The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The ways of karma are easier to understand if we consider what happens to the human soul between death and a new birth. Today we’ll therefore discuss different prospects that open up along the road which the soul has to follow between death and a new birth. A picture should unfold of what happens to the soul after death. And as we can only gradually enter into these regions in our thoughts and get accustomed to them, it would indeed be useful to let such thoughts pass through the mind on more than one occasion.

To look at what happens to the soul after death we have to understand above all that the relationship the human being has to the worlds around him is then completely different. It is always good to draw the parallel between death and sleep. Human beings as we now have them before us are made up of different parts. First of all we have the physical body. The ether body is like an archetype behind it. In a way, this ether body is the creator of the physical body. There is relative justification in saying that the ether body resembles the physical body. It is mainly in its head region, the upper region, that the ether body is a kind of double of the physical body. The ether body is the basis of our temperament, and also of the ideas that become established in the mind. If an idea becomes a permanent part of a person, so that it is always to hand, this means it has imprinted itself in the ether body. The ether body provides the basis for memory, and the densest part of the ether body is the basis for our conscience.

The third part of the human being is the astral body, the basis for appetites and passions and wishes that arise from human needs. There is no sharp dividing line between the ether body and astral body.

The fourth part of essential human nature is the I. It holds the germ of the immortal human being, the spirit human being or atman, the life spirit or buddhi, and the spirit self or manas.

When a human being lies asleep in bed, the ether body and the physical body remain connected. The astral body is lifted out. During the night, pain and pleasure and all other sensations vanish because the astral body has separated from the physical body and so there can be no perception of them. It is different when a person goes through the gate of death. We then have a physical body that has just been left by the ether body. In sleep, the ether body does not leave the physical body, but it does do so in death.

After death the physical body dissolves either by decay or by being burned, and its parts are given back to the physical world. The astral body and the ether body remain connected for a time. This is an important moment in life after death. At the moment when the ether body separates from the physical body but remains connected with the astral body, the whole of life presents itself to the human soul as in a tableau of memories. This happens because the ether body sustains memory. For as long as the ether body remains connected with the physical body, our memory is tied to the powers of the physical body. When the ether body has been lifted out of the physical body after death, all of it comes up at once in the soul, like a tableau of memories.

To our ordinary way of thinking it is difficult to imagine how such a long span of time can be apparent to the soul in one and the same moment. But another element also plays an important role here. In the physical world, every event in life brings pain and pleasure, eagerness or reluctance. And when we look back on our lifetime, eagerness and reluctance come back to mind again. After death, however, pain and suffering have gone. The images are objective and do not cause pain; they do not evoke personal feelings. A tableau of memories of this kind can also come up in life on exceptional occasions, for instance in individuals who are about to die of drowning or are in danger of their life in some other way. The best people to cite as witnesses for this are those who don’t want to know about spiritual investigation in any real sense, for instance the Viennese criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt.⁷⁷ He has told in his memoirs how on one occasion he was close to death on a mountaineering trip and how the whole of his life went through his mind at that moment. The phenomenon arises because something happens to the ether body when someone gets a major shock in life.

You know what it feels like when your hand goes to sleep. This is because the ether body has loosened. A clairvoyant is then able to see the fingers which have gone to sleep hang down limply from the hand, like a glove. Something like this also happens when you hypnotize someone. The clairvoyant then sees the ether head hang out of the physical head to the left and the right. When someone suffers a shock that touches the vitals, as in the case of drowning, his whole ether body is lifted out of the physical body. This then causes such a tableau of memories to appear.

A second death comes when the soul has lived in this memory picture for some time after death. The astral body with the I separates from the ether body. The ether body becomes part of the cosmic ether or the world of cosmic life in general, just as the physical body merges with the elements of the physical world. When the ether body first separates, it retains the form of the physical body for a time. You can see the ether body like a kind of spectre near the grave or somewhere else where the person has been. It has a tendency to stay close to the physical body.

We now need to see what happens to the astral body with the human being’s self-awareness. A particular kind of conscious awareness develops soon after the ether body has separated from the astral body. This is more powerful than ordinary dreaming. It enters into the reality of the astral world in a condition called kama loka, literally ‘desire world’. This does not refer to a place beyond the physical world, however. The worlds only differ in that one world is perceived with a different kind of organ from another. In the astral world, the human beings then lives surrounded by his astral body. It is a strange life he lives at this time. We can best understand it if we consider how the individual has lived until then.

Let us assume an average citizen of today has his favorite dish, something he really enjoys. This pleasure in his favourite dish is not in his physical body, for that merely takes in the food, in physical processes. Such physical processes may be chemical changes. But that is not the enjoyment of the food. The enjoyment is in the gourmet’s soul. It is the same with all pleasure and pain known to the soul. When the soul delights in beautiful colours or other things, a physical eye is needed if pleasure in the colour is to enter into the soul. The element in the soul that demands to be satisfied through the senses is kama. In the kama loka, the soul still thirsts for the pleasure but it no longer has the organs for this after death. The soul then develops an inner feeling of a particular kind. It may be compared to what happens in the soul if one walks through a desert where there is no well and suffers raging thirst. The condition after death is therefore due to the fact that one does not have the organs to satisfy one’s desires. The individual then experiences a raging thirst which will continue until all desire has gone. The more he has managed to free himself from the need to have his senses satisfied during life on earth, and the more he has made the beauty and the good of the world his own, things that are pure and independent of the body, the sooner will the time in kama loka be over. If he has already found his way into the world of the spirit, if the ideas and thoughts that are behind the world perceived by the senses have entered into his soul, the time in kama loka will be short.

Everything goes back to front on the astral plane, and things are the other way round, mirror images. Thus the figure 641 has to be read as 146 there. A passion which you produce comes towards you as an image, a wild animal, for example. In reality, however, this image comes from you yourself.

Human beings thus live once more through the physical life they have left behind, and do so in reverse. They live through the things that happened before death in reverse. This will take them back to childhood and they finally come free of all the things that tied them to physical life. The words ‘Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as does a child, there is no doubt that he shall not enter it,⁷⁸ are fulfilled. The individual has reached the point where he was before he incarnated. He will be as a child again. With this, he is ready to return to the devachan.

There are two ideas we must make our own. We have to consider an inner sensation that becomes very intense at the moment of death. At the same time as they have the memory picture, the individuals feel themselves growing larger and larger. The images that surround them, images of their past life, also enlarge. Still being in their ether body, they grow into their environment, as it were. When the human being is in his ether body and has relived an event that happened fifty miles away, it will be as if he expanded as far as the scene of that event. If he’s been in America, he’ll feel himself expand as far as America. Human beings feel themselves growing larger and larger in their ether body.

In their astral body, on the other hand, they feel themselves to be divided up into many different parts. They do not experience the astral body as something that is connected in space. There are gall wasps, for instance, where the front part of the body and the abdomen are only connected by a very thin stalk.⁷⁹ That is an example of how even in the physical world two parts that belong together may be connected by a very tenuous link. In the astral world it can happen that there is no link at all between two parts and yet the one belongs to the other and there is a definite feeling of their belonging together. In the astral body, human beings can be in all kinds of different places at once. If an individual going through kama loka has caused another person physical or mental pain at some time during life on earth, he will feel himself to be inside the other individual when he reaches that time in his journey back through life’s experiences and he will feel the pain of the other individual in his own astral body. All events and actions of the past life come up a second time in this mirror of inner sensations. This, too, is part of life in kama loka.

Let us sum up what has been said so far about life after death. The first thing is that everything we have experienced in life on earth passes before us without the individual feeling pleasure or pain. The second thing is that he goes through the suffering he has caused in reverse order. Two things remain for him. The substance of the ether body leaves him. but the powers of the ether body remain; an extract of all life’s experiences remains like a kind of residue. This extract absorbs the things he has done. He takes the experiences from the kama loka with him up into the devachan. The substance of which the human being must rid himself before entering into the higher life now separates off. The astral plane all around is full of astral corpses. This is the element the human being cannot take with him into the devachan. The astral corpse dissolves in the astral world.

To understand what a human being does in the devachan one must first of all consider the way life goes here on earth. The way we deal with life’s experiences here on earth is such that only an extremely small part is extracted; one could gain a great deal more from every event. This can be most clearly seen if we look at the matter the other way round. Remember, for instance, how you learned to write. This involved all kinds of experiences. They all condense into one thing—the ability to write. Something which initially occurred in an outward way in the world is transformed into an ability. All of life’s experiences hold that potential, that opportunity; they can later become abilities. Such is the transformation which takes place after death. When the individual is born again, much will show itself as ability or potential. The basic inner feeling on the devachan plane is that all life’s experiences are transformed into abilities. This gives a feeling of blessedness. A stream of blessedness then passes through the human being. The feeling may be compared to the one that goes through a hen’s soul when she hatches an egg. A soul always experiences a feeling of blessedness when it brings something forth. The higher the production, the higher the state of blessedness felt. This devachan feeling is no illusion. The relationships developed in this world are much more intense in the devachan than they are here. The barriers of space and time have gone. In this world one can truly enter wholly into another human being. The feeling a mother has for her child evolves from an animal level of feeling to become a moral relationship. Everything that is animal by nature drops away like scales during kama loka, and everything spiritual fills both entities in the devachan. All relationships that have developed here will be transformed with greater intensity in the devachan. When the human being has developed all that is necessary in the devachan, he is ready for a new birth.

All kinds of different forms and configurations exist in the astral world. One gets to know many different inhabitants on the astral plane. Thus there are forms that hasten through astral space at tremendous speed; they whirr through the astral world like bell—shapes. These are human beings on their way back to being born. When a human being has transformed all life's experiences into abilities in the devachan, he goes down to the astral world again. Just as a magnet attracts iron shavings, so do human beings gather the ether body for their next life as they return to the astral space. This happens with the help of other spirits. At the same time human beings are guided towards the parents who will be more or less right for the new incarnation. They can only be given the best possible body. Entering into the physical body happens not only from this one point of view, for the place and environment in which people develop is also determined. All this is determined by the things which they have done in the previous life on earth. The astral substance coming to them consists in the abilities they have gained. The ideas which have become an established part of the soul influence the configuration of the ether body. The ether body in its turn determined the nature of the physical body.

Now how do human beings come to be taken exactly into the situation into which they are taken when they incarnate again? Here we have to speak of mysterious influences around human beings. When someone has a thought, a wish, a sensation, these are initially experiences in the astral body. Inner feelings and thoughts that come to expression in the aura, are also forms on the astral plane. Anything human beings experience in the soul during physical life has a corresponding form in astral space. Physical experiences not only exist on the physical plane but also continue on the astral plane. Everything human beings experience deep down in the soul has its mirror image on the astral plane. Anything that is a quality of the ether body continues on the devachan plane. Just as every thought creates a form on the astral plane, so does every quality of the ether body evoke its counter image on the devachan plane. Our actions also have their counter images in higher worlds, and that means on the buddhi plane. Thus thoughts have their counter image on the astral plane, habits on the devachan plane, actions on the buddhi plane.

thoughts—astral plane
inclinations—devachan plane
actions—buddhi plane

Human beings are all the time populating the astral plane with thought forms, the devachan plane with forms that are their inclinations, the buddhi plane with reflections of their actions. All this is then around us all the time on the higher planes. That is one side of it. There is also another side. Imagine you have done something to someone, an action that has done him harm. During kama loka you experience this in yourself. The pain you then take with you as the pain you have experienced in the other individual becomes a power that is recorded on the buddhi plane. The unfolding of this power is prepared by being inscribed on the buddhi plane. Human beings are guided towards everything inscribed on the buddhi plane. Through the experiences that have come to them in kama loka they connect again with the consequences of their actions on the buddhi plane. Human beings are not yet able to live on the buddhi plane and therefore cannot do this themselves. They need guides. These are the Lipikas, the destiny gods.⁸⁰ They guide human beings to their destiny because they are not yet able to take hold of it themselves.

• 77. Benedikt, who by the way was a passionate mountaineer, had this experience not on a climbing trip but when he was about to drown. His description goes like this: 'From my childhood I had been very fond of water, and many of the things I experienced in connection with it stayed in my mind. I wanted to be a natural swimmer, and in the open-air Danube baths it happened that I went down. Fortunately I bumped into a post put there as a marker for bathers. It was no doubt scarcely 30 seconds that I had the feeling: I am drowning now. And I made the peculiar observation on myself that all life's memories passed before me at a tremendous speed within this short period. This observation is known in psychiatry, but few have had firsthand experience of it. I was 12 years old at the time.' Moriz Benedikt, Aus meinem Leben, Wien 1906, S. 35.
• 78. Matth. 18:3; Mark 10: 15; Luke 18: 17.
• 79. Cynipidae, usually small or indeed tiny, dark hymenopters that lay their eggs in plant parts, causing them to produce galls.
• 80. See Steiner R. At the Gates of Spiritual Science (GA 95), lecture of 26 August 1906. Tr. E. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1986.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Today I'd like to consider the question as to how far religious confessions can be seen, using specific examples, to have their foundation in the science of the spirit, or, as we may also put it, in occult science. I only want to consider a very small part of this subject concerning the spiritual scientific foundation of religions. You are going to see that this concerns a fact known to everyone in our civilization, even the most naive individuals, a spiritual fact that holds the most profound truths and fundamentals of the science of the spirit, and one only has to look for it to see how mysterious and full of wisdom are the connections that exist in cultural life.

Let us start with the question of Christian prayer. You all know 'Christian prayer’, as it is called today. We have spoken of it before and some people may well have asked themselves: ‘How does Christian prayer relate to the view of the world we have in the science of the spirit?’ Through this view of the world, members of the spiritual scientific movement have heard something about another way in which man, the human soul, can rise to the divine spiritual powers in the universe; about meditation, about that particular way of inwardly living with a spiritual thought; also something or other about what the great spirits that guide humanity have given us; or about the spiritual reality that lived and lives in the great civilizations. If we consider those civilizations we are given the means of entering for a short time in our souls into the divine and spiritual streams in this world.

Someone who meditates, even in the simplest way, using one of the meditations given by the spiritual guides of humanity; someone who meditates and thus lets one of the formulae, one of the significant thoughts, be present in his mind—you know it cannot be any kind of thought, but has to be something given by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Inner Feelings—someone who meditates and lets these formulae come alive in his heart, finds he has entered into the stream of a higher spirituality; a higher power flows through him. He lives in it. First he creates the ability to strengthen his ordinary powers of mind, to elevate them and give them life, and with sufficient patience and perseverance, perhaps having let this power flow into him to strengthen him morally and intellectually, the moment will come when deeper powers are aroused that lie dormant in every human soul, powers awakened by such a meditative thought. From the simplest way of gaining moral strength up to the highest regions of clairvoyant potential, all kinds of stages can be reached by meditating like this. For most people it is just a matter of time, patience and energy to reach the higher levels. Meditating like this is usually considered a more Eastern way of going to higher levels to meet one’s god. In the West, and especially in the Christian world, we have prayer instead, the prayer in which the Christian goes to higher levels, to his god, prayer in which the Christian seeks to gain entrance to the higher worlds in his particular way.

Now above all else we must be clear that much of what is thought to be prayer today would not have counted as such at all in the early Christian sense, and least of all in the view of the founder of the Christian religion, Christ Jesus himself. In truly Christian terms it never is prayer if someone asks his god for something to satisfy his own personal and egoistical desires. When someone pleads or prays for his own personal wishes to be met, he will soon reach the point where he completely forgets the universal and comprehensive nature of anything which is granted in answer to prayer. He thinks the divine spirit will specifically meet his own desires. A farmer who is growing a particular crop may need rain, perhaps, whilst his neighbour needs the sun to shine. One of them prays for rain, the other for sun. What is divine providence to do? And this quite apart from anything divine providence is supposed to do when two armies face one another in the field and each is praying for victory, each considering its own victory to be the only just and fair one. You can see immediately how little universality and general humanity lies in such prayers, and that if a god were to grant them, only one party would be satisfied.

Praying in that way people forget the prayer in which Christ Jesus set the basic mood that should prevail in any prayer, the prayer that says: ‘Father, let this cup pass; but not my will but your will be done.’⁹¹ That is the basic mood of Christian prayer. Whatever people intercede or pray for, this basic mood must be a bright note sounding again and again in the soul as someone seeks to offer Christian prayer. The prayer formula then becomes a means of raising ourselves to higher regions so that we may feel the god within us. The formula will then also drive away any egoistical wish and will impulse, so that the words ‘not my will but your will be done’ will have real meaning. We then give ourselves up to and enter deeply into the divine world. When we achieve this basic mood as the true mood for prayer, Christian prayer is exactly the same—only with more of a feeling note to it as meditation. And this Christian prayer originally was exactly what meditation also is. It is only that meditation is more at the level of thought, seeking to be in harmony with the divine streams that go through the world and doing so by means of the thoughts of the great guides of humanity. The same thing is achieved, but more at the level of feelings, in prayer.

We see therefore that in both prayer and meditation people seek to achieve something which we may call oneness of the soul with the divine streams that go through the world, something which at its highest level is known as ‘mystic union’ with the godhead. Prayer and meditation, are the first step towards this. Human beings could never unite with their god, they could never make connection with the higher spiritual entities if they themselves were not an outflowing from this divine spirit.

As we all know, man is dual by nature. He has the four bodies that make up his essential human nature, bodies we have often mentioned before—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. Within the I lies the potential for the future—manas, buddhi, atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being.

To gain the right insight into the way these two essential realities of human nature are related, we have to go back for a moment to the time when man came into existence. You all know from earlier lectures that man as he is today is a symphony of the two essential realities—threefold potential for the future in manas, buddhi and atman, his three higher principles on the one hand, and physical body, ether body, astral body and I as the four lower principles on the other. We also know that he evolved to be like this in a far, far distant past which we call the Lemurian age of the earth.

Going back from our present age, through the Graeco-Latin, then the Egyptian, Assyrian and Chaldean, the Persian and also the Indian civilizations, we gradually come, as we go further and further back, to the great Atlantean flood that lives on in the mythologies of all peoples, and to our ancestors who lived in the land that lay between Europe and America, a land which we call Atlantis. Further back we come to ancestors who lived in primordial times in a land which then lay between Australia and India. The higher trinity of man—spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being—did not unite with the four lower bodies, as we call them—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—until the middle of that period.

We have the right idea if we see it like this. During Lemurian times on this earth, the highest life form was not the physical human being we know today. There was just a kind of highly developed animal form which today envelops our present-day human being. At that time it consisted of the four lower bodies. Higher human nature, the eternal in man, with the three potential elements that will develop further in the future through manas, buddhi and atman, had until then been in the keeping of the godhead. To imagine what happened at the time, in a way that may be rather commonplace but does help us to see it, think of all the people who today make up the whole of humanity having developed bodies by then that would enable them to absorb the human soul rather the way a sponge is able to absorb water.

Think of a vessel filled with water. You’ll be unable to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. And then think of a number of tiny little sponges dipped into the water. What had been a uniform mass of water in the vessel, is now divided up among many tiny sponges. That is how it was with the human soul at that time, if we may use such a commonplace analogy. Before, they rested in the care of the divine prime spirit, and they were dependent, having no individuality; then they were absorbed into human bodies and thus made individual, like the water in the tiny sponges. The principle which was then absorbed by the individual bodies, which are the four lower principles, has continued on into our time, developing all the time, and it will continue to develop in the future. In the science of the spirit, or occult science, it was always called the upper trinity, and triangle and square were chosen, above all by the Pythagorean school, to represent this human being who came into being in the middle of the Lemurian age.

But as you can easily imagine, this upper, eternal principle which goes through all incarnations can be considered from two points cf view. On the one hand we may see it as part of humanity for ever and all eternity, and on the other hand as part of the divine spirit which that great spirit gave away at the time as a part or droplet of its own content, which is now down in the fourfold human vessel. A droplet of divinity became individual and independent as it came to rest in us human beings. You can see, therefore, that you may consider the three higher principles of human nature, the eternal in us, to be not only the three highest principles in human nature, but also as three principles in the godhead itself. If you wanted to enumerate the principles of the gods who gave humanity the soul droplet at that time, you would have to start with man and his physical body, continue with the ether body, astral body and I, go on up from manas to atman, beginning with manas, continuing with buddhi and atman, and go on to the principles that lie above atman and of which present-day human beings will only be able to have a idea when they become pupils of the initiates. So you see that we can also consider these three principles, which man has within him as his content, to be three divine principles.

Let us now look at them not as human but as divine principles, and describe them in their essential nature. The highest principle in the human being, atman, something we will develop at the end of this earthly, or, shall we say, present planetary evolution, can be characterized in terms of spiritual or occult science by comparing its essential nature with something of which present-day human beings have only a vague notion, and that is the will element in man. The basic character of this, the highest divine principle in us, is will-like by nature, a kind of will intent. The will, which is least developed in our inner nature today, will be our most outstanding principle at a future time, when we shall ascend higher and higher.

Today man is essentially a creature who seeks insight, with the will really still limited in all kinds of directions. We can grasp the universal nature of the world around us up to a point. But just consider how few of the things we are able to grasp are things we are able to will; how little power we have over the things we are able to grasp. The future will bring what we do not yet have. The will is going to grow mightier and mightier, until we reach our great goal, which in the science of the spirit is called 'the great offering' or 'sacrifice'. This consists in a power of the will where the spirit which wills is able to give itself up completely, not just giving the little a human being is able to give out of the weakness of his powers of feeling and will, but giving one’s whole existence, letting oneself flow out as an essential spirit right down to the level of material nature.

You’ll get an idea of what is meant by 'the great sacrifice', the highest form of the will in divine nature, if you look at it in the following way. Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror and your image is looking at you from this mirror. This image is an illusion but it is your perfect counterfeit. Now imagine you have died, giving up your own existence, your feeling, thinking and your very essence in order to give life to this image, making it into what you yourself are. To give up oneself and one's life to the image—this is something which in the science of the spirit has always been called the emanation, the flowing out. If you were able to do this you would find that you yourself are no longer there, for you have given away everything in order to resurrect life and conscious awareness in the image.

When the will has reached a level where it is capable of performing ‘the great sacrifice’, as it is called, then it makes, it creates a universe, large or small, and this universe is a mirror image that has been given its mission through the essential nature of its creator. We have thus characterized the creative will in the divine spirit.

The second principle we have to characterize in divine nature, in so far as it has entered into humanity, is already contained in the analogy we have made—it is the mirror image itself. Enter as actively as you can into a divine spirit that is the creator of a world and the centre of the universe. If you think of a point in this room and imagine that rather than by these walls, of which there are six, it is surrounded by a hollow sphere, the inner surface of which is a mirror, you will see yourself, the centre, reflected on all sides. You have the image of a divine spirit as a will centre that is reflected on all sides, and the mirror is the image of the godhead itself and also of the universe. For what is a universe? It is nothing but a mirror reflecting the essential nature of the divine spirit.

The universe is alive and active. And this is because the godhead emanates in making its great sacrifice, in reflecting its universe, which is like the enlivening of the mirror image we tried to imagine. The whole universe is given life out of the universal will that comes to expression in infinite variety. This process of infinite variety, infinite replication, this repetition of the godhead is known as the ‘realm’, as distinct from the ‘will’, in every occult or spiritual science. The will is thus the centre; its mirror is the realm, so that you may compare the will with atman or spirit man, and the realm, or mirror image of the will, with buddhi or life spirit.

Now this realm is such that it reflects the essential nature of the divine in infinite variety. Just look at this realm all around, in so far as it is our realm, our rich variety, our universe; look at its visible part in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The realm manifests in every individual form, and something of this still lives on in the German term Reich [meaning 'rich' as well as 'realm'; tr.], with the major divisions of our universe called the mineral, plant and animal worlds or realms. But if we also go into detail, then every detail, too, is divine by nature. Nature is reflected in all of it, just as the centre would be mirrored in the hollow sphere. And someone who looks at the world in the terms of occult research sees the god, an image and expression of the divine, in every mineral, every plant, every animal and every human being.

