The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Here, where my hopes and dreams found peace, let me name this house ‘Wahnfried’ [hopes and dreams at peace].¹⁹⁵

These are the words Richard Wagner wrote for the house he had built in Bayreuth. The house brought fulfilment of a deep longing. To him, all of life had been endeavour, hopes and dreams. Peace came to his hopes and dreams with his occultist dramatic work Parsifal.

People generally believe that when a work of art such as Wagner's Parsifal is produced, all the thoughts that may be found in it have been deliberately put in by the artist. That, however, is not the way a mystic will ever consider a work he has created. A plant also does not know the laws which the botanist discovers when he studies it. Invisible powers were hovering above Richard Wagner. The occult contents of Parsifal come from them. Much of the process we call ‘occult training’ lived in Wagner. Wonderful things may be discovered by following the development of someone throughout his life. You can observe truths dawning in his mind that were systematically nurtured in occult centres for centuries.

Let us consider the way in which the secrets that later came instinctively to Wagner were presented to the pupils at occult centres. All kinds of physical and mental exercises were done and this intimately shaped their faculty of occult vision. The teacher would above all awaken a basic mood in the student that would give him an intimate relationship to the natural world that surrounded him. The pupil would be guided through the realms of nature and taught to approach nature inwardly in the same way we approach human beings. Seeing a smile we surmise a cheerful mood of soul, tears are to us another specific inner response. The pupil would be shown how to perceive correspondences between physiognomy and soul life also in the natural world. An occultist is someone for whom these things become very real in his inner life. Looking at the natural world, the pupil would be told: ‘All is physiognomy, reflecting something that is of the spirit.’ A plant in brilliant colours would be the smiling mien of the earth spirit to him, another the sorrowful mien of the earth spirit. An occultist thus takes emotional impressions with him through all parts of the world.

A crystal chastely lets light pass through itself. Here matter is free from desire and longings. Human substance is more perfect, but it is full of pleasure and pain, desire and passion. The day will come when human substance will be as chaste and precious as that of a crystal. The pupil's heart and mind would be attuned to finding images in looking at the world of nature, showing how the flesh would develop at a future time. Objects in the outside world are seen as expressions of the world's soul by the occultist, and this is just as objective as the spatial forms a mathematician is able to visualize. And just as it is impossible for two mathematicians to teach different things about a theorem, so it is impossible for two individuals who have gained access to higher knowledge to have different inner responses. Mystical things are beyond dispute, just as mathematical concepts are.

When a pupil had practised like this and was then found ready for it, another idea would be presented to him. He was introduced to something that was the most beautiful and most pure and yet also the most questionable. He would be told: ‘Look at the plant. The chalice of its corolla faces the sun. The sunbeam influences its growth and maintains it. It presents its reproductive organs to the sun in a chaste way. These parts, kept hidden in shame by man and animal, are chastely turned towards the sun in the plant. Now look back into the far distant past. Then man, too, was at the stage at which the plant has remained. Then he, too, had his reproductive organ facing the sun. The head, the root, was in the soil. Mystics have always known that man is an inverted plant. Only he developed further in the course of evolution, first becoming horizontal, like the animal, and then assuming the upright form human beings have today. He went through the plant realm and the animal realm to reach the human realm. Plato referred to this when he said that the world's soul has been crucified on the world's body.’ Man has not yet come to the end of his evolution, however. He is in a transitional stage where he must overcome desire and reach a higher spirituality. Desire must be overcome in the part he turns away from the sun, winning through to a higher spirituality. Then man will offer the chalice of his essential nature to the higher spiritual sun as purely and chastely as the plant does.

This ideal of the plant's chalice made spiritual was presented to those who were pupils of the Holy Grail. They were told that the holy chalice was the plant corolla which had gone through the sphere of animal life and had then been purified again and made spiritual. The words spoken to the pupil were: ‘The potential for this chalice, which takes the rays of the spiritual sun into itself; also lies in the human being. Man has finished organs and others that will only develop in future. In the far distant future man will reproduce himself the way we create a wave in the air when we say a word today.’ When the pupil had made these feelings his own, he was able to feel in those occult fastnesses how the power that sprouts forth from the plants at the time of Good Friday and Easter will in future also show itself in man, having been cleansed and purified. This sprouting growth was experienced especially on Good Friday, and people also felt that a pledge had been given with Christ's sacrificial death that man might have the possibility of gaining possession of the Holy Grail through his struggles. The sap that is the blood of Christ makes man pure, just as the plant has pure sap flowing through it. This was something the pupils experienced at the most solemn moments. The thought of redemption arose clearly before them when they had their inner experience of the relationship between Christ's sacrificial death and the sprouting plant. This idea came to be ever present for Richard Wagner. Wagner used the figure of Alberich to represent the birth of the I and of egotism. He used the E flat organ pedal for this.¹⁹⁶

In 1856 he tried to give form to the riddle of life on earth in a play called The Victors. A youth was loved by a girl belonging to the lowest caste in India. The difference in their castes made him turn away from the girl and become a pupil of Buddha. The pain this gave to the girl was so great that she realized that she had been a Brahman in an earlier life who had refused the hand of a low-caste girl. This is how Wagner was searching for a way of helping people to understand cosmic thought.

In 1857 Richard Wagner was standing outside the Villa Wesendonk near Zurich and looking out upon the Lake of Zurich and the countryside. Seeing the sprouting plants he came to see the relationship between redemption and plant life. A basic feeling for the ideal of the chalice came to him, an ideal the followers of the grail had always known. Later he tried to find the music that would express the evolution that leads from plant chalice to grail chalice. And he then found peace in his hopes and dreams.

The Parsifal idea has always been part of more recent culture, lying hidden in it as a seed. In his poem The Secrets, Goethe wrote of a youth walking through the woods to a monastery where he was received into the community of initiates. This youth seems like a Parsifal on his way to the grail castle. Asked about the poem by a group of students, Goethe explained that there are many different religious views in the world. Each of the twelve men whom Brother Mark found in the monastery was the representative of one of them, and the thirteenth among them was their leader.

Goethe was representing the occult lodge in his poem where there are no disputes over different opinions but only love. On reaching the monastery the young man saw a cross above the entrance with roses wound around it. He asked: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ The sign of the rose cross expresses a thought that is part of the whole of world evolution. Someone who understands the ideal and the symbol is able to find it everywhere. Ancient legend tells of Cain looking for the door to paradise.¹⁹⁷ He was not admitted, but Seth was. Seth found the tree of knowledge and the tree of life intertwined. He took three seeds and put them on the dying Adam's tongue. A tree grew from them. That was the tree which Moses saw in flames, hearing the words: ‘I am he who was, who is and ever shall be.’¹⁹⁸ Moses got his staff from this tree. The great door to Solomon's temple was made of its wood, also the bridge which the Christ crossed on his way to the Mount of Olives, and finally the Cross on Golgotha. Those who knew of the grail had added: When the wood had grown dry and become the cross, it produced living shoots as a pledge of life eternal. The grail pupil would see this in the form of roses. Here past and future come together. Goethe touched on this secret in verses such as:

Tell none but the wise,
For the crowd will cast instant derision.

This is also the mood behind the words: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ Wagner brought this stage of evolution most intensely to expression in his Parsifal. Everything Parsifal does has meaning. Nothing he does is superficial. He is allowed to be active in the supersensible world and does most at the point where he reaches the greatest pinnacle of his inner development.

This can be heard so marvellously in Wagner's last work. When we see the group of holy people gathered around the grail, and Parsifal who first of all kills—he shoots the swan—and then becomes the redeemer, we understand what Wagner meant with the words: ‘hopes and dreams found peace’. He had wanted to show that it was possible to reach in the musical sphere what it had not been possible to show by means of drama. Until then, music had only given expression to inner feelings. On the other hand people felt it was importunate to use the term ‘drama’. Deepest inner feelings begin where words cease to be. Wagner was looking for a link in musical drama. The spoken word was to stop at the given moment, leaving the stage to music. Without Parsifal, Wagner would not have achieved the ideal he strove for. At the point where he penetrated to the highest level in the supersensible sphere, he needed the most intimate musical element. He found the purest musical expression for this in his Parsifal. As an artist and musician he sought to show what lived in Wagner the mystic.

• 195. See Kleeberg L. Wege und Worte. Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner aus Tagebüchern und Briefen. 2. Aufl. S. 134 ff. Stuttgart 1961.
• 196. In the Rheingold prelude.
• 197. See Steiner R. The Temple Legend (GA 93). 20 lectures, Berlin 1904–1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985
• 198. Exodus 3: 1-5 & 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions and Answers

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

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

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

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

Third question could not be heard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian theologians are calling the gospel of John into question today.⁵³ They say the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, are consistent in the way they speak of Jesus. Any variations between them are considered unimportant. It is said that on the basis of the synoptic gospels one can have a consistent idea of Jesus. The gospel of John differs greatly from them, speaking of the founder of Christianity in a very different tone and apparently a very different way. It is therefore considered less credible. The synoptics, people say, were intended to tell the life of Christ, whilst the writer of John's gospel lived at a later period and wrote a kind of hymn to express how he felt. Theologians see John's gospel as the fictional work of a believer. The times have gone when a theologian like Bunsen⁵⁴ might write: ‘If the gospel of John does not tell the historical truth, Christianity simply will not be tenable.’ It is the task of spiritual science to show the significance of John's gospel again to the people of today.

There is another reason why present-day theologians give preference to the synoptics over John's gospel. If one takes the content of these three gospels, having thrown out the miracles, one has the image of an exalted human being, but someone who is no more than an exalted human being. According to the gospel of John, however, Jesus was more than just a highly developed human being. He was a universal spirit incarnated in an earthly body. The synoptics speak of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of John is about the Christ.

The introduction to John's gospel refers to an all-encompassing cosmic principle, the logos, which incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth: ‘In the beginning was the logos.’ People do not want to know about a sublime spirit descending. They only believe in highly developed human beings and not that a god ever lived on earth. It is because of this that people have gradually lost their relationship to the gospel of John over the last centuries. This lecture will be about the way people relate to the gospel of John.

If you read John's gospel the way you read any other book, to find out what it says, you are reading it very much the wrong way. John's gospel is not a book in the sense one generally takes a book to be. It is a book of life.

Let me say first of all that in all deeply religious documents every word has been put there with profound intention. This may be illustrated by considering the question: ‘What is the name of Jesus' mother according to John's gospel?’ Everyone will say: ‘Mary’. But this cannot be shown from John's gospel. Jesus' mother is first mentioned in the story of the wedding at Cana, but she is not named: ‘On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there.’⁵⁵ She is mentioned again and not named as one of the three women who stood by the cross: ‘But beside Jesus' mother and his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.’⁵⁶ Here it is not his mother but her sister who is called ‘Mary’. It is unlikely that both sisters would be called Mary, and we therefore have to assume that Jesus' mother had a different name.

Another example is this. The writer of John's gospel or the individual who is otherwise always called John, is always only referred to as ‘the disciple whom the Lord loved’. ‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there, he said to his mother: Here is your son.’⁵⁷ This is deeply important if we are to understand the questions we meet when we take the gospel of John in a spiritual sense.

Until a few centuries ago, the gospel of John was considered to be a book of meditation. It had to become inward experience if one wanted to have inner understanding of Jesus. It was for priests who wished to behold the secrets of Christianity. Hundreds of people have truly done this, and hundreds of them have gained the fruit of it. To penetrate to the Christian mysteries one had to let one's soul mature solely with the aid of John's gospel. People had to know, however, that the first lines had magic powers. The pupil had to let them come alive in his soul for a quarter to half an hour every morning, never speculating on them but purely to absorb their power. This was meditation. Someone who lived with the first lines of John's gospel in this way for months, for years, would realize their special power, for the eyes of the spirit would open for him. Those lines are live powers capable of waking dormant faculties. The pupils would then have living astral visions of the images given in the gospel. The first words of it served to give people this experience. Their power was greater in the past than it is today. People have changed more than one tends to think.

People did not read in the 13^th century, when printing had not yet been developed. Reading has changed humanity a great deal. Even the most devout individual today has no idea of the riches of feeling people then had. Today we must give different meditations to people who want to progress.

It would also be necessary to translate John's gospel properly,⁵⁸ so that it may once again be what it used to be for people.

In the origin was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.

This was with God in the origin.

All that exists has come into being through it, and nothing that has come into existence has done so except through it. In it was life, and life was the light of mankind. And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

There came to be a man, sent by God, and his name was John. He came to witness, that he bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him.

He was not the light, but a witness of the light.

For the true light, that illumines all men, was to come into the world. It was in the world, and the world came into being through it, but the world did not know it.

It came into individual human beings (it came to the I-people); but the individual human beings (the I-people) did not receive it.⁵⁹

At the time of the Lemurian race, the human soul entered into its first human incarnation. Before then it rested in God; human beings were not yet I-endowed.

This inner vision—what happens when someone gains insight into the world of the spirit? Everyday people live between waking and sleep, the latter at most broken up by dreams. Human beings consist of physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. These four members are together when people are awake. The physical body is a sum of physical apparatuses, the eye a camera obscura, the ear a stringed instrument. The ether body enters into these, vitalizing them and conveying the sensations to the astral body—the bearer of pleasure and pain, drives, desires and passions—and then also to the I. In sleep, the physical and ether bodies lie in the bed, the astral body with the I is lifted out. The ether body stays with the physical body and vitalizes it; vital functions continue without interruption in sleep. Colours, sounds, pleasure and pain are in deep darkness, as it were, with the individual not aware of them.

There are as many worlds as the human being has sense organs to perceive. Without eyes no light. If man had an organ for electricity he would perceive it just as he now perceives light, for instance.

In sleep, a human being lives in the astral or also in the devachanic world, but is not sentient of it. A change will only come if he works consistently to develop higher organs. Light then begins to dawn around him. In sleep, he is sentient of a space around him that is filled with objects. Something happens to him the way it does to someone born blind who has an operation. Astral and spiritual sense organs develop, he sees the world of the spirit, and sleep no longer makes him unconscious. Later the world of the spirit around him begins to sound. He hears the Pythagoreans' music of the spheres, something people nowadays think is a metaphor. Goethe knew exactly what it was. In his prologue to Faust he said:

The sun proclaims its old devotion
In rival song with brother spheres,
And still completes in thunderous motion
The circuits of its destined years.⁶⁰

This cannot be taken to be mere words but must be taken literally. One hears the sun sound forth when one hears the music of the spirit. In part 2 of Faust, Goethe wrote:

Resounding now for ears of spirit
The new day is already being born.⁶¹

The world of the spirit thus first comes during sleep for human beings, but they must also be able to take the experiences they have had in their sleep into the everyday world. They must find the things they first discover in sleep among the physical objects they know when awake. This comes with further training.

When the first lines of John's gospel had had their effect, and the gospel's images arose before the mind's eye, the pupil would be assisted in developing certain feelings. After some further exercises the teacher would ask him to develop the following feeling, doing this for a long time: ‘If the plant that grows in the soil were to consider the rock on which it is growing it would have to say to it: "You, stone, belong to a lower realm than I do, but I could not exist without you." It would have to bend down to it and thank it in all humility for making life possible for it. In the same way every higher class of human beings must bend down to the lower class and thank it. Every individual who is at a higher level owes his existence to the one who is lower than he is. This is a feeling you must firmly establish in your soul, for hours every day, for weeks and for months.’

If the pupil did this, a spiritual image would finally appear before his eyes that would be the same for everyone. He would see twelve people of a lower order sitting around him and he would wash their feet. The teacher would then say: ‘Now you have inner understanding of the 13^th chapter of John's gospel, the washing of the feet.’ Apart from this image seen in the spirit there would also be physical symptoms which again were the same for almost all of them. The pupil would feel as if there was water washing around his feet.

He then had to develop a second feeling, again for weeks and months. When all the pain and hardships of life beset me, I want to develop the strength to withstand them. When he had developed this inner feeling a new vision would arise. He would see himself being scourged. This vision again would be the same for everyone. The outer symptom would be a stinging and itching sensation over the whole body that continued for a long time. He would then have to develop a third feeling. It is not enough to bear the hardships of life: ‘The best you have in you may have scorn and derision poured on it. Remain upright in spite of this.’ When the pupil had developed this feeling a third vision would appear: He would see himself wearing the crown of thorns. The external symptom would be a severe headache.

He then had to develop another feeling. ‘All people say “I” to the body they bear. Your body must be no more important to you than any other object. You must feel your body to be something alien to you.’ When the pupil had gone through this, the vision of the crucifixion would come, and externally the stigmata of the Christ on hands and feet and on the right side of the chest—not the left, as is usually said. These symptoms would come again on many occasions at times of meditation.

The teacher would then say to the pupil: ‘You will now experience the mystic death.’ This can only be described in approximate words. The pupil's experience would be that the whole of existence was extinguished for a moment; all objects had gone, were hidden behind a veil. The veil would then rip apart from top to bottom and the pupil would look into the world of the spirit. Before this there was something else. Before he knew mystic death, the pupil would have visions of all the evil that may exist in the world; he had to descend to hell before he experienced the mystic death.

In the sixth stage the pupil would begin to feel that his body no longer was something that belonged to him. His conscious awareness expanded to embrace the whole earth. When this had been developed it would be called the entombment. The seventh stage can no longer be described in earthly terms. It was resurrection and ascension to heaven. This state is beyond anything a human being can think of.

The gospel of John describes these seven stages. Someone who had gone through them all would recognize Jesus as he had lived on earth. The gospel of John is the way of coming to know Christ Jesus. It was therefore given to those who wanted to grow wise as a book to help their development, not as a book of devotions. Every part of it can become living experience.

Details: The revelation of this truth is a stage in human evolution that cannot be compared with any other. The following came into the world with Jesus: Man already had four members when he first incarnated, but he developed further. Let us consider an undeveloped human being. His astral body would still be the way it was when he received it. Let us compare it with the astral body of an average European or that of an idealist such as Schiller⁶² or a highly developed individual such as Francis of Assisi.⁶³ The average European no longer obeys every drive. He will reject some, and also put other feelings in their place—moral laws. The I has been working on the astral body. His astral body consists of two parts—the unpurified part, which is still the way it was when he received it, and the purified part. In Schiller, the purified part was already large, compared to the unpurified. And the astral body of a Francis of Assisi consists of the purified part only. This purified part of the astral body is called the spirit self or manas, and the human being then has five principles to his essential nature.

