The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The legend of Judas indicates that an old descending spiritual current is joining forces with a new ascending one. Everything should become new from the moment when the Christ event made an impression on the naive soul, except for those who had ascended to a certain degree of initiation. The effect of the latter on those who had been initiated in the sense of the old schooling is made clear to us by the conversation with Nicodemus. By night - the trivial interpretation is not enough here; [but Nicodemus was] one of those who had come a certain way: through his clairvoyance he could come by night; through the power of clairvoyance Nicodemus stood before Christ Jesus by virtue of the gifts which Nicodemus already had. But Christ also had something to say to this Jewish initiate: that the old initiation was not enough and that something new had to come: If you are not born again of spirit and water. - If he does not experience a renewed opening of his spiritual senses, he cannot come to the spirit. — Not only the others, but you too must be born again.

For before, rebirth was not experienced as it would be in the future. The I clouded, it dawned in the old Egyptian initiation. Likewise, the one who came through ecstasy behind the veil of the sense world had to lose his I. Now man is to learn to find his way in the spiritual world without losing his I. Therefore Jesus says: He who is initiated in the same way as you, hears the spirit going there, but he does not know where it comes from. So Christ testifies that Nicodemus can perceive the spirit, but does not know where it comes from, because he cannot retain his ego. So something completely new had to come for the initiate as well.

This is the essential thing that confronts us in these first chapters of the Gospel of John. The modern man finds miracles in the gospel that do not follow [today's] natural laws. This view can only be held by someone who believes that the world has always looked the same as it does today. Our soul has lost clairvoyant gifts in order to conquer self-awareness in the time leading up to the ascent into future clairvoyance. Because people used to be clairvoyant, the soul could have a more direct and immediate effect on the soul. Today it can do so through the word. Those who develop through the methods of living themselves into spiritual worlds must, in order to be understood, seek and find receptivity in the other, and today this is found through the word.

This was not the case in ancient Persian and Egyptian times. A wish that one experienced had an effect on the soul of the other, and the soul had a stronger power over the body. By influencing through the will, namely through pictorial imagination, one could have a healing effect on the other person.

Therefore, when Christ appeared, people were not surprised that healing could take place through psychic influence. The most important thing for those around Him, including the unbelievers and the rulers in Palestine, was not that Christ worked miracles, but something else. What was it like in the old initiation? The dim old clairvoyance could work by looking; but it could not get to a point; not to the center of the I, because the I, the self-consciousness in this highest sense, had only come into the world through Christ. So: He saw into the I, the innermost part of the human spirit, from I to I, not [only] from soul to soul could He work.

At best, ancient clairvoyance was able to look into the soul of another if there was a blood relationship. The Christ looked into the other, the stranger. The conversation with the Samaritan woman is an example of this fact. How does she recognize that he is the one who is supposed to come? Not allegorical interpretations are the essence of such a story. She says: I believe him because he has seen my most intimate heart affairs, [because he] has penetrated into my very self.

What does it depend on? All ancient initiation was a popular initiation, so everything that was connected with the people was familiar. In Christ, we have the impulse that has gone beyond all barriers into the human being. The most individual is at the same time the most generally human. Christ went right into the most intimate part of the human being; his spiritual power was so strong because it went right into the ego. The others could heal the members of their own people. Christ heals the stranger, works beyond the barrier of the people. [Let us take as an example the] healing of the captain's son. Because the father has that impression of the soul that goes to the very core, this healing power works at a distance.

That which works in the innermost human being from incarnation to incarnation is what is connected with human well-being, with health and illness. Beyond the individual incarnation, that brings to expression in the body the moral qualities of the soul. He who only saw the soul could only grasp what was of a spiritual nature in the present incarnation, but not what concerned karma. Christ sees right into karma through the I and can say: Your sins are forgiven you. He does not only work in the feelings, but right into that center of the human being where karma lives itself out. That is an intensification.

One thing emerges from the stories of the Gospel of John: the Christ had to bring something to consciousness in order to be able to work anew. At the wedding at Cana, for example, it is the bond with His mother. Something else happens during the healing of the son of King Herod and the sick man of Bethesda. This is the bond that connects Him in His I with the I of every human being. This became conscious to Him in His conversation with the Samaritan woman.

The Gospel of John shows us in a powerful way how Christ grows. This is the artistically accomplished part of the structure of the Gospel of John. And now we see how John the Baptist speaks of Christ. He is supposed to say what kind of spirit lives in the Christ... He compares it to the spirit in the ancient initiations. This spirit has previously spoken “according to measure,” but now it does not - what is this? In the past, the initiate had to use a meter; he had to work in a mantric measure; this stimulated the soul of the other person. Now the spirit is to work directly, not according to an external syllabic measure. So here, too, we are given a hint of how the I of the Christ is to unfold in its direct divine activity.

That which can be taught about the Christ should be gradually absorbed by people, so that they educate themselves spiritually: First there was the I, which shows us how we should become. If we have applied each incarnation in the Christian sense, we will have been permeated by the goal of evolution on Earth. An impulse from the I, from the innermost center, will pass over to the innermost center of the other. Thus brotherhood will be achieved through the power of Christ. Therefore it is shown how the spirit takes the place of what previously only matter could do.

I am the bread of life. Taken symbolically on the outside: in the ancient Egyptian mysteries, it was known that bread was a symbol of wisdom; the real inner meaning: the I developed to the highest degree of strength should take the place of material activity. This was to be demonstrated in a great deed, in the feeding of the five thousand. It is said: When the loaves and fishes were brought to Christ, he blessed them – that is, he united them with his spirit – the spirit took effect in place of matter. The spirit brought about what otherwise matter brings about. They had been filled. With what? I am the bread of life, says Christ. The body of Jesus, as it gradually died, could overflow its powers through sacrifice.

From the center into the material existence, Christ Jesus could work. The effect of the body of Christ Jesus is eaten by the five thousand. In the mystery language, the body of man is divided into twelve members, which correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac: forehead - Aries, neck - Taurus, hands - Gemini, breastplate - Cancer, and so on.

What the people around had enjoyed was connected to the body of Christ; therefore twelve baskets were collected. It is a real event that the spirit had a physical effect, that of being filled; and through this the people around were imbued with the spirit and clairvoyantly saw the twelve parts of Jesus at that moment.

Thus, in these narratives, we always find a transition from the physical to the clairvoyant.

So we have an intensification in the fourth sign and also in the fifth sign. The writer of the Gospel of John describes the events so that we can take his words quite literally. But modern headlines are often wrong. It does not say “Jesus walks on the sea,” but that the disciples “saw how he walked.” The fact that he worked across, was really with them where they felt abandoned, was spiritually real with them, is hinted at. [Where his physical body was is never mentioned. This is also of no importance. The important thing was that he was with them in their need in his astral body, although he was absent with his physical body. And in this way we also always have Christ with us. - “I am with you always.”

Thus we can always experience Christ when we ascend to the spirit. He had emerged with His spirit and was with the disciples, overcoming space and time through the strong power of the ego.

The author of the Gospel of John describes how [one's own] consciousness in Christ is always increasing. How does man attain that power of love that enables him to work across? By increasing to the highest degree what is indicated to us in the discourses on judging. He never wants to let this self work, but only the great laws of the cosmic Father.

By killing his own fatherliness, his physical body, he attains to the Cosmic Father. This ascent is described to us in our own consciousness to an especially high degree in a powerful scene: an adulteress is brought before him. To understand the teaching of karma means to know that even the smallest thing we do finds expression in our life account. We only need to stand aside, then it takes effect by virtue of its own laws. The Christ does it... He sees what she has in her life account, but he does not judge. He writes on the earth what he has seen because the karma of man is working through the earth evolution. He says, “Leave the compensation to the earth evolution.” Thus, in this scene of judgment, the Christ extinguishes his own will and lets the Father work. In this way, He has the strength to transfer His ego power to the other person in such a way that it can change the other person's feelings. In this way, He makes Himself into someone who does not close anything off in Himself, but radiates everything into others.

Through this sacrifice, what humanity had done badly to itself is made good. It had worked into the inner being, striving into the ego, but had not yet had the opportunity to radiate its essence. The divinely radiating essence is light. “I am the light of the world.” Because he is this radiating light, he can help those who have become blind through karma, [thereby he can] work on such sufferings that the ego has brought with it from previous incarnations through its actions. [Jesus saw that at that moment the man's karma had expired and that he could see again, and he understood that by healing him, he was doing the will of the one whose instrument he was. But to give sight to a person who should not have it would not have been a good work.] He must work in such a way that his work is an expression of the divine work of the Father principle that permeates the cosmos. Christ does not want to work on his own initiative. Therefore, he works in the sense of karma. His presence brings about what happens in the sense of world justice.

The highest intensification is found where he lets his I pass over into the physical body of another, where he says, “I am the life.” Lazarus must become one in whom the I of Christ itself lives. Therefore, he has set up a new initiation in place of the old one. The last act of the old initiation was a letharic state of three and a half days... Hierophant awakened... [The last act of the initiation consisted of the initiate spending three and a half days in a cataleptic sleep, during which time the etheric and astral bodies were freed from the physical body. After that, the hierophant called him back to life, and he then became a teacher and a proclaimer of spiritual things, now that he could speak from his own experience. This took place in a crypt inside the temple and was done in secret. Now this resurrection took place before the whole world. Jesus loved the family in Bethany and often stayed there. He had brought Lazarus to the point that, according to the old initiation, only the last act was missing.

In Lazarus - the disciple whom Jesus loved - we are shown how, through the power of the presence of Christ Jesus, a keystone was to be laid for the old initiation; but the new one was to follow; after three and a half days, through Christ, the “I am” was to be awakened in Lazarus. Not the spiritual world in the old way, but as it lived in the spirit of Christ, the I-ness of Christ, perfected Atma, Budhi and Manas.... and what had flowed into him from higher worlds like an avatar. The world that lived in him was to shine forth as wisdom in Lazarus. So that Lazarus was imbued with the highest wisdom from the Christ himself through this initiation. He knew the mysteries through the Christ himself, and so he could share all the mysteries of the Christ event.

[In the Gospel of John, the name of the author is never mentioned. But when, at the end of the same, the author is spoken of, he is called “the disciple whom Jesus loved” – that is, he is referred to by the same expression that was always used for Lazarus before.]

He is John, the one who proclaimed the mysteries of the Christ Himself. Therefore, John is never mentioned before, just like Lazarus himself. The Lord loved him so much.

This is how Christ Jesus initiated the one who then became his proclaimer to the world.

It will be my task to-day to blend into a sort of picture, though naturally only a sketchy one, our reflections of the last few days regarding “occult physiology,” in which the endeavour has been made to present (though in part likewise only sketchily) much that pertains to the processes of the human organisation. Through this picture it will be possible for us to have a vision of the quickening life which weaves and works throughout the human organisation. Here again our best procedure will be to start from the most common and everyday side, the reciprocal relationship between the human organisation and the outer world, our earth, in the process of taking in nutritive substances.

It is these substances, as we know, after they have been taken in and have passed through various stages of change, that are conveyed through the most diverse actions of the organs to the separate members of the human organisation, to all the individual systems constituting the physical being of man. Indeed it requires no special effort to see that, fundamentally considered, what the human organism succeeds in doing with the nutritive substances is what really makes the human being into the physical man as he stands before us in the physical world. To be sure, there is a certain difficulty in taking such a view. But anyone who is serious about the principles that have here been applied in our reflections regarding the human being, must say to himself that everything else to be considered in connection with the human organisation, apart from this impressing of nutritive substances into the organism, is, fundamentally viewed, something super-sensible, invisible, the actions of hidden force. If you banish from your mind for a moment everything by way of nutritive substances which fills out the human organism, you retain as a physical organisation even less than a mere physical sack, if I may be permitted this trivial expression; indeed, you retain nothing whatever of a physical character. For even what exists in the form of skin and outer covering exists solely by reason of the fact that nutritive substances have been driven to particular areas of action of super-sensible forces. Cancel then from your reckoning the nutritive substances and what is produced out of them, and you have to conceive the human organism as a system of super-sensible forces working behind it in such a way that these same nutritive substances may be conveyed in all directions.

If you hold to this thought you will see that one thing must be presupposed before any nutritive substance whatever, even the tiniest particle, is taken in; for these substances could not be taken in from the outer world in just any chance form and conveyed into just any being, in order that those processes should occur which do occur in the human organism. It must be, then, that this human organism confronts the very first nutritive substances taken in with an inner co-ordination of forces coming from the spiritual worlds; the organism must really be “man,” as such, in this inner co-ordination of forces. In all occultism, this which first confronts the purely physical matter that is to fill out the human being and which must, therefore, always be conceived supersensibly) is called, in the most comprehensive sense of the expression, “the human form.” If, therefore, you descend to the nethermost boundary of the human organisation, you have to conceive the primary super-sensible human form which, as a force-system born out of the super-sensible worlds, is destined, not like a sack or a physical bag but as something superphysical, super-sensible, to take in what alone renders possible the physical-sensible manifestation of the human being. Only by reason of the fact that this super-sensible form incorporates the nutritive matter does the human organism become a physical-sensible organism, something that our eyes can behold and our hands can grasp. That which thus confronts the external nutritive substances is called “form” in accordance with the law that is operative throughout the whole of nature, an identical law termed the “principle of form.” Even though you descend to the crystal, you find that the substances which enter into it, if they are to become what is manifest as the crystal, must be seized as it were by form-principles, which in this case are the principles of crystallisation. Take for example kitchen salt or sodium chloride: here you have, according to our present-day physics, the physical substances chlorine and sodium, a gas and a mineral. You will readily see that these two substances, prior to their entrance into the entity which lays hold upon them in such a way that, in their chemical union, they appear crystallised into a cube, have nothing in them that can indicate to us such a form-principle. Before they enter into this form-principle they possess nothing in common, but they are seized upon and yoked together by this form-principle and there is then produced this physical body, kitchen salt. They presuppose this, we may say. And so everything which enters into the human organism as nutritive substance presupposes the nethermost of super-sensible being, the super-sensible form.

Now, when the nutritive substances enter into that sphere which, by means of this form-principle, is externally bounded as the human being, they are first taken in by the alimentary canal. When they are thus taken in, from the moment they enter the mouth, one might say, they at once undergo the very first change, indeed the alimentary canal itself causes a metamorphosis. This could not be produced if there were not present as an integral part of the human organism, something which would so metamorphose these nutritive substances—entirely neutral in relation to each other when first taken in and possessing no living inter-relationship—that they are evoked into life. We must think of the metamorphosis of the nutritive substances in their passage through the human alimentary canal as similar to that of plants when they take their nutritive substances from the soil, although, of course, the process is quite different in the human being because it takes place at a different stage. We must picture to ourselves a nutritional stream, taken in by the life-process, or, as we say in occultism, by the ether-body. The moment the nutritive substances enter the human organism they are worked over by the ether-body: that is, the ether-body first provides for their metamorphosis, for their being made a component part of the inner vital activities of the organism. We thus have to look upon this nearest super-sensible member of the human being, the ether-body, as the stimulator of the first process of metamorphosis in the nutritive substances. After these substances are sufficiently metamorphosed to have been taken up into the life-process, we must understand clearly that they are still further worked over—in just that sense, and in the same way, which we have described in the preceding lectures. They must be still further adapted to the human organism, be so worked over that they are able little by little to serve those organs which are the manifestation of the higher super-sensible principles, the astral body and the ego. In short, the work of the higher processes clearly is to send their own peculiar kind of inner vital activity down as far as these metamorphosed nutritive substances as they are when they have come through the oesophagus, the stomach, the intestines, etc. At this point the nutritional stream, in so far as it has been metamorphosed by the alimentary canal alone, is confronted by those seven inner organs already known to us which represent, as we say, the inner cosmic system of man. To sum up, the nutritive substances are taken in, at once metamorphosed in the most diverse ways in the alimentary canal, and then confronted by the liver, kidneys, gall-bladder, spleen, heart, lungs, etc.

If we further understand that these organs are designed through their corresponding force-systems to work further over the nutritive substances, we may say with regard to the meaning of this metamorphosis that, if the nutritional stream were worked over only to the extent to which this occurs in the alimentary canal, man would have to lead a plant existence; for he would not have attained to the formation of such organs in the physical world as could become the instruments of his higher capacities. Thus the seven organs further metamorphose the nutritional stream, and what they do is prevented by the sympathetic nervous system from entering human consciousness. We have consequently, in the sympathetic nervous system and the seven organs, that which confronts the nutritional stream. We have now gone far in penetrating from the outer into the inner side of the human organism. For everything that goes on within there, as the mutual concern of the seven organs, is something that could never go on anywhere else in our terrestrial world; and it can take place here only because this inner world is shut off from the outer world, and because its activity is provided for beforehand by the alimentary canal. Thus in our reflections we are already in the inner human organism.

And here we must take note of something peculiar. Now that we are within this organism we find that it must again inwardly organise and differentiate itself. For the performance of its manifold undertakings it must work as a multiplicity of organs; and it is precisely for these inner functions that a very great deal is needed. Whatever more is now to be attained can be attained only in the following manner; and we shall understand this if we first imagine how it would be if there were only this metamorphosis of the nutritional stream by means of the seven organs, the inner cosmic system, and imagine also that this process were concealed from our consciousness by the sympathetic nervous system. That would mean that man would never be able to unfold into a being possessed of consciousness; he would never have even the dimmest form of the consciousness which he now possesses. For everything occurring there is withheld from him. A connection must be established between this system of organs, built into him, as it were, from without, and everything else in the interior of the human organism. This connection is actually established through the fact that everything provided by the nutritive process as a whole causes the entire form of the organism to be interwoven with what we call tissue, in the broadest sense of the term. Tissue, one of the very simplest forms of organisation, is woven through all the separate members of the human entity. And out of this tissue the most diverse organs form themselves. Certain kinds of tissue, for instance, change themselves in such a way that when they have added to their composition other special kinds of cells they are transformed into muscles. Then again, other kinds change themselves by hardening and, through the appropriation of suitable substances, by depositing bone-cells. Thus, in the single organs which form themselves so as together to fill out the form of the human organism as a whole, we must think of something as underlying this organism: in other words, we must think of tissues woven throughout the body, and active everywhere, bringing forth out of themselves the individual organs.

But this tissue, no matter how much it might grow, and no matter how many individual organs it might put forth out of itself, would still constitute basically nothing more than something plant-like; for the essential nature of the plant lies in the fact that the plant-entity grows, that it produces organs out of itself and so on. Since however in the case of man we are to go beyond the plant nature, an entirely new element must present itself by means of which man becomes capable of adding to what exists in plant-life, that which elevates him above it. That is, man must add consciousness, the simplest form at first, that dim consciousness by which he is aware of his own inner life. So long as a living being does not consciously share in its own inner life, is not in position to mirror its own inner life and thus share it consciously, we cannot say that it has risen above the plant nature. Only through this fact that it does not merely have “life” in itself, but mirrors the flow of its inner life and raises it to conscious life, does any being rise above the plant-like state. It is at first, then, an inner experience, an experience of the inner life-processes.

How does conscious inner life come about?

We have already forecast a conception of this. In the earlier lectures we have shown that conscious inner life comes about through the processes of secretion.¹ For this reason we shall have to look for the basis of inner experience, of that dim experience of consciousness which permeates the inner life-processes, in the processes of secretion. We shall have to presume that everywhere, out of tissues, out of all that underlies the human organisation, processes of secretion are taking place. And these secretory processes again do manifest themselves when we observe the human body externally and see how substances from all parts of the tissue and the organs are continually being taken up by what we call the lymph vessels, which permeate the whole organism as another kind of system parallel to that of the blood. From all regions of the human organism those secretions which mediate that dim inner experience enter this system. Thus we might in abstract thought banish from our minds for the moment the whole system of the blood, in which case indeed we should conceive the tissue as though it possessed no blood-like character. This is quite conceivable, and the fluids in the lower organisms do actually have such an appearance. We should thus have to imagine our blood-process as one higher than that which takes place when secretions from every region of the organism enter into the lymph-channels which, we know, accompany the blood-channels which join them later. In these secretions the human being dimly feels, as it were, his animal existence in the physical body, dimly mirrors his organisation. And, just as everything is held back by the sympathetic nervous system which comes to life through the digestive and nutritional process as far as the seven organs, just so through the reflection of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, through the association and reciprocal action between this system and the lymph-channels, there is formed for the present-day human being a dim consciousness which is outshone by the clear day-consciousness of the ego. This dim consciousness is, as it were, the obverse side of that consciousness which utilises the sympathetic nervous system as its instrument. It is outshone, as a powerful light outshines a feeble light, by all that lives in our souls under the influence of the ego.

Now let us suppose for a moment that we had evolved the human organisation only to this point, to the formation of the bodily tissues and the first organs that must be formed in order to render possible all these processes; for you can see that certain muscles have to be incorporated to enable such processes to take place as, for example, the secretions into the lymph-channel. A man thus organised would be able to maintain a dim consciousness of his inner life in the physical world, mediated to him by means of his organism; but he would not be able to attain to that ego-consciousness which can be present only when man does not merely have an inner experience of himself as a being, but also opens himself to the external world. It is this opening again outward, so to speak, to which we must here call attention.

We have already spoken indeed of this reopening outward. We have shown how the human being opens himself again to the outside world in his breathing and so forth, in order to enter into direct contact with the physical world. We may now go even further, since we have seen how hard it is to apply ordinary concepts to these things, and say that, so long as we confine ourselves to the inner man, we can go only as far as the alimentary canal; for, inasmuch as the extensions of the seven organs reach into the alimentary canal and show themselves there (the liver empties through the gall-bladder into the duodenum) and show their influence in the digestion, we at once disclose, through the impact of this inner cosmic system on the alimentary canal, something which amounts to the reopening of ourselves to the outer world. Thus it is really an opening outward when the human being declares himself ready to receive nutritive substances from without; and hence we need reckon the inner man only as far as the boundary of the alimentary canal. Then we have also another opening outward through the breathing, on the one hand, and on the other hand through the higher organs which serve the functions of the soul.

Thus we see how man, in so far as he has the stage of the dimly conscious inner life as something basic in him, so to speak, reopens himself in order to form a connection with the external world. Only in this way can man become an ego-being. For it is not merely in the process of sensing the resistance in his own inner world, in his processes of secretion, but through the fact that he opens his inner world and senses the resistance of the outer world, that he is able to evolve his ego-consciousness. Thus it is really wholly in the fact that man reopens himself outward that we find the basis for his physical egohood. At the same time, however, he must also possess the capacity to develop the organ of this egohood in the most manifold ways. And we have seen how the organ for the ego here fits itself into the circulatory course of the blood, which in fact passes through all these inner organs, in order to serve throughout the whole human organisation as an instrument for the egohood. Just as the egohood permeates soul and spirit in the whole man, so does the circulatory course of the blood physically permeate his entire organisation. And this organisation thereby evolves these two sides, so to speak: the inner human being in the seven organs, the sympathetic nervous system, the system of tissues, and predominantly in the digestive apparatus, etc.; and the other side that again opens outward, coming into connection with the outer world, a real “circulation” in the highest sense of the word.

We must now give still further attention to the individual phases of this circulation. And what concerns us here, first of all, is to follow once more the nutritional process, the taking in of nutritive substances which become a living stream in the human organism through the fact that they are taken up by the ether-body, or, rather, are grasped by the force of the ether-body. The inner cosmic system, consisting of the seven organs, then meets these substances; and it does this because, as we have seen, the human being would otherwise not rise above a plant-existence. The higher stage of man's being requires that these seven organs should go out to meet the digestive process. So that it really is what comes to life in the astral nature of man that works upon the nutritional stream: this stream comes from without, and that which constitutes the inner nature of man goes forth to meet and work upon it. First of all the ether-body meets the nutritional stream, and metamorphoses its substances all along the course of the digestive system; then the astral system goes forth to meet them, metamorphoses them still further, and makes them so much a part of the inner world that they more and more become inner vital activities. And now, since everything in the human organism constitutes a co-operative unity, the entire nutritional stream must in addition be taken hold of by the forces of the ego, by the blood itself. That is, the instrument of the ego must extend its activity down to where the nutritional stream is taken up. Does the blood do this? Can we verify that which occult perception compels us to affirm?

Yes, we can; for the blood is actually driven down into the organs of nutrition, just as it is into all other organs. In this nutritional organisation, as elsewhere, it goes through the entire process whereby it is capable of being the instrument of man's ego in the physical world. We know that the blood, as the instrument of the ego, passes through the transition from red blood to blue, so that here, too, it meets with resistance. Thus the ego, by means of its instrument, reaches down even to the nutritive processes, since this transformed blood, in order to be the expression of the ego, works upon almost the first beginnings of the nutritive process. This occurs through the fact that the system of veins discharges into the liver, and that out of this modified blood the gall is prepared, which then comes into direct contact with the nutritional system.

We thus have a wonderful union of the two extremes of the human organisation. The nutritional stream, on the one hand, is taken into the digestive tract and this represents the external matter which enters our physical organisation. The ego, on the other hand, together with its instrument the blood, constitutes the noblest endowment which man possesses in the terrestrial world. It establishes a direct connection with the nutritional stream in that it comes to the very end of the blood-process, and there, at the end of the blood-process, in turn brings about the preparation of something which, we may say, directly confronts the nutritional stream. In other words, the gall is prepared by the instrument of the ego, the blood, through the roundabout way of the liver; and in the gall the ego opposes the nutritional stream. For at this point the activity of the blood has come to an end and, before acting upon the nutritional stream, it is able to prepare the gall.

Here we see the one working downward, as it were, into the other. And whoever has the will to do so can see in this very fact something that leads in a wonderful way into many, many mysteries of the human organisation. He can follow these processes still further, including abnormal processes, which take their course, for example, in a reverse discharge, a congesting and reverse discharging of the gall into the blood. He might thus quite easily form an opinion about “jaundice,” for example, its cause and effect; but it would take us too far afield if we were also to discuss such things as this to-day.

Thus we see how the seven organs reach as an actual fact down into the action of the ether-body and have taken into themselves, from above, the influence of the ego. In the gall we have the ego setting itself in direct opposition to the nutritional stream. If, now, the gall is to meet this nutritional stream, which has already become a living stream in the alimentary canal, it must itself likewise meet it as a living substance; otherwise a truly continuous process could not come about. The gall must be enabled, as a living substance, to meet the nutritional stream. This occurs through the fact that the very organ in which this gall is formed is one of the seven organs of the inner cosmic system, which vitalise the inner life of man in order that it may as inner life meet the outer life. We pass from the gall-bladder back into the liver itself, and the liver in turn we find connected with the spleen.

When we more closely observe the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen (this follows quite naturally out of our previous reflections, for the spleen has been fairly accurately considered in this connection and used as an example) we must affirm that it is these organs that directly confront the nutritional stream and so metamorphose it that it is capable of advancing to the higher stages of the human organisation, and also of caring for those organs which open themselves to the external world. Those which open outward are the heart (through the lungs) and, of course, the alimentary canal itself; but, most of all, the organs in the head which serve as the organs of the senses.

We must now understand clearly that all inner perception, all inner experience, must have something to do with processes of excretion. It is for this reason that we have given special consideration also to these excretory processes. Liver, gall-bladder, and spleen have nothing to do directly with processes of excretion; the fact that they secrete their own nutritive substances is a different matter; but they do not excrete anything with respect to the organisation as a whole. They signify the ascending life, which turns away from a mere being alive and directs itself to the organisation of consciousness. Since, however, the heart is added as a fourth member to this organisation, and since the heart opens itself to the outer world, man attains through this opening outward his ego-consciousness. Yet he would not be in a position to experience this ego otherwise than merely as something which faces the outer world. He would not be able to bring this outward-looking ego into relationship with what he experiences by means of his inner organs as a dim corporeal life within him. He must add to the secretional processes of the inner organisation still another process which makes possible for him an experiencing of his inner being by that ego which has its instrument in the blood. At first man realises his inner life only in a dim consciousness and we have seen how this manifests itself in the organisation through the fact that the processes of excretion are taken up by the lymph-ducts from the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. In the same way something must be excreted from the blood, if man is to rise to a really conscious ego. And it is in this excretion that he becomes aware that, as an inner entity, he confronts the outer world. If man did not have these inner excretional processes he would, in his realisation of inner life, so face the outer world that he would inwardly lose himself; or he would at most realise dim inner processes but would not know what is outside him, he would not know that what is inhaling the air and taking in nutritive substances is the same as the being which is working in him. It is possible for him to know this through the fact that he excretes the modified blood through the lungs, in the form of carbonic acid gas; and that, through the kidneys, he excretes the metamorphosed substances which must be removed from the blood in order that he may have an inner perception of his own entity.

Thus we find our assertion justified, that the organs which represent an ascending process, the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen, as well as those representing in a certain sense a descending process, the lungs and the kidneys (although the lungs, in that they open themselves to the outer world, are at the same time the means of an ascending process; the individual organs are constantly in living reciprocal relationship, and we must not establish any hard and fast classification) we see how all these seven members of the inner human cosmic system are bound up with man's realisation of inner life, and with his opening of himself to the outer world. These seven members completely metamorphose, on the one hand, the vital activities peculiar to the nutritive substances into inner vital activities; and with these metamorphosed substances they provide for the human organism. They make it possible for man to reopen himself to the outer world. But, in addition to this, they bring it about that what he evolves as an excessively strong inner vital activity, which would not harmonise with the vital activity that penetrates into him from without, is brought into balance with this outer vital activity by being thrown off through the excretional processes of the lungs and the kidneys. So that we have before us the complete and regular control of the inner vital activities in this inner cosmic system of man. And in fact this entire relationship manifests itself in such a way that the best picture occultism can give us is to conceive the heart standing as the sun, at the centre, and caring for the three bodies of the inner cosmic system which signify the upward rising and upward bearing process. In the same way in which the sun is related to Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the planetary system, so is the inner sun, the heart, related to Saturn, spleen; Jupiter, liver; and gall-bladder, Mars, in the human organism. I should have to speak, not for weeks but for months, if I were to explain all the reasons why the relationship of the sun to the outer planets of our planetary system may really be declared to be parallel, for an exact and intimate occult observation, to the relationship which the heart sustains in the human organism to the inner cosmic system, i.e., to the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. For it is an absolute fact that the relationship existing in the outer cosmos has been so adopted into the organism that what goes on in the great world or macrocosm, in our solar system, is mirrored in the reciprocal action among these organs. And those processes which go on between the sun and the inner planets, working inwards from the sun to our earth, are again reflected in the relationship of the heart-sun to the lungs as Mercury, and to the kidneys as Venus. Thus we have in this inner human cosmic system something which mirrors the external cosmic system.

We have already indicated, how, when we delve clairvoyantly into our own inner organism we can perceive this interior of ours; and that we then cease to perceive our inner organs in the way they manifest themselves merely to the external observation of the physical eye. We then go beyond the fantastic picture of our organs conceived by external anatomy, for we rise to the observation of the real form of these organs when we bear in mind that they are systems of forces. External anatomy cannot possibly establish what these organs really are, for it sees only the nutritive matter stuffed into them. And no one can doubt, when he goes more deeply into the matter, that external anatomy sees only the stuffed-in nutritive substances. That which lies at the basis of these organs as force-systems can be seen only by clairvoyant observation. And what we see justifies our nomenclature, because we discover the outer cosmic system duplicated in our inner cosmic system.

We stated yesterday that the organism may develop too strong an inner vital activity. Each separate organ may develop too strong an inner vital activity. This is then manifested in the irregularity with which the organism acts. I indicated yesterday that when, by reason of this excessive inner vital activity, there appears in the inner organs a self-willed life of their own, it is important that something should be set in opposition which will subdue these inner vital activities. That is, when the inner organs transfer too vigorously the external vital activities of the nutritional substances, transform them too much, when they provide an inner product too strongly metamorphosed, we must then set in opposition to them from without something which will dam up, as it were, will subdue the inner vital activities.

How can this be brought about? By introducing into the organism something from the external environment which possesses a vital activity contrary to those of the organs and is capable of combating them. That is, we must endeavour to discover those external vital activities which correspond to the peculiar vital activities of these organs. To contemporary man, who sometimes comes upon such things in the mangled writings of the Middle Ages yet cannot look upon them as anything but a jumble of superstition, it sounds quite amazing when he hears that for thousands of years occult science has not only examined, profoundly and thoroughly, the correspondence between the vital activities of these organs of the inner organic system, and certain external substances possessing the opposite vital activities; but that also, through countless observations made with the clairvoyant eye, there has resulted the knowledge, for example, that when the inner “Jupiter” oversteps its limit it can be checked if confronted with that external vital activity manifest in the metallic substance tin. The inner vital activity of the gall-bladder, we combat by what is manifest in the metallic substance iron. And we ought not really to be surprised to learn that the gallbladder is the very organ to be combated by iron. For iron is that metal which we require particularly in our blood, and which therefore belongs to the instrument of the ego; and we have seen that in the gall-bladder we have the very organ which brings about the connection of the ego with the densest matter deposited in the human being through the digestive process. In the same way the spleen (Saturn) has its correlative in lead; the heart (Sun) in gold; Mercury has its own name: that is, the metal mercury (or quicksilver) corresponds with the lungs; and the metal copper corresponds with the kidneys.

Now, when we introduce into the organism such vital activities as exist in these metals, in order to combat the excessive vital activities of the inner organism, we must realise that everything in the organism is more or less interrelated with everything else; and indeed that the individual organ-systems were formed in a mutual parallelism one with the other. For it is not as if there first existed in a finished state what we have here merely sketched in our drawing, i.e., what we may call the headless man; but rather the brain and the spinal cord form themselves simultaneously with the other organs, so that the blood-process extending downward extends also upward. And, just as we have pointed out that there are these two circulatory courses of the blood, so we have similarly an upward action of the lymph-system toward the head, and have, therefore, a dim consciousness apportioned also to the upper parts of the organism. This is true because of the fact that what is incorporated above in the upper blood-stream corresponds in a certain way with what we have described as the incorporated lower blood-stream.

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From this we now see that certain of these metals to be found on the earth have their respective kinship with the organs or members which we find embedded in the upper blood-organisation. That which, in the lungs for example, opens itself upward into the larynx, thus becoming an organ of the higher human organisation, and which otherwise presses down into the gall-bladder as dim life, acts correspondingly as a Mars- or iron-system in the larynx which contains the upper part of the lungs. These things are, of course, hard to differentiate; but I should like, nevertheless, to point out some of them. In the same way the upper part of our head containing the brain-formation corresponds, as regards its position in the upper course of the blood, to the position of Jupiter-liver (tin) in the lower course of the blood; so that we have here a correspondence between the fore part of the head, in the upper course of the blood, and tin, or Jupiter; and, in the same way, between the back of the head and lead, or Saturn. And so it is with the organs which may be looked upon as embedded in the upper cosmic system.