The divine spirit shows itself in infinitely many different forms of life in all their variety. If one has reached the level of perception in the science of the spirit that enables one to see the individual entities as having originated in the godhead, they are told apart by giving them a ‘name’. It is the name which the human being thinks of as the individual entity; it serves to distinguish the individual entities in this vast variety from one another. It is the third of the greatest three human principles that flow from the godhead and may be said to correspond to the manas or spirit self. The occult teaching of different religions also used to teach, naively, what had flowed from the godhead and flowed into you, becoming your eternal image.

If you wish to rise to the realm to which you are ultimately destined to rise, you will find that it is will-like by nature.

If you wish to rise to the buddhi, the bearer of this will, of this atman, its realm is of the divine.

And if you wish to rise to that which you perceive to be names, concepts or ideas of things—this is what name is within the realm of the divine.

What we have been considering is the ancient wisdom which tells us that name, realm and will make up the part of the godhead that has flowed into essential human nature to be the eternal part of it. We thus see that the three higher principles in man are part of the divine.

To complete our study, let us now take a look at the four lower principles of mortal man. We know of the three higher principles that they can actually be considered from the other aspect, since we consider them to be parts of the divine principle. In a similar way, the four lower principles of essential human nature can be considered to be parts of the transitory world and parts of human nature.

Consider the physical body. It is made up of the same material and the same forces as the seemingly lifeless world all around it. This physical body could not exist unless matter and energy were continually flowing into it from the physical world that surrounds it, building it up over and over again. Everything we have in the physical body is really in transit within it. Materials flow into and out of it which make up the outer universe as well as being inside us for a time. Mention has been made here on several occasions that the whole material content of the human body is renewed in the course of seven years. None of you have any of the matter in you today that you had in you ten years ago. Human beings renew the substance of their physical bodies all the time. The matter which was in us before is now somewhere else, distributed in the natural world outside, and other matter has come into us. The life of the body requires matter to come in and go out all the time.

Just as we considered the three higher principles in the essential human being to be parts of the godhead, so we can consider the four parts of lower human nature to be parts of the divine natural world.

We may consider the physical body to be part of the material part of our planet; its substance has been taken from this material planet and goes back again to it. If we consider the ether body, we must also see it as part of the world that surrounds us here, and the same holds true for the astral body.

Let us consider the life body or ether body and the astral body in context. You know that the astral body sustains everything we have by way of drives, desires and passions, everything that moves the human soul—joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, whilst the life or ether body relates to qualities of soul that are more lasting, of longer duration and sustains them.

On some occasions when speaking to you I compared the development of the life or ether body and the astral body with the hour and minute hands of a clock. I made you aware that when you recall things which you knew and which happened when you were eight and the things you know and that happen now, you'll notice a great difference. You have learned infinitely many things, taking up many ideas; as to the things you did when you were eight, many feelings of joy and pain may have come to mind again; not only come to mind, but also passed through it. But if you now compare this with your temperament, your character, your lasting tendencies, you will realize that if you had a violent temper as a child you will probably still have a violent temper today. Most people keep these basic characteristics for the whole of their lives. As we have stressed a number of times, occult training is not a matter of theory but of directing evolution to the structures in the ether body, which otherwise tend to be unchanging. A disciple has done more if he has changed one of these temperamental characteristics, his basic inclination, and thus made the hour hand move a little faster than would otherwise have been the case. All the things that evolve so slowly—our lasting habits and basic temperament—are embodied in the ether or life body. Everything that changes relatively more quickly, like the minute hand on the clock, is embodied in the astral body.

If you now apply this to our human environment, to our life in the outside world, you will see that your habits, temperaments and lasting inclinations connect you with your era, your nation and your family. The lasting, unchanging qualities which people have will be found not only in them but in everyone with whom they are in some way connected—family, nation and so on. Individual members of a nation can be seen to have the same habits and temperaments. This basic set of habits and inclinations which need to be changed if we want to go through higher development make up our higher nature. Because of this such an individual is called a 'homeless' person, for he must change his ether body which normally connects him with his people.

If we consider the communities we live in, into which we are born, we find that the character qualities through which we belong to a family, a nation, and through which we feel we have a connection with the members of this nation, are also similar to the character qualities that live in our era. Just think how little you’d have in common with a member of the ancient Greek nation. His ether body would have been very different from the ether body of someone living today. People understand one another because of the common qualities in their ether bodies. The quality that makes people stand out from the common characteristics, making them unique within the family or the nation, so that they are individuals and not just a French or a German person, a quality that can also transcend the sum of gender characteristics, is anchored in the astral body; the astral body sustains it. The astral body thus holds more the individual, personal aspect.

If someone errs through his ether or life body, he is more liable to be a sinner among the people he lives or works with, failing to play his proper role in the social sphere that enables people to have a social life. Sins of a more individual nature, so that a person errs in a personal way, are due to the qualities of the astral body.

Sins against the community that come from a faulty ether body have always been called ‘faults’ in occult science. The way the term ‘fault’ is used for a physical defect is close to its use in a moral sense. The problem is due to a defect in the ether body. Defects in the astral body, on the other hand, are called ‘temptations’. Temptation causes people to commit individual sins. The I can also fall into its own kind of error, as shown in the story of paradise. When the human soul came down, out of the keeping of the godhead, and for the first time entered into an earthly body, it was taken up into that body the way a drop of water is absorbed into a sponge, and the higher soul then developed I-nature.

This higher soul, I-nature, can commit errors within the I. Man does not fall because of faults in his ether and astral bodies, but there is a basic way of falling into sin and this is due to the fact that man has gained his independence. Humanity had to go through selfishness and egoism so that they might gradually gain freedom and independence in full awareness. Man came down as a soul that was part of the godhead, and the godhead cannot fall into egoism. Nothing that is part of an organism would ever imagine itself to be independent of it. If a finger were to think so, for example, it would tear itself away from the body and shrivel up. Human beings could never have gained the independence which they need to develop if they had not first gone through selfishness; this independence will only gain its true meaning once selflessness has become its basic characteristic.

Selfishness entered into the human body and this made man a selfish, egoistical creature. We see, therefore, that the I follows all the drives and inclinations of the body. The human being devours his neighbour, he gives in to all kinds of drives and desires and is wholly caught up in the earthly vessel, just as a drop of water is absorbed by a small sponge.

The paradise story refers to the sins man was able to commit once he had become such an I-creature, a truly independent creature. Before that he drew on the common source, like a drop that is still in water and takes its energy from the common body of water; now he has all impulses within himself. This is indicated by biting into the apple in the paradise story, and not for nothing, for in occult science, all true meanings of words have a deep inner connection. So the Latin malum means both ‘evil’ and ‘apple’. In occult science, the word ‘evil’ is only used for errors arising out of the I.

Evil thus is to do wrong out of the I. A fault is the kind of error the ether body falls into in social life, in the life that human beings live together. Temptation is something that may affect the astral body in so far as it may be defective on the personal, individual level. And so the error which the ether or life body falls into is ‘fault’, that of the astral body is ‘temptation’, and the I is capable of ‘evil’.

When we consider the way the four lower bodies of man relate to the environment, to the surrounding planetary body, we see that the physical body is all the time taking up physical matter to feed and maintain itself. We see that the life of the life or ether body here on earth comes into existence in that the individual maintains community with the people of the community into which he has grown. We see that the astral body maintains itself by not falling into temptation. And finally we see that the I maintains itself and develops in the right way by not succumbing to what we call ‘evil’.

Now imagine you have before your mind’s eye the whole of this human nature with its lower four and higher three principles and are then able to say: ‘A drop of the divine lives in the individual human being, and man is developing towards the divine, to let his deepest, inmost nature come to fruition.’ Once he has done this, he will have gone through a gradual process to transform his own nature into what is called the ‘Father’ in Christian terminology. The great goal of humankind which lies hidden in the human soul is the ‘Father in heaven’. To develop in that direction, we must have the power to develop our higher three and lower four principles to the point where they maintain the physical body in the right way. The ether or life body must then live in such a way with other human beings that compensation is made for anything that lives in it by way of faults; the astral body must not perish in temptation and the I not in evil.

Through the three higher principles, man must seek to rise to the Father in heaven—through the name, the realm and the will. The name should be seen as something holy. Behold all things around you; they reflect the godhead in their manifoldness. Saying their name you must once again know them to be parts of the divine world order. Let everything there is around you be sacred; and see something in the name you give it that will make it part of the divine. Let it be sacred to you, grow into the realm that has come forth from the godhead, and progress to achieve the will that shall be atman, but at the same time also part of the godhead.

Now think of someone who enters deeply in meditation into this aim of evolution, and needs to express this aim in seven petitions in a prayer. How will he put it?

To say what the aim of the prayer is, he will say: ‘Our Father, who are in heaven,’ before he says the seven petitions. This refers to the deepest part of the human soul, the inmost nature of man which according to Christian esoterics belongs to the realm of the spirit. The first three petitions relate to the three higher principles in the human being: ‘Let your name be holy. Let your realm come to us. Let your will be done.’ We now move on from the realm of the spirit to the earthly realm: ‘Let your will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’

The last four petitions relate to the four lower principles in human nature.

What shall we say of the physical body, so that it may be maintained in life on the planet? ‘Give us today our daily bread.’

What shall we say of the ether or life body? ‘Forgive us our faults, just as we shall forgive those who commit faults against us.’

What shall we say with regard to the astral body? ‘Lead us not into temptation.’

And what shall we say with regard to the I? ‘Deliver us from evil.’ You see, therefore, that the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer speak of how the human soul, if it rises to this in the right way, asks the divine will to guide the development of the individual principles of the human being in such a way that he may develop all aspects of his essential nature in the right way. The Lord’s Prayer thus helps the human being to rise in moments of need to the true purpose of developing his sevenfold nature. And even for the most naive of individuals who is quite unable to understand them, the seven petitions reflect human nature as it is seen in the light of spiritual science.

Any meditation formulas that ever existed with the major religions have come from occult knowledge. You may take all real prayers and analyse them word by word—you’ll never find them to be words put together at random. It has not been a matter of following a vague impulse and putting together nice words; no, the great initiates took the prayer formulas from the wisdom of old, something we call the science of the spirit today. There is no true prayer formula that has not come to life out of profound wisdom. Christ Jesus, the great initiate and founder of Christianity, had the seven principles of essential human nature in mind when he taught this prayer, which reflects those seven principles.

All the prayers thus show a particular order. If they did not they would not have had the power which they have had for thousands of years. Prayers have to show this kind of order if they are to be a power also for simple people who may not even understand the meaning of the words.

This will be clearer if we compare what happens in the human soul with something that happens in the natural world. Consider a plant. It delights you and there is no need to know anything about the great universal laws that have made it grow. The plant is there and can lift up your hearts. It could not have been created if it had not been for those original and eternal laws. Naive minds need not understand those laws, but a plant can only come into existence on the basis of these laws. To be effective, a prayer cannot just be invented at will but must have arisen out of the eternal laws of wisdom just as a plant arises on the basis of the eternal laws of wisdom. A prayer can have no real significance for those who understand and those who do not understand unless it has come from that wisdom.

We now live in an age when people who have looked at the plant for so long, letting it lift up their hearts, can be guided towards discovering the wisdom-filled content of those laws. For two millennia, Christians have prayed the way naive people may look at a plant. In future they will perceive how the power of the prayer comes from that profound original wisdom that has given rise to it. All prayers, and especially the Lord’s Prayer as the central, focal prayer of Christian life, reflect that original wisdom. And just as light comes to expression in this world in seven colours, and the tonic in music in seven notes, so does human life, rising to its god in seven ways in the seven different feelings relating to the sevenfold nature of the human being, come to expression in the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer, as we contemplate it in our souls, thus reflects the sevenfold human being.

• 91. Matthew 26: 39.

The last time I spoke to you we were able to see how a familiar old prayer truly reflects the whole way the human being is seen in the science of the spirit. We realized that the religious streams, religious teachings and rites have come from something which we ourselves have come to know in the course of time through the science of the spirit. The way we should see this is like this. Originally humanity started with a universal, all-embracing basic view which in the religious confessions of different nations finds expression in accord with the differences in national character. You may of course ask how exactly can it be that the basic truths, the basic wisdom of humanity are connected with what people of different nations have been told by the people who founded the different religions.

It really is quite remarkable that we find the basic concepts of spiritual science in the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. Many of the things we are now able to see through the science of the spirit must seem figments of the imagination to someone who has not given these things much consideration before, and he may easily say: All this has merely been put into knowledge you have obtained from the religious works.

If we are to go a bit more deeply into the question as to how the great wisdom of old originally came to be part of religious beliefs, we need to consider a basic question. We have to understand that anything we are able to know today, the things taught out of the science of the spirit today, were not presented in the same way in the earliest religious belief systems. We have to understand that the way in which such things were presented varied in the course of time. The old religious books you open speak to human beings in images and not ideas. These images, in many ways connected with ideas based on sensory perceptions, have been as far as possible preserved in those religious works. Thus insight is always referred to as a light, wisdom as a kind of fluid element, as water. If you look carefully, you’ll again and again find the same images in those very early times. There is a definite reason for this. Today we’ll bring together some of the things we know already so that we may enter really deeply into the way in which the very first teachers of humanity worked among the nations to which they brought the blessing of religious teachings. To understand how religious teachers worked who came before those whom we call the great initiates—Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses and finally the greatest, Christ Jesus—we must once more contemplate the difference which exists between people’s ordinary conscious awareness and their astral or imaginative awareness.

People generally have an object-related awareness from morning till night. This shows things in such a way that they appear to be outside the human being and that their properties are those we perceive with the senses. This is not the only form of conscious awareness. The other forms are, however, hidden from most people today; they lie in the vague darkness which we call dreamless sleep, though for initiates this has a specific meaning. For initiates who know the world behind the physical objects there is a further state of conscious awareness which comes between going to sleep and waking up. In this, they do not perceive the objects that exist here the way they are here, but they perceive a world of its own. For ordinary mortals, dreamless sleep is an unconscious state, but for initiates it is a condition in which they consciously perceive the world of the spirit. To understand how this unconscious state comes to conscious awareness we have to consider the intermediate state which we also know—dream-filled sleep. This shows common, everyday sensory perceptions or the inner states of the soul in allegorical form. But the image quality you have in your dreams is something you’ll also find if you study the conscious mind of an initiate when he is in the world of the spirit. He sees the things of that world in images, though these are not as chaotic as our dream images. The only thing they have in common with dream images is that they are always changing. This table and this chair always look the same once they are where they are. Plants and people, in so far as they are objects outside us, show the form they have at the time. But the more we go towards the realm of conscious life, the more do we find transformation—the plant germinating from its seed and developing stem, leaves, flower and fruit; the animal making voluntary movements, the human being we see in motion as gestures and physiognomy change.

All this does however have permanence compared to the things a human being experiences in the world of devachan when he has reached a higher level of development. There we see continuous change. Anyone who gains access to the world of the spirit by doing the necessary exercises will see how there the colour of a plant rises above the plant like a flame. He comes to see colours as configurations that rise and fall in free space. He will only come to true vision, however, when he is able to see colours and sounds by themselves and make them move towards specific entities. Such entities are always present around us. If you were able to take the violet from the flower so that the colour moved independently in space, this would reflect the life in the plant’s inner spiritual world. The human aura and the astral bodies, as we call them, act in the same way. All human inclinations, feelings of vanity and egoism appear as quite specific streams of colour in their auras, and we are able to say that the inner life of the soul comes to expression in the human aura. The aura is never still, nothing is stationary the way things are stationary here in the world we perceive through the senses. And when an entity in the world of the spirit has a feeling or will impulse, you can always see it reflected in quite specific changes in colour and sound. Constant change is the essential characteristic of the higher worlds.

This is of course confusing for anyone who is entering the higher worlds for the first time. It also happens because everything in these higher worlds shows itself the way it is at the moment. People can hide their inner life from those who are only able to observe them with physical eyes, but not from someone who is able to see with eyes of the spirit. Then all is revealed, and you have to say to yourself: If we want to study someone with the eyes of the senses, we have to draw conclusions as to his soul life from outer signs—the way he smiles or weeps. It is different in the higher world. There no conclusions regarding inner life are drawn from outer appearances. The inner life is openly displayed. We live with the essence of things there. In our time, only an initiate can develop this awareness, for he needs to be able to live in the higher world in conscious awareness. To the level of consciousness we have from waking up to going to sleep he can add another, and this enables him to add the inner to the outer. All people were able to do this in a way in the far distant past. Before the human race reached today’s state of conscious awareness, they had one where they saw things from the inside.

Going back into the far distant past we come to human beings who have less and less of the abilities we have today. Today we are able to count and do sums. In the middle of the Atlantean period you would find people who could not yet count and do sums, and there was no such thing as logic for them. In this respect the least of our schoolchildren today can do more than any Atlantean was ever able to do. But the Atlantean could do something else instead. Studying some life form, a plant, for example, he would have quite a specific feeling rise in him. Every plant had a specific feeling quality for him. Today people walk past plants in a way that is quite indifferent, but an Atlantean would develop lively sensations and feelings. If we go far enough back, to the times of the earliest Atlanteans, we would find that they also did not see the lively colours people do today. If such an Atlantean had walked up to a violet, he would not have seen it the way we have it here before us, but as if a kind of misty form arose before him. Nor would he have seen the red colour of a rose, but a red aura around the rose, with the red colour floating freely in space. If you look at a crystal today, it would be red if it were a ruby. The earliest Atlanteans would not have seen the colour in the crystal. The crystal would have been surrounded by a radiant circle of colour for them, and the ruby would have been like something cut out from this radiant circle. Going back to those times you go to a far distant past where human beings would not have seen the outline of other human beings, nor of a plant or an animal. Approaching someone who was hostile to them they would perceive a browny red colour. If they saw a beautiful blueish colour they would have been able to say to themselves: This person comes to me in peace. The inner life of a human being would show itself to them in such colours. Going even further back we come to the far, far distant past of ancient Lemuria, which lay between Asia, Australia and Africa. Not only did human beings have a different state of consciousness when they perceived things then, but everything we may call will impulse was also different. The will still worked through magic; it had power over other objects; it was like a force of nature that influences other objects. When a Lemurian held his hand above a plant and let his will go down into it, he could make the plant grow rapidly by just using his will.

The forces active in the natural world are exactly those that also exist in the human being. Because man has become a closed-off life form enclosed in a skin, his powers have gradually come to be more removed from and unlike the forces of nature. Human thinking is most unlike the forces of nature. To make mental connections and do sums is quite alien to anything that exists in nature. However, if you were able to go back far enough you’d see that there were life forms once, the mental ancestors of humanity, who would have considered it to be great nonsense, comparatively speaking, to say: 'I am forming an idea of something that is outside me'. They could not have said this, but they would have seen the idea, as it were, seeing it as an activity and even seeing the essence of it as an entity. To get an idea of this today you have to realize that the object was originally produced out of that idea. You get a notion of this if you think of the way something or other is produced by a person. You may think of a finished clock, the mechanism of it, and the way the hands move. You would not be able to do this if there had not been a clock maker earlier on to think the thoughts you are thinking now. You follow the thoughts he has put into the clock.

All ideas human beings are able to have today, everything our thinking does today, existed as a reality in our past, a reality that has been put into the objects. Everything is grasped in its idea. And once upon a time each of them was shaped according to the idea. The situation in the world was no different from the situation we have in the arts today. The ideas people develop today were originally put into the objects. If you were to go even further back you would see that those people could never have said: ‘I develop an idea by looking at things,’ for they truly saw what was happening there, how the idea was put in. They were watching the master craftsmen, as it were.

This gives you the difference between the rational thinking of people today and the intellect of those early times, which we’ll have to call creative. But if you were to meet those who still knew the creative mind from personal experience—very different from modern minds which merely take things in—you would find them to be very different from us. They had not yet incarnated in a human body. The essential human being which today dwells in the enveloping bodies was still in the keeping of divine spirits at that time.

Without noticing it, we have gone past a time in earth evolution that would appear like this, if we were to make the comparison: Physical life already existed on earth; forms had developed down below that were quite different from but in a way similar to today’s minerals, plants and animals, and others that were not yet human beings but were between animals and humans and ripe to be given the human soul. Their organization had reached a point where they would be able to receive the human soul. We can only make an approximation, but we may visualize human beings walking about down on earth who were really still animal-humans. Now think of the human bodies as small individual sponges and the souls as drops of water which at the time were still all united in a common body of water. So you have the physical earth teeming with fife, and enveloping it a soul atmosphere—rather like our air atmosphere today. Within that soul atmosphere everything was still undivided, like the drops of water. And what happened then was just like it would be if you now let the sponges absorb the water, with every sponge receiving a single drop. Common soul substance was absorbed into individual human bodies; it was divided among them. And it was only through this that the human soul came into being. Without this process, the human substance would never have divided into numerous single individuals.

This also began the process in which human beings gradually separated from the environment, and this would give them a distinct awareness of objects around them. Before this they did not develop concepts, for the soul was still wholly within the world soul, receiving the whole of its wisdom from the communal world soul as though it came from within. They did not need to look outside. We might truly say that this communal world soul could still do everything; it created everything that exists on earth today according to common concepts. Human beings received those concepts when that droplet of wisdom was given out by the communal world soul. That is the difference between the ancient knowledge before it was embodied in the flesh, and today’s knowledge which arises when human beings turn to the outside.

The moment we no longer perceive with the senses, our inner life goes down into the indefinite sphere of darkness we call dreamless sleep today. The physical body and the ether body remain lying in the bed during sleep, the astral body goes outside. What is it in the human being which perceives the outside world? The astral body perceives colours and sounds. The astral body experiences pleasure when we enjoy something pleasurable and it feels pain as such. But this astral body cannot do anything in the human being today unless it is in a physical body, for it needs eyes, ears and all the physical tools to perceive the environment and also pleasure, pain, sorrow, joy, and so on. The physical body is just a tool, but it is necessary to today’s astral body. The moment the astral body is outside the physical body it no longer has perceptions.

This is the very astral body which in earlier times was in the common soul substance that surrounded the earth. If you were to separate out all astral bodies and put them together, you would have the astral or soul substance which at that time existed around humanity. If we were able to get all human beings on earth today to fall asleep at the same time, so that the whole human race would be asleep at once, and if we were to lift out all the astral bodies and mix them into the rest of the substance, we would see dreamless sleep come to an end altogether. The souls would no longer perceive colours and sounds with their external tools, but colours would begin to rise on all those astral bodies, and constantly changing colour images would be floating all around, and sound would begin to arise within. All this would then surround the earth again, the way it was in those times before any soul ever came to enter into a body. The dimming of that ancient state of conscious awareness, something you know from your dreamless sleep today, occurred because the common astral substance was divided into individual parts by the world soul and these were absorbed into human bodies. You can go even further. At the time of which we are speaking, night as we know it today, with the human soul going down into an indefinite sphere of darkness, was wholly filled with light; it was day. So you have now been taken to a condition where humanity had astral perceptions, though not in a physical body.