Human beings can work on their ether bodies in the same way. Religious and artistic feelings work on the ether body and create the life spirit, buddhi, out of it. If someone is able to gain control of the physical body, the part of it which he has made spiritual is the atman. The process is exceedingly slow in external evolution. In Greece the buddhi was called Chrestos, and most people today have only the first beginnings of this. The greatest power given to our age to develop the buddhi came with the Christ. He made it possible to develop the sixth principle, the buddhi, in the whole of humanity. He made humanity spiritual.

The seventh principle is that of the father. The holy spirit develops manas, the Christ the sixth principle, and when this has been extensively developed for a whole race, the power that has lain hidden in it emerges, and that is the sixth principle. All human beings who are part of that race will then have reached the sixth stage of initiation, which is the entombment.

A cheerfull or a sad face tells us that the soul is cheerful or is sad; the outer reveals the inner, everything brings the soul to revelation. If you think of the earth as the body of an ensouled being, then the souls of human beings have merged with the soul of the earth when their bodies have merged physically with the earth. The soul in the earth could be just as the human soul is in the human body. Man takes his food from the body of the earth and tramples it underfoot. Jesus said: ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me.’

Older writings often have keywords, specific terms for particular things. Thus a master going to the inner sanctuary with his pupils is ‘going up the mountain’. The sermon on the mount was for the pupils only: ‘And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain ... his disciples came to him.’⁶⁴

In the same way ‘temple’ refers to the physical body. It is usually referred to as our lower nature. Is it truly low in relation to the astral body? The fact is that the physical body is much more highly developed than the astral body today. Later on, of course, the astral body will be much more highly developed than the physical body. Consider the thigh bone, where maximum strength is given using the minimum of material. Or consider the heart, which is so wisely organized that it resists continuous attacks from the astral body for decades.

It was said that when an initiate's astral body loosened and came to conscious awareness: ‘He has gone out of the temple.’ The Christ speaks of the temple in the gospel of John: ‘Then they took up stones to throw at him. But Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.’⁶⁵ He also spoke in this sense of cleansing the temple and destroying it and rebuilding it in three days.

How the Christ came into the world may be seen as follows. The sixth principle, the buddhi, is born of the fifth when this has reached its highest point, of the spirit self or manas or, to use the name the Greeks had for the fifth principle, Sophia. All gnostics who accepted the meaning of the gospel of John called the mother of Jesus ‘Sophia’.

With the appearance of Jesus the earth received the sixth principle. The life spirit united with humanity. For this to be accomplished, the Sophia had to be fully mature first. When the life spirit unites with humanity, humanity is the Sophia. This is given as a parable in the story of the wedding at Cana.

The Lord let the gospel of John be revealed by the disciple whom he loved. That is always the name given to the first and favourite pupil of a master. In the gospel of John, reference to the disciple whom the Lord loved is first made in chapter 11, where he speaks of the raising of Lazarus. In those days, a pupil would spend three days in the temple to be initiated. Not only his astral body but his ether body, too, would be loosened. He therefore died, as it were, and was raised again at the end of the three-day period. The Lord initiated the disciple whom he loved, and the raising of Lazarus signifies this.

The disciple who stood by the cross was therefore again Lazarus, and the same initiate also wrote the gospel of John. To make it all harmonize, the disciple whom the Lord loved is not mentioned before the raising of Lazarus in chapter 11. This was the view held in all gnostic and Rosicrucian schools. It is a view that will be held again.

The gospel of John is a book full of secrets, full of powers offered to humanity.

Questions and Answers

What is the ‘causal body?’

When people die today, the ether body separates from the physical body together with the astral body and the I. The ether body still stays with the higher members for a time, and during this first period after leaving the physical body a person's whole last life lies spread before him like a vast tableau. This is because the ether body supports not only the vital functions but also memory. In life it was limited by the physical brain and unable to function fully. As soon as the physical barriers have gone, the complete memory spreads before the human soul. This continues until the ether body separates from the astral body and I after a few days. It is only the ether substance which separates, however. The memory picture is taken along. The individual keeps this essence of the ether body, and the sum of such essences from all lives on earth is the causal body.

How should we regard the celebration of the last supper in the gospel of John, and especially bread being given to Judas, the betrayer?

A specific part of the old form of initiation consisted in the pupil being taken to the temple, and in a ‘three-day death’, which meant that the ether body was also loosened and taken through astral and devachanic experiences. One of these was that every part of the body became a human figure. There were twelve parts, and the pupil would see twelve figures, with himself the thirteenth, the soul of the twelve.

Sensuality has brought egotism and this must be overcome. This was an important part of the teaching for medieval initiands. At that time, a teacher might have said something like the following to a pupil. ‘Look at the plant, it chastely holds the fruiting organs up to the sun. A fruit can only develop if the flower is kissed by the sun. Man is an upside-down plant. The animal is between the two. The cosmic soul goes through plant, animal and man. The cosmic soul is crucified on the cross which is the earth. Man's substance is interwoven with desires. His flesh is lower than the flesh of a plant. Later, man will be without desire again and chastely offer himself to the rays of the spiritual sun.’ The principle known as the holy grail arises, which is a bringing forth in the spirit.

At the last supper in the gospel of John, lower self-seeking is represented by Judas, the betrayer. The disciple whom the Lord loved was leaning on his breast. The purified energy goes up to the heart which will be the organ for bringing things forth in the spirit in future. This can already be seen in the anatomy of the heart. The heart is an involuntary muscle and therefore should have smooth fibres. But it does not; it is striated the way voluntary muscles are. It is thus already pointing to a time when it will be a voluntary muscle.

When pupils woke from their initiation, the words ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!’⁶⁶ would be wrested from their lips, they mean ‘My God, my God, how you have transfigured me!’ These words given in the original text are easily changed to the other version, which is: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The house where the last supper was taken was one of the initiation houses.

What did the transformation of water into wine at Cana mean?

The way modern theologians explain it, it is the transformation of the old testament into the new, which is to be the bubbling wine. Here in the north, Siegfried was the pre-Christian initiate who did not go beyond pre-Christian initiation. This is indicated by his vulnerable spot. Siegfried, invulnerable, was vulnerable at the point where the Christ bore the cross.

One individual will come who signifies the meaning of the earth. Water is the blood of this spirit. Water was known as ‘the blood of Christ’ in all the mysteries.

In the 8th century before Christ, the rites of Dionysus developed and with them also excessive drinking of wine. Wine was not known in Atlantean times. Today it has fulfilled its function. The appearance of the vine louse is a sign that wine has had its day. When it did not yet exist, all human beings had an awareness of the eternal core that goes from life to life. Belief in reincarnation was a consolation for an Egyptian worker who had to labour so hard that we cannot imagine it today. Those people did not drink wine. Drinking wine cuts human beings off from insight into the higher aspects. This had to happen at one time. If humanity had never had wine, they would have grown weary of the earth and that could not be allowed to happen. To develop civilization, human beings had to come to love the earth; they had to be cut off from their earlier incarnations and love only the one in which they were at the time. The whole of humanity once had to go through a period when they knew nothing of their higher principles and of earlier incarnations. Christianity did not teach reincarnation in public for two millennia; it was only taught to initiates, which is also what the Christ did when he asked them to tell no one about the things they had seen till he had come again,⁶⁷ that is, until the sixth principle had slowly evolved. That time has now come. The whole of humanity has now gone through one incarnation where they were cut off from the higher world.

In earlier times marriage was among blood relations. A consequence of the change to marrying out of one's tribe was that clairvoyance was lost. Today marriage between blood relations would cause degeneration. In those early days, people not only remembered things from their own but also from their parents' lives. This inherited memory bore a name: Adam, Seth, Enoch. Apart from memories, good and evil things were also inherited—original sin.

To change this, general love of humanity had to replace the blood bonds. ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’⁶⁸

Jesus also went to people not of his tribe, to the Samaritan woman. ‘Jews had nothing in common with Samaritans.’⁶⁹ Christ Jesus came from Galilee, a country of the most mixed blood possible.

A spirit on a distant star looking at the earth would see the physical earth penetrated and surrounded by an ether and an astral body. If this spirit had observed earth evolution from Abraham to the present day it would have seen its colours change at the moment when the blood flowed from Christ's wounds. An initiation like that of Paul the apostle⁷⁰ could not have happened before the coming of the Christ. This external initiation had become possible when the earth's whole astral body changed.

Question concerning the future of Christianity

Christianity has such infinite depths that it is quite impossible to see how it will develop. As a religion it is the last. It has all the potential for development. Theosophy merely serves Christianity.

The difference between the Christ and the other founders of great religions is that in the other religions people believe in what the founders taught, in Christianity people believe in what the Christ himself represents.

Healing influence of the ether body on the physical body

Mental diseases are partly due to the fact that the ether body does not have the power to influence certain parts of the physical body. If the ether body is too weak to control part of the body, this part will get sick. If you strengthen the ether body you have helped.

• 53. E.g. Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74), German theologian, Leben Jesu (life of Jesus) 1835, translated into English by George Eliot in 1846; Renan, Ernest (1823–92), French philologist and historian, Vie de Jésus (life of Jesus) 1863; Hamack, Adolf von(1851–1930), Das Wesen des Christentums (the nature of Christianity) Leipzig 1901.
• 54. Bunsen, Christian KarlJosias, Baron (1791–1860), Prussian diplomat, theologian and scholar, author of works on history and theology.
• 55. John 2: 3-5.
• 56. John 19: 25.
• 57. John 19: 26
• 58. Rudolf Steiner had translated John 1:1 -14 for a lecture he gave in Munich on 27 Oct. 1906 (in German in GA 94). See also lecture of 2 Dec. 1906 in this volume.
• 59. The manuscript of Rudolf Steiner's translation into German is in the Archives in Domach (No. NZ 3477). The words in parentheses were added by him at a later stage.
• 60. Karl Julius Schröer wrote in his Faust commentary: ‘The ancient Germans believed that a sound could be heard as the sun rose (Tacitus, Germania 45). In one of the Songs of Ossian translated by Goethe it says: “Where the sun sings as he rises.” The Pythagoreans held the view that the law of physics according to which heavenly bodies move and are held, is expressed in sounds that are the harmony of the spheres.’
• 61. Here Karl Julius Schröer again referred to the ancient Germans and to Ossian, continuing: ‘Goethe probably had the passages 5, 749 and 8, 393 in the Iliad in mind. The Horae, guardians of Olympus, guard, open and close the gate of heaven. Those passages do, however, say: Heaven's gate crashed open of its own accord which the Horae were guarding.’
• 62. Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), German writer, poet and playwright.
• 63. St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), Pater Seraphicus, see R. Steiner's lectures given in Berlin on 15 Feb. 1909 (in The Principle of Spiritual Economy, GA 109) and 22 March 1909 (in The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers, GA 107).
• 64. John 13:18. Sermon on the mount—see also the lecture given in Stuttgart on 19 Jan. 1907, in this volume.
• 65. John 8: 59.
• 66. Matthew 27: 46; Mark 15: 34.; ‘sabachthan’, is usually translated as ‘forsaken’. A similar-sounding word ‘shevachthani’ means ‘elevated’ or ‘glorified’. See lecture given in Basel on 12 Sept. 1910 (in The Gospel of St Matthew, GA 123).
• 67. Mark 9: 9.
• 68. Luke 14: 26; Matthew 10: 37; Mark 10: 29.
• 69. John 4: 9.
• 70. John 4: 9.

It gives me great joy to be able to greet you again today on my journey through and to be able to speak with you about some theosophical matters on this day. In doing so, we may touch on a topic that is more closely related to the emotional life and yet it points us upwards and can point us upwards into perspectives that will teach us about the connection between human beings and the great starry worlds, with what we call the macrocosm.

Today I would like to start with an observation, a motto that runs through human history and which, on the one hand, expresses man's longing to come close to his higher self, but on the other hand, says how little he can reach his divine self. In Greek history we find Socrates going about teaching people, directing them to virtue by means of simple concepts, to everything that is close to the human mind. Socrates, the Greek sage, wanted to turn the gaze of his contemporaries away from the external world of nature. While his predecessors thought about the underlying principles of the great natural phenomena and sought to explain them, it is said of Socrates that he is supposed to have said: What do we care about nature, the trees, the birds? They cannot teach us how to become better human beings. — This sentence contains an error. But what matters here is not whether Socrates makes a mistake, but what he wanted. He was one of the greatest sages in the world, who even paid for what he wanted with his life.

One of his maxims has been preserved. Its content strikes every human soul that wants to know itself: he taught virtue, morality. If man could truly understand it, he would act accordingly. If man departs from morality, it is only because he does not yet fully understand it. Virtue can be taught. The human heart objects that human nature is weak, that it often fails in virtue. He who gave this saying the form in which it lives in many hearts, lives in such a way that it is an expression of the deepest regret, of apology, Paul, gave this saying the form: Strong is the spirit, the flesh is weak. Many see what virtue consists in and yet cannot follow it. This dichotomy runs through all human nature. You only need to write this saying in your soul and you have recorded the dichotomy of human nature. There is something in man that transcends him: higher human nature transcends lower human nature.

Through Theosophy we are accustomed to seeing human nature not as something simple. The soul of man appears to us as a trinity. Here we must remember the development of our planet, its earlier incarnations, which it has gone through and in which man has also been developed with it. The first incarnation of our planet was the Saturn state. Here the germ was laid for the physical body of man. After this state had lasted a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared as the sun, with the powers of the life ether. In this state, the etheric or life body was added to the physical body in the germ. After a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared in the state of the moon. In this state, the astral body was added to the human physical and etheric bodies. And after this state had also gone through dissolution, the earth embodied itself in the form it has now. As a fourth principle, the germ of the self was now added to man.

Saturn, the sun and the moon are a trinity: the past of the earth. During this time, the human trinity has developed: physical body, etheric body, astral body. These are the human past. The I is the present. Its future lies in what it works out of the lower trinity, what spiritualization is achieved in the process. By penetrating and learning to control the astral body, the I transforms it into the spirit self or Manas. By penetrating the etheric body, the I transforms it into the life spirit or Buddhi. By penetrating the physical body, the I transforms it into the spiritual man or Atman. This is the upper trinity, the future of man.

Now the I is also threefold, for the soul has three aspects, three basic powers of which it consists, which can never be separated or torn out of it. These three powers are what we have called the sentient soul, the mind soul, and the consciousness soul. They are parts of the individuality that is gradually emerging into consciousness. We can also describe them in our own words as wisdom, individuality and morality. In the sentient soul, we feel the inner soul; the astral body can be regarded as the exterior of the sentient soul. The I, which is becoming conscious, struggles out of the soul of understanding. Within the adult I-forces, the consciousness soul is experienced as the inner self, the spiritual self as the outer self.

Is there anything that can suggest to us that what has just been said is true? To answer this question, let us consider what we have become through the stages of human development. We stand in the middle of the past lower triad and the luminous spiritual-soul triad. Today, we want to describe this triad with words taken from direct life, not as in the book “Theosophy”, where it is scientifically presented. What is it that can mean so much to us, our deepest spiritual shortcomings, our spiritual longings and dissatisfaction, what is this trinity when we look at our cleverness, individuality and virtue, at all our striving that can fill us with bliss or disharmony? This is the trinity that we can describe as faith, hope and love. They are the three fundamental powers of the soul that can never be taken from it. Faith – what is faith? Faith is a power of the soul that can never be completely wrested from the human soul, and it lives in every human being. There has never been a nation that did not have it, no religion has allowed itself to be deprived of speaking of it. It is the yearning for faith that permeates the world. The soul always wants to have something to hold on to. If this yearning for faith is not satisfied, then the tormented soul is in a bad way. If it is deprived of what it can believe in – as happens through materialism – then it is as if the human body were deprived of the air it needs to breathe. Only that the process of suffocation of the body takes a very short time, that of the soul takes a very long time.

One often reads sayings like: knowledge is power – and the like. Now, at the beginning of the Bible, a peculiar word has been found that has not yet been properly appreciated to this day. There is talk of the tree of knowledge and of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is eaten. This is to be taken quite literally. Knowledge is nourishment, knowledge is nourishment for the soul. The soul eats of that which we absorb as concepts from Theosophy. It eats of that which it believes, and it has healthy nourishment only from that which Theosophy offers it.

Faith, say the scientists and materialists, is an outdated point of view. I only believe what I know, says the modern man. This is a mistake. Belief is not a regression into the past, because belief and knowledge do not form a contradiction. But knowledge is changeable and cannot satisfy the need for faith in the human heart. When material science claims that the world is composed of atoms and came into being by chance, the human heart quite rightly says: I cannot believe that, I find no satisfaction in this hypothesis. And because man cannot believe, because he has nothing to cling to with his sense of faith, that is why the human soul is not healthy, and this unhealthy soul makes the body sick. This is how nervousness in the modern sense arises and gets worse and worse. This is how the soul affects the body and the person who has become so affects his environment, which he drags down and makes sick, and his descendants. This is why humanity is degenerating more and more, and unfortunately it will continue to get worse and worse. It is materialistic science that gives people “stones instead of bread”. The soul has no nourishment, although the intellect is overflowing with knowledge. And such a person then goes around not knowing what to do with himself, he does not know what to hold on to, and just as if one were to take away the air to breathe, the human soul suffocates from not having any nourishment, no spiritual sustenance. Theosophy has therefore come into the world to provide humanity with nourishment.

When we come together to study Theosophy, we do not do so like other associations that deal with literature, fine arts, social problems and the like. We do not practice Theosophy out of curiosity, but to satisfy the urge to believe, to nourish the soul. Therefore, we allow the theosophical concepts, feelings and sensations to affect our soul.

If we now consider this in terms of the evolution of the world and of humanity, we must remember that during the lunar state of the earth the astral body was added to the human being. What is this astral body? It consists of forces that must always grasp something, that must always attach themselves somewhere. In their effect, these forces are what we experience as faith, as the power of faith. The astral body is the source of faith itself. It must therefore receive nourishment if it is to develop, if it is to live. The desire for nourishment is the yearning of faith. If this power of faith cannot be satisfied, if the faith is deprived of one thing after another that it could hold on to, if it is not offered good spiritual nourishment, then the astral body becomes ill and through it the physical man also. But if he receives satisfaction from the concepts, ideas and feelings that Theosophy draws from the truth, from the depths of world knowledge, then he has the spiritual nourishment that appeals to him, then he has his satisfaction. He becomes strong and healthy, and the person himself becomes healthy. The views have changed a great deal over the past century, right down to the word. A hundred and thirty years ago, a man was called nervous who was a strong fellow, with strong muscles and full of strength. Today, a nervous person is a dissatisfied, weak person, a sick person, one whose soul searches unsatisfied for what it can draw nourishment from. From all this it follows that we can justifiably call the astral body the body of faith.

