continuation of its being into the astral world, there these continuations meet together and form the garment or covering for the animal-ego. These group egos live as single individuals on the astral plane, just as human individual egos do here on the physical plane. When the clairvoyant enters the astral plane he encounters the various animal egos as separate beings which stretch forth their principles into the physical world. One must not merely picture this diagrammatically, but must accustom oneself to picture these egos in their reality. It must be clearly understood that we do not have to go into another region to enter the astral world; the astral world permeates our physical world. It is only a case of our being able to look into it with opened astral senses.

You may now ask what do the group-egos of animals look like? The group-ego of one of the higher orders of animals appears to the clairvoyant somewhat as follows: Along the spine of the animal he sees what resembles a brightly shining line. As a matter of fact our atmosphere is permeated not only by the material currents generally recognized, but also in every direction by astral currents, and in these currents the clairvoyant recognizes the group-egos of animals.

A second question might now be asked: Have lower beings, such as plants for example, an ego? Yes, they have an ego. When the clairvoyant examines a plant he finds that the part visible in the physical world is nothing but a combination of the physical and etheric bodies of the plant. Imagine the surface of the earth on which plants grow, picture the root of a plant, the stem, the leaves, and flowers. That which grows has not in the physical world, like man, a physical body, an etheric body, astral body, and ego, but only a physical and etheric body. We must not conclude from this that the astrality with which we are filled, and which is active also in animals, is not active in the plant. To the opened eyes of the clairvoyant the plant is surrounded by a glow, and this comes from astral substances. It is this also which cooperates in the development of the flower. While the plant grows from leaf to leaf through the influence of the etheric body its growth terminates above in a flower through being surrounded by astral substance.

The clairvoyant sees every growing plant thus surrounded by astral substance, but there is something else connected with the plant, namely its ego. If we wish to locate the ego of a plant we must seek it in the centre of the earth. There the ego of all plants is to be found; this is an important and essential truth. Whereas we see the egos of animals in the circumference of the earth, we must turn to the centre of the earth for the egos of plants. In fact, when clairvoyant vision has attained to such a view of the plant creation the earth, which otherwise confronts man merely as a material structure, expands to an organism having its ego in the centre; this ego includes all plant egos.

The earth is ensouled by an ego and in the same way as your head is covered with hairs which grow from out your being, so plants grow from out the being of the earth, and belong to the whole organism of the earth. When one tears a plant up by the roots it hurts the whole earth, the soul of the plant experiences pain. This is a fact. On the other hand one should not think that the earth feels pain when a flower is plucked; exactly the reverse is the case. For example, when in autumn a reaper cuts corn the clairvoyant sees great currents of a feeling of well-being pass over the earth. Objections to this from the moral standpoint do not hold good. One might for example ask: Is it then a more trifling sin when a child plucks all sorts of plants uselessly than when a man transplants one carefully and with good intention? The fact remains the same: If a plant is uprooted the earth feels pain; if a plant is cut the earth feels pleasure. For the earth has pleasure in yielding up what it bears on its surface; also when animals pass over the earth grazing upon its plants the earth has a sensation of pleasure; much the same as a cow has when her calf draws milk. This is an absolutely occult fact. The sensation of the earth when plants spring from it and are beamed upon by the astral body is the same as that of animals when they yield their milk. These are not merely comparisons, but are actual facts. Anyone who with clairvoyant vision can see into the astral world still sees nothing of the ego of plants; to do this a higher clairvoyance is required, that by which it is possible to see into the devachanic world.

We can say, therefore, that the group-ego of animals is in the astral world, whereas the ego of plants is in the devachanic world.

The next question that naturally presents itself is: How is it with the mineral world? How is it with so-called lifeless minerals? Have they anything resembling an ego, or some other higher principle? If we observe a stone clairvoyantly we find that in the physical world it has only a physical body; the etheric body of minerals surrounds and envelops this on all sides. Take, for example, a rock crystal; you must imagine this entire form as hollowed out, that it resembles a hollow space, and that only where the physical substance ends does the etheric begin. Just as the upper part of a plant is woven round by the astral, so the mineral is surrounded by the etheric. This etheric is at home in the astral world. Mark this well—we have an etheric that is at home in the astral world.

Things are really more complicated than is generally supposed. It is not the case that in the astral world everything is astral; this is as little the case as that in the physical world everything is physical. For example, in the physical world you have the etheric body, the astral body, and even the ego of man; and the clairvoyant also sees the etheric body of minerals in the astral world.