We have been able in this way to extend our reflections to that which is incorporated in the circulatory course of man's blood, as having a connection with this, but also as determining it as the organisation of the seven members of the inner cosmic system. And we have been able to take into consideration the connection with the external world as regards both the normal and the abnormal condition of life. In this correspondence between the metals and the inner organs we have a most interesting fact. And if all that which is contained in manifold form in the statements to be found in our books dealing with therapy is ever assembled and compared, not in chaotic manner but systematically, this picture that we have formed will one day, quite of itself, burst into view as a result of the external facts. We can always affirm, when we work creatively in the right way with the help of occult sources, that we can quietly bide our time, that the facts themselves will one day confirm all this for mankind!

When we introduce into the organism the substances of these principal metals—and they are all metals that pass over at a certain temperature into a sort of vapour in which there is active something resembling little smoke-like globules—the particular quality of the respective metals acts upon what is in these seven organs. And just as the metallic element acts upon these systems of organs, so anything in the nature of a salt acts upon the blood-system. Only, we must introduce the salty substance into the blood in such a way that it enters from outside, through the air, through air with a saline content, or through a salt bath; or again we can introduce from another direction, through the digestive process, what constitutes salt or builds up salt, so that we are in a position to bring about from two directions this process which results in the formation and depositing of salt.

When you recall what I explained yesterday as the physical effects of the inner processes of soul and spirit, you will understand that everything which meets the processes brought about by these metals as metals, processes which embed themselves in these systems, forming tiny globules, as it were, is what I designated yesterday as the physical effect of the feeling-processes.

Thus the dim feeling-processes and the higher feeling-processes are bound up with that which constitutes inner liquefying processes, on the one hand, when it develops the right inner vital activity, but which, on the other side, can be checked if something is introduced from outside, if the appropriate substances which have their external counter-activities embed themselves in these systems from outside.

When, by reason of excessive digestive activity occurring where the nutritional stream is seized by the ether-body, this body develops a too insistent inner vital activity of its own so that it contradicts that from without—when this process of a self-willed inner vital activity gets the upper hand, we can work in opposition to it through the process of introducing salt in so far as salt works as salt. In the case of an intensified inner vital activity of those very processes which go on where the external nutritional substances are seized upon by the ether-body, signifying too intense a taking up, a sucking up of salt out of everything, the process is combated through the external vital activity of salt.

Then we also have processes which occur outside us as processes of combustion or oxydation, when something or other combines with the oxygen in the air. When substances which readily combine with the oxygen in the air are taken into the organism, they radiate their inner activity most extensively throughout the inner organism. Whereas salts act only when introduced into the organism through the digestion or from without into the blood, and hence can get only a limited access to the inner organism; and whereas we can, with metals, work in as far as the inner cosmic system we have, in the external vital activities of the substances that readily unite with the oxygen of the air, something which radiates through the whole organism, even into the blood: something which is capable of radiating through all the systems of organs. We shall thus find it comprehensible that through such processes as develop too strong an inner vital activity in warmth, which is the outward manifestation of the development of the will, we find ourselves inwardly aroused, as it were, in our entire organism. Such is not the case if we direct our attention to those other processes which constitute the organic processes of thought. We feel there that the actions which, in yesterday's lecture, we connected with salt can take place only in certain organs. From this we see how complicated an apparatus the human organism is, and, at the same time, how complicated is its relation to the external world. Moreover, we see that we have now for the first time set the human organisation with its inner vital activities over against a mineral, inorganic Nature which has not yet been given life, into relation with what salts are, what the particular quality of a vaporising metal is, and what readily combustible substances are.

A polarity of the same sort exists between the human organism and what constitutes the vitally active forces in the external plant world. When we take up a plant into us in such a way that it simply gives off some particular substance, which is taken up by us as lifeless matter and acts as such in us, the real plant-nature may then be left out of account in the human being. On the other hand, the plant element may also be taken up by the human organism in such a way that it goes on working in its own peculiar character as plant, that is, the external vital activity of the plant continues to work as the same sort of external vital activity which works in the plant. In this case that process cannot take effect which otherwise always goes on at the border line between the physical nutritional substances and the ether-body. For the ether-body is akin to the plant; and the plant is “plant” precisely by reason of the fact that it has an ether-body. The plant-nature is simply caught up at the point where the nutritional stream is seized upon by the ether-body, so that whatever of the plant-nature works into the human organism cannot be taken into account so long as it is in the alimentary canal, but only in those organs involved in the processes to which the ether-body already has its relationship and into which the astral nature of man also works. For this reason the external plant-activity begins its work only when it reaches the inner cosmic system and the sympathetic nervous system and, in so far as it is involved with these, also the lymph-system. The plant-nature no longer extends to the point where the human being opens himself, through the blood, to the outer world. The plant-element is fitted to the central, more inward part of the human being; so that whatever may be sought in the plant-nature in the way of vital activities, capable of combating the excessively strong inner vital activities of the functions of our organism, cannot have any effect at all upon whatever belongs to the material substance in the seven organs of our inner cosmic system and in the corresponding organs of the head, and which nourishes itself in these organs; it can act only upon whatever pertains to the activities, the functions of these organs. When these functions are disturbed, when they act abnormally, without our being able to say that they are over-nourished or under-nourished, then the vital activity of the plant-nature comes into question. Hence, when an excessive activity of the organs is manifest, we can combat this with something taken out of plant-nature but capable of working in only as far as the seven organs, as far as the boundary of the lymph-system and the blood-system.

It is impossible to go further into the combating of irregularities in the human organism, not so much because we should in any case have insufficient time as because it is better for the Anthroposophist to hold aloof from everything which is at present still involved in partisan strife. What we have thus far set forth is not involved in conflicts where there is far too much fanaticism. For at most people can take it for pure nonsense, in which case it will share the same fate which for many is to be that of Anthroposophy in general: namely, that it has no worth whatever. Anthroposophy would have to keep silent if it wished not to speak about those things which appear nonsensical to people who are not willing at the present time to accept it. But, if it were to proceed further and investigate the effect of the animal element upon the human organism, we should very quickly become involved in strife.

One thing, however, you will have perceived: that this human organism is a complicated system of individual organs and instruments which stand at various stages of evolution, these stages differing very greatly among themselves, and which are connected in the greatest possible variety of ways with the organism as a whole. What it is that works into this physical organisation of man, which we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands, in order that the nutritive substances may organise themselves suitably, may be ordered according to the various organs, this cannot be seen with the external eye but it is disclosed to the spiritual eye of the seer. Everything that has displayed itself before us in the human organism we must look upon as one single system, wherein appears both what is young and what is old. We have brought out this fact in individual examples, for instance, in the fact that the brain shows itself as an older organ and the spinal cord as a younger one; and in the fact that the brain was once a spinal cord and has transformed itself out of that. Then, too, we have seen that our complicated digestive system forms, together with the blood-system, one single system which is old and has been metamorphosed; whereas in the lymph-system which cannot take up substances from without but can as yet open only inwards to the material supplied by the inner tissue, we have a younger system in comparison with the combined digestive and blood-system, just as we have in the spinal cord an organ that is younger than the brain. And this, again, is a very important viewpoint. When we look at our lymph-system and all that goes with it we have before us something which, if it were not embedded there as a lymph-system, and did not remain shut off but opened itself to the more advanced stage of its evolutionary process, would progress to a digestive system and blood-system as the spinal cord evolved to the brain. Thus the digestive-blood-system presents to us a lymph-system that has been metamorphosed out of the substances and tissues of the body, substances and tissues which, as we know, have to be changed in the body before they can take on the form which they have inside the man; whereas the lymph-system, as we have it, is employed to take up the substances that are produced inside. In the lymph-system and what pertains to it, we have a simpler digestive system and a simpler system for mediating consciousness. On the other hand, a system more complicated than the lymph-system, opening not only to the inner but also to the outer world, is what we have in the metamorphosed lymph-system, the digestive and glandular systems.

Everything that appears later, during the course of evolution of any living creature, is laid down beforehand in the germinal plan. What I have here explained to you as the complicated human organisation exists potentially in the germinal plan of the human being as it builds itself up, when once it is produced through the process of impregnation. If we retrace the course, so to speak, from this fully-formed man to the germinal plan, we are able to discover that inside this same life-seed or germ complicated systems of organs in miniature, scarcely visible at first, even to microscopic examination, are present, as the very first plan; present in such a way indeed, that the organs even at that time already reveal just how they are related to one another.

Once we observe that the outermost enclosure of the human being is the boundary of the skin which leads us on to the sense-organs embedded therein, and observe also how these sense-organs are organised so as to extend inward to the nervous system, we shall realise that everything present in the outermost boundary of man must have been transformed out of something else, for this is already very complicated in itself. (The brain, for instance, belongs to this system; to imagine a brain which is not first prepared through other organs, and transformed out of these, is impossible.) We must think therefore of the outer sheath of the human being as it appears to-day, as the product of a transformation from those organs which are its groundwork, as having passed through a transformation similar to that of the brain out of the spinal cord, and to the digestive-blood-system with all its accessories, out of the lymph-system.

Now, it is precisely in everything which we have observed as the brain, that we have a transformed spinal cord system. But here again this spinal cord system shows itself to us at the present time in such a way that we can see that it is an organ in a descending evolution, so to speak. In those organs, accordingly, which represent earlier stages, we have organ-systems formed later and at the same time in a descending evolution. This we must apply also to the lymph-system. In that which confronts us in the human being as the lower man, thought of spatially, we have, in the antithesis, lymph-system and digestive-blood-system, something which transforms the lymph-system into the digestive-blood-system. We must understand clearly, to be sure, that the blood-system itself is such a complicated inward-coursing system that it reveals, even in its very configuration, the fact that it is itself the product of a transformation of a still earlier state, the product of a twofold metamorphosis. On the other hand, that which reveals to us that it has gone through its transformation only once, an opening outward, is the digestive canal. We may therefore say that, if we were to move the digestive canal more inward, we should keep this whole organic system shut up inside, as far as the activity at present characteristic of the lymph-system through which only that is taken up from the inner product which is secreted by the tissues.

Thus in the outer boundary of man, the skin-system, we have the metamorphosis of another system; and in the digestive system likewise we can see the transformation of another organ-system out of which it has developed, and which is itself to-day in a descending process of evolution. According to the whole nature of the organ-systems as they present themselves to us we have to seek, therefore, for their first or primal plan in such a way that we feel everything we see as the germinal design containing the skin- and the sense-organs and nervous system—to be the redisposition of another system which is to-day inside the organism and in a descending evolution, just as the digestive system in its design is a redisposition of another inner system which is now in a descending evolution. Thus we have, at the present time, both an ascending and a descending evolution already indicated in the “life-seed” of man.

And so we may trace the whole human organism back to a scheme or plan where everything in the separate organs is prepared in the germ. And, in fact, we do see in the human germ which comes into existence through the process of impregnation that in the four superimposed germ-layers (the outer germ-layer or exoderm, the inner germ-layer or entoderm, and the outer and inner middle layers or mesoderma) the four principal systems of the human organism are actually already present, pre-modelled in this germinal plan. Furthermore, in accordance with our evolution we shall have to consider the outer germ-layer, which, in contemporary anatomy or physiology is called the skin-sense layer, as the product of a metamorphosis which reveals to us its original plan in the outer middle layer. In the outer mesoderm, that is, we have as an embryonic plan in a descending evolution, what appears at a higher stage in the skin-sense-layer; and in the inner middle layer we have in a younger formation and in a downward evolution, what appears in the inner layer or entoderm as the intestinal glandular-layer. When we observe the human germ in its evolution we have in the two middle germ-layers, in what external physiology calls the mesoderma, the original plan of the human being still recognisable; whereas the two external germ-layers, exoderm and entoderm, are layers which have undergone a metamorphosis. The two middle layers reveal to us the original state, whereas the two others reveal higher evolutionary stages of this state. And it is only an illusion when external microscopic research does not accurately state the facts of the case.

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Now we know that this germinal plan, this life-seed, is formed through the flowing together of two tendencies, the feminine and the masculine, and that the complete germ can only come into being through the living interaction of the two. In both these germinal tendencies, accordingly, there must be included all the processes which, through interaction, form the one single embryonic plan for the complete human organisation.

What does occultism reveal to us regarding the interaction of the male and the female germs?

It shows us that the female organism, under the conditions of our age, is capable of producing only such a human germ as would be unable, if it were to follow a completely isolated evolution, to develop what we call in its broadest sense the “form-principle.” That which leads, therefore, to the final stage of the bony system, thus giving complete firmness to the human being, and which also brings about the final unfolding into a skin-and-sense-system as we have it to-day, could not be supplied through the female contribution. The contribution of the woman is such as to justify one in saying: “What it would bring forth would be too good for this earthly world as it is to-day; for there are not present in our external world all the processes which could serve such an organism, if it were to evolve itself in accordance with the tendency of the woman's contribution to the whole human organism.” It should not be necessary for the human organism derived from the woman to proceed so far as to be of this earth, as we may say, which is the case in the dense deposit of the bony system; it should not be forced to unfold itself in a way that enables it to look out into the present physical world through the senses. On the contrary, it should be enabled to have its inner support in softer material, as it were, than our solid bony system. It ought, furthermore, to be free not to open its eyes so wide toward the outside world, or to open its other senses outward, to the same degree as is the case with the human being of to-day, but to remain with its perceptions more enclosed in its inner life. This represents the female portion of the common human organism: a germinal plan which tends to shoot forward beyond the limit of what is possible in our present earth existence. And this simply because, in the physical earth-conditions of to-day, we have not the requirements essential to so refined an organism, one so little adapted to be of this earth, in the way the bony system is, or to unfold itself outward. Such an organism, under natural conditions, is from the very beginning predestined to death. That is to say: by reason of that which the woman's organism is of itself unable to imprint upon the human embryo, this embryo is from the beginning doomed to death.

The other portion which is added to the germinal plan is the male element, and this is in exactly the reversed situation. If the male germ alone were to bring forth the human being, the progress of that organisation which lives its life in an opening of itself outward, as is the case in the skin-sense-system and in the powerful development of what leads to the solidification of the bony system, would overshoot the mark in the opposite direction. The male organisation would be just as little able as the female to create of itself an embryo capable of living. Of itself alone it would just as certainly create a dead embryo as would the female organisation because that which it could create, which it could contribute to the germ-plan, would be so organised, if it were to unfold its forces of itself, that it would have to vanish in view of the conditions actually existing on the earth at the present time; for it would unfold forces which are simply too powerful for such conditions, so that it could not exist as organic life within the confines of this world. That is to say, the male element of the germ does not really come into existence at all; it can act only through co-operation with the female germ. That which stimulates the female germ-plan too intensely, carrying it too far beyond what is possible on the earth, leads the male germ-plan too far downward, below what is possible on the earth. Whatever is destined to death in this female germ, through the excess of those forces which, if they could find any approach at all to the sense-world, would ultimately lead to a breaking up, a failure to grow together with the external world, this balances itself with the male germ through the process of impregnation. The forces that are compressed into the male germ-plan, if these were ever to accomplish their growth alone, would lead the whole thing immeasurably below the earthly, would bring the human organisation to a far greater terrestrialising of the bony system, and to an entirely different unfolding of the senses and taking up of the outer world, than is the case to-day. These two organic tendencies must in their very first beginning blend and come together; for, under earthly conditions, either one of them alone is from the first predestined to death, and only the living interaction of what otherwise gushes over the limits in both directions gives us that human embryo which alone is suited to earthly life.

Thus we see that we have been able, although only in a sketchy way, to comprehend things as far as this point, where the human being is capable of bringing forth his kind. We could go much further by throwing light also upon all the details of the embryonic process. And the more profoundly we should illuminate these, the more we should see that the most minute as well as the most glaring facts, including what has been said here regarding the super-sensible force-systems in the germinal plans, verify themselves in the outward expression of these force-systems, in what the human being develops in order that his race may live over all the earth so long as it is going through its present processes.

We have seen at the same time, however, that the earth gives us its densest terrestrialising process, so to speak, in what we call the tendency to the bony system, and its most vitally active process in what we call the human blood-system. And it need be added only very briefly that everything which goes on on the earth in the external physical human organism, in so far as this is visible, forces its way up as it were, into those processes which take place in the blood. And these processes are warmth processes. We have, therefore, in these processes the direct expression of the activity of the blood as the instrument of the ego, of the highest level, that is, of the human organism. Below this are the other processes; uppermost is the warming process, and in this there takes hold, directly, the activity of our soul and our ego. It is for this reason that we feel, with regard to so many activities of the soul, what we may call “the transmutation of our soul-activities into a kindling of inner warmth,” and this may extend its effects even to a becoming physically warm in the process of the blood. Thus we see how, from out the soul and spirit by way of the warmth-process, there takes hold down into the organic, into the physiological, what is directed from above. We might show, in connection with many other facts of the external world, how the psychic-spiritual comes into contact in the warmth-process with the physiological, with what occurs behind the physiological. In the warming process, accordingly, we have a transformation of the organic systems in their activities. We find the most manifold transformations in the complicated apparatus of soul and spirit in man; but this physical human organism reaches up as far as the warmth process.

Does this transformation cease at this point? Does that which confronts us as the inheritance of the bony system, proceeding from below upward, extend only thus far? Everywhere, below the warmth process, we have transformation; from below upward it reaches as far as the warmth process. What then follows can here only be indicated and then left to the further reflection and feeling of the listeners.

What the organism produces in the way of inner warmth processes in our blood, warmth processes which it conducts to us through all its different processes, and which it finally brings to expression in a flowering of all other processes, penetrates up into the soul and spirit, transforms itself into soul and spirit. And what is it that is most beautiful about the psychic-spiritual? The most beautiful, the loftiest thing about it, is the fact that, through the forces of the human soul, what is organic can be transformed into what is soul nature! If everything that man can have through the activity of his earthly organism is rightly transformed by him after it has become warmth, it then transmutes itself in his soul into what we may call an inner living experience of compassion, a sympathy for all other beings. If we penetrate through all the processes of the human organism, to the highest level of all, to the processes of warmth, we pass as it were through the door of the human physiological processes, above the uppermost heights which are formed by these processes into that world where the warmth of the blood is given its worth in accordance with what the soul has made out of it: in accordance with the living sympathy of the soul for everything that has being, and its compassion for everything around it. In this way we broaden our life, if our inner life carry us on to a kindling of inner heat, beyond all that is earthly being; we make ourselves one with all earthly being. And we must note the marvellous fact that the whole of Cosmic Being has taken the round about path of first building up our whole organisation, in order finally to give us that warmth which we are called upon to transmute through our ego into living compassion for all beings.

In the Earth's mission, warmth is in the process of being transmuted into compassion.

This is the meaning of the earth process; and it is being fulfilled, since man as a physical organism is embedded in this earth-process, through the fact that all physical processes finally come together in man's organisation as their crown; that everything therein, like a microcosm, in turn, of all earthly processes, opens again into new blossoming. And, as this is transmuted in the human soul, the earth-organism, through man's sympathetic interest and living compassion for every kind of being, attains to that for which warmth had its intended use in the organism allotted to him as Earth-Man. What we take up in our souls through living sympathy, which helps us to broaden our inner soul-life more and more, we shall take with us when we shall have gone through many organisations such as enable us to use to the full, for the spirit, everything that the earth could give us as kindling heat, burning warmth, flame of fire! And when, through innumerable incarnations, we shall have taken up into ourselves all that there is of this fervour of warmth, then will the earth have reached its goal, its purpose. Then will it sink beneath us, a great corpse, into indeterminate cosmic space; and there will arise out of this earth-corpse the united throng of all those earthly human souls who, through their different earthly incarnations, have realised the worth of the outpouring warmth of earth-organisms by transmuting it into living compassion and sympathy, and into whatever can be built upon these. Just as the individual soul, when the human being passes through the portal of death, rises to a spiritual world and gives over the corpse to the forces of the earth, so to the forces of the cosmos will one day be surrendered the earth's corpse, when it shall have given to us that burning warmth we needed for the compassion which was the foundation-stone of all our higher activities of soul. This corpse which will be given over to the cosmic system, just as the individual human corpse is given over to the earth-system, will be able to see rising above it the sum of all the individual human souls, now one important stage nearer perfection as a result of earth existence, and these will then press onward to new stages of existence, to new cosmic systems. Just as in the earth-system the individual human being, after he has passed through the portal of death, advances to new incarnations, so does the throng of all the individual souls, after the earth-corpse has fallen away, advance to new planetary stages of existence.

And so we see that nothing in the cosmic system is lost, but that what is given to us in our organism up to the final blossoming of heat is that “material” which, when we have used it up as burning warmth, helps us to find the way to a new and higher stage leading to eternity. Nothing in the world is lost, but what the earth produces, through human souls, is carried over by them into eternity!

Thus does spiritual science also permit us to connect the physiological processes in the human organism with our eternal destiny. And thus will this science, if we view it as something which must so implant itself within us that it is not mere theory or abstract knowledge, fill us with all those forces which show us that we as human beings do not, after all, stand only upon the earth, but in the whole cosmic system! If we learn to think thus about the lofty and eternal destiny of humanity, how man takes the forces of the earth in order that he may work on into eternity, we then receive through spiritual science what must be wrung out of it, not only what we may attain for the sake of knowledge but for our whole man. And if those human beings who divine or already possess this high ideal of knowledge come together in a true brotherhood, harmoniously united in striving toward the highest of all, who understand each other, that is, in their innermost being, this means that there are present on our earth, in its process of becoming, human beings who have the right to be conscious that they bear within themselves seeds which are developing, which can be fruitful for the further evolution of earth and humanity. In all modesty may anthroposophists come together and unite their feelings with what is highest, most universal, in man. And, when men gather in such a spirit, they understand one another in their deepest being; for they acknowledge one another, not merely as individual earth-men and in their earthly destiny, but rather in their eternal destiny.

It was in this spirit that we came together here; and it is in this spirit that we shall go away again, to live in the outside world and perhaps to pass on to others much of what it has been possible to give here as an incentive, even if only in outline, and thus to bring it to new flower. We shall at the same time strive so to work when we are scattered that, although physically separated, we shall be in harmony with one another in living thought, in feeling, and in all our willing. Then shall we be rightly united in that Spirit which ought to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. In this Spirit we are about to separate after having been together for a while; in this Spirit we shall remain united in soul; and in this Spirit we shall meet again when it is meant to be.

• 1. See footnote on p. 79.

The opening words of our festival this year were put into the mouth of Hermes,¹ the messenger of the gods, and in view of what our own Spiritual Science aspires to be, we may perhaps look upon this as symbolic. For to us Spiritual Science is not just a source of ordinary worldly knowledge, but a ‘mediator’; through it we may indeed rise up into those super-sensible worlds whence according to the ancient Greeks it was Hermes who brought down the spark which could kindle in men the strength to ascend thither. And taking my start from these words of Hermes, I may perhaps be allowed to add to what has resounded during the last few days out of the performances themselves some observations linking them with the lectures that are to follow.

These performances have not been given merely as a sort of embellishment of our festival; they should be regarded as deeply integral part of the annual celebration which has been held here for many years, and as the focus of our spiritual-scientific activity here in Munich. This year we have been able to open with a renewal of the drama which is the origin of all western dramatic art, a drama which we can only really grasp by looking beyond the whole historical tradition of dramatic art in the West. This also makes it a worthy introduction to a spiritual-scientific festival, for it takes us back into ages of European cultural development when the several activities of the human mind and soul which today we find separated as science, art and religion were not yet sundered from one another. It carries us back in feeling to the very first beginnings of European cultural development, to times when a unified culture, born directly out of the deepest spiritual life, fired men with religious fervour for the highest that the human soul can reach; it was a culture pulsating with religious life, indeed it may be said that it was religion. Men did not look upon religion as a separated branch of their culture, but they still spoke of religion, even when their minds were directly concerned with the practical affairs of everyday life. That very concern itself was raised to the level of a religion, for religion shed its rays over every experience which man could have. But this archetypal religion was inwardly very strong, very powerful in its particular workings. It did not confine itself to a vaguely exalted religious response to great powers of the universe; its inspiration was so strong that some of those particular workings took forms which were none other than those of art. Religious life overflowed into bold forms, and religion was one with art. Art was the daughter of religion, and still lived in the closest ties of kinship with her mother. No religious feeling in our own day has the intensity which imbued those who took part in the ancient Mysteries and saw religious life pouring itself into the forms of art.

But this archetypal religion and its daughter, art, were at the same time so purified, so lifted into the refining spheres of etheric spiritual life that their influence even brought out in human souls something of which today we have a faint reflection, an abstract reflection, in our science and knowledge. When feeling became more intense, became filled with enthusiasm for what as religion overflowed into artistic form, then knowledge of the gods and of divine things, knowledge of spirit-land, was kindled in the soul. Thus knowledge was the other daughter of religion, and she too lived in close family relationship with the archetypal mother of all culture.

If we ask ourselves what we are hoping to achieve with today's feeble beginning ... the answer is that we would rekindle in mankind something like a unification, a harmony, between art and science. For only thus can the soul, fired by feeling, strengthened by the best in our will, imbue every aspect of human culture with that singleness of vision which will lead men up again into the divine heights of his existence, while. at the same time it permeates the most commonplace actions of everyday life. Then what we call profane life will became holy, for it is only profane because its connection with the divine source of all existence has been forgotten.

The festival we have organised this year is meant to be a direct expression of this feeling, which simply must enliven us if the truths of Spiritual Science are to enter into the depths of human souls. That is why it is in accordance with spiritual science, in the literal meaning of those words, that we should look upon The Mystery of Eleusis as a kind of sun which, shedding its rays in our hearts, can arouse a true perception of what Spiritual Science is.

What is generally known as drama, what is recognised in the West as dramatic art and reached its culmination in Shakespeare, is a current of spiritual life originating in the Mystery; it is a secularisation of the ancient Mystery. If we trace it back to its origin, we come to something like The Mystery of Eleusis.

We already had all this in mind some years ago, when we produced this very drama at the Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. I may perhaps mention an incident which may throw light upon our aims, for day-to-day happenings do have a dose bearing upon the spiritual ideal which hovers before our minds. When some time ago we were beginning to prepare for the production of The Children of Lucifer,² I remembered something which I think greatly influenced the course of our Middle European spiritual-scientifie development. When I myself judged that the time had come for me to bring my spiritual work into connection with what we may call Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, it was a discussion about this play, The Children of Lucifer, which gave me the opportunity I needed. Following upon that talk we allowed our thoughts about our work to pass through a period of development of seven years; but the seed which had been laid in our souls with the words spoken about The Children of Lucifer meanwhile developed silently in our hearts, according to the law of the seven-yearly rhythm. At the end of the seven years we were ready to produce a German version of The Children of Lucifer at the opening of our annual festival at Munich.

In today's talk, which is to serve as an introduction to the lectures which are to follow, I may perhaps be allowed to link this thought with another, which springs from the depths of my heart, out of deepest conviction. The kind of spiritual life which in future will increasingly influence western minds will have to be cast in a specific form. Today it is possible to think of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science in various ways. Men do not always think in accordance with the necessities of existence, in accordance with the evolutionary forces at work in man, but they think in conformity with their own will, their own sentiment; thus one person may regard this, the other that, as the right ideal. There are many ideals of Anthroposophy, according to the dispositions of men's hearts, according as their sentiments and feelings incline them this way or that. True occultism at a somewhat higher level shows us however that such hankerings after an ideal are always something connected with our own personality. Ideals of this kind are really only what one or another would like to think of as Anthroposophy, something which his own peculiar sentiment and the make-up of his intellect causes him to believe the best. Anthroposophy is not the only thing about which men form their opinions out of feelings and personal motives, but Spiritual Science must learn not to take what springs from our own personal feeling as the standard of measurement. As persons we are always liable to err, however much we may believe ourselves to be cherishing an unselfish ideal. We can only form an opinion about what has to happen in human evolution when we entirely suppress our own personal feelings about the ideal, and no longer ask what we ourselves consider the best way to treat of Spiritual Science. For we can only come to a true opinion if we let the necessities of life speak, quite regardless of our own inclinations, regardless of what particular expression of spiritual life we prefer; we can only arrive at a true opinion if we ask ourselves how European civilisation has taken shape in recent centuries, and what are its immediate needs. If we put the question to ourselves without bias, we get an answer which is twofold. Firstly, if European cultural life is not to dry up, to become a ‘waste land’, the great, the overwhelming need—shown by all that is happening in the life of the mind today—is Spiritual Science. Secondly, it needs a spiritual science suited to the conditions which have developed through the centuries, not in any one of us, but in Europe as a whole. But we shall only be able to give them a spiritual science which meets these conditions if we ask ourselves unselfishly what it is that Europeans have learnt to think and to feel during recent centuries, and what it is that they are thirsting for as a means for the spiritual deepening of their lives.

If we put this question to ourselves, then all the signs of the times show us that it cannot be a continuation of the occultism, the mysticism, which has been known for thousands of years, and which has been rich in blessing for diverse peoples. The continuation of this mystic lore as it has always been known, as it has been handed down by history, could not meet the needs of European civilisation. We should be committing a sin against European civilisation and everything connected with it if we were merely to immerse ourselves in ancient occultism; we should be putting our personal preferences above the necessities of existence. However great our personal inclination for some form or other of ancient occultism, let us suppress this, and ask ourselves what it is that men need in the conditions which have come about through centuries of development. The signs of the times make it equally clear that what we call modern science, however high may be the esteem in which it is held today, however great may be the authority which it enjoys, is like a tree that has passed its prime and will bear little fruit in future. When I say that what today is known as physical science is a withering branch in humanity's mental and spiritual heaven, I know that it will be thought a bold assertion, but it is at any rate not an idle one. Science has rendered good service; to throw light upon the conditions of its existence, as I have just done, is not to disparage it.

Neither ancient occultism nor modern science will serve to satisfy the deepest need of the humanity of the future, the need to establish a link between the human soul and spiritual revelation. That is what hovered before us, as if inscribed in letters of gold, when we began some years ago to develop the spiritual life on broader lines. And if I may be allowed to say something which is as much a matter of feeling as of conviction, I would say that, considered objectively and without bias in relation to the question I have raised, the work of our esteemed friend Edouard Schuré, Les Grands Initiés,³ steering as it does a middle course between purely historical occultism, which can be read up anywhere from historical records, and the academic learning which is a withering branch of civilisation, is an extremely important literary beginning with the kind of spiritual life which will be needed all over Europe in the future. It is a most significant beginning towards the apprehension of true Anthroposophy, an Anthroposophy which observes life directly, sees how spiritual life at present is a slow trickle, sees how the stream will widen. I pointed this out at the commencement of my lectures here a year ago.⁴ Anyone who can to some extent see into the future, anyone who sees what that future demands of us, knows that with Les Grands Initiés a first literary step has been taken along that golden middle road between ancient occultism and modern, but decadent, science, and that this beautiful and important beginning which has already been made by that book for all European countries, will assume ever further forms. The book is coloured by a turn of thought which does not impress us sympathetically just because of our own personal preferences for this or that form of spiritual science, but because we see that the necessities of European civilisation, making themselves felt ever more insistently, demanded that such a literary beginning should be made. If you know this book, you know how impressively it calls attention to the Mystery of Eleusis, a subject which Schuré subsequently developed further in Sanctuaires d'Orient.⁵

What kind of thoughts are aroused in us by these indications—anthroposophical in the best sense—which we find in Les Grands Initiés, and by the reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis? If we look back to the original sources of European artistic and spiritual life, we find there two figures, figures which have a deep significance for a truly theosophical grasp of the whole of modern spiritual life—two figures which stand out as symbolical presentations of great spiritual impulses. To those who can look below the surface of the spiritual life of today these figures appear like two beams of prophetic light: they are Persephone and Iphigenia. With these two names we are in a way touching upon what are really two souls in modern man, two souls whose union is only achieved through the severest ordeals. In the course of the next few days we shall see more clearly how Persephone arouses in our hearts the thought of an impulse to which we have often alluded in our spiritual-scientific studies. Once upon a time it was given to mankind to acquire knowledge in a way different from that of today. From earlier lectures we know of an ancient clairvoyance which in primeval times welled forth in human nature, so that clairvoyant pictures took shape in men's souls, as inevitably as hunger and thirst and the need for air arise in their bodies—pictures filled with the secrets of the spiritual worlds. This was the primeval gift of seership which man once possessed, and of which he was so to say bereft by the gradual birth in him of knowledge in its later form. The ancient Greek partly felt that in his own time the rape of ancient clairvoyance by modern knowledge was already taking place and partly foresaw that this would happen more and more in the future—a future which has become our own present. He thus turned his gaze upwards to that divine figure who released in the human soul directly out of elemental Nature the forces which led to that ancient clairvoyance. He looked up to that goddess called Persephone, who was the regent of this old clairvoyance bound up with human nature. And then this ancient Greek said to himself: ‘In place of this ancient clairvoyance another culture will become more and more widespread, a civilisation directed by men themselves and born of them, born of men to whom the ancient clairvoyance is already lost.’

In the civilisation which the ancient Greek associated with the names of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus, we find the external civilisation which we know today, untouched by forces of clairvoyance. It is a civilisation whose knowledge of nature and her laws is assumed to be as useful for finding a philosophical basis for the secrets of existence as it is for making armaments. But men no longer feel that this kind of mental culture requires a sacrifice—they no longer feel that in order to achieve it they must offer sacrifice in a deeper sense to the higher spiritual Beings who direct the super-sensible worlds. These sacrifices are in fact being made, but men are as yet too inattentive to notice them. The ancient Greek did notice that this external culture which he traced back to Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, involved sacrifice; it is the daughter of the human spirit who in a certain way has to be sacrificed ever anew. And he represented this perpetual sacrifice demanded by intellectual culture as the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. Thus to the question raised by the sacrifice of Iphigenia there resounds a wonderful answer! If nothing but that external culture which can be traced back, as the ancient Greek understood it, to Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, were given to mankind, then under its influence men's hearts, the deepest forces of souls, would have withered away. It is only because mankind retained the feeling that it should make perpetual sacrifice and should single out, set apart from this general intellectual culture, rites which, not superficially, but in a more profound sense, may be called sacerdotal—it is only because of this that this intellectual civilisation has been saved from drying up completely. Just as Iphigenia was offered to Artemis as a sacrifice, but through her sacrifice became a priestess, so in the course of bygone millennia certain elements of our intellectual civilisation have had repeatedly to be cleansed and purified and given a sacerdotal-religious character in sacrifice to the higher gods, so that they should not cause the hearts and souls of men to wither up. Just as Persephone stands for the leader of the ancient clairvoyant culture, so Iphigenia represents the perpetual sacrifice which our intellectuality has to make to the deeper religious life.