A second basic power is love. No one lacks it, it is always there, it cannot be eradicated. Anyone who would believe that the greatest hater, the greatest egoist, has no love, is mistaken. To think so is quite wrong. The longing for love is always present here. Whether it is sexual love, love for a child, for a friend, or love for something, for a work, it is always there. It cannot be torn out of the soul because it is a fundamental power of the soul. But just as man needs air to breathe, so he needs the work of love, the activity of love, for his soul. Its opponent, its hindrance, is egoism. But what does egoism do? It does not allow love to work outwards, it presses it into the soul, again and again. And just as air must flow out when breathing, so that man does not suffocate, so love must flow out, so that the soul does not suffocate from what is forcibly pressed into it. Better said: the soul burns from its own fire of love within itself and perishes.

Let us now remember that on the old sun, the human being was given the ether body as an inclination, that this fiery, luminous, shining part of the sun is the ether body. In it, however, there is given only another aspect of love, that which love is in the spirit: light is love. In the ether body, therefore, love and the yearning for love are given to us, and we can justifiably call the ether body the body of love: light and love.

It is a true saying: love is the greatest good. But it can also have the most disastrous consequences. We see this in everyday life, and I will give you an example that has been experienced. A mother loved her little daughter very much, and out of love she let her do everything, no matter what she did. She never punished her and fulfilled her every whim. The little daughter became a poisoner, and out of love she became so. Love must be combined with wisdom, it must become an enlightened love, only then can it truly work for good. The theosophical teaching is called upon to bring this wisdom, to give this enlightenment. And when man has absorbed in himself what is said and taught concerning the evolution of the world, concerning this apparently so far, so distant lying, what is communicated about the connection of man with the macrocosm, then man will become such that his enlightened love will face his fellow man in order to see into him, to be able to understand him, and thus become enlightened human love.

We often hear that life is dull and empty. This feeling even causes a kind of discord in the body. This is the effect of the unsatisfied power of love. When the world rejects our love, we feel pain. When we do something out of love, we must do it because the soul needs it, just as the lungs need air. Not out of scientific curiosity or to present a scientific opinion to the world – we have more than enough of that, because there are a thousand questions waiting to be solved – but to give humanity a sense of fulfillment, that is why Theosophy came into the world. We still gather in small groups, but these groups will soon grow larger and larger, and we will one day be able to solve the thousand questions of today.

Who will solve the social question? Those who theorize and debate about it? Never. The theosophical worldview and love will solve it. And truly, as paradoxical as it may sound, humanity will soon no longer even be able to grow potatoes – because the potatoes are already getting worse and worse – it will not even be able to grow potatoes without Theosophy! How can this be explained? Much of what mankind does today is instinctive, based on a certain instinct. However, this instinct must increasingly disappear. Why? Because the time has come for it to become conscious. People will therefore not be able to know agriculture without learning the truths of theosophy about the nature of the earth, the forces at work in it, and so on.

"The third basic power is hope. The human soul must hope, everyone knows that. Unsatisfied and searching, people go around in the world, and all too often one finds people to whom everything seems stale, to whom nothing gives satisfaction, to whom one thing after another slips through their fingers. It is dark around them, without prospect, without hope – so they say.

A great man once said: “Virtue without hope is the greatest crime, eternity without hope is the greatest lie!” And yet the power of hope is written into the soul; it is an ineradicable force that no power will ever be able to wrest from man. But if mankind is deprived of what it needs to climb upwards, the souls that are robbed of it will lose their security, support and stability, and so people will collapse in insecurity, they will be stupid and senseless. The theosophical principles of karma and re-embodiment satisfy the human soul's need for hope. They offer the lasting, that which leads into the future. What is an act, what is a thought, a word, that is thought by man and then torn away? Man and his deeds, man and his thoughts belong together, and it is illogical to regard an evil deed, an insult, for example, as atoned for if the perpetrator has not made amends for it himself. The law of causation speaks here: Man's life is bound to man, and he must go from embodiment to embodiment.

Lessing left behind the book “The Education of the Human Race” as the final result of his entire life. The thought that is the culmination of this work is that man returns again and again. What else have great minds, such geniuses as Lessing, thought of as the doctrine of reincarnation, namely, that the human soul develops further from stage to stage, that it continues to experience that which it has caused, on and on. It will only take a short time before the doctrine of reincarnation and the doctrine of karma will also be recognized in external science. And with that, humanity will receive something again that has been taken away from it by materialistic science: hope.

Why do we understand the essence of past cultural epochs? It is not literature or art history that gives us what the Greeks left behind. Far too little do both bring, it would not even be necessary to know about it. We have the achievements of Greek culture within us simply because we were alive at the time, because we lived through this epoch of culture, and we could not be what we are today if we had not lived through this epoch at that time. Hebbel left behind notes of a thought that he was no longer able to shape dramatically. In a school, a professor was practicing Plato with his students. The reincarnated Plato is among the students and gets one very bad grade after another, even punishments, because he - the Plato - does not understand the Plato! Again, the idea of reincarnation comes from the soul of a genius.

If the fruit of virtue did not depend on man, what would be virtue? How could evil be atoned if man himself did not have to atone for it! Eternity would remain a lie if man himself did not depend on eternity, if it did not concern him. Continuity through incarnations and reincarnations, that is what constitutes hope, and only through this can the hopeless souls, who cannot satisfy their longing for hope, become whole.

The germ of the physical human being was laid on the old Saturn. How so? Spiritually it was laid there, namely in that which should continue: hope. Therefore, the physical body can justifiably be called the body of hope. The characteristic of the physical body is its density. When the waves of the soul's life beat against the human body over and over again and penetrate it more and more, it is permeated by hope, by the certainty that something will develop out of it that lasts forever, that is imperishable. This desire for the satisfaction of hope, for a continuation of life, is a consequence of the soul's power of hope, and it is deprived of nourishment by external science.

Theosophy, its concepts, ideas and perceptions, gives it back to it, and that is the great mission of Theosophy: to make people strong in faith again, happy in love and enduring in hope.

If we take only the truths that Theosophy transmits to us and give them to the soul's power of faith for nourishment, then Manas will arise by itself, the transformation of the astral body into Manas will take place by itself. If we take only the truths and give them to love for nourishment, then buddhi will arise by itself. If we take the theosophical truths and give them to hope for nourishment, then the spirit man, atman, will arise by itself.

That is why theosophy is studied and thought about, not out of scientific curiosity. It is wrong to say out of laziness that one does not need to know all this. For the theosophical truths have been taken from the truth itself, they have been brought down from the great All, they serve the human soul as living nourishment, like bread, like air. If man, if humanity is not to suffocate, if it is to fulfill its mission, this nourishment must be brought to it, and that right now, because it is so extraordinarily necessary. That is the purpose of the theosophical study, and not a thirst for knowledge, not curiosity, or something even worse perhaps.

Notes from a lecture at the inauguration of the Heidenheim branch.

We have gathered here today to celebrate the inauguration of the Heidenheim branch. Friends from various regions have come together for this celebration to show their support for their local friends.

Over the years, a number of people have come together here in this city whose inner urge has brought them together for joint spiritual work in a spiritual scientific spirit.

Everything in life has an effect. If a person succumbs to an error or a lie, even if he is not aware of it in his ordinary consciousness, it is still present in the subconscious, where it acts as a destructive force not only for the individual person but for the whole evolution of the world. Likewise, when man unites with the forces of truth, it continues to work as a life-creating force for the whole evolution of the world and of humanity.

There are three decisive points in our seven cultural epochs for the further development of humanity. These are:

The first call that went out to humanity with a thundering voice from Mount Sinai, as the commandments of Jehovah!

The second call in the wilderness by John the Baptist, when the Baptist said to those who wanted to hear him: “Change your minds, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”!

The third call, my dear friends, is that which is proclaimed from the spiritual worlds as a new revelation through spiritual science or theosophy!

The child at conception, when the soul descends from spiritual spheres into this world of physical laws, is a memory and a symbol of the moment of the first thunderclap from Sinai in the laws.

And when the child, in the first years of his life, experiences the moment when he begins to use language but does not yet think about learning it, learning language without yet using his dormant thinking abilities, this is, in the individual human being, the time of the second call to humanity through John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness.

When, in a later period of his life, the child begins to understand language by using and developing his powers of thought, this is the reflection of the third call to humanity through spiritual science: the new revelation for understanding what is set forth in the Gospels as the Gospel of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Spiritual science brings man, as a new revelation from the spiritual worlds, an understanding of what was announced by the second call of John and was laid down in writing after the Mystery of Golgotha. Through spiritual science, the third call of our seven cultural epochs, man is brought to an understanding of what the Christ Jesus said: “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth cycle.

Just as only a small number of people heard the second call at that time, so it will also be only a small number in our time that hears the third call. But, my dear friends, should the call pass by without being heard, the evolution of humanity could not take place in the way intended by the high spiritual beings.

In retrospect, we may consider it an infinite mercy that there were people at that time who heard the second call, and we owe thanks to these souls that the development of humanity could continue as a result. Those who understand how to read the signs of the times know what it means to hear the third call of the living new revelation or to let it pass unheard. There was a time when it was said that there were only two paths for man: if he does good, he will receive eternal bliss after death; if he does evil, he must be cast into eternal damnation. — Spiritual science proclaims something different. My dear friends, we know that the human being is a complex creature, that he consists of a physical body, an etheric or life body, an astral body and an I. When a person begins to believe in a spiritual world, to imbue themselves with powers of faith, these powers of faith are a power of the astral body. Thus the astral body is the “body of faith”.

Through faith in the body of faith, man struggles up to the powers of love. These are the powers of the etheric or life body. Thus the etheric or life body is the “body of love”. If people could not penetrate to the spiritual worlds through the power of faith, their powers of imagination and thought would become ever more barren, empty and ossified. Man would be unable to rise to any power of love. What would man be without love? — He would have to suffer loneliness, he would be unable to have any connection with his fellow human beings and fellow creatures of nature. Man must be able to develop love, that alone gives him true vitality, by renouncing selfishness and shaping himself into true, unegoistic love in the love or etheric body.

When we look at nature, we learn to recognize the truth of the reincarnation of the individual soul. Look out there. What kind of feeling would you have to have when the plant world dies in the fall, when you would have to think: Everything is dead, it will never sprout, germinate, or bloom again! — It is often said: We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Yes, but is that really so? Do we really know nothing about tomorrow when we perform our work today with zeal and the most sacred sense of duty? We know that tomorrow the sun will begin its course again and conclude it in the evening. We know that the world order continues. Indeed, how would a person feel if he never knew whether the sun would shine the next day, whether the forces of day and night, rain and sunshine, whether the regulated rhythm of the stars would cease tomorrow or take a different form every day? Man would have to go to work without courage or strength if he did not know that he would resume work the following day and continue working on what he had started.

Just as spring follows winter and what rests as the dormant germ of plants within themselves is reawakened, so the soul that leaves the physical body will revive the germ that has been left behind and resume its life on the physical plane and continue its and humanity's development. Thus the forces of love give rise to the forces of hope. The physical body is the “body of hope”. What would man be without hope for the morrow, for the completion of the work he has begun, without hope of reunion with those he has loved in life? Thus the New Revelation of the Christ-message, theosophy or spiritual science, may proclaim the teaching of reincarnation despite the enlightened science and scholarship that is spreading throughout the world and wants to deny the supersensible worlds. Even if we are ridiculed and pitied for still being so superstitious, looking at what is happening in nature can be proof for us of what spiritual science proclaims.

If the third call were to pass unheeded, my dear friends, the development of humanity would be unable to progress, and those who would later look back on this time, when we ignored the call, would have to lay the blame at our door. But just as we look gratefully to the human souls who heard the call of St. John at that time, so will later people look gratefully to the souls who heard today's, third call, so that humanity may be led forward.

Just as the first few Christians had to hold their devotional meetings with the dead in the Roman catacombs, while above in the arena the people who set the tone at the time were wallowing in sensuality and throwing these first Christians to wild beasts or torches, as they did to them, but how these tone-setting people were suddenly carried off, so today we have to gather in rooms that our friends make available to us, or in rooms that are spiritual catacombs. But today's dominant materialism will also be swept away, and spiritual science will be allowed to lead humanity forward when the third call is heard. Who can say whether one or other of those who are here among us did not hear this call of John at the time? We have all heard this second call in one way or another and must hear the third in order to give humanity the opportunity to be led further.

In order that the teachings of the new Christ-Revelation may be heard in this city, the spiritual powers have brought together a number of people through an inner urge of the heart. Those high spiritual individuals who are called to make this call to humanity through their messengers are the guides of humanity.

From our study of spiritual science we learn of the so-called “members” of man's constitution and we then speak of his physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego and so on. It may seem to many people that once they know of these members they have also, in some measure, understood man's real being; and indeed there are numbers who believe that they know the essentials if they are able to enumerate these different members of man's constitution, or even, possibly, to indicate what happens to one or another of them in the course of his incarnations. Although any study of man must necessarily begin with a knowledge of these members, we must be quite clear that this knowledge is very preliminary. For what is really important is not that the human being consists of these seven or nine members, but how they are related to one another, how each of them is connected with any one of the others. It must also be realised that the connections are by no means the same in all human beings, in every epoch. The connections and relationships change in the course of the ages of human evolution. In an epoch lying four or five thousand years behind us, the connection between the members of man's constitution was not the same as it is today, and in the future it will again be quite different. The way in which the members are interlinked, their relationship to each other—all this changes as time goes on. Indeed the continual re-appearance of the human being in his various incarnations acquires its significance from the fact that while he is passing through his individual evolution from one incarnation to another, this complex, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, itself evolves in respect of the relationships between these members, so that at each new incarnation the human being finds an entirely new combination of them. New experiences come to him ever and again as a result of this.

In order to grasp what this means we need only compare ancient times with our own epoch in one single respect. If we were to look back into the fourth or fifth millennium of ancient Egyptian civilisation and observe the men of that epoch, we should see that the interconnections between the physical body, etheric body and astral body were far looser than they are in men today. In those times the astral body and the etheric body were far less firmly linked with the physical body. The characteristic tendency of our present phase of evolution is precisely that the astral body and etheric body try to be connected more and more firmly with the physical body. This is very significant, for as evolution advances and the astral body and the etheric body of man tend to chain themselves more closely to the physical body, man is no longer able to influence his physical body from his soul to the extent that was possible in ancient times when the astral and etheric bodies were freer and the laws of the physical body did not, therefore, work into them as forcefully as they do today. When, in those times, a feeling arose in a man, or some idea came to him, the force of this feeling or idea spread quickly into the astral and etheric bodies, and from there—because the man had mastery over these members—he was able, from his soul, to be master of his physical body. This possibility of mastering the physical body from the soul is constantly becoming less, because the astral body and the etheric body are entrenching themselves more and more firmly in the physical body. But this has still another consequence, namely, that in the course of the ages, man's natural constitution makes him less and less accessible to those forces and powers which work down upon him from the spiritual world. Hence in the man of olden times we find a kind of natural inspiration and imagination, an ancient clairvoyance, due to the greatest freedom of the etheric body and the astral body; and into these bodies with their greater freedom there streamed the forces of the superhuman Hierarchies. These forces were able to work into man's etheric and astral bodies. But in the course of the evolutionary process the physical body wrests the etheric and astral bodies away from the inmost core of man's being, claims them for itself, with the result that the direct influence from the spiritual worlds becomes constantly weaker, less and less able to penetrate into the etheric and astral bodies.

Evidence of this can be traced even in the external form of the human being. If we were to go far, far back, for example to the humanity of ancient Egypt, we should find that in accordance with a man's constitution of soul, when, let us say, he was stirred by some passion or impulse, this worked on into the astral and etheric bodies which then imprinted the passions and impulses in the physical body itself. Hence we should find that in very early epochs of Egyptian culture, for example—but actually in all such culture-epochs—the external appearance of a man was a kind of imprint of his soul. What was astir in the soul could be read from his very countenance, his physiognomy. In a certain respect there was complete analogy between the physical exterior and the life of soul. Then came the period of Greco-Latin civilisation, the period of that remarkable people who stand, as it were, at the middle point of the Post-Atlantean epoch. These men of Greece stand at the middle point in such a way that the forces of the spiritual world still stream universally to the soul and express themselves in the bodily nature. Hence that wonderful unison in the Greeks between the beauty of the external bodily structure and the beauty of the soul. Because this soul in its beauty was free from the physical body it was able to open itself to a higher world, to the Hierarchies; and the Hierarchies sent their forces into it. This came to expression in the physical body and thereby the whole physical body of the Greek became the expression of the beauty of the soul. And so a superhuman reality, an all-human reality, came to a very high degree of expression in the Greek era.

In the future there will be an altogether different state of things. The important fact to bear in mind is that man's physical body will make still greater demands in the future, will chain the astral and etheric bodies to itself, and only by consciously approaching the spiritual world, by absorbing the ideas, concepts and feelings of the spiritual world as we are now beginning to do in the spiritual Movements, will man be able himself to develop those strong forces which were formerly poured by the Hierarchies into his physical and etheric bodies. And if, as he advances into the future, man wishes to retain mastery over his physical body, he will be able to do so only by consciously drawing forces from the spiritual world wherewith to overcome the opposing force of the etheric body that is tied to the physical body. Thus we may say: In ancient, pre-Christian times, the possibility of working upon the physical body was given to men naturally; in the future, this possibility will be given to them only if they themselves do something towards it. But for this reason a difference will become more and more perceptible in humanity of the future between those who oppose spiritual teaching and knowledge and those who approach this knowledge eagerly and willingly, as if by instinct. We know that the latter are still only a tiny handful today but in the future this distinction will inevitably come about between people who out of hatred and aversion oppose spiritual knowledge with increasing hostility, and those who impelled to begin with by a certain instinct, willingly ally themselves with spiritual Movements. Those human beings who oppose spiritual knowledge will show this more and more distinctly in their very countenances; they will show that they have no power over their behaviour, over their physical nature, that their physical nature is in every respect stronger than themselves. In those who approach the spiritual teachings willingly, it will be apparent that they have the strength and the power to overcome the opposition presented by their physical nature.

