The Rudolf Steiner Archive

WE have come in our studies to the point where the Earth has passed through its so-called Moon-stage. We have also seen that a kind of sleep-state of the whole system followed the Moon stage of the Earth. One must of course realise that all the beings which inhabit the planet share with it this transitional, intermediate state. During this time they pass through experiences differing from those of the actually external state of evolution. We will try to be clear as to how the beings have undergone various things in this transition between the Moon-stage of the Earth and the actual Earth evolution.

We have seen that three kinds of beings lived on the Moon, physical ancestors, so to say, of our present Nature-kingdoms. There existed a kind of plant-mineral, animal-plant and man-animal; man himself on this Old Moon was in a state of not yet developed ego-consciousness. So far man had not attained to an “I” dwelling within a body.

Now during this transitional period something very important came about in the spiritual part of man—if I may thus express it.

If we form a true picture of the Old Moon sphere, we could describe it as a being which itself possessed a sort of life, somewhat like a tree, upon which all manner of living things exist. The Moon was itself a kind of homogeneous plant-mineral. Its rocks were in fact only a hardening of the plant-mineral like mass, and its animal-plants grew out of the mass, while what we can call the men-animals circled around the Moon. We must at the same time be clear that the Ego-consciousness still lived more or less in the atmosphere of the Moon in the Fire-mist, that it was still a part, a member, of a higher being, in whom existed all the egos which today are to be found in bodies separated by the skin one from another. Thus as yet there were no human beings going about as today, equipped with ego consciousness. On the other hand, however, something else was much more fully developed than on the Earth.

You know that what is called Folk-soul, Race-soul, has become a somewhat abstract idea today. Many think nowadays that the individual soul of man that dwells in his body is the actual reality. And if one speaks of German, French, Russian National-souls, people look on that as more or less an abstraction, as a comprehensive concept, embracing the characteristics which the individual members of these nations possess. To the occultist this is not so at all. What one calls the Folk-soul, as the German, French, Russian Folk-soul, is to him an absolutely independent entity. It is only that in our present Earth-existence the Folk soul is purely a spiritual being, perceptible only to one who can ascend to the astral plane; there you could not deny it, for there it is present as an actual living being. You would encounter the Folk-soul there, as on the physical plane you encounter your friends.

On the Moon it would have still less occurred to you to deny this Group-soul, for at that time it had a still more real existence. It was the Folk-soul, the Race-soul, which guided the bloodstream down into the bodies, into those beings which circled round the Moon. It is the destiny of our age to deny the existence of such beings as possess an actual life on the astral plane, and are not perceptible here on the physical plane. And we are at the very height of this materialistic evolution which prefers to deny such beings as Folk-souls and Race-souls.

Recently among other things a very characteristic book has appeared, which has attracted a good deal of publicity. It is a book which has been praised and considered, with justice, to be a true expression of our abstract objective thinking, since it is written as out of the soul of modern man. Such a book had to be written sooner or later. It denies everything that cannot be seen with the eye or felt with the hands. It is a scandalous book from the standpoint of the occultist, a notable book, however, from the standpoint of present-day methods of thought! I refer to Mauthner's Critique of Language. In his book a clean sweep is made of everything which cannot be grasped with the hand. Our age had to produce such a book as a kind of necessity. That is not meant as criticism, it is only to point out the contrast between the occult mode of thought and the present time. You can find in it the exact opposite of all occult methods of thought, it is the most amazing product of a dying cultural stream of the present day, and from this point of view it is quite excellent.

You will understand that on this Old Moon a more common consciousness prevailed than here on Earth. On Earth a man feels himself as an individual, on the Moon this was not the case. On the Moon the Group-soul was active, which then appeared on the Earth in such an attenuated form as Folk-soul; hence the whole Moon-globe had a common consciousness in a high degree. This common consciousness on the Moon felt itself as feminine. And now you know that the Moon was irradiated by the Sun, and the Sun was experienced as the masculine. This is preserved in the old Egyptian myth, for instance, Moon as feminine-Isis; Sun Osiris, masculine. An ego-consciousness, however, enclosed in the human body was altogether lacking. That was contained in the Moon's atmosphere.

Now during the intermediate state from Moon to the Earth, various beings worked in from the atmosphere of the Moon, and made the human etheric body and human astral body ready to possess an ego-consciousness. Now what happened when the Sun again shone forth in which were still contained the Moon and the Earth? In the environment of this now newly awakened Sun-globe were the beings who today form your souls, and during the intermediate stage they had incorporated the ego consciousness into the astral and etheric bodies. As yet the physical body did not possess it, and this emerged at first as the man-animal as it had been on the Moon. Thus these two parts were no longer in harmony. On the Moon they had still harmonised. What had now descended into the astral and etheric bodies was no longer quite in harmony with what existed below as physical, and the consequence of this was that before a harmony could arise the earlier states of Saturn, Sun and Moon had to be recapitulated. Thus we have three recapitulations before our actual Earth could appear.

To begin with, the Saturn existence came forth with the physical bodies of the animal-men, but in a certain respect no longer as simple as they were on Saturn. At that time the sense organs existed as rudimentary germs; now the glandular and nerve organs were present in addition, but they were incapable of taking in what was above. A short recapitulation of the Saturn existence had to take place. The Spirits of Ego-hood and independence must work once more on the physical bodies, in order to implant in them the power of taking up the Ego. In the same way the Sun-state must be passed through, so that these physical bodies in respect of the organs formed on the Sun were capable of receiving an Ego. And in the same way the Moon condition was repeated in order to make the nervous system fitted for it. Thus there was first a kind of repetition of the Saturn stage. In this the beings who were earlier animal-men now wandered on the Earth like automata or a kind of machine. Then began the time when this repeated Saturn condition went over into the Sun condition; there these human bodies were like sleeping plants. Next entered the repetition of the Moon-state, where the Sun had already released itself. Everything remained behind that had earlier already detached itself as Moon. Once again then the whole Moon-cycle was repeated, except that now the capacity to receive an Ego was implanted into the beings.

This repetition of the Moon-cycle was for the Earth, if one may say so, an evil period of its evolution, for considered spiritually, the ego-hood had been implanted into the human body consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body, but without the refining power of thought. During the time when the Sun had already withdrawn and the Earth had not yet cast out the Moon, man was in a condition in which his astral body was the bearer of the most savage lusts, for every bad force was implanted in him and there was no counterbalance. After the separation of the Sun there was a globe in which, if one wished to express it today, the human beings were still entirely group-souls, but of the most sensual order with the worst instincts.

During this passage through a veritable hell, and under the influence of the departed pure Sun forces (not only of the physical sun, but also of the Sun-beings, who had withdrawn to the Sun) the recapitulating Moon gradually matured so far that it could throw out the terrible instincts and powers, and retain on the Earth whatever was capable of evolving. With the departure of the present moon all those sensual forces went away; therefore in the present moon you have the remains, in its spiritual significance, of all the evil influences which were at that time present in the human realm; and therefore too the moon is looked upon as having a detrimental influence.

Thus it was everything capable of evolution that remained on the Earth after the separation of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us consider first the animal-men themselves. They were gradually matured far enough for the Ego to be incorporated Thus we now have wandering on the Earth the human being who consisted of four members (physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego). It is now for the first time that the earlier swimming, floating position changes and man begins gradually to arrive at the upright position. His spine, his spinal nerve-cord, became vertical, in contrast to the completely horizontal position which it had during the Moon period, and with this rise into an upright position went parallel the widening out of the mass of the spinal marrow into the brain; and yet another development ran parallel with it. For the floating, swimming motion which man had both in the Moon period and during the repetition of the Moon period when the Fire-mist forces were still present in the environment, he needed a kind of swimming bladder, and this was actually a part of man's composition, as is the case with the fishes of the present day. But now the Fire-mist (we have called it “Ruach”) was precipitated. This took place quite gradually and slowly. The air, to be sure, was still filled with thick vapour, but the worst was precipitated and with this began the time when from a gill-breather man became a lung-breather. The swimming bladder was transformed into lungs. Through this man became capable of receiving into himself the higher spiritual beings, namely, the first rudiments of that which stands above the Ego-Spirit-Self or Manas. This metamorphosis of the swimming bladder into the lungs is expressed in the Bible in the wonderful monumental words: “And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” Here is expressed what had taken place in the human being during millions of years. And all the beings which we have learnt to know, the plant-animals as well as the animal-men of the Moon and their descendants during the Moon period of the Earth, all of them as yet had not red blood. What they possessed resembled the blood of the present day lower creatures which is not yet red. Blood-like substance flowed in and out of them from above. In order to be able to harbour the red blood in themselves something else was necessary. We shall understand that when we know that until the casting out of the Moon in the evolution of our planet no part had been played by iron. Till then there was no iron on our planet, it received it when the planet Mars passed through our Earth, and so to say, left iron behind. Hence the influence of iron in the red blood is derived from Mars.

Legend has preserved this well by ascribing to Mars the qualities which iron brought to the blood—strong and warlike forces. Thus the influence which came in then with the change in the breathing process, was supported by the introduction of iron into our evolution. This was of the utmost importance in our terrestrial evolution. Under these influences the human organism was perfected to the point of beginning to purify and refine the bodies which it had earlier received on Saturn, Sun and Moon. It began to work first, of course, on the body which had been last received, the astral body, and this purification of the astral body constitutes our present civilisation.

If you could observe that human being, still in process of transforming the lungs and taking the first steps towards the development of red blood, you would find him very dissimilar to the present human form. He was so different that one really hesitates to describe man at that period, for it would appear grotesque to the present day materialistic thinker. He had more or less the development of an amphibian, a reptile, which was just beginning to breathe through lungs, and from the former floating, swimming motion was learning little by little to raise and support himself on the earth. When we say that man in the Lemurian Epoch had a mode of progression that alternated between a hop, scarcely to be called a step, and then a flight into the air, we have the nearest approach to some memory of it in the old Saurians. Nothing remains to be discovered by the geologist as solidification's or fossils, for the body was quite soft, it contained as yet no kind of bony structure.

And now how did the Earth appear, after having freed itself from the Moon? It had formerly been surrounded by fire-mists, as in a seething steaming vessel, and then by degrees the dense watery vapours withdrew. The Earth was now covered by a very thin hardened crust, beneath which lay a bubbling churning sea of fire, the remains of the fire-mist of the former atmosphere,. Then gradually tiny islands emerged, the first beginnings of our present mineral kingdom. Whereas on the Moon a plant-mineral kingdom still existed, there now appeared the earliest foundations of our modern rocks and stones in consequence of the hardening, mineralising of this mass. Earlier still the animal-plant kingdom had developed more or less to our present plant kingdom. And the beings on the Moon who were animal-men had divided into two groups, one of which had kept pace with evolution and taken on the human form. But there were some who had not advanced with evolution; these are the present higher animals, they had stayed behind at an earlier level and since they could not share in the advance, they fell back more and more. All our present mammals are relics of the Moon animal-men who stayed behind. You must therefore never imagine that the human being was ever such an animal as those existing on earth today. The bodies of those animals were not at that time capable of receiving the I, the Ego; they had remained with the group nature of the Moon. The last which had almost achieved the additional principle of the earth, but which nevertheless proved later on too weak to be the vehicle of an individual soul, are the apes, the present Ape species. They too, however, were never actual ancestors of mankind, but beings which had degenerated.

Thus in the old Lemurian Age, the Earth was a kind of fiery mass, in which the modern mineral was for the most part dissolved and fluid, as is iron in an iron-foundry, and out of this developed the first mineral island masses. Upon these there wandered, half hopping, half hovering, the forefathers of man. The Spirit-Self endeavoured little by little to gain possession of this human being.

So we must picture the ancient fiery period of the Earth as a time m which a last echo still lingered of the forces of the Moon, which then gradually disappeared. They were manifested in the mastery which the human will possessed over the substances and forces of nature. On the Moon, of course, man was still fully united with nature and the Group-soul moulded the conditions of human existence. That was now no longer the case, but there still continued a magical connection between human will and the forces of fire. If the human being had a mild character, then, through the will, he acted on the natural element of fire in a calming manner, and in this way more land could be deposited. The passionate man, on the other hand, worked with his will magically in such a way that the fire-masses became fierce and turbulent and tore up the thin earth crust. Now once more the whole savage, passionate power that was peculiar to man on the Moon and during the repetition of the Moon-period on the Earth burst forth in the newly arisen individual human souls. The passions had such an effect on the fiery masses that they became ungovernable; a great part of the land on which the Lemurians dwelt was destroyed, and only a small number of the inhabitants of Lemuria were preserved and could continue the human race.

All of you were living in those times; your souls are the very ones which saved themselves from the raging fiery mass of Lemuria. The portion of humanity which had been saved, migrated into the land which we know as Atlantis, and the main part of which stretched between the present Europe and America; from there the human race multiplied and spread. Gradually the Earth's atmosphere had so changed that every trace of the old “Ruach” had gone, and the air was only saturated by dense masses of vapour. The Germanic legend has preserved the memory of this in the Nivelheim or Nebelheim, a land that was permanently permeated by similar heavy clouds of mist (Nebelmist).

Now what had been working in from outside during the Lemurian Age? At first, in the Saturn period it was the beings which we call Spirits of Egoism, of the sense of independence. During the Sun, it was the Archangels, the Fire-Spirits: during the Moon those beings which were, so to speak, the good spirits of the Moon time, for which the Christian designation is Angel, and which are called in Theosophy “Spirits of Twilight.” We have designated the outstanding Leader of these spirits as the “Holy Spirit” or the “Holy Ghost,” the Regent of the Fire Spirits as the “Christ,” that of Saturn as the “Father God.”

Thus the last Who had been at work with His hosts was the Spirit named in Christianity “the Holy Spirit,” the Regent of the Moon-evolution, the Spirit who was still present during the Earth's repetition of the Moon-period. It was the same Spirit who had formed man from without, and who now sent a ray of his own essence, so to say, into the human being. We have to distinguish two kinds of spirits in the beginning of the Lemurian Age: the spirits who prepare the lower bodily nature, who implant the ego-consciousness, who fashion the human sheaths, and that Spirit who himself drew into man at the moment when the human being learnt to breathe physically.

Now if you think that everything which on Saturn formed a kind of fiery mass surrounded by a finer atmosphere, was gaseous on the Sun, and then on the Moon was surrounded by those masses of fire-mist, then you must regard the evolutionary process of the Earth as one of purification, even as the evolution of humanity itself is a purifying process. What one calls air today only gradually became free of all that filled it as a kind of steam and smoke. We must be clear that what separated itself out from the atmosphere are the substances from which all bodies have built themselves up. The air is the purest of what has remained behind, it is the best corporeal medium for the guiding Spirits of the Moon, whom one calls “Angel” in Christian terminology. Therefore in the purified air, in the air which had been refined, men felt the bodily nature of the new guiding Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit Who now was Leader, Jehovah. In the stirring of the wind men experienced that which led and guided the Earth. And so they lived over into the Atlantean times, on the continent which forms the present bed of the Atlantic Ocean, sensing in the breath which they drew, the bodily nature of the Godhead.

That magical influence which the human beings had upon the Fire-ocean, upon the processes of the Earth, gradually disappeared, but in the early Atlantean Age another connection remained instead. A man still possessed a certain magical power over the growth of plants. If he lifted his hand, which at that time had a quite different form, above a plant, he was able to bring it to rapid growth, through the influence of his will. He stood in intimate relation with the being of Nature. The whole life of the Atlantean was in accordance with Nature.

What today is called the power of synthesis, the intelligence, logical thinking, was not yet in existence. On the other hand man had developed other things to a high degree, memory, for instance, of the marvelous development of which we can nowadays form not the slightest idea. Man could not calculate, not even that 2 x 2 = 4, but he knew it out of his memory; on each occasion he remembered the previous experience. Another memory lingering into Atlantean times was that although a man no longer felt the Folk-soul directly within him as on the Moon yet he experienced the influence of the old Folk Souls, Race-souls. This influence was so strong that it would have been quite impossible in those times for anyone who belonged to one Race or Folk-soul ever to unite with one who belonged to another race. There was a deep antipathy between the peoples of the various Folk-souls, love only existed between those belonging to the same. We may say that the common blood which earlier in the Moon-period had been poured down from the Folk-soul was the basis of this kinship. And men remembered not only in some dim way, but quite clearly, the experiences of their forefathers, they felt members of the chain of ancestors just as you feel your hand to be a member of your organism. This feeling of kinship was a part of evolution inasmuch as in this transitionary period which we have been considering and which took place when the Sun withdrew and the Moon was cast out, another important event took place. It is connected with all that was proceeding on the Earth as a sort of hardening process. The mineral kingdom appeared and at the same time a similar hardening took place in the interior of human nature. Something more solid formed itself by degrees out of the soft mass, and hardened first to cartilage and then to bone. And not until this bony structure was formed did the human being begin to walk.

With the insertion of the skeleton another process ran parallel. In consequence of the advance of human evolution on the casting out of the Moon and the retention of only what was able to develop, two different forces arose in the beings inhabiting the Earth. The Sun and Moon were now outside and their influences affected the Earth from without. From this intermingling of the Sun-forces and the Moon-forces, which had previously been in the body of the Earth, but now streamed in from without, the sex-life made its appearance. For all the forces connected with sex come under the influence of the Sun and Moon.

