The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.

In these lectures, some of the occult signs and symbols will be discussed in such a way that the meaning and significance of such symbols and signs will be revealed not only to the mind but also to the senses and the soul.

You all know that in occultism, in Theosophy, the most diverse symbols and signs are used, and you also know that sometimes a great deal of ingenuity and speculation is applied to interpreting such signs and symbols. These lectures will now show us that much of this acumen and speculation is misplaced, and that speculation and acumen are not at all the abilities by which one can come close to the real meaning of occult signs and symbols. For the occultist, signs and symbols are by no means limited to what is listed as such in the usual manuals and writings. Rather, we find occult signs and symbols most frequently where we might least expect them: In myths and tales rooted in the people, deep occult truths are hidden. The mistake usually made in the interpretation of such myths and legends is simply that too much ingenuity, too much speculation is applied; one might almost say that too much is sought in a rational, too much reason is sought in a deep sense. Of course, a series of four lectures cannot exhaust this subject, but only treat it aphoristically. Nevertheless, what we discuss should be presented in such a way that we can form a conception of the relationship between the occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds, namely, what is called the astral world and the devachanic or spiritual world.

You know that even in ordinary language, when we want to imply something higher, we often use certain figurative similes. For example, if we want to use an image for knowledge or for insight, we say “light” or also “light of knowledge”. Behind these simple expressions of our language there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound. Those who use such expressions are often not even aware of the origin and therefore often have no idea how, for example, the image of light relates to knowledge or insight. They take it as a figure of speech, just as poets use figures of speech today. We would be quite wrong if we thought of occultism only in terms of such a figurative meaning. Things are much, much deeper. What in modern language is called symbolic, what is called pictorial, and what is also called an allegory, is as a rule misleading. It is easy to think that a sign has been arbitrarily chosen for something. In occultism, no sign is ever chosen arbitrarily. When a sign is used in occultism for a thing, there is always a deeper connection.

However, we will not be able to truly understand this connection between occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds if we do not delve a little into how man, from the point of view of occultism, relates to his environment. When occultism, or that elementary part of occultism that is proclaimed today as Theosophy, will one day fulfill its mission in the world in a deeper sense - with that only a beginning has been made - when it will one day come to the various branches of our life and culture are permeated by the truths and impulses of occultism, then the whole emotional and intuitive life of man, his whole relationship to the world around him, will change fundamentally. If we want to describe how today's human being relates to the environment, we have to say: for a number of centuries, the human being has increasingly developed a relationship to the environment that is very abstract, very intellectual, very materialistic. A person walking through the fields today, whether in spring, summer or fall, usually sees what meets the eye, what the senses can perceive, what the mind can combine from the sensory perceptions. If a person is aesthetically inclined and has a poetic sensibility, they imbue their perceptions with feelings and emotions, feeling sadness and pain at one natural phenomenon and elation, joy, and delight at another.

But even where, in the case of modern man, dry, sober sensual perception gives way to poetic and artistic feeling, it is actually only a beginning of what must be given through occultism, not to reason, not to the mind, not to the heads, but to the souls and the hearts. Only then will Theosophy become a significant factor in life, when it gives us not just a mental summary of all kinds of events in the physical, astral and devachanic planes, but when it becomes so ingrained in our souls that our souls feel, sense and learn differently. We must realize that through Theosophy and Occultism there will really come to pass more and more what we emphasized in our lecture yesterday: Humanity will learn to see in what is expressed in the outer world, as it presents itself to the senses, the physiognomy, the gestures, the facial expressions, through which what is soulful and spiritual is revealed behind things. We will learn to see an expression of the spiritual and soul-life in what is going on outside in the surrounding world, in the movements of the stars, just as we see an expression of something soul-like in the hand movements or in the gaze of a person. And so we will learn, for example, to see in the brightening air an external manifestation of internal processes of spiritual beings that truly permeate the air, the water and the earth.

Let us try to imagine how nature appears around us when we elevate ourselves to a concept of the soul and spirit that lives around us. Once we have opened ourselves up to this, we have to ask ourselves: What about the souls of the creatures living around us on the physical plane, the souls of animals, plants and minerals? What is in these three kingdoms of nature, besides what is physically presented to our senses? If we consider the animal kingdom, it differs quite substantially from the human being in spiritual and mental terms. What we have in the individual human being, enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, we do not have in the same way in the individual animal. The individual animal can rather be compared to an individual limb of a human being. We can compare all formally identical animals, so for that matter all lions, all tigers, all pikes, all flies and so on, everything in the animal kingdom that has the same form, with a limb of the human being, for example with the fingers of the hand. If we take the ten fingers of the human being, we will not be tempted to ascribe a soul to each of the ten fingers that would be endowed with ego. We know that all ten fingers belong to a single human being. We ascribe the I-soul to the individual human being. Just as we ascribe the I-soul to a single human being, we ascribe an I-soul to an entire species of animal; whether you call it the same group or species soul is not important. What is important is that we think of things as flowing into each other, fluctuating. Thus, in the case of a group of animals of the same form, we must assume that the same thing underlies them as underlies the individual human being: the I-soul. However, we must not look for this soul of the animal groups where we look for the I-soul of the human being. The place where this I-soul of the human being is between birth and death is the physical plane. This is not to say that this I-soul, by its nature and essence, belongs only to the physical plane, but the human I-soul lives on the physical plane. This is not the case with the group I-ness of animals. For these group Iches of animals, to which the individual animals belong that are of the same nature, it does not depend on the place where the individual animals are; whether a lion is in Africa or here in a menagerie, it makes no difference. The individual animals all belong to the same group I, and the group I is on the astral plane. So if we want to find the ego of a group of similarly shaped animals, we have to go clairvoyantly to the astral plane; and on the astral plane, the group ego of the animals in question is as complete a personality as a human being is on the physical plane. If a man puts out his ten fingers, and you put up a wall here, and the man puts his ten fingers through the ten holes in the wall, then someone standing outside the wall sees only the ten fingers; if he wants to find the ego behind the ten fingers, he must go behind the wall. So you must imagine that we have to see the individual lion as part of the group ego of all lions. If you go to the astral plane, you will find there a lion-genus individuality or personality of all lions, just as you find the individuality for the ten fingers of the human being behind the wall. The same applies to the other similarly formed animal species. And when you “walk” on the astral plane, you will find the astral plane populated by these animal group-I's, which you will encounter there just as you would encounter individual people here on the physical plane. The only difference is that these group-I's reach out for the separate animal individuals on the physical plane, just as you reach through the wall for the individual ten fingers.