This will come to expression inasmuch as traits quite different from those prevailing in ancient times will become perceptible in the external, formative development of human beings. In the men of antiquity, let us say in the Egyptians living four or five thousand years before the Christian era, we should find that in the phase of its development directly following birth, the child did not look completely human but as if an angel had entered into it, as if it had received from the spiritual world those pliable bodily forms in which the spiritual was expressing itself directly in the physical. And the older the child grew, the more human it became, developing downwards, as it were, to manhood.

In the Greeks there was great uniformity between the first and the later years of life. Even in earliest childhood the impress of the all-human was apparent, and it remained so; hence the Greeks were rightly regarded as a people with a childlike nature. In the future it will more and more be the case that as a newly-born child the human being—and precisely one who is outstandingly significant—will be ugly, really ugly according to the Greek ideal of beauty. And the more deeply he acquaints himself with spiritual ideas, the more will his form and figure acquire a certain characteristic: the features that were at first blurred and indistinct, even ugly, in the child, will change in such a way that the facial features themselves will tell us that they are the expression of ideas and concepts from the spiritual world. And this will be the case more and more.

Things that appear in the external life of humanity often present themselves, as if in concentrated form, in art. In actual fact, the material for the humanity that is to advance towards the future is drawn from the European peoples, whereas the material for the humanity which possessed the ancient mastery over the physical body, originated in the south. Thus we find that in art, Greek art, expression is given to the beautiful human being. The Greeks gave the stamp of human beauty even to the figures of his gods; and this same trait continued into the time of the Renaissance in Southern Europe. Compare one of Raphael's Madonnas with a northern Madonna and you will see that art anticipates what actually comes to pass. The echoes of Greek artistic genius gave the impression of beauty achieved without effort. In the immediate future, however, man will be dependent upon inner strength of his own, upon the vigour and activity of his own life of soul. We are approaching this age and we must connect this fact with the other, namely, that in the different epochs of the evolution of humanity, these several members of man's being are differently inter-related. In earlier times the connection between them was much looser, but the lower members are now striving all the time to be knit more and more closely together. Many things that in our time may be very obvious to an attentive observer of life are connected with a fact such as this. For example: It is simply impossible for certain people to form any adequate conceptions even of the most patent facts of the world and of life. There are large numbers of men today whose ideas and concepts have been so firmly drilled into them that it is a sheer impossibility for them to take in a single new idea or concept. Why is this? An etheric body that is less firmly knit to the physical body can always absorb new ideas, because it is elastic; an etheric body that is firmly knit to the physical body absorbs a certain number of concepts, and definite forms have thus been imprinted in the physical body which it, in turn, forces upon the etheric body. And so it comes about that many of those in cultured and learned circles today are no longer capable in later life of changing what they have imprinted into their brains, and their thinking is stiff, rigid, inelastic. Their etheric body cannot get free, can no longer emancipate itself from the physical body. In such circumstances it is only the strength and power and forcefulness of spiritual concepts and ideas that can make it possible for a man to overcome this tendency. For here, by his own efforts, he has to overcome something that is a cosmic tendency.

The mission of man consists precisely in this: through his own strength to be able to overcome a cosmic tendency. The gist of the matter can be made clear by a comparison.—Look at a plant that is permeated with moisture and is therefore fresh and green. Think of the etheric body of man as being the moisture and his physical body as the other part of the plant. I said that this physical body of man becomes powerful by drawing the etheric body and also the astral body to itself. By this means it acquires excessive strength, and the consequence is that the etheric and astral bodies become impotent, just as when the plant is deprived of moisture it dries up and lignifies, becomes woody. The human physical body gradually begins to lignify because the forces of the etheric and astral bodies are impoverished. A brain that lignifies can absorb only few new ideas and concepts, because it wants to remain static with those it has already acquired. The astral body and the etheric body must be revivified through the absorption of spiritual ideas and concepts.

And so in the spiritual Movement appropriate for the present day, it is a matter of dealing with something that is a necessity for the future, a necessity that is part of the mission of man, something that is just as essential as any of the events that have overtaken the human race without co-operation on the part of men themselves. For a long, long time, no doubt, such truths will be vehemently opposed, but none of this opposition will ultimately avail. Men will become aware from the very form and direction taken by culture in the near future that this is how things are; the facts themselves will prove it.

Now it is not only in the process of human evolution as a whole that a change takes place in this inter-relation of the several members of man's constitution; the same is also true in the life of the individual. There is by no means the same relationship between etheric body and astral body and ego in early childhood as there is in the later years of a man's life. In considering the development of the individual himself, account must be taken of the fact that the relationship between the members of his constitution changes. A very specially important period in the course of an individual human life is the one that comprises approximately the first three years. In that period, every individual is fundamentally a different being from the being he is later on. We know that these first three years are sharply demarcated from later life by two facts.—One is that it is only after this first period that the human being learns to say “I”, to grasp and understand his egohood. The other is that when, in later years, a man is looking back over his life, he can at most remember only as far back as this point of time—the point at which this three-year period is separated from the later life. In the normal state no human being knows anything of what happened before this point of time. In a certain respect man is then quite a different being. On that subject, too, modern psychologists talk the most incredible nonsense. We, however, must adhere firmly to the knowledge that in actual fact it is not until after that period that the human being becomes conscious of his egohood. There are books on psychology today in which we may read that the human being learns first to think and then to speak. Such rubbish as is written today in popular literature on psychology is only possible in an age when those who pursue psychology in official positions are automatically regarded as serious scientists. One of the most important things of all is that we should bear in mind the division between the first years of life and the later years, and regard man during those early years as a being who is quite different from the one he is later on. It is only later that the ego appears, the ego with which everything else is bound up. But let nobody believe that before this point of time the ego was inactive. Of course it was not inactive! It is not the case that until the third year of life the ego remains unborn. It was already there, but its task was not that of penetrating into the activity of consciousness. What, then, was its task? The ego is the most important spiritual factor in the development of the three sheaths of the child: astral body, etheric body, physical body. The physical sheath of the brain is constantly re-moulded and there the ego is continually at work. It cannot become conscious because it has a quite different task to fulfil: it has first to shape the instrument of consciousness. That of which we later become conscious works, to begin with, upon our physical brain during the first years of life. The task devolving upon the ego changes—that is all. It works first upon us, then within us. The ego is in reality a sculptor and the greatness of what it achieves in the actual forming of the physical brain can never be adequately described. The ego is a supreme artist! But what is the source, the giver of its power? The ego has this power because, during the first three years of life the forces of the angels, of the Hierarchy next above our own, stream into it. In very truth—and this is no figure of speech, no simile, but an actual truth—an angel, that is to say, a being of the nearest higher Hierarchy, works in man through his ego, moulding and shaping him. It is as if the man were borne by the whole current of spiritual life, as if he were floating upwards to the higher Hierarchies whose forces stream into him. And the moment he learns to say “I”, it is as if some of this force were cut off, as if he himself were called upon to do something formerly done by the angel.

In the first years of life there is actually given to us something like a last echo of what prevailed to a certain extent through the whole of human life in the first Post-Atlantean epoch. Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, throughout the whole of his life or at very least through the first half of it, the human being was more or less like he now is during the first years of life only. We can picture this clearly if we think of the early Indian civilisation-epoch. The most truly childlike among the men of that epoch were the great Teachers of the Indian people, the Holy Rishis. I have often spoken of them. If we were to picture the Holy Rishis according to the pattern of a modern savant, we should be very far from the truth. If a man were to encounter them today he would not regard them as of any account at all; they would seem to him to be nothing more than naïve, childlike peasants—but the childlike quality that was manifest in the Rishis is perhaps nowhere to be found today. At certain times an inflowing stream of inspiration became articulate through them and then they gave voice to secrets of the higher worlds, because throughout their whole life the word “I”, in the sense in which modern man uses it, never passed their lips. They never said “I”. They differed from a child today inasmuch as a child possesses the faculty of ideation. But the highest treasures of wisdom flowed into them in the same form of soul-life; it was as if a child today were to give utterance to the most sublime wisdom during the first three years of its life. Actually it is not the child who is speaking—but perhaps this applies now only to a part of mankind. I have so often referred to the saying: The wisest can learn most from a child. And when someone who is himself able to look into the spiritual worlds has a child before him, with the stream that rises up into the spiritual world, it is as if—forgive the homely expression—he has in the child something like a telephone-line into the spiritual worlds. The spiritual world speaks through the child, but men are not aware of it. The wisest can learn most from a child. It is not the child that is speaking, but the angel is speaking out of the child.

And now the question is: What is there to be said of man's whole constitution in later years, bearing in mind that in the earliest period of his life the ego is not merely the fourth member of his own being but at the same time the lowest member of an angel?—for we can speak of these “members” of an angel in connection with this period and of the child's ego as the lowest member of the angel. The connections between the members are quite different from those prevailing in later life. The question therefore is: What is the nature of the change? What is it that takes place in later life? It is as though the living stream had been cut off; the human being loses the living connection with the spiritual world. Hence it is in the earliest years of life that the forces a human being brings with him from his former incarnations are most perceptible. It is then that the essential, spiritual core of his being works the most strongly and deeply to elaborate the bodily organisation in such a way that it is suitable for the incarnation. How is the later normal consciousness related to this? The answer is that, today, the human being simply no longer has a bodily nature—the etheric body and its relationship to the physical body—such as was present in and at the time of the Holy Rishis. In that epoch there persisted through the whole of life the inherited relationship between etheric body and astral body that made it possible for the ego to mould the outer sheath of the human being. Today, already at birth, we inherit such a dense and demanding physical body that only a small part of the work formerly accomplished by the ego can now be carried out. Our physical body is no longer really suitable for what we ourselves are during the first three years of our life. What we inherit is a physical body that is suitable for the later years of life, and this body is not adapted for directing the eyes upwards into the spiritual worlds. The child himself has no knowledge of what is streaming down into him and those around him most certainly have none; for the physical body has altered, has become denser, drier. We are born with a soul that in the first three years of our life still stretches up into the spiritual worlds; but we are born with a body that is called upon to develop, through the whole of the rest of our life, the consciousness in which the ego lives. If we had not this dense physical body it would be possible for us in the conditions of the present cycle of human existence to remain childlike in the sense indicated; but because we have this dense physical body, communion with the spiritual world during the first three years of life cannot come to full consciousness.

What is it that must now be fulfilled in the course of the evolution of humanity? What is the one end only way in which to achieve it? This can most easily be expressed by the two concepts which in earlier times designated these two beings within us. The one is the concept of the being of spirit-and-soul in the first three years of childhood, the being who is now no longer really adapted to the external nature of man and is, moreover, unable to unfold ego-consciousness: this being of spirit-and-soul was called in olden times the Son of God. And the being whose physical body today is so constituted that ego-consciousness can awaken within it was called the Son of Man.—The Son of God within the Son of Man.—The conditions prevailing today are such that the Son of God can no longer become conscious in the Son of Man, but must first be separated if the ego-consciousness of today is to arise. It is the task of man, through conscious absorption of the realities of the spiritual world, so to transform and make himself master of his external sheaths that the Son of Man is gradually permeated by the Son of God. When the earth has reached the end of its evolution, man must have consciously achieved what he has no longer been able to achieve from childhood onwards: he must have completely permeated what he is as Son of Man with the divine part of his being. What is it that must completely permeate and flow through his human nature? What is it that must pour into every part of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, so that the whole Son of Man is permeated with the Son of God? It is that which lives in the first three years of life, but permeated with the fully conscious ego—this it is that must spread through the whole man.

Let us imagine that a being were to appear before us as an Ideal, a model of what man should be. What would have to be fulfilled in this being? The soul-nature of such a being cannot penetrate the outer sheaths of an ordinary man of present-day development, for he would not be able to realise the human Ideal of earthly evolution, would not be able to make it manifest. We should have, as it were, to tear the soul out of him and put in its place a soul such as is present in the first three years of life, but permeated with full ego-consciousness. In no other way could an Ideal of earth-evolution stand before us. And for how long would such a soul be able to endure a physical human life? The physical body is capable of bearing such a soul for three years only; then, if it is not to be shattered, it is bound to overpower that soul. The whole karma of the earth would have to be so organised that after three years the physical body is shattered. For in man as he is today, the being who lives in him for three years is overpowered; if, however, it were to remain, it would overpower and shatter the physical body. The Ideal of man's mission on the earth can therefore be fulfilled only if, while the physical body, etheric body and astral body remain, the ordinary soul-nature is ejected and the soul-nature of the first three years, plus full ego-consciousness, is inserted in its place. Then this soul would shatter the human body; but during these three years it would present a perfect example of what man can achieve.

This Ideal is the Christ-Ideal; and what took place at the Baptism in Jordan is the reality behind what has here been described. The human Ideal was once actually placed before mankind on the earth. Through the Baptism in Jordan, the soul with which we are connected during the first three years of childhood—but in this case completely permeated by the ego and in unbroken connection with the spiritual world—entered into a human body from which the earlier soul had departed. And then, after three years, this soul from the spiritual worlds shattered the bodily sheaths. Therefore we have before us in the first three years of life a faint image, an utterly inadequate image, of the Christ-Being Who lived for three years on earth in the body of Jesus. And if we try to develop in ourselves a manhood whose nature is that of the soul of childhood but fully permeated with the reality and content of the spiritual world, then we have a picture of that Egohood, that Christhood, of which St. Paul is speaking when he calls upon men to fulfil the “Not I, but Christ in me”.—This is the childlike soul, permeated with full and complete egohood. Thereby the human being is able to permeate his “Son of Man” with his “Son of God” and to fulfil his earthly Ideal, to overcome his external nature and once again to find the connection with the spiritual world.

But how can this be achieved? In sacred records every utterance has more than one meaning. If we are to look into the kingdom of Heaven we must become as children, but with the full maturity of the ego. That is the prospect before us until the earth's mission has been fulfilled.—We may well be moved when we realise on the one hand that our physical body is actually facing a withering process and takes into itself the spiritualising process by overcoming that which is tending to wither. The inner nature must be so strengthened from the spiritual worlds that the opposing outer nature is brought into conformity with it. When this is achieved, we stand, as men, in harmony with the evolutionary process of our earth.

Spiritual science tells us that the earth has evolved far beyond the point when the mineral kingdom which forms the soil still contains any forces of renewal, any upbuilding forces; this applies to granite, gneiss, schist, up to the very soil of our fields. All this is involved in unceasing process of destruction. We do not walk upon soil that has within it new, formative forces, but rather—because the earth has passed the mid-point of its evolution—we walk upon soil that is already breaking up, is already involved in a process of destruction. Our own development is completely in line with that of our planet. We have a physical body that is gradually withering, and this we can overcome. But in the soil we have something that is involved in a process of destruction. The valleys and mountains are formed by the crumbling of the earth's crust. Spiritual science tells us that we are moving about on an earth that is crumbling. When we climb a mountain we must realise that here something has crumbled, has split asunder, and that no process of onward development is in operation. Since the middle of the Atlantean epoch we have passed beyond the middle point of the earth's evolution. Since then we have lived on an earth that is crumbling and will one day fall away from us as a corpse.

In this connection we have one of the finest examples of complete accord between spiritual knowledge and modern science in its true form. It is essential that anthroposophists should learn to distinguish between true science and all that through countless popular channels poses as science, but in reality is nothing but a compendium of preconceived ideas, theories and the like. If we go to the true sources of the several sciences we realise how fully spiritual knowledge accords with science. And here is one of the very best examples.—

There is no more reliable or well-versed geologist than Eduard Suess; and what another geologist says is undoubtedly correct, namely, that Suess's work “The Face of the Earth” is a great geological epic of the earth. It bears all the traces of exceptional thoroughness and careful study. With all caution, and unprejudiced by theories, the author of this really monumental work presents what may be stated today on the foundation of actual geological facts. Suess is not guided in his investigations by ideas previously conceived, as was the case even with such men as Buch or Humboldt. Suess investigates facts, facts alone. What he has to say on the basis of meticulously observed facts about the formation of the earth's soil is particularly interesting. His conception is exactly the same as that of spiritual science, only of course Suess knew nothing of spiritual science. He draws his conclusions from the actual physical facts. He maintains that valleys have formed as the result of the working of certain forces through which rock and stone were hurled down; subsidence took place and heights remained.—All this is the result of processes of segmentation, displacement and “folding”, in which only forces of destruction are working. Let me refer you to one passage in Suess's great work and you will see that here, where we have to do with true science, there is complete accord with spiritual knowledge. The passage is as follows:

The breaking up of the terrestrial globe, this it is we witness. It doubtless began a long time ago, and the brevity of human life enables us to contemplate it without dismay. It is not only in the great mountain ranges that the traces of this process are found. Great segments of the earth's crust have sunk hundreds, in some cases even thousands of feet deep, and not the slightest inequality of the surface remains to indicate the fracture; the different nature of the rocks and the discoveries made in mining alone reveal its presence. Time has leveled all. In Bohemia, in the Palatinate, in Belgium, in Pennsylvania in many other places as well, the plough quietly traces its furrows over the mightiest fractures .....¹

I refer to this merely to show you that our earth-planet displays the same process of withering, shriveling and destruction as the physical body of man. Those who come forward with views of the world today do not base themselves upon science in its true form. Even to read intelligently through this tremendous work, “The Face of the Earth”, entails strenuous effort. But even that would be of no avail unless one were acquainted with the whole of modern geological science; for this alone teaches one how such a book should be read. When a man turns to the true sources of knowledge he finds the absolute facts.

Spiritual science tells us—for example about the progress of our earth's evolution—that at one time, before organisms existed, the earth was not in that fantastic condition when granite is alleged to have been liquid fire, but when the whole earth was pervaded by an activity similar, for example, to the activity taking place in a man when he is thinking. The process of destruction was once introduced and as a result of it we are able to say: The chemical substances which today are no longer contained in the earth's organism—for example, the substances of which granite is composed—fell away from this organism like rain. They trickled down, as it were, and in essentials it was these processes of destruction which in alliance with the chemistry of the earth made it possible for granite to come into existence as the mother-soil of the earth. But by that time a process of destruction had already set in, and what is present today is the necessary consequence of that process of destruction which continues in a straightforward line.

What does true natural science show us? That those processes which must be there are there. And in true natural science this is shown us everywhere. True natural science nowhere contradicts spiritual science; everywhere there is corroboration.