The still united Sun, Moon and Earth of ancient times could from its activity be looked on as of feminine nature and this was fructified, so to say, by the forces of the Sun itself. The Sun experienced itself as male, the Moon as female. Now the Moon drew out, the forces of the two mingled. In a general way we can describe all the beings which arose up to the departure of the Moon as being of a feminine nature, for all the fructifying forces came from without, from the Sun-force. Only upon an Earth, which had cast out the Moon, so that the Sun shone upon quite a different cosmic body, could the former undifferentiated female divide into male and female. With the solidifying, bone-forming process, therefore, took place the differentiation of the sexes. And with this was given the possibility of perfecting the Ego in the right way.

THE process that I have described to you as the division of the sexes was of such a nature that the two sexes are to be thought of as still united in that animal-man of the Moon and also in his descendants in the Moon recapitulation of the Earth. Then there really took place a kind of cleavage of the human body. This cleavage came about through densification; not until a mineral kingdom had been separated out as it is today could the present human body arise, representing a single sex. The Earth and the human body had first to be solidified to the mineral nature as we know it. In the soft human bodies of the Moon and of the earlier periods of the Earth human beings were of dual-sex, male-female.

Now we must remind ourselves of the fact that Man in a certain respect has preserved a residue of the ancient dual sex inasmuch as in the present man the physical body is masculine, the etheric body feminine, and in the woman it is reversed; for the physical feminine body has a masculine etheric body. These facts open up an interesting insight into the soul life of the sexes; the capacity for sacrifice in the service of love displayed by the woman is connected with the masculinity of the etheric body, whereas the ambition of the man is explained when we realise the feminine nature of his etheric body. I have already said that separation into the human sexes has arisen from the intermingling of the forces sent to us from the sun and the moon. Now you must be clear that in the man the stronger influence on the etheric body emanates from the moon and the stronger influence on the physical body from the sun. In the woman the opposite is the case, the physical body is influenced by the forces of the moon and the etheric body by those of the sun.

The continual change of mineral substances in man's present body could not take place until the mineral realm had taken shape; before this there was quite a different form of nourishment. During the Sun-period of the Earth all plants were permeated by milky juices. Man's nourishment was then actually effected by his imbibing the milk-juices from the plants as today the child draws its nourishment from the mother. The plants which still contain milky juices are the last stragglers from that time when all the plants supplied these juices in abundance. It was not till a later time that nourishment took on its present form.

To understand the significance of the separation of the sexes we must be clear that upon the Moon and during its recapitulation on the Earth all the beings looked very much alike. Just as the cow has the same appearance as her “daughters,” as all other cows, since the Group-soul lies behind, so could men scarcely be distinguished from their forefathers, and this continued till long into the Atlantean Age. Whence arises the fact that human beings no longer resemble each other?

It comes from the rise of the two sexes. From the original dual sex-nature the tendency had continued in the female being to produce similarity in the descendants; in the male the influence worked differently, it tended to call forth variety, individualisation, and with the flowing of the male force into the female, dissimilarity was increasingly created. Thus it was through the male influence that the power of developing individuality came about.

The ancient dual sex had yet another peculiarity. If you had asked one of the old dwellers on the Moon about his experiences, he would have described them as identical with those of his earliest ancestors; everything lived on through the generations. The gradual rise of a consciousness that only extends from birth to death came about by the individualising of the human race, and at the same time arose the possibility of birth and death, as we know them today. For those ancient Moon beings with their floating, swimming motion, were suspended from the environment with which they were united by the “strings” conducting the blood. Thus if a being died it was not a death of the soul, it was only a dying off of a sort of limb, while the consciousness remained above. It was as if your hand, for instance, should wither on your body and a new hand grow in its place. So these human beings with their dim consciousness only experienced dying as a gradual withering of their bodies. These bodies dried up and new ones continually sprang forth; consciousness, however, was preserved through the consciousness of the group-soul, so that really a kind of immortality existed.

Then arose the present blood, which was created in the human body itself, and this went hand in hand with the rise of the two sexes. And with it the necessity of a remarkable process came about. The blood creates a continuous conflict between life and death, and a being who forms red blood within himself becomes the scene of a perpetual struggle, for red blood is continually consumed and changed into blue blood, into a substance of death. Together with man's individual transformation of the blood arose that darkening of the consciousness beyond birth and death. Now, for the first time, with the lighting up of the present consciousness, man lost the ancient dimly sensed immortality, so that the impossibility of looking beyond birth and death is intimately connected with the division of the sexes. And something else too is connected with this.

When man still possessed the Group-soul, existence went on from generation to generation, no interruption was caused through birth and death. Then this interruption appeared and with it the possibility of reincarnation. Earlier, the son was but a direct continuation of the father, the father of the grandfather, consciousness did not break off. Now there came a time when there was darkness beyond birth and death, and a sojourn in Kamaloca and Devachan first became possible. This interchange, this sojourn in higher worlds, could only come about at all after individualisation, after the expulsion of Sun and Moon. Only then appeared what today we call incarnation, and at the same time this intermediate state, which again will one day also come to an end.

Thus we have reached the period in which we have seen the earlier dual-sexed organism, representing a kind of group-soul, divide into a male and a female, so that the similar is reproduced through the female, what is varied and dissimilar through the male. We see in our humanity the feminine to be the principle which still preserves the old conditions of folk and race, and the masculine that which continually breaks through these conditions, splits them up and so individualises mankind. There is actually active in the human being an ancient feminine principle as group-soul and a new masculine principle as individualising element. It will come about that all connections of race and family stock will cease to exist, men will become more and more different from one another, interconnection will no longer depend on the common blood, but on what binds soul to soul. That is the course of human evolution.

In the first Atlantean races there still existed a strong bond of union and the first sub-races grouped themselves according to their colouring. This group-soul element we have still in the races of different colour. These differences will increasingly disappear as the individualising element gains the upper hand. A time will come when there will no longer be races of different colour; the difference between the races will have disappeared, but on the other hand there will be the greatest differences between individuals. The further we go back into ancient times the more we meet with the encroachment of the racial element; the true individualising principle begins as a whole only in later Atlantean times. Among the earlier Atlanteans members of one race actually experienced a deep antipathy for members of another race; the common blood caused the feeling of connection, of love; it was considered against morality to marry a member of another stock.

If, as seer, you wished to examine the connection between the etheric body and the physical body in the old Atlanteans you would make a remarkable discovery. Whereas in the man of today the etheric head is practically covered by the physical part of the head and only protrudes slightly beyond it, in the old Atlantean the etheric head projected far out beyond the physical head; in particular it projected powerfully in the region of the forehead. Now we must think of a point in the physical brain in the place between the eyebrows, only about a centimetre lower, and a second point in the etheric head which would correspond to this. In the Atlantean these two points were still far apart and evolution consisted precisely in the fact that they continually approached each other. In the fifth Atlantean period the point of the etheric head drew in to the physical brain and by reason of these two points coming together there developed what we possess to-day: calculation, counting, the capacity of judging, the power of forming ideas in general, intelligence. Formerly the Atlanteans had only an immensely developed memory, but as yet no logical intellect. Here we have the starting point for the consciousness of the “ego.” A self-reliant independence did not exist in the Atlantean before these two points coincided, on the other hand he could live in much more intimate contact with nature. His dwellings were put together by what was given by nature; he moulded the stones and bound them together with the growing trees. His dwellings were formed out of living nature, were really transformed natural objects. He lived in the little tribes that were still preserved through blood relationship, whilst a powerful authority was exercised by the strongest, who was the chieftain. Everything depended on authority, which however was exercised in a way peculiar to those times.

When man entered on the Atlantean Age, he could as yet utter no articulate speech; this was only developed during that period. A chieftain could not have given commands in speech, but on the other hand these men had the faculty of understanding the language of nature. Present day man has no idea of this, he must learn it again. Picture, for instance, a spring of water which reflects your image to you. As occultist a peculiar feeling emerges in your soul. You say—My image presses towards me out of this spring, to me this is a last token of how on old Saturn everything was reflected out into space. The memory of Saturn arises in the occultist when he beholds his reflection in the spring. And in the echo which the spoken sound gives back arises the recollection of how on Saturn all that resounded into cosmic space, came back as echo. Or you see a Fata Morgana a mirage in the air, in which the air seems to have taken up whatever pictures are imprinted in it and then reflects them again. As occultist you see here a memory of the Sun-period, when the gaseous Sun took in all that came to it from cosmic space, worked it over, and then let it stream back, giving it its own sun-nature at the same time. On the Sun planet you would have seen how things were prepared as Fata Morgana, as a kind of mirage within the gases of the Sun condition. Thus without being a magician one learns to grasp the world from many aspects and that is an important means towards developing into higher worlds. In ancient times man understood nature to a high degree.

There is a great difference between living in an atmosphere like the present and such as it was in Atlantis. The air was then saturated by immense vapour masses; sun and moon were surrounded by a gigantic rainbow halo. There was a time when the mist-masses were so dense that no eye could have seen the stars, when sun and moon were stiff darkened. Only gradually they became visible to man. This coming into sight of sun, moon and stars is magnificently described in records of the Creation. What is described there has really taken place, and much more besides.

The understanding of surrounding nature was still very vividly present in the Atlantean. All that sounds in the rippling of the spring, in the storm of winds, and is an inarticulate sound to you today, was heard by the Atlantean as a speech he understood. There were at that time no commandments, but the Spirit pierced through the vapour-drenched air and spoke to man. The Bible expresses this in the words “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The human being heard the Spirit from surrounding objects; from sun, moon and stars the Spirit spoke to him and you find in those words—in the Bible a plain expression for what took place in man's environment.

Then came the time in which an especially advanced portion of the human race, who lived in a region which today is on the bed of the ocean in the neighbourhood of present Ireland, first experienced that definite union with the etheric body and thus an increase of the intelligence. This portion of humanity began to journey eastwards under the guidance of the most advanced leader while gradually immense volumes of water submerged the continent of Atlantis. The advanced portion of these peoples journeyed right into Asia, and there founded the centre of the civilisation that we call the Post-Atlantean Culture. From this centre civilisation radiated out; it proceeded from the groups of people who later moved farther to the east. There in Central Asia they founded in India the first civilisation, which still had an echo of the culture attained in Atlantis. The ancient Indian had not yet such a consciousness as we have today, but the capacity for it arose when these two points of the brain of which I have spoken coincided. Before this union there still lived a picture-consciousness in the Atlantean, through which he saw Spiritual beings. In the murmuring of the fountain he not only heard a clear language, but the Undine, who has her embodiment in the water, rose for him out of the spring: in the currents of air he saw Sylphs; in the flickering fire he saw the Salamanders. All this he saw and from it have arisen the myths and legends which have been preserved with most purity in the parts of Europe where there remained remnants of those Atlanteans who did not reach India. The Germanic Sagas and Myths are the relics of what was still seen by the old Atlanteans within the vapoury masses. The rivers, the Rhine, for instance, lived in the consciousness of these old Atlanteans as if the wisdom, which was in the mists of ancient Nivelheim had been cast down into their waters. This wisdom seemed to them to be in the rivers, it lived within them as the Rhine Nixies or similar beings.

So here in these regions of Europe lived echoes of the Atlantean culture, but over in India another arose, that still showed remembrances of that picture world. That world itself had sunk from sight, but the longing for what was revealed in it lived on in the Indian. If the Atlantean had heard the voice of Nature's wisdom, to the Indian there remained the longing for the oneness with Nature, and thus the character of this old Indian culture is shown in the desire to fall back into that time where all this was man's natural possession. The ancient Indian was a dreamer. To be sure, what we call reality lay spread all around him, but the world of the senses was “Maya” in his eyes. What the old Atlantean still saw as hovering spirits was what the Indian sought in his longing for the spiritual content of the world, for Brahma. And this kind of going back towards the old dream-like consciousness of the Atlantean has been preserved in the Oriental training to bring back this early consciousness.

Farther to the north we have the Medes and Persians, the original Persian civilisation. Whereas the Indian culture turns sharply away from reality, the Persian is aware that he must reckon with it. For the first time man appears as a worker, who knows that he is not merely to strive for knowledge with his spiritual forces, but that he is to use them for shaping the earth. At first the earth met him as a sort of hostile element which he must overcome, and this opposition was expressed in Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the bad divinity, and the conflict between them. Men wished more and more to let the spiritual world flow into the terrestrial world, but as yet they could recognise no law, no laws of nature within the outer world. The old Indian culture had in truth a knowledge of higher worlds, but not on the grounds of a natural science, since everything on the Earth was accounted Maya; the Persian learnt to know nature purely as a field of labour.

We then come to the Chaldean, the Babylonian and the Egyptian peoples. Here man learnt to recognise a law in nature itself. When he looked up to the stars he sought behind them not the gods alone, but he examined the laws of the stars and hence arose that wonderful science which we find among the Chaldeans. The Egyptian priest did not look on the physical as an opposing force, but he incorporated the spiritual which he found in geometry into his soil, his land; outer nature was recognised as conforming to law. The external star-knowledge was inwardly united in Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom with the knowledge of the gods who ensoul the stars. That was the third stage of cultural evolution.

It is only in the fourth stage of post-Atlantean evolution that man advances to the point of incorporating in civilisation that which he himself experiences as spiritual. This is the case in the Greco-Latin time. Here in the work of art, in moulded matter man imprints his own spirit into substance, whether in sculpture or in the drama. Here too we find the first beginnings of human city planning. These cities differed from those of Egypt in the pre-Grecian age. There in Egypt the priests looked up to the stars and sought their laws, and what took place in the heavens they reproduced in what they built. Thus their towers show the seven-story development which man first discovered in the heavenly bodies; so too do the Pyramids show definite cosmic proportions. We find the transition from priest-wisdom to the real human wisdom wonderfully expressed in early Roman history by the seven Kings of Rome. What are these seven kings?

We remember that the original history of Rome leads back to ancient Troy. Troy represents a last result of the ancient priestly communities who organised states by the laws of the stars. Now comes the transition to the fourth stage of culture. The ancient priest-wisdom is superseded by human cleverness, represented by the crafty Odysseus. Still more plainly is this shown in a picture which can only be rightly understood in this way and which represents how the priest-wisdom has to give way before the human power of judgment. The serpent can always be taken as symbol of human wisdom, and the Laocoon group depicts the overthrow of the priestly wisdom of ancient Troy through human cunning and human wisdom symbolised in the serpents.

Then by the directing authorities who work through millennia the events were outlined that had to happen and in accordance with which history must take its course. Those who stood at the foundation of Rome had already foreordained the sevenfold Roman culture as it stands written in the Sibylline Books. Think it out: you find in the names of the seven Roman kings reminiscences of the seven principles. That goes so far in fact that the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, comes from without; he represents the principle of Manas, Spirit-Self, which binds the three lower with the three higher. The seven Roman kings represent the seven principles of human nature, spiritual connections are inscribed in them. Republican Rome is none other than the human wisdom, which replaced the ancient priestly wisdom. Thus did the fourth epoch grow within the third. Man sent forth what he had in his soul into the great works of art, into drama and jurisprudence. Formerly all justice was derived from the stars. The Romans became a nation of law-givers because there men created justice, “jus,” according to their own requirements.

We live ourselves in the fifth period. How does the meaning of the totality of evolution come to expression in it? The old authority has vanished, man becomes more and more dependent on his own inner nature, his external acts bear increasingly the stamp of his character. Racial ties lose their hold, man becomes more and more individualised. This is the kernel of the religion which says “He who doth not leave father and mother, brother and sister cannot be my disciple.” This means that all love which is founded on natural ties alone is to come to an end, human beings must stand before one another, and soul find soul.

We have the task of drawing down still further on to the physical plane that which flowed from the soul in Greco-Latin times. Man becomes in this way, a being who sinks deeper and deeper into materiality. If the Greek in his works of art has created an idealised image of his soul-life and poured it into the human form, if the Roman in his jurisprudence has created something that still further signifies personal requirements, then our age culminates in machines, which are solely a materialistic expression of mere personal human needs. Mankind sinks lower and lower from heaven, and this fifth period has descended deepest, is the most involved in matter. If the Greek in his creations has lifted man above man in his images (for Zeus represents man raised above himself), if you find still left in Roman jurisprudence something of man that goes out beyond himself (for the Roman placed more value on being a Roman citizen than on being a person and an individual) then in our period you find people who utilise spirit for the satisfying of their material needs. For what purpose is served by all machines, steamships, railways, all complicated inventions? The ancient Chaldean was accustomed to satisfy his need of food in the simplest way; today an immensity of wisdom, crystalised human wisdom, is expended on the stilling of hunger and thirst. We must not deceive ourselves about this. The wisdom that is so employed has descended below itself right into matter.

All that man had earlier drawn down from the spiritual realms had to descend below itself in order to be able to mount upwards again—and with this our age has received its mission. If in man of an earlier time there flowed blood which bound him with his tribe, today the love which still flowed in the earlier blood shows greater and greater cleavage; a love of a spiritual kind must take its place and then we can ascend again to spiritual realms. There is good reason for us to have come down from spiritual heights, for man must go through this descent in order to find the way up to spirituality out of his own strength. The mission of Spiritual Science is to show mankind this upward path.

We have followed the course of mankind as far as the time in which we ourselves stand; we must now show how it will evolve further, and how one who passes through an initiation can even today forestall a certain stage of humanity on his path of knowledge and wisdom.

IT IS now our task to speak somewhat of the progress of human evolution in the future and of what one calls initiation. It is by means of initiation that present day man passes in advance through stages of life which are otherwise only passed through by humanity in the future.