But there is an enormous difference between the nature, the inner character of the group-I of the animals and that which is the character of the individual human being. This difference will seem very paradoxical to you, but it exists. There is a peculiar fact here: if you compare the intelligence and wisdom of the animal group-I on the astral plane with the intelligence and wisdom of humans here on the physical plane, you will find that the animal group-I are much cleverer. Everything they have to do is done with the greatest matter-of-factness. In the course of evolution, the human being must first bring his I to that wisdom which the animal group-Iche already have on the astral plane. These animal group-Iche lack one thing, however, which the human being here on the physical plane has to develop throughout the entire evolution on earth. This specific element is not to be found at all in the animal group-Iche. This is the element of love, everything that is love - from the simplest form of blood love between blood relatives to the highest ideal love of a universal brotherhood of man. This element is being developed by humanity within the evolution of the earth. The animal group-egos also have feelings, perceptions and volitional impulses. The mission of the human being here on earth is to develop love; this is lacking in the animals. The basic element of the group ego of animals is wisdom, just as the basic element of the human ego is love.

If we now want to find out how we ourselves are to perceive the revelations of these animal group-Iche within the surrounding nature, we only have to remember that everything around us here are revelations of spiritual events and spiritual beings. Those who are not endowed with clairvoyant abilities cannot, of course, take those “walks” on the astral plane whereby they encounter the population of animal group-Iche there as they encounter physical human Iche here on the earth. But even those who are not clairvoyant can perceive the effects, the deeds of what the group-Iche do here on the physical plane. He can observe how every year, when autumn approaches, the birds fly in the direction from northeast to southwest to the warmer regions, and how they fly back in very specific paths when summer approaches. If you compare the individual paths according to their height and direction for the individual bird species, you begin to suspect that there is wisdom, deep wisdom in all of this. Who is in charge of all this? The animal group egos are in charge. Everything that the various animal species accomplish here on our planet is an effect, an action of the animal group egos. And if you follow these actions of the animal group egos, you will find that, essentially, these animal group egos span the circumference of the earth, that they unfold as forces around the circumference of the earth. The earth is circled by forces of the most manifold kind, by forces that go around the earth in the most manifold convolutions, in straight and crooked and snake-like lines. Man can see these forces here only in their effects, in their revelations. When he grasps these revelations, he can divine what, with clairvoyant ability, leads him to the group Iches of the animals. Thus we can learn to empathize with the wisdom that takes place in our animal kingdom. What the genera and species do reveals something of the deeds of the animal group-I.

The situation is different for the plant world. For the plant world, too, the occult observer sees a series of I's, but there are far fewer I's for the plant world than for the animal world; they are more limited in number. Again, whole groups of plants belong to a common I, and these lie, when we visit them, in an even higher world. While the animal group I's are on the astral plane and live out their lives in the astral that flows around and envelops our Earth, the plant group I's are to be found in the lower regions of the Devachan plane, in what we are accustomed to calling in Theosophy the Rupa parts of the Devachan plane. There they live as closed personalities; just as people do here, the group-I-ities of plants walk there. Along with other beings that do not have a physical body at all, the plant-I-ities are there and form the population on the lower devachan plan.

How does a person find their way into the perception of these plant group-I-ities? The perception itself is ultimately tied to the development of clairvoyant abilities. But this development leads from lower levels upwards, ever higher and higher. What one must first develop in order to ascend to these abilities is feeling and sensation for the matter. Real, true clairvoyant abilities are always based first on the development of feelings and sensations, but not on trivial, egoistic feelings, no, on deeper and more devoted feelings. This is something completely different.

When you look at a plant, you must first of all focus your attention on the fact that the plant develops its roots into the soil, that it pushes its stem upwards, unfolds its leaves upwards, gradually transforming them into sepals and a corolla, in which the fruit then forms. It is important to realize that we cannot compare the plant to the human being in this way. We must not compare the human being to the plant in such a way that we compare the head of the human being to the corolla of the plant and his feet to the root. That is completely wrong. In occult schools, it has always been pointed out and said: You must compare the plant and the human being. But you have to compare them in such a way that you compare the head of man with the root of the plant. Just as the plant turns its root towards the center of the earth, so man turns his head into the universe; and just as the plant chaste turns its blossom and its fruit organs towards the sun, man shamefully turns his fruit organs straight down, where the plant turns its root. That is why occultism says: Man is the upturned plant. The plant appears like a human being standing on its head; the animal stands in between.

In what is usually called a plant, only the physical body and the etheric body of the plant are present. But the plant also has its astral body and its I. But where is the astral body, and where is the I of the plant? We can ask about this place, because it is only a general definition of the matter when one says that the group I of plants is on the lower Devachan plan. We can indicate quite precisely where the astral body of the plants and where the ego of the plants is. The astral body of the plants, and indeed the astral body of all plants that exist on our globe, is the same as the astral body of the earth itself, so that the plant is immersed in the astral body of the earth. In terms of location, the plant-I am in the center of the earth. From the occult point of view, we can understand the earth as a great organism, as a living being that has its astral body; and the individual plants that are on our earth are the limbs. Individually, separately, they only have the physical body and the etheric body. In the individual plant, the individual lily, the individual tulip and so on, there is no consciousness; the earth has its consciousness, its astral body and its I. But there are not only plant 'I's; there are also other spiritual entities. We must not ask whether there is room for all of them. They are interwoven, and they can get along very well there. So when you look at the individual plant, you can only ascribe to it the properties of a physical body and a life body, but not consciousness as an individual being. But plants do have a consciousness, and it is connected with the consciousness of the Earth, it is part of the consciousness of the Earth. Just as we human beings have a consciousness that encompasses joy and sadness, and these interpenetrate each other, so the individual astral bodies of plants permeate the astral body of the Earth, and the plant 'I's permeate the center of the Earth. The living plant occupies the same position in the organism of our earth as milk in the animal organism. Similar astral forces underlie the process by which the plant sprouts from the earth, greens and flowers, and by which the cow gives milk. When you pick a plant with its flower, it does not feel unpleasant for the earth. The earth has its astral body and has feelings there, and when you pick a plant, it feels the same as when a calf sucksleaks, it feels a kind of sense of well-being. When you remove what has grown out of the ground, the earth does not have the individual plant - a sense of well-being. If, on the other hand, you tear out the plant by the roots, it is for the earth as if you were tearing flesh from an animal; it has a kind of feeling of pain.

