The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In connection with the Congress held by the “Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society” in Budapest in the year 1909, Dr. Steiner gave a Lecture-Course entitled: “Theosophy and Occultism of the Rosicrucians.” The Mystery of Golgotha is there indicated as the great turning-point between the old, now already fading Mystery-wisdom and the wisdom in its new form of revelation wherein account is taken of the faculty of thought possessed by a maturer humanity and of the advance of culture and civilisation. Theosophia, the Divine Wisdom, could not, as in earlier times, flow as inner illumination into the hardened constitution of man. Intellect, the more recent faculty of the soul, was directed to the world of sense and its phenomena. Theosophy was rejected by the scholars with a shrug of the shoulders and the very word brought a supercilious smile from the monists. Dr. Steiner, however, was trying to restore to this word its whole weight and spiritual significance and to show how the roots of all later knowledge lie in Theosophy, how it unites East and West, how in it all the creeds are integral parts of one great harmony.

This had also been the fundamental conception of the Founder of the Theosophical Society but she understood nothing of the essence of Christianity and disputed its unique significance. Her tendency to place too much reliance upon spiritualistic communications drew her into the net of an oriental stream only too ready to use this instrument for its own ends—to begin with under the cloak of Neo-Buddhism then represented in the person of Charles Leadbeater, a former priest of the Anglican Church. Annie Besant, a pupil of Charles Bradlaugh, a free-thinker and the most brilliant orator of the day in the field of political and social reform, had also been so deeply influenced by spiritualistic communications that on the advice of William Stead she went to Madame Blavatsky towards the end of the latter's life and became her ardent follower. Stead's spiritualistic circle was influential and the Theosophical Society, with its much purer spiritual foundations, had here a dangerous rival.

Dr. Steiner brought light to bear upon all these developments, upon their aims and aberrations, and raised Theosophy to heights far transcending the narrow sphere of the Theosophical Society. Alarmed by this, the Indian inspirers behind the Adyar Society, with their nationalistic aims, took their own measures.—The imminence of a return of Christ was announced and the assertion made that he would incarnate in an Indian boy. A newly founded Order, the “Star in the East,” using the widespread organisation of the Theosophical Society, was expected to achieve the aim that had met with failure in Palestine.

Not very long after the Budapest Congress, these developments began to be felt in the sphere of Dr. Steiner's lecturing activities. Disquieted by the beginnings of the propaganda for the Star in the East, Groups begged Dr. Steiner to speak about these matters. This caused alarm to the organisers of the Genoa Congress, who thought that the scientific as well as the esoteric discussions with Dr. Steiner would be too dangerous a ground, and for extremely threadbare reasons the Congress was cancelled at the last moment. Many of those taking part were already on their way—we too. A number of Groups in Switzerland took advantage of this opportunity to ask Dr. Steiner for lectures. They wanted to understand the meaning and significance of the Michael Impulse which denotes the turning-point in the historic evolution of the Mystery-wisdom. The Intelligence ruled over in the spiritual world by the hierarchy of Michael had now come down to humanity. It was for men to receive this Intelligence consciously into their impulses of will and thenceforward to play their part in shaping a future wherein the human “I” will achieve union with the Divine “I.” For this goal of the future men must be prepared, a transformation wrought in their souls; they must “change their hearts and minds.” To bring this about was the task of Rudolf Steiner. The moment had arrived for treading the path which liberates the Spirit from the grip of the material powers. The first healthy step to be taken along this path by the pupil of spiritual knowledge, is study.

As the theme chosen for Genoa had been “From Buddha to Christ,” it was natural that the lectures now given in Switzerland should shed the light of Spiritual Science not only upon the earlier connections between the Buddha and Christ Jesus but also upon the lasting connections indicated by the Essene wisdom contained in the Gospels. This is the theme which gives these studies their special character—which could only be brought out by outlining the historical development of the Mystery-wisdom. The ancient revelations of the Mysteries had shed light into many forms of culture, but were now spent; symptoms of decay and increasing sterility of thought were everywhere in evidence. Then, from heights of Spirit, the Michael Impulse came down to the Earth—in order gradually to stir and flame through the hearts of men. The intellect was pervaded by spiritual fire, the lower human “I” lifted nearer to the ideal of times to come: union with the Divine “I.” To awaken understanding of these goals, to establish them firmly on the ground of their spiritual origins and to place them in living pictures before the souls of men—such was the task of Rudolf Steiner.

This brought the inevitable counterblow from the opposing powers; into this they knew they must drive their wedge. The development of the human being in freedom, this gift bestowed by Michael, must be checked and the hearts and minds of men incited to resistance. In his Four Mystery Plays, Rudolf Steiner has given us living pictures of this: the human being between Lucifer and Ahriman—now succumbing to their promptings, now overcoming them, but nevertheless bearing them in the soul like a poison that may at any time begin to work. We too shall continue to bear this picture and its substance in our souls.

The full content of the lectures, however, has not been preserved, for we possess no good transcriptions. The fact that no really reliable and expert stenographist was available at the time seems like a counterblow from the opposing powers. Besides the abbreviated reports of the Cassel lectures, we have in some cases only fragments, in others, scattered notes strung together. But the essential threads have been preserved and an attempt at compilation has been made. The attempt does not always succeed from the point of view of convincing style, but the impetus for effort in thought and study will be all the stronger.

The activities of the Star in the East led, finally, to the exclusion of the German section from the Theosophical Society; this, however, had been preceded by the forming of a Union which included people in other countries who opposed this piece of Adyar sectarianism and led to the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. For a time, care was necessary to prevent confusion as between the two Societies and so for the Movement associated with him, Rudolf Steiner chose the name Anthroposophy—the Divine Wisdom finding its fulfilment in man. Theosophy and Anthroposophy are one, provided the soul has cast away its dress. And Rudolf Steiner showed us how this can be done.

The new Indian Messiah soon cast off the shackles of the renown that had been forced upon him and retired to private life in California. Annie Besant was obliged to renounce her cherished dream and died at a very great age. It is rumoured that the question of the dissolution of the Adyar Society was considered but that this proved impossible owing to the extensive material possessions. Jinarajadasa, my good friend from the days of the founding of the Italian Section, succeeded Annie Besant as President. The branch of the Theosophical Society which had seceded at the time of the Judge conflict and to which Madame Blavatsky's niece belonged, had found in Mrs. Catharine Tingley a leader of energy and initiative, but she too had died.

The old conditions have now faded away. Those grotesque edifices of phantasy can no longer be associated with the Anthroposophical, formerly Theosophical, Movement, for they have crumbled to pieces. We can allow the word Theosophy again to come to its own, as did Rudolf Steiner when he was trying to restore to this word its primary and true significance.

Besides laying emphasis on the essential character of Spiritual Science in the post-Christian era, the aim of the lectures given in 1911 and 1912 was to explain karma as the flow of destiny and to point to its intimate workings. The lines of development running through the lectures have survived only as pictures of memory; the transcriptions often failed to catch the threads of the logical sequence and the notes or headings jotted down and collected here and there are really no more than indications. But the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved, and justifies, maybe, the attempt at compilation. Through meditative study these impulses will be able to work in us and deepen our souls.

We shall begin by discussing something of a general character. And since we are a small intimate circle, we can then elaborate on any aspect that especially interests you. I would like to make some general statements about the being of man in connection with World Being, with the Macrocosm. And I will not approach it so much in the style of my book Theosophy—you can all get sufficient knowledge from that—but I invite you to consider especially man's inner nature.

If now and then we contemplate ourselves as human beings, we are immediately struck by the fact that we experience the world about us through our senses, and then think about the impressions we have received. We constantly observe these two attributes of man's being. If, for instance, we have put the light out at night and review the day's impressions before going to sleep, we are conscious that all day long the world has worked upon us. Now only the memory pictures of the day's impressions surge up and down in our souls. We know that we are thinking about them, our soul is now within the after-effects of what has taken place in us through the outer impressions. Apart from trivial matters, we call these memories of the day our own individual impressions. It is only because we are intelligent, individual human beings, beings with an intellect, that we are capable of receiving impressions of the world in this way.

Now, in our spiritual life this individual aspect is closely connected with external impressions. During the day, whilst we observe the world, our sense impressions and our thoughts intermingle. And at bedtime, when we no longer have any fresh sense impressions, but let those we have had pass through our soul, then we know very well that these are our pictures of what is outside. Our impressions of the outer world merge with what we are as individuals. They become one. Now, as we all know, one can make this inner, individual element within us more and more alive, more and more exact, by the means already known to us and described for instance in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. What you can experience first of all in your inner life, is that you feel you are not absolutely dependent in your thoughts on the external world. If, for instance, someone can think about what happened on Saturn, Sun and Moon, then he has higher thoughts of this kind. For of course nobody can have external impressions of what happened on old Saturn, old Sun and old Moon. We do not even need to go so far. If we ask ourselves in a quiet moment: ‘How many of my concepts have changed since my youth?’ this in itself is taking an independent individual stand with regard to the world. When we form views about life, we feel ourselves becoming more independent in our intellect. Becoming independent in the individual element of the intellect is of great importance for the human being. For what does this mean? What does it mean for the human being to grasp general truths about life—not just in theory—but through experience, even of things that are independent of external impressions? It means that he is becoming more independent in his etheric body. That is the first step of a long process. At the beginning he does not even notice that to some extent he is lifting out his etheric body; ultimately he can make it completely independent of the physical body.

Whilst the beginning is just a tiny step towards becoming independent, the end is a total drawing out of the etheric body and a perceiving with it. We then have perceptions in the environment with this independent etheric body. We can even perceive in this way when we are not yet very advanced in inner mystical experience. We can grasp this and to a certain extent understand it if we remember what our perception is like in the physical body. With our physical body we perceive by means of our senses, which are independent. Our eyes are independent and so are our ears. We can perceive the world of colour and the world of sound independently. We can no longer do this when we perceive with our intelligence. In the case of intelligence everything is a unity, nothing is divided into separate spheres. We cannot perceive with etheric eyes and etheric ears as though they were separate sense realms, we perceive the etheric world in general. And when we begin to say something about it we can describe how etheric experience works as a comprehensive whole. I will not discuss how much further this experience can lead, but only point out that when the human being perceives how general truths are formed he can perceive something of the etheric elements.

Whoever perceives the etheric world and can gradually realise that a higher world of this kind exists, can have an inner conviction that an etheric body is the basis of the physical body. As soon as we speak of such a being as an etheric body we must take our lead from significant disclosures and from direct experience. As soon as we know that the physical body is interpenetrated by an etheric body we will readily understand the occultist describing in his way that paralysis is an abnormal occurrence of what otherwise happens through normal training. It can happen that a man's etheric body withdraws from his physical body. Then the physical body becomes independent. Paralysis could possibly result, for the physical body has been deprived of its enlivening etheric body. But we do not need to go as far as the appearance of paralysis, for we can understand its appearance in everyday life even better. For example, what is a lazy person? He is someone who has a weak etheric body from birth or who has let it grow weak through neglect. We try to correct it by relieving the physical body of its leaden heaviness and by some means making it lighter. A thorough cure, however, can only arise by way of the astral body, for it can stimulate the etheric body to fresh life. But you have to realise something else. The etheric body is actually the bearer of our whole intellect. When we go to sleep at night all our thought pictures and memories actually remain in the etheric body. The human being leaves his thoughts behind in the etheric body and does not return to them until morning. By laying aside the etheric body we lay aside the whole web of our experiences.

This etheric body, however, is constructed so that when we investigate it in a Spiritual Scientific way we can quite clearly perceive that the human being is subjected to a far greater number of changes in the course of time than we would imagine. We all know, of course, that man has passed through a series of incarnations. It is not for nothing that we are incarnated again and again. Man's vision is limited. It is a general belief that man's Organisation has always been like it is today. In fact, the human Organisation changes from one century to another, only we cannot perceive this externally. In the frontal lobe of the brain there is an organ with delicate convolutions, that has only been developed since the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. It is an organic form for the purely intellectual life of the present centuries. We can well imagine that it is impossible for a detail of this kind to alter in the brain without in fact the whole human Organisation altering, even if only slightly. So that in very truth the human Organisation shows signs of changes as the centuries pass by. But it is only through reading the Akashic Record that these changes can be confirmed. And that is where the changes in the etheric body can be best followed up. We see that the people of ancient Greece or ancient Egypt had etheric bodies that were quite different. All the movements in them were different.

Now, in order to arrive at a thought that can be fertile for us, I would like to make a short digression and draw your attention to the fact that even in ordinary life you can assume the existence of more than one world. The human being goes to sleep without knowing that he is in another world. But the fact that he is asleep and does not know anything about it does not prove that this other world does not exist. Other worlds do impinge in a certain way. The human being perceives with his senses when he is in the physical world but not when he withdraws into himself: then he has an intellectual world which borders on the physical. And he finds within himself, in addition to the already developed intellectual element, two other elements as well that are quite different again. Can the human being develop these other elements?

A simple reflection can show that there is a more characteristic world in the inner life than that of the mere having of thoughts. It is there whenever we say to ourselves: as human beings we feel ourselves to be moral. That is the world where we connect a feeling of sympathy or antipathy with certain definite experiences. This goes beyond intellectual experience. Someone shows goodwill to another and we are pleased, or he shows ill will and we are displeased. That is something quite different from what is experienced purely intellectually. Mere reflection does not produce in us the feeling of whether a deed is moral or not. A person can be highly intelligent in an intellectual way, without feeling the repulsive nature of a purely egotistical action. That is another realm of experience, which we also become aware of when we admire what is beautiful and elevating in works of art, or are repulsed by what is ugly. What elevates us in works of art cannot be grasped by the intellect but only by our life of soul. So we can say: something comes into our life in this way which is beyond the intellect. If an occultist observes a soul at the moment when it is experiencing aversion from an immoral deed, or pleasure in a moral one, he perceives a higher level of soul life. The mere having of thoughts is on a lower level of soul life than pleasure in or aversion from moral or immoral deeds. If the human being develops a more intensified feeling in this way for what is moral or immoral in his strengthened etheric body, this can be, seen to bring not only a constant increase of strength in his etheric body but an increase of strength in his astral body too, an especial intensification of the astral forces. So that we can say: a person who has particularly sensitive feelings about moral and immoral deeds will acquire especially strong forces in his astral body, whilst a person who only improves his etheric body intellectually—with exercises, say, that strengthen the memory—can certainly develop his clairvoyance very far, but he will not get beyond the etheric-astral world, because the intellectual element alone is active within him. If we want to get beyond the astral world we must do the kind of exercises in which we develop sympathy for moral deeds and antipathy for immoral deeds. Then we do indeed ascend to a world that is behind our world in a different sense than purely astrally. We then ascend to the heavenly world. So that we can say: in the cosmic world of the invisible, the heavenly world of the macrocosm corresponds to what relates in us to impressions of morality and immorality, and the astral world of the macrocosm corresponds to what relates in us to the intellectual sense perception of the physical world. All that develops within the intellectual element corresponds to the astral world, whilst what can be developed in relation to moral or immoral deeds corresponds to the heavenly world, the world of Devachan.

Then there is yet another element in the human soul. There is a difference between feeling happy about moral deeds and feeling responsible enough to carry out what thus appeals to you, and to withstand doing what is not moral. A feeling of responsibility for his actions is the highest level a man can reach in the world today.

So the human being's soul stages can be set out like this:

1. The sense man.
2. The intellectual man, who relates to the first invisible world.
3. The aesthetic man with moral feelings, who is attracted or repelled by moral and immoral deeds. This corresponds externally to the lower Devachanic world.
4. The morally active man.

The actual carrying out of what he feels within himself to be the highest moral ideals corresponds externally to the higher Devachanic world, the world of reason, ruled by those beings who represent absolute reason in the world. When the human being can grasp that his moral impulses give a shadow picture of the highest world from which he comes, he has understood a great deal about the macrocosm.

So we have the physical world and the world of the intellect, the moral world or the heavenly world of lower Devachan, and the world of reason or higher Devachan. Cosmic worlds cast into us shadow pictures of the sense world: i.e. the intellectual world; intellectual clairvoyance; the aesthetic world; moral feeling; the world of reason; moral impulses for deeds. Through a kind of self-knowledge man can perceive these different stages within himself.

Now this whole configuration of the human being has altered in the course of time. In ancient Greek or Egyptian times the human being was not at all as he is today. In the Greek age man was so constituted that higher beings ruled over the soul element within him, and so he felt a kind of natural obligation towards those beings. We now live in the age when man is ruled by his intellect, and so he feels something like an aesthetic-moral obligation. In those olden times however, it would have been impossible for anyone to have thought it possible to act in a way contrary to a moral impulse that presented itself. In Greece they still felt pleasure and displeasure so strongly that they had to act accordingly.

Then came the modern age where men do not feel any obligation, even where the aesthetic element is concerned, as is expressed in the saying: ‘You cannot argue about tastes’—though people who have a developed taste can probably agree among themselves.

What was felt in earlier times to be a necessity in the moral and aesthetic sphere is nowadays felt to be so in the intellectual sphere: to have a certain line of conduct so that you cannot think as you like but you have to conform to the laws of logic. This brings us, however, to the lowest level of human experience. At the moment we are at the transitional level, as we can well see. For if we look at the past millennia we see the physical body of man drying up more and more, until he has become quite different. One and a half millennia ago the physical body was considerably softer and more pliable. It has become harder and harder. On the other hand something quite different has occurred in the etheric body too, something that the human being could have less experience of because this etheric body has passed through an upward development. It is significant that we stand at the important moment when the human being must grow aware that his etheric body should become different. That is the event that will take place just in this twentieth century. Whilst on the one hand an intensification of the intellectual element is making itself felt, on the other hand the etheric body will become so much more independent that human beings are bound to become aware of it. For a period of time after the Christ Event people did not think as intellectually as they do today. Strengthening the intellectual element causes the etheric body to become more and more independent, so that it can also be used as an independent instrument. And during this process it can be seen to have gone through a hidden development which makes possible the perception of the Christ in the etheric body. Just as the Christ could formerly be seen physically, He can now be seen etherically, so that in this twentieth century a beholding of the Christ will occur like a natural event, in the way Paul saw Him. A number of people will be able to see the Christ in the etheric, which means that we shall know Him even if all the Bibles are destroyed. We shall not need any records then, for we shall see Him. And that is an event equal in importance to what occurred on Golgotha. In the centuries to come a greater and greater number of people will reach the stage where they can see the Christ. The next three millennia on earth will be devoted to the kind of development whereby the etheric body becomes more and more sensitive, so that certain people will experience this and other events. I will just mention one more event: there will be more and more people who want to do something and then have an urge to hold back. Then a vision will follow, and these people will perceive increasingly clearly: that which will happen in the future is the karmic result of what I have done. A few people who are ahead of the rest already feel such things. It happens especially with children.

There is a tremendous difference between what trained clairvoyants experience and what is described here as something that will come about in the natural course of events. Since time immemorial the trained clairvoyant experienced the Christ by means of certain exercises. On the physical plane, if I meet a man, he is there is front of me; with Clairvoyant vision I can perceive him in quite different places and we do not actually meet. It has always been possible to see the Christ clairvoyantly. But to meet Him, now that He stands in a different relationship to humanity, that is, that He helps us from out of the etheric world, is something which is independent of our clairvoyant development. From the twentieth century onwards, in the next three thousand years, certain people will be able to meet Him, meet Him objectively as an etheric form. That is very different from experiencing a vision of Him through inner development.

This places the exalted Being that we call the Christ altogether in a different series of evolution from that of the Buddha. The Bodhisattva who became Buddha, was born into the royal house of Suddhodana and became Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, so that he did not need to undergo further incarnations. When such a being, a Bodhisattva, becomes a Buddha or Master, this signifies a higher form of inner development that any human being can pass through. The esoteric training of a human being is a start in the direction that can lead to Buddha-hood. That has nothing to do with what happens round about us human beings. Such people appear at certain times to help the world forward. But those events are different from the Christ Event. Christ did not come from another human individuality, He came from the macrocosm, whilst all the Bodhisattvas have always been connected with the earth.

So we have to be clear that in so far as we speak about Bodhisattvas or Buddhas we do not come near to the Christ. For Christ is a macrocosmic being who became connected with the earth for the first time through the baptism by John. That was the physical manifestation. Now the etheric manifestation is coming, then will come the astral one and a higher one still after that. Human beings will first have to be far advanced before they experience this higher stage. What human beings can experience belongs to the general laws of the earth. The Being whom we call by the name of Christ or by other names will also bring about what we can describe as the saving of all the souls on earth for the Jupiter existence, whilst everything else will fall away with the earth. Anthroposophy is not something arbitrary, but something of importance that had to come into the world. The world must learn to understand the Christ Being who lived for three years on the earth. That was at the beginning of our present era.

In my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity you will find details about the two Jesus boys. The Christ Event was prepared for by a personality connected with the sect of the Essenes, Jeshu ben Pandira, who was born a hundred years before the two Jesus boys were born in Palestine. So you have to distinguish between them and Jeshu ben Pandira, of whom Haeckel,⁸ among others, has spoken in a most derogatory way. The Matthew Gospel,⁹ in the main, originated from this most exalted person, Jeshu ben Pandira, as a preparation for what was to come.

In what way should we understand the relationship of Jeshu ben Pandira to Jesus of Nazareth?

To begin with the individualities have nothing to do with one another, except that one prepared the way for the other; as individualities they are in no way related. The facts are that in one of the Jesus boys, the one described in the Luke Gospel, we have a somewhat indefinable individuality, so far difficult to understand in that He could speak immediately after birth in such a way that His mother could understand Him. He was not intellectual, this individuality of the Luke Gospel, but tremendously vital and elemental in the realm of moral feelings. The astral body of this being was influenced by the individuality of the Buddha.

When he had reached the Buddha stage, Buddha did not need to incarnate on earth any further. As long as he was a Bodhisattva he continued to incarnate. After he had become Buddha he was active from the higher worlds, and his activity flowed through—the astral body of the Jesus of the Luke Gospel. The forces emanating from Buddha are in the astral body of this Jesus boy. Thus the Buddha stream is contained within the Jesus of Nazareth stream.