These two factors have already been alive in European cultural life from the time of ancient Greece right up to the present time—from the time when Socrates first wrested scientific thinking from the old unified culture, right up to the time when poor Nietzsche, in travail of his soul, had recourse to the separation of the three branches of culture—science, art and religion—and lost his balance as a result. Because forces are already working towards the reunification of what for millenia has had to be separated, because the future already lights up the present with its challenge, the present age, through its representatives—men inspired by the Spirits of the Age—has had to realise anew the two impulses just characterised, and to connect them with the names of Persephone and Iphigenia. And if one realises this, it brings home to one the significance of Goethe's action in immersing himself in the life of ancient Greece and expressing in the symbol of Iphigenia what he himself felt to be the culmination of his art. When he wrote his Iphigenia, which in a way brings to symbolic expression the whole of his work, Goethe made his first contact with the spiritual riches of European antiquity. Out of that deed of Goethe's there resounds to us today the secret thought: ‘If Europe is not to be blighted by her intellectuality we must remember the perpetual sacrifice which intellectual culture has to make to religious culture.’ The whole compass of intellectual civilisation furnishes for the higher spiritual life an atmosphere as harsh as King Thoas in Iphigenia. But in the figure of Iphigenia herself we meet gentleness and harmony, which do not hate with those that hate but love with those who love. Thus when Goethe was inspired in presenting his Iphigenia to Europe to testify to the perpetual sacrifice of intellectuality it was a first reminder of all-important impulses for the spiritual life of Europe. We may indeed feel that his soul was enlightened by the spiritual inspirers of modern times.

A second reminder was needed, for which we have had to wait a little longer—one which points to an age when the old clairvoyant culture was still alive, the culture associated with the name of Persephone. In that chapter of Les Grands Initiés which rises to a certain climax in the description of the Mystery of Eleusis, one again feels inspirers of European spiritual life working to conjure up out of the glimmering darkness of the age a growing recognition that the old clairvoyant culture represented by Persephone must light up again. One pole of modern European spiritual life was given in the revival of the ancient Iphigenia-figure; the other pole comes with the recreation of the Mystery of Eleusis by Edouard Schuré. And we must regard it as one of the most fortunate of the stars that rule our efforts, that this performance of The Mystery of Eleusis is allowed to shed its light upon our anthroposophical life in the presence of its recreator, who has now for several years rejoiced us by his presence.

What I have just said is only partly a matter of feeling. From another aspect it is a thought springing from the most sober and objective conviction. If I have expressed this conviction today, it is because I agree with Goethe that ‘only what proves fruitful is true’—a pearl of wisdom for our whole pursuit of knowledge. If there is any sign of fruitfulness in what we have been doing for years past, we may acknowledge that the thinking which has inspired our work for many years, the thinking which has always been present with us as a hidden guest, as a comrade in arms, has shown itself to be true by its fruitfulness. In the next few days, when we come to talk about ‘Wonders of Nature, Ordeals of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit’ we shall have much to say in illustration of our theme which will have a bearing upon what I have just said about Iphigenia and Persephone. Here let me preface that as Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon—one of those Heroes to whom the ancient Greek traced the cult of its intellectuality in its widest sense, with the practical and aggressive forms it takes—so Persephone is the daughter of Demeter. Now we shall see that Demeter is the ruler of the greatest wonders of Nature, she is an archetypal form which points to a time when the life of the human brain was not yet cut off from the general bodily life, a time when nutrition by external foodstuffs and thinking through the instrument of the brain were not separate functions. When the crops were thriving in the fields it was still felt at that time that thinking was alive there, that hope was outpoured over the fields and penetrated the activity of Nature's wonder like the song of the lark. It was still felt that along with material substance spiritual life is absorbed into the human body, becomes purified, becomes spirit—as the archetypal mother, out of whom what is born elementally becomes Persephone in the human being himself. The name of Demeter points us back to those far distant times when human nature was so unified that all bodily life was at the same time spiritual, that all bodily assimilation went hand in hand with spiritual assimilation, assimilation of thought. Today we can only learn what things were like then from the Akashic record. It is from the Akashic record that we learn that Persephone is the true daughter of Demeter. It is there too that we learn that Eros, another figure who appears in the reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis, represents the means whereby, according to Greek sentiment, the forces of Demeter in the course of human development have become what they are today. When Demeter stands before us on the stage, with the stern admonition of a primeval force, for ever and as if by enchantment permeating all human feeling, the whole marvel of human nature is immediately conjured up before our souls. Something stands before us there in Demeter which speaks throughout all ages of time as an impulse of human nature. When Demeter is on the stage we feel it streaming towards us. She is the mightiest representative of ‘chastity’—as today we abstractly call it—that archetypal force with all its fruitful efficacy when it is not mere asceticism, but embraces humanity's archetypal love. On the other hand what speaks to us in the figure of Eros? It is budding, innocent love. Eros is its ruler ... that is what the Greeks felt.

Now the drama unfolds. What are the forces which are at work with supporting life-giving power throughout the whole drama from beginning to end? Chastity, which is at the same time archetypal love in all its fruitfulness, in its interplay with budding, innocent love. This is what holds sway in the drama, just as positive and negative electricity hold sway in the everyday wonders of Nature. Thus throughout the space into which this pregnant archetypal drama is poured, there may be more or less consciously sensed something of the forces which have been at work since the beginning of time and which still permeate our modern life; though those archetypal currents, the Demeter current and the Eros current, will in the future become more and more absorbed in a way by the tendencies represented in the three figures Luna, Astrid and Philia. This will be further elucidated in the next few days. We shall be shown a living relationship between the currents which are those of man's origin—Demeter and Eros with Persephone between them—and on the other hand something which dawns in us today in a form as yet impersonal; it is like a spiritual conscience which as yet calls to us from the unknown and does not venture upon the stage; it is only a voice from without. I am speaking of the three figures Luna, Astrid, Philia, the true daughters of Persephone.

I have tried to put before you the feelings which prompted us to give pride of place, at the opening of our studies, to The Mystery of Eleusis in its reconstruction by Edouard Schuré. No doubt the training you have received in recent years will enable you to view our present performances of this important work in the way which should come naturally to us in the anthroposophical Movement. Today it is frightfully easy to taunt us with amateurishness in comparison with what we are given as dramatic art in the world outside; it is easy to point out the mistakes which we all make if with our feeble capacities we tackle such a great work as this Mystery of Eleusis. But we are not trying, or at any rate we ought not to be trying, to represent things in the same manner as is done on the ordinary modern stage. Those today who already have some inkling of the impress our special kind of spiritual knowledge should give to art will know that we are aiming at something quite different. They will also know that performances which will only be able to achieve a certain perfection in the future must make a beginning in all their imperfection in the present. We are not called upon to compete with ordinary stage performances. We do not dream of such a thing, and it is a mistake even to make such comparisons. Let the dramatic critic say what he will about other stage performances, he is a mere amateur as regards what Spiritual Science is aiming at, what it must aim at, even in the realm of art.

Those of you who can share the profound gratitude which I feel every time at the opening of our Munich festivals to all who have helped to bring them about will not think it inappropriate or too personal if again this year I express my thanks to them at the close of this introductory lecture. Not only have many hands been needed to make this festival possible, but it has needed souls who have already permeated themselves with what can be the finest fruit of a life of spiritual effort—spiritual warmth. This spiritual warmth is never without effect and always brings a gradually developing skill in its appropriate sphere. Thus, each time we set to work—first the small group of those here in Munich who are the forerunners of the larger community which then gathers here—we find ourselves filled with spiritual warmth, and, even when to begin with everything seems to go very badly, we have faith that our work must succeed. And it does succeed to the full extent of our capacities. This undertaking proves to us that spiritual forces hold sway in the world, that they help us, that we may entrust ourselves to them. And if sometimes it seems as if things are not going well, then we say to ourselves that if we are not successful it is because the powers behind our activity do not intend us to succeed, and not to succeed would then be the right thing. Thus we do what we have to do without giving a thought to the sort of performance which will finally emerge. We think of the spiritual forces, to which we too in the sense of our own time are making our puny sacrifice—the sacrifice of modern intellectuality to the religious deepening of the human heart. It is beautiful to see what spiritual warmth there is in that small group, wonderful to see how each individual in undertaking his or her by no means easy sacrificial task actually experiences something spiritual. It is a fraternal offering which those who participate in it carry out for us. Those who understand this will share the grateful feeling to which I now give expression.

Our thanks of course go in the first place to the recreator of the Mystery of Eleusis, and then to my numerous fellow-workers here in Munich. I remember especially those who throughout many years of work in the service of Spiritual Science, permeated with loving spiritual warmth, have felt the call to unite their knowledge and experience with what we here are trying to do. Let me first gratify a heartfelt wish by alluding to the two ladies who have co-operated with me in quite a special way, Fräulein Stinde and Countess Kalckreuth, so that today the beautiful harmony between their spiritual thinking and their purely technical work shines upon us everywhere in this Munich festival. Permit me to mention our good friend Adolf Arenson, who in this as in previous years has composed the music for all three plays. I leave it to your own hearts to judge of these compositions. I myself regard it as a fortunate destiny that our work should have been completed by the musical compositions of our dear friend Arenson. Further I feel it to be a particular mark of good fortune that the stage effects which hovered over the scenes and imbued them with a truly religious spirit should have been carried out so admirably by Baroness von Eckhardstein. To me every flicker of light, be it red or blue, every shade in the scenic effect, be it light or subdued, is important and meaningful, and that the Baroness should feel this is among the things which we should regard as indeed the work of the spirit.

I need only call your attention to the scenery contributed by our artists Herr Linde, Herr Folkert and Herr Hass, and in mentioning them I would like you to understand that the spiritual thought which lives in their souls has found its way even into their paint brushes. It is spirituality which you see in the scenery which these three have contributed. Of course in none of the things I have mentioned do we find perfection, but we find the beginning of an aim. I should like you to see in all that is willed here, in all that cannot yet be fully achieved, how one can think of the future development of art.

That is why it is so tremendously important too that the dramatic production should only be in the hands of actors who are striving for spiritual knowledge. It is my wish, not out of personal preference but because it cannot be otherwise, that not a single word in our dramatic performances should be spoken by anyone not of our way of thinking, even though those words should be spoken with perfect artistry and the utmost refinement of stage diction.

What we are aiming at is something quite different from the customary stage technique. We are not aiming at what people call art today; what we want is that in each of those who stand on the stage his heart should speak out of spiritual warmth, and that such an atmosphere should breathe through the whole performance, be that performance good or indifferent, that we should experience spiritual warmth as art and art as spiritual warmth. For this reason every one who is present at these dramatic festivals which precede our lecture cycles at Munich must feel, ‘there is not a word spoken in this production which is not experienced in the depths of the actor's soul.’ In many respects this results in a certain reserve, a certain restraint, which anyone who has no desire to feel in a spiritual way may regard as amateurish, but it is the beginning of something which is to come, the beginning of something which will one day be regarded as artistic truth in the deepest and most spiritual sense of the words, however imperfect and rudimentary it may seem to you today. Therefore it will never occur to those of you who have understanding to want to cut passages. You will calmly accept all the long passages necessitated by the subject. Nothing is too long for us, nothing too undramatic, in the modern, generally accepted sense of the word, because we are concerned, not with the demands of external ‘theatre’, but with the inner necessities of the subject, and we will never abandon our dramatic convictions. For example, take the fairy-tale you heard yesterday, the fairy-tale that Felicia tells Capesius in the fifth scene of my playThe Soul's Probation. The habitual theatre goer would pronounce it deadly dull. We must never shrink from putting long passages which may seem tedious on the stage, if dramatic truth calls for it. Dramatic truth is the overruling consideration in our productions.

Moreover, dramatic freedom demands that every individual who does us the favour of co-operating with us should have freedom of action as regards his own part, so that each one can feel that every action he makes and every word he utters on the stage proceeds from himself. You will never see in our performances an arbitrary stage-production such as is so very fashionable today. In its place you will feel the influence of that spirit which breathes unseen over our production as a whole, even if only in a rudimentary and imperfect way, but which is able to multiply its work in each individual concerned. Hence when one is involved in such an enterprise as this, one feels above all things profound gratitude for the sacrifices made by every single actor. It is not possible to mention each one individually, because so many have helped, but each one has accomplished much.

I might continue this catalogue of thanks for a long time. Lastly I might thank you all for having shown understanding for what one day, in the drama of the future, will be regarded as a sine qua non—that what is not seen on the stage must play its part as well as what is seen, that what is merely hinted at must have a place as well as the more material impersonations; that some figures must stand out in the illumination of the footlights, while others have rather to be secretly insinuated in the depths of the human word. What is intended in my Mystery Plays and will more and more be felt as the true meaning of the three figures Philia, Astrid and Luna can only partly be conveyed in the light in which they appear on the stage in bodily form; for with these three figures which are intended to represent important impulses of human evolution, intimate secrets of the soul are also bound up, intimate secrets which one only appreciates rightly by coupling what arrests one's attention by its strong illumination with what is suggested in the intimacy of the spoken word. These three feminine figures working in the silvery moonlight and fashioning from the evanescent forms taken by the spray the chalice which subtly represents what they are aiming at both in their more manifest as well as in their more delicate form—these beings whom we encounter in the silvery moonlight of the fairy-tale, and who show us how they accompany the souls of men as intimate friends, show us how men are formed in childhood, what they look like after thrice three hundred and sixty weeks have gone by—these beings can only be understood when one takes into consideration both aspects, the one grasped by the senses and outwardly visible, seen on the stage in tangible form, and the other aspect, which seems so tedious to the modern theatre goer, communicated through the telling of a delicate fairy-tale ... the only vehicle fit to convey the subtlety of meaning expressed by such figures as Luna, Astrid and Philia. And when one sees that already today there are a number of souls who are capable of pure unprejudiced feeling as regards what is not easily tolerated on the stage, then one can say ... Spiritual Science is grateful to you that you have been willing to train your souls to experience and absorb what has been attempted here in its service. For all these reasons, at the close of this introduction to our forthcoming lectures you will not mind my giving this expression to my gratitude.

Thankfulness and joy again and again fill me, not only when I see our fellow workers co-operate and adapt themselves to what is new, but also when I see men like our stage hands working for us so willingly. I feel it is really something to be thankful for, when one of the workmen asks if he too may have a book. I know well that everything is very rudimentary and imperfect, but it is something which will bear fruit, something which will work on. If out of all that we have attempted to do at the opening of our Munich festival one thing is impressed upon us—that Spiritual Science is not meant to be something abstract, a hobby which one pursues, but that it is related to the conditions of our whole life—then the modest effort which we have tried to make, as a beginning only, will have had its effect; something of what we have been aiming at will have been achieved. In this spirit I welcome you at the outset of this cycle of lectures, which is to be devoted to the study of many things we encounter when we direct our gaze into the vast world, and experience what for the ancient Greeks was the origin of all theosophy, all philosophy—when we experience ‘wonder’, from which we derive the German word meaning miracle; when we experience some premonition of those ‘ordeals of the soul’, and when we see what may well be the resolution of all wonder and the liberation from all ordeals which ‘revelations of the spirit’ can effect. What can be experienced from all these three—from the wonders of Nature, from the ordeals of the soul, from the redeeming revelations of the Spirit, this then is to be the subject of our forthcoming studies.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring to the opening words of Edouard Schuré's The Mystery of Eleusis, a performanee of which in the German language together with performances of the first two of Dr. Steiner's own Mystery Plays had preceded the giving of these lectures.
• 2. Les Enfants de Lucifer, Edouard Schuré, (Paris, Perrin et Cie, 1922).
  English translation, The Children of Lucifer by B. Kemmis, (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 1935)
  The production to which Dr. Steiner refers was from a German translation by Marie von Sivers put into free verse by Rudolf Steiner, but not published until 1955, under the title Lucifer, Die Kinder des Lucifer. (Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.)
• 3. First edition 1889 (Perrin et Cie. Paris). English edition, The Great Initiates, translated by Fred Rothwell in two volumes,. (Rider & Co. London) (o.p.). American edition translated by Gloria Raspberry, 1961. (Rudolf Steiner Publications Ltd., West Nyack, New York).
• 4. Lecture-Course translated into English under the title of Genesis: Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation, (Anthroposophical Publishing Co. London).
• 5. Sanctuaires d'Orient, par Edouard Schuré. (Perrin et Cie, Paris).

Yesterday I tried to give you some idea of the way the Greeks thought about the relationship between the human soul and our Earth evolution, laying special emphasis upon two things. I said the Greeks were conscious that in primeval times the soul had been gifted with clairvoyance, and they regarded Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, as the ruler of those clairvoyant powers which played into men's souls from the cosmos. On the other hand I showed how the entire intellectual civilisation of mankind can be traced back to the stream associated with the names of Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. I tried to make you feel that this civilisation calls for a continual sacrifice. Thus the finest feelings and sentiments of which the human soul is capable, when it comes under the influence of this intellectual civilisation, were offered up to a kind of religious sacerdotal-ism, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia expresses this thought for us. Such views enable us to realise that the tradition, and to a certain extent the actual knowledge, of what we are now endeavouring to regain through Spiritual Science was still very much alive in ancient Greece. We draw attention to the fact that in primeval times the soul had clairvoyant capacities. You can read in my Occult Science—An Outline how in Atlantis men saw into the spiritual world and how cosmic forces appeared to them as actual forms or figures; so that men did not then speak of abstract forces, but of real Beings. Such a figure as Persephone is a relic of this consciousness. Through Spiritual Science we are struggling gradually to come to know again from our modern viewpoint the same living reality in the spiritual world which was familiar to men in primeval times, the same living Beings who lay hid behind the figures of Greek mythology.

The more deeply one goes into Greek mythology, the greater is one's respect, one's admiration, for the profound cosmic wisdom which lies behind it. To give you some idea of this, let me just mention one thing. I said yesterday that Greek mythology draws attention to two different trends—to the intellectual civilisation associated with the names of Menelaus, Agamemnon and Odysseus, and so beautifully exemplified in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and to the other culture associated with Persephone and her mother Demeter. Now a thoughtful person will naturally reflect that such movements do not take their course in complete independence. Despite their apparent separation there must have been a point of contact somewhere. How does Greek mythology express this profound truth? We know that modern scholarship has nothing but a few abstract ideas to offer in this connection. But Greek mythology traces the ancestry of Agamemnon back to a representative of human soul-forces whom we may call Tantalus. According to the Greek legend Tantalus wantonly offered his own son to the gods as food. We know too that the gods recognised the impious nature of this act, and only one—a goddess—partook of a shoulder-blade. That goddess was Demeter. In this remarkable touch of symbolism—Demeter's eating of the shoulder-blade of the son of Tantalus—we find an indication that there is a connection between the two streams. It confirms that Demeter forces enter into the entire modern civilisation associated with the names of Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Thus every item of Greek mythology has its correspondence in what we are bringing to light again in the form of modern spiritual wisdom. It is worth while to call attention now and again to such deeply significant features. It brings home to us the fact that the way man looks at the wonders of Nature changes in course of time. Our natural science is proud of its interpretation of Nature. There seems little ground for this pride when we reflect that by representing the force hidden in the depths of Nature as the female ruler of the wonders of Nature, the Greek system of divinities showed a far deeper wisdom than the science of today has any inkling of, or will so much as guess at until Spiritual Science is allowed to penetrate into our civilisation. It can give a considerable spur to our own knowledge, to the knowledge which we have acquired in the course of years, to consider it in relation to the depths of wisdom in Greek mythology.

One feature of The Mystery of Eleusis draws attention to an important natural wonder. What is really the crucial event of the drama? Persephone, who represents the ancient clairvoyant forces of the human soul, is carried off by Pluto, the god of the underworld. The whole wondrous action comes alive for you in the Pluto scene of the reconstructed drama; once more we have it before our very eyes ... what does it mean, when we apply what Greek mythology and the Mystery of Eleusis thus express to the nature of man himself? What in terms of Spiritual Science has happened to the old clairvoyant faculty of the human soul? This rape of Persephone has in fact been going on from the earliest times right up to our own day; the old clairvoyant culture has vanished. But nothing in the world ever really disappears, things are really only transformed. Whither, then, has Persephone gone? What is the Regent of the old clairvoyant forces doing today in human nature? In the opening chapters of a little book¹ now on the verge of publication, and which virtually reproduces the contents of my recent lectures in Copenhagen, you can read that the human soul encompasses far more than what it knows by way of intellect, by way of reason. A more comprehensive soul-life, a subconscious soul-life, is at work in us—it is better to call it subconscious rather than unconscious—a soul-life which in most modern men does not emerge into consciousness at all. In this subconscious life which is at work today in the human being without his being able to give a reasoned account of it, is Persephone; that is where the suppressed clairvoyant forces have gone. Whereas in primeval times they worked in such a way that the soul could see into spiritual worlds, today they work in the depths of the human soul. They assist in the development and formation of the ego principle, making it firmer and firmer. Whereas in primeval times these forces were dedicated to the task of making man clairvoyant, today they devote themselves to the establishing to the consolidation of our ego. Thus these Persephone forces have been drawn down into the human subconscious, they have been embraced, have so to say been raped, by the depths of the human soul. Thus in the course of the historical development of humanity, the rape of Persephone has been brought about by soul-forces which lie deep in the subconscious, forces which in outer Nature are represented as Pluto. According to Greek mythology Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, of the interior of the earth. But the Greek was also aware that the same forces which are at work in the depths of the earth are also at work in the depths of the human soul. Just as Persephone was carried off by Pluto, in the same way, in the course of human development, the soul was robbed of its ancient clairvoyant capacity through Pluto's intervention.

Now Persephone is Demeter's daughter, and so we infer that in Demeter we have a still older ruler, both of the forces of external Nature and of the forces of the human soul. I said yesterday that Demeter is a figure of Greek mythology whom we associate with the kind of clairvoyant vision which belongs to the very oldest endowment of wisdom of Atlantean humanity—for it is in Atlantis that Demeter is really to be found. When an Atlantean man gazed into the spiritual world, he saw Demeter; she really came to meet him. When, out of this spiritual world, this whirling world of constant movement and changing forms, the archetypal mother of the human soul and of the fruitful forces of Nature appeared to him, what did he say? He said to himself, not in full consciousness, but as it were in the unconscious, ‘I myself have done nothing, I have gone through no inner development, as later ages will do, in order to see into the spiritual world. The same forces of Nature which have given me my eyes, my brain, my organism, and are active in me, these very same forces give me also the power of clairvoyance; just as I breathe, so also I have clairvoyant sight.’ Just as man went through no special development to produce breathing, so at that time he did not form his own clairvoyant faculty, but both these things were given to him by the powers of Nature, by divine Beings. When man turned his attention to what was outside him, to what existed all around him, and along with the sensible received the spiritual, he consciously felt: ‘I absorb into myself the substance of the plant kingdom in the world around me (a plant kingdom quite different from our present one), I absorb from outside everything that is growing, but with the substances I take in also the forces active in them.’ The man of that time was not so hopelessly limited in his outlook as to believe that what he took in as food was only physical substance, only something which could be analysed by the chemist; he knew that with the substances he took in the inner configuration of the forces which are active in them, and that it is these forces which construct him, which build up his body again. Atlantean man said to himself: ‘Outside in Nature, forces are at work; through my breathing and through the food I eat they enter into me. What they are outside me is under the control of the great Demeter. But Demeter sends these forces into the human soul, there they are worked upon and transformed into the faculty of clairvoyance.’ (We may call these forces the process of digestion, but the digestion was then a spiritual one.) ‘Through the forces under the control of Demeter, the fecundating goddess of the whole world, the clairvoyant capacity represented by Persephone is born in the human organisation.’ Thus Atlantean man feels that he too has his place among the wonders of Nature. He feels this clairvoyant capacity born in him as the birth of Persephone, he feels that he owes this birth to Demeter, who spreads abroad in the wide cosmos the very same forces which in man develop into the faculty of clairvoyance.

Thus the man of old looked up to the great Demeter, and in ancient Greece man was still aware that it had once been so. But you will have already realised from this that the human organism, the entire bodily constitution, has changed since those ancient times. The human body of today, with its organisation of muscle and bone, is substantially denser, more compact, than the bodies of those men who were still able to give birth to Persephone within themselves, since they still had the faculty of clairvoyance. And because this organism of ours has become denser, it can also hold fast the clairvoyant forces in the sub-earthly realm of the soul. The imprisonment of the clairvoyant forces within human nature comes about as a result of the densification of the human body. And when the ancient Greek feels the old, more delicate, rarefied body becoming denser, it is because he is taking in forces which are active in the inner earth, whereas formerly he had been more under the sway of forces connected with the surrounding air, which rendered him in consequence softer, more supple. And what is active in the sub-earthly realm, the realm governed by Pluto, obtained a greater and greater influence on the human body, so that we may say that Pluto obtained an ever increasing hold over man; he densified the human body and in doing so abducted Persephone. This densification went on right into the physical body. For even in the earlier postAtlantean times the human organisation appeared very different from what it does today. It is very shortsighted to think that the human being was always formed as he is today.

Thus we see that the rape of Persephone and man's connection with Demeter are really expressions of the wonders of Nature within man himself. They show us how Greek mythology was dominated by the consciousness that man is a microcosm, an expression of the macrocosm, the great cosmos. As Demeter works without in the powerful forces of all that brings forth fruit from the Earth, so also is what comes from Demeter active within us. As the forces represented in Greek mythology by Pluto are active within the Earth and not on the Earth's surface, so does Pluto work in man's own organism. We must be able to blot out entirely the usual way of looking at things today, our own habits and customs, if we want to understand the completely different habit of thought even of people as recent as the Greeks. When the modern man wants to make laws he looks to the government, he looks to his parliaments. This is of course, not a criticism, it is merely a comment. That is where our laws come from today, and a man would probably be considered a fool if he were to put forward the theory that cosmic forces pass through the heads of the sitting members! We will not pursue this any further; it is sufficient that the man of today would find such an idea grotesque.

It was not so in prehistoric times, it was not even so in ancient Greece. In those times there was prevalent an idea so wonderful, so impressive, that modern man can scarcely believe it. Think of all that I have told you about the development of the Greek gods. I pointed out how Demeter worked in ancient times, how she instilled her forces into human nature—her forces which were active in the plants and caused her child to be born in that human nature. That is what Demeter did in ancient times. Now there were also other gods working in like fashion both with the forces of Nature and the wonders of Nature. How did they work? Well, when the human being ate and when he breathed, he knew that the forces which he took in from the air and from the plants came from Demeter, and he knew that it was Demeter who gave him his clairvoyant consciousness, but he knew too that it was she who taught him how he had to behave in the world. There were at that time no laws in the later meaning of the term, there were no commandments outwardly expressed, but since man was clairvoyant, it dawned in him clairvoyantly how he ought to behave, what was right, what was good. Thus in those very remote times he saw Demeter, who gave him his food, also as the cosmic power of Nature who, when he took in foodstuffs, so transformed their forces within him that they gave him his morality, his rule of conduct. And the man of old said to himself: ‘I gaze upwards to the great Demeter, and whenever I accomplish something in the world, I do so because forces active in the plant world without are sent into my brain.’ This Demeter of old was a law-giver, giving law which did not flash up into consciousness, but which was self-evident, impelling the soul. And it was the same with other gods. In nourishing human beings, in causing them to breathe, in prompting in them impulses to walk and to stand, they at the same time gave men the impulse for morality, for the whole of their outer conduct. When the gods assumed the forms they had later and of which we have spoken ... when Demeter saw her child Persephone lost in man's nature, saw her raped as it were by the now denser human body so that these clairvoyant forces could henceforth only be used for coarser bodily nutrition. ... When at that point she so to say gave up imparting the moral law directly, what did she do? She instituted a Mystery, thereby providing a substitute, a new form of law, for the old law which worked through the forces of Nature. Thus the gods withdrew from the forces of Nature into the Mysteries, and gave moral precepts to men who no longer possessed a morality drawn from the activity of Nature within them.

This was the essence of Greek thought in the matter, that originally the gods bestowed morality upon men along with the forces of Nature; then the forces of Nature more or less withdrew, and later the gods substituted a moral law in a more abstract form through their messengers in the Mysteries. When man became estranged from Nature he needed a more abstract, a more intellectual morality, hence the Greeks looked to their Mysteries for guidance in their moral life, and in the Mysteries they saw the activity of the gods, as previously they had seen their activity in the forces of Nature. For this reason the earliest Greek period attributed the moral law to the same gods who were at the back of the forces of Nature. When the Greeks spoke of the origin of their earliest laws they did not refer to a parliament, but to gods who had come down to men and who had in the Mysteries given them the laws which continue to live in human morality.

But as the human body became denser and denser, as it became transformed, what happened to the original Demeter forces? If I may use a very rough illustration, you all know that one cannot do with ice what one can do with water, because ice is in another form. In the same way one cannot do with the solid human body what it was once possible, out of the forces of Nature, to do with the finer body. Into this more rarefied body Demeter had been able to instil, with the products of Nature, the spiritual forces which were in them and thereby to develop clairvoyant forces.

What became of the Demeter forces as a result of the solidifying of the human body, or to use the language of Greek mythology, through the rape of Persephone by Pluto? They had to take a back place in the organisation of the human body, they had to become less active; man had to be alienated from the direct influence of Demeter, to become subject to other forces, forces to which I called attention yesterday. What is it that makes the denser human body fresh and healthy? Just as of old it was Demeter, now it is Eros, it is what is represented in the Nature-forces by Eros, who brings this about. If Eros were not working upon the human body, if Demeter had continued to work, the body would be shrivelled and wrinkled throughout life. Today, Demeter forces are not to be found in youthful bodies, in chubby rosy cheeks; they are in the body just when it eliminates the Eros forces, as it does when it becomes older, when it becomes shrivelled and wrinkled. This profound truth is actually portrayed in The Mystery of Eleusis. After the rape of Persephone, Demeter appears before us denuded of her original forces. She is transformed by Hecate, so transformed that she now bears the forces of decline. The rape of Persephone also represents the withdrawal of Demeter from the bodily organisation in the course of the historical development of humanity. How splendidly those ancient wonders of Nature are expressed in the figures of the ancient gods! When in old age Eros begins to withdraw from the human body, then the influence of Demeter begins again. Then Demeter can, once again in a way, enter the body, then forces of fruitful chastity can predominate, while the Eros forces fall into the background. We are touching upon a tremendous mystery in human growth, human development, when we speak of old age, when we speak of the metamorphosis of Eros into Demeter forces. Secrets such as this were hidden deep within the Eleusinian drama, so deeply hidden that no doubt anyone with the usual education of today would regard everything I have just said as fantasy. In fact, however, it is the pronouncements of materialistic science about these things that are fantastic, that is where all the dreaming and the superstition really lie!

What is it then that, between the time of Atlantis and our own time, has really changed in human nature? It is that part of man in which his essential being is ensheathed. His essential being is enclosed in three bodily sheaths; it is enclosed in the physical body, the ether body and the astral body; our innermost, our ego, is hidden within these three sheaths. These three have all become different in the course of evolution from the age of Atlantis up to our own time. What is the essential drive which makes these sheaths different? We have to look for this impulse primarily in the ether body. It is the ether body which is the energising influence, which is the really impelling factor. It is the ether body which has made the physical body denser, and which has also transformed the astral body. For these three bodies are not like the rind of a fruit, or the layers of an onion, one outside the other, but their forces mutually interpenetrate, they are in living interplay with one another. The sheath which plays the most important part in this process of transformation, in this historical development of the human being, is the ether body. Let us make a diagram of the three bodies to illustrate this. I will draw them simply as three layers lying one under the other.

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We have to look for the real forces, the effectual forces, especially those of Eros and Demeter here in the ether body; from the etheric they are sent upwards into the astral body, and downwards into the physical body; that is to say, the ether body has an influence both on the astral and upon the physical bodies. During the period I have referred to the ether body makes the physical body definitely denser, more compact; it so transforms the astral body that it no longer develops forces of clairvoyance, but only the intellectual forces of human nature. Because man has been transformed in this way, because the ether body has brought about a transformation in all three bodies, important and fundamental changes have taken place. They have all three been changed. The Atlantean body, even a post-Atlantean body of the first period, was utterly different from a body of the present day. All the relationships and conditions of life were quite different, everything has changed.

If we look at the physical body as it develops from the earliest times right up to the present day, we see that through having become denser it has come more under the influence of its physical environment whereas the delicate physical body of old was more subject to the spiritual conditions of existence. Hence certain characteristics of the physical body which did not exist earlier in a similar form have been enhanced; the causes of disease, of illness, in the physical body in particular have become quite different. In olden times what we call sickness and health were due to quite other causes. In those times human health was directly dependent upon conditions in the spiritual world. Today the physical body is bound up with external physical conditions and therefore dependent upon them; today we have to look for the requisite conditions for health more to the external physical environment. Thus, to use the language of Greek mythology, because of the rape of Persephone by Pluto and her captivity in the nether world of human nature, man in his inmost being has become subject, so far as sickness and health are concerned, to external conditions. That is one of the things which has happened to humanity.

The second thing has to do with the ether body itself. Besides being the source of the forces of metamorphosis, the ether body has also changed in itself. In primeval times this ether body was so organised that the human being did not get to know the world in the way he does today; but when through the old Persephone clairvoyance he gazed into the spiritual world he saw pictures of spiritual Beings. Man saw around him a world of images. Of course it was the forces of the astral body which called forth these images, but the astral body would not have been able to see them if it had depended upon itself alone. The astral body does not of itself see images. Just as a man does not see himself advancing unless a mirror confronts him, so the astral body would not see the images it produces if its activity were not so to say reflected back by the ether body. Thus it is the ether body which brings to the point of vision, to perception, the images called forth by the astral body. What man perceives of the goings-on in his own astral body is what is mirrored for him by his ether body. If all our inner astral processes were not reflected by our ether bodies we should of course still have the astral body's activity within us, but we should not be aware of it, we should not perceive it. Hence the whole picture of the world which the human being makes, the total content of his consciousness is a reflection of his ether body. Whether a man knows anything of the world depends upon his ether body. This was so in the old clairvoyant days, and it is still so today.

What is the secret of the ether body? Its secret is that it is the key to knowledge of the world. What the world brings about in the astral body would not open the door to knowledge of the world were it not for the ether body. The ether body contains all that I have referred to in certain passages of the two Mystery Plays² of mine which you have just seen performed. The Plays mention the labyrinth of thought, the threads which have to weave our knowledge of the world. We do not come to know the world merely by looking at it. Either, as in the old clairvoyance, we move from picture to picture, or as in modern intellectualism, we move from thought to thought as if through a labyrinth. This association too is brought about by the activity of the ether body. Thus what we may call the key and what we may call the threads which connect the single images of our consciousness when we acquire knowledge of the world have both undergone a change. Thus you see what is dependent on the forces of the ether body and what has to be changed in these forces.

