The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The lectures given so far have led essentially to two questions. One relates to the objective event connected with the name, Christ Jesus; to the nature of that impulse which as the Christ-Impulse entered into human evolution. The other question is: how can an individual establish his connection with the Christ-Impulse? In other words, how can the Christ-Impulse become effective for the individual? The answers to these two questions are of course interrelated. For we have seen that the Christ-Event is an objective fact of human Earth-evolution, and that something real, something actual, comes forth to meet us in the Resurrection. With Christ there rose out of the grave a kind of seed-kernel for the reconstruction of our human Phantom. And it is possible for this seed-kernel to incorporate itself in those individuals who find a connection with the Christ-Impulse.

That is the objective side of the relationship of the individual to the Christ-Impulse. Today we wish to add the subjective side. We will try to find an answer to the question: ‘How does the individual now find it possible gradually to take into himself that which comes forth through the Resurrection of Christ?’

To answer this question, we must first distinguish between two things. When Christianity entered into the world as a religion, it was not merely a religion for those who wished to approach Christ by one or other of the spiritual paths. It was to be a religion which all men could accept and make their own. A special occult or esoteric development was not necessary for finding the way to Christ. We must therefore fix our attention first on that path to Christ, the exoteric path, which every soul, every heart, can find in the course of time. We must then distinguish this path from the esoteric path which right up to our own time has revealed itself to the soul who desired to seek the Christ by gaining access to occult powers. We must distinguish between the path of the physical plane and the path of the super-sensible worlds.

In hardly any other century has there been such obscurity concerning the outward, exoteric way to Christ as in the nineteenth. And this obscurity increased during the second half of the century. More and more men came to lose the knowledge of the way to Christ. Those imbued with the thought of today no longer form the right concepts, such concepts for example as souls even in the eighteenth century formed on their way to the Christ-Impulse. Even the first half of the nineteenth century was illumined by a certain possibility of finding the Christ-Impulse as something real. But for the most part in the nineteenth century this path to Christ was lost to men. And we can understand this when we realise that we are standing at the beginning of a new path to Christ. We have often spoken of the new way now opening for souls through a renewal of the Christ-Event. In human evolution it always happens that a kind of low point must be reached in any trend before a new light comes in once more. The turning away from the spiritual worlds during the nineteenth century was only natural in face of the fact that in the twentieth century a quite new epoch for the spiritual life of men must begin, in the special sense we have often mentioned.

To those who have come to know something of Spiritual Science, our Movement often appears to be something quite new. If, however, we look away from the enrichment that spiritual endeavours in the West have experienced recently through the inflow of the concepts of reincarnation and karma, bound up with the whole teaching of repeated earth lives and its significance for human evolution, we must say that, in other respects, ways into the spiritual world, similar to our theosophical way, are by no means new in Western history. Anyone, however, who tries to rise into the spiritual world along the present path of Theosophy will find himself somewhat estranged from the manner in which Theosophy was cultivated in the eighteenth century. At that time in this neighbourhood (Baden), and especially in Württemberg, much Theosophy was studied, but everywhere an illuminated view of the teaching concerning repeated earth lives was lacking, and thereby a cloud was cast over the whole field of theosophical work. For those who could look deeply into occult connections, and particularly into the connection of the world with the Christ-Impulse, what they saw was over-shadowed for this reason. But within the whole horizon of Christian philosophy and Christian life, something like theosophical endeavours arose continually. This striving towards Theosophy was active everywhere, even in the outward, exoteric paths of men who could go no further than sharing externally in the life of some congregation, Christian or otherwise.

How theosophical endeavours penetrated Christian endeavours is shown by figures such as Bengel and Oetinger, who worked in Württemberg, men who in their whole way of thinking—if we remember that they lacked the idea of reincarnation—reached all that man can reach of higher views concerning evolution, in so far as they had made the Christ-Impulse their own. The ground-roots of theosophical life have always existed. Hence there is much that is correct in a treatise on theosophical subjects written by Oetinger in the eighteenth century. In the preface to a book on Oetinger's work, published in 1847, Rothe, who taught in Heidelberg University, wrote:

What Theosophy really wants is often difficult to recognise in the case of the older theosophists ... but it is none the less clear that Theosophy, as far as it has gone today, can claim no scientific status and therefore cannot extend its influence more widely. It would be very hasty to conclude that Theosophy is only an ephemeral phenomenon, and entirely unjustifiable from a scientific standpoint. History already testifies loudly enough to the contrary. It tells us how this enigmatic phenomenon has never been able to accomplish anything, and yet, unnoticed, it is continually breaking through afresh, held together in its most varied forms by the chain of a never-dying tradition.

Now we must remember that the man who wrote this learnt about Theosophy only in the forties of the nineteenth century, as it had come over from many theosophists of the eighteenth. What came over was certainly not clothed in the forms of our scientific thought. It was therefore difficult to believe that the Theosophy of that time could affect wider circles. Apart from this, such a voice, coming to us out of the forties of the nineteenth century, must appear significant when it says:

The main thing is that once Theosophy has become a real science, and has thus clearly yielded definite results, these will gradually become matters of general and even popular conviction, and will be regarded as accepted truths by people who could not follow the paths by which they were discovered and by which alone they could be discovered.

After this, certainly, comes a pessimistic paragraph with which, in its bearing on Theosophy, we cannot now agree. For anyone familiar with the present form of spiritual-scientific endeavours will be convinced that this Theosophy, in the form in which it desires to work, can become popular in the widest circles. Even such a paragraph may therefore inspire us with courage when we read further:

Still, this rests in the lap of the future, and there we will not encroach: for the present we will gratefully rejoice in what our valued Oetinger has so beautifully set forth, and which may certainly count upon a sympathetic reception in a wide circle.

Thus we see that Theosophy was a pious hope of those who came to know something of the old Theosophy that was handed down from the eighteenth century.

After that time the stream of theosophical life was buried under the materialistic trends of the nineteenth century. Only through what we may now accept as the dawn of a new age do we again approach the true spiritual life, and now in a form which can be so scientific that in principle every heart and every soul can understand it. During the nineteenth century there was a complete loss of understanding for something that the theosophists of the eighteenth century still fully possessed; they called it Zentralsinn (inner light). Oetinger, who worked in Murrhard, near Karlsruhe, was for a time the pupil of a quite simple man in Thuringia, named Voelker, whose pupils knew that he possessed what was called ‘inner light’. What in those days was this ‘inner light’? It was none other than that which now arises in every man when earnestly and with iron energy he works through the content of my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It was fundamentally nothing else that this simple man of Thuringia possessed. What he brought into existence—for his time a very interesting Theosophy—was the teaching which influenced Oetinger. It is difficult for a man of the present day to reconcile himself to the knowledge that a deepening of Theosophy occurred so recently, and gave rise to a rich literature, buried though this is in libraries and among antiquarians.

Something else is equally difficult for a man of today: to accept the Christ-Event as first of all an objective fact. How much discussion of this matter there was in the nineteenth century! It is impossible in a short course to indicate even in outline how many and diverse are the views of the nineteenth century concerning Christ Jesus. And anyone who takes the trouble to inquire further into opinions concerning Christ Jesus, whether those of theologians or of laymen, will encounter some very real difficulties, if the views of the nineteenth century on this question are considered in relation to the times in which better traditions still prevailed. In the nineteenth century it even became possible for persons to be regarded as great theologians when they were far removed from any acceptance of an objective Christ who entered into and worked in the history of the world. And here we come to the question: What relationship to the Christ can be found by an individual who takes no esoteric path, but remains entirely in the field of the exoteric?

So long as we keep to the standpoint of those nineteenth-century theologians who held that human evolution can take its course purely in the inner being of man, and has nothing to do with the external world of the Macrocosm, we cannot reach an objective appreciation of Christ Jesus; we come to all kinds of grotesque ideas, but never to a relationship with the Christ-Event. For anyone who believes that he can reach the highest human ideal compatible with Earth-evolution merely by an inner soul-path, through a kind of self-redemption, a relationship with the objective Christ is impossible. We may also say that wherever the redemption of man is thought of as a matter for psychology to deal with, there is no relationship to the Christ. Anyone who penetrates further into cosmic mysteries soon finds that when a man believes that he can attain his highest ideal of Earth-existence solely through himself, only through his own inner development, he cuts off altogether his connection with the Macrocosm. Such a person believes that he has the Macrocosm before him as a kind of Nature, and that his inner soul-development, side by side with the Macrocosm, is something running parallel with it. But a connection between the two he cannot find. This is just what is so terribly grotesque in the evolution of the nineteenth century. The connection that should exist between Microcosm and Macrocosm, has been torn asunder. If this had not happened, we should not have seen all those misunderstandings that have arisen over the terms ‘theoretical materialism’ on the one hand and ‘abstract idealism’ on the other. Just consider—the sundering of Microcosm and Macrocosm has led men who care little for the inner life of the soul to assign it, as well as the external life of the body, to the Macrocosm, thus making everything subject to material processes. Others, aware that there is nevertheless an inner life, have fallen gradually into abstractions concerning everything of significance to the human soul.

To be clear regarding this difficult matter, let us recall something very significant that was learnt in the Mysteries. How many people today believe in their innermost consciousness: ‘If I think something—for instance, if I entertain a bad thought about my neighbour—it has no significance for the outer world; the thought is only in myself. It has a quite different significance if I give him a box on the ears. This is something that happens on the physical plane; the other is a mere feeling or a mere thought.’ Or again, how many people there are who, when they fall into a sin or a lie or an error, say: ‘This is something that happens in the human soul.’ And, by contrast, if a stone falls from the roof: ‘This is something that takes place externally.’ And they will readily explain, using crude sense-concepts, that when a stone falls, perhaps accidentally, into water, it sets up ripples which spread out far and wide, so that everything produces effects which continue unobserved; but anything that has occurred in the soul is shut off from the world outside. People could therefore come to believe that to sin, to err, and then to put it right again, is entirely a concern of the individual soul. To anyone with an outlook of this kind, something many of us have witnessed in the last two years must seem grotesque.

Let me recall to you the scene in the Rosicrucian drama, The Portal of Initiation, where Capesius and Strader enter the astral world, and it is shown that what they think, speak, and feel is not without significance for the objective world, the Macrocosm, but actually releases storms in the elements. For modern man it is absurd to suppose that destructive forces can strike at the Macrocosm through somebody having had wrong thoughts. In the Mysteries it was made very clear to the pupil that when, for example anyone tells a lie or falls into error, this is a real process which does not concern himself only. The Germans say ‘Thoughts are duty free’, because they see no Customs barrier when the thoughts arise. Thoughts belong to the objective world; they are not merely experiences of the soul. The pupil of the Mystery saw: ‘When you tell a lie, it signifies in the super-sensible world the darkening of a certain light; when you perpetrate a loveless action, something in the spiritual world is burnt up in the fire of lovelessness; with errors you extinguish light in the Macrocosm.’ The effect was shown to the pupil through objective experience: how, through an error, something is extinguished on the astral plane, and darkness follows; or how through a loveless action something acts like a burning and destroying fire.

In exoteric life man does not know what is going on around him. He is like an ostrich with its head in the sand; he does not see effects which nevertheless are there. The effects of feeling are there, and they would be visible to super-sensible sight if the man were led into the Mysteries. It was not until the nineteenth century that anyone could say: ‘Everything in which a man has sinned, everything in which he is weak, is his personal affair only. Redemption must come about through an experience in the soul, and so Christ also can be only an experience in the soul.’ What is necessary, in order that man may not only find his way to Christ, but that he may not sunder his connection with the Macrocosm, is the knowledge: ‘If you incur error and sin, these are objective, not subjective events, and because of them something happens outside in the Cosmos.’ And in the moment when a man becomes conscious that with his sin, with his error, something objective happens; when he knows that what he has done, what he has given out from himself, is not connected merely with himself but with the whole objective course of cosmic development, then he will no longer be able to say to himself that compensation for what he has brought about is only an inner concern of the soul. There is indeed a good and significant possibility that a man who sees that thoughts and feelings are objective may also see that what has brought and brings people into mistakes through successive earth-lives is not an inward affair related to a single life, but is the consequence of karma.

Now an event which was outside history and outside human responsibility, as was the Luciferic influence in the old Lemurian period, could not possibly be expunged from the world by a human event. Through the Luciferic event man gained a great benefit: he became a free being. But he also incurred a liability: the propensity to deviate from the path of the good and the right, and from the path of the true. What has happened in the course of incarnations is a matter of karma. But all that has crept down from the Macrocosm into the Microcosm, all that the Luciferic forces have given to man, is something that man cannot deal with by himself. To compensate for the objective Luciferic event, another objective act was needed. In short, man must feel that what he incurs as error and sin is not merely subjective, and that an experience in the soul which is merely subjective is not sufficient to bring about Redemption.

Anyone who is convinced of the objectivity of error will thus understand also the objectivity of the act of Redemption. One cannot by any means treat the Luciferic influence as an objective act without treating in the same manner the compensating act, the Event of Golgotha. A theosophist can only choose between two things. Everything may be set on the foundation of karma; of course that is quite right as regards everything that man himself has brought about. But then we come to the necessity of stretching out the repeated lives forward and backward as far as we like, with no end to it in either direction. It always goes round and round like a wheel. The other thing—the alternative choice—is the concrete idea of evolution we must hold: that there was a Saturn, a Sun, and a Moon existence which were quite different from the Earth existence; that in the Earth existence the kind of repeated earth-life as we know it first occurred; that the Luciferic event was a single unrepeated event—all this alone gives real content to our theosophical outlook. All this, however, is inconceivable without the objectivity of the Event of Golgotha.

In pre-Christian times men were—as you know—different in various ways. One particular difference was that when they came down from spiritual worlds into earthly incarnations they brought with them, as substance, some of the Divine element. For this reason, when a man reflected on his own weakness, he always felt that the best part of him had originated in the Divine sphere from which he had descended. But the Divine element gradually became exhausted in the course of further incarnations, and it was quite exhausted when the Events of Palestine drew near. The last after-effects of it continued to be felt, but none of it was left when John the Baptist declared: ‘Change your conception of the world, for the times have changed. Now you will no longer be able to rise up into the spiritual as in the past, for the vision that could see into the old spirituality is lost. Change your thinking, and accept the Divine Being who is to give anew to men what they have had to lose through their descent to earth!’ Consequently—you may deny this if you think in the abstract, but not if you look at history in concrete terms—the feelings and perceptions of men changed altogether at the turning-point of the old and new epochs, a point marked by the Events of Palestine.

After these events, men began to feel forsaken. They felt forsaken when they approached the hardest questions, those which concerned most directly the innermost part of the soul; when, for example, they asked themselves: ‘What will become of me when I go through the gate of death with a number of deeds that have not been made good?’ Then there came to meet them a thought which certainly might be born from the longing of the soul, but could be allayed only when the soul could say to itself: ‘Yes, a Being has lived who entered into the evolution of mankind and to whom you can hold fast. He is working in the outer Cosmos, where you cannot go. He is working to bring about compensation for your deeds. He will help you to make good the evil results of the Luciferic influence!’ Through this feeling oneself forsaken, and then feeling oneself rescued by an objective power, there enters into humanity an intuitive feeling that sin is a real power, an objective fact, and that the Act of Redemption is also objective, an act that cannot be accomplished by an individual, for he has not invoked the Luciferic influence, but only by One who works in the worlds where Lucifer is consciously active.

All that I have thus set before you, in words drawn from Spiritual Science, was not grasped intellectually, as knowledge. It resided in feelings and intuitive perceptions, and from this source came the need to turn to Christ. For those who felt this need there was of course the possibility of finding in Christian communities ways by which they could deepen all such perceptions and feelings.

After man had lost his primal connection with the Gods, what did he find when he looked out at the material world? Through his descent into the material realm, his perception of the spiritual, of the physical manifestation of the Divine in the cosmos, steadily declined. The remnants of the old clairvoyance faded by degrees, and nature, for him, was in a certain sense deprived of the Divine. A merely material world was spread out before him. And in face of this material universe he could in no way maintain a belief that the Christ-Principle was at work there. The nineteenth-century Kant-Laplace theory, whereby our solar system developed out of a cosmic nebula, and eventually life arose on individual planets, has led finally to the universe being regarded as a collaboration of atoms. If we try to think of Christ in this setting, as conceived by materialistic scientists, it makes no sense. There is no place for the Christ-Being in this cosmogony, no place for anything spiritual. You remember someone saying—I read you the passage—that he would have to tear up his whole conception of the universe if he had to believe in the Resurrection. This shows that in contemplating Nature, or in thinking about Nature, all possibility of penetrating into the living essence of natural facts has disappeared.

When I speak like this, it is not by way of disapproval. The time had to come when Nature would be deprived of the Divine, deprived of the Spirit, so that man could formulate the totality of abstract thoughts required to comprehend external nature, as the outlook of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo enabled him to do. The web of thoughts which has led to our age of machinery had to take hold of humanity. On the other hand, it was necessary that this age should have a compensation for the fact that it had become impossible in exoteric life to find a direct path from the Earth to the spiritual. For if man had been able to find this path, he would have been able to find the path to Christ, as he will find it in the coming centuries. There had to be a compensation.

The question now is: What had become necessary as an exoteric path for man to Christ during the centuries in which an atomistic conception of the universe became gradually accepted, a conception which alienated Nature more and more from the Divine and in the nineteenth century grew into the study of nature deprived of the Divine?

A two-fold remedy was required. A spiritual vision of the Christ could be found exoterically in two ways. One way was to show that all matter is completely foreign to man's inner spiritual being. He could be shown that it is untrue to say that everywhere in space where matter appears, only matter is present. How could this come about? In no other way than by something being given to man which is at one and the same time spirit and matter; something which he knows is spirit and yet sees to be matter. Therefore the transformation, the eternally valid transformation, of spirit into matter, of matter into spirit, had to continue as a vital fact. And this came to pass because the Holy Communion has been celebrated, has been maintained through the centuries as a Christian ritual. And the further we go back in the centuries towards the institution of the Holy Communion, the more can we trace how in the older times, not yet so materialistic, it was better understood.

In regard to higher things, when people begin to discuss something, it is a proof, as a rule, that they no longer understand it. Even simple matters, as long as they are understood, are not much discussed. Discussions are a proof that the point at issue is not understood by a majority of the people involved. Thus it was with the Holy Communion. As long as it was known that the Holy Communion furnished a living proof that matter is not merely matter, but that there are ceremonial acts through which the spirit can be united with matter—as long as people knew that this interpenetration of matter with spirit, as it finds expression in the Holy Communion, is a union with the Being of Christ, so long was the Holy Communion accepted without argument. But then came the time when Materialism arose, when people no longer understood what lies at the foundation of the Holy Communion. Then they disputed whether the bread and wine are merely symbols of the Divine, or whether Divine power actually flows into them. For anyone who can see more deeply, all the disputes which arose on this account at the beginning of the new epoch signify that the original understanding of the ritual had been lost. For those who desired to come to Christ, the Holy Communion was a complete equivalent of the esoteric path, if they could not take that path, and thus in the Holy Communion they could find a real union with Christ. For all things have their time. Certainly, just as it is true in regard to the spiritual life that a quite new age is dawning, so is it true that the way to Christ which for centuries was the right one for many people will remain for centuries more the right one for many. Things pass over gradually into one another, and what was formerly right will gradually pass over into something else when people are ready for it.

The aim of Theosophy is to work in such a way that we shall grasp in the spirit itself something concrete, something real. By means of meditation, concentration and all that we learn as the knowledge of higher worlds, men become ripe in their inner being not merely to experience thought-worlds, or worlds of abstract feelings and perceptions, but to permeate themselves inwardly with the element of the Spirit; thereby they will experience the Communion in the Spirit; thereby thoughts, meditative thoughts, will be able to live in man; they will even be the very same, only from within outwards, as the symbol of the Holy Communion, the consecrated Bread, has been from without inwards. And as the undeveloped Christian can seek his way to Christ through the Holy Communion, so the developed Christian who, through progressive knowledge of the Spirit has learnt to know the Form of the Christ, can raise himself in spirit to what will indeed be in the future an exoteric path for men. That will be the force which is to bring to men a widening of the Christ-Impulse. But then all ceremonies will change, and that which formerly came to pass through the attributes of bread and wine will come about in the future through a spiritual Communion. The thought of the Sacrament, the Holy Communion, will remain. Only it must be made possible that certain thoughts which flow to us through what is imparted within our Movement, certain inner thoughts and feelings, shall permeate and spiritualise our inner being—thoughts and feelings as fully consecrated as in the best sense of inner Christian development the Holy Communion has spiritualised the human soul and filled it with the Christ.

When this becomes possible—and it will be possible—we shall have progressed a stage further in evolution. And then we shall see the real proof that Christianity is greater than its external form. For a poor opinion of Christianity is held by anyone who thinks it will be obliterated when the external forms of the Christianity of a certain period are swept away. A true opinion will be permeated with the conviction that all Churches which have cherished the Christ-Thought, all external thoughts, all external forms, are temporal and therefore transitory, while the Christ-Thought will live in ever-new forms in the hearts and souls of men in the future, little as these new forms are evident today. Thus we are first taught by Spiritual Science how, along one exoteric path, the Holy Communion had its significance in earlier times.

The other exoteric path was through the Gospels. And here again we must realise what in earlier times the Gospels still were for men. It is not very long since the Gospels were not read as they were in the nineteenth century. In those days they were read as a life-giving fountain whence something substantial passed over into the soul. They were not read in the way described in the first lecture of this course, when we were speaking of a false path, but so that a person saw approaching from outside something for which his soul was panting with thirst; they were so read that his soul found pictured therein the real Redeemer, of whom the soul knew that He must be there, in the wide universe.