On the other hand, what is told in Eastern writings and is also known to be correct by Western occultists, is that in the moment when the Bodhisattva becomes Buddha a new Bodhisattva appears. In the moment when Gautama Buddha became Buddha this Bodhisattva individuality was taken from the earth, and a new Bodhisattva became active. He is the Bodhisattva who is to become a Buddha in due time. In fact the time is exactly determined when the successor of Gautama Buddha, Maitreya, will become a Buddha: five thousand years after the enlightenment of Buddha beneath the bodhi tree. Roughly three thousand years after our time the world will experience the Maitreya Buddha incarnation, which will be the last incarnation of Jeshu ben Pandira. This Bodhisattva, who will come as Maitreya Buddha, will also come in a physical body in our century in his reincarnation in the flesh—but not as Buddha—and he will make it his task to give humanity all the true concepts about the Christ Event.

Genuine occultists recognise the incarnations of the Bodhisattva, the Maitreya Buddha-to-be. In the same way as other human beings, this individuality will also go through a development of the etheric body. When humanity becomes more like him who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, then this individuality will go through a special development that in a certain respect in its highest stages will be something like the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth: he will undergo an exchange of individuality. In both cases another individuality comes in. They grow up as children in the world, and after a certain number of years their individuality is exchanged. It is not a continuous development, but a development that undergoes a break, as was the case with Jesus. In His case there was an exchange of individuality of this kind in the twelfth year and then again at the baptism by John. This kind of exchange occurs, too, with the Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha. These individualities are suddenly as it were fructified by another. The Maitreya Buddha, in particular, will live with a certain individuality until his thirtieth year, and then an exchange will occur in him, as we find with Jesus of Nazareth during the baptism in Jordan. We will always recognise the Maitreya Buddha, however, in that nothing will be known of him prior to the exchange of individuality, even though he is present. And then he will suddenly reveal himself.

The leading of an unknown life is the characteristic of all Bodhisattvas that are to become Buddhas. The human individuality in the future will have to be more and more self-reliant. It will be a characteristic of his that he will pass unknown in the world for many years, and it will only be possible to recognise him then through the fact that he works from out of his own inner strength as a self-reliant individual. For thousands of years past, and now by occultists of the present day, it is recognised as an essential that the nature of his being remain unknown throughout his youth until the time of the birth of the intellectual soul, indeed even until the birth of the consciousness soul, and that he will come into his own with the help of nobody but himself.

That is why it is so important to be to a certain degree uncompromising. Any true occultist would find it strange for a Buddha to appear in the twentieth century, as every occultist knows that he can only come five thousand years after Gautama Buddha. However a Bodhisattva can and will be incarnated.

It is part of an occultist's basic knowledge that the Maitreya Buddha will be unknown in his youth. That is why I have been emphasising for years that we should bear this principle of occultism in mind: before a certain age nobody should be given the duty from certain central places to speak about occult matters. This has been stressed for years. When younger people speak, they may do this for good reasons, but they do not do it as an occult duty.

The Maitreya Buddha will make himself known through his own power. He will appear in such a way that he can receive no help except from the power of his own soul being.

To approach true theosophy, understanding for the whole of earth development is a necessity. Those who do not develop this understanding will destroy the life in the modern theosophical movement.¹⁰

• 8. Jeshu ben Pandira, whom Haeckel, among others, has spoken of in a most derogatory way: Ernst Haeckel, 1834 – 1919, German natural scientist. His remarks about Jeshu ben Pandira are in his work ‘Die Weltratsel’ (‘World Secrets’); Bonn, 1899.
• 9. The Matthew Gospel, in the main, originated from ... Jeshu ben Pandira: Matthai was a pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira. See Rudolf Steiner's ‘The Gospel of St. Matthew’, twelve lectures; Berne, September, 1910; Rudolf Steiner Press 1965.
• 10. the modern theosophical movement: see Marie Steiner's preface, p. 1.

I am very happy to be speaking to you today—among these peaceful mountains and within view of the wonderful lake about matters appealing to our deepest interests, that is, revelations, realities of the life of the spirit. And the most obvious fact that strikes those of us who have gathered here today to visit our Alpine friends, is this: that a number of our friends have withdrawn up here, not necessarily for the sake of solitude, but at least for the peace and charm of the mountains. And if we then ask ourselves what our hearts are looking for, we might find that it is something very similar to man's present-day longing for the spirit. And perhaps it is no illusion to assume that in the world outside the same impulse is at work as the one that spurred you on to come up here into the solitude of the mountains.

Man knows, or senses dimly, that there is spirituality in all that surrounds us in nature, in forest and crag, wind and storm; the kind of spirituality which, according to a well-known figure in the West, is more ‘Consistent than man's activities’, and his feeling and thinking. We cannot help sensing that in everything that surrounds us as forest and crag, mountain and lake, the spirit is coming to expression. And in Spiritual Science we become more and more aware that there is spirit in everything that expresses itself in nature round about us and in the firm earth beneath us. Looking back into the ancient past we can tell ourselves that we descend from a spiritual past and are the children of ancient times. Just as we create our works of art, exploring what we can make of the material to hand, in just such a way did our ancestors create their implements and tools. And the phenomena of nature are the product of the work of the ancient gods in times long past. And if we permeate ourselves with such a feeling, the whole of nature will gradually become for us what it has always been for Spiritual Science. Even though it will seem a maya, it will become the kind of maya that is beautiful and great, for the very reason that it is the creation of the divine-spiritual. So when we go out into nature we are among memorials reminding us of the spiritual activity that took place in ancient pre-earthly times. Then we are filled with that tremendous enthusiasm that deepens our feeling for nature and can fill us with warmth.

When we can enhance our feeling for nature through Spiritual Science we should also feel that it is in a certain respect a privilege to have the good fortune to be within the spirit of nature. And it is a privilege. For we can and ought to bear in mind how many people there are who are unable to get close to the creations of nature in their present incarnation. How many people there are today, especially in cities, who no longer have the chance of feeling the uplifting quality of the divine in nature! And when we look at nature with a power of observation that has been enhanced by spiritual science, then we know the intimate connection that exists between what we feel for nature and what we call morality—moral life being the highest thing we can strive for in this life.

It is a paradox perhaps, but it is true to say that those people who live in towns and have to forget what oats, wheat and barley look like, unfortunately get separated in their hearts, too, from the deepest moral sources of their existence.

If we bear this in mind, then we will certainly regard it as a privilege to be able to be close to the sources of nature's spirit, for a feeling like this of itself leads to another which, supported by Spiritual Science, must become known in the world: that is, the truth of reincarnation. To begin with we take it on trust, this truth concerning man's repeated earth lives. But how can a soul stand firm at the present time, when it sees what very different paths of life people tread, and experiences all the glaring but inevitable inequalities in the world. Then the human being who is privileged to be near the well-springs of nature, not only feels that he has every reason to be happy in knowing the truths of Spiritual Science, but he also feels a great responsibility, a great obligation towards this knowledge of the spiritual life. For what is the greatest thing that these souls will be able to bring to the gate of death, these souls who today have the privilege of enjoying peace and health in nature? What will be their finest contribution?

If we look for a moment at what is taught us by the spiritual powers that are closer to us now than they were in the nineteenth century, what can we learn? We can learn, without any doubt, that we can take something different with us into our following incarnations, in our deepest soul, in our deepest feeling, if we imbue ourselves with Spiritual Science, than we could if we kept aloof from it. Nowadays we are certainly not expected to take in as an abstract theory what Spiritual Science can give us. What your souls receive, what enters into you like a theory, is there so that it can come alive in you. And this happens with some people in this incarnation and with others in the next. It will become real, immediate life, the life we cannot conceive of unless we devote ourselves to that prophetic vision which prompts us to ask: where does this development lead? With all its fruits it leads straight into outer life. And what we can only express in the form of words today, will become vision, vision in the young, vision in the old, vision that brings blessing.

All those people who have not yet been able to approach the warmth and light of Spiritual Science and to acquire the fruits of Spiritual Science for themselves, will feel the blessing of such vision! Everything that can exist in the way of outer personality will in the future have that fire in it for which our present-day theories are the fuel. It is just a handful of people who have the will to be the real bearers of what, in the future, will have to reach all those who are in need of it, that is the real, genuine fruits of human love and human compassion. We do not study Spiritual Science for the sake of our own satisfaction but so that we can acquire gentle hands that have the power to bless, and gentle eyes from which power can shine forth, so that we can give out all that springs forth from the eyes, all that we call spiritual vision. Those people in particular who have this attitude, and who have the good fortune to live so close to nature should pay heed right now to the way everything is changing at the present time! It is changing, in fact it is changing throughout the cosmos.

It is wrong to say nature makes no leaps. Nature is perpetually making leaps, from leaf to blossom, from blossom to fruit. When the chick develops out of the egg, that is a leap. To say that nature makes no leaps could not be further from the truth. There are leaps everywhere, sudden transitions. And we are living in such a time of transition. During our lifetime there has been a year of great importance:¹¹ the year 1899. The turn of the twentieth century is significant for the whole of cultural development because it is the time when the stream that came from the East and mingled with Western culture ceased in order to make way for what can be drawn from the life of nature to enliven the deepest levels of our life of soul.

Those men whose spirit is awakened will be able to see beings of a new order in the processes of nature. Whilst the human being who has not yet become clairvoyant will increasingly be able to experience that despite all his melancholy feelings concerning the continual death process, there is something of a rejuvenating quality in nature, the human being whose clairvoyant faculties have awakened will see new elemental beings issuing out of dying nature. Whilst in outer physical nature relatively little will be seen of the great change at the turn of the twentieth century, the spiritually awakened soul will feel: times are changing, and we human beings have the task of preparing spirit knowledge. It will become more and more important to observe such things and carry them in our consciousness. For men are free either to take up such things for the salvation of humanity or to let them pass them by, which will lead to disaster.

That is to say, at the turn of the century a relatively new kingdom of nature-beings will come into being, arising from nature like a spiritual spring, and human beings will be able to see and experience this. And further: though it would show great apathy of soul if a person were unable to perceive the sprouting forth of springtime, there is more to come. Those people who will grow able to experience as a fact of nature what has just been described, will preserve these impressions in quite a different way than through ordinary memory. They will carry beyond the threshold the new elemental spirits that stream towards them, as the seeds carry their life through the winter into spring. What was experienced in spring and what was experienced in autumn, this bursting forth of nature in the spring and this melancholy in autumn, had no connection one with the other in the past. What the cosmos gives out from its memory enables us to carry over something of what we have experienced in the autumn into the spring. If we let the elemental forces of autumn work in us, then we can feel in a new way what will be given us in the future. Everything will acquire something new in the future, and it is our duty to prepare ourselves through our knowledge of the spiritual to understand it. For Spiritual Science has not come into the world through the personal whims of men, but because new things are happening in the heavens, that can only be perceived when men take up the results of spiritual research. This is why the theosophical movement has come into being.

In the life of morality it is the same as it is in nature: the life of the soul will experience a transformation. Certain things will happen of which men have as yet no idea. I would just like to mention one example. There will be more and more people, especially children, who will have the experience that when they intend doing something or other in the future, a voice will speak in their souls urging them to refrain from action and listen to what is to be told them from the spiritual world. Something will come to meet them, appearing before their eyes like a vision. First of all they will be strangely touched by these visions. When they have made a greater contact with Spiritual Science they will then realise that they are seeing the karmic counterpart of the deeds they have just done. The soul is being shown: you must strive to take yourself in hand so that you can take part in the evolution of the future. And it is also being shown that there is no such thing as a deed without an after-effect. And this will be a driving force bringing order into our moral life. Moral impulses will be put into our souls like a karma, in the course of time, if we prepare ourselves to open our spiritual eyes and our spiritual ears to what can speak to us from the spiritual world.

We know that it will take a long time before men learn to see in the spirit. But it will begin in the twentieth century, and a greater and greater number of people will acquire this capacity in the course of three thousand years. Humanity will devote itself to such things during the next three millennia. In order that these things can happen, however, the main streams of development—again under the direction of the spiritual guidance of humanity—will take their course in such a way that human beings will be able to come to an understanding of occult life as I have described it today.

There are two main streams. The first is known through the fact that there is a so-called Western philosophy, and that the most elementary concepts of the spiritual world arise out of the purest depths of philosophy. And it is remarkable what we see when we make a survey of what has gradually taken place within the science of Western culture. We see how some people become purely intellectual, whilst others are rooted in the religious life, yet at the same time are filled with what can only be given by the vision of the spiritual world that is behind all existence. On all sides we see spiritual life flowing out of Western philosophy. I will only mention Vladimir Soloviev,¹² the Russian philosopher and thinker, a real clairvoyant, though he only saw into the spiritual world three times in his life: once when he was a boy of nine, the second time in the British Museum, and the third time in the Egyptian desert under the starry heavens of Egypt. On these occasions there was revealed to him what can only be seen by clairvoyant vision. He had a prevision of the evolution of humanity.—there welled up in him what Schelling¹³ and Hegel¹⁴ also achieved through sheer spiritual effort. As they stood alone on the heights of thinking, we may now place them on the summit which all educated people will eventually reach. All this was said in the course of previous centuries, particularly the last four centuries. When we survey this and work on it with the methods of practical occultism, as has been done recently, in order to make a special investigation into what the purely intellectual thinkers from Hegel to Haeckel¹⁵ have worked out, we can see occult forces at work here too. And a very remarkable thing comes to light: we can speak of pure inspiration in the case of just those people who appear to have least of it. Who inspired all the thinkers who are rooted in pure intellectualism? Who gave the stimulus for this life of thought that speaks out of every book to be found even in the lowliest cottage? Where does all this abstract thought life in Europe come from, that has had such a curious outcome?

We all know, of course, how the great event took place. It happened that an important individuality in the evolution of mankind, one of the individualities that we call a Bodhisattva, incarnated in the royal house of Suddhodana. We all know that this individuality was destined to ascend to the next rank that follows after that of Bodhisattva. Each human being who progresses and reaches the rank of Bodhisattva must become a Buddha in his final incarnation. What does this rank of Buddha signify? What does it signify in the case of the particular Bodhisattva who attained the rank of Buddha as Gautama Buddha? It signifies that Buddha—as with every other Buddha—does not need to incarnate on earth any more in a body of flesh. And therefore Gautama Buddha was destined, like every Buddha, to work henceforth from the spiritual world. He must not appear again on the earth in physical form, but his achievements in the course of incarnations enabled him henceforth to send his influence into our civilisation.

The first great deed that the Buddha had to accomplish as a purely spiritual being was, as I indicated in Basle,¹⁶ to send his forces down into the astral body of the Jesus boy described in the Luke Gospel, which came to significant expression in the Christmas message: Divine beings are revealing themselves in the heights, and peace shall come to men on earth who have goodwill.

If our souls are stirred by this message that angel beings hovered in the aureole above the angelic child, we should know that in this aura around Jesus the forces of the Nirmanakaya¹⁷ of the Buddha were active. Since then, the spiritual forces of the Buddha have been incorporated in the events connected with the highest individualities concerned with the Mystery of Golgotha. His forces work also in the world conception stream of the philosophers of the West. He himself is the driving force working out of the spiritual world into that life that has penetrated as far as intelligence and has then gone astray.

If we read Leibniz,¹⁸ Schelling and Soloviev today, and ask ourselves how they have been inspired, we find that it was by the individuality who was born in the place of Suddhodana, ascended from Bodhisattva to Buddha and then continued to work selflessly. In fact he continued to work in such a selfless way that we can go back in time today to a point when not even the name of Buddha was mentioned in the West. You do not find the name of the Bodhisattva who became Buddha, not even in Goethe! You know, though, that he lives in everything. He has met with so much understanding that he works on unnamed in Western literature. The Middle Ages knew about this, too, but they did not speak about it in this way then. They tell us something different.

In the eighth century there lived a man called John of Damascus¹⁹ who wrote a book in the form of a narrative. What was it about? He relates that there once lived a great teacher who became the teacher of Josaphat, instructing Josaphat in the secret doctrine and the great Christian truths. And if you investigate all this you find truths concerning those things. You also find narratives from Buddhist literature. When we follow up our theme we come upon a legend, the one that relates that Buddha went on living, not in an earthly human form but in an animal form, that of a hare. And when a Brahman once happened to find a hare—which was the disguised Buddha—the Brahman complained to him about the misery of mankind outside in the world, and Buddha made a fire and roasted himself, in order to help mankind. The Brahman took him and transported him to the moon. When you know that the moon is the symbol of the wisdom that lasts forever, which lives in the human breast, then you see there is a consciousness of Buddha's sacrifice, which has been developed and presented in these old legends.

What is Buddha's task out there in the spiritual world? It is his task now and for ever-more to kindle those forces in our hearts that can give birth to great wisdom. This is how we must understand one force streaming through our world; it is the Buddha force. It is also represented in the form it has taken in our century, even though here it has been reduced to abstraction. We have to try however, to understand the occult significance of every spiritual form. To this force is added the other one whose source was the Mystery of Golgotha, and which combined with the Buddha force to make a necessary whole, in which we must also now partake in earthly life. This force, emanating from Golgotha, with which all men have to connect themselves, not only affects man's inner life but involves our whole earthly existence.

Whilst the Buddha stream, like any other stream, concerns all of us as human beings, in the case of the Christ Being we have a cosmic intervention. All Bodhisattvas are individualities who go through life here on earth, who belong to the earth. The Christ Individuality comes from the sun, and walked the earth for the first time at the baptism in the Jordan, dwelling in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth for only three years. The uniqueness of the Christ Individuality was that it was destined to work for only three years in the earthly world. He is the same Being to Whom Zarathustra referred when he called Him Ahura Mazdao, He Who is behind the visible sun, the same Whom the Holy Rishis announced, and Whom the Greeks spoke of as the Being behind the pleroma. It is the Being Who has gradually become the spirit of our earth, the aura of our earth, since His blood flowed on Golgotha. The first person permitted to see Him without witnessing the physical event, was Paul.

Thus through the Mystery of Golgotha something took place that has brought a completely new course of events into our earthly evolution. Before that time, the greatest variety of concepts could be assimilated through the many different religions. What crossed over from the Buddha religion, when the being of Buddha streamed into the astral aura of Jesus, and what I told you concerning the soul seeing and feeling new things in nature, means nothing short of this: that just as the Christ Being descended through the baptism into the physical body, dwelt within it until the Mystery of Golgotha, and was therefore here physically on the physical plane, He will now, in the same way, begin working in the etheric world. So we can speak of a physical incarnation from the event of the baptism by John until Golgotha, and now of an etheric reappearance.

The etheric Christ will be perceived through the development of the etheric body, and also through impressions of autumn which the human being weaves into himself. Why was Christ here in a physical body? It was so that man could develop higher in order to acquire the capacity to perceive the Christ more and more in the etheric.

To sum up: we began this lecture with the elemental spirits manifesting themselves in nature. We continued with those particular visions that impel us to pause in our actions and listen to the inner word. And in all these occurrences grouping themselves round a central point we see that those human beings who find the right path to the spiritual world—and this does not mean trained clairvoyants, who have always been able to find the Christ, but human beings through their natural development—will be able to see the Christ as an etheric vision: see Him Who will only take part in world events from out of the etheric. We see that all these occurrences group themselves around the future Christ event. And if we look at the whole of spiritual development in its progressive stages, we see that the Buddha who sacrificed himself in the fire of love is the inspirer of our Spiritual Science.

Those people who give careful thought to the reading of, for instance, The Soul's Probation,²⁰ which I was able to have performed in Munich, and who become aware of where all the mysterious forces are to be found that point to what is in surrounding nature, and who also pay heed to the wisdom of the future—even if the wisdom of the future is often the folly of the present, as the wisdom of the present is often the folly of the future—these people will become aware that there will be a kind of chemistry pervaded by the Christ Impulse, and a kind of botany pervaded by the Christ Impulse, and so on. The world does not consist of lifeless molecules. All that is spread out in nature comes from the spirit. Even a flower is an etheric being, and on the other hand the spirit has come into the earth from outside through this flower. In all the forms that spring forth out of the earth we can see meaning of the highest order. Then we shall not only know by faith, but we shall understand.

This has brought us to the second stream which has to unite with the first. The coming years will bring many surprises to the earth. In everything that will occur in this way we shall be able to see the Christ Principle, whilst we shall become aware of the Buddha impulse in a more inward way. This is why unless we have an understanding of these sublime measures taken by the spiritual guidance of the world we shall not see clearly how to seek the Christ Impulse, nor perceive that it is He Who, in the course of history, leads one individuality over into the other. What is there to offer the thinking man's thirst for knowledge in the sort of phenomenon that is to be found in the West, where all the thinking is expressed more in the style of—let us say Galileo, to name an example—or again, in the East, where it is expressed in the manner of Vladimir Soloviev? When we see this, we acknowledge how objectively the Christ works. Similarly, we can see the Christ Impulse in everything that happens outside in the world.

Great things will happen in the next epochs of culture. What only arose as a dream²¹ of the great martyr Socrates in the fourth epoch, will become reality. What was this mighty impulse of Socrates? He wanted it to come about that whoever experiences a moral precept and understands it so thoroughly that it becomes one with his feeling, should also be a moral person, carrying his morality into his actions. Consider what a long way from this we still are, what a lot of people can say: such and such must happen—but how few have the inner power, the moral strength to do it! Moral principles will have to be so clearly understood and moral feelings so positively developed that we cannot inwardly know something without having the impulse to carry it out with enthusiasm. For this really to mature in the human soul, so that a moral impulse does not stop at the stage of understanding, but has inevitably to become a deed, men will have to live their way into these two particular streams. Then, under the influence of the two streams, human beings will develop in increasing numbers who are capable of carrying the feeling for the acknowledgment of morality, through into action.