If we occupy ourselves with the first problem it may seem to you audacious to try to speak about the future, or even that it is impossible to find out anything of the future of man. Nevertheless if you will consider the matter a little you will find that the view that one can know something about the future is not so unfounded after all. You have only to compare these things with what the ordinary researcher, the natural scientist, for example, can know with regard to future events. He can tell you definitely that if he mixes together oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur under certain conditions, sulphuric acid always results. One can say exactly what happens when one intercepts rays by a mirror. In fact, this goes even further in regard to things of external life; one can predict eclipses of the sun and moon for indefinitely long periods of time.

How is it possible to do this? Because, and in so far as [one knows], one knows the laws of physical life. Now if someone knows the spiritual laws of life, from these laws he can likewise say what must come about in the future. Here, however, a question generally arises which weighs heavily in people's minds. It is so easy to imagine that it is a contradiction of freedom, of man's own voluntary acts, if it could be known in advance what will happen. This too is an incorrect idea. When you combine sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions, sulphuric acid arises; that is determined by the laws of the combination. Whether you do it, however, depends on your will; and so it is also in the spiritual course of human evolution. What will happen will be done by man in entire freedom of will, and the higher a man develops the freer he will be. Nor must one think that it is already decided what a man will do in the future because one can see it in advance. Most people, however, have no right understanding of this problem and in fact it presents very great difficulties. Since ancient times philosophers have tormented themselves with the question of human freedom and the law of predestined phenomena. Practically all that has been written in this field is extremely unsatisfactory, for as a rule people cannot distinguish between foreseeing and being foreordained. Seeing in advance is in fact no different from looking out to some distant spot in space. If you look in space to a point far off, let us say the corner of the street over there, and you see a man giving a penny to another, have you brought about this action? Has it been caused through the fact that you see it? No, you only see that he does it, and that exercises no pressure on his act. Now in a certain respect it is like this in time, only people cannot grasp it. Let us suppose you are reincarnated in a couple of thousand years, you then do something of your own free will; that is the same as the example of the gift of the penny. Under certain circumstances the seer sees what is done in the future, and this future act is just as little determined by the present point of time as the gift of the penny by the point of space. People often say if one sees that something will happen then it is actually predetermined. But then one is confounding the present with the future. In fact it would be no prevision into the future if it were already predestined; you are not seeing something that is already there, but something that has first to come; you must grasp with exactness the concept of seeing-into-the-future. It must be exercised and practised in patient meditation, then only does one find it possible to understand these things aright.

After these introductory words we will now speak of some few things that can be said about the evolution of humanity in the future. We have reached the point where humanity has descended most deeply into matter, where men turn to account their spiritual forces in the construction and manufacture of instruments and machines that serve the personal life. Connected with this was an ever-increasing densification, both of mankind and the earth as a whole. We have seen that the mineral kingdom, as we call it, the densest part of the earth, only arose at a definite point of time in our evolution. It was only then that man entered upon his present earthly, development; and the division of the sexes and other phenomena went hand in hand with it. At that time when the human being had not as yet entered this physical development which contains a mineral kingdom, he too was of a much finer, softer nature. Just to give some idea of it, let us note how the reproduction of the human race took place in those ancient times before the two sexes were in existence. At that time the human being who was still of double sex and of a thinner, finer corporeality, brought forth another being from itself. This did not take place as it does today, but somewhat as in spiritualistic seances the etheric body of some other being proceeds from the medium. That gives you more or less a picture of this materialisation from oneself, the manner of human propagation in ancient times. It was like an out-pressure from human beings who were ripe to continue their own development.

Thus you see that with the densification of man in the cosmos is connected a descent into the world of matter. And another force is connected with it which could never have developed without it:—egoism. Egoism has a good and a bad side. It is the foundation of human independence and freedom, but in its reverse aspect the foundation too of all that is bad and evil. But man had to go through this force of egoism if he was to learn to do good of his own freewill. Through the forces which had guided him previously, he would always have been impelled to the good; it had, however, to be possible for him to go his own way. Just as he has descended he must now ascend again to spirituality; and as the descent is linked with the predominance of egoism so does the ascent depend on men's selflessness, their feeling of sympathy for one another, becoming stronger and stronger. Mankind has evolved through various epochs, first through the old Indian, then the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin to the present, the Fifth epoch. And this will be replaced by a sixth. And as human evolution is working towards this, it is working at the same time at the overcoming of the principle which has been strongest since the time when the etheric body united with the point in the brain of which I spoke to you yesterday. That was the time of the fall into the deepest egoism.

Man was also egotistic in his earlier evolution, but it was then in a different way. The egoism which enters so deeply into the soul as in our present age is inseparable from the predominating materialism; a spiritual age will denote the overcoming of this egoism. Therefore Christianity and all movements imbued with genuine religious life have worked consciously towards breaking through all the old blood-ties. Christianity has made a radical statement in the words, “He who forsaketh not father, mother, wife, child, brother, sister cannot be my disciple.” This indicates nothing less than that in place of the ancient blood ties there must enter the spiritual bond between soul and soul, between one human being and another.

The only question now is—what are the ways and means by which humanity may attain spirituality, that is, the overcoming of materialism, and at the same time reach what may be called the bond of brotherhood, the expression of universal human love. One might imagine that universal human love need only be stressed strongly enough, and that then it must come about or that one should found Unions which aim at the goal of a universal human love. Occultism is never of this opinion. On the contrary! The more a man speaks of universal brotherly love and humanity, becoming in a sense intoxicated by them, the more egotistic he becomes. For precisely as there is a lust of the senses so is there a lust of the soul; and it is in fact a refined voluptuousness to say: “I will become morally higher and higher.” This, to be sure, is not a thought which creates the ordinary conventional egoism, but it does lead to a subtle form of egoism.

It is not by emphasising “Love,” “Sympathy,” that they are generated in the course of mankind's evolution. Mankind will be led to that bond of brotherhood far rather through something else, namely, through spiritual knowledge itself. There is no other means of bringing about a universal human brotherhood than the spreading of occult knowledge through the world. One may talk forever of Love and the Brotherhood of Man, one may found thousands of Unions; they will not lead to the desired goal, however well intentioned they may be. The point is to use the right means, to know how to found this bond of brotherhood. Only those whose lives are grounded in universal occult truth, valid for all men, find themselves together in the one truth. As the sun unites the plants which strive towards it and which yet remain individually separate, so must the truth to which all are striving be a uniform one, then all men find themselves together. But men must work energetically towards truth, for only then can they live together in harmony.

The objection might be made: surely all are striving towards the truth, but there are different standpoints and therefore strife and dissension arises. That denotes a knowledge of truth which is not sufficiently thorough. One must not plead that there may be different standpoints, one must first experience that truth is single and indivisible. It does not depend on popular vote it is true in itself. Or would you put it to the vote as to whether the three angles of a triangle are equal to 180 degrees? Whether millions of people admit that, or not a single one, when you have recognised it, it is true for you. There is no democracy about truth. And those who are not yet in harmony have not penetrated far enough into the truth—thence originates all quarreling over truth. It may be said: “Yes, but someone asserts this and another that in occult matters!” In genuine occultism that is not so. It is the same in occult things as in materialistic things, there too someone asserts this and another that, but then one of them is false. Even so is it in genuine occultism; it is only that people often have a bad habit of judging occult matters before they have been understood.

The aim of the Sixth epoch of humanity will be to popularise occult truth in the widest circles; that is the mission of that epoch. And the society which is united in spirit has the task of carrying this occult truth everywhere—right into life—and applying it practically. This is precisely what is lacking in our age. Only look how our epoch is searching and how no one can find the right solution. There are innumerable problems, the Educational Problem, the Feminist Movement, Medicine, the Social Problem, the Food Question. And people doctor away at these problems, endless articles are written, and each talks from his own standpoint, without being willing to study what lies at the centre—occult truth.

It is not a matter of having some abstract knowledge of the truths of spiritual science, but of applying them directly to life, of studying the social problem, the educational problem, in fact the whole range of human life, from the standpoint of real occult wisdom. “But then,” it might be urged, “one would have to know the highest wisdom.” That arises from the mistake of thinking one must always understand what one makes use of in life. But that is not necessary; understanding of the highest principles often comes much later than their application. If mankind had wished to wait in the matter of digestion till the laws of digestion were understood then the evolution of mankind would not have been possible. So too one does not need to be aware of all spiritual laws in order to let spiritual science flow into everyday life. That is precisely the way in which the Rosicrucian method deals with the spiritual—fewer abstractions, but instead, the study of the problems of everyday life. Do you think that the child knows all the grammatical rules of speech when it has learnt to speak? First it learns to speak and then learns grammar. So we must lay stress on the value it has for a man, with the help of spiritual teachings, to attack what lies directly around him, before he occupies himself with what is to be found in the highest worlds, with information concerning the astral plane and Devachan. This is the only way to understand what exists in our surroundings, and where we ourselves must play our part. And we shall find that it is our task to bind together through the unifying bonds of spiritual wisdom those portions of humanity who have been torn out of the old bonds of blood and race.

And then, inasmuch as we evolve from the fifth into the sixth and then into the seventh epoch, the ancient connection of race and blood will be increasingly lost. Mankind becomes freer of physical ties in order to form groups from the aspect of the spirit. It was a bad habit in Theosophy to speak of races as if they would always remain. The concept of race loses its meaning in the immediate future. To state incessantly that seven and again seven races have always evolved in the world is the speculative extension of an idea that only holds good for our age—looking backwards and forwards; it has never been said from clairvoyant vision, from occultism. Races have arisen, as everything else arises; and as everything again dies out so will races die out too. Those who have always only spoken of races will have to accustom themselves to making their ideas fluid. It is only a convenient way of talking. If one looks but a little into the future those ideas which applied to past and present are already no longer valid. It is most important that people should not consider that something they have once brought into a beautiful concept is a truth for all time. Men must get into the habit of making ideas fluid, of recognising that ideas change-that will be an advance. The ability of passing over from rigidly dogmatic ideas to mobile ones must be cultivated in those who would be the bearers of the future. For just as times change so must our ideas change too, if we would understand the times.

Souls live now in a human body which you distinctly perceive with the senses. By what means has it arisen? It was very different in earlier times when the soul descended, in fact for our present material outlook even comically different. The soul took up its abode in it. By what means has the human being evolved to its present form? Because the soul has itself worked in the body during all its incarnations. You can form an idea of how the soul has worked on the body if you consider what possibility has remained to the man of our materialistic age to work upon his body. He can work relatively but very little on his dense physical body. See how you work temporarily on the body and its physiognomy. Something for instance causes you terror, anxiety; the impression of anxiety and fear makes you go pale. And your physical appearance is affected in the same way by the blush of shame. This passes away again, but you see how it is caused. Something acts on the soul and the effects extends to the blood and thence to the physical body, changing the very appearance. The effect can be still more intensive. You know that people who lead a life of thought have it very much in their power to create an impression on their countenance of their intellectual work, one can observe whether or not a man has lived a life of mental activity. So men still work on their external expression and a man of noble feelings displays them in dignified movements. These are but very slight relics of how man has worked on himself during millions of years. Whereas nowadays you can only bring the blood to the cheek and drive it away again, in earlier times man was entirely under the influence of a picture-world which was the expression of a world of spirit.

The effect of this influence was that the human being could work much more creatively on his body. At the same time the body was also more soft and yielding. There was a time when you could not merely stretch out your hand, when you could not only point with the finger, but when you could send your will into your hand, and so form it that you could thrust out the fingers as continuations. There was a time when the foot was not yet permanent but could be extended as a continuation when man needed it. Thus through the pictures which he received from the surrounding world man shaped his own body. Today in our material age this moulding is unimaginably slow, but a time will come again when it will proceed more rapidly. In the future man will again acquire more influence over his physical corporeality. We shall see when we consider Initiation by what means he gains this influence; although he may not reach it in one life, yet he will be able to do much for the next incarnation.

Thus it is man himself who will bring about the future form of his body. Inasmuch as the human being becomes softer and softer, inasmuch as he separates himself from the hard parts, he is approaching his future. An age comes when man will live above his earthly portion as it were, as in time gone by. This condition, which is comparable to your present sleep-condition, will then be replaced by another when the human being will be able to draw his etheric body out of his physical body at will. It will be as if the denser part of man were here below on earth and the human being will make use of it from outside like an instrument. Man will no longer bear his body about and live within it, but will float above it, the body will itself have become rarefied and finer. That seems a fantastic idea today, but one can be distinctly aware of it from spiritual laws just as one reckons future eclipses of the sun and moon from the laws of astronomy. Above all it will be upon the reproductive force that man will work. He will transform it. Many people cannot imagine that there will ever be a different generative process. But it will be so, the process of generation will be altered. The generative process and all that stands in connection with it will pass over in the future to another organ. The organ that is already preparing to become the future organ of generation is the human larynx. Today it can only bring forth vibrations of the air, can only impart to the air what lies in the word that goes forth from it, so that the vibrations correspond to the word. Later on, not only will the word press forward in its rhythm from the larynx, but it will be irradiated by man, it will be penetrated by very substance. Just as today the word only becomes airwaves, so in the future man's inner being, his own likeness, which today is in his word, will issue from the larynx. The human being will proceed from the human being, man will speak forth man. And this in the future will be the birth of a new human being—that he is spoken forth by another.

Such things throw a definite light on phenomena in our surroundings which no natural science can explain. That transformation of the reproductive force which will again become free of sex, takes over then the functions of the earlier reproduction. Hence in the male organism at the age of puberty, a transformation also takes place in the larynx. The voice becomes deeper. This shows you clearly how these two things are interconnected. Thus occultism throws light again and again on facts of life and illumines phenomena for which materialistic science can give you no explanation.

And just as the organ of the larynx will be transformed, so too will the human heart. It is the organ which stands in intimate connection with the circulation. Now science believes that the heart is a kind of pump; that is a grotesquely fantastic idea. Occultism has never made such a fantastic statement, as has modern materialism. It is the feelings of the soul which give rise to the movement of the blood; the soul drives the blood, and the heart moves because it is driven by the blood. Thus the truth is exactly the opposite of what materialistic science states. Man today, however, cannot guide his heart as he will; when he feels anxiety, it beats faster, since the feeling acts on the blood and this quickens the motion of the heart. But what is suffered involuntarily by man today, will later, at a higher stage of evolution, be in his own power. Later on he will drive his blood by his own volition, and cause the movement of his heart as today he moves the muscles of his hand. The heart with its peculiar structure is a crux, a riddle for modern science. It has diagonally striped fibres, which are otherwise only to be found in voluntary muscles. Why? Because the heart has not yet reached the end of its evolution, but is an organ of the future; because it will in the future be a voluntary muscle. Thus it already shows the rudiments of this in its structure.

All that goes on in the soul changes the organism. And if you now imagine the man who is able to create his own likeness through the spoken word, whose heart has become a voluntary muscle, who will have altered yet other organs, then you have a conception of the future of the human race in future planetary incarnations of our earth. Humanity will progress on our earth as far as it is possible under the influence of a mineral kingdom. This mineral kingdom, in spite of its having arisen the last, will be the first to disappear again in its present form. Man will then no longer build up his body from mineral substances as today, the coming human body will only incorporate into itself substances of a plant nature. All that works in man today, as mineral will disappear. In order to give you a seemingly grotesque example: the human saliva of today is a mineral product, for the physical body is an inter-action of mineral processes. When man will have ended his mineral evolution he will no longer have a mineral spittle; it will be of a plant-nature—man will, so to speak, spit flowers. Glands will no more secrete what is mineral, but a plant-like substance. The mineral kingdom is brought to an end by the evolutionary return of humanity to plant-like existence.

Thus the human being lives over to Jupiter inasmuch as he expels all that is mineral and passes over to the creativeness of the plant. And inasmuch as he then later passes over to animal-creation—the animals will be different from those of today—when his heart will have progressed so far that it can appear as a creator, then he will create in the animal world, as today he creates in the mineral kingdom, and then the Venus condition will arise. And when he can create his kind by virtue of uttering his own likeness, then is the meaning of evolution complete, then is the word fulfilled: “Let us create man in our own image.”

Only by observing this aspect—that the body will be moulded from the soul—will man really transform the human race. Only through a thinking trained in the occult and spiritual sense, will there appear what has been described as the transformation of the heart and the larynx. What humanity thinks today, that will it be in the future. A humanity that thinks materialistically will produce frightful beings in the future, and a humanity that thinks spiritual thoughts, so works upon and transforms the future organism that beautiful human bodies will proceed from it.

What the materialistic mode of thought brings about has not yet been completed. We have two streams today, a great materialistic one which fills the earth, and the small spiritual stream which is restricted to but few human beings. Distinguish between soul-evolution and race-evolution. Do not think that if races pass over to a grotesque form that the soul too does the same. All materialistically thinking souls work on the production of evil race-formations, and what is done of a spiritual nature causes the bringing forth of a good race. Just as mankind has brought forth that which has retrogressed in the animals, plants and minerals, so will a portion split off and represent the evil part of humanity. And in the body which meanwhile will have grown soft the inner badness of the soul will express itself externally. Just as older conditions which have degenerated to the ape species seem grotesque to us today, so do materialistic races remain at the standpoint of evil, and will people the earth as evil races. It will lie entirely with humanity as to whether a soul will remain in the bad race or will ascend by spiritual culture to a good race.

These are things that we must know, if we would live into the future with real knowledge. Otherwise we go through the world with our eyes bound, for forces are working in humanity which we must recognise and to which we must pay attention. A man would neglect his duty to mankind if he did not wish to become acquainted with the forces which work in the direction of right evolution or against it. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge would be egotism. He who wants to know in order to look into higher worlds acts egotistically. But one who tries to carry this knowledge into the direct practice of everyday life, furthers the advance of the coming evolution of humanity. It is extremely important for us to learn more and more to put into practice what exists as the conception of spiritual science.