If we delve into this, not just in the abstract terms of group-I-ness, but in such a way that we transform the empty abstract concepts into feelings and sensations, then we learn to live with the processes of nature; our observation of nature becomes a living sensation. When we walk through the fields in autumn and see the man with the scythe mowing the grain, we get an inkling that, to the same extent as the scythe passes through the stalks and cuts them off, something like spiritual winds is breathing feelings of well-being over the field. And so it is. What the clairvoyant sees in the astral body of the earth is the spiritual source of what has just been described. For the one who sees into these things, the mowing of the grain is not an indifferent process. Just as one can feel and see in a person, through one experience or another, that astral forms of a very specific kind arise, so one can see these astral expressions of the earth's sense of well-being sweeping across the fields in autumn. It is different when the plow cuts furrows through the earth and reworks the roots of the plants. The plowing through with the plow causes pain to the earth; we see feelings of pain emerging. In response to what has just been said, one could easily object that it would be better under certain circumstances to remove plants from the earth by their roots and replant them than to walk across a meadow and tear up all kinds of flowers out of idleness. Such an objection may well be correct from a moral point of view, but here we have a completely different point of view. It could, of course, be better for a person who is just beginning to go gray to pluck out the first gray hairs if he finds this right for aesthetic reasons, but it still hurts him. It is a completely different point of view when we say: plucking the flowers does the earth good, and when we dig up the plant by the roots, it hurts the earth. Life enters the world through pain. The child that is born causes pain to the mother who gives birth to it. This is an example of how we must learn not only to recognize but also to empathize with nature in our environment.

This extends to the mineral kingdom. Minerals also have their I, only the I of minerals lies even higher; it lies in the upper parts of the Devachan plan, which theosophical literature is accustomed to call the Aupa-Devachan. These group 'I's of the minerals are also partially self-contained entities, just as the human 'I's are on the physical plane, as the group 'I's of the plants are on the lower devachan plane, and as the group 'I's of the animals are on the astral plane. On the physical plane, you have only a physical body of minerals, but the minerals also have an astral body and an etheric body. The seer sees the living connections; he knows that when he goes out to a quarry and sees the workers cutting stones there, something is felt there just as when you cut into the flesh of an organism. And while the workers are at work, astral currents flow through the stone realm. What belongs to the mineral as an astral body can be found in the lower parts of the Devachan plan, and the I of the minerals is to be found in the upper parts of the Devachan plan. The group I of the stones feels pain and pleasure. When you break stones, the mineral group I feels pleasure, pleasure. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it is true nonetheless. If you only think in analogies, you might believe that when you smash a stone, it hurts the stone just as much as if you were to wound a living being. But the more you smash the stone, the more pleasure the mineral ego feels. Now you may ask: When does the mineral ego feel pain? You can perceive pain for the mineral ego in the following example. Take a glass of water in which table salt has been dissolved. Now cool the water in the glass until the salt separates out as solid crystals, thereby re-solidifying the mineral substance. Pain arises in this separation of the solid. Similarly, pain would arise if you were to reassemble all the individual pieces into which you had broken a stone. In the group ego of the minerals, pleasure arises whenever the mineral dissolves, and pain arises whenever it solidifies. A feeling of well-being arises when you dissolve salt in heated water, and a feeling of pain arises when the cooling of the water causes the salt to crystallize.

If we imagine this in a larger, cosmic context, we can see how the formation of our earth and our minerals is connected to such a process. If we trace the formation of our Earth far back in time, we come to ever higher temperatures, to ever greater warmth of our Earth; and we encounter a state of our Earth in the Lemurian period when the individual stones had dissolved, when even the minerals that have now crystallized into solid form ran out, as iron runs out today in ironworks when it is liquefied. All our minerals have undergone a process similar to the one you are experiencing on a small scale when the dissolved salt is deposited in a glass when the water cools down. In this way, everything has solidified and contracted on earth. This solidification has taken place in such a way that solid crystals have gradually been embedded in the liquid earth through contraction. Only through this solidification could the earth become the dwelling place for today's physical humanity.

However, this solidification is to be understood in such a way that it reached a peak in a certain period of time. This peak has now been passed in a certain way, and today we can already see a process of dissolution to a greater or lesser extent. When the Earth has reached its goal, when people have purified and spiritualized themselves to the extent that they can no longer draw anything out of the Earth, then the Earth itself will also be spiritualized again. Then all its mineral inclusions will have become fine and ethereal, so that the Earth can pass into an astral state, which it also had before it became physical. The physical process of dissolution is a transitional state to this.

When we look at the earth at the time when it was preparing to become the solid place, the solid ground on which we walk at our present stage of development, we see an ongoing process of suffering for the earth. As it becomes more and more solid, it suffers and “groans in pain”. Our existence has been achieved through its pain. And we find an increase of this pain in the early part of the so-called Atlantean period. From the time when man gradually brought about his own purification, the earth also attained liberation from pain and suffering. This process is not yet far advanced. The greater part of the solid ground that lies under our feet still suffers today, and when we turn our clairvoyant gaze to it, the solid ground is a revelation of the sighs of the earth's being. Whoever studies these facts from the occult and then rediscovers them in the great religious scriptures, will realize from what depth of the spiritual world these scriptures are written. We develop more and more a feeling of reverence for these religious documents. Through our experience, we can thus empirically recognize, by looking at the facts of the outer world, what real foundations underlie St. Paul's saying: “All nature groans in pain, awaiting adoption as a child.” Translate this saying of St. Paul's for yourself: All becoming earth is a becoming under pain, a drawing together into the firm under pain, so that afterwards for their beings the “adoption as children,” the spiritualization, can take place.

In what is really called the Secret School we must begin with such images from our environment, which, when they are looked at, awaken feelings in us. One begins by imparting to the pupil who wishes to undergo a training such images and concepts that enable him to see what is happening in nature not only as an external process, but to feel it as an inner experience with his whole soul, to feel how the becoming of our earth, its solidification, is like pain. This image of pain represents a real spiritual fact. In true occultism, images are not something invented, but are derived from real spiritual facts. No philosophy, no speculation, not the greatest acumen can unravel such an image; only the knowledge of the facts of the higher worlds leads to understanding. In occultism, all images are expressions of spiritual facts.

