The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The rôle of Christianity in human history is unique. The coming of Christianity represents, in a sense, the central moment, the turning point between involution and evolution. That is why it radiates so brilliant a light—a light that is nowhere so pregnant with life as in the Gospel of St. John. Truth to tell it is only in this Gospel that the full power of the light is made manifest.

It cannot be said that modern theology has this conception of the Gospel. From the historical point of view it is considered inferior to the three synoptic Gospels, as being, in a sense, apocryphal. The very fact that its authorship is said by some to have taken place in the second century after Christ has made certain theologians of the school of Bible criticism regard it as a work of mystical poetry and Alexandrian philosophy.

Occultism has quite another conception of the Gospel of St. John.

During the Middle Ages a number of Brotherhoods saw in this Gospel the essential source of Christian truth. Such Brotherhoods were the Brothers of St. John, the Albigenses, the Catharists, the Templars and the Rosicrucians. All were engaged in practical occultism and looked to this Gospel as to their Bible. It may be said in a sense that the legend of the Grail, Parsifal and Lohengrin emanated from these Brotherhoods and that it was the popular expression of the secret doctrines.

All the members of these different parent Orders were considered to possess the secret. They were the precursors of a Christianity which should spread over the world in later times. In the Gospel of St. John they found the secret, for its words contained eternal truth—truth applicable to all times. Such truth as this regenerates the souls of all who become aware of it in the depths of their being. The Gospel was never regarded or read merely as a gem of literature. It was used as an instrument for developing the mystic life of the soul. Let us, to begin with, leave its purely historical value out of account.

The first fourteen verses of this Gospel were the subject of daily meditation among the Rosicrucians. These verses were held to possess a magical power—a fact well known to occultists. By repeating these verses at the same hour, day by day without intermission, the Rosicrucians began to see in dream-visions all the events recorded in the Gospel and lived through them in inner experience.

Thus in spiritual vision the Rosicrucians saw the life of Christ—nay indeed the Christ Himself being born in the depths of the soul. They believed, of course, in the actual and historic existence of the Christ, for to know the inner Christ is also to recognise the outer Christ.

A materialist of today might ask whether the fact that the Rosicrucians had these visions is any proof of the actual existence of Christ. To this the occultist will reply: ‘If there were no eye to perceive the sun, there would be no sun; but if there were no sun in the heavens, there would be no eye to perceive it. For it is the sun which in the course of ages has formed and built the eye in order that it may behold the light.’ In this sense the Rosicrucians said:—‘The Gospel of St. John awakens thine inner senses but if there were no living Christ, He could not live within thee.’

The mission accomplished by Christ Jesus cannot be understood in all its depths unless we realise the difference between the Ancient Mysteries and the Christian Mystery.

The Ancient Mysteries were held in the temple-sanctuaries. The Initiates were the awakened ones. They had learnt to work upon the etheric body and were the ‘twice-born’ because they could perceive truth in a two-fold sense: directly, through dream and astral vision, indirectly, through sense-perception and logic. The initiation through which they passed was accomplished, in three stages: life, death and resurrection. The disciple spent three days in a sarcophagus in a tomb of the temple. His Spirit was released from his body; but on the third day, at the call of the hierophant, the Spirit came down again into the body from the cosmic spaces of universal life. The man was a transformed, new-born being. The greatest Greek writers have spoken of these mysteries with great awe and inspiration. Plato goes so far as to say that the Initiate alone is worthy of the name of man. This ancient initiation has its crowning-point ‘in Christ.’ Christ represents the crystallised initiation of the life of sense. All that was supersensibly seen in the Ancient Mysteries becomes, in Christ, historic fact on the physical plane. The death undergone by the ancient Initiates was only a partial death in the etheric world. The death of Christ was a full and complete death in the physical world.

The Raising of Lazarus may be regarded as a moment of transition from the ancient initiation to the Christian initiation. In the fourth Gospel no mention is made of John himself until after the story of the death of Lazarus. “The disciple whom Jesus loved” is he who passed through the stages of death and resurrection in initiation and who was called to new life by the voice of Christ Himself. John is Lazarus who came forth from the tomb after his initiation; he lived through the death undergone by Christ. Such is the mystic path concealed in the depths of Christianity.

The marriage at Cana expresses one of the most profound mysteries of the spiritual history of mankind. It is related to the saying of Hermes: “The above is as the below.” In the marriage at Cana, water is changed into wine. The symbolic meaning of this miracle is that the sacrifice of water was to be replaced for a time by the sacrifice of wine.

There were ages in the history of man when wine was not known. In the days of the Vedas it was practically unknown. In the ages when there was no drinking of alcohol, the idea of previous existences and of many lives was universally held; nobody doubted its truth. As soon as man began to drink wine, however, the knowledge of re-incarnation rapidly faded away, ultimately to disappear entirely from the consciousness of man. It existed only among the Initiates who took no alcohol. Alcohol has a peculiarly potent effect on the human organism, especially on the etheric body which is the seat of memory. Alcohol obscures the intimate depths of memory. ‘Wine induces forgetfulness’—so the saying goes. The forgetfulness is not only superficial or momentary, but deep and permanent and there is a deadening of the power of memory in the etheric body. That is why, little by little, men lost their instinctive knowledge of reincarnation when they began to drink wine.

Belief in reincarnation and the law of Karma had a great influence not only upon the individual but upon his social sentiment. It helped him to bear with the inequalities of human life. When the unhappy Egyptian labourer was working at the Pyramids, or the lowest caste of Hindu building the gigantic Indian temples in the heart of the mountains, he said to himself that another existence would compensate him for labours patiently accomplished, that his master if he were good had already undergone similar tests or that he would have to undergo them in the future if he were unjust and cruel.

As the era of Christianity drew near, man was destined to enter upon an epoch of concentration upon earthly efforts; he was to work towards the amelioration of earthly existence, the development of intellect, of logical and scientific understanding of Nature. The knowledge of re-incarnation, therefore, was to be lost for two thousand years and wine was the means to this end.

Such is the profound background of the cult of Bacchus, the God of wine and intoxication. (Bacchus is the popular expression of the God Dionysos of the Ancient Mysteries to whom quite a different significance must be attached.) Such, too, is the symbolic meaning of the Marriage at Cana. Water served the purpose of the ancient sacrifice; wine was to serve the purpose of the new. The words of Christ, “Happy are they who have not seen and yet have believed,” refer to the new epoch when man—wholly given up to his earthly tasks—was to live without remembrance of his incarnations and without immediate vision of the divine world.

Christ has left us a testament in the scene on Mount Tabor, in the Transfiguration before Peter, James and John. The disciples see Him between Elias and Moses. Elias represents the Way of Truth; Moses, the Truth itself; Christ, the Life that epitomises them. That is why Christ can say of Himself: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

All life is thus concentrated, illumined, deepened and transfigured in Christ. He epitomises the past of the human soul back to its primal source and prefigures its future to the point of union with God. Christianity is not only a power of the past but of the future. In common with the Rosicrucians, the occultist of our day teaches of the Christ in the inner being of each individual and of the Christ, in the future, in all mankind.

The occultist will never dream of imposing dogmas. He is one who tells what he has seen and tested in the astral and spiritual worlds or what has been revealed to him by trustworthy and reliable teachers. He does not desire to convert but to quicken in others the sense that has awakened in him and to enable them to see likewise.

Here we shall consider man as an astral being as he is revealed by clairvoyant vision. The astral being of man includes the whole world of feelings, passions, emotions and impulses of the soul. To inner sight these are changed into forms and colours. The astral body itself is a cloud-like, ovoid form, permeating and enveloping man. We can perceive it from within.

In man as a physical being, we have to consider the substance and form of the body. The astral substance entirely changes in the course of seven years, but the form remains. Behind substance is the constructive, upbuilding principle—the etheric body. We do not, in the ordinary way, perceive it; we only see its accomplished work, in the physical body. The eye of sense only sees what is finished, not what is in the state of becoming.

The contrary is the case when we are able to see the astral body—that is to say, our own astral body. We become aware of it from within through our desires and the various movements of the soul.

Seership consists in learning to see from without that which in ordinary life we feel from within. Feelings, desires and thoughts then become living and visible forms, constituting the aura around the physical sheath.

The etheric body builds and moulds the physical body; the astral body is made up of desires. Every human aura has its own individual shades and predominating colours. There is one fundamental colour in which the others play. The aura of a man with a melancholic temperament, for example, is of a bluish hue. But so many impressions coming from without flow through it that the observer may easily be deceived, above all if he is looking at his own aura. The clairvoyant sees his own aura reversed, as it were, the outer as the inner, the inner as the outer, because he is observing it from outside.

All the great Founders of religions have been possessed of clairvoyant sight. They are the spiritual Guides of mankind, and their precepts are precepts of the moral life based on astral and spiritual truths. This explains the similarities in all the religions. There is a certain similarity, for instance, between the Eight-fold Path of the Buddha and the Eight Beatitudes of Christ. The same underlying truth is that whenever man develops one of the virtues, he unfolds a new faculty of perception. Why are eight stages mentioned? Because the seer knows that the faculties which may be transmuted into organs of perception are eight in number.

The astral organs of perception are called in occultism, the ‘lotus-flowers’ (sacred wheels, chakra). The lotus-flower with sixteen petals lies in the region of the larynx. In very ancient times this lotus-flower turned from right to left—that is to say in the opposite direction to the hands of a clock. In the man of today, this lotus-flower has ceased to turn. In the clairvoyant seer it begins to move in the opposite direction—from left to right. In earlier times, eight of the sixteen petals were visible, the others undeveloped. In future ages they will all be visible, for the first eight are the result of the action of unconscious initiation, the other eight of the conscious initiation attained by dint of personal effort. The eight new petals correspond to the Beatitudes of Christ.

Another lotus-flower (with twelve petals) is situated in the region of the heart. In earlier times, six petals only were visible. The acquisition of six virtues will, in times to come, develop the other six. These six virtues are: control of thought, power of initiative, balance of the faculties, optimism which enables a man always to see the positive side of things, freedom from prejudice, and finally, harmony in the life of soul. When these virtues have been acquired, the twelve petals begin to move. They express the sacred quality of the number twelve which we have in the twelve Apostles, the twelve knights of King Arthur, and again in all creation, in all action. Everything in the world develops according to twelve different aspects. We have another example in Goethe's poem, Die Geheimnisse, which expresses the ideal of the Rosicrucians. According to the explanation given by Goethe to certain students, each of the twelve Companions of the Rose Cross represents a religious creed.

We find these virtues expressed again in signs and symbols, for symbols are not arbitrary inventions—they are realities. The symbol of the Cross, for instance, as well as that of the Swastika, represents the four-petalled chakram in man. The twelve-petalled flower is expressed in the symbol of the Rose Cross and the twelve Companions. The thirteenth among them, the invisible Companion who unites them all, represents the truth that unites all religions.