Let us now consider the third member, the astral body itself. This is the element in us which is subject to the influences of the world and in which the forces and the skills are formed which are then reflected by the ether body. Knowledge is kindled in the astral body; it is brought to consciousness through the ether body. A thought, an image, is kindled in the astral body; we have these in us because we have astral bodies. But these thoughts and images become conscious in us because we have ether bodies; they would still be in us even if we had no ether bodies, but we should not be aware of them. The torch of knowledge is kindled in the astral body; this torch is reflected as conscious knowledge in the ether body. This torch of knowledge which is kindled in the astral body has changed in the course of the historical development of mankind; in ancient times man had clairvoyant or imaginal knowledge; today he has intellectual or rational knowledge. That is the change which has come about in the astral body.

Thus during the course of the historical development of man forces have been at work in his nature which have changed his whole relationship with Demeter. Out of the human body, once so rarefied, Demeter was so to say driven. She was driven out of the astral body with its lost clairvoyant capacities and Eros took her place. In return, as I have shown you today, certain different Eros-free forces in human nature came more under the sway of Demeter. Thus during this period from the time of Atlantis up to the present day a force has been working on the development of human nature in three ways: there is a triple kind of development, of transformation, a triple kind of metamorphosis, emanating from the ether body and working upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself, and upon the astral body. This force of genetic change has been and still is in human nature. It changes us from youth to age by leading over the forces of Eros into those of Demeter. There is in our organisation this threefold development which in the physical body brings about changes in the conditions affecting sickness and health, which causes the ether body to reflect knowledge in a different way, and which transmutes the torch of knowledge in the astral body. How wonderful it is to find these genetic forces represented in Greek mythology, forces which are active in all of us, forces which transform our astral bodies and therefore the nature of Demeter herself. These human etheric forces which work upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself and upon the astral body are represented by the threefold Hecate. Whereas today we say that forces of metamorphosis emanate from the ether body in a threefold way, the Greek spoke of the threefold Hecate.

One of Nature's wonders in the genesis of the human organisation is expressed in this threefold Hecate. We there get a glimpse into immense wisdom. You can still see the statue of this ‘triple Hecate’ in Rome today.³ It reveals how one of her aspects has to do with the conditions determining sickness and health, being furnished with the symbols of the † and the serpent (this latter symbol was also assigned to Aesculapius as the representative of medicine). The † represents the external destructive influences upon the human organism. The endowment of one aspect of the threefold Hecate with these emblems indicates forces which act upon the ether body in its development. The second aspect of Hecate had to indicate that in the ether body itself the key to knowledge of the world had changed; what are the symbols shown by this second form? They are the key and the coil of rope, typifying the labyrinth of thought. The third Hecate carries a torch—the torch of knowledge developed in the astral body. We cannot help feeling that the way in which this profoundly meaningful figure is regarded in our materialistic age is one great mass of superstition. What new life such profound and impressive symbols as that of the threefold Hecate will acquire when we know once more what they mean! When the soul steeped in Spiritual Science stands before such a statue, ancient Greece will arise anew in her thought, all the knowledge of the spiritual nature of man mysteriously hidden in such a statue will stream into her again. We should not take these things in an abstract way. Of course we can only express them by clothing them in abstract thought, but all this can become for us living feeling if we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that Hecate has only changed the manner of her activity, that she is in us even today, is at work in every single one of us.

The ancient Greek said that not only humanity as a whole but every individual is subject in his development to the forces of Hecate, in the changes undergone by physical, etheric and astral bodies. Hecate works in man in a threefold way. But what was communicated to the soul at that time in pictorial form can also be learnt again today. How is this expressed by the pupil of Spiritual Science, who no longer speaks in this pictorial way? He says that in the course of the development of the individual from birth to maturity his sheaths undergo changes. In the first seven years the physical body is changed, in the second seven years the ether body, in the third seven years the astral body. The forces which you find described in my little book Education of the Child⁴ without the use of pictures, work in the human organisation in a threefold way. They are the Hecate forces. When Spiritual Science describes for you how up to the change of teeth the human being develops primarily his physical body, it is saying that one form of Hecate is working in him. There we are saying in a modern way what the Greek meant when he represented one part of Hecate with † and serpent; and the second seven years of transformation, when the ether body works upon itself, is represented in the key and the coil of rope; and the third seven years, during which changes take place in the astral body, is represented in the emblem of the torch. Thus long ago I said in modern form what was expressed in the ancient Greek Mysteries by the figure of Hecate.

That is also the meaning of the development of our European civilisation. Going back to Greek times, we find in the tradition of Greek mysticism, of Greek mythology, the powerful pictures which were placed before the pupils in order to awaken in them the knowledge which man at that time needed. In a different way the figure of the threefold Hecate awakened the knowledge which we today absorb when we grasp the doctrine of the threefold change which takes place between birth and about the age of twenty. And when we understand such teaching, then we grasp correctly the course which human civilisation has to take. The old clairvoyant form of knowledge had to be buried in the Plutonic region of the human soul, and for a period, from the time of Socrates right up to our own day, men had to remain more or less in ignorance about all these things. Men had to build up, to consolidate, their egos. But under the surface the old knowledge, the knowledge aroused by those impressive pictorial images of the Greeks, still remained. It was buried as it were under the load of intellectual culture. Now it is emerging again from the dark depths of the spirit. What was submerged in the depths of the soul is coming to the surface again for the life of today in the form of Spiritual Science. Today we are again beginning in the way I have described in Education of the Child to recognise the threefold Hecate in a more abstract way. This is preparing the human soul for a future clairvoyance which is already in sight, notwithstanding our intellectualism.

The triple Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and all those other figures of whom Greek mythology tells us, were not in Greek times abstractions as the credulous scholars of today imagine. No, they were living figures of Greek seership! All these figures will appear again to clairvoyant vision, which in the future will press more and more urgently upon man from the spiritual world. And the force which penetrates into human souls in order to lead them up again to clairvoyance—or I could also say in order to bring down clairvoyance to them—is the force which was first prepared as conscious thought in the old Jahve civilisation, and then reached its full development through the coming of the Christ Being, who will become ever better understood by men. And when among the adherents of genuine Spiritual Science it is said that this clairvoyant vision of the Christ, who has been united with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, is already beginning in this twentieth century, it is also made clear that this return of Christ will certainly not be in a physical body, but will come about for etheric vision, as it did for Paul at Damascus.⁵ The power of the Christ provides all the impulses to enable human nature to rise again and to see all that has been buried in the depths of the soul—such as for instance, the figures of the Greek gods. That will be the greatest event for the future history of the human soul. It is the event for which Spiritual Science must prepare, so that the soul may become capable of acquiring the etheric vision. In the next three thousand years it will lay hold of more and more souls, the next three thousand years will be devoted to kindling the forces in the human soul which will make it aware of the etheric wonders of Nature around it. It will begin to happen in our own century that one here and one there will see with their etheric souls the reappearing Christ, and within the next three thousand years more and more men will see Him. Then will come the fulfilment of the true oriental tradition, a tradition with which all true occultism is in agreement. At the end of three thousand years the Maitreya Buddha will descend, and will speak to humanity in a form which every human soul will understand, and will mediate the Christ-nature to man. That is the secret guarded by oriental mysticism, that about three thousand years after our time the Maitreya Buddha will appear. What can be added as the contribution of western culture is that the cosmic Individuality who has only once appeared in a human body will become ever more visible to the etheric vision of man; you will find this again emphasised in my Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation. The Soul's Probation. Thereby He will become a trusted friend of the human soul. Just as two thousand years ago the Buddha spoke of what was natural to the best human souls of his time, so in words which will thrill the soul, the Maitreya Buddha will be able to proclaim everywhere what today cannot be proclaimed publicly: the vision of the Christ in the etheric world which is to come. That is the greatest event of the twentieth century, this upward development of human nature towards what we may call the recurrence of the vision of St. Paul. In the vision at Damascus it came to one person only; in the future it will come little by little to all humanity, beginning in our own century. Whoever has faith in the progress of human nature, whoever believes that the soul will develop ever higher and higher powers, knows that it was necessary for the soul which had sunk to the uttermost depths of the physical plane, that the Christ too should appear once in a physical body. It was necessary because at that time the soul could only see the Godhead in a body which was visible to the physical eye, to physical organs. But because, after the old Hebrew civilisation had paved the way for it, this event did take place, the soul is being led to ever higher capacities. The soul's heightened capacities will show themselves in that man will learn to see the Christ even when He no longer walks among men in a physical body, when He shows Himself as He is among us now, as He has been since the Mystery of Golgotha, visible of course only for clairvoyant sight. Christ is here, He is united with the ether body of the Earth. What matters is that the soul should develop so as to be able to see Him.

Herein lies the great advance in the evolution of the human soul. Anyone who believes in this progress, who believes that Spiritual Science has a mission to fulfil in regard to it, will understand that the powers of the soul must become ever higher, and that it would mean stagnation if in our time the soul were obliged to see the Christ in the same physical form in which He was once seen. He will know that there is a sublime meaning in the old Rosicrucian formula about God the Son, who once, and once only, incarnated in a human body, but Who, beginning from our own century, will become visible as an etheric Being to human souls to an ever increasing extent. This is confirmed by prophecy as well as by our own knowledge. Anyone who believes in human progress believes in this Second Coming of the Christ, who will be visible to those endowed with etheric sight. Those who refuse to believe in this progress may well believe that the powers of the soul remain stationary, and still today need to see the Christ in the same form in which He was seen when humanity was plunged in the uttermost depths of matter. They are the ones who can believe in a Second Coming of Christ in a physical body.

• 1. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. (Anthroposophic Press Inc., New York, 1950).
• 2. Die Pforte der Einweihung and Die Priifung der Seele, the first two of four Mystery Plays by Rudolf Steiner. Translated as The Portal of Initiation and The Soul's Probation in the first volume of Four Mystery Plays. The references are to be found in Scene 2 of The Portal of Initiation and Scene 2 of The Soul's Probation. See 1983 edition of the Four Mystery Plays, translated by Adam Bittleston, published by Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 3. The triple Hecate. A bronze statuette in the Capitoline Museum.
• 4. Translated by Mary and George Adams (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.).
• 5. See The true Nature of the Second Coming. Two lectures by Rudolf Steiner (1910) (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.).

In this course of lectures I hope to be able to give you a survey of some important truths of Spiritual Science from one particular aspect. It is perhaps only towards the end of the course that you will be able to see how the threads all hang together. In the two lectures just given I dwelt a good deal upon the Mystery of Eleusis and upon Greek mythology, and I shall still often have occasion to refer to the performances we have seen. But I also have another purpose, which you will recognise at the end of the course. I want this evening to bring home to you from another direction how Spiritual Science in our day is aspiring towards that mighty archetypal wisdom of which we have caught a glimpse, how it throws light upon those great figures and images and upon the tidings of the Mysteries which have come down to us from ancient Greece. If we are to grasp the whole mission of Spiritual Science today we shall have to recognise that many concepts and ideas which obtain today have to be changed. Contemporary humanity is often very short-sighted, it scarcely gives a thought to anything beyond the immediate future. To evoke a feeling that we must change our very manner of thinking if we are to enter deeply into the mission of Spiritual Science—that is why I draw attention to the completely different view of the world and of life, and of the relation of man to the spiritual world, held by the Greeks. For in all this the Greek attitude of heart and soul was very different from that of modern man.

Let me begin today by mentioning just one thing. There is a concept, an idea, very familiar to you all, an idea which not only finds common expression in the vocabulary of all languages, but which has also tended to take on a certain scientific connotation. It is the word NATURE. When the word ‘nature’ is used in any context it at once arouses in modern man a whole number of ideas. We think of nature as the opposite of soul or spirit. Now what the man of today means by ‘nature’ simply did not exist for Greek thought. You have to eliminate altogether what you mean today by the term ‘nature’ if you wish to enter into the thought of ancient Greece. The contrast between nature and spirit which we today experience was unknown to the Greeks. When the Greek directed his eye to the processes which took place in wood and meadow, in sun and moon, in the world of the stars, he did not yet experience a natural existence devoid of spirit, but everything which happened in the world was as much the deed of spiritual Beings as for us a movement of our hand is an expression of our own soul-activity. When we move our hand from left to right, we know that a mental activity lies behind this movement, and we do not talk of an opposition between the mere movement of the hand and our will, but we know that the movement of the hand and our will, as an impulse of movement, constitute a unity. We still feel the unity when we make a gesture which our mind directs. But when we direct our gaze upon the course of sun and moon, when we become aware of the currents of air in the wind, then we no longer see in these things, as the Greeks did, the outer gestures, the moving hand so to say, of divine-spiritual Beings, but we see something outside us which we study according to abstract laws, mathematical-mechanical laws. Such a nature—a nature which is calculated according to purely external mathematical-mechanical laws, a nature which is not simply the physiognomy of divine-spiritual activity—was unknown to the Greeks. We shall hear how the concept ‘nature’ as understood by modern man gradually came to birth.

Thus in those ancient times Spirit and Nature were in full harmony with one another. Consequently what we today call a wonder, a miracle, did not bear its present interpretation. Putting aside all finer shades of difference, today we should call it a miracle if we were to perceive an event in the outer world which could not be explained by natural laws already known or of the same kind as those already known, but which presupposed a direct intervention of the spirit. If a man were to perceive directly a spiritual event which he could not understand and could not explain according to the strict laws of mathematics and mechanics, he would say it was miraculous. The ancient Greek could not use the term ‘miraculous’ in this sense, for to him it was obvious that everything which takes place in Nature is effected by Spirit; he did not discriminate between the daily happenings in the ordering of Nature and rarer events. The one kind occurred only rarely, the other kind was habitual, but for him spiritual creation, divine-spiritual activity, entered into every natural event. You see how these concepts have changed. For the intervention of the spirit in events on the physical plane to be regarded as miraculous is essentially a feature of our own time. It is peculiar to our modern way of looking at things to draw a sharp line between what we believe to be governed by natural law and what we have to recognise as a direct intervention of spiritual worlds.

I have spoken to you of the harmonising of two streams of culture which I may call the Demeter-Persephone stream and the Agamemnon-Iphigenia stream. It is the mission of Spiritual Science to unite these two streams. We cannot emphasise too strongly how necessary it is for humanity to learn to feel again that the spiritual is active in everyday events as well as in rarer occurrences. But this requires a clear recognition that there are two currents in human experience. Men must be quite clear that there are things which form part of a system of nature, things which follow the laws accepted today by the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the biologist, while on the other hand there are also other occurrences which can be accepted as facts, just as the facts which follow the physicalmathematical-chemical laws, but which cannot be explained unless one recognises the reality of a spiritual movement and life behind the physical plane.

The whole conflict caused in the human soul by this opposition between Nature and Spirit, and at the same time the longing to resolve it, is discharged in my Rosicrucian Drama The Portal of Initiation in the soul of Strader. There we see how such an event as Theodora's vision, an event outside the ordinary processes of nature, affects someone who is accustomed only to accept as valid phenomena which can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry ... Strader's character and his inner experiences illustrate how such an event acts upon the heart as an ordeal of the soul. This scene epitomises the sense of conflict which finds expression in countless modern souls. People like Strader are very numerous today. To such people it is a necessity to inquire into the characteristics of the regular, normal course of natural events, events which can be explained by physical, chemical or biological laws; on the other hand it is also necessary that such souls should be brought to recognise other events, events which also take place on the physical plane, but which are classed as miracles by the purely materialistic mind, and hence brushed aside as impossibilities and not recognised for what they are.

Thus we can say that today there is a longing to reconcile the opposition between nature and spirit, an opposition which did not yet exist in ancient Greece. And the fact that attempts are made, that societies are established, to examine the activity and nature of laws in the physical world other than purely chemical, physiological, biological laws, is proof that the longing to resolve this opposition is very widely felt. It is part of the mission of our own Spiritual Science to resolve this opposition between spirit and nature. We must set to work out of new sources of spiritual-scientific insight; we must fit ourselves to see again in what is all around us more than meets the eye of the physicist or the chemist or the anatomist or the physiologist. To do this we must start with man himself, who so emphatically demands not only that the chemical and physical laws active in his physical body should be studied, but also that the connection between physical, psychic and spiritual, which for anyone who will look attentively can become visible in an unobtrusive way even to physical eyes, should be investigated.

The man of today no longer experiences what I have so far only been able to put before you as the working of the Demeter or the Persephone forces in the human organism. He no longer experiences the important fact that what is diffused over the whole universe without is also in us. The Greek did experience this. Even if he could not express it in modern terms, he experienced a truth, for example, of which modern theology will only slowly become convinced again—a truth which I will try to bring home to you in the following way. Today you look upwards to the rainbow. So long as it cannot be explained it is as much a wonder of Nature, a wonder of the world, a miracle, as anything else. Amid all that is familiar in everyday life there stands before our eyes the marvellous bow with its seven colours ... we will ignore all the explanations of the physicist, for the physics of the future will have quite different things to say about the rainbow too. We say to ourselves: ‘Our gaze falls upon the rainbow which emerges as if out of the bosom of the surrounding universe; in looking at it we look into the macrocosm, into the great world; the macrocosm gives birth to the rainbow.’ Now let us turn our gaze inwards; within ourselves we can observe that out of a vague, unthinking brooding, there emerge specific thoughts relating to something or other—in other words, thought flashes up within our souls. It is an everyday experience, we have only to see it in the right light. Let us take these two things, the macrocosm which gives birth to the rainbow out of the bosom of the universe, and the other thing, that in ourselves thought is born out of the rest of our soul-life. Those are the two facts of which the wise men of ancient Greece already knew something and which men will come to know again through Spiritual Science. The same forces which cause thoughts to light up in our microcosm call forth the outward rainbow from the bosom of the universe. Just as the Demeter forces from without enter into man and become active within, so outside us in the cosmos those forces are active which form the rainbow out of the ingredients of Nature; there they work spread out in space; within, in the microcosmic world of man, they cause thought to flash up out of the indefinite. Of course ordinary physics has not yet come anywhere near such truths, nevertheless, that is the truth.

Everything that is outside in space is also within us. Today man does not yet recognise the complete harmony which exists between the mysterious forces at work in himself, and the forces active outside in the macrocosm; indeed he probably regards that as a fantastic daydream. The ancient Greek could not say what I say today about these things, because he could not penetrate the matter with intellect, but it lived in his subconscious, he saw it, or felt it clairvoyantly. If today we wish to express in up-to-date phraseology what the Greek felt, we must say that he felt working within him the forces which caused thought to flash up, and felt that they were the same forces which organised the rainbow without. That is what he experienced. And he said to himself: ‘If there are psychic forces within me which cause thought to flash up, what is it that is without? What is the spiritual force in the widths of space, above and below, right and left, before and behind? What is it outspread there in space which causes the rainbow to flash up, causes the sunrise and the sunset, causes the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, just as within me the forces of the soul bring forth thought?’ For the ancient Greek it was a spiritual Being who gave birth out of the universal ether to all these phenomena—to the roseate tints of sunrise and sunset, to the rainbow, to the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, to thunder and lightning. And out of this feeling, which, as I said before, had not become intellectual knowledge, but was elemental feeling, there arose the intuitive perception, ‘That is Zeus!’ One does not get any idea, still less any sense of what the Greek soul experienced as Zeus, if one does not approach this experience and this feeling by way of the spiritual-scientific outlook. Zeus was a Being with a clearly defined form, but one could not get an idea of him without the feeling that the forces which cause thought to light up in us are also at work in what flashes up externally, such as the rainbow and so on. But today in anthroposophical circles, when we look into the human being and try to learn something of the forces which call forth in us thoughts, ideas—the forces which call forth all that flashes up in our consciousness—we say that all this constitutes what we call the astral body. In this way, having the microcosmic substance, the astral body, we can give an answer in terms of Spiritual Science to the question we have just put in a more pictorial way, and we can say that as a microcosm we have in us the astral body ... we can then ask ourselves what corresponds without in the widths of space to the astral body—what fills all space right and left, behind and before, above and below? Just as the astral body extends throughout our microcosm, so is the universal ether, so are the wide expanses of space, permeated with the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body, and we can also say that what the ancient Greek pictured to himself as Zeus is the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body. In us we have the astral body, it causes the phenomena of consciousness to light up; without extends the astrality from which, as from the cosmic womb, is born the rainbow, the sunrise, the sunset, thunder and lightning, clouds and snow. The man of today can find no word to cover what the Greek thought of as Zeus, and which is the cosmic counterpart of our astral body.

To continue: Besides what lights up in us momentarily or for a short time as thought, as idea, as feeling, we have our enduring life of soul, with its emotions and passions, with its fluctuating life of feeling, something which is abiding and subject to habit and memory. It is by their permanent soul-life that we recognise individuals. Here we see a man of wild passions, impetuously laying hold of everything in his path; here another who has no interest in the world. That is something quite different from the momentary thought, that is what constitutes the permanent configuration of our inner life, the basis of our happiness, of our destiny. The man of fiery temperament, of strong passions, sympathies and antipathies, may in certain circumstances commit some action which causes him happiness or unhappiness. The forces in us which represent the more enduring qualities, the qualities which turn into memory and habit, must be distinguished from the forces of the astral body—the former are rooted in our ether bodies. You know that from other lectures.

Now if we were to put the matter as a Greek would do, we should ask once more whether there is anything outside in the cosmos which has the same forces as we bear in our habits our passions, our enduring emotive attitudes. And once more the Greek felt the answer, was conscious of the answer without undergoing any intellectual process. He felt that in the ebb and flow of the ocean, in the storms and hurricanes which rage over the earth, the same forces are active as are active in us when lasting emotions, when passion and habit pulsate through our memory. When we are speaking microcosmically they are the forces in us which we cover by the term ‘ether body’, and which bring about our lasting emotions. Macrocosmically speaking they are forces more closely bound up with the earth than the forces of Zeus in the widths of space, they are the forces which determine wind and weather, storm and calm, untroubled and raging seas. In all these phenomena, in storm and tempest, in tumultuous or untroubled seas, in hurricane or doldrums, the modern man sees merely ‘nature’, and present-day meteorology is a purely physical science. For the Greeks there was as yet no such thing as a purely physical science comparable to what we have today in meteorology. To talk of meteorology in such terms he would have thought as senseless as it would be for us to investigate the physical forces which move our muscles when we laugh, if we did not know that in these movements of our muscles psychic forces are involved. To the Greeks all these things were gestures without and around us, gestures of the same spiritual activity that is revealed in us, in the microcosm, as lasting emotion, passion, memory. The ancient Greek was still conscious of a figure who could be reached by clairvoyance, he was still conscious of the ruler, the centre of all these forces in the macrocosm, and spoke of him as Poseidon.

Today we will go on to speak of the physical body, the densest part of the human being. Microcosmically speaking we have to look upon the physical body as composed of all those characteristics of the human being which have not been mentioned as belonging to the other two bodies. Everything in the nature of transitory thought and idea, thought which arises in us and then disappears, belongs to the astral body; every habitual, lasting attitude of mind, everything which is not merely thought in the sense that it leads its own isolated thought-existence in the soul, belongs to the ether body. And for everything which is not merely a sentiment, an attitude of mind, but which passes over into the sphere of will, for everything which results in an impulse to do something, man needs in this life between birth and death the physical body. The physical body is what serves to raise the mere thought or the mere sentiment to an impulse of will, it is the prime mover behind the deed in the physical world. The will-impulses, the soul-forces which lie behind the will, find their expression in the whole outward aspect of the physical body. The physical body is the expression of will-impulses as the astral body is the expression of mere thoughts, and the ether body of enduring sentiments and habits. In order that will can act through man here in the physical world he must have the physical body. In the higher worlds, activity of will is something quite different from what it is in the physical world. Thus, as microcosms, we have in us above all those forces of soul which bring about our will-impulses, impulses which are needed to make good the claim that the ego is the central governing power of the human soul. For without his will man would never attain to an ego-consciousness. Now when the Greek asked himself what it was, outspread in the macrocosm, that corresponded to the forces in us which call forth the will-impulse—the whole world of will—what did he answer? He gave it the name of Pluto. Pluto, as the central ruling power outspread in macrocosmic space, but closely associated with the solid mass of the planet, was for the Greeks the macrocosmic counterpart of the impulses of will which forced the life of Persephone into the depths of the soul.

Anyone who has clairvoyant consciousness, who can see into the real spiritual world, has a self-knowledge which can properly distinguish this threefold nature of his being into astral, etheric and physical bodies. The ancient Greek was really not in a position to examine the microcosm with the precision we apply to it today. Actually it was not until the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch that man's attention was turned to the microcosm. The ancient Greek was far more conscious of the Pluto, Poseidon and Zeus forces outside him and took it for granted that those forces worked into him.

He lived far more in the macrocosm than in the microcosm. Therein lies the difference between ancient and modern times, that the Greek felt mainly the macrocosm and consequently peopled the world with the gods who were for him its central ruling powers; whereas the modern man thinks more about the microcosm, about man himself, the centre of our own world, and thus seeks more within his own being for the distinguishing features of this threefold world.

We begin to see how it was that, just at the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, there arose in all sorts of ways in western esotericism an awareness of the inner activity of the soul-forces, so that physical, etheric and astral bodies were distinguished. Now that occult investigation in this direction is being pursued with greater intensity, many things to which particular individuals in modern times have borne testimony can be confirmed today. For instance, it has been possible recently to confirm experiences which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the ‘clear-tasting’ of one's own being. Just as one can speak of clairvoyance, or clairaudience, so one may speak of clairsipience. This clairsipience can apply to the threefold human being, and I can describe to you the difference between external sensations of taste and the various sensations of taste which a man can have in connection with his own threefold being.

Try to imagine vividly the taste you have when you eat a very tart fruit such as the sloe, which contracts the palate; imagine this wry sensation enhanced so that you are completely permeated by the sensation of bitterness, of astringency, of downright pain; try to imagine yourself from top to bottom, right down to the finger-tips and in every limb, permeated by this astringent taste, then you have the self-knowledge which the occultist calls the self-knowledge of the physical body through the occult sense of taste, the spiritual sense of taste. When self-knowledge works in such a way that man feels himself completely permeated by this astringent taste, the occultist knows that he is experiencing knowledge of his own physical body through the occult sense of taste, for he knows that the astral body and the etheric body are bound to taste quite different, if I may so express it. As astral and etheric man, one has a different taste from what one has as physical man. These things are not said out of the blue, but out of concrete knowledge; they are known to occultists in the same way as the laws of the outside world are familiar to physicists and chemists.

Now take—not exactly the taste you get from sugar or from a sweet—but the delicate etheric sensation of taste, which most men do not experience, but which nevertheless can be experienced in physical life when, for example, you enter into an atmosphere which you enjoy very much—let us say into an avenue of trees or into a wood, where you feel, ‘Ah, how delicious it is here, I should like to be one with the scent of the trees!’ Imagine this kind of experience, which can really grow into a kind of taste, a taste which you can have when you can forget yourself in your own inwardness, when you can feel yourself so united with your surroundings that you would like to taste yourself into those surroundings ... imagine the experience transferred into the spiritual, then you have the clairsipience which the occultist knows when he seeks the self-knowledge which is possible in respect of the human ether body. It comes if one says, ‘I am now eliminating my physical body, I am shutting off everything connected with the will-impulses, I am suppressing the flashing-up of thought, and surrendering myself entirely to my permanent habits, to my sympathies and antipathies.’ When the occultist acquires the taste of this, when as a practising occultist he feels himself in this etheric body of his, then there comes to him a spiritualised form of taste rather like what I have just described as regards the physical world. Thus there is a clear distinction between self-knowledge in respect of the physical and of the etheric bodies.

The astral body can also be recognised by the occultist who has developed these higher faculties. But in this case one can no longer properly speak of a sense of taste. In the case of the astral body the sense of taste is lacking, just as it is in the case of certain physical substances. Knowledge of one's own astral body has to be described in quite different terms. But it is also possible for the practising occultist to eliminate his physical body, to eliminate his ether body, and to relate his self-knowledge solely to his astral body—that is to say, to pay attention only to what his astral body is. The normal man does not do that. The normal man experiences the interworking of physical, etheric and astral. He never has the astral body alone, he cannot experience it because he is incapable of shutting out the physical and etheric bodies. When this does happen to the practising occultist, he certainly gets at first a very unpleasant sensation ... it can only be compared with the sensation which overcomes us in the physical world when there is not enough air, when we have a feeling of breathlessness. When the etheric and physical bodies are suppressed, and self-knowledge is concentrated upon the astral body, there comes a feeling of oppression rather like breathlessness. Hence knowledge of a man's own astral body is first and formost accompanied by fear and anxiety, more so than in the other cases, because it consists basically in being filled through and through with a sense of oppression. It is impossible to perceive the astral body in isolation without becoming filled with dread. That in ordinary life we are not aware of this fear, which is there all the time, arises from the fact that the normal man, when aware of himself, feels a mixture, a harmonious or inharmonious working together of physical, etheric and astral, and not the isolated, separate members of the human being.

Now that you have heard what are the main experiences of the soul in self-knowledge as regards the physical body, which represents the Pluto forces in us, as regards the ether body, which represents the Poseidon forces, and as regards the astral body, which represents the Zeus forces, you may want to know how these forces work together; what is the relationship between the three kinds of force? Well, how do we express relationship between things and events in the physical world? It is very simple. If anyone were to give you a dish containing peas and beans and perhaps lentils all jumbled up together, that would be a mixture. If the quantities of each were not equal, you would have to separate peas, beans and lentils from one another to get the ratio between their quantities. You could say, for example, that their quantities were in the ratio of 1:3:5; in short, when you are dealing with a mixture of things, you have to find out the proportions of the component parts of the mixture. In the same way we can ask what is the ratio of the strength of the forces of the physical body to those of the etheric body, to those of the astral body? How can we express the relative magnitudes of physical, etheric and astral bodies? Is there a numerical formula, or any other formula, which can express their relative strengths? The question of this relationship will enable us to acquire a profound insight, first into the wonders of the world, and then into the ordeals of the soul and into the revelations of the spirit. We will begin to speak about it today; we shall be led further and further into the subject.

The proportions can be expressed. There is something which shows quite exactly the quantities and the strengths of our inner forces in physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively, and the corresponding relationships between them. Let me make a diagram of it for you. For these relationships can only be expressed by means of a geometrical figure. If we ponder deeply this figure we find that it contains—like an occult sign on which we can meditate—all the proportions of size and strength of the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively. You see that what I am drawing is a pentagram.

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If we look at this pentagram, to begin with, taken at its face value, it is a symbol for the etheric body. But I have already said that the ether body also contains the central forces of both astral and physical bodies; it is from the ether body that all the forces, the ageing and the youth-giving forces emanate. Because the ether body is the centre for all these forces it is possible to show, in this diagram, in this sign and seal of the ether body, what in the human body is the ratio between the strength of the forces of the physical body, the strength of the forces of the etheric body, and the strength of the forces of the astral body respectively.

One arrives at the precise magnitude of these relationships in this way; within the pentagram there is an upside-down pentagon. I will fill it in completely with chalk. That gives us to start with one of the component parts of the pentagram. You get another part of the pentagram if you look at the triangles based on the sides of the pentagon. These I am shading with horizontal lines. Thus the pentagram has been reduced to a central pentagon with its point downwards (blocked out in chalk) and five triangles which I have shaded by means of horizontal lines. If you compare the size of the pentagon with the size of the sum of the five triangles, you can say, ‘as the size of this pentagon is to the size of the sum of the five triangles, so are the forces of the physical body in man to the forces of his etheric body.’ Note well that just as one can say in the case of a mixture of peas, beans and lentils that the quantity of lentils is to the quantity of beans let us say—as three to five, so we can say, ‘the ratio of the strength of the forces in the physical body is to the strength of the forces in the etheric body as the area of the pentagon in the pentagram is to the sum of the areas of the triangles which I have shaded horizontally.’ Now I will draw a pentagon with the point upwards, by circumscribing the pentagram. In this case you must not take only the triangles which complete the figure, but the whole pentagon, including the area of the pentagram—that is to say, including all that I have shaded vertically. Now consider this vertically shaded pentagon around the pentagram.

As is the area of this small downward-pointing pentagon to the area of this vertically shaded upward-pointing pentagon, so is the strength of the forces of the physical body in man to the strength of the forces of his astral body. In short, in this figure you find expressed the reciprocal relationships of the forces of physical, etheric and astral forces in man. It does not all come into human consciousness. The upward-pointing pentagon comprises all the astral forces in man, including those of which he is not yet aware, and which will be perfected as the ego transforms the astral body more and more into Spirit-Self or Manas.

Now you may wonder how these three sheaths are related to the ego. You see, normally developed man today knows very little of the real ego, which I have called the baby, and which is the least developed of the human members. But all the forces of the ego are already in man. If you want to consider the total forces of the ego in relation to the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies, you need only describe a circle around the whole figure. I don't want to make the diagram too confusing, but if I were to shade the whole area of the circle, the ratio of the size of its area to the size of the area of the upward-pointed pentagon, to the sum of the areas of the horizontally-shaded triangles, to the small downward-pointed pentagon which I have filled in with chalk ... would give the ratio of the forces of the entire ego (represented by the area of the circle) to the forces of the astral body (represented by the area of the large pentagon), to the forces of the ether body (represented by the sum of the horizontally shaded triangles around the small pentagon), to the forces of the physical body (represented by the area of the pentagon filled in with chalk). If you give yourself in meditation to this occult sign and acquire a certain feeling for the proportional relationships of these four different areas, you get an impression of the mutual ratios of physical, etheric, astral and ego. Thus, you must think with the same attentiveness of the large circle and try to grasp it in meditation. Next you must place before you the upward- pointing pentagon, and because it is somewhat smaller than the circle—to the extent of these segments of the circle here—it makes a weaker impression upon you than the circle. And to the extent to which the impression of the pentagon is weaker than the impression of the circle, so are the forces of the astral body weaker than the forces of the ego. And if as a third exercise you place before you the five horizontally shaded triangles (without the middle pentagon) you have a still weaker impression if you are thinking with the same degree of attentiveness. And to the extent to which this impression is weaker than the impression made by the two previous figures, so are the forces of the etheric body weaker than the forces of the astral body or the forces of the ego. And if you place before you the small pentagon, assuming the same degree of attentiveness, you get the weakest impression. If you can acquire a feeling of the relative strengths of these four impressions and can retain them, as we hold together in our thought the notes of a melody—if you can think these four impressions together in proportion to their strengths, then you have the measure of harmony which exists between the forces of ego, astral, ether and physical bodies respectively.