I just wanted to give you a hint today of how what we acquire in elementary theosophy as ideas, concepts and notions gradually leads to experiences; and every image in occultism is taken only from experiences. If you take, for example, the well-known image of the swastika, you can find the most astute interpretations for this image in the various scriptures. How did it originally come into occultism? This image is nothing other than the reflection of what we call the astral sense organs. Through a certain approach, through training, the human being can develop astral sense organs. These two lines (it is being drawn) are actually movements in the astral body, which are seen by the clairvoyant as fiery wheels or flowers. They are called lotuses.

For these wheels or lotus flowers – of which, for example, the two-petalled one is located in the area of the eyes and the sixteen-petalled one in the area of the larynx – for these astral sense organs, which appear as a luminous phenomenon in the astral world, is the sign, the image, the swastika. Or let us take another symbol, the so-called pentagram. You cannot find the original meaning of the pentagram by speculation or philosophy. The pentagram is a reality; it is a picture of the working of currents, of force currents that are found in the etheric body of the human being. There is a certain flow of forces in a person from the left foot up to a certain point on the head, from there to the right foot, from there to the left hand, from there through the body, through the heart to the right hand, and from there back to the left foot, so that you can draw into the person – into his head, arms, hands, legs, feet – the pentagram.

You have to imagine it as a force effect, not just as a geometric figure. In the etheric body of the human being you have the pentagram. The force effects follow exactly these lines of the pentagram. The lines can take the most varied contortions, but they always remain drawn as a pentagram on the human body. The pentagram is an etheric reality, not a symbol, but a fact.

Thus every symbol in occultism is an image of a fact in the spiritual world. One recognizes its significance only when one can point to the world in which this fact is rooted. Therefore, even the greatest acumen cannot lead to the interpretation of occult signs. The meaning of occult signs and symbols can only be found through experience [of spiritual worlds], and only with the realization of their meaning can man do something with them. It is therefore by no means useless for man to be told and told something that was first found through clairvoyant ability. And from the fact that has been researched, man can in turn be led back to the causes of that fact itself.

The same applies to signs and symbols as to ancient legends and myths. It is a theory based on erudition that legends and myths were invented by folk poetry. The people do not make up stories. All legends and myths are remnants of a time when man was still clairvoyant to a certain extent. What we are told in European legends and myths are records of facts that people saw in the past. Everything in these legends, fairy tales and myths was originally seen clairvoyantly and is the retelling of original clairvoyant experiences. That is what mythology is all about: the retelling of clairvoyant experiences.

Even today we can follow all the events related in mythology on the astral plane. The deeds of Wotan or Odin are real happenings. We must seek realities behind the occult signs, symbols and seals. And the less one allows oneself to be tempted to undertake an interpretation of these signs out of speculation, the better it is.

This lecture series is intended to guide us into the factual sense of occultism. No sign is invented or conceived; it is a picture or reproduction of a real process in the spiritual world. And all the stories we encounter in mythologies are renditions of what people saw when a large proportion of people still had clairvoyant powers.

After yesterday's introduction, we want to move on to discussing some very characteristic signs and symbols today.

We emphasized yesterday that only humans, as they live here on the physical plane, have an individual soul, an ego, and that the animals that surround us have a group ego, a group soul, which lives on the astral plane and can be found there as a closed entity. Thus, when we look at them spiritually, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom are on opposite sides, the animal kingdom as group soul or group ego and the human kingdom as individual ego. We must not imagine that there are no transitions between the individual entities in the universe. Although the saying that nature does not make leaps is not at all correct for the occultist, transitions can be found everywhere. And so you will also find a transition between the group souls of the animal kingdom and the individual soul of the human being. It would be wrong to imagine that a person, upon entering earthly existence, had a fully developed individual soul, and that this soul would then incarnate again and again in the same form here on earth. It is much more the case that the human being today is in a gradual transition from a group soul, which he had in ancient times, to the fully developed individual soul, which he still does not have today. He is only on the way to the complete integration of his individual soul into his physical body. He will only have this completed individual soul when the earthly existence is more or less complete. For the vast majority of people today, their ego is an intermediate product between a group ego and an individual ego. The further back we go in the past, the more the human ego is still a group ego. At the beginning of their existence on earth, when the souls first descended from the divine worlds into our physical plane, human souls were still group selves. Several people belonged together to a group that had a communal soul, a group self.

On the one hand, we want to hold on to that. On the other hand, we now want to take a closer look at the members of human nature itself. You are well aware, since it has been said over and over again, that man initially has four members of his being: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body and the I. And this I, when we look at it more closely, appears to us again divided into three parts, which we know under the names: sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul. In the sentient soul and in the mind or emotional soul, the independent I first dawns, and only in the consciousness soul do we have the first announcement of the self-conscious I. Only then does that which is called the fifth part of his being, the spirit self or manas, gradually shine into the human being. So, in today's human being, we have the following structure: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body; then, intimately connected with the astral body, the sentient soul, which is embedded in him; then the mind soul and the consciousness soul; and again in the consciousness soul, which is the actual I-soul, the spirit self or Manas is incorporated. This is roughly how we would have to imagine today's human being.

Now we must realize which of these human limbs is the most developed, the most perfect. Some of you have already heard me say that, as man is developed today, the physical body is the most developed, the most perfectly developed limb. One must not confuse “most developed and most perfectly developed” with “higher natured”. Certainly the etheric body and the astral body are of a higher nature than the physical body, but the etheric body and the astral body will only achieve the perfection of their development in the future. In its way, the physical body is the most perfect part of the human being today. Anyone who studies the physical body, not just anatomically and physically, but penetrating its mind and heart, will stand in awe of the tremendous wisdom built into the physical body. Our physical body shows us the perfect, wise structure in every smallest of its limbs. If you take just a piece of the thigh bone from this physical body, the uppermost part of the thigh bone, it is not a solid mass, it is a wise construction, wonderfully put together from small beams. If you study how the fine beams are joined together, you will find that everything is built to produce the greatest amount of force with the least amount of substance, so that the upper body can be supported by these two pillars of the thigh bone. Even the most accomplished engineering skill today cannot build a bridge or any kind of scaffolding with such wisdom, where such a small amount of material is used to develop such a large amount of strength. Human wisdom lags far, far behind the wisdom with which the human physical body is built. It is the same with all parts of the physical body. If you look at the brain with the nervous system, it is a miracle. And if you look at the human heart, which is only on the way to its perfection and which will reach much, much higher degrees of perfection – it is something wonderful! If you compare the perfection of the physical body with the astral body, with its drives, instincts and passions, we have to say: Although it will one day be higher than the physical body, it is still at a relatively low level today. In everything that man develops today in the way of desires for pleasures, he delivers hundreds and hundreds of attacks on the physical body. Everything that man desires and satisfies in pleasures that he procures for himself, such as alcohol and all kinds of other things, are basically heart poisons, with which he continually attacks the wisdom and wonder of his physical body. It will take a long time of development before the astral body has reached the level of perfection that the physical body has today.