Now let us ask the question as to what humanity has actually gained since those days. What has been added to what human beings had already? What has humanity gained through incarnation? They have gained the ability to say ‘I’ to themselves. The whole level of consciousness, however clairvoyant, was merely a more or less enhanced dream level of consciousness. Human beings had no self awareness at that time, so this is what humanity has gained. It is the gift which God gave them. Religious records such as the Bible tell us that human beings were given self-awareness at the time when they incarnated. They did not know it until then, and this self-awareness will be progressively enhanced in present-day humanity. It is the principle which from the time when we were no longer in a dim or clairvoyant state of consciousness came to be revealed as the ‘I am’, and we can call it by no other name but ‘I am the I am’. This, then, is the word of Jahve: ‘I am he who was, who is, and who shall be.’⁹²

We have thus gone back to a time when this ‘I am’ word was still extinguished. It was not yet in the human being. Human beings had a conscious awareness that had been poured into them and which they did not gain by looking at outside objects. Where did the ‘I am’ awareness reside? Divine spirits had such awareness. Human beings gained it after incarnation in a physical body. There you have the difference between the Holy Spirit, as it is termed among Christians, and the spirit as such. The Holy Spirit is the one which had self awareness up above, before incarnation; the spirit as such had self awareness in the human being. If you were to throw all self awarenesses into one pot, separating them from egoism, you would once again have the Holy Spirit.

You now have the point we started from in its most radical form. We have found our way back to a very strange way of teaching. Today we teach face to face, with the student told: This is how things are. In those times only one thing was possible, a method of teaching that was at the same time also work, doing. Wisdom was poured out into individuals. The wisdom did not come from outside; it came to human beings from inside, a process known only to initiates today. If you were now to move on to our own time from the times I have been speaking of just now, when there was no teaching but only enlightenment from inside, you would pass through an intermediate period where people were half in the one state, we might say, and half in the other. This was the middle of the Atlantean age. People were then able to see definite outlines to things, and would gradually see colour covering the surfaces of objects, see how individual things gained characteristics. But the way they would see it was as if it was all enveloped in a mist of colours. They would still hear sounds that went through the whole world, wise sounds that would tell them something and bring them knowledge of other entities. But everything was still very confused at this intermediate stage. It was also the time when a way of teaching began that gradually changed to become the later way of presenting religious contents to humanity.

If we were able to go back to Atlantean times, we would find a major school for adepts. People are able to take in wisdom today due to the fact that the Turanian adepts of those times had pupils; those pupils then instructed others and so on, until our own time, so that we have a direct tradition going back to Turanian adept schools⁹³

People were put into a trance to teach them wisdom. Something which would be wrong today was perfectly normal then. The individual would be put into a kind of sleep state, and this sleep state was used to enlighten him in the following way. Before the human soul first incarnated in a body there was no night, all human beings were enlightened. Dreamless sleep was the state in vhich they then had sensory perceptions. They no longer had these by this time. The faculty had gone, and instead they had the ability to see objects in general outline. Inner perception was lost to the same degree as external sensory perception increased. But a special skill had been developed among the adepts; they had learned what we would call occult writing today, or we might also call it occult speech. You all know that there are mantras, ancient formulations of prayers, and that the sound of the words has a certain influence. This holds true for the first words in the Gospel of John. When it says: ‘In the original beginning was the word’, the ‘original’ carries a specific value which originally was inherent in those first words in the Gospel of John altogether. All this is but a shadow compared to the sound compositions used in the adept schools. This made up for the capacity for enlightenment which people had lost. They were able to receive this enlightenment in a trance from another individual who was an initiate. The pupils were thus given a kind of artificial enlightenment by their more advanced brethren, so that they would see the spirits at work again, like before, at work in a world that had always been there around them before the human soul had incarnated. Those were the experiences the pupils would have in Turanian times; those were the first religious instructions; this is how they were taught the laws of the cosmos.

Enlightenment of this kind would give the people formulas and line drawings, for drawings, too, would have an influence. A line following a specific law would have the effect of teaching people great secrets of the world. If you drew a vortex for someone, it was something he would not have seen with his eyes open. But if the vortex was shown to him when he was in a trance, or if it was tapped out, this would have evoked quite specific inner responses, for example the way a plant develops until it produces seed and then a new plant grows from the seed. Such formulas and such lines were later handed down from the adept schools and given to the nations by the founders of the different religions.

The further back we go, the more is the soul principle that was distributed among individual human beings a uniform soul. When the individual souls were distributed they were closed off from one another, and they then grew different. In sleep, all astral bodies are still similar to one another today. In the daytime they look fairly different from each other. And that is how it was in this trance state in which the astral bodies that were given instruction were really fairly similar. It was therefore possible to convey a certain original wisdom to them all. But when human beings were no longer able to receive wisdom in this way, the teaching in ancient India had to be the way the Indian body required it, in ancient Persia as the Persian body required it, and different again in Greece, in Egypt and among the ancient Germans. The outer physical bodies required this, according to the different influences that were brought to bear on them. The founders of the original religions had cast their teaching in the forms we now know from tradition as Egyptian Hermetic teaching, the teaching of Zarathustra, and so on.

But in all the basic forms of true religions there still lives the principle out of which they have arisen. The enlightenment given to human beings in earlier times was something very different from what can be done today. Things were conveyed not by teaching but in a living way. A pupil would relate to his teacher in a much more intimate way then. You can imagine perhaps that a vortex would elicit a direct inner response. Today, concepts are conveyed, and our inner responses have to catch fire from those concepts. But the religious formulas arose from exactly this way of influencing people through life itself. The sevenfold nature of man was one of the things that was made known in the Turanian adept school. And it still makes up the hidden thoughts in the Lord’s Prayer today. The Lord’s Prayer reflects the sevenfold nature of man.

This would be made clear to the disciple of the Turanian adepts by letting him hear a scale, the seven sounds of which represented the seven parts of the human being, with certain colours shown and a scale of aromas. The principle that lives in the sevenfold harmony of the scale would become an inner experience; the external things were just a means to this. The founders of the great religions then poured this into a number of formulas, the greatest of them the Lord’s Prayer, and everyone who says the Lord’s Prayer is influenced by it.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer and as such is not a mantra. It will still have meaning when thousands and thousands of years will have passed, for it is a thought mantra. The effect of the Lord’s Prayer was poured into the thoughts, and just as we are well able to digest food without having a physiologist tell us how the digestive process works, so will someone who says the Lord’s Prayer feel the effect of it even if he is not told all about it The effect of the Lord’s Prayer is there, for it lies in the power of the thoughts themselves. There is, however, higher knowledge that will give the Lord’s Prayer deeper meaning, and no one should reject this. This, then, is the road that has been taken by the religious truths. Your souls, living in your bodies today, once lived in the common divine spirit substance and were enlightened there in a sleepwalking state. Without self-awareness, they were able to perceive the divine spiritual powers at work. Then the souls were incarnated. The old way of perception became more and more obscured and they finally were also no longer able to produce this state artificially, the way in which it was still done at the Turanian adept school. The religious teachings and formulas which have come down from the original wisdom that once created the world are a mere echo of the inner responses that can be passed on from one individual to another. The wisdom of the Old Testament is like something spoken by the first and original ideas, the original wisdom that is at the bottom of all things, a wisdom which your soul once had. In future, human beings will have this again, this wisdom they originally had in a dim dreamlike consciousness; but they will have it in bright, clear conscious awareness, from the soul. Human beings will have their present bright, clear conscious minds and also enlightenment. Humanity had to give up the original clairvoyance in order to gain self-awareness, and as this clairvoyance grew less and less, inner self-awareness developed more and more. Once this has reached its peak, the human being will have come to his last incarnation, bearing the old clairvoyance within him as the fruit of life that is also an element which has been newly acquired.

A phrase one often hears is that people should gradually lose themselves in a common consciousness, that redemption lies in their losing their present-day conscious awareness and becoming part of a collective mind and spirit. But that is not how it is. Our self-awareness, which once did not exist at all, will continue to exist after our last incarnation. Everything that had separated out from the common spiritual substance will come together again.

You can visualize it like this: Initially you had clear water, and this was absorbed into the many small sponges. During this period of separation, everything in the environment that can be taken up will be taken up. Every droplet gains its own special colouring. When the small sponges are squeezed dry again, each brings its own colour with it. That is a vast variety of colours, shimmering, more beautiful than it could ever have been before. On returning to the collective spirit, every human being brings his own colour note with him. This is his individual conscious awareness, something that can never be lost. The collective consciousness will be a symphony of all individual conscious minds, a harmony. The spirits that have gone through the human stage will freely unite and be one. They will continue to be many individuals, but they will also be one because they want to be one though they are not forced to be so. All have retained the conscious mind, and through their will they all come together in a conscious awareness that is one. This is how we should think of the beginning and end of our present world process.

We must not use phrases but consider things the way they are. To talk of ‘losing oneself in a common consciousness’ is a pantheistic phrase. It is exactly when we speak from the point of view of eternity that we shall have to consider words that will show that humanity has not existed for nothing, that it had significance within the universe. In other words, someone who studies the real facts in this world will finally say to himself that man is destined to contribute, to give meaning to this life. Ultimately he will have to place the piece he has gained for himself on the altar of the godhead. And this creates a fabric, as it has been put so beautifully, which the whole spirit of the earth is weaving. This holds all the human ‘I’s, and Goethe spoke as a true initiate when he described it as a real process:

I ply on my wave
With weaving motion
Birth and the grave,
A boundless ocean,
Ceaselessly giving
Weft of living,
Forms unending,
Glowing and blending,
So work I on the whirring loom of time,
The life that clothes the deity sublime.⁹⁴

The deity will wear the immortal garb when earth will have reached its completion. Individual human beings will have woven the fabric as they moved up through their individual incarnations, always going through birth and death.

• 92. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 93. The Turanians were the fourth sub-race on Atlantis. See Steiner R. Cosmic Memory (GA 11), chapter on our Atlantic ancestors. Tr. K. E. Zimmer. New York: Harper and Row 1981
• 94. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.

Today I’d like to tell you some more and expand on the theme of human biography from my last lecture.⁹⁵ We can consider some more subtle aspects and also add something here and there that had to be left out in the public lecture. Above all I would like to present human biography to you as a whole, in all its greatness. I’d like to show you how human beings, the way we have them before us today, are indeed a kind of microcosm, a small world. Everything we have all around us, not only on earth but in a way also in the starry heavens, is in us, being part of the laws that govern our evolution.

You may remember that reference has been made on several earlier occasions to the fact that our earth has to go through an evolution which is similar to that of the human being, that our earth has not always been the planet on which we live today, but that it is a reincarnation, as it were, of earlier planets. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit, we can say that our earth has evolved from a planet that preceded it, though this was a vast number of years ago, and, as we have said several times before, this planet is called ‘Moon’ by occultists. It should not, of course, in any way be confused with our present-day moon. Today’s moon, a satellite of our earth, is a kind of cinder that has been cast off as being of no further use. You could see the predecessor of our earth develop if you were able to stir together everything our present-day earth and moon are today and everything of soul and spiritual quality they contain. This would give you a planet that would more or less be the predecessor of our earth, the Moon. On that Moon, from which our earth has gradually evolved, the physical human beings did not yet have their present form. A kind of physical predecessor lived on the Moon, but this predecessor still had very much an animal nature. You should not think that today’s human being was present in the animal-human being on Moon. On ancient Moon, creatures walked about that had animal and human nature, higher than today’s mammals but lower than today’s human beings. The soul human beings have in them today was not yet present in the Moon human being. At that time it enveloped human beings, just as they have an invisible aura around them today.

I have said on several occasions that the human astral body leaves the physical body at night. In sleep, it is merely connected with the physical body by an astral strand in the region of the spleen that can be perceived by a clairvoyant. The spleen does not only have a physical function; it also serves to provide the connection between man’s physical part and his spirit and soul. The spleen is the point where the physical body connects with the astral body. It is because of this that you’ll read in any anatomy book that nothing much is really known about the spleen. It is one of the organs that are on the borderline of being physical organs. The astral body, which in sleep is thus only connected with the physical body through the spleen, works to rid the body of matter created by tiredness. To the clairvoyant, the sleeping human appears to be enveloped in a strange cloud that is continually working on the physical body.

In the earth’s Moon state, the part of the human being which today is outside the physical body during sleep was outside all the time. It was connected with the general divine spirit of the world. Part of the spirituality enveloping the Moon only separated off for human beings during earth existence. Occultists may indeed say that human beings had a predecessor who was animal-like in spirit. But if you were to take materialistic thinking to be the only kind that has validity, the present-day human being would never have evolved from this predecessor. The principle which had been working on human beings from outside had to enter into them and develop in order to achieve the later stages. The ensoulment spoken of in the paradise myth did therefore truly take place on earth. This paradise myth is something you may take literally in the widest sense. The air which surrounds us today was the true body of the human soul on the Moon. At that time the air was still wholly filled with spirit. Just as today’s earth is surrounded by physical air, so the Moon was enveloped in something that was full of soul substance. Now you’ll understand why the air has grown soulless and physical. The soul entered into the body: ‘And God breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’⁹⁶ This paradise myth contains the most profound wisdom.

On the Moon, a physical body in the cosmos, the human being was therefore still much less perfect as a physical entity, and everything else therefore had not reached the level it has today. This Moon body is something I have also described to you several times before. Let us recall what it may have looked like. Rocks, soil, the kind of solid ground on which we walk about today did not exist on the Moon. The ancient Moon as a cosmic body was a kind of half living creature. Imagine a peat bog, though with more life in it than today’s peat—a vegetable mush, if you like, like spinach perhaps. This mushy substance contained woody material. Instead of the rocks we have today, there was a kind of woody foundation on the Moon, and above this a mass that was half plant, half stone. Life-forms grew on this that were halfway between plants and animals—plant-animals we might say. Today’s parasitic plants are descendants of the plants that lived on the Moon, above all mistletoe. This can only grow on other plants because it is a relic, a plant that grew on a vegetable base on the Moon. This is why mistletoe plays such a role in popular tales.

Human beings were at a higher level of development than those life forms that were half plant, half animal. If the Moon had stayed the way it then was, if it had retained all those things, human souls could never have managed to develop Moon's animal-human being further, to become today’s human soul. The whole substance of the Moon was not of a kind that would allow human beings to be taken further in their development. For this to happen, it was first of all necessary to cast out the material that is in our present-day moon. This alone made it possible to develop the animal-human being to the human being of today, using the earth’s material. We thus have a predecessor of our earth which we call ‘planet Moon’. In it, our present-day earth was united with the present-day moon, which was merely discarded in order to obtain the purified substance that would make it possible to develop human beings in their present form.

Further back in time, our earth was a planet which is called ‘Sun’ in occult science, though again it was not the same as our sun today. If you were to stir together our present earth, our present sun and our present moon, with all the creatures and spirits that belong to them, you would have the earlier planet Sun. Cosmically speaking, the sun is a much more advanced entity than our earth. It is inhabited by spirits who live permanently in the condition in which human beings only find themselves when they are in the devachanic world between death and rebirth. They are devachanic spirits whom we might call our devachanic comrades. They had previously gone through the stages human beings are going through today. To enable them to reach the Sun stage, they on their part had first to remove the Moon of that time, just as today’s earth later had to remove the present-day moon. This had to be taken out of the Sun as it then was, and the planet then advanced to being a fixed star. A star is not fixed from the beginning. In reality a fixed star has evolved from a planet. Our earth, too, will one day be a fixed star. It will then also be a sun, and the inhabitants of our earth will then exist in the spirit, as the sun’s inhabitants do today. First, however, the moon had to be cast out.

That Sun had in turn evolved from a planet which goes so far back that present-day humanity cannot easily gain an idea of it. This would need a high level of initiation. That planet is called ‘Saturn’. It became Sun, Sun became Moon, and Moon became earth. Earth will change into ‘Jupiter’, Jupiter into ‘Venus’, and Venus into a planet called ‘Vulcan’.

Someone may come and ask: ‘There’s a Venus in the heavens today, and also a Jupiter. How do all these planets relate to one another?’ It would be quite the wrong idea to think that our present-day humanity has ever been on the Saturn which is out there in the cosmos today. It would be like having a child of six and a man aged fifty before us and thinking that the child’s powers could ever pass over to that man. The man has once been a child of six, he has gone through exactly the same stage. And that is how it is with today’s planet Saturn. It has nothing to do with earth evolution, but represents the stage at which earth has once been. Just as the fifty-year-old man has once been what the six-year-old boy is today, so our earth has once been in a condition similar to today’s Saturn, today’s sun and today’s moon. But if you look at today’s Venus, that is the condition in which earth will be in future. The earth will be in that condition one day. The planet Venus is not just any heavenly body which man will inhabit one day; no, the earth will be Venus one day. These are generic terms representing the specific stages reached by a planet.

The way they are today, human beings consist of a physical body which has the same substances in it as the whole mineral world. They also have an ether body, which plants also have, an astral body, which animals also have, and an I. If we go back to ancient Saturn, human beings—our physical ancestors—had nothing but the potential for a physical body. The potential for an ether body was added on the Sun, the potential for an astral body on Moon, and the I evolved on earth. This is the meaning of those consecutive stages of development.

On ancient Saturn, nothing existed that would be like a present-day physical human body. When Saturn was at its densest, it was as follows. When I talk, I set the air in wave motion. If you did not need to hear what I am saying, if I were able to set the air in motion without speaking, you would be able to see the wave motions of my words—quite specific movements in the air—you would see images of my words. If you had the context, you would be able to see from those waves what I had been saying. My words are the reason why the air is in motion here. Now just imagine you were able to freeze the air waves at one moment. My words would then fall to the ground, you would have something like oyster shells on the ground and be able to see the shapes of my words in air which had grown solid. This is more or less how you have to visualize the human body, the animal bodies, the plants and mineral crystals on Saturn—dissolved out of their stillness and in an air-like state. For on ancient Saturn all this lived only as a heaving, boiling mass of air. Today’s crystal is boiling Saturn matter that has become solid. It is the same with the plants and animals which existed on ancient Saturn as wave motions in the light, subtle Saturn matter. It was just as if higher spirits were speaking all the plants, creatures and minerals into the Saturn matter, just as I create waves in the air by speaking now. The creative spirits of Saturn set Saturn matter into inner motion, and those were the precursors of later plant, animal and human bodies.

That was the beginning of our evolution—‘In the beginning was the word.’ The word sounded through Saturn matter and all creation was wave motions in this Saturn matter. Think of Chladni’s figures for an analogy. If you take a brass plate sprinkled with fine sand or dust and make it sound, using a violin bow, you will get all kinds of figures on the plate. This is because you were holding the plate still and playing the bow against it. The movement of the bow creates a sound with specific waves and lines. The dust remains on parts of the plate that do not take up the wave motion and is shaken off elsewhere. You can evoke the figures from the tone colour, as it were, just as once—through the ‘word’ in the beginning—they were spoken into matter. Matter was given inner form and organization according to the laws of sound waves. And little by little solid bodies arose from the sound waves.

On the Sun, the ether body was added, filling part of the forms that had evolved on Saturn with spirit. The form thus filled with spirit progressed to a kind of plant existence. On the Moon, the astral body was added. Here the life forms advanced to a kind of animal existence. On earth, then, came ensoulment with the I. Humanity could only come into being on earth, however, if the predecessor of the earth cast off what has become physical moon matter today. Certain constituents will need to be removed from the earth as evolution continues, so that man may progress to Jupiter existence, to Venus and to Vulcan.

You need to be clear in your minds that in occultism careful distinction is made between the first and second halves of the earth stage, for in its first half, earth passed through Mars. The potential was gathered then to produce warm, red blood. The earth’s iron content comes from Mars, and the incorporation of iron in the blood comes from that passage through Mars. The initiates of ancient Greece and Rome who knew that humanity was given the element of courage, of aggressiveness, with the iron, would therefore refer to Mars as the god of war. The names which astronomers give to newly discovered stars today are chosen at will. In those days the name was still seen as something taken from the nature of the thing. The courageous nature of the soul is thus connected with powers which earth owes to Mars. Mars was therefore given the name of the war god because of the quality of courage. The second half of the earth stage on the other hand is more and more connected with powers which earth will one day owe to Mercury. The connection between earth and Mercury is of a more spiritual nature, however.

The following, then, are the different stages of our planet—Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars (because that powerful influence came from there), then Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. This comes to expression in the sequence of weekdays. The initiates referred to the sequence of earth incarnations in the names they gave to the weekdays. You have to start with Saturday, which was the Saturn day. It is still called Saturday in English, Zaterdag in Dutch. Then comes Sunday, Monday, and the Mars day, mardi in French; Ziu was the god of war in old German, hence ‘Ziu's day’, English Tuesday. Wednesday is a more exoteric name in German (Mittwoch = midweek, translator). The ancients called it Mercury day, mercredi in French, Wotanstag in German—because Wotan is a Mercury spirit—Woensdag in Dutch, Wednesday in English. Then we have Jupiter day, French jeudi. For the Germans, Jupiter was Donar, the thunderer, hence Donnerstag. Then came Venus day, French vendredi, German Freyatag. And then it starts again from the beginning, Vulcan being a new Saturn stage.

The human body has to some extent also gone through everything I have been describing to you. The traces of motion that existed on Saturn are now wave motions in the physical body. The development of the physical body in the first seven years is a kind of repetition of Saturn existence which is why occultists call the period from the 1st to the 7th year of life, that is, up to the changing of the teeth, the period of Saturn existence. The same powers are active there which were just beginning to be a possibility at the time when human beings had only developed in their physical body on Saturn. Then the ether body was born and with it the powers connected with Sun existence. The period from the 7th to the 14th or 16th year, when these powers are active, is therefore called our Sun existence. You have to understand that all the powers which were present in the human being at the Sun stage emerge as powers of life coming into flower, that is, as Sun powers, and develop during the period from the changing of the teeth to sexual maturity. This is not without importance, for you will only begin to understand something of the way these human powers relate to the present-day forms of those corresponding stars if you think back on the time when earth itself was a similar star.

The powers active in the child up to the 7th year also relate to today’s Saturn. Here you see the first inner seed of the widespread and tremendous wisdom that has come down to us as astrology from the times of the truly great initiates, a science that is no longer understood today. As there is this inner relationship between Saturn and childhood years, you can now understand how these things are inwardly connected. You can also see how the powers of the Sun itself have gone away. The development which will be important for the human being later on was brought to a conclusion with Moon and earth. The form principles are particularly important for human development from the 7th year to sexual maturity. This will in turn give you the right insight to realize how extraordinarily important it is that where their ether body is concerned, children have a deeper connection with the ‘spiritual sun’, as it is called, exactly at this time.

Here you have the more esoteric connection between the things I referred to in my public lecture. Remember above all that it is particularly important to give children a sense of beauty at this time. If they are not given a sense of beauty at this time, this cannot be made up for later on, because completely different powers will have come into play by then. This period has to do with a feeling for light and shade, and you can’t do better than teach your child to have a feeling for light and shadow. A quite renowned art historian I know⁹⁷ once complained bitterly: ‘I’m supposed to give lectures on art history. When I try and get people to understand, showing them pictures, they have no idea. Young people come from grammar school and have no feeling for light and shade; they can’t even grasp why a hand is foreshortened. One could build on light and shadow in the widest possible sense, but people are not much inclined to take this up.’

People can only develop a sense of beauty if they come to understand what the Sun does so beautifully on earth, the spiritual deeds of the Sun. This is very important. The Sun spirits live as divine spirits. Because of this, it is also necessary for religious development to begin at this time. This has to do with the development of the human ether body. Just as the Sun was able to take its inhabitants to the level of being spirits in the course of cosmic evolution, so teachers are able to arouse a receptivity, a feeling for the purely spiritual and religious element in children between the changing of the teeth and sexual maturity, for that is the time when the Sun body develops freely in all directions.

From the 14th to the 21st or 23rd year you then have human Moon existence, with above all the astral body coming into its own. This is the period when the drives that must be fought tend to emerge; everything that cannot be purified must be cast off. Things come out that really must sometimes be treated like the moon cinder; things truly have to be cast out, the way it happened with the moon.