Such corroboration will also be found in connection with reincarnation and karma. Only it will be necessary some day for mankind to rise above all previously conceived theories, prejudices and the like. Facts can always be made use of whenever they are facts and not confused hypotheses such as the once generally accepted assumptions and theories of geologists about the condition of the earth in the granite-epoch—quite apart from all the philosophical theories of the present time which are practically devoid of spirituality. We must not allow ourselves to be impressed by such talk as the following,—“The evolution of the individual human being” (which we ourselves base upon reincarnation and karma) “derives from the infinities of spiritual evolution ...” It is possible for a man to become world-famous and yet say this. It is sheer rubbish, even though it is proclaimed as authentic philosophy and linked with the name of Wundt. In very truth we stand here at the dividing-line between two spheres of spiritual life, and we must be fully conscious of it. The one is that of natural science which, whenever it is based on facts, actually corroborates spiritual science. The other consists of the different philosophical theories, hypotheses and all the other high-sounding twaddle about what is supposed to underlie external processes and happenings. From all this, spiritual science should sternly dissociate itself. And then it will assuredly become more and more possible to realise that what we acquire through spiritual knowledge, namely, an understanding of man and of how his various members are related to the different epochs of the evolution of humanity, leads us deeply into the secrets of the universe. We shall also realise that true observation of the first three years of childhood is the first stage towards a recognition of the Mystery of Golgotha in all its truth and to a real understanding of the words:

Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

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• 1. This passage is the penultimate paragraph in Vol. I of Suess's book. The work consists of four volumes and was published in English in 1904 by the Clarendon Press. The translation is by H. Sollas.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 1976.

In a public lecture such as the one given yesterday on Spiritual Science and the Future of Man, account must always be taken of the very limited receptive capacity of the world today. In our time, data of knowledge that are essential for humanity do indeed flow down from the spiritual worlds but can be accepted open mindedly only by very few people. To most individuals who have not prepared themselves adequately for the reception of such knowledge, the deeper aspects of our Spiritual Science prove to be something of a shock, something that seems fantastic or dreamlike.

All the more it behoves us to deepen our feeling for the most significant questions that arise in the course of fairly lengthy study in a Group. And now I want to speak of the need for a closer study of the great truth of the implanting of the Ego, the ‘I’, in man and to indicate that the subject is more complicated than it is usually thought to be at the present time.

We have heard that during the period of Old Saturn man was endowed with the rudiments of the physical body, during the period of Old Sun with that of the etheric body, during the period of Old Moon with that of the astral body, and that the essential task of our Earth evolution is the incorporation of the Ego into the other members of man’s constitution. Not until the end of Earth’s evolution will the human being be completely permeated—as is possible—by the Ego. If we study the man of Earth as such, we can say that the actual centre of his being is the Ego, the ‘I’ But then it must occur to us that in each of the different periods of our present life this Ego is connected with us differently, by no means always in the same Way. We must realise above all that the different members of our being are not understood when we simply enumerate them as physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now let us consider in what different ways the members can be connected with each other both during the various epochs of mankind’s evolution and during the single life of the human being.

Let us think, to begin with, of a child. We know that it is not until a comparatively late period that he learns to say ‘I’ of himself. This is very indicative. Although modern psychology, in its endeavours to be a bona tide science, does not grasp the fact, it is deeply significant that the inner experience, the mental conception of the ‘I’ wakens in the child comparatively late. In the very earliest years, until the age of 3 or 3½, although now and then the child babbles the sound ‘I’, he has no real experience of Egohood. You may come across a book by Heinrich Lhotzky entitled Die Seele deines Kindes (Your Child’s Soul) which contains the curious statement that the child learns to think before he learns to speak. This is nonsense, because it is by speaking that the child learns to think. Those who strive to grasp Spiritual Science must be cautious of what purports to be Science today. It is approximately) after the third year of life that a child learns for the first time to experience and be cognisant of the ‘I’.

This is connected with another fact, namely that in normal consciousness—not in higher, clairvoyant consciousness—we have no remembrance of our life before a certain point of time. If you think back over the past, you will realise that remembrance ceases at a certain point and does not extend as far as birth. What others have told us can often be confused with what we ourselves have experienced, but the thread breaks at approximately the point when the ‘I’ is experienced for the first time. A very young child has no such experience; it arises later on and it is then that a very dim kind of remembrance begins.

We now ask ourselves: if the experience of ‘I’ was not present during the first three years of life, was the ‘I’, the Ego, itself also not there in the child? The question to put to ourselves is this. Are we cognisant of something that is actually within us or is it within us without our knowledge? The Ego is indeed within the child only he is unaware of it, just as during sleep a person is connected with the Ego but is not cognisant of it. The fact is that we know of something, but that can be no criterion for us. We must say: the ‘I’ is present in the child but the child is not conscious of it.

What, then, is there to be said about the Ego? It has its own task to perform. If you were to investigate the human brain purely physically, you would find that just after birth it looks very imperfect compared with its later structure. Many of the finer convolutions have to be elaborated and moulded later on, during the subsequent years. This is what the ‘I’ achieves in the human being and because this is its task it cannot itself become conscious of it. The Ego has to elaborate the brain into a more delicately complicated structure, in order that later on the human being will be able to think. During the first years of life the Ego is very active.

When the Ego becomes conscious of itself, we could ask in vain: how have you managed to construct this brain with such artistry?—you will admit that during the whole span of life between birth and death the Ego does not develop consciousness on a par with that by which the brain is elaborated. Nevertheless we can ask ourselves the question. And the answer is that in its activity the Ego is under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we observe a child clairvoyantly, his Ego—as Ego-aura—is certainly there, but streams go out from this aura to the higher Hierarchies, to the Angels, Archangels, and so on; the forces of the Hierarchies stream in. Therefore when naive consciousness speaks of a child having a Guardian Angel, this is a very real truth. Later on this closer connection ceases; the ‘I’ experiences itself more in the nerves and can therefore become conscious of its own existence. A kind of detachment takes place. In the child a sort of ‘telephonic connection’ exists, inasmuch as the ‘I’ extends into the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. The statements of Spiritual Science must be taken seriously. I once said that the very wisest person can learn a great deal from a child. He can also learn a great deal because he need not look only at the child himself but also through him into the spiritual world, because in the child there is the ‘telephonic connection’ with the spiritual world—the connection that is ultimately severed.

Hence during the first three years of life we have before us a being quite different from the one who is there later on. Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development.

The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man. In the latter the Ego is present, moves the limbs and works—as far as it is possible to work—from within outwards. A distinction must therefore be made between the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The Son of God who is preeminently active for the first three and a half years of life embraces all the vitalising forces, stimulates the human being to pour these life giving forces in greater and ever greater measure into his organism. In comparison with those in an older person these forces are also health giving, strengthening factors. If we are not content in later life to be human beings who have to rely entirely on the senses and on the instrument of the physical body for our connection with the surrounding world but determine in our later years to strive upwards to the spiritual world, then we must contrive by some means to awaken these forces within ourselves; we must evoke the forces that are within us in earliest childhood, but with the difference that now we awaken them consciously, whereas a child awakens them unconsciously. In this respect too, therefore, it is obvious that man is a twofold being.

What is it, in reality, that is brought to light by these forces during the first three and a half years of life? In these forces—which are active under the direction of the higher Hierarchies—what is working over from earlier incarnations is asserting itself. You can easily convince yourselves of this by handling the human skull, where you find individual mounds and depressions. No skull is exactly similar to another, hence there is no universally valid Phrenology. Each case must be studied individually. The forces working in the formation of the human skull come over from earlier incarnations and their impetus ceases after the first three and a half years of life. During these years everything is still pliable and the spirit is still able to work in it. Later on, everything has become solid and the spirit can no longer come into play.

What, then, is responsible for the fact that in later life we are no longer able to work with these forces? To what is this due? It is due to the essential character of our Earth evolution. When the ‘I’ has become conscious of itself in the body, this presupposes that the body is very firmly knit and can no longer be elaborated by the forces just described. There are also forces which essentially belong to man as a generic being, which mould him in accordance with the architectural principles of the human form. Were we to work in the physical body with the forces of early childhood for more than the three and a half years which are the appropriate period, the physical body could not .survive. It would be rent asunder, shattered, for now the forces by which the physical body is attached to the line of physical heredity become operative. If the action of the other forces did not cease, the body would break up, disintegrate. The Son of Man within us brings about our destruction; the Son of God within us cannot offer resistance to the Son of Man after a period of three years. For all that, we bear this Son of God within us. These forces work within the physical body throughout life but they cannot participate directly in the up-building process. If we look within our own inmost being, however, we can nevertheless find the continuation of the Ego with the ‘telephonic connection’. It is only that the physical body has become too coarse, too solid, too wooden to enable the Son of God to mould it any further.

Thus the best forces are present in us during the first three to three and a half years of childhood. The whole of life is nourished by them but they are obscured. In an entirely different form they are nevertheless present in the later years of life. We are permeated by these forces but cannot allow them to come to direct expression. When through Spiritual Science we endeavour to acquire ideas and conceptions of the higher worlds, this will be all the easier, the more forces have remained in us of those that were within us during the first three years when our ‘I’, our Ego, was within us but without self-consciousness. The fresher, the more flexible these forces have remained, the less time-worn they have become in advanced age, the more easily we can bring about transformation in ourselves through these spiritual forces.

It is the very best part of manhood that we have within us during these early years, only the solid physical body prevents us from using these forces then to the fullest extent. Even if someone in his later years succeeds in developing them to a special extent, he cannot transform his physical body which is by no means as pliable as wax. But if through esoteric wisdom he is able to use these forces to the full, their power streams through the tips of his fingers, and he acquires the gift of healing, of health-bestowal, through the laying on of hands—if, that is to say, these spiritual forces are still active. They can no longer transform his body but when they stream out from him they bring about healing.

The goal of Earth evolution is to enable these forces—the best that are within us—to take effect. When the evolution of the Earth is at an end and we have lived through our many incarnations, we must consciously have permeated our whole being with the forces that are within us unconsciously during the first years of childhood. There is a difference between bearing these forces unconsciously and bearing them consciously. At the end of Earth evolution human beings must be completely permeated by this childhood consciousness. And then, because the process of expansion will be slow, the body will not burst asunder.

In world-evolution a prototype of penetration of the forces of childhood into mankind was necessary. Needless to say, this prototype could not be a child. It was necessary that an individual of a certain age should be permeated in full consciousness by the same forces by which all human beings are permeated unconsciously in earliest childhood. Suppose we were to remove his Ego from a human being, empty his Ego and pour into him the forces that are active in a child during the first years of life, he would become conscious of these forces with his developed brain. What had been active within him during the first years of childhood would become a conscious experience in him. For how long is a human life on Earth able to endure this? For no longer than three years, for then the body would be shattered. If there can be no transformation—in the case of man this takes place in the process of ordinary evolution—the human body can endure this state of things for no longer than three years. Were it possible for any being to bear the forces of early childhood consciously within himself, the karma of that being must be so adjusted that the physical body involved is shattered.

It is conceivable that what man attains through all the incarnations leading to the goal of Earth evolution can be brought to the notice of the world by a prototype, by an individual whose bodily nature makes it possible for his Ego to depart and be replaced by another Being. In such a case the human body would not tolerate the presence of the other Being for longer than three years. It would be the karma of the body to be shattered. And this actually happened. At the baptising by John in the Jordan we see this human body which made it possible for the Ego, the Zarathustra-Ego, to depart. A Being, the Christ Being, came down into this body, indwelt it for three years but could remain in it no longer. After three years the body broke up when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was able to live for three years in a human body at that time must be tended and cherished by man and gradually, in the course of incarnations, made a living reality in his soul, in order that at the end of the incarnations it may be present in full strength.

A remarkable connection is apparent between the Son of God in man and the Christ Event. Everything to be found in the domain of occultism can be illuminated from different sides. Proofs such as are demanded by conventional science cannot satisfy occultism. Proofs must convince by virtue of truths being gathered together from all sides, truths which sustain and support each other. We can study the Christ Event from still another side by deriving it, as has been done today, from the very nature of man. We realise that the best way to understand the Christ is to develop the attitude of soul arising from such a truth. We must realise too that in a fully evolved human body, there was present in Jesus of Nazareth through the Baptism in Jordan a Being who is present in every human body, but unconsciously only, during the first three years of life. And then we must contemplate the three years when this child has become conscious. That is how understanding of the Christ can best be acquired.

Ancient utterances have different meanings. One such meaning is disclosed by the words: Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the Kingdoms of Heaven. There we have a glimpse of the deeper meaning often contained in single sentences of the religious texts.

Let us contemplate this life of childhood especially in the period when it is actually developing. Science today does not know much about what can contribute to the study of the true nature of man. In the first place we must realise clearly that from the very beginning man differs quite radically from all other beings. Take an example near at hand, let us say, an ape. Its gait is determined from the very outset because the characteristic equilibrium is established by the arrangement of its limbs. The human being cannot, to begin with, walk at all, for he must first bring about equilibrium in his body. Through the work of his Ego his limbs must be brought into the positions which enable him to stand upright and walk. Thus in the first years of childhood the Ego must work not only at moulding the brain but must also bring about the equilibrium that is not, from the beginning, established in the human being as it is in the animal. The bones of the human being must first be arranged in the angles necessary for the main-tenance of his centre of gravity, in order that he may be able to walk and make his way about. This capacity is implanted from the beginning in every animal, up to those of the highest species, whereas in the human being it must be acquired gradually though the work of the Ego. Before then he crawls about or falls down. He would be fettered to the same spot on the ground if his Ego was not at work during the first three years of his life.

We have already heard that the Ego works at man’s brain, sculps and moulds it into a form that enables him later on to become a being possessed of intelligence. Thus it can be said that we acquire the capacity to recognise the truth in life as a result of the Ego having moulded its instrument. It must become obvious to us that there can be no further life unless we bring it about by work and activity.

What further distinguishes man so radically from all other things is his speech. That capacity too must be acquired through the work of his Ego. Man is not, from the beginning, organised for speech. Cows utter the sound ‘moo’ but that is not speech. The acquisition of speech depends upon the Ego sojourning among other human Egos. If a human being were transported to a remote island he would not learn to speak. The coming of the second teeth is due to heredity; so too is the fact that we grow. The teeth would come even if we were on a lonely island. But it is through the Ego that we acquire the faculty of speech. These differences are important. Thus in human life, speech is the third faculty acquired through the Ego.

Through the activity of these forces the human beings finds his way on Earth, he recognises the truth and lives his life in common with the surrounding world. If a child were able to express what he thus acquires, he could say: the Ego within me transforms me in such a way that I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Think of this translated into a higher, spiritual reality, and let us ask: what will be said to man by a Being who with fully conscious forces of childhood lives for three years in a human body? Such a Being will say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In very fact, when the forces of childhood rise to a higher, fully conscious stage, there we have the great prototype of what is revealed at a lower stage in the child. Through Christ Jesus it becomes a basic, fundamental truth. Not only is the utterance “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven” incomprehensible without a knowledge of what Spiritual Science has to say about the connection with the life-giving forces of early childhood, but it is also true that we can best understand the radical utterance, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” when we recognise its prototype in what the Ego achieves by its activity in the body of early childhood.

Such truths make it possible for us to generate—if not for the body at least for the soul—some measures of the life-giving forces we need on the Earth. The man of today who does not acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world has no genuine feeling for such facts. If you go to a number of individuals in outer life and tell them something of what has been said here today: ‘Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven’—you will find that these people say: “Well, yes, these are quite clever analogies, but what use can be made of them?” They consider it more advantageous to go to some blood-curdling drama, if not anything worse! Those who have no feelings that these facts are significant will regard them as unjustifiable because it is in the feeling for such things that there lies the power to instil the gift of childhood into life. If we lack enthusiasm for the idea of Christ being compared with the activity of the human Ego during the first years of life, if we reject such a comparison as unjustifiable, then we have no faculty for kindling to life the forces of earliest childhood. Wizened scholars have so little power to awaken these forces and thereby to approach the reality of the spiritual world! But if we have the enthusiasm to concern ourselves with such truths, we can permeate our whole being with these forces.

Thereby something is given to an individual which enables him to uphold the principle of universality in his Christianity. Have I not often said that we are only at the beginning of a true conception of Christ? Until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no possibility of hearing the Bible read. Christians were obliged to rely upon preaching and the proclamations of evangelists. Then came the Christianity which adhered strictly to the Bible, deriving its knowledge from that one source. We are not mindful of Christ’s power if we ignore His words: “I am with you until the end of the ages.” We are Christians when we realise that after Christ had once revealed Himself He will do so again, for anyone who has eyes to see Him. The content of the Gospels by no means represents all that Christ has to say. We should not constantly be quoting the words: “You could not bear it now”. Humanity must become mature enough to understand Christ’s declaration.

It also follows that we ought to be able to adopt the right attitude to what is revealed through the Baptism by John, namely, the manifestation of the health-giving, fertile forces of early childhood. That in itself would be a fruitful conception. Even if there were no human being who knew anything about the name of Christ or about the Gospels—we do not overstress the importance of names—what is all-important is the Being Himself. We leave it to others to say that an individual who does not swear allegiance to Buddha is no true adherent. What matters to us is the reality, not the name. This is the principle we follow when, for example, we recognise that during the first years of life there are within the human being forces which once streamed down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Think of a remote, lonely island to which no single record of the Mystery of Golgotha has ever found its way. If human beings there through their spiritual life consciously draw the powers of earliest childhood into themselves until they reach old age, then they are Christians in the true sense of the word. In such circumstances there is no need for them to search in the Gospels, for Christianity in itself is a living power and will evolve to further and further stages.

There is a difference here that must be strictly remembered. We shall realise ever more clearly how intimately Christ’s mission is connected with the very being of the Earth. We shall be able to say that the mission of Christ is something that can be understood by contemplating man as he is today. The need to be filled with the power of Christ, to make a reality of Paul’s affirmation “Christ in me”, is confirmed when we say that the whole of our life must be dedicated to the transformation of what is present within us during the first years of childhood. Then the Christ is in us in very truth.

This realisation makes it possible to have a wide understanding of Christianity and reveals the prospect that it will take quite different forms. Times will come when Christ will be referred to in an entirely different way, when sources of an essentially different character will be in existence, when there will be no reference to the external history of the existence of such a Being, but when this fact will be revealed by the actual consciousness of mankind.