What I have shown you is an occult sign; one can meditate on such signs; I have described more or less how it is done. By thinking of the relative sizes of these areas with an equal attentiveness, one gains an impression of their difference in strength. Then one receives a corresponding impression of the relative strengths of the forces of the four members of the human being. These things are symbols of the true occult script, emanating from the nature of things. To meditate on this script means to read the signs of the great world-wonders, which guide us into the great world-secrets. Thereby we gradually acquire a complete understanding of what is at work in the cosmos as wonders of the world, an understanding of the fact that the spirit pours itself into matter in accordance with definite ratios. I have at the same time evoked in you something of what was really the most elementary exercise of the old Pythagorean schools. A man begins by meditating on the occult signs, makes them real to himself, and then finds that he has seen the truth of the world with its wonders; then he begins to perceive with his spiritual hearing the harmonies and the melodies of the forces of the world. Tomorrow we will go further into this. My main object today has been to place before your souls this occult sign, which will lead us a step further into the nature of man.

Yesterday's lecture will have enabled you to see what I meant when I said at the outset of this course that the Greeks thought of the whole of Nature as permeated by Spirit; they had no such conception of nature as we have today. You will have realised this from the way I tried to show the position of the three great gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto in Greek spiritual life. We see that we have to think of the microcosmic forces found in man's astral body as transplanted into cosmic space. If we think of the sovereign ruler of these powers, their controlling centre, as superpersonal, superhuman, we have what Greek feeling associated with the name Zeus. Similarly, if we think of the forces of our ether bodies transplanted into cosmic space, we have what the Greeks associated with Poseidon; if we think of the forces of our physical bodies as transplanted into space, we have what the Greeks associated with Pluto.

Now it will certainly occur to you to ask: ‘What about the fourth member of our human being?’ For in our time we have of course to regard the whole man as consisting of physical, etheric, astral, and also of the ego or the ego-bearer. Now it is obvious that because this ego is in such a peculiar position in relation to the other members of the human being, the forces of the universe corresponding to the ego must also be in a peculiar position. One can say of the forces of the physical body that transplanted into the world of space they are governed by the central power of Pluto; similarly the forces of the ether body come into the sphere of Poseidon, and the forces of the astral body into the sphere of Zeus. But when we consider the ego itself, we find that it is closely bound up with all that is happening around us. Indeed with our egos we are right inside the world. Upon what goes on in the world around us our whole destiny, our happiness or unhappiness, depends. Very little reflection upon the matter leads us to feel that the forces of our ego must be very different from the forces of Pluto around us in space. Just as the destiny of the ego is closely connected with the environment, so too we must think of the forces of this ego as also connected with the divine-spiritual forces outside in space which are their counterpart, just as the other divine-spiritual forces correspond to soul-forces within us. Think how closely the experiences of our ego are bound up with our environment! How different our ego feels if we raise our eyes and allow it to plunge into the star-strewn heavens, or to gaze, at dawn or dusk, upon the rising or the setting sun! How little can we detach our egos from all this! How intimately we are bound up with the macrocosm out there! With our egos we are as if emptied out into our environment. What radiates into us from without, the golden rays of the sun, the majestic world of the stars, at one moment is something objective outside in the macrocosm, at another, an idea within the human soul, within the microcosm; in actual life we can scarcely distinguish between the two, they merge into one another. From the way the Greek had of experiencing the world and its wonders directly, we may expect him to think of the divinity who represented to him the ego-forces holding sway outside in space as far more closely related, far more closely bound up with the human being than the other gods—whom he really thought of as quite remote from human nature. Hence we find, as the representative of the ego-forces in the world outside, a divine figure with a certain affinity with human nature, so to say, one whose destiny, whose whole life, seems in a way quite human. That god is Dionysos. Just as we have to look upon Pluto as representing the forces of the physical body, Poseidon as representing the forces of the ether body, and Zeus as representing the forces of the astral body, transplanted into the universe, so we have to regard Dionysos as the macrocosmic representative of the soul-forces which live in our ego. The way in which the Greeks looked upon Dionysos, that figure which stands before our ego at last in such a remarkable way in the Mystery of Eleusis, will only become fully clear to us if first we learn a little about the way spiritual powers and spiritual beings in general work into our earthly existence, into the wonders which constitute our own human existence.

Much of what I am now about to say by way of parenthesis you will find in the little book I have just completed and which in essentials reproduces lectures that I gave a short time ago in Copenhagen. It is called The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. I shall have to refer to certain passages in this little book which have a bearing upon our purpose in these lectures. First we have to reflect that humanity, as it evolves on the earth, determining its own destiny, little by little shaping the epochs of its own civilisation, is guided by Beings whom we must call super-human, Beings not accessible to human sense-perception, but to be found in the main in a super-sensible world, and attainable only to clairvoyant sight. If we turn to the category of Beings concerned with the guidance of mankind which is nearest to man, we find those who in eastern mysticism are called Dhyani, in Christian terminology Angels, Angeloi. We have often spoken of these superhuman Beings of the first category, and you know the relationship in which they stand to us. We know that, under quite different conditions of life, they too were once human; that was during the Moon evolution, at the time when our present Earth was passing through its previous embodiment. At that time these Angel Beings, who today take part in the guidance of humanity, were themselves passing through their human stage; thus at the commencement of the present evolution of the Earth they had got so far that today they stand one stage higher than humanity; at the end of Earth evolution that part of humanity which reaches the goal of the present Earth evolution will be as far advanced as the Angels were at the end of the Moon evolution. Hence these Beings are particularly fitted to be responsible for this guidance at the point where it is nearest to man. They are at work within our human evolution.

Now we invariably find in evolution that one thing, one epoch, is never exactly like another, and when we say that the Angels were the leaders nearest to men, that is not to be taken as of universal application. Thus no one should say, ‘then Angels were leaders of humanity in the first postAtlantean culture-epoch, in the Persian epoch, in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and so on.’ To do so would be to think in a very abstract way. Things are not like that in the real world; there are all sorts of distinctions. As a matter of fact, there are only two post-Atlantean epochs in which the Angels have the direct and in a way, independent guidance of humanity—the third, the Egypto-Chaldean, and our own, the fifth epoch. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch it was Angels who were the actual leaders of the epoch. How did they carry out their leadership?

On this point we may quote the Greek historian Herodotus. Once when the ancient Egyptians were asked who were their great leaders they answered, ‘the gods’. In the language of olden time ‘the gods’ meant these Angelic Beings, and the ancient Egyptians who were instructed in such things said quite seriously that at that time those who were the leaders of mankind were not normal men, but Beings of a superhuman nature, Beings who had already completed their human stage during the Moon evolution. But these leaders of humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean culture-epoch were unable to appear directly in human bodies. The physical bodies which we men have are an Earth product, wholly dependent upon earthly conditions of existence; and only beings who are going through their human evolution on the Earth—that is to say, only men—have a constitution of soul able to live out their lives in this sheath of the human physical body. Because the Angels went through their human stage on the Moon, it is impossible for them to clothe themselves in such a sheath as the human physical body. Thus they could not descend into incarnation in physical, fleshly bodies. These leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch did not tread the Earth in human form. There were however men gifted with clairvoyance who were susceptible to inspiration from the spiritual worlds. In moments when they were specially open to these inspirations they were able to see before them those guiding Beings and to permeate themselves with their substance. These old clairvoyants offered up their bodies to the guiding Beings, they said to them, as it were, ‘Behold my body; enter into it, permeate it with spirit, inspire it.’ Thus in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch there walked on Earth an ordinary man, but one who was clairvoyant; what he said and did and what he taught was spoken and enacted in him and through him as the instrument of a higher Being, one who had completed his human development on the Moon. This was how the Egypto-Chaldean epoch was guided, and this guidance endeavoured above all to direct humanity along the straight line of evolution, to further its unfettered development towards the goal of the Earth. Thus Angels—Angeloi—who had completed their human stage on the Moon, inspired the loftiest seers of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and through their instrumentality became kings and priests, the leading personalities of the period.

Side by side with these individualities there were yet others. One would have sought in vain for the leading individualities in human bodies. But there were others in a different position. They were Angel Beings in the lowest stage of Luciferic development, Angel Beings who had not completed their evolution on the Moon, who had not attained the goal of lunar humanity, thus Beings who, when the Earth evolution began, were themselves not so far advanced as men will be at the end of Earth evolution, if they reach their full development. These Beings too instilled their forces into the Egypto-Chaldean civilisation; but just because they had not fully completed their human stage, they were able to tread the Earth in human fleshly bodies. They incarnated in human bodies and mixed with the rest as real men. Legends are to be found among all peoples of such individualities, not only in Chaldea and Egypt, but among all the peoples of that time; they tell us of men who dwelt on Earth, but who were really in their inner soul-nature backward Angel Beings from the Moon. It was these individualities that the Greeks were referring to, when they spoke of their Heroes—for example, Cecrops and Cadmos. None of the great leaders of civilisation were actually men (I am not now speaking of the ones who only inspired men, but of those who really dwelt among men in physical bodies); their human form was maya, they were in truth backward Moon Beings. These individualities were the Heroes, superhuman Beings who were in the lowest of the Luciferic ranks. What then was the actual task of these Beings? It is wisely decreed in the plan of universal evolution that not only those Beings who guide evolution along its line of direct advance have legitimate tasks; if man were only subject to the spiritual guidance of those normally developed Beings, he would push forward in his evolution too swiftly, with too little weight, too little gravity. Evolution has need of hindrances in order that the right tempo can be maintained. Evolution needs a certain weight. The progressive forces gain strength only by meeting with resistance. Those Beings who by the wise guidance of the world lagged behind during the Moon evolution have the task of imparting weight to evolution.

I said that it would be wrong if one were to apply what I have just described for the Egypto-Chaldean epoch to all the culture-epochs. Things were different in the Persian epoch. There it was not the Angels who played the outstanding part in the guidance of humanity; there humanity was much more directly subject to the Archangels or Archangeloi. One may say that the Persian, the Zarathustra culture, was guided by Archangels just as the Egypto-Chaldean culture was under the direct guidance of Angels. And just as the Egyptian clairvoyant kings and priests were inspired by Angels, so Zarathustra and his pupils were inspired by Archangels, Amshaspands. If we go right back to the first post-Atlantean epoch, to the civilisation of which we still get a faint echo in the Vedas, we come to the great teachers of India, who are called the Holy Rishis. The Holy Rishis were inspired by a still higher hierarchy, they were inspired by the Spirits of Personality, the Principalities, the Archai, who of course used the Archangels and the Angels as their instruments, but who at that time intervened far more directly than they did later.

Thus we have to record a continuous progress of humanity from the first post-Atlantean epoch through the succeeding epochs, inasmuch as ever lower ranks of hierarchies intervene in the spiritual guidance of mankind. First in the Indian epoch the highest rank, the Archai or Spirits of Personality, then in the Persian epoch the next lower hierarchy, the Archangels, and in the Egyptian epoch the Beings who are next above man, the Angels. In the Greek period quite special conditions prevailed. At that time the leaders of humanity were the Beings who, of all superhuman Beings, had the greatest need themselves, so that those leaders of the Greco-Latin time gave men the greatest independence and freedom; for they were hoping to attain as much for themselves through their leadership as man could attain through them. Hence in Greco-Latin times we have the remarkable phenomenon that mankind seems to be thrown upon its own resources, seems to be self-sufficient. There has been no epoch of civilisation since the Atlantean catastrophe during which man was thrown so entirely on his own resources, or in which so much depended upon his expressing his own peculiar self as in the Greco-Latin time. Hence we see too how everything in this epoch tends to bring to expression in its purest form the human individuality. It could be said that this was so because the guiding hierarchies slackened the reins, because at this time men were most left to themselves.

In our own epoch, which follows the Greco-Latin time, we again find something very distinctive. Hence the same Beings who were the leaders of humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean time intervene again. If in clairvoyant consciousness we lift ourselves into the presence of the leaders of humanity, the same Beings appear to us as our spiritual leaders who were the leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean time, both those who at that time only inspired men, those Angels who had reached their full goal on the Moon, and also the Heroes, the leaders who took on fleshly form, that is to say, those who had not reached their full development on the Moon, the Luciferic Beings. They all appear again. But we must bear in mind that they have all undergone a further development of their own. Just as man today is at another stage than he was in the ancient Egyptian time, so also with these Angels and Luciferic Angels. Their achievement in guiding humanity in the EgyptoChaldean epoch raised them to a higher stage of evolution. If we turn with the eye of seership to the Akasha Chronicle and see how these leading Beings looked during the EgyptoChaldean epoch, we find that at that time they had reached a certain level of development. Now they emerge again from the twilight of existence and intervene anew in human evolution, having meanwhile reached a greater degree of perfection. But there is one difference.

Let us for a moment ignore the Beings who at that time were Luciferic Angels, and turn our attention to the normal Angels, those who during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch directed evolution in the straight line of advance. During that epoch some of them reached the normal goal of their own development, but there were also among them a number who lagged behind. Thus there are some who, although they had attained their normal development on the Moon and thus entered into the evolution of our present Earth as Angels, nevertheless, during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch failed to achieve all that they could have achieved on Earth. At that point they lagged behind. Thus among those Beings who were still in the line of normal development during the Egypto-Chaldean time there arose once more two classes, and there is really an enormous difference between these two classes of Angels. This difference has to do with the loftiest mystery of human evolution, and it is of paramount importance that we should understand it. I have already referred to it in the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. In order to give an account of this difference we have to introduce the name of Christ, the Christ who is so very closely bound up with the whole range of Earth evolution.

We know that as far as concerns Earth-development on the physical plane Christ was incarnated for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. We know that that incarnation took place once for all, that there had been no previous incarnation, and that there will be no other like it. What the Christ did by dwelling for three years in a human body was necessary for human beings on the Earth, it was necessary for men as earthly beings of sense to have the Christ also among them once as an earthly being of sense. But in His essential nature the Christ is not restricted to His life for three years in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth; He is also the leader of all the Beings of the higher hierarchies. He is an all-embracing, cosmic, universal Being. Just as through the Mystery of Golgotha He entered into human evolution, so for the Beings of the higher hierarchies corresponding events took place. That means that as time went on Christ brought something about for all these Beings of the higher hierarchies. How did this happen?

During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already said, the Angels went through an evolution which has enabled them to take over the leadership of mankind today as more highly developed Beings. What made it possible for them to reach a higher stage of evolution? It was because they themselves, while they were guiding human souls in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, became pupils of Christ in the spiritual, super-sensible world. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch Christ was the teacher of the Angels. His impulse flowed into them during that epoch, and it is because of this, because they have meanwhile been permeated by Christ that they now appear at a higher stage of development. Thus if at the time when the Greco-Latin age begins we were to look at those Beings who had been the spiritual leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, we should say that by the beginning of the Greco-Latin age the most highly developed of them, those who were the best prepared to play a leading part in our fifth epoch, had received into themselves the Christ Impulse, which formerly they did not have, and that as Christ-filled Beings they now influence mankind from the higher worlds. In the same way the Archangels, who when they acted as the inspirers of Zarathustra and his pupils had not yet been ‘Christ-ened’, have meanwhile absorbed the Christ Impulse, and in the sixth culture-epoch, the epoch following our own, they will be the spiritual leaders of mankind. But in contradistinction to what they were in the Persian epoch, in the sixth epoch they will appear as Christ-filled Beings. The Archai, the Spirits of Personality, who were the inspirers of the Holy Rishis in the Indian epoch, have also meanwhile absorbed the Christ Impulse, and they will be the spiritual leaders of the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. Then everything which was once proclaimed to mankind by the voice of the Holy Rishis will come to pass in great glory and majesty; but in the most advanced men of the seventh culture-epoch it will all be illuminated, inflamed, set on fire by the Christ Impulse. The Holy Rishis will rise again in the splendour of the Christ Sun in the seventh culture-epoch of post-Atlantean humanity.Thus we see that for the Beings of these four hierarchies—not only for man, but also for Angels, Archangels and Archai—the Christ-event signifies the very highest experience of which we in our cosmic evolution can speak.

Why was it that certain Beings lagged behind? It was because they rejected the Christ Impulse. Thus we now have one class, one category, of guiding Beings who have accepted the Christ, but in the action upon our own epoch of another category, the backward Angelic Beings, there is no trace of the Christ Impulse to be found. They have not been ‘Christened’. Whereas the Angels who since Egypto-Chaldean times have been filled with the Christ Impulse now imbue human evolution with forces which lead them upwards to a spiritual life, the other Beings, those who rejected the Christ Impulse, seek to give to humanity for their inspiration everything which we can call materialistic culture and materialistic science. Hence the confusion prevailing in our time between the inspiration derived from the purest Christ Impulse, which should guide humanity upwards to spirituality—and it is to this which we devote ourselves when we follow strictly the goal of Spiritual Science—and the other inspirers who have turned away from the Christ and are concerned to introduce the material element into human civilisation. These two tendencies intermingle in our time. We can only understand our own epoch if we are aware that these two currents of spiritual leadership dominate it. So long as we cannot distinguish between them, and so long as we fanatically uphold one or the other of them, we are not in a position to understand clearly the course of our civilisation. Today under the guidance of the Angels who have rejected the Christ Impulse we have a science which is quite abstract, entirely unspiritual. We have the urge to rise to spirituality because the other Angels whom I have described are gaining an ever stronger hold upon the guidance of humanity. All the great spiritual Beings who lead humanity forwards, whether as Angels, Archangels or Archai, have at some time since Atlantis been open to the Christ Impulse, just as at the lowest level man was open to it through the Mystery of Golgotha. That is what the intervention of the Christ Impulse means in human evolution.

Of course we have to be quite clear that the Beings who were pressing forward towards spirituality with the greatest intensity could not become incarnated in human physical bodies even in the Egypt-Chaldean epoch. Even less so can this happen in our own time. Even today we have to seek for the outstanding spiritual leaders of humanity in the spiritual world through the eye of seership, through spiritual-scientific knowledge; to expect to find the highest leaders of humanity, the really progressive authoritative leaders, incarnated in human bodies would be quite wrong. From the universal rule that the real, guiding individualities do not incarnate during Earth evolution in human bodies, the Christ in a certain respect forms an exception, since He was incarnated for three years in a human body. What is the reason for this? It is because the Christ Being in all His forces, in all His impulses, is an essentially higher Being than any of the individualities of the hierarchies we have described—an Individuality even higher than the Archangels and the Archai, a Being of whose full greatness we can only be dimly aware. These stronger forces and impulses enabled this Individuality to fulfil a purpose that we shall come to understand more closely; they enabled Him to assume a human fleshly sheath as a sacrifice for three years. But something else is connected with this assumption of human bodily sheaths by the Christ which then led to the Mystery of Golgotha—something which it is important for us to understand.

It is only when we reflect upon this other factor that we are able to grasp not only the nature of Christ Himself, but also the nature of another figure, of whom we know that he plays a very considerable role in human evolution, a figure of whom we have already often treated in our lectures, but who can only gradually be fully characterised—I mean Lucifer. Let us consider these two individualities, Christ on the one hand and Lucifer on the other, and let us take to begin with only one characteristic of the Christ—that He once descended to Earth so far as to incarnate in a human physical body, that He dwelt for three years in such a body. What then is the consequence of the event which culminated on the physical plane in the Mystery of Golgotha?

The consequence was that now the etheric and astral spheres of the Earth became substantially permeated by the Christ Being. Whereas previously the Being whom we know as Christ was not there, now the etheric and astral spheres have become permeated through and through by Him. This is hinted in the words spoken by Theodora in my Mystery Play The Portal of Initiation. Anyone who becomes clairvoyant in the manner of St. Paul sees into the etheric sphere of the Earth and perceives there the Christ—something which at an earlier time was not possible even for the most advanced clairvoyant, something which was first made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. You know that it is actually in the twentieth century, actually in our own time that a number of men will repeat this event of Damascus and recognise the Christ. Through their further development men will raise themselves ever more and more to a recognition of the etheric Christ. This shows you that it is an essential feature of the evolution of Christ that after the Mystery of Golgotha, search as we may in the physical realm, we shall not find the Christ substance as such incarnated there. Nevertheless the Earth is saturated by the Christ substance, because it reaches right down to the etheric sphere of the Earth, and will be able to be found there for all time, though it could never condense to the physical in a body of flesh. Today what is physical upon Earth is like a snail shell, which one day when the Earth has reached the goal of its evolution will fall away from the totality of human souls, just as the physical body now falls away from the individual soul at death. There will be a death of the Earth when it has reached the goal of its evolution. Just as today the individual soul throws off the physical body and enters a spiritual realm when man passes through the gate of death, so at the death of the Earth the totality of human souls will pass over into a spiritual sphere, and will cast off as dross, as husk, what today constitutes the physical element of the Earth. Where will be the Christ-substance when the Earth has undergone its earthly death? It will permeate the totality of human souls, who will rise out of the corpse of the Earth, out of the earthly dross. The Christ Being, together with the totality of human souls, ascends further into the spiritual realms, in order later to come to the next incorporation of the Earth, which in Spiritual Science we call Jupiter. That is the essence of the Christ Being, that in a wholly spiritualised form He continues to lead mankind in its development; He does not enter into any kind of physical manifestation, but for the time being remains close to the physical, but only until the death of the Earth; He remains close to the physical inasmuch as it is permeated by the etheric, but when the Earth has reached the goal of its evolution, the physical will be cast off as a corpse. Since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ has retained absolutely nothing which could arouse in Him a desire to assume any kind of physical body. His renunciation of all physical substance is absolute.

That is the great secret connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, that by the sacrifice of His three years passed in a physical body, the Christ Being brought it about that nothing of Him will be left behind in the Earth-husk which will fall away at the death of the Earth. Because, though the Christ does indeed permeate the Earth's physical substances, He does not since the Mystery of Golgotha unite Himself with them, nothing remains in His nature which could look back with longing towards the cast-off husk at the death of the Earth. This husk will be cast off, it will shine from afar like a star. It will be seen by Beings then dwelling upon the outer planets as they gaze outwards into the heavenly spaces.

Will not only the Christ and those belonging to Him, but all other Beings, cease to have any connection with this star which will be cast off as dross at the death of the Earth? Not at all. I have just been speaking, for instance, of those Beings who rejected the Christ Impulse in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. Some of them will go on rejecting Him. In certain circumstances even in time to come these Beings may incarnate in physical bodies and walk the Earth as men. They will be the ones who will yearn in a way after the star cast off at the death of the Earth, which will radiate in splendour out there in space. After the death of the Earth all those souls who belong to the Christ will in the future admire this star, but they will not hanker after it, they will not say, ‘That star is our home’. Neither these souls nor the souls of the Beings of the higher hierarchies will yearn after this star, any more than souls on the Earth hanker after Mars. They raise their eyes to Mars, receive its beneficent influence, but they do not yearn after it.

What then would have happened if the Christ Being had not entered into Earth evolution? There would have been a tremendous difference in the destiny of humanity. Suppose for a moment that the Christ had not entered human evolution; the Earth would still undergo death, human beings and the higher hierarchies would still continue their development in the spiritual worlds, but they would carry into those worlds the perpetual longing for that star which, as the husk of the Earth, would radiate with wondrous brilliance into the universe. Human beings without the Christ would look down from Jupiter with tragic longing towards the star formed of earthly dross, and not only would they admire it, but longingly they would say: ‘That is our home, it is grievous that we have to be here, grievous that we cannot be in our true home upon that star.’ That is the difference it would have made in the course of evolution if the Christ Impulse had not united itself with the Earth. To liberate men from the Earth, to make them free and independent for evolution that is to come in the future, that was the mission of Christ upon Earth. We see the immensity of the Christ-event, we see that it is because Christ has dwelt upon the Earth that humanity will become mature enough to evolve towards the future structure of our planet.

Is there any instance of Beings working on another planet who yearn after some other heavenly body as if it were their own true home? Yes, there are such cases; let us take one of them and compare him with the Christ. During the Moon evolution there were powerful Beings, exalted Beings, who however in a certain respect did not reach the goal of their Moon evolution. Among these exalted Beings was a host under its own leader which, when the Moon evolution came to an end and the evolution of the Earth began, had not attained the goal of its own evolution. Now this host of Beings entered into Earth evolution, and participated in the guidance of humanity, but always with this tragic longing for a cosmic star which had been cast out of the Moon evolution in the way I have described in the book Occult Science. Within the spiritual evolution of the Earth are mighty, highly significant Beings, with their leader, who, because they had to quit the Moon and go on to the Earth without having reached their full development, really feel this yearning for a star outside in the cosmos which they regard as their true home, but to which they cannot attain. These hosts are the hosts of Lucifer. Lucifer himself takes part in Earth evolution with the perpetual longing within him for his true home, for the star Venus outside in the cosmos. That is the salient feature of the Luciferic nature seen from the cosmic aspect. Clairvoyant consciousness comes to know just what the star of Venus is by entering into the soul of Lucifer, thus experiencing from the Earth Lucifer's tragic longing, like a wonderful cosmic nostalgia, for the star Phosphorus, Lucifer or Venus. For what Lucifer cast off as a husk, what at the death of the Moon was cast out of the Luciferic beings, as the physical body is cast off by the human soul at death, shines down from heaven as Venus.

I have now put before you from the cosmic aspect something about our Earth and about its neighbouring planet Venus. This was of course not experienced by the Greeks quite in the way I have expressed it, but it nevertheless lived in their sensations and feelings. When a Greek turned to the stars, especially when he turned to Venus, he sensed in his soul the inner connection between such a star and certain beings who inflame and inspire the earthly realm. When the ancient Greek felt what Lucifer was to the Earth, when he said to himself, as it were ‘The Luciferic principle wafts through our earthly existence’, he looked up to the star Venus and said: ‘There is the wandering point in the heavenly spaces towards which Lucifer's longings perpetually tend’.

This gives you the Greek sense of one of the ‘wonders of the world’, and it brings out very clearly that the Greek was far from gazing into space as do our modern astronomers, describing Venus as a purely physical globe. What then was Venus to the Greek soul? It was that region of space which he came to identify by observing clairvoyantly the spiritual content of Lucifer's soul; for in the soul of Lucifer he detected the great longing which reaches out as a living bridge from the Earth to Venus. This longing which the Greek soul recognised as being Lucifer's, he also felt to belong to the substance of Venus. The Greek did not see just the physical planet, he saw something which had been severed from the Luciferic Being, just as the physical body is severed from man when he goes through the gate of death, and as the corpse of the Earth will be severed when the Earth has reached the goal of her evolution. But there is this difference. The physical body of man is destined to disintegrate, whereas the body of a Lucifer is destined, when it falls away from the being of soul, to shine as a star in the heavenly spaces. In what I have just said about Venus, I have at the same time described what in the spiritual sense stars are. What are they to a quickened insight—those wonders of the world, those wonders of Nature—but the bodies of gods? What has gone forth into space from the bodies of the gods has become star. Looking up into the starry worlds, this is how the Greek saw the planets and the fixed stars. He said to himself: ‘The spiritual beings whom we revere as gods were once upon a time out there in space. They have undergone development. When they reached that point which for them corresponds with what for man during earthly existence is death, then their physical substance left them and became star.’

Stars are the bodies of gods, gods whose souls work on in the world in another way, independently of those bodies—just as Lucifer became independent of his body and continues to work in our Earth evolution. To grasp this is to have a spiritualised conception of nature and of the world. This of course has nothing in common with the wishy-washy pantheism which gives out that all Nature is permeated with a uniform divinity. Such a statement is inadequate; stars cannot simply be defined in this abstract way, as bodies through which the gods manifest themselves; when one looks up to those far-distant worlds one has to understand that the stars are bodies which the gods have abandoned, having progressed to other stages of evolution. But in this we find the difference between all the planetary gods and the Christ. As I have explained, the Christ leaves no such physical star at the death of the Earth, no residue still unspiritualised, but passes over entirely into the spiritual world, and as spirit goes over with the human soul into the Jupiter existence. That is one of the essential differences between the planetary spirits and the Christ-Spirit. It is of supreme importance to bear this distinction in mind for it shows that the whole meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha would be lost if, after that event, He whom we rightly call the Christ could once more incarnate in a physical body. For if, after the Mystery of Golgotha, the Spirit to whom we rightly give the name of Christ were again to incarnate in a physical body, this physical substance would furnish the first germ to which other substance would attach itself to form a star which in the future would remain behind, and the profound significance, the profound purpose of the Mystery of Golgotha would fail to be attained. The Christ would only have to incarnate in some physical body to belie Himself, and to annul the Mystery of Golgotha. He would then create a point of attraction of a material nature to which other material would attach itself. There would then have to be other incarnations of the same Being. In this way a star would be created towards which man would yearn for all time. Such a nostalgia may not be brought about by the Christ Being. Hence, after the Mystery of Golgotha, no one is justified in associating any incarnation in a body of flesh with the name of Christ. To do so implies either an abuse of the name of Christ, or a complete lack of comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is extremely important that these things should be understood. For only so is it possible to bring the universal nature of the Christ into a right relationship to human evolution. The forces which will be produced in a part of the human soul through the obliteration of the longing for the Earth, these forces, like all others, have to be strengthened by opposition. Hence it must necessarily be brought about by the wise guidance of the world that again Beings are left behind who, as was the case with the leading Angels of the Egypto-Chaldean time, with the Archangels of the Persian epoch, and the leading Archai of the Indian epoch, do not permeate themselves with the Christ Impulse, and therefore will continue to guide evolution without it. In future evolution they will be the element through which there will still admittedly be a certain longing and even a certain union with what as planetary residuum, as stars, will be out there in the universe and will be seen from Jupiter, just as our Venus, our Mars and our Jupiter are seen from the Earth. Thus it is really a different stream of humanity and a different stream of the higher hierarchies which will continue to hanker after the influence exerted upon the humanity of Jupiter from its future planetary neighbours. One must clearly distinguish these two things, then the greatest truth will throw light upon the lesser ones. Everywhere these two streams intermingle. Everywhere we see the progressing Christ Being, Who will guide men upwards to a higher vision of Himself; on the other hand we see the forces of hindrance, to which we must not give the name of the Christ, forces which even incarnate in human bodies; they too can acquire knowledge of the Christ, but they cannot acquire a Christ Impulse such as have the Angels who completed their evolution in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch; they are Beings who even in future times will be able to descend to fleshly embodiment.

We must clearly distinguish the one from the other. All the materialistic thought of our time comes from the Spirits who hinder, who hold progress back. To expect the salvation of mankind solely from individualities who could in the future incarnate in the flesh is a thought which comes from these Spirits of hindrance, for it is a materialistic principle. It deflects men from their upward course towards the vision of the spiritual. It concentrates their attention upon individualities incarnated in physical bodies upon whom they rely just because they can be seen by the physical senses.

Pre-Christian Greece had no clear insight into all that I have been saying about the Christ, because the Mystery of Golgotha had not yet taken place; but it had a spiritual perception of Lucifer and of his connection with the planet Venus, and of the connection of other gods with other stars. All these sensations and feelings which the Greeks derived from an archetypal wisdom, are a preparation for the ideas, the feelings, the impulses of soul which awoke in the informed Greek when the name Dionysos was spoken. Hence what has been said today has been a necessary preparation to enable us tomorrow to enter into those wonders of the world, those marvels of Nature, of which the Greeks thought when they spoke of Dionysos. This will serve to build a bridge to something which concerns man more closely, this will lead us to his inner nature, to the ordeals of his soul.

At the end of yesterday's lecture I introduced the name of Dionysos, and finished on a note of interrogation as to his nature. As everybody knows, Dionysos is one of the Greek gods, and the question must have arisen in your minds as to the nature of the Greek gods in general. I have already tried to describe in considerable detail such figures as Pluto, Poseidon and Zeus himself. In view of what I said yesterday as to the part played by the higher hierarchies in the spiritual guidance of mankind, you may have wanted to ask to what category of the higher hierarchies the ancient Greeks regarded their gods as belonging.

We said yesterday that in contradistinction to conditions prevailing in previous epochs—in the Persian and the EgyptoChaldean epochs—during the Greco-Latin culture the reins of spiritual guidance from above were less tightly drawn. That the Greeks were conscious of this somewhat freer relationship between the divine Spirits and men is quite clear from the way in which they depicted their gods, giving them thoroughly human traits, one might even say human frailties, human passions, human sympathies and antipathies. From this we can infer that they knew that, just as human beings on the physical plane have to strive to make progress, the gods immediately above them do the same thing—they strive to transcend such qualities as they have. In fact, compared with the gods of Egypt or Persia, the Greek gods needed so much to make progress in their own evolution that they could not bother themselves much about men! Hence came that standing-upon-its-own-feet of Greek civilisation which is so truly human. The bond between gods and men was looser than ever before. It was just because they were aware of this that the Greeks could depict their gods as so human. This very fact may well prompt us to ask where in the ranks of the hierarchies the Greeks themselves placed their gods. We can be in no doubt—their very qualities proclaim it loudly enough—we have to put them all without exception into the ranks of the Luciferic beings. If we ask ourselves what these gods were trying to do, what they were seeking to gain by their participation in earthly life, we can have no doubt that they had failed to complete their Moon evolution and that the Greeks knew it, knew that they had to take advantage of Earth evolution just as men had to do. It follows from this that the Greeks knew quite well that all their gods were imbued with the Luciferic principle.

The Greek attitude towards their gods is in sharp contrast to that of another people. We know of one nation which had developed to a very high degree a consciousness of being under a divine hierarchy which in its own development had attained the full goal of the Moon evolution. Anyone who heard the course of lectures I gave here a year ago with all that I then said about the Elohim, about the culmination of the Elohim in Jahve, will have no doubt that the Hebrew people knew that the Elohim, that Jahve, belonged to the gods who could not be directly affected by the Luciferic principle on Earth, because they had reached their full development upon the Moon. That is the great contrast between these two peoples, and the singularity of the ancient Hebrew consciousness of God is wonderfully portrayed in that powerful dramatic allegory which sheds its light upon us from remote antiquity, and the profound meaning of which will only gradually be understood once more as Spiritual Science prepares the ground for it. If ancient Hebrew consciousness was utterly filled with the knowledge that every member of the Hebrew nation was under the divine guidance of spirits who had attained the full goal of their evolution on the Moon, how must this have affected its attitude towards man himself? The Hebrew must inevitably have felt: ‘Devotion to this divine world with the whole strength of the soul will lead men upwards to the spiritual in the universe; union with any other forces, union with forces which still belong to the material world, will inevitably lead men away from the spiritual.’ This is the significance of that text, that epigrammatic utterance, which has come down to us from the Book of Job, whose wife says to her suffering husband: ‘Curse God and die.’ There is something magnificent, powerful, in these words, and they can only mean that union with Jahve, as the extract of the Elohim, means life itself to the ancient Hebrew people. Union with the hierarchy of the Elohim is life, and union with any other hierarchy would mean turning away from this progressive principle of human evolution, would mean death to human evolution. To the ancient Hebrews, no longer to be permeated by the substance of the Elohim, or of Jahve, meant to die.