How does it come about that these two streams unite in humanity so that the Christ can be taken up from within through the Buddha? It is because the position of Bodhisattva has never been unfilled. As soon as the Bodhisattva became Buddha, another attained to the rank of Bodhisattva. And it was attained by the particular individuality who is known to have lived as an Essene about a hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth. This personality has been sadly slandered and misunderstood, by the writer Celsus,²² for example, and particularly by Haeckel in his Riddles of the World. He was the personality who carried out his task a full hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, and he is known as Jeshu ben Pandira, one of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva who succeeded Gautama, the Bodhisattva who became Buddha. He will continue to work as a Bodhisattva until three thousand years have gone by, and then, when about five thousand years will have taken their course after the Buddha became enlightened under the bodhi tree, he will become a Buddha also. Every serious occultist knows that five thousand years after the enlightenment of Gautama Buddha under the bodhi tree that individuality who lives on as Bodhisattva will have become Maitreya Buddha. He will have incarnated frequently before that time comes. And then, when the five thousand years are over, a teaching will arise that will be the teaching of Maitreya Buddha, Buddha of the Good, where the spoken word works at the same time morally. Words are not powerful enough at the present time to describe the reality of this. It can only be perceived in the spiritual world, and human beings will first of all have to be mature enough to receive it. What will be special about the Maitreya Buddha is that he will have to repeat in a certain way what took place at the event of Golgotha.

We know that the Buddha individuality entered into Jesus of Nazareth and now only works into earth evolution from outside. All those individuals who live as Bodhisattvas and will later on become Buddhas have the particular destiny on earth, as every serious occultist can see, of being in a certain respect unknown in their youth. Those who do know something of them may see them as gifted people, but do not see that the being of the Bodhisattva is working in them. It has always been like this, and it will be like this in the twentieth century, too. It will only become recognisable during the time that lies between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year—the same span of time as there was between the baptism in Jordan and Golgotha. Then a change takes place in the human being, and to a certain degree he sacrifices his individuality and becomes the vehicle for another, as the Jesus individuality made way for the Christ.

The Bodhisattva incarnations, which are those of the future Maitreya Buddha, occur in unknown people. They work as individuals relying on their own inner strength. The Maitreya Buddha will also work out of his own inner strength, and against the stream of general opinion. He will remain unknown in his youth. And when in his thirtieth year he has sacrificed his individuality, he will appear in such a way that morality will work through his words. Five thousand years after the Buddha was enlightened beneath the bodhi tree his successor will ascend to the rank of Buddha, and will be the bringer of the word that works morally. We now say: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. We shall then be able to say: ‘In the Maitreya Buddha the greatest teacher has been given us, and he has appeared in order to make apparent to men the full extent of the Christ Event. His unique quality will be that he, the greatest of teachers, will be the bringer of the most exalted Word.’

As it happens so often that great things that should be brought into the world in the right way are so badly misunderstood, we must try to prepare ourselves for what should come. And if we want to approach the spirit at the point where the spirit of nature also speaks to us morally, then we may say to ourselves: all Spiritual Science is in a certain respect a preparation to help us understand what has been said about past events when we discussed the changes that take place in the course of time.

New times were dawning when John proclaimed the Christ. In a certain sense we can also speak today of new times, in preparation for which it is necessary for our hearts to change. Despite all the machinery of civilisation that will appear in the outside world, men's hearts must change in such a way that souls care about the spiritual world that will make itself known in a new way, just at this time in which we live. Whether a glimpse of it will become visible here in this life, or at the gate of death, or at a new birth—we shall not only see this new world but work from out of this new world. And the best that is often in us will come to realisation because, from beyond the gates of death, beings send these forces into us from the other world. And we shall also be able to send these forces, if we go through the gate of death having acquired what we recognise to be the necessary change for our time, about which I have permitted myself to speak to you today.

• 11. a year of great importance: the year 1899: 1899 marks the end of a period lasting from 3112 BC. to 1899 AD., which in Indian is called Kali Yuga, meaning ‘The Dark Age’.
• 12. mentioned
• 13. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: 1775 – 1854.
• 14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: 1770 – 1831.
• 15. Ernst Haeckel: 1834 – 1919.
  
  For above three notes, see Rudolf Steiner ‘The Riddles of Philosophy’, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 16. as I indicated in Basle: Rudolf Steiner ‘The Gospel of St. Luke’, ten lectures, Basle, September, 1909; Rudolf Steiner Press 1975.
• 17. Nirmanakaya: terminology in Eastern science for the body of a Buddha after he has passed through perfection. See the Gospel of St. Luke lecture cycle, p. 73, where definition is given: ‘The body which such a Being assumes after he has passed through the stage of perfection’: ‘the Body of Transformation’.
• 18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: 1646 – 1716. See Rudolf Steiner ‘The Riddles of Philosophy’; Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 19. John of Damascus who wrote a book in the form of a narrative: the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat.
• 20. ‘The Soul's Probation’, which I was able to have performed in Munich: the second of Rudolf Steiner's four mystery plays, first performed in Munich in the summer of 1911. See ‘Four Mystery Plays’ (1910 – 13); Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983.
• 21. dream of ... Socrates: in the platonic dialogues ‘Menon’ and ‘Protagoras’.
• 22. Celsus: Roman philosopher. In the middle of the second century AD. he wrote ‘The True Word’, the first polemic against Christianity.

It gives me great joy to be here for the first time in this newly founded group bearing the great name of Christian Rosenkreutz,²³ which gives me the opportunity for the first time of speaking about Christian Rosenkreutz at greater length. What is contained in the mystery of Christian Rosenkreutz? I cannot tell you all about this personality in one evening, so we shall speak about Christian Rosenkreutz himself today, and tomorrow we shall talk about his work.

To speak about Christian Rosenkreutz presupposes great confidence in the mysteries of spiritual life, confidence not only in the person but in the great secrets of the life of the spirit. The founding of a new group, however, also always presupposes faith in spiritual life.

Christian Rosenkreutz is an individual who is active both when he is in incarnation and when he is not incarnated in a physical body; he works not only as a physical being and through physical forces, but above all spiritually through higher forces.

As we know, man lives not only for himself but also in connection with human evolution as a whole. Usually when man passes through death his etheric body dissolves into the cosmos. A part of this dissolving etheric body always stays intact, however, and so we are always surrounded by these remaining parts of the etheric bodies of the dead, for our good, or also to our detriment. They affect us for good or ill according to whether we ourselves are good or bad. Far reaching effects emanate also from the etheric bodies of great individualities. Great forces emanating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz can work into our soul and also into our spirit. It is our duty to get to know these forces, for we work with them as rosicrucians.

Strictly speaking the rosicrucian movement began in the thirteenth century. At that time these forces worked extraordinarily strongly, and a Christian Rosenkreutz stream has been active in spiritual life ever since. There is a law that this spiritual stream of force has to become especially powerful every hundred years or so. This is to be seen now in the theosophical movement. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements.²⁴

In the year 1785 the collected esoteric revelations of the rosicrucians appeared in the work: The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians²⁵ by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus.²⁶ In a certain limited sense this publication contains references to the rosicrucian stream active in the previous century which was expressed for the first time in the works collected and put together by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus. Another hundred years later we see the influence of the rosicrucian stream coming to expression again in the work of H. P. Blavatsky, especially in the book Isis Unveiled.²⁷ Much of the meaning of this image has been put into words. A considerable amount of Western occult wisdom is contained in this book that is still a long way from being improved upon, even though the composition is sometimes very confused. It is interesting to compare The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus with the works of H.P. Blavatsky. We must think especially of the first part of the publication, which is written in Symbols. In the second part Blavatsky deviates a little from the rosicrucian stream. In her later works she departs entirely from it, and we must be able to distinguish between her early and her later publications, even though something of H.P. Blavatsky's uncritical spirit already appears in the early ones. That this is said can only be the wish of H.P. Blavatsky who is not in incarnation now.

When we look at the characteristic quality of human consciousness in the thirteenth century we see that primitive clairvoyance had gradually disappeared. We know that in earlier times everybody had an elementary clairvoyance. In the middle of the thirteenth century this reached its lowest point, and there was suddenly no more clairvoyance. Everyone experienced a spiritual eclipse. Even the most enlightened spirits and the most highly developed personalities, including initiates, had no further access to the spiritual worlds, and when they spoke about the spiritual worlds they had to confine themselves to what remained in their memories. People only knew about the spiritual world from tradition or from those initiates who awakened their memories of what they had previously experienced. For a short time, though, even these spirits could not see directly into the spiritual world.

This short period of darkness had to take place at that time to prepare for what is characteristic of our present age: today's intellectual, rational development. That is what is important today in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In the Greco-Roman cultural epoch the development of the intellect was not as it is today. Direct perception was the vital factor, not intellectual thinking. Human beings identified with what they saw and heard, in fact even with what they thought. They did not produce thoughts from out of themselves then as we do today, and as we ought to do, for this is the task of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Man's clairvoyance gradually begins again after this time, and the clairvoyance of the future can now develop.

The rosicrucian stream began in the thirteenth century. During that century personalities particularly suitable for initiation had to be specially chosen. Initiation could take place only after the short period of darkness had run its course.

In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet²⁸—though this will be possible in the not very distant future—a lodge of a very spiritual nature was formed comprising a council of twelve men who had received into themselves the sum of the spiritual wisdom of olden times and of their own time.. So we are concerned with twelve men who lived in that dark era, twelve outstanding individualities, who united together to help the progress of humanity. None of them could see directly into the spiritual world, but they could awaken to life in themselves memories of what they had experienced through earlier initiations. And the karma of mankind brought it about that in seven of the twelve all that still remained to mankind of the ancient Atlantean epoch was incarnated. In my Occult Science it has already been stated that in the seven holy Rishis of old, the teachers of the ancient Indian cultural epoch, all that was left of the Atlantean epoch was preserved. These seven men who were incarnated again in the thirteenth century, and who were part of the council of twelve, were just those who could look back into the seven streams of the ancient Atlantean cultural epoch of mankind and the further course of these streams. Among these seven individualities each one of them could bring one stream to life for their time and the present time. In addition to these seven there were another four who could not look back into times long past but could look back to the occult wisdom mankind had acquired in the four post-Atlantean epochs. The first could look back to the ancient Indian period, the second to the ancient Persian cultural period, the third to the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian cultural period and the fourth to the Greco-Roman culture. These four joined the seven to form a council of wise men in the thirteenth century. A twelfth had the fewest memories as it were, however he was the most intellectual among them, and it was his task to foster external science in particular. These twelve individualities not only lived in the experiences of Western occultism, but these twelve different streams of wisdom worked together to make a whole. A remarkable reference to this can be found in Goethe's poem The Mysteries.²⁹

We shall be speaking, then, of twelve outstanding individualities. The middle of the thirteenth century is the time when a new culture began. At this time a certain low point of spiritual life had been reached. Even the most highly developed could not approach the spiritual worlds. Then it was that the council of the spiritual elite assembled. These twelve men, who represented the sum of all the spiritual knowledge of their age and the twelve tendencies of thought, came together in a place in Europe that cannot as yet be named.

This council of the twelve only possessed clairvoyant memory and intellectual wisdom. The seven successors of the seven Rishis remembered their ancient wisdom, and the other five represented the wisdom of the five post-Atlantean cultures. Thus the twelve represented the whole of Atlantean and post-Atlantean wisdom. The twelfth was a man who attained the intellectual wisdom of his time in the highest degree. He possessed intellectually all the knowledge of his time, whilst the others, to whom direct spiritual wisdom was also denied at that time, acquired their knowledge by returning in memory to their earlier incarnations.

The beginning of a new culture was only possible, however, because a thirteenth came to join the twelve. The thirteenth did not become a scholar in the accepted sense of that time. He was an individuality who had been incarnated at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the incarnations that followed he prepared himself for his mission through humility of soul and through a fervent life devoted to God. He was a great soul, a pious, deeply mystical human being, who had not just acquired these qualities but was born with them. If you imagine to yourselves a young man who is very pious and who devotes all his time to fervent prayer to God, then you can have a picture of the individuality of this thirteenth. He grew up entirely under the care and instruction of the twelve, and he received as much wisdom as each one could give him. He was educated with the greatest care, and every precaution was taken to see that no one other than the twelve exercised an influence on him. He was kept apart from the rest of the world. He was a very delicate child in that incarnation of the thirteenth century, and therefore the education that the twelve bestowed upon him worked right into his physical body. Now the twelve, being deeply devoted to their spiritual tasks and inwardly permeated with Christianity, were conscious that the external Christianity of the Church was only a caricature of the real Christianity. They were permeated with the greatness of Christianity, although in the outside world they were taken to be its enemies. Each individuality worked his way into just one aspect of Christianity. Their endeavour was to unite the various religions into one great whole. They were convinced that the whole of spiritual life was contained in their twelve streams, and each one influenced the pupil to the best of his ability. Their aim was to achieve a synthesis of all the religions, but they knew that this was not to be achieved by means of any theory but only as the result of spiritual life. And for this a suitable education of the thirteenth was essential.

Whilst the spiritual forces of the thirteenth increased beyond measure, his physical forces drained away. It came to the point where he almost ceased to have any further connection with external life, and all interest in the physical world disappeared. He lived entirely for the sake of the spiritual development which the twelve were bringing about in him. The wisdom of the twelve was reflected in him. It reached the point where the thirteenth refused to eat and wasted away. Then an event occurred that could only happen once in history. It was the kind of event that can take place when the forces of the macrocosm co-operate for the sake of what they can bring to fruition. After a few days the body of the thirteenth became quite transparent, and for days he lay as though dead. The twelve now gathered round him at certain intervals. At these moments all knowledge and wisdom flowed from their lips. Whilst the thirteenth lay as though dead, they let their wisdom flow towards him in short prayer-like formulae. The best way to imagine them is to picture the twelve in a circle round the thirteenth. This situation ended when the soul of the thirteenth awakened like a new soul. He had experienced a' great transformation of soul. Within it there now existed something that was like a completely new birth of the twelve streams of wisdom, so that the twelve wise men could also learn something entirely new from the youth. His body, too, came to life now in such a way that this revival of his absolutely transparent body was beyond compare. The youth could now speak of quite new experiences. The twelve could recognise that he had experienced the event of Damascus: it was a repetition of the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus. In the course of a few weeks the thirteenth reproduced all the wisdom he had received from the twelve, but in a new form. This new form was as though given by Christ Himself. What he now revealed to them, the twelve called true Christianity, the synthesis of all the religions, and they distinguished between this true Christianity and the Christianity of the period in which they lived. The thirteenth died relatively young, and the twelve then devoted themselves to the task of recording what the thirteenth had revealed to them, in imaginations—for it could only be done in that way. Thus came the symbolic figures and pictures contained in the collection of Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus, and the communications of H.P. Blavatsky in the work Isis Unveiled. We have to see the occult process in such a way that the fruits of the initiation of the thirteenth remained as the residue of his etheric body, within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. This residue inspired the twelve as well as their pupils that succeeded them, so that they could form the occult rosicrucian stream. Yet it continued to work as an etheric body, and it then became part of the new etheric body of the thirteenth when he incarnated again.

The individuality of the thirteenth reincarnated as soon as the fourteenth century, roughly in the middle. In this incarnation he lived for over a hundred years. He was brought up in a similar way in the circle of the pupils and successors of the twelve, but not in such a secluded way as in his previous incarnation. When he was twenty-eight years old he formed a remarkable resolution. He had to leave Europe and travel. First he went to Damascus, and what Paul had experienced there happened again to him. This event can be described as the fruits of what took place in the previous incarnation. All the forces of the wonderful etheric body of the individuality of the thirteenth century had remained intact, none of them dispersed after death into the general world ether. This was a permanent etheric body, remaining intact in the ether spheres thereafter. This same highly spiritual etheric body again radiated from the spiritual world into the new incarnation, the individuality in the fourteenth century. Therefore he was led to experience the event of Damascus again. This is the individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz. He was the thirteenth in the circle of the twelve. He was named thus from this incarnation onwards. Esoterically, in the occult sense, he was already Christian Rosenkreutz in the thirteenth century, but exoterically he was named thus only from the fourteenth century. And the pupils of this thirteenth are the successors of the other twelve in the thirteenth century. These are the rosicrucians.

At that time Christian Rosenkreutz traveled through the whole of the known world. After he had received all the wisdom of the twelve, fructified by the mighty Being of the Christ, it was easy for him to receive all the wisdom of that time in the course of seven years. When, after seven years, he returned to Europe, he took the most highly developed pupils and successors of the twelve as his pupils, and then began the actual work of the rosicrucians.

By the grace of what radiated from the wonderful etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz they could develop an absolutely new world conception. What has been developed by the rosicrucians up to our time is work of both an outer and an inner nature. The outer work was for the purpose of discovering what lies behind the maya of the material world. They wanted to investigate the maya of matter. Just as man has an etheric body, so does the whole of the macrocosm have an etheric macrocosm, an etheric body. There is a certain point of transition from the coarser to the finer substance. Let us look at the boundary between physical and etheric substance. What lies between physical and etheric substance is like nothing else in the world. It is neither gold nor silver, lead nor copper. It is something that cannot be compared with any other physical substance, yet it is the essence of all of them. It is a substance that is contained in every other physical substance, so that the other physical substances can be considered to be modifications of this one substance. To see this substance clairvoyantly was the endeavour of the rosicrucians. The preparation, the development of such vision they saw to require a heightened activity of the soul's moral forces, which would then enable them to see this substance. They realised that the power for this vision lay in the moral power of the soul. This substance was really seen and discovered by the rosicrucians. They found that this substance lived in the world in a certain form both in the macrocosm and in man. In the world outside man they revered it as the mighty garment of the macrocosm. They saw it arising in man when there is a harmonious interplay between thinking and willing. They saw the will forces as being not only in man but in the macrocosm also, for instance in thunder and lightning. And they saw the forces of thought on the one hand in man and also outside in the world in the rainbow and the rosy light of dawn. The rosicrucians sought the strength to achieve such harmony of willing and thinking in their own soul in the force radiating from this etheric body of the thirteenth, Christian Rosenkreutz.

It was established that all the discoveries they made had to remain the secret of the rosicrucians for a hundred years, and that not until a hundred years had passed might these rosicrucian revelations be divulged to the world, for not until they had worked at them for a hundred years might they talk about them in an appropriate way. Thus what appeared in 1785 in the work The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians³⁰ was being prepared from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century.

Now it is also of great importance to know that in any century the rosicrucian inspiration is given in such a way that the name of the one who receives the inspiration is never made public. Only the highest initiates know it. Today, for instance, only those occurrences can be made public that happened a hundred years ago, for that is the time that must pass before it is permissible to speak of it in the outside world. The temptation is too great that people would idealise fanatically a person bearing such authority, which is the worst thing that can happen. It would be too near to idolatry. This silence, however, is not only essential in order to avoid the outer temptations of ambition and pride, which could probably be overcome, but above all to avoid occult astral attacks which would be constantly directed at an individuality of that calibre. That is why it is an essential condition that a fact like this can only be spoken of after a hundred years.

Through the works of the rosicrucians the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz became ever stronger and mightier from century to century. It worked not only through Christian Rosenkreutz but through all those who became his pupils. From the fourteenth century onwards Christian Rosenkreutz has been incarnated again and again. Everything that is made known in the name of theosophy is strengthened by the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz, and those who make theosophy known let themselves be overshadowed by this etheric body, that can work on them, both when Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated, and when he is not in incarnation.

The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century.³¹ This name was given to other people, too, however; therefore not everything that is told about Count Saint Germain here and there in the outside world applies to the real Christian Rosenkreutz. Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated again today. The inspiration for the work of H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, came from the strength radiating from his etheric body. It was also Christian Rosenkreutz's influence working invisibly on Lessing³² that inspired him to write The Education of the Human Race (1780). Because of the rising tide of materialism it became more and more difficult for inspiration to come about in the rosicrucian way. Then in the nineteenth century came the high tide of materialism. Many things could only be given very incompletely. In 1851 the problem of the immortality of the soul was solved by Widenmann^{33, 34} through the idea of reincarnation. His text was awarded a prize. Even around 1850 Drossbach wrote from a psychological point of view in favour of reincarnation.

Thus the forces radiating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz continued to be active in the nineteenth century too. And a renewal of theosophical life could come about because by 1899 the little Kali Yuga had run its course. That is why the approach to the spiritual world is easier now and spiritual influence is possible to a far greater degree. The etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz has become very strong, and, through devotion to this, man will be able to acquire the new clairvoyance, and lofty spiritual forces will come into being. This will only be possible, however, for those people who follow the training of Christian Rosenkreutz correctly. Until now an esoteric rosicrucian preparation was essential, but the twentieth century has the mission of enabling this etheric body to become so powerful that it can also work exoterically. Those affected by it will be granted the experience of the event that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. Until now this etheric body has only worked into the school of the rosicrucians; in the twentieth century more and more people will be able to experience the effect of it, and through this they will come to experience the appearance of Christ in the etheric body. It is the work of the rosicrucians that makes possible the etheric vision of Christ. The number of people who will become capable of seeing it will grow and grow. We must attribute this re-appearance to the important work of the twelve and the thirteenth in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

If you can become an instrument of Christian Rosenkreutz, then you can be assured that the smallest detail of your soul activity will be there for eternity.

Tomorrow we will come to speak about the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. A vague longing for Spiritual Science is present in mankind today. And we can be sure, that wherever students of rosicrucianism are striving seriously and conscientiously, they are working creatively for eternity. Every spiritual achievement, however small, brings us further. It is essential to understand and revere these holy matters.