These matters are brought forward because they show how deeply Spiritual Science can influence man’s life of feeling and must become actual practice. It is only then that what we find in original sources becomes really intelligible to us. For many human beings, however, these original sources are verily a book with seven seals. At the end of the Earth’s existence, a man of today will have reached the stage where his soul is inwardly Christian in the truest sense. Today he is only at the beginning of this development. Nevertheless Christ lives within him and will do so in an ever wider sense through all the following incarnations.

What was the state of things before Christ came to the Earth, before He revealed Himself on the Earth? The Ego was then only in the preparatory stage, for it is by Christ that the Ego is given its very purpose and meaning. When the mission of a Being is in the preparatory stage, his predecessors must help him. Until the Mystery of Golgotha, man’s Ego was still at the stage of preparation. Until then it was necessary for other Beings to help man, Beings who had reached the human stage previously, namely, during the

Old Moon embodiment of the Earth. We know that these are the Beings of the Hierarchy immediately above us—the Angels. Their evolution has reached a stage higher than that reached by man. It was chiefly these Beings who took over the guidance of humanity before man was in a position to say: Christ gives my Ego purport and meaning. Man could not lead himself to Christ but had perforce to be led to Him by the Beings who are his elder Brothers.

The Bible records this with wonderful accuracy. Let us think of John, the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The true forerunner could not have been the Being who is presented in external history, for as we now know man had as yet no Ego. Therefore it cannot be strictly true to say that John the Baptist himself was Christ’s forerunner. Remarkably, the Gospel of St. Mark begins at once with the words: “I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way.” We must pay attention to something that theologians have, it is true, noticed in a very abstract form but ignored as a concrete reality. The external world is primarily maya. We must learn to see it in the right way and then it is no longer maya. The narration of the external events connected with John the Baptist on the physical plane, is maya. We do not understand them. The biblical picture of John the Baptist is maya. The truth is that an Angel lives in John, takes possession of his soul, and it is this Being who leads men to Christ. John is the sheath in which the Angel is revealed. The reborn Elijah was able and ready to receive into himself the Angel who entered into and spoke out of him, using him—John—simply as an instrument. The story given in the Bible is accurate in every detail.

It can therefore be said that it was only because the Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon embodiment of the Earth became the leaders of man in the pre-Christian era that he could be prepared to receive the Ego. In point of fact, all the leaders of humanity in the pre-Christian era could be leaders because Angels were working through them. What would happen in the case of a man of the modern age? In pre-Christian times the Angel could work in a man because he had no Ego of his own. Since the Christ has come, man can turn to Him and a power enters into him instead of the Angel, as formerly. Man today must take the Christ into himself through devotion and reverence. John could still say: Not I but the Angel in me has been sent and uses me as the instrument for preparing the way. Man must say as did St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ Man must learn to understand Christ in the light of the teaching of Spiritual Science.

What has been said today about the first three years of childhood can, for example, usefully be emphasised. Man is ‘christianised’ when the truth is brought home to him that the forces at work during the age of earliest childhood shed their sunlike radiance over the whole of life. Modern science, on the other hand, is ultimately responsible for the onset of senility, for resistance to the sunlike forces in early childhood, for ossification of parts of the brain, and a great deal else besides.

From such truths we realise that it is possible to understand the living truth of Christianity even when original records are left out of account and we simply study the nature and being of man. If our understanding of Spiritual Science is such that we do not simply say, ‘now I know that man consists of four members—physical, etheric, astral bodies and Ego’ but realise that what matters is to know how these single members are interconnected in his constitution—then we can become aware that the Ego working in early childhood is related to another entity, that the first Ego is like a sheath and that after about three years its connection with all the members of the rest of man’s nature changes entirely.

This knowledge acquires genuine value when it becomes a power within us and when we say to ourselves that because in the future many incarnations lie ahead of us we can develop what is in us to further and further stages of consciousness, that we can enable the forces of the higher man, The Son of God within us, to be victorious over the Son of Man, thereby rising higher in each succeeding incarnation until the Earth reaches its goal. The Earth then becomes a corpse just as the individual human being becomes a physical corpse; the corpse sinks into the Earth and the soul rises into the spiritual world. This is what will also happen to the Earth as a whole.

If we think of the Earth as the body of all humanity, we can say: the Earth dies as a corpse, dissolves into the substance of the Universe, is pulverised in order to be used in a new material form. But man rises into spiritual worlds in order to pass over into the next planetary existence. It behoves us to remember that these are no abstract words.

Strange to say, there are people who believe that our Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets, was once a great nebula and nothing else, that then Sun, Earth and man himself, through the consolidation of matter, came into existence, that he will evolve to further and further stages and will eventually be entombed in the Earth the whole process being an aimless episode!

In future histories of civilization great efforts will have to be made to understand this patho-logical fantasy, to grasp how it could have been possible for man’s imagination to become sickly enough to accept this as a serious conception. To uphold the Kant-Laplace theory is exactly the same as to think that man can be explained by studying the dust produced by his cremation. Such science is pernicious, incapable of engendering living power in the soul.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to kindle the power to develop our stature as human beings to higher and higher stages, no longer connecting ourselves with the dust of the Earth but evolving towards a new planetary existence.

This is the 8th of 17 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1911. The title of this series of lectures is: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. This address was given following a Concert at the Berlin Group of the Anthroposophical Society, at which Mendelssohn's Overture of the Hebrides had been played).

Through the tones and harmonies of this Overture we have been led in spirit to the shores of Scotland, and in our souls, we have thus followed again a path of travel which, during the course of human evolution, has been deeply influenced by the secrets of karma. For, from entirely different parts of the western hemisphere of our earth, as if through a karmic current of migration, various peoples were once transplanted into that region, and its vicinity, to which these tones now lead us. And many strange destinies are made known to us. We are told, both by what Occultism relates as well as by outer historical documents, of what these peoples experienced in very ancient times on this particular part of the earth.

A memory of the mysterious destinies of these peoples arose again, as if newly awakened, when about 1772 the cave on the Island of Staffa belonging to the Hebrides, known as Fingal's Cave, was rediscovered. Those who beheld it were reminded of mysterious ancient destinies when they saw how Nature herself seemed to have constructed something which may be likened to a wonderful cathedral. It is constructed with great symmetry in long aisles of countless pillars towering aloft: above there arches a ceiling of the same stonework, while below the bases of the pillars are washed by the inrushing foaming waves of the sea which ceaselessly beat and resound with a music which is like thunder within this mighty temple. Dropping water drips steadily from strange stone formations upon the stalactites beneath, making melodious magical music.

A spectacle of this kind actually exists there. And those who, upon discovering it, had a sense for the mysterious things which once took place in this region, must have been reminded of the hero who once upon a time, as one of the most famous individualities of the West, guided destiny here in such a strange way, and whose fame was sung by his son, the blind Ossian, who is like a western Homer—a blind singer.

If we look back and see how deeply people were impressed by what they heard about this place, we shall be able to understand how it was that Macpherson's revival of this ancient song in the 18^th Century made such a mighty impression upon Europe. There is nothing which may be compared with the impression made by this poem. Goethe, Herder, Napoleon harkened to it—and all believed to discern in its rhythms and sounds something of the magic of primeval days. Here we must understand that a spiritual world such as still existed at that time, arose within their hearts, and felt itself drawn to what sounded forth out of this song! And what was it that thus sounded forth?

We must now turn our gaze to those times which fall together with the first impulses of Christianity and the few centuries which followed. What happened up there in the vicinity of the Hebrides, in Ireland and Scotland—in ancient Erin, which included all the neighboring islands between Ireland and Scotland, as well as the northern part of Scotland itself. Here we must seek for the kernel of those peoples, of Celtic origin, who had most of all preserved the ancient Atlantian clairvoyance in its full purity. The others who had wandered farther to the East had developed further, and so no longer remained in connection with the ancient gods. The western peoples, however, had preserved for themselves the possibility of experiencing an ancient clairvoyance now entirely immersed in the personality, in the individuality. And they were led to this particular part of the earth, as if for a special mission, where a structure confronted them which mirrored their own music's inner depths and was itself architecturally formed entirely out of the spiritual world, a structure which I have just tried to characterize with a few words—Fingal's Cave. We shall imagine these events rightly if we realize that the cave acted as a focus point, mirroring what lived in the souls of these human beings who, through their karma, were sent hither as to a temple erected by the gods themselves. Here those human beings were prepared who should later receive the Christ Impulse with their full human being and were here to undergo something extremely strange by way of preparation.

Again we shall be able to imagine all this if we realize that here particularly those ancient folk customs were preserved whereby the tribe was divided into smaller groups based upon family. Those who were related by blood felt themselves closely connected, while all others were looked upon as strangers, as belong[ing] to another Group Ego. During the migrations from Atlantis toward the East, all that the Druid priests, who remained behind here in the West, were able to give to the people poured itself out over these individual groups as a harmonizing influence. And what they were able to give still lived on in the bards. We shall only rightly understand what worked through these bards, however, if we make clear to ourselves that here the most elemental passions met together with the ancient powers of sight into the spiritual world, and that those who, with powerful life forces, sometimes with rage and passion, fought as representatives of their clan against other clans, perceived at the same time impulses working out of the spiritual world which directed them in battle.

Such an active connection between the physical and the soul realms cannot be conceived of today. When a hero raised his sword he believed that a spirit out of the air guided it, and in the spirit he beheld an ancestor who had fought upon this same battlefield in former times and who had gone up yonder to help now from over there. In their battle ranks they felt their ancestors actively aiding them, their ancestors on both sides—and they did not only feel them ... they heard them clairaudiently! It was a wonderful conception which lived in these peoples, that the heroes had to fight upon the battlefields and to shed their blood, but that after death they ascended into the spiritual world, and that their spirits then vibrated as tone—sounding through the air as a spiritual reality.

Those who had proven themselves in battle, but had trained themselves at the same time so that they could listen to what sounded out of the winds as the voice of the past, who were blind for the physical world, who could no longer see the flashing of the swords but were blind for the physical plane—these were highly honoured! And one of these was Ossian. When the heroes swung their swords, they were conscious that their deeds would resound further into the spiritual world and that bards would appear who would preserve all this in their songs. This was perceived in living reality by these peoples.

But all this creates an altogether different conception of humanity. It creates the conception that the human being is united with spiritual powers which sound forth out of the whole of Nature. For he cannot look upon a storm or a flash of lightning, he cannot hear the thunder or the surging of the sea without sensing that out of all the activities of Nature spirits work who are connected with the souls of the past, with the souls of his own ancestors. Thus the activity of Nature was at that time something altogether different than for us today. And it is for this reason that the rhythms and sounds of this song are so important, which, after being handed down for centuries through tradition only, were revived by the Scotsman Macpherson so that they create for us again a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the souls of his ancestors and with the phenomena of Nature.

We can understand how this Scotsman had in a certain sense a congenial feeling when he described how a line of battle stormed into the field, sweeping darkness before it, even as did the spirits who took part in the battle. This song is in reality something which was able to make a great impression upon spiritual Europe. The whole character of the description, even though given in a rather free poetical form, awakes in us a feeling for the kind of perception which lived in these ancient peoples. There was active in them a living knowledge, a living wisdom, concerning their connection with the spiritual world and the world of Nature in which the spiritual world works.

Out of such wisdom the finest sons from the different tribes—that is, those who had the strongest connection with the spirits of the past, who more than others allowed these spirits of the past to live in their deeds—were chosen as a picked band. And those who had the strongest clairvoyant forces were placed at its head. This band had to defend the kernel of the Celtic peoples against the peoples of the surrounding world. And one of these leaders was the clairvoyant hero, who has come down to us under the name of Fingal. How Fingal was active in the defense of the ancient gods against those who wished to endanger them—all this was handed down in ancient songs, heard out of the spiritual world—the ancient songs of the bard Ossian, Fingal's son, so that it remained alive even into the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. What Fingal achieved, what his son Ossian heard when Fingal had ascended into the spiritual realm, what their descendants heard in the rhythms and sounds of Ossian's songs with which they ever and again ensouled their deeds, this it was which worked on so mightily even into the 18^th Century. And we shall win a conception of this if we realize how Ossian allowed the voice of his father, Fingal, to sound forth in his songs.

We are told how the heroes find themselves in a difficult position. They are almost overthrown ... when new life fills the band: “The king stood by the stone of Lubar. Thrice he reared his terrible voice. The deer started from the fountains of Cromia. The rocks shook on all their hills. Like the noise of a hundred mountain streams, that burst, and roar, and foam! Like the clouds, that gather to a tempest on the blue face of the sky! So met the sons of the desert round the terrible voice of Fingal. Pleasant was the voice of the king of Morven to the warriors of his land. Often had he led them to battle; often returned with the spoils of the foe.”

“‘Come to battle,’ said the king, ‘ye children of echoing Selma! Come to the death of thousands. Comhal's son will see the fight. My sword shall wave on the hill, the defense of my people in war. But never may you need it, warriors; while the son of Morni fights, the chief of mighty men! He shall lead my battle, that his fame may rise in song! O ye ghosts of heroes dead! Ye riders of the storm of Cromia! Receive my falling people with joy, and bear them to your hills. And may the blast of Lena carry them over my seas, that they may come to my silent dreams, and delight my soul in rest’ ...”

“Now like a dark and stormy cloud, edges round with the red lightning of heaven, flying westward from the morning's beam, the king of Selma removed. Terrible is the light of his armor; two spears are in his hand. His gray hair falls on the wind. He often looks back on the war. Three bards attend the son of fame, to bear his words to the chiefs. High on Cromia's side he sat, waving the lightning of his sword, and as he waved we moved ...”

“Fingal at once arose in arms. Thrice he reared his dreadful voice. Cromia answered around. The sons of the desert stood still. They bent their blushing faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of the king. He came like a cloud of rain in the day of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Silence attends its slow progress aloft: but the tempest is soon to arise. Swaran beheld the terrible kings of Morven. He stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear, rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed, as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. It bends over the stream: the grey moss whistles in the wind: so stood the king. Then slowly he retired to the rising heath of Lena. His thousands pour around the hero. Darkness gathers on the hill!”

“Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him. He sends forth the voice of his power: ‘Raise my standards on high, spread them on Lena's wind, like the flames of an hundred hills! Let them sound on the winds of Erin, and remind us of the fight. Ye sons of the roaring streams, that pour from a thousand hills, be near the king of Morven! Attend to the words of his power! Gaul, strongest arm of death! O! Oscar of the future fights! Connal, son of the blue shields of Sora! Dermid, of the dark brown hair! Ossian, king of many songs!—Be near your father's arm!’ We reared the sunbeam of battle; the standard of the king! Each hero exulted with joy, as, waving, it flew in the wind. It was studded with gold above, as the blue wide shell of the nightly sky. Each hero had his standard, too, and each his gloomy mien!”

Thus Fingal stormed into battle, thus he is described by his son Ossian.

No wonder that this life, this consciousness of a connection with the spiritual world which sank deep into these peoples, into the souls of the ancient Celts, is the best preparation whereby they could spread the personal divine element throughout the West in their own way and from their own soil. For what they had experienced in the form of passion and desire, what they had heard sounding forth in the melodies of the spiritual world, prepared them for a later time when they brought into the world sons who revealed these passions in their souls in a purified and milder form. And thus we may say—it seems to us as if Erin's finest sons were to hear again the voices of their ancient bards singing of what they once heard out of the spiritual world as the deeds of their forefathers, but as if in Erin's finest sons the ancient battle cries had now been formed and clarified, and had become words which could express the greatest impulse of mankind.

All this sounded forth out of olden times in the songs about the deeds of the ancient Celts who fought out many things in mighty battles in order to prepare themselves for further deeds of spiritual life in later times, as we recognize them again today in that which the finest sons of the West have achieved. These were the impulses which flowed into the souls of human beings in the 18^th Century, when these ancient songs were revived. And it is this which was remembered by those who saw again the wonderful cathedral, built as if by Nature herself, and which caused them to say to themselves—“Here is a site, a gathering place, given to man by karma, in order that what the bards were able to sing about the deeds of their ancestors, about all that the heroes did to steel their forces, might sound back to them as in an echo out of this temple which they themselves did not have to build—out of their holy temple which was built for them by the spirits of Nature and which could be an instrument of enthusiasm for all who beheld it.”

So the tones and harmonies of this Overture which we have just heard offer an opportunity which allows us to sense, in our own way at least, something of the deep and mysterious events which do indeed reign in the history of mankind, events which occurred long before our present era on almost the same soil upon which they now continue to live. As we must deepen ourselves in all that lives within us, and as all that lives within us is only a further resounding of what was there in the past, so this feeling, this sense, for what once was and now works further in mankind is of great significance for occult life.

The objection is frequently made that theosophy does not really work its way into the realm of morality. In fact it is said that through certain of its teachings it in some respects not only does not counter egotism but furthers it. Those who are of this opinion share the following thoughts. They say that theosophy demonstrates how the human being develops his existence from life to life and that the main point is that even if he suffers defeats he has the possibility of striving ever higher, employing in a subsequent life the results of what he has learned in a given life as in a kind of “school.” He who immerses himself completely in this belief in human perfectibility will strive to render his “I” ever more pure, to make it as rich as possible, so that he may ascend ever higher and higher. This, so these people say, is after all really an egotistic striving. For we theosophists, they say, seek to attract teachings and forces from the spiritual world in order to elevate our “I” to ever greater heights. This is therefore an egotistic basis for human action. These people maintain further that we theosophists are convinced that we prepare a bad karma for ourselves through imperfect actions. Thus in order not to do so the theosophist will avoid doing this or that which he would otherwise have done. He therefore refrains from the action for fear of karma. For the same reason he would probably also do this or that which he otherwise would not have done, and this too would be but one more quite egotistic motivation for an action. There are a number of people who say that the teachings of karma and reincarnation as well as the rest of the striving for perfection which originates in theosophy leads people to work spiritually for a refined form of higher egotism. It would actually be a severe reproach if one were able to maintain that theosophy prompts people to develop moral action not out of sympathy and compassion but out of fear of punishment. Let us now ask ourselves whether such a reproach is really justified. We must reach very deeply into occult research if we wish to refute such a reproach to theosophy in a really fundamental way.