This truth underlies the rites and ceremonies of the various religions. Divine wisdom speaks through the rites and cults which have been founded by seers. The astral world expresses itself through them in the physical world. As in a reflection, the rite represents what is happening in higher worlds. This fact appears again in masonic ritual and in certain Asiatic religions. At the birth of a new religion, an Initiate gives the foundations upon which the ritual of the outer cult is built. As evolution proceeds, the rite—a living picture of the spiritual world—tends towards the domain of Art. Art, too, comes from the astral world; the rite becomes beauty. This came to pass notably at the time of Greek civilisation. Art is an astral event of which the cause has been forgotten.

We have an example in the Mysteries and Gods of Greece. In the Mysteries, the hierophant retraced the development of man in its three stages: man the animal, man the human, man the God (the true Superman, not the false Superman of Nietzsche). The hierophant projected these three super-sensible types as living images into the astral light, where they were visible to those who had been initiated into the Mysteries. At the same time they were expressed in poetry and sculpture by three symbols: (1) the Satyr, or bestial type; (2) the human type: Hermes, or Mercury; (3) the divine type: Zeus, or Jupiter. Each of these figures, together with everything around them, represents a cycle of human evolution. That is the way in which the disciples of the Mysteries carried over into Art what they had seen in the astral light.

The zenith of the earthly life of man is reached at about the age of thirty-five. Why is this so? Why does Dante begin his journey at the age of thirty-five, the middle point of human life? Before this moment, man's activity has been concentrated on the development of the physical body but he can now begin his ascent to the spiritual worlds and apply his forces for the unfolding of seership. Dante became a seer at the age of thirty-five. It is the age when the physical forces cease to forestall the influx of Spirit; liberated from the body, these same forces can be transformed into clairvoyant faculties. Here we are touching upon a deep mystery: the law of the transformation of organs. Transformation of the organs constitutes man's evolution. The highest in him is the product of what once was the lowest and which has been transfigured.

At the time of the separation of the sexes, the astral body of man divided: the lower part producing the sexual (physical) organism and the higher part giving rise to thought, imagination, speech.

In days of yore, the sexual organs (the procreative forces) and the organ of the voice (the word creative) were united. Two poles have appeared in man's being, where formerly there was but one single organ. The negative pole (animal) and the positive pole (divine) were once united and have separated.

The third aspect of the Logos is the creative power of the word (as expressed at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John), of which the words of human speech are the reflection. In the old myths and legends this truth was represented in the figure of Vulcan, the cripple. His mission was to guard the sacred fire. He is crippled because, in initiation, man must lose something of his lower, physical forces; the lower part of the body is a product of the past. Raised to the heights of initiation, the lower nature must fall away, to rise thereafter to a yet higher stage. Thus in the course of his evolution man has divided into a lower and higher nature.

In certain mediaeval pictures, the human body is divided into two parts by a straight line; the head and left upper part of the body are above, the right upper part and the lower part of the body are below the line. This division is an indication of the past and the future of the human body.

The two-petalled lotus-flower lies beneath the forehead, at the root of the nose. As yet it is an undeveloped astral organ which will one day unfold into two antennae or wings. The symbol of them can already be seen in the horns traditionally represented on the head of Moses.

Viewed from above downwards, head and sexual organ, man is synthetic and one. All this is the product of the past. Left and right he is symmetrical, representing the present and the future. These two symmetrical parts, however, have not the same value. Why is man usually right-handed? The right hand which is the more active of the two today, is destined subsequently to atrophy. The left hand will survive when the two ‘wings’ on the forehead have developed. The heart will be the brain of the chest—an organ of knowledge.

Before man assumed the upright posture there was a time when he moved on all fours. Such is the origin of the riddle of the Sphinx: ‘Who is the being who in infancy walks on four legs, in middle age on two, in old age on three?’ Oedipus answers that this being is man, who when, a baby crawls on all fours, and in old age leans on a stick. In reality, riddle and answer refer to the whole evolution of humanity, past, present and future, as it was known in the ancient Mysteries. Quadruped in a previous epoch of development, man walks today on two feet; in the future he will ‘fly’ and will indeed make use of three auxiliary organs, namely the two wings developed from the two-petalled lotus which will be the motive organ of his will, and for the rest, the organ arising by a metamorphosis of the left half of the chest, and the left hand. Such will be the organs of movement in the future.

The present organs of reproduction will atrophy as well as the right side and the right hand. Man will give birth to his like by the force of the word; his word will mould ethereal bodies like his own.

Devachan is the Sanscrit term for the long period of time lying between the death and rebirth of man. After death, in the astral world, the soul first learns to cast off the instincts that are connected with the body. After this, the soul passes into Devachan for the long period that lies between two incarnations.

The devachanic world is a state or condition of existence. It surrounds us even in earthly life, but we do not perceive it. In order, by way of analogy, to understand devachanic existence and its functions in earthly and cosmic life, it will be best to take our start from a consideration of the state of sleep.

For the vast majority of human beings, sleep is a condition full of enigmas. During sleep, man's etheric body remains with his physical body and continues its vegetative, restorative functions, but the astral body and individual Ego leave the sleeping body and live an independent existence.

The physical body is used up, consumed, as it were, by our conscious life. From morning till night man spends his forces; the astral body transmits sensations to the physical body which gradually exhaust it. At night, the astral body functions in quite a different way. It no longer transmits sensations which come from outside; it works upon them and brings order and harmony into what the waking life, with its chaotic perceptions, has thrown into disorder. By day, the function of the astral body is to receive and transmit; by night, during sleep, its function is to bring order, to build up and refresh the spent forces.

In man's present stage of evolution, it is not possible for the astral body to do this work of restoration by night and at the same time to observe what is happening in the surrounding astral world. How, then, can man arrive at the point of being able to relieve his astral body of its work, in order to set it free for conscious existence in the astral world?

The procedure adopted by the adept in order to release his astral body is, on the one hand, to train and develop such feelings and thoughts as possess, in themselves, a certain rhythm which can then be communicated to the physical body and, on the other, to avoid those which give rise to physical disorder. Joy or suffering that runs to extremes is avoided. The adept teaches the necessity for equanimity of soul.

Nature is governed by one sovereign law which is that rhythm must enter into all manifestation. When the twelve-petalled lotus-flower which constitutes man's organ of astral-spiritual perception has developed, he can begin to work upon his body and imbue it with a new rhythm whereby its fatigue is healed. Thanks to this rhythm and the restoration of harmony it is no longer necessary for the astral body to perform the restorative work on the sleeping physical body which alone prevents it from falling into ruin.

The whole of waking life is a process destructive of the physical body. Illnesses are caused by excessive activity of the astral body. Eating to excess affords a stimulus to the astral body which re-acts in a disturbing way on the physical body. That is why fasting is laid down in certain religions. The effect of fasting is that the astral body, having greater quiet and less to do, partially detaches itself from the physical body. Its vibrations are modulated and communicate a regular rhythm to the etheric body. Rhythm is thus set going in the etheric body by means of fasting. Harmony is brought into life (etheric body) and form (physical body). In other words, harmony reigns between the universe and man.

This gives us some idea of the function performed by the astral body during sleep. Where is the Self, the Ego of man? In the world of Devachan, but he has no consciousness of it. We must distinguish between sleep that is filled with dreams and the state of deep sleep. Sleep that is filled with dreams is an expression of astral consciousness. Deep, dreamless sleep—the sleep that follows the first dreams—corresponds to the devachanic state. Nothing of it is remembered because it is a condition of unconsciousness for the physical being of ordinary man. Only after the attainment of higher initiation is man aware of his experiences in deep sleep. In the Initiate there is continuity of consciousness through waking life, dream life and dreamless sleep.

Let us now consider the condition of man in Devachan, after death. At the end of a certain time, the etheric body disperses into the forces of the living ether.

What is the next task of the astral body and Ego? A new etheric body has to be built for the incarnation that is to follow. Devachanic existence is devoted, in part, to this work. The substance of the etheric body, like that of the physical body, is not conserved. The substance of which the physical body is composed, is constantly changing—to the point of being wholly renewed in the course of seven years. Similarly, etheric substance is renewed, although its principles of form and inner structure remain the same under the influence of the higher Self. At death, this substance is given completely over to the ether-world and nothing remains from one incarnation to another, any more than the substance of the physical body remains. In each successive incarnation, therefore, the etheric body of man is entirely renewed. That is why there is such a change in the physiognomy and bodily form of man from one incarnation to another. The physiognomy and bodily form do not depend upon the will of the individual but upon his karma, his desires, passions and his involuntary actions.

It is quite different in the case of an initiated disciple. He develops his etheric body in earthly existence in such a way that it is conserved and is fit to pass into Devachan after death. Here on Earth he is able to awaken, within his etheric forces, a ‘Life-Spirit’ which constitutes one of the imperishable principles of his being. The Sanscrit term for the etheric body which has developed into Life-Spirit is Budhi. When this principle of Life-Spirit has developed in the disciple, it is no longer necessary for him entirely to re-mould his etheric body between two incarnations. His period of devachanic existence is then much shorter and for this reason the same character, temperament and outstanding traits are carried forward from one incarnation to another. When the master in occultism has reached the point of conscious control not only of his etheric but of his physical body, another, higher spiritual principle comes into being—Spirit-Man (in Sanscrit, Atma). At this stage the Initiate preserves the characteristics of his physical body every time he incarnates on Earth. With unbroken consciousness, he passes from earthly to heavenly life, from one incarnation to another. Here we have the origin of the legend referring to Initiates who lived for a thousand or two thousand years. For them there is neither Kamaloca or Devachan but unbroken consciousness through deaths and births.

The following objection to the idea of re-incarnation is sometimes made: When a man has accomplished his task in the physical world, he knows the Earth. Why, then, should he return? This objection would be justifiable if man were to return under similar conditions. But as a general rule, he returns to find a new Earth, a new humanity, even a new Nature. For all have evolved and he can enter a new apprenticeship, fulfil a new mission.

These changing conditions of the Earth which determine the times of rebirth, are themselves determined by the passage of the Sun through the Zodiac. Eight centuries before Jesus the Christ, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Ram. Reference is made to this in the legend of the Golden Fleece and in the name of the Lamb of God—the Christ. 2,160 years before that, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Bull, a fact expressed in the cults of the Egyptian Apis or the Mithras Bull in Persia. 2,160 years before that again, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Twins and we find this expressed in the cosmogony of the very ancient Persians, in the two opposing figures of Ormuzd and Ahriman. When the civilisation of Atlantis was destroyed and the age of the Vedas was beginning, the Sun at the vernal equinox was in the sign of Cancer, (inscribed as the sign of cancer) indicating the end of one period and the beginning of another.