Now, let us ask: where is the astral body of minerals? This looks like peculiarly formed rays. Picture to yourselves forms of light, or rays, broadening out more and more, and piercing into the etheric body of the mineral. Astral rays stream thus from every mineral. They have no end, but stream out indefinitely into space. When a rock crystal is observed you see first the space which is filled out physically; clairvoyantly you see this physical form surrounded by the light of the etheric body, and this again as if pierced by all kinds of ray-formations which extend endlessly in all directions into space. Vision is led from each point of space that is filled by some substance into the infinite. There is no point of space that is not connected with the Universe, it is as if every single thing in the world hung on thousands and thousands of threads of spiritual light which stretch into infinite space, and you can imagine, if these extended more and more, how they would all ultimately mingle.

In fact, when a mineral is examined clairvoyantly something like the following is presented to view: the physical part is seen rayed round by the light-forms of the etheric body, these rays of light appear to broaden and radiate continually into space till they ultimately disappear as if into a hollow globe. You can think of every mineral as being the centre of such a hollow globe, and that these are present everywhere in the world. These hollow globes interpenetrate each other, and if we can picture clairvoyant power enhanced more and more to where these rays unite we arrive at where the egos of the minerals stream towards us from every direction of space. These egos reveal themselves to clairvoyant capacity when it enters the higher regions of the devachanic plane. Whereas the rays which compose the astral body are in the lower regions, the ego is in the higher devachanic world.

You have here been given a panoramic view of the different kingdoms. The ego of man is on the physical plane, that of animals on the astral plane, that of plants in the lower regions of the devachanic world, and the ego of minerals is in the higher regions of the same world.

Therefore the minerals are in the opposite position to man. Man has his ego within him, it is enclosed within his skin; each human being is a centre in himself, a “man-centre.” Plants form a wider centre; taken together they form an “earth-centre”; and the egos of minerals form the circumference of the earth-sphere. Wherever a man is found the human ego is always the centre; the mineral ego is always in the circumference—exactly the opposite of man. You will now find it comprehensible when I tell you that the mineral soul is in an entirely different position to the human or to the animal soul.

When a mineral is broken up it does not feel pain, on the contrary it feels pleasure, it has a sensation of well-being. Great currents of pleasurable feeling stream forth from a quarry where stones are broken to pieces; on the other hand were you to put all the broken pieces together again it would cause very great pain. The same fact may be observed in another process. Imagine that you have a glass of warm water into which you throw a piece of salt. When the salt dissolves not only does the substance dissolve, but feelings of well-being fill the warm water, feelings of pleasure on the part of the mineral at being dissolved. Again, if you cool the water so that the salt crystallizes, the process is connected with a feeling of pain. Initiates have always known these things and have told them to man; he has but to learn to understand what they say.

One great Initiate spoke about this in a very significant manner.

Let us picture how things were at one time in the earth's development. Today we walk on solid earth, but it was not always thus. When we trace the evolution of the earth backwards we find that it becomes ever softer and softer till at last its condition is fluidic or even vapoury. That which is solid today, namely, the mineral part, has crystallized from out the erstwhile fluidic earth. It had to become solid in order that man might walk upon it. It was necessary for human existence that the earth, as regards its mineral nature, should suffer infinite pain—for infinite pain was connected with the solidification of the earth. Paul said, referring to this: “The whole creation groaneth in pain awaiting the state of adoption,” meaning that the earth has to endure pain in connection with solidification, and formation of the mineral earth, in order that man may be adopted as the child of God.

We need never lose respect for the writings of true Initiates when we come to understand them; every line of the inspired Biblical record fills us with profound awe when we learn its meaning with the help of Spiritual Science. Cosmic secrets are hidden in the saying of Paul quoted above. It is true that such truths as these will only again become fruitful for humanity when they enter into and affect men's feeling. They must not be only comprehended intellectually, but must be embodied in feeling if they are to become true knowledge.

Let us turn now to the consideration of plants; let us think how their physical body grows, how the glow of the astral body surrounds this, and how the ego is in the centre of the earth. Let me point out once more what is essential in this. What does the astral body really do when it develops the flower from outside? It does something of great importance in the life of the plant, and we shall understand this if we go a little more deeply into the spiritual structure of our earth.

In the last lecture we learnt that there was a time when the earth and the sun formed one body. Man was already there though he lived under entirely different conditions from those of today. He possessed a dim clairvoyant consciousness; and his organism was such that he could live in that earth-sun body. Today he is so organized that, when a sunbeam falls on his eye he “sees,” that is, he sees the sunbeam which penetrates to him from outside, and he sees by means of this sunbeam. This was not the case at the time when man was still one with the earth, in the sun. He then saw the sunbeams from within; he saw the soul-forces which permeated the sunbeams. What were these soul-forces? The forces permeating the sunbeams are the same as the forces within our astral bodies. Physical light is but the external body of the astral light which radiates from the sun, and the astrality gleaming about the upper part of the body of a plant is connected inwardly with the astral outpourings coming from the sun. You have wishes and impulses of will, because you possess an astral body. In the case of plants it is desire, feeling, and will that play round the blossoms.