So you see, the Spiritual Movement has a quite definite goal, namely, to mould future humanity in advance. And the goal can be reached in no other way than through the acceptance of spiritual wisdom. This is the thought that lives in the mind of one who conceives spiritual science as the great task of mankind. He thinks of it as inseparable from evolution and he regards it not as an object of desire but as a task and duty that is laid upon him. And the more we acknowledge this, the more rapidly do we approach the future form of humanity in the Sixth Age. As at that time in ancient Atlantis, in the neighbourhood of modern Ireland, the advanced human beings were drawn to the East in order to found the new civilisations, so have we now the task of working towards the great moment in the Sixth Age, when humanity will undertake a great spiritual ascent.

We must endeavour to come out of materialism again, and societies with a spiritual aim must undertake to guide humanity, not from motives of arrogance and pride, but as a task and duty.

So a certain group of people must join together in order to prepare the future. But this union is not to be conceived of geographically. All ideas of locality have then lost their meaning because it is no longer a question of racial relationships. The point will be for people over the whole earth to find each other spiritually, in order to fashion the future in, a positive way. For this reason, 400 years ago, when our epoch plunged the deepest into matter, the Rosicrucian Brotherhood emphasised that practical spiritual science which contains an answer to all problems of everyday life.

Here you have the ascending evolution following the descending. Just as old knowledge acts as a disintegrating force, as is shown in Mauthner's Criticism of Language, so the spiritual current of thought seeks the unifying bond of spiritual wisdom. Hence arises the new school of initiation which is directly concerned with leading humanity over into a new cycle of time.

Thus with the principle of human evolution is connected the concept of Initiation.

WE have yet to speak today of the principle of Initiation, or esoteric training. And we will speak of the two methods of training which take into special consideration what has been explained here concerning human evolution. For we must be clear that in a certain way we find the truth by retracing our steps to earlier stages of humanity.

It has been said that the inhabitants of old Atlantis could perceive wisdom in all that surrounded them. The further we go back into the far past, the more we find states of consciousness through which men were able to perceive the creative powers which pervade the world, the spiritual beings which surround us. All that surrounds us has arisen through these creative beings and to see them is indeed the meaning of “knowledge.”

When mankind had developed to our present stage of consciousness (and this has only come about during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch) a longing was left in the soul to penetrate again into the spiritual realms. I have told you how in the ancient Indian people there lived from the beginning that deep longing to know the real spirit behind all that surrounds us in the world. We have seen how they had a feeling that all that surrounded them was a dream, an illusion; how their only task was to evolve upwards to the ancient wisdom that had worked creatively in early times. The pupils of the ancient Rishis strove to tread the path which led them through Yoga to look up into the realms from which they had themselves come down. They strove away from Maya to these spiritual realms above.

That is one way which man can take. The most recent way of attaining to wisdom is the Rosicrucian path. This path does not point man to the past but to the future, to those conditions which he will further live through. Through definite methods the pupil is taught to develop in himself the wisdom which exists in germ in every human being.

This is the way which was given through the Founder of the Rosicrucian esoteric stream, known to the outer world as Christian Rosenkreuz. It is not an unchristian way, rather is it a Christian path adapted to modern conditions, and lies between the actual Christian path and the Yoga path.

This path had been partially prepared long before the time of Christianity. It took on a special form through that great initiate, Dionysius the Areopagite, who in the esoteric school of Paul at Athens inaugurated the training from which all later esoteric wisdom and training have been derived.

These are the two paths of esoteric training particularly fitted for the West. All that is connected with our culture and the life we lead and must lead, is lifted up, raised into the principle of initiation through the Christian and through the Rosicrucian training. The purely Christian way is somewhat difficult for modern man, hence the Rosicrucian path has been introduced for those who have to live in the present age. If someone would take the old purely Christian path in the midst of modern life he must be able to cut himself off for a time from the world outside, in order to enter it again later all the more intensively. On the other hand the Rosicrucian path can be followed by all, no matter in what occupation or sphere of life they may be placed.

We will describe the purely Christian way. It is prescribed as to method in the most profound Christian book least understood by the representatives of Christian theology, the Gospel of St. John, and as to contents, in the Apocalypse or Secret Revelation.

The Gospel of St. John is a miraculous book: one must live it, not merely read it. One can live it if one understands that its utterances are precepts for the inner life, and that one must observe them in the right way. The Christian path demands of its disciple that he considers the St. John Gospel a book of meditation. A fundamental assumption, which is more or less absent in the Rosicrucian training, is that one possesses the most steadfast belief in the personality of Christ Jesus. The pupil must at least find it possible to believe that the most lofty Being, the Leader of the Fire-Spirits of the Sun evolution, was physically incorporated as Jesus of Nazareth; that Christ Jesus was not merely the “Simple Man of Nazareth,” not an individual like Socrates, Plato or Pythagoras. One must see his fundamental difference from all others. If one would undergo a purely Christian training one must be sure that in him lived a God-man of a unique nature, otherwise one has not the right basic feeling that enters the soul and awakens it. Therefore one must have an actual belief in the first words of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and a God was the Logos “to the words” And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” Thus the same Spirit who was the ruler of the Fire-Spirits, who was linked with the transforming of the Earth, whom we also call the Spirit of the Earth, has actually dwelt among us in a garment of flesh, he was actually in a physical body. That must be recognised! If one cannot do this then it is better to undertake another method of training. One, however, who has accepted this basic condition and calls before his soul in meditation every morning through weeks and months the Gospel words down to the passage “full of grace and truth,” and moreover in such a way that he not only understands them, but lives within them, will experience them as an awakening force in the soul. For these are not ordinary words, but awakening forces which call forth other forces in the soul. The pupil must only have the patience to bring them before his soul continuously, every day, then they become the forces which the Christian training needs, aroused through the awakening of quite definite feelings. The Christian path is more an inner one, whereas in Rosicrucian training the experiences are kindled by the outer world.

The Christian path is pursued by an awakening of the feelings. There are seven stages of feeling which must be aroused. In addition are other exercises which are only given personally to the pupil, and suited to his special character. It is, however, indispensable to experience the 13th Chapter of St. John's Gospel, so to experience it as I will now describe. The teacher says to the pupil: You must develop quite definite feelings. Imagine the following: the plant grows from the soil, but is of a higher order than the mineral soil from which it grows. Nevertheless the plant needs it, the higher could not exist without the lower, and if the plant could think, it would have to say to the earth: It is true that I am higher than thou, yet without thee I cannot live. And it must incline itself to the earth in gratitude. Likewise must the animal bear itself to the plant, for it could not exist without plant life, and even so must the human being bear himself with regard to the animal. And if man has ascended higher, he must say to himself: I could never stand where I do without the lower. He must bow thankfully before them, for they have made it possible for him to exist. No creature in the world could subsist without the lower, to which it must feel gratitude. So even Christ, the very highest, could not exist without the twelve, and the feeling of his inclination to them in gratitude is powerfully portrayed in this 13th chapter. He, the highest of all, washes his disciples' feet.

If this is thought of in full wakefulness as a basic feeling in the human soul, if the pupil lives for weeks and months in reflection and contemplation which deepen this fundamental feeling—the gratitude with which the higher should look down to the lower to which it really owes its existence, then one awakens the first basic feeling. The pupil will have entered deeply enough into the experience when certain symptoms appear, an external symptom and an inner vision. The external symptom is that one feels the feet to be laved by water; in an inner vision one sees oneself as the Christ washing the feet of the twelve. This is the first stage, that of the Washing of the Feet. The event in the 13th Chapter of St. John's Gospel is not only an historical event, it can be experienced by all. It is an external symptomatic expression of the fact that the pupil has raised himself thus far in his life of feeling, nor does this sign fail to appear when he has progressed to this point in the enhancement of his feeling-life.

The second stage, the Scourging, is passed through if one deepens oneself in the following: How would it fare with you if the sufferings and blows of life broke in on you from every side? You should stand upright, you should make yourself strong to meet all the sorrows that life offers, and should bear them. This is the second fundamental feeling which must be experienced. The outer feeling of it is an irritation on the whole surface of the body, and a more inner expression is a vision in which one sees oneself scourged, at first in dream, and then in vision.

Then comes the third, which is the Crowning with Thorns. Here week-long, month-long one must live in the feeling: How would it fare with you, if you must not only undergo the sorrows and sufferings of life, but if even the holiest, your spiritual being, should be subjected to scorn and derision? And again, there must be no lamenting, it must be clear to the pupil that he must stand upright in spite of all. His inwardly developed strength must make him able to stand erect despite mockery and scorn. Whatever threatens to overthrow his soul he must stand erect! Then in an inner astral vision he sees himself with the crown of thorns and is sensible of an external pain on the head. This is the sign that he has advanced far enough in his life of feeling to be able to make this experience.

The fourth is the Crucifixion. Here the pupil must again develop a quite definite feeling. Today man identifies his body with his ego. One who would go through the Christian initiation must accustom himself to carry his body through the world as if it were a foreign object, a table, for instance. His body must become foreign to him, he bears it in and out of the doorway as something external, not himself. When a man has advanced far enough in this fundamental feeling, there is revealed to him what is called the “Ordeal of the Blood.” Certain reddenings of the skin appear on certain places in such a way that he can call forth the wounds of Christ, on the hands, the feet and on the right side of the breast. When the pupil by his depth of feeling is able to develop in himself the Blood Ordeal, the external symptom, then appears likewise the inner, the astral, in which he sees himself crucified.

The fifth is the Mystic Death. The pupil raises himself ever higher to the feeling: I belong to the whole world; I am as little an independent being as the finger on my hand. He feels himself embedded in the whole world, as if a part of it. Then he experiences the feeling that all around him grows dark, as if a black darkness envelops him, like a pall that becomes dense around him. During this time, the pupil of the Christian initiation learns to know all the sorrow and all the pain, all the evil and wickedness that attaches itself to mortal man. That is the Descent into Hell; each one must live through it. Then something comes to pass as if the veil were torn asunder, and the pupil sees into the spiritual worlds. This is called the Rending of the Veil.

The sixth is the Burial and Resurrection. When the pupil has advanced so far he must say: I have already accustomed myself to look on my body as something foreign, but now I see everything in the world as standing as near to me as my own body, which indeed is only taken from these substances. Every blossom, every stone, is as near to me as my body. Then the pupil is buried in the earthly planet. This stage is significantly linked with a new life, with the feeling of being united to the deepest Soul of the planet, with the soul of the Christ, who says, “those who eat my bread tread me underfoot.”

The seventh, the Ascension, cannot be described; one must have a soul that is no longer dependent on thinking through the instrument of the brain. In order to be sensible of what the pupil undergoes in what is called the Ascension, it is necessary to have a soul which can live through this feeling.

This passing through states of humility and deep devotion represents the nature of the Christian initiation, and he who earnestly goes through it experiences his resurrection in the spiritual worlds. Today it is not possible for all to undertake this path, and so the existence of another method leading to the higher worlds has become a necessity. That is the Rosicrucian method.

Here again I must refer to seven stages which will give a picture of the content of this training. Much of it has already been described in Lucifer-Gnosis,¹ much can only be given from teacher to pupil within the school, and yet an idea must be formed of what the training provides. It has seven stages, though not consecutive, it is a question of the pupil's own individuality. The teacher prescribes what seems to him adapted to his pupil, and much else forms a part that cannot be made public.

The seven stages are the following:

1. Study
2. Imaginative knowledge
3. Inspired knowledge, or reading the Occult Script
4. Preparation of the Philosopher's Stone
5. Correspondence between Macrocosm and Microcosm
6. Living into the Macrocosm
7. Divine Bliss

Study in the Rosicrucian sense is the ability to immerse oneself in a content of thought not taken from physical reality but from the higher worlds. This is called the life in pure thought. Modern philosophers for the most part deny this; they say that every thinking must have a certain vestige remaining from sense perception. This, however, is not the case, for no one, for example, can see a true circle; a circle must be seen in the mind; on the blackboard it is only a collection of tiny particles of chalk. One can only attain to a real circle if one leaves aside all examples, all actual things. Thus thinking in Mathematics is a super-sensible activity. But one must also learn to think supersensibly in other fields.

Initiates have always exercised this kind of thinking in regard to the being of man. Rosicrucian theosophy is such super-sensible knowledge, and its study, with which we are now occupied, is the first stage of the Rosicrucian training itself. I am not bringing forward Rosicrucian theosophy for any external reason, but because it is the first stage of the Rosicrucian Initiation. People think often enough that it is unnecessary to talk about the principles of man's being, or the evolution of humanity or the different planetary evolutions, they would rather acquire beautiful feelings, they do not want to study earnestly. Nevertheless, however many beautiful feelings one acquires in one's soul it is impossible to rise into the spiritual worlds by that alone. Rosicrucian theosophy does not try to arouse the feelings, but through the stupendous facts of the spiritual worlds to let the feelings themselves begin to resound. The Rosicrucian feels it a kind of impertinence to take people by storm with feelings. He leads them along the path of mankind's evolution in the belief that feelings will then arise of themselves. He calls up before them the planet journeying in universal space, knowing that when the soul experiences this fact it will be powerfully gripped in feeling. It is only an empty phrase to say one should address oneself direct to the feelings, that is just indolence. Rosicrucian theosophy lets the facts speak, and if these thoughts flow into the feeling nature and overpower it, then that is the right way. Only what the human being feels of his own accord can fill him with bliss or blessedness. The Rosicrucian lets the facts in the cosmos speak, for that is the most impersonal kind of teaching. It is a matter of indifference who stands before you; you must not be affected by a personality, but by what he tells you of the facts of world-becoming. Thus in the Rosicrucian training that direct veneration for the teacher is struck out, he does not claim it nor require it. He wishes to speak to the pupil of what exists, quite apart from himself. One who will press forward into the higher worlds must accustom himself to the kind of thinking in which one thought proceeds from another. A thinking of this nature is developed in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Science. These books are not written in such a way that one can take a thought and put it in another place; much more are they written as an organism arises, one thought grows out of another. These books have nothing at all to do with the one who wrote them; he gave himself up to what the thoughts themselves worked out in him, how they linked themselves one to another.

Study, then, for one desiring to make a somewhat elementary approach means acquiring a certain knowledge of the elementary facts of spiritual science itself, whereas for one who wishes to go further it means an inner meditation in a thought-structure which lets one thought grow out of another, out of itself.

The second stage is Imaginative Knowledge, the knowledge which unites with what is given to the pupil in the study-stage. The study is the basis, it must be perfected through individual imaginative knowledge. If you think over various things that I have touched upon in the last lectures, you will find traces—in the echo for instance—of what were everyday occurrences on Saturn. It is possible to look on all around us as a physiognomy of an inner spiritual element. People walk over the earth and it is a conglomeration of rocks and stones to them, but men must learn to grasp that all surrounding them is the true physical expression for the Spirit of the Earth. Just as the body is ensouled, so is the earth planet the external expression for an indwelling spirit. When men look on the earth as possessing body and soul as man does, then only they have an idea of what Goethe meant when he said “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” When you see tears run down the human countenance you do not examine by the laws of physics how quickly or how slowly the tears roll down; they express to you the inner sadness of the soul, just as the smiling cheek is the expression for the soul's inner joy. The pupil must educate himself to see in each single flower in the meadow he crosses, the outer expression of a living being, the expression of the Spirit dwelling in the Earth. Some flowers seem to be tears, others are the joyful expression of the earth's Spirit. Every stone, every plant, every flower, all is for him the outer expression of the indwelling Earth Spirit, its physiognomy that speaks to him. And everything “corruptible” or transitory becomes a “semblance” of an eternal, expressing itself through it. Feelings like these had to be attained by the disciple of the Grail, and by the Rosicrucian. The teacher would say: Behold the flower chalice which receives the ray of the sun, the sun calls forth the pure productive forces which slumber in the plant and hence the sun's ray was called the “holy lance of love.” Look now at man; he stands higher than the plant, he has the same organs within him, but all that the plant harbours in itself, perfectly pure and chaste, is in him steeped in lust and impure desire. The future of human evolution consists in this: man will again be chaste and pure, and speak forth his likeness into the world through another organ which will be the transformed organ of generation. Chaste and pure without desire, without passion, man's generative organ will be; and as the calyx of the blossom turns upward to the holy love lance, it will turn to the spiritual ray of wisdom, and fructified by this will bring forth its own image. This organ will be the larynx.

The Grail pupil was shown: the plant on its lower stage has this pure chalice, man has lost it; he has degenerated to impure desires. Out of the spiritualised sun ray he must let this chalice come again, in chastity he must develop that which forms the Holy Grail of the future.

Thus the pupil looks up to the great Ideal. What comes to pass in the slow evolution of the whole human race is experienced earlier by the initiate. He shows us mankind's evolution in pictures and these pictures work quite differently from the abstract thoughts which have been produced by the modern materialistic age. If you picture evolution in such lofty and powerful pictures as the Grail, then the effect is different from that of ordinary knowledge, which is unable to exercise any deep influence on your organism. Imaginative knowledge works down on the etheric body and thence on to the blood and this is the medium which acts formatively on the organism. Man will become increasingly more able to work on his organism through his etheric body. All imaginative knowledge based on truth is at the same time healing and health giving, it makes the blood healthy in its circulation. The best educator is imaginative knowledge, if man is only strong and devoted enough for it to be able to work on him.