There has always been some consciousness among the peoples of the Earth of their relation to the heavenly constellations. The great periods of human civilisation are subject to the heavenly cycles and the movement of the Earth in its relation to Sun and stars. This fact explains the different characteristics of the various epochs and gives new meaning to the incarnations occurring in them. 2,160 years is approximately the time needed for the accomplishment of a male and a female incarnation—that is to say, for the two aspects under which the human being gathers all the experiences of one epoch.

A new flora and a new fauna on Earth are brought forth on Earth by the Devas; they are an expression of the forms of Devachan.

Darwin tries to explain the process of earthly evolution by the struggle for existence—but that is no explanation. The occultist knows that the flora and fauna of Earth are shaped by forces issuing from Devachan. The more man has advanced in his evolution, the more he can participate in this process. His influence upon the moulding of Nature is measured by the extent to which his consciousness has developed.

The Initiate can work in the sphere where the germs of new plants come into being, for Devachan is the region where vegetation receives its form. In Kamaloca, man works at building up the animal kingdom. Kamaloca belongs to the Moon-sphere; Devachan to the Sun-sphere.

Thus man is bound up with all the kingdoms of Nature. Plato speaks of the symbol of the Cross, saying that the soul of the world is bound to the body of the world as it were upon a Cross. What is the meaning of this symbol? It is an image of the soul passing through the kingdoms of Nature. In contrast to the human being, the plant has its root beneath and its organs of generation above, turned towards the Sun. The animal is at the intermediary stage, its organism lying, generally speaking, in the horizontal direction. Man and the plants stand vertically upright and with the animal form a Cross—the Cross of the world.

In future ages there will be conscious participation on the part of man in the higher worlds after death in the work of building up the lower kingdoms of Nature. The consciousness of man will govern the circumstances whereby a new civilisation comes into being, concurrently with the appearance of a new flora. The divine mission of the Spirit is to forge the future. A time will come when there will be no question of ‘miracle’ or chance. Flora and fauna will be a conscious expression of the transfigured soul of man. Creative works on Earth are wrought by the Devas and by man. If we build a cathedral, we are working on the mineral kingdom. The mountains, the banks of the holy Nile are the work of the Devas the temples on the banks of the Nile are the work of man. And the aim is one and the same—the transfiguration of the Earth.

In future ages man will learn to mould all the kingdoms of Nature with the same consciousness with which today he can give shape to mineral substances. He will give form to living beings and take upon himself the labours of the Gods. Thus will he transform the Earth into Devachan.

Devachan (abode of the Gods) corresponds to the heaven of the Christians, the spiritual world of the occultists.

These regions of existence are beyond the range of our physical senses, although they are intimately connected with this world. In attempting to describe them, we must have recourse to allegories and symbols. The words of human language are only adapted to express the world of sense.

There are seven distinct stages or degrees of Devachan. The seven stages are not definite ‘localities’ but conditions or states of the life of soul and Spirit. Devachan is everywhere present; it envelops us as does the astral world, only it is invisible. By dint of training, the Initiate acquires, one by one, the faculties necessary for beholding it.

At the first stage of clairvoyance, greater order enters into dreams; man sees marvelous forms and hears words that are pregnant with meaning. It becomes more and more possible to decipher the meaning of dreams and to relate them to actuality. We may dream, for example, that a friend's house is on fire and then hear that he is ill. The first faint glimpses of Devachan give the impression of a sky streaked with clouds which gradually turn into living forms.

At the second stage of clairvoyance, dreams become precise and clear. The geometrical and symbolic figures employed as the sacred signs of the great religions are, properly speaking, the language of the creative Word, the living hieroglyphs of cosmic speech. Among such symbols are: the cross, the sign of life; the pentagram or five-pointed star, the sign of sound or word; the hexagram or six-pointed star (two interlaced triangles) the sign of the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm, and so forth. At the second stage of clairvoyance, these signs—which we today delineate in abstract lines—appear full of colour, life and radiance on a background of light. They are not, as yet, the garment of living beings, but they indicate, so to say, the norms and laws of creation. These signs were the basis of the animal forms chosen by the earliest Initiates to express the passage of the Sun through the Zodiacal constellations. The Initiates translated their visions into such signs and symbols. The most ancient characters employed in Sanscrit, Egyptian, Greek and Runic scripts—every letter of which has ideographic meaning—were the expressions of heavenly ciphers.

At this stage of his seership, the disciple is still at the threshold of Devachan. His task is to penetrate into Devachan, to find the path leading from the astral world to the first stage of the devachanic world proper. This path was known to all the occult schools and even during the first centuries, Christianity contained esoteric teaching of which traces can be found. The ancient methods of Initiation, however, were abandoned from the beginning.

In the Acts of the Apostles, mention is made of Dionysius the Areopagite. He was an initiated disciple of St. Paul and taught an esoteric Christianity. Later on, at the Court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena again taught the esoteric doctrines. Esoteric Christianity was then gradually obscured by dogma. When the Initiate has penetrated into Devachan, however, he finds that the descriptions given by Dionysius of this world are correct.

The rhythmic breathing practised in Yoga was one of the methods by means of which man was enabled to penetrate the world of Devachan. A certain sign that this entrance has been made is a conscious experience indicated in Vedic philosophy by the words: tat twam asi (Thou art That).

In dream, man beholds his own bodily form from without. He sees his body stretched on the couch but merely as an empty sheath. Around this empty form shines a radiant, ovoid form—the astral body. It has the appearance of an aura from which the body has been eliminated. The body itself seems like a hollow, empty mould. It is a vision where everything is reversed as in a photographic negative. The soul of crystal, plant and animal is seen as a kind of radiation, whereas the physical substance appears as an empty sheath. But it is only the phenomena of Nature that so appear—nothing that has been made by the hands of men. At the first stage of Devachan, we are contemplating the astral counterparts of the phenomena of the physical world. This region has been spoken of as the ‘continents’ of Devachan—the ‘negative’ forms of the valleys, mountains and physical continents.

If he enters into deep meditation while the breath is held, man reaches the second stage of Devachan. The moulds which represent physical substance are seen to be filled with spiritual currents—the currents of life universal. This is the ocean of Devachan. At this stage the Initiate enters the well-spring of all life. This life has the appearance of a network of vast streams with their tributaries. At the same time there is a strange and new experience of living within the metals. Reichenbach, the author of L'Od, speaks of this phenomenon in connection with sensitive subjects who were able to detect different metals wrapped in paper.

The Beings living in the region which becomes perceptible at the second stage of clairvoyant vision are called by Dionysius the Areopagite, the Archangels. [In German, Erzengel,—Erz = ore, mineral.] They represent the living soul of the minerals.

To attain the third stage of Devachan, thought must be freed from bondage to the things of the physical world. Man can then live consciously in the world of thought, quite independently of the actual content of thought. The pupil must experience the function of pure intellect, apart from its content. A new world will then be revealed. To the perception of the ‘continents’ and ‘waters’ of Devachan (the astral soul of things and the streaming currents of life) will be added the perception of its ‘air’ or ‘atmosphere.’ This atmosphere is altogether different from our own; its substance is living, sonorous, sensitive. Waves, gleams of light and sounds arise in response to our gestures, acts and thoughts. Everything that happens on Earth reverberates in colours, light and sound. Whether it be in sleep or after death, the echoes of Earth can be experienced in these ‘airs’ of Devachan. It is possible, for example, to experience the effects of a battle. We do not actually see the battle, nor hear the cries of the soldiers and the booming of the cannons. Strife and passions appear in the form of lightning and thunder. Thus Devachan does not separate us from the Earth, but reveals it to us from outside, as it were. We do not experience sorrow and joy as if they were arising in ourselves; we behold them objectively, as a spectacle. Devachan is a school of apprenticeship where we learn to regard sorrows and joys from a higher point of view, where we strive to transmute suffering into joy, failures into renewed efforts, death into resurrection.

This has nothing in common with the passive contemplation and more or less egotistic bliss of heaven conceived of by certain writers on religion who think that the sufferings of the damned are part of the bliss of the elect. Devachan is a living heaven, where the overwhelming urge to sympathy and action contained in the human soul is faced with a boundless field of activity and a vista of infinity.

At the fourth stage of Devachan, the archetypes of things arise—not the ‘negatives’ but the original types. This is the laboratory of the Cosmos wherein all forms are contained, whence creation has proceeded; it is the home of the Ideas of Plato, the ‘Realm of the Mothers’ of which Goethe speaks in Faust in connection with Helena. In this realm of Devachan, the Akashic Record of Indian philosophy is revealed. In our modern terminology we speak of this Record as the astral impression of all the events of the world. Everything that passes through the astral bodies of men is ‘fixed’ in the infinitely subtle substance of this Record as in a sensitive plate. To understand the images which hover in the astral nimbus of the Earth, we must have recourse to analogies. The human voice pronounces words which set up waves of sound, penetrating by the ears into the brains of others, where images and thoughts are evoked. Each of these words is a wave of sound with an absolutely definite form which—if we could see it—is distinct from all others. Let us imagine these words congealing somewhat as water congeals to ice by sudden, intense cold. In such a case the words would descend to Earth as congealed air and we could recognise each word by its form.

And now, instead of a process of densification, let us imagine the reverse. We know that matter can pass through the most solid to the most rarified states: solid, liquid, gaseous. Matter can be subtilised to a point at which we are led over to ‘negative’ matter—Akasha. Events on Earth impress themselves into this akashic substance and can be rediscovered there even those which occurred in far remote ages of the past.

Akashic pictures are not static and immobile. They unroll before the eye of the seer as living tableaux where objects and persons move and even speak. The astral form of Dante would speak as he spoke in his own milieu. It is almost invariably this kind of image that is seen in spiritualistic séances, where it is thought to be the spirit of the dead.

Our task is to learn how to decipher the pages of this book of living images and to unroll the innumerable scrolls of the ‘Chronicle’ of the universe. This can only be done if we are able to distinguish between appearance and reality, between the human sheath and the living soul. Daily discipline and long training are necessary if false interpretations are to be prevented. Definite answers to questions, for example, might be received from the form of Dante thus perceived. But they do not emanate from the individuality of Dante, for the individuality continues to evolve; they emanate from the ancient figure of Dante, ‘fixed’ in the etheric milieu of his time.