What does that which plays round the plant desire? It desires to absorb the soul of the sunbeam, and with the soul its purest part—its ego; and it is this purest part which passes through the plant to the centre of the earth. The activity of the plant's ego is expressed in the activity of the spiritual content of the sunbeam which passes through it to the centre of the earth. Thus earth, plant, and sun work together. The spiritual powers of the sun are in fact continually being led to the earth. And how? By means of the astral body playing round them; the blossoms, which long to absorb the soul of the sunlight, allow to sink through their bodies into the earth. That which is brought about outwardly in the physical world through the beams of the sun is but one side of its activity; the other works psychically in the plant, which longs for the soul of the light that streams to earth in the rays of the sun.

Let us now try to understand the practical result of these things. Imagine a man of a far distant future who perceives in every plant what I have just told you of its longing to absorb the soul of the sun. This man will have, at a higher spiritual stage, something that the animal has at a lower stage—when grazing in a meadow it chooses the plants that are of use to it and leaves others alone—an unconscious instinct, but really it is higher spirits who guide the animal. The man of the future will approach plants that are of use to him consciously; not as now when he reflects on which yield the best substances for his body; he will then have a vital relationship to every plant, for he will know what it is they have absorbed, and what passes from them to him. Eating will not be to him a mean occupation, but an act consummated with soul and spirit, for he will know that everything he eats is the external form of something spiritual. In our immediate age, when men know little about the vital inward relations between themselves and the world, all kinds of substitutes are made use of. Why have the Initiates of all ages urged people to say grace before eating? The grace should be a token of the recognition that, together with the food, something spiritual enters into man.

We have seen how sensation and feeling alter when man acquires true wisdom. With a certainty as sure as the instinct of animals at a lower stage man will know with shining clearness what he should do; he will know because he will recognize the soul of that which he absorbs into himself. Down to everyday details such as these we can trace the practical value of Spiritual Science for the future.

Thus we can now consider the world with entirely different feelings; for we regard the earth not only as a body shone upon by the rays of the sun, but as a living being which absorbs the soul of the sun through the astral mantle of plants, and we see the entire Universe permeated by the egos of minerals, we see how all these things are ensouled and filled with spirit.

We have now dealt with the four kingdoms of nature, the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms, but the series does not end here; it goes farther. These are only the kingdoms which man can see in his normal development. We have already pointed out, however, that in the Atlantean epoch man was the companion of Beings who as their densest form had only an etheric body. Those figures which have remained as a memory in the legends of various peoples, the figures of Zeus, Apollo, etc., were actual to the ancient Atlanteans; they dwelt with them during sleep. Such Beings were to be found everywhere who had not descended so far as to embodiment in the flesh.

Looking from man upwards to higher kingdoms, we have to begin with three kingdoms which interest us. In accordance with Christian esotericism, we call the kingdom immediately bordering on the human the realm of the Angels; they are also called Spirits of Twilight. Then there is a second kingdom, higher than the Angels, the kingdom of the Archangels; they are also called the Spirits of Fire. Lastly there is a still higher kingdom, that of the Archai (Original Forces or First Beginnings), called also the Spirits of Personality. These are the three kingdoms next above man.

I will try to tell you a little about the life of these kingdoms; they play a very positive part in our life. Just as man plays a part in the life of plants when he tills the ground, so these higher kingdoms influence the human kingdom. We shall best understand this if we consider the following: Man has at the present time an ego, an astral body, an etheric body, and a physical body. How does further development come to pass? Through working continually upon himself. Today the ego of man is still in many respects powerless to affect the other principles of his being, he is in many ways unable to control his passions, but is therefore ruled by them, that is, by his astral body. There is a great difference between human beings in this respect. Compare a savage who eats his fellow men with a European and then think of a high idealist such as Schiller or Francis of Assisi. You see here an advancing development which consists in man learning more and more to control his astral body by his ego. A time will come when the ego will do this completely; it will irradiate the astral body completely. Man will then have formed a higher principle, this principle we call Manas, or Spirit-Self. It is nothing but the astral body, which has been transformed by the ego.