• 23. Christian Rosenkreutz: A fourteenth century personality not given historical credence by external history but known to us from two anonymous rosicrucian legends ‘Fama Fraternitatis or Discovery of the Brotherhood of the highly commendable Order of the Rose Cross’; Cassel 1614; and ‘Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the commendable Brotherhood of the highly honoured Rose Cross’; Cassel 1615; according to which Christian Rosenkreutz was a German of noble descent who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name occurs for the first time in a document called ‘Chymical Wedding: Christian Rosenkreutz. Anno 1459’ written in 1604, handwritten copies of which were anonymously published in Strasbourg in 1616, the publisher being Johann Valentin Andreae who was inspired by Christian Rosenkreutz. See Rudolf Steiner ‘Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz’, an essay in the periodical ‘Das Reich’, Munich, 1917/18. In ‘Philosophie und Anthroposophie’, Gesammelte Aufsdtze (collected essays) 1904 – 18, GA 35; Dornach 1965. See also Johann Valentin Andreae ‘The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459’; Minerva Books, London.
• 24. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements: Rudolf Steiner is evidently referring here, as he did in an earlier lecture (Berlin 16th December 1904) to an utterance of Count de Saint Germain handed down in literature (see reference to page 47) according to which he said in Vienna in 1790: ‘I shall disappear from Europe towards the end of the century and proceed to the regions of the Himalayas. I shall rest; I must rest. In 85 years time I shall be seen daily.’ (Quoted from Isabella Cooper-Oakley in the periodical ‘Gnosis’ Vol. 1, no. 20 of 15.12.1903). In the year 1875, that is, exactly 85 years after this utterance, the Theosophical Society was founded.
• 25. The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians: Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 3 books, Altona 1785 – 88 (anon.). Book I contains an essay by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: “Aurcum Seculum Redivivum”, which had already appeared in 1621.
• 26. Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: Anagrammatic pseudonym of the paracelsist Hadrianus a Munsicht (Adrian von Mynsicht: Mynsicht is also an anagram of the surname Symnicht, originally Seumenicht, an alchemist) whose distinction it is to have been the first person to produce antimonoxydkali. He was born in Braunschweig the son of a pastor and lived from about 1590 – 1638. See C.S. Picht, Hinricus Madathanus, in “Die Drei”, Stuttgart 1927, Vol. VII No. 4.
• 27. H.P. Blavatsky ... Isis Unveiled: 2 volumes, New York 1877.
• 28. In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet—though this will be possible in the not very distant future: this place was not named later, either.
• 29. Goethe's poem ‘The Mysteries’: see Rudolf Steiner's lecture ‘The Mysteries. A Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe’, Cologne, 25th December 1907; Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. London, 1946.
• 30. ‘The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians’: see note 25.
• 31. The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century: Rudolf Steiner mentioned the connection between these two figures before, in a lecture of 4th November 1904, in ‘A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology’.
• 32. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: 1729 – 81. In his work ‘The Education of the Human Race’, Lessing discusses the concept of reincarnation.
• 33, 34. Widenmann ... Drossbach: in 1849 Maximilian Drossbach, 1810 – 84, wrote the article ‘Wiedergeburt, oder die Losung der Unsterblichkeitsfrage auf empirischen Wege nach den bekannten Naturgesetzen’ (Reincarnation, or the Solving of the Problem of Immortality by Empirical Means according to the known Laws of Nature). Without disclosing his name he offered a prize of 40 ducats of gold for the best exposition of the idea expressed in this article. This prompted the writing of the article by Gustav Widenmann (1812 – 76) ‘Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des Erdenlebens’ (Ideas on Immortality as the Repetition of Life on Earth), Vienna 1851, which won the prize. This short article was recently published anew in cornbination with an essay by C.S. Picht ‘Das Auftauchen der Reinkamationsidee bei dem Arzt und Philosophen Gustav Widenmann um 1850’ (The Emergence of the Concept of Reincarnation in Gustav Widenmann, doctor and philosopher around 1850), im Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1961.

My task today will be to tell you something about the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. This work began in the thirteenth century, is still going on today, and will continue right into eternity. The work began, of course, with what I told you yesterday of the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz, and all that took place between the council of the twelve and the thirteenth. When Christian Rosenkreutz was born again in the fourteenth century, in an incarnation lasting more than a hundred years, his main task was instructing the pupils of the twelve. At that time hardly anyone else came to know Christian Rosenkreutz apart from these twelve. This is not to be understood as if Christian Rosenkreutz did not meet other people, but only that the other people did not recognise him for what he was. Fundamentally this has remained the same until today. However, the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz has been constantly active in the circle of his pupils, its forces working in ever growing circles, until today many people are actually able to be influenced by the forces of his etheric body.

Christian Rosenkreutz selects those whom he wants to have as his pupils in a remarkable way. The one chosen has to pay attention to a certain kind of event, or several events in his life of the following kind: Christian Rosenkreutz chooses people so that, for instance, someone comes to a decisive turning-point, a karmic crisis in his life. Let us assume that a man is about to commit an action that would lead him to his death. These things can be very different one from the other. The man goes along a path which, without noticing it, can lead him into great danger. It leads to the edge of a precipice, perhaps. Then the man, now only a step or two from the precipice perhaps, hears a voice saying ‘Stop!’—so that he has to stop without knowing why. There could be a thousand similar situations. I should say, of course, that this is only the external sign of being outwardly qualified for a spiritual calling. To be inwardly qualified, the chosen person has to have an interest in something spiritual, theosophy or some other Spiritual Science. The external event I have described is a fact of the physical world, though it does not come by means of a human voice. The event always occurs in such a way that the person concerned knows quite clearly that the voice comes from the spiritual world. He may at first imagine that the voice has come from a human being who is hidden somewhere, but when the pupil is mature enough he discovers that it was not a physical person intervening in his life. In short, this event convinces the pupil that there are messages from the spiritual world. Such events can occur once or many times in life. We have to understand what effect this has on the soul of the pupil. The pupil tells himself: I have received another life through grace; the first one was forfeited. This new life given him through grace sheds light on the whole of the pupil's further life. He has this definite feeling which can be described in this way: without this rosicrucian experience of mine I should have died. My subsequent life would not have had the same value but for this event.

It can happen, of course, that even though a man has already experienced this once or even several times he does not come to theosophy or Spiritual Science at once. Later on, however, the memory of the event can come back. Many of you here can examine the past course of your lives and you will find that similar occurrences have happened to you. We give too little attention to such things today. We ought altogether to realise how very important occurrences we pass by without noticing them. This is an indication of the way the more advanced pupils of rosicrucianism are called.

This kind of occurrence will either pass a person by without being noticed at all, in which case the impression is blotted out and he attaches no importance to it; or, assuming the person to be attentive, he will appreciate its significance, and he will then perhaps rise to the thought: you were actually facing a crisis then, a karmic crisis; your life should actually have ended at that moment. You had forfeited your life, and you were only saved by something resembling chance. Since that hour a second life has been grafted onto the first, as it were. You must look on this life as a gift and live it accordingly.

When such an event awakens in a person the inner disposition to look at his life from that time onwards as a gift, nowadays this makes him a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For that is his way of calling these souls to him. And whoever can recall having had such an experience can tell himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added the possibility of such an experience to my karma. That is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz makes his choice of pupils. He chooses his community like this. Whoever experiences this consciously, knows: a path has been shown me, and I must follow it and see how far I can use my forces to serve rosicrucianism. Those who have not understood the sign, however, will do so at a later time, for whoever has received the sign will not be free of it again.

That a man can have an experience of the kind described is due to his having met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world between his last death and his last birth. Christian Rosenkreutz chose us then, and he put an impulse of will into us that now leads us to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are brought about.

To go further, let us discuss the difference between Christian Rosenkreutz's teaching in earlier times and in later times. This teaching used to be more in the nature of natural science, whereas today it is more like Spiritual Science. In earlier times, for instance, they considered natural processes and called this science alchemy, and when the processes took place beyond the earth they called it astrology. Today we consider things from a more spiritual aspect. If we consider, for instance, the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs, the culture of ancient India, ancient Persia, the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian culture and the Greco-Roman culture, we learn about the nature of the development of the human soul. The rosicrucians of the Middle Ages studied natural processes, regarding them as the earth processes of nature. They distinguished, for instance, three different natural processes which they regarded as the three great processes of nature.

The first important process is the salt process. Everything in nature that can form a deposit of hard substance out of a solution was called salt by the rosicrucian of the Middle Ages. When the medieval rosicrucian saw this salt formation, however, his conception of it was entirely different from that of modern man. For if he wanted to feel he had understood it, the witnessing of such a process had to work like a prayer in his soul. Therefore the medieval rosicrucian tried to make clear to himself what would have to happen in his own soul if the formation of salt were to take place there too. He arrived at the thought: human nature is perpetually destroying itself through instincts and passions. Our life would be nothing but a decomposition, a process of putrefaction, if we only followed our instincts and passions. And if man really wants to protect himself against this process of putrefaction, then he must constantly devote himself to noble thoughts that turn him towards the spirit. It was a matter of bringing his thoughts to a higher level of development. The medieval rosicrucian knew that if he did not combat his passions in one incarnation he would be born with a predisposition for illness in the next one, but that if he purified his passions he would enter life in the next incarnation with a predisposition for health. The process of overcoming through spirituality the forces that lead to decay is microcosmic salt formation. So we can understand how a natural process like this occasioned the most reverent prayer. When observing salt formation the medieval rosicrucians told themselves, with a feeling of deepest piety: divine spiritual powers have been working in this for thousands of years in the same way as noble thoughts work in me. I am praying to the thoughts of the gods, the thoughts of divine spiritual beings that are behind the maya of nature. The medieval rosicrucian knew this, and he said to himself: when I let nature stimulate me to develop feelings like this, I make myself like the macrocosm. If I observe this process in an external way only, I cut myself off from the gods, I fall away from the macrocosm. These were the feelings of the medieval theosophist or rosicrucian.

The process of dissolution gave a different experience: it was a different natural process that could also lead the medieval rosicrucian to prayer. Everything that can dissolve something else was called by the medieval rosicrucian quicksilver or mercury. Now he asked again: what is the corresponding quality in the human soul? What quality works in the soul in the same way in which quicksilver or mercury works outside in nature? The medieval rosicrucian knew that all the forms of love in the soul are what correspond to mercury. He distinguished between lower and higher processes of dissolution, just as there are lower and higher forms of love. And thus the witnessing of the dissolution process again became a pious prayer, and the medieval theosophist said to himself: God's love has been at work out there for thousands of years in the same way as love works in me.

The third important natural process for the medieval theosophist was combustion, that takes place when material substance is consumed by flames. And again the medieval rosicrucian sought the inner process corresponding to this combustion. This inner soul process he saw to be ardent devotion to the deity. And everything that can go up in flames he called sulphur. In the stages of development of the earth he beheld a gradual process of purification similar to a combustion or sulphur process. Just as he knew that the earth will at some time be purified by fire, he also saw a combustion process in fervent devotion to the deity. In the earth processes he beheld the work of those gods who look up to mightier gods above them. And permeated with great piety and deeply religious feelings at the spectacle of the process of combustion, he told himself: gods are now making a sacrifice to the gods above them. And then when the medieval theosophist produced the combustion process in the laboratory himself, he felt: I am doing the same as the gods do when they sacrifice themselves to higher gods. He only considered himself worthy to carry out such a process of combustion in his laboratory when he felt himself filled with the mood of sacrifice, when he himself was filled with the desire to devote himself in sacrifice to the gods. The power of the flame filled the medieval theosophist with lofty and deeply religious feelings, and he told himself: when I see flames outside in the macrocosm I am seeing the thoughts and the love of the gods, and the gods' willingness to sacrifice.

The medieval rosicrucian produced these processes himself in his laboratory and then he entered into contemplation of these salt formations, solutions and processes of combustion, letting himself at the same time be filled with deeply religious feelings in which he became aware of his connection with all the forces of the macrocosm. These soul processes called forth in him divine thoughts, divine love and divine sacrifice. And then the medieval rosicrucian discovered that when he produced a salt process, noble, purifying thoughts arose in him. With a solution process love was stimulated in him, he was inspired by divine love, and with a combustion process the desire to make a sacrifice was kindled in him, it urged him to sacrifice himself on the altar of the world.

These were the experiences of one who did these experiments. And if you had attended these experiments yourself in clairvoyant vision, you would have perceived a change in the aura of the person carrying them out. The aura that was a mixture of colours before the experiment began, being full of instincts and desires to which the person in question had perhaps succumbed, became single-hued as a result of the experiment. First of all, during the experiment with salt formation, it became the colour of copper—pure, divine thoughts—then, in the experiment with a solution, the colour of silver—divine love—and finally, with combustion, the colour of gold—divine sacrifice. And then the alchemists said they had made subjective copper, subjective silver and subjective gold out of the aura. And the outcome was that the person who had undergone this, and had really experienced such an experiment inwardly, was completely permeated by divine love. Such was the way these medieval theosophists became permeated with purity, love and the will to sacrifice, and by means of this sacrificial service they prepared themselves for a certain clairvoyance. This is how the medieval theosophist could see behind maya into the way spiritual beings helped things to come into being and pass away again. And this enabled him to realise which forces of aspiration in men's souls are helpful and which are not. He became acquainted with our own forces of growth and decay. The medieval theosophist Heinrich Khunrath,³⁵ in a moment of enlightenment, called this process the law of growth and decay.

Through observing nature the medieval theosophist learnt the law of ascending and descending evolution. The science he acquired from this he expressed in certain signs, imaginative pictures and figures. It was a kind of imaginative knowledge. One of the outcomes of this was The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians which was described yesterday.

This is the way the best alchemists worked from the fourteenth to the eighteenth and until the beginning of the nineteenth century. About this truly moral, ethical, intellectual work nothing has been printed. What has been printed about alchemy concerns purely external experiments only, and was only written by those men who performed alchemy as an end in itself. The false alchemist wanted to create substance. When he experimented with the burning of substances he saw the material results as the only thing gained, whereas the genuine alchemist attached no importance to these material results. For him it all depended on the inner soul experiences he had whilst the substance was forming, the thoughts and experiences within him. Therefore there was a strict rule that the medieval theosophist who produced gold and silver from his experiments was never allowed to profit from it himself. He was only allowed to give away the metals thus produced. Modern man no longer has the correct conception of these experiments. He has no idea what the experimenter could experience. The medieval theosophist was able to experience whole dramas of the soul in his laboratory when, for example, antimony was extracted; the experimenters saw significant moral forces at work in these processes.

If these things had not taken place at that time, we would not be able to practise rosicrucianism in the Spiritual Scientific way today. What the medieval rosicrucian experienced when he beheld the processes of nature is a holy natural science. The mood of spiritual sacrifice, the tremendous joys, the great natural events, including pain and sadness, as well as the events that uplifted him and made him happy, all these experiences that he had during the experiment he performed, worked on him in a liberating and redeeming way. All that was planted into him then, however, is now hidden in the innermost depths of man.

How shall we rediscover these hidden forces that used to lead to clairvoyance? We shall find them by studying Spiritual Science and by devoting ourselves deeply to the inner life of the soul in serious meditation and concentration. By means of inner development of this kind, work with nature will gradually become a sacrificial rite again. For this to come about human beings must go through what we now call Spiritual Science. Human beings in their thousands must devote themselves to Spiritual Science; they must cultivate an inner life, so that in the future the spiritual reality behind nature will be perceptible again, and we learn to understand again the spirit behind maya. Then, in the future, although it will only happen to a small number of people to begin with, they will be able to experience Paul's vision on the road to Damascus and to perceive the etheric Christ, Who will come among men in super-sensible form. But before this happens man will have to return to a spiritual view of nature.

If we did not know the whole significance of rosicrucianism we could believe that humanity was still at the same stage as it was two thousand years ago. Until man has gone through this process, which is only possible by means of Spiritual Science, he will not come to spiritual vision. There are many good and pious people who are theosophists at heart, although they are not followers of Spiritual Science.

Through the event of the baptism in Jordan, when the Christ descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and through the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind has become capable of beholding and recognising the Christ later in the etheric body—since 1930 onwards. Christ has only walked the earth once in a physical body, and we should be able to understand this. ‘The second coming of Christ’ means seeing Christ supersensibly in the etheric. Therefore everyone who wants to tread the right path of development must work to acquire the capacity to see with spiritual eyes. It would not signify human progress for Christ to appear again in a physical body. His next appearance will be a revelation in the etheric body.

What was given in the different religious creeds has been gathered into one whole by Christian Rosenkreutz and the council of the twelve. This means that everything that the separate religions had to give and all that their followers strove and longed for will be found in the Christ Impulse. Development during the next three thousand years will consist in this: the establishing and furthering of an understanding of the Christ Impulse. From the twentieth century onwards all the religions will be reconciled in the mystery of rosicrucianism. And in the course of the next three thousand years this will become possible because it will no longer be necessary to teach from documents, for through the beholding of Christ human beings will themselves learn to understand the experience Paul had on the way to Damascus. Mankind itself will pass through the experience of Paul.

The Maitreya Buddha will appear five thousand years after Buddha was enlightened under the bodhi tree, that is, about three thousand years from now. He will be the successor of Gautama Buddha. Among true occultists this is no longer in doubt. Occultists of both the West and the East are in agreement about it. So two things are beyond question:

Firstly, that the Christ could appear only once in a physical body; secondly that He will appear in the twentieth century in etheric form. Great individualities will certainly appear in the twentieth century, like the Bodhisattva, the successor of Gautama Buddha, who will become the Maitreya Buddha in about three thousand years. But no true occultist will give to any human being physically incarnated in the twentieth century the name of Christ, and no real occultist will expect the Christ in the physical body in the twentieth century. Every genuine occultist would find such a statement erroneous. The Bodhisattva, however, will especially point to the Christ.

Secondly, it will be three thousand years before the Bodhisattva who appeared in Jeshu ben Pandira appears as the Maitreya Buddha. The real occultists of India, in particular, would be horrified if we were to maintain that the Maitreya Buddha could appear before then. There could well be the kind of occultists in India, of course, who are not real occultists and who, for reasons of their own, speak of a Maitreya Buddha already in incarnation. Proper devotion to rosicrucian theosophy and to Christian Rosenkreutz can protect anyone from falling into these errors.

All these things are stated in rosicrucianism in such a way that they can be tested by reason. Healthy human understanding can test all these things. Do not believe anything on my authority, but just take what I say as an indication and then test it for yourselves. I am not perturbed, for the more you examine theosophy or Spiritual Science the more sensible you will find it. The less you take on authority, the more understanding you will have for Christian Rosenkreutz. We know Christian Rosenkreutz best when we enter properly into his individuality and become conscious that the spirit of Christian Rosenkreutz lives on and on. And the nearer we approach his great spirit the stronger we shall become. We can hope for a great deal of strength and help from the etheric body of this great leader, who will always be there, if we ask him to help us.

We will also be able to understand the strange event of Christian Rosenkreutz falling ill if we absorb ourselves properly in the work of Spiritual Science. In the thirteenth century this individuality lived in a physical body that grew weak to the point of transparency, so that for several days he lay as though dead, and during this time he received from the twelve their wisdom and he also experienced the event of Damascus.

May the spirit of true rosicrucianism be with you and inspire you in this group, then the mighty etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz will be all the more active here.

• 35. Heinrich Khunrath: 1560 – 1605, medical doctor and the writer of a great number of articles on alchemy. A reference to ‘Nashni Khuni’ in a transcript of a lecture suggests that the ‘Khuni’ could point to Khunrath.

When we discuss, in connection with Spiritual Science, other spiritual worlds in addition to our physical world, and declare that the human being sustains a relationship, not only to this physical world, but also to super-sensible realms, one may ask what is to be found within the human soul—before one achieves any sort of clairvoyant capacity—which is super-sensible, which gives an indication that the human being is connected with super-sensible worlds. In other words, can even the ordinary person, with no clairvoyant capacity, observe something in the soul, experience something, which bears a relationship to higher realms? In essence, both today's lecture and tomorrow's will endeavour to answer this question.

When we observe the life of the human soul, it manifests three parts in a certain way independent of one another and yet, on the other hand, closely bound together.

What first confronts us when we direct attention to ourselves as souls is our conceptual life, which includes also in a certain way our thinking, our memory. Memory and thought are not physical. They belong to the invisible, super-sensible world: in man's thought-life he has something which points to higher worlds. What this conceptual world is may be grasped in the following way. We bring before someone an object, which he observes. Then he turns away. He has not immediately forgotten the object, but preserves within himself a living picture of it. Thus we have concepts of the world surrounding us, and we may speak of the conceptual life as a part of our soul life.

We can observe a second part of our soul life if we inquire whether we do not possess within us something related to objects and beings in addition to our concepts. We do, indeed, have something else. It is what we call feelings of love and hate, what we designate in our thinking by the terms sympathy, antipathy. We consider one thing beautiful, another ugly; perhaps, we love one thing and hate another; one we feel to be good, the other evil. If we wish to summarise what thus appears in our inner life, we may call it stimulation of the feelings. The life of the heart is something quite different from conceptual life. In the life of the heart we have a far more intimate indication of the invisible than in the life of the concepts. Here is a second component of our soul-organism, this life of emotions. Thus we have already two soul-components, our life of thought and of emotion.

Of a third we become aware when we say to ourselves, not only that we consider a thing beautiful or ugly, good or evil, but that we feel impelled to do this or that, we have an impulse to act. When we undertake anything, perform a relatively important act or even merely take hold of an object, there must always be an impulse within us which induces us to do this. These impulses, moreover, are gradually transformed into habits, and we do not always need to bring our impulses to bear in connection with everything that we do. When we go out, for instance, intending to go to the railway station, we do not then purpose to take the first, second, and third steps; we simply go to the station. Behind all this lies the third member of our soul life, our will impulses, as something ranging wholly beyond the visible.

If we now connect with these three impulses characteristic of the human being our initial question, whether the ordinary man possesses any clue to the existence of higher worlds, we must take cognizance of dream life, and how this is related to the three soul elements: the thinking, feeling and willing.

These three components of our soul life can be clearly differentiated: our thought life, our emotions, and our will impulses. If we consider our soul life, we can differentiate these three single components of the life of the soul in our external existence. Let us first take the life of concepts. The life of thought follows its course throughout the day—if we are not actually void of thought. Throughout the day we have concepts; and, when we grow tired in the evening, these concepts first become hazy. It is as if they became transmuted into a kind of fog. They become hazier and hazier, finally vanishing altogether, and we can then go to sleep. Thus this conceptual life, as we possess it on the physical plane, persists from our waking till our falling asleep, and disappears the moment we fall asleep. No one will suppose that, when he is really sleeping—that is, if he is not clairvoyant during sleep—his thought life can nevertheless continue just as while he is awake. The life of thought—or the conceptual life—which engrosses us fully from our waking till our falling asleep, must be extinguished, and only then can we go to sleep.