Those who understood how to read the Gospels in this way never thought of asking the endless questions which first became questions for the intelligent, clever people of the nineteenth century. You need only recall how many times in speaking of these questions, in one form or another, we have had to say that for quite clever people, who have all science and learning at their finger tips, the thought of Christ Jesus and the Events of Palestine are truly not compatible with the modern conception of the universe. In an apparently enlightened way they say that when men were not aware that the earth is a quite small heavenly body, they could believe that with the Cross of Golgotha a special new event took place on earth. But since Copernicus taught that the earth is a planet like others, can one still believe that Christ came to us from another planet? Why should we believe that the earth is so exceptionally situated as was formerly thought? A simile is then brought in: ‘Since our conception of the universe has been so much enlarged, it seems as though one of the most important artistic presentations had taken place, not on the great stage of a capital city, but on the small stage of some provincial theatre.’ So that is how it looks to these people: the earth is such an insignificant little cosmic body that the Events of Palestine appear like the performance of a great cosmic drama on the stage of a small provincial theatre. We can no longer imagine such a thing, because the earth is so small in comparison with the great universe!

It seems so clever when something like that is said, but after all there is not much cleverness in it, for Christianity never asserted what is here apparently contradicted. Christianity has never placed the beginning of the Christ-Impulse in the magnificent places of the earth. It has always seen a certain deep seriousness in the fact that the bearer of the Christ was born in a stable among poor shepherds. Not only the little earth, but a very obscure place on earth, was sought out in Christian tradition to place the Christ therein. Christianity from the very first answered the questions of the clever people. But they have not understood the answers which Christianity itself has given, because they could no longer let the living force of the great majestic pictures work upon the soul.

Nevertheless, through the Gospel pictures alone, without the Holy Communion and all that is connected with it—for the Holy Communion stands at the centre of all Christian cults—an exoteric path to Christ could not have been found. For the Gospels could not then have been widely enough popularised for a finding of the way to Christ to depend on them alone. And when the Gospels were popularised, we can see that it was not an unmixed blessing. For at the same time arose the great misunderstanding of the Gospels: they were taken superficially, and then all that the nineteenth century made of them came about; and indeed—speaking quite objectively—it was bad enough. I think anthroposophists will understand what is meant here by ‘bad enough’. No censure is intended, for we cannot but acknowledge the diligence which the nineteenth century brought to the task of scientific investigation, including all the work in natural science. The tragedy is that this very science—and anyone familiar with it will grant this—owing to its deep seriousness and its tremendous, devoted industry, which one can only admire, has led to a complete splitting up and destruction of what it wished to teach. When in the future course of evolution people look back at our time, they will feel it to be particularly tragic that men sought to conquer the Bible by means of a science worthy of endless admiration—and succeeded only in losing the Bible.

Thus we can see that as regards these two aspects of the exoteric we are living in a transitional period, and in so far as we have grasped the spirit of Theosophy, the old paths must lead over into others. And having now considered the exoteric paths of the past to the Christ-Impulse, we shall see tomorrow how this relationship to Christ takes form in the realm of the esoteric. We will then conclude our study by showing how we can come to grasp the Christ-Event not only for the whole evolution of humanity, but for each individual man. We shall be able to review the esoteric path more briefly, because we have assembled building-stones for it during past years. We will crown our endeavours by fixing our gaze upon the relationship of the Christ-Impulse to every individual human soul.

Yesterday we tried to characterise the path to Christ that can still be taken today, as it could especially in earlier times, by exoteric means. We will now touch briefly on the esoteric path—the path which leads to Christ in such a way that he can be found within the super-sensible worlds.

First of all we must note that this esoteric path to Christ Jesus was also the way of the Evangelists, of those who wrote the Gospels. For although the writer of the John Gospel had himself witnessed many of the events he describes—as you can see from the lecture-cycle on this Gospel—his chief object was not merely to relate what he remembered, for this applies only to those minute, exact details which surprise us in his Gospel. The great, majestic, crowning features of the work of redemption, of the Mystery of Golgotha, were drawn by the writer of this Gospel from his clairvoyant consciousness also. Consequently, although the Gospels are really revived Mystery rituals—this is shown in my Christianity as Mystical Fact—they are so because the writers of the Gospels, following their esoteric path, could procure for themselves out of the super-sensible world a picture of the events in Palestine which led to the Mystery of Golgotha. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha up to our own times, a person who desired to come to a super-sensible experience of the Christ-Event had to go through the stages which you will find described in earlier lecture-cycles as the seven stages of our Christian Initiation: The Washing of the Feet; The Scourging; The Crowning with Thorns; The Mystic Death; The Burial; the Resurrection; the Ascension. Today we will make clear to ourselves what the pupil can attain by going through this Christian Initiation.

First of all, one essential point. As you can convince yourselves by reading the lectures on this subject, Christian Initiation is very different from the incorrect method of Initiation described in the first lecture of this course. In Christian Initiation certain feelings which belong to humanity in general are first invoked, and they lead to an Imagination of the Washing of the Feet. Thus the picture of this in the John Gospel is not the first thing to be imagined; the aspirant begins by trying to live for a long time with certain feelings and perceptions. I have often characterised this by saying that the person concerned should gaze upon the plant, which grows out of the mineral ground, takes into itself the materials of the mineral kingdom, and yet raises itself above this kingdom as a higher being than the mineral. If the plant could speak and feel, it would bow down to the mineral kingdom and say: ‘Certainly I was destined within the economy of the Cosmos to attain a higher stage than you, Mineral, but you give me the possibility of existence. In the order of beings you are certainly a lower being than myself, but I have to thank you for my existence, and I bow myself in humility before you.’ In the same way the animal would have to bow down to the plant, although the plant is a lower being than the animal, and say: ‘I thank you for my existence; I acknowledge it in humility, and I bow myself before you.’ And so would each being that climbs upwards have to bow down to the other standing below, and also he who has risen by way of a spiritual ladder to a higher level must bow down to the beings who alone have made this possible for him.

A person who permeates himself with the feeling of humility in regard to the lower, who thoroughly incorporates this feeling in his own being and lets it live there for months, perhaps even for years, will see that it spreads itself out in his organism, and so pervades him that he experiences a transformation of this feeling into an Imagination. And this Imagination corresponds exactly to the scene represented in the John Gospel as the Washing of the Feet, where Christ Jesus, who is the Head of the Twelve, stoops to those who stand here below Him in the order of the physical world, and in humility acknowledges that He thanks those who are below Him for the possibility of his higher ascent. He acknowledges before the Twelve: ‘As the animal thanks the plant, so do I thank you for what I was able to become in the physical world!’ A person who permeates himself with this feeling comes not only to an Imagination of the Washing of the Feet, but also to a quite pronounced feeling, as though water were washing over his feet. This can be felt for weeks: it shows how deeply imbued our human nature is with such universal human feelings, which nevertheless can raise man above himself.

Further, we have seen that we can go through the experience which leads to the Imagination of the Scourging when we place the following vividly before us: ‘Much suffering and pain will meet me in the world; yes, from all sides suffering and pain may come; no one escapes them. But I will so steel my will that suffering and pain, the scourgings that come from the world, may do their worst; I will stand upright and bear my fate resignedly, as it comes to pass. For had it not come to pass as it has done, as I have experienced it, I should not have been able to reach the height I have attained.’ When the person in question makes this a matter of his perception, and lives within it, he actually feels something like sharp pains and woundings, like strokes of a scourge against his own skin, and the Imagination arises as if he were outside himself, and was watching himself scourged according to the example of Christ Jesus. In line with this example one can experience the Crowning of Thorns, the Mystic Death, and so on. This has often been described.

What is attained by a man who thus seeks within himself to experience first the four stages, and then, when his karma is favourable, the others also, making in all seven stages of Christian Initiation? From the foregoing description you can gather that the whole scale of feelings we go through ought to strengthen us and give us power, and ought to make us into quite another nature, so that in the world we feel ourselves standing strong, powerful and free, and also capable of every act of devoted love. In Christian Initiation, this ought in a deep sense to become a second nature to us. For what has to happen?

Perhaps it has not yet occurred to all those of you who have read the earlier elementary cycles, and so have met with Christian Initiation in its seven stages, that owing to the intensity of the experiences which must be undergone, the effects go right into the physical body. For through the strength and power with which we go through these feelings, it really is at first as if water were washing over our feet, and then as if we were transfixed with wounds. We actually feel as if thorns were pressing into our head; we feel all the pain and suffering of the Crucifixion. We have to feel this before we can experience the Mystical Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection, as these also have been described. Even if we have not gone through these feelings with sufficient intensity, they will certainly have the effect that we become strong and full of love in the right sense of the word. But what we then incorporate can go only as far as the etheric body.

When, however, we begin to feel that our feet are as though washed with water, our body as if covered with wounds, then we have succeeded in driving these feelings so deeply into our nature that they have penetrated as far as the physical body. They do indeed penetrate the physical body, and then the stigmata, the marks of the bleeding wounds of Christ Jesus, may appear. We drive the feelings inwards into the physical body and know that they develop their strength in the physical body itself. We consciously feel ourselves more in the grip of our whole being than if the impressions were merely in the astral body and etheric body. The essential thing is that through a process of mystical feeling we work right into our physical body; and when we do this we are doing nothing less than making ourselves ready in our physical body to receive the Phantom that went forth from the grave on Golgotha. Hence we work into our physical body in order to make it so living that it feels a relationship with, an attractive force towards, the Phantom that rose out of the grave on Golgotha.

And here I would make an incidental remark. In Spiritual Science one must accustom oneself to becoming acquainted with cosmic secrets and cosmic truths gradually. Anyone who is not prepared to wait for the relevant truths will not make good progress. Of course people would like to have Spiritual Science all at once, preferably in one book or in one course of lectures. But that cannot be so, as you will see from an example. How long is it since in earlier lectures Christian Initiation was first described? You heard that such and such takes place, and that the individual, through the feelings which affect his soul, works right into his physical body. Everything said in those earlier lectures was intended to provide some elements for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha, and now for the first time it is possible to describe how an individual, through the requisite exercises of feeling in the course of Christian Initiation, makes himself ripe to receive the Phantom which rose from the grave of Golgotha. We had to wait until the union of the subjective with the objective could be found; and for this many preparatory lectures were necessary. Even today there are many things that can be indicated only as ‘half truths’. Anyone who has patience to continue with us—whether in this or in another incarnation, each according to his karma—will have seen how he could advance from the description of the mystical path in the Christian sense to the description of the objective fact, and so to the real meaning of this Christian Initiation, and he will see also that still higher truths will be brought to light from out of Spiritual Science in the course of the coming years or the next age. Thus we see the aim, the goal, of Christian Initiation.

Through what has been characterised as Rosicrucian Initiation, i.e. what an individual can have of it as Initiation today, the same thing in a certain sense is also attained, only by somewhat different means. A bond of attraction is formed between the individual, in so far as he is incorporated in a physical body, and that which arose as the real prototype of the physical body from the grave of Golgotha. Now we know from previous lectures that we are at the starting-point of a world-epoch in which we must expect an event that will not take place on the physical plane, as did the Event of Golgotha, but in the super-sensible world; an event which nevertheless stands in a close and true connection with the Event of Golgotha. The latter was designed to give back to man his real physical force-body, the Phantom which had degenerated from the beginning of the Earth-evolution, and for the giving back of it a series of events on the physical plane had to occur; but for that which is now to happen an event on the physical plane is not necessary. An incarnation of the Christ-Being in a human body of flesh could take place only once in the course of the Earth-evolution. When people announce a repetition of the incarnation of this Being, it simply means that the Christ-Being is not understood.

The event now to come, which can be observed only in a super-sensible world, has been characterised in the words: ‘Christ becomes for men the Lord of Karma.’ This means that in future the ordering of karmic transactions will come about through Christ. Ever more and more will men of the future feel: ‘I am going through the gate of death with my karmic account. On one side stand my good, clever, and beautiful deeds, my clever, beautiful, good, and intelligent thoughts; on the other side stands everything evil, wicked, stupid, foolish and loathsome. But He who in the future will have the office of Judge for the incarnations which will follow in human evolution, in order to bring order into this karmic account of men, is the Christ!’ And truly we have to picture this in the following way:

After we have gone through the gate of death, we shall be incarnated again in a later period. We shall then have to encounter events through which our karma can be balanced, for every man must reap what he has sown. Karma is a just law. But what the karmic law has to fulfill is not there only for individual men. Karma does not only balance the accounts of each Ego, but in every case the balancing must be arranged so as to be in the best possible accord with the concerns of the whole world. It must enable us to give all possible help to the advancement of mankind on earth. For this we need enlightenment, not merely the knowledge that the karmic fulfillment of our deed must come about. The fulfillment can take a form which will be either less or more useful for the general progress of humanity. Hence we must choose those thoughts, feelings or perceptions which will pay off our karma and at the same time serve the collective progress of mankind. In the future it will fall to Christ to bring the balance of our karma into line with the general Earth-karma and the general progress of humanity. And this happens principally in the time between death and a new birth. But it will also be prepared for in the epoch of time we are now approaching, before whose door we stand, because men will more and more acquire the capacity for a special experience. Very few are capable of it now, but from the middle of this century onwards, through the next 1,000 years, more and more people will have the following experience.

A person has done this or that. He will feel constrained to reflect on his action, and something like a dream-picture, arising in his mind, will make a quite remarkable impression on him. He will say to himself: ‘I cannot identify this as a recollection of something I have done, yet it feels like an experience of my own.’ Like a dream-picture it will stand there before him, closely concerned with him; but he cannot recall that he has experienced or done it in the past. If he is an anthroposophist he will understand the matter; otherwise he will have to wait until he comes to Anthroposophy and learns to understand it. The anthroposophist will know: ‘What you see as an apparent consequence of your actions is a picture that will be fulfilled in the future; the balancing of your actions is shown to you in advance.’ We are at the beginning of an epoch in which men, directly after they have committed a deed, will have a premonition, a feeling, perhaps even a significant picture, of how this deed will be karmically balanced.

Thus, in closest connection with human experience, enhanced capabilities for humanity will arise during the coming epoch. These capabilities will give a powerful stimulus to human morality, and this will signify something quite different from the voice of conscience, which has been a preparation for it. The individual will no longer believe: ‘What I have done will die with me.’ He will know quite exactly: ‘My action will not die when I die; it will have a consequence which will live on with me.’ And there is much else that the individual will know. The time during which the doors of the spiritual world have been closed to men is nearly over. Men must again climb up into the spiritual world. Their awakening capacities will enable them to participate in the spiritual world. Clairvoyance will always be different from this participation. Just as there was an ancient dreamlike clairvoyance, so will there be a future clairvoyance that is not dreamlike, the clairvoyance of people who know what they are doing and what it signifies.

Something else, too, will come about. The individual will know: ‘I am not alone. Everywhere there are spiritual beings who stand in a relationship to me.’ Men will learn to communicate with these beings and to live with them. And in the next three thousand years the truth that Christ is acting as Karmic Judge will become apparent to a sufficiently large number of people. Christ Himself will be experienced by men as an etheric Form. Like Paul before Damascus, they will know quite intimately that Christ lives, and is the Source for the reawakening of the physical prototype we received at the beginning of our evolution, and need if the Ego is to attain full development.

If through the Mystery of Golgotha something happened which gave the greatest impetus to human evolution, on the other hand it came at the time when the human mind, the human soul, were in their darkest condition. There were indeed ancient periods of evolution when men could know with certainty, because they had an ancestral memory, that the human individuality goes through repeated earth-lives. In the Gospels the teaching of repeated earth-lives is apparent only when we understand the Gospels and can discern traces of it there. That was the time when men were least fitted to comprehend this teaching. In the later times when men sought for Christ along the path indicated yesterday, everything had to take the form of a childlike preparation. Men could not then be made acquainted with experiences concerning reincarnation; they were not ripe for it and it would only have led them into error. Christianity had to develop for nearly 2,000 years without being able to indicate the teaching of reincarnation.

We have shown in these lectures how different it was in Buddhism, and how in Western consciousness the thought of repeated earth-lives arises as something self-evident. Certainly, many misunderstandings still prevail; but whether we take this idea from Lessing or from the psychologist Drossbach, we become aware that for the European consciousness the teaching of reincarnation concerns humanity at large, whereas in Buddhism the individual regards the question of how he goes from life to life, how he can free himself from the thirst for existence, as concerning only his personal inner life. The Oriental makes what is given to him as teaching about reincarnation into a path of individual redemption, whereas for Lessing the essential question was: ‘How can the whole of humanity move forward?’ According to Lessing, we must distinguish successive periods of time within the progressive development of humanity. Something new is given to humanity in each epoch. We see from history that new civilising actions keep on emerging in the course of human development. How could one speak of the evolution of the whole of humanity, says Lessing, if a soul lived in only one epoch? Whence could the fruits of civilisation come if human beings were not born again, if what they had learnt in one epoch were not carried over into the next, and its fruits into the following epoch and so on?

Thus for Lessing the idea of repeated earth-lives is not only a concern of the individual soul. It concerns the whole course of earthly civilisation. And in order that an advanced civilisation may arise, a soul which lives in the nineteenth century must carry over into its present existence whatever it had previously gained. For the sake of the earth and its civilisation, human beings must be born again. That is Lessing's thought. But in this thought of reincarnation as concerning all mankind the Christ-Impulse has been at work, woven into it. For the Christ-Impulse makes everything a man does or can do into an action of universal relevance, not something that touches him only as an individual. He only can be Christ's disciple who says: ‘I do it for the least of the brethren, because I know Thou feelest as though I had done it for Thee.’ As the whole of humanity is bound up with Christ, so does he who confesses Christ feel that he belongs to all mankind. This thought has worked into the thinking, feeling, and perception of the whole human race. And when the idea of reincarnation reappeared in the eighteenth century, it appeared as a Christian thought. And although Widenmann treated reincarnation clumsily, in an embryonic way, yet in his prize essay of 1851 his thought of reincarnation is permeated by the Christian impulse. He devotes a special chapter to showing the connection between Christianity and the teaching of reincarnation.

It was necessary in human evolution that souls should first accept the other Christian impulses, so that the thought of reincarnation might come to our consciousness in a ripe form. And indeed this thought of reincarnation will so connect itself with Christianity that it will be felt as something that leads a person on through successive incarnations. We shall understand how individuality, which is completely lost according to the Buddhist view—as we saw from the conversation of King Milinda with the sage Nagasena—first receives its true content by becoming permeated with Christ. We can now understand why the Buddhist view, about 500 years before the appearance of Christ, lost the human Ego, while retaining the teaching of successive incarnations. We have reached a time in which the human organism must understand, accept, permeate itself with the thought of reincarnation. For the progress of human evolution does not depend on what teachings are promulgated or find a new foothold. Other laws come into consideration, and they do not depend upon ourselves.

In the future human nature will develop certain powers which will have the effect that the individual, as soon as he has reached a certain age and has become properly conscious of himself, will have the feeling: ‘There is something in me which I must understand.’ This feeling will take hold of men more and more. In past times, even when human beings were fully aware of themselves, the consciousness which is now to come did not exist. It will express itself somewhat as follows: ‘I feel something within me which is connected with my personal ego. Strangely, it will not fit in with all that I have come to know since birth.’ One man will understand what is at work here; another will not. A man will understand it if he has carried the teachings of Spiritual Science into his life. Then he will know: ‘What I am now feeling is foreign to me, because it is the ego that has come over from earlier lives.’ This will oppress the heart, will cause fear and anxiety, in those who cannot explain it by repeated earth-lives. These feelings, which are not merely a theoretical uncertainty but a starving, a cramping, of life, will disappear through the perceptions given to us by Spiritual Science, which tell us: ‘You must think of your life as extended over earlier earth-lives.’ Then men will see what it means for them to experience the connection with the Christ-Impulse. For it is the Christ-Impulse which will give life to the whole retrospective view, the whole perspective of the past. A man will feel: ‘Here was this incarnation; there, that one.’ Then he will come to a time beyond which he will be unable to go without clearly understanding: ‘The Christ-Impulse was then on earth!’ Incarnations will be followed further back to a time when the Christ-Event was not yet there. This illumination of the retrospective view through the Christ-Impulse will be needed by men for their assurance in the future, as a necessity and a help which can flow into later incarnations.

This transformation of the human soul will derive from the Event which begins in the twentieth century and may be called the second Christ-Event, so that those persons in whom higher faculties have awakened will look upon the Lord of Karma. Some of you may say that when the Christ-Event of the twentieth century takes place, many of those now living will be with those who have fallen asleep, will be in the time between death and a new birth. But whether a person is living in a physical body, or in the time between death and a new birth, if he has prepared himself for the Christ-Event, he will experience it. The vision of the Christ-Event does not depend on whether we are incarnated in a physical body, but the preparation for the Christ-Event does so depend. Just as it was necessary that the first Christ-Event should take place on the physical plane in order that the salvation of man could be accomplished, so must the preparation be made here in the physical world, the preparation to look with full understanding, with full illumination, upon the Christ-Event of the twentieth century. For a person who looks upon it unprepared, when his powers have been awakened, will not be able to understand it. The Lord of Karma will then appear to him as a fearful judgment. In order to have an illuminated understanding of this Event, the individual must be prepared. The spreading abroad of the anthroposophical world-conception has taken place in our time for this purpose, so that men can be prepared on the physical plane to perceive the Christ-Event either on the physical plane or on the higher planes. Those who are not sufficiently prepared on the physical plane, and then go unprepared through the life between death and a new birth, will have to wait until, in the next incarnation, they can be further prepared through Anthroposophy for the understanding of Christ. During the next 3,000 years the opportunity will be given to men of going through this preparation, and the purpose of all anthroposophical development will be to render men more and more capable of participating in that which is to come.

Thus we understand how the past flows over into the future. When, for example, we recall how the Buddha permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child, we see how the activity of the Buddha forces continued after he himself no longer needed to incarnate again on earth. And when we remember how influences not directly connected with the Buddha worked on in the West, we see how the spiritual world penetrates the physical.