The fifth realm of Devachan is the sphere of heavenly harmony. The higher regions of Devachan are characterised by the fact that all sounds have a greater clarity, brilliance and richness. In a mighty harmony we hear the voice of all beings. This harmony was called by Pythagoras, the ‘Music of the Spheres.’ It is the living, Cosmic Word. To the clairvoyant who has now become clairaudient, each being communicates his true name in a definite sound or tone. In Genesis, Jehovah takes the hand of Adam and Adam gives all beings their names. On Earth, the individual is lost among the crowd of other beings. In the highest sphere of Devachan, each being has his own particular sound; yet at the same time the Initiate is united with all beings, becomes one with his environment.

The Initiate who has attained to this degree is called the ‘Swan.’ He hears the sounds through which his master speaks to him and then communicates them to the world. The singing swan of Apollo brings to the ears of men the tones of the Beyond. The swan is said to come from the land of the Hyperboreans—that is to say from the world where the Sun sinks to rest, from heaven.

At this point, the Initiate passes to a sphere beyond the world of stars. He no longer reads the Akashic Records from the side of the Earth but from the side of the heavens. The Akashic Record becomes the occult script of the stars and the Initiate experiences the primal source of the universe, of the Logos.

In the myths, we find indications of this degree of the Swan, notably in the Middle Ages in the Grail stories which give expression to experiences in the devachanic world. All the exploits there described are by knights of the Grail, who represent the great spiritual impulses given to mankind by command of the masters.

The time when the legend of the Grail was composed, under the inspiration of high Initiates, is the age when the reign of the Bourgeoisie began and when the movement connected with the freedom of great cities had its rise, coming from Scotland into England and thence to France and Germany. When he is a free citizen, man aspires unconsciously to truth and divine life. In the legend of Lohengrin, Elsa represents the soul of man in the Middle Ages, striving to develop what is always expressed in occultism by a female figure. Lohengrin, the knight who comes from an unknown country, from the Castle of the Holy Grail, to deliver Elsa, represents the master who is the bearer of truth. He is the messenger of the Initiate and is borne by the symbolic swan. The messenger of the great Initiates is a “Swan.” None may ask his true name nor whence he comes. His authority may not be doubted. By his words he must be believed; by the truth shining in his countenance he must be recognised. He who has not this faith is incapable of understanding, unworthy to listen. That is why Lohengrin forbids Elsa to ask his name and whence he comes. The Swan is the chela who bears the master.

The disciple who has reached the fifth degree of initiation is sent by the master into the world. The legend of Lohengrin is a description of events occurring in the higher worlds. The light of the Logos—the solar and planetary Word—shines through the myths and legends of the ages.

We will endeavour in contemplation to retrace the stages of man's evolution to the Logos by Whom this world was created.

Modern exoteric science goes back to the Stone Age—an epoch when man lived in caves, using shaped stones as his only instruments. His existence was primitive in the extreme, his horizon narrow, his thought limited to the search for food and means for defending his life.

Occult science leads us back beyond this Stone Age to the epoch of Atlantis. In those times, man's physical appearance was not at all the same as it is today. It is known that the brow of prehistoric man was not developed, for, in effect, the development of the brow and forehead runs parallel with the development of the brain and of thinking. In days of yore, the physical brain was much smaller than the corresponding ether-form which extended beyond it on all sides. In the course of evolution, the etheric and physical brains have become more or less equal in size. A certain centre in the etheric brain which is now inside the skull, was in the evolution of Atlantean man, this centre moved to the interior of the skull. It was a moment of cardinal importance, for as soon as man began to think, to be conscious of his own being and to say ‘I,’ he began to associate ideas and to calculate—which he could not do before. On the other hand, the earliest Atlanteans possessed a far stronger and truer memory. Their knowledge was based, not upon the relations between facts but on their memory of these facts. They knew, by their memory, that a certain event would invariably give rise to a series of others; but they did not grasp the causes of these facts, nor could they think about them. In addition to this powerful memory, they possessed another faculty—a mighty power of will. Today, man can no longer work directly with his will upon the life forces. He cannot, for example, hasten the growth of plants by an act of will. The Atlantean had this power and was, moreover, able to draw from the plants ether forces which he knew how to use. He did this instinctively, without the help of intellect and the faculties of logical reasoning which are associated today with what we call the ‘scientific mind.’ To the measure in which intellectuality, the faculty of reflective thought and calculation unfolded in the men of Atlantis, to that measure their powers of instinctive clairvoyance declined.

If we go still further back in the history of Atlantis, we come to a very remote period when expression through speech, that is to say, expression in articulate sounds, first became possible. This was the age when man began to walk upright, for speech and the expression of articulate sounds can only be a faculty of beings who stand upright.

Before the great Atlantean race, of which all European and Asiatic races were the offshoots, there existed another continent and other peoples, still nearer to the animal nature—the Lemurian race. Science only admits its existence as a hypothesis. Certain islands to the South of Asia and the North of Australia are, nevertheless, evidences of this continent; they are the metamorphosed remains of old Lemuria. The temperature of the Earth in those times was much higher than it is today. The atmosphere was vaporous, full of currents. In Lemuria, we find rudimentary human forms, breathing not through the nasal organs but through organs more like gills.

In the course of human evolution, organs are perpetually being transformed both as to character and appearance. Thus primitive man walked on four feet; he could not utter articulate sounds; he had no ears with which to hear. Movement in the semi-liquid, semi-gaseous element surrounding him was made possible by an organ which enabled him to float and swim. When the elements differentiated and man found himself on solid earth, this organ changed into the lungs, the gills into ears and the frontal parts of his structure into arms and hands—free instruments for action. Besides this, he began to utter articulate sounds—the words of speech.

This great transformation was of cardinal importance to man. In Genesis (II.7), we read: “And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This passage describes the period when the gills once possessed by man changed into lungs and he began to breathe the outer air. Simultaneously with the power to breathe, he acquired an inner soul and with this soul, the possibility of inner consciousness, of becoming aware of the self living within the soul.

When man began to breathe air through the lungs, his blood was invigorated and it was then that a soul higher than the group-soul of the animals, a soul individualised by the Ego-principle, could incarnate in him to carry evolution forward to its fully human and then divine phases. Before the body breathed air, the soul of man could not descend to incarnation, for air is an element enfilled with soul. At that time, therefore, man actually inbreathed the divine soul which came from the heavens. The words of Genesis, in their evolutionary sense, are to be taken quite literally. To breathe is to be permeated with Spirit. This truth was the basis of the exercises given in ancient systems of yoga. These exercises were founded upon the rhythm of breathing, their purpose being to render the body fit to receive the impouring Spirit. When we breathe, we commune with the world-soul. The inbreathed air is the bodily vesture of this higher soul, just as the flesh is the vesture of man's lower being.

These changes in the breathing-process mark the transition from ancient consciousness which was merely a play of pictures, to consciousness as it is in our time. Sense perceptions are received from the body; consciousness has a purely objective character. Consciousness in pictures (imaginative) created its own inner content by means of an inherent, plastic force. The further we go into the past, the more we find the soul of man living, not within him, but around him. We reach a point when the sense-organs existed only in germ and when man merely received from external objects impressions which gave rise to attraction or repulsion, sympathy or antipathy. The movements of this being—whom we cannot really call ‘man’ in our sense of the word—were governed by these feelings of attraction or repulsion. He had no reasoning faculty and the pineal gland—an organ of cardinal importance in those times—was his only ‘brain’.

The existence of this imaginative consciousness is the answer to endless philosophical discussions on the objective nature and reality of the world and it is the refutation of all purely subjectivist philosophies, such, for instance, as that of Berkeley. Two poles of being and of life are essential to evolution. The ‘subjective universal’ becomes the objective universe; man proceeds, first, from the subjective to the objective and he will finally be led from the objective to the subjective by the development of Spirit-Self (Manas), Life-Spirit (Budhi), Spirit-Man (Atma).

Dream-consciousness is an atavistic survival of the picture consciousness of olden times. One quality of this picture consciousness is that it is creative. It creates forms and colours which do not exist in physical reality.

Objective consciousness is by nature analytic subjective consciousness is by nature plastic and has magical power. (This is indicated by the etymology of the word ‘image’). The subjective, plastic consciousness of man was thus superseded by objective, analytic consciousness. The procedure by which the soul (which, to begin with, enveloped man like a cloud) subsequently penetrated into the physical body, may be compared with that of a snail secreting its own shell and then shrinking back inside it. The soul first gave form to the body and then penetrated within this body, having prepared the organs of perception from outside. The power of sight with which the human eye is endowed today is the same power which once was exercised upon the eye from without, in order that it might take shape.

The change from outer to inner activity of soul is expressed by a hieroglyph. This is the sign of Cancer in the Zodiac, expressing a dual action or movement—one from without inwards, the other from within outwards.

The middle of the third (Lemurian) epoch was the time when the soul passed into its self-created dwelling place and began to ‘animate’ the body from within. Before this point of time we find an astral humanity indwelling a purely astral Earth. Before that again, man and Earth existed merely in a devachanic condition. There was as yet no picture consciousness. Cosmic thoughts poured into and through the being of man. His higher soul was still part and parcel of the whole Cosmos, participating in cosmic thought.

The further we retrace the parallel development of man and Earth, the more do we find them existing in a fluid, embryonic condition and the nearer to Spirit. Today, we have reached the lowest point on the curve of descent; man and Earth have reached the greatest degree of solidification and are about to re-ascend, through the action of individual will, towards the Spiritual.

What underlies this great process of evolution? Where was the home of human beings when, at the beginning, they existed merely in germ? Whence has man proceeded? Who created him? It is here that we must try to envisage a life and power of manifestation infinitely more sublime than all human, nay, than all planetary life. This power is the Logos.

In what does human and planetary life differ from the life of the Logos?—This question would seem to demand a flight into the unknown, into a universe of another order. And yet there are analogies which help us to understand or at least to divine something of the creative power of the Logos.

Let us try to envisage an all-embracing mind, a mind to which all earthly and planetary experiences are known. Such a mind could live through all and every form of evolution. But with this power alone, it could not rise beyond the point of the creation of man and of the planetary system. It would remain in the sphere of what can be and has been proved by man. Human intelligence cannot pass beyond this limit.

But we can rise to a consciousness other than that wherein our experiences are merely realised in the mind. There are certain states of creative activity in which the spirit of man can give birth to something new, something never seen before. Such, for instance, is the consciousness of a sculptor at the moment he conceives or sees in a flash the form of a statue before his inner eye. He has never seen a model, he creates his statue. Such too, is the consciousness of a poet who conceives a poem in one flash of inspiration, in creative, spiritual vision.

This creative power is not generated by any intellectual idea but rather by a spiritual sense,—Think of a hen sitting on its eggs. It is wholly given up to this brooding activity and is filled with a kind of warm, almost voluptuous pleasure in which there arises a dreamy pre-vision of the hatching of the little winged chicken. This bliss in the work of creation exists at every stage of cosmic life, and warmth pours from it. In the sphere of Cosmic Intelligence—which may be conceived as the world of thoughts accessible to the higher Self (Manas)—this warmth seems to pervade the whole universe, emanating from the creative life of soul (Budhi). We can divine the presence of a creative sphere in existence before our Earth and ‘brooding’ over it. This is to ascend from Spirit-Self to Life-Spirit, and from Life-Spirit to Spirit-Man.