But the human being must recognise that the concepts he has, which have so overwhelmingly taken possession of him during the day, and which he always has unless he merely drowses along, are no hindrance to his falling asleep. That this is so is best seen when we surrender ourselves to particularly vigorous concepts before falling asleep—for instance, by reading a very difficult book. When we have been thinking really intensely, we most easily fall asleep; and so if we cannot go to sleep, it is good to pick up a book, or occupy ourselves with something which requires concentrated thinking—study a book of mathematics, for instance. This will help us to fall asleep; but not something, on the other hand, in which we are deeply interested, such as a novel containing much that captivates our interest. Here our emotions become aroused, and the life of the emotions is something that hinders us from falling asleep. When we go to bed with our feelings vividly stirred, when we know that we have burdened our soul with something or when there is a special joy in our heart which has not yet subsided, it frequently happens that we turn and toss in bed and are unable to fall asleep. In other words, whereas concepts unaccompanied by emotions weary us, so that we easily fall asleep, precisely what strongly affects our feelings prevents us from falling asleep. It is impossible then to bring about the separation within ourselves which is necessary if we are to enter into the state of sleep. We can thus see that our life of emotions has a different relationship to our whole existence from that of our life of thought.

If we wish, however, to make the distinction quite clearly, we must take into account something else: that is, our dreams. It might be supposed at first that, when the variegated life of dreams works upon us, it consists of concepts continuing their existence into the state of sleep. But, if we test the matter quite accurately, we shall observe that our conceptual life is not continued in our dreams. That which by its very nature wearies us does not continue during our dreams, except when our concepts are associated with intense emotions.

It is the emotions that manifest in dream pictures. But to realise this it is necessary, of course, to test these things adequately. Take an example: someone dreams that he is young again and has some experience or other. Immediately the dream is transformed and something occurs which he may not have experienced at all. A kind of event is manifest to him which is foreign to his memory, because he has not experienced it on the physical plane. But persons known to him appear. How often it happens that one finds oneself during dreams involved in actions in the company of friends or acquaintances whom one has not seen for a long time. But, if we examine the thing adequately, we shall be forced to the conclusion that emotions are behind what emerges in dreams. Perhaps, we still cling to the friend of that time, are not yet quite severed from him; there must still be some kind of emotion in us which is connected with him. Nothing occurs in dreams that is not connected with emotions. Accordingly, we must draw a certain conclusion here—that is, that when the concepts which our waking life of day impart to us do not appear in dreams, this proves that they do not accompany us into sleep. When emotions keep us from sleeping, this proves that they do not release us, that they must be present in order to be able to appear in dream pictures. It is the emotions which bring us the dream concepts. This is due to the fact that the emotions are far more intimately connected with man's real being than is the life of thought. We carry them over into sleep. In other words, they are a soul element that remains united with us even during sleep. In contrast with ordinary concepts, the emotions accompany us into sleep; they are far more closely, more intensely, connected with the human individuality than is ordinary thinking, when it is not pervaded by emotion.

What about the third soul component, the will impulses? There also we can give an example. Of course, this can be observed only by persons who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep in a rather subtle way. If someone has acquired through training a certain capacity to observe this moment, he will find it extremely interesting. At first, our concepts appear to us to be enveloped in mist; the external world vanishes, and we feel as if our soul-being were extended beyond our bodily nature, as if we were no longer compressed within the limits of our skin but were flowing out into the elements of the cosmos. A profound feeling of satisfaction may be associated with falling asleep. Then comes a moment when a certain memory arises. Most likely, extremely few people have this experience, but we can perceive this moment if we are sufficiently attentive. There appear before our vision the good and also the evil will impulses that we have experienced; and the strange thing is that, in the presence of the good impulses, one has the feeling: ‘This is something connected with all wholesome will forces, something that invigorates you.’ If the good will impulses present themselves to the soul before the person falls asleep, he feels so much the fresher and more filled with life-forces, and the feeling often arises: ‘If only this moment could last forever! If only this moment could endure throughout eternity!’ Then one feels, also, how the bodily nature is deserted by the soul element. Finally there comes a jerk, and he falls asleep. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to experience this, but only to observe the life of the soul.

We must infer from this something extremely important. Our will impulses work before we fall asleep, and we feel that they fructify us. We experience extraordinary invigoration. With regard to the mere emotions, we had to say that these are more closely connected with our individuality than our ordinary thinking, our ordinary act of conceiving. So we must now say of our will impulses: ‘This is not merely something that remains with us during sleep, but something which becomes a strengthening, an empowering, of the life within us.’ The will impulses are far more intimately connected with our life than are our emotions; and whoever frequently observes the moment of falling asleep feels in this moment that, if he cannot look back upon any good will impulses during the day, it is as though something of what enters into the state of sleep had been killed within him. In other words, the will impulses are connected with health and disease, with the life force in us.

Thoughts cannot be seen. We see the rose bush at first through ordinary physical perception; but, when the beholder turns aside or goes away, the image of the object remains in him. He does not see the object but he can form a mental image of it. That is, our thought life is somewhat super-sensible. Completely super-sensible are our emotions; and our will impulses, although they are transmuted into actions, are none the less super-sensible. But we know at once likewise, when we take into consideration everything which has now been said, that our thought life not permeated by will impulses is the least closely connected with us.

Now, it might be supposed that what has just been said is refuted by the fact that, on the following day our concepts of the preceding day confront us again; that we can recollect them. Indeed, we are obliged to recollect. We must, in a super-sensible way, call our concepts back into memory.

With our emotions, the situation is different; they are most intimately united with us. If we have gone to bed in a mood of remorse, we shall sense upon awaking the next morning that we have woken with a feeling of dullness—or something of the sort. If we experienced remorse, we sense this the next day in our body as weakness, lethargy, numbness; joy we sense as strength and elevation of spirits. In this case we do not need first to remember the remorse or the joy, to reflect about them; we feel them in our body. We do not need to recollect what has been there: it is there, it has passed into sleep with us and has lived with us. Our emotions are more intensely, more closely, bound up with the external part of us than are our thoughts.

But anyone who is able to observe his will impulses feels that they are simply present again; they are always present. It may be that, at the moment of waking, we note that we experience again in its immediacy, in a certain sense, what we experienced as joy in life on the preceding day through our good moral impulses. In reality nothing so refreshes us as that which we cause to flow through our souls on the preceding day in the form of good moral impulses. We may say, therefore, that what we call our will impulses are the most intimately bound up with our existence.

Thus the three soul components are different from one another, and we shall understand, if we clearly grasp these distinctions, that occult knowledge justifies the assertion that our thoughts, which are super-sensible, bring us into relationship with the super-sensible world, our emotions with another super-sensible world, and our will impulses with still another, even more intimately bound up with our own real being. For this reason we make the following assertion. When we perceive with the outer senses, we can thereby perceive everything that is in the physical world. When we conceive, our life of concepts, our thought life, is in relationship with the astral world. Our emotions bring us into connection with what we call the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan. And our moral impulses brings us into connection with the Higher Devachan, or the World of Reason. Man thus stands in relationship with three worlds through the impulses of thinking, feeling and willing. To the extent that he belongs to the astral world, he can carry his thoughts into the astral world; he can carry his emotions into the world of Devachan; he can carry into the higher Heavenly World all that he possesses in his soul of the nature of will impulses (See also Macrocosm and Microcosm).

When we consider the matter in this way, we shall see how justified occult science is in speaking of the three worlds. And, when we take this into consideration, we shall view the realm of morality in an entirely different way; for the realm of good will impulses gives us a relationship to the highest of the three worlds into which the being of man extends.

Our ordinary thought life reaches only up to the astral world. No matter how brilliant our thoughts may be, if they are not sustained by feelings they penetrate no further than the astral world; they have no significance for other worlds. You will certainly understand in this connection what is said in regard to external science, dry, matter-of-fact external science. No man can by means of thoughts not permeated by emotion affirm anything regarding other realms than the astral. Under ordinary circumstances, the thinking of the scientist, the chemist, the mathematician, proceeds without any accompanying feeling. It goes no further than just under the surface. Indeed, scientific research even demands that it shall proceed in this way, and because of this it penetrates only into the astral world.

Only when delight or repugnance are associated with the thoughts of the research scientist is there added to these thoughts the element needed in order to penetrate the world of Devachan. Only when emotions enter into thoughts, into concepts, when we feel one thing to be good and another evil, do we combine with thoughts which carries them into the Heavenly World. Only then can we get a glimpse into deeper layers of existence. If we wish to grasp something belonging to the world of Devachan, theories are no help to us at all. The only thing that helps us is to unite feelings with our thoughts. Thinking carries us only into the astral world.

When the geometrician, for example, grasps the relationships pertaining to the triangle, this lifts him only into the astral element. But, when he grasps the triangle as a symbol, say of the participation of the human being in the three worlds, of his threefoldness, this helps him to a higher level. One who sees in symbols the expression of the soul force, who inscribes this in his heart, who feels in connection with everything that people generally merely know, brings his thoughts into connection with Devachan. For this reason, in meditating we must feel our way through what is given us, for only thus do we bring ourselves into connection with the world of Devachan. Ordinary science, therefore, void of any feeling, can never bring the human being, no matter how keen, into connection with anything except the astral world.

On the other hand, art, music, painting and so on, lead man into the lower Devachan world. To this statement the objection might be raised that, if it is true that the emotions really lead one into the lower Devachan world, passions, appetites, instincts, would also do this. Indeed, they do. But this only shows that we are more intimately bound up with our feelings than with our thoughts. Our sympathies may be associated with our lower nature also; an emotional life is aroused by appetites and instincts also, and this leads into lower Devachan. Whereas we absolve in Kamaloka whatever false thoughts we have, we carry with us into the world of Devachan all that we have developed up to the stage of emotions; and this imprints itself upon us even into the next incarnation, so that it comes to expression in our karma. Through our life of feeling, so far as this can have these two aspects, we either raise ourselves into the world of Devachan, or we offend it.

Through our will impulses, on the contrary, which are either moral or immoral, we either have a good relationship with the higher world or we injure it, and have to compensate for this in our karma. If a person is so evil and degenerate that he establishes such a connection with the higher world through his evil impulses as actually to injure it, he is cast out. But the impulse must, nevertheless, have originated in the higher world. The significance of the moral life becomes clear to us in all its greatness when we view the matter in this way.

From the worlds with which the human being is in such a close relationship through his threefold soul nature and also through his physical nature—from these realms proceed those forces which can lead man through the world. That is, we cannot observe an object belonging to the physical world, without eyes to see it with: this is the human being's relationship with the physical world. Through his life of thought, he is in relationship with the astral world; through his life of feeling, he is connected with the world of Devachan; and through his moral life with the world of upper Devachan.

Man has four relationships with four worlds. But this signifies nothing else than that he has a relationship with the Beings of these worlds. From this point of view it is interesting to reflect upon man's evolution, to look into the past, the present, and the immediate future.

From the worlds we have mentioned proceed those forces which penetrate into our lives. Here we have to point out that, in the epoch which lies behind us, human beings were primarily dependent upon influences from the physical world, primarily capacitated to receive impulses out of the physical world. This lies behind us as the Greco-Roman epoch. During this epoch Christ worked on earth in a physical body. Since the human being was then enabled primarily to receive the influences of the forces existing in the physical world, Christ had to appear on the physical plane.

At present we live in an epoch in which thinking is mainly developed, in which man receives his impulses out of the world of thought, the astral world. Even external history demonstrates this. We can scarcely refer to philosophers of the pre-Christian era; at most, to a preparatory stage of thinking. Hence the history of philosophy begins with Thales.³⁶ Only after the Greco-Roman epoch does scientific thinking appear. Intellectual thinking develops for the first time about the sixteenth century. This explains the great progress in the sciences, which exclude all emotion from the activity of thought. And science is so specially beloved in our day because in it thought is not permeated with emotions. Our science is void of feeling, and seeks its well-being in the utter absence of sentiments. Alas for one who should experience any feeling in connection with a laboratory experiment! This is characteristic of our epoch, which brings the human being into contact primarily with the astral plane.

The next age, following our own, will already be more spiritual. There the emotions will play a role even in connection with science. If anyone shall then wish to sit an examination for admission to some scientific study, it will be necessary for him to be able to sense the light that exists behind everything—the spiritual world which brings everything into existence. The value of scientific work in any test will then consist in whether a person can develop in the test sufficient emotion; otherwise he will fail in the examination. Even though the candidate may have any amount of knowledge, he will not be able to pass the examination if he does not have the right sentiments. This certainly sounds very queer but it will be true, nonetheless, that the laboratory table will be raised to the level of an altar, at which the test of a person will consist in the fact that, in the electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, feelings will be developed in him corresponding with what the gods feel when this occurs. The human being will then receive his impulses from an intimate connection with the lower Devachan.

And then will come the age that is to be the last before the next great earth catastrophe. This will be the age when man will be connected with the higher world in his will impulses, when morality will be dominant on the earth. Then neither external ability nor the intellect nor the feelings will hold the first rank, but the impulses. Not man's skill but his moral quality will be determinative. Thus, humanity will have reached the epoch of morality, during which man will be in a special relationship with the world of higher Devachan.

It is a fact that, in the course of evolution, ever greater powers of love will awaken in the human being, out of which he may draw his knowledge, his impulses and his activities.

Whereas at an earlier period, when Christ came down to the earth in a physical body, human beings could not have perceived Him otherwise than in a physical body, in our age the forces are actually awaking through which we will see the Christ, not in His physical body, but in an etheric form which will exist on the astral plane. Even in our century, from the 1930's on, and ever increasingly to the middle of the century, a great number of human beings will behold the Christ as an etheric form. This will constitute the great advance beyond the earlier epoch, when human beings were not yet ripe for beholding Him thus. This is what is meant by the saying that Christ will appear in the clouds; He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane.

But it must be emphasised that He can be seen in this epoch only in the etheric body. Anyone who believes that Christ will appear again in a physical body loses sight of the progress made by human powers. It is a mistake to suppose that such an event as the appearance of Christ can recur in the same manner as that in which it has already taken place.

The next event, then, is that human beings will see Christ on the astral plane in etheric form, and those who are then living on the physical plane, and who have absorbed the teachings of Spiritual Science, will see Him. Those, however, who are then no longer living, but who have prepared themselves through Spiritual-Scientific work will see Him, nonetheless, in etheric raiment between their death and rebirth. But there will be human beings also who are not yet ready to see Him in the etheric body. Those who have scorned Spiritual Science will not be able to see Him, but will have to wait till the following incarnation, when they may then devote themselves to spiritual knowledge and so be able to prepare themselves to understand what then occurs. It will not depend then upon whether a person has actually studied Spiritual Science or not while living on the physical plane, except that the appearance of the Christ will be a rebuke and a torment to them, whereas those who strove to attain a knowledge of the spirit in the preceding incarnation will understand what they behold.

Then will come an epoch when still higher powers will awaken in human beings. This will be the epoch when the Christ will manifest Himself in a still loftier-manner; in an astral form in the lower world of Devachan. And in the final epoch, that of the moral impulse, the human beings who have passed through the other stages will behold the Christ in His glory, as the form of the greatest ‘Ego’, as the spiritualised Ego-Self, as the great Teacher of human evolution in the higher Devachan.

Thus the succession is as follows: in the Greco-Roman epoch Christ appeared on the physical plane; in our epoch He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane; in the next epoch as an astral form on the plane of lower Devachan; and in the epoch of morality as the very essence and embodiment of the Ego.

We may now ask ourselves for what purpose Spiritual Science exists. It is so that there may be a sufficient number of human beings who will be prepared when these events take place. And now already Spiritual Science is working to the end that human beings may enter in the right way into connection with the higher worlds, so that they may enter rightly into the etheric-astral, into the aesthetic-Devachanic, into the moral-Devachanic. In our epoch it is the Spiritual-Scientific movement whose special aim is to enable the human being in his moral impulses to develop a right relationship with the Christ.

The next three millennia will be devoted to making visible the appearance of the Christ in the etheric. Only to those whose feelings are wholly materialistic will this be unattainable., A person may think materialistically when he admits the validity of matter alone and denies the existence of everything spiritual, or through the fact that he draws the spiritual down into the material. A person is materialistic also in admitting the existence of the spiritual only in material embodiment. There are even theosophists who are materialists. These believe that humanity is doomed to the necessity of beholding Christ again in a physical body. One does not escape from being a materialist through being a theosophist, but through comprehending that the higher worlds exist even when we cannot see them in a sense manifestation but must develop ourselves to the stage when we can behold them.

If we allow all this to pass through our minds, we may say that Christ is the true moral Impulse, permeating humanity with moral power. The Christ Impulse is power and life, the moral power which permeates the human being. But this moral power must be understood. Precisely in our own epoch it is necessary that Christ shall be proclaimed. For this reason Anthroposophy has the mission also of proclaiming the Christ in His etheric form.

Before Christ appeared on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, the teaching about Him was prepared in advance. At that time, also, the physical Christ was proclaimed. It was primarily Jeshu ben Pandira who was the forerunner and herald, a hundred years before Christ. He also had the name Jesus, and, in contrast to Christ Jesus, he was called Jesus ben Pandira, son of Pandira. This man lived about a hundred years before our era. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to know this, for it is to be found in Rabbinical writings, and this fact has often been the occasion for confusing him with Christ Jesus. Jeshu ben Pandira was at first stoned and then hanged upon the beam of the cross. Jesus of Nazareth was actually crucified.

Who was this Jeshu ben Pandira? He is a great individuality who, since the time of Buddha—that is, about 600 BC. has been incarnated once in nearly every century in order to bring humanity forward. To understand him, we must go back to the nature of the Buddha.

We know, of course, that Buddha lived as a prince in the Sakya family five centuries and a half before the beginning of our era. The individuality who became the Buddha at that time had not already been a Buddha. Buddha, that prince who gave humanity the doctrine of compassion, had not been born in that age as Buddha. For Buddha does not signify an individuality; Buddha is a rank of honour. This Buddha was born as a Bodhisattva and was elevated to the Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, while he sat absorbed in meditation under the bodhi tree and brought down from the spiritual heights into the physical world the doctrine of compassion. A Bodhisattva he had previously been—that is, in his previous incarnations—and then he became a Buddha. But the situation is such that the position of a Bodhisattva—that is of a teacher of humanity in physical form—became thereby vacant for a certain period of time, and had to be filled again. As the Bodhisattva who had incarnated at that time ascended in the twenty-ninth year of his life to the Buddha, the rank of the Bodhisattva was at once transferred to another individuality. Thus we must speak of a successor of the Bodhisattva who had now risen to the rank of Buddha. The successor to the Gautama-Buddha-Bodhisattva was that individuality who incarnated a hundred years before Christ as Jeshu ben Pandira, as a herald of the Christ in the physical body.

He is now the Bodhisattva of humanity until he in his turn advances to the rank of Buddha after 3,000 years, reckoned from the present time. In other words, he will require exactly 5,000 years to rise from a Bodhisattva to a Buddha. He who has been incarnated nearly every century since that time, is now also already incarnated, and will be the real herald of the Christ in etheric raiment, just as he prophesied the physical appearance of the Christ.

And even many of us will ourselves experience the fact that, during the 1930's, there will be persons—and more and more, later in the century—who will behold the Christ in etheric raiment.

Spiritual Science exists to prepare for this and everyone who works at the task of Spiritual Science shares in making this preparation.

The manner in which humanity is taught by its Leaders, but especially by a Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, changes greatly from epoch to epoch.

Spiritual Science could not have been taught in the Greco-Roman epoch as it is taught today; this would not have been understood by anyone at that time. In that period, the Christ Being had to make manifest in physically visible form the goal of evolution, and only thus could He then work. Spiritual research spreads this teaching ever increasingly among human beings, and they will come to understand more and more the Christ Impulse, until the Christ Himself enters into them.

Today it is possible by means of the physically uttered word, in concepts and ideas, by means of thinking, to make the goal understandable and to influence men's souls in a good way, in order to fire them with enthusiasm for aesthetic and moral ideals. But the speech of today will be superseded in later periods of time by forces capable of a mightier stimulation than is possible at present by means of speech alone. Then will speech, the word, release powers conveying feelings of the heart from soul to soul, from master to pupil, from the Bodhisattva to all those who do not turn away from him. It will then be possible for speech to be the bearer of aesthetic feelings. But the dawn of a new epoch is needed for this. In our time it would not be possible even for the Bodhisattva himself to exert such influences through the larynx as will then be possible.

And during the final period of time, before the great War of All against All, the situation will be such that, as speech is at present the bearer of thoughts and conceptions and as it will later be the bearer of emotions, so will it then carry the moral element, the moral impulses, transmitting these from soul to soul. At present the word cannot have a moral influence. Such words can by no means be produced by our larynx as it is today. But such a spiritual power will one day exist. Words will be spoken through which the human being will receive moral power. Three thousand years after our present time the Bodhisattva we have spoken of will become the Buddha, and his teaching will then cause will impulses to stream directly into humanity. He will be the one whom the ancients foresaw: the Buddha Maitreya, a Bringer of Good.

He has the mission of preparing humanity in advance so that it may understand the true Christ Impulse. His mission is to direct men's gaze more and more to what they can love, to bring it about that what they can spread abroad as a theory shall flow into a moral channel so that at length all that men can possess in the form of thoughts shall stream into the moral life. And, whereas it is still entirely possible today that a person may be very able intellectually but be immoral, we are approaching a time when it will be impossible for anyone to be at the same time intellectually shrewd and immoral. It will be impossible for mental shrewdness and immorality to go hand in hand.

This is to be understood in the following way. Those who have kept themselves apart, and have opposed the course of evolution, will be the ones who will then battle together, all against all. Even those who develop today the highest intelligence, if they do not develop further during the succeeding epochs in feeling and morality, will gain nothing from their cleverness. The highest intelligence is, indeed, developed in our epoch. It has reached its climax. But a man who has developed intelligence today and who neglects the possibilities of further evolution, will destroy himself by his own intelligence. This will then be like an inner fire consuming him, devouring him, making him so small and feeble that he will become stupid and be able to achieve nothing—a fire that will annihilate him in the epoch wherein the moral impulses will have reached their climax. Whereas a person can be very dangerous today by means of his immoral shrewdness, he will then be without power to harm. Instead of this power, the soul will then possess in ever increasing measure moral powers—indeed, moral powers such as a modern man cannot in the least conceive. The highest power and morality are needed to receive the Christ Impulse into ourselves so that it becomes power and life in us.