Let us assume that someone were to say that if a person does not already possess this striving for perfection, theosophy will certainly never prompt him to moral actions. A deeper understanding of what theosophy has to say can teach us that the individual is related to the whole of humanity in such a way that by acting immorally he not only does something that may earn him a punishment. It is rather the case that through an immoral thought, an immoral action or attitude he brings about something really absurd, something that cannot be reconciled with truly healthy thinking.

The statement has many implications. An immoral action not only implies a subsequent karmic punishment; it is rather in the most fundamental respect an action that one definitely ought not to do. Let us assume that a person commits a theft. In so doing the person incurs a karmic punishment. If one wishes to avoid this punishment one simply does not steal. But the matter is still more complicated. Let us ask ourselves what really motivates the person who lies or steals. The liar or thief seeks personal advantage—the liar perhaps wishing to wiggle out of an unpleasant situation. Such an action is only meaningful if one actually does gain an advantage through lying or stealing. If the person were now to realize that he simply cannot have that advantage, that he is wrong, that on the contrary he will bring about a disadvantage, he would then say to himself that it is nonsense even to think about such an action. As theosophy penetrates ever deeper into human civilization, people will know that it is absurd, indeed that it is ridiculous, to believe that through lying or stealing one can acquire what one seeks to acquire. For one thing will become increasingly clear for all people as theosophy enters their consciousness: that in the sense of higher causes we have to do not at all with totally separate human individualities, but that along with the separate individualities the whole of humanity forms a unity. One will realize more and more that in the sense of a true view of the world the finger is more intelligent than the whole man, for it does not presume to be something on its own, independent of the entire human organism to which it belongs. In its dull consciousness it knows that it cannot exist without the whole organism.

But people continually embrace illusions. They fancy themselves separate by virtue of what is enclosed within their skins. This they are, however, just as little as is the finger without the whole organism. The source of the illusion is the fact that the human being can wander about and the finger cannot. We are in the same situation on earth as is the finger on our organism. The science that believes our earth is a glowing hot, fluid sphere surrounded by a hard shell upon which we humans walk about, and that this explains the earth, stands at the same level as a science that would believe that in all essential respects the human being consists of nothing more, nothing else than his skeleton, for what one perceives of the earth is the same as the skeleton in man. The rest of what belongs to the earth is of a super-sensible nature. The earth is a real organism, a real living being. When one pictures to oneself the human being as a living creature, one can think of his blood with its red and white corpuscles. These can only develop in the entire human organism and thereby be what they are. What these red and white blood corpuscles are for the human being we human beings are for the organism of the earth. We definitely belong to this earth organism. We form a part of the whole living being that is the earth, and only then do we view ourselves correctly when we say, “As single individuals we are nothing. We are only complete when we think our way into the ‘body’ of the earth, the body of which we perceive only the skeleton, the mineral shell, as long as we do not acknowledge the spiritual members of this earth organism.”

When a process of infection arises in the human organism, the entire organism is seized by fever, by illness. If we translate this into terms applicable to the earth organism we can say that what occultism maintains is true: When something immoral is done anywhere on earth it amounts to the same thing for the whole earth organism as a little festering boil on the human body, which makes the whole organism sick. So that if a theft is committed on the earth the result is that the entire earth develops a kind of fever. This is not meant merely in a metaphorical sense. It is well-founded. The whole organism of the earth suffers from everything immoral and as individuals we can do nothing immoral without affecting the whole earth.

It is really a simple thought, yet people have a difficult time grasping it. But let those people who do not want to believe it just wait. Let one try to impress such thoughts upon our culture; let one try with these thoughts to appeal to the human heart, the human conscience. Whenever people anywhere act immorally their actions are a kind of infected boil for the whole earth and make the earth organism ill, and experience would show that tremendous moral impulses inhere in such knowledge.

One can preach morality as much as one likes; it will not help people one bit. But knowledge such as we have developed here would not seize hold of people merely as knowledge. If it found its way into the developing culture, if it streamed into the soul already in childhood, it would provide a tremendous moral impulse, for in the end no moral preachments have any real power to overwhelm, to convince the human soul. Schopenhauer is quite right when he says that to preach morality is easy but to establish it is difficult. People have a certain antipathy toward moral preachments. They say, “What is being preached to me is the will of someone else and I am supposed simply to acquiesce to it.” This belief will become more and more dominant to the degree that materialistic consciousness becomes dominant.

One says today that there is a morality of class, of social standing, and what such a class morality considers to be right is then applied to the other class. Such an attitude has found its way into human souls and in the future it will become worse and worse. People will come increasingly to feel that they themselves want to find everything that is to be acknowledged as correct in this sphere. They will feel that it should originate in their own inclination toward objective knowledge. The human individuality wants to be taken ever more seriously. But at the moment in which the heart, for instance, were to realize that it too would be sick if the whole organism became sick, man would do what is necessary in order not to fall ill. At the moment in which man realizes that he is embedded within the total organism of the earth and has no business being a festering boil on the earth's body—at that moment there exists an objective basis for morality. And man will say, “If I steal I am seeking my own personal advantage. I refrain from stealing because if I do steal I shall make sick the entire organism without which I cannot live. I do the opposite and thereby bring about something advantageous not only for the organism but also for myself.”

In the future the moral awareness of human beings will form itself in this general way. He who, through theosophy, finds an impetus to moral action will say to himself that it is an illusion to seek personal advantage through an immoral action. If you do that, you are like an octopus that ejects a dark fluid: you eject a dark aura of immoral impulses. Lying and stealing are the seeds of an aura into which you place yourself and through which you make the whole world unhappy.

People say, “All that surrounds us is maya.” But such truths must become truths for life itself. Let us suppose that one can demonstrate that through theosophy humanity's moral development in the future will enable man to see how he wraps himself in an aura of illusions when he seeks his own advantage. If one can demonstrate this, it will become a practical truth to say that the world is a maya or illusion. The finger believes this in its dull, half sleeping, half dreaming consciousness. It is bright enough to know that without the hand and the rest of the body it is no longer a finger. The human being today is not yet bright enough to know that without the body of the earth he is actually nothing. But he must become bright enough to know this. The finger therefore enjoys a certain advantage over man. It does not cut itself off. It does not say, “I want to keep my blood for myself or cut off a portion of myself.” It is in harmony with the whole organism. Man must, to be sure, develop a higher consciousness in order to come into harmony with the whole organism of the earth. In his present moral consciousness man does not yet know this. He could say to himself, “I inhale the air. It was just outside, and now it is inside the human body. Something external becomes something internal. And when I exhale, something internal again becomes something external. And so it is with the whole man.” The human being is not even aware of the simple fact that separated from the surrounding air he is nothing. He must undertake to develop an awareness of how he is locked into the entire organism of the earth.

How can the human being know: “You are a member of the whole organism of the earth?” Theosophy enables him to know this. It shows man that first there existed a Saturn condition, then a Sun condition, then a Moon condition. Man was present through all these conditions, although in a quite different way from today. Then the earth proceeded from the old Moon condition. Gradually the human being arose as earthly man. He has a long development behind him and in the future he is to advance to other stages of development. Man in his present form has arisen with the earth in its present form. When through the study of theosophy one traces how man and the earth have arisen it becomes clear in what way man is a part of the whole organism of the earth. Then it becomes clear how earth and man gradually have emerged from a spiritual life, how the beings of the hierarchies have fashioned earth and man, how man belongs to the hierarchies, even though he stands at the lowest stage. Then theosophy points to the central Being of the entire earthly evolution, to the Christ as the great archetype of the human being. And from all these teachings of theosophy the awareness shall spring forth for man, “Thus ought you to act.”

The science of the spirit shows us how we can feel ourselves to be a part of the whole life of the earth. The science of the spirit shows us that Christ is the Spirit of the earth. Our fingers, our toes, our nose, all our members dream that the heart provides them with blood. They dream that without a central organ they would be nothing, for without a heart they are not possible. Theosophy shows man that in the future of earthly evolution it would be folly not to take up the idea of Christ, for what the heart is for the organism Christ is for the body of the earth. Just as through the heart the blood provides the whole organism with life and strength, so must the Being of Christ have moved through all single souls on earth, and the words of St. Paul must become truth for them: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” The Christ must have flowed into all human hearts. Whoever wanted to say, “One can continue to exist without Christ,” would be as foolish as eyes and ears if they wanted to say that they could continue to exist without the heart. In the case of the single human body the heart must of course be present from the beginning, whereas the heart entered the organism of the earth only with the Christ. For the following ages, however, this heart's blood of Christ must have entered all human hearts. He who does not unite himself with it in his soul, will wither away. The earth will not wait with its development; it will come to the point to which it must come. Human beings alone can remain behind, that is, they would balk at receiving Christ in their souls. A number of human beings would stand there in their last incarnation on earth and not have reached the goal: they have not recognized Christ, have not received Christ-feeling, Christ-knowing into their souls. They are not mature. They do not take their places in the development to higher stages. They separate themselves off.

Such people do not immediately have the opportunity to collapse completely as would the nose and ears if they detached themselves from the whole human organism. But occult research shows that the following would happen to those who do not want to permeate themselves with the Christ element, the life of Christ, as this can be attained only through theosophy. Instead of living on upwards with the earth to new levels of existence they would have assimilated substances of decay, of disintegration, and would first have to enter upon other paths. If in the sequence of incarnations human souls take up the Christ into their knowledge, their feelings, their whole soul, the earth will fall away from these human souls just as a corpse falls away at a person's death. The corpse of the earth will fall away and that which, permeated with Christ, is present in a state of spirit and soul will proceed to form itself into new existence and will reincarnate itself on Jupiter.

What will happen now with those people who have not taken the Christ into themselves? Through theosophy they will have abundant opportunities to be able to recognize the Christ, to be able to take the Christ into themselves. Today people still resist doing so. They will resist less and less. But let us assume that at the end of the development there were those who even then continued to resist. There would then exist a number of people who could not join the rest in advancing to the next planet. They would not have reached the actual goal of the earth. These people would constitute a veritable cross on that planet upon which human beings will then develop further. For while this group will be incapable of sharing in the experience of the actual and proper Jupiter condition and what develops there, they will nevertheless be present on Jupiter. Everything that is subsequently material is first present in a spiritual state. Thus everything that people now, during the period of the earth develop spiritually in the way of immorality, of a refusal to take the Christ into themselves, is first present in a soul-spiritual state. But this will become material. It will surround and penetrate Jupiter as a neighboring element. This will be made up of the successors of those persons who did not take the Christ into themselves during the earth condition. What the soul develops in the nature of immorality, of resistance to the Christ will then be present materially, in an actually physical state. While the physical part of those people who have taken the Christ into themselves will exist in a finer form on Jupiter, the physical part of these other people will be fundamentally coarser. Occult research paints before the eye of the soul an image of what will be the future of the people who will not have reached earthly maturity.

We now breathe air. On Jupiter there will in essence be no air. Instead, Jupiter will be surrounded by a substance that, in comparison to our air, will be something refined, something etheric. In this substance those human beings will live who have reached the goal of the earth. Those others who have remained behind, however, will have to breathe something like a repulsively warm, boiling, fiery air infused with a dank stuffiness full of fetid odors. Thus the people who did not attain the maturity appropriate to the earth will be a cross for the other Jupiter people, for they will have a pestilent effect in the environment, in the swamps and other land masses of Jupiter. The fluid-physical components of the bodies of these people will be comparable to a liquid which constantly seeks to solidify, freezes up, coagulates. Consequently these beings will not only have this horrendous air to breathe but also a bodily state in which the blood would seem continually to congeal, to cease to remain fluid. The actual physical body of these beings will consist of a kind of slimy substance more revolting than the bodily substance of our present snails and fully equipped to secrete something like a kind of crust surrounding them. This crust will be softer than the skin of our present snakes, like a kind of soft scaly armor. Thus will these beings live in a rather less than appealing manner in the elements of Jupiter.

Such a picture as that contemplated in advance by the occult researcher is ghastly to behold. But woe to those who, like the ostrich, do not want to look at the danger and wish to shut their eyes before the truth. For it is just this that lulls us into error and illusion, while a bold look at the truth imparts the greatest moral impulses. If human beings listen to what truth says to them they will feel, “You are lying.” Then there will arise in them an image of the effect of this lie upon human nature in the Jupiter condition, the image that shows that the lie creates a slimy, pestilent breath for the future. This image, arising again and again, will be a reason to direct the impulses of the soul to what is healthy, for no one who really knows the consequences of immorality can in truth be immoral, for one is called upon to teach the true consequences that result from the causes. One should in fact direct people's attention to them while they are still children. Immorality exists only because people have no knowledge. Only the darkness of untruth makes immoral actions possible.

To be sure, what can thus be said concerning the connection between immorality and ignorance should not be intellectual knowledge but wisdom. Knowledge by itself participates in immorality and if it turns into sophisticated cleverness it can even be roguery, while wisdom will affect the human soul in such a way that the soul rays forth truth, innermost morality.

My dear friends, it is true that to establish morality is difficult; to preach morality is easy. To establish morality means to establish it out of wisdom, and one must first have this wisdom. Here we see that it was after all a rather intelligent utterance on the part of Schopenhauer when he said that to establish morality is difficult.

Thus we see how unfounded it is when people who do not really know theosophy come and say that it contains no moral incentives. Theosophy shows us what we accomplish in the world when we do not act morally. It provides wisdom, and from this very wisdom morality streams forth. There is no greater arrogance than to say that one need only be a good person and all will be in order. The trouble is that one must first know how one goes about really being a good person. Our contemporary consciousness is very arrogant when it wishes to reject all wisdom. True knowledge of the good requires that we penetrate deeply into the mysteries of wisdom, and this is inconvenient, for it requires that we learn a great deal.

So when people come and tell us that reincarnation and karma lay the foundation for an egotistical morality we can thus reply, “No! True theosophy shows man that when he does something immoral it is roughly the same as if he were to say, ‘I'm taking a sheet of paper to write a letter,’ and then takes a match and sets fire to the sheet of paper. That would be grotesque nonsense. A person finds himself in the same situation with respect to a wrong action or an immoral attitude.”

To steal means the same thing for the real, deeper human essence as when one lies. If one steals, one plants into the essential human being the seed that will cause one to develop a slimy, repulsive substance and to surround oneself with pestilent odors in the future. Only if one lives in the illusion that the truth is in the present moment can one do such a deed. In stealing, man places into himself something that amounts to the same thing as a flaying of the human being. If man knows this he will no longer be able to do an immoral deed; he will not be able to steal. Just as the plant seed sends forth blossoms in the future so too will theosophy, if it is planted in the human soul, send forth human blossoms, human morality. Theosophy is the seed, the soul is the nourishing ground and morality is the blossom and fruit on the plant of the developing human being.

A course of lectures in Helsingfors was to have begun today, but as karma has brought us together here instead, it may be useful to speak of certain subjects belonging to Spiritual Science, and then perhaps some particular wish may be expressed in the form of a question arising from our study on this unexpected occasion.

We will concern ourselves with certain thoughts which throw light on the subject of man's evolution in connection with the evolution of the earth, and as often before, we shall try to enlarge upon many things already known to us. Many things connected with the religious life and men's view of the world may have prompted the question: How are these things related to the deeper conceptions of life and the world which arise from Spiritual Science?

To begin with, I want to speak of two important concepts which confront the soul of modern man, even though he may believe he has long outgrown them. These two concepts are usually designated by the words ‘Sin’ and ‘Grace’. Everyone knows that the concepts ‘Sin’ and ‘Grace’ are of outstanding significance in the Christian view of life. There are theosophists who—from the standpoint of karma, as they allege—give no thought to concepts such as those of Sin and Grace or to the broader concept of Sin and Original Sin. This lack of reflection can lead to no good, because it prevents such people from recognizing the deeper aspects of Christianity, for example, and of other problems connected with views of life and the world. The background of the concepts of Sin, Original Sin, and Grace, is infinitely more profound than is generally imagined. The reason why this deep background is not perceived at the present time is that the real profundities of nearly all the traditional religions—this applies, to a greater or less extent, to nearly all of them in the form in which they now exist—have been more or less obliterated. The tenets of these religions seldom contain anything even remotely comparable with what lies behind these concepts of Sin, Original Sin and Grace. For what lies behind them is actually the whole evolution of the human race.

We are accustomed to divide this evolution into two main phases: a phase of descent, from the most ancient times until the appearance of Christ on the earth, and the phase of ascent which begins with the appearance of Christ on the earth and continues into the farthest future. Thus we regard the Coming of Christ as the event of supreme importance, not in the evolution of humanity alone but in the whole of our planetary evolution.

Why must the Christ Event be given this place at the very centre of our cosmic evolution? It is for the simple reason that man has come down from spiritual heights into the depths of material existence, whence he must again ascend to the heights of spirit. We have therefore to do with a descent and an ascent of man. In respect of man's life of soul, we say: In times of remote antiquity men were able to lead a spiritual life approximating far more closely to the Divine than is possible today. They were nearer to the divine-spiritual and divine-spiritual life shone with greater strength into the human soul. It must not, however, be forgotten that this descent into the material-physical world was necessary, because when men were nearer to the divine-spiritual, their whole consciousness was dimmer, more dream-like; it was less lucid, but at the same time inwoven with divine-spiritual thoughts, feelings and will-impulses. Man was nearer to the divine-spiritual but more like a dreaming child than a fully wide-awake, conscious human being. He has descended inasmuch as he has acquired the faculty of judgment necessary in physical life, namely, reason. Therewith he has descended from the heights of divine-spiritual existence but has become more clearly conscious of himself, has found a firm centre within his own being. In order to work his way upwards again he must fill this inner kernel of his life of soul with what has been brought by the Christ Impulse. And the more his soul is filled with the Christ Impulse, the higher he will ascend again into the divine-spiritual world, reaching it not as a being with dreamy, hazy consciousness, but as a being looking into the world with alert, lucid consciousness.

Closer investigation of the process of human evolution discloses that it is the ‘I’, the ego, of man which alone has made it possible for him to acquire the faculty of clear, intelligent perception of the physical world of sense, but that the ego was the last member of his being to develop; the astral body had developed earlier, the etheric body still earlier, and again earlier, the first rudiments of the physical body. We will remind ourselves especially today that the first stage of the development of the astral body preceded that of the ego. Many things we have heard in the course of time will have made it clear to us that before man could pass through the stage of ego-development, he must have passed through a stage where he consisted of three members only: physical body, etheric body, astral body. But already then he was involved in the process of the evolution of the ego; he lived within this evolutionary process, waiting, as it were, for the later bestowal of his ego. Rightly understood, this enables us to conceive that certain things must have happened to man and to the whole process of his development before he actually received his ego. These happenings belong to an epoch preceding that of the development of the ego. This is of great significance, for if man had passed through a phase of evolution before receiving his ego, what happened during that phase cannot be attributed to him in the same sense as what has happened since the bestowal of the ego is to be attributed to him.