We might indeed look more deeply into this time, and we would see how deeply man is connected with the whole world. We would see how because humanity is not able to cast out certain powers that are really moon powers, the terrible diseases develop which are called dementia precox, insanity of the young. This is a specific phenomenon, with symptoms of definite character that indicate how it attaches itself to the astral body which is just in the process of evolving out of the ether body. Try and observe someone who sails into dementia precox in puberty. You get specific symptoms that show a marked tendency to repeat things. The astral body if often very bright, but the way in which the astral body should relate to the ether body is in disorder. So if you were to ask such a person: ‘How much is 5 times 6?’ he’ll say: ‘30.’ ‘How much is 7 times 8?’ ‘30.’ How much is 6 times 9?’ ‘30.’ And so on, always 30. Memory goes haywire, as it were, and you can imagine that he cannot get out of the ether body stage, and cannot let the Moon stage develop in himself. Such aspects make it possible for us to look very deeply into the microcosm.

From the 21st to the 28th or 30th year of life human beings have their Mars existence. This is indeed the time when the courageous character of a person develops, through the blood sphere. It is not for nothing that people are made to serve Mars in exactly these years. To some extent these things happen from instinct. Much is also tradition based on things that people used to know in the spirit before.

Then come periods of preparation for future ages. As the soul is more and more left to itself, it initiates a process in the human being that will happen on the cosmic scale with the earth. Something will drop away from the earth, so that it may rise higher, up to Jupiter. And humanity is beginning with this process today. Here, too, the human being is a microcosm. Something separates off inwardly and develops to the inner freedom we call Mercury existence. This reaches its peak in the 35th year. We speak of mid-life, just as 70 has been called the patriarchal age, not without justification. Human beings thus gain their independence in their 35th year. They enter into the age where they do not merely learn things, but consolidate and strengthen them inwardly. With the will coming in firmly, the human body is left to itself and the inner life consolidates. Now people become counsellors for others around them. Their views now have value for others. Before, they had to follow the world; now the world can follow them. This is important, for many sins are committed in this respect. People above all cause harm to themselves if they start giving advice before they have reached the age of maturity, the middle of life. They will not create so many obstacles for themselves if they feel themselves to be merely students passing on what they have heard, but they will if they present all kinds of things as their own. This will indeed make their best powers ineffective. Knowledge can be acquired earlier, but wisdom is something that has to be developed inwardly. Knowledge is something one must first gather and which may then become wisdom.

The Jupiter age then begins with the 49th year. The soul grows even more free inwardly by leaving the body to itself even more and developing something in itself that contains the best powers for transition to the Venus age which begins in the 63rd or 64th year. The inner life has then consolidated to the point where individuals may have shed all egoism if development has gone well. They then have only love for everything there is in the world. They no longer want to have anything for themselves but are there for others. Today human beings are only developing the very beginnings of this, so that it is difficult to speak of it.

In the science of the spirit we speak of seven stages in the biography. This also shows how man is seen as a microcosm, looking back to a cosmic age that has passed and pointing to future development. Human beings are thus born out of the universe, and not only out of the past, for their whole development also has a prophetic note, something that points to the future. And what is to happen one day in the cosmos is already happening today in human life. It is therefore not entirely wrong to say that we truly get to know our self when we get to know world evolution. Letting the mind’s eye roam from Saturn to Venus, we see in the macrocosm what also happens in our own lives. This is how humanity is connected with the whole cosmos.

If you think of human beings, the way they are now, with their organs spread out in the cosmos, you have an idea that may also be found in an ancient Central European myth. This tells that the whole world was created out of the giant Ymir—the vault of heaven from their skull, the rivers from their blood, mountains from their bones, and so on. The myths of Osiris and Dionysus tell a similar story. Yet when we speak of the original human being as being thus divided up, this means nothing else but that the whole cosmos may be found in man, and when human beings enter into the cosmos they find there their own existence in greatly magnified form. We have to extend our own insight to make it cosmic, and not brood in introspection. Just as we see ourselves in the body in which our soul and our spirit are concentrated, so we may look at the large body which is the widespread image of our own body, seeing it as the divine body, image of the cosmic spirit. In self perception we thus have perception of the world and of God.

Thus man is born out of the godhead and in gaining insight can gradually return to the godhead again. Entering into the cosmos and opening up cosmic existence with all the powers of the human soul—that is the mood which may come to us also from the science of the spirit. Through it, human beings learn to see the world as the great body of the godhead, and they learn how the self has evolved out of this body. If we learn first of all to feel this in our hearts, having gained it through the science of the spirit, this inner feeling will finally be transformed into a feeling of being with God. Though still a long way off, this feeling, this inner experience, will be the completion of what human beings can learn by considering the world in the light of spiritual science.

• 95. Steiner R. Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55), Berlin, 28 February 1907. Tr. R Stebbing. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1987.
• 96. Genesis 2: 7
• 97. Grimm, Hermann (1828–1901). ‘Again and again I find myself surprised by young people's inability of recognizing what is shown to them in easily understood copper engravings based on he works of Raphael, for instance. When I ask them to tell me something about the whole, or individual figures, they usually having nothing at all to say; they see the things without having any ideas as to what they are. I would not insist that history of art be taught at grammar school; but I do ask how we can explain such marked deficiency in students who have previously been at grammar school.’ From ‘Die Deutsche Schulfrage und die Deutschen Klassiker’ in Fünfzehn Essays / vierte Folge: Aus den letzten fünf Jahren, Gütersloh 1890, S. 61.

On Easter Monday I want to talk to you about the Mystery of Golgotha. Today we may perhaps prepare a little for this. What I have to say today will relate mainly to a New Testament passage which many people find it impossible or at least difficult to understand. At the least it is easily seen that people do not perceive these words to have the deep meaning which they certainly should be given if one considers esoteric Christianity. From another point of view, these words will take us even more deeply into the spirit and the meaning of Christianity. They are words you know well: ‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven him.’⁹⁸

Such words do indeed tell us the meaning of the mission given to Christianity, and essentially the only proper instrument to help us reveal their deep meaning is the view of the world gained through the science of the spirit. Those who come to this world view will have to get used to coming to know the great world mission of the spiritual scientific movement from many different points of view. The world will have to realize more and more that this movement clearly does not exist in order to found some kind of new faith, let alone a new sect or the like. The times when new faiths and new special religions could be founded in the course of human evolution have passed. The future of religious development lies in making the existing religions into one great religion for the whole human race. The movement for spiritual insight does not aim to preach a new religion. It merely wants to be an instrument for gaining insight into the profound religious truths contained in the original religious writings.

I have said on several occasions before that today the tendency in theological and other religious circles is to reduce religious truths to the commonplace, and not take them deeply enough. Just think how it satisfied people to have Christ Jesus considered ‘the simple man of Nazareth’,⁹⁹ a figure people are certainly pleased to consider one of the great ideals of humanity, like Socrates or Plato or Goethe or Schiller, but they do not want to put him too far beyond the level of common humanity. People never think of asking today if it is not true that something that went beyond all common humanity dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. modern humanity seems to have gone far beyond that ancient Gnostic question. The intention had been to call on the whole of human wisdom to understand what really happened in the year 1 of our time. And so people are also satisfied to cover a truth as great as the sin against the holy spirit in a few moralistic phrases, a few, rather commonplace words.

But the original religious writings do not exist to be explained in commonplace terms. No depth is deep enough and no wisdom wise enough to remove the veil that covers them. It is also important not to add anything when we seek to understand the deep meaning. This is none too difficult for a non-academic, non-scientific person; but it is also true that the religious document is so profound that no wisdom suffices to decipher its meaning completely. No mind is so simple that it cannot gain great and sublime impressions from the true original religious writings. Nor should wisdom ever be considered to be so elevated that it goes beyond the limits of a true religious document. This is the point of view and these are the convictions from which we are going to consider those words.

Let us first of all be clear in our minds as to what is meant by the Holy Spirit in true esoteric Christianity and what is meant by the other two aspects of the godhead—the Son, the Word, or Logos, and the Father. It would be wrong to try and penetrate such things by means of speculation or by thinking about them. They do not exist so that anyone may put in whatever meaning suits them. The meaning was given by individuals who are called Christian initiates, and we must go by the things taught in their schools. It is therefore wrong to take the Bible in a superficial way, speculating about the meaning of one passage or another. A true occultist would never do this. He sets about things in a different way, for he knows that there have been esoteric Christian initiation schools where the deep meaning of the original Christian writings was taught. It has never been taught in any other way, and so there are no different points of view with regard to it.

If there is one thing we want to go by, something which in this respect has perhaps come most to the surface of external history, it is the great esoteric Christian school which Paul the apostle himself founded in Athens, the School of Dionysius the Areopagite.¹⁰⁰ Academics have come to speak of a pseudo-Dionysius because writings that bear his name can only be traced back to the 6th century. Academics cannot know the truth in this respect unless they realize that customs have changed enormously through the ages. Today, someone who has a bright idea cannot wait to get it down on paper and into print so that it may flutter out into the world. In earlier times it was the custom to preserve the most sacred truths carefully from the public at large, not to bombard people with them. The only people permitted to receive those truths were people one knew and who had given evidence that they would receive such truths in a worthy manner, having a sense of truthfulness. Initially they were only passed on by mouth, for the intention was that anyone passing on such truths, or indeed revealing the facts relating to them before the eyes of their pupils, would let the words enter only into genuine feelings, into warm hearts that were truly alive. The disciples at those schools had to develop a certain mood, a certain attitude to the most sublime truths.

Today people think a truth may be received whatever one’s mood. This is not a criticism—it is part of evolution. In those days, people took a different view. It did matter then if one received a mathematical or physical truth in one mood or another. People understood that this mood mattered, and even the simplest truths, which ultimately also reveal truths, were received in an exalted mood. They would be received as a revelation of the divine cosmic spirit. Even the mathematical truths representing the divine revelations relating to space would be received in this mood. The school was very much concerned with creating the right attitude, the right sphere of feeling.

In Paul’s school, too, the most sublime truths would only be revealed after intimate preparation. Whilst Paul was preaching to the world at large, his disciples went through their esoteric experiences in Athens. The spirit of that school continued through long periods of time, and because of this the individual who bore the esoteric truth would always be given the same name. The School of Athens continued for centuries and the highest of the teachers was always called Dionysius. This is why the one who wrote the things down in the 6th century, when writing had become more of a custom, also bore that name. You have to know this to understand what this means for the Dionysius school.

Let us now consider the three words ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ in the truly Christian sense. We went into what lies behind these words from another point of view when speaking of the Lord’s Prayer.¹⁰¹ We then came to see what speaks of the divine in the three higher principles of human nature—atman, buddhi, manas. We heard that these three higher principles of human nature are connected with the words ‘name’, ‘realm’ and ‘will’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Today we’ll consider these three human principles from another point of view, as was done in esoteric Christian teaching. Let us briefly recall the relationship between the lower and higher nature of man. In that Christian initiation training it was always taught that man consists of physical body, ether or life body and astral body, and that the I lives within these three human bodies as the inmost part of essential human nature. That was the ‘sacred tetrad’ of which people would speak in the past—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I.

We have also come to know that the three bodies are transformed by the I in the course of human evolution. We have seen that the I must first of all transform the astral body, the bearer of affects, drives, passions and inner responses. We might also call this astral body the awareness body. Esoteric Christian teaching was that the I has the task of progressively improving and purifying the astral body. And as much of the astral body in a person as has been thus cleansed, purified and improved is called the ‘holy spirit’ in that person in esoteric Christian terms. To use theosophical terms we might also say that the part of the astral body which has been purified through the I is in esoteric Christian terms called ‘the part of the astral body which has been taken hold of by the holy spirit’.

We also know that the I influences the ether or life body to transform, improve and purify it. Whilst in everyday material and non-material life our moral cultural life ennobles the astral body, only the things people take in through religion and art—sensing the eternal in the time form—will change and improve the ether body. The impulses that come from the arts are more powerful than moral teaching, more powerful than the life of rights and government among human beings, for the eternal, immortal shines through in a true work of art. Religious impulses have the most powerful influence on the ether body. Under this influence part of the ether body differentiates out and is transformed into buddhi, the logos, the word. This is known as 'the Christos' in esoteric Christian teaching.

One thing we must always keep in mind when looking at these things is that with the science of the spirit we are not pursuing some kind of grey theory, nor anything removed from the world and alien to life. We are seeking the element in the spirit through which we can have a direct ennobling and purifying influence on these bodies. We must be able to grasp the spiritual principle, live it, and bring it down into life. Only then can we let the insights gained in the realm of the spirit flow through all life, from moment to moment, and make it spiritual. This is practical perception of the spirit. It is not a matter of thinking things out but of letting the spirit flow into our civilization. And so it is also meet and right, at a point where we are speaking of the transformation of the bodies, to draw attention to a practical aspect, namely, what the contemplation of such passages is really meant to convey to us.

When you are in ordinary life with your conscious mind, walking along the streets and crossing the market square, letting life’s influences and impressions come to you, the things you find there will be only part of the whole of your experience. If we do not consider this, we will never come to understand life and perhaps also fail to perceive certain important secrets of our most everyday life. Someone seeking insight in the spirit has to look deeper than someone else would be able to see with the ordinary means our civilization provides today. Our different bodies, the ether and the astral body, also differ in that the outside world influences them in different ways. Everything you take in consciously, giving it your attention, knowing it as you go past it in life, so that it comes to awareness, everything you see outside or in your room that makes an impression on the astral body, creates surges and movements in the astral body. An occultist is able to perceive everything which you experience in full awareness in looking at the movements and currents and everything that shows itself in the astral body.

You can see the infinite importance here of something which people do not really take into account at all in their conscious minds. Beneath the surface of our civilization, things are continually influencing present-day human senses, acting directly on the ether body that is bypassing the astral body and calling up images that are of lasting significance. Beneath the surface of our civilization, such things are all the time having an influence on us. And this is where the science of the spirit needs to draw attention to the more subtle elements that lie beneath our civilization, and has to show how insight can be gained into everyday life by gaining insight into the world of the spirit.

It is simply like this. The people of one age think and do things very differently from those of another. If the former produce horribly bad posters and joke magazines that focus merely on low things, pure sensuality and calculated sensationalism, and the latter do not have such magazines, this reflects for the occultist the things that live in their inclinations and generally also temperaments and character traits. Even conscience mirrors the hidden influences on human beings. If we wanted to study the consciences and also the temperament, mood and inclinations of central Europeans, or Europeans altogether, in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, proceeding by occult methods, we would have to go back to the building styles, the kind of paintings and other cultural elements that were around people in those times. A person would have been in a very different mood walking down streets where everything seen to the left and the right had a relationship to the inner life from the mood you have today when you cross the market square and see quite different things around you. We certainly must not ignore the things that live deeper than conscious awareness, for the very impulses which are connected with the major periods of human civilization have a profound influence. And so we must not underestimate all kinds of things present beneath our present-day civilization that are like the ones I mentioned just now, for there lie the true and real foundations of materialistic feelings and inner responses. That is where we must look for them. And so people should not simply consider one a reactionary when one wants, from a deeper point of view, that nobility and significance should come to expression exactly in these things which have such a profound influence on the human soul, and indeed right down to the form-giving powers of the ether body.

As you can see, therefore, there is a way of looking at things where one is guided not by the prejudices of the age but by spiritual truths. And if we also extend this way of looking at things to the harmful elements in our daily environment which give rise to materialistic views without people having paid them real attention, do you think we shall get far with theories and teachings unless these theories and teachings go right down as far as this? If you know how the more sublime teaching in Christian thinking came to be reflected in paintings, you will not be surprised that they were also reflected in the things that were around people all the time, even if they did not focus their attention on them.

Let us now consider the principle which in Christian esoterics was called ‘the Father’. We know that not only the astral body, but also the ether body and the physical body are transformed through the I. They are transformed unconsciously by people, but consciously so by an esotericist or occultist or someone undergoing esoteric training. Everything that influences only the astral body is mere preparation for the actual esoteric or occult training. Occult training begins when we learn to work into the ether or life body, when the human being is enabled, through the instruction given by the occult teacher, to transform temperaments, inclinations and habits, thus becoming a different person. This alone will give insight into the true higher world—that the person changes. You can study the theory of physics and this will only affect your astral body. You can learn all kinds of things, and they will only affect the astral body. It is only when teachings have such power that they are able to transform the human being that organs develop from inside that allow us to look into the higher world. Then the ether body is transformed and also the physical body. And because the transformation of the physical body comes from the breathing process, bringing rhythm into breathing, a physical body illumined by conscious awareness is called atman. The Christian esoteric term is ‘the Father’.

Within Christian esotericism we have to distinguish between the Holy Spirit—the Christ has as much of the Holy Spirit in him as he has ennobled his astral body; the Son, Logos, Word—the Christ has as much of the son, the Logos, the word in him as he has transformed of the ether body; and thirdly the Father—the Christ has as much of the Father in him (only an initiate can consciously have the Father in him) as he has transformed the physical body, making it eternal. To understand sin or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the Son or the Father, and learn the Christian way of saying these things, we have to recall the mission of Christianity as the esoteric Christian teachers saw it. I have on some occasions said that the deeper mission of Christianity is given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters as well as his own soul-bearing life, he cannot be my disciple.’¹⁰² Mark also put it in other words: ‘His mother and his brothers came and stood outside and sent to call him. But a crowd was sitting round him. So when they said to him: See how your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside looking for you, he answered them: Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Looking round at those sitting in the circle he said: See here my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.’ In Luke’s gospel we also find: ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’

Such words speak of Christianity’s real mission. We can understand them if we consider the evolution of the human race, and this will also be the best possible preparation for our discussion of the Mystery of Golgotha next Monday.

Going a long way back in human history we come to a time we call the Lemurian age. As you know we go back through Atlantean times to the Lemurian age. There we find the fourfold human being who we may say was half animal, a human being who did have four bodies—physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I—but was not yet in a position to do any work on the three outer bodies. For the power human beings need to work on their outer bodies in the above-mentioned way first had to enter into those vessels for man’s true essential nature. The I as you know it today, veiling your soul, your deepest nature which already contains as much of the three outer bodies as has been transformed—this did not yet exist then, it was still waiting to enter into the process of evolution. The I was still a hollow space that would receive what today is our deepest, inmost part, our immortal part, as we call it, that goes through all incarnations and can go with the earth when it enters into a different planetary existence. This came down into the human vessel at that time. Before, it had been in the keeping of the godhead, part of divine nature.

On a previous occasion I gave you a picture for the way man was ensouled at that time, with the divine droplet poured into each individual human vessel. I then said that one might take a glass of water—many drops are in it, a mass of fluid. We might then take a thousand tiny little sponges and let each absorb one drop of water. We have then taken many drops from the glass, and something which had been united in the glass has then been distributed among all the small sponges. Something which is now in us and had previously been in the keeping of the godhead as in an element where everything flowed into one, distributed itself at that time among the individual human bodies, so that today each has a drop of this one divine substance in it. This element, which until then had been part of general divine nature, thus became individualized. Just as my ten fingers are part of my organism, so are the souls which are in human bodies today part of the godhead. And just as every finger would become individualized, every finger would receive a life of its own if it were to surround itself with other outer elements, so did the drops resting in the keeping of the godhead become human inner natures.

These human inner natures lived in the human bodies which had been prepared for them at that time. Human bodies looked very different at that time compared to today. Perhaps no one would believe it if I were to describe those bodies which walked about, waiting to be ensouled by the godhead. People who listen to these lectures may be used to some things, but some would be quite surprised, really, if I were to tell them what those bodies were like and how those shapes, grotesque as they would be in our eyes today, gradually changed into the bodies we have today. Who made them look the way they do today? The inner soul itself has done this. The figure, the form of this human soul influenced the body from inside. You get an idea of how this soul was working if you consider the last bits of configuration the soul still does on the human body today.

Consider feelings of shame, anxiety, fear, fright. A feeling of shame makes the blood rush up to make us go red. The colour of the face also changes with anxiety, fear or fright. In the one case it turns red, in the other it grows pale. In my lecture on the blood as a very special fluid,¹⁰³ I showed that the blood is an outer reflection of the inner work of the individual person. Our most intimate nature shoots into the blood—someone who has blood has an I, and someone who has an I has blood. It is therefore a very special fluid. This only applies to warm blood, however, and not to creatures whose blood is sometimes warm and sometimes cold. Today the I influences the blood when we feel shame, fear and fright, changing the body in this definite, subtle way when we feel shame or grow pale from fear, and it also acted like this in those times. The influence which the blood had in the earliest time of human evolution was great and powerful. It reflected, subtly and exactly, the inner power that had entered into the I as its divine content. And because of this the I came to be reflected through the races. Just as people may grow pale or turn red today, so did the inner feeling shape the human body from the inside. When the human being was still soft—he did not yet have fingers—the I created the form from inside, through the blood. Blood is still brought to expression today. The sculpting power comes from the I, via the blood, and develops the human body. In the many different shapes and forms we thus get to know the blood as the vehicle for the I.

In other lectures I spoke of a secret that lies in the earliest Bible stories. I spoke of the image given by saying that Adam grew to be hundreds of years old.¹⁰⁴ This was due to something we call intermarriage, marriage between blood relations. We find it in the early times of every nation, though ve have to go back a long, long way. Then we find small groups everywhere within the earth’s population who are blood-relatives, marrying only within the group. This has an important result. To make it easier for you to understand what needs to be said I once referred to a conversation between Anzengruber and Peter Rosegger.¹⁰⁵ You’ll remember that Rosegger, a good and popular writer, describes the country people in his books the way he sees them; that’s how he presents them to us. Anzengruber describes them in a more living way, his countrymen stand firmly and securely on their feet, as though hewn from wood, absolutely true and sure. The two writers once went out together. Rosegger then said to Anzengruber: ‘You’d be able to give a much better description of the country people if you went into the country and took a look at them there.’ Anzengruber’s reply was: ‘I have never seen such a countryman. But I describe them the way I do because it is in my blood. My father, grandfather, great grandfather and my uncles, too, were country people. And that’s in my blood.’ There was no need for Anzengruber to have seen the country people. The blood had an influence through generations, and this showed itself in the way he wrote about country people.

So you see how the spirit works through the blood, and an I limited to an individual does not stop there but grows strong and spreads through father, grandfather and so on. That’s how it was with Anzengruber, because those country people had only married among themselves. Some level of awareness of this remained. This level of awareness was much higher at the times written about in the first parts of the Bible. People then still had a real memory of things that had happened to their ancestors. There was a time when people remembered not only the things that had happened to themselves in childhood and youth but also had memories of what their father and grandfather had done. This may seem unbelievable to people today, but it is true that in those early times when blood relationship was strictly maintained within a small group and one could not marry outside the community without committing a sin, the I not only had awareness of the character of country people but the son would say of things that had happened to his father, grandfather and so on that they had happened to him. People who after nine hundred years had descended from Adam would say: ‘That has happened to me’, when speaking of things that had happened to Adam. It was a kind of group self that went through generations. And the term Adam, or Abraham, was used to refer to the way the I had thus continued through generations.

This is also what lies behind the stories in the first chapters of the Old Testament You realize that the blood may be seen as an outer reflection of the inner creative soul. How did humanity lose this way of looking upwards into the generations? What caused conscious awareness and memory to be limited to the life of the individual? They were limited because the bond of blood relationship was broken. The old form of blood relationship loosened, small groups became larger ones. A family group became a tribe, the tribe a nation. Humanity could not have developed in any other way but by families coming to be part of tribes, and tribes of nations, breaking the close blood bonds. Memory used to go back up through the generations.

If you recall the many times I’ve said that memory is sustained by the ether body, which reproduces the things that make up memories, you’ll know the connection between blood and ether body. The I impresses itself into the ether body by coming to outward expression in the surges of the blood, in the element that enters into the blood. You’ll recall, however, that someone wanting to be an initiate has to work into the ether body, and here we come close to something that is deeply connected with the mysteries of pre-Christian times. Those mysteries also had to do with the blood. Today we want to see what all this has to do with the blood.