From the doctrine of development, as given by our theosophical cosmology, you know that the physical body was already present on the old Saturn and underwent further degrees of perfection through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth. You know that in the second stage, on the old sun, the etheric body was added, which is therefore one degree lower in development than the physical body today. You know that on the old moon the astral body was added; it has only the moon evolution behind it and that part of the earth evolution that we have gone through so far. The I is only added on earth; it is the “baby” among the four members of human nature. Actually, the wisdom we spoke of yesterday, which permeates the group souls of animality, is imprinted in the physical body of the human being; it has passed over into the individual physical body of the human being, which is built full of wisdom. The etheric body of the human being is only on the way to its completion; in the course of its earthly development, it will absorb everything it needs to fulfill itself.

When the Earth has reached its goal, it will pass into the astral state and then into even higher states, and later transform into a planet that will replace the Earth and which we call Jupiter. Then the etheric body of man will be completed in its kind, as on Earth the physical body of man is completed in its kind. In the next incarnation of the Earth, which we are accustomed to calling the future Venus, the astral body of man will have reached its completion; it will then stand at the stage at which the physical body stands today and at which the ether body will stand in the next planetary state. And finally, when the Earth has reached the volcanic state, then our I will have reached its completion. So that we can actually say: On earth, only the physical body of man is human; in the next planetary state of our earth, the etheric body of man will become human; then it will be impregnated with what the earth can give to man: with love.

What the physical body of man carries today as its characteristic properties, it owes to the old moon. In occultism, the old moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom. Back then on the old moon, what you now find in the physical body of man was gradually prepared. And just as what our physical body is was imbued with wisdom on the moon, so what you will find in the later Jupiter state of the earth is being prepared through the Cosmos of Love: the etheric body is completely permeated by the element of love. And just as we today admire a piece of bone in the physical body in its wisdom, so will the people of Jupiter admire the etheric body, because it is permeated with love in the same way as the physical body on earth is shaped by wisdom.

If you hold on to this, you will come to the realization that only man's physical body is truly human, only truly at the human level. The human etheric body is not yet at the human level, it is still at the level of animality, and the human astral body is still at the level of plant-like existence. When you are sleeping at night and your astral body is raised out, then the physical and ether bodies sink into a dreamless sleep; this is the state that plants are in all the time. In relation to its state of consciousness, the human being's astral body is at the level of plant-ness. The I is only at the level of the mineral kingdom. The state of consciousness of the human being is definitely on the level of the mineral kingdom. Try to examine yourself according to this truth, to see what insights you can have; try to recognize them correctly. What can a person understand? He can understand the physical laws of the mineral kingdom, according to which he can build machines and factories, erect buildings and so on. All this happens according to the physical laws of the mineral kingdom. With plants, man rightly says that he cannot grasp life itself with the intellect. The time will come when man will understand plants just as he understands minerals today; then he will also be able to build plants as he builds his cathedrals and houses and machines according to the laws of the mineral kingdom. All the laws of the mineral kingdom are imbued with the I.

Science is waiting for its ideal to be fulfilled, to produce living beings in the laboratory. It will not be able to do so unless humanity has reached a certain necessary stage of moral development. It would be a bad thing if humanity were already able to do so today. Just as one makes a clock according to mineral laws, or builds a house, so in the future man will produce living beings according to the laws of the living. But then he must be able to impress life itself upon the living thing. Whoever stands at the laboratory bench must be able to transfer from himself those vibrations, let us call them, that are in his own etheric body, to that which is to be animated. If he is a good man, he transmits good; if he is a bad man, he transmits evil. But there is a law in occultism: the knowledge of the White Lodge, which is called the secret of generation, will not be delivered to humanity until man has learned the secret of sacramentalism.

“Sacramentality” is an expression of the fact that human action must be imbued with moral perfection, with holiness. Only when the laboratory bench where he does his work becomes an altar for him and his actions become sacred, only then will he be mature enough to receive this knowledge. Consider people today with all their materialism – how far removed their laboratory bench is from an altar!

You see how man's consciousness is raised from mineral consciousness to plant consciousness. Again it is an occult sentence: Man will only attain the state of plant consciousness when he is no longer able to separate his own good from the good of all other people. As long as the individual seeks his own good at the expense of other people, the condition has not yet been reached that consciousness could be raised one step higher.

Thus, with the physical body, we are only at the stage of the actual human being, with the ether body still at the stage of animality, with the astral body at the stage of plant-like existence and with the I at the stage of the mineral. Of these truths, we want to hold on to one: we stand with our ether body on the level of the animal. The ether body transforms itself more and more during our earthly existence to the level of the human being. More and more, it permeates itself with that love that can no longer separate the good of the individual from the good of others. Just as we first developed the physical body and brought it to the level of the human being, so now the ether body, and later also the astral body and the ego, will rise to the level of the human being. The ego is still at the mineral level; it has only been incorporated into the human being on earth.

Let us now consider the relationship between our soul, that is, our sentient soul, our mind or emotional soul, our consciousness soul and the spirit self or manas enclosed in the consciousness soul, and our etheric body. Our etheric body itself is at the level of the animal. Below (written on the board - see diagram: from bottom to top) at the level of the human being, we have the physical body. We will leave out the etheric body for the time being (see points in the diagram). Our astral body, in which the sentient soul is enclosed - this is the first link in our soul -, we have at the level of the plant; then we have the mind or emotional soul. All this is on the level of the plant. Further up we then have the I or consciousness soul, in which the spirit self or manas is included, insofar as it can already be found in humans today.