There are beings who obviously have no ego in the human sense, namely, the animals. They consist of physical body, etheric body and astral body only. Everyone who thinks rationally recognizes something about the animals. Whatever fury may be exhibited by a lion, for example, we shall not say of a lion as we might say of a human being: he can be evil, he can sin, he can commit immoral deeds. We shall never speak of immorality in connection with the actions of an animal. This in itself is significant because even if we give no thought to it, we are thereby recognizing that the difference between man and animal consists in the fact that the animal has physical body, etheric body and astral body only, whereas man has the ego in addition. Man passed through a phase of evolution when the astral body was the highest member of his being. Did something happen to him during that stage which must be regarded in a different light from that in which the actions of animals are to be regarded? Yes indeed! For it must be clearly understood that although man was once a being consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body, his nature was never the same as that of the animals as we know them today. Man was never an animal, but in other epochs he passed through a stage of evolution when he had these three bodies only—epochs when there were as yet no animals in their present form and when the conditions of existence on the earth were quite different.

What was it that actually happened to man at that time? As he had not received his ego, we cannot attribute to him what we now do in distinguishing him from the animals. What arose through him cannot be judged as it is to be judged today, when he has an ego. In the last stage of transition, when man was on the point of receiving his ego, there came the Luciferic influence. In that epoch of his evolution man was not the being he is today, but neither is he to be identified with the animals. Lucifer approached him. At that time man could not—acting as it were with full moral responsibility—choose whether he would or would not follow Lucifer; nevertheless he could be drawn into Lucifer's toils in a way other than that which applies to the animals today. This temptation by Lucifer occurred at the time when man was actually at the point of receiving his ego. This temptation was a deed to which man yielded before the period of ego-development but which has cast its shadows into the whole of this development. Who then, in the real sense, was the sinner? Not man as an ego-endowed being. Through Lucifer, man became a sinner with one part of his being—the part with which, properly speaking, he can no longer be a sinner today, for now he has his ego. At that time, therefore, he sinned with his astral body. That is the radical difference between the sin we now incur as men and the sin which at that time crept into our human nature. When man succumbed to the temptation of Lucifer, he succumbed with his astral body. This, therefore, is a deed which belongs to the period prior to that of ego-development and is entirely different in character from any deed of which man has been capable since his ego entered into him—even in its very earliest rudiments. It was therefore a deed of man which preceded the entry of the ego, but it cast its shadows into all subsequent ages of time. Man's nature was such that before receiving his ego, he was able to perform the ‘deed’ of lending himself to the Luciferic temptation but through all later time he has been under the influence resulting from this deed. In what sense under its influence? The consequence of the astral body having incurred guilt before man became an ego-endowed being has been that in each successive incarnation he sank more deeply into the physical world. The impetus for this descent was this action, this deed, which was enacted then in the astral body. Man found himself on a steep downward gradient, and with his ego he now lends himself to forces in his nature deriving from the stage of his evolution preceding that of the development of his ego.

How did these forces take effect in the evolution of humanity? They took effect in the following way. We know that until approximately the seventh year of life the physical body of the human being develops, from the seventh to the fourteenth years the etheric body, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first years the astral body, and so on. When the development of the etheric body has been completed, man reaches the stage when he is able to propagate his kind. (We will not now consider what form this takes in the animal kingdom.) When the etheric body has fully developed, the human being is able to reproduce his kind. Anyone who gives a little thought to this—he need not be clairvoyant but only reflect a little—will say: when the development of the etheric body is complete it is possible for a human being to bring forth another of his kind in the fullest sense. This means that as he grows on into the twenties he can develop no new procreative powers. It cannot be said that a man of 30 adds anything to this capacity to propagate his kind; he possesses it to the full as soon as the development of his etheric body is complete. What factor is added later? Nothing that he himself subsequently acquires is added, for he already possesses the power of propagation to the full when the etheric body is completely developed. What, then, is added? As far as the full power to propagate his kind is concerned, the one and only capacity subsequently added by the human being is that of being in a position to vitiate, to weaken it. What he can still acquire after the full development of his etheric body cannot enrich the actual power to propagate his kind, but can only impoverish it. The fact is that qualities acquired after the onset of puberty contribute nothing to the improvement of the human race but only make for its deterioration. This is due to the influence of the impulse which proceeds from the guilt incurred by the astral body. After the etheric body has fully developed, that is to say, at about the fourteenth year, the astral body develops further. Yes, but the influence of Lucifer is implanted in the astral body! What works back again from there into the functioning of the etheric body can only have the effect of weakening the forces of the etheric body which enable man to propagate his kind. In other words: what the astral body has become as the result of the temptation of Lucifer is a perpetual cause of degeneration and deterioration of the human race. And this has actually happened.

There has been continuous deterioration in man through the course of the incarnations. The farther we go back towards the Atlantean epoch, the more do we find in the physical endowments of man, higher forces than were working in later times. Where, then, was the impulse activated in the astral body through the temptation of Lucifer, implanted? It was implanted in heredity, causing increasing deterioration in that process. Sin that man incurs with his ego may work back upon the astral body and can only take effect in karma; but the sin incurred by man before he had an ego, contributes to a continual degeneration and deterioration of the human race as a whole. This sin became an inheritance. And just as it is true that no human being can inherit anything from his ancestors in the higher, spiritual sense—for nobody is clever because he has a clever father but because he learns things that make for cleverness (nobody has yet inherited the principles of mathematics or other such concepts from his ancestors)—just as we cannot inherit these capacities but acquire them through education, it is equally true that what works back into the etheric body from the astral body, contributes only to the undermining of the faculties of the human race. There we have the true meaning of the concept of ‘Original Sin’. The Original Sin which still persisted in the human astral body was handed down by gradual transmission and imparted itself to the hereditary qualities—which were themselves involved in the process of physical degeneration—as a factor in man's descent from spiritual heights into physical degeneration. So the legacy of Lucifer's influence has been a continuous impulse which in the very truest sense must be designated as Original Sin; for what entered into the human astral body through Lucifer is transmitted from generation to generation. There is no more appropriate term for the real cause of man's fall into the material-physical world than the expression: Original Sin, Inherited Sin. But our conception of the Original Sin must differ from that of other sins of ordinary life which are to be attributed entirely to ourselves: we must think of Original Sin as a destiny of man, as something that had inevitably to be imposed upon us by the World Order, because this World Order was obliged to lead us downwards—not in order to worsen us but in order to awaken in us the forces wherewith again to work our way upwards. We must therefore conceive of this Fall as something that has been woven into human destiny for the sake of the freeing of mankind. We could never have become free beings had we not been thrust downwards; we should have been tied to the strings of a World Order which we should have been obliged to follow blindly. What we have to do is to work our own way upwards again.

Now there is nothing that has not its opposite pole. Just as there can be no North Pole without a South Pole, so there can be no phenomenon such as this sin of the astral body without its opposite pole. Without being able to speak in the ordinary sense of moral wrong on our part, it is our destiny as men to be permeated by Luciferic forces. In a certain respect we can do nothing about it, indeed we must rather be thankful that it happened so. We were obliged, then, to incur a burden for which we cannot in the full sense be held responsible.

In human evolution there is something that is related to this as the North Pole is related to the South Pole. This sin which, in its consequences, is inherited, which represents sin in man of which he is not guilty in the real sense, must be counterbalanced by the possibility of re-ascent, also without merit of his own. Just as without guilt of his own, man was obliged to fall, so he must be able to re-ascend without merit of his own—that is to say, without full merit of his own. We fell without being ourselves guilty and we must therefore be able to ascend without merit of our own. That is the necessary polarity. Otherwise we should be obliged to remain below in the physical-material world. Just as we must place at the beginning of our evolution a guilt which man did not himself incur, so at the end of evolution we must place a gift that is bestowed upon him without merit on his part. These two things belong together. The best way of understanding why it is so is to think of the following.

What a man does in ordinary life proceeds from the impulses of his feelings, his emotions, his natural urges, his desires; he gets angry and does certain things out of anger; or he loves in the ordinary way and his actions are prompted by this emotion. There is one word only that can aptly express what man does in this way. You will all admit that in what a man does out of passions, out of anger, or out of ordinary love, there is an element that defies all abstract definition. Only a prosaic, academic brain would attempt to define what actually underlies some particular action of a human being. Yet there is a word which indicates the antecedents of the actions of a man in ordinary life—it is the word ‘Personality’. This word embraces all the indefinable factors. When we have really understood a man's personality, then we may be able to judge why it was that he developed this or that passion, this or that desire, or whatever it may be. Everything that is done out of these impulses bears a personal character. But we are so entangled in material life when we act out of our impulses, desires and passions! Our ego is submerged in the ocean of the physical-material world, is anything but free when it follows the dictates of anger, of passions, or also of love in the ordinary sense. The ego is unfree because it is ensnared in the toils of anger, of passion and the like.

If we observe our present age we shall find something that simply did not exist in ancient times. Only those who have no knowledge of history and who can scarcely see farther than their noses will declare that in the earlier periods of ancient Greece, for example, there were present such things as we today express with words that have been famous now for more than a century—words such as ‘liberty’, ‘equality among men’, and the like. These words signify moral and ethical ideas, as in the first declared object of the Theosophical Society: ‘To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Man without distinction of race, creed, caste or sex.’ For us, as men of the modern age, this is an ideal. It was not at all the same among the ancient Egyptians, among the ancient Persians, or indeed among any of the other peoples of antiquity. In the present age men adhere to such ideals but, in most cases, what they do in the name of liberty, brotherhood, and so forth, bears all the characteristics of abstraction, and admits of definition. For the majority of men, what they grasp of the real import of these ideals of freedom, brotherhood and so on, is capable of definition because they grasp so very little. Passions may become inflated but, for all that, numbers of human beings give us the impression that we have before us something that is withered and sapless. These ‘ideals’ cannot be called personal; they are abstract ideas, lacking the full-blooded vigour of personal life. Yet we attribute greatness to individuals in whom the idea of liberty, for example, seems to have become an out-streaming elemental force, as if it were issuing from wrath, passion, or ordinary love. In many respects today ideas which are to be regarded as the very highest moral ideals are allowed to lie fallow; yet these ideas could be the beginning of momentous development. Just as man has plunged with his ego into the physical-material world, has unfolded personality while acting under the influences of passions, impulses and desires, so he must rise, not merely with abstract concepts but with personality to the heights of ideas which are still abstract today. When this happens, spiritual ideals will be imbued with the same elemental force that can be perceived in actions springing from hatred or love in the ordinary sense.

Man will eventually ascend to higher spheres with his personality. But something else is required. When the human being dives with his ego into the ocean of physical-material life, he finds his personality, he finds his warm blood, he finds the surging impulses and desires in his astral body—in short, he dives down into his personality. But now he must ascend into the realm of moral ideals—which must no longer be a realm of abstraction. He must rise to the Spiritual, and then there must stream towards him a reality in every sense as ‘personal’ as the reality streaming to him when he dives with his ego into his warm blood and surging passions. He must now scale the heights without lapsing into abstraction. How, then, as he rises into the Spiritual, can he enter into something that is a ‘personal’ reality? How can he develop these ideals in such a way that they are invested with the character of personality? There is only one way whereby this can be achieved. In these heights of spiritual life man must be able to draw to himself a Personality as inwardly real as the personality below in the flesh is real. Who is this Personality Whom man must draw to himself if he is to ascend into the Spiritual? This Personality is none other than Christ! One who speaks in the sense contrary to St. Paul may say: ‘Not I, but my astral body’—but St. Paul says, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’—indicating that when Christ lives in us, abstract ideas are invested with a personal character. Herein lies the significance of the Christ Impulse. Without the Christ Impulse humanity would reach abstract ideals only, abstract ideas of morality and the like, such as are described as ideas working in history by many historians today but which can neither live nor die because they have no creative power. When reference is made to the part played by ideas in history, it should be realized that these are dead, abstract concepts, incapable of exercising sway over epochs of civilization. Living reality alone can exercise such sway. The task before man is to unfold a higher Personality. This is the Christ-Personality Whom he draws to himself, receives into himself.

Man cannot rise again to the Spiritual by merely talking about the Spirit but only by taking the Spirit into himself in the living, personal form presented to him in the Events of Palestine, in the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus does man rise upwards again under the influence of the Christ Impulse. In no other way can abstract ideals be invested with the force of personality than by allowing the Christ Impulse to permeate the whole of our spiritual life. If on the one side, through guilt incurred before the development of the ego, we have burdened ourselves with what is called Original Sin, if there we have something for which we cannot be held wholly responsible, neither are we ourselves responsible for the fact that it is possible to draw the Christ to ourselves. Our ego plays a part in what we do or endeavour to do in order to come near to Christ, and there we can truly speak of merit. But the fact that Christ is present, that we are living on a planet where He once dwelt and in times after this actually happened—this is not due to any merit of our own. Therefore what flows from the Living Christ in order to bring us upwards again into the spiritual world, comes from beyond the sphere of the ego and draws us upwards as irresistibly as we incurred guilt without ourselves being guilty. Through Christ's existence on earth we have the strength to rise again into the spiritual world without merit of our own, just as we incurred guilt without sin of our own. Neither fact has to do with the element of personality in which the ego lives, but both are connected with happenings that precede and follow the coming of the ego. Man has evolved from a state of existence when he had only physical body, etheric body and astral body, and he evolves further through transforming his astral body into Manas (Spirit-Self). Just as man has worsened his astral body through incurring Original Sin, so he heals it again through the Christ Impulse. An inflowing power repairs the astral body to the same extent to which it has deteriorated. That is the Atonement, that is what in the true sense is called ‘Grace’. Grace is the concept that is complementary to that of Original Sin. So the Christ Impulse has made it possible for man to become one with Christ, to say with St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, thus giving expression to everything that is designated by the concept of Grace.

Therefore to speak of the existence of Original Sin and of Grace does not denote misunderstanding of the idea of karma. For in speaking of the idea of karma we are speaking of the reincarnation of the ego in the different earth-lives. Karma is inconceivable without the presence of the ego: Original Sin and Grace, impulses which lie below the surface of karma, [are] in the astral body. We can say with truth that human karma was first brought about because man had burdened himself with Original Sin. Karma flows through the incarnations and before and after there are happenings which introduce and subsequently expurgate it. Before karma—Original Sin; and after—the victory of the Christ Impulse, the fullness of Grace.

So again from this point of view, Spiritual Science has a great and significant mission, particularly in our time. For true as it is that humanity has only lately come to recognize ideals in the form of abstractions, to unfold abstract ideas of liberty, brotherhood and the like, it is also true that we are facing a future when these ideas must no longer hovel before us as abstractions but approach us as living forces. True as it is that men have passed through the transitional stage of forming abstract ideals, it is equally true that they must advance to the stage where these ideals come to personal fulfillment within them; they must advance to the portal of the new Temple. That is the prospect before us. Men will be taught that what works down from spiritual heights is not mere abstraction but living reality. When the new faculty of vision that is to arise in the next phase of evolution begins to function, when men give up thinking, ‘How well I am getting on!’ but with etheric vision behold the living power of Christ Who will reveal Himself in an etheric body—as we know, this will happen to certain individuals before the middle of the century—when they begin to behold the Living Christ, they will know that what they have glimpsed for a time in the form of abstract ideas are in very truth living beings within our evolution. For the Living Christ Who first appeared in physical form—which at that time was the only form in which He could convey to men that even those who were not His contemporaries could believe in Him—the Living Christ will reveal Himself in a new form. The fact that He lives will need no proof, for then there will be actual witnesses—men who themselves experience, even without special development but with a kind of matured vision, that the moral powers of our World Order are living realities, not merely abstract ideals.

Our thoughts cannot carry us into the true spiritual worlds because they have no life. Not until we cease to regard these thoughts as our own creations but as testimonies of the Living Christ Who will appear to men, shall we rightly understand these thoughts. Then, as truly as man became a personality through descending with his ego into lower spheres, as truly will he be a personality when he ascends to the heights of spirit. This is beyond the comprehension of materialistic thinking. All that materialism can understand, and readily understand, is that there are abstract ideals, ideals of the Good, the Beautiful, and so forth. That there are living Powers who draw us upwards through their Grace—this can be realized only through spiritual development. That is what the renewed Christ Impulse means. When we no longer regard our ideals simply as ideals but through them find the way to Christ, then we help Christianity forward in the sense of Spiritual Science; then Christianity will enter a new stage and cease to be merely a preparation. Christianity will itself make evident that it contains the greatest of all impulses for all time to come. And then those who believe that to speak of developing Christianity is only to endanger it will see how greatly they are in error. These are the people of ‘little faith’, who are alarmed when it is said that in Christianity there are glories still greater than have yet been revealed. Those whose conception of Christianity bears the hallmark of greatness are men who know that the words that Christ is with us to the end of time are true—meaning that He is the constant Revealer of the New and at the same time its origin and source.

By realizing that Christianity will bring forth from its depths an increasing flow of new and more living creations, we enhance its greatness. Those who are always saying: ‘That is not in the Bible, that is not true Christianity and those who maintain that it is, are heretics’, must be reminded that Christ also said: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now’. He did not say this in order to indicate that He wished to withhold anything from men, but that from epoch to epoch He would bring them new revelations. And this He will do through those who are willing to understand Him. Those who deny that there can be new revelations do not understand the Bible, neither do they understand Christianity. For they have no ears for what is implied in the admonition given by Christ: ‘I have still much to say to you—but prepare yourselves in order that you may be able to bear it and understand it.’

The true Christians of the future will be those who are willing to hear what the Christians who were contemporaries of Christ were not yet able to bear. Those who allow Christ's Grace to flow into their hearts in ever increasing abundance—they will be the true Christians. The ‘hard of heart’ will resist this Grace, saying: Go back to the Bible, to the literal text of the Bible, for that alone is true. This is a disavowal of the words which in Christianity itself kindle light, words which we will take into our hearts: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.’ Good it will be for men when they can bear more and more in this sense: for thereby they prepare themselves for the ascent into the spiritual heights. And to these spiritual heights Christianity leads the way.