We know that someone who was to be given the pre-Christian initiation had first to be prepared. We know how such an initiation went. The candidate was instructed to transform his qualities and habits and this would make him the kind of human being he needed to be for initiation. I also said that the initiates went back to the adepts of ancient Atlantean times and that the candidate, once suitably prepared, was put into a sleep state for the whole of three and a half days. This was the kind of sleep in which it was possible to lift not only the astral body but also the ether body out of the physical body. The wise individual who initiated the disciple would guide the whole process. The ether body would be lifted out and this made it possible for the initiator to give the disciple the power to experience things in the spirit and have a real perception and experience of the higher world. The ether body would have been set in motion through the preparations that were made, and the disciple would then be able to see into the higher worlds. When he had been brought back, he would be able to bear witness to the truth and reality of the spiritual world. The essential point was that the individual’s conscious mind had to be dimmed, tuned down, and this was connected with lifting out the ether body. He would be wholly under the influence of the initiator.

Let us consider the situation. All existing laws, institutions and social structures ultimately went back to initiation. At the pinnacle of the social structure would be the great initiator. All goals and trends would depend on this. The disciples would take the wisdom that had been revealed out into the world, and those who heard them out there would take their guidance from them and also arrange their social life accordingly. Everything was under the authority of initiation, of the initiator. Everything depended on these. The principle was one of authority based on truth and wisdom, lived out to the highest degree and in the best possible sense. Only the great, wise leaders of humanity were allowed to have such authority. And it was like this without causing any kind of harm to humanity.

What mattered then was to lift the ether body out of the physical body in the right way. This could not be done with just anybody. Anyone who says that this could be done with anybody, is talking in an abstract way and not out of the truth. It needed long preparation to achieve these things. Essentially the blood had to be the right mixture. This is also why great care was taken to see that the generation of priests did not mingle with others. Preparations would continue for centuries to ensure that one of the right descendants would always be available, who might one day be made a true initiate. It was a way of treating the human body in a grand style, in a tremendously mysterious way, a way that was mysterious in the best possible sense of the word. The greatest initiates had been prepared for through centuries to get the right physical principle, the right blood mixture. This whole process of preparing for initiation is the key characteristic of pre-Christian initiation. Yet it could continue for ever in the course of human evolution. For what was this initiation principle about? It had to do with having a clear view of the blood community. The closer we come to understanding community, the more do we come across principles of this kind.

In those very early times, therefore, initiation was based on the blood principle. This came to be broken more and more, from family to family, tribe to tribe, nation to nation. And now the future was making itself felt, with all such blood bonds broken. For where did the community principle reside for human beings when they had come down from the keeping of the godhead? We might say that it flowed through the blood, and the blood therefore had to be taken into account when one wanted to initiate someone.

When the possibility was given, with the warm blood, for the I to make the divine soul quality its own, that divine soul quality flowed through the blood: ‘I’ am he who was, who is and who shall be.’¹⁰⁶ This was indeed the one who spoke as the god Jehovah, saying: ‘I am he who was, who is and who shall be.’ And where did he show himself to be most powerful? In the blood. And how did they guide a human being to initiate him? They would guide him by treating his blood.

These are profound, far-reaching mysteries of ancient times. Someone who only considers Christianity on the surface does not understand it properly. Much thought went into the title of my book, calling it not ‘The mysticism of Christianity’ but Christianity as Mystical Fact. It means that Christianity itself is a mystical fact and can only be understood if one knows that the whole spiritual configuration of the planet earth changed with the coming of Christ Jesus.

Put yourself on a distant planet and imagine you are a seer looking down on to the earth, the earth atmosphere, the earth’s astral body, the bubbling, boiling, billowing mass of animal and human astral bodies. And then imagine you were able to look down on it some centuries before the Christ was born and follow events on into a far distant future. If you were able to follow this you’d see something strange. You would see the astral atmosphere changing profoundly with the coming of Christ Jesus, a tremendous sudden change, so that its shade, its colour, would be different for all future times. Something new entered into the earth’s spiritual atmosphere. Anyone who does not admit that something now exists in the spirit on earth which was not there millennia ago, does not understand Christianity and the preparations that preceded it. You have to consider that something absolutely real came in, something new, and then you know what happened at the beginning of the Christian era.

Looking at it this way you’ll also find the right words for the transformation of the planet earth in the realm of the spirit and have to say to yourself: ‘All close blood bonds broke, everything that kept people together in small blood-based communities gradually disappeared. The small brotherhoods were gradually extended, ultimately to become the large brotherhood that is to include all human beings on earth, with everyone calling everyone else “brother”, and human beings “leaving their mother and father and brother and sister.’” Everything the blood has prepared within a kind of group I, an I that goes beyond the ordinary I, has to vanish from this earth. And when the earth will be ready to be a new astral sphere, the fruit will have germinated, all bonds will have been broken and a single large bond will bring the whole of humanity together. Christ Jesus made it his mission to give the impulse, the power to create this brotherhood. His mission and the ideal of Christianity are thus given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple.’ And the rejection: This is not my mother; my mother and my brothers are those who do my father’s will. That is the new spirit that is to come, different from the blood bond.

Please take what I am going to say now not as an image or a symbol, but as something that is real. It is difficult for the materialistic thinking of today to see the reality of such things, but they are real. Let us look on the cross raised up high, and above all the blood flowing from the wounds. Of this blood that flows from the wounds—be clear in your minds of its significance in world history! Why is it flowing? Why do we actually speak of the flowing blood of Christ Jesus? What was the foundation of all close communities? What brought the small tribes together? What must lose its significance within these narrow limits if the whole of humanity is to grow into a brotherhood? The blood. The element that influences the I, pulses in the I, can no longer depend on the blood when the whole of humanity has matured to make brotherhood possible. And so the excess I blood, the blood that causes human beings not to extend their I and let it be universal, must flow out, for it is self-seeking blood, egoistical blood. Consider this not as an image but a reality. Consider the amount of blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds to have been the amount that had to flow so that the blood would lose the tendency to create close communities and thus gain the ability to spread brotherhood over all the earth.

No one perhaps ever came as close to the mystery as Richard Wagner did exoterically in his essay on his conception of Parsifal.¹⁰⁷ Here an exoteric thinker touches on the most profound esoteric mystery truths. If you see things in this light you’ll find that the purpose of Christianity is on the one hand to dissolve the bonds of tribe, family and closely limited communities and on the other to split humanity apart into individuals, so that each feels himself to be an individual and yet also a member of the human race. These are polar opposites that run side by side. In the early times, when groups were small and based on blood relationship, the individual felt himself to be a member of the family, a member of the tribe. And as blood relationship dies out individual independence will grow and increase to the same degree.

This happens because of the event on Golgotha. You can see this from the fact that from that time onwards, when the event happened that was to embrace the whole earth, the religious impulse came to be of the greatest significance. Everything that happened there had been prepared for, and was preparation. The effect of it began when the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. Speaking in such a way that we speak out of the soul of the other person, that is, no longer egoistically—this was shown in the best possible way in the place where the apostles spoke to all people in all tongues. The Holy Spirit thus prepared the way for the new impulse that was to come through the blood of the Son, the logos, the Christ.

Let us now go back to the ancient initiation principle. This was based on authority. Everyone would look up to the initiates and receive impulses from them. This authority principle is gradually coming to an end. Here we have an apparent contradiction. Humanity is being split up into individuals, with the ancient authority principle no longer valid, and yet brotherhood is to be established in its fullness. By what means is it to be established? By people getting a grasp of what has come as Spirit. What is the nature of this? For the initiate of old it was enough to have the whole wisdom, the truth, and let it flow into the whole of humanity. Now the individual person, with individuality taken to its highest level, must have the truth. Every individual must have truth and wisdom. In those early times, truth came to the individual from the highest pinnacle, and he had to make it his own. The spread of wisdom must go hand in hand with development, and human individualization with the creation of the great human brotherhood. These two things cannot go in parallel; they must go together.

Considering this, we are following the stages by which the Holy Spirit was brought to bear. For as long as human beings obeyed that one and only authority they could, as individuals, give themselves up to life. They were able to live in close communities. The supreme authority took care of the whole. This is no longer possible when the principle of authority is destroyed. Then every individual must take care that brotherhood is maintained. Each individual must be able to take care of the social life within the brotherhood. They must perceive what exists in general, what every individual is preparing. What may this be? We only have to remember how the ancient religions arose. All initiates had the same original wisdom of humanity. But as this wisdom was given to individuals, the state, the clergy and so on gave it specific characteristics, different forms. Buddhism and Zoroastrianism arose in this way. The smaller the communities, the more specialized did things have to be. Now that the great brotherhood has to be created, the wisdom of the initiate must be able to reach the whole of humanity so that every individual can now take care of the things that used to be the responsibility of the initiates.

Wisdom thus comes to the whole of humanity. It is the same for all. And we can see, therefore, that this wisdom, this insight, is the element that was distributed among the separate individuals who ‘leave their father, mother, brother, sister and child’. They shall have this wisdom again, exactly because it is the same for all. To understand what is said of the Holy Spirit we must understand that wisdom is the same for all.

People have not yet got that far, however, for they’ll still say: ‘That’s the way I see it; someone else may have his own point of view.’ This point-of-view idea must be overcome. Humanity had to be split ip so that there could be I-nature, egoism. They have not yet found the way of coming together in one and the same wisdom. They will be able to do so if they truly apply themselves to this wisdom and grow as individual as possible. If they find the spirit of the wisdom that is the same for all they will get out of the habit of saying: ‘That’s the way I see it; that’s my point of view.’ We have to understand that there is no particular point of view when it comes to the wisdom that is the same for all, that having a point of view means that one has not yet progressed far enough. Only then can we grasp the idea of the Holy Spirit. Only imperfect human beings have a point of view. Individuals who are approaching the spirit of wisdom do not have a point of view. They know that they must give themselves up selflessly to the wisdom that is always and forever the same for all. Just as all plants turn to the same sun, so human beings will unite in turning to the One, for one spirit of wisdom will live in them. The principle which originally held people together in the blood has flowed out of the Christ, and now wisdom brings us together again in brotherhood.

This has been reflected most marvellously in the miracle of Pentecost, when the apostles extended their brotherhood into one that embraced the whole of humanity, speaking in words that all could understand. This must show itself more and more, as individual nature reaches its highest development. We are all united in the spirit of truth. All other aspects of human nature will develop further at a much later time, when our planet goes through different stages of embodiment. The one thing, however, which will be alive and active until the earth comes to its fulfilment, is the wisdom that unites, wisdom revealed to us in the way in which it was only revealed to initiates in the past. Anyone who sins against this wisdom, the wisdom that creates brotherhood, cannot be forgiven, for this delays the earth’s evolution, for the earth will only be able to enter into its astral stage once humanity has come together in brotherhood. The spirit which brings the human race together is the one that has been poured out into the future. If we let our astral body be filled with this spirit of wisdom which exists for all, we can take it up into the astral body of the earth.

So now we are able to see that something exists in which the earth may be united. The content of the wisdom is therefore positive theosophy, something that must be reflected in the view of the world that is taken in the science of the spirit. This will not happen if you just say to people: ‘We must unite.’ It is not enough merely to preach brotherhood; moral sermons are empty words. Just as we have to supply a stove with fuel if we want it to get hot, so we must supply wisdom for humanity; this will unite human beings in brotherhood. To talk to people about brotherhood is like talking to the stove, telling it to get hot. No, what will take us forward is to teach in a very real way, concept by concept, idea by idea, conveying the wisdom of the evolution of the world and the nature of the human being. Preaching compassion, and indeed feeling any kind of compassion, means nothing unless we have wisdom. What good is it to someone who has fallen and broken his leg if fourteen people gather round him in the street, overflowing with compassion and love and not one of them can fix the leg! All fourteen of them are useless. But the one who is able to do it can help when he comes, and he will do so if he lives in the spirit.

Ethical principles will come of their own accord. They do not have to be taught. But the one wisdom which is beyond dispute, beyond points of view, the wisdom of which it is said in Christianity that it transfigures the astral body, cleansing it completely—this must come to humanity through the spiritual scientific movement. This is what the mission of Christianity means, it gives us the mission of Christianity.

People should grow more and more independent of all authority and move towards the truth that is the same for all. The brotherhood of humanity will develop of its own accord if people perceive the truth of the most Christian words, the words that are most free and most sublime: ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’¹⁰⁸

If you have two occultists with different views, they do not see the truth. Among true initiates it is not possible to say two different things about one and the same matter. Nor will there be two ways of thinking about it when humanity has reached the path that leads to the unification of the human race, of a brotherliness that is not just a word but an inner power.

• 98. Matthew 12: 31; Mark 3: 28.
• 99. A term used by the Protestant theologian Heinrich Weinel (1874–1936), which Rudolf Steiner would often quote.
• 100. Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century). Greek or Syrian churchman. Mentioned in Acts 17: 34 as a disciple of Paul. At the end of the 5th century On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies appeared under his name in Syria, translated from Greek into Latin by John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.
• 101. Lecture of 28 January (in this volume).
• 102. Matthew 19: 29; Mark 10: 29; Luke 14: 26. Second quote from Mark 3: 31-33, third from Luke 8:21.
• 103. Lecture given in Berlin on 25 October 1906. In Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55). See note 95.
• 104. Genesis 5: 3-5.
• 105. 'Another time, going for a walk with Anzengruber... We chatted about creative writing and subjects to write about. I said that he must surely have lived in Upper Bavaria or have had a lot of dealings with the country people of that area. His country figures were very much of that stamp. He put his pince-nez on his strongly hooked nose and said: "Upper Bavaria? No. Actually I never had any dealings with country people. At least not at close hand." Noting my surprise he added: "I don't need that. Just need to see such a one from a distance, hear some ordinary words, observe some gesture of other—and I know the whole chap inside out." "Most peculiar!" "My friend," he said, "you know yourself that all external occasions and opportunities are but midwives. The writer must give birth out of his own resources. Country people? - I'm a city man! But if, as you say, I’m better at writing about country people than city people, it may well be because it is in my blood. Or somewhere in one of my bones, like an inherited kind of gout. My father's family were Upper Austrian farmers. Well, and such things will linger on.'" Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger, Leipzig 1914-16, 36. Band, Gute Kameraden—Personliche Erinnerungen an beruhmte und eigenartige Zeitgenossen, S. 145 f.
• 106. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 107. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen hg. von Wolfgang Goiter, Leipzig o. J., 10. Band, 'Ausführungen zu Religion und Kunst', S. 275 ff.; 'Heldentum und Christentum', insbes. S. 281. See Rudolf Steiner's lectures of 29 July 1906 and 16 January 1907 in The Christian Mystery (GA 97). Tr. A. R. Meuss. Gympie, Australia: Completion Press 2000.
• 108. John 8: 32.

Today we are going to talk about the Mystery of Golgotha. At the same time we'll be looking at Easter in the light of spiritual science. A week ago, I said that the Mystery of Golgotha had not only been significant in the evolution of human history but that it is of the most profound significance for the whole of earth evolution, and we do, of course, include the human being in this earth evolution. At the time I drew your attention to the way an observer of our globe, someone who had been able to look at our planet from a distant planet for millennia before our present calendar started, would have perceived the way the planet changed. Such an observer looking down from a distant planet would indeed have seen the appearance of the earth change through those millennia. And if the eye had been clairvoyant, able to observe not only the physical events on our planet but also the non-physical changes, it would have seen that the whole spiritual atmosphere of the earth changed, became different, when Christ Jesus came to the earth.

Just as the human being has a physical body, ether body and astral body, so does the earth, too, have a physical body, ether body and astral body. We are all of us surrounded not merely by air, but also by the ether body and the astral body of the earth. Such a clairvoyant observer would see this ether and astral body of the earth. It would have had a specific colour and a specific way of moving up to the time of the coming of Christ Jesus. Then, however, it changed, assuming new colours and new movement. This event has such a profound effect on our earth and on human evolution that the whole spiritual content of the earth then changed.

You should not think that this happened suddenly as the Christ was born, suffered and died. It had been in preparation for centuries in the spiritual content of our planet and has not reached completion to this day. With clairvoyant vision one would be able to see how the new spiritual element that came to the earth at that time is still in the process of condensing and consolidating. It will be a long time yet before all the fruits that were produced at the coming of Christ Jesus have been received into the earth.

To understand what this is about we must once more let the whole of earth evolution go through our minds. We have to go back to the time in earth evolution when man's present form was only evolving, developing. We call this the Lemurian age. We reach it by going back through the different historical periods of our present age.

Today we live in the fifth sub-period of the fifth main era of the earth. Going back to the time of the Graeco-Latin peoples, to a time when that wonderful art developed which really only came into existence in the Greek period, a time when the Romans developed their legal way of thinking, we would be in the fourth sub-age of our era. Going even further back we would come to a time when the Egyptian, Babylonian and Chaldean civilization was at its height. Beyond this we should find the time when there came the first beginnings of a life in the spirit, with Zarathustra bringing the first culture of the mind. That would have been the second sub-age. Even further back we'd come to the most ancient Indian peoples, not the culture of which the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita speak, but the preVedic peoples who were taught by the holy Rishis themselves. That was a marvellous ancient civilization, and clairvoyants are still able to see the whole of it. It was the first period of development, immediately preceded by the flooding of the earth in which the Atlantean continent that used to be between Europe and America was washed away.

Our ancestors lived in Atlantis, the people of the fourth main era. They did not yet have a social order, for there were no rules, no laws. Nor did they have logical thinking or the ability to do sums. Elements of counting only come up towards the end of the Atlantean age. Memory gradually came to be the highest inner power. Man then lived in marvellous interaction with nature. We only have the right idea of Atlantean culture, however, if we realize that physical conditions on earth were very different from those that developed later. Central European legends still hold memories of those early Atlantean times in Niflheim (land of mists), which was full of dense, heavy mists. All life forms then lived in such dense, heavy mists, and because of this conditions were also very different in the life of soul and spirit. It would take too long to go into more detail about the Atlantean age. I just wanted to, and had to, mention it briefly, so that we may move on to the time when human beings assumed their present form. For this we would have to go back not only to a flood but to tremendous upheavals caused by powers of fire. These fiery upheavals destroyed the land which in theosophical literature is known as Lemuria. It lay far down to the south, extending from the north of Africa to southern Australia. This was the region where man first appeared in his present form.

Going far back into Lemurian times we would see people walk about on the earth who were very different from people today, figures we should not yet call human, for they did not yet have the seed of the human soul in them which alone would enable them to rise to higher levels of development. We would find people there who only had the bodies that envelop the soul, people who had only a physical body, ether body and astral body. And their astral bodies had a depression, a kind of bay, in them—figuratively speaking—for the reception of self awareness. Essentially the four parts of the enveloping human form were already there, but the principle you call 'I' today, a principle that lives in you, was still in the keeping of the godhead then.

Figures were thus walking about on this earth. To describe those human figures that were ready to receive the core of essential human nature, we have to say they were completely different from today's human beings. You would think them to be utterly grotesque, going to the very limits of ugliness. Where today's human beings have air all around them, those human 'casings' were surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere. They were surrounded by a spiritual sphere of air in which they were alive and active.

To give you a diagram of the human beings of that time, I'd have to draw them like vessels, as it were, vessels ready to receive the higher soul quality into themselves (Fig. 20). The inner space is meant to be a hollow made in the astral body and this is ready to receive a higher soul quality into itself. That higher soul element was still in the surrounding atmosphere, the layer of spiritual air. Something which today is inside you was not yet inside human beings at that time, but moved around them. You have to understand, of course, that the spirit can assume different forms and that the element which was then your spirit did not need a physical body. Further development actually consisted in the human spirit coming to dwell in a physical body where it developed further inwardly as soul. Something which today lives in you was then living outside you, in the spiritual atmosphere that was around you. At that time, the individual souls which today live in separate bodies were not yet separate and individual.

Let us think of this glass of water containing thousands of droplets, all connected with each other. All the souls which were later to be distributed among human beings were like this, soul drops in this spiritual atmosphere, but as though dissolved to make a uniform, fluid element. And you may go on and image this: if I were to take a thousand tiny sponges and let them absorb a thousand drops, those thousand drops would then be distributed among the thousand tiny sponges. That is how you should think of the way the spiritual principle was distributed in Lemurian times. Having been all around on the outside before, this principle then came down into the bodies and separate entities were created. Just as the thousand droplets of water would be individualized in the thousand tiny sponges, so was the communal spiritual substance individualized in the separate human forms in Lemuria. At the beginning of the Lemurian age, every human form did not immediately receive the soul fully into itself. To show the way the soul content was received in my diagram, I'd have to do it like this (Fig. 20). I'd also have to show, however, that much of it remained outside the body, in the surrounding area. The body was thus surrounded by a spiritual content that was of the same kind as the part that was already inside the human form.

Evolution for the Lemurian and Atlantean periods and into our time meant that the element that was outside the physical body was gradually drawn into the body. This happened throughout the Lemurian and the whole of the Atlantean age. You have to imagine that human beings were in a permanent state of being half asleep and half awake, though they also had a kind of clairvoyance. If someone whose inner eye had been opened could have looked at the human beings of Atlantean times, these would have looked the way someone who is asleep does today. When a human being lies asleep, the physical and etheric body lies in bed, and the higher spiritual content is spread around it. It is exactly because it is outside that the individual falls asleep. You would see an Atlantean in such a permanent state of sleep; yet this would be full of lively dreams.

One individual approaching another in those times would not have seen the other the way we do today, sharply defined; instead, a colour form would arise in the first individual's soul. This colour form was such that if the other individual was congenial, it would indicate sympathy; with someone uncongenial it would show unsympathetic colour nuances. In those times human beings would perceive the world around them in a more clairvoyant way. The more the spiritual substance entered into them, the more did their state of consciousness become like the one we know in full daytime awareness today.

The process in which the soul came down into the physical body also had its physical aspect, a secondary physical fact. In the Old Testament this is significantly referred to in the words: 'And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.'¹⁰⁹ Truth is, it was not only air that was breathed into man at the time but the spiritual human being that filled him with life. You have to understand that the matter which lives all around us is not simply physical matter or substance. With every breath you inhale not only physical air but also spirit. It is perfectly true that when the physical air was inhaled at that time, in the way in which it is done by people in their present-day form, everything I have drawn here came down into the physical form. This is what the passage in the Old Testament refers to. And if you were to ask: ‘What was the human body at that time, when the soul came down from being in the keeping of the godhead?’ The body was the air, and today you still breathe the element which at that time came down into the body of human beings. For the principle we call the spirit is in the air. The air is merely the body, the substance, of the spirit.

You also have to understand that something else was connected with this way of breathing air, with the spirit coming down into the human form. It was closely bound up with what we call the warm blood of man, or rather blood that was warmer than the surroundings. Before this moment in time had come in earth evolution, there were no warm-blooded life forms. Warm-blooded animals only came into existence at a later stage. This breathing was therefore connected with warm-bloodedness, and this meant that something else also happened then. A certain quantity, a certain amount of warmth entered into the human being, the blood warmth you still have today. This is a higher kind of warmth than the warmth in the world around you. In those days, at the time that preceded this actual time when man came into being, something was present in the environment of our ancestors that was very different from the spirit embodied in the air.

You can get an idea of what was also present in the earth's atmosphere if you consider the following—not literally, a bit figuratively, yet also real—if you consider the warmth present in the different human beings who lived on earth, [if you consider] the warmth that lives in your blood, and then the warmth that has flowed out into your surroundings, and all this warmth enveloping the earth, all the blood warmth, therefore, all warmth that comes from the blood and flows within us—is the warmth that used to be around us on the outside in the past. Just as it is true that the spirit which used to be outside you is now inside you, so it is true that the warmth which was outside you is now inside you.