When we observe a man of the present day clairvoyantly we see that his astral body really consists of two parts, namely, the part that is already under the control of the ego and the part he is not yet able to control. This latter is still filled with lower forces and impulses, and when the ego drives these out all kinds of powers are added to the astral body. In order that the astral body should not be destroyed by the lower forces it must always be permeated and suffused by higher beings who control it in the same way that man will control it in the future when he has attained the goal of his evolution. The beings whose task it is to control that part of the astral body which is still uncontrolled by man are one stage higher than he is, they are the Angels, or Spirits of Twilight. In fact one such Spirit watches over every human being, and this Spirit has power over the astral body; it is therefore no childish idea, but profound wisdom, to speak of guardian angels. These guardian angels have a great duty to perform.

Let us consider the course of a human life in its entirety. We know that it passes through many incarnations. At a given time—at a certain point in earthly evolution—man began to live as a soul, as an ego, in his first incarnation on earth. He then died, there was an interval, then a new incarnation, and so it has gone on from incarnation to incarnation; and these will only come to an end at a far-off period of human evolution. Man will then have passed through all his incarnations, and he will also have attained power to control his astral body perfectly. This can not be done till he has passed through all his incarnations, at least not in normal evolution.

Now, an Angel accompanies the inmost part of man's being and guides him from incarnation to incarnation, so that he may truly fulfil his mission on earth. It is, in fact, as if the human being had been able, since the beginning of his life on earth, to look up to an exalted Spirit who was his prototype, who could completely control his astral body, and who said to him: “Thou must be like unto me when in future thou passest out of this earthly evolution.” It is the task of Angels to guide the incarnations of men and whether we say that he looks up to his higher self, whom he must come to resemble more and more, or that he looks up to his Angel as his great pattern, it is exactly the same in a spiritual sense.

As man works further upon himself he will transform the etheric body into Buddhi, or Life Spirit; one day he will do this consciously, even now he is working on it unconsciously. So even higher Spiritual Beings have to work today in all human etheric bodies; this is the task of the Fire Spirits. Now, human etheric bodies are not individually so different as are human astral bodies. Every man has his own particular virtue or vice, but in things connected with the etheric body there is a certain similarity. This can be seen in the qualities peculiar to a race or nation. Because of this we see that each individual human being does not have an Archangel in connection with his etheric body, but that whole nations and races are guided by higher or lower Spirits of Fire. The peoples and races of the earth are indeed guided as a whole by Archangels. Here our view expands to something which to many persons is entirely abstract, but for those who are able to see into the Spiritual world it is entirely concrete. If anyone today mentions a national spirit, or a national-soul, this is considered an abstraction. It is not so to the occult observer. To him the whole nation is as if embedded in Spiritual substance and this Spiritual substance is the body of a Fire-Spirit. From hoary antiquity until now our evolution has been led and guided from people to people, from race to race, by the Spirits of Fire, whose bodies are the souls of nations, and whose mission it is to guide the course of human evolution through the various races of the earth.

There is, however, something else which is independent of tribe, nation, and race. In studying our present age we find much that is independent of such communities, yet that manifests itself simultaneously in many. For example, if we look back to the twelfth century we see how certain similar spiritual tendencies occurred in all the peoples of Europe, something that goes beyond the national-spirit. A word has been coined for this, it has been called the “Spirit of the Age.” This Spirit of the Age really exists, it forms the body for still Higher Beings, namely, the Spirits of Personality, or Archai.

From all that has been said you can see that our earth is embedded in a spiritual atmosphere. From a mineral foundation plants spring forth, and animals and human beings walk on it; enveloping all this are exalted Spiritual Beings who guide individual men, and other spirits who are the leaders of communities of people and races; and, further, there are other Beings who guide the “Spirit of each Age” over from one epoch to another.

In this lecture we have tried to give a panoramic view of our earth, of what it is also in a spiritual sense, and of man's connection with it all. At the same time a foundation has been laid on which we can build usefully what we have to say in the following lectures on the relationship between Universe, Earth, and Man.

The Outer Manifestations of Spiritual Beings in the Elements. Their connection with Man. Cosmic partitions. The Myth of Osiris.

In our last lecture we spoke of various Spiritual Beings who supplement the different Kingdoms of nature that surround us in the physical world. We learnt that minerals and plants have an ego as well as an astral body; and our Spiritual view was enlarged to include a plenitude of realities besides those that our physical eyes can see and that can be comprehended by means of our physical intellect. We learnt, further, that high Spiritual Beings take part in man's evolution on earth; and that as regards individual men a yet higher grade of being takes a hand in this.