Thus we see that Spiritual Science has the task of planting in the present stage of the evolution of humanity the seeds for its future evolution. Of course, we must take into account in connection with Spiritual Science also what has to be considered in connection with the whole of creation—that is, that errors may occur. But even one who cannot as yet enter into the higher worlds can make adequate tests and see whether here and there the truth is proclaimed: the details must be compatible. Test what is proclaimed, all the individual data which are brought together regarding the evolution of the human being, the separate appearances of the Christ, and the like, and you will see that things mutually confirm one another. This is the evidence of truth which is available even to the person who does not yet see into the higher worlds. One can be quite assured: for those who are willing to test things, the doctrine of the Christ reappearing in the spirit will alone prove to be true.

• 36. Thales: 640 to circa 543 BC., first Greek philosopher.

Since we spoke yesterday of the differentiation of the soul life of the human being into three parts—the realm of concepts, or of thought, the realm of emotions, and the realm of will impulses—it should be interesting to us now to raise the question: How can self-discipline, the nurture of the soul life, set to work in the appropriate way to develop and to cultivate these three parts of the soul life? Here we shall begin with our life of will, our will impulses, and shall ask ourselves: What characteristics must we specially cultivate if we wish to work in a beneficial way on our will life?

Most beneficial of all in our will nature is the influence of a life directed in its entire character towards a comprehension of karma. We might also say a soul life which strives to develop, as its primary characteristic, serenity and acceptance of our destiny. And what better way can one find of developing this acceptance, this calmness of soul in the presence of one's destiny, than by making karma an actual content in one's life?

What do we mean by this? It means that—not merely theoretically but in a living way—when our own sorrow or the sorrow of another comes upon us, when we experience joy or the heaviest blow of fate, we shall really be fully aware that, in a certain higher sense, we ourselves have given the occasion for this painful blow of fate: this means developing such a mood that we accept an experience of joy with gratitude, but are also clearly aware, especially in regard to joy, that we must not go to excess, since this is perilous. If we desire to progress in our development, we can conceive joy in the following way. For the most part, joy is something which points to a future destiny, not to one already past. In human life joy is usually something one has not deserved through previous actions. When we investigate karma by occult means, we always discover that in most cases joy has not been earned, and we should accept it gratefully as sent to us by the gods, as a gift of the gods, and to say to ourselves: The joy which comes to meet us today ought to kindle in us the will to work in such a way as to take into ourselves the forces streaming to us through this joy, and to apply these usefully. We must look upon joy as a sort of prepayment on account for the future.

In the case of pain, on the other hand, we have usually merited this, and we always find the cause in our present life or in earlier lives. And we must then realise with the utmost clarity that we have often failed to conduct ourselves in our external life in accordance with this karmic mood. We are not able to conduct ourselves always in external life in the presence of what causes us pain in such a way that our conduct shall seem to be an acceptance of our destiny. We do not generally have an insight into such a thing at once—into the law of destiny. But, even though we are not able to conduct ourselves outwardly in such a way, yet the principal thing is that we shall do this inwardly.

And even if we have conducted ourselves outwardly in accordance with this karmic mood, yet we should say to ourselves in the depths of our souls that we ourselves have been the cause of all such things. Suppose, for instance, that someone strikes us, that he beats us with a stick. In such a case it is generally characteristic for a person to ask: ‘Who is it that strikes me?’ No one says in such a case: ‘It is I that beat myself.’ Only in the rarest cases do people say that they punish themselves. And yet it is true that we ourselves lifted the stick against another person in days gone by. Yes, it is you yourself who then raised the stick. When we have to get rid of a hindrance, this is karma. It is karma when others hold something against us. It is we ourselves who cause something to happen to us as recompense for something we have done. And thus we come to a right attitude toward our life, to a broadening of our self, when we say: ‘Everything that befalls us comes from ourselves. Our own action is fulfilled outwardly even when it seems as if someone else performed it.’

If we develop such a way of viewing things, then our serenity, our acceptance of our karma in all occurrences, strengthens our will. We grow stronger in facing life with serenity, never weaker. Through anger and impatience we become weak. In the face of every occurrence we are strong when we are serene. On the contrary, we become continually weaker in will through moroseness and an unnatural rebellion against destiny.

Of course, we must view within a broad compass what we consider as destiny. We must conceive this destiny of ours in such a way that we say to ourselves, for instance, that the development of precisely one power or another at a certain period of one's life belongs also to a person's karma. And mistakes are often made just here in the education of children. Here karma comes into contact with the problem of education, for education is destiny, the karma of the human being in youth.

We weaken the will of someone when we expect him to learn something, to do something for which his capacities are not yet adequate. In educating one must come to see clearly in advance what is suitable for each stage of life in accordance with the universal karma of humanity, so that the right thing may be done. Doing the wrong thing is raising a rebellion against destiny, against its laws, and is associated with enormous weakening of the will. It is not possible to discuss here how a weakening of the will is associated with all premature awakening of the sensual appetites and passions. It is the prematurely awakened appetites, instincts and passions which are especially subject to this law. For making premature use of the bodily organs is contrary to destiny. All that is directly against the karma of humanity, all actions opposing the existing arrangements of nature, are associated with a weakening of the will.

Since people have been for a long time without any true fundamental principles of education, there are many persons in the world now who did not pass through their youth in the right way. If humanity does not determine to direct what is most important of all, the education of youth, according to Spiritual Science, a race will arise with ever weaker wills—and this not in a merely external sense. This takes a deep hold of the life of the human being. Ask a number of people how they came into their present occupations. You may be sure that most of them will answer: ‘Well, we don't know; we have in some way been pushed into this situation.’ This feeling that one has been pushed into something, has been driven into it, this feeling of discontent, is also a sign of weakness of will.

Now, when this weakness of will is brought about in the manner described, still other results follow from this for the human soul, especially when the weakness of will is evoked in such a way that states of anxiety, of fear, of despair are produced at a youthful age. It will be increasingly necessary for human beings to have a fundamental understanding of the higher laws in order to overcome states of despair, for it is precisely despair which is to be expected when we do not proceed in accordance with knowledge of the spirit.

By means of a monistic and materialistic world view it is possible to maintain only two generations of persons with strong wills. Materialism can satisfy just two generations: the one that founded the conception and the pupils who have received it from the founders. This is the peculiarity of the monistic and materialistic world view: the one who works in the laboratory or the workshop and who founded the view, whose powers are fully occupied and activated by what he is building up in his mind, experiences an inner satisfaction. But one who merely associates himself with these theories, who takes over a materialism ready-made, will not be able to achieve this inner satisfaction; and then despair will work back upon the culture of the will, and evoke weakness of will. Weakening of the will, human beings lacking energy, will be the results of this world view.

The second of the three aspects of the super-sensible life we mentioned yesterday is that of the emotions. What affects the emotions favourably?

If we take the utmost pains to acquire an attentive attitude of mind, a marked attentiveness to the events in our surroundings—and do not imagine that this attentiveness is very generally and strongly developed by people—this can be of great value to us. I must repeatedly mention a single illustration. In a certain country the order of the examinations for teachers was once altered, and for this reason all the school teachers had to sit the examinations again. The examiner had to test both old and young teachers. The young ones could be tested on the basis of what they had learned in the teachers' colleges. But how should he test the old teachers? He decided to ask them about nothing except the subjects which they had themselves been teaching year after year in their own classes, and the result showed that very many of them had no notion of the very subjects they themselves had been teaching!

This attentiveness, this habit of following with vital interest the things that occur in one's environment, is most beneficial especially in the cultivation of the emotions.

Now, the emotions, like everything else in the soul, are connected in a certain way with the will; and, when we influence our emotional life unfavourably, we may thus indirectly influence our will impulses. We nurture our emotions favourably when we place ourselves under the law of karma in connection with our anger and our passions, when we hold fast to karma. And this we find in what occurs in our environment. We find it, for example, when anyone does the opposite of what we had expected. We may then say to ourselves: ‘All right; that is simply what he is doing!’ But we may also become angry and violent, and this is a sign of weakness of will.

Outbursts of violent temper hinder the right development of the emotions and also the will, and also have a far more extensive influence, as we can see at once. Now, anger is something that a person does not by any means have under his control. Only gradually can he master the habit of becoming angry, and one must have patience with oneself. To anyone who believes he can achieve this with a turn of the hand I must repeat the story of a teacher who took very much to heart the task of ridding his pupils of anger. When he was faced by the fact, that after constant efforts, a boy still became angry, he himself became so angry that he threw the ink bottle at the child's head. A person who permits himself to do such a thing must think for many, many weeks about karma.

What this signifies will become clear to us if we take this occasion to look a little more deeply into the life of the human soul. There are two poles in the soul life, the life of will on the one hand and that of thoughts, of conceptions, on the other. The emotions, the feelings of the heart, are in the middle. Now, we know that the life of man alternates between sleeping and waking; and, while the human being is awake, his life of thoughts and conceptions is especially active. For the fact that the will is not very wide awake can become clear to anyone who observes closely, how a will impulse comes about. We must first have a thought, a concept; only then does the will thrust upward from the depths of the soul. The thought evokes the will impulse. When the human being is awake, he is awake in thought, not in will.

But occult science teaches us that when we sleep, everything is reversed. Then the will is awake and is very active, and thought is inactive. This cannot be known by the human being in a normal state of consciousness, for the simple reason that he knows things only by means of his thoughts and these are asleep. Thus he does not observe that his will is active. When he attains clairvoyance and arrives at the world of imaginative representations, he then observes that the will awakes the moment thinking falls asleep. And the will slips into the pictures he perceives and awakens these. The pictures are then woven out of will. Thus the thoughts are then asleep but the will is awake.

But this being awake in our will is connected with our total human nature in a manner entirely different from the way our thoughts are connected. Depending on whether the person works or does not work, is well or ill, is serene or hot-tempered, the will becomes healthy or unhealthy. And according as our will is healthy or unhealthy it works in the night on the condition of our life, even into the physical body. Very much depends upon whether one develops a mood of serenity during the day, acceptance of his destiny, and thus prepares his will so that this will may be said to develop a pleasant warmth, a feeling of well-being, or whether, on the other hand, he develops anger. This unhealthiness of the will streams into the body during the state of sleep at night and is the cause of numerous illnesses, whose causes are sought for but not found because the resulting physical illnesses appear only after the lapse of years or even decades. Only one who surveys great stretches of time can see in this way the connection between conditions of the soul and of the body. Even for the sake of bodily health, therefore, the will must be disciplined.

We can also influence our emotions through serenity and acceptance of our karma so that they work beneficially even upon our bodily Organisation. On the other hand, in no other way do we injure this Organisation more than through apathy, lack of interest in what is occurring around us. This apathy is spreading more and more; it is the reason why so few persons take an interest in—spiritual things. It may be supposed that objective reasons lead to the adoption of a materialistic view of life. There are really by no means such great objective reasons for a materialistic view of life. No, it is apathy; no one can be a materialist without being apathetic. It is a lack of attention to our surroundings. Anyone who observes his environment with alert interest is confronted on all sides with what can only be harmonised by spiritual knowledge. But apathy deadens the emotions and leads to weakness of will.

Furthermore, special significance attaches to the characteristic called obstinacy—the attitude of mind that insists inflexibly upon one thing or another. Unhealthy emotions can also bring about obstinacy. These things are often like the serpent that bites his own tail. All that we have mentioned may be caused by obstinacy. Even persons who go through life very inattentively may be very obstinate. Persons who are altogether weak-willed are often discovered to be obstinately persisting in something when we had not expected it, and the weakness of will becomes constantly more marked if we do not strive to overcome obstinacy. It is precisely in persons with weak wills that we find this quality of obstinacy. On the other hand, when we endeavour to avoid the development of obstinacy, we shall see that in every instance we have improved our emotions and strengthened our wills. Every time that we actually are goaded by an impulse to be obstinate but refuse to yield to it, we become stronger for the task of confronting life. We shall observe the fruits if we proceed systematically against this fault; through struggling to overcome obstinacy we attain to inner satisfaction. The nurturing of our emotions specially depends upon our struggling in every way to overcome obstinacy, apathy, lack of interest. In other words, interest and attentiveness in relation to the environment foster both the feelings and the will. Apathy and obstinacy have the opposite effect.

For a sound emotional life, we have the fine word ingenuity. * [Sinnigkeit, the gift or capacity of inventive or creative fantasy.] Being creatively fanciful means that something ingenious occurs to one. Children ought to play in such a way that the fantasy is stimulated, that the spontaneous activity of their souls is stimulated, so that they have to reflect about their play. They ought not to arrange building blocks according to patterns: this merely develops pedantry, not creative fantasy. We are developing creative fantasy when we let children do all sorts of things in sand, when we take them into the woods and let them form little baskets out of burs, and then stimulate them to make other things of burs stuck together. Things which cause a certain inventive talent to expand nourish creative fantasy. Strange as it may seem, such cultivation of creative fantasy brings serenity of soul, inner harmony, and contentment,

Moreover, when we go for a walk with a child, it is good to leave him free to do whatever he will, provided he does not behave too badly. And, when the child does anything, we should show our pleasure, our participation and interest; we should not be unresponsive or lacking in interest in what the child produces out of his own inner nature. Even when instructing a child, we should connect what we teach him with the forms and processes of nature. When children reach an older stage, we should not then occupy them with riddles or puzzles taken from newspapers; this leads only to pedantry. On the contrary, observation of nature offers us the opposite of what is afforded by the press for the cultivation of the emotional life. A serene heart, a harmonious life of feeling, determines not only mental health but also bodily health, even though long stretches of time may intervene between cause and effect.

We come now to the third aspect of the super-sensible life, to thinking. This, we nurture and sharpen, especially by the development of characteristics which seem to have nothing whatever to do with thinking, with concepts. The best method of developing good thinking is by complete absorption and insight, not so much through logical exercises but by observing one thing and another, using for this purpose processes in nature, in order to penetrate into hidden mysteries. Through absorption in problems of nature and of humanity, through the endeavour to understand complex personalities, through the intensifying of attentiveness, we grow wise. Absorption means striving to unravel something by thinking, by conceiving. In this connection, we shall be able to see that such mental absorption has a wonderfully good effect in later life.

The following example is taken from life. A little boy showed his mother remarkable aspects of his observation, which were associated with extraordinary absorption and capacity for insight. He said: ‘You know, when I walk on, the streets and see persons and animals, it seems as if I had to enter into the persons and the animals. It happened that a poor woman met me, and I entered into her, and this was terribly painful to me, very distressing.’ (The child had not seen any sort of destitution at home, but lived in altogether good circumstances.) ‘And then I entered into a horse and then into a pig.’ He described this in detail, and was stimulated to an extraordinary degree of compassion, to special deeds of pity, through feeling union with the life of others. Whence does this come, this expansion of one's understanding for other beings? If we think the matter over in this case, we are led back into the preceding incarnation, when the person in question had cultivated absorption in things, in the secrets of things, as we have described.

But we do not have to wait till the next incarnation for the results which follow the cultivation of absorption. These manifest themselves even in a single life. When we are induced in earliest youth to develop all of this, we shall develop in later life a clear, transparent thinking, whereas otherwise we develop a scrappy, illogical thinking. It is a fact that truly spiritual principles can advance us in our course of life.

During recent decades there have been few truly spiritual fundamental principles of education, almost none at all. And now we are experiencing the results. There is an extraordinary amount of wrong thinking in our day. One can suffer the pains of martyrdom from the terribly illogical life of the world. Anyone who has acquired a certain clairvoyance does not simply feel that one thing is correct and another incorrect, but he suffers actual pain when confronted by illogical thinking, and a sense of well-being in connection with clear, transparent thinking. This signifies that he has acquired a feeling for such things, and this enables him to make decisions. And this brings far truer differentiations when one has actually reached this stage. It gives a far truer discrimination between truth and untruth. This seems incredible, but it is true. When something erroneous is said in the presence of a clairvoyant person, the pain which rises in him shows him that this is illogical, erroneous. Illogical thinking is extraordinarily widespread; at no time has illogical thinking been so widespread as precisely in our time, in spite of the fact that people pride themselves so much on their logical thinking. Here is an example that may well seem somewhat crass, but it is typical of the habit of passing through experiences without interest or thought.

I was once traveling from Rostock to Berlin. Into my compartment entered two persons, a gentleman and a lady. I sat in one comer and wished only to observe. The gentleman was very soon behaving in a strange manner, though he was otherwise probably a well-educated person. He lay down, sprang up again in five minutes; then again he groaned pitiably. Since the lady thought he was ill, she was seized by pity, and very soon a conversation was in full course between them. She told him that she had clearly observed that he was ill, but she knew what it meant to be ill, for she was ill also. She said she had a basket with her in which she had everything that was curative for her. She said: ‘I can cure anything, for I have the remedy for everything. And just think what a misfortune has befallen me! I have come from the far interior of Russia all the way here to the Baltic Sea, in order to recuperate and to do something for my ailment, and, just as I arrive, I find that I have left at home one of my important remedies. Now I must turn back at once, and this hope also has been in vain.’

The gentleman then narrated his sufferings, and she gave him a remedy for each of his illnesses, and he promised to do everything, making notes about all. I think there were eleven different prescriptions. She then began to enumerate all of her illnesses one by one; and he began to show his knowledge of what would cure them: that for one ailment she could be helped in a certain sanatorium, and for another in another sanatorium. She, in turn, wrote down all the addresses and was only afraid that the pharmacies might be closed for Sunday when she arrived in Berlin. These two persons never for one moment noticed the strange contradiction that each knew only what might help the other one, but for himself and herself knew no means of help. This experience gave these two educated persons the possibility of bathing in a sea of nonsense that streamed forth from each of them.

Such things must be clearly seen when we demand that self-knowledge shall give insight. We must demand of self-knowledge that it shall develop coherence in thinking, but especially absorption in the matter in hand. All these things work together in the soul. Scrappy thinking has the inevitable result, even though only after a long time, of making the person morose, sullen, hypochondriacal about everything, and frequently we do not know where the causes of this are to be found. Insufficient cultivation of concentration and insight makes one sullen, morose, hypochondriacal. What is so absolutely essential to thinking seems to have nothing to do with it. All obstinacy, all self-seeking, have a destructive effect upon thinking. All characteristics connected with obstinacy and selfishness—such as ambition, vanity all these things that seem to tend in a very different direction make our thinking unsound, and act unfavourably upon our mood of soul. We must seek, therefore, to overcome obstinacy, self-seeking, egoism; and cultivate, on the contrary, a certain absorption in things and a certain self-sacrificing attitude toward other beings. Absorption, a self-sacrificing attitude, in regard to the most insignificant objects and occurrences have a favourable effect upon thinking and upon one's mood. In truth, self-seeking and egoism bring their own punishment because the self-seeking person becomes more and more discontented, complains more and more that he comes off badly. When anyone feels this way about himself, he ought to place himself under the law of karma and ask himself, when he is discontented: ‘What self-seeking has brought this discontent upon me?’

In just this way we can describe how we may develop and how injure the three parts of the soul life, and this is extraordinarily important. We see, therefore, that Spiritual Science lays deep hold upon our life, for true observation of spiritual principles may lead us to self-education, and this is of the most vital importance and will become of ever-increasing significance since the time in man's evolution has passed when human beings were led by the gods from above, from the higher worlds. In ever-increasing measure, men will have to do things for themselves, without being directed and led.

With regard to what the Masters have taught about our working our way upward to Christ, Who will appear even in this century on the astral plane, a greater understanding of this advance for humanity can be achieved only in this way: that the human being shall ever increasingly stimulate himself. Just as we explained to you yesterday that human beings gradually work their way upward to Christ, so must we gradually perfect in freedom our thinking, feeling, and will impulses. And this can be achieved only through self-mastery, self-observation. Just as in earlier times, in ancient clairvoyance, the impulses were given to men from above by the gods, so will man determine his own way in later times through the new clairvoyance. This is why Anthroposophy appears precisely in our time, so that mankind may learn to develop soul characteristics in the right way. In this way man learns to meet what the future will bring. Only in this way can we understand what must one day appear: that is, that those who are shrewd and immoral will be cast out and rendered harmless.

The characteristics mentioned are important for every human being. But they are of such a nature that they are especially important to those who are determined to strive to reach rapidly in rational ways those characteristics which are to become more and more necessary for humanity. For this reason it is the Leaders of human beings who strive to achieve this development in very special measure in themselves, because the highest attainments can be reached only by means of the highest attributes.

To the highest degree of all is this development carried through, for example, by that individuality who once ascended to the rank of a Bodhisattva, when the preceding Bodhisattva became a Buddha, and who has, since then, been incarnated once in nearly every century; who lived as Jeshu ben Pandira, herald of the Christ, a hundred years before Christ. Five thousand years are needed for his ascent to the rank of a Buddha, and this Buddha will then be the Maitreya Buddha. He will be a Bringer of the Good, because (as can be seen by those who are sufficiently clairvoyant) he succeeds, by most intense self-discipline, in developing to the utmost those powers which cause to emanate from him such magical moral forces as enable him to impart to souls through the word itself heart forces and moral impulses. We cannot as yet develop on the physical plane any words capable of doing this. Even the Maitreya Buddha could not do this at present—could not develop such magical words. Today only thoughts can be imparted by means of words.

How is he preparing himself? By developing to the highest possible degree those qualities which are called good. The Bodhisattva develops in the highest degree what we may describe as devotion, serenity in the presence of destiny, attentiveness to all occurrences in one's surroundings, devotion to all living beings, and insight. And, although many incarnations will be needed for the future Buddha, yet he devotes himself during his incarnations primarily to giving attention to what occurs even though what he now does is relatively little, since he is utterly devoted to the preparation for his future mission.