This is just an indication that in remote antiquity there was an opposite spiritual consciousness in vivid contrast to the consciousness which we meet later among the Greeks. Greek consciousness brings to maturity the truly human element in earthly life, tries to assimilate into its humanity all that the Earth has to offer and is in consequence under the domination of a hierarchy which is seeking to lay hold of the elements of earthly life for its own development, and which therefore exercises the least possible control over men. The other consciousness, the ancient Hebrew consciousness surrenders itself entirely to the principle of the Elohim, is completely given up to Jahve. Those were the two great poles of civilisation in the past.

I said yesterday that the Luciferic beings, or the Angels who during the Moon evolution remained backward, can still incarnate upon the Earth, can still move among men, in contradistinction to those who completed their evolution on the Moon. But we are not told that the Greek gods incarnated directly in human form! There seems here to be an inconsistency. Such apparent inconsistencies are inevitable, for Spiritual Science is extraordinarily comprehensive and complicated. Indeed the paths of spiritual truth are intricate, and can only be trodden by those who patiently wind their way through the labyrinth—as is said in a passage of my Mystery Play The Soul's Probation.¹ Such inconsistencies can only be resolved little by little, and anyone who expects a glib solution will not easily penetrate to the truth. The Greeks were certainly aware that in their own time the Beings of their divine hierarchies were not able to incarnate directly upon the earth. But those soul-individualities whom the Greeks regarded as their gods did nevertheless incarnate in physical bodies, and that happened in the time of Atlantis! Just as in the Greek Heroes we have the later incarnations of backward Angels from the Moon evolution, going about the Earth in human bodies, bearing within them knowledge of a Luciferic, a superhuman nature, so in the Greek gods we have beings who underwent their fleshly incarnation in Atlantean bodies. Thus we can say that the Greeks looked upon their gods as true Luciferic beings who had already gone through their human incarnation in Atlantis. We must be clear about this if we wish to understand the whole world of the Greek gods.

But another apparent contradiction might occur to you. You might say: ‘All very well, but another time you tell us that Zeus is outside in space as the macrocosmic representative of the astral forces at work in man, Poseidon as the macrocosmic representative of the forces working in the ether body, Pluto as the macroscosmic representative of the forces of the physical body ... so that one has to think of these forces as outspread in the widths of space!’ The objection that these forces are at work outside in space without being gathered together into separate human forms could only be made by someone who has not yet understood how evolution comes about, what is its whole meaning. For a modern consciousness it is somewhat difficult to come to terms with the proper concepts. It is difficult to imagine that what works outside in space as natural law can at the same time walk about the Earth in a human body. Nevertheless it can be so. For the scientist of today naturally it would seem utter nonsense for anyone to say, ‘Take all the forces known today to the chemist, all the chemical forces described in the text-books, all the forces at work in the analysis and combination of substances, and then think of all these laws at some time concentrated in a human body, walking about, making use of hands and feet’ ... a modern man would regard that as sheer madness! Equally little would he be able to imagine that the macrocosmic counterpart of the forces at work in our astral bodies, their counterpart outspread in space ... was once upon a time, exactly in the manner of today, a human soul, centred in a single person, a single person who in Atlantis walked the Earth as Zeus. And the same thing applies to Poseidon and to Pluto. In these Atlantean men to whom Greek consciousness gave the names of Pluto, Zeus, Poseidon, there were incarnated those wonders of the world which are also called laws. Try then to imagine to yourself a real man of Atlantean mould walking about in Atlantis just like other Atlanteans, and imagine an observer endowed with full consciousness looking upon this denizen of Atlantis who was Zeus ... such an observer would have been obliged to say: ‘This soul of Zeus walking about as an Atlantean appears to be concentrated in an Atlantean body, but that is an illusion, that is maya. It only seems to be so. The truth is that this soul is the totality of all the macrocosmic forces which work outside as the counterpart of the soul-forces concentrated in our astral bodies.’ If clairvoyant observation were directed to this Atlantean man who is Zeus, it would acknowledge: ‘As I observe this soul, it becomes larger and larger, it broadens out, it is in fact the macrocosmic counterpart of the soul-forces in the human astral body.’ The same thing applied to the other Atlanteans who were really Greek gods. The world as it meets us on the physical plane is altogether maya. It is because the modern man has no idea of this that it is so difficult for him to conceive of the Being of Christ Jesus Himself. For if we contemplate the soul which was in Christ Jesus after the baptism in the Jordan, we find the same thing. That is made clear in the little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. In that book we come to recognise that as long as the clairvoyant, or so long as human beings in general, could think of this soul as confined to one human body, they were the victims of maya. In reality this soul pervades all space, and exercises its influence from the whole of space, though for the mind held captive by the sense-world it seems to work through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Whereas after the baptism by John we have to see the cosmos as a whole through the body of Jesus, in the Greek gods, during the time they were Atlantean men, we have to see those specific forces which have their place within the cosmos. They actually dwelt on the physical plane, and were, in terms of maya, real Atlantean men.

But this will no longer astonish you if you observe the ordinary man of today. At bottom he also is maya, and it is sheer illusion to think that the human soul is confined to the space which encloses his body. As soon as a man attains to knowledge of the super-sensible world he no longer looks upon his physical body as something within which he with his ego is confined; it is something upon which he looks from without, towards which he is focused, and he feels himself, together with his ego, as poured out into cosmic space. He is in fact outside himself, united with the beings of the surrounding world, whom formerly he only looked at; and in a way every soul is spread out over the whole macrocosm, every soul is there within the great universe. Moreover, when man goes through the gate of death and severs his essential soul-nature from his bodily part, as soon as death has taken place, he at once feels himself to be poured out into the macrocosm, he feels himself to be one with the macrocosm, because reality then enters into his consciousness and takes the place of the maya.

I have tried to make clear what a consciousness experiences when it has been freed from the body, when so to say it looks upon the physical body from without, when it lives instead in the spiritual world, when it gradually makes itself at home in the macrocosm. ... I tried to make that clear in Scene 10 of my playThe Soul's Probation, in the monologue which Capesius speaks when, after having plunged into the cosmic, the historical form of his previous incarnation, he returns again to ordinary consciousness. In that monologue what he experienced while he was living through his earlier incarnation passes through his soul; it is not just drily recorded that he had seen one of his earlier incarnations, but if you follow the monologue word by word, line by line, you find a true description of what he experienced. You find it all there, quite realistically described. From this monologue you can get an idea of what really takes place when one looks back in the Akasha Chronicle to earlier periods of Earth evolution, in which one has gone through earlier incarnations. It would be a great mistake to overlook a single word of it; it would be a mistake as regards other passages too, but particularly in this monologue it would be a great mistake not to realise that it describes quite realistically, in all detail, actual soul-experiences. You are even told how the human being has to ask himself whether everything out there in space has not been woven out of the stuff of his own soul! Capesius does actually feel as if what he has encountered there outside himself has been made out of the stuff of his own soul. It is very strange to feel oneself to be part of other things, to feel expanded to a cosmos, to feel completely drained, literally starved of one's own being, which has turned into pictures which then stand before one, pictures that one sees just because they are saturated with the stuff of one's own soul. If you take all that into consideration, you will come to understand the assurance with which the Greeks fashioned the pictures of their gods and of the divine world.

Thus during the time of Atlantis these gods were human beings, with souls which had a macrocosmic significance and this experience enabled them to make such progess as to fit them to play their part in the fourth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, but during that epoch to hold the reins very loosely in their spiritual guidance of humanity. As gods they no longer needed to be like Cecrops, Theseus and Cadmus, in whom were also incarnated Luciferic souls who had fallen behind during the Moon evolution, for they had finished with what earthly incarnation could give them in their Atlantean incarnations. Yet if we are looking at the matter in the right light we see that however much these Greek gods could still give to men, there was one thing they could not give; they could not give the ego-consciousness which man had to acquire. Why not? You will have gathered from all my earlier lectures that this human ego-consciousness was something which had to come about specifically upon Earth. We know of course that man first developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies during the Moon evolution. On the Moon the ego-consciousness could find no footing. There was no ego-consciousness in anything created on the Moon, or in any knowledge which the Greek gods had acquired there about the principle of creation. They could not give ego-consciousness to men, because that was an Earth product. They could do much for man's physical, etheric and astral bodies, for they had been fully conversant with the laws governing these from the time of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, in which at a higher level they themselves had participated. But because they were retarded Beings they could not become creators of the ego-consciousness. In this respect they are in marked contrast to the Elohim, to Jahve, who is pre-eminently the creator of the ego-consciousness. Thus the whole of modern mental life has only been able to develop through the intermingling of these two polaric influences in human spiritual development—the ancient Hebrew influence, which had the very strong tendency to arouse all the forces in the human soul leading towards ego-consciousness, and the other influence which poured into the human soul all these forces which the human physical, etheric and astral bodies needed in order that Earth evolution might be rightly carried through.

It was only through the intermingling of these two, the Greek and the Hebrew influences, that it was possible for that unified consciousness to arise which was then able to absorb the Christ Impulse, the Christ principle. For within Christianity these two influences are to be found, merged together as the waters of two rivers flow into one. Thus while the life of the soul in modern western civilisation is inconceivable without the impact of Greece, it is no less so without the impulse which was contributed by the ancient Hebrew civilisation. But from the hierarchy to which Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto belonged there was no possibility of man's acquiring his earthly ego-consciousness. The Greeks had a wonderfully clear perception of this, and brought it to expression in their concept of Dionysos. Indeed as regards this figure of Dionysos the Greek soul has expressed itself with such marvellous clarity that we can only contemplate the wisdom of its mythology in reverent amazement.

Greek mythology tells us of an older Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus. This older Dionysos was a figure which the Greeks depicted in such a way as to give expression to their feeling that an old clairvoyant consciousness had preceded the intellectual consciousness man has since acquired. This sentiment they did not of course express outwardly in thought such as ours, it was entirely a matter of feeling. This old clairvoyant consciousness was not constrained by maya, illusion, deception, to the same degree as is the later consciousness of humanity While men were still clairvoyant they did not believe that the soul is enclosed in the body, that it is bounded by the skin; the centre of the human being, so to say, was still outside the body. Man did not believe that he saw through his eyes by means of his physical body, but he knew: ‘With my consciousness I am standing outside my physical body.’ He regarded the physical body as a possession. One might say that modern man is like someone who sits firmly and comfortably on a chair in his house and says: ‘Here am I inside my house and surrounded by its walls!’ The old clairvoyant man did not sit within his house in this way, he was more like a man who walks out through the door of his house, stands outside it and says: ‘There is my house, I can walk round it, I can look at it from various standpoints.’ ... one then has a far wider view of the house than when one is inside it. That is what the old clairvoyant consciousness was like. It circulated outside its own bodily form and looked upon the latter merely as a possession of the consciousness outside it. When we consider the course of earthly evolution from ancient Lemuria through the Atlantean time and on into the post-Atlantean epochs, we know that the development of earthly consciousness has been gradual. During the Lemurian time this human consciousness was in many respects very similar to that of the Moon evolution. Man paid little attention to his body, he was still outspread in space. It was only by slow degrees that he entered with his ego into his body; during Atlantis his consciousness was to a considerable extent outside it.

Thus it was only gradually that this consciousness began to enter into the physical body—the whole tenor of Earth evolution shows this, and the Greek too was aware of it. He was sensible of an earlier consciousness, a clairvoyant consciousness which, though it had arisen during Earth evolution, still had a very strong leaning towards the Moon consciousness, towards the consciousness which had developed when man's highest member was his astral body. We ourselves might express this stage of human evolution thus.—At the time the Earth entered upon its present evolution man had developed physical, etheric and astral bodies, man bore in his astral body the Zeus forces; in the course of Earth evolution there was added to this all that went to form the ego. A new element united itself with the astral Zeus forces. Grafted upon the Zeus forces as it were, was something which in earlier times had indeed been vaguely associated with them, but which more and more came to be an independent ego added to the Zeus forces. The independent ego first found clairvoyant, and only later intellectual expression. If we see in the astral and Zeus forces, and if in what then emerges, and is at first clairvoyant, we see what we have called Persephone, then we can say: ‘Before man lost his clairvoyant consciousness there lived in him, side by side with what was in his astral body as the Zeus forces, Persephone.’ Man had brought over this astral body, closely associated with the forces of Zeus, from the Moon. The soul-life which we find personified by Persephone was developed in him on the Earth. And that is what the man who lived in olden times on Earth was like! He felt, ‘I have in my astral body. ... I have within me Persephone.’ In olden times man could not yet speak of an intellectual ego, as we do today, but he was aware of something which arose in him as a result of the co-operation of the Zeus forces in his astral body with the Persephone forces. What came about in him through the union of these two, Zeus and Persephone, that was his very self. He was something only one aspect of which was bestowed upon him by Zeus; to this there had to be added the other thing, upon which Zeus as such had no direct influence. What Persephone as the daughter of Demeter was, was connected with the forces of the Earth itself. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, a divine Being whose relationship with Zeus was regarded as that of a sister. Persephone was a soul who had gone through a different evolution from Zeus, she was connected with the Earth, and out of the Earth had an influence upon man and thereby upon the formation of his ego-consciousness.

Thus from very ancient times man bore in him from the side of Zeus his astral body, from the side of the Earth, Persephone. The ancient Greek was conscious that he bore within him something, the origin of which he could not discover when he looked up to the hierarchies of the upper gods. Hence he ascribed what he bore within him to what were called the sub-earthly gods, to the gods who were connected with the origin of the Earth, in which the upper gods had played no part. ‘I bear something in my being to which I owe my earthly consciousness, something which the world of the upper gods, the world of Zeus or of Poseidon or of Pluto could not directly give me, something with which they could only co-operate! Thus there is upon the Earth something beyond what the macrocosmic forces of Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto are, something which Zeus can only look upon, but which he cannot himself produce.’ For all these reasons Greek mythology has good ground for making the elder Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus, a son of Persephone and Zeus. In olden times, forces in earthly life which further the development of man's ego-consciousness, looked at microcosmically from within man, constitute the ancient clairvoyant consciousness; seen from the macrocosmic aspect, as they surge through the earthly elements, they are the elder Dionysos.

Thus when man had an ego which was not yet the ego of today with its power of intellect, but the forerunner of our present ego, when man had the old consciousness, which has now become subconscious, man looked outward to the macrocosmic forces which cause the ego-forces to flow into us, and called them Dionysos Zagreus, the elder Dionysos. But the Greek had a peculiar feeling towards what the elder Dionysos could give him. He was, after all, already living in an intellectual civilisation, even though one permeated with the living sap of fantasy, one wholly pictorial. Within the pictorial mode his culture was already intellectual. Only the oldest times still bear evidence of a clairvoyant civilisation. Everything to do with Greece which has been handed down historically to later times is intellectual civilisation, however steeped in imagery and fantasy. Thus actually the Greek looked back to an older time, to a time to which the elder Dionysos really belonged, to a time when he infused into human nature the still clairvoyant ego. The Greek had a sense of tragedy when he said to himself, ‘Our Earth can no longer maintain such an ancient ego-consciousness.’ Try for a moment to place yourself livingly within such a Greek soul. He looked back as if in recollection upon those olden times, and said to himself: ‘At that time there was a humanity which lived with its consciousness outside the physical body, a time when the soul was independent of the bit of space enclosed by its skin, a time when it lived outside, lived at one with the world of cosmic space. But those times have gone, they belong to the past. Since then this ego-consciousness has developed in such a way that in fact man cannot do otherwise than feel himself enclosed in the space bounded by his skin.’

This involved something further. Try to imagine for a moment that, by a miracle, it could come about that each one of your souls, now in your physical bodies, were to leave them, were to become outspread in the widths of space ... then your souls would merge into one another, they would not be separate. The several souls could point to their own property at as many different points as there are heads sitting here; but out there above the souls would coalesce and we should have a unity. But if the souls were to withdraw from this exalted consciousness into their respective bodies again ... what would become of this unity? It would be divided up into as many bodies as are sitting here. Picture to yourselves this sensation, think to yourselves that the Greeks knew in their souls that there was a kind of consciousness in which souls were united with one another and formed a unity, a consciousness in which the human psyche drifted over the Earth, and as an egoity none could really distinguish himself from another; then came a time when this egoity lost its unity and each separate soul trickled into a body. Greek fancy represents this moment in an impressive picture, the picture of the dismembered Dionysos.

With nice discernment Greek mythology has interwoven into the Dionysos saga the figure of Zeus on the one hand and Hera on the other. We have seen that Zeus is the central power of the macrocosmic forces which correspond to the soul-forces anchored in the astral body. These soul-forces have come over from the Moon evolution. Even Zeus really derives from the Moon evolution, so that he plays a part in the creation of Dionysos, who to begin with, as Dionysos the elder, is a son of Zeus and Persephone. Zeus's part in the creation of Dionysos lies in his representing the element of one-ness, of homogeneity, of Being as yet unfragmented. The figure whom we meet in the feminine Hera has passed through a different development. She has passed through a development considerably more advanced spiritually than that of Zeus—more advanced in the sense that she inclined more towards the Earth, whereas Zeus had remained behind at an earlier stage. Whereas Zeus had remained at the stage of the Moon evolution, had persisted in the Moon stage of development, Hera had gone further and had taken into herself certain motives which could be used upon the Earth. Hera belongs to the category of those Luciferic beings who labour to bring about the separation, the individualisation of men. Hence she is so often represented as jealous. Jealousy can only come about where individuality is well defined. Where consciousness of unity prevails there can be no jealousy. Hera belongs to those gods who further separation, individualisation, isolation. Thus Hera plays an active part in the mutilation of Dionysos ... whereas he is the offspring of the union of Zeus and Persephone. At a time when the human being of old was endowed with clairvoyant consciousness as a universal consciousness, the individualising goddess Hera—a function symbolically expressed as her jealousy—appears and calls upon the Titans, the gods centred in the forces of the earth, to cut into pieces the old unified consciousness, thereby driving it into separate bodies. This is how this universal consciousness, this consciousness of being one, was banished from the world.

The ancient Greek looked back with a sense of tragedy to that old clairvoyant consciousness which lived outside the physical body and knew itself to be one with all things in the universe; for he could only look back to it as to a thing of the past. If nothing else had supervened, had there been only the deed of Hera, man would have walked the earth, enclosed within the narrow confines of his own personality. Men would never have understood one another. But neither would they have been able to understand their environment, the elements of the earth, the world. They would have been able to look upon their bodies as their property, to feel themselves shut up within their bodies as in a house; possibly they would have been able to feel the environment in their closest proximity as their own, as a snail feels its shell to belong to it, but further than this the human ego would never have expanded; it would never have expanded to a consciousness of the world. That is what Hera wanted. She wanted to separate men from each other in their individuality.

What then saved men from this isolation? Whence comes it that, although men's egos had assumed intellectual form, this later consciousness, no longer clairvoyant but intellectual, is able to form an image of the world through acquiring intellectual knowledge? Whence comes it that the ego can transcend itself, is able to connect one thing with another? Whereas clairvoyant sight encompasses the whole world in one look, intellectual vision is restricted, it has to pass from object to object, to assemble the separate items in its vision of the world in order to make a picture of the whole by intellectual knowledge. It is not only the work of Hera which has continued to develop, but the intellectuality of the ego has been brought to completion, and although man can no longer, like Dionysos Zagreus, live in objects clairvoyantly, he can at least form intelligent pictures of the world, he can picture the world as a whole. To the Greeks the central power behind this world-picture, behind the thoughts and imagery with which we grasp it, was represented by the goddess Pallas Athene.

In point of fact it was the intellectual image of the world, the wisdom of the intellect, which rescued the dismembered Dionysos, rescued the old unified consciousness that had withdrawn into human bodies. It directed human consciousness once more outwards. Hence the subtlety of the Dionysos saga, which relates how Pallas Athene, after Dionysos had been dismembered by the Titans at the instigation of Hera, rescued his heart and brought it to Zeus. That is a marvellously subtle and wisdom-filled feature of the story, in full accordance with the ‘world-wonders’ to which Spiritual Science provides the key again today. We contemplate its profundities with reverence and admiration. This story of the dismemberment of Dionysos and the rescuing of his heart by Pallas Athene, who took it to Zeus, is only the macrocosmic counterpart of something which takes place microcosmically in us.

We know that the blood which sets the heart in motion is the physical expression of earthly man. What would have happened if the intellectual expansion of the ego to an intellectual conception of the world had not saved it from being imprisoned in the human body? What would have happened had not Pallas Athene rescued the heart of the dismembered Dionysos and taken it to Zeus? Men would have walked about each imprisoned in his own bodily form, each imprisoned in those microcosmic forces of his body which manifest merely the lower egotistic impulses, through which man does in fact tend to cut himself off as an isolated person enclosed in his skin. Of course man does have within him those forces which led to the dismemberment of Dionysos. They are the lower impulses of human nature, those which work in an animal, an instinctive way, and are the basis of human egotism. Those are the impulses from which develop sympathy and antipathy, everything of an instinctive nature, from hunger and other allied instincts to the reproductive instinct, which as such belongs entirely to the category of lower instincts. Had it depended upon Hera alone, had Pallas Athene not intervened to save man, he would only have developed an appetite for food, for the process of reproduction, in short for all the lower instincts.

What then happened to enable man to overcome this egotism, concentrated solely upon his lower nature? These lower instincts do constitute egohood, but there is something in human nature which lifts us above them. It is the fact that in our hearts we can still develop a different kind of enthusiasm from the egotistic passions—the hunger that drives us to maintain life and the sexual instinct that drives us to maintain the species. Those appetites, after all, still leave human nature plunged in its egotism. It is only because something else is intermingled with them that their egotistic character can to a certain extent be overcome, that they can be released from the body. There is a higher element connected with the heart, particularly with the circulation of the blood, which develops higher enthusiasms. When our hearts beat for the spiritual world and for its great ideals, when our hearts are afire for things of the mind, when we feel as much warmth for the spiritual world as a man feels in his lower instincts in the erotic life, then human nature is being purified and spiritualised by what Pallas Athene has added to the deed of Hera. Humanity will only become able to understand this tremendous truth in course of time, for at present there is much in human nature to give the lie to it. How often do we hear this sort of thing said: ‘Some people are very queer, they get worked up about all sorts of things which really don't exist, they get as heated over abstractions, over mere ideas, as other men do about real life’—meaning by that the satisfaction of hunger and other lower instincts. But those who are capable of developing so much warm enthusiasm for the super-sensible, for things in no way concerned with the lower instincts, that they can feel the super-sensible world to be a reality, have devoted themselves to what Pallas Athene added to the work of Hera. That is the microcosmic counterpart of the forces holding sway in the universe, of which Greek mythology gives us such a magnificent picture when it tells how Pallas Athene rescued the heart of the dismembered Dionysos and took it to Zeus who hid it in his loins. After the old clairvoyant consciousness had entered into man it merged with his bodily nature; this is wonderfully expressed in the Greek myth in the fact that the Dionysos-nature is concealed in the loins of Zeus; for all that would have sprung from the dismembered Dionysos would have had its microcosmic counterpart in what emanates from man's lower bodily nature. Thus we see how wonderfully what is given in the magnificent pictures of the old Dionysos saga is in agreement with Spiritual Science.

However, we are told how the old clairvoyant consciousness, represented by the elder Dionysos, developed further into the younger Dionysos, into the later consciousness, into our present ego-consciousness. For the macrocosmic counterpart of our present ego-consciousness, with its intellectual civilisation, with all that derives from our reason, and from our ego generally, is in fact the second Dionysos, who was born because a love-potion, brewed from the rescued heart of the dismembered Dionysos was given to Semele, a mortal, and resulted in her union with Zeus—with the forces of the astral body. Thus one who as a human being is already different, unites with what has come over from the Moon evolution, and from this union comes the man of today, who has his macrocosmic counterpart in the younger Dionysos, the son of Zeus and Semele. What further are we told about this younger Dionysos? Surely if he is the macrocosmic counterpart of our intellectual ego-forces, then he must be the intelligence which spans the Earth, which is outspread in the widths of space. If Greek feeling is to be in accordance with the truth, it will have to think of the younger Dionysos, the macrocosmic counterpart of our intellectual ego, as the intelligence which encircles the Earth; it will have to think that there moves a being outside in space who is like intelligence passing from land to land! And, wonderfully enough, we do find in Greek mythology the splendid legend of the second Dionysos who travelled from Europe to far-distant India, everywhere teaching men the arts of agriculture, the cultivation of the vine, and so on; we find how he then crossed into Arabia, returning again through Egypt. Every variety of intellectual civilisation stems from the journeys of the younger Dionysos; what we in our abstract dryas-dust way call the spread of intellectual civilisation, the old Greek mythology called the journeys of the younger Dionysos, who taught men agriculture, taught them the cultivation of the vine, besides teaching them science, the art of writing and such things, during journeys which carried him all over the earth. The conceptions of the older and the younger Dionysos fit in wonderfully together; they are pictures of mankind advancing from its older, clairvoyant consciousness, with its macrocosmic counterpart in the older Dionysos, to the younger, intellectual consciousness which has a macrocosmic counterpart in the younger Dionysos.

Let us once more turn to the thought which formed the starting point of this lecture, the idea that the ancient Greek gods were Atlantean men. ... The older Dionysos ... you will feel of him that—although the son of Persephone and Zeus has already taken Earth-elements into himself through the Titans, he still has a very close affinity with the gods of the Zeus hierarchy. He is the son of Zeus and Persephone, a super-sensible Being. This elder Dionysos from the very fact that he is still the son of Zeus as well as of Persephone—a super-sensible figure of the post-Atlantean epoch—is in his very nature allied with the Zeus hierarchy. Because of this, ancient Greek consciousness is clear, and the legend makes it clear, that the elder Dionysos, Dionysos Zagreus, like the other Greek gods, lived as a human being in Atlantis, walked the Earth as a man in Atlantis. But when you enter into the spirit of the saga of the younger Dionysos, who is already closely related to man, being born of a human mother, you see that the myth is aware that he is actually more closely akin to man than to the gods. Hence the legend relates what is in fact true, that the younger Dionysos was actually born in Greece in remote antiquity, and lived in a post-Atlantean fleshly body. Just as the forces of Zeus were once to be found in an Atlantean Zeus, in the same way what we recognise as the intellectual civilisation which is spread throughout the world, this mental macrocosmic counterpart of the personal intellectual ego, once lived as a man, as the younger Dionysos, in the post-Atlantean epoch, somewhere in Greek pre-historic times. This Dionysos the younger actually lived, he was one of the Greek Heroes. He grew up in Greece, and travelled to Asia, getting as far as India. This journey really did take place! And much of Indian civilisation—not the part which has survived from the teaching of the Holy Rishis, but another part—derives from the younger Dionysos. Then with his band of earthly creatures he journeyed to Arabia and Libya, and back again to Thrace. This prodigious pre-historic journey really took place. Thus a Dionysos figure who actually lived as a man, accompanied by a remarkable band of followers, described in mythology as sileni, fauns and other like beings, actually made the round journey to Arabia, Libya, Thrace and back again to Greece. When the time came for his death, he poured out his soul into the intellectual civilisation of mankind.

Thus one is justified in asking: ‘Is Dionysos the younger alive today?’ Yes, my dear friends. Go where you will, look at what lives in the world as intellectual culture, consider the mental content of what is given to us by modern historians in such a hopelessly dry-as-dust form, and which is called the tradition of history or something equally fantastic—consider this in its concrete reality. Think of this concrete, macro-telluric element which surrounds the Earth like a spiritual sheath, which subsists from epoch to epoch, which is not only in every head, but which as an atmosphere of intellectual culture also envelops all men in their daily lives—therein lives Dionysos the younger! Whether you turn to the teaching of our universities, or to the intellectual training which is applied to technology, whether you look at the kind of thought which has come into the world and forms the mental atmosphere of the banking and financial system throughout the world, in all that there lives the soul of Dionysos the younger. Since the death of the personality of the younger Dionysos who made that great journey, his soul has gradually been poured out into the intellectual civilisation of the entire Earth.

• 1. Scene 2 of The Soul's Probation. The precise words are:
  “Der höhern Wahrheit Wege sind verworren;
  nur der vermag zurecht zu finden sich
  der in Geduld durch Labyrinthe wandeln kann.”
  Translated as:
  “Tangled the paths that lead to higher truths!
  And only those may hope to reach the goal
  Who walk in patience through their labyrinths.”

We have devoted much attention in these lectures to a subject that arose out of the dramatic performances which preceded them, but it is a subject which is intimately bound up with the aim we have set before us in this year's Cycle. I am referring to the world of the Greek gods and the form it took. Since our actual subject is ‘Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit’, why should we have spent so much time talking about the world of the Greek gods? The reason is that such a study can provide—as well as much else—the basis we need for a spiritual-scientific study of the world. I have pointed out that the concept of nature and natural existence which is generally accepted today was quite unknown to the ancient Greek. If we call to mind what the thought and feeling of ancient Greece was really like, we find there no chemical, physical, biological laws as we understand them today. What lit up in the soul of the ancient Greek, what was enkindled in the spirit of this marvellous Greek civilisation when the eye (clairvoyant or otherwise) was directed upon the wonders of the world, presented itself to them as a kind of knowledge, a kind of wisdom; but for us it is the marvellous structure of their world of gods. Anyone who looks upon this world as having no inner coherence, which is the usual attitude, knows nothing of what it is trying to express. This world of the Greek gods, in its wisdom-filled structure, is actually the Greek reply to the question ‘What is the response of the human soul to wonders of the world?’ The Greek response to the riddle of the world was not a law of nature as we understand it, but the shaping forth of some group or other of divine beings or divine forces. Hence in these wonderful clues we have followed up in the last few lectures, and which we sometimes found so astonishing, but which, pieced together, give us the world of the Greek gods, we cannot help seeing the equivalent of our own dry-as-dust, prosaic, abstract wisdom. And if we want to make real progress in Spiritual Science we must acquire a feeling that it is possible to think and feel in an entirely different manner from the modern way.

But when in the last lecture we were considering the figure of Dionysos, our attention was drawn to yet another thing. While the rest of the gods represent what was reflected in the soul of the Greek when he tried to understand the wonders of the world, we found that in the figure of Dionysos the Greek has concealed what we might call the inherent contradiction of life, and we shall get no further unless we give some thought to this aspect. Abstract logic, abstract intellectual thinking, is always trying to discover inconsistencies in higher world-conceptions, and then to say, ‘This world-conception is full of inconsistencies, it cannot therefore be accepted as valid.’ The truth is, however, that life is full of contradictions, indeed nothing new, no development would be possible unless contradiction lay in the very nature of things. For why is the world different today from what it was yesterday? Why does anything become, why does not everything remain as it was? It is because yesterday there was a self-contradictory element in the state of things, and today's new state has arisen through the realisation of yesterday's contradiction and its overcoming. No one who sees things as they really are can say, ‘Falsehood is detected by proving contradiction’ ... for contradiction is inherent in reality. What would the human soul be like if it were free from contradictions? Whenever we look back at the course of our life we see that it has been activated by contradictions. If at some later date we are more perfect than we were earlier, it has come about because we have got rid of our earlier condition, because we have discovered our earlier state to be in contradiction to our own inner nature, and thus have called forth a reality of our own inner being in contradiction to what was. Contradiction is everywhere at the basis of all beings. Particularly when we study the entire man, the four-fold man, as we are accustomed to treat of him in the light of occultism, do we find this contradiction, a contradiction which addresses itself not only to our reason, to our philosophy, but to our hearts, to our whole soul-nature.

We must constantly remind ourselves of the fundamental basis of our Spiritual Science, that man as he stands before us consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. Our being consists of these four members. Let us look at them as they meet us to begin with on the physical plane, in the physical world. We will for the present ignore the question as to how the human being appears to clairvoyant sight, we will just ask how the four members of the human being appear to physical eyes, for the physical world. Let us begin with the innermost member of the human being, the ego, which as you know we regard as the youngest—or better call it ‘the ego- bearer’. The outstanding characteristic of this human ego occurs at once to anyone who studies the world with even a little intelligence. However widely we search, we shall never find this ego by the exercise of our physical senses, by exercising our faculties for knowledge of the physical world. It is not visible to our eyes, nor in any way perceptible to any faculty for acquiring knowledge of the outer world. Hence when we meet another man, if we only try to study him physically, with purely physical instruments, if we do not enlist the help of the clairvoyant eye, we can never observe his ego. We go about among men, but with organs of perception for the outer world we do not see their egos. If anyone thinks he can see egos he is utterly deceiving himself. With physical faculties for acquiring knowledge of external things we cannot observe the ego as such; we can only contemplate its manifestation through the organs of the physical body. A man may be inwardly a thoroughly untruthful person, but so long as he does not utter the lie so that it passes over into the external world, we cannot see it in his ego, because egos cannot be observed with external physical instruments. Thus, however far we go in investigating with the forces of physical knowledge, we only encounter this ego once. Although we know quite well that there are many egos upon the Earth, only one of them is to be perceived, and that is our own. In the physical world, or for physical instruments of knowledge, each man has only one opportunity of perceiving the ego, that is his own ego. So that we may say that the peculiarity of this youngest and highest member of the human being is that its existence, its reality, is capable of being perceived in one example only, in ourselves. The egos of all other men are hidden from us within their bodily sheaths.

From this ego, as the innermost, as the youngest, but also the highest member of the human being, let us now turn to the outermost member, to the physical body. As you know from things I have written or said on various occasions in recent years, the physical body can only be known in its true inner being to clairvoyant consciousness. To ordinary consciousness, to the physically based powers of physical knowledge, the physical body manifests itself only as maya or illusion. When we meet a man, what we see as his physical body is maya, illusion. But there are as many instances of this illusion of a physical body as there are men to be met with on Earth. And in this respect—as maya—our own body is just like that of other men. Thus there is a great difference between the perception of our own ego, of which only one example is given, and the perception of human physical bodies, of which we have as many examples as the people we know on Earth. We only learn to know the ego when we direct our physical faculty of knowledge upon ourselves. We have to look into ourselves with the power of knowledge which we have acquired upon the physical plane if we wish to learn to know our ego.