Spiritual Science maintains that each separate human being is complete ruler over his inner world, the world of his deeds, and of his will, between birth and death; but we know that the essential inner being of man has passed through many incarnations, and that in his present normal development man is incapable of working beyond one incarnation. Higher powers must co-operate to give the directing force necessary which is able to work, not only between birth and death, but also beyond death, from one incarnation to another. In Christian esotericism these Spiritual Beings are called Angels, and in Anthroposophical parlance Spirits of Twilight; they may also in accordance with Rosicrucian occultism be called the Sons of Life—all these designations will become clearer to you later. We also heard how communities of men—races and peoples—are guided by an order of Spirits called Archangels, or Fire Spirits; and, lastly, how that which goes beyond the limits of a community of people—that which finds expression in the “Spirit of the Age,” or Zeitgeist—is guided by the Archai, also called Spirits of Personality or Original Forces, or, in Theosophical parlance, Asuras. Spiritual Beings are at work everywhere in the world, and we must realize that three more kingdoms have to be added to those immediately around us. We will now try to give some idea of how it is with the more external manifestations of these Beings.

When we consider the earth from the ordinary physical standpoint we see it is made up of what we call earth, water, air, and fire. These are the four primary conditions of external matter. That to which Spiritual Science gives the name of “earth” is called “solid”; everything fluid (not only water but quicksilver, for instance) is called “water”; everything in the shape of gas, “air”; everything that can be perceived as having any degree of warmth is thought of as permeated with a finer substance, this we call “substantial warmth.”

Now the Spiritual Beings of whom we have spoken live in these various material elements, as if in external bodies. To anyone able to observe the world with clairvoyant vision that which is known as the fluidic element, especially water, is not only inhabited by the Beings we know as aquatic creatures, such as fish, but, in spite of the ever-changing substance, in spite of the fact that no solid form endures in this watery element, Spiritual Beings live in it, and are actually embodied in it in continually changing forms, although it is not possible to distinguish them with external vision. In this element live the Beings whom we have described as Angels, or Spirits of Twilight. Their physical body is in a form not represented by any solid, clearly defined corporation; and when old myths and legends tell of such water-beings it is no phantasy, but is entirely in accordance with reality.

Further, in that which we know as “air,” and particularly in our air, those Beings live whom we called Archangels. It is no fairy tale when in streaming currents of air, in the rushing storm, we see the bodily manifestation of this Spiritual Kingdom. (When I said that Angelic Beings dwelt in water it is preferably that form of water which permeates the air as watery vapour—fugitive and fleeting and dispersed in separate atoms, but in which clairvoyant vision sees the embodiment of Angels.)

In that which we know as warmth we have the embodiment of Beings known as the Spirits of Personality or Archai. As man is made up of these four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, he has mingled within him not only the four elements, but also the Beings we have just named; they fill his body to a certain extent, they pass in and out of his physical body just as material substances do.

The series of Beings connected with man is not exhausted with those I have mentioned. Still higher Beings have to do with the earth, the universe, and man, Beings who are at a higher stage even than the Spirits of Personality. There are Beings, for example, who stream towards us in the light for light to us is a still finer condition than warmth. Wherever there is anything that sends forth light we recognize in this light the garment of exalted Beings, those to whom Christian esotericism gives the name of Exusiai, or Powers, or Spirits of Form. It is they who give form to everything around us. Wherever things are seen with a distinct form this is due to the activity of these Spirits.

We now see that what is active in the evolution of our earth as the “Spirits of the different Ages, or Zeitgeists,” is controlled by the Spirits of Personality. The task of the Spirits of Form is still higher. We shall best understand what this is if we reflect that from the beginning of human evolution, that is, from the time when man experienced his first incarnation, the “Zeitgeist” has continually changed, that from among the many Spirits of Personality different ones have been the directors of succeeding ages; but beyond all that is accomplished by the “Zeitgeist” something else is active which goes through the whole of' earthly humanity. Since the mission of mankind first began on earth, Spiritual Beings have taken part in work upon humanity, and it is they we have to thank for the fact that we can be active as human beings. As if from a higher kingdom, the Spirits of Form have ruled from the beginning of the earth over that which appeared as the Spirits of Personality in the Zeitgeist; as Archangels in separate communities; and as Angels in regard to individual men; they are the principal guides and directors of all these Spiritual Beings. These Spirits of Form have the task of working on the earth as a whole, theirs is a planetary activity. Therefore when we go beyond the “Zeitgeist” to the Spirit of the whole of humanity we encounter the Spirits of Form.

Now you are aware that our earth, as a planet, is under the law of re-embodiment, just as man is. Previous to its present embodiment our earth was what is called the ancient Moon. What we now regard as the mission of the earth did not then exist. The mission of the Moon was different; each planetary condition has its own mission to fulfil within the mighty whole; nothing is repeated, everything is under the law of evolution. During that incarnation of the earth which we call Ancient Moon certain Beings had a duty similar to that of the Spirits of Form on the earth, and these are called, according to Christian esotericism, Spirits of Motion, or Virtues, or Dynamis.