We would thus reach the time when the whole earth was enveloped in an atmosphere of heat. Another spirit was embodied in this warmth atmosphere, a spirit that was like the spirits who had been on the Sun—meaning one of the three planets that had preceded the earth. These had reached perfection at the time when the Sun was still a planet. The spirit embodied in this heat had reached a level of completion, perfection, which otherwise has been reached only by the spirits who achieved completion on the Sun planet at that time and dwell in the sun today. It is a fact that at the time when this warmth enveloped the earth there was in it the bearer of a unique spirit for the whole of humanity. And for a long time after this, the warmth that surrounded the earth was the bearer of one particular spirituality for all humanity, a spirituality which is no other but that of the spirit of the earth itself.

Just as every human being has his own spirit, is filled with his own spirituality, so for someone who is able to perceive these things, every plant and every material thing is at the same time also an expression of a spiritual entity. And our earth is the body or spiritual expression of the earth spirit. The blood warmth enables the earth spirit to enter into the human being. In the blood warmth which lives in the human being, and in pre-Lemurian times lived outside the human being, we have the medium by which the spirit of the earth enters into the human being himself.

You have to imagine, therefore, that at the time when actual human development began in Lemurian times, the spirit which belonged to the air came down upon human beings, and then the higher spirit began to come down which is in the warmth of the blood, the actual earth spirit. The relationship between these two spirits is such that we may say: ‘The spirit which has the air for its body is the one that has made it possible for human beings to gain speech.’ For the configuration of the human organism which makes the present-day breathing process possible, also makes speech possible. Speech developed in Atlantean times, and came to its highest expression in the ability to utter the word ‘I’ towards the end of the Atlantean period.

The process began in Lemurian times and gradually reached perfection towards the end of Atlantean times. The Bible says: 'And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.' This was gradually perfected until it became the word ‘I’, until the spirit began to speak out of the inner human being and began to call itself, out of the inner human being: ‘Y-a-h-w-e-h’. That is at the same time the eternal core and essence of every individual human being: ‘I am the one I am, the one I was and the one who shall be. ‘I am’ is the deepest inmost core. It came into man at that time and will remain for all eternity as the human being’s individual spirit.

This was the first outpouring of the godhead. It is called the outpouring of the spirit, or of Yahweh. In the mythologies of religious peoples, which are always more intelligent than scientific treatises, this outpouring of the spirit or of Yahweh is described as a breath in the air, something that moves over the earth in the air. Ancient German legend, and also Jewish, Hebrew legend, where Yahweh is the god of the tempest or the wind, shows that this is a divinity which has its outer body in the flow of the air and has poured into the human being.

Because of its essential nature this divinity did indeed play a role in human beings becoming individual when it entered into them. The uniform, fluid element which prior to the Flood had been all around humanity on a magnificent scale, was divided up among individual human beings, like the water being absorbed into tiny sponges. But this could not make the human being wholly individual. Human beings had to find the transition to complete individualization. They were not ordained to be complete individuals right away. Initially they formed groups. We have mentioned before that people lived in small tribal groups. They did not as yet feel themselves to be separate individuals. The human individual felt himself to be entirely part of such a tribal group or family, just as a hand is part of the body. Modern people with their very different way of thinking cannot really imagine what it is like to belong to a tribe, feeling oneself part of the tribal body. But that is how it was, and the more the small tribes spread, and the family came to be the tribe, the more individual did people become.

You have to think of this as a process of singling out, of progressively becoming more individual, as bound to the human being's blood. You can understand it if I tell you one thing, and I would ask you to remember it. The pouring out of the spirit in Lemurian times was not uniform. You would have been able to see many spirits coming down on to the earth from the spiritual surroundings of the earth. Many individual spirits were coming down. Speaking of Yahweh, we are not speaking of a single divinity but the spirits of many nations. The Jews know that it was one of many divinities. Nations were split up into tribes because many such souls of nations—please note that these were something real—were coming down. And the more they developed, the more did they live in families, in tribes, which then came together in large tribal nations. One thing that was not possible at that time was for all to come together in a great universal brotherhood. It will only gradually be possible for all of humanity on earth to come together, because apart from this sending out of the spirit and ensouling human beings with this spirit, which has come down into many souls of nations, there is also something that lived in the warmth of the earth, not in the air, and this more universal principle has also entered into human beings. In Christian esoteric terms, the element which came first is also called the Holy Spirit. Speaking of the old spirits that have come down, we should really refer to many holy spirits, many Yahwehs. When we speak of the spirit that has all warmth in it, we can only refer to a single one. In Christian esoteric terms this is called the Logos, the Christ, the universal spirit of the human race on earth.

Just consider that everything which lives in the spirit self, everything we call manas, came down in a multiplicity, and that everything we call budhi poured itself out over humanity as a spiritual oneness, and you have the difference. You'll then understand that humanity needed to be prepared first by the outpouring of the spirit before the outpouring of the Christos, of the budhi, the life spirit. Up to the time when Christ Jesus appeared on earth, everything there was of the Christ spirit was a oneness. It was a uniform sphere surrounding the whole earth, the solid earth being its skeletal system, as it were. If you take the solid earth with everything that is in it, and add to this the warmth that surrounds the earth, you more or less have the body of the Christ spirit, as it is called. Hence the beautiful words in the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus refers to himself as the spirit of the earth: 'He who eats my bread has lifted his heel against me.'¹¹⁰ What do we eat when we eat? Bread. We eat the bread which is the body of the Christ. And in walking on the earth we do the other thing—we lift our heel against the Christ. This must be taken quite literally.

Just as in Lemurian times the Yahweh spirit poured something of the element of the spirit into separate individuals, so during the ages that preceded Christ Jesus and in those that followed, the Christ spirit gradually poured in, the Christ spirit which has its body in the blood warmth. When the whole of the Christ spirit has been poured out into individual human beings, the Christian spirit, the great brotherhood of humanity, will have conquered the earth. Then there simply will no longer be any thought of cliques and small groupings, but only awareness of humanity as a brotherhood. There will be the greatest degree of individualization, yet each will be drawn to the other. The small tribal and national communities will have given way to the community of the life spirit, the budhi, the community of the Christ.

The eye of a soul looking down clairvoyantly on our planet would then see this. It would be able to follow the way in which the Christ spirit had been wholly in the sphere surrounding the earth and had then poured into individual human beings. It would see the earth changing more and more. Other colours and moods would appear. An element that had been in the sphere surrounding the earth would then have to be looked for in the inmost being of individual human beings. This is what the coming of Christ Jesus means; it is the cosmic significance of this event.

Anything else you may find in the spiritual development of our earth has been preparation. The coming of the Christ was in preparation for centuries. The preparation for this event which was so important for the whole of cosmic earth evolution was such that the Christ showed human beings how to overcome the narrow limits of tribal relationships. You know Mercury, Hermes Trismegistos, the Persian Zarathustra, the Indians Krishna and Buddha and the Greek Pythagoras. The Christos spirit, which until then had been in the earth's surroundings, began to enter into human beings. Then came a band of time when religions were founded; there we can see the process of transformation advancing more and more, and we can get to know the nature of the Christian spirit.

The outpouring of the spirit—what effect was it able to have? It was able to bring it about that love was tied to the blood. In those early times when tribal communities had not yet developed, people loved one another no less than they do today. In fact, they loved one another more, but it was in the way a mother loves her child and the child his mother. Love was therefore more due to nature. Blood felt drawn to blood, and people felt they belonged together because of this. But the people drawn to such blood-based communities progressed further in their development and this meant that their sympathies became more individual. This led to smaller groupings, families and communities, which then became part of larger communities. Individual people were, however, getting more egoistical and self-seeking. The situation thus was the following. On the one hand humanity was getting more selfish, and on the other hand the influence of the Christ made people one. On the one hand we have individualization, with the individual progressively more independent, and on the other the unifying nature of the Christian spirit. These two streams must come fully into their own before it will be possible to have a condition on earth where everyone is independent and on the other hand also connected with everyone else, for each will be filled with the 'Christ spirit', as it is called.

We must clearly understand that all this is connected with the blood, and that originally something came to expression in human blood that brought to light feeling and inner responsiveness. These would come into play within the blood relationship, but they brought about blood-based love. We must also understand that feelings then became more egoistical. Self-seeking came to be increasingly more present in the blood. That is the secret of human evolution, that the blood gained more and more of the quality of self-seeking. This blood which had grown egoistical had to be overcome.

The principle which was excessive egoism in the human blood ran from the wounds of Christ Jesus on the cross in real mysticism; it became an offering. If this blood had not flowed, self-seeking would have grown more and more in human blood as evolution progressed. The cleansing of the blood from self-seeking—this is what the Mystery of Golgotha achieved. By this deed of love, human blood was saved from its self-seeking.

It is impossible to perceive the cosmic significance of the event on Golgotha if one only sees a human being hanging on a cross, bleeding from a wound made by a lance. The profound mystical significance of this event is that vicariously this is the blood which humanity had to lose in order to be redeemed. We shall never understand the Christian spirit if we take these things in a materialistic sense only, knowing only the material event and not also the spiritual principle which lies behind it This spiritual principle is the regenerative power of the redeemer's blood that flowed on the cross. We shall only understand the further evolution of the human race if we perceive how crucial this fact is, realizing that the most tremendous and complete change in humanity's spiritual evolution on earth is connected with this fact.

If we consider this evolution on earth, we find that in early times, before the Christos principle entered into human souls, the mysteries of the spirit were profound centres of teaching and ritual The more the Christ came into the world, the more did the Mysteries of the Son unfold; and in future the Mysteries of the Father will be important. We are told of them in the Book of Revelation.

Let us go back to the Mysteries of the Spirit. They were initially established in a place that would have been between Europe and America and has long since vanished. The nursery of the great adepts was founded there, inaugurating the Mysteries of the Spirit that have continued into our age. People who had given evidence of having achieved maturity could be initiated in the Mysteries of the Spirit. The mystery centres would accept people who had been adequately instructed and purified. There they would receive the teachings, the theosophy, that is the basis of all religions, teachings we receive today through the science of the spirit. They would have purified their instinctive drives, trained to bring order into their thinking, and then have learned not only to love people who were blood-related but to embrace the whole of humanity in love. They had become 'homeless people'. The process which occurs at the highest levels of human development is one that points to the future.

Initiation at the ancient mystery temples continued on into the last pre-Christian centuries. We see evidence of this in the Egyptian pyramids. There the disciple who had come so far that he was able to love the whole of humanity would be put to sleep for three days. His physical body would be as if dead, in total lethargy. The initiator would be able to draw his spirit forth from him the way your spirit is drawn from your body every night when you're asleep. Just as it is true that this spirit is unconscious in ordinary sleep, so it is true that it would be conscious in disciples who had been frilly prepared. The interference that comes from the physical body would no longer be there. But in those three days the disciples would be able to remember everything they had learned before; they were able to take this into their body.

Because the candidate had been learning, taking in the necessary concepts and feelings, the initiator was now able to let him experience as a spiritual reality everything he had previously worked for and taken in by way of inner feelings. The soul would wander through the astral and devachanic world during the three days when it was out of the body. It would encounter the reality of what it had previously learned, and the individual thus came to know, to be initiated. The theosophical teachings ceased to be mere theory; now they were something in which he himself had been, as though in a living element. When he woke again in his body and looked at his physical surroundings, a sound would come to his lips that must wrest itself from the soul of its own accord when after wandering through the world of the spirit for three and a half days the soul found itself back in the physical world again. The soul was then aware that the I had become a citizen of higher worlds, that it had been in those worlds and could now speak to people about its experience in those worlds. Speaking of the world of the spirit from experience, he had become a herald of the spirit in the physical world, a missionary of the spirit. And this comes to expression in the words: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!'¹¹¹ which means: 'Oh God, my God, you have indeed glorified me!' These were the words one would have been able to hear from every individual who had been initiated in this way.

If you had examined such an individual with regard to his whole essential nature, you would have found that someone who was initiated in the mysteries of the spirit became a herald of something which in Christ Jesus was given for the whole of humanity. The budhi had, however, only awoken inwardly, in the 'ether body', as it is called, of such an initiate. Initiates in the spirit, in whom the Son, the Christos, had inwardly awakened, existed throughout antiquity in pre-Christian times. This Christos had not penetrated as far as the physical body, but he had been awakened in the ether body. Those initiates had become immortal as ether human beings.

The great step forward for humanity came because what applied to the great initiates in the spirit also applied to Christ Jesus coming to the earth. But in the case of the individual who died on the cross, this applied right down to the physical body. Everything which in the ancient mysteries could be experienced when out of the body could be seen on the physical plane in this one case, because of the event on Golgotha. It became visible even for those who had only physical eyes. In earlier times, initiates who were able to progress that far would be able to see it. They would feel at one with God because, being the chosen, they experienced inwardly how life must conquer death. Now, however, this was no longer necessary. With the event on Golgotha it had taken place in front of human eyes. There it happened that life overcame death. And through the connection with this unique event, through the bond that connects every individual with it, like a family bond, something was given that replaced the things which had been given to individuals in the Mysteries of the Spirit.

There is one great, significant image from the Mysteries of the Spirit which I must describe to you if you are to understand the Mysteries of the Son. I had to describe how the individual who lay in his sleep for three and a half days was surrounded by twelve human forms, as though he were sitting around a table with them. And how should they appear to someone who had had experiences of the higher worlds as an initiate? Twelve of his incarnations would appear to him, twelve of the bodies he had gone through before. Those twelve bodies were nothing more or less than what he bore within himself as the elements of his body. In occult terms, the human body is divided into twelve parts, and these are a recapitulation of twelve incarnations in which the individual human being is gradually purified and taken to a higher level of perfection. The individual would thus feel himself to be surrounded by the forms or figures which he himself had gone through in earlier times, and he would say to himself: The one form you had before lives in one part of you; the second form lives in another, the third in again another, the fourth, and so on.’ They are thus around you like the guests sitting at a meal with their host.

This image would appear before the soul of every individual entering into the Mysteries of the Spirit. It was the Son of Man who brought this to an end, no longer the son of a family, a tribe, a nation, but the son of the whole of humanity. It was really the thirteenth who had the greatest perfection among the twelve. Being outside his earthly self, he saw himself as the thirteenth.

Let us now consider how the experiences every candidate would have in the higher world came to be repeated in Christ Jesus. It is covered with a kind of veil, the way everything given outwardly, exoterically, is veiled. The Easter feast celebrated by the Christ and the twelve was not to be an ordinary feast. It was to be something else—a recapitulation on the physical plane of the experience which the initiates in the spirit had had a number of times on the higher plane.

In Luke's gospel, chapter 22, verses 7-12, we read: ‘When the day of unleavened bread came, ... they said to him, “Where do you wish us to prepare it?” And he told them, “Now when you enter the city, a man will meet you who is carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house where he is going. Then speak to the master of the house, saying, The teacher says to you, Where is the guest room so that I may eat the Passover there with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room which has been set out ready; prepare for us there.”’

During the feast he explained once again that the bread was his body, that the blood flowing in his body was like the sap in the body of a plant. It was right for him to say, with reference to the plant sap, the wine: ‘This is my blood,’ and it was right for him to say this because he is the spirit of the earth. It is right for him to say of all substance: ‘This is my body,’ and of all juices: ‘This is my blood.’

Then comes the scene where Christ Jesus developed the Mysteries of the Spirit further into the Mysteries of the Son, and ultimately into the Mysteries of the Father. Again you must consider the twelve apostles sitting around him to be an embodiment of the twelve parts of his own body. If you really contemplate this, using inner delicacy and discretion as you approach a passage which unveils—or rather veils—the deepest truth of the Christian spirit, you will be able to encompass in your mind the transition from the Mysteries of the Spirit to those of the Son.

Consider once again what had to happen as the Mysteries of the Son were approaching. People had to become aware that the blood had to give up its connection with blood bonds. One day blood bonds would mean less to people than their egoism. Looking to the future mission of the Christian spirit, Christ Jesus realized that this could only be achieved by his sacrifice. It had to be thus. For times would come when people grew more and more egoistical in order to gain their freedom. The excess of egoistical blood therefore had to be sacrificed in a cosmic deed, so that human beings, however independent, might one day be able to unite in one great brotherhood. The egoistical element exists particularly because of the human race; it has grown more and more, and it needs to be made spiritual, to be ennobled, by the Christian spirit. Human beings are thus getting more and irore independent. Let us take a look, however, at something which has since come to girdle the earth—our forms of transport. What are they but arrangements to satisfy our egoism? Everything thought up by using the rational mind and common sense has only been thought up to satisfy our egoism, even if only in a roundabout way. Humanity was less egoistical when grain was still ground by using two stones. Humanity had to grow independent, however, and therefore also had to go through egoism, with the whole of our civilization providing the material basis for this.

Someone initiated in the Mysteries of the Spirit thus sees his own incarnations, with himself at the head, as the part which is now the most perfect, just as the Son of Man saw the group of disciples around him as versions of himself. Someone who looks into the future will see the configurations humanity will need to go through. Anyone who lives through the Mysteries of the Son sees into the future, to the end of earth evolution, when the earth state changes into a new star state. Christ Jesus was therefore able to say of the former state: 'You who are sitting around me represent different degrees of perfection, and when I look into the future, you, as you are sitting around me here, represent the twelve stations. These must be overcome, however. I must guide them through myself to the Father. I must guide you to the Father as though through myself, so that the earth may achieve a higher degree of perfection.' All sensuality, all drives, passions and affects attaching to human beings must be overcome. This can be seen in symbolic form in what happened with the twelve.

The age that followed is represented in Judas Iscariot. The representative of low sensuality is closely connected with the representative of the greatest moral and ethical qualities. It is Judas Iscariot who really betrayed the Christian spirit immediately afterwards. Oh, a time will come when it will look as though what happened on Golgotha is also happening all over the earth! It will look as if egoism was to bring death for the Christ, the budhi. It will be the time of the Antichrist. It is law that everything that happened around the cross will also have to happen on the physical plane. What happened on Golgotha does at the same time also have profoundly symbolic significance. Judas' betrayal signifies the lower drives gaining the upper hand. All things sensual must, however, become spiritual.

We thus have reference made here to the future evolution of humanity within the earth. I have spoken of this on several occasions. Everything of a lower nature will drop away from human beings. The future human being is already preparing in the human race. They will not be creative then the way they are today. They will not be working out of their lower passions. Today they produce the word, which can embody the most sublime, and they will become more and more creative through the word. They have grown more egoistical because of their sexuality, and they will be selfless again once that sexuality drops away.

Today the word is produced on a stream of air coming from the larynx; in humanity's future the word will be productive again. Boys' voices break at puberty. It will be the voice which will be productive. And in becoming productive, this word will at the same time—in the future, for the whole situation will be turned around—give expression to human control over the air. It means that the principle which originally breathed through man will cause a transformation in something which is even more deeply connected with essential human nature. The word will be creative with regard to the preparation of the blood. Even the blood of man will be transformed. It will only be able to produce pure, selfless feelings. A human race will arise that is creative through the word. Selflessness will be transformed into a quality of the blood, and the thinking organ will be transformed to be in the heart. This is one of the two evolutions that will follow Christianity. The age when egoism rules is represented by Judas Iscariot. Anyone taking an unbiased look at world events can see how sexuality is capable of betraying man as spirit, to kill him. But human beings who today can produce the word as something higher in themselves will one day be creative through the word. This will be when the heart is the organ of their mind and spirit.

I would now ask you to apply this to the gospel and note a passage which puts what I have just been saying in a truly wonderful way, with magnificent symbolism. Consider what will follow when Christianity has grown selfless and brotherly; how Judas Iscariot embodies everything that makes people egoistical; and consider also the direction in which humanity will develop through the twelve stations—to the form which Christ Jesus himself assumed. Everything rises upwards towards the heart.

The way the transformation occurs is such that creative power pushes upwards from the lap to the heart. This has to come to expression in the one who represents the highest form and is closest to Jesus. Now read this: ‘One of the disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, lay in Jesus' lap at the table. Simon Peter beckoned to him, indicating he should ask which one it was. He then leaned against the breast of Jesus and said to him: “Lord, which one is it?”’¹¹² The passage tells us how the lowest power of production in man moves up into the breast, shown here by Christ Jesus' closest disciple. The Mystery of the Son, of Jesus, is suggested in the most delicate way. One cannot think of a more magnificent way. You will see that it is meant to be a mystery if you read what the initiated disciple himself writes at the end of this whole scene, having had living experience of how he would be transformed and come to the Father through the Son. What was he then able to say? At a higher level, he was able to say what initiates are able to say: ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.’ Those are his words. Read it for yourselves in John's gospel: ‘And Jesus said: Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him.’¹¹³

This Easter feast was the preparation for what then happened on the physical plane. In contemplating Christ's death we learn of death being overcome on the physical plane, and egoistical blood being overcome as the blood flowed from his wounds. We also come to perceive the great prospect that lies ahead as the words are once again heard coming from the cross, out of an awareness of what the future holds: The earth will have reached the goal of a great brotherliness, of becoming spiritual, overcoming everything that could drag the human spirit down.'

Those who have gone through this with the Christ will be able to gather around him once they leave earth evolution behind and rise to a higher form of evolution. And perceiving that the perfecting of the earth has been accomplished, Christ Jesus will once again be able to call out words he once called out on the cross: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!' that is ‘ My Lord, my Lord, how you have glorified the I in humanity, making it spiritual.' That is the meaning of these words. There is a later translation which is wrong, taking up the lines from the psalm.¹¹⁴ But the proper translation of the words is the one you have now heard. Those are the words that express the Mystery of Golgotha: ‘My God, my God, how greatly you have glorified me, made me spiritual.'

These words reveal to us how the spirit wrests itself free of the body. The Mystery of the Son reveals to us how at that time, the inner visionary eye of the world's redeemer looked ahead to the end of the earth's perfecting and put the great goal of humanity in words, speaking of overcoming all differences and the founding of utter human love. This goal will only be reached if people learn to enter more and more in a spiritual way into the world of the spirit. For it is in the spirit that humanity comes to be at one. Once human beings were at one as they stepped forth out of the spirit, out of that oneness, out of the way where everything merges into one in the divine. They became individualized as they entered into individual human bodies—the way water is individualized when droplets of it are absorbed into small sponges. And human beings, now become individual, will be at one again when they enter into the great bond of brotherhood, still maintaining their individual nature. They will thus prepare themselves to be deified creators, just as they were gods, creators, before they came to earth as human beings.

Human evolution took its origin in a divine spirit and it is going back to a divine spirit. The different ‘I’s will be individual, yet at the same time they will be a oneness, being united in the bond of brotherhood. This oneness will give birth to a new star, the new star which in the Book of Revelation is called 'the new Jerusalem'.¹¹⁵ The human ‘I’s will be born in their I-nature, and then the harmonies of the spheres will create the echo for the words in which the Mystery of Golgotha came together, the words: 'My God, my God, how you have glorified me!'

Those words were spoken then, in the past. They will be repeated when human beings ascend to the highest levels, to ever greater heights, when they will have gone through the Son to the Father. The Son guides humanity to the end of earth evolution; then human beings will be taken up into the cosmos again, retaining their I-nature. The earth will go back to the Father. 'No one comes to the Father except through me.'¹¹⁶

The inner eye is able to see a long, long way if human beings are prepared to seek insight into the profound secret of Golgotha. But festivals like the great seasonal festivals exist as important points where people should abandon their everyday routine, when they should let their inner eye go out to the great milestones in evolution, when they should survey not only centuries but millennia. We should consider humanity in a vision that comes to the conscious mind. If we let the distant goal of the future come alive in our hearts, as the great teachers of the human race have taught us, if we let this distant goal come alive in us, a goal that is so far away, yet can be so close if it becomes a power in our hearts—then alone shall we reach it.