I should perhaps add, because there is so much unclear thinking, that what I mean by the ego which we perceive with our physical powers of knowledge belongs entirely to the physical world. It would be idle nonsense to say that what a man's normal faculties find within him as his ego ever belongs to any other world than the physical. If anyone were to consider the ego, observed not with clairvoyant but with normal faculties, as belonging to any other world than that of the physical plane, he would be making a mistake. In the higher worlds things look quite different; the ego too for clairvoyant consciousness is something very different from what man finds within him in normal consciousness. We must not think of the ego of which ordinary psychology and ordinary science speak as belonging to anything but the physical plane; only we are looking at it from within, and because we stand within it, as it were, because we do not confront it from the outside, we are able to say: ‘Admittedly we learn to know this ego upon the physical plane only, but we do at least learn to know it in its own inner being, by direct knowledge, whereas what we know of the physical body, of which we see so many specimens in the world, is only maya.’ For as soon as the faculty of clairvoyance is turned upon the physical body it dissolves like a cloud, vanishes away, reveals itself as maya. And if we wish to get to know the physical body in its true form we have to rise, not just to the astral plane but to the highest region of Spirit- land, to Devachan; thus a clairvoyance of a very high order is needed if we wish to learn to know the physical body in its true form. Here below, in the physical world, the physical body has only a quite illusionary stamp, and it is this counterfeit image that we see when we look at this physical body from outside. Thus these two members of the human organism, the highest and the lowest, show a very remarkable contrast. Here in the physical world we see the human physical organism as maya—that is to say, it is not at all in accordance with our inmost being; but the ego we see here in the physical world is in its physical manifestation quite in keeping with our inmost being. Please take note of that, it is an extremely important fact. Let me put it in another way, half symbolically, and yet with all the seriousness which the reality demands. Half symbolically ... yes, but this pictorial approach has a fulness about it which comes nearer to expressing the truth than any abstract concepts.

Half symbolically then, but also half seriously, I ask how we have to think of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall. We know that according to the Bible they were unable to see each other's outer physical bodies before the Fall, and that when they did begin to see them they were ashamed. That is the expression of a most profound mystery. The Old Testament tells why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their bodies after the Fall. It indicates that before the Fall the bodies they had were more or less spiritual bodies, bodies only accessible to clairvoyant consciousness, bodies of quite different appearance from physical bodies, bodies which expressed the ego in its true form. We see that even the Bible recognises that quite a different bodily form, one only perceptible to clairvoyant vision, was really fitted to the deepest being of man, and that the external physical body we have today actually does not measure up at all to the inner being of man. What then did Adam and Eve feel when their relation to each other was no longer one in which they did not see their physical bodies, but on the contrary, one in which they did see them? They felt that they had fallen into matter, that, out of a world to which they had formerly belonged, denser matter than had been theirs formerly had been instilled into them. They felt that man with his physical body had been transplanted into a world to which, if the true nature of his ego is taken into account, he does not belong. No more striking expression could be found to mark how little the outer expression of his being, the sensible reality, really measures up to the divine ego than this being overcome by shame.

But we can look at the matter from another aspect, which throws quite a different light upon it. If man had not descended into his physical body, had not taken into himself the denser matter, he would not have been able to acquire his ego-consciousness, or in terms of the Greek mind, he would not have been able to participate in the Dionysos forces. That also was felt by the Greeks. They felt that the ego of man as it lives on the physical plane has within it not only those forces of a higher spiritual, super-sensible world which it had had before the Fall, and which stream into it out of the spiritual worlds above, but that it is also dependent upon forces which come from quite another side, from the opposite direction. We know that before man had acquired his present ego-consciousness it was normal for him to have a clairvoyant consciousness. But this clairvoyant consciousness was a pictorial one, a dreamlike one, it was not a consciousness lit up by any real intellectual light; man only acquired that later. This old clairvoyant consciousness had to be lost to man in order that a new ego-consciousness could arise. To this end the old form of the ego, the old Dionysos Zagreus had to be destroyed.

We had before us yesterday the impressive picture of how this came about—of how in the language of Greek mythology the elder Dionysos was dismembered by the Titans, and emerged again later as the younger Dionysos, that is, as our present ego-consciousness, the consciousness which has come about in human evolution as the achievement of time. But in order to bring about the birth of the younger Dionysos the human mother, Semele, has to play her part. The figure of Semele furnishes another example of the unerring wisdom of Greek feeling for the true wonders of the world.

A necessary condition for the coming into existence of this younger human ego was that the old clairvoyant consciousness had to die out, had to sink below the horizon of consciousness. Anyone who knew that—and those who built up Greek mythology did know it—said to himself: ‘Once upon a time the human soul was endowed with a clairvoyant consciousness which looked up into a world full of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds, into a world in which the human being was still a fellow-citizen. But in course of time man has withdrawn from this spiritual world, and has become a quite different being, a being permeated by an ego.’ What would happen to a man of today if, without his having undergone any preparation, any kind of esoteric training, suddenly, in a moment, there were to stand before him, instead of the physical world as it appears to physical eyes and physical ears, the world that was there for the old clairvoyant consciousness? Let us imagine that, by some miracle or other, instead of the world which displays itself to him in the star-strewn heavens, in the rising and the setting of the sun, in mountain and cloud, in minerals, plants and animals, suddenly the world of old Atlantis were to stand before a normal human consciousness of today ... the man would be shattered, so dreadful, so alarming, would seem the world which is nevertheless all around us; for this world is there behind everything, it is all around us ... but it is covered over by the world of our ego. There is a world around us which would fill the man of today with fear, would shatter him with terror, if he were suddenly confronted by it. But the ancient Greek felt this too. That is also implicit in the wonderful, wisdom-filled form of the Dionysos saga. Dionysos had to come from another direction from that of the world-wonders in which the ancient Greek consciousness had placed Zeus and the other figures of the upper gods ... the ancient Greek felt that in what constituted the world of men there lived something different from what lived in the gods of Zeus's world.

That the world in which we live has a heterogeneous constituent was felt too by the Greek. He felt that an element is included in our physical human existence that is certainly not present in the super-sensible world. Hence the younger Dionysos, macrocosmic representative of our modern ego-consciousness, could not be like the elder Dionysos, a son of Persephone and Zeus, but he had to be a son of an earthly mother—he was the son of Semele and Zeus. But we must bear in mind what the Greek consciousness added in the further development of this saga. It was brought about through the machinations of Hera that Semele saw Zeus in his true form, not as the old Atlantean hero, but as he now is. That could only happen by means of clairvoyant consciousness. What then does it mean that Semele was to see Zeus for a moment as he now is? It simply means that Semele became for a moment clairvoyant. She was destroyed by flame because she saw Zeus in the flames of the astral world. Semele bears witness to this human tragedy, a tragedy which would immediately come about if man, unprepared, were to enter clairvoyantly the spiritual
world.

Hidden somewhere or other in the world of the Greek tales, all the truths about the wonders of the world are to be found. We find secreted there how Dionysos, the macrocosmic representative of the ego—the ego which no man endowed with normal consciousness can see in more than one exemplar—derives from a being of the physical world; that, so to say, what only meets the eye for normal physical consciousness as a maya was embodied in Dionysos; in other words, we see how Dionysos had to participate in the great Illusion, in maya. Today when we discuss the wonders of the world in our prosaic, dry-as-dust way, we speak of physical, chemical, biological laws. The Greek used splendid pictures which really penetrate far deeper into those wonders than our laws that only skim the surface. This is true of the whole world of Greek legend and Greek mythology.

Thus we see as if in a mighty occult script, the question arising out of this Greek myth. If this essential human ego is to manifest in a bodily form, can we expect to see it in the human form we have in the physical world? No, for this form is maya, it is not at all a manifestation of the real ego, it is truly of such a nature that the real egos in Adam and Eve were right to be ashamed of it. What we as men are confronted by today is in fact a real contradiction, and the Greek felt that too. Although it has often been said, very superficially, that he only paid attention to the outer beauties of Nature, even the Greek felt the self-contradiction in the external human form. He was not a naturalist in the sense in which modern man believes he was, but he felt profoundly that the human form as it walks the Earth today is a compromise, from no aspect does it show itself to be what in reality it ought to be. Suppose for a moment that the human form had only arisen under the influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies, suppose that no ego had entered into this human form, then it would have been fashioned as it was when it came over from the previous embodiments of our Earth, as it came over from Saturn, Sun and Moon. Then the human form would be different from what it actually is. If the Earth had not endowed man with the ego, men would be walking about with quite different-looking physical forms. Secretly, in the depths of his soul, the ancient Greek wondered what the human form would look like if earthly men today were ego-less, if men had not participated in the blessings bestowed by the Earth, had not participated in the coming into existence of the ego, had not taken Dionysos into themselves! If there were among us on the Earth men who had developed purely under the influence of the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies, he wondered what they would look like. And the Greek—uplifted, inspired by the spirit, and moved by unutterable depth of feeling—even put to himself the corresponding question: ‘If there were only the ego, if the ego had not been drawn into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, how would it be formed?’

It would not have a physical body such as it has now, it would have a spiritual body that would be quite different from our external human body. But this spirit-body exists only for a clairvoyant consciousness, it is nowhere to be seen in the physical world. What, then, really is the man who actually walks about the earth? He is neither the ego-less man, purely under the influence of astral, etheric and physical bodies, nor is he the ego-man, but a compromise between the two, something coming about as the result of a combination of both. The man we see before us is a composite being. The Greeks felt this and they said to themselves: ‘Since Dionysos, the younger Dionysos, is really the first teacher of intellectual civilisation, we must imagine him as not yet in a body which has already been subjected to the influence of the ego, for it is through the effect of the Dionysos civilisation that man has first to acquire the intellectual ego. Therefore Dionysos must be represented as this human ego still outside the human body.’ So when the Greeks depicted the procession of Dionysos, which I have called a march of civilisation, they could only accurately represent it on the basis that the essential ego of Dionysos had not yet entered the human body, but was just on the point of doing so; they could only imagine that Dionysos and all his followers had the kind of bodies which would inevitably come about if there were no egos in them, if their bodies were under the influence of forces emanating only from the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They said to themselves: ‘Dionysos and his rout should not look like the man of today, whose bodies are the combined result of the invisible ego and the visible body, but the invisible ego should hover as an aura over the bodily form and the body should be so fashioned as would inevitably come about under the sole influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies, that is, as a man would inevitably be formed if he had continued to develop the forces he had brought over from the Moon without taking in the Earth ego.’

Because the Greek soul has given a graphic answer to this world-riddle quite in accordance with the truth, it has portrayed in the figure of Dionysos, and particularly in the figures of those who constituted his band of followers, human figures who have the ego outside them, and whose own external forms really show only the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies. These are the satyrs and Sileni who follow Dionysos on his travels, that wonderful creation of picture forms which comes to us from Greek thought. That is what man would look like if we were able to separate the composite form into its component parts. Imagine for a moment that by some kind of magic the physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man could be so treated that the invisible, super-sensible body of the ego could be torn out of him, then he would turn into a figure resembling those who followed in the train of Dionysos.

But the Greeks in their admirable mythology have also drawn attention to something else. We know that the ego has only gradually drawn into the human form, that in the time of Atlantis it was not yet within the body. What then, were these Atlantean bodies like? In the satyrs and the fauns and in Pan, as we shall see later, Greek fantasy and Greek intuition has elaborated pictures of the average Atlantean. Under present Earth conditions such human forms can of course no longer arise. The figures of the satyrs and the fauns and the whole rout of Dionysos represented those stragglers who had most closely retained the ancient Atlantean form. Dionysos had to take with him on his travels the very men who bore the least trace of the ego within them, because he was to become the ego's first teacher.

We see then that the Greeks represented in this train of Dionysos the forms of average Atlantean men. Atlantean men were so formed that they did not have skeletons such as men have today. The human body has become more solid; it was much softer in Atlantean times. For this reason it was incapable of preservation, and the geology, the palaeontology, of today will be hard put to it to find any trace of the real Atlantean man. But a geology, a palaeontology, of quite a different kind has preserved the Atlantean man for us! It is not in the geological strata of the earth that we have to delve if we wish to know the man of prehistoric times, the man whose higher corporeality was still outside the physical body. To burrow in the earth is quite absurd; in the earth we shall never find traces of prehistoric man which are anything but decadent. But in the strata of human spiritual life, in the strata of spiritual geology which have been preserved for us in the wonderful Greek mythology, there we shall find the normal, average, Atlantean man, just as in the geological strata of the earth we find snail shells and mussel shells. Let us study the configuration of the fauns, of Pan and of Silenus; it is there that we have the spiritual fossils which lead us to the Earth's prehistoric humanity. Therein we see how the ancient Greek consciousness had an answer to wonders of the world which today may be dubbed sentimental, dreamy, fantastic, but which nevertheless was imbued with a kind of science more profound than our modern abstract, prosaic, intellectual science. There are today many Darwinian and anti-Darwinian hypotheses as to what prehistoric man looked like. The Greeks set this world-riddle before us in a way that can satisfy the soul. Neither Haeckelism nor any other branch of Darwinism, nor the excavations of geology, tell us anything about the outward appearance of prehistoric man, but Greek mythology has supplied the answer to this question for us by its representations of the rout of Dionysos in its plastic art.

We must come to feel that Greek mythology really provides a serious answer to questions about the wonders of the world, and then we shall be able to enter into it ever more deeply. It is only someone who does not understand what underlies these things who can say, ‘I can't accept that interpretation, it is too far fetched.’ Anyone who knows the whole story in all its ramifications, besides knowing the true development of man as revealed by the Akasha Chronicle, knows that there is nothing fantastic, nothing sentimental in what is being put before you today as Spiritual Science. The fancifulness, the sentimentality, lies in the abstract, empirical science of today, which imagines that it can dig up from the strata of the physical earth something that is not there, and can make a study of that while it ignores the wondrous script of spiritual geology which comes before us, to the rescue of human wisdom and its evolution, in the impressive mythology of ancient Greece.

What is it that has been the theme of our lectures during the last few days? We have been trying to bring to light again in the impressive pictures of Greek mythology, as the expression of an ancient wisdom, what in our own time we can come to know through Spiritual, or Occult Science; and we have certainly seen how much of what we come to know today in quite another way is to be found there as something quite obvious. When we realise this, especially when we discover that the deepest and most significant principles of knowledge, principles still today not fully recognised, were already expressed in pictorial fashion in this Greek mythology, our usual very superficial ideas about it are bound to be severely shaken.

The Greeks felt that what they hid in their Mysteries and associated with the figure of Dionysos was still deeper and more significant than all that they associated with the upper gods—with Zeus, Poseidon, Pluto, with Apollo, Mars and so on. For whereas they expressed pretty well everything which had to do with the upper gods exoterically, by means of the world around them, they veiled what had to do with Dionysos within the sanctity of the Mysteries, and only communicated it to those who had undergone a thorough preparation.

What then was the contrast between what the Greeks felt in their ideas about the upper gods, and what was withdrawn into the sanctity of the Mysteries? What was the fundamental difference? In their ideas about the upper gods, about Zeus, Poseidon, Pluto, Apollo, Mars and so on, they expressed everything of which one can become conscious through a deeper insight into the wonders of the world, a deeper insight into what takes place all around us and into the laws which govern it. But something essentially different was involved in what was associated with the figure of Dionysos; Dionysos had to do with the deepest vicissitudes of the human soul struggling for knowledge and for entry into the super-sensible worlds. The Mysteries associated with his name threw light upon the lot of the soul struggling for knowledge, living in the depths; they shed light upon all the testings which the soul had to undergo on its way.

If we would understand the figure of Dionysos and his connection with these tribulations, we must first give some thought to what modern Spiritual Science has to say about the human mind in the act of cognition. It might seem that modern man has abundant opportunity to become instructed as to what cognition really is. For the study of philosophy is accessible in all countries, and it is to this that we look to supply the answer to the question of how knowledge comes about. But from the standpoint of Spiritual Science philosophy has not been very successful in answering this question, and you can easily see why this is. So long as philosophy—the ordinary philosophy of the day—refuses to recognise the truth about the human being, that he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, it can come to no viable theory of knowledge. For knowledge is bound up with the whole being of man, and unless the true being of man, his fourfold nature, is taken into account, the question as to what knowledge is will only be answered by the empty phrases which are so familiar in modern philosophy. Because of the limited time at our disposal I can of course only briefly refer to this, I can only say a few words about the nature of human knowledge. But we shall understand one another if we begin by asking how it is acquired as distinct from what it may signify.

You all know that the human being could never attain to knowledge if he did not think, if in his mind he did not carry on something akin to work in ideation or thinking. Knowledge does not come of itself. The human being has to undertake work within himself, he has to allow ideas to pass through his mind if he wants to know. As adherents of Spiritual Science we have to ask ourselves where in human nature those processes take place which we designate as ideation, as mental representation, and which lead to knowledge.

According to the materialistic illusion, the typical philosophic fantasy of today, knowledge comes about as a result of work carried out by the brain. Admittedly, work does take place in the brain in the act of cognition, but if we bear in mind that the main thing in knowledge is the work within the soul in the life of ideation, the question must arise: ‘Has the content of the process of ideation anything to do with the work which goes on in the brain?’ The brain is part of the physical body, and what constitutes the content of our life of ideation, what constitutes the work of our soul in ideation, in mental representation, which is what brings knowledge about, does not go as far as the physical body; that all takes place in the three higher members of the human being, takes place from the ego through the astral body down to the etheric body. As far as its content goes, you will find nothing in any element of our process of ideation which takes place in the physical brain. Thus, if we are talking expressly of the content, or of the activity of mental representation, we must attribute that solely to the three higher super-sensible members of the human being, and then we can ask ourselves what the brain has to do with all this that goes on supersensibly in the human being. The obvious truth upon which modern philosophy and psychology are based, that in the act of cognition processes do take place in the brain, has of course to be admitted, it cannot and should not be denied, but it is relatively unimportant. Nothing of the mental representation itself lives in the brain. What significance, then, has the brain, has the external bodily organisation in general, for knowledge, or let us say to begin with, for the life of ideation?

Since I must be brief, I can only indicate it pictorially. As regards what really happens in our souls in the forming of ideas and in thinking, the work of the brain has precisely the same significance as a mirror has for the man who sees himself in it. When you with your personality move through space, you do not see yourself—unless you meet a mirror; then you do see what you are, you see how you look. A man who claims that the brain thinks, a man who professes that the work of ideation, of representation, goes on in the brain, is just about as shrewd as the man who looks at a mirror and says: ‘I am not walking about out here, that is not me. I must get inside the mirror, that is where I am.’ He would soon become convinced that he was not in the mirror, but that the mirror was reflecting what was outside it. So it is with the whole of the physical organisation. What becomes evident through the work of the brain is the inward super-sensible activity of the three higher members of the human organisation. The mirror of the brain is needed in order that this activity may become evident to the human being himself, in order that through the mirror of the brain he may perceive what he is supersensibly; this is an inevitable result of our contemporary human organisation. If, as an earthly being today, man had not this reflecting bodily organism, primarily the brain, he would still think his thoughts but he would not be aware of them. The whole endeavour of modern physiology and a good deal of modern psychology to understand thinking is about as clever as looking into a mirror to find your own reality. What I have here said in a few words can be epistemologically and scientifically substantiated in the strictest manner. It is of course quite another question whether the argument would be at all understood. Experience indeed suggests the contrary. In however strictly logical a manner one argues today even with philosophers, they do not understand a mortal word, because they just do not want to go into these things. For in the outer world today there is still absolutely no will to tackle the most serious problems concerning the human faculty of cognition.

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Let us take this diagram to represent the human physical bodily organisation. When we wish to express in correct diagrammatic form the human process of cognition, we have to say: ‘No part of what thinking is, nothing of the act of cognition, takes place anywhere within this external physical organism; it all takes place in the adjacent etheric and astral bodies and so on.’ It is there that all the thoughts which I have indicated diagrammatically by these circles are to be found. These thoughts do not enter into the brain at all—it would be nonsense to think that they do—they are reflected through the activity of the brain and thrown back again into etheric body, astral body and ego. And it is these images which we ourselves have first produced, and which are then made visible to us by the brain—it is these mirrored images which we see when as earthly men we become aware of what actually goes on in our soul-life. Within the brain there is absolutely no thought; there is no more of thought in the brain than there is of you in the mirror in which you see yourself.

But the brain is a very complicated mirror. The external mirror in which we see ourselves is simple, but the brain is tremendously complicated and of necessity a complex activity takes place in order that it can become the instrument, not indeed for producing thought but for reflecting it. In other words, before a single thought of a single earthly man could come into existence, there had to be a preparation. We know that this preparation took place during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and that in fine the present physical body, and with it the brain, is the result of the work of many spiritual hierarchies. So we can say that by the beginning of Earth evolution man on Earth was so formed that he could develop his physical brain to become the reflecting apparatus for what the human being really is, for the real man, who is at first only to be met with in the environment of this our physical bodily organisation. That is how we put it today, and it can surely be understood, at all events by an. audience of anthroposophists. Fundamentally this process of cognition we are examining is quite easy to understand.

What we today are able to understand in this way was felt by the ancient Greek, and therefore he said to himself: ‘There is concealed in this physical bodily organism, without man's having any direct consciousness of it, something of great significance. This physical organism is undoubtedly from the Earth, since it consists of the materials and forces of the Earth, but there is something secreted within it which can reflect back the whole life of the human soul.’ When the ancient Greek was directing his feeling upon the microcosm, upon man, he called this element—coming from the Earth and thus macrocosmic—this element which played a part in the constructing of the brain, the Dionysian principle; so that it is Dionysos who works in us to make our bodily organism into a mirror of our spiritual life.

Now if we apply ourselves to this purely theoretical exposition, if we enter into it, we can experience that the soul is being put to a first and very gentle trial; it is very slight, and since the organisation of present-day man is not tuned to the most delicate refinements, it usually passes unnoticed. These challenges will have to become ruder if the man of today is to feel them.

It is only when one is filled with enthusiasm for knowledge, when one looks upon the attainment of knowledge as a matter of life itself, that one feels what I am about to describe as a first tremendous challenge to the soul. It comes about when this very knowledge leads us on to recognise that the mighty word of wisdom ‘Know thyself’, resounds towards us out of primeval times. Self-knowledge, as the cardinal maxim upon which all other true knowledge turns, shines before us as a high ideal. In other words, if we want to attain knowledge in general, we must first endeavour to get to know ourselves, to get to know what we are. Now all our knowledge takes its course in the process of ideation. Our life of ideation, or mental representation, which reproduces for us all the things outside us, we experience in the form of mirrored image. The process does not penetrate at all into what we are as physical bodily organism; it is thrown back to us, and the human being can no more see into his own physical being than he can see what is behind the mirror. Moreover he does not penetrate into his physical organisation because his soul-life is completely filled by this process of representation. One is obliged to say: ‘Then it is quite impossible to learn to know oneself, one can come to know nothing but this process of ideation which has turned one into a reflecting apparatus. It is impossible to penetrate further, we can only reach as far as the frontier; and at the frontier the whole life of the soul is thrown back again, as a man's image is thrown back in a mirror.’ If an undefined feeling challenges us to know ourselves, we have to confess that we cannot do it, that it is impossible for us to know ourselves.

What I have just been saying is for most men of today an abstraction, because they have no enthusiasm for knowledge, because they are incapable of developing the passion which must come into play when the soul is confronted by its own absolute need. But imagine this realisation developed into feeling, and then the soul is faced with a hard task indeed: ‘You must attain something which you cannot attain!’ In terms of Spiritual Science that means that no knowledge which man can acquire by exoteric means will lead to any degree of self-knowledge.

From this springs the endeavour to press on by quite another path than that of ordinary knowledge to what the work of Dionysos within us is—to our own being. That has to take place in the Mysteries. In other words, something was given to man in the Mysteries which had nothing to do with the ordinary soul-life, that is only mirrored in our bodily organisation. The Mysteries could not confine man within the limits of exoteric knowledge, for that would never have enabled them to lead man into himself. Anyone determined to recognise only exoteric science would consequently have to say: ‘The Mysteries must have been pure humbug, for they only make sense on the assumption that something quite different from ordinary knowledge was cultivated in them, with the object of reaching Dionysos.’ Thus in the Mysteries we have to expect happenings of a kind which approach man in quite another way from all that man meets in ordinary exoteric life. This brings us directly up against the question: ‘Is there really any means of penetrating into what is ordinarily only a reflecting apparatus?’

I should like to begin from something seemingly quite unimportant. As soon as one takes the very first step in describing spiritual truths—truths which lead to reality and not to the maya of the outer world, not to illusion—one has to set about it in quite a different way from the way one sets about describing scientific or other matters in ordinary life. That is why it is so difficult to make oneself understood. Today men try to confine everything within the fetters which have been forged for modern science, and nothing that is not presented in this form is accepted as ‘scientific’. But with such knowledge it is impossible to penetrate into the nature of things. Hence in the lectures on Spiritual Science which are given here, a different style, a different method of presentation is used from the one to which ordinary science is accustomed; here things are so described that light is thrown upon them from several sides, and in a certain way language is taken seriously again. If one takes language seriously, one reaches what one might call the genius of language. In one of the earlier lectures of this course I said that it was not for nothing that in my second Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation, I used the word dichten for an original activity of the World Creator, or that in The Portal of Initiation I said of Ahriman that he creates ‘in dichtem Lichte’.¹ Anyone who appraises such words in the light of present-day usage will believe that they are just words like any other. Not at all. They are words which go back to the original genius of language, words which draw out of the language something that has not yet passed through the conscious human ego-life of ideation. And language has many instances of this.

In the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, I have pointed out what a beautiful expression there still was in old German for what is indicated in an abstract way by geboren werden (to be born). When a man comes into the world today he is said ‘to be born’. In old German there was another expression for this. The human being was of course not conscious of what really takes place at birth, but the genius of language, in which Dionysos plays a part, reaching in this way right into the activity of mental representation as distinct from the mere reflection of it—the genius of language knew that, when the human being goes through the gate of death, then in the first part of the time between death and a new birth, forces are at work in him which he has brought with him from his previous life and which are the forces which caused him to grow old in that life. Before we die we become old, and the forces which make us old we carry over with us. In the first part of the time between death and a new birth these forces go on working. But in the second half of the life between death and rebirth quite different forces set in. Forces take hold of us which fashion us in such a way that we return to the world as little children, that we become young. The language of the Middle Ages hinted at this mystery, by not using merely the abstract phrase geboren werden but by saying: Der Mensch ist jung geworden (the man has become young). This is an extremely significant expression! In the second part of Goethe's Faust² we find this phrase: im Nebellande jung geworden. Nebelland is an expression for the Germany of the Middle Ages; it means no more than to have been born in Germany, but in this expression there lies an awareness of the genius of language, thus of a higher Being than man, who participated in the creation of the human organism. That one speaks of ‘Dichtung’ in German is based on awareness that the ‘Dichter’ brings together what is outspread in the world, condenses it. One day there will be a philosophy which is not so dry and prosaic, not so philistine as that of today, because it will enter into the living genius of language, which in the ego-man of today underlies his conscious life of ideation. Much has to be elicited from this genius of language if one wants to characterise the things of the spiritual world, which lie beyond what ordinary consciousness can grasp.

Thus another method of presentation has to be used in the description of spiritual things. Hence the strangeness which is bound to be felt in many descriptions of the higher worlds. When we speak of the spiritual worlds we already meet at the very outset with something which must have originated behind what the human being has in his consciousness. It has to be drawn from the sub-conscious depths of the soul. Moreover, if one does this today something is necessary which seems quite trivial but is nevertheless important. If one wants to describe spiritual-scientific things in their true sense, one must forego the use of the customary terminology. One has perhaps even to go so far as to acknowledge quite consciously: ‘If you reject the customary terminology then the professors and all the other intellectuals will say you have no proper command of language. They will find all manner of things to object to, they will find you lacking in clarity; they will carp at all sorts of things in the way in which Spiritual Science is expressed.’ One has to accept that quite consciously, for it is inevitable. One must face up to the fact that one will probably be looked upon as stupid, because one fails to make use of the customary ‘perfectly logical’ terms, which in a higher connection are the height of imperfection.

What I have pointed out to you as a small matter—or not so small—was in ancient Greece a necessity for the pupil of the Mysteries, and is still so today. In order to come to his full self, in order to penetrate into his inmost being, which otherwise is only reflected by his external bodily organisation, the pupil must divest himself of the usual conscious external method of acquiring knowledge. Superficial persons could of course immediately say: ‘But you claim that the human being always retains his common sense, and judges everything in the higher worlds in accordance with it; yet you now say that he must renounce normal external knowledge. Surely that is a contradiction!’ In reality it is quite possible to test the things of the higher spiritual worlds with common sense and intelligence while nevertheless withdrawing from that form of conscious knowledge to which we are accustomed in the outer world. Here our souls are once more faced by a severe ordeal. In what does this ordeal consist?

As things are today, it is the habit of the soul to think and to apply the judgments of common sense within certain moulds, namely in those forms which in the ordinary process of mental representation are taught by the external world. That is the normal thing. And now imagine some professor or other, who is learned in the science of the outer world—and within the forms appropriate to that kind of knowledge an exceptionally able thinker. People come and say: ‘You want to make yourself understood by that professor; he obviously knows how to think scientifically in the modern sense of the term, if he can't understand you, you must have said something it is impossible for anyone to understand!’ Well, there is no need to dispute that our professor has a sound common sense judgment for the things of the ordinary external world. But our subject matter is the things of the spiritual world, and it will not do for him to listen with that part of his soul which brings common sense to bear on the ordinary things of the external world; he would have to listen with quite a different part of his soul. It does not follow that his common sense will continue to accompany a man when he seeks to grasp anything other than the things belonging to the outside world. Those are the things for which common sense is adapted; and a man may well possess an understanding for those things—and yet it may leave him in the lurch when he comes to the things of the spiritual world.

What is required if we intend to penetrate into spiritual worlds is—not a critique of spiritual-scientific things conducted by the instrument of common sense, but that we should take our common sense along with us in our approach to them, and not lose it on the way from outer science towards inner, spiritual science. What matters is that the soul should be strong enough to avoid the experience so many people endure today. You could describe it like this. As long as it is only a question of external science, these people are paragons of logic, but when they hear of Spiritual Science, then they have to make the journey from information about external things to information about the spiritual world. And on this journey they generally lose their common sense. Then they fancy that, because they had it with them when they started, they must have had it later on too! It would be a bad mistake to conclude that it is not possible to enter into the things of the spiritual world with common sense. It is just that one must not lose hold of it on the way there.

What I have just put before you in a petty example was in a far higher sense a necessity for Greek pupils of the Mysteries, as it is for modern mystics also. They have to slough off completely as it were their normal consciousness, yet for all that they have to keep with them the sound common sense which goes with normal consciousness and then make use of it as an instrument for judgment in an entirely different situation, from an entirely different viewpoint. Without relinquishing his normal consciousness no one can become a mystic. He has to do without the consciousness which serves him well in the everyday world. And the challenge to the soul which emerges at this point, on the way from the customary outer world to the spiritual world, is that it should not lose its common sense and treat as nonsense what, if it has held on to its common sense, reveals itself as a deeper experience.

Thus the pupil in the Greek Mysteries needed to divest himself of all that he was able to experience in the outer, the exoteric, world, and this is also necessary for the mystic today. Hence the things of the world outside sometimes assume quite different names when they enter into the sphere of mysticism. When in my Rosicrucian play The Soul's Probation it is said of Benedictus that in his speech the names of many things are changed, that they even take on a completely opposite meaning, this is something of deep significance. What Capesius calls unhappiness, Benedictus is obliged to call happiness.³ Just as after death our life to begin with runs its course backwards and we experience things in backward order, in the same way we have to change the names of things into their opposites if we are speaking in the true sense of the higher worlds. Hence you can estimate what an entirely different world it was which the ancient Greeks acknowledged as the content of the holy Mysteries.

What was the meaning of Dionysos in these Mysteries? If you read the little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, which is to be published within the next few days, you will see that in all ages there have been great teachers of mankind who have remained unseen, who only manifest themselves to clairvoyant consciousness. You will see that when the ancient Egyptians said, in answer to a question from the Greeks as to who their teachers were, that they were instructed by the gods, it was the truth. They meant that men who were clairvoyant were inspired by teachers who did not descend to Earth, but who appeared to them in the etheric sphere and taught them. I am not putting it fancifully, what I am saying is absolutely true! When in ancient Greece pupils were introduced into the Mysteries, after having undergone due preparation so that they did not take such things lightly, superficially—as is done today when they are discussed in abstract terms—they were then in a position to see within the Mystery the teacher who was not to be seen by physical eyes but was visible only to the inspired consciousness. The hierophants, who were to be seen with physical eyes were not the important people. The important Beings were those visible to clairvoyant consciousness. In the Mysteries with which we are concerned in these lectures, in the Dionysian Mysteries, the highest teacher of the pupils who were sufficiently prepared was in fact the younger Dionysos himself—that figure which I have already told you was a real one, he who was followed by a train of sileni and fauns and who made the journey from Europe to Asia and back again. He was the real teacher of the pupils in the Dionysian Mysteries. Dionysos appeared in an etheric form in the holy Mysteries, and from him it was then possible to perceive things which were not merely seen as mirror-images in normal consciousness, but things which welled forth directly from the inner being of Dionysos.

But because Dionysos is in us, the human being saw his own self in Dionysos, and learnt to know himself—not by brooding upon himself, as is so often recommended by people who know nothing of reality—but the way to self-knowledge for the Greek Mysteries was to go out of himself. The way to self-knowledge was not to brood upon himself and to gaze only upon the mirror-images of ordinary soul-life, but to contemplate that which he himself was, though he could not reach down to it in normal consciousness, to look upon the great Teacher. The aspirants looked upon the great Teacher, who was not yet visible when they entered into the Mystery, as upon their own being. In the world outside, where he was recognised merely as Dionysos, he made his journey from Europe to Asia and back, actually incarnated in a fleshly body; there he was a real man standing upon the physical plane. In the Mysteries he appeared in his spirit-form.

In a certain way it is still so today. When in the world outside the modern leaders of men go about in human garb, they are unrecognised by the world. When from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we talk about ‘The Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings’ people would often be surprised to know in what simple, unassuming human form these Masters are to be found in all countries. They are present on the physical plane. But they do not impart their most important teachings on the physical plane, but following the example of Dionysos of old, they impart them on the spiritual plane. And anyone who wishes to listen to them, to be taught by them, must have access to them not only in their physical bodies of flesh, but in their spiritual forms. In a certain way that is true today as it was in the Dionysian Mysteries of old. Thus one of the tests we have to undergo is to obey the exhortation ‘Know thyself’ by going out of ourselves.

But in the Dionysian Mysteries the soul was exposed to yet another test. I told you that the aspirants learned to know Dionysos as a spirit-form. In the Mysteries they were actually instructed by him, they learned to recognise him as a spirit-form governed entirely by what was most essential and most important in man's own nature, by what represented the human self firmly planted upon the Earth. When the Greek pupils directed their clairvoyant sight upon the figure of Dionysos, then this Dionysos seemed to them a beautiful, sublime figure, a noble external representation of humanity. Now just suppose that one of these pupils had left the Mystery Temple, after having seen Dionysos there as a beautiful, sublime human form. I expressly draw your attention to the fact that the younger Dionysos still remained a teacher in the Mysteries long after the real man, of whom I have told you that he journeyed from Europe to Asia and back again, was dead. If however one of these pupils had left the place where the Mystery was enacted and had encountered in the world outside the real Dionysos incarnated in the flesh, if he had met that human being who corresponded to the higher man whom he had seen in the Mystery, he would have seen no beauty! Just as today the man who has entered into the Mystery may not hope to see the figure which he had before him in sublime beauty in the spiritual world in the same august beauty on the physical plane, just as he must be clear that the physical embodiment of the spiritual form which he met in the Mystery is maya, is complete illusion, and conceals the sublime beauty of the spiritual figure, so that in the physical world it becomes in a way hideous—so it was in the case of Dionysos. And what tradition has given us as the external appearance of Dionysos, who is not represented as such a perfect divine form as Zeus, is in fact the image of the Dionysos who was manifested in the flesh. The Dionysos of the Mystery was a beautiful being; the fleshly Dionysos was not to be compared with him. Hence it is no good looking for the figure of Dionysos among the finest types of antique human beauty. He is not so represented by tradition, and we have in particular to think of those who constituted his followers as being hideous in appearance, like the satyrs and sileni.