If we go back still further in evolution we arrive at a planetary condition of our earth which preceded that of the Ancient Moon; this is, the Ancient Sun condition, which as you are aware has nothing to do with the globe we now see in the heavens as the sun. A very exalted principle ruled upon the Ancient Sun, as the Spirits of Form rule upon the earth, and as the Spirits of Motion ruled upon the Moon, this principle is named in Christian esotericism the hierarchy of the Spirits of Wisdom, called also Kyriotes, or Dominions. These Beings were in command during the Sun condition. We now come to a still earlier planetary condition, that of ancient Saturn and the Beings who at that time superintended the guidance of the world we call the Thrones, or Spirits of Will.

Thus we pass to greater and ever greater grades of' Spiritual Beings, to Beings who are not merely directors of something that changes—like the “Zeitgeist”—but who are concerned with the mission of planetary conditions that change only from planet to planet such as the Thrones, the Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form. All these Hierarchies are continually in some sort of connection with us, although not in such close, directly perceptible connection as the lower Hierarchies. We will try by an example to show how these work into our earthly evolution, but in order to do this it will be necessary first to consider the evolution of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai.

These Beings are all greater than the man of today, but in the next incarnation of the Earth, which we call the Jupiter condition, he will be as great as the Angels are now; and he will continually expand to ever greater degrees of perfection. This is also the case as regards the evolution of the other Beings; they were not always what they are now, they also have passed through lower stages of development.

Take for example the Angels. In earlier times these passed through their human stage as we are now doing on earth; this was on the Ancient Moon, and it was because of the work they carried out upon themselves at that time that they have become the higher Beings they are now. In the same way Archangels passed through their human stage on the Ancient Sun; at that time they were Beings like us; today they have advanced two stages above us. The Archai had their human stage upon Ancient Saturn. They were one stage higher than the Beings who passed through their humanity on the Sun, and about three stages higher than man is today. But those Beings whom we call the Spirits of Form, whom we look up to and reverence as very exalted Beings, passed through their human stage in a past that it is impossible for us to conceive of. When the embodiment of the earth first began, when the earth was Saturn, they had already left their human evolution behind them.

What exaltation must fill our souls when we look in thought up to these Beings! But even they are under the law of evolution, and although on Saturn they were greater than the humanity of today, they rose through ever higher and higher stages of development during the Sun and Moon periods, and on to the time of the Earth, till at last they have attained to such a degree of expansion and have so large a field of activity that they no longer have need of a planet in order, on it, to find the substances through which they can exist.

Other Beings have need of our earth in a certain way; the Angels have need of water, the Archangels of air, and the Spirits of Personality of fire; but the Spirits of Form no longer require our planetary conditions, hence it was necessary for them, when our earth began its development, to find another dwelling-place, and that was why they separated from it. It was no merely mechanical splitting asunder of matter, but heavenly bodies separated off from each other in order to provide a dwelling place for Spiritual Beings.

Spirits of Form tore from the earth its finer substances; in this way the sun originated and now sends its light down to the earth from outside. In the sunlight the spiritual nature of the Spirits of Form streams down to us, hence I said that light is the garment of these Spirits. When we see the bright light of the sun streaming down to us we see in it the garment of these Spirits who send their guiding and directing forces to the earth from the sun, thus controlling the mission of the earth.

We have to think of the Ancient Moon as a heavenly body similar to our earth, that towards the end passed through a spiritualizing process. That which had been split asunder was blended once more, and converted into an undifferentiated condition. It then passed through a kind of cosmic sleep after which there emerged from the womb of the cosmos that nebulous etheric sphere which is the re-birth of the Ancient Moon. For us this is no material mass, but within this globe dwell all those mighty Beings whom we have designated as the Spirits of Motion, of Form, etc. Only the germ of man dwelt in this globe, as yet he had no ego; but all those Spiritual Beings who already had a certain degree of development behind them were intimately connected with this nebula.

How does the materialistic hypothesis explain the rise of the solar system from out this nebulous mass? There is an experiment frequently made in schools to demonstrate the course of this development. A small quantity of oil is placed in the middle of a heavier liquid and rotated by some simple mechanical device. It can then be observed how this globule becomes oblate, how drops break from it, how these form again into globes and circle round the larger globule; by this means we see, in small, how something resembling a planetary system originates through rotation. This acts most suggestively. Why should we not imagine that the same thing took place with the world? We can see demonstrated before us how, through rotation, the planetary system originates, we have it before our eyes. Only one thing is forgotten! Sometimes it is good to forget this one thing, but not in this case; here one has forgotten oneself! In this experiment, if there is no person there to rotate the axis no planetary system can be produced. If one thought rightly and logically one would have to suppose a gigantic human being in cosmic space who set the axis in motion like a mighty spit! Now it is obvious that there is no giant in space; but something else is there, the nebula is not merely matter, it is inspired and permeated by the Beings we have already mentioned who have certain requirements and aspirations.