The third stage is Reading in the Occult Script, that is, not only seeing isolated pictures but letting the relationship of these pictures work upon one. This becomes what is called occult script. One begins to coordinate the lines of force which stream creatively through the world forming them into definite figures and colour-forms through the imagination. One learns to discover an inner connection which is expressed in these figures and this acts as spiritual tone, as the sphere-harmony, for the figures are founded on true cosmic proportions. Our script is a last decadent relic of this old occult writing and is modeled on it.

One comes to the fourth, Preparing the Philosopher's Stone, through exercises of the breathing process. If man breathes as ordained by nature he needs the plant-world for his breathing.

If the plant were not there he could not live, for it gives him oxygen and assimilates the carbon which he himself breathes out. The plant builds its own organism from this and gives back oxygen, thus through the plant world oxygen is continually renewed for man. Humanity could not exist by itself; eliminate the plant world and mankind would in a short time die out. So you see the cycle: you breathe in oxygen which the plant breathes out, you breathe out carbon which the plant inhales and from which it builds up its own bodily nature. Thus the plant belongs to me, it is the instrument by which my life is sustained. You may see in the coal how the plant builds its body from carbon, for coal is nothing else than the dead remains of plants.

Rosicrucian training guides the pupil through a definitely regulated breathing process to form that organ that can within himself effect the transformation of carbon into oxygen. What is today done by the plant externally, will later on, through a future organ which the pupil is already developing through his training, be effected in man himself This is slowly being prepared. Through the regulated breathing process man will bear in himself the instrument for the preparation of oxygen; he will have become akin to the plant, whereas now he is of a mineral nature. He will retain the carbon in himself and build his body from it, and hence his body will later on be more plant-like, then he can turn towards the holy love lance. The whole of humanity will then possess a consciousness like that gained by the initiate today when he raises himself into the higher worlds.

This is called the transmutation of human substance into that substance of which carbon itself is the basis. This is the Alchemy which leads man to build up his own body as does the plant today. One calls this the preparation of the “Philosopher's Stone” and carbon is its outer symbol. But it is not the Philosopher's Stone until the pupil can create it himself through his regulated breathing process. The teaching can only be given from teacher to pupil, it is wrapped in deep secrecy, and only after he is completely purified and made ready can the pupil receive this mystery. If it were to be made public today, then men in their egoism would gratify their lowest needs through the misuse of this highest mystery.

The fifth is the Correspondence of Microcosm and Macrocosm. When we survey the path of human evolution we see that what lies within man today has gradually entered from without—for instance, the glands were an external growth on the Sun, like our modern fungi; all that today lies within the human skin was once outside. The human body is, as it were, pieced together from what was spread outside it, each separate member of your physical body, etheric body and astral body was somewhere outside in the universe. This is the macrocosm in the microcosm. Your very soul was outside in the Godhead. Whatever is within us corresponds to something which is outside, and we must learn to know the true correspondences in ourselves.

You know the spot on the brow just above the root of the nose; it expresses the fact that a certain something which was formerly outside has drawn into man. If you penetrate this organ in meditation, sink yourself into it, this denotes more than a mere brooding in this point, you learn to know then the part of the outer world which corresponds to it. The larynx, too, you get to know and the forces which build it. Thus you learn about the macrocosm through sinking yourself into your own body. This is no mere brooding within yourself! You should not say: God is within and I will seek Him. You would only find the puny human being whom you yourself magnify into God! One who only speaks of this inward brooding never comes to real knowledge. To reach this by the path of Rosicrucian Theosophy is less comfortable and demands real work. The universe is full of beautiful and marvelous things, one must be absorbed in these, one must seek God in his individual expressions, then one can find him in oneself and then only does one learn to know God as One. The world is like a great book. We find its letters in created things, we must read these from beginning to end, and then we learn to read the book microcosm and the book macrocosm from beginning to end.

This is no longer a mere understanding, it lives over into feeling, it fuses the human being with the whole universe and he feels all things to be the expression of the divine Spirit of the Earth. If a man has reached this point, he voluntarily performs all his deeds in accordance with the will of the whole cosmos and this is what is known as Divine Bliss.

When we are able to think thus, we are treading the Rosicrucian path. The Christian school is based more on the development of inner feelings, in the Rosicrucian school all that is spread out in physical reality as the divine nature of the earth is allowed to work upon us and reverberate in us as feeling. These are two ways which are open to all. If you think in the manner of modern thought then you can take the Rosicrucian path, no matter how scientific you may be. Modern science is an assistance if you do not merely study cosmic evolution, reading the letters, as it were, but carry your research into what is concealed behind, just as in a book one does not consider the letters but reads the meaning by their aid. You must seek the spirit behind science, then science becomes to you but the letter for the spirit.

What has been said is not meant to be a comprehensive account of the Rosicrucian training, it is only meant to serve as an indication of what can be found in it. It is a path for present day man, it makes him capable of working into the future. These are only the elementary stages, to give some idea of the way. We can thus realise how through the Rosicrucian method one may oneself penetrate into the higher mysteries.

Spiritual Science is necessary to humanity for its further progress. What is to take place for the transforming of mankind must be brought about through men themselves. He who accepts the truth in his present incarnation will mould for himself in later incarnations the outer form for the deeper truths.

Thus what we have discussed in this lecture course is coordinated to a whole. It is the instrument which is to work creatively for future civilisation. It is taught today because the man of the future needs these teachings, because they must be directed into the evolutionary path of mankind. Everyone who will not accept this truth of the future, lives at the cost of other men. But he who accepts it lives for others, even if at first he is impelled by an egoistic longing for the higher worlds. If the path is the right one then it is of itself the destroyer of self seeking and the best educator of selflessness.

Occult development is now needed by mankind and must be implanted into it. An earnest, true striving for truth, step by step, this alone leads to genuine brotherliness, this is the magician which can best bring about the uniting of humanity. This will serve as the means to bring about humanity's great goal, unity; and we shall reach this goal when we develop the means to it in ourselves, when we seek to acquire these means in the noblest, purest way, for it is a matter of hallowing humanity through these means.

Thus Spiritual Science appears to us not only as a great ideal, but as a force with which we permeate ourselves and out of which knowledge wells up for us. Spiritual Science will become increasingly more widespread, it will penetrate more and more all the religious and practical aspects of life, just as the great law of existence penetrates all beings; it is a factor in humanity's evolution.

This is the sense in which these lectures on Rosicrucian Theosophy have been given. If it has been understood, not only abstractly, but so that feelings have been evoked through knowledge of facts, then it can work directly into life. When this knowledge flows into all our members, from head to heart and thence into the hand, into all that we do and create, then we have grasped the foundations of spiritual science. Then we have grasped the great task of civilisation which is laid in our hands, and then from this knowledge feelings, too, are developed which one who likes to take things easily would prefer to develop direct.

Rosicrucian Theosophy does not wish to revel in feelings, it wishes to bring the facts of the spirit before your eyes. The pupil must take part, must let himself be stimulated by the facts which have been described, feelings and sensations must be aroused in him through them. In this sense Spiritual Science should become a powerful impulse for the sphere of feeling, but at the same time be that which leads us direct into the facts of super-sensible perceptions, which lets them first arise as thoughts and then leads the seeker upward into the higher worlds.

This was intended to be the significance of these lectures.

• 1. Dr. Steiner refers to the articles in Lucifer-Gnosis afterwards published as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.

When we carefully study the mental life of the present day we find a deep cleft in many minds. Men now receive, even in earliest youth, not one view of the world only but two: the one from their religious instruction and the other from Natural Science. The result of this is, that from the very outset doubts arise as to the correctness of the religious traditions.

It might be thought that Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy desires to bring in a new religion in addition to those already existing; but that is not the case. Anthroposophy is not a new religion, it is not a new sect.

In these lectures it will be our task, with the aid of Spiritual Science, to show the significance of this religious document, St. John's Gospel, and in so doing we shall be able to point out the relation of Spiritual Science to religious records in general. Spiritual Science enables us to understand the various religions in the world. One who is acquainted with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science takes Christianity as it is, as a fact of the very greatest significance to the whole spiritual life of humanity. It has been made impossible for the mental and spiritual life of the present day to understand the depths of Christianity. This understanding can only be gained through Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If we make use of what it provides we can penetrate deeply into the wisdom contained in the religious records.

We might compare Spiritual Science with philology. We can also study the Christian documents with the aid of philology; but Spiritual Science leads us into the spirit of these documents. The best expounder of Euclid's Geometry is one who knows Geometry, not one who only knows the Greek language.

Spiritual Science is not to be a new religion for the men of modern times; it is to be the means by which the true contents of Christianity may be brought home to them. Christianity is the zenith and meeting point of all religions. All other religions do but point to Christianity, which is the religion for all the future and will not be followed by any other. The fountain of Truth which springs up in it is abundant and never-ending; it is so plenteous that as the evolution of humanity progresses it will reveal every new aspects of its being. Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is to present Christianity to man from a new and different side.

Now, the various religious records may be considered from four different points of view:

1. The point of view of the Simple Believer, who holds fast to the words that are giving him. Many people, however, cannot reconcile the standpoint with their modern thought and they then pass on to:

2. The point of view of the Critic, the Doubter, the one who denies. This is the point of view of the “clever, enlightened men”, who have “risen above” religious truths. But many of them search further and discover that a very great deal is nevertheless contained in these religious documents they wrestle through to:

3. The point of view of the Symbolists. These interpret the religious records in their own way and find in them much or little according to their knowledge or acuteness. In Germany many former Freethinkers have come to this point of view. Finally, it is possible through Spiritual Science to arrive at:

4. The point of view where one learns to take the religious documents literally once more. We find many remarkable examples of this in the study St. John's Gospel.

St. John's Gospel takes quite a special place among the four Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke give us an historical picture of Jesus, but St. John's Gospel is regarded as a kind of apotheosis, a wonderful poem. There are many contradictions when we compare it with the statements made in the other Gospels, but these contradictions are so apparent that it cannot be supposed that the old defenders of St. John's Gospel did not perceive them also.

At the present time St. John's Gospel is considered to be the least worthy of credence. The reason for this attitude lies in the materialistic frame of mind of the men of our time. In the course of the 19th century humanity became materialistic in feeling, and consequently also in thought; for as a man feels, so does the judge. Materialism is not confined to the view of the world contained in the books of Büchner, Moleschott, and Vogt: even those who explain the religious documents from a certain spiritual standpoint do this in a fully materialistic way. As example of this I might quote the dispute between Karl Vogt and Professor Wagner of Munich. This dispute was fought out at the time in the “Augsburger Zeitung” and ended completely in favor of Karl Vogt. Wagner stood up for the existence of the soul; he did this, however, in an absolutely materialistic way. And as the theologians have materialistic feelings, the three synoptic Gospels please them better, because they more easily admit of a materialistic explanation. It is repugnant to materialistic thinking to accept a Being who towers above all men; it is much more acceptable to them to see in Jesus a noble human being only, “the humble man of Nazareth.” According to St. John's Gospel is quite inadmissible to see in Jesus only that which also lives in any other man. The Christ-soul in the Jesus-body is something quite different. St. John's Gospel represents Christ to us not only as a very great man, but as a Being who embraces the whole earth.

If we translate St. John's Gospel according to the spirit and not only according to the words, the first 14 verses run approximately as follows:—

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God

2. The same was in the very beginning with God

3. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

4. In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men.

5. And the Light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

6. There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

7. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that through him all men might believe.

8. He was not that Light, that came to bear witness of the Light.

9. For the true Light, which enlighteneth all men, was to come into the world.

10. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, but the world did not recognize Him.

11. It came into the several human beings, even into the ego-men; but the individual human beings, the ego-men, did not receive Him.

12. But those that did receive Him, to them gave He power to manifest that they were Sons of God.

13. Those who trusted in His Name were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

14. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have heard His teaching, the teaching of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of devotion and truth. (in St. John's Gospel truth—aletheia—is Spirit Self, devotion—charis—is Life Spirit, and wisdom—sophia—is Spirit Man.)

Even the very first words are taken in an abstract sense by the modern man. The “Very Beginning” is thought of as an abstract beginning; but to grasp the true significance of this word we must recall what was taught on this point in the Christian Secret School of Dionysius the Areopagite.

Mineral, plant, animal, and man make up the series of being in evolution which require the physical body. Above them are beings who do not need the physical body, namely, the Angels, Archangels, Very Beginnings, the Powers, Virtues, Dominions, the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim, and Beings were still higher.

Thus the Very Beginnings are real Beings. They are those who, at the beginning of the evolution of our world, were already at the stage humanity will only reach at the end of its evolution (in the Vulcan Period.) If in the light of this we study the first verse, “In the very beginning was the word,” we might represent the state of affairs pictorially by the following comparison. Before we utter a word, this word lives in us as thought. It lives within us. When the word is uttered the air around us is set in motion; vibrations are produced. If we imagine these vibrations condensed and hardened in some way, we should see the words fall to the ground as forms and figures; we should perceive the creative power of the word with our eyes. If the word is already creative now, it will be much more so in the future.

Man already possesses organs which will only attain their full significance in the future; he also possesses others which are already in decline. To the latter belong the organs of reproduction, to the former the heart and the larynx, for these are only at the beginning of their development. At the present time the heart is an involuntary muscle, although it has transverse fibers like all voluntary muscles. These transverse fibers are an indication that the heart is in the process of transition from an involuntary to a voluntary organ. The larynx is destined to be the human organ of reproduction in a distant future, strange as this may sound at present. Just as man, by means of speech, can already transpose his thoughts into vibrations of the air, he will in the future be able to create his own image by means of the word.

The Very Beginnings already possessed this creative power at the outset of the evolution of our world and can therefore be rightly looked upon as divine Beings. At the beginning of the evolution of the Earth a divine Word was uttered, and this has become mineral, plant, animal and man.

According to Spiritual Science man, as he stands before us, is divided—from one point of view—into seven parts, of which the physical body perceptible to our senses is only one part of the human being. Man possesses this physical body in common with the whole of the mineral kingdom surrounding us; the forces at work in our physical body are the same as those operating in the whole of so-called inanimate nature.

This physical body is, however, permeated by still higher forces, just as a sponge may be permeated by water. The difference between inanimate and animate bodies is that in inanimate bodies the materials of which they are constituted follow physical, chemical laws only; but in animate bodies the various materials are combined with one another in a very complicated manner, and only under the influence of the etheric body can they be held together in this form, which to-them is unnatural and is forced upon them. The physical materials have the constant tendency to group themselves according to their own nature; this signifies the destruction of the living body and the etheric body fights continually against this destruction.

When the etheric body withdraws from the physical body, the substances of the physical body group themselves in the manner natural to them, and the body becomes a corpse and falls to pieces. The etheric body, therefore, continually combats the destruction of the physical body.

Each organ of the physical body has behind it this etheric body. Man has an etheric heart, an etheric brain, etc., which holds together the corresponding physical organ. One is naturally tempted to picture the etheric body in a material way, somewhat like a thin cloud, but in reality the etheric body consists of a number of currents of force. The clairvoyant sees in the etheric body of man certain currents that are exceedingly important. Thus, for example, there is a stream which rises from the left foot to the forehead (see diagram), to a point which lies between the eyes, about half an inch down within the brain; it then returns to the other foot; from there it passes to the hand on the opposite side; from thence through the heart into the other hand, and from there back to its starting-point. In this way it forms a pentagram of currents of force.

This current is not the only one in the etheric body, there are very many of them. It is to this stream of force that man specially owes his upright position. We do not find this current in animals, they are bound to the earth by their front limbs. In respect of the form and size of the human etheric body we may say that in its upper part it is an exact image of the physical body. The lower parts are different; here they do not coincide with the physical body. There is a great secret underlying the relationship between the etheric and physical bodies, one which throws a strong light upon human nature. The etheric body of a man is female, that of a woman is male. This explains the fact that in each man's nature there is much that is feminine, and in each woman's nature there is much that is masculine. In the animals the etheric body is larger than the physical body. Thus, for example, in the case of the horse the clairvoyant sees that his etheric body projects above his head like a cap.

There is something in man that is much closer to him than his blood, muscles, nerves, etc., namely, his feelings of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain,—all that he calls his inner being. In Spiritual Science this is called the astral body, and man possesses it in common with the animals only.

A man who is born blind only knows the world around him imperfectly; for him the world of colour and light does not exist. Man is in the same position in respect of the astral world; it exists just as truly, it surrounds and permeates the physical world, but he does not perceive it. When a man's astral senses are opened the astral world becomes visible to him. The significance and importance of this moment in the development of a human being is, however, very much greater than when a man who is born blind recovers his sight through an operation. Every human being knows this astral world, although imperfectly, for his astral body is transposed into it each night.

We repose in the astral world in order to restore the harmony of the astral body, for from the standpoint of Spiritual Science tiredness is only disharmony in the physical and astral bodies. The relationship between the physical and astral bodies may be illustrated in the following way. If we take a sponge, cut it into a thousand small pieces and place them in a glass of water, so that the water is absorbed into these tiny pieces, this represents the waking condition of the average man. If we squeeze out the little sponges and collect the water again in its container, it flows together into one common mass: In the same way the human astral bodies, which during the day were individualised, like the drops of water which were absorbed into the tiny sponges, enter into the common astral substance and are strengthened by it. This we recognize each morning by the fact that our tiredness has gone. Until a person becomes a seer his astral body during the night mingles with the others; but in a seer the conditions are different.