Let us resolve never to let such festivals pass by without inscribing in our souls those great future prospects and goals for humanity. People have time for everyday things in their everyday lives, but when the bells ring on holy days, they do well to remember that they are children not just of their age, but in their spirit, also children of eternity.

• 109. Genesis 2: 7
• 110. John 13: 18.
• 111. Matth. 27: 46; Mark 15: 34. sabachthani generally translated as 'abandoned'. A similar sounding term, shevachthani means 'elevated' or 'glorified'. See Steiner R. The Gospel of St Matthew (GA 123), 12th lecture. Tr. D. Osmond, M. Kirkcaldy. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1985.
• 112. John 13: 23-25. The translation of the Greek ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ tends to be a problem. A kolpos was the space, a kind of pouch, created above the belt in a loose Greek-style tunic. It was the place where men in those times would keep things that were valuable to them. Translations vary between ‘bosom’ and ‘lap’ (in Abraham's bosom, in the lap of the gods). Verse 23 says kolchos, whilst verse 25 has στῆθος, stethos, meaning ‘breast’.
• 113. John 13:31.
• 114. Psalm 22:2.
• 115. Rev. 3: 12; 21:2.
• 116. John 14: 6.

Today I'd like to add a few things to our various spiritual scientific discussions relating to Christianity. In the first place we are going to consider the interpretation and explanation of Christian parables. Then I'd like to say a few things, just touching on the subject lightly, on the Book of Revelation, which I also spoke of in the public lectures.¹¹⁷

The first parable I want to consider is the one of the untrustworthy agent.¹¹⁸ As you know, this parable is a puzzle to many people. Let us look at it, at least in so far as we want to consider it today. I am going to present it in the literary translation¹¹⁹ and we'll then consider it in esoteric terms.

He also said to his disciples: ‘There was a rich man who had an agent of whom he heard complaints that he was wasteful with his property. So he called him and said to him:” What is this that I hear about you? Render an account of your management, as you cannot be agent any longer.” The agent said to himself: “What shall I do now that the lord takes the management away from me? I have not the strength to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what to do so that when I have been dismissed as agent they will accept me into their homes.” And he called his lord's debtors, one at a time, and said to the first: “How much do you owe my lord?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of oil.” So he said to him, “Sit down at once, take your account and write fifty.” Then he said to another: “And you, how much do you owe?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of wheat.” So he said to him: “Take your account and write eighty.” And the lord praised the untruthworthy agent because he acted with forethought, and said: “The sons of this age show more forethought in their own generation than the sons of light.” ’

This parable has been a great puzzle to many people, and rightly so. Before we go into it, let us just consider that parables like this have been explained in all kinds of different ways through the ages. We have known people to say that there is profound meaning behind such a parable. Many have tried to find explanations according to their own ideas. It is perfectly clear that if people come and explain such parables according to their own ideas, something intelligent will result if the individual concerned is intelligent, and something unintelligent if he's not. If people bring in their own ideas, there can of course be no guarantee that theirs is the right interpretation. The situation is completely different from the spiritual scientific point of view. What matters to us is to explain such parables the way it was done in the original Christian mysteries; that we know the profound significance which they hold and out of which they have arisen.

Such Christian mysteries existed and I have referred to them on several occasions. I said that Paul went forth to speak of Christianity, and that he founded the esoteric Christian school under Dionysius in Athens. We are going to explain the parables in the way they were explained at that time. We are not going to speak of our own ideas but of things we are truly able to know. The teachers at those Christian schools drew on the things they had received from Christ Jesus himself.

It is especially today that parables of this kind have suffered greatly because people's—and even theologians'—thinking is generally materialistic. To demonstrate what is actually possible in this regard, let me read you something about this parable from a small book published as part of a series.¹²⁰ The author is considered to be one of the most outstanding representatives of the Hamack approach; he was appointed associate professor at Jena University and a few days ago to the chair of New Testament studies. These are therefore the ideas presented by a university professor. What is more, his wisdom is available to everyone, for the book only costs a few pence. The best way of disseminating ideas like these is to present them in cheap books of this kind. Everything suggests that the matter is more important than one would generally think, for that is how the materialistic thinking of theologians reaches the hearts and minds of people.

The way of explaining such a parable is more or less like this: ‘The things people say regarding a deeper meaning to these parables are nothing special; it is something which simply is not there behind the parables. We need to go back to our original, childlike way of thinking.’ It is as if the Christ merely intended to tell an artfully composed story. What he said in the story is of so little importance that it is entirely in accord with modern thinking, where things cannot be reduced low enough, to bring them down to the level of the most ordinary commonplace.

His actual words are: 'Let us take the parable of the untrustworthy agent, for this often causes problems. We'll take it on its own, up to the words: "The lord praised the untrustworthy agent because he acted with forethought." The reason why we leave away the rest of the verses will be clear later on; one thing is certain and that is that they can no longer all be used for the interpretation, for they are about completely different ideas. If we take the parable as a parable again, all it is intended to say is that the agent knew that there would be an accounting followed by dismissal. He therefore considered what he might do in this situation, and right away took the only course he could think of. That was an intelligent way of doing things. Even his lord, whom he had cheated, had to admit this.

Now to what it was meant to tell Jesus' contemporaries: "You, too, know and believe that God will call you to account one day. Be intelligent, therefore, and prepare for this!' 'At least be intelligent about if, the parable is meant to say. Jesus was not concerned in this case with goodness, nor with the longing in human hearts. A harsh, ironical mood prevails. Nothing here of 'Blessed be they who bear pain, blessed those of a pure heart!' Instead we have: 'If you won't listen to everything, at least be as intelligent as that untrustworthy agent!' There's a note of sharpness in this parable, and this is why we have such a strange choice of image. Jesus did not consider it necessary to add that we cannot prepare for God's judgement by committing further villainies the way the agent did.

You see that Weinel himself compared the lord in the story with God. The last three lines clearly show that the parable could be seen to relate to this, for the author says that God might one day call the soul to account. So there should surely be the words: 'at least be good'. But if we then read what the lord says to the untrustworthy agent, using the words 'you should at least be as intelligent as such an untrustworthy agent', it means we have not understood the parable.

Such ideas are presented in popular books today and implanted in the minds of young students. It is not the kind of materialism which explains the outside world in materialist terms which is worst, but the materialism of people who do not want to know of any deeper insight into theological things. It is the kind of materialism which is the cause of the other, scientific materialism. Here materialism enters deeply into human souls, and then one cannot help oneself but interpret the facts of modern science in a materialistic way. We'll have to learn again to understand things of the spirit And this can only happen through the approach where it is truly possible to explain the Bible and other religious documents.

We come to understand such a parable if we enter more deeply into its meaning. One thing to be considered from the beginning is that it is in Luke's gospel and does not appear in the other gospels. What does it mean to say it is only in Luke's gospel? It means a great deal. If you study the gospels, for instance those of Mark and Luke, and compare them, you'll find that each has a particular mood. In yesterday's lecture I said these were canonical works coming from different initiation centres. Luke goes back to the initiation gone through by the Essenes and Therapeutists. You therefore have a medical aspect to it, seeking to restore balance for people, to bridge differences between them and make it come true that in the eyes of the world of the spirit, all human beings are equal. Luke's gospel often seems like a gospel for people who are oppressed and burdened. It will help them to stand up straight, for they are equal in the eyes of the world of the spirit. This needs to be considered, and then we shall find the basic note, the mood, which is to be found in the gospel of Luke.

In earlier times, the different gospels were in fact declared to be different even in tone. Let us hold on to this for a bit. Here we have to consider an important basic quality of Christianity, which you'll remember from earlier lectures. You know that I often reminded you of the words: ‘Anyone who does not disregard his wife, child, mother and brother, cannot be my disciple.’¹²¹ You know that these words refer to a major step forward in the evolution of the human race. It refers to the fact that in earlier times we had a love in the world that was founded on blood bonds; this love had to go, however, as soon as the bonds of blood were broken. In earlier times, in the past, blood relative loved blood relative. The Christ taught the love which will be such that one human being loves the other, irrespective of how their blood relates. This bond of brotherhood will mean that people are equal not in the greatest possible external sense, but in what Christianity teaches to be equality in the worlds of the spirit.

The coming of the Christ thus brought a decisive change in human evolution on earth. It gave the impulse for humanity to progress towards a great bond of brotherhood that encompasses the whole world. Christ Jesus has made it possible for human beings to be guided by the power that comes from his words, guided to that all-encompassing love for which we use the term 'bond of brotherhood'. The gospels give us the strength and power we need to establish this bond. This is something we need to understand clearly.

Seeing things in this way, we perceive the great profundity of a word we find in the gospels in many ways, a word which always refers to the old law, the law pertaining to the early times described in the Old Testament. Jesus did say¹²² that neither the dot on an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, but he put something completely new in place of this law, something which has not yet become real. He put the free, loving attitude people have to one another in place of things that are governed by law today. Laws regulate the ways people live together and the things one person has to do for another. A time will come, however, when each individual will know, having an immediate feeling for this, what he needs to do for, and give to, his human brother.

Let us now consider the parable from the point of view of Christianity. If we take it seriously we'll grasp the profound significance and understand that the rich man may indeed be compared to the divine regent of this world. The analogy does indeed exist—rich man and divine regent of the world. But how? Putting the question like this, one might easily be asking why the agent was untrustworthy. It is generally assumed that it is because he let people put down 80 instead of 100 measures, and so on. People think the agent was untrustworthy because he put something down for people that was not in accord with their debt certificates. This was veiy wrong. Truth is that he was called untrustworthy because he had demanded excessively high prices for the grain and other produce which he had sold to the people. We can now understand why people would not support the agent if his lord dismissed him. If that were not the case, we'd have to assume that the rich man himself wanted to be untrustworthy. But the parable says nothing of the kind. And if we take the sentences that follow—the ones Weinel was arbitrarily leaving out—we'll find that we have no need to think the rich man to have been someone who would ask his agent to cheat people. The agent thought he'd serve his lord well by getting the best possible prices for him. Yet in spite of this he stood accused of not having acted in his lord's interests.

Let us approach the parable in the light of the above and get a clear picture. It was said of the agent that he had wasted his lord's property. He knew that people would not stand by him because of the way he had done things, asking high prices. So he thought: 'What am I to do? My master wants an accounting, and he'll dismiss me from my office. The others, he said to himself, won't accept me into their homes.' So what did he do? He made up for some of the things he had done wrong earlier, as an untrustworthy agent. He let people off a bit, that is, he now asked more humane prices. He let some of the mammon go which he had wrongly demanded for his lord.

If we take the parable like this, we may indeed compare the rich man with the divine regent of the world, and the agent with someone who was appointed to govern the old world at the behest of the divine regent, when life was regulated by laws. We may then also say that there was to be an accounting as to how affairs had been managed. It was found that the agent had grown untrustworthy. The same may be said of the law. It had been good originally, but had gradually become unfair. Class distinctions were made and rights established that could no longer be upheld. And so someone who had said that neither the dot of an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, now had to demand an accounting from the Pharisees and Scribes who were administering the law. The parable was about the Pharisees; they were the untrustworthy agents, administrators of the law. It was they who must not imagine that if they were not accepted by the one they thought to be their god they would be welcome in the huts of those who were subject to the law.

We can now also see why there is no need to make the rich man in the parable untrustworthy. He actually praised the agent for having cut prices. If a rich man wants to cheat people, surely he's not going to praise someone who returns some of the money where prices have been too high. The agent thought to serve his lord and grew unjust towards others. In the same way the people whose task it was to guard the law believed they were serving their lord and grew unjust towards other people.

This changed the moment the Christ came. We also see that those who have been handling those laws needed to restore to rights anything they have done wrong in the process. The law had grown unjust. Now, when love of all people was demanded, those who wanted to gain the huts—meaning the souls—of people must put the just law in place of a law which in specific areas had become unjust. They have to write something off where things had become unjust. In the gospel, therefore, the old Scribes and Pharisees are divided into those who in rigid orthodoxy go on calling themselves ‘children of God’. They are the ones whom Christ Jesus condemns, saying he wants to have nothing to do with them. They are the ones of whom he says that they continue to be far removed from him; who say: ‘We serve God who has given us the laws.’ They were the ‘children of light’ because they held fast to the law, which was a technical term for the servants of God who were later compared to the untrustworthy agent The others, who lived among the people, who had to be involved with human inclinations, were the ‘children of the world’. They did not insist on the letter of the law; they let people off because one could no longer do things in an unjust way. They are people who were unjust before, but having to be in close touch with life they were forced to change. Because of this the 'children of the world' were wiser than the 'children of light'.

The parable refers to the way the world is ruled. What was good before may become a torment, and something else must take its place. So what is the situation now concerning the law, and the honesty of those who administer it? Where are the people who no longer base themselves on the old law? And those who have reason to fear that they will not be welcome in the huts of others, because they have been unjust? The parable is now easily understood, for we have given the old esoteric interpretation from which the parable originally arose. One should not interpret the parable in a materialistic, theological way, but very simply. These parables exist in order to show the profound significance of humanity’s great mission.

The other parable is the parable of the lost son. You know it. It also presents difficulties for some. It would be taking us too far to read out the whole parable. You know what it is about. A father had two sons. One asked for his inheritance so that he might go out into the world; the other stayed at home, was a good boy and helped to run his father’s affairs. The one who had gone out into the world lost everything, grew poor, and ended up in the greatest misery and dire want. When he came home, his father received him most lovingly. When the older son heard this, he grew angry and would not enter the house. His father went outside and asked him to come in. But he said to his father: 'Look, I have been serving you for so many years, but you've never given me a ram so that I might have a pleasant time with my friends. But now that this son of yours has come, having wasted his inheritance on bad girls, you have killed a fatted calf for him.' He said to him, however: *My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But you should be happy and delighted for your brother was dead and has come to life again. He was lost and has been found again.'

Imagine now that someone plays a part in the parable of the lost son today and that it is not covered with the dust of millennia of venerable tradition. Don't think that there aren't also people today who consider it to be extremely unfair that the father receives his runaway son with open arms, putting his other son at a disadvantage. Don't think that people are going to say anything else! And they do say it. There are people who do not venerate the Bible the way the faithful do. To some, the Bible is an ordinary book known the world over. A few lines from someone who sees it like this, a thoroughly bourgeois freethinker, will show you. The book is entitled Finsternisse (darknesses).¹²³ It says: 'Our sympathies are entirely with the older son... The way the father treats his younger son is extremely unfair to the older son,' and so on.

This is uninspired, but many people would think the same if the parable were to be written today. Consider, however, that there's something behind these things. Consider that we can understand the whole nature of these things out of what lies behind them. We can see, therefore, that we merely have to give them a deeper meaning. The most important of these parables may also be found in a kind of canon of the mysteries, taking different forms among different nations. Let me tell you one from the Hebrew Canon,¹²⁴ and then you can make the comparison.

A king had to accept the fact that his son left him and went away. He sent the tutor who had power over his son, that he might bring him home. The tutor did soften the son's heart. But the son said: 'How am I to face my father again?' And his father sent word: 'Surely it is me, your father, whom you'll be facing,' and so on. But it also says something else, and that is: 'This also happened to the people of Israel who had grown sinful and turned away from their father, the regent of the world. They had lost faith.' The story then goes on: The King sent messengers after his son. The son said, however: How can I face my father? His father replied: Surely it is your father whom you'll be meeting face to face?

The parable is not the same as in the gospel but it came into existence centuries before the Christian era, with definite similarities, and has been preserved in Hebrew tradition. The difference is merely that a deeper explanation is given. It is spelled out for people that the story refers to the nation which needs to return to the father. Jesus merely gave the images in the parables, interpreting them only for the disciples. The Jewish parable relates to the nation, a single nation connected by blood bonds; the Christian parable relates to the evolution of the whole of humanity.

Let us now remember how souls came down from the keeping of the divine spirit in ancient Lemurian times, how the soul entered into the human being, and how it was only because of this that he became an individual person. Let us follow the way the soul grew more and more individual; let us remember that animals still have group souls today and not individual souls—a group soul on the astral plane. If we go back in the evolution of the human race we find that humans also had group souls once, being closer to the divine spirit then than they are today. Human beings had not yet descended and entered into bodies at that time. They brought about what the god in them brought about. Once they had entered into human bodies they grew more and more individual, their own masters in the habitation of a human body. Others remained behind at the original level and at other early stages. Because of this we have the different types of human beings side by side. We have people who today still have almost a generic soul. We cannot perceive individual impulses in them, and they act less of their own accord and more in a generic way. The god instilled the group soul. It continued like this until the independent human being evolved who seeks the way back to his god again.

The process of evolution was such, therefore, that originally the human being was a group soul in the keeping of the divine spirit. Looking at an individual today and at human evolution, we are able to say: Primitive man still remains with the father; he has not left his father’s habitation. The other one, however, has gone out into the world, has asked for his inheritance, so that he may develop freely. A moment comes when the developing human being feels isolated, deprived of spiritual goods. He then seeks to find his way back to God again. That is the process of evolution—descent from the god into matter and then the re-ascent, returning to his father’s house. If we find the way back out of our own resources, we return having first grown poor, hungering for spiritual goods. We do, however, return as independent individuals, and the higher we advance in the spirit the more do we return home. Candidates felt themselves to be returning to the house of their divine father. What they said came from the group soul. It will become clear to us if we consider this in its occult sense.

It is not easy to study the human organism esoterically. The way people are today, they have a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and the actual I. All these bodies do not exist on their own; they are not yet independent entities. Please forgive the not very appetizing comparison, but it will show things a bit more clearly. Spirits that are more or less alien by nature are present in all these bodies, like maggots in a cheese. They move in and out. The influences to which human beings are subject come from the outside and from very different spirits. The spirits that move into and out of the physical body are called 'phantoms'. The human being becomes unfree because of this. The spirits present in the ether body are called 'spectres'. And the spirits present in the astral body are called 'demons'. As you know, people who were not superstitious but knew something of these things, were familiar with this. And the entities that have to do with the I are called 'ghosts'.

How does the human being grow individual? By purifying himself. He is most powerfully purified by becoming a companion to the world of the spirit. He then works on his astral body to free it from demons. When he is working on his ether body he frees himself from spectres. Working on the physical body he gets rid of his phantoms. Once this is done, he returns to the pure, divine realm. He will have won something in the process. He had been unfree. But now, having freed himself, he returns to his father’s house a free man. This will make it easier for you to understand the reports of Jesus driving out demons.

In the parable of the lost son, you need to think of the whole of human evolution. The spirits will be delighted at the soul's return, for it will not have remained the way it was when it went away. The individual has changed, has become free. This delights his companions. We should not see the sphere to which the parable relates as something lowly or small; we need to see it as the great cosmic tableau. You will penetrate even more deeply if you recall that everything is the other way round on the astral plane, as I told you. Remember I said that even figures have to be read the other way round in the astral world, in their mirror images. So if we come to the figure 64, we should read 46, not 64. When your passions take their leave of you, it seems to you that they are all kinds of spirits rushing towards you. If you want to create a parable with a profound, ethical core for the most sublime worlds, you use numerous images that appear the other way round in the physical world. This shows you the deeper reason why some parables, ethical in the world of the spirit, will sometimes offend in the physical world. You have to think of many things in parables. You are driven by them, through your feelings, into the world of the spirit. And that is also the mood, the tone, which lives in such parables. And it is in fact characteristic of such parables that they offend in their physical form.

Another parable I would like to mention briefly is the one of the wise and foolish virgins.¹²⁵ This also makes us think. Let us recall. The realm of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, however, and five were wise. The foolish virgins took their lamps but no oil with them. The wise virgins carried oil in their vessels as well as their lamps. The bridegroom was delayed and they all grew sleepy and went to sleep. At midnight, however, voices were heard: “Lo, the bridegroom is coming; go forth to meet him!” The virgins all rose and prepared their lamps. The foolish ones then said to the wise ones: “Give us of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” The wise virgins replied: “No, for then both we and you will not have enough; but go to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.” Yet as they went away to buy some the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him for the wedding, and the door was closed. Finally the other virgins also came and said: “Lord, lord, open up for us!” He said, however: ‘Truly, I tell you I do not know you. Watch and wait, therefore, for you will know neither the day nor the hour at which the Son of Man will come.”'

Here an indication is given that the parable has something to do with the Christ's future coming. Let us make this clear. We can do this if we once again consider the parts of the human being. If I work on my astral body, the Holy Spirit arises in Christian terms. If the I works on the ether body, budhi arises, or Christ, the logos. In my Theosophy, the Holy Spirit is called ‘spirit self,’ the Christ, the logos, is called ‘budhi’ or ‘life spirit’.

We look at people today and see the way they are living now that they have developed physical body, ether body, astral body and I. If the I works on the astral body, the Holy Spirit, spirit self, manas develops from the astral body. And because the I has already done some work on the astral body, people also have some manas, some Holy Spirit. This manas acts into the human being in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit A time will come when humanity will enter into the sixth of the root races. Manas will then have developed in those who have really done something for their development They will have developed manas. They will be ready to receive budhi, the Christ, the sixth basic part.

In the sixth race human beings will develop the Christ, and that will be the majority of people. We are moving towards that time. It will be the time when Christ Jesus will come. At that time human beings will be given the power to move to the place where they can receive the Christ in a new form, as a fruit, the place where the Christ laid down the seed, as it were, like a mustard seed that will grow ii the soul. The Christ will be visible to them, that is, to those who have developed the inner Christ eye.

A parable, a symbol, is used to describe what human beings are inwardly developing. Just as the physical human being comes into existence through the male and female principles coming together, so the idea is that the other parts of the human being were also inseminated, that the different parts were inseminated in a particular way. This was during the Saturn period. Then the ether body developed, and then the astral body. The coming of these new developmental aspects was thought to be like an insemination. This example can also show you how deeply the words of the Bible must be taken. It is not for nothing that it says in the Bible: 'And Adam knew his wife,'¹²⁶ when referring to an insemination, for at the back of it all is the idea of insemination out of the spirit. To know1, 'gain insight', is to be inseminated with the divine self. 'Know yourself means 'Let yourself be inseminated with the divine self which is present throughout the world'.

Something similar to this lies behind the parable of the foolish and wise virgins in Christian esotericism. The image of insemination is the lamp which has been given oil. Thus each of these parts of the human being is seen as a virgin who has not yet been inseminated, and the inseminated bodies of the human being are the virgins who have poured oil into their lamps. The undeveloped part of humanity remains where it is, with no oil in its lamp, and does not take its bodies up to the budhi level. The developed part has allowed the spirit to influence its bodies, pouring oil into the lamp, as it were. The others have poured no oil into their lamp, they have not developed their five bodies. The others did develop them, preparing for the important moment of the Christ's coming. The time of the Christ's coming then arrives. Some will have poured oil into their lamps; their souls will be illumined and ready to receive the Christ. Others, who have remained dark in themselves, will see that others have developed and they'll go to receive the wisdom from the others. They will need to go to the merchants to get their oil. But they'll be too late. And what will the Christ say to the wise virgins? ‘I know you.’ And what will he say to the foolish virgins? 'I do not know you.'

Applied to insemination the parable thus means: He will come to inseminate the sixth basic part, and he'll enter into the sixth basic part. 'Adam knew his wife, and she came to be with child.' And then the bridegroom says to the unwise virgins: 'I do not know you.' Such words taken from the profundity of Holy Writ will always be true. If we were to proceed in this way we would find that letter by letter the Bible contains the science of the spirit, and that we can learn the truths of that science by studying it. We need no other book. Anyone who says that the Bible contradicts the science of the spirit, does not know the Bible, and it does not matter if they are theologians who consider themselves to be at a very high level. Life in the spirit has to be found again in this ancient document.