The Ego or ‘I’ Principle of man is created by the third Logos.

We should try to conceive the power of the higher Ego as being suffused through the whole universe as a life-begetting warmth and then we reach the conception of the second Logos by Whom macrocosmic life is quickened and Who is reflected in the creative activities of the human soul.

The one primal source and centre of manifestation is the first Logos—the unfathomable Godhead.

In every age these three Divine principles have been represented in occultism by these three signs:—

In the last lecture we retraced the past of man more particularly from the point of view of his form and his body. We will now consider the past as regards his states of consciousness.

The following questions often arise before the mind: Is man the only being upon Earth who possesses self consciousness? Or again: What is the relation between the consciousness of man and that of the animals, plants and metals? Have these lower kingdoms of life any consciousness at all?

Imagine that a tiny insect crawling on the body of a man could see only his finger. It could have no conception whatever of the organism as a whole, nor of the soul. We ourselves are in exactly the same position as regards the Earth and other beings indwelling it. A materialist has no conception of the soul of the Earth and, as a natural result, he is not aware of the existence of his own soul. Similarly, if a tiny insect is unaware of the soul of man, this is because it has no soul with which to perceive.

The Earth-soul is much more sublime than the soul of man and man knows nothing of it. In reality, all beings have consciousness but man's consciousness is quite different, inasmuch as in our age it is perfectly attuned to the physical world.

As well as the waking state (corresponding to the physical world), man passes through other conditions of consciousness. During dreamless sleep, his consciousness lives in the devachanic world. The consciousness of the plant is always devachanic. If a plant ‘suffers,’ the suffering brings about a change in devachanic consciousness. The animal has astral consciousness, corresponding to the dream-life of man.

These three states of consciousness are very different. In the physical world we evolve ideas simply by means of the sense organs and the outer realities with which these organs put us into touch. In the astral world, we perceive the surrounding milieu only in the form of pictures, feeling at the same time as if we were part of them.

Why does man, who is conscious in the physical world, feel himself separate from all that is not himself? It is because he receives all his impressions from a milieu which he perceives very distinctly outside his body. In the astral world, on the contrary, we do not perceive by means of the senses but by the sympathy which makes us penetrate to the heart of everything we encounter. Astral consciousness is not confined within a relatively limited field; in a certain sense it is liquid, fluidic. In the devachanic world, consciousness is as diffused as a gas might be. There is no resemblance whatever with physical consciousness, into which nothing penetrates except by way of the senses.

What was the object of this shutting-off of consciousness which followed the stage of imaginative consciousness? If such a shutting-off had not taken place, man could never have said ‘I’ of himself. The divine germ could not have penetrated into his being in the course of evolution if it had not been for the crystallisation of his physical body. Where, then, was this divine Spirit before the solidification of the Earth and of consciousness? Genesis tells us: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The divine Spirit, the spark of the Ego, was still in the astral world.

In higher Devachan, beyond the fourth degree, referred to in occultism as Arupa (without body), where Akasha (negative substance) has its rise—there is the home of the consciousness of the minerals. We must try to reach a deep and true understanding of the mineral kingdom and discover our moral link with it. The Rosicrucians in the Middle Ages taught their disciples to revere the chastity of the mineral,—“Imagine,” they said, “that while retaining his faculties of thinking and feeling, a man becomes as pure and free from desire as the mineral,—He then possesses an infallible power—a spiritual power.”—If we can say that the spirits of the several minerals are living in Devachan, we can say equally correctly that the spirit of the minerals is like a man who might live only with devachanic consciousness.

In other beings, then, the existence of consciousness must not be denied. Man has traversed all these degrees of consciousness on the descending curve of evolution. Originally he resembled the minerals, in this sense, that his Ego lived in a higher world and guided him from above. But the aim of evolution is to free man from being subject to beings endowed with a consciousness higher than his own and to bear him to a point where he himself is fully conscious in higher worlds.

All these levels of consciousness are contained within man today:

1. The consciousness of the mineral-corresponding to deep sleep.
2. The consciousness of the plant-ordinary sleep.
3. Animal consciousness-dream-life.
4. Physical, objective consciousness-the normal waking state. The two former states are atavistic survivals.
5. A consciousness which repeats the third stage but retains the acquired quality of objectivity. Images have definite colours and are realised as being quite distinct from the perceiver. The subjective sense of attraction or repulsion vanishes. In this new imaginative consciousness, the faculty of reason that has been acquired in the physical world retains its own powers.
6. Sleep itself—not the dream—here becomes a conscious state. We do not only behold images but we enter into the living essence of beings and hear their inner tones. In the physical world we give names to things but the names are merely outer appellations. Only man can express his own being from within by saying ‘I’—the ineffable name of conscious individuality. By this word we distinguish our own personality from the rest of the universe. But when we become conscious of the world of sound, each being, each thing communicates its own true name; in clairaudience we hear the sound which expresses its innermost being and rings forth as a tone in the universe that is distinct from all others.
7. One stage further and deep sleep becomes a conscious state. Description is impossible, for this condition passes beyond the limits of comparison. All that can be said is that it exists.

Such are the seven states of consciousness through which man passes, and he will pass through others too. There is always one central state, with three beneath and three above. The three higher states reproduce, in a higher sense, the three lower. A traveler is always at the centre of the horizon. Each state of consciousness develops through seven states of life, and each state of life through seven states of form. Thus seven states of form always constitute one state of life; seven states of life compose one whole period of planetary evolution, for example that of our Earth.

The seven states of life culminate in the formation of seven kingdoms, of which four are actually visible: the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. In each state of consciousness, therefore, man passes through 7 x 7 states of form this brings us to 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses (343).

If we could envisage in one single tableau the 343 states of form, we should have a picture of the third Logos.

If we could envisage the 49 states of life, we should have a picture of the second Logos.

If we could envisage the 7 states of consciousness, we should have a conception of the first Logos.

Evolution consists in the mutual interaction of all these seven forms. In order to pass from one form to the other, a new spirit is necessary (the action of the Holy Spirit). In order to pass from one state of life to another, a new power is necessary (the action of the Son). In order to pass from one state of consciousness to another, a new consciousness is necessary (the action of the Father).

Christ Jesus brought a new state of life and was in very truth the Word made Flesh. With the coming of the Christ, a new force entered into the world, preparing a new Earth in a new relationship with the heavens.

To gain an idea of this evolution we must have recourse not to abstractions but to pictures, for pictures have a living, creative quality that is not contained in the pure idea. The picture is a symbol in one world but corresponds to a reality in a higher world.

We know that before developing to its present stage, our Earth passed through a phase called the Old Moon period. But this Old Moon phase of evolution is not to be confused with the satellite we now see in the sky, nor to any other planet that astronomy might ever discover. The heavenly bodies visible today are bodies which have been mineralised. The human eye can only see objects which contain mineral elements and reflect the light, in other words, objects which have a physical body. When the occultist speaks of the mineral kingdom, he is not merely referring to the stones but to the milieu at the central core of which the consciousness of man unfolds. Many scholars regard living beings as mere machines and reject the idea of a vital force. This mentality is a result of the fact that our organism is unable really to behold life. The occultist, on the other hand, says that in our age man lives in the mineral world.

Think of the human eye. It is a highly complicated mechanism, a kind of ‘dark chamber,’ with the pupil as a window and the crystalline as a lens. The whole body of man is composed of a number of physical organs, equally delicate and complicated. The ear is like a harpsichord with a key-board and fibres for strings. And the same may be said of every sense-organ.

The consciousness of modern man is only awakened if connection is established with his physical or mineral body. True, it awakens first in the physical world, but it must none the less gradually light up in the other members of man's being—in the member that is constituted by the life-forces (the plant-nature of man), in the member that is chiefly dominated by the forces of feeling (the animal-nature), and finally in the Ego.

Truth to tell, man only knows what is mineral in the universe. He does not know the essential laws underlying the animal's life of instinct and feeling, and the growth of plants. He simply sees their physical expressions. Try to conceive a plant in super physical existence, having lost its mineral substance—it would be invisible to our physical eyes.

But even though man knows only the mineral, at least he has it in his power. He works it, moulds it, smelts and combines it. He fashions the face of the Earth anew. He is able to do this in our age with the help of machines. If we go back to remote historic ages when as yet no human hand had been laid on the Earth, we find it as it issued from the hands of the Gods. But ever since man began to exercise control over the mineral kingdom, the Earth has been changing, and we may foresee an age when the whole face of the Earth—which at the beginning was the work of the Gods—will have received the stamp imparted by the hand of man.

In the beginning, form was given to all created things by the Gods. This power of giving form has passed from the Gods to men, in so far as the mineral kingdom is concerned. In ancient traditions it was taught that man must accomplish the task of transforming the Earth in fulfillment of a threefold goal, namely the realisation of truth, beauty, goodness. It is for man to make the Earth into a temple of truth, beauty and goodness. And then, those who come after him will look upon his work as we now look upon the mineral world which came forth from the hands of the Gods. Neither cathedrals nor machines have been built in vain. The Gods have given form to the crystal which we extract from the Earth, just as we build our monuments and our machines. Just as in the past the Gods created the mineral world from a chaotic mass, so our cathedrals, inventions and even our institutions are the germs from which a future world will come to birth.

Having transformed the mineral world, man will learn to transform the plants. This denotes a higher power. Today, man erects buildings; in future times he will be able to create and give shape to plant-life by working upon plant-substance. At a still higher stage, he will give form not only to living beings but to conscious beings. He will have power over animal life. When he has reached the stage of being able to reproduce his like by an act of conscious will, he will accomplish, at a higher level, what he accomplishes today in the mineral world.

The germ of this sublime power of generation, cleansed of all element of sensuality, is the word. Man became a conscious being when he drew his first breath; consciousness will reach its stage of perfection when he is able to pour into the words he utters, the same creative power with which his thought is endowed today. In this age, it is only words that he communicates to the air. When he has reached the stage of higher creative consciousness, he will be able to communicate images to the air. The word will then be an Imagination—wholly permeated with life. In giving body to these images, he will be giving body to the word which bears and sustains the image. When we no longer simply embody our thoughts in objects, as for instance when we make a watch, but give body to these images, they will live.

And when man knows how to impart life to what is highest in him, these ‘images’ will lead a real and actual existence, comparable to animal existence. At the highest stage of evolution, man will thus be able, finally, to reproduce his own being. At the end of the process of the Earth's transformation, the whole atmosphere will resound with the power of the Word. Thus man must evolve to a stage where he will have the power to mould his environment in the image of his inner being. The initiate only precedes him along this path.