We have initially left out the etheric body at the level of the animal. Now we must be clear about the fact that in every limb of the human being, the other limbs are expressed in a certain way. Thus, the human physical body has expressed within itself the revelation of the physical body itself. We find the physical principle expressed in the physical body when we look at the sense organs. In the eye we have a kind of photographic camera, in the ear a kind of piano. In short, the physical principle expresses itself in the sense organs. When we look at the human glands, we find the etheric body expressed in them; in the nervous system we have the expression of the astral body, and in the blood we have the expression of the ego. “Blood is a very special juice!” Whoever has the blood has the human ego. If the devil has human blood, he has the ego.

In the same way, every other limb expresses itself in the physical body of the human being to the extent that it protrudes into it. The blood pulsates unconsciously because the I, to the extent that it is active in it, is unconscious of its physical processes. Just as the nature of the other limbs is expressed in the physical body, so too is it expressed in the etheric body, only there it is expressed not “humanly” but “animal-like,” and in the form of certain animals, in a form that bears a certain similarity to our outer animal forms. Thus, what lies beneath the etheric body, the physical body, expresses itself like a silhouette; this part of the etheric body, in which the physical limb of the human being expresses itself, is called the “human being” (it is written on the board). The astral body, the sentient soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body, is called the “lion” because of the similarity of its etheric form; the mind soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body is called the “bull” or the cow, and the consciousness soul with the spirit self is called the “eagle” because of the similarity that its etheric form has for the clairvoyant eye.

So here you have (in diagram form) the four signs of the apocalypse: man, lion, bull and eagle – as the four expressions of the human being in the etheric body. You can see from this that those of our ancestors who conceived these profound symbols, these animal images for the human being, did not create them out of their imagination, philosophy or speculation, or out of any kind of ingenuity, but out of the world of facts, out of the occult world of facts.

Now we must realize that these four expressions do not emerge in the same way in every person; one of the expressions predominates in one person and the other in another. However, we must consider the development of all humanity. If you look at where the physical body expresses itself most strongly, we find the strongest expression in the declining, red race, in the Indians, in the particular development of the bone system that prevails here. If you want to see where the etheric body physically expresses itself particularly, you have to look for it in another human race: in the black race, in the glandular system. In the secretion of carbon you find an expression of the plant nature. The people in whom the nervous system is particularly strongly expressed on the physical level and with it the sensitive, are to be found in the malatic race, and the race in which the blood system is particularly expressed is the Mongolian race. The part of man that begins to develop the principle of manas is found in the Caucasian race. Thus you see that the classification of the human races is based on occult truths. What is found in the present-day human being is distributed throughout humanity, with one or the other predominating or receding in one human species or another.

You also find such differences in the etheric body of humans. When the clairvoyant gaze looks at the etheric body, as the physical gaze looks at the physical body, it finds humans divided into human-humans, lion-humans, bull-humans, and eagle-humans. Their group ego is astral in nature. On the astral plane, the clairvoyant finds the human group ego standing between the animal group ego and the human individual ego. The further back in time we go, the more we find that people take on one of these four forms in relation to their etheric body, and we assign one human group soul to each of these four soul groups: a human group soul to one, a lion group soul to the other, a bull group soul to the third, and an eagle group soul to the fourth. You would only get a wrong idea of these if you were to press these names, which are taken from physical animal forms, too hard. This etheric body of the lion people is much more similar to the group soul of the lions than to the individual lion here on the physical plane. Christianity has been presented by the evangelists as not being like ordinary human souls, but as comprising whole groups of people. This is due to the similarity that Christian esotericism attributed to the souls of the individual evangelists. We shall understand this more clearly when we see that the human being is on the one hand in a descent and on the other hand in an ascent. Here on earth, at the lowest point of materialism, the human being acquires the disposition of the individual soul. Man has descended from the ancient times when the individual group souls were more distinctly distinguished: man-man, lion-man, bull-man, eagle-man. When people ascend again in the future, they will retain their individual soul and develop it to a higher level with a higher consciousness of what they previously only had in a dim consciousness, the four group souls. That is why in Christianity the evangelists are given these qualities.

Let us hold on to this concept of the group souls of people for a while longer. These group souls lived much more in space than in time. When we look at animal group souls, we say that when we take a group of lions or a group of whales, they have their common group soul on the astral plane. But when we look at human group souls, we have to consider time more. A human group soul is born in the etheric, so to speak, at the boundary between the physical and the astral planes at a certain time and in turn transforms itself in a certain time. These four types of group soul that we have discussed are only the four main types, but there are countless intermediate stages. We have only indicated the most characteristic forms of man, lion, bull, eagle, which can occur in all possible mixtures.

Let us consider a group of people, say, for example, a tribe; let us take any of the old Central European tribes, for example the tribe of the Cheruscians. Such a tribe comes into being once, and then it passes away. The materialistic world observer sees in what the tribe of the Cheruscans is actually only something abstract, a concept that holds them together. But that is something unreal. The occultist sees in the tribe of the Cherusci a group soul, which comes into being, is born, at the time when the tribe of the Cherusci enters history; it grows as the power of the Cherusci grows, and it dies when the Cherusci disappear from history. Behind the developing tribe of the Cherusci, the occultist sees an evolving etheric being. Now there is a difference between an etheric being and a physical being here on earth. A physical being is born on the physical plane, grows, reaches a peak in life and dies again. Birth and death is the characteristic of the beings on the physical plane. This is not the case with the beings that live on the higher planes. If we follow animal group souls on the astral plane through thousands of years, their arising and passing away cannot be expressed by the words 'birth' and 'death'. Something quite different underlies it. It is based on transformation, metamorphosis. If you, with clairvoyant powers, were to encounter an animal group soul on the astral plane today and remember one of its previous embodiments, how it was with this animal group soul 1500 years ago, it will not appear to you as it would if you were to look at a younger person. You will, however, see the group soul passing through youth, middle age, and old age, but it does not give up consciousness in old age; it does not die. It is constantly transforming itself without passing through death. You can trace the animal group soul back to times immemorial – you will only encounter metamorphosis, not birth and death.