The various plants do not possess an astral body of their own, but the whole world of plants has one astral body in common, namely that of the earth. The earth is a living being and the plants are part of it,—just as the hair belongs to the human body:

The fourth principle of man is the ego. The word “I” can only be uttered by a man with reference to himself; this word can never strike our ear from outside with reference to ourselves. When this “I” sounds in a being, then God is expressing Himself in him. In respect of the ego, the animal, plant and mineral worlds are in a different position. For example, an animal can no more say “I” to itself than a finger on our hand can say “I” to itself. If the finger desired to name its “I,” it would have to point to the “I” of the human being; in the same way the animal would have to point to an ego which belongs to a being living in the astral world. All lions, all elephants, etc., have a group-ego in common; thus there is a lion group-ego, an elephant group-ego, and so on.

If the plants wished to point to their ego they would have to point to a common ego in the centre of the earth, in the lower spiritual world. When an animal is injured it feels pain. In the plant it is different, and the seer is able to say that the plucking of a flower or the cutting of the corn gives to the earth the same pleasant feeling that a cow experiences when her calf draws the milk from her. But when a plant is torn out of the earth by the root this is just as though one were to tear a piece of flesh out of an animal. It is felt in the astral world as pain.

Were we to seek for the ego of the minerals, we should not find it in a being forming a centre in the spirit world, for the ego of the minerals is to be found in the higher spiritual world outspread everywhere as a force of the whole cosmos.

In the Christian occult doctrine the world in which the egos of the animals are found—the astral world—is called the world of the Holy Spirit, and the world which contains the egos of the plants—the lower spiritual world—the world of the Son. When the seer begins to have perceptions in this world, the “Word,” the “Logos” speaks to him. In the same occult teaching the world of the mineral egos—the higher spiritual world—is called the world of the Father Spirit.

Man is involved in a process of continuous development. We have now become acquainted with all four principles of his nature; they are what Pythagoras referred to in his school as the lower quaternary. The savage, the civilised man, the idealist, the saint—all possess these four parts. But the savage is the slave of his passions; the civilized man no longer follows indiscriminately all his passions and desires; the idealist does this still less, and the saint has fully mastered them.

The ego works upon the astral body and separates a portion from it. In the course of human evolution this part grows larger and larger, whereas the inherited portion becomes ever smaller. In Francis of Assisi almost the whole of the astral body was worked upon by the ego and transformed. This transformed part forms the fifth principle of human nature: the Spirit Self.

But the ego can also become master of the etheric or life-body. The part of the etheric body which has been transformed by the ego is called Life Spirit. The etheric body is transformed under the influences of art and religion. The influence of religion is especially strong because it is repeated day after day, and this repetition is the magic power which transforms the etheric body. But the conscious work in occult training acts most strongly upon the etheric body, and meditation and concentration are the means here used.

The relative speed in the transforming of the etheric body and the astral body may be compared to the movement of the hour and minute hands of a clock. If a man succeeds in changing his temperament ever so little, which depends on the conditions of his etheric body, this is of more value to him than the acquisition of many clever theories.

It requires the very greatest strength to change the physical body consciously. The means for this are only given in the occult school. We can only indicate here that the regulation of the breathing forms the beginning of this transformation. The physical body that has been consciously transformed by the ego is called Spirit Man or Atma. The force for the transformation of the astral body flows to us from the world of the Holy Spirit; the force for the transformation of the etheric body flows to us from the world of the Son or the Word; the force for the transformation of the physical body flows to us from the world of the Father Spirit or the Divine Father.

The ideas contained in St. John's Gospel are so profound that we shall only be able to understand this document correctly in all its parts when we have laid the right foundation for this through the knowledge of the evolution of our planet.

There is a remarkable agreement between the beginning of St. John's Gospel and the first words of the Bible. The first words of the book of Genesis are: “In the very beginning God created the heavens and the earth;” and in St. John's Gospel the first words are: “In the very beginning was the word.” These opening words give the fundamental tone to the whole of St. John's Gospel. The development of the earth can only be understood correctly when it is realised that in it the same laws are at work as in the evolution of the individual human being. The planet visible to the senses is, in the view of Spiritual Science, only the body of the spirit dwelling in it. This spiritual Being goes through repeated incarnations just as man does. Spiritual research recognises three incarnations before the earth reached its present condition. By this we do not mean to say that it had not already gone through other incarnations before, but even to the highest clairvoyant only three preceding and three following incarnations can be known. These, together with the present incarnation, make seven. When we use this number seven we are under no superstition. When a person stands in the open country he sees equally far in all directions. It is the same with the clairvoyant; he, too, sees equally far in time both forwards and backwards. In Spiritual Science these seven incarnations of the Earth are called: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. These names signify only conditions of one and the same Being.

Saturn was a condition of our Earth lying in the far distant past. The present planet Saturn is related to the present Earth as a child to an old man, and the Earth was once in the Saturn condition, a child. Again, it must not be thought that in the next embodiment of the Earth humanity will wander over the present planet Jupiter; but in its next embodiment the Earth will reach the condition in which the present planet Jupiter exists to-day.

Between two planetary embodiments there lies a kind of heavenly or spiritual state a Pralaya. The period between two planetary conditions is not a period of rest, any more than is the period through which man lives between two incarnations; it is a time of spiritual activity and preparation for the next life. Outwardly this condition appears to be dim.

When the Earth came forth from Pralaya in order to pass into the Saturn condition, it was not constituted as it is to-day. If we were to take all the substances and Beings contained in the Earth, Sun, and Moon, and form a single body out of them, we should then have what constituted the Earth when it passed over from that dim state into the Saturn condition. It did not come forth as a body without any being; the present humanity was already there, but in a state suited to that of the planet. On Saturn we formed the first foundations of the physical body. We can gain an idea of the physical constitution of man at that time if we try to realize the material condition of the planet. On Saturn there were no conditions of corporeality such as we meet with to-day. There were no solid, fluid or gaseous substances; matter was in a state which the modern physicist would not recognise as being corporeal.

Spiritual Science knows of four states of matter: earth, water, air, and fire or warmth. By “earth” we mean all that is solid; thus frozen water or ice is included in “earth”. “Water” is all that is fluid; thus molten iron or metal is also “water.” Air is all that is gaseous; thus steam would come under the heading of “air.” According to the view of the Physicist of the present day, fire or warmth is only a state of matter, an extremely rapid vibration of its smallest particles. But to Spiritual Science warmth is also a substance, one much finer than air. According to Spiritual Science, when a body is heated it absorbs the substance of warmth; when it cools it parts with warmth, the substance of warmth can condense to air, this in its turn can condense to water, and this to earth. All substances were once present merely as warmth. When the Earth was in the Saturn condition, only warmth existed.

The first rudiments of the human body were also formed out of the substance of warmth, nevertheless certain organs were already indicated even then. Not only did the germ of the physical body exist, but there was also the Spirit, the inmost being of man, the Spirit Man. This Spirit Man rested in the bosom of the Deity, which formed the spiritual atmosphere of Saturn. The Spirit Man was not an independent being, any more than one of our fingers is to-day, only at the end of the Vulcan Period will it be independent.

In the following epoch, the Sun Period, matter—and also the human bodies—had condensed from the state of warmth to the form of “air.” In consequence of this the etheric body of man was added to the existing physical body, and on the spiritual side the Deity descends, as it were, a step further and forms the Life Spirit.

In the Moon Period matter condensed to the fluid condition, and the densest substance might be compared to wax. Man also developed further and the astral body was formed, and on the other hand (from the spiritual side) the Spirit Self. Man at that time did not yet process an ego; he might be compared to the animals of the present day, although he looked quite different from them.

After the period of rest which followed the Mood Period the Earth came forth once more in its present period of evolution, and it then contained within it the substances and beings now contained in the present Sun, Moon and Earth. Man was so far refined materially that his astral body became capable of receiving an ego, for this astral body formed itself into an ego-bearer. On the other hand, the Spirit had so far condensed that it could, as ego, fertilise the lower bodies.

The first important cosmic event was the separation of the Sun from the Earth. This separation was necessary in order to provide the higher spiritual Beings with a suitable field of action—those spiritual Beings who till then had been united with humanity and were now ready to pass on to higher activity. These higher Beings had reached the goal of human evolution even during the Saturn Period, and they were then at the stage of evolution which man will only reach in the far-distant Vulcan Period of the Earth. Again, other high spiritual Beings had already reached in the Sun Period of the Earth the sublime condition which humanity will only reach in the Venus Period. These are the Beings who now send down their forces to us with the physical sunlight. These two kinds of Beings separated from the Earth and, taking with them the finest substances and forces, formed the present Sun.

It was a sad time when the Sun was separated from the Earth and the Moon was still within it. There was a danger of man being immersed in mere form, of his spiritual part dying out and with it all possibility of development. If the Sun had remained united with the Earth, this would have caused man to develop so rapidly in the direction of the spiritual that he would not have been able to develop himself corporeally. If, on the other hand, the Moon forces had remained united with the forces of the Earth, all life would have hardened in mere form, the human beings would have become statues and, as Goethe says in “Faust”, a “crystallised people” would have originated.

Through the separation of the forces of the Sun and Moon from the Earth there was brought about the balance between life and form which was necessary for the evolution of humanity. It was only because these forces could from this time forth work upon man from outside that he could continue to develop in the right way. The forces coming from the Sun create and fertilise life; the forces coming from the Moon pour this life into firm forms. The form of the physical body we now possess we owe to the Moon; but the life which sinks into this body comes from the Sun.

It was through one of the Sun-Beings uniting himself with the Moon that these two streams from the Sun and Moon work in the right way. The Beings standing at the stage of the Gods separated with the Sun; that one of these Beings separated himself from the rest and made the present Moon his dwelling place. This Spirit who is united with the Moon is known as Jehovah, the God of Form or the Moon-Deity. This God Jehovah or Jahve so moulded the three bodies of man that they became capable of receiving the drop of the ego. Jehovah formed the human body in his image, “in the Image of God created He him:” (Genesis 1:27.)

The occult schools of all ages have possessed this knowledge of evolution. In the Christian occult school of Dionysius the Areopagite the pupil received this teaching in approximately the following way. His teacher said to him: observe various kingdoms of nature. You see the stones. They are dumb; they manifest neither joy nor sorrow. Observe the plants. They, too, are dumb, they express neither pleasure or pain. The animals have raised themselves above this stage; they are not dumb. If with spiritually sharpened gaze you were to follow their development; you would see that in the sounds uttered by the animals of the far distant past the same is expressed as sounds through the cosmos. The further you ascend in the kingdoms of nature and approach Man the more you will find that sound becomes the expression of individual pain and individual pleasure. To man alone is it given to express in sound that which proceeds, from his individual spirit. The animal bellows forth that which goes on in nature; but sound became word when Jahve had so moulded the human bodies that the spiritual Beings of the Sun could sink into them. When sound becomes word, the Spirit enters into the astral body. Sense and meaning penetrated into sound when the higher Sun-Powers pressed into the forms created by Jehovah. The actual spiritual beginning of man was when the first word rang out in him.

We have now arrived at the point touched upon by the Evangelist John in the first verse of his Gospel: “In the very beginning was the Word.” The highest Spirit united with the Sun, He who sent the Egos to the Earth, is called in the occult teaching: “Christ.” But the Egos, as parts of the Sun-Logos, only streamed gradually into the forms. The “Light” streamed forth from the Sun-Logos, but few received it in those old times; those, however, who received it became different from their fellow-men. They were called children of God or Sons of God (St. John, 1:13). They possessed four principles, physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, although the fourth, the youngest principle, was still weak and dim. The “light,” however, is to come to all men, but for this time is needed. This is indicated in verses eight to fourteen. But there were a few men who had already received the light to a high degree so that they knew about it and could bear witness to it, and these taught others. Those who bore witness to the “light” from their own experience, those who were able to point out that One was coming Who for the first time would offer the light to all, were in the occult teaching called “John” (Chapter 1:6-7). The writer to one of these “Johns.” In verse eighteen we read: “No man has ever seen God.” That is to say, no one before “Johns,” for He only became personified in Christ Jesus. The Event of Golgotha is the greatest Event in the evolution of Man and the Cosmos.

At the outset of our studies to-day we must deal with a word that in Spiritual Science is very important. In Christian occult science the Old Moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom and the Earth the Cosmos of Love. By “Moon” we here mean the Moon Period of the Earth. The reason why the Old Moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom is because all that was then developed was filled with wisdom. When the Earth Period succeeded the Moon Period the Cosmos of Wisdom was replaced by the Cosmos of Love. When the Earth came forth from the darkness of Pralaya, the rudiments of the human being which had been developed in former periods reappeared—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. On the Old Moon Wisdom had been implanted in these bodies and their mutual relationships; we therefore find wisdom in the constitution of these three bodies. We find the greatest wisdom in the construction of the physical body, less in that of the etheric body, and still less in that of the astral body. If we thoughtfully observe the human body we discover this wisdom in each organ, in each part. For instance, if we study the upper portion of the human thighbone we find in it a network of cells beautifully constructed with a view to their purpose. No engineer of the present day would be able to produce these two columns, which bear the upper part of the human body with the smallest expenditure of matter and force. Wisdom was implanted in the human body as long as the divine Spirits worked upon it. As a rule the physical body is looked upon as the lowest part of man, unjustly so, for the very greatest wisdom can be seen just in the physical body. Only through this wisdom is it possible for the physical body to withstand the attacks continually made upon it by the astral body, and so not break up before the time. The pleasures and desires which hold sway in the physical body when tea and coffee and so on are taken, all these are attacks of the astral body on the physical body, and especially on the heart. It has therefore to be so wisely constructed that these attacks can be withstood for decades. Of course the suitable form of the heart could only be discovered by subjecting it to many transformations.

Wisdom lies at the foundation of the construction of the world, and it is for this reason that our intellect can now seek and find it there. But wisdom did not come suddenly into the world, it was only poured in slowly and gradually; and in the same way love will also permeate the Earth very gradually. The purpose of the evolution of our Earth is to be permeated with love. Love has only begun to permeate the Earth to the smallest extent, but it will spread more and more, and at the end of the Earth Period everything will be saturated with love, just as it was saturated with wisdom at the end of the Moon Period.

When the Moon separated from the Earth the force of love was only contained in it seminally. First of all only those who were related to one another by blood loved one another. This state of things lasted for a long time; then the sphere of the activity of love gradually widened. For the perception and exercise of love a certain independence is necessary.

From the beginning of human evolution two forces have always been active: one that draws together and one that separates (Sun and Moon forces). Under the influence of these two forces man was so far developed that his three bodies, together with the bearer of the ego, inclined towards the Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. But a final union could not have come about without the addition of a new cosmic force. This force, which exercised a specially strong influence after the separation of the Moon, came from another planet, which entered into a remarkable relationship with the Earth. This planet, Mars, made a sort of passage through the body of the Earth when the latter began its evolution. Until then iron had been lacking in the Earth, and through its appearance on the Earth the course of evolution was changed at one stroke. It was the planet Mars which brought iron to the Earth, and from that time it was possible for Man to develop warm blood containing iron. Through Mars the astral also received a new principle, the sentient soul, the courageous soul. When Mars entered, the aggressive element developed in the soul. We have now to distinguish in men the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the sentient soul. Red, warm blood was the result of the activity of the sentient soul on the physical body; then the fertilising Ego could gradually be membered into the human being.

“Blood is a very special fluid.” The God of Form, Jehovah, now played a specially important role. He took possession of the newly developed organ, the blood, permeated it with His forces, transformed the aggressive qualities of the courageous soul into the forces of love and made the blood into the physical vehicle of the Ego.

In the beginning each human individual did not possess his own Ego. The same Jehovah-force, the Ego-force, the same Ego worked in all who were related by blood, who preserved the same blood through endogamy (near marriage). A small group of this kind had a common Ego. The individual was related to the whole family as a finger is related to the whole body. In the beginning there were group-souls; the individual felt himself to be part of the family or tribe; and the same Ego lived on through several generations, it was not confined to those who were living at the same time; the common Ego was felt as long as the blood remained unmixed, as long as those who belonged to the same tribe intermarried. Therefore the Ego was not felt as something personal, but as something common to all the members of the tribe. Just as a man now remembers what he has experienced from the time of his birth, the men of that time remembered what the ancestors of the same tribe had done as vividly as if they themselves had experienced it: The grandchild and great-grandchild felt within them the some Ego that had lived in the grandfather and great-grandfather. When we know this we shall understand the secret of the great age of the patriarchs. For example, “Adam” was not the name of a single individual but of the common Ego which flowed through many generations. We have just said that Jehovah made the blood, into the physical vehicle of the Ego. He did this by taking in hand the development of the blood. He expressed His force in the kind of breathing; man became the Jehovah-man through Jehovah giving him the breath. The fact that the man who was supplied with the necessary preliminary conditions had the living breath breathed into him must be taken quite literally. “Jehovah breathed breath into man and he became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). But this inbreathing of the soul did not take place suddenly, it was a process which lasted for thousands of years. Man thus became a breather of air.

On the Old Moon there was something else in place of the breathing of air. Whereas the man of the present day breathes air in and out and thereby has a source of warmth within himself, his ancestors on the Old Moon consisting of physical, etheric and astral bodies; breathed the substance of warmth or fire in and out. Man's predecessors on the old Moon were fire-breathers. Occult Science looks upon all matter only as the expression of spirit. We breathe in and out not air alone, we breathe in the Spirit it contains. Air is the body of Jehovah just as flesh is the body of man. The remembrance of this is expressed in the German legend of Wotan who rides in the Wind. What was breathed in and out on the Old Moon was also spirit.