It is evident that the Earth today cannot produce human bodies such as will be produced at the final stage of evolution. When that final stage has come, these bodies will be a fit expression of the Logos. The one great Messenger, He alone Who manifested in a human body like our own, this power of the Logos, is Christ. He came at the central turning-point of evolution, to reveal its goal.

And now let us enquire into the form in which the Spirit of man lived before this Spirit entered into him by way of the breath. The Earth is a reincarnation of an earlier planet—of the Old Moon. In this lunar period of evolution, the pure mineral did not yet exist. The planetary body was composed of a substance somewhat akin to the nature of wood a substance midway between the mineral and the plant. Its surface was not hard like the mineral—indeed it was liken to turf. It brought forth beings by nature half-plant, half-mollusc, and was inhabited by a third kingdom of beings at a stage of existence midway between the human being and animal. These beings were endowed with a dreamlike, imaginative consciousness. We can envisage the kind of matter of which their ‘bodies’ were composed, by thinking of the nerve-substance of the crayfish. This matter densified to become the substance of which the brain is now composed. On the Old Moon, this matter remained in a more fluid state but on Earth it required a protective sheath of bone—the skull. In this sense, all the substances of which we are composed are ‘extracts’ of the macrocosm. All this preparatory activity in the universe was necessary in order that the Ego might descend into man.

We have heard that man was only ready to receive the germ of his Ego, when, on Earth, he began to breathe the air around him. Did he then breathe on the Moon?

The further we go back in the periods of evolution, the higher the temperature. Atlantis was bathed in hot vapours. In earlier times still, the air was pure warmth; before that again, fire. Fire was there in the place of air. The Lemurians breathed fire. That is why it is said in occult writings that the first Teachers of men were the Spirits of Fire. When physical man appeared on the Earth, air became his element of life. But man changes this air, in that he transforms it into carbonic acid and the breathing-process has thus caused the materialisation of our globe to descend still one degree lower. The equilibrium is restored by the plant-world.

In times to come, the physical body will disappear; man and the Earth will live as astral forms. Physical substance destroys itself by its own forces. But before this metamorphosis comes about, a cosmic night will fall, just as a previous cosmic night marked the transition of the Old Moon evolution to that of our present Earth.

The atmosphere of the Moon contained nitrogen, just as today the atmosphere of the Earth contains oxygen, and it was the predominance of nitrogen which brought about the end of the Old Moon period and the onset of a cosmic night. The cyanides on Earth are survivals from the conditions existing at the final stages of the Old Moon evolution. That is why they have a destructive effect on Earth, for the Earth is not their proper sphere. They are the poisonous remains of life in another age.

Animal-man, as he lived on the old Moon, is thus the ancestor of earthly, physical man; the Spirit within man is the offspring of the Spirits of Fire in the lunar period. The Beings who on the Old Moon were incarnate in the fire, incarnated, on Earth, in the air. But now, has anything of the action of these Spirits of Fire remained in man? On the Old Moon, living beings had no warm blood. What was it that gave rise to the warmth of the blood and, as a consequence, to the life of passions?—The fire which was inbreathed by the beings of the Old Moon and which lives again on Earth in their blood. And the Spirit of the air surrounds the body which contains the heritage of the Old Moon evolution, namely, the warmth of the blood, the brain, the spinal fluid, the nerves.

These examples serve to show that a close study of the transformation of substances is required before we can begin to understand the great processes of metamorphosis which took place during the earlier periods of the Earth's evolution. At a stage still earlier than that of the Old Moon, the planetary sphere which has now become our Earth had a body composed merely of gaseous substance; before that again, we can only speak of a body of sound. It is in this sound—the Cosmic Word—that man's evolution has its origin, proceeding thence towards light, fire, air. Only in the fourth condition does consciousness flash up in the Spirit of man. From this point onwards, the directing force bestowed by the Logos has its rise from within man's own being and his conscience becomes his rightful guide. His primordial being comes to expression in the ‘I,’ the Ego. The conscious Ego is the realisation in man of the Christ Principle.

In a preceding lecture we went back in human evolution to the time when the division of the sexes occurred. This moment is in itself the climax of a long cosmic preparation. After the night which separated the phase of the ancient moon from the terrestrial phase, the earth to begin with appeared combined with the forces of the present sun and moon. They formed but one body which, little by little, became differentiated thus giving birth to the three bodies as we now know them. The present division of the sexes is the result of the separation between the moon forces and the earthly forces. The feminine forces of reproduction have remained under the influence of the moon. The moon still rules over the forces of propagation both in man and animal. Thus occult knowledge reveals the forces that are at play in the planetary system.

At the time when the sun was still united both with the earth and the moon, neither plants nor animals nor human beings existed as we know them today. In fact, only a plant kingdom existed then but under totally different conditions from our own. This kingdom preserved a particular connection with the forces of the sun similar to that of the animal with the moon and of man with the earth. As long as the sun was united with the earth-moon, the plants directed their blossoms toward the center of the globe; when the sun separated off they oriented themselves in accordance with it and directed their flowers heavenward. We have seen in an earlier lecture (XI) that the plants have thus adopted an inverted position in relation to man; both manifest themselves in the vertical whereas the animal is found to be half way between the human orientation and that of the plant world. The spinal column of the animal is in the horizontal. It is by means of the gradual separation of the three heavenly bodies that the different kingdoms on earth have become as we now know them: the plant kingdom at the time of the separation of the sun, the animal when the separation of the moon occurred. The pristine composition of these forces contained in germ what was later to take on physical manifestation. Let us imagine a substance which is heated to a high temperature and then cooled; one would then see the various elements which it contains taking on form.

At the time of the ancient moon we also find the solar forces which during a certain period are concentrated in a celestial body outside the moon. The moon was revolving around the ancient sun but in such a manner that it always turned the same side to the sun; the orbit of the moon around the earth is a continuation of the motion formerly described around the ancient sun. These bodies, both at the beginnings and at the end of this cosmic period, became one—just as the earth, the moon and the sun were united at the beginning of earth evolution and will again be united at the end. These two ancient cosmic bodies would never have been able to be active in evolution had they not recast their forces after their separation. The moon, during the time it was separated from the sun, developed in such a way that forces were engendered which later made it possible for a third body to appear. In fact, it was during this separation that man was able to develop within himself what later took on physical embodiment and gave him the possibility of developing objective, waking consciousness on earth.

The period which preceded the lunar one is referred to as the solar. At this time of evolution everything was pure solar life. Occultism sees the sun as a fixed star which had previously been a planet and similarly it recognizes the earth as a planet destined to become the sun of a future cosmic system. During the solar period, man was only endowed with a consciousness akin to that of dreamless sleep.

Yet another state preceded the solar period; at that time the sun was not even a planet. The human being was only endowed with a deep trance consciousness or deep sleep. He was not yet the being of light which he would become on the ancient sun; he simply vibrated like a tone in the pure harmony of this Saturn period, but it should be noted that our present Saturn has nothing to do with this condition.

After our earthly period of clear physical consciousness, a fifth condition will dawn of conscious astral imagination during a period known as Jupiter. This will be followed by a period of Venus where we shall become conscious of what today is the unconsciousness of sleep. Finally, a period of Vulcan will come into being which corresponds to the highest state of consciousness which can be attained by an initiate.

But this does not exhaust the relationships of the earth and the planets. We in fact can divide our present terrestrial stage into two parts. During the first it came about that our blood is red. What has given us our red blood? During the separation of the earth and the sun, this globe composed of fluid substance was shot through by other fluid forces emanating from the planet Mars. Before this passage of Mars not the slightest trace of iron existed on this earth. In fact, that is a result of this passage; all substances containing iron such as our blood have been subjected to the influence of Mars. Mars has colored the substance of the earth. And the appearance of red blood is the result of its influence. That is why the first half of earth evolution is referred to as the period of Mars.

At that time, iron was a fluid substance and the metals only hardened later on. Mercury is the only metal which has not solidified. When this will have happened the soul of man will have become totally independent of the physical body and astral imaginative vision will have become conscious. This fact is connected with the forces of Mercury which influence the second part of Earth evolution during which they will densify and finally become solid. The Earth is both Mars and Mercury. And it is this which Initiates have woven into our language by indicating that the days of the week belong to the planets of our evolution: Mars and Mercury are placed between the Moon and Jupiter.

The Interior of the Earth

Physical science as yet only knows of the terrestrial crust, a mineral layer which in fact is only like a thin skin at the surface of the earth. In reality the earth consists of a succession of concentric layers which we shall now describe:

1) The mineral layer contains all the metals which are found in the physical bodies of everything that lives at the surface. This crust is formed like a skin around the living being of the earth. It is only a few miles in depth.

2) The second layer can only be understood if we envisage a substance which is the very opposite of what we know. It is negative life, the opposite of life. All life is extinguished there. Were a plant or an animal plunged into it, it would be destroyed immediately. It would be totally dissolved. This second shell—half liquid—which envelopes the earth is truly a sphere of death.

3) The third layer is a circle of inverted consciousness. All sorrow appears there as joy. And all joy is experienced as sorrow. Its substance, composed of vapors, is related to our feelings in the same negative manner as the second layer is in regard to life. If we now abstract these three layers by means of our thinking, we would then find the earth in the condition in which it was before the separation of the moon. If one is able by means of concentration to attain a conscious astral vision, one would then see the activities in these two layers: the destruction of life in the second and the transformation of feelings in the third.

4) The fourth layer is known as water-earth, soul-earth, or form-earth, It is endowed with a remarkable property. Let us imagine a cube and now picture it reversed inasmuch as its substance is concerned. Where there was substance there is now nothing: the space occupied by the cube would now be empty while its substance, its substantial form, would now be spread around it; hence the term ‘earth of form.’ Here this whirlwind of forms, instead of being a negative emptiness, becomes a positive substance.

5) This layer is known as the earth of growth. It contains the archetypal source of all terrestrial life. Its substance consists of burgeoning, teeming energies.

6) This fire-earth is composed of pure will, of elemental vital forces—of constant movement—shot through by impulses and passions, truly a reservoir of will forces. If one were to exert pressure on this substance it would resist.

If now again in thought one were to abstract these last three layers just described, one would arrive at the condition in which our globe was when Sun, Moon and Earth were still interwoven.

The following layers are only accessible to a conscious observation which is not only that of dreamless sleep but a conscious condition in deep sleep.

7) This layer is the mirror of the earth. It is similar to a prism which decomposes everything that is reflected in it and brings to expression its complementary aspect; seen through an emerald it would appear red.