Something similar is the case with group souls such as that of the Cherusci tribe. When the Cherusci tribe appears on the physical plane as a number of physical people, the Cherusci soul has just formed; but it has not been born, but has transformed itself from another time, transformed. It grows with the power of the Cherusci, reaches its peak when the Cherusci tribe reaches its peak in history, and when the Cherusci tribe degenerates and disappears on the physical plane, the Cherusci soul rises anew in youth to become the soul of another tribe; it metamorphoses. Physical birth and physical death do not exist when we consider souls on higher planes. Birth and death, as we know them, only exist on the physical plane, not on the higher planes. Occult wisdom has expressed this well and has paid great attention to numbers. They have tried to determine an average number of times that a group soul, as it belongs to a particular human community, arises, metamorphoses out of another, grows and reaches its peak, only to undergo a descending development and then transform into another group soul. If we assume an average human lifespan of 75 years – calculated in lunar years – and multiply it by seven, we get the lifespan of a human group soul in its four types until its next transformation. Seven here refers to generations. Taking into account that we are dealing with lunar years, we arrive at a figure of approximately 500 years. And so it was said in occultism: The life of a group soul lasts 500 years; after 500 years it becomes another, it gives birth to itself anew without losing its consciousness.

If we look at the ego of such a group soul and look for a means of expression for the ego externally in the physical, it is indeed the blood. For the occultist, blood is the expression of fire: a substance glowing with fire. Just as the human physical body is the expression of the earth, the etheric body the expression of water, and the astral body the expression of air, so the I, not yet chained to selfishness, is the expression of fire. We therefore say – we will discuss this further tomorrow – that through selfishness, blood has found death. The human ego “consumes itself in its own fire,” through itself. This is an occult expression. Only when man overcomes egoism does he attain immortality. The human group ego is consumed by its own fire. When 500 years have passed, it burns and creates a new form out of itself. In occultism, this was represented in such a way that the group ego generally lives for 500 years, then it burns and is reanimated from its own fire, and this was called the “bird Phoenix”. The beautiful saga of the bird Phoenix has its factual background here. The Phoenix is the group ego with the characteristics of the four types, which burns itself after seven generations and is restored - one generation calculated at 75 lunar years of age.

This is the real background of the Phoenix legend. Here you have new proof that such ancient legends as that of the Phoenix are created from the deepest occult facts. It is not intended to speculate here, but to show what has been taught in the occult schools throughout the centuries, and what is a real actual experience, for which the occult signs and seals are the expression.

Again and again, when we hear such expressions of occult truths and compare them with what humanity has preserved for us in its signs and symbols, we are reminded of how much human consciousness had already created before it became mind-consciousness. Man likes to believe that we have come a long way today. But his intellect lags behind the creative consciousness of the pre-world, which, however, only the initiates had, and they hid it in the legends. The symbols of the four animals are not invented; not the thought is the starting point, the origin of it, but the vision.

When I say that the group soul is in the etheric at the boundary between the physical and astral planes, you must not imagine a boundary line. If we start from the physical plane, we have (as shown here) seven subdivisions of the physical plane; then there are seven subdivisions of the astral plane. Of these, the three lowest correspond to the three highest of the physical plane. We must consider the astral plane and the physical plane pushed together in such a way that the three uppermost parts of the physical plane are at the same time the three lowest parts of the astral plane. We can speak of a fringe zone, which is the one that our souls cannot leave after death if they are still tied to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka.

So we have definitely seen in the occult signs, symbols and seals, which we have chosen here as the first examples, something gained from the depths of the occult facts, and you would be quite mistaken if you were to ignore the deep wisdom of the past in the occult schools or to consider it in any way superseded by our modern wisdom. Where the wisdom of occult teaching comes to you in signs or symbols, it will always present itself in such a way as to be confirmed by immediate occult observation. An example of how the teaching of occultism has worked in comparatively recent times is that symbolic meanings have been read into names and words, but in such a way that there was a real meaning underlying them: facts of the higher world. We will not go back to the origin of word formation in the sense of philology; what I am about to say is not something that you could verify with philology. Even if philology were to find it wrong, the word symbolism would still be right.

The further you ascend from the physical plane through the astral world to the devachan world, the more everything presents itself to you as a mirror image of the physical plane, which you first have to learn to read. The easiest way for the student to learn this is by numbers. Suppose you have the number 543 here on the physical plane, this number can be read as a mirror image on the astral plane, i.e. 345. Likewise, all other things and events are to be read as mirror images. I will give you a blatant example: Here on the physical plane, you can see how the old chicken lays the egg and how the young chicken develops from the egg. If you look at the same event on the astral plane, you have to go backwards: first you see the young chicken, then the chicken gets smaller and smaller and finally merges with the egg. Time also runs backwards. You can see how extremely confusing this must be for the student at first glance. The passions that emanate from the person are seen as in a tableau; they radiate from the center. The reflected passions appear as if you were being stormed by animals. The lower passions man sees as all kinds of wild animals, as mice, rats and so on around him. If the student has not learned this, and the first experience of it comes to him when he sees his own passions rushing at him as mice and rats, then pathological conditions such as persecution mania and so on can easily occur.

What I have now expressed as a fact about the relationship between the higher and lower worlds was symbolically expressed in the theory of evolution in a play on words. When human beings entered into their existence on earth, they entered from a spiritual state into a sensual state - through Eve. In Eve, people saw the state where spiritual humanity became physical, and therefore sinful. If humanity is now to be led back up to the spiritual, and if the opposite is to be expressed to the woman who brought mortality into the world, then that which is to bring the immortal back into humanity must be expressed in reverse; the name must be reversed. Therefore the Angel of God addresses Mary with the words “Hail Mary!” Eve becomes Ave; this reversal has a symbolic character. Whatever a more or less incorrect philology may say about it, it does not matter. What matters is to show how the symbolic in the wording can work in occultism. The aim of this wording was to make the person, by pronouncing the words, aware of the occult fact that the physical and spiritual worlds have opposite directions in their currents.

This has a very deep meaning. Do not see anything arbitrary behind it. The best you can see behind it is that people were taught to recognize occult laws in their language. By letting people do such exercises to recognize the occult laws in language, they are consciously or unconsciously working on their occult training. The principle of symbolism is at the same time a principle of training.

We need only recall the fact that the physical and etheric aspects of the human being, as he stands before us today, are denser forms of the astral. Man was previously a purely astral being before he became an etheric being and then a physical being. In truth, all the denser substances, that is, the etheric substance and the physical substance, are differentiated out of the astral substance, just as ice is differentiated out of water. Just as water condenses and becomes ice, so the astral substance becomes 'condensed into etheric and then into physical substance. In the time when man was still a being like you are today, when you sleep, where you are outside your physical and etheric body, the forces that shaped his astral substance were pure powers of sensation and imagination. The astral substance works quite differently from the etheric or physical substance. The astral substance is in perpetual motion. Every passion, every instinct, every desire is immediately realized in the astral substance, so that in the next moment it is of a completely different form, if it is the expression of a different passion. Today, the mental no longer has such an easy effect on the dense physical body of man. Nevertheless, the mental and the emotional still have an effect on the physical body of man. You only have to observe that when a person is frightened or afraid of something, they turn pale. This means that the entire blood mass is moving differently in the body than in a normal state. It pushes the blood mass from the outside inwards. Or take the blush of shame, where the blood is driven from the inside to the periphery, outwards. These are only slight effects that the soul still has on the body today. But if you consider long periods of time, you will find much more significant effects of the soul and the mind on the body. If you could follow the human forms through the millennia, you would see that the shape, the whole physiognomy, everything about the human being changes. This happens in such a way that the soul and spiritual processes are there first. Man has certain ideas, and as he forms his ideas, so in the course of millennia his physical form and physiognomy are formed, even if this is not immediately noticeable to an external biological observer. Everything is formed from the inside out. Our external materialistic science is still far from understanding how these effects relate to each other over the course of millennia. But they are there.

To make it clear to us what such connections are like, let us just recall the first appearance of Gothic architecture, where certain processes in the development of humanity were expressed for the first time in Gothic architectural forms. Those people who devoted themselves to prayer in rooms built in the Gothic style experienced the thoughts that were the inspiration for the Gothic buildings. These thoughts, which were active in the souls of men, formed the souls, the inner powers of man, right into the etheric body; they reshaped the powers of man. And after centuries, as a consequence of these impressions received by the senses, and the ideas formed after these sensory impressions, that mystical movement emerged, which we find in Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and others. In what they devised, we have the after-effects of what their ancestors had received as impressions from Gothic buildings. And those higher individualities who lead humanity in its development consciously guide this process of human development. They consciously look ahead into the centuries and millennia, and at a certain time humanity is given what is to develop these or those qualities. Thus we see how, here in the course of a few centuries, by looking at the external forms of Gothic architecture, the pointed arch style, that mysticism striving towards heaven is expressed in Meister Eckhart, Tauler and so on. If we were to consider millennia instead of centuries, we would see how even the human body forms according to the thoughts and feelings and ideas that people had millennia ago; and the great leaders of humanity give people the right ideas at the right time in their development, so that even the human form is transformed.

Now let us imagine ourselves in the period of transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period. We know that our ancestors, indeed our very souls, lived in other bodies, in ancient Atlantis. In the last days of Atlantis, this continent, especially the northern parts, was largely covered by masses of fog, and everything that lived on the earth, on this continent, was shrouded in dense fog. And if we go back even further, we come across times when there were not only masses of fog, but where our air circle is today, there were masses of water trickling down. The first Atlantean man was even more of a water creature. It was only gradually during the Atlantean period that he transformed into an air being. At that time, man had a completely different distribution of his etheric and physical bodies. Today, the etheric body and the physical body are distributed in such a way that they are almost the same in shape and size in the upper parts. This is by no means the case with other beings. If you were to look at a horse's etheric body, you would see the horse's etheric head shining out far above its physical head. In humans, too, the etheric body of the head used to extend far beyond the physical head, and it was only towards the end of the Atlantean period that the two parts merged. A point that is now within the head used to be outside it, and only gradually was it drawn in. These two points drew closer and closer together, and in the last third of the Atlantean epoch they coincided. That was the time when the pre-Semitic race descended from the northeast of Atlantis, from the area of present-day Ireland. At that time, man acquired the ability through which the two points coincided and came to overlap. Due to the etheric body of his head being outside, the Atlantean man had a kind of misty clairvoyance. He could not calculate or count, nor develop any kind of logic of thought. This is only a result of the post-Atlantean time. But they had a kind of primitive clairvoyance because they were much more out of their heads than in them with the ether part of the head. At that time, when this ether part of the head was outside the physical head, the thoughts and feelings of the astral body also had a much greater influence on this part of the ether body and thus on the formation of the physical body. That which first lived in the astral body as feelings, sensations and thoughts continued as a process of movement in the etheric body and shaped the physical body into its present form.

Where did the present length, width and height of the physical body actually come from? It is an effect of what was first present in the astral body and in the etheric body. First there were thoughts, images, sensations and so on. You will be able to understand this better if you remember the process that occurs immediately after physical death; the physical body is first left by the etheric body and then by the astral body. During sleep, only the ego and the astral body go away, while the etheric body and the physical body remain in bed. Death differs from sleep in that the etheric body also leaves with the astral body and the ego. A peculiar phenomenon occurs, something that could be described as a sensation, but which is linked to a certain idea. The person feels as if he were growing, as if he were expanding in all directions; he takes on dimensions in all directions. This expansion of the etheric body, which it takes on immediately after death, this seeing of the etheric body in large dimensions, is a very important concept. In the ancient Atlantean man, this idea had to be awakened when the etheric body was not yet as closely connected to the physical body as it is today. The fact that it was awakened, that man was introduced to the magnitude that he feels today when he grows after death, is how the cause, the thought form, was formed to bring the physical body into the form that it has today. When, in those days, when the physical body and etheric body were still more separated, man was presented with these forms, these measurements, it stimulated the physical body to take on the form it has today. And these forms were suggested by those who are the leaders of human evolution. In the various flood legends, especially in the biblical flood legend, there are traces of precise details. If you imagine the human being surrounded by the forms that his etheric body must have in order for the form of the physical body to be formed in the right way, then you have the size of Noah's Ark. Why does the Bible state that Noah's Ark was 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits high and 300 cubits long? Because these are the proportions that a person needs in the transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period in order to form the right thought form, which is the cause that the body of the post-Atlantic person was formed in the right way in length, height and width. In Noah's Ark you have a symbol for the proportions of your present body. These proportions are effects of those thought forms which Noah experienced and which he had built into the ark in such a way that by looking at them the world of thought was created according to which the organism of the post-Atlantean man was to be built. Mankind was educated through effective symbols. Today you carry within you the proportions of Noah's Ark in the dimensions of your physical body. When a person stretches out their hands upwards, the dimensions of Noah's Ark are contained within the dimensions of the human body.

Thus man has passed from the Atlantean era into the post-Atlantean era. In the sixth cultural epoch