This will be achieved through the fact that a special law exists with regard to just this Bodhisattva. This law we shall understand if we take account of the possibility that a complete revolution in the soul's life may occur at a certain age.

The greatest of such transformations that ever occurred took place at the baptism by John. What occurred there was that the ego of Jesus, in the thirtieth year of His life, abandoned the flesh and another ego entered: the Ego of the Christ, the Leader of the Sun Beings.

A like transformation will be experienced by the future Maitreya Buddha. But he experiences such a revolution in his incarnations quite differently. The Bodhisattva patterns his life on that of Christ, and those who are initiated know that he manifests in every incarnation very special characteristics.

It will always be noted that, in the period between his thirtieth and thirty-third years, a mighty revolution occurs in his life. There will then be an interchange of souls, though not in so mighty a manner as in the case of Christ. The ‘ego’ which has until then given life to the body passes out at that time, and the Bodhisattva becomes, in a fundamental sense, altogether a different person from what he has been hitherto, even though the ego does not cease and is not replaced by another, as was true of the Christ.

This is what all occultists call attention to: that he cannot be recognised before this time, before this transformation. Up to this time—although he will be absorbed intensely in all things—his mission will not be especially conspicuous; and even though the revolution is certain to occur, no one can ever say what will then happen to him. The earlier period of youth is always utterly unlike that into which he is transformed between his thirtieth and thirty-third years.

Thus does he prepare for a great event. This will be as follows: The old ego passes out and another ego then enters. And this may be such an individuality as Moses, Abraham, Elijah. This ego will then be active for a certain time in this body; thus can that take place which must take place in order to prepare the Maitreya Buddha. For the rest of his life he lives with this ego which enters at that moment.

What then occurs is like a complete interchange. Indeed, what is needed for the recognition of the Bodhisattva can occur. And it is then known that, when he appears after 3,000 years, and has been elevated to the rank of Maitreya Buddha, his ‘ego’ will remain in him but will be permeated inwardly by still another individuality. And this will occur precisely in his thirty-third year, in the year in which, in the case of Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. And then will he come forth as the Teacher of the Good, as a great Teacher who will prepare the true teaching of Christ and the true wisdom of Christ in a manner entirely different from what is possible today.

Spiritual Science must prepare that which will one day take place upon our earth.

Now, it is possible for anyone in our time to cultivate those characteristics which are injurious to the emotional life, such as apathy, etc. But this results in a laxity in the emotions, a laxity in the inner soul life, and such a person will no longer be able to carry out his task in life, will no longer be able to fulfil it. For this reason everyone may consider it a special blessing if he can acquire for himself a knowledge of what is to occur in the future. Whoever has the opportunity today to devote himself to spirit knowledge, enjoys a gift of grace from karma.

For having a knowledge of these things gives a foundation for security, devotion, and peace in our souls, for serenity, confidence and hope in meeting what faces us in the coming millennia of the evolution of humanity. All who can know these things should consider this a special good fortune, something which evokes the highest powers of the human being, which can enkindle everything in his soul that seems at the point of being extinguished or is in a state of disharmony, or approaching destruction. Enthusiasm, fire, rapture become also health and happiness in outer life.

He who earnestly acquaints himself with these things, who can develop the necessary absorption in these things, will surely experience what they can bring to him in happiness and inner harmony. And, if anyone in our Society does not yet find this demonstrated in himself, he should for once accept such knowledge and say:

“If I have not yet felt this, the fault lies in me. It is my duty to steep myself in today's mysteries. It is my duty to feel that as a human being, I am one link in a chain which has to stretch from the beginning to the end of evolution, in which are linked together all human beings, individualities, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Christ. I must say to myself: ‘To feel that I am a link in it is to be conscious of my true worth as a human being.’ This I must sense; this I must feel.”

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science is based on occult science, as we have often emphasised, which brings us knowledge of the forces underlying the various epochs, and also enables us to understand what is at work in the cultural periods of our own epoch. So we must speak of these inner forces of our own time, whenever and wherever we meet, in order to understand the tasks of Spiritual Science in relation to what is at work beneath the surface of life, and so that occult research can help us direct our lives in harmony with the great goals of mankind.

In order to speak about contemporary occult trends it would be a good thing to start from the point where deep, occult research can lead us to what is also taking place in the super-sensible world in our time. By way of introduction we must also take into account what we have right in front of us at present, though we can only give a general sketch of it and not go into any details. Many things can only be spoken of without embarrassment in Anthroposophical gatherings, for ours is a time of dogmatism and abstraction. The strange thing is that this basic characteristic is not recognised in exoteric life, and people believe generally that their thoughts and actions are free from dogma, when in fact they are extremely dogmatic. They think they are basing themselves on reality, although they are really lost in the wildest abstractions. Therefore it is worthwhile bringing Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science, with its realities, to the attention of wider circles, to open up the possibility for an understanding of our epoch, though it will probably be a long time before the outside world wants to develop a deeper understanding for these things. We do not see how tied up in dogmas and abstractions our civilisation is, until we stop looking at it from the abstract point of view and begin seeing it in a really living way. One then finds a trend of thought whose chief characteristic consists in the laying down of ready-made dogmas that enlightened people are required to accept, whilst imagining they are being genuinely discriminating. Something of the sort is evident in the so-called monistic movement, though it is not justified in calling itself monistic. It gets its chief dogmas from modern natural science, in fact that particular branch of it which, strictly speaking, likes drawing its knowledge by means of purely external methods. If this natural science were to keep to its own field of activity, it could do important work; instead of this it leads to the formation of a new religion. Men take the facts of materialistic natural science and turn them into abstract dogmas. And anyone who is of the opinion that he is right because he is convinced of these dogmas himself, believes that the others have lagged a long way behind. They completely ignore the whole life of human individuality, and strive only to cram their heads with what the external world outlook considers as dogmas, and to regard the conclusions drawn from abstractions as the most important thing. This leads to the formation of sects whose adherents cling to expert opinions, principles and dogmas which they then advocate as the thing.

All that comprises the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement represents the opposite of this. This movement does not set out to follow a number of doctrines but to place the worth of the human individuality in the foreground.

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science leads to the kind of social life that is based on a mutual interchange founded on the sort of confidence that each personality has in the other. Human beings should and will come together who have trust in one another. And in joint tasks one ought to say: You are the right person, not because you adhere to this or the other principle, but because you can achieve this or that and do not disturb the other people in the course of your work. Nothing could be worse than this, that the bad modern habit of forming sects should take hold of Anthroposophical life. It is not only when you are in full agreement with your neighbour that you should listen to him, but, if you are not, you should still reserve freedom and mobility for yourself and for him, and, with this recognition of individualities, work educationally in the Anthroposophical movement. Our time has very little understanding for this sort of thing. It aims at generalities. What is right for one can make the other man appear a fool. In the Anthroposophical movement we must make a clean sweep of that. If this attitude were not prevalent in the outside world of materialism, men would hasten of their own accord to understand human individualities in our own way, and then a scientific spirituality would soon appear that would be bound to lead to a world conception of a spiritual kind. But men are rigid with dogmas and therefore cannot reach it.

If you look into the principles that are upheld in monistic gatherings, you would soon see that none of these principles and dogmas are based on the outlook and results of present day science but on those of fifteen to twenty years ago. Thus, for instance, a personality distinguished in modern scientific circles said at a recent scientific meeting in Koenigsberg: ‘Facts of physics are all tending in a certain direction. People always used to speak of the ether as being in matter and outside, and it was taken for granted without taking the other known material sciences into account. But, after all, this has gradually met with justified doubt, and therefore we must now ask what the physicists should assume to be there in place of the ether.’ The answer was: Purely mathematical constructions, Hertz' and Maxwell' equations, conceptual formulae. According to these, light does not spread through space by means of ether vibrations, but, assuming them not to be there, it overcomes the non-material space as a vacuum in the sense of the equations referred to, so that according to this the transmission of light appears to be bound to concepts and ideas. It could quite easily happen that anyone who pointed to such hypotheses of the most up-to-date science in a monistic meeting could be mistaken for a mad theosophist, making the absurd proposition that thoughts are the bearers of light. Yet Max Planck³⁷ of Berlin, a respected authority on natural science, declared this to be his scientific opinion. If, therefore the monists wanted to make progress in science, they would also have to accept this opinion of the experts. As this is not the case, a monistic religion will only be possible if its supporters believe they have a scientific basis, but do not know that their assumptions have long been superseded. People who think in a monistic way are only held together by the results of so-called intellectual research and its world conception, or the biased dogmas arising out of this. Whereas the Anthroposophically orientated theosophist complies with facts that cannot deprive anyone of his freedom or lead to the formation of sects, and each individuality can remain free.

An important aspect of the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement is that it gives an impulse for self-education in a way that hardly has its equal at the present time. We must understand what we ourselves are as a movement, and realise that this movement is based on foundations that can only be found within this movement and nowhere outside.

Facts of real life can show us this. There are many people who think we ought to take what Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science has to offer and give it out in philosophical terms, in the style of official science, to make Spiritual Science more acceptable to the representatives and followers of officialdom. But that cannot be done, because it is impossible to make compromises between the occult stream of Spiritual Science and any other movement that arises out of the characteristic outlook of our times, like the monistic one, for instance—that is, one that has a completely different basis. To bring about compromises between the two, even if only in form, is impossible. It is much more a matter of aiming at bringing a new impulse into the culture of the times. The others cannot even understand or explain their own basic facts, nor judge them one single step ahead, because they lack the courage to draw the conclusions arising from these facts. On closer examination we find incomplete thought processes in every sect, including scientific circles, and Spiritual Science must see these for what they are, for we know that a half truth or a quarter truth is worse than a total fallacy because it deceives the outside world which is not competent to judge. The Anthroposophist must enter the very nerve of the spiritual movement in order to understand the materialistic movement that sets the pace in the outside world, because it sometimes works with facts that are tending in the direction of spiritual truth, but are not fully developed.

If the medical branch of natural science means to go seriously into bodily research, it cannot ignore the sphere, the concepts and the results of occult investigation. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud³⁸ in Vienna, which enjoys a large and still growing circulation, gives us an instructive example of the difficulties arising in this sphere. It began by investigating the life of the soul in both the physically and the mentally ill, in an attempt to discover certain psychic causes there, in the long-forgotten early years, for example, because there was a definite feeling that what is still there in the unconscious has its lasting effect on later life too. An ingenious doctor of this school, Dr. Breuer,³⁹ tried to put the patients into a condition of hypnosis, and then let them make a kind of confession, so that he could probe into the depths of their souls. You all know that it is a great relief to talk about what is oppressing you. People were often cured by these hypnotic confessions, or they were well on the way to it. Even without hypnosis Freud often achieved the same results by means of well chosen questions. Apart from this he discovered that happenings of a largely unconscious kind are revealed in dream life, and out of this a kind of dream interpretation arose in the school of psychoanalysis. If someone were now to say that here is a good opportunity to strike a compromise between Spiritual Science and the results of these efforts, such an opinion can only be called a fallacy, because despite the quarter truth contained in it he would soon become aware that the direction in question leads to the wildest errors and that it would be preferable to keep to purely materialistic interpretations. Spiritual Science, when properly understood, has to reject such things. The point is that the ideas about the soul's dream life and the resulting theory are steeped in coarse, sense-bound thinking, and it is therefore not possible on this basis to turn it into a spiritual truth. For in order to do that one needs the spiritual foundations that Spiritual Science has to offer, otherwise one gropes around in obscure hypotheses and theories and explains them in a materialistic way. And that is the way things have turned out in the Freudian school. They certainly got as far as the symbolism of dreams, but wove into them the thoughts of the materialistic age, whilst Schubert's⁴⁰ and Volkelt's⁴¹ correct conception could be started on in Leipzig but not developed. They thought of the dream as a symbol of sexual life, because our time is incapable of realising that this area is the lowest revelation of innumerable worlds that rise far above our world in spiritual significance. By so doing they are turning it into something that gives an irresponsible flavour to a whole field of investigation, and, in consequence, brings about the most serious errors. Therefore the only thing that Spiritual Science can say about the Freudian school is that it has to reject its research on the grounds that it is dilettante. If it would first of all make itself thoroughly acquainted with spiritual investigation, these truths would produce quite different results. People would then begin to see that our age is an intellectual age, an age of dogma, that drives people into a wild chaos of instincts and passions and is satisfied with what is merely intellectual and abstract.

In the example of the Freudian school therefore, we see an area of soul life being shown in a wrong light and dragged down by the worst kind of materialism by trying to relate all the phenomena to sex, a procedure of which one could say that it arose out of the personal inclination of the scientists themselves, only they are not conscious of it, and it is dilettante into the bargain.

We must feel how necessary it is that spiritual investigation rejects half and quarter truths and only adopts those it can defend with its own principles, for we realise that Spiritual Science can work out of its own strength. It is important to stress that my first books did not grow out of theosophy, yet people outside find it strange that I nevertheless became a theosophist later on. That is a short-sighted, narrow-minded view, however. The books have this about them that despite their strictly scientific attitude they do not have dealings with what is regarded as official science, or assume the style that believes itself capable of making general definitions.

Spiritual Science should draw abundant life from the foundations of occultism, make no compromises and show a courage that is lacking in the domains outside. Whoever refuses to make any compromises of this kind, acquires a reputation of being inadequate in the eyes of those people who always want one to give way, but do not do so themselves. As opposed to this, Spiritual Science stands in the world as a spiritual movement firmly established on its own basis, and its members must always be conscious of this fact, and see it to be a vital element of this spiritual movement. It sometimes happens that people with special interests come into Spiritual Science, but where Spiritual Science and spiritual investigations are concerned it is not a case of special interests. Each individual can follow these up for himself, and he should not expect Spiritual Science to follow after him. Spiritual Science must penetrate into our whole cultural situation and have the courage to carry out its task in life with consistency in an age that is justifiably called intellectual.

But do not let us imagine that this intellectuality ought to merge, as such, with spiritual life, for we have to take our start from facts that are reached by clairvoyant means. We find, then, that the life of the soul has three basic elements. There is, firstly, the life of concepts, intellectuality, which to begin with only comes to expression in perception. When we consider intellectuality by itself, we notice that it is bound in the widest sense to the material world from which man draws his mental images. These images themselves, of course, are super-sensible. From the very connection between the life of mental imagery and the life of perception we see that the former is connected with the physical plane. If we involve ourselves in difficult thoughts and think to such an extent that we get tired, then we sleep well, provided that only the life of thought and not the life of feeling was engaged in the activity. Therefore we can grasp the statement that the life of thought is a super-sensible process, and is connected with the next element, the astral world. It is from the astral plane that those forces come that awaken and maintain the life of thought in the human soul.

The second element consists of the waves of feeling that pass through our soul, such as pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sorrow, love, dislike, and so on. The flow of thought and feeling is intimately connected with our ego, and these rob us of our sleep because their emotional unrest prevents us entering the astral plane. We can understand therefore that this brings us into connection with lower Devachan, which does not accept our emotions if they are impure but rejects them from that part of the astral world that is lower Devachan.

Morality and will impulses are the third element. The man who can look back on good deeds in his day's review can experience a moment of bliss before falling asleep. He is in the pleasant situation in which he can say: If only it were possible to prolong it, to enjoy the enlivening power of it, and that it could take hold of our whole soul life as a fructifying force! This enables us to understand what occult investigation tell us: That will impulses refer us to higher Devachan, where they are accepted only if they issue from a pure will and are suitable for this spiritual world. Thus our life of mental images and concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral world, our life of feeling with lower Devachan and our life of will with higher Devachan.

In addition to these we have our life of sense perception on the physical plane. These four elements develop at a different rate in human incarnations during the various cultural epochs.

When we consider the occult background, we see how the life of perception comes to the fore in the Greco-Roman era, how the Greek and the Roman was completely attuned to the physical world that he esteemed so highly. Our time, the fifth cultural epoch, is that of thinking, of intellectuality. This is why the abstract sciences are flourishing. The coming sixth age will retain intellectual life, in the same way as we in the fifth have retained the life of perception, and will in addition express itself in the feeling life of the soul. The environment will affect people so that it causes them pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, to a degree that as yet can only be felt by the occultist who is capable of overcoming mere intellect, and understanding certain connections of life with real feeling, without lengthy logical reasoning. The occultist feels displeasure over illogical things, joy and peace of soul over logical things. If he defends something that he immediately sees to be right, he has to prove it nowadays with a lengthy argument, in order to be understood. The occultist feels pain especially vividly when he reads the newspaper, because it is just in the daily papers that one frequently finds illogicality incarnate. You have to read them, nevertheless—choosing as carefully as you can—in order to keep in touch with the outside world. You should not choose in the way the professor of the Chinese language did, who told his colleague one day, in a great state of agitation: I have just this moment discovered—it was the year 1870–71—that Germany has been at war with France for half a year, because I only read the Chinese newspapers.

In the last post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh era, the sense for morality will develop, that is, the sense for the will impulses. Remarkable progress will come about through this. Occult investigations, even those of the present-day, show us that someone can be very clever and intellectual without being moral. Nowadays intellectuality and morality exist alongside each other. Little by little, however, the curious fact will emerge that a person's cleverness will be killed off by his immorality, so that in the far future an immoral person will actually be stupid or will have to become so. A moral era is coming in which the morality of our whole soul life and the intellectuality of those later times will become one.

Although man has within his soul all the four elements mentioned, sense perception predominated over all others in the Greco-Roman era, and intellectuality is added to this to a greater degree in the present; in the one before the last, the sixth period, emotion will predominate, and in the seventh, the last cultural epoch, it will be morality, and in a way we can only dream of today. We cannot even imagine what it will be like as Socrates could, who considered that virtue could be both taught and learnt. All this, however, will become reality by the seventh epoch, for the tendencies that are already clearly perceptible in occultism foretell this.

Intellectuality, then, is the chief spiritual characteristic of our age, but there is a difference between the way it comes to expression in the materialistic thinking of the world and in Spiritual Science. Man is connected through his intellect with the astral plane, but he will only be conscious of this—and he will only make the right use of it—when he has developed clairvoyance. This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years. In bygone times, however, when man was mainly connected with the physical plane, Christ could only appear in physical incarnation. In the present age of the intellect He can appear only in etheric form. Spiritual Science wishes to prepare mankind for this in such a way that it acquires a proper understanding and makes proper use of the clairvoyant faculties that are slowly appearing and will be used for vision later on, in the course of natural development. And this will ensure that in the second half of our intellectual age the Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in His etheric form.

The age of feeling will develop the soul further in a different respect, enabling it to enter the lower Devachanic world in a conscious way. Christ will appear as a form of light to a number of human beings in the lower Devachanic world, revealing Himself through sound, and from His astral body of light He will fill their receptive souls with the Word that was active in astral form in the beginning, as is expressed by John in the opening words of his Gospel.

In the age of morality a number of human beings will perceive the Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true Ego that surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral impulses. Such is the connection between the impulses of the different cultural epochs and the soul of man. From higher and ever higher worlds will come the forces that flow into man and become active within him.

Perception in the physical world is wonderful indeed; even more wonderful is the intellect when it attains predominance and forms a connection with the astral world, and even greater still are the feelings and morality that are connected with the Devachanic world.

Thinking this through logically you will realise the logic in this course of development, because life confirms it on all sides. The Anthroposophist faces these stages of development consciously, not only in broad sweeps and universal truths but also in the individual details of human development. In the abuses of the outer world the striving towards dogma of the intellectual element is very prominent, but in spiritual knowledge the intellect has to become spiritualised so that it can understand the more advanced results of occult investigation. This is more clearly illuminated in the fact that in the Greco-Roman era, through the Mystery of Golgotha, we are presented in physical form with that which then developed further so that with its impact on the human soul it could lead humanity upwards. It is necessary above all that man learns to understand what this Christ Impulse signifies for our world. It has to be stressed that this Christ Impulse is a living reality that is streaming into mankind, and that Christ did not give the world a doctrine or a theory but the impulse for new life. Let us take a serious look at this.

Since the Saturn stage, throughout the Sun and Moon stage, man has developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. The ego could only appear on earth in a body that was sufficiently prepared for it and then develop further under the nurturing influence of the Christ Impulse because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is to us microcosmically. The four principles of the macrocosm are connected in manifold ways with our four lower principles including the most important of these, the ego. In our present cultural period the higher human principles can already be glimpsed in our development. Life-spirit, spirit-self and spirit-man will be developed in us out of the higher spirit worlds through the macrocosmic principles. Not through the fourth macrocosmic principle, however, but through the help of beings that have no macrocosmic significance of their own but only microcosmic significance, really working as teachers among mankind, as they have themselves advanced by one or more principles beyond man himself. On the other hand Christ is a macrocosmic being at the fourth stage of His macrocosmic development, as man is microcosmically at the fourth stage.

So you should keep macrocosmic and microcosmic principles apart, but be clear about the fact that the four first macrocosmic principles include of course all the higher microcosmic principles. Thus the microcosmic beings work as teachers and seek to carry mankind forward through their teaching, whereas Christ, working as a macrocosmic reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity, for He united Himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as very life.

The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the so-called Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in His full reality of being; again in the Christian era they point to Him as a power Who is now united with the earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas work both before and after Christ's physical life on earth. He, who was born as the son of a king in India 550 years before Christ, lived and taught for twenty-nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the earth in a body of flesh, but from then onwards he worked from the spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva became Buddha he was succeeded in that very moment by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the earth, for about the year 105 BC. there was living in Palestine a man still to this day defamed in rabbinical literature, Jeshu ben Pandira, and he was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an essentially different Being, in that when He reached the age of thirty He became the bearer of Christ at the baptism by John in the Jordan.

It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene⁴² teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew, and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature, although the information is either misleading or deliberately falsified. He bore within him the individuality of the new Bodhisattva and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew passed over to later pupils, and the content of the Gospel known by that name had already been in existence since the time of the first Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the ancient mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus the essential content of these mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What were previously only pictures from the mysteries, seeds as it were of subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the ceremonies of the ancient mysteries, before it became, once and once only, an actual event on the physical plane.