8) In this layer everything appears fragmented and reproduced to infinity. If one takes a plant or a crystal and one concentrates on this layer the plant or the crystal would appear multiplied indefinitely.

9) This last layer is composed of a substance endowed with moral action. But this morality is the opposite of the one that is to be elaborated on the earth. Its essence, its inherent force, is one of separation, of discord, and of hate. It is here in the hell of Dante that we find Cain the fratricide. This substance is the opposite of everything which among human beings is good and worthy. The activity of humanity in order to establish brotherhood on the earth diminishes the power of this sphere. It is the power of Love which will transform it inasmuch as it will spiritualize the very body of the Earth. This ninth layer represents the substantial origin of what appears on earth as black magic, that is, a magic founded on egoism. (See diagram)

These various layers are connected by means of rays which unite the center of the earth with its surface. Underneath the solid earth there are a large number of subterranean spaces which communicate to the sixth layer, that of fire. This element of the fire-earth is intimately connected with the human will. It is this element which has produced the tremendous eruptions that brought the Lemurian epoch to an end. At that time the forces which nourish the human will went through a trial which unleashed the fire catastrophe that destroyed the Lemurian continent. In the course of evolution this sixth layer receded more and more toward the center and as a result volcanic eruptions became less frequent. And yet they are still produced as a result of the human will which, when it is evil and chaotic, magnetically acts on this layer and disrupts it. Nevertheless, when the human will is devoid of egoism, it is able to appease this fire. Materialistic periods are mostly accompanied and followed by natural cataclysms, earthquakes, etc. Growing powers of evolution are the only alchemy capable of transforming, little by little, the organism and the soul of the earth.

The following is an example of the relationship that exists between the human will and telluric cataclysms: in human beings who perish as a result of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions one notices, during their next incarnation, inner qualities which are quite different. They bring from birth great spiritual pre-dispositions because, through their death, they were brought in touch with forces which showed them the true nature of reality and the illusion of material life.

One has also noticed a relationship between certain births and seismic and volcanic catastrophes.

During such catastrophes materialistic souls incarnate, drawn sympathetically by volcanic phenomena—by the convulsions of the evil soul of the earth. And these births can in their turn bring about new cataclysms because reciprocally the evil souls exert an exciting influence on the terrestrial fire. The evolution of our planet is intimately connected with the evolution of the forces of humanity and civilizations.

The Interior of the Earth:

1. Mineral crust
2. Negative life
3. Inverted Consciousness
4. Circle of forms
5. Circle of growth
6. Circle of fire
7. Circle of decomposition
8. Circle of fragmentation
9. Ego-centric-egoism

There are seven mysteries of life which up till now have never been spoken of outside the ranks of Occult Brotherhoods. Only in our age is it possible to speak of them openly. They have been called the seven ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unutterable’ mysteries. We shall attempt to deal with the fourth mystery, that of Death. These mysteries are as follows:

1. The mystery of the Abyss.
2. The mystery of Number (which can be studied in Pythagorean philosophy).
3. The mystery of Alchemy. (We can learn something of this mystery in the works of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme).
4. The mystery of Death.
5. The mystery of Evil (to which reference is made in the Apocalypse).
6. The mystery of the Word, of the Logos.
7. The mystery of Divine Bliss. (This mystery is the most occult).

In speaking of the planetary body which preceded our Earth—the Old Moon phase of evolution—we distinguished three kingdoms of Nature, very different from those we know. Our mineral kingdom did not then exist. It came into being as the result of condensation and crystallisation of what on the Old Moon was half-mineral, half-plant. Our plant-world has sprung from the lunar plant-animal. Similarly, the animal world has arisen from the lunar animal-man. So we see that on the Earth, each of these lunar kingdoms makes a descent into materiality. The same thing happens to the Beings who on the Old Moon were higher than animal-man: the Spirits of Fire. In that period man breathed fire, just as today we breathe air. This is why the legends and myths speak of fire as the primary manifestation of the Gods. Goethe alludes to this in Faust, in the words: “Let us kindle fire in order that the Spirits may clothe themselves as in a garment.” These Fire-Spirits of the ancient Moon descended to the air in the Earth period proper. They too have descended into denser materiality, into the air we inbreathe and outbreathe.

Now it is just because these Spirits have descended into the air that man can, by their help, rise to the Divine. A twofold movement occurred in the innermost nature of the beings dwelling in the Old Moon. Animal-man divided into two groups. In the one group, a brain developed under the influence of the inspiration and action of the Spirits of Fire who became Spirits of Air. The other group descended towards the animal kingdom. This division is now apparent in the very constitution of man, for the lower part of his being is more akin to the animal, while the higher rises towards the Spirit. According to whether the one or the other characteristic was more or less pronounced, two groups of human beings came into existence: the one bound by a lower nature to the Earth—the other more developed and free of the Earth. The first group grew more like the animals. The beings of the other group received the Divine Spark, the consciousness of ‘I.’ Such is the relation between man of today and the animals, more particularly the ape.

The physical correlate of this spiritual evolution was the growth and development of the human brain into a veritable temple of God. But if this had been the only evolution, something would have been lacking. There would have been minerals, plants, animals and human beings possessing a brain and a human form and figure, but something would have remained at the lunar stage of evolution. On the Old Moon there was neither birth nor death.

Try to conceive of man without a physical body. He would not pass through death; the renewal of his being would not be brought about by birth as we know it, but by some other means. Certain parts of the astral body and the etheric body would be subject to change, that is all. Around an imperishable centre, the surrounding sheaths alone would be the media of communication with the environment,—such was the condition of man during the Old Moon period of evolution; his being was subject to metamorphoses, not to birth or death. But in this state he had no consciousness in our sense of the word. The Gods who had given him form were around him, behind him, not within him. They were to him what the tree is to the branch or what the brain is to the hand. The hand moves, but the consciousness of the movement is in the brain. Man was a branch of the divine tree and if earthly evolution had not changed this condition of things, his brain would have been but a flower of the same divine tree, his thoughts would have been reflected in his countenance as in a mirror but he would have had no consciousness of his own thoughts. Our Earth would have been a world of beings endowed with thoughts, but not with consciousness, a world of statues ensouled by the Gods, above all by Jahve or Jehovah. What was it that changed this order of things and how has man arrived at independence?

The Gods of the nature of Jahve were able to descend into the human brain. But other Spirits who, on the Moon, had been of the order of the Spirits of Fire, had not completed their evolution, and instead of penetrating into the brain of man on the Earth they mingled with his astral body. The astral body is composed of instincts, desires, passions, and it was there that those Spirits of Fire who had not attained the goal of evolution on the Moon, took refuge. They found a home in the animal nature of man where the passions unfold, and at the same time they imbued these passions with higher qualities. They poured the capacity for higher enthusiasm into the blood and the astral body of man. The gift of the Jehovistic Gods was the pure, cold form of the idea; but under the influence of these Spirits—we may speak of them as Luciferian Spirits—man became capable of enthusiasm for ideas, of being passionately for them or against them. The Jehovistic Gods gave form and shape to the human brain; the Luciferian Spirits set up the connection between the brain and the physical senses; they live in the nerve branches which end in the sense-organs. Lucifer has lived in us for as long as Jehovah.

The fact that his senses give man an objective consciousness of the world around him is due to the Luciferian Spirits. Human thought is the gift of the Gods; human consciousness is the gift of Lucifer. Lucifer lives in the astral body of man, and Lucifer's activity comes to expression at the point where the nerves give rise to feeling and perception. That is why the Serpent in Genesis says: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ These words must be taken literally, for it was by the Luciferian Spirits that the senses of man were opened.

The individualisation of consciousness is due to the senses. If man's thoughts were not related to the sense-world they would simply be reflections of the Divine—not knowledge but belief. The contradiction between faith and science is due to this dual origin of human thought. Faith turns to the eternal Ideas, the ‘Mother-Ideas’ lying in the bosom of the Gods. All science, all knowledge of the outer world by means of the senses owes its existence to the Luciferian Spirits. In man, the Luciferian principle and Divine Intelligence are combined. It is this fusion of opposing principles which makes evil possible for man but it also gives him the power of self-consciousness, choice and freedom. Only a being capable of individualisation could be thus helped by opposing elements within his being. If when he descended into matter, man had only received the form given by Jehovah, he would have remained an impersonal being. And so it was due to Lucifer that man was able to become truly man, a being independent of the Gods. Christ, or the Logos made manifest in man, is the Principle which enables him to ascend once again to God.

Before the Coming of Christ, man embodied the principle of Jehovah (form) and that of Lucifer (individualisation). He was divided between obedience to the Law and the revolt of the principle of individuality. But the principle of Christ came to establish equilibrium between the two. Christ taught man how to find the Law which was originally laid down from outside, within the centre of individual being. This is what St. Paul meant when he said that freedom and love are the highest principles of Christianity. The ancient world was ruled by Law; Love is the governing principle of the new order of things. Thus three principles are inseparable from and essential to man's evolution—Jehovah, Lucifer, Christ. Christ Jesus is not only a Universal Principle; Christ is a Being who appeared once, and once only, at a definite moment in history. In human form, He revealed by His words and His life, a state of perfection which it is possible for all men ultimately to acquire by their own free-will. Christ came to the Earth at a critical moment, when the descending arc of human evolution was about to reach its lowest point of materialisation. In order that the Christ-Principle might awaken in man, the life of Christ Himself on Earth was necessary in a human body.

Karma is the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world; it represents the spiral process of evolution. The Christ Impulse intervenes in this karmic process and becomes its central pivot. Since He came to Earth the Christ has lived in the depths of every human soul.

When karma is conceived as a necessity imposed on man in order that his wrong doings may be redressed and his errors redeemed by an implacable justice working over from one incarnation to another, the objection is sometimes raised that karma must do away with the rôle of Christ as the Redeemer. In reality, karma is a redemption of man by himself, by dint of his own efforts as he gradually ascends to freedom through the series of incarnations. It is through karma that man is able to draw near to Christ.

The Christ-Impulse transforms implacable Law into Freedom, and the source of this Impulse is the person and example of Christ Jesus. Karma is not to be conceived as fatalism but as an instrument essential to the attainment of that supreme freedom which is life in Christ—a freedom attained not by defying the world-order but by fulfilling it.

Another objection is one that may be made from the point of view of oriental philosophy. It is said that the idea of a Redeemer of men does away with the logical concatenations of karma and substitutes for it an act of a miraculous Providence which intervenes in the universal laws of evolution. It is surely right and just that those who have committed sins should bear the weight of them. This is an error of thought. Karma is the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world, just as mechanical action is the law of cause and effect in the material world. At every moment of life karma represents something like a balance sheet, an exact statement of debit and credit. By every action, bad or good, man augments his debit or credit. Those who will not admit the possibility of an act of freedom are like a business man who will not venture to embark upon a new transaction because he does not wish to run any risk; he prefers always to keep the same balance sheet.