Upon the Old Moon there were the same spiritual Beings as live upon the Earth; there they lived in fire, but upon the Earth they have become spirits of air. In cosmic evolution Beings remain behind in their development, just as some pupils are backward at school. The Beings who made the Sun their dwelling-place had developed more rapidly and made the transition from fire-spirits to air-spirits; but a great host of beings had not made this transition. The former now worked upon man as spiritual forces from outside, from Sun and Moon. Man takes them into himself through his breath. Between Man and these highly developed Sun-Spirits there are the spiritual Beings, who, it is true, developed very much further than man upon the Moon, but not as fast as the Sun-Spirits and Jehovah. They were unable as yet to influence man through his breathing, nevertheless they endeavoured to influence him. They were the Fire-Spirits who had not completed their task. They worked in the element of warmth and this existed in man his blood. They lived in this warmth.

Thus in the course of his evolution man was placed between the Air-spirits, who live in his breathing (the highest Spirits who permeate him with Spirit), and the fire-spirits who live in the warmth of his blood. They act in his blood as the opponents of the God Jehovah. Jehovah sought to hold men together by love in small groups, He desired to fill them with the feeling of belonging together. But if love had only existed in this form men would never have become independent beings; they would have had to develop love involuntarily. The Fire-spirits directed their attacks against this, with the result that man gained his personal freedom. The small groups of people were broken up. Jehovah's only interest was to lead people together in love, He worked in the blood as the God of blood-love. The action of the Fire-spirits was different; it was they who brought art and science to men. These Spirits are also called Luciferic Spirits. The further course of the evolution of humanity proceeded under the influence of Lucifer, who brings freedom and wisdom to man. Under the guidance of the God Jehovah men were to be led together through the principle of blood-brotherhood. The fact that man has become a free citizen of the Earth,—this he owes to Lucifer. Jehovah placed men in the Paradise of Love; then there appeared the Fire-spirit, the Serpent, in the form which man once possessed when he still breathed fire, and opened men's eyes to what still remained from the Old Moon. This Luciferic influence was perceived as a temptation. But those who were instructed in the occult schools did not look upon this enlightenment, as wrong; the great Initiates have not cast the Serpent down but, like Moses in the wilderness, they have raised it. (Numbers 21:8-9).

That which was revealed in humanity was manifested for a long period through Jehovah as blood-love. Beside this worked the Spirit of Wisdom, a principle which has to prepare something different. Love gradually spread from smaller to larger groups of human beings, from families to tribes and peoples. A characteristic example of this is the Hebrew people, which felt itself as a group which belonged together and called all others “Galileans,” i.e. those who did not belong to the blood. But humanity was to receive not only blood-love but spiritual love, which will embrace the whole earth with a bond of brotherhood. The period during which humanity was held together by the love which existed between relations is only to be looked upon as a period of preparation for what was to come later. The action of Lucifer, too, which consisted in splitting apart the bonds which confined human beings, is only the preparation for the activity of a higher Being who was to come. This higher Being was called in the Christian occult schools the true Light-bearer, the true Lucifer, the Christ.

Let us now go back to the period when the Atlantean humanity lived on the Earth. The Earth had quite a different appearance then. Between Europe and America, where now the Atlantic Ocean rolls, there was land, a part of the Earth which now lies at the bottom of the ocean. Modern science is gradually arriving at the knowledge that a continent once existed where the Atlantic Ocean now lies. In Haeckel's magazine, '“Cosmos,” there is an interesting article on “Atlantis.” Atlantis was inhabited by people who were quite different from those of the present day. The relationship between the etheric and physical bodies was then quite different from what it is now. The clairvoyant sees two-points in the human head, one in the etheric brain, the other in the physical brain, between the eyes, about half an inch below the surface. In the man of the present day these two points coincide, but in the Atlantean this was different; the etheric brain projected some distance beyond the physical brain and the two points did not coincide. It may also happen in exceptional cases in people of the present time that these two points do not coincide and the consequence is—idiocy. It was only in the last third of the Atlantean Epoch that these two points came together, and only from that time did man learn to say “I” consciously to himself. Before that time the Atlanteans could not reckon, think logically or form a judgment; but they possessed a wonderful memory, which extended over generations, and they were dimly clairvoyant. They did not see the outlines of physical objects clearly, but they perceived psychic occurrences. When the Atlantean met an animal he perceived clairvoyantly the attitude of the creature towards him whether it was friendly or hostile. For instance, if he saw reddish-brown colour, he turned away for he knew that a hostile influence was approaching; but if he saw a reddish-violet colour he knew that something sympathetic to him was approaching. He also recognised the value of certain foods to him with the aid of this clairvoyance. The animals of the present day, which have preserved this dim clairvoyance, distinguish in a similar way between the plants in the meadows in respect of their value as food or their harmful nature. The kind of vision man now possesses in dreams is a decadent remnant of the clairvoyance of the old Atlanteans. Among the Atlanteans there was not such a clear separation between the consciousness of waking and sleeping as there is in the man of the present day. Their day-consciousness was less clear than ours; but their consciousness during sleep and in dreaming was clearer. During the early part of the Atlantean Epoch there were also times of complete unconsciousness, which were filled with mighty dream-pictures. In those very early times, too, the Atlanteans were unconscious of the act of reproduction. This took place in a state of complete unconsciousness. When the Atlantean awakened, he knew nothing about the act of reproduction; this process was only shown to him in pictorial images. We are reminded of this by the Greek legend which tells of two people who came to Greece and threw stones behind them, and out of these stones men developed. The act of reproduction was veiled in unconsciousness as long as marriages took place between those who were related by blood. It is due to the activity of the Luciferic Spirits, who opened the eyes of men, that men awakened to consciousness and that they recognized the act of reproduction consciously. Men learned to distinguish between good and evil. Because Men now knew about their love and no longer enquired about the blood-relationship they became independent. Then Jehovah was replaced by Christ, Who brought a higher love into the world and made man independent of the members of their tribe and blood-relationships. This universal love is only just beginning; but when the Earth has one day passed on its being to Jupiter, it will be entirely permeated by this spiritual love. It is to this universal love that Christ's statement refers: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children and brethren, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26). It is the Christ Who pours out this universal love more and more over the Earth. The evolution of the Earth is divided into two parts through the appearance of Christ Jesus,—the blood, which flowed on Golgotha signifies the replacement of the love of relations by spiritual love. This is the connection between Jehovah, Lucifer, and Christ.

“The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” If we thoroughly understand this passage we shall also understand that deeply significant event in the history of humanity which took place through the appearance of Christ on the Earth. In the earlier lectures of this course we have traced the evolution of humanity in broad outlines, and we have described the way in which the consciousness of the Ego developed in the distant past whole groups and generations of human beings had one Ego in common. From this we learned to understand the long age of the patriarchs. Gradually this feeling of the Ego became limited more and more to the single personalities. We also showed how two spiritual streams made themselves felt in this evolution: the one was the stream of blood-relationship, which endeavoured to hold men together by natural ties, and the other, the Luciferic, which made men independent and prepared them for the purely spiritual tie which was to come.

During the whole period of the Old Testament one understood by “Law” something which brings order into human society from without. After blood-relationship had lost its binding power, men had to be brought into a certain connection with one another by an outer thought-order. The law was perceived as something coming from outside, and this Law which was given from outside holds good until the “grace and truth,” or devotion and truth, which comes through Jesus Christ, has developed in us from within, the understanding for the true knowledge. Devotion and truth can only develop gradually. Christianity, which is to bring devotion and truth in place of the Law, is only at the beginning of its growth; the further the Earth progresses in its evolution the stronger will be the influence of Christianity on humanity. Humanity is to raise itself to a stage of social life at which each one is drawn, by an impulse arising within himself, to act towards his neighbor as one brother to another. Men could not however, raise themselves of their own power to this high stage of development, and it is the task of Christianity to help them to do this. Men will no longer need any outer law to force upon them this attitude when they have the inner impulse so to act that devotion and truth are the motives for their actions.

We do not mean to say by the above, that humanity no longer needs the Law, but that which we have described is an ideal, which should be striven for. Gradually men will come to where the harmony of the world will be brought about through their voluntary action, but for this goal to be reached the Power which in the Gospel is called Christ had to step in. In the occult schools it is said of one who, of his own inner power, is able to raise himself into this relationship to all his fellow-men, that “he bears Christ within him.” In order to understand what we are about to say, it will first of all be necessary to recapitulate once more the real constitution of man. Recall to mind the contents of the third lecture with the aid of the following sketch:

Through the work of the Ego upon the astral body the latter is transformed into Spirit Self. But this takes place step by step, through the sentient soul being developed first, then the intellectual soul, and finally the spiritual soul; then the Spirit Self pours into the purified and mature spiritual soul. In the same way the Ego works upon the etheric body, and the impulses which are most effective in this case are the influences of art, religion and occult training.

There were also occult schools in pre-Christian times, where pupils were trained, so that they were able to look into higher worlds; but this vision only existed among the true pupils in the most hidden occult schools, and even they only at the actual moment of initiation, when the etheric body was separated from the physical body . The raising of a human being, so that he might be able to see in the spiritual world, was called Initiation. In all initiations of pre-Christian times the one who was to be initiated had to be brought into a kind of sleeping state. This sleep of initiation was distinguished from ordinary sleep by the fact that in the latter the etheric body remains united with the physical body, whereas in the former the etheric body was for a short time separated from the physical body. During this time the Hierophant had to keep the body alive. Through the etheric body being separated, it was possible to lead it, together with the other parts, into the higher worlds, in order there to undergo experiences which could afterwards be imparted to the physical brain. That was the method of initiation in pre-Christian times.

Through the advent of Christ Jesus an entirely new kind of initiation came in. Imagine that a man has transformed the whole of his astral body into Spirit Self. This Spirit Self then impresses itself into the etheric body, as a seal impresses itself into sealing-wax, and gives it its imprint. The etheric body is thereby changed into Life Spirit. When this has come about completely, the Life Spirit then imprints itself in the physical body and makes it into Spirit Man. Now it was only through the appearance of Christ Jesus that it became possible to imprint the Life Spirit directly into the life body; and the experiences undergone in the higher worlds could henceforth be embodied in the physical brain without the necessity of a previous separation of the etheric body. Thus all the pre-Christian initiates had undergone the experiences of initiation outside the physical body; they had then descended again into the physical body and could from that time forward, out of their own experience, announce what had taken place in the spiritual world.

Buddha, Moses and others were initiates of this kind. In Jesus there had come to the Earth for the first time a Being who, while still remaining in the physical body, could see the life of the higher worlds. The teachings of Buddha, Moses, etc., were quite independent of the personality of their agent. Those who accept the teachings of Buddha or Moses are Buddhists or followers of Moses, for these founders of religion only passed on what they had experienced in the higher worlds. With Christ it is different. It is only through His personality that His teachings become Christianity, and in order to be a Christian it is not enough merely to follow the teachings of Christianity. Those alone are true Christians, who feel themselves united with the historical Christ. Certain sentences contained in Christian teaching, or something very similar to them, could also be found in that world before Christ appeared; but that is not the point. The essential thing is, that the Christian believes in Christ Jesus, that he considers Him to be the One Who, while walking in the flesh, represents the perfect man.

In ancient times the statement was often made; ‘The initiate is a divine man.’ The reason for this lay in the fact that during the ceremony of initiation the initiate was above in the spiritual world with the spiritual or divine Beings; He was then the divine man. But one could “see” in the physical body for the first time through Christ Jesus, the Deity,—but never before. Thus we have to take the words of John 1:18. quite literally: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” Formerly the Deity could only be perceived by one who had himself made the ascent. In Christ the Deity had for the first time come down visibly to the Earth. This is told us in St. John's Gospel, (Chapter 1:14): “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” It was also taught in the Dionysian School. Christ came to show men the way; they are to become His followers; they are to prepare to imprint what is in the etheric body into the physical body; that is to say, to develop within themselves the Christ principle.

The Gospel of St. John is a book of life. No one who has merely enquired into it with his intellect has understood this book; he alone who has experienced it really knows it. If a man meditates upon the first fourteen verses day after day for some time, he will discover the purpose of these words. They are really words which, when one meditates upon them, awaken in the human soul the capacity to see the various parts of the Gospel, such as the marriage at Cana in chapter two, the conversation with Nicodemus in chapter three, as one's own experiences in the great astral tableau. Through these exercises clairvoyance develops in the human being and he can then experience for himself the truth of what is written in St. John's Gospel. Hundreds have experienced this. The writer of St.John's Gospel was a great Seer who was initiated by Christ Himself.

The disciple “John” is never mentioned by name in this Gospel. We read of him as “the disciple whom the Lord loved,” for example in Chapter 19:26. This is a technical expression and signifies the one who was initiated by the Master Himself. “John” describes his own initiation in the story of the “raising of Lazarus.” (Chapter 11). It was only through the writer of St. John's Gospel being initiated by the Lord Himself that the most secret connections between Christ and the evolution of the world could be revealed. As we have already said, the old initiations lasted for three and a half days; hence the raising of Lazarus on the fourth day. It is also said of Lazarus that the Lord loved him (John 3:35-36.)

While the body of Lazarus lay as if dead in the grave, his etheric body was lifted out in order to undergo the initiation, and to receive the same force that is in Christ. Thus the one whom the Lord loved, the one to whom we owe St. John's Gospel, was raised, he was awakened. Not a line in St. John's Gospel, contradicts this fact; the process of initiation is represented in a veiled way.

Let us now consider another scene in this Gospel. In (John 19:25), we read: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother, and His mothers sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.” If we wish to understand this Gospel it is necessary to know who these three women are. We do not usually give two sisters the same name; neither was it the custom in former times. The passage we have quoted proves that, according to St. John's Gospel, the mother of Jesus was not called Mary. If we search through the whole of this Gospel we nowhere find it said that the mother of Jesus was called Mary. In the scene of the Marriage of Cana, for example, Chapter 2, we only read, “the mother of Jesus was there.” In these words something important is indicated, something we only understand when we know how the writer of this Gospel uses his words. What does the expression “the mother of Jesus” mean? We have seen that man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies. We must not consider the transition of the astral body to the Spirit Self so simply. The Ego transforms the astral body very slowly and gradually into sentient soul, intellectual soul and spiritual soul. The Ego goes on working and only when it has developed the spiritual soul is it able so to purify it that Spirit Self can arise in it.

The following diagram represents the constitution of man.

The Spirit Man will only be developed in the distant future, and Life Spirit is also only germinal in most people of the present day. The development of the Spirit Self has only just begun; it is closely united with the spiritual soul (somewhat like a sword in its sheath). The sentient soul is similarly united with the astral body. The human being thus consists of nine parts or principles; but as the Spirit Self and the spiritual soul, and the sentient soul and the astral body are so closely united, we often speak of seven parts. Spirit-Self is the same as the “Holy Spirit,” who according to esoteric Christianity, is the guiding Being in the astral world. According to the same teaching, Life Spirit is called the Word or the Son; and Spirit Man is the “Father Spirit” or the “Father.”

Those human beings who had brought the Spirit Self to birth within them, were called Children of God; in such men “the light shone into the Darkness and they received the light.” Outwardly they were, men of flesh and blood, but they bore a higher man within them; the Spirit Self had been born within them out of the spiritual soul. The “mother” of such a spiritualised man is not a bodily mother, she lies within him; she is the purified and spiritualised spiritual soul; she is the principle who gives birth to the higher man. This spiritual birth, a birth in the highest sense, is described in St. John's Gospel. The Spirit Self or the Holy Spirit pours into the most highly purified Spiritual Soul. This is referred to in the words, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.” (John 1:32).

As the Spiritual Soul is the principle in which the Spirit Self develops, this principle is called the “mother of Christ,” or, in the occult schools, the “Virgin Sophia.” Through the fertilisation of the Virgin Sophia the Christ could be born in Jesus of Nazareth. In the occult school of Dionysius, the Intellectual Soul was called “Mary,” and the Sentient Soul “Mary Magdalene.”

The Physical man is born of the union of two human beings; but the higher man can only be born of a Spiritual Soul which embraces a whole people. Among all the peoples of olden times the method of initiation was essentially the same. Each initiation had seven stages or degrees. Among the Persians, for example, they were called as follows:—I. The Raven. One at this stage had to bring information from the outer world into the temple. The Raven has always been called the spiritual messenger, for instance in the legend of the Ravens of Barbarossa, and also in the German legends of Odin and his two ravens. 2. The Occult. 3. The Warrior. In the occult school the warrior was allowed to go forth and announce the teachings. 4. The Lion. The Lion was one who was firmly grounded in himself; he not only had the word, but he possessed also the magical forces; he had stood the test which guaranteed that he would not misuse the powers entrusted to him. 5. The Persian; 6. The Sun Hero. 7. The Father.

Let us consider the title of the fifth degree,the “Persian”, a little more closely. In all the occult schools an initiate of the fifth degree was called by the name of the people to whom he belonged; for his consciousness had widened where it included the whole people. He felt all the sorrow of the people as his own; his consciousness had been purified and expanded to the consciousness of the whole people. Among the Jews the initiate at this stage was called an “Israelite.” Only when we grasp this fact do we understand the conversation between Christ and Nathanael (John 1:46-49). Nathanael was an initiate of the fifth degree. The words of Christ Jesus to Nathanael, that he had seen him under the fig tree, refer to a special process in initiation, namely, the reception of the Spiritual Soul.