The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which cannot as yet be completed. Although its consummation can already be foreseen by clairvoyance, no larynx exists that is capable of producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental occultism, therefore, it can be said: Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next three thousand years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in the future, he becomes Buddha, his spoken words will contain the magic power of goodness. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come, will be a bringer of goodness by way of the word. He will then be able to teach men the real nature of the Christ Impulse, and in this age the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so can the Christ Mystery be truly understood.

• 37. Max Planck: 1858 – 1947, founder of the quantum theory. ‘Die Stellung der neureren Physik zur mechanischen Naturanschaung’ (The Position of Modern Physics with respect to the Mechanical World outlook), lecture held on 23.9.1910 at the 82nd session of German natural scientists and doctors in Konigsberg; Leipzig, 1910.
• 38. Sigmund Freud: 1856 – 1939, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 39. Dr. Breuer: Joseph Breuer, Viennese surgeon. See Rudolf Steiner ‘An Autobiography’, Steinerbooks, New York, 1977, and also lecture of 10th November 1917 in ‘Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy’, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1946.
• 40. Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert: 1780 – 1860, natural philosopher. ‘Die Geschichte der Seele’ (History of the Soul) Stuttgart. 1839.
• 41. Johann Volkelt: 1848 – 1930: ‘Die Traum-Phantasie’ (Dream Pictures) Stuttgart 1875. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘Riddles of Philosophy’, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 42. Essene teachings: Essenes, Jewish secret Order, about 150 BC. to 70 AD. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘The Fifth Gospel’; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1968.

Yesterday [Public lecture, Munich 19th November 1911, ‘From Paracelsus to Goethe’. (Not published in English.)⁴³ we heard that in still later epochs men will be able to behold Him in even higher forms in the aesthetic and moral spheres. But when we speak in this way of the Christ Impulse we are concerned with ideas which will be resolutely opposed above all by the churches of Christendom. Great and incisive measures have been and are necessary in the onward progress of human evolution in order to promote increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse. Hitherto, indeed, such understanding has been lacking. And anyone who considers modern theology will realise not only the futility of the attitude maintained by the opponents of Christianity, but also by those who claim to be its steadfast adherents. The theosophical movement in the West should have become that stream of spiritual life which out of true and genuine sources awakens understanding for Christianity in the modern age, but such endeavours met with strong opposition.

It is important to understand the real sources of Christianity, but owing to lack of time they cannot all be mentioned today. We shall speak only of those which have been accessible to mankind since the thirteenth century.

Since the thirteenth century the movement connected with the name of Christian Rosenkreutz has been an integral part of the spiritual life of mankind. Spiritual measures of a very definite kind were necessary in the thirteenth century to enable the influence connected with this name to become part of the spiritual life of the modern age. At the time when the spiritual world was entirely shut off from human vision, a council of twelve wise men came together. All the spiritual knowledge then existing, of the world and its secrets, was gathered from their separate different spheres into this council. By means of certain occult processes, the wisdom that had passed over from Atlantis to the holy Rishis had been transmitted to seven of these twelve men. In four others lived the wisdom of the sacred mysteries of the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Greco-Roman epochs respectively. And what existed in those days of the kind of culture which was to characterise the fifth post-Atlantean epoch constituted the wisdom of the twelfth. The whole range of spiritual life was accessible to these twelve.

Now it was known at that time that a certain individuality who had been a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be born again as a child. Meanwhile, through a number of incarnations, this individuality had unfolded a power of deep and fervent piety, devotion and love. The council of the twelve wise men took this child into their care soon after he was born; shut off from the outside, exoteric world, he came under no influence save theirs; they cared for all his bodily needs and were also his teachers. The manner of the child's development was altogether unique; the profound spirituality he bore within him as the fruit of many incarnations came to expression, too, in his outer, bodily form. He was a weak and sickly child, but his body became marvelously transparent. He grew up and developed in such a way that a radiant, shining spirit indwelt a body that had become transparent. Through the processes of a profoundly wise form of education, all the wisdom from the ages preceding and during post-Atlantean times which the twelve wise men were able to give forth, rayed into his soul. By way of the deeper soul-forces, not by way of the intellect, the treasures of all this wisdom united in the soul of this child. He then fell into a strange condition. For a certain period of time he ceased to take nourishment; all external functions of life were as though paralysed, and the whole of the wisdom received by the child rayed back to the twelve. Each of them received back what he had originally given, but now in a different form. And those twelve wise men felt: Now, for the first time, the twelve great religions and world conceptions have been given to us, united into one interconnected whole. And henceforward what we call rosicrucian Christianity lived in the twelve men.

The child lived only a short time longer. In the external world we give the name Christian Rosenkreutz to this individuality. But it was not until the fourteenth century that he was known by this name. In the fourteenth century he was born again and lived then for more than a hundred years. Even when he was not incarnated in the flesh, he worked through his etheric body, always with the purpose of influencing the development of Christianity in its true form as the synthesis of all the great religions and systems of thought in the world. And he has worked on into our time, either as a human being or from his ether body, inspiring all that was done in the West to establish the synthesis of the great religions. His influence today is increasing all the time. Many a person of whom we do not expect it, is a pupil chosen by Christian Rosenkreutz. Already today it is possible to speak of a sign by means of which Christian Rosenkreutz calls to one whom he has chosen. Many people can discover this sign in their life; it may express itself in a thousand ways, but these different manifestations all lead back to a typical form which may be described as follows.

The selection may, for example, happen in the following way. A man embarks upon some undertaking; he spares no effort to make it successful and forges straight ahead towards his goal. While he is ruthlessly making his way in the world (he may be a thorough materialist), suddenly he hears a voice saying: ‘Stop what you purpose to do!’ And he will be aware that this was no physical voice. But now suppose that he abstains from his project. Then he will be able to realise that if he had continued ruthlessly towards his goal, he would certainly have been led to his death.

These are the two fundamentals: that he knows with certainty, firstly, that the warning came from the spiritual world, and secondly, that death would have come to him had he persisted in his undertaking. This is therefore revealed to one who is to become a pupil: You have actually been saved, moreover by a warning proceeding from a world which, to begin with, you are not within. So far as earthly circumstances are concerned, death has already come to you and your further life is to be regarded as a gift. And when the person in question realises this he will be led to the resolve to work in a spiritual movement. If the resolve is taken, this means that the choice has been accomplished. This is how Christian Rosenkreutz begins to gather his pupils around him, and many human beings, if they were sufficiently alert, would be conscious of such an event in their life.

The human beings of whom it can be said that they were, or will be, united in this way with Christian Rosenkreutz, are those who should be the pioneers of a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. This stream of spiritual life connected with Christian Rosenkreutz provides the highest means for enabling the Christ Impulse to be understood in our time. The beginning was already made long, long ago—a hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, through Jeshu ben Pandira, whose essential mission it was to make preparation for the coming of Christ. He had a pupil, Matthew, whose name subsequently passed over to his successor who was living at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. The greatest deed wrought by Jeshu ben Pandira was that he was the originator and preparer of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The content of this Gospel derives from a ritual of initiation, and passages such as that concerning the temptation, and others, too, originate from enactments in the ancient mysteries. All these processes in the evolution of humanity were to be enacted on the physical plane too. This was written down in outline by the pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira.

Jeshu ben Pandira was not spared from the hard fate he himself predicted; he was stoned, and his corpse was suspended on a cross. The original chronicle was preserved in the hands of a few of his adherents, in deep secrecy. We can best follow what happened to it later on when the great Church father Jerome⁴⁴ himself says that he had received the document of the Matthew Gospel from a Christian sect. The original record was held at that time in the secret keeping of a small circle and through certain circumstances came into the hands of Jerome. He was charged by his bishop with the task of translating it. Jerome himself narrates this; but he says at the same time that because of the form and manner of the transcription, it should not pass into the hands of the outside world. He wanted to translate it in such a way that its secrets would remain secret—and he says, furthermore, that he himself does not understand it. The nature of what came into existence in this way was such that one man could express it in one way and another in a different way in secular language. And this is how it has come down to posterity. In reality, therefore, the world does not yet possess the Gospels in their true form. There is every reason and justification then for spiritual research today, in shedding new light upon the Gospels, to go back to the Akashic Record, because there and there only are they to be found in their original form.

Let there be no mistake about it. Christianity in its true form has yet to be separated out from the trash. One sign among many others indicates how necessary this is. For example, in the year 1873 in France a count was taken of those who could be said to belong inwardly and genuinely to Catholicism. They amounted to one third; the other two thirds proved no longer to be adherents in the real sense—and these two-thirds were certainly not composed of people who never feel the need of religion! Life is such that the religious longings of men do incline towards the Christ, but the true sources of Christianity must be rediscovered. And it is to this end that the stream of spiritual life going out from Jeshu ben Pandira flows into unity with the other stream which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is connected with the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.

It is also necessary for us to know that one of the characteristics of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is that in his youth he cannot be recognised as such. Between his thirtieth and thirty-third year a great revolution takes place in the soul and the personality is fundamentally transformed. For example a Moses or Abraham individuality can be possessed by the personality of a Bodhisattva at this time of his life.

About 3,000 years after our present time this Bodhisattva will become the Maitreya Buddha. And then his influence from the spiritual world will flow into the hearts of men as a magic, moral power. In this way the two streams work together, the stream of the Maitreya Buddha and the Western stream connected with Christian Rosenkreutz.

• 43. Yesterday we heard: in the public lecture in Munich on 19th November 1911 ‘Von Paracelsus zu Goethe’. There is no transcript of the lecture. See the corresponding lecture given in Berlin on 16th November 1911 in—‘Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung’ (Human History in the Light of Spiritual Research) GA 61 Dornach, 1962.
• 44. when ... Jerome himself says: see Rudolf Steiner ‘From Jesus to Christ’, Carlsruhe, October 1911; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.

Today's lecture will be historical in character, and the day after tomorrow I shall speak of matters which will give us deeper insight into the impulses contained in the thinking,—willing and actions of rosicrucianism. We can only understand the work of rosicrucianism as it is today when we realise that it was never a model laid down once and for all but assumes a different form in every century. This is because rosicrucianism must always adapt itself to the conditions of the times. It is quite obvious to us that the fundamental impulses of Spiritual Science must increasingly find their way into the culture of the present age; but we know, too, that Western culture presents difficulties. Spiritual Science cannot make different human beings of us from one day to the next, because through our karma we have been born into Western culture. Our task is not as simple as that of the representatives of communities based upon race or the tenets of a particular religion. For our fundamental principle must be that we are not rooted in the soil of a specific creed but regard the different systems of religion as forms and variations of the one, universal life. It is the seed of spiritual truth in all religions for which Spiritual Science must seek. As a Westerner, the Anthroposophist may very easily be misunderstood, above all by the different religious confessions and schools of thought in the world.

If we rightly understand our task as Spiritual Scientists we must hold fast to the principle of historical development, realising that Spiritual Science is an integral part of this development. Each one of you here has been incarnated in every epoch of culture—indeed more than once. What is the purpose of these reincarnations? Why must the human being pass through all these different schoolings in the periods of culture and civilisation? It was this question which brought Lessing⁴⁵ to avow his belief in the idea of reincarnation. Lessing thought to himself: Human beings have lived through all the earlier periods of culture and they must return again and again in order to learn new things and to be able to connect the old with the new. There must be a purpose in the fact that we pass through different incarnations, and the purpose is that in each of them the human being shall add new experiences to the old.

As you have often heard, there are great differences between the successive epochs of culture. Today we shall speak in greater detail of an extremely important period: the thirteenth century. Human beings in incarnation at that time lived through an experience which had not fallen to the lot of others. What I am now about to say is known to all who have reached a certain high level of spiritual life and who are now again in incarnation.

In the thirteenth century spiritual darkness fell for a time upon all human beings, even the most enlightened, and also upon the initiates. Whatever knowledge of the spiritual worlds existed in the thirteenth century came from tradition or from men who in still earlier times had been initiates and were able to call up memories of what they had then experienced. But for a brief space of time it was impossible even for these men to have direct vision of the spiritual world. Darkness had to fall for this short period to prepare for the intellectual culture which was to be characteristic of our modern age. The important point is that we have this kind of culture today in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Culture in the Greek epoch was quite different. Instead of the modern, intellectual kind of thinking, direct perception was then the dominant faculty; the human being was one, as it were, with what he saw and heard, even with what he thought. He did not cogitate and reason as he does today, and needs must do, for this is the task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In the thirteenth century it was necessary for especially suitable personalities to be singled out for initiation, and the initiation itself could only take place after that brief period of darkness had come to an end. The name of the place in Europe where these events that I shall now describe took place cannot yet be communicated, but before very long this too will be possible.

We shall speak today of the dawn of occultism in the modern age. Twelve men were living at the time of the darkness, twelve men of deep spirituality, who came together in order to further the progress of humanity. None of them possessed the power of direct vision of the spiritual world, but they were able to bring to life within them memories of what they had experienced through earlier initiation. And by the dispensation of the karma of mankind, the heritage left by the ancient culture of Atlantis was embodied in seven of these twelve men. In my book Occult Science it is stated that the seven wise teachers of the ancient, holy Indian civilisation bore within them the surviving wisdom of Atlantis. These seven men were incarnated again in the thirteenth century and formed part of the twelve; it was they who were able to look back to the seven streams of the ancient Atlantean wisdom and to their further course. The task assigned to each of the seven was to make one of the seven streams of wisdom fruitful both for the culture of the thirteenth century and for that of our modern age. These seven individualities were joined by four others; unlike the first seven, these other four were not able to look back to times of the primeval past; they looked back to what mankind had acquired from occult truths during the four epochs of post-Atlantean culture. The first of the four looked back to the period of ancient India, the second to that of ancient Persia, the third to that of Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian culture, and the fourth to that of the Greco-Roman age. These four joined the seven in the council of the wise men in the thirteenth century; the twelfth had fewer memories; he was the most intellectual of the twelve and it was his task to cultivate and foster the external sciences. These twelve individualities did not live on only in the sphere of occultism as cultivated in the West, but could also be ‘incorporated’ as it were in men who possessed some genuine knowledge of occultism. Goethe's poem The Mysteries⁴⁶ gives a certain indication of this.

Thus there were twelve outstanding individualities, joined by a thirteenth who, after the period of darkness had come to an end, was to be chosen for the kind of initiation demanded by the culture of the West. The circumstances are very mysterious, and I can only give you the following information in the form of a narrative. To me it is objective truth, but you yourselves can put it to the test by gathering together what has been said by Anthroposophical Spiritual Science during the last few years, in addition to what you know of history since the thirteenth century.

It was known to the council of twelve wise men that a child was to be born who had lived in Palestine at the time of Christ and had been present when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. This individuality had strong heart forces and a power of deep, inward love which circumstances had since helped him to unfold. An individuality of extraordinary spirituality was incarnated in this child. It was necessary in this case for a process to be enacted which will never be repeated in the same form. What I shall tell you does not describe a typical initiation but an altogether exceptional happening. It was necessary for this child to be removed from the environment into which he was born and to be placed in the care of the twelve at a certain place in Europe. But it was not the external measures adopted by the twelve wise men that are of essential importance; what is important is the fact that the child grew up with the twelve around him, and because of this, their wisdom was able to stream into him. One of the twelve, for example, possessed the Mars wisdom and therewith a definite quality of soul—a mood of soul tempered by the form of culture influenced by Mars. The forces of the Mars culture endowed his soul with the faculty, among others, of presenting occult sciences with a fiery enthusiasm and ardour. Similar planetary influences were also at work in other faculties distributed among the twelve. The influences pouring from the twelve wise men worked in such mutual accord that the soul of the child was brought into harmony. And so the child grew up under the unceasing care of the twelve. Then, at a certain time, when the child had grown into a young man of about twenty, he was able to give expression to something that was a kind of reflection of the twelve streams of wisdom—but in a form altogether new, new even to the twelve wise men. The metamorphosis was accompanied by violent organic changes. Even physically the child had been quite unlike other human beings; he was often very ill and his body became transparent, as though filled with light. Then there came a time when for some days the soul departed altogether from the body. The young man lay as if dead ... And when the soul returned it was as though the twelve streams of wisdom were born anew, so that the twelve wise men, also, could learn something quite new from the youth. He was now able to speak of quite new experiences. There had come to him, through the Mystery of Golgotha, an experience similar to that of Paul before Damascus. Thereby it was possible for all the twelve world conceptions, religious and scientific—and fundamentally there are only twelve—to be amalgamated into one comprehensive whole, which could do justice to them all. Of what was taught we shall speak the day after tomorrow. It remains now to be said that the young man died very soon afterwards. His life on earth had been brief. His mission has been to create this synthesis of the twelve streams of wisdom in the sphere of thought and to bring forth the new impulse which he could then bequeath to the twelve men who were to carry it further. A great and significant impetus was thus given. The name of this individuality from whom this impulse originated was Christian Rosenkreutz.⁴⁷ He was born again in the fourteenth century and this earthly life lasted for more than a hundred years. In the new earthly life he brought to fruitfulness, in the outer world too, all that he had lived through in that brief space of time. He traveled all over the West and over practically the whole of the then known world in order to receive anew the wisdom which in the previous life had quickened in him the new impulse—the impulse which, as a kind of essence, was to filter into the culture of the times.

This new impulse also came to expression in the exoteric world. The inspiration of the being of whom we have spoken, worked, for example, in Lessing. It is not, of course, possible to give external proof of this, but Lessing's whole mode and manner of thinking is such that the rosicrucian impulse is perceptible to one who is versed in these matters. Again in the nineteenth century—an age so ill adapted for the ideas of karma, reincarnation and the like—this impulse worked exoterically. It is an interesting fact that towards the end of the forties of the nineteenth century a certain scientific body offered a reward for the best philosophical treatise on the subject of the immortality of the soul: Among the treatises submitted, the one that was awarded the prize was by Widenmann⁴⁸ who accepted the principle that the soul has many earthly lives. Naturally this essay does not speak of reincarnation in the way as Spiritual Science now does; but it is interesting that such a writing should have appeared at that time and have been awarded the prize. And other contemporary psychologists also acknowledged their belief in repeated earth lives. The thread of belief in reincarnation and karma was never entirely broken. Moreover the early writings of the founder of the Theosophical Society, the great H.P. Blavatsky,⁴⁹ are explicable only when we recognise the rosicrucian inspiration underlying them.

Now it is of the greatest importance for us to know that whenever the rosicrucian inspiration is given, in each century, the bearer of the inspiration is never outwardly named. His identity has been known only to the very highest initiates. Today, for example, it is only permissible to speak of happenings of a hundred years ago; for this is the period of time which must elapse before they may be spoken of openly. The temptation to pay fanatical veneration to authority vested in some personality—than which there is no greater evil—would be too great. This danger is too near at hand. Silence is a necessary precaution not only against the wiles of ambition and pride—which it might be possible to resist—but paramountly because of the occult, astral attacks which would be directed all the time against such an individual. Hence the rule that these things may not be spoken of until a hundred years have elapsed. Such studies must help us to realise that the fulcrum of historical development is contained in rosicrucianism.

By a simple comparison let me explain to you what is meant by this. Think of a pair of scales. There must be only one fulcrum, for if there were two, no weighing would be possible. One such fulcrum is also necessary in the process of historical development. Eastern world conceptions do not admit this, nor do they recognise historical evolution in this sense; and the same applies to Schopenhauer.⁵⁰ But it is the task of Western humanity to acknowledge the course of history—and it is the mission of rosicrucianism to promote a kind of thinking which admits the reality of a fulcrum or pivotal point in history. In regard to what will now be said, the religious confession to which a man may belong is of no consequence. For it can be substantiated from the Akashic Record that the day which represents the pivotal point in the evolution of mankind is the 3rd April in the year 33 AD. Knowledge of the fact that the pivot of evolution lies at this point is an essential part of rosicrucianism.

What was it that really happened then? What happened was what can be called the crisis in the world of the demons. And what does this mean? We know that in earlier times human beings possessed the faculty of primitive clairvoyance. This clairvoyance became progressively feebler, almost to the point of extinction. The fact is that hitherto the human being had been conscious mainly in the astral body and less in the ego. The crisis came about because of the darkening of the ancient clairvoyance. Man's vision extended only into the lowest regions of the spiritual world. The ego still lived in the astral world; but the beings and powers which the ego was able to behold deteriorated into greater and greater impurity. Man no longer had any vision of the good powers, but as he looked into the astral world he saw only these evil beings. The only means of salvation was the cultivation and development of the ego. The starting point for this was what took place in the baptism by John in the Jordan. What was the experience of one thus baptised? He experienced in the first place the physical process of immersion in the water, which caused the separation of the astral and etheric bodies from the physical body. This enabled him to perceive that a crisis was at hand in the world of the demons. And those who had been baptised knew: We must change our hearts! The time is at hand when the spirit is to stream directly into the ego. Such a man felt that these terrible astral beings were within him, always penetrating into him.

Something had to come that transcends the astral, and this is the ego. Through the ego it will be possible for communities of human beings to gather together in freedom of soul, communities no longer determined by ties of blood. And now picture to yourselves a man possessed by demons of the most evil kind who know that they are facing a crisis. Picture to yourselves again that to such a man there comes One Whose mission it is to oppose the demons. What must the demons feel? They must feel ill at ease to the highest degree! And so indeed it was: in the presence of Christ Jesus the demons were ill at ease.

Rosicrucianism has within it the impulse by which the demons may and must be countered. Through this impulse the ego is to become supreme—but in this respect little progress has yet been made.

Returning to the point at which the lecture began, it is not difficult to realise that it will be harder for us as Anthroposophists to make our voice heard in the world than it will be for any others. The adherents of other views of the world will have less persecution to suffer than Anthroposophists. For nothing makes men more uneasy than to describe to them the true nature of the Christ. But our conviction is based upon the results of genuine occult science, and this conviction must be sustained with all the strength of which we are capable.

• 45. See note 32.
• 46. See note 29.
• 47. See note 23.
• 48. See note 33.
• 49. See note 1.
• 50. Arthur Schopenhauer: 1788 – 1860. See ‘Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung’ (The World as Will and Idea in the ‘Supplements to the second volume’, chapter 38 ‘Uber Geschichte’ (On History).