A purely logical conception of karma would prohibit one from helping a man in adversity. But there, too, such fatalism would be false. The help we give freely to another opens up a new era in his destiny. Our destinies are woven of these impulses, of these acts of grace. If we accept the idea of individual help, may we not conceive that a far mightier Being could help, not one man alone, but all men, could give a new impulse to all humanity? Such, indeed, was the act of a God Who was made man, not in order to defy the laws of karma but to fulfil them. Karma and Christ—the means of salvation and the Saviour. Through karma, the Act of Christ becomes cosmic law, and through the Christ-Principle karma achieves its aim—the liberation of conscious souls and their identification with God. Karma is gradual redemption, Christ is the Redeemer.

If men would steep themselves in these ideas, they would realise that they belong to one another; they would understand the law recognised in all true occult brotherhoods—namely that each individual suffers and lives for others. There will come a time in the future when outer redemption will coincide in each man with the interior act of the Redeemer. It is not revelation but truth which makes men free: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”

The path of evolution leads to freedom. When man has awakened in himself all those qualities which were prophetically manifest in the Christ, he will be a free being. For if necessity is the law of the material world, freedom is the law of the spiritual world. Freedom is only acquired step by step and it will not be fully manifest in man until the end of his evolution, when his nature will be truly spiritualised.

It has been said many times in the course of these lectures that Christianity marks the turning point of human evolution. All the religions have their raison d'etre and have been partial manifestations of the Logos, but none have changed the world so deeply as Christianity.—Those who ‘have not seen’ are those who have not known the Mysteries. Through Christianity, certain fundamental teachings of the ancient Mysteries—for instance those which dealt with morality, the immortality of the soul by Resurrection or the ‘second birth’—were given to the whole world.

Before Christianity, super-sensible truth was revealed in the rites and dramatic ritual of the Mysteries. Since then, we have believed in it as it was revealed in the Divine Personality of Christ. But in every epoch there has been a difference between esoteric truth as known to the Initiates and its exoteric form which has been adapted to the multitude and expressed in the religions. The same applies to Christianity. What is written in the Gospels is the message, the good tidings announced to all the world. But there was a more profound teaching; it is contained in the Apocalypse in the form of symbols

There is a way of reading the Apocalypse which only now can be made public. But it was practised in the Middle Ages, in the occult schools of the Rosicrucians. They paid less attention to the historic aspect of the writing, the question of its author and all the problems which occupy the minds of modern theologians who only seek to discover the outer, historical circumstances. Theology today only knows the shell of the Apocalypse and has neglected its essence and core. The Rosicrucians were concerned with the prophetic utterances, with the eternal truths.

Occultism in general is not concerned with the history of a single evolutionary cycle or period but with the inner history of human evolution as a whole. True occultism is at pains to discover the first manifestations of the life of our planetary system and the earlier stages of man's existence, but it looks forward through the millennia to a divine humanity, to a time when the Earth herself will have changed in substance and in form. Is it possible to predict the far distant future? It is indeed possible, because all that has finally to become physical in the future, already exists in germ, in archetypal form. The plan of evolution is contained in archetypal thought. Nothing comes into being in the physical world which in its broad lines has not been foreseen and prefigured in the devachanic world. Individual freedom and power of initiative depends upon the manner of the realisation of this truth.

Esoteric Christianity is not based upon vague and sentimental idealism, but upon a realisation born of a knowledge of the higher worlds. Such was the knowledge possessed by the author of the Apocalypse, the Seer of Patmos, who gave a picture of the future of humanity.

Let us try to envisage this future in the light of the cosmological principles which we have been studying in these lectures. Certain visions of the past and also of the future were revealed to the pupils in the Rosicrucian Schools and then, in order that they might interpret these visions, they were told to study the Apocalypse. We will proceed in the same way and consider how man has gradually become what he is today and what lies before him in the future. We have spoken of the ancient continent of Atlantis, and of the Atlanteans who had only a primitive consciousness of the ‘I’ towards the end of their period. The Post-Atlantean civilisations were as follows:

1. Pre-Vedic civilisation in the south of Asia and in India—the beginning of Aryan culture.
2. The epoch of Zoroaster, comprising the civilisation of ancient Persia.
3. Egyptian civilisation (including the Chaldean and Semitic). The first germs of Christianity were laid down in this epoch among the Hebrew peoples.
4. Graeco-Roman civilisation, the era of the birth of Christianity.
5. A new epoch commenced at the time of the migrations of the peoples and of the invasions. The heritage of the Graeco-Roman civilisation was taken over by the races of the North: the Celts, the Germanic peoples and the Slavs. We ourselves are living in this epoch. It is a later transformation of the Graeco-Roman culture, brought about by the invigorating impulses of new races under the influence of Christianity mingled with the leaven of the East which was brought into Europe by the Arabs. The essential mission of this epoch of civilisation is to adapt man to the physical plane to develop reason and practical logic, to immerse intelligence in physical matter so that matter may be understood and finally mastered. In this hard and difficult task which is reaching its culminating point in our own day, man has temporarily forgotten the higher worlds whence he came. If we compare our intellectuality with that of the Chaldeans, for example, it is easy to see how much we have acquired and yet how much we have lost. When a Chaldean Magus looked at the sky—which for us simply presents problems of heavenly mechanics—his feelings were quite different from ours. Whereas modern astronomy is concerned with calculations and abstractions, the Magus of old Chaldea sensed the deep harmony of the heavens as that of a living and divine Being. When he looked at Mercury, Venus, Moon or Sun, he not only perceived the physical light of these celestial bodies; he perceived their souls and he knew that his own soul was in communion with these mighty souls of the heavens. Their forces of attraction or repulsion seemed to be a marvelous symphony of divine will; the music of the macrocosm sounded in his being. Thus the ‘Music of the Spheres’ was a reality uniting man to the heavens. The superiority of the scholar in our modern age lies in a knowledge of the physical world, of mineral matter. What was once spiritual knowledge has descended to the physical world, to the world we know so well. But from now onwards we must strive to reach a knowledge of the astral world and of the world of pure Spirit by true clairvoyance.

This descent into materialism was necessary in order that the fifth epoch might fulfil its mission. It was essential that astral and spiritual clairvoyance should grow dim in order that the intellect might develop by dint of precise, minute and mathematical observation of the physical world. Physical Science must be supplemented by Spiritual Science. Here is an example: Comparisons are often made between Ptolemy's chart of the heavens and that of Copernicus. It is said that Ptolemy's chart is erroneous. Now this in itself is not correct. Both are true from different points of view. Ptolemy's chart is concerned with the astral world where the Earth is seen in the centre of the planets, including the Sun. The map of the heavens given by Copernicus was prepared from the point of view of the physical world—the Sun is at the centre of the solar system. The significance of Ptolemy's system will be recognised again in ages to come.

Our fifth epoch will be followed by another, the sixth. This sixth epoch will see the development of brotherhood among men, clairvoyance and creative power. What will Christianity be in the sixth epoch? To the priest in the Mysteries before Christ, there was harmony between science and faith. Science and faith were one and the same. When he looked up to the heavens, the priest knew that the soul was a drop of water from the celestial ocean, led down to Earth by the great streams of life flowing through space. Now that the attention of men is wholly directed to the physical world, faith has need of a refuge, of religion. Hence the separation between science and faith. Faith in the Person of Christ, of the God-Man on Earth has temporarily replaced Occult Science and the Mysteries of antiquity. But in the sixth epoch, the two streams will again unite. Mechanical science will become spiritually creative. This will be Gnosis-spiritual consciousness. This sixth epoch which will be radically different from our own, will be preceded by mighty cataclysms. It will be as spiritual as ours has been material. But the transformation can only be brought about by physical catastrophes. The sixth epoch will prepare for a seventh epoch. This seventh epoch will be the end of the Post-Atlantean civilisations and conditions of earthly life will be entirely different from those we know. At the end of the seventh epoch there will be a revolution of the elements analogous to that which put an end to Atlantis, and the subsequent eras will know a spirituality prepared by the two preceding Post-Atlantean periods.

Thus there are seven great epochs of Aryan civilisation in which the laws of evolution slowly come to expression. At first, man has within him what he later sees around him. All that is actually around us now, passed out from us in a preceding epoch when our being was still mingled with the Earth, Moon and Sun. This cosmic being from whom the man of today and all the kingdoms of nature have issued, is referred to in the Cabala as Adam-Cadmon. Adam-Cadmon embraced all the manifold aspects of man as we know him today in the various races and peoples.

All that lives today in the inner being of man, his thoughts, his feelings, will find expression in the outer world and become his surroundings. The future lies within man. He is free to make it good or evil. Just as he has already left the animal kingdom behind him, so the evil in him today will form a race of degenerate beings. In our age man can to a certain extent hide the good or evil within him. But a time will come when he will no longer be able to do so, when the good and the evil will be written in indelible characters upon his countenance, upon his body, nay even upon the very face of the Earth.

Humanity will then divide into two races. Just as today we see rocks or animals, in that future age we shall encounter beings who are wholly evil, wholly ugly. In our time it is only the clairvoyant who is able to see moral goodness or moral ugliness in human beings. But when man's very features express his karma, human beings will divide into groups of themselves, according to the stream to which they manifestly belong, according to whether the lower nature has been conquered or whether it has conquered the Spirit. This differentiation is beginning to operate little by little. When we derive understanding of the future from the past, and strive to realise the ideal of this future, its plan begins to unfold before us. A new race will come into being to be the link between the man of the present and the spiritual man of the future.

It was taught in Manicheism that from our age onwards the souls of men would begin to transmute into good the evil which will manifest in full force in the sixth epoch. In other words: human souls must be strong enough to bring good out of evil by a process of spiritual alchemy.

When the Earth begins to recapitulate the previous phases of its evolution, there will first be a re-union with the Moon, and then of this Earth-Moon with the Sun. The re-union with the Moon will mark the culminating point of evil on the Earth; the re-union with the Sun will signify, on the other hand, the advent of happiness, the reign of the ‘elect.’ Man will bear the signs of the seven great phases of the Earth. The Book with the Seven Seals, spoken of in the Apocalypse, will be opened. The Woman clothed with the Sun who has the Moon under her feet, refers to the age when the Earth will once again be united with Sun and Moon. The Trumpets of Judgment will sound for the Earth will have passed into the Devachanic condition where the ruling principle is not light but sound. The hallmark of the end of earthly existence will be that the Christ-Principle permeates all humanity. Having become like unto Christ, men will gather around Him as the hosts around the Lamb, and the great harvest of evolution will constitute the new Jerusalem.