What is more, we discover in Greek mythology something extremely remarkable. We are told something which is in fact the truth—that the teacher of Dionysos was himself a very ugly man. This person, Silenus who was the teacher of Dionysos himself, the aspirants in the Mystery came to know also. But Silenus is described to us as a wise individual. We need only recall that a great number of wise sayings are attributed to him, sayings which repeatedly stress the worthlessness of the normal life of man if it is only viewed from the outside in its maya or illusion. Then we are told something which made a great impression upon Nietzsche—we are told that King Midas asked Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, what was best for man. The wise Silenus gave the significant but puzzling reply: ‘Oh, thou race of brief duration, the best would be for thee not to have been born, or since thou hast been born, the second best for thee would be swiftly to die.’ This saying has to be rightly understood. It is an attempt to indicate the relationship between the spirituality of the super-sensible world, and the maya, the great illusion, of outer life.

Thus, when we look at them in their physical human forms, these exalted beings are by no means beautiful—or at any rate they can only be regarded as beautiful in a different sense from that in which the late Greek period understood ideal beauty. We can in a way still idealise Dionysos in contrast to what he was as a man in the outer world. If we wish to contrast the form Dionysos assumed in the physical with the majestic splendour of the spiritual form which he revealed in the Mystery itself, there is nothing to stop us doing so. We are not obliged to think of him as ugly. But we should be wrong to think of the teacher of Dionysos, old Silenus, otherwise than as with an ugly snub-nose, and ears which stuck out, and anything but handsome. Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, who was finally to hand over to man the archetypal wisdom in a form suitable for the human egoconsciousness—a wisdom which sprang from the deeper self of man—this Silenus was still closely akin to the life of Nature, which man in his present bodily form has really grown out of. The ancient Greek imagined that the present comeliness of the human being, from the point of view of external maya, had developed out of an old, ugly, human form, and that the type of the individuality who was incarnated in Silenus, the teacher of Dionysos, was not at all pleasing to look at.

Now as students of Spiritual Science it will not be difficult for you, from all I have said so far, to suppose that both in the younger Dionysos and in his teacher the wise Silenus, we have to do with individualities who have been of immense importance for the education of modern human consciousness. Thus when we cast about to find the individualities in the spiritual environment who—both for our own as well as for Greek consciousness—were and are momentous for what man has become, we find these two, Dionysos and the wise Silenus. These individualities are there in prehistoric times into which no history, no epic, goes back, but of which nevertheless the later history of the Greeks tells us, particularly in the epic tradition of its sagas and its myths. In these times both the wise Silenus and Dionysos were incarnated in physical bodies, performed physical deeds and died, as their bodies had to do. The individualities remained.

Now you know of course that in human history very much happens which is highly surprising to the man who only thinks abstractly; this is especially the case as regards the incarnation of human and other beings. Sometimes a later incarnation, although more advanced, may from the outside seem less perfect than an earlier one. In my second Rosicrucian Mystery Play, in the incarnation of the monk in the Middle Ages (Maria in modern times), I have been able to give just a very faint idea of the spiritual realities. Thus in history too the abstract thinker must sometimes be overcome with astonishment when he contemplates two successive incarnations, or at any rate incarnations which belong together. The younger Dionysos, who, I told you, allowed his soul to be poured out into external culture was nevertheless able at a specific time to gather himself together again as a soul in a single physical human body; he was born again, incarnated among men; but in such a way that he did not keep his old form but added to his outer physical form something of what had constituted his spirit-form in the Dionysian Mysteries. Both the younger Dionysos and his teacher, the wise Silenus, were reincarnated in historical times. Those initiated in the Mystery-wisdom of ancient Greece were fully conscious that these two had been born again; so were the Greek artists, who were stimulated and inspired by the Initiates.

Little by little such things have to be told if Spiritual Science is not to stop at platitudes, if it is to enter into the reality. Things which are true have to be told for the sake of the further evolution of humanity. The wise old teacher of Dionysos was born again, and in his further incarnation was none other than Socrates. Socrates is the reincarnation of old Silenus, he is the reincarnated teacher of Dionysos. And Dionysos himself, that reincarnated being in whom verily lived the soul of Dionysos of old, was Plato. One only realises the profound meaning of Greek history if one enters into what was known—not of course to the writers of external history—but to the Initiates who have handed down the tradition from generation to generation right up to today—knowledge which can also be found in the Akasha Chronicle. Spiritual Science can once more proclaim that Greece in its early period harboured the teacher of humanity whom it sent over to Asia in the journey conducted by Dionysos, whose teacher was Silenus. What Dionysos and the wise Silenus were able to do for Greece was renewed in a manner suited to a later age by Socrates and Plato. In the very time when the Mysteries were falling into decay, in the very time in which there were no more Initiates who could still see the younger Dionysos clairvoyantly in the holy Mysteries, that same Dionysos emerged as the pupil of the wise Silenus, he who had himself become Socrates—emerged as Plato, the second great teacher of Greece, the true successor of Dionysos.

One only recognises the meaning of Greek spiritual culture in the sense of ancient Greek Mystery-wisdom when one knows that the old Dionysian culture experienced a revival in Plato. And we admire Platonism in quite another way, we relate ourselves to it in its true stature when we know that in Plato there dwelt the soul of the younger Dionysos.

• 1. dichten = to compose, as author or a poet, to make literature; dicht = thick. In Ahriman's speech in Scene 4, he says: ‘Ich wirke diese Schönheit in dichtem Licht’—translated in the English version as ‘which charm I weave for thee in light condensed’.
• 2. Part II Act 2. Laboratory Scene. Spoken by Homunculus.
• 3. The Soul's Probation, Scene I.

In the course of yesterday's lecture we saw how manifold cosmic forces play into human nature, and we also saw how the Greeks experienced these forces and gave them pictorial expression in a mythology most of which is still extant. My frequent references to Greek mythology have not at all been made with the object of interpreting it, but rather to throw the light which it affords upon certain pristine truths. Pictures, together with what we gather from history, are a better help in this respect than our abstract ideas, which are too impoverished to be able to bring to adequate expression the great wonders of the world. Then too in the figure of Dionysos our attention was drawn to something which is associated with the deepest forces of our souls, with what we can call the challenges or ordeals of the soul. What then is meant by the expression ‘ordeals of the soul’? Ordeals are what come upon a man whenever he tries to enter upon the paths leading to the spiritual worlds. I made some reference yesterday to the lightest, the gentlest of them. In general they consist of the experiences a man can have on his way into the higher worlds, experiences to which his soul is not equal without having undergone a certain preparation. The ordeal thus lies in the fact that a man has to make great efforts to endure certain pieces of knowledge, to meet calmly certain experiences. A soul-experience of this nature is indicated towards the end of the second of my Rosicrucian dramas, The Soul's Probation, and this will perhaps help to make clear what such an inner ordeal actually is.

Let us call to mind the figure there described, the figure we know as Capesius. We know from both these two plays of mine the experiences which he has undergone. We have seen how little by little he draws near to the spiritual life, how to begin with the sound instinct, which has alienated him from the kind of scholarship he had hitherto pursued, gives him premonitions of it but no more. He begins to suspect that there is a higher reality behind the world of the mind. It is mainly because he gives rein to these premonitions, it is because he allows them full play, that he inevitably becomes impressed by the exoteric teachings of Spiritual Science. The communications of Spiritual Science differ fundamentally from those of other scientific or literary discourse. Whereas the other simply appeals to our intellect, and perhaps indirectly through our intellect to our feeling, a man is only allowing Spiritual or Occult Science to work upon him rightly if he is stirred to the inmost depths of his soul, if his soul is turned inside out, so to say, if it is completely changed by what flows therefrom, not as abstract content, but as life itself. Something like that is what Capesius is depicted as feeling in the first scene of the second Play, after he has wrestled with himself as a result of his premonitions, and then plunged deeply into the writings of Benedictus, into the ‘Book of Life’. And that not only causes him to ponder, to rack his brains to try to get at the meaning of what he reads, as he would do whatever he was reading, but he feels the spiritual world break in upon him in a way he does not understand. It has yet another effect upon him. It would be easy to compare the mood which prevails in the first scene of the second Play with the mood at the opening of Goethe's Faust; it is however essentially different. The mood of Faust merely shows that, having arrived at a certain scepticism, a certain doubt, as to all knowledge, a man then has an inner urge to find other ways of obtaining knowledge than the usual ones. In Capesius's case something else happens. To begin with he is torn in two, because it makes him recognise doubt, persistence in ignorance, as man's greatest sin. He learns to acknowledge that something lies in the depths of the human soul of which the normal consciousness is quite unaware. A treasure slumbers in the deepest strata of our souls; we are harbouring something in depths of soul which the normal consciousness is at first incapable of recognising.

When we enter fully into the meaning and the true significance of Spiritual Science, we realise that it is no mere selfish yearning, but deep-seated duty towards the macrocosmic forces not to allow the buried treasure in our souls to be wasted. We come to realise that deep down in every man there lies something which once upon a time the gods implanted in him out of their own body, their own substance. We come to feel: ‘The gods have sacrificed a piece of their own existence, they have as it were torn away a fragment of their own flesh, and have deposited it within human souls.’ We men can do one of two things with this treasure, this divine heritage. We can out of a certain indolence say: ‘What do I want with knowledge? The gods will soon direct me to my goal!’ But they do not do so, for they have buried this treasure within us in order that we may bring it to the light of day out of our own freedom. Thus we can let this treasure go to waste. That is one of the courses which the soul can take. The alternative is that, recognising our highest duty towards the heavenly powers, we should say to ourselves: ‘We must raise up this treasure, we must lift it out of the hidden depths into our consciousness.’ What are we doing when we bring up this treasure out of the unconscious? We give it a different form from the one it had earlier in the body of the gods, but in a mysterious way we give it back again to the gods in the form which it has acquired through us. We are not cultivating in our knowledge any private concern of our own, we are not doing anything merely in the interests of our own egotism, we are simply carrying back into the higher worlds, in the changed form which it has acquired through us, the noble heritage which the gods have given us, so that they may share it with us. But if we neglect this treasure, if we allow it to deteriorate, then we are in a very real sense being egotistic, for then this treasure in our souls is irrevocably lost to the world-process. We are allowing our divine heritage to go to waste, if we are reluctant to recognise its presence in us.

The mood of Capesius springs from this. In the first scene of the second Play he feels it his duty not to stick fast in doubt, not to persist in the feeling that one can know nothing; he feels that it would be a violation of his duty to the cosmic powers to allow the treasure in his soul to go to waste. Only he feels to begin with incapable of using the apparatus of his body to draw out these riches, and that is what causes the conflict in his soul. There is nothing of the Faustian attitude here. On the contrary, Capesius says to himself: ‘You must acknowledge that you cannot persist in your ignorance; you may not surrender to the feeling which overtakes you when you think how little strength our customary life has placed at our disposal for drawing out this treasure.’ Then there is only one resource left to us—confidence in our own soul. If the soul patiently develops what lies within it, little by little, then the strength which it feels as yet to be inadequate is bound to become ever greater, until it will at length really be able to fulfil its obligations towards the cosmic powers. This trust in the soul's powers of endurance and its fruitfulness must uphold us when, as often, because we only bring with us strength drawn from the past, we feel afraid, not knowing what to do; when it seems: ‘You must, and at this moment you cannot.’ All the soul's ordeals are like this. From this fear, this feeling of impotence, we at first shrink back, and it is only when we find the strength which arises from this confidence in ourselves, from this trust which grows in us gradually through our deepening in Spiritual Science, that we are able to pass safely through such trials.

You will already have recognised from the whole trend of these lectures that two cosmic influences play their part in man, in his whole nature and being. And to bring these two currents into harmony great strength of soul is needed, strength to confront them both with fortitude and courage. This is clearly expressed at the end of my second Play >The Soul's Probation. There we see how Capesius has undergone important occult experiences, how he has been permitted a glimpse into his previous incarnation, how he has been allowed to know what he was centuries ago on Earth. Then we come to a sentence which is really not to be taken lightly. We come to the saying that knowledge of one life lays obligations upon us for many lives, not simply for one. When we look back into our former incarnation, when we see how we have behaved to this or that person, when we see the debt we have incurred towards them, we feel that we have a heavy burden of debt to repay. And then there comes to us a thought which might well rob us of all courage; we recognise: ‘It is quite impossible for you to make good in your present incarnation the debt which you have brought upon yourself.’ Many men have a great longing to make all the reparation possible, but that springs from egotism. Most men in their egotism find it intolerable to have to carry through the gate of death so very much of their debit account, unbearable to have to say to themselves: ‘You must die and must take your debt of guilt in respect of this or the other matter with you into your next incarnation.’ But courage to admit freely and frankly, ‘You have wickedness upon your soul’, calls for a high degree of disinterestedness, whereas usually the human being wants to think himself as good as is his idea of a good man.

Anyone who has had occult experiences of the kind we have been speaking of has to recognise his evil propensities frankly, and he must go further, he must accept the impossibility of making everything good in this life. Romanus expresses this in The Soul's Probation¹ in a speech which may serve to illustrate this point. He says that guilt from the preceding life has to be carried through the gate of death, and that we must have the courage to face the moment when the Guardian stands before us and presents us with our debit account. This situation has to be taken seriously. It brings us face to face with the other current which may be described in the following way. When the human being cultivates self-knowledge—not just superficial self-knowledge, but true self-knowledge—when he really learns something of his inmost being, then as a rule he discovers something in himself which he finds it very difficult to accept, something which is in the highest degree repugnant to him, something which, when it really dawns upon him, is absolutely shattering. Contrast this crushing feeling in the depths of the soul with the sentiment which prevails in so many people, even in those who have some acquaintance with Spiritual Science. How often do we hear it said: ‘I do that with no thought of myself, I don't want anything for myself,’ and so on. It may be that just when one is most self-seeking one puts on a mask, one hides this fact from oneself by saying, ‘I want nothing for myself.’ That is a common experience. But it is better to acknowledge to oneself the truth, that at bottom even the most unselfish actions are performed for our own sakes, for by recognising this we lay a foundation which will enable us gradually to bear the true picture with which the Guardian of the Threshold confronts us.

Now let us consider the question at a higher level. Why is it that we find so much in ourselves which is inharmonious? That is connected with the whole of evolution. We shall have to undertake a deeper study of human evolution if we want to understand why it is just when the human being plunges more deeply into his own nature and his own being that he finds so much that is inharmonious. Let us assume for a moment that there is a treasure hidden in the depths of our soul of which the normal consciousness today is quite unaware, and that when in the course of our soul's trials we discover it, we find so much to shock us that we probably shrink back in terror, feeling completely shattered. What is it that we carry within us? We all know that humanity underwent a very complicated evolution before man reached his present stage. We know that in order to reach his present form he had to go through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions and that only after having done this did he enter upon Earth evolution. One day the complexity of the facts of life will be recognised in wider circles and people will realise that it is impossible to understand man or his environment without taking into consideration the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; people will then see how very naive, how superficial, is the contribution of the abstract science of today. Thus what we have today as the fourfold human being has been slowly prepared and formed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. By the time the Moon evolution came to an end, the human being had developed up to a certain point. The time between Moon and Earth evolutions was occupied in working upon the spiritual element which had been present in man during the Moon evolution, elaborating it into a new germ for Earth evolution.

What, then, was man like—man, the product of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions—when he arrived on Earth? We have already dealt with this question from very many aspects. Today we will look at it from yet another side. We cannot come to know occult facts by pinning ourselves down to a few abstract concepts; we have to approach the truth by throwing light on the facts from all sides. The paths of higher truth are complex, and only he can walk them who is willing patiently to trace their labyrinth.

What was man like when, bringing with him the fruits of his Moon evolution, he arrived on Earth? Nothing of what we are familiar with today as the physical body of man was present at the commencement of Earth evolution. Although the first rudiments of this physical body were present in the Saturn evolution, were further developed on the Sun, and had already reached a high stage of development on the Moon, we must nevertheless understand that in the intervening periods between Saturn and Sun, and again between the Sun and Moon evolutions, all that had evolved of the physical and other bodies had reverted to spirit. Everything again passed over into imperceptible substantiality at the end of the Moon evolution. The physical which had evolved on Saturn and subsequently been further fashioned was no longer physical, everything had been taken up into the spirit again; the physical was as it were in solution, was present only as forces—forces with the capacity to call forth physical forms, but with the physical element not actually present. When Earth evolution began, what we call the physical was not there in a physical, but only in a spiritual form, a spiritual form which was capable of condensing little by little to the physical. That has to be borne in mind.

We can go further. We know that we are now in the postAtlantean age, and that this was preceded by the Atlantean and the Lemurian ages. Beyond the Lemurian age we come to still earlier periods of Earth evolution. But at the beginning of Lemuria man was still not to be found in his present form as physical body. What today is physical was at that time, even where it was densest, still only in etheric form; that is to say, the forces of our present physical body were at that time in solution as it were within the ether body, but the forces of this ether body were such that when they condensed in accordance with their own nature they were then able to bring about our physical body. Thus these etheric forces were in a way the forces of the physical body but they were not present in a physical condition. Thus when man entered upon his Lemurian development, his densest body was still an etheric one. Condensation to the physical body only began from the Lemurian time onwards. It was brought about in a very complicated manner. Thus for spiritual vision man was there at the outset in an etheric body, and this etheric body contained those physical forces which had been acquired through the course of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. These forces had the tendency to condense, so that little by little the physical body could come into existence, but they were not yet in physical form. But had the forces of the physical body condensed in the way they tended to do at that time, even in his physical appearance man today would have looked very different.

We must be quite clear that, in fact, man's appearance today is quite different from what he was by predisposition in the time which preceded ancient Lemuria. During the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and post-Atlantean epochs there have been at work in human nature not only the forces which were already present in man in rudimentary form, but other forces as well. If we wish to form an idea of what the further working of the forces of the etheric body has been, it can best be illustrated in a particular organic system of the human physical body. Let us consider what a part of the human being originating from the ether body has become since the time of Lemuria; let this diagram represent the human ether body as it was at the beginning of Earth evolution, before the Lemurian epoch. In it we find numerous currents, manifold directions of force, which are the outcome of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; from among these we pick out a certain number the purpose of which was to bring into being in man's physical organism his blood circulation with its centralisation in the heart. Thus there are forces which were acquired under Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions which were anchored in the etheric body before Lemuria, and which then condensed in such a way as to bring about the blood-system with its centre in the heart. We have been describing a particular organic system which from the time of Lemuria onwards, out of specific etheric forces in our ether body, has little by little reached physical densification. Just as, given the right treatment, you can see salt-crystals crystallise out from a solution of common salt in water, just as a crystalline form becomes visible in the solution, so in a higher sense something of the same kind happens to the blood-system and the heart. They crystallise out of special forces in the human etheric body which have an inherent tendency to condense to this physical organic system. It has only been during the course of Earth evolution that they have been able to develop into the physical heart.

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We have yet to see why that took place in the course of Earth evolution, and not for instance in the Moon evolution. What really do the blood circulation and the heart mean to us? They are the ether-world condensed, they are the densified forces of the etheric world! Now from the moment these forces reached the degree of density manifested today by the physical heart, by the blood and the whole circulatory system, they would have come to an end as far as Earth evolution is concerned, a kind of death would have set in. The important and mysterious feature of Earth evolution is not only that this densification took place, not only that the forces which had come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon condensed to such an organic system, not only that what was in the etheric body became physical, but that as regards each of our systems of organs in Earth evolution an impulse entered whereby what was once etheric and had become physical, is once more dissolved, is changed back again into the ether. That this is so, that after the etheric forces have condensed to a system of organs they are not allowed to rest at this as their goal, but that other forces then intervene which dissolve them again, is one of the most momentous impulses of our Earth evolution. In the very moment when our human organs have reached the point of greatest densification in earthly evolution, certain macrocosmic powers re-dissolve the substantiality of the organic system, so that what was there before and had gradually lapsed into this organic condition, now emerges from it again, again becomes visible.

This process can be most closely followed by the occultist in the case of the heart and the blood streaming through it; it is possible to see how this dissolution comes about, how the Earth-impulses enter into the substance of such an organic system. For clairvoyant sight something streams continuously out of our heart—our heart, the outcome of our blood circulation. If you see clairvoyantly the blood pulsating through the human body, then you also see how this blood becomes rarefied again in the heart, how in its finest elements—not in its coarser, but in its finer parts—it is dissolved and returns to the etheric form. Just as the blood has gradually been formed in the ether, so in the human body of the present day we have the reverse process. The blood becomes etherised, and streams of ether flow continuously from the heart towards the head, so that we see the etheric body built up in an opposite direction by way of the blood. Thus what crystallised out from the etheric during the early part of Lemuria to form the human blood circulation and the heart we now see returning to the etheric form and streaming in the human etheric body towards the brain. And unless these streams of ether were to flow continuously from the heart towards the head, however much we tried to think about the world and to know about it, we should be quite unable to make use of our brain as the instrument for thought. As an instrument for knowledge the brain would be completely useless if it were only to function as physical brain. We have to resort to occultism to learn how the brain would work today if it were left to itself. The human being would only be able to think thoughts connected with the inner needs of his body. For example he would be able to think, ‘Now I am hungry, now I am thirsty, now I will satisfy this or that instinct.’ If he were entirely dependent upon his physical brain man would only be able to think thoughts connected with his own bodily needs, he would be the perfect egoist. But currents of a fine etheric substance coming from the heart stream continuously through the brain. These etheric currents are indirectly related to a delicate and important part of the human brain called the pineal gland. They continuously lave the pineal gland, which becomes luminous and its movements as physical brain-organ respond in harmony with these etheric currents emanating from the heart. Thereby these etheric currents are brought again into connection with the physical brain and give it an impress which enables us to know, in addition to egotistic knowledge, something of the outside world, something that is not ourselves. Thus by way of the pineal gland our etherised blood reacts upon our brain. You will find an even more detailed description of this from a certain standpoint in the lectures which are about to be published under the title Occult Physiology,² lectures originally held in Prague. There I have pointed out from another aspect something of the function of the pineal gland. So you see we have not only a process within the Earth which leads to solidification, but also a reverse process of rarefaction. When we grasp this we are driven to the conclusion that we bear in us forces which will cause us to revert to the form we had during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.

In his normal consciousness today, man knows nothing of the marvellous play of forces in his ether body; he knows nothing of this communication between heart and brain. Anyone who is made aware of it through occult development becomes aware of something peculiar about these etheric currents, and here self-knowledge yields something very striking, something of the highest significance. One comes to know how these forces stream upwards from the heart to the brain, to form the brain in such a way that the human being may be able to make use of it as the instrument of his soul-life. But at the same time one learns that these forces have not passed through the human organisation unscathed, that they do not leave the heart in the same state in which they entered it. All that man has meanwhile developed out of the unconscious by way of lower instincts and appetites, all his natural propensities, are carried along in the etheric stream which is borne upwards from the heart. Thus we received this current in ancient Lemuria as a pure etheric stream which had no other craving, no other will so to say, than to condense to form the wondrous structure of our heart. Since that time we have gone on living as physical men with this heart and this blood circulation, we have passed through a number of incarnations without knowing anything of this solidification of our original ether bodies into the physical parts of heart and blood circulation. And we have become permeated with desires, longings, sympathies and antipathies, emotions and passions, habits and mistakes, and the reborn ether body which now streams upwards to the brain is darkened, is filled with all this. We send all this upwards from our heart and now, in real self-knowledge, we become aware of it. We become aware that what we received from the gods themselves in the depths of our life-body we are unable to give back to the gods again in the same state in which we received it, but that it has become sullied by our own being.

Little by little we must come to know more closely what it is that I have just described as a kind of impurity of our own being. If we would understand the matter we have to bear in mind the following considerations. At the beginning of the Saturn evolution, or rather before it had begun, there was one single etheric stream for the whole of mankind and for the whole of Earth evolution. At the very moment when the Saturn evolution started a split occurred in the cosmic powers. We shall learn later why that happened; now I only want just to mention it. This duality in the whole of cosmic activity only started from the moment when Saturn began to develop. Greek mythology indicates it by making ancient Saturn or Cronos, as the Greeks called him, the opponent of his father Uranus. This shows that they were aware of the original unity of all the macrocosmic forces. But when Saturn or Cronos began to crystallise, at once something hidden in the nature of Cronos put him in opposition to the general evolution. To repeat what has been said before, we can put it in this way: The totality of the divine-spiritual Beings who held sway in evolution when the development of the planet Saturn began split in two; so that we now have one evolutionary stream which is directly involved in everything which takes place through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions down to our Earth, and another stream side by side with this main one.

You can form a rough idea of this secondary stream if you think of the air, the atmosphere surrounding our Earth, as a finer substance, and compare it with the denser parts of the Earth, with water and with the solid elements. We could likewise imagine that a denser development went on in Saturn, Sun and Moon, but that this denser evolution was all the time sheathed in a more rarefied evolution. We could imagine that there were divine-spiritual Beings working directly on Saturn, Sun and Moon in their own substance, but that there were always other divine-spiritual Beings in the periphery who surrounded the spiritual Beings working directly in Saturn, Sun and Moon just as air surrounds the Earth. Thus we have indicated two realms of gods, two spiritual realms, one of which plays a direct part in all that takes place successively in the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, the other holding itself aloof, so to say, and only intervening indirectly. Now we must try to form an idea of how the one category of gods is related to the other. Please take careful note of the relationship of those gods whose range is properly speaking more comprehensive, I mean those who take part directly in the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, to those others who encircle this cosmic globe in its successive stages.

You will get a better idea of this if you first have a look at man himself. Take the human soul: it thinks. What does it mean, to think? It means to bring about thoughts. Thinking is a process which goes on in us, and while on the one hand it makes real soul-beings of us, on the other hand it draws us upward and causes our thoughts all the time to envelop our souls. Now man with his thoughts, even as a being of soul, is still at a relatively subordinate stage of world-organisation, but the Beings whom we have just referred to as gods, dividing them into two streams, are at a far higher stage. Imagine for a moment that man was capable not only of grasping his thought purely as thought, but that the human soul was so strong that what it thought immediately became a being. Imagine that we were to give birth to our thoughts as beings, that whenever we grasped a thought it straightaway existed. (In a certain way it does remain in the Akasha Chronicle, but it does not become so dense that we are confronted by it as a reality.) Imagine that we were not just to think thoughts, but that with each thought we were to bring forth a being! Then you would have grasped what takes place within the divine-spiritual world. The gods who were living in the complete harmony, the perfect unity, which existed among them before Saturn, represented themselves; they thought. But their thoughts were not like human thoughts, which we have to pronounce unreal; they were Beings, they were other gods. Thus we have generations of gods whose reality is original, and others who are merely the representations—the real ideas—of the gods directly associated with the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. They are the gods who surround the world-sphere in the course of its development through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.

Thus we have two categories of gods; one of them is the thought-world of the other, is in fact related to the other as our thoughts are related to our real soul-existence. What have we so far usually called the gods who are merely the thoughts of the others? Because of certain characteristics of theirs we have called them Luciferic beings, and henceforth we must assign to the category of Luciferic beings all those of whom we can say that ‘the original gods had need to present themselves to themselves in self-knowledge.’ Therefore they confronted themselves with the Luciferic beings as cosmic thoughts, or cosmic thought-beings, just as the human being is confronted by his thoughts. And just as man actually first comes to know himself in his thoughts, so the original gods learned to know themselves in Lucifer and his hosts. We could express that in another way; we could say that these beings, who are really only the ideas of the others, always lagged behind the others in their development. The advanced gods have so to say left something of themselves behind, so that they could look back and see themselves in this mirror thrown off from their own substance—just as we in everyday life can only see ourselves in a mirror. Thus in fact the Luciferic beings are backward beings, entities thrown off by the original gods, entities who are there to form a mirror of self-knowledge for the progressive gods.

In a certain sense what goes on in our own souls is a complete picture of this macrocosm. Only the pattern prefigured in the macrocosm occurs in us reversed. We bear in our microcosm a copy of this division between the ranks of the gods, of whom one class is original and the other born out of this original class and existing in order that the original gods may present themselves to themselves. From this you can well see that there must be a great difference between these two categories of gods.

The difference is quite obvious. It is shown in the fact that our entire self, including all that is unconscious in us, the whole comprehensive self from which our bodily organisation, has also sprung, derives from the original generation of gods. But what we experience, what we can span with our everyday consciousness comes from the generation of gods who are only the thoughts of the original gods. Our being comes to us from two sides. Our organisation as a whole, with all that is unconscious in us, comes from the original generation of gods. What we are conscious of comes from the other side, from the generation of gods who only hover around the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Hence when we examine closely our own life of ideation we feel that the idea or mental representation is, in a higher sense, only the youngest daughter, so to say, of a line of gods; we feel the unreality, the merely notional transience, the elusiveness, of our life of consciousness. That is something which also dawned upon the pupils of the Greek Mysteries, in that it was made clear to them: ‘There are divine streams running through the whole of evolution which are all-embracing, all-inclusive, which pour their entire being into us, streams of which we are quite unconscious; and there are other streams which are only taken into the ordinary normal consciousness.’ Then the Greek pupil became clear that he must disregard his formal consciousness and turn to the ancient gods, who were also called the gods of the underworld, gods in whose nature Dionysos shared, for only so would he be able to acquire knowledge of the true being of man.

There is only one Being in Earth evolution through whom something quite new can enter into us—a new element of clairvoyance, but also a new element of feeling and activity, steeped in occult forces.

The fact is that of the divine stream which hovered over the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, up to a certain point of time only what I have just described could enter into human life. It streamed into human consciousness from outside, so to say, without man's descending into his inmost being, into the region of the lower gods. And what flowed in in this way was something incapable of ever reaching true world-reality. It was not possible to reach the true world-reality through external knowledge. In order to reach that it would have been necessary for something to be instilled into what through the long ages of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, had entered our normal consciousness from without—something which was not just the thought-life of the sub-earthly, the Chthonic deities, but something which was itself a reality, something which would cause our mere life of thought—all that seems to us to have been exuded from our soul as our unreal thoughtlife—suddenly for a moment to be so laid hold of by a substantial reality ... that a particularly precious thought should stand fast and abide with us, close to us as our very soul, as a reality. Something like this would have to happen if the gods moving in the periphery were to work in the way that the other gods have acted throughout the ages—the gods who through the more extended self have worked right into our bodily organisation. Something would have to stream into us from without, which would signify a kind of renewal from the spiritual world, a resurrection, a revivification of what had first organised us and then withdrawn into the depths of our consciousness.

What entered into these peripheral gods at a certain moment was in fact the Christ, who at the Baptism by John in the Jordan took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In Christ a divine Being entered into physical life by the same path which had been taken by those gods who earlier had only been the thought-life of other gods. But now for the first time a real Being enters, a Being who is not just the thought of the other gods, but who is substantial and autonomous. Out of the world-space, in which hitherto only the thoughts of other gods had lived, there comes a divine thought which is real. What had made that possible? It was possible because this significant event of the Baptism by John in the Jordan had been preceded by a long preparation lasting through the whole of evolution through Saturn, Sun and Moon. What happened on the banks of the Jordan, and later in the Mystery of Golgotha, echoes another momentous event that took place in the far-distant past, as far back as the time of the Sun evolution.

We know that prior to Earth evolution there were the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. On Earth we experience the Mystery of Golgotha and the Baptism by John in the Jordan. It can be elicited from the Akasha Chronicle that during the Sun evolution another important event took place. You could describe it as the culmination of a long process. The upper gods were the thoughts of the lower gods, and these upper gods found that it suited them better, (putting it colloquially) to live in the rarefied element of the upper world rather than in the denser element of which the Earth was composed. It was during the Sun evolution that this separation took place between the two different generations of gods, of whom one elected to continue to live, as the real ancient gods, with the elements of earth, water and air, whereas the other found it too difficult to enter into these dense elements, and continued to live only in what we call the etheric elements, first with warmth, then with light, chemical and life ether. We can also designate these two generations of gods working side by side by saying that the one chose the more difficult path, that took them through the denser elements, while the other chose the easy way, flitting around the first generation in the chemical and life-ether out of which they formed their bodies. Everything which lives in the finer etheric elements was developed in this way, forces were developed which in the long run were only able to live in these finer elements. This took place in the main during the Sun evolution.

But towards the middle of the Sun evolution something stupendous happened. A Being developed forces not in accordance with the finer, rarer etheric elements. Side by side with the Mystery of Golgotha which we call the great Earth-sacrifice we can speak of a Sun-sacrifice in that a Being who had chosen to dwell among the gods who only wanted to live in the finer elements nevertheless developed powers of densification adequate to the Earth elements. And so, since the Sun evolution, we have had in the ranks of the Beings equipped only with forces adapted to the etheric spheres, a Being who, within the cosmic ether, has an inner relationship with the earthly element. From the time of the Sun evolution this Being waited for the right moment to introduce the forces He had developed into the Earth itself. It was Zarathustra's great merit to recognise ‘In the sun in the heavens above us something remains from the old Sun evolution. For the present this Being is in the sun. But the moment is drawing near when He will also bring down to earth his form that is suited to the earthly elements.’ Then came the time when humanity, though still not mature enough to recognise this Being who had become part of the etheric world in Himself, was nevertheless able to recognise Him in reflection; that was a stage on the way.

Thus in course of evolution, for reasons which we shall speak of tomorrow, this Being showed Himself to humanity to begin with not directly, but in a reflected form, which we can describe as related to reality as moonlight, which is reflected sunlight, is related to the direct light of the sun. That Being who began to prepare Himself for His great deed on Golgotha during the old Sun evolution, was first shown to humanity in mirrored form. And this reflected form was called by the ancient Hebrew people, Jahve. Jahve or Jehovah is the reflection of Christ; he is really the same as Christ, only seen in a mirror, so to say, seen aforetime, prophetically—prefigured until the time was ripe for Him to show Himself not merely in reflection, but in His own, His pristine form.

Thus we see the most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its archetype.

• 1. Scene 13.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., 1951.