One kind of these Beings animated one kind of' matter, and others another, and it was these who, when a certain degree of maturity had been reached, undertook to bring about separation, so that the higher beings went forth with the sun, and those who had need of earthly materials and forces remained behind upon the earth. Within this seething primeval body all these Spiritual Beings were active and they gradually formed that which today we know as our planetary system.

There were some, for example, who had not quite attained the goal which was that of the Spirits of Form; they were backward in their development. These Beings had progressed too far to make of the earth their dwelling-place, but were not sufficiently mature to go along with the finer substances to the sun. There were two principal classes of these Beings, and we shall later become acquainted with their effect upon the earth. For in the same way that the perfected and matured Powers shone in the sunlight upon the earth as Spirits of Form, and guided it from the sun, so did these intermediate Beings also direct the earth, but from a smaller horizon as it were, which was, however, an exalted one compared with the human standpoint. It was in this way that Venus and Mercury originated between the sun and the earth; these are inhabited by beings who are at an intermediate stage. The other planets of our system have separated off in the same way through other Beings having need of them as a field of activity.

Now let us again call to mind the time (in the Earthly period) when the sun went forth with its Beings; the earth remaining behind with all its potentialities, present humanity among them, who had not then reached their present stage. There were also other Beings belonging to the animal and vegetable kingdoms that had already gone through a certain amount of development in the previous embodiments of the earth, and these now reappeared germinally.

Let us to begin with consider man alone. Previous to this, when the sun was still one with the earth, mighty forces which proceeded from exalted sun beings were united with the earth, and worked upon man from within it. At first man was just as he came from the Old Moon, he had only just evolved from the seed, as one might say, and was to begin with furnished only with a physical, etheric, and astral body. The physical body was not so dense as it is now, it was more etheric and finer, and the ego was not yet formed.

Now, through the sun shining upon the earth from outside, and the sun-beings also working on it from outside, conditions on earth became completely changed. You can think of it in this way: as long as the earth was bound up with the sun, exalted Beings (who later went forth with it) were hampered in their own development, hence also in their powers, and power to govern—by the gross forces of the earth. But now that they had become free they could continue their evolution at a quite different rate from before, when they had to carry the very heavy weight of the earth mass with them. They freed themselves from the earth as regards their own evolution, and thus gained power to work on man more strongly from outside. Evolution would have been enormously accelerated through this, and human life would have been brought to an issue with extreme rapidity, if something else had not taken place. Man was unable to proceed at this rate of development, therefore from the totality of Spirits who existed previously, one, with his hosts, separated from the rest, and remained united with the earth.

The task of this Spirit of Form was to hold back and limit that which the sun forces had accomplished with their enormous acceleration, so that these sun Spirits did not work alone. If this Spirit of Form had remained connected with the earth and continued to work there, the whole earth would have grown stiff and hard, his influence would have been too powerful; therefore he took the grossest materials and forces and led them out of the earth; that which he thus led out of the earth constitutes our present moon. So this Spirit which had undertaken the duty of retarding and holding back the too-rapid development of humanity was now united with the moon.

Evolution went on the earth-beings and the moon-beings had separated. At this time the earth-beings came principally under the influence of two forces, one proceeding from the sun, the other from the moon. If man had come merely under the influence of the sun forces he would soon have grown old, almost as soon as he was born; whereas, under the influence of the moon alone he would have stiffened, become hard, and mummified. He could only develop rightly through the sun and the moon forces being balanced; he was placed upon the earth and, in a spiritual sense, beings and forces acted on him from outside in order that he might pass through his present evolution.

We have seen how man is led from incarnation to incarnation by the Beings we call Angels; but these Angels have no independence in the vast cosmos, they have higher directors who are the dwellers on the sun. Under the sole influence of these Sun Spirits all man's development would have been compressed into one incarnation; whereas under the influence of the moon alone nothing at all would have taken place. Through the co-operation of these two sets of Beings, that which gives man form he receives from the moon forces, that which destroys form and leads the eternal part of him through his various incarnations he receives from the sun. Thus if we do but consider it all spiritually we see that everything in the world has its appointed task.