Now a few comments on the things I was referring to in my public lectures on the Book of Revelation. You know that the sun once separated from the earth, and that it will unite again with the earth in the far distant future. The quality which makes it possible for human beings to become so spiritual that they are able to reunite with the sun is in occult terms called 'the sun's intelligence'. This good spirit in the sun has an adversary, the demon in the sun. The two are not only active in the sun but also send their influences down to the earth. The powers of the good sun spirit enter into plant, animal and human being; they bring forth life on earth. The adversary principle of the sun demon, the power which opposes the union of earth and sun, is active in man's evil powers.

Occult symbols of this have existed through the ages.¹²⁷ A seven-cornered sign is the symbol of the good sun spirit. The seven corners symbolize the seven planets. The pentagram is the symbol for the human being. In occultism, the stars are drawn into the figure [heptagram] in the form of seven eyes. They bind it all together. At the same time we also have the days of the week if you follow this line here (Fig. 21).¹²⁸

In the distant past, time could not yet be measured by external methods based on the way the sun moves around the earth. Early occultists thought of special regents for the orbit of the sun, and they were right in their thinking. The whole system was orbiting, and time was determined in relation to the twelve signs of the zodiac—Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, and so on. As you know, one cycle in the evolution of a cosmic system is called a manvantara, and this is always followed by a pralaya, a state of rest. They alternate like day and night, with both night and day of 12 hours duration. Those 12 hours correspond to the vast periods of time in the cosmic day that were regulated by the ancient rulers of the circling of the zodiac. I would need to draw 24 masters of rotations around this sign. If I were to draw it for you, you'd have the heptagon here (Fig. 21), then the seven eyes for the seven stars, and the 24 ancient rulers, 12 for the night and 12 for the day.

The good sun spirit is also called 'the lamb'. We have already referred to the pentagram as the symbol of the human being. A black magician uses it with the two 'horns' pointing upwards and the single peak pointing down. On completion of this development, the 'good' will have developed seven 'horns'. That is the sign of the Christ spirit.

Having gained this occult insight, read the passage where John receives the book sealed with seven seals. Let us read it as it is given in chapter 4 of the Book of Revelation. 'And immediately I was in the spirit And behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardius stone ... And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting'—I have presented them to you in the twenty-four hours of the cosmic day, night and day. And then, moving on to chapter 5: ‘And I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts and in the midst of the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of god sent forth into all the earth.’ This occult sign forms the background to John's writing of the secrets of cosmic existence in his Book of Revelation. You need to know these if you are to have some feeling for the profundity of this work, and what it signifies when the adversary of the lamb is spoken of as the two-homed beast. The symbol of the sun demon is drawn like this:

The Book of Revelation is all in occult writing, which is given expression in words.

One of its secrets also lies in the 'number of the beast', 666,¹²⁹ also 'the number of a man'. According to Aramaic occult teaching, the figure should be read like this: 400, 200, 6, 60. These four figures¹³⁰ are represented by the Hebrew letters:

Hebrew writing is read from right to left:

These letters symbolize the four principles that cause man to harden completely unless he is able to transform them. Sameh represents the principle of the physical body, vav that of the ether body, resh that of the astral body, and tav the lower I which has not developed into higher I. The whole word reads ‘Sorat’, which is the occult name of the sun demon, the adversary of the lamb.

This is the secret which in more recent theology has been turned into: It means ‘Nero’.¹³¹ I can’t think of anything more fanciful. The individual who invented this Nero story is considered to be one of the greatest theological thinkers. Vast volumes have been written on the subject. People thus misunderstand the meaning of those symbolic signs. Works like the Book of Revelation can only be understood by someone who is able to read the occult writing.

The prophetic significance of such signs and symbols may also make you realize that the spiritual science movement has an important mission. In choosing the seven seals from the Book of Revelation for the auditorium in Munich, we are also giving an outward indication of the direction we want to take. The spiritual principle is to come to face us again also in the outside world.

• 117. See Steiner R. Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55), lecture of 26 April 1907. Tr. R Stebbing. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1987.
• 118. Luke 16: 1-8.
• 119. Weinel H. Die Gleichnisse Jesu in Aus Natur und Geisteswelt. Sammlung wissenschaftich-gemeinverständlicher Darstellungen 46. Band, 2. Auflage Leipzig 1905, S. 130.
• 120. Ibid S. 23.
• 121. SGenesis 3: 14,Rev. 1: 8.
• 122. Matth. 5:17-18.
• 123. Zurich 1896; quoted by Weinel (see note 119).
• 124. Free rendering of story of Absalom according to 2 Samuel.
• 125. Matth. 25: 1-13.
• 126. Genesis 4: 1.
• 127. The sketches have not survived. See The Apocalypse of St John (Book of Revelation) (GA 104). Tr. rev. M. Cotterell. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1958; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 128. See also lecture given on 4 March 1907, in this volume.
• 129. Rev. 13: 18.
• 130. The Phoenician and later the Hebrew alphabet had a fixed sequence of letters, and this also made it possible to use the letters as numerals. This happens on several occasions in the Old Testament, in both the Hebrew and the Greek versions. The numerical value of letters is of considerable importance in occult writings.
• 131. The interpretation which Rudolf Steiner had shown to be wrong may still be found in reference works today, e.g. in Lexikon der Bibel, von Fritz Rienecker herausgegeben, 3. Auflage, Wuppertal 1961.

The Munich Congress,¹³²¹³³ being the fourth after Amsterdam, London and Paris, was intended to mark a certain milestone in our theosophical movement. A kind of connection is to be made between the different nations also for our theosophical cause in Europe. I am not intending to give an actual report on the congress today but just to offer a few comments for those who were unable to be there.

The congress was to show one thing, something I had been emphasizing many times with reference to our theosophical cause—it was to show that theosophy is not meant to be a personal matter of broodingly looking inward. It is meant to play a role in practical life, be concerned with education, come to be at home in all branches of practical life. Those who have deeper insight and understanding of the true impulses of theosophy will know, even today, what opportunities this theosophy will provide in the future. It will be the harmony between things we see [outside] and feel inwardly. Someone able to see into things more deeply will see a major reason for the scattiness [of today's people], disharmony between the situation as it is and the things theosophy aims at. Not only theosophists have felt this, but also other important figures, Richard Wagner, for instance...

In earlier times every door lock, every house, every structure was a structure of the soul. Soul stuff had flowed into it. In the old days a work of art was part of human feeling and thinking. The forms of Gothic churches were in accord with the mood of people who would often walk a long way to those churches. They had the soul mood of the people. The worshipper walking to the church would feel that those forms were like putting one's hands together in prayer, just as the ancient German [entering a grove] would feel [the movements of the trees] to be something like a putting the hands together in prayer. Everything was more familiar to people in those times. You can still see this most beautifully expressed in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The way a whole small village would come together in the church was a true expression of the inner life in that village. Whole ether streams would gather in the place where the church stood. The materialistic age has split everything apart. People don't realize this, being unable to take a clear look at life. A seer will know, however, that when you walk through a town today you'll see practically nothing but things for our stomachs or the latest fashions. Anyone able to trace the secret threads in life will also know what has brought our materialistic civilization to this split-apart state.

Health can come for the outside world if it becomes a reflection of our inmost moods of soul. We can't achieve complete perfection right away, but an example has been given in Munich. The spiritual scientific view of the world was brought to expression in the auditorium. The whole hall was in red. People are often quite wrong about the colour red, one should not fail to perceive the deeper significance of the colour. Human evolution involves ascending and descending movements. Look at the original peoples. Their natural world is green. And what do they love most? Red! An occultist knows that red has a special effect on a healthy soul. It releases active powers in that soul, powers that encourage one to act, powers that should move the soul from taking it too easy to making an effort, even if this is far from easy. A room intended to have a solemn, festive mood needs to be papered in red. Someone who uses red wall paper in his living room shows that he no longer has a feeling for solemn moods, taking the red colour down to an everyday level. Goethe wrote the most excellent words one can think of about these things: 'The effect of this colour is as unique as its nature. It gives an impression both of solemnity and dignity and of charm and graciousness. It does the former in its dark, dense form, the latter when bright and diluted. And so the dignity of old age and the charm of youth may garb themselves in one and the same colour.'¹³⁴

Those are the moods which red creates, moods we are able to demonstrate using occult methods. Look at the countryside through a red glass and you'll get the impression: That's what it must look like on the day of judgement. Red makes us glad to see how far human beings have developed. Red is hostile to moods that hold us back, moods of sin.

Then we had the seven column motifs for the time when buildings might also be erected for theosophy. The column motifs were taken from the teachings of the initiates, from very early times. In theosophy it will be possible to provide architecture with genuinely new column motifs. The old columns have really long ceased to mean something to people. The new ones relate to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and Venus. The capitals reflect the laws. Between the columns we had put the seven seals of the Book of Revelation, in Rosicrucian style. The seal of the Grail appeared in public for the first time.

We can also build theosophy. We can build it in architectural forms, in education and in the social field. The Rosicrucian principle is to bring the spirit into the world, to do fruitful work for the soul. And it will also prove possible to elevate art to the mystery art which Richard Wagner longed for so much. An attempt has been made in Edouard Schuré's mystery play.¹³⁵ He sought to follow the mystery plays of old. The underlying intention was to let theosophy crystallize in the developing structure of the world. The programme was in a solemn and festive red, showing a black cross with roses wound around it against a blue background. Rosicrucianism takes the things given through Christianity forward into the future. The initials given on the programme reflected the underlying thoughts.¹³⁶

Today I would like to consider some questions that may come up in relation to this. First of all: How would it be if theosophy were to move across into the Rosicrucian stream and come wholly into its own within this? In this respect let us consider some ideas relating to theosophical ethics or morality. It is not a matter of saying: You must do or not do one thing or another. Theosophy has nothing to do with demands and commandments but with facts and narratives.

Let us take just one example of a fact in the astral world; it will immediately be apparent that there is no need to preach morality—which does not serve any purpose anyway, for admonitions and commandments cannot be the basis of genuine morality which comes only with the facts of higher life. If you hear occultists say that a lie is murder and suicide, this acts as an impulse with such moral power that it simply does not compare with the simple admonition: You must not lie. If we know what a lie is and what the truth is, if we know that everything leaves its mark in the realm of the spirit, the situation changes. A narrative which is in accord with the truth creates vital energies for further development. Untruths that are spoken strike at the truth and this reflects on the individual himself. Every lie that is told will later have to be felt by the teller himself. Lies are the greatest obstacles to further development. It is not for nothing that the devil is called the spirit of lies and obstacles. The explosive substance of a lie kills objectively and discharges itself against the individual who put it out into the world.

We have three terms for the personal: the personal, the impersonal, and the more-than-personal. There were human ancestors once who were higher than any animal but lower than the human being. They consisted of physical body, ether body and astral body. Then the I was added, and this creates the higher parts out of itself, so that essential human nature will be sevenfold.

The evolution of physical body, ether body and astral body continued through long periods of time. They thus made themselves ripe to receive I-awareness into themselves. Today, we'll consider the tendencies of the three lower bodies and the way in which they developed. The human being gradually became more and more able to gain self-awareness. This is only possible with the power of egoism, self-seeking, which may be divine or devilish. We should judge these terms not merely by how we feel about them but according to their true essence. Independence made it necessary for human beings to grow egoistical.

Developing egoism brought with it the form of—apparent—loss of conscious awareness we call death in our present human life. Death developed to the same degree as self-seeking evolved. In the very beginning human beings did not die. They were like a part that dried up and would then grow again, more or less the way a finger nail may drop off and grow again. Our present-day way of dying and being reborn came into existence so that we may have the potential for our present I-awareness. Egoism and death are two sides of the same thing. The higher aspect of human nature is such that it overcomes egoism, works to rise to the level of the divine and thus overcomes death. The more the individual develops the higher part in himself, the more does he develop awareness of his immortality. The moment someone has become egoistical, he has also become an individual person. Animals are not persons and that is because they have their I as a group soul that does not descend from the astral plane. The individual personality lets the three bodies—physical body, ether body and astral body—be shone through by the I. This may of course be in an unclear, shadowy way, and in that case the individual concerned is weak in his personal identity.

This is clearly apparent to a clairvoyant. He sees a colourful aura around the individual which exactly reflects his moods, passions, feelings and sensations in currents and clouds of colour. If we were to go back to the time when the three bodies were only just ready to receive the human I, we would see an aura also for this creature which was not yet wholly human. This would, however, lack the yellow currents that reflect man's higher nature. Powerful personalities have an aura with powerful yellow radiation. Now you may be a powerful personality but not active; you feel things strongly inside but not be a man or woman of action. The aura will also show a lot of yellow. But if you are a woman or man of action, and your personality is actively influencing the world, the yellow will gradually change into a radiant red. An aura showing red radiance is the aura of someone who is active; but it must be radiant.

There is, however, a pitfall for personalities that want to be active. This is ambition, vanity. Strong natures are particularly prone to this. A clairvoyant sees it in their auras. Without ambition the yellow changes directly into red. If the individual is ambitious, the aura will contain a lot of orange. This pitfall must be avoided if the action is to be objective.

Weak personalities are more interested in being given things than in giving themselves and doing something. You will then see mainly blues, and if they are particularly indolent you see indigo. This is more an inner indolence than an outer one.

So you see how a strong or weak personality is reflected in the aura. People should overcome the personal element more and more and let the higher principle be active. This is why you hear such a lot about overcoming personal concerns and egoism. But this brings us to our main point. It is a question of whether we overcome the personal with the impersonal or the more-than-personal.

What does it mean, to overcome oneself with the impersonal? It means to weaken and force back the individual's powerful energies. That would mean being impersonal. More-than-personal would in some respect be the exact opposite of this. It would mean increasing the individual's energies, bringing out the powerful energies which a person has.

We find the I in the soul, and within it first of all the element of courage, but secondly also the soul's desirous and demanding qualities. Basically everything in the inner life goes back to these two things. And things receive different treatment there. This is due to the following. Human beings do not make enough of an effort to be open to higher things. They will develop, but it will be the lower principle which develops, with elements of courage and qualities of desire developing in a crude way. If they were simply to reduce this side of things, we'd have a civilization of the impersonal. Activity, which makes human beings human as they go out to be among others and do whatever they are capable of, will in a way always bring such individuals in collision with others. And they must experience collisions if they feel they are called on to do something.

We can also kill off our desires. This will make the personality colourless, however. Yet there's something else we can do, and that is to ennoble them. We need not reduce their strength. We can direct them towards higher objects. The personality need lose nothing of its strength then, though it will grow more noble and divine. We need not kill off desires, only transform them into finer and more noble desires. They can then come into their own with the same vehemence. An example. Think of a honky-tonk entertainment. Someone who does not go to it need not be an ascetic. He has merely transformed his lower desires into higher ones and so a honky-tonk would simply bore him.

This is an area where theosophy has been most misunderstood by theosophists. There can be no question of killing off the personal element. It needs to be helped to move up to something higher. Everything theosophy is able to give us will be needed for this. It is thus above all a matter of arousing interest in higher things. This does happen. People need not deaden their feelings for this, but direct them towards the higher, divine process of evolution, to the great realities in this world. If we direct our feelings towards these we will lose interest in the brutal side of life, yet our feelings will not be deadened but will grow rich, and the whole of our human nature will catch fire. If someone is fond of some nice roast pork, it is not a matter of getting rid of this feeling for roast pork but of transforming it. Our aim should be to metamorphose our feelings. The feelings which one individual has for the symphony of a meal are applied to a real symphony by another. If you preach overcoming desires and activity, you are preaching something impersonal. But if you show people the way in which they can direct their desires to things of the spirit, you point them towards things that are more than personal. And this more-than-personal must be the goal of the theosophical movement.

The science of the spirit is not intended to produce stay-at-homes and eccentrics but people who are active, going out into the world. How do we reach the more-than-personal, however? Not by eating into the personal, but by perceiving what is true, great and all-embracing. This is why it is not for nothing that we cultivate an eye for the great scheme of things in theosophy. This helps us to grow beyond trivial things and take things not in an impersonal way but in one that goes beyond being personal.

There is an area where we have a crossover experiment,¹³⁷ as it were, to establish the difference between personal, impersonal and more-than-personal. When it comes to love, you may easily think that the feelings which someone has for someone else are impersonal. But this may be a long way off from anything more-than-personal. People fall into a strange illusion here. They confuse self love with love for someone else. Most people think they love someone else but are in fact loving themselves in the other person. Giving oneself up to someone else is merely something to satisfy our own egoism. The individual concerned is not aware of this, but basically it is just a roundabout way of satisfying one's egoism.

We do not exist in isolation but are part of a whole. A finger is lovingly part of the hand and the organism. It would die if it weren't. In the same way a person could never exist without the rest of humanity. The result of this is that people like people.

Love sometimes simply comes from poverty of soul, and poverty of soul always comes from powerful egoism. If someone says he can't live without another person, his own personality is impoverished, and he is looking for something that will make him more complete. He dresses it all up by saying: I am getting impersonal; I love the other person.

The most beautiful and selfless love shows itself when one does not need the other person and can also do without him. The individual's then loving someone not for his own sake but for the sake of that other person. This does of course mean one has to be able to discern the true value of someone, which can only be done by entering deeply into the world. The more of a theosophist you are, the more you will learn to enter into the inner essence of another individual. And you'll then be all the more sensitive of his value and not love him for egoistical reasons. If you go through the world like this, you'll also see that some people have one kind of egoism, and others another, each living according to the value of his egoism.

What is needed is higher development of the personality. Impersonal love based on weakness will always also involve suffering. Love that is more-than-personal bases on strength and perception of the other person. It can be a source of joy and satisfaction. Swinging to and fro between all kinds of different moods in one's love is always a sign that this love is masked egoism and comes from an impoverished personality. This is how we can best see the difference between impersonal and more-than-personal—by looking at love.

Someone to whom the science of the spirit has not given a foundation in his life has failed to understand it, for it is a source of inner satisfaction in life for the future. If materialism were to continue to gain the upper hand, and with it also egoism, which is part of it, humanity would fall more and more into the pessimism which represents the burned-out ashes of burned-out minds. If humanity takes up the science of the spirit, true cheerfulness will be restored to it, and this is at the same time also the source of health. Disharmony ultimately comes from egoism, and the higher human being spreads a cheerful, happy mood. The more the higher, the divine comes into its own, the more will human beings be in harmony. We should think more about how we can help the whole of humanity than about how the science of the spirit may help us in particular. We will find it easier and easier to discover the source of genuine cheerfulness and joy, youth eternal, the more we make ourselves familiar with the ethics of the more-than-personal.

Negation is definitely not the aim with theosophy, but rather affirmation. The impersonal signifies negation, the more-than-personal affirmation, weak though it may still be. This also shows us the mission which the science of the spirit is given out of the essential nature of humanity. 'You'll know it by its fruits,' by the way it makes people fit and effective in life, with faces that reflect inner harmony. The spirit never shows itself in a woebegone face. Even the pain someone has to go through is transformed in the thinker's face and appears in a more noble form; the expression of pain has been purified in the harmonious face of a thinker. A woebegone face indicates that egoism has not yet been overcome. The science of the spirit encourages us to turn to the world around us without losing ourselves in that world. It takes us beyond the personal, not by destroying the personality, making it impersonal, but by enhancing it so that it will be more than personal.

• 132. Concerning this record of the lecture on 12 June 1907, based on poor-quality notes, see Rudolf Steiner's essay 'Der Kongress der Federation europäischer Sektionen der Theosophischen Gesellschaft in München' in Luzifer-Gnosis (GA 34), S. 590 ft".
• 133. Fourth Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, 18-21 May 1907 in Munich. See Steiner R. Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28), ch. 28; . Tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 134. Zur Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil. Sechste Abteilung. Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe, 796.
• 135. Das heilige Drama von Eleusis, reconstructed by Edouard Schuré, translated from the French by Marie von Sivers, cast in free rhythms by Rudolf Steiner. The premiere was given on 19 May 1907, at the Munich Congress.
• 136. E.D.N. -1. C. M. - P. S. S. R. as the initial letters of the Rosicrucian words Ex deo nascimur. In Christo morimur. Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
• 137. Testing two cross-over qualities that are inseparably bound up with one another. Either both are present or neither, so that one needs only search for one of them. The method goes back to Francis Bacon.

Working with this volume involves a journey in both time and space, for the Berlin of 1906-7 is something far removed for many English-speaking readers. Yet for anyone interested in the life and work of Rudolf Steiner the journey brings worth-while insights and discoveries.

Taking the lectures published in this volume and in GA 97 (The Christian Mystery. Tr. A. R. Meuss. Gympie, Australia: Completion Press 2000) together, we get some idea of Rudolf Steiner’s work in those years. The lectures in GA 97 were given in various locations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In between his travels Rudolf Steiner would return to Berlin, where he then lived, and continued his lectures for a group of theosophists. These Berlin lectures cover a fairly wide range of subjects, from health and education, volcanic eruptions (in response to an eruption of Vesuvius at that time), to planetary evolution, the Rosicrucian way of initiation, the modern science of the spirit, the Lord’s Prayer, the blood that flowed on Golgotha, and karmic law.

The lectures were given to people with considerable knowledge of theosophical ideas and terminology, and anyone who is new to spiritual science may find it helpful to read one or two of the basic works first.

Echoes come up in these pages of the works Rudolf Steiner had published by that time, especially his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, but one keynote that comes through most strongly is that he was bringing a completely new approach to the science of the spirit. Theosophy was at that time mainly concerned with cultivating the old wisdom. If one reads Emil Bock’s studies of that period in Steiner’s life and work,¹ it is evident that these were themes that must have taken people aback a bit in circles where much devotion had been given to cultivation of the past. Mrs Besant understood this very well and did not consider it a problem, as may be seen from a letter she wrote to Dr Hübbe- Schleiden, the president of the Theosophical Society in Germany:

London, 7/6/07
Dear Dr Hübbe-Schleiden,

Dr Steiner’s occult training is very different from
ours. He does not know the eastern way, so cannot,
of course, teach it. He teaches the Xtian &
Rosicrucian way, and this is very helpful to some, but
is different from ours. I regard him as a very fine
teacher on his own lines, & as a man of real
knowledge. He & I work in thorough friendship &
harmony, but along different lines.

Yours ever sincerely,
Annie Besant²

In one of the two lectures on karmic law published in this volume, Rudolf Steiner struck that keynote, truly a clarion call as he pointed to the future:

Karmic law must above all throw light on our future. We should not think so much of the past, but more of the future. ... For when an individual makes himself more perfect, this will also have an effect on the organism of nation and race in the future.

Berlin, 15 October 1906

At the back of this volume are some notes giving details of the origin of these texts, which are based on notes taken by members of the audience.

Rudolf Steiner always avoided getting too fixed in his choice of words as well as in his approach to a subject. At the level of words, this is apparent, for example, from variation between ‘ether body’ and ‘etheric body’. I have followed this exactly in the translation. The variation between ‘buddhi’ and ‘budhi’ is probably due to the fact that the notes were taken by different people. The German editors left it in, and I have done the same.

Biblical quotes have been taken from the King James' Version where Rudolf Steiner quoted from the Luther translation of the Old Testament, and from Kalmia Bittleston's translations of the gospels (Edinburgh: Floris Books), as appropriate. The publishers were able to allow me plenty of time, and this made it possible to read the translated lectures in our Surbiton study group over several months. It is helpful for a translator to hear the translation read aloud by individuals who have not seen it before, for one hears the rhythms (and the stumbles) and is able to make final adjustments.

Most of the lectures have also been very kindly read through for me by a friend who is an Anglican priest and not an anthroposophist. She was able to make some truly helpful suggestions. Other lectures were proof-read for me by Pat Hague, an Australian living in London. She is an anthroposophist and I am most grateful to her for her careful work.

Surbiton, November 2000
Anna R. Meuss

• 1. Bock E. Rudolf Steiner. Studien zu seinem Lebensgang und Lebenswerk. Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben 1967.
• 2. Facsimile facing page 196 of the above.