All this preparation is connected with the fact that men are always drawing nearer to an ideal which dawned in ancient Greece, an ideal formulated by Socrates: that when a man grasps the idea of the good, the moral, the ethical, he feels this idea as so magical an impulse that he becomes capable of living in accordance with it as an ideal. Today we are not so far advanced that this ideal can be realised; we are only so far on that in certain circumstances a man may very well form a concept of the good; he may be very clever and wise, and yet he need not be morally good. The direction of inner evolution, however, is such that the ideas we hold of the good will immediately become moral impulses. That is the intent of the evolution we shall experience in the approaching times. And the teachings given on earth will increasingly be such that in the course of future centuries and millennia human speech will come to have an effect unimaginably greater than it has now or ever had in the past. Today in the higher worlds anyone can see clearly the connection between intellect and morality; but as yet there is no human speech which works so magically that when a moral principle is stated, it sinks down into a man as a new idea, so that he perceives it as directly moral, and cannot do otherwise than act upon it as a moral impulse. After the next 3,000 years it will be possible to use a form of speech that could not now be entrusted to our heads. It will be such that everything intellectual will at the same time be moral, and this moral element will penetrate into the hearts of men. During the next 3,000 years the human race must become as though permeated with magical morality. Otherwise men would not be able to bear such an evolution; they would only misuse it.

For the special preparation of an evolution of this kind we must look at a much slandered individuality who lived about a century before our era. He is mentioned, though certainly in a distorted form, in Hebrew writings as Jeschu Ben Pandira—Jesus the son of Pandira. From lectures once given in Berne, some of you will know that this Jeschu Ben Pandira worked in preparation for the Christ-Event by training pupils, among whom was one who became the teacher of the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Jeschu Ben Pandira, a noble Essene figure, preceded Jesus of Nazareth by a century. Jesus of Nazareth Himself only went among the Essenes, whereas Jeschu Ben Pandira was altogether an Essene.

Who was Jeschu Ben Pandira?

The successor of that Bodhisattva who in his final earthly incarnation had risen in his twenty-ninth year to be Gautama Buddha was incorporated in the physical body of Jeschu Ben Pandira. Every Bodhisattva who rises to the rank of a Buddha has a successor. This oriental tradition corresponds exactly with occult research. The Bodhisattva who worked at that time in preparation for the Christ-Event was re-embodied again and again. One of his re-embodiments is fixed for the twentieth century. It is impossible to speak here more exactly concerning the re-embodiment of this Bodhisattva; something, however, can be said about the way in which such a Bodhisattva may be recognised.

Through a law which will be demonstrated and explained in future lectures, it is a peculiarity of this Bodhisattva that when he reappears in a new embodiment—and he always reappears thus in the course of the centuries—he is quite dissimilar in his youth from what he comes to be in his later activities. At a quite definite point of time in the life of this Bodhisattva, something like a revolution, a great transformation, always takes place. To express it more in detail, in some place or other there is a more or less gifted child, in whom it is not noticeable that he has to do anything special in preparation for the future evolution of humanity. Occult research confirms that no one during his childhood and youth gives so little sign of what he really is as he who is to incorporate a Bodhisattva. For at a certain point of time in his life a great change comes over him. If an individuality from the remote past—Moses, for example—is incorporated, it is not the same with him as it was with the Christ individuality, to whom Jesus of Nazareth left the sheaths. In the case of a Bodhisattva there certainly will be something like an exchange, but the individuality remains in a certain sense, and the individuality who comes from the remote past—as patriarch or another—and is to bring new forces for the evolution of humanity, descends, and the human being who receives him experiences an immense transformation. This transformation occurs particularly between the thirtieth and thirty-third years. It can never be known beforehand that this body will be taken possession of by the Bodhisattva. The change never shows itself in youth. The distinctive feature is precisely that the later years are so unlike the youthful ones.

He who was incorporated in Jeschu Ben Pandira—the Bodhisattva who was repeatedly reincarnated, and who succeeded Gautama Buddha—has prepared himself for his Bodhisattva-incarnation so that he can reappear and rise to the Buddha dignity exactly 5,000 years after the illumination of Gautama Buddha under the bodhi-tree. Here again occult investigation fully agrees with oriental tradition. So, 3,000 years from now, this Bodhisattva, looking back on all that has happened in the new epoch, and looking back on the Christ-Impulse and all that is connected with it, will speak in such a way that his speech will make into a reality what has just been characterised: intellectuality will become directly moral. The future Bodhisattva, who will place all that he has at the service of the Christ-Impulse, will be a Bringer of the Good through the Word, through the Logos. He will speak in a language as yet possessed by no man, but a language which is so holy that he who speaks it can be called a Bringer of the Good. This also will not show itself in his youth, but approximately in his thirty-first year he will appear as a new man, and will yield himself up as the one who can be filled with a higher individuality. The experience of one single incarnation in the flesh holds good only for Christ Jesus. All Bodhisattvas go through various successive incarnations on the physical plane. This Bodhisattva, 3,000 years hence, will have advanced so far that he will be a Bringer of the Good, a Maitreya Buddha, who will place his Words of Goodness at the service of the Christ-Impulse, which a sufficient number of men will by then have made part of their lives. The perspective of the future development of man tells us this today.

What was necessary so that human beings could come gradually to this epoch of evolution? This we can make clear as follows.

If we wish to make a graphic picture of what happened in ancient Lemuria for the earth-evolution of man, we can say: That was the time when man descended from Divine Heights: it was ordained for him that he should develop further in a certain way, but through the Luciferic influence he was cast down more deeply into matter than he would have been without that influence. Thereby his path in evolution became different.

When man had gone downwards to the lowest stage, a powerful impetus in the upward direction was required. This impetus could come about only because in the higher worlds the Being whom we designate as the Christ-Being had formed a resolution which He would not have needed to take for His own evolution. For the Christ-Being would also have attained His evolution if He had taken a path far, far above the path that men were pursuing. He could have passed by, so to speak, far above the evolution of humanity. But if the upward impulse had not been given, human evolution would have been compelled to continue on its downward path. The Christ would have had an ascent, but humanity a downfall. Only because the Christ-Being had taken the resolution to unite Himself at the time of the Events of Palestine with a man, to embody Himself in a man and to make the upward path possible for humanity—only this could bring about the Redemption of humanity, as we may now call it: redemption from the impulse brought by the Luciferic forces and designated symbolically in the Bible as ‘original sin’, the Temptation by the Serpent and the original sin that was its consequence. Christ accomplished something that was not necessary for Himself.

What kind of Act was this?

It was an act of Divine Love. We must be quite clear that no human feeling is capable of realising the intensity of love that was needed for a God to make a decision—a decision He had no need to make—to work upon earth in a human body. Thereby, through an act of love, the most important event in human evolution was brought about. And when men grasp this act of love by a God, when they try to grasp it as a great ideal in contrast with which every human act of love can be but small, then, through this feeling of utter disproportion between human love and the Divine Love needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, they will draw near to the building up, to the giving birth within them, of those Imaginations which place before our spiritual gaze the momentous Event of Golgotha. Yes, verily, it is possible to attain to the Imagination of the mount on which the Cross was raised, that Cross on which hung a God in human body, a God who out of his own free will, out of Love, accomplished the act whereby the earth and humanity could reach their goal.

If the God who is designated by the name of the Father had not at one time permitted the Luciferic influences to come to man, man would not have developed the free Ego. With the Luciferic influence, the conditions for the free Ego were established. That had to be permitted by the Father-God. But just as the Ego, for the sake of freedom, had to become entangled in matter, so then, in order that the Ego might be freed from this entanglement, the entire love of the Son had to lead to the Act of Golgotha. Through this alone the freedom of man, the complete dignity of man, first became possible. For the fact that we can be free beings, we have to thank a Divine Act of Love. As men we may feel free beings, but we may never forget that for this freedom we have to thank this Act of Love. Then, in the midst of our feeling, the thought will arise: ‘You can attain to the value, the dignity, of a man; but one thing you may not forget, that for being what you are you have to thank Him who has brought back to you your human prototype through the Redemption on Golgotha.’ Men should not be able to lay hold of the thought of freedom without the thought of Redemption through Christ: only then is the thought of freedom justified. If we will to be free, we must bring the offering of thanks to Christ for our freedom. Then only can we really perceive it. And those who consider that their dignity as men is restricted when they thank Christ for it, should recognise that human opinions have no significance in face of cosmic facts, and that one day they will very willingly acknowledge that their freedom was won by Christ.

What we have been able to do in these lectures is not very much for gaining a closer understanding of the Christ-Impulse, and of the whole course of human evolution on earth, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. We can only bring together single building-stones. But if the effect upon our souls is something like a renewed stimulus to further effort, to further development along the path of knowledge, then these stones will have done their work for the great spiritual temple of humanity. And the best we can carry away from a spiritual-scientific study such as this is that once more we have learnt something towards a certain goal, that we have again somewhat enriched our knowledge. And our high goal is this: that we may know more exactly how much we still need to know. Then we shall be more and more permeated with the truth of the old Socratic saying: ‘The more a man learns, the more he knows how little he knows.’ But this conviction is good only when it is not a confession of passive, easy-going resignation, but testifies to a living will and effort towards an ever-extending knowledge. We ought not to acknowledge how little we know by saying, ‘Since we cannot know everything, we would rather learn nothing; so let us fold our hands in our lap.’ That would be a false result of spiritual-scientific study. The right result is to be more and more inspired to further striving; to regard every new thing learnt as a step towards the attainment of yet higher stages.

In these lectures we have perhaps had to say much about the Redemption-thought without often using the word. This Redemption-thought should be felt by a seeker after the spirit as it was felt by a great forerunner of our Spiritual Science: that it is related and entrusted to our souls only as a consequence of our striving after the highest goals of knowing, feeling and willing. And as this great forerunner connects the word ‘Redemption’ with the word ‘striving’ and has expressed it in the line, ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’—‘He who never gives up striving, he it is whom we can redeem’—so should the anthroposophist always feel. The true Redemption can be grasped and felt and willed in its own realm only by someone who never gives up.

May this lecture-cycle—which has been specially laid upon my heart, because so much has to be said in it concerning the Redemption-thought—be a stimulus to our further endeavours; may we find ourselves ever more and more united in our endeavours, during this incarnation and in later ones. May this be the fruit which comes from such studies. With this we will close, taking with us as a stimulus the thought that we must continually exert ourselves, in order that we may see what the Christ is, on the one hand, and on the other may draw nearer to Redemption, which is being set free not merely from the lower earth-path and earth-fate, but free also from everything that hinders man from attaining his dignity as man. But these things are written down truly only in the annals of the Spiritual. For the script that can be read in spiritual realms is the only true writing. Let us therefore strive to read the chapter concerning the dignity of man and the mission of man, in the script where these things stand written in the spiritual worlds.

This lecture is in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works; the volume containing the German texts is entitled, Von Jesus Zu Christus, From Jesus to Christ (Vol. 131 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). It is the first lecture in this series of ten lectures.

The object of these lectures is to place before you an idea of the Christ Event in so far as it is connected with the historical appearance of the Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So many questions of the spiritual life are bound up with this subject that the choice of it will enable us to make a wide survey of the realm of Spiritual Science and its mission, and to discuss the significance of the Anthroposophical Movement for the spiritual life of the present time. We shall also have the opportunity of learning what the content of religion is. And since this content must spring from the common heritage of mankind, we shall seek to know it in its relation to the deeper sources of religious life, and to what the sources of occult science have to tell us concerning the foundation of all religious and philosophic endeavors. Much that we shall have to discuss will seem to lie very far from the theme itself, but it will all lead us back to our main purpose.

We shall best come to a more precise understanding of our subject—modern religious life on the one hand and the spiritual-scientific deepening of spiritual life on the other—if we glance at the origins both of religious life on the one hand and of occult spiritual life in recent centuries, for as regards spiritual development in Europe during this period, we can discern two directions of thought which have been cultivated with the utmost intensity: on the one hand an exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle, and on the other a most careful, conscientious preservation of the Christ-Principle. When we place before our minds these two recent streams, we must see in the exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle a great and dangerous error in the spiritual life of those times, and on the other side a movement of deep significance, a movement which seeks above all the true paths and is careful to avoid the paths of error. From the outset, therefore, in our judgment of two entirely different spiritual movements, we have to ascribe serious error to one of them and most earnest efforts after truth to the other.

The movement which interests us in connection with out spiritual-scientific point of view, and which we may call an extraordinarily dangerous error in a certain sense, is the movement known in the external world as Jesuitism. In Jesuitism we encounter a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. In the other movement, which for centuries has existed in Europe as Rosicrucianism, we have an inward Christ-movement which above all seeks carefully for the ways of truth.

Ever since a Jesuitical current arose in Europe, much has been said and written in exoteric life about Jesuitism. Those who wish to study spiritual life from its deeper sources will thus be concerned to see how far Jesuitism signifies a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. If we wish to arrive at a true characterisation of Jesuitism, we must get to know how the three chief principles of world-evolution, which are indicated in the most varied ways in the different world-outlooks, find practical statement in human life, including exoteric life. Today we will first of all turn quite away from the deeper significance and characterisation of these 3 fundamental streams, which run through all life and all evolution, and will review them from an external point of view.

First of all we have the cognitional element in our soul-life. Now, whatever may be said against the abstractions of a one-sided intellectual search for truth, or against the alienation from life of many scientific, philosophical and theosophical endeavors, anyone who is clear in his own mind as to what he wills and what he can will, knows that Cognition belongs to the most deeply rooted activities of the soul. For whether we seek knowledge chiefly through thinking, or more through sensation or feeling, Cognition always signifies a taking account of the world around us, and also of ourselves. Hence we must say that whether we are satisfied for the moment with the simplest experiences of the soul, or whether we wish to devote ourselves to the most complicated analysis of the mysteries of existence, Cognition is the primary and most significant question. For it is basically through Cognition that we form a picture of the content of the world—a picture we live by and from which our entire soul-life is nourished. The very first sense-impression, in fact all sense-life, must be included in the realm of Cognition, along with the highest formulations of the intellect.

Under Cognition we must include also the impulse to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, for although it is true in a certain sense that there is no disputing about taste, yet cognition is involved when someone has adopted a certain judgment in a question of taste and can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Again, our moral impulses—those which prompt us to do good and abstain from evil—must be seen as moral ideas, as cognition, or as impulses to do the one and avoid the other. Even what we call our conscience, however vague the impulses from it may be, comes under the heading of Cognition. In short, the world we are consciously aware of, whether it be reality or maya; the world we live in consciously, everything we are conscious of—all this can be embraced under the heading: cognitive spiritual life.

Everyone, however, must acknowledge that under the surface of this cognitive life something else can be discerned; that in our everyday existence our soul-life gives evidence of many things which are not part of our conscious life. When we wake up in the morning, our soul-life if always strengthened and refreshed and newly born from sleep. During the unconsciousness of sleep we have gained something which is outside the realm of conscious cognition, but comes from a region where our soul is active below the level of consciousness.

In waking life, too, we must admit that we are impelled by impulses, instincts and forces which throw up their waves into our conscious life, while they work and have their being below it. We become aware that they work below the conscious when they rise above the surface which separates the conscious from the subconscious soul-life of this kind, for we can see how in the moral realm this or that ideal comes to birth. It takes only a little self-knowledge to realise that these ideals do rise up into our soul-life, but that we are far from always knowing how our great moral ideals are connected with the deepest questions of existence, or how they belong to the will of God, in which they must ultimately be grounded. We might indeed compare our soul-life in its totality with a deep ocean. The depths of this oceanic soul-life throw up waves to the surface, and those that break out into the realm of air, which we can compare with normal consciousness, are brought within the range of conscious cognition. All conscious life is rooted in a subconscious soul-life.

Fundamentally, the whole evolution of mankind can be understood only if a subconscious soul-life of this kind is acknowledged. For what does the progress of spiritual life signify save that many things which have long dwelt down below take form for the first time when they are brought to surface level? So it is, for example, when an inventive idea arises in the form of an impulse towards discovery. Subconscious soul-life, as real as our conscious life, must therefore be recognized as a second element in our life of soul.

If we place this subconscious soul-life in a realm that is at first unknown—but not unknowable—we must contrast it with a third element. This element is immediately apparent to external, exoteric observation, for if we turn our attention to the outer world through our senses, or approach it through our intellect or any form of mental activity, we come to know all sorts of things. But a more exact consideration of every age of cognition compels us to realise that behind everything we can know about the world at large something else lies hidden: something that is certainly not unknowable but in every epoch has to be described as not yet known. And this not-yet-known, which lies below the surface of the known in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, belongs as much to ourselves as it does to external nature. It belongs to us in so far as we absorb and work up in our physical organism the materials and forces of the outer world; and inasmuch as we have within us a portion of nature, we have also within us a portion of the unknown in nature. So in the world wherein we live we must distinguish a triad: our conscious spiritual life; our subconscious soul-life below the threshold of consciousness; and that which, as the unknown in nature and at the same time in man, lives in us as part of the great unknown Nature.

This triad emerges directly from a rational observation of the world. And if looking away from all dogmatic statements, from all philosophical or theosophical traditions, in so far as these are clothed in conceptual definitions or formulations, we may ask: How has the human mind always expressed the fact that this triad is present not only in the immediate environment, but in the whole world to which man himself belongs? We must then reply: Man gives the name of Spirit to all that can be known within the horizon of the conscious. He designates as the Son or the Logos that which works in the subconscious and throws up only its waves from down below. And to that which belongs equally to the unknown in Nature, and to the part of our own being which is of one kind with Nature, the name of the Father-Principle has always been given, because it was felt to express the relation of the third principle to the other two.

Besides what has now been said concerning the Spirit, the Son and the Father-Principle, it can be taken for granted that other differentiations we have formerly made, and also the differentiations made in this or that philosophy, have their justifications. But we can say that the most widely accepted idea of this differentiation corresponds with the account of it given here.

Now let us ask: How can we characterise the transition from that which belongs to the Spirit, and so plays directly into the conscious life of the soul, to the subconscious element which belongs to the Son-Principle? We shall best grasp this transition if we realise that into ordinary human consciousness there plays quite distinctly the element we designate as Will, in contrast to the elements of ideations and feeling. If we rightly interpret the Bible saying, ‘The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, it indicates that everything grasped by consciousness lies in the realm of the Spirit, whereas by ‘the flesh’ is meant everything that lies more in the subconscious. As to the nature of the Will, we need only think of that which plays up from the subconscious and enters into our consciousness only when we form concepts of it. Only when we transform into concepts and ideas the dark impelling forces which are rooted in the elemental part of the soul—only then do they enter the realm of the Spirit; otherwise they remain in the realm of the Son-Principle. And since the Will plays through our feelings into the life of ideas, we see quite clearly the breaking out into the conscious of the waves from the subconscious ocean. In our threefold soul-life we have two elements, ideation and feeling, which belong to conscious life, but feeling descends directly into the realm of the Will, and the nearer we come to the impulses of Will, the further we descend into the subconscious, the dark realms into which we sink completely when consciousness is engulfed in deep, dreamless sleep.

Thus we see that the Will-element, because it descends into the realm of the subconscious, stands towards the individual being of man in a relationship quite different from that of cognition, the realm of the Spirit. And so, when we differentiate between Spirit and Son, we may be impelled to surmise that man's relationship to the Spirit is different from his relationship to the Son. How is this to be understood?

Even in exoteric life it is quite easy to understand. Certainly the realm of cognition has given rise to all kinds of debate, but if people would only come to understand one another concerning the concepts and ideas they formulate for themselves, controversy over questions of cognition would gradually cease. I have often emphasised that we no longer dispute over mathematics, because we have raised mathematics entirely into consciousness. The things we dispute about are those not yet raised into consciousness: we still allow our subconscious impulses, instincts and passions to play into them.

On the other hand, we must recognise the Will-element, and everything in another person's subconscious, as something which should on no account be intruded upon; it must be regarded as his innermost sanctuary. We need consider only how unpleasant to a healthy soul-life is the feeling that the Will of another man is being put under compulsion. It is not only aesthetically but morally unpleasant to see the conscious soul-life of anyone eliminated by hypnotism or any other powerful means; or to see the Will-power of one person working directly on the Will of another. The only healthy way to gain influence over another person's Will is through Cognition. Cognition should be the means whereby one soul comes to an understanding with another. A person must first translate his wishes into a conceptual form: then they may influence another person's cognition, and they should touch his Will only by this indirect route. Nothing else can be satisfactory in the highest, most ideal sense to a healthy life of soul. Every kind of forcible working of Will upon Will must evoke an unpleasant impression.

In other words, human nature strives, in so far as it is healthy, to develop in the realm of the Spirit the life it has in common with others, and to cherish and respect the realm of the subconscious, in so far as it comes to statement in the human organism, as an inviolable sanctuary that should rest in the personality, the individuality, of each man and should not be approached save through the door of conscious cognition. So at least a modern consciousness, attuned to our epoch, must feel if it is to know itself to be healthy.

In later lectures we shall see whether this was so in all periods of human evolution. What has been said today will help us to think clearly about what is outside us and what is within us, at least for our own period. This leads to the conclusion that fundamentally the realm of the Son—embracing everything that we designate as the Son or Logos—must be awakened in each individual as a quite personal concern; and that the realm of common life, where men may be influenced by one another, is the realm of the Spirit.

We see this expressed in the grandest, most significant way in the New Testament accounts of the attitude of Christ Jesus towards His first disciples and followers. ====================== From all that is told concerning the Christ-Event we can gather that the followers who had hastened to Jesus during his life-time were bewildered when His life ended with the crucifixion; with that form of death which, in the land where the Christ Event took its course, was regarded as the only possible expiration for the greatest crimes. And although this death on the cross did not affect everyone as it did Saul, who later became Paul, and as Saul had concluded that someone who suffered such a death could not be the Messiah, or the Christ—for the crucifixion had made a milder impression on the disciples, one might say—yet it is obvious that the writers of the Gospels wished to give the impression that Christ Jesus, through his subjection to the shameful death on the cross, had forfeited some of the effect He had had on the hearts of those around Him.

But with this account something else is connected. The influence that Christ Jesus had acquired—an influence we must characterise more exactly during these lectures—was restored to Him after the Resurrection. Whatever may be our present thoughts about the Resurrection, we shall have to discuss it here in the light of occult science; and then, if we simply go by the Gospel narratives, one thing will be clear: for those to whom Christ appeared after the Resurrection He had become someone who was present in a quite special way, different entirely from His previous presence.

In speaking on the Gospel of St. John I have already pointed out how impossible it would have been for anyone who knew Jesus not to regognise Him after 3 days, or to confuse Him with someone else, if He had not appeared in an altered form. The Evangelists wish particularly to evoke the impression that the Christ appeared in this altered form. But they also wish to indicate something else. For the Christ to exert influence on human souls, a certain receptivity in those souls was necessary. And this receptivity had to be acted on not merely by an influence from the realm of the Spirit but by the actual sight of the Christ-Being.

If we ask what this signifies, we must realise that when a person stands before us, his effect upon us goes beyond anything we are conscious of. Whenever a human being or other being works upon us, unconscious elements affect our soul-life; they are produced by the other being indirectly through consciousness, but he can produce them only if he stands before us in actuality. What the Christ brought about from person to person after the so-called Resurrection was something that worked up from the unconscious soul-powers of the disciples into their soul-life: an acquaintance with the Son. Hence the differences in the portrayal of the risen Christ; hence, too, the variations in the accounts, showing how the Christ appeared to one or other person, according to the disposition of the person concerned. Here we see the Christ-Being acting on the subconscious part of the souls of the disciples; hence the appearances are quite individual, and we should not complain because they are not uniform.

If, however, the significance of the Christ for the world was to be His bringing to all men something common to all of them, then not only this individual working of the Son had to proceed from the Christ, but the element of Spirit, which can encompass something that belongs to all men, had to be renewed by Him. This is indicated by the statement, that after the Christ had worked upon the Logos-nature of man, He sent forth the Spirit in the form of the renewed or ‘holy, Spirit’. Thus was created that element common to all men which is characterised when we are told that the disciples, after they had received the Spirit, began to speak in the most diverse tongues. Here we are shown how the common element resides in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And something else is indicated; how different is this out-pouring of the Spirit from the simple imparting of the power of the Son, for in the Acts of the Apostles we are told that certain persons to whom the apostles came had already received the Jesus-baptism, and yet they had now to receive for the first time the Spirit, symbolically indicated by the laying on of hands. In the characterisation of the Christ-working, which acts upon the subconscious impulses of the soul and so must have a personal, inward character, and the Spirit-element, which represents something common to all mankind.

It is this Spirit-element that those who have named themselves ‘Rosicrucians’ have sought to preserve most carefully, as far as human weakness permits. The Rosicrucians have always wished to adhere strictly to the rule that even in the highest regions of Initiation nothing must be worked upon except the Spirit-element which, as common between man and man, is available in the evolution of humanity. It was never an Initiation of the Will, for the Will of man was to be respected as a sanctuary in the innermost part of the soul. Hence the individual was led to those Initiations which were to take him beyond the stage of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, but always so that he could recognise within himself the response which the development of the Spirit-element was to call forth. No influence was to be exerted on the Will.

We must not mistake this attitude for one of indifference towards the Will. The point is that by excluding all direct working upon the Will, the purest spiritual influence was imparted indirectly through the Spirit. When we come to an understanding with another man with regard to entering on the path of knowledge of the Spirit, light and warmth are radiated from the spiritual path, and they then enkindle the Will, but always by the indirect path through the Spirit—never otherwise.

In Rosicrucianism, therefore, we can observe in the highest sense that impulse of Christianity which finds twofold statement: on the one hand in the Son-element, in the Christ-working which goes down deeply into the subconscious; on the other, in the Spirit-working which embraces all that falls within the horizon of our consciousness. We must indeed bear the Christ in our Will; but the way in which man should come to an understanding with each other in life concerning the Christ can be found only—in the Rosicrucian sense—through a conscious soul-life which penetrates ever more deeply into the occult.

In reaction against many other spiritual streams in Europe, the opposite way was taken by those who are usually called Jesuits. The radical, fundamental difference between what we justifiably call the Christian way of the Spirit and the Jesuit way of the Spirit, which gives a one-sided exaggeration to the Jesus-Principle, is that the intention of the Jesuit way is to work directly, at all times upon the Will. The difference is clearly shown in the method by which the pupil of Jesuitism is educated. Jesuitism is not to be taken lightly, or merely exoterically, but also esoterically, for it is rooted in esotericism. It is not, however, rooted in the spiritual life that is poured out through the symbol of Pentacost, but it seeks to root itself directly in the Jesus-element of the Son, which means in the Will; and thereby it exaggerates the Jesus-element of the Will.

This will be seen when we now enquire into the esoteric part of Jesuitism, its various spiritual exercises. How were these exercises arranged? The essential point is that every single pupil of Jesuitism goes through exercises which lead into the occult life, but into the Will, and within the field of occultism they hold the Will in severe discipline; they ‘break it in’, one might say. And the significant fact is that this discipline of the Will does not arise merely from the surface of life, but from something deeper, because the pupil has been led into the occult, in the way just indicated.

If now, leaving aside the exercises of prayer preparatory to all Jesuit exercises, we consider these occult exercises, at least in their chief points, we find that the pupil has first to call up a vivid Imagination of Christ Jesus as the King of the Worlds—mark this carefully: an Imagination. And no one would be received into the degrees of Jesuitism who had not gone through such exercises, and had not experienced in his soul the transformation which such psychic exercises mean for the whole man. But this Imaginative presentation of Christ Jesus as King of the Worlds has to be preceded by something else. The pupil has to call up for himself, in absolute solitude and seclusion, a picture of man as he was created in the world, and how by falling into sin he incurred the possibility of most terrible punishments. And it is strictly prescribed how one must picture such a man; how if he were left to himself he would incur the utmost of torturing penalties. The rules are extraordinarily severe. With all other concepts or ideas excluded, this picture must live uninterruptedly within the soul of the future Jesuit, the picture of the God-forsaken man, the man exposed to the most fearful punishments, together with the feeling: ‘That am I, since I have come into the world and have forsaken God, and have exposed myself to the possibility of the most fearful punishments.’ This must call forth the fear of being forsaken by God, and detestation of man as he is according to his own nature.

Then, in a further Imagination, over against the picture of the outcast, God-forsaken man, must be set the picture of the God full of pity who then became Christ, and through His acts on earth atones for what man has brought about by forsaking the divine path. In contrast to the Imagination of the God-forsaken man, there must arise that of the all-merciful, loving Being, Christ Jesus, to whom alone it is due that man is not exposed to all possible punishments working upon his soul. And, just as vividly as a feeling of contempt for the forsaking of the divine path had first to become fixed in the soul of the Jesuit pupil, so must a feeling of humility and contrition now take hold of him in the presence of Christ.

When these 2 feelings have been called forth in the pupil, then for several weeks he has to practise severe exercises, picturing to himself in Imagination all details of the life of Jesus from his birth to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. And all that can arise in the soul emerges when the pupil lives in rigorous seclusion and, except for necessary meals, lets nothing else work upon his soul than the pictures which the Gospels give of the compassionate life of Jesus. But these pictures do not merely appear before him in thoughts and ideas; they must work upon his soul in vivid, living Imaginations.

Only someone who really knows how the human soul is transformed through Imaginations which work with full living power—only he knows that under such conditions the soul is in fact completely changed. Such Imaginations, because they are concentrated in the most intense, one-sided way, first on sinful man, secondly on the compassionate God, and then only on the pictures from the New Testament, evoke precisely, through the law of polarity, a strengthened Will. These pictures produce their effect directly, at first hand, for any reflection upon them must be dutifully excluded. It is solely a matter of holding before one's mind these Imaginations, as they have been described.

What then follows is this. In the further exercises Christ Jesus—and now we may no longer say Christ, but exclusively Jesus—is represented as the universal King of the Worlds, and thereby the Jesus element is exaggerated. Because Christ had to be incarnated in a human body, the purely spiritual took part in the physical world; but over against this participation stand the monumental and most significant words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” We can exaggerate the Jesus element by making Jesus into a king of this world, by making Him that which He would have become if He had not resisted the tempter who wished to give Him ‘all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof’. Then Jesus of Nazareth would have been a king who, unlike other kinds who possess only a portion of the earth, would have had the whole earth under his sway. If we think of this kind portrayed in this guise, his kingly power so increased that the whole earth is his domain, then we should have the very picture that followed the other exercises through which the personal will of each Jesuit pupil had been sufficiently strengthened.

To prepare for this picture of “King Jesus”, this Ruler over all the kingdoms of the earth, the pupil had to form an Imagination of Babylon and the plain around Babylon as a living picture, and, enthroned over Babylon, Lucifer with his banner. This picture had to be visualized with great exactitude, for it is a powerful imagination: King Lucifer, with his banner and his hosts of Luciferic angels, seated amidst fire and dense smoke, as he sends out his angels to conquer the kingdoms of the earth. And the whole danger that issues from the ‘banner of Lucifer’ must first of all be imagined by itself, without casting a glance upon Christ Jesus. The soul must be entirely engrossed in the Imagination of the danger which issues from the banner of Lucifer. The soul must learn to feel that the greatest danger to the world's existence that could be conjured forth would be a victory for the banner of Lucifer. And when this picture has had its effect, the other Imagination, ‘The banner of Jesus’, must take its place. The pupil must now visualise Jerusalem and the plain around Jerusalem; King Jesus with His hosts, how he conquers and drives off the hosts of Lucifer and makes Himself King of the whole earth—the victory of the banner of Jesus over the banner of Lucifer.

These are the strength-giving Imaginations for the Will which are brought before the soul of the Jesuit pupil. This is what completely changes his Will; makes him such that in his Will, because it is trained occultly, he turns away from everything else and surrenders absolutely to the idea: ‘King Jesus must become the Ruler upon earth, and we who belong to His army have to employ every means to make Him Ruler of the earth. To this we pledge ourselves, we who belong to His host assembled on the plain of Jerusalem, against the host of Lucifer assembled on the plain of Babylon. And the greatest disgrace for a soldier of King Jesus is to forsake His banner.’

These ideas, gathered up into a single resolution of the Will, can certainly give the Will immense strength. But we must ask: what is it in the soul-life that has been directly attacked? The element that ought not to be touched—the Will-element. In so far as this Jesuit training lays hold of the Will-element, while the Jesus-idea seizes the Will-element completely, in so far is the concept of the dominion of Jesus exaggerated in the most dangerous way—dangerous because through it the Will becomes so strong that it can work directly upon the Will of another. For where the Will becomes so strong through Imaginations, which means by occult means, it acquires the capacity for working directly upon the Will of another, and hence also along all the other occult paths to which such a Will can have recourse.

Thus we see how in recent centuries we encounter these two movements, among many others: one has exaggerated the Jesus-element and sees in ‘King Jesus’ the sole ideal of Christianity, which the other looks solely at the Christ-element and carefully sets aside anything that could go beyond it. This second outlook has been much calumniated because it maintains that Christ has sent the Spirit, so that, indirectly through the Spirit, Christ can enter into the hearts and minds of men. In the development of civilisation during the last few centuries there is hardly a greater contrast than that between Jesuitism and Rosicrucianism, for Jesuitism contains nothing of what Rosicrucianism regards as the highest ideal concerning human worth and human dignity, while Rosicrucianism has always sought to guard itself from any influence which could in the remotest sense be called Jesuitical.

In this lecture I wished to show how even so lofty an element as the Jesus-Principle can be exaggerated and then becomes dangerous, and how necessary it is to sink oneself into the depths of the Christ-Being if we wish to understand how the strength of Christianity must reside in esteeming, to the very highest degree, human dignity and human worth, and in strictly refraining from groping our clumsy way into man's inmost sanctuary. Rosicrucianism, even more than Christian mysticism, is attacked by the Jesuit element, because the Jesuits feel that true Christianity is being sought elsewhere than in the setting which offers merely ‘King Jesus’ in the leading role. But the Imaginations here indicated, together with the prescribed exercises, have made the Will so strong that even protests brought against it in the name of the Spirit can be defeated.

Now that we are once more together after a long summer interval, we may say a few words as to what concerns theosophical life during such an interval—and in particular as to what it has brought to us, which is in no wise without significance to the life limited to Central Europe. You know that from the time we were last assembled here, before separating for the summer, preparations were begun for the gathering at Munich, which generally begins with a dramatic representation carried out in the spirit of our theosophical movement; and in the last few years we have been able to develop these dramatic representations. Some time ago we began by having one such dramatic representation before a course of lectures at Munich, last year two, and this year we have been able to make the experiment of having three. Naturally in many respects a risk is connected with this, but thanks to the self-sacrifice and willingness of those able to take part in this artistic endeavour, we have been able to make a beginning in this direction. For this should not be regarded as anything but a beginning—a beginning of something which will indeed find its continuance as an important impulse of theosophical life when none of us will any longer be able to be present in our physical bodies. But there must always be a beginning to such things, which extend far beyond the narrowest circle of our own personal activity, and above all it is necessary that those who take part in them, should be conscious of the fact that they are working at something new, so that they may have the necessary humility as also the necessary strength. We always connect these representations with a course of lectures, which not only bring together various members of own section but also many friends of our movement, who come to the Munich gathering from every possible country in Europe. Two things will be particularly striking this year to those who take the trouble to look into the matter both from without and from within. The first is the special manner in which we intend to carry theosophical life into Art. For indeed it lies very near to our hearts that theosophical life should be carried into all branches of life and external existence. It appears to us very important to carry out in Art the fact that Theosophy is not a merely abstract theory and teaching, but that it can be carried out into our immediate life, that it can, so to say, act practically. It is particularly remarkable in the Munich representations that Theosophy does not try to bring this about externally by all sorts of clever thoughts and arguments, but that from its own life fresh vigour can be drawn for the active life of Art. This can be observed by the inner devotion and growing comprehension shewn by those of our theosophists in Munich, who took part. It can also be observed in the fact that in the year 1909 we had one representation, that last year we had two, and that this year, in spite of great difficulty we were able to prepare three representations. If you go into the matter itself you will be able to perceive from such a work as The Soul's Probation that occult perception may very well be turned to account in artistic representation in the same way as the external observation of life. I might say a great deal if I were to speak about the inner core of this subject.

What particularly struck us in Munich was the ever increasing thronging to our gatherings, which made the lack of room greatly felt both for the artistic undertakings as well as for the theosophical lectures. In the lectures this lack of space was felt externally by the audience, through the very uncomfortable heat in the room. Now of course it would be quite easy to say, why not take a larger hall? But there is difficulty even in this. Theosophy requires, as you all know, a certain intimacy; and just as little as it would be possible to give the old Greek Dramas in a circus, so it is with Theosophy. (In certain districts this has certainly taken place, though nothing but a lack of all understanding for Art could make it acceptable in larger circles; on the other hand it is not to be wondered at when we know how little artistic our age is, though we must be astounded that such a thing should be thought possible). It might even be cultivated in an ancient Greek theatre, but not in an enormous circus-like hall. The Architectural Hall in Berlin appears to me the maximum size; and instead of passing from that to a still larger one I should prefer to repeat my lecture, rather than give it once only in a still larger room. These things are so related to the inner, more intimate nature of Theosophy that they may perhaps not be understood at the present day, but they will be when everything that Theosophy included passes out into the different departments of life.

Now as regards our work in Munich, it is inevitable—if by means of all that may be done in a small hall anything of a theosophical nature can be attained—that our theosophical life should lead to our creating an inner chamber for ourselves. This led to the thought of constructing a large building in Munich which would really admit of our possessing a house of our own for the requirements of the lectures given there. The immediate future will prove what fortune awaits us in this respect. For it is certain, if we are ever in a position to carry out the idea of a building in Munich it must be done soon, otherwise the fairest fruits of our work will be lost—for the simple reason that the next few years will be the best time possible for carrying out our work in the desired manner, if only we have the proper room to do so. That this may have good results if we are able to construct a Hall for ourselves, we have seen, not only in small beginnings but in Stuttgart, where they have now constructed the first Central European Lodge and house. And those who were present at its opening were amply convinced of how important it is to possess an inner chamber consecrated in the theosophical sense, and how completely different it is to enter such a room when compared with any other—quite apart from the separate details to which I referred when I spoke about the significance of colour, of the limitations of space and so on, as regards the cultivation of occult knowledge in such a room. We have seen that the deepening for which we are striving in the domain of Theosophy has already found numerous ears, hearts and souls, and will apparently continue to find more and more. We have seen, and indeed we have been obliged to see over and over again, how easily in our day the longing may encroach to make the convictions and knowledge of the spiritual world too easy. I believe that when course after course of lectures is followed and the thought, the deepening of feeling and the expansion of knowledge in the separate domains of life—even of occult life—is more and more required, that a great number of those who have worked with us may have already discovered that precisely in that current of theosophical life we call our own, we do not make things too easy. When we consider the great store of lectures and books accumulated as time goes on, on our table here,—(sometimes quite appalling to me to see what has been brought together in the course of the year,—but with which anyone belonging to our movement must make himself intimately acquainted or at any rate must study a little)—when we consider this, we may truly say that we do not make it easy for anyone wishing to enter the spiritual world. And yet, as the years go by it is more and more evident that we are able to find our way to the ears, hearts and souls of people—so far as we have been able to approach them. Although through particular circumstances to which we need not now refer, the Congress of the European Section in Genoa did not take place, we on our part did not abandon our festival on this account. It might have been thought when the Congress at the last minute fell through—that we could not have held our festival, but it became immediately evident how necessary it was to spend this time elsewhere; so that the Lodge lectures were held at the time of the Genoese Congress in Lugano, Locarno, Milan, Neuchatel and in Berne, and we were able during this time to work on a ground upon which it might have been difficult to work in the time approaching. When I reflect for instance that in Neuchatel a Lodge was formed wanting to call itself by the name of a great spiritual individuality, after the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, and that this Lodge longed to hear intimate things about him, upon which I shall shortly lecture here; when I reflect that in order to speak about Christian Rosenkreutz at all, in order to understand this singular individuality, all the truths were necessary which we had collected in the course of the year, and that yet there was an inner need to hear something more intimate about this individuality; it must be said that we have succeeded in deepening ourselves in a theosophical sense, although it has not been made easy for those who work with us. Notwithstanding this, how easy it really is made for those who truly wish to attain this deepening. We may, without exaggeration say that we do make it easy for them.

Reflect, for example upon the fact, that I have again and again emphasised that in our theosophical movement we have to look upon the occult ideal as the basis of our whole theosophic life. There is in reality only one occult truth. There cannot in reality be an Eastern and Western occultism. That would be just as sensible as if we were to distinguish an Eastern and a Western system of mathematics; yet some one or other problem or question can, on account of human peculiarity, be better attended to by occult research in the East or in the West. Hence we must say that what relates to the great Figure that for some years we have designated as the Christ is the result of the occult research of the last century in the European esoteric schools, the European sanctuaries of occultism. Nothing that has been said in the course of years concerning the Individuality we call Jesus of Nazareth, or about the two Jesus children, or the entrance of Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the time marked by the Baptism of John in [the] Jordan, or of the Mystery of Golgotha, or what has recently been said in Carlsruhe about the Mystery of the Resurrection—could possibly have been announced to-day, were it not that the occult researches of the West had been fostered from the middle of the twelfth century down to the present day. And yet, we could not understand Christianity without possessing these truths. We cannot really understand Christianity, for instance, without understanding the resurrection, however great theologians we may be. Anyone speaking after the manner of the modern theologian cannot understand Christianity; for what could he make of the words of St. Paul, ‘If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith also is vain.’ In short where there is no understanding of the Resurrection, there can be no understanding of Christianity.

But on the other hand, we must also reflect that the external intellect, whether directed to Theosophy or to natural science, has the peculiarity of not being able to approach subjects such as the Resurrection. The modern thinker says: I must draw a line through the whole structure of my thought if I am really to believe in the Resurrection, and what is described in the Gospel of St. John;—the consciousness of many people lead them to say this. It is therefore necessary that occultism should give its conclusions on these facts in the West. It is precisely these facts relating to Christianity, to the Mystery of the West, which the Eastern school of occult thought, in so far as it can be known externally, does not possess. And why? The people in Asia—with the exception of regions in Asia Minor—are not interested in Christ, and never have been. They do not feel any need to ask about His Being, for hundreds and thousands of years they have done without it; so that in India and Thibet there are wonderful occult teachings—for instance, about Buddha or the Bodhisattvas—but no one was particularly interested in meditating about the Being of the Christ, or in making occult researches concerning, It. It is therefore impossible to require of the Oriental school of Theosophy any knowledge of the Christ.

When the Theosophical movement first arose, H. P. Blavatsky, as we all know, accomplished an enormous amount for it. How did she do this? Was it by forming the three fundamental rules of our Society which are still on our card of membership to-day? Certainly not by saying that there must be a Society to cultivate universal love! For there are many such, and every normally thinking person will look upon the cultivation of universal love as something which must be extended. H. P. Blavatsky accomplished so great a work because through her a great number of occult truths have penetrated into the world, and any one who studies Isis Unveiled, or The Secret Doctrine will say that, notwithstanding everything that may be said against these works they contain an immense number of truths.—Truths of which, till now, no one in spiritual life had any conception,—except those who had undergone initiation. We must admit that Madame Blavatsky had an illogical, disorderly mind, and invented things, putting them beside the communications of the Masters where they should not be, (to go into this now would lead us too far) we know she had an impetuous nature and often said what she should not, for it is not right in occultism to speak in so impetuous a manner. Still though we may say that it would be a good thing to take Isis Unveiled and put it into systematic and logical order, or to take five-sixths out of The Secret Doctrine and revise the remaining sixth part in an orderly manner, yet in Theosophical life we must follow the positive and admit that something powerful was brought into occult life through her.

But how does the matter really stand? It is that H. P. Blavatsky, at the time she wrote Isis Unveiled, received a kind of Rosicrucian inspiration? There are great Rosicrucian truths in Isis Unveiled, which even included the errors of Rosicrucianism; the significant thing is that it really is all Rosicrucian. I say deliberately the errors of Rosicrucianism, for ancient Rosicrucianism had not the possibility of an insight into the truths of reincarnation and karma, did not possess these truths in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. These were only revealed later to the West. Madame Blavatsky did not give an extensive teaching of reincarnation and karma in Isis Unveiled, indeed she took over all the faults of Rosicrucianism. Then it came about by reason of things of which we have not time to speak to-day, Madame Blavatsky fell away from the influences coming from Rosicrucianism, and fell under those of Eastern Theosophy. From this proceeded The Secret Doctrine, which contains great truths concerning everything not Christian,—but in respect to what is Christian, is the greatest nonsense. With respect to all the religions and conceptions of the world with the exception of Judaism and Christianity,—The Secret Doctrine is very useful. But nothing relating to Judaism and Christianity can be made any use of at all, because Madame Blavatsky entered a domain in which these truths were not cultivated. The whole course taken later by the theosophical movement is connected with this. It became inadequate for the understanding of Christianity. Allow me to make clear to you by an important example, in what way it is inadequate.

The highest individuality in Eastern occultism with the exception of the highest Initiates who even in Orientalism do not speak differently from ourselves—is that of the Bodhisattva. Such a Bodhisattva was that individuality who, five hundred years before our era, ascended to the next dignity, which is also understood in Orientalism; we refer to that Bodhisattva who was the son of King Suddhodana, and who in his twenty-ninth year became Buddha. Becoming a Buddha, as everyone acquainted with Buddhism understands includes the fact that the being in question, the being who has become Buddha, no longer descends into physical life, can never appear again on earth. The Bodhisattva became Buddha; he no longer returns to earth in an ordinary body, in accordance with the laws of reincarnation. But he has a successor. At the moment the Bodhisattva received illumination and rose to Buddhahood, he nominated a successor to become Bodhisattva. This next Bodhisattva will now appear as man, a man towering above his fellows, until he himself ascends to the dignity of a Buddha. Now every disciple of Orientalism regards it as a truth that precisely five thousand years after the illumination of Gautama Buddha under the Bodhi tree, the next Bodhisattva will rise to the dignity of Buddha, and will appear as Maitreya Buddha. That is, three thousand years after our time; so that until then a Bodhisattva will live in the manifold incarnations yet to come, he will descend again and again to the earth, but will only ascend to the dignity of a Buddha three thousand years after our time—and will then be a great teacher on earth. That is the highest individuality to which the Eastern occult teaching leads. And because Madame Blavatsky was in a sense caught by the Eastern school of thought, her understanding of such things was limited by Eastern conceptions. At the same time it was necessary to give to Europeans a mode of understanding Christianity, but it was not possible really to understand Christianity by means of Eastern conceptions. These only lead up to the Bodhisattva and the Buddha individualities, with the consequence that even the old clairvoyants could only see so far as the individuality of a Bodhisattva. One of these was however, present in an individuality who lived 105 years before our era, in Jesus ben Pandira, who occupied a curious relation to the Essenes, who had disciples—and among others him who prepared the Matthew-Gospel. Such a Bodhisattva-Individuality, a follower of Gautama Buddha, was incarnated in Jesus ben Pandira. Eastern Theosophy speaks of this Bodhisattva-Individuality. And to the clairvoyant vision of the East it would appear as though 105 years after Jesus ben Pandira nothing particular happened in the world.—H. P. Blavatsky, for instance, directed her vision to the point of time in which Jesus ben Pandira lived: she saw that in him a great Bodhisattva-Individuality was incarnated; but because her occult vision was limited by her entanglement in Eastern Theosophy, she could not perceive that 105 years later the Christ was there. In short, she only knew of Christ what was said of Him in the West, and from this she formed the idea that Christ had never lived at all, that it was all a delusion, but that 105 years before our era there lived a Jesus ben Pandira who was stoned and hanged upon a tree, and who therefore was not crucified. This Jesus she now described as if he had been Jesus of Nazareth. This is however, a complete confusion of one with another. And concerning the true Jesus of Nazareth nothing at all was said, but that he who was born 105 years before was substituted for the Christ, and because it was wished to give him a European name he was spoken of as Christ.

We however, must adjudge that that school of thought is simply incapable of seeing what the Christ-Being is. The moment we draw attention to such a point as this we are naturally in an unpleasant position; that cannot be denied. And why so? What I must say is that everyone who is acquainted with one or other of the sciences knows that there are points which can be disputed while others are indisputable; regarding these latter, if a man holds a contrary opinion we are compelled to say that he has not grasped the point in question. But if we say, ‘you do not understand this,’ we may be considered extremely arrogant! This is the unpleasant position in which we find ourselves when we cannot agree with those who speak of Jesus ben Pandira as the ‘Christ.’ They are simply not advanced enough to understand it. It is unpleasant to be obliged to say this, but it is true. Therefore we cannot blame them when they speak of the Being Whom they too acknowledge, as though He could again and again appear in the flesh. For they have no conception of that Being Who, as the Christ Being, could only appear once in the flesh!—Now take Esoteric Christianity by Mrs. Besant, and read it with more care than is usual in theosophical circles. You will find an individuality described there who lived 105 years before our era; the only mistake is that he is described as the Christ. Suppose any person,—the authoress of this book for instance,—were now to say that in the twentieth century the being she described in Esoteric Christianity appeared in human fleshly form. Nothing more could be said against this—from our standpoint—than would be said to anyone in India who ventured to say that the Buddha was about to reincarnate. He would be told that he was an uneducated European in the following terms: ‘We all know that Buddha can never appear again in the flesh; you understand nothing of Buddhism.’ We Europeans must have recourse to this too when anyone says that Christ will be incarnated a second time. We must reply, ‘You do not understand, for the true knowledge of the Christ-Being shows us that He is a Being Who could only appear once in a fleshly body!’ Let us say that the understanding of these facts belongs to a different level. Then there can be no misunderstanding.

I ask, to what can we reduce that which separates us from any Eastern theosophical school? Do we deny that a man lived 105 years before our era, who was stoned for blasphemy and hanged upon a tree? No, we do not deny this. Do we deny that in this being a great Individuality was concealed? We do not. Neither do we deny that this being may reincarnate in the twentieth century. We admit that. Is there actually any point at all concerning which we must deny what the other school asserts? Only this: that we must say—’You do not know the Being Whom we all Christ: you call another by His Name, and we must reserve the right to correct this.’ Otherwise it is only a question of nomenclature. People are incorrect when they assert that what we place at the starting point of our era never existed; for there we place our two Jesus children, the Baptism of John in [the] Jordan, and the Mystery of Golgotha! Of this they say nothing! We really must be allowed the right to know something about that of which they are ignorant! Otherwise the decree would go forth: ‘no one must know what we do not know: everything we do not know is false.’ In this respect we take the stand of denying nothing; and if anything be denied, it is by the other side.

In this way all misunderstandings which otherwise arise can very easily be avoided. Here we take the position that in our view there is no room for misunderstanding, and none exists. Only we must have the right to bring to bear on our theosophical life occult researches which immeasurably deepen the problems of the West but which simply do not exist in the East because nothing is known of such. So we see that in one important point, if goodwill is present, it is not in the least necessary that there should be any disharmony in the theosophical movement. But for this, goodwill is certainly necessary—goodwill not dependent on the denial of any truth that may have been recognised as correct, for that would not be goodwill—but denial of the truth. But in so far as we are logical, goodwill must exist. For what is the cause of differences of opinion? Is it the consideration of a subject from different standpoints or perhaps from different heights? If that be the case the opponent would be unable to give a logical reason for his opinion. And then comes the question of understanding the subject and showing forbearance.

This, which must be established so far as we are concerned, is what I had to notice to-day, when for the first time we meet again. I referred to it as a proof of how easy it is to see perfectly clearly into our movement if desired. On this account we may say that we need oppose no one. We can quietly wait till they oppose us. We can calmly go on working, and we should not have mentioned these subjects to-day at all, if our friends had not been confused by hearing it said that theosophists are much at variance among themselves. As soon as things are enquired into we may perhaps come upon a very awkward situation, and be obliged to say, that the other side is not acquainted with certain things. Thus perhaps we may be accused of pride, and sometimes we must take that upon ourselves if we are conscious that we can really be both humble and modest. This made it necessary last year to show in occult work, such for instance, as my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, the progress that has taken place since the thirteenth century. Such results as have been produced since that time can hardly be observed in any other movement than our own. Hence we may say that we have for once imposed upon our occult movement the difficult task of examining into the most advanced occult conclusions. And we may look upon it as a good result of our summer work that at the founding of the Branch at Neuchatel, the need arose to learn to know more intimately the great teacher of Christianity, Christian Rosencreutz, in his various incarnations and his own peculiar nature.

I myself brought forward what has been said to-day so that each of you may know the real facts of the case and may know what to reply if someone on the opponents’ side should say, ‘Here it is said that that Christ will incarnate again in the twentieth century—and there it is said that He will only appear as a Spiritual Being. These two are conflicting ideas!’ No, we must not allow it to be said that these are two different ideas; we must emphasise, even on the opposite side that the being spoken of there lived 105 years before our era and was stoned. But when for instance, in the last book by Mrs. Besant, The Changing World in which all these things are mixed up and no attention is paid to the fact that the Name of Christ was only usurped, when a complete contradiction is found in her own books Esoteric Christianity and The Changing World these are really things that we must point out, so that no one should believe that in the new book by Mrs. Besant Christ is in question. Otherwise she would have to say that she will draw a thick line through Esoteric Christianity and that its contents are no longer correct. For if they were correct a being is spoken of who lived 105 years before our era—and not at the beginning of our era, as we say of Christ Jesus.

The characteristic of our movement is that we carry the result of our occult researches on to the most modern times. Hence in a certain respect there is a sort of detraction—although an unconscious one, when we are called Rosicrucians not by ourselves but by outsiders. When we are thus spoken of it reminds us of a nice little story of something that took place in the market of a town in Central Germany. One man said that he knew that another was a sluggard. ‘What?’ said somebody, ‘He a sluggard? I am certain that he is a chemist, not a sluggard I’ The same logic that says that if a man is a chemist he cannot be a sluggard, would lead us to say the movement in which we work is not ‘theosophical’ but ‘Rosicrucian.’ Why do we cultivate Rosicrucian principles? Because there have been Rosicrucian Occult Sanctuaries, and because we must accept the Rosicrucian results cultivated there into our theosophical current, just as we have spoken without prejudice about Brahmanism, Orientalism, ancient and modern Christianity. I do not think that in many other theosophical branches the subjects discussed have included, for instance, the Mexican Divinities, Quetzalcoatl and Tezkatlipoka, as has been done here. And so in addition to all the other subjects we have also included the Rosicrucian occult results. That is quite natural unless we refuse to admit what is occult. And if we have some good symbols derived from Rosicrucianism, it is because such things are the best to work on the minds and hearts of modern men. And we are precisely modern theosophists because we do not refuse to admit the results of modern research. Has anyone beard me commence any lectures, ‘My dear Rosicrucian friends?’ It is precisely because we stand upon the common ground of Theosophy that such things occur. For this reason it is an unconscious detraction when our movement is given the name of Rosicrucian as a designation. We must make allowance for these things.

This winter it will be our task to enter more deeply into the teachings and truths we have already received. And so I should like in particular, in order to prepare the ground presently to speak here upon Christian Rosenkreutz, to speak on the threefold principles of man and their true basis, in so far as man is able to take up the intellectual, the aesthetic and the moral impulse. We must seek very deeply in the occult subsoil for these things, and the teaching we have received about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution will precisely enable us to consider man more deeply, as an intellectual, aesthetic and moral being.

If we wish to pursue the studies we have carried on in our Lodge evenings in former years, it will be necessary to acquire still other concepts and views than those that have been discussed. We know that what we have to say about the Gospels and other spiritual documents of humanity would not suffice if we did not pre-suppose the evolution of our whole cosmic system, which we describe as the incorporation of our planet itself, through the Saturn existence, the Sun-existence, the Moon-existence, on to our present Earth-existence. Anyone who recollects how often we have had to start from these fundamental conceptions will know how necessary they are for all occult observations of human evolution. If we now turn to the accounts given, for instance, in my Occult Science about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, to that of the Earth, you will admit that nothing but a sketch could be given, (indeed even if it were much more amplified it would still be no more) nothing but a sketch from one side, from one point of view. For just as the Earth-existence comprises an immense number of details, it is quite obvious that the former embodiments are equally detailed, and that it would never be possible to give more than a merely rough charcoal drawing, just an outline of these. It is however necessary for us to describe evolution from yet another side.

If it be asked, whence arise all the accounts given here, we know that they arise from the so-called register of the Akashic Record. We know that what has once taken place in the course of the world's evolution is in a sense to be read as though registered in a delicate spiritual substance, the Akashic substance. There is a register there of everything that has taken place, by which we can discover how things once were. Now it is natural that just as the ordinary vision contemplating anything on our physical world sees the details of objects in its vicinity more or less clearly, and that the further away they are the less clear do they appear, so we may alert admit that those things that are near us in time, belonging to the Earth or the Moon evolutions can be more minutely observed; while on the other hand those further removed from us in time take on more or less indistinct outlines—as for instance when we look back clairvoyantly into the Saturn or Sun existence.

Why do we do this at all, why do we set value on following up an age so far behind our own l It might well be objected: for what reason do theosophists bring up such primeval subjects for discussion at the present day? In the world we really do not need to trouble ourselves about these ancient matters, we have quite enough to do with what is going on now!

It would be wrong to speak in this way. For what has once happened is fulfilling itself continuously even at the present day. What occurred in the time of Saturn did not only take place then,—it goes on even to-day; only it is covered over and made invisible by what to-day surrounds man on the physical plane. And the ancient Saturn existence which played its part very, very long ago, has been made very, very invisible to us; but it still somewhat concerns man even now, this old Saturn-existence. And in order that we may form a conception of how it concerns us to-day, let us place the following before our souls.

We know that the innermost core of our being meets us in what we call our Ego. This ego, the innermost core of our being, is, in reality, for people of the present day an absolutely super-sensible and imponderable entity. This can be seen in the fact that there are to-day teachings regarding the soul, so-called official psychologies which no longer have the slightest inkling that such an ego is to be alluded to. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that in the German psychology of the 19th century the following expression has come into use, ‘Soul-teaching without soul.’ In the celebrated School of Wundt, which is considered decisive not only in German countries, but everywhere where psychology is discussed, it is mentioned with great respect. This school was well known for the ‘soul-teaching without soul’ although it did not coin the expression. This teaching insisted, without taking an independent soul-being into consideration, that all the qualities of the soul are gathered into a sort of focus,—into the ego. It would be impossible to think of greater nonsense, yet the psychology of the present day is absolutely under the influence of this nonsense. This ‘soul teaching without soul’ is to-day famous throughout the world. Future writers on the history of civilisation will have much to do to make it appear plausible to our successors that in the 19th century and well on into the 20th it was possible that such a thought could have arisen as the greatest production of the psychological field. This is only mentioned to point out how vague is official psychology respecting what we designate as the central point of the human being.

If we could have a clear grasp of the ego and place it before us like the external physical body; if we could look for the environment upon which the ego depends in the same way as the physical body is dependent upon what is seen by the eyes and perceived by the senses,—if we could look for the environment of the ego in the same way as we do for that of the physical realm, in the clouds, mountains, etc., or, in the same way as the physical body does for its means of nourishment we should come at last to an expression of the cosmos, to a cosmic tableau, which even to-day is, as it were, imprinted upon our environment and is invisibly within it, similar to the cosmic appearance of ancient Saturn. This means that a man who wishes to learn to know the ego in its own world must represent to himself a world such as ancient Saturn. This world is hidden; to man it is a super-sensible world. At the present stage of his evolution man could not possibly bear the perception of it. It is veiled by the Guardian of the Threshold Who conceals it from him. And it requires a certain grade of spiritual development to support such a vision. It is indeed a vision to which we have to become accustomed.—And above all you must form a conception of what is necessary, to be able to feel such a cosmic tableau as reality. You must think away everything that can be perceived by the senses, you must even think away your own inner world, in so far as this consists of the wonted working of the mind. Further, you must think away everything that is in the world; all the concepts you have within you. Thus you must remove from the external world all that the senses can perceive, and from the inner world all the workings of the mind, all conceptions. And now, if you wish to form an idea of that soul-disposition which a man must have if he really holds the thought that everything is taken away and man alone remains, we cannot say otherwise than that he must learn to feel dread and fear of the infinite emptiness yawning around him. He must be able to feel, as it were, his environment tinged and saturated with that which inspires dread and fear wherever he turns, and at the same time he must be able to overcome this fear by inner firmness and certainty.

Without these two frames of mind,—dread and fear of the infinite emptiness of existence and the overcoming of this fear it is impossible to have the faintest conception of the ancient Saturn existence underlying our own world. Neither of these feelings is much cultivated by people in themselves. Hence in literature we find but few descriptions of this condition. It is naturally only known to those who in course of time endeavour to seek the origin of things by means of clairvoyant forces. In external literature, however, whether written or printed, you will find but few indications of man having felt anything like the dread of the infinite emptiness or the overcoming of this. In order to obtain a sort of insight into this, I have tried to investigate some of the more modern literature where the consciousness of this dread of the immeasurable emptiness might be found. The philosophers are as a rule extremely clever and speak in clear concepts—they avoid speaking of the mighty, awe-inspiring impressions; it will not be easy to find anything of the sort in their writings. Now I shall not speak of those in which I have found nothing. But I once found one small echo of these feelings, and this was in the Day-Book of Karl Rosenkrantz, the writer on Hegel, in which he sometimes describes intimate feelings produced in him by engrossing himself in the Hegel philosophy. I came upon a remarkable passage, which is simply expressed and noted in his Day-Book. It had become clear to Karl Rosenkrantz that this philosophy proceeds from pure being. This ‘pure being’ of Hegel is much discussed in philosophical literature of the 19th century but we must say that it was very little understood. We might almost say, though of course this can only be mentioned in the most intimate circles, that the philosophy of the second half of the 19th century understood just as little of the ‘pure being’ of Hegel as the ox understands of Sunday, when he has eaten grass all the week. This concept of the ‘pure being’ of Hegel is one that has been sifted again and again, (not existing but Absolute Being); it is a concept which indeed is not quite what I have described as the dreadful emptiness into which flows fear. But all space in Hegel's sense is tinged with the quality containing nothing that can be experienced by man; it is infinity filled with ‘being.’ Karl Rosenkrantz once felt this to be as a dreadful shuddering recoil from a coldness, tinged with nothing but ‘being.’

In order to understand what underlies the world it does not suffice to speak of it in concepts, or to form concepts and ideas on it; it is far more necessary to call up an impression of the feeling aroused by the infinite emptiness of the ancient Saturn existence. A feeling of horror accompanies the mere hint of it. If we wish to ascend clairvoyantly to the state of Saturn, we must prepare ourselves by-acquiring a feeling that may be compared to the giddiness experienced on a mountain, when a man stands at the edge of an abyss and feels that he has no sure footing under him, that he cannot retain it in any place and wants to give way to forces over which he has no longer any control. But that is only the most elementary of these apprehensive feelings. Next he loses not only the ground beneath him, but also what eyes can see, ears hear and hands grasp; in fact all spatial environment. And he can do no other than lose every thought that may come to him, in a sort of condition of dimness or sleep; and then he can arrive at having no perception at all. He may be so deeply absorbed in this impression that he can do no other than come to the condition of dread, which often is like a giddiness not to be overcome.

Man of to-day has two possibilities. The first is that he may have understood the Gospels, or the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who has really understood these in their full depths—naturally not as modern theologians speak of them, but in such a way that he has drawn from them the deepest that can be expressed in them—will take something with him into that emptiness, which seems to expand from a given point and fills emptiness with something similar to courage. It is a feeling of courage, of protection through being united with that Being Who accomplished the sacrifice on Golgotha. The other way is to penetrate into the spiritual worlds without the Gospels through a real true Theosophy. This is also possible. (You know that we emphasise the fact that we do not start from the Gospels when we consider the Mystery of Golgotha, but that we should arrive at it even if there were no Gospel at all). It would not have been possible before the Mystery of Golgotha took place; but it is the case to-day, because something entered the world through the Mystery of Golgotha which enables a man to understand the impressions of the spiritual world directly through his own impressions. This is what we call the ruling of the Holy Spirit in the world, the ruling of cosmic thought in the world. Whether we take one or the other of these two ways, we cannot lose ourselves and we cannot, so to say, fall into the bottomless abyss when we stand before the dreadful emptiness. If we now approach this dreadful emptiness with the other preparations given us by the various methods, for instance, those in my book, The Knowledge of Higher Worlds etc. and other methods dependent on these—and enter a world born from that which has so shaken our minds, which can now be grasped by our conceptions when we live into that world, when we place ourselves, so to say, in the Saturn existence, then we learn to know Beings—not in the least similar to those we perceive in the animal, plant or mineral kingdoms but Beings. This is a world where there are no clouds, no light, it is quite devoid of sound, but we become acquainted with Beings—indeed those Beings, called in our terminology, Spirits of Will or Thrones. We learn so to know them that the surging sea of courage becomes a true objective reality for us.

What at first can only be pictured in thought, becomes through clairvoyance, objective reality. Think of yourself as immersed in this sea—but now immersed as a spiritual being, feeling one with the Christ-being, carried by the Christ-Being, swimming—though not in a sea of water but in a sea filling infinite space, a sea (there is no other description for it) of flowing courage, flowing energy. This is not simply an indifferent and undifferentiated sea, but we meet herewith all the possibilities and diversities of what we call a feeling of courage. We become acquainted with beings who consist of courage, but it is not as though they consisted of courage alone, they are really concrete beings. Naturally it may appear strange to say that we meet beings just as real as man who is made of flesh, and yet they are not of flesh but consist of courage. Yet such is the case. Of such a nature are the Spirits of Will. To begin with, we shall only designate as Saturn-existence what the Spirits of Will, consisting of courage, represent,—and nothing else. Saturn is this to commence with. It is a world of which we cannot say that it is spherical, hexagonal or square. None of these definitions of space apply to it, for there is no possibility of any end being discoverable. If we revert to the simile of swimming, we may say it is not a sea in which one would come to any surface, but on all sides and in all directions are to be found Spirits of Courage or Will.

In later lectures I shall describe how we do not at once come to this: for the present I will keep to the same order as formerly: Saturn-Sun-Moon; though it is much better to keep to the reverse direction; from Earth to Saturn. I am now describing the other way round, but it is of no importance.

When we have lifted ourselves to this vision, something meets us of which it is extremely difficult to form an idea, except for one who has taken the trouble, slowly and gradually to attain to such conceptions. For something ceases, which is more intimately connected with our ordinary human ideas than anything else: space ceases! It no longer has any meaning to say—we swim ‘up’ or ‘down,’ ‘forward’ or ‘backward,’ ‘right’ or ‘left,’ these have no longer any meaning. In this respect it is all alike But the important thing is when we reach these first ages of the Saturn existence even time ceases, there is no longer ‘earlier’ or ‘later.’ It is naturally very difficult for man to imagine this to-day, because his ideas themselves flow in time. On Saturn no thought is before or after another. This again can only be described by a feeling that time ceases. This feeling is certainly not pleasant. Imagine that your concepts are benumbed, that everything that you can remember, everything to which you look forward is benumbed into a rigid state, so that you feel yourself held in your conceptions and are no longer able to move, then you will no longer be able to say that what you formerly experienced you experienced formerly; you are fastened to it; it is there, but it is benumbed: time ceases to be of significance, it is absolutely no longer there. On this account it is rather foolish for anyone to say: ‘you describe the Saturn existence, the Sun existence etc, now tell us what was before Saturn.’ ‘Before’ has no longer any meaning because time ceases to exist; we have done with all definitions of time. It is true of the old Saturn existence, speaking very comparatively,—our ordinary world must be non-existent for us, in the fact that thought must be absolutely still: It is the same with clairvoyance, ordinary thoughts must be left behind, they do not extend so far. By way of a comparison and expressing it in image, we must say that our brain is frozen. And when we realise this condition of rigidity, we shall have a comparative conception of the consciousness no longer enclosed in time.

Now when we have got as far as this we become aware of a remarkable alteration in the whole picture. It can now be observed that out of this rigidity, this timeless character of the infinite sea of courage with its Beings Whom we call the Spirits of Will, come the Beings of other Hierarchies, as though striking into it and playing into it. We can only notice that there are other Beings here at play when we become aware of the cessation of time. We notice an indefinite life of which we cannot say that we ourselves experience it, but that it is there. We can say that it is within the whole infinite sea of courage. We observe something passing through this like a flashing-up, like a becoming lighter, but not a real illumination, more like a glimmer. This glimmer does not give the impression of a glimmering light, but as we must understand these things in various ways and we desire to make this comprehensible, we must imagine the following. Suppose a man says something to you and you think, ‘how clever he is!’ and as he talks on further, this feeling increases and the thought comes: ‘he is really wise, he must have had endless experience, to say such wise things’ ... Besides this feeling, the person makes an impression upon you like a breath of enchantment. Imagine this breath of enchantment enormously enhanced—and within it clouds, which do not flash up but glimmer; if you take this altogether you will have a conception of how Beings consisting entirely of Wisdom interact with the hierarchy of the Spirits of Will. Their Wisdom is not Wisdom alone, but streams which are actively radiant. In short, you then become clairvoyantly aware how the Cherubim are radiantly active there.

Now imagine yourself surrounded by nothing but what I have described. I have already said, and have laid certain stress upon it, that we cannot say of it: ‘we have it around us,’ we can only say, ‘it is there.’ We must think ourselves into this. And concerning the conception that something is there flashing up, I said it was not a flash but a glimmering. It is not as though something arose and vanished again; everything is simultaneous. Now, however, the feeling comes that there is some connection between these Spirits of Will and the Cherubim. The feeling comes to us that they have established a relationship between themselves; we become conscious of this. And indeed we become conscious too that the Spirits of Will or Thrones sacrificed their own being to the Cherubim. That is the last conception to which we can attain when we approach Saturn in retrospect, that of the sacrificing Spirits of Will offering their sacrifice to the Cherubim. This is the first scaffolding of our world. And we can experience the sacrifice that the Spirits of Will make to the Cherubim; something is wrung from our being, which we can only express by saying, through the sacrifice made by the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim, time is born. But ‘time’ here is not the abstract time of which we usually speak, but independent being. We can now first speak of something that begins. Time begins with the birth of time-beings—whose nature is pure time. Beings are born consisting only of time. These are the Spirits of Personality, known to us as Archai in the hierarchy of spiritual beings. In the Saturn existence they are nothing but time. We have also described them as Time-Spirits, as Spirits who rule time. But there they are born as spirits, they are really beings consisting of nothing but time.

It is extremely important to take part in this sacrifice of the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim, and in the birth of time. For it is only now, when time is born, that something else appears—something that makes it possible for us to speak of the Saturn condition as having anything in the least similar to our environment. What we call the element of heat in Saturn is as it were the sacrificial smoke of the Thrones giving birth to time. Hence I have always said, in describing the condition, that it was one of beat. Of all the elements we have around us now, the only one we can speak of as being on ancient Saturn is heat. And this heat consists of the sacrificial heat offered by the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim. This should give us an indication of how we should really look upon fire. Wherever we see fire, wherever we are aware of heat, we should not think in so materialistic a fashion as is natural and usual to the man of to-day. But wherever heat is present we should feel that what is at the spiritual foundation of our life is present, though it is not yet visible, namely the sacrifice of the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim. The world only acquires its truth when we know that behind every development of heat, there is sacrifice.

In Occult Science, in order not to rack people's brains too much, I have begun by describing the more external condition of ancient Saturn. Their brains are quite puzzled enough by this, and people who can only think in accordance with modern science look upon the book as nonsense. Just think what it would mean if we were to say, ‘Ancient Saturn has in its innermost being—in its very foundation—this fact, that the beings belonging to the Spirits of Will offered sacrifice to the Cherubim, that in the smoke of their sacrifice time came to birth as the sacrifice they brought to the Cherubim, and that from this proceeded the Archai, the Time-Spirits, and that external heat is nothing but maya as compared with the sacrifice of the Spirits of Will!’ But so it is. Externally heat is really only maya. And if we wish to speak truly we must say that wherever there is heat we have in reality sacrifice, sacrifice of the Thrones to the Cherubim.

And now an excellent ‘imagination’ is the following: In Knowledge of Higher Worlds and elsewhere it is frequently said that the second stage of Rosicrucian initiation is the forming of imagination. The theosophist must build up these imaginations from the right conceptions of the world. Thus we can think of what we have discussed to-day as transformed into an ‘imagination’: we can imagine the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, kneeling in absolute devotion before the Cherubim, but so that their devotion does not proceed from a feeling of littleness but from a consciousness that they have something to offer. Imagine the Thrones, with this desire of sacrifice underlying their strength and courage, kneeling before the Cherubim and sending up their sacrifice to them. ... And they send up this sacrifice as foaming heat, so that the sacrificial smoke ascends to the winged Cherubim. So might we picture it. And proceeding from this sacrifice (just as though a word of ours spoken into the air became time—in this case it is time-beings) and emerging from this sacrifice the Spirits of Time—Archai. This sending forth of the Archai gives a grand and powerful picture.—And this picture placed before our souls is extremely impressive in certain imaginations, for it can lead us further and further into the realm of occult knowledge.

This is precisely what we have to attain; we must be able to transform the ideas we receive into imaginations, into pictures. Even if the pictures are clumsily formed, even if they are anthropomorphic, even if the beings appear as winged angels etc., that does not signify. The rest will be given to us later; and what they ought not to have will fall away. When we yield ourselves to these pictures we penetrate into imaginative perceptions.

If you take what I have just endeavoured to describe you will see that the soul will soon have recourse to all kinds of pictures unconnected with intellectual ideas. These latter owe their existence to a much later period, so that we should not at first take such things intellectually. And you must comprehend what is meant when some minds describe other than from the intellectual side; the intellectualist will never be able to understand such minds. I will give a hint to anyone who wishes for instruction on this point.—Take out of the public library a book—which is quite a good one,—the so-called ‘Old Schwegler,’ formerly much used by students for examinations, but now no longer applicable since the ‘soul’ is dethroned; although this book has been mutilated by way of improvement, it is not quite spoilt. You can take old Schwegler's History of Philosophy and you will have quite a good book. If you read there about the philosophy of Hegel you will find everything splendidly described. But now read the short chapter of Jacob Boehme, and try to obtain a correct idea of how helpless a man is who writes an intellectual philosophy when confronted with a spirit such as Jacob Boehme! Paracelsus—thank God—he left out entirely; for concerning him he would have written completely unjustifiable things. But just read what he says about Jacob Boehme. Here Schwegler comes to a spirit who simply proceeded to describe—not the Saturn picture,—but the recapitulation of the Saturn picture taking place in the Earth period; this he can only do in words and concepts that cannot be approached by the intellect. To the intellectual man all comprehension here ceases. It is not as though these things were impossible of comprehension, but they cannot be understood if the standpoint of the dry philosophic intellect is insisted upon.

You see, what the ordinary intellect cannot reach is for us precisely the most important. Even though the ordinary intellect produces something as excellent as The History of Philosophy by Schwegler, (for I have expressly called this a good book) it is only an example by which we must see how a splendid intellect is completely at a standstill before a spirit such as Jacob Boehme.

Thus to-day we have endeavoured in our consideration of ancient Saturn to penetrate more inwardly, so to say, into this old planetary embodiment of our Earth. We shall presently do the same with the Sun and the Moon-existence. And in doing so we shall see that there too we come to ideas which perhaps may not appear less impressive than the glimpse afforded us when we look back to the old Saturn condition, and to the Thrones sacrificing to the Cherubim and resulting in the creation of the Beings of Time. For time is a result of sacrifice, and first arises as living time, as a creation of sacrifice. Then we shall see how all these things are transformed on the Sun, and other glorious events of the cosmic existence will confront us, when we pass from Saturn to the Sun, and then to the Moon-existence.

You will have gathered from our last lecture how extremely difficult it is to describe the early condition of our evolution before our own Earth came into being. For we have seen that we must first of all build up concepts and ideas through which we may reach those strange and distant conditions of the evolution of our world. I have already called attention to the fact that the description in my Occult Science of the period of ancient Saturn, as well as that of the following embodiments of our Earth is not only not exhaustive, but that, in a sense, we had to be satisfied (in order not to startle the public, to whom the book is accessible) with clothing the subject in pictures taken from what is near at hand and familiar. The description given there is in no respect incorrect, but it is very deeply immersed in Maya and Illusion; and we must first work our way through the illusion in order to penetrate further into the truth of the matter. For instance, the old Saturn period is described (and this is quite correct within certain limits) as a heavenly body whose essential parts did not consist of what we know as earth, water and air, but of ‘heat.’ So, too, in first speaking of ‘space,’ that also is merely a pictorial description; for, as we saw in the last lecture, ‘time’ itself did not even exist. When we speak of ‘space’ we are speaking pictorially. Of space there was none in our sense. And time first came into being on Saturn itself. When we carry our thought back to ancient Saturn we are absolutely in the realm of spaceless eternity. When, therefore, something is said to call up a picture before our minds, we must be clear that it is only a picture. If we could have observed the space of ancient Saturn we should have found no substance dense enough to be called gas, nothing but heat and cold.

In reality we could not speak of coming from one part of space into another, but only the sensation of passing through warmer and colder conditions; so that even the clairvoyant, when he transports himself back to the time of Saturn, receives the impression of being in spaceless ebb and flow of heat. That is only the outer veil of the Saturn condition. For this ‘heat’ or ‘fire’ as it is called in occultism, is concealed from us in the fundamental depths of its being; and we have seen that spiritual achievements formed in truth the very existence of ancient Saturn; and we have formed a picture of the spiritual deeds then existing. We have said that the Spirits of Will or Thrones achieved sacrificial acts; so that when we look back to the concrete occurrences on Saturn, we have the Cherubim and the sacrifice flowing forth from the Thrones. Sacrifice streamed from the Thrones to the Cherubim. And it is these sacrificial deeds seen from without, as it were, which appear as ‘heat.’ Conditions of heat are the external expression—speaking in a general sense—the external physical expression of sacrifice, and throughout the world, wherever heat is perceptible it is the outer expression of what lies behind it. Conditions of heat are the sacrificial acts of beings. Thus in describing heat we must say ‘Cosmic heat is the manifestation of Cosmic sacrifice, or of Cosmic sacrificial deeds.’

For we have seen that from this sacrificial deed offered by the Thrones to the Cherubim is brought to birth that which we call time: though I have already called attention to the fact that ‘brought to birth’ is a modern term and does not quite apply. For time was not then that abstraction man now accepts as time, but a totality of beings, the Spirits of Personality, whom we have therefore come to recognise as ‘Time-Spirits.’ The Time-Spirits are the true ancient time—and they are the children of the Thrones and the Cherubim. The condition by means of which the Beings of Time originated on ancient Saturn was sacrifice. Thus, in order to obtain an actual comprehension of what lies behind, when it is said: Ancient Saturn consists of ‘heat,’ we do not merely require external, physical concepts (for ‘heat’ is a physical concept), but we must acquire concepts which can only be derived from the soul-life itself, from the ethical wisdom-laden life of the soul. No man can know what heat is who is not able to form a conception of what it means; to be ready to sacrifice what he has, everything he possesses, indeed, not only everything he possesses, but also what he himself is. The sacrifice of the individual being, the soul's determination to renounce individual being, so regarding it as to be ready to devote its best to the welfare of the world, wishing to keep back nothing of the heat for itself, but gladly to offer it in sacrifice on the altar of the universe; if this becomes a living idea permeating our soul, it will gradually lead to the understanding of what lies behind the phenomenon of heat. If it is to be recognised as what in our modern life—even today—is bound up with the conception of sacrifice, it is hardly thinkable that anyone sacrificing himself with understanding ever does so against his own will. A sacrifice offered against the will argues some compelling motive; there must be compulsion. But this would not apply to what we are now discussing. The sacrifice that flows forth from a being as a matter of course is what is meant here. And if a man should make a sacrifice, not because he is forced to do so by any external motive, not because he hopes to gain something by so doing, but because he feels within him the impulse to sacrifice, it is then unthinkable that he should feel anything but inner warmth of bliss. If we feel ourselves glowing with this inner warmth of bliss, it is an expression of what can be described in no other way than by saying that the one making the sacrifice feels himself warmed through and through, glowing with bliss. In this way it is possible for us to feel the glow of sacrifice in the outer Cosmic heat. He alone understands what really is who can grasp the thought: Whenever heat appears in the world there is always in some way underlying it something of a soil-spiritual nature which is behind the heat and brings about the warmth through the special bliss. He who can feel all this about the warmth will gradually arrive at the reality of what is concealed behind the illusion of warmth, behind the phenomenon of heat.

Now if we wish to penetrate further, from the life of ancient Saturn to that of the Sun, we must again first form an idea by which we can imagine the substance of the ancient Sun—not our present Sun. For when we read in Occult Science that ancient Sun re-organised heat by adding to it air and light, that again is depicted merely by an external phenomenon. Just as behind the heat we must seek for the glow of sacrifice of the Spirits of Will, so must we look behind ‘air’ and ‘light’ for something ethical if we wish to understand the air and the light which are added to the heat on ancient Sun. Now we can only obtain a feeling of this substance of the ancient Sun through something of a spiritual psychic nature which we may experience in our souls.

We can describe it in the following way as a soul-experience. Let us imagine that a man were to see a real, genuine act of sacrifice, or that he were to picture to himself what we described in the last lecture as the sacrificial act of the Thrones, the Thrones offering up their sacrifice to the Cherubim—so that he is moved by the picture of the beatific sacrifice which he contemplates and which awakens the life in the soul. What would our souls feel through either the vision of the sacrificing Beings themselves, or by the picture we make truly living in our souls? If the feelings of this man are vivid, if the beatific sacrifice does not leave him unaffected, he will feel a profound feeling of bliss at the vision of the sacrifice; he will feel in his soul that it is the most beautiful deed, the most beautiful experience that can be called forth in our souls, the vision of the beatitude of sacrifice! We should be soul-less lumps if this experience did not arouse in the soul a passionate desire to understand inwardly with intensest reverence, what the beatitude of sacrifice is—if we did not learn the spirit of utter devotion. Sacrifice is devotion transformed into activity. The contemplation of active practical devotion may call forth the attuning of the soul's being to self-surrender, to the casting off of self, to self-effacement. Imagine this spirit of disinterested casting off of self wholly flooding the soul through the vision; then we have with this spirit that which can come nearer to us for our understanding, inasmuch as without such a spirit—without at least a hint, a foretaste of such a spirit—never could we really attain to what the higher knowledge gives. He who is unable to feel this spirit of self-surrender can never attain to higher knowledge. For what would be the opposite of this spirit? It would be self-will, assertion of individual will. These are, as it were, the two opposite Cosmic poles; devoted absorption in that which is contemplated, and self-willed assertion of individuality. These are two great opposites. Personal will fatally opposes the permeation of the higher Self with wisdom. In ordinary life we only know self-will in the form of prejudice, and prejudices always destroy the higher insight. But we must imagine what is here called self-surrender as intensified; for this can only be conceived when a man has worked his way up to the higher worlds. There he must be able to experience this casting off of self—at least as a frame of mind. Therefore it must always be emphasised that we can never attain higher knowledge so long as we work after the fashion of ordinary science and trivial thought. Let us be clear; ordinary science and everyday thought work out whatever self-will has created by means of the ordinary will of man, through the inherited or educated sensations and feelings. We can deceive ourselves greatly as to this. For instance, people may say: ‘Suppose one takes up any science, such as that set forth in spiritual science or Theosophy; I will not accept anything that does not agree with my thought, I will accept nothing unproved.’ Certainly we should not accept anything unproved. But neither do we advance a single step further if we only accept what is proved. And a man who wishes to be clairvoyant will never say that he can only accept what he has first proved. He must be completely free of all self-seeking and must wait what comes to him from the Cosmos, and which can only be designated by the word ‘grace.’ From the grace which illuminates he expects everything. For how do we acquire clairvoyant knowledge? Only by eliminating everything we have ever learnt. As a rule a man says, I have my own opinion. But what he ought to say is: This only comes because I have revived what my ancestors have thought, or what my desires have aroused in me, etc. For there can never be any question of these being his own opinions, and those who attach most value to their own opinions are not in the least aware that they are being led by the leading-strings of their prejudices. All this must be done away with when we wish to attain to higher knowledge. The soul must be empty able to wait quietly for what may enter into it from the concealed secret world free from space and time, free from things and deeds. And we must never believe that we can acquire any conception of clairvoyant knowledge except by creating a suitable frame of mind through which we may receive what may be offered to us as revelation or illumination, so that we can never expect anything to come to us except from the grace which approaches and brings gifts.

How then does such knowledge reveal itself? How is that which comes to us revealed when we have prepared ourselves sufficiently? It reveals itself as the feeling of being endowed with grace through the gifts that come to meet us from the spiritual world. If we wish to describe what thus approaches us, bringing us grace and pouring knowledge into us, we can only make use of the expression: it is that which comes to meet us, an active inspiring with grace; a bestowing, a giving. Let us grasp the nature of a being chiefly characterised by what I have just described, so as to say of him: he is a bestower, a giver, an offerer of gifts. Such a being whose chief characteristic is the showering of grace around him, the shedding forth of grace from himself. Let our conception of this being show us that in order to attain this possibility of giving forth grace there must be the vision of the sacrifice made by the Thrones to the Cherubim; let us suppose that he was present when the sacrifice was being offered. Let us clearly imagine a being such as this, who through having had this vision is stimulated to shower the gifts of his grace around him. Suppose we were to see a rose and were charmed by it, experiencing the feeling of one enraptured by what we call ‘beautiful.’ Suppose another being through the vision of what we have described as the sacrifice by the Thrones to the Cherubim, were inspired to pour forth into the world, to offer to the world as a gift, everything ho possessed—we should thus be describing those beings spoken of in Occult Science as Spirits of Wisdom who on the Sun were added to the beings with whom we become acquainted on ancient Saturn. If now we were to put the question, what is the character of these Spirits who appeared on the Sun in addition to the Saturn Spirits? We must reply: The principal characteristic of these spirits is the virtue of giving, of pouring forth grace. If we wish to find a title for them, we must say: These are the Spirits of Wisdom, the great Bestowers, the great Givers of the Universe. Just as we have called the Thrones ‘The great Sacrificers,’ so we must say of the Spirits of Wisdom, they are ‘the great Givers’ who so devote their gift that it weaves and lives in the universe, flowing out into it and first bringing about its order.

That is the activity of the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun, they endow their environment with their own being. And what is presented to the external view when we look up and wish to have a higher sense-perception of what takes place on the Sun?

When we look at it, it is as described in Occult Science. Besides heat, the Sun consists externally of air and of light. But when we say this, it is as though someone were to say: ‘In the distance I see a grey cloud.’ And if he were an artist he would paint the impression; but if he were to come nearer he might perhaps see, instead of the grey cloud, a swarm of midges. Thus in reality, what he took for a grey cloud is nothing but a number of living beings. In like manner do we confront the ancient Sun-existence. Seen from afar it appears as the illusion of a body consisting of light and air; but if we approach nearer, we have no longer a body of light and air but it appears as the great bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom. And no one learns the real nature of air who only describes it according to its external physical properties. That is only maya and illusion, only outer manifestation. For wherever there is air in the world, the deeds of the Spirits of Wisdom lie behind it. Weaving, active air means the manifestation of the bestowing virtue of the macrocosm, and only he looks rightly upon air who says: ‘I see air in this way,’ in reality within it something is bestowed by the Spirits of Wisdom, something streams out into their environment.

And now we know what was meant by describing ancient Sun as consisting of air. We now know that what appears outwardly as air is a gift which the Spirits of Wisdom allow to flow forth from their own being. But now something wonderful is seen by the clairvoyant. We must clearly understand how we obtain from our own soul-life a still more accurate idea of this virtue of giving. Let us bring home to our mind the feeling we may ourselves have if through the above-described mode of devotion we are able to permeate ourselves with a perception, with an idea; such an idea may produce in us a distinct perception of which the best is the artistic longing to master colour or form in some way or other, to send it forth into the world, thus to give to the world something having an independent existence. We may describe the nature of such a capacity of giving by saying that productivity and creative activity is connected with it; this giving is self-creative. Anyone who has an idea and feels that he can give it forth for the good of the world, and can represent it in a work of art, has the right conception of this productivity of the virtue of giving. This it is which as air weaves through the Sun. When we think of this creative idea in the mind of the artist, and how it imprints itself into matter (besides everything else), this is the spiritual being of air. Wherever there is air we are concerned with it in some such way. But from the living productivity having been on the Sun, proceeds the following.

Let us hold firmly in mind that on ancient Saturn the Spirits of Time had been born, therefore ‘time’ could be present on the Sun; for it came over from Saturn. Thus on ancient Sun there was the possibility of giving, which could not have been found on ancient Saturn. For just imagine. How could there have been any giving if there had been no time? It would not have been possible, for giving must include acceptance, the one is not to be thought of without the other. Thus giving must consist of two actions, giving and accepting, otherwise giving has no object. On the Sun, however, giving and accepting occupied a peculiar relation to one another, for—as time was already there—the gifts offered to the environment on ancient Sun had been, as it were, stored up in time: as it were, guarded in time so that the Spirits of Wisdom pour forth their gift—and it endures. But now something must enter to accept this. This occurs comparatively speaking at a later time than the gifts of the Spirits of Wisdom. They give at an earlier moment, and that which is necessarily connected with receiving appears later. We can only obtain a correct conception of this if here too we use our own soul-experience as a foundation.

Suppose you are trying very hard to understand something, or to form some sort of thought. Suppose you have formed the thought. The next day you will make your mind as clear as possible so that the thought you formed yesterday may come back into it. What you formed yesterday is received by you to-day. Thus it was on ancient Sun; what was given at an earlier time was guarded till a later moment and was then received. What then was this acceptance? It was a deed, an occurrence only distinguished from the other occurrence in that it occurred later. The giving comes from the Spirits of Wisdom. Who then accepts? If there is to be an acceptance there must be someone to accept! In the same way as the Spirits of Time arose from the sacrifice of the Thrones to the Cherubims on ancient Saturn—through an act of nativity—so through ‘an act of giving’ to the world by the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun, the Spirits we call Archangels or Archangeloi, came into being. They are these who accept on ancient Sun. But they receive in a very special way, for they do not retain for themselves the gift received from the Spirits of Wisdom, but reflect it, just as a mirror reflects an image. Thus the task of the Archangels on the Sun was to collect at a later epoch what had been given earlier, what was still there and could be reflected by the Archangels. Thus we have on the Sun an earlier act of giving and a subsequent accepting, but this accepting is a reflection back. Just suppose that the earth were not as it is now, but that what occurred at an earlier age could be reflected again at the present time. We actually know that something of the sort does take place. We are now living in the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilisation, when the events of the third, the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean age are being reflected. What formerly was received is now reflected. Everything that formerly existed is recapitulated. So that we have to think of the Archangels on the one side and as the recipients on the other the Spirits of Wisdom who in the ancient Sun-period were the bestowers. From this something quite special arises, which can only be properly conceived by thinking of a globe complete in itself and radiating forth from its centre that which is given. It radiates out to the periphery—whence it is radiated back to the centre. Thus we have to think of what comes from the Spirits of Wisdom as proceeding from the centre; this radiates forth in all directions, is collected by the Archangels and reflected back. What is thus reflected back into space is the gift from the Spirits of Wisdom. It is light that re-conducts the radiations of the Spirits of Wisdom, and the Archangels are at the same time creators of light. Light is not in the least the external illusion presented to us; but wherever light appears we have the gifts of the Spirits of Wisdom radiated back to us. And the beings whose existence must be presumed behind all light are the Archangels. Hence we must say: Wherever light appears to us, behind it are the Archangels; but they are only able to ray forth light to us because they reflect back what has streamed out to them—namely, the bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom.

In this way we obtain a picture of ancient Sun: We think of a centre in which is focussed what came over from ancient Saturn; the sacrificial acts of the Thrones to the Cherubim. Absorbed in contemplation of these acts of sacrifice are the Spirits of Wisdom. This vision causes them to radiate forth from themselves that which is their real being: streaming, flowing wisdom is the virtue they give. However, as this is radiated through by ‘time’ it is sent forth and sent back again, so that we have a globe, inwardly illuminated by the virtue returning to it; for we must not think of the ancient Sun as outwardly but as inwardly luminous, because the Spirits of Wisdom radiate outwards. Thus something new is created which we may describe as follows: Let us imagine the Spirits of Wisdom as sitting at the centre of the Sun absorbed in contemplation of the vision of the sacrificing Thrones; and by reason of this vision, radiating forth their own being; and receiving back their radiating being which they sent forth, receiving it reflected back from the surface, so that they receive it back as light. Everything is illuminated. What then do they receive back! Their own being surrendered by them became a gift to the Macrocosm, it was their inner being. Now it rays back to them; their own being meets them coming back from outside. They see their own inner being outspread in the Cosmos—and reflected back as light, as the reflection of their own being.

The inner and the outer are the two opposites which we now meet. The earlier and the later are transformed into the inner and the outer; and space is born! Space comes into existence through the bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom on ancient Sun. Before that, space could only have pictorial value. Now we have space—but consisting at first of only two dimensions. There was as yet no above and below, no right or left, nothing but an outer and an inner.—In reality these opposites appear at the end of ancient Saturn; but they repeat themselves as space-creation on ancient Sun. And if we wish to obtain a conception of all these occurrences, as we did of the last when the picture appeared before our soul of the sacrificing Thrones, giving birth to the Spirits of Time, we must not even picture a body consisting of light, for the light within it was only a reflection. We must think of it as a globe of inner space, in the centre of which the picture of Saturn is recapitulated: the Thrones as Spirits as though kneeling before the Cherubim, those winged beings, sacrificing their own being, and, in addition to these, the Spirits of Wisdom, absorbed in the vision of the sacrifice. And now it is also possible to have the vision of the heat of the sacrifice being so transmitted that we may think of it objectively as the incense of sacrifice, as air ascending from the sacrifice as incense. We obtain a complete picture if we imagine: the sacrificing Thrones kneeling before the Cherubim, and as though participating, the Spirits of Wisdom, absorbed in the contemplation of what they perceive in the centre of the Sun as the sacrifice of the Thrones, and thereby ascending in their conception to the idea of the sacrificial incense pouring forth and spreading out on all sides, and finally condensing, while from its clouds proceed the figures of the Archangels,--who reflect back the incense from the periphery as light, illuminating the interior of the Sun, returning the gift of the Spirits of Wisdom, and in this way creating the sphere of the Sun. This sphere consists of the outpoured gift of glowing heat and sacrificial incense. At the outer periphery are the Archangels, the creators of the light, who, later depict what was first on the Sun; it then returns as light. What then, do these Archangels preserve! They guard the beginnings, what was formerly there, the earlier. The gifts they receive they reflect. That which was there in the beginning they radiate forth at a later time, and in as much as they do this, they are the Angels of the Beginning, because they bring into activity in later times what was previously there. ‘Archangeloi’ ‘Messengers of the Beginning’!

It is very wonderful when such a word arises from the depths of true occult knowledge and we remember that this word comes across to us from primeval traditions, along the path of the School of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was the pupil of Paul. It is wonderful to see that this word is so deeply stamped that when we evolve it again, independently of what is written, what stands there arises before us. And we then feel ourselves united with the ancient holy schools of Initiation-Wisdom, of the science of Initiation, so that we feel as though this ancient time were streaming into us, we picture it with understanding after having ourselves created the possibility of accepting it Independently of what we have heard. Anyone feeling even a little of the spirit of these old expressions which have descended to us without our having paid attention to them, will feel himself within the current of the mighty power of the Spirits of Time passing through humanity. What is thus felt in contemplation of these things is in marvellous connection with the whole human evolution, it makes us feel one with it. The Archangels preserve the memorial of the primordial beginnings; but whatever takes place on any one planet is always recapitulated later, only when it occurs later there is always something added to it. So that we meet with the being of the Sun again in what we find on our own earth.

The whole conception, the whole feeling that we are thus able to acquire—which gives us a picture of the sacrifice of the Thrones, of the Cherubim receiving the sacrifice, of the glow given forth by the sacrifice, of the sacrificial incense spreading out as air, of the light radiated back by the Archangels who preserve for later ages what took place at the beginning—this feeling is something that can call up inns a true understanding of everything connected with the creation of such a feeling, with the sacrifice proceeding from it.

We have now contemplated in a more spiritual sense, what I have just described as a soul-sphere whereas previously we considered it from a physical aspect. And we shall now see that the Being who appeared on earth as the Christ-being when we grasp the idea of the bestowing virtue, the grace-bestowing virtue in its reflection in the light of the universe in the inner substance of the Sun-body, which was permeated and illuminated through and through by this light. If we can exalt our conception of what has just been described and transform that into an imagination, bearing in mind that something of all that was brought to the earth by the Christ-Being is on the earth, fulfils its life on the earth, we can then go still more deeply into the actual spiritual nature of the Christ-impulse. We are then able to understand the dim idea that can stir in a human soul on hearing such an account, when it dawns on the soul that what has been described may in a certain sense again come to life on earth. Just imagine all that has been described of the Sun as absolutely concentrated in the soul of one Being, suppose all this gathered up and taken away to reappear at a later period and so to reappear and work, that He would bring with Him an extract of what came into existence through the ancient primordial sacrificial deed and the smoke of sacrifice through the light-creating time and the bestowing Virtue and would reflect it out of the universe of radiant light. Imagine all this concentrated in one soul, think of that soul as giving all this to the Earth-existence; around Him are assembled those who now as earth-beings are destined to radiate this back again and preserve it for the remainder of the earth-existence. In the centre is the One Who comes forth from the Sacrifice and Who bestows through the sacrifice, and around Him are gathered those who are to receive it—on the one side all that the sacrifice is and everything belonging to it, as it were translated into earthly life; on the other hand the possibility of destroying the sacrifice for everything that can be given to the human being in the way of Divine grace may be either accepted or rejected. If we think of all this as embodied in an intuition, we can, on looking at the ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci, have somewhat the following feeling. The entire Sun with the sacrificial Beings the Beings of Bestowing Virtue, the Beings of warmth-giving bliss, of the radiant light, spiritually grasped, radiated back by those selected to preserve into later ages what belongs to the earlier, and so ordained for the earth that it may also be rejected by the traitor. We may feel that this is the Earth-Being, in as much as the Sun-Being reappears on the Earth. If this is felt—not in an external intellectual manner, but in true artistic way; then something of the actual driving-force of such a great work of art can be felt, a work which reflects, as it were, the extract of the Earth existence. When we see this picture again, and see how the Christ grows forth from the Sun-Sphere, we shall better understand what I have often said: If a spirit were to come down to the Earth from Mars, while he would not be able to understand everything that he saw here, he would understand the actual mission of the Earth if he allowed the ‘Last Supper’ of Leonardo da Vinci to work upon him. The inhabitant of Mars would then see that the Sun-existence must lie concealed within that of the Earth; and thereby everything he might be told concerning the meaning of the Earth would become clear to him. He would understand that the Earth had a meaning, and he would know what was involved. He would say to himself: ‘What is taking place on the Earth may perhaps be only of importance to one part of it: but could the deed represented in the colouring of this picture really take place? When I concentrated on the central Figure with those other around Him, I feel what the Spirits of Wisdom felt on the Sun, and what is re-echoed here in the words; “This do in remembrance of me.”‘ The earlier preserved in the later: this saying will only be comprehensible to us when we grasp it in its whole cosmic connection, as we have just learnt to do.

In the next lecture it will be our task to study the Christ-Being in the spiritual nature of the Sun, in order to pass on from that to the spiritual nature of the Moon.

In the last two lectures an endeavour was made to call attention to the fact that behind all the material phenomena of the substance of our earth something spiritual is to be sought. We endeavoured to describe the spiritual to be found behind the phenomenon of heat, and then that behind the phenomenon of flowing air. As, in order to do this, it was necessary to turn back to the very early ages of our evolution, we had to glance into our own soul-life to describe the spiritual conditions underlying matter. For it is obvious that the concepts by means of which anything is described must necessarily be drawn from somewhere. Words alone will not suffice; we must have quite definite conceptions. As we have seen, the spiritual conditions to which we referred are so far removed from anything experienced by man at the present time, or of which he can have knowledge—that we had to appeal to certain conditions in our soul-life, conditions by no means universal. We have seen that the deepest being of all conditions of heat and fire must be sought very far away from what we know as external physical fire or heat. To a man of the present day it must appear truly absurd that sacrifice should be recognised as the essence of all conditions of heat: a sacrifice made by very definite Beings to be met with in the old Saturn state of the Earth—the Thrones—who then brought their sacrifice to the Cherubim. And yet in truth we must say that a sacrifice such as possessed its starting point in the world-evolution, appears to us—although in maya or illusion—in all external conditions of heat or fire. In the last lecture we also recognised that behind all that we may call flowing air or flowing gas, there is something very far away, which we have called ‘the virtue of bestowal,’ the devotional pouring forth by spiritual Beings of their own being. This is to be found in every breath of wind, in all flowing air. Thus what is perceived externally, physically, is in reality mere illusion, nothing but maya; and only when we progress from maya to the incorporeal, the spiritual, do we obtain the correct conception of fire and heat; for in fact fire, heat and light bear the same relation to the real world as does the reflected image of a man seen in a mirror to the person himself. For, just as the mirror presents merely an illusion in relation to the man, so in this sense, fire, heat and air are illusions; and the realities behind these bear the same relation to them as the real man to his reflection. Neither fire nor air should be sought in the world of reality, but sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal.

When we saw the virtue of bestowal added to that of sacrifice we ascend from the life of ancient Saturn to that of ancient Sun. In the latter, the second cosmic embodiment of our earth, we find something which brings us a step nearer to the real conditions of development. Yet another concept must now be introduced, which belongs to the world of reality as concerned with the world of illusion. But before passing to the actual conditions of development we must acquire a definite idea from the following.

When in his external life a man does something, accomplishes something, the impulse of his will as a rule underlies it. Whatever he does, be it the movement of a hand or the greatest of deeds, the impulse of the will underlies them. From his will proceeds everything that leads to an act, to an achievement. Now at first a man would say that a strong, forceful act, one for instance that is to bring about great healing and blessing, must proceed from a stronger impulse of will, while a less important act comes from a weaker impulse. And in general it is assumed that the greatness of the deed depends upon the strength of the impulse of the will. But only in a certain degree is it correct that as we intensify our will we accomplish great things in the world. Certain deeds that man may do—particularly such as bear upon the spiritual world—do not, strange to say, now depend upon the strengthening of our impulses of will. In the physical world, in which we particularly live, the greatness of our deeds certainly does depend upon the strength of our impulses of will, for the more we wish to accomplish, the greater are the efforts we must make. But in the spiritual world this is not so, there the opposite comes to pass. There it is the case that the greatest deeds or better said, the greatest results do not necessitate any strengthening of the positive impulses of will, but far more a certain resignation, a renouncing. Take the very smallest purely spiritual facts. We do not attain any spiritual effects by bringing strong desires into play, or by bestirring ourselves as much as possible; no—in the spiritual world we attain certain results by controlling our wishes and desires, and renouncing all idea of satisfying them. Suppose a man has made up his mind to bring something about in the world by means of inner spiritual workings. To do this he would have to prepare himself by learning above all to suppress his own wishes and desires. For whereas in the physical world we grow stronger when we eat well, when we are well nourished and acquire greater strength thereby, so, in the spiritual world, when we wish to attain something important we can precisely do so with the greatest ease, if, by fasting or other means, we repress and control our wishes and desires; (this is only a statement, and not given by way of advice). The greatest spiritual, magical effects, always require preparation connected with the renunciation of wishes, desires, and impulses of will which may appear within us. The less we ‘will’ the more we say: We will allow life to flow over us, not longing for this or that, but accepting everything just as Karma sends it to us, the more we are able to accept Karma and its workings in this way, keeping quietly ready to renounce all that we should otherwise wish to choose for this life, the more forceful shall we become as regards the activity of our thinking. In the case of a teacher or tutor who is above all things fond of eating and drinking and has other masterful passions, it will be noticeable that his words to his pupils will not accomplish very much, his words will go in at one ear and out at the other. He will think that this is the fault of the pupils, but that is not always the case. A man who has begun to lead a higher life, who lives temperately, who only eats as much as is necessary to support life, who is determined to accept what destiny brings him with equanimity, will gradually notice that his words have great force; he will not even require to look at his pupils, but only to be near them and have encouraging thought without expressing it, and that thought will pass over to the pupil. It all depends on the degree of renunciation and self-denial he has acquired as regards the things usually desired by man.

The right path for spiritual activities intended to lead to spiritual effects in the higher worlds, is that of renunciation. In relation to this many delusions are met with, and delusions while resembling true renunciation, do not lead to the right results. We are all acquainted with what in ordinary life is called ‘asceticism,’ self-inflicted suffering. In many cases the practice of this may be a spiritual self-indulgence, for a person may practise it in order to obtain great results, or from some other source of desire for self-satisfaction. In such cases asceticism produces no results; it is of no avail unless it is a sign of the renunciation rooted in the spirit. Let us then acquire the concept of the creative renunciation, the creative resignation. It is indeed of immense importance that we should accept this renunciation, this creative resignation, which we may experience in the soul, as a conception of something far removed from our everyday life; and then we are guided a step deeper into the evolution of humanity. For in the process of evolution something of the kind really does take place in the transition from the conditions of ancient Sun to those of ancient Moon. Something of the nature of renunciation takes place in the realm of the Beings of the higher worlds, for these Beings, as we know already, are connected with the process of the earth's development. At this juncture let us once again call to mind the ancient Sun evolution. But let us first give our attention to something else with which we are already familiar, but which may until now have appeared in some respects to be somewhat of an enigma.

We have repeatedly drawn attention to occurrences in evolution which must be traced back to those beings who have in the course of evolution ‘remained behind.’ We know that the Luciferic beings have invaded the domain of our earth humanity. It has repeatedly been necessary to draw attention to the fact that these beings are able to enter our astral body during the development of our earth because they did not, during the evolution of the Moon, reach the stage they ought to have attained. A commonplace comparison has often been used, that as in our schools some pupils remain behind, so even in the great cosmic evolution there are cosmic beings who, remaining behind in the stages of their own evolution, subsequently interfere with the evolutionary stages of other beings, with a result similar to that produced by the Luciferic beings, who lingered behind on the ancient Moon. We might easily suppose these to be faulty beings actually injurious to the evolution of the world; for why did they linger behind? Such a thought might occur to us. The thought, however, which we should entertain is this: that man would never have attained his freedom, or the capacity for individual initiative action had not the Luciferic beings remained behind on the Moon. So that on the one hand man owes to the Luciferic beings the fact that he has in his astral body passions, emotions, and desires driving him constantly down from a certain height into lower parts of his nature. But, on the other hand, if man were incapable of wickedness, unable to err from good through the forces of the Luciferic beings in his astral body he could not act freely, or possess what we call freewill, freedom of choice. We must therefore admit that to the Luciferic beings we owe our freedom. The deduction to be drawn from this is that the one-sided view is not valid that claims that they only lead man astray; their remaining behind must be regarded as something beneficial, as something without which he could never have acquired his human dignity, in the true sense of the word.

Now what we call the ‘remaining behind’ of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings is based on something much deeper, something already to be encountered in connection with ancient Saturn, although it is there so difficult to perceive that words could hardly be found in any language to describe it. But when we advance to the ancient Sun-existence, we are able to describe it quite distinctly if we bear in mind the idea of resignation or renunciation which we just described at the beginning of this lecture. For what lies beneath all such remaining behind and all its influence is renunciation, resignation by higher Beings. So now, on the Sun we see the following taking place. We have said that the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, offer sacrifice to the Cherubim; and this they do, as we have seen in the last lecture, not only during the Saturn period, but they continue their sacrifice through that of the Sun, so that there too we have the idea of the Thrones or Spirits of Will sacrificing to the Cherubim. In this sacrifice is to be found the actual essence of all the conditions of heat or fire present in the world. Now: if we look back into the Akashic Record of the Sun-age we can quite distinctly notice the following. The Thrones offer and continue their sacrificial activity; so that we have there the sacrificing Thrones and a host of Cherubim to whom, as we see, the sacrifice rises, while they take into themselves the heat which flows forth from it. However, another host of Cherubim accomplish something else; these renounce the sacrifice, they do not accept what is offered them. We must therefore complete the picture we called up before our minds in the last lecture.

In this picture we have the sacrificing Thrones and those Cherubim who accept their sacrifice, and we also have the Cherubim who do not accept it—but give back that which was offered up to them. It is extraordinarily interesting to follow this in the Akashic Record. For by reason of the bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom now flowing into the sacrificial heat we are able during the ancient Sun-period to see ascending something like sacrificial smoke of which we have said, that it is reflected back by the Archangels from the outermost periphery of the Sun, in the form of light. But now besides this, something altogether different seems to appear in the space of ancient Sun; not merely the sacrificial smoke thrown back by the Archangels in the form of light, but also that smoke which was not accepted by the Cherubim and which as it were flows back again, as though dammed back. So that we have permanent clouds of sacrifice in space; Sacrifice that ascends, Sacrifice that descends, Sacrifice accepted and Sacrifice rejected. The encounter of these intrinsically Spiritual cloud-formations is seen to take place between what in the last lecture we called the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, until the separation occurs. Thus in the centre we have the sacrificing Thrones, then in the heights above the Cherubim accepting the sacrifice, and beside these, those other Cherubim who did not accept the proffered sacrifice, but diverted its course back again. Through this diversion arises, as it were, an encircling cloud, and right outside we have the cast-back masses of light. Let us try to form a picture of this in our minds. We must think of this ancient Sun-space, the ancient Sun-mass as a cosmic globe beyond which we conceive of nothing, so that we only imagine space extending as far as the Archangels. Let us further picture in the centre of this globular formation the meeting of the accepted and the rejected sacrifices. From these two, the accepted and rejected sacrifices, there comes into being in the ancient Sun something that we may call a division of the whole Sun-substance, a divergence. If we wish to compare the Sun in that bygone age with any external image, we can only compare it with the form of our present Saturn which is a globe encircled by rings; for that which is in the centre is thrown inwards by volumes of sacrifice and that which was outside is arranged as an encircling mass. Thus we have the Sun's substance divided into two parts by the force of the arrested and dammed up powers of the sacrifice.

What then is brought about by this renunciation of the sacrifice on the part of certain of the Cherubim?

We are now coming to an extremely difficult chapter indeed, and we shall only be able gradually to grasp, by means of meditation, what is comprised in the conceptions about to be set forth. Only after long and profound reflection upon the conceptions about to be given can we discern what the realities are that underlie them. That resignation of which mention has already been made, must be brought into connection with the origin of Time—the scene of which we have laid in ancient Saturn. Time, as we have seen, actually originated on ancient Saturn, with the Archai or Spirits of Time, and there is no sense in referring to Time previous to ancient Saturn. Now at the risk of repeating ourselves, we may say that Time continues. Continuity or Duration is a conception which contains Time within itself. Thus when we say that Time is continuous it means that when we observe Saturn and Sun in the Akashic records, on Saturn we find the origin of Time—and on the Sun we still find Time present. Now if all conditions remained as they were, as we described them in the last two lectures when speaking of Saturn and Sun. Time would then form an element in everything that happens in evolution. We could not in thought eliminate Time from any occurrence in evolution. We have seen that the Spirits of Time came into being on ancient Saturn, and that Time is implanted into everything. All that we have hitherto thought whether in pictures or in imagination concerning evolution we must bring into connection with Time. All that has taken place—sacrifice and the virtue of bestowal, which we have mentioned—would be subject to Time, nothing would not be subject to Time, which means that all arising and passing away which indeed pertains to Time, must be subject to it.

Now those Cherubim who renounced the acceptance of the sacrifice and of that which was, as it were, contained in the smoke of the sacrifice, did so because in so doing, they withdrew from the properties of this sacrificial smoke. And to these properties belongs above all Time, which includes ‘arising’ and ‘passing away.’ The whole renunciation of the sacrifice on the part of these Cherubim signifies that they had grown beyond the conditions of Time. These Cherubim extended beyond Time and withdrew from subjection to it. The combination of circumstances during the evolution of ancient Sun was such, that the sacrificing and the virtue of bestowal, which conditions continued in a direct line from Saturn, remain subject to Time; whilst others, brought about by the other Cherubim who renounced the acceptance of the sacrifice wrested themselves free, and chose Eternity, Duration, permanence, the non-subjection to arising and passing away. It is in the highest degree remarkable; during the evolution of ancient Sun we come to a severance between Time and Eternity. Through the resignation made by the Cherubim during the Sun-evolution, Eternity was gained, as a property of certain conditions which then came about. Just as we saw, on looking into our soul, that in it certain effects were produced through the acquisition by man of the qualities of renunciation and resignation—so we see, speaking now of the ancient Sun alone, that eternity and immortality were acquired by certain divine Spiritual Beings, that they resigned the sacrifice and all that might have come to them from the virtue of bestowal and all its diffused gifts. Whereas we have seen Time coming into being on ancient Saturn, we have also seen certain conditions wresting themselves free from it during the Sun development. But we must take special care to note that this was prepared even during the Saturn-age; so that Eternity does not actually begin during the Sun age. This can however, only be sufficiently clearly and distinctly observed so that it can be expressed in concepts, in the Sun-age: on Saturn the division between Time and Eternity is so faintly perceptible that our ideas and words do not prove precise enough to define anything of the sort for ancient Saturn and its evolution.

We have now learnt the significance of resignation, the renunciation made by the gods during the time of ancient Sun, and the attainment of immortality. What was the further consequence of this?

From the study of the book Occult Science which must in certain respects still be veiled in Maya, we learn that the evolution of ancient Moon followed that of ancient Sun, that at the close of the Sun-age all the existing conditions were immersed in a kind of twilight, in a sort of cosmic chaos, from which emerged the Moon. And we see the sacrifice re-issuing in the form of heat. All that remained as heat on ancient Sun reappears as heat on the Moon; we see the virtue of bestowal reappearing as gas, or air. And with the resignation also continues the renunciation of the sacrifice; all that we have called ‘resignation’ is within whatever takes place on ancient Moon. It is actually the case, that what we can ourselves experience as resignation we must think of in everything on ancient Moon, carried over from ancient Sun, and as we think of everything else in the external world. That which had been sacrifice reappears in Maya as Heat; and that which was bestowing virtue appears in Maya as gas or air. Resignation as it has now become appears in external Maya as Fluidity, as ‘Water’. ‘Water’ is Maya and would not be in the world at all were it not that its spiritual foundation is renunciation, or resignation. Wherever water is to be found in the world there is divine-renunciation. Just as heat is an illusion behind which is sacrifice, and gas or air an illusion behind which is the virtue of bestowal, so is water as a substance, as an external reality, nothing but an illusion of the senses, a reflection; the only reality existing in it, is resignation by certain Beings of that which they receive from other Beings. It might be said, water could only flow in the world because resignation underlies it. Now, we know that while the Sun progressed to Moon, airy conditions condensed to watery conditions. Water first appeared on the Moon; on ancient Sun there was as yet no water. What we see gathering like clouds during the old Sun development coagulated as they interpenetrated each other, to denser substance, to ‘water,’ and this appears on ancient Moon as the Moon-ocean.

If we bear this in mind it will at any rate be possible to grasp a question that may be raised. From resignation comes forth water; water is in literal truth resignation. We acquire a peculiar kind of spiritual insight into the actual nature of water. But now the question may be raised: There is after all a certain difference between the conditions which would have arisen if the Cherubim had not made this resignation, and that which has actually come about through their having done so. Is this difference in any way conveyed? Yes, it is. It is conveyed in the fact that the consequences of that resignation appeared clearly during the Sun-State. If it had never been made, if the Cherubim had accepted the proffered sacrifice, they would—speaking figuratively—have had the sacrificial smoke as part of their own inner substance; what they themselves had done would have found expression in the smoke of the sacrifice. Suppose these Cherubim had accomplished this or that; this would have been apparent, it would have been outwardly expressed by the changing clouds of the air; that is to say: In the outer form of the air would have been expressed what the Cherubim who made no resignation did with the substance of the sacrifice. But they did reject it, and in so doing they passed from mortality to immortality, from a transitory state into a State of Duration. However the substance of the sacrifice is there to begin with; it is released from the forces, so to speak, which it would otherwise have absorbed, and is now obliged to follow the inclinations and impulses of the Cherubim; for they gave it up, they renounced it. What then happens to this substance of sacrifice? The following occurs: It happens that other beings, because the sacrificial substance is not with the Cherubim, take possession of it, become independent of the Cherubim, self-reliant beings; whereas they would otherwise have been directed from the sacrificial substance within the Cherubim, if the latter had accepted it. Thus it became possible for the opposite of resignation to arise; in that certain beings attracted to themselves the substance of the sacrifice that had been poured forth and become active within it. These beings are ‘they who remained behind’; ‘remaining behind’ was therefore a consequence of the resignation made by the Cherubim. Through the very substance which they refused to accept, the Cherubim themselves furnished backward beings with the first possibility of staying behind. Through the rejection of a sacrifice, other beings who did not resign it, but gave way to their wishes and desires, bringing them to expression were enabled to take possession of the object of the sacrifice, of the sacrificial substance, thereby attaining the possibility of taking their place as independent beings side by side with those who here were offering.

Thus, when evolution passed from ancient Sun to Moon, with the immortality of the Cherubim, the possibility was given for other beings to separate in their own substance from the uninterrupted evolution of the Cherubim, generally speaking from the immortal beings. So now, when we learn the deeper reasons of the remaining behind, we see that the original fault—if we may venture to speak of such an original fault—did not lay with those who remained behind. This is the important point, which we must realise: If the Cherubim had accepted the proffered sacrifice, the Luciferic beings could not have remained behind; they would have had no opportunity of embodying themselves in that substance. To make it possible for beings to become thus independent, renunciation previously took place. Thus, in cosmic evolution it is the case that the gods themselves called their opponents into being. If the gods had not renounced the sacrifice, beings would not have been able to oppose them. Put into simple words we may suppose the gods had foreseen as follows: ‘If we merely go on creating as we have done from Saturn to Sun there would never be any free beings, capable of acting from their own initiative. In order that beings of this nature might come into existence, the possibility must be given for opponents to arise against us in the Universe, so that we should meet with resistance in that which is subject to time. If we ourselves ordain everything we shall meet with no such resistance. We could make everything very easy for ourselves by accepting the sacrifice offered to us; then would the whole of evolution be subject unto us. But this will not do, we want beings able to resist us. We will therefore not accept the sacrifice; so that through our resignation and because they accept the sacrifice, they become our opponents!’

So we see that we must not look for the origin of evil in the so-called ‘evil’ beings, but in the ‘good’ Beings, who, through their resignation first brought evil about through those beings who were able to bring it into the world. But now the following objection may easily be made, (and I want you to let these thoughts work profoundly upon your souls): I have till now thought more highly of the gods! I have always believed them able to give freedom to man without creating the possibility of evil. How is it that all these ‘good gods could not produce something like human freedom without bringing evil into the world?’ In this connection I should like to remind you of that Spanish King who considered the world dreadfully complicated, and who said on one occasion that if God had allowed him to create it he would have made it much simpler—Man in his weakness may think that the world might have been made simpler than it is, but the gods knew better and therefore they did not allow man to create the world.

From the standpoint of scientific perception, we might describe these circumstances more accurately. Suppose something required supporting and the suggestion were made that a column might be erected and the weight rested on that. This person in question might say: ‘There must be some other way of doing it!’ Why, indeed, should it not be done in some other way? Or again, when a triangle is made use of in building, it might be said: Why should a triangle have only three angles? Perhaps a god might make a triangle not having three angles? There would be just as little sense in thinking of a triangle without three angles, as in supposing that the gods might have created freedom without the possibility of evil and suffering. Just as three angles are necessary to a triangle, so the possibility of evil, given by the resignation of Divine Beings, is necessary to freedom. It all forms part of the Divine resignation, for the gods created evolution out of immortality, after they had through their renunciation or sacrifice, ascended to immortality, in order to lead back evil to good. The gods did not shrink from the evil, which alone could give the possibility of freedom. Had the gods avoided evil, the world would be poor, without variety. For the sake of freedom the gods had to allow evil to enter the world, and for this reason they had to acquire the power enabling them to lead evil back again to good. This power is such it can only be acquired as a consequence of renunciation and resignation.

Religions always exist for the purpose of showing us the great cosmic mysteries in symbols, in imaginations. In this lecture we have alluded to primordial phases of evolution, and by adding the conception of resignation to those of sacrifice and of the bestowing virtue we have come a step further, from Maya and illusion into the realities. Conceptions such as these are presented to man in religions. And in that of the Bible there is something whereby man can acquire a conception of resignation, of the rejection of the sacrifice. That is the story of the sacrifice about to be made by Abraham who was ready to offer his own son to God, and of the renouncing by God of the sacrifice offered by the patriarch. If we take into our souls this conception of sacrifice, then intuitive visions such as those described, may come to us. On one occasion I suggested that we should suppose that the sacrifice of Abraham had been accepted, that Isaac had been sacrificed. As all the ancient Hebrew people are descended from him, God would then by accepting the sacrifice have taken this whole nation from the earth. Everything derived from Abraham was a gift of God through the renunciation of a sphere to be outside Himself; if He had accepted the sacrifice He would have taken into Himself the whole sphere which played its part within the ancient Hebrew people; for the sacrificed Isaac would have been with God. But He renounced this and therewith He gave over that whole line of evolution to the earth. Thus in the significant picture of the offering made by the old patriarch, the conception of renunciation and of sacrifice can arise within us.

And in yet another part of our earth-history do we find this resigning on the part of Higher Beings, and here too we must again refer to something alluded to in the last lecture—the picture of the ‘Last Supper,’ by Leonardo da Vinci. It represents the scene in which as it were, we have before us the meaning of the earth, the Christ. While trying to penetrate the whole meaning of the picture, let us recollect those words, which are to be found alone in the Gospel: ‘Am I not able to call forth a whole multitude of angels if I wish to avoid the death of sacrifice.’ That which Christ might have accepted at that moment, which would of course have been quite easy for Him to do, He rejected in resignation and renunciation. And the greatest renunciation made by Christ Jesus confronts us when, by having made it, He allows the opponent himself—Judas—to enter His sphere. If we are able to see in Christ Jesus all that is to he seen, we must see in Him an image of those Beings with whom, at a certain stage of evolution, we have just become acquainted, those who were compelled to renounce the proffered sacrifice, those whose very nature was resignation. Christ renounced that which would have occurred if He had not allowed Judas to appear as His opponent just as once upon a time, during the Sun-age, the gods themselves called forth their opponents by the renunciation they made. And we see a repetition of this event in a picture here on earth: that of the Christ seated among the twelve, and Judas, the betrayer, in the centre. In order that that which makes mankind of such immeasurable value might enter into evolution, Christ Himself had to place His opponent in opposition to Him. This picture makes such a profound impression on us because when we contemplate it, it reminds us of such a great cosmic moment; and when we recall the words: ‘He who dips his bread into the bowl with me, he it is who shall betray me,’ we see an earthly reflection of the opponent of the gods, placed in opposition to them by the gods themselves. For this reason I have often ventured to say that if an inhabitant of Mars were able to descend to the earth, he might find things which would be of more or less interest to him although he might perhaps not understand them properly; but as soon as he saw this picture by Leonardo da Vinci he would, through a certain position in the cosmos which has the same connection with Mars as with the earth, learn something which would teach him the meaning of the earth. The incident represented in the earthly picture is of significance to the whole Cosmos: that is the fact that certain powers place themselves in opposition to the immortal Divine power. And this representation of Christ surrounded by His Apostles, He who on the earth overcomes death and thus proves the triumph of immortality, is intended to point to that significant universal moment when the gods severed themselves from temporal existence and gained the victory over Time, that is they became immortal. When we contemplate the ‘Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci, we may feel this in our hearts. Do not object that a person of simple mind may contemplate this picture and not know all that has been referred to to-day. It is not necessary that he should. For such are the mysterious depths of the human soul, that it is not necessary to understand with the intellect what the soul feels. Does the flower know the laws which regulate its growth? No! Yet none the less it grows. What does the flower want with laws or the human soul with intellect to feel the whole immeasurable greatness of the subject, when before our eyes we see depicted a God and His opponents; when the highest that can possibly be expressed, the opposition of immortality to the transitory is brought before our eyes. It is not necessary to know this; for it passes into the soul with magic force when one stands before this picture, which represents in painting an image of the cosmic purpose. The artist [is not required] to be an occultist in this sense in order to paint this picture. But in the soul of Leonardo da Vinci were precisely the necessary forces to enable him to express this, the highest and most significant. That is why great works of art make such a tremendous impression, because they are intimately connected with the purpose of the cosmic order. In earlier ages artists in dim consciousness were in touch with this cosmic purpose without being aware of it. Art would however, die out altogether if nothing were received by way of continuation of this, if, in the future Anthroposophy were not there as the knowledge of these things to give to art a new foundation. Subconscious art has become a thing of the past. The art which submits to the inspiration of Anthroposophy is only at its starting point, its beginning. This will be the art of the future. Just as the artist of old had no need to know what lay behind his works of art, so the artist of the future must know this—but knowledge with those forces which represent afresh an aspect of immortality, something of the perfection of the soul. For a man who uses Anthroposophy as an intellectual science knows nothing of it. That man alone understands who has made it his own, who in every conception that we evolve—sacrifice, bestowing virtue, resignation—is able to feel in every word what it is that is trying to burst forth in that word or idea, what at the most can flow forth in the many-sided significance of the pictures. If a man believes the evolution of the world is accomplished by means of abstract conceptions, he will perhaps make diagrams. If we wish to represent living conceptions such as sacrifice, or the virtue of bestowal and renunciation, diagrams are of no use; we must paint pictures in our minds like those described in the last lectures: of the Thrones offering sacrifice and sending up to the Cherubim the smoke of the sacrifice, ever spreading more widely and of the Archangels sending hack the light; and so on. And when in our next study we pass on to the Moon. existence we shall see how much richer the picture becomes, how something like the liquefying of the dammed up masses of cloud actually had to take place, and that this becomes drizzling rain, into which flashes the lightning of the Seraphim. We must then pass on to richer conceptions still with regard to which we must say: The future of mankind will certainly find the possibility, the artistic ways and means to convey to the consciousness and express to the outer world what can otherwise only be read in the Akashic Records.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “Spirits” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word ‘Spirit’ to-day. Even in saying “Spiritual”; and indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use this word with very little application to spiritual things, on one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did the postman know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance was compelled to remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing; who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It will be incorrect to speak of ‘Sin’ or ‘wrong-doing’ as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions. Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice our feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can well be included in the hidden depths of Soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our Soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: ‘He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,’ if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own Soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: ‘readiness to bestow,’ ‘readiness to give’, even to giving oneself, so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a Soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although our Soul-life is fitted into our earth-body, an upper layer exists over this hidden Soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the Soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the Soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited to convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later Soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant in the depths below the superficial waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he would simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had however been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the Soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the Soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths one which governs every Soul and occasionally emerges in, its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted; perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as ‘home-sickness’. If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term ‘home-sickness,’ expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be more accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will towards an inclination which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable wish.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our Soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to exercise this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own Soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will, passes in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to highest Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of Soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had been forced to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to others all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this into themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called ego-nature which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their own Ego-nature, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a Being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other Being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to made sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer Him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the Soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of Soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But between the boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, and that which is an attribute of noble character in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world, there are many intermediate states—what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new Beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those Beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate--for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new Beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our Soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a ‘movement’ takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only one particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only accrue when it presents invariably the same aspect to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of Movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we know it up to the present, something else must follow. We know that in the whole Cosmic multiplicity in the upward course of development during this evolution, besides the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called ‘Bestowing Virtue,’ which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and Spirituality behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as ‘thoughts’ but as ideas. We can best picture these to ourselves by the ideas that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic ideas that succeeding one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a Being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other Beings. But when this is thus guided into a relation with the other Beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory idea of the other Beings, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the ‘arising’ of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human Beings our selves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing. We can in a certain fashion realise, if we do not regard these conditions of suffering as earthly that they could not possibly be so, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its Soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these Beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these Beings would have been empty-Souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the Beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for that has stretched over to the earth-stage of our nature. And this is so imbedded in the subsoil of our Soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have a Soul-life which can play its part. And when it does so, what does the Soul-life say? If we bear in mind the Cosmic subject of this subconscious Soul-life, we can say that what we can thus trace back to the subsoil of the soul is a bursting-forth within that which we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has moved across from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we really have an explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If we just grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, we obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human Soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should a picture remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly afresh in the background—and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. When these have been there for some little time the longing pushes up again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to the Soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: that if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something else, something that is able to redeem it by something other than mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we can the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the ‘Planet of Redemption,’ just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence may be called the ‘Planet of Longing’; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the Soul-life, is longing, which is the ocean-bed of our Soul. This strives continually to ascend to one who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very best he is capable of feeling. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have become acquainted with all that can satisfy the ordinary superficial individual consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which in its individuality can never be satisfied, but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality rather than with the individuality. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the mind of to-day be brought into touch with application to the study of universal Being living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the Soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the Soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his Soul, above all, when the unconscious Soul-forces akin to longings, burn up ardently as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great Soul. If only something could have flowed into his Soul, drowning, silencing the longing for ideas while he yearned for an end to this search for ideas—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the Spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing Soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—‘Who would desire to be happy in this world! I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we shun each other for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! There must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our Souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, He is only not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!’—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies Anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life 100 years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the planet of redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet's attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness cannot be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our Souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the Soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows bygone men have so long desired—we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also theosophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

In the original the numbering of the lectures is confusing. Six lectures in all were given. The Moon Development is divided into Parts 1 and 2, making the 4th and 5th Lecture.

The following Synopsis is not authoritative, and has merely been inserted by the Editor for the possible convenience of students. The lectures began in 1911, during the crisis in the Theosophical Society, due to the claim started by Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater that a certain Hindu boy under the protection of the latter would be used later on for the physical reincarnation of the Christ. Their dogmatic attitude and the intolerant propaganda associated with it brought about the withdrawal of Dr. Steiner from the Theosophical Society. The matter is just referred to by him in the Introductory Lecture, but not again in this Course of Lectures, which are of extreme importance and utility in their power of connecting the living with the dead.