We shall now consider for a short time somewhat more concretely what took place at that time upon the earth. We know that when man came over from the ancient Moon he possessed only his physical body, etheric body, and astral body. At the time of the separation of the sun the physical body had not progressed far enough for the sense organs to be able to perceive external objects. These had existed indeed from the time of Saturn, but man could not perceive external objects by them. Upon the ancient Moon man possessed organs which evoked pictures within him. The position at that time was approximately as follows. Imagine that one human being approached another, he could not have perceived the other's external form, but a kind of dream picture would rise within him; and by the form and colour of the picture he knew that an enemy drew near, and that he must flee from him. This was picture consciousness, and had a real relationship to the soul qualities of the Beings in a man's vicinity.

Objective consciousness only came to man gradually on earth. Though the sun as heavenly body was outside the earth, man could not at first see it, he perceived it only in pictures through an inner light. It is true that he did see in a certain sense, in a spiritually psychic way, the beneficial activities sent down to him by the Spirits of the Sun—he perceived these radiating in auric pictures, but they had nothing to do with present sense perception. Thus there was a time when the sun forces sent their light to man, although he could not see the external sun.

The separation of the moon from the earth took place somewhat later, and it was only at the stage of the moon's withdrawal that man was capable of acquiring the very first rudiments of an ego-consciousness, he only then began to feel himself as a separate being; with this came also the power to perceive the first faint loom of physical objects. You can easily understand that sight is connected with ego-consciousness, for as long as one cannot perceive an outer world one is not an ego. Therefore the first flash of ego-consciousness coincided with the first opening of man's eyes to external objects. This was connected also with the going forth of the moon. Previously, when the moon was still one with the earth, it directed the forces of growth of the individual between birth and death—it does so still, but now from outside. But in order that the life of man should not be shut in between birth and death, other forces had to approach him from outside; these were the sun forces. A continual interaction between the moon forces working from within, and the sun forces working from without, was associated with earthly development.

Try to picture vividly and exactly what happened next. So long as the sun was outside, but the moon still within the earth, man perceived the beneficial effect of the sun forces in inward pictures; he sensed the virtue of the sun forces, for these were always associated with the moon forces within the earth-body, and had an effect upon man's constitution although he could not see them. Then came the time when the moon also went forth from the earth. Man's senses were opened, and because of this he lost the power to perceive the soul and spirit part of the sun forces. Imagine the moment when Spiritual perception disappeared and the first beginnings of actual sight with an outer view of the sun began, although in fact man could not yet see the sun, for the earth was covered with dense vapour. As against his former dim clairvoyant perception, man was now able—if only gradually—to see the sun externally, although it was veiled by the density of the atmosphere. The beneficent effects of the sun were now withdrawn from man because of the advance in his development.

When the ancient Egyptian priests remembered this condition they gave the name of Osiris to the forces of the sun, those pure rays which man had perceived at one time through his dim clairvoyance. He now perceived Osiris no longer, and because of the cloudy envelope surrounding the earth external perception of the sun was not yet possible; what man had previously seen was dead. “Typhon the opposer had killed Osiris,” they said, and the forces which were active between birth and death, and as moon had left the earth, now sought that ancient Osiris with longing.

Slowly and gradually the mist receded—it had endured for very, very long periods, even down to the latter part of the Atlantean epoch; men now began to see the sun, but not as previously when all mankind had a common consciousness, the rays of the sun now fell on each individual eye when men gazed on the sun: “the dismembered Osiris.”

We are here concerned with a mighty cosmic event and when we were incarnated as ancient Egyptians we recognized a repetition of this cosmic event. The wise Egyptian priests had this in mind, and they described it pictorially as follows they said, “At the time the moon and the sun went forth from the earth man remained in the middle, balanced between the solar and lunar forces.” Up to that time there had been no sexual reproduction, there was what might be called virginal reproduction. The forces which ruled our earth passed over from the sign of the Virgin, through the Balance, into the sign of the Scorpion. Therefore the priests of Egypt said: “When the sun was in the sign of the Scorpion, and the earth in the Balance, his rays acted like a sting, stinging the sense organs to activity; thus Osiris was slain.” The emergence of external objectivity is the sting of the Scorpion, and came as something new; it was in contradistinction to the old virginal reproduction.

Then began the search, the longing of humanity for its ancient power, for the vision of Osiris.

We must not look merely for astronomical facts in such a myth as the myth of Osiris, but we must see in it the result of the deep clairvoyant insight of the wise priests of ancient Egypt. They embodied in this myth what they knew concerning the evolution of earth and man.

Actual facts concerning the higher Spiritual Worlds lie at the foundation of all myths, and today we have shown how such facts form the basis of the myth of Osiris.

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