The following considerations will help towards the understanding of the inner process of initiation. The individual “I”-consciousness of man is in the physical world; men walk the Earth with their Ego. But the egos of the animals are on the astral plane; each group of animals there possesses an ego-consciousness in common. There is, however, in the astral world, not only the ego of the animal, but also the ego of the body which man has in common with the animals, the ego of the human astral body. In the Lower Spirit World we find the ego of the plants and also the ego of the body man possesses in common with the plants, the ego of the etheric body. If we rise still higher, into the Higher Spirit World, we there find the ego of the minerals and the ego of that part which man has in common with the minerals—the ego of the physical body. Thus through our physical body we are connected with the Higher Spiritual World. We are here in the physical world with our individual Ego only. When, in the case of an initiate, the ego of the astral body is permeated by his Individual ego, the consequence is that he becomes conscious in the astral world; he can then perceive the beings around him there and become active in that-world. He then meets Beings who are incarnated in astral bodies; he also meets the group-souls of the animals, and the higher Beings who in Christianity are called angels. On being initiated still more deeply, the ego of the etheric body is also permeated by the individual ego. The consciousness of the human being then extends into the Lower Spiritual World. There he encounters the egos of the plants and the Spirit of the Planet. A still deeper initiation takes place when the individual ego permeates the ego of the physical body,—man then rises to personal consciousness in the higher Spiritual world. There he meets the egos of the minerals and still higher Spirits. Thus continued initiation raises a man to higher and higher worlds, in which he meets with higher and higher Beings.

When the individual Ego has gained full control over the three bodies, it has brought about inner harmony. Christ possessed this harmony to the fullest extent,—he appeared on the Earth in order that men might develop this power of inner harmony. In this Son of Man we see represented the full development of humanity, up to the highest spiritual stage. Formerly this inner harmony did not exist, outer laws worked in its place,—this inner harmony is the new impulse which humanity received through Christ. Man is to acquire the “Christ capacity,” that is to say, he is to develop the inner Christ. Goethe said: “The eye is built by light for light;” in the same way this inner harmony, this inner Christ is only kindled through the presence of the outer, historical Christ; before His appearance it was not possible for man to reach this stage of spiritual development.

Those human beings who lived before the appearance of Christ on Earth are not excluded from the blessings He brought to humanity; for it should not be forgotten that, according to the law of reincarnation, they will come again to the earth and will therefore have the opportunity to develop the inner Christ. It is only when people forget the law of reincarnation that they can speak of injustice. St. John's Gospel shows the way to the historical Christ, to that Sun which enkindles the inner light in man, just as the physical Sun has enkindled the light of the eyes.

The ego of the etheric body may be compared to the engineer who builds a motor-car; the ego of the astral body may be compared to the one who drives it; and the ego of the individual to the one who owns it.

One of the most significant mysteries in all occult schools, including that of Dionysius, is the Mystery of Number. None save those who can decipher the secret of Number can read an occult writing. There is always deep meaning behind it, wherever in religious documents numbers are mentioned. In the School of Pythagoras, also the Mystery of Number played an important part. Although it is true that the letter killeth, one must, nevertheless in explaining occult writings, attach a certain value to the letter, otherwise there is danger of explaining into the writing the spirit one wants to have in it. In St. John's Gospel we find various numbers which have a secret significance. In our last lecture we spoke of the three women who stood by the cross; the virgin mother Sophia, Mary, and Mary Magdalene. We will now consider another secret of number.

In the course of His conversation with the woman of Samaria, Christ Jesus said to her: “Thou hast has five husbands; and he whom thou now has is not thy husband.” (John 4:18) And again, in the story of the healing of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, the five occurs: the pool of Bethesda had five porches. (John 5:2) We will now look somewhat more closely into the significance of this mystical number five. Let us consider the human being in connection with the evolution of humanity. As we saw in yesterday's lecture, man consists of nine parts, which may, from another point of view, be reduced to seven. These several principles of man gradually unfold in the course of the evolution of man. They are not all developed in the average man of the present day; he has only developed as far as to the Spiritual Soul. The Spirit Self is only just beginning to unfold. Let us go back to the period in human evolution when man learned to say “I” consciously to himself. Before that period there was the old Atlantean epoch, when men still possessed the old dim clairvoyant forces. In the parts of Atlantis corresponding to present-day Ireland there lived a people which had so progressed in evolution that the etheric head and the physical head coincided. This people was at that time the most advanced, and it was destined to become the bearer of the evolution of the future. A very advanced Being led this group towards the East, through present-day Russia to Central Asia, to the region of the present desert of Gobi. There a colony was founded, and from this centre colonists were sent forth in various directions who spread the culture fostered in this centre. This took place about the time when Atlantis was being gradually submerged; present-day Africa and Europe gradually emerged out of the waves.

Another group of Atlanteans travelled towards the West and formed the original population of present-day America, where they were found by the Europeans when America was rediscovered. Another group wandered to the north of Europe. All these groups preserved their clairvoyant remembrances in old sagas, myths and legends. When these sagas and myths are rightly understood they throw light upon much that is still dark in the history of humanity. But we must not go to work pedantically in explaining these sagas and myths; we must know how clairvoyant experiences and the power of phantasy co-operated in a complicated manner to produce these old legends.

During the period when the Ego first shone out in the personality, man lived to a much higher degree in his environment than he did later. He perceived the outlines of the objects and beings around him less clearly than he did their inner qualities and their attitude towards him,—whether they were useful or harmful, friendly or hostile. The more the ego became enclosed within the human personality the more did the clairvoyant capacities diminish while the forms in the outer world, appeared more and more clearly before the physical eyes. If we picture this fact clearly, we can easily comprehend that the entrance of the Ego produced a mighty change. Previously man had not seen his own body; he now began to describe it as his Ego. Towards the end of the Atlantean Epoch Atlantis was a land of cloud, it was covered with dense volumes of mist. There were no alternating periods or rain and sunshine, and there was no phenomenon such as the rainbow; this could only appear after the Atlantean Epoch, when the masses of mist dispersed. This event has remained alive in the folk consciousness as the legend of Wotan, who journeys over the bridge with his he-goats, and in the story of Noah and the Ark.

The memory of the land of mist has been preserved in the northern name, Niffelheim, Nobelheim—home of cloud. And the northern peoples have also preserved the memory of the coming of the Ego into the human personality in the Saga of the Niebelungen. In that saga the Ego is represented by the symbol of gold. The gold was once dissolved in the water; then it condensed into the ring, the treasure of the Nibelungen. The Ego, which had hitherto been distributed over the whole world, condensed into the firm human form. In Wagner's version of this legend we can see very clearly the unconscious perception of the creative artist. Wagner was not fully conscious of what he created in his work, an unconscious knowledge guided him. For example, Wagner may have characterised the Ego awakened to consciousness, by the organ notes which sound throughout the whole overture of the opera, “Rheingold.”

Over in the Far East the first post-Atlantean civilisation arose, a civilisation to which the ancient Vedas still bear witness. The first impulse for this civilisation was given towards the south in the old Indian Civilisation. The reports of this fact are preserved in the old Indian legends and in the religious records, and they can be read by one who is clairvoyant. Many statements that are apparently contradictory prove to contain the deepest truth. The men of this civilisation had preserved clear remembrances of the former old clairvoyance, and they still longed for it, for they looked upon it as a valuable possession which they had lost. They were still so filled with the reality of the spiritual world that they looked upon the physical as maya, illusion. Hence they sought to regain this lost treasure by turning away their gaze from all that is earthly and continually directing it to the spiritual. This is the origin of the Yoga exercises, which seek to lead the pupil into the spiritual world by diminishing the consciousness. They desired to return to the old dreamy state; they sought the path which would lead them back into the Paradise they had lost.

Throughout the whole of the Atlantean Epoch man had only perceived the outer world in dim, unclear outlines; the Atlantean lived chiefly in the spiritual world. To the spiritual investigator the whole of the post-Atlantean Epoch signifies but a gradual conquest of the physical plane. The men of the first post-Atlantean civilisation, the Indian had little feeling for what was outside in physical nature; for the Initiates it was an absolute illusion, and they strove to get away from it and reach the only reality, the spiritual world.

The second was the old Persian civilisation. The Persian was already closer to the outer world than was thg Indian. He learned to distinguish especially between good and evil, represented by the Gods Ormuzd and Ahriman; he strove to unite himself with the former in order to combat the latter. The Earth was for him a place for work, in order to embody the Spirit in physical existence.

The third age of civilisation was the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian, and here, again, man made a further step forward in the conquest of the physical plane. To the Persians the world was physically an undifferentiated field for work; in the Egyptian civilisation man began to apply his knowledge and make it useful. He applied his knowledge of Geometry and divided the land; he directed his gaze to the stars, and laid the foundations of Astronomy.

The fourth was the Graeco-Latin age of civilisation. Hitherto man had occupied himself in applying his science to the things of the outer world; he now began to embody his own inner being, his specifically human nature, in matter. His own form reappeared in his works of art, and in his epics and dramas he described his own psychic qualities. The Romans developed the idea of citizenship, and so the State and Jurisprudence arose.

In the fifth age of civilisation, in which we are now living, man has gone still further in the mastery of the outer world. In our age the Spirit has descended most deeply into matter. This descent had to come if humanity was to progress; only when the Spirit has descended fully into matter can its reascent begin. In our age we have a great development of science, and with its aid we can control the various forces of nature. In ancient times, when men ground their corn in a most primitive way between two stones, they did not need to expend much mental power to satisfy their simple needs, but things are quite different now. Think of the immense expenditure of mental effort necessary to satisfy the material needs of the modern man. We have locomotives, steamships, telephones, electric light. An immense amount of mental power has been embodied in matter in these things, but the spiritual interests of men here pass entirely into the background. Thus we see that the whole development of humanity in the post-Atlantean Epoch has signified a descent of the human spirit into matter. But the purpose of this descent is the conquest of matter, this great opponent of the Spirit; for after the deepest descent, an ascent to conscious, spiritual life must now begin.

The course of human history in the post-Atlantean Epoch may be represented by the curved line in the following diagram.

It is the power of Christianity which is to bring about the ascent. The Star of Christianity appeared in the fourth age of civilization, long before the deepest point in the descending curve had been reached. Christ Jesus appeared as the great Personality Who brought to humanity the power which would enable it later to rise to the Spirit. All the former ages of civilisation can also be looked upon as a preparation for Christianity. In the fifth age of civilisation Christianity has to withstand the severest testing, for materialistic thought darkens and hides the spiritual truths of Christianity. In the sixth age Christianity will unite humanity into a great bond of brotherhood, and Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy must be looked upon an the messenger of this coming age, for it is preparing the way for the spiritualising of humanity. The teachings given to mankind in Christianity are so profound, so full of wisdom, that no religion of the future will be able to displace or supplant Christianity. It will be possible for Christianity to adapt itself to all the forms of civilisation in the future.

We must now study another side of the evolution of humanity. The physical body underwent a special development in the Atlantean Epoch, and when Atlantis was submerged beneath the waves man possessed approximately the same form he now has. Then began the development of the more spiritual principles. In the Indian Age the etheric body was especially developed. In that first age of civilisation the Indians were very receptive to the spiritual life, and this was connected with a special development of the etheric body.

We may remark that our present European civilisation is very different from the present Indian and also from the old Indian, and so it is comprehensible that the paths to be followed by the Indian and the European to the spiritual life must be different. The Yoga exercises that are suited to the Indian and helpful to him are unsuitable for the European. The methods of initiation arranged by the Masters are carefully adapted to the stage of development reached by humanity at a particular time, for a method which is excellent at a certain stage, may be positively harmful at another stage. It is not without reason that various religions have appeared in the course of time; although there is a kernel of truth that is common to them all, the various expressions of this truth are conditioned by the differences in the several ages of civilisation. A tree is, from root to flower, a complete whole, and yet the root requires a different food from that needed by the leaves and flowers; so also the humanity of the various ages of civilisation requires a different religion and method of initiation.

In the Persian civilisation the astral body was specially developed. In the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian civilisation the Sentient Soul was developed; in the Graeco-Latin civilisation the Intellectual Soul, and in our own age the Spiritual Soul. In the sixth age the Spirit Self, as yet is only in a germinal condition, will be developed. It needs the mighty power of the Christ Spirit to enable this germ to develop, and true Christianity will only be there when the Spirit Self has been developed. Then humanity prepares itself to receive the Life Spirit. At first but a number of human beings will unfold this force within them; they will, however achieve a wonderful spiritual life. Christianity is now only at the beginning of its development; those who are now preparing to develop the Spirit Self within them will in the next age make this deeper and more spiritual Christianity more and more accessible to humanity.

We see how in the third age, a relatively small body of people, the Hebrews, prepared the conditions which made the appearance of Christ possible; how in the fourth age the power of Christ penetrated into the physical; how in the fifth age humanity sank most deeply into the physical world; now, after humanity has gained the mastery over this physical world, it will gain a still greater power and capacity in the sixth age to receive into itself the spiritual life which the Christ Spirit has brought. Christ appears as the firstborn, the man who is far ahead of his time, who has already reached the stage which the rest of humanity will only reach in the sixth age. The fifth is the most material age in the evolution of humanity.

The Spiritual feelings form the basis of the conditions of the body, and a constitutional disease is the expression of some spiritual aberration. Leprosy, the terrible disease of the Middle Ages, was an expression in the physical of the fear of the Huns which possessed the people of Europe at that time. The Huns were decadent descendants of the Atlanteans. Their physical bodies were still healthy, but their astral bodies were already infected with the substances of decay. Fear and terror form an excellent fostering soil for the decaying substances of the astral plane, hence these decaying substances living in the degenerated descendants of the Atlantean peoples could take root in the astral bodies of the European peoples and from thence they produced leprosy in the physical bodies of later generations.

Everything appears first of all in a spiritual way, and then it expresses itself later in the physical body. The nervousness of the people of the present day is the result of the materialistic frame of mind in our age. The wise Leaders of humanity know that if the high tide of materialism were to continue, great epidemics of nervous diseases would break out, and children would be born with quivering limbs. The Anthroposophical Movement was brought into the world to rescue humanity from the dangers of materialism. One who spreads materialistic thought and feeling among the people is preparing the way for these devastating diseases; and one who combats materialism is fighting for the health of the people
and its power to develop further. The individual can do but little towards his own health, for he is part of the whole body of humanity and draws the substances for his maintenance from the source that is common to all men: One who sees into the laws of human evolution must observe with a bleeding heart how the individual suffers, and how his suffering is but the expression of the spiritual and mental aberration of the whole of humanity. It is the task of Anthroposophy not so much to help the individual but, rather, to give to the whole of humanity the upward swing into the spiritual, and thereby to work for the bodily health of humanity.

In the sixth and seventh ages of civilisation the Spirit Self and the Life Spirit will develop through the power of Christ in those who rely upon Him, and at the same time these will gain healthy thought and feeling. Christianity brings health and healing, for the life force of Christ conquers all disease and death. The human body as a solid body has developed out of liquid substances. The five porches or halls which surround the pool of Bethesda signify the five ages which man has used to penetrate more and more deeply into the body, and in the end he has succumbed entirely to matter. Only after he has passed through these five ages can man be healed. One who has entered into these five halls cannot be healed unless the great Healer, the Christ, approaches him; but when this happens, there takes place what is described in the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel. Thus the story of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years is a prophetic announcement of what will take place in the sixth age, when man will no longer need any remedies, because he will be his own healer.

At the beginning of the Post-Atlantean Epoch the power of blood relationship was still very strong. When Christ said: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,”—these words refer to a stage of human evolution that will be reached in the sixth age. One common Spirit of humanity well then rule, in place of the nation and race spirits. Man will then no longer be the son of his tribe or nation, but the son of humanity, the “son of Man.” Here, again, Christ was the first to bear this name with right (John 3:13-14). He conducted Himself already at that time as men will conduct themselves when they are sons of Man.

This is expressed by Christ going to the Samaritan woman, to one who had nothing to do with the Jews. The element in man which makes his development possible is feminine (passive), as compared with the Spirit, which represents the fertilising, the male (active) principle. The result of this continuous activity of the male element upon the feminine principle is first of all the unfolding of the etheric body, then the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul. The Spirit Self then develops in the spiritual soul. This is indicated in Christ's conversation with the Samaritan woman in the words: “Thou has had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.” (John 4:18.) The five husbands which the woman has had, are the five higher principles, which work upon the physical, and the sixth, the Spirit Self is no longer the husband in the old sense. The other five are lower passing stages of evolution, whereas the sixth, the Spirit Self, represents the Divine and Eternal. Thus, in His conversation with the Samaritan woman, we also see an announcement of the coming age by Christ Jesus.

While the five principles need to be purified from outside, the Spirit Self will keep man himself pure. The body of Christ is already filled with purity. He will also purify humanity; for this reason He approaches and purifies the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of man, from the lower principles attaching to him, and makes him capable of receiving the Spirit.

The explanations here given must not give rise to the idea that the descriptions in St. John's Gospel are to be looked upon as symbols only. In ancient times names were not given arbitrarily, they were strictly adapted to the person's character. It is true that the three women who stood by the cross of Jesus represented the three souls, the sentient soul the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul; but it is also true that these three persons stood there in the body at the foot of the cross. When we read St. John's. Gospel we look at the symbolical pictures of what will be realised on this Earth in the next age of civilisation; but we also see what actually took place at the beginning of our era. All the historical facts are presented by the wise powers that are guiding humanity as symbols of the future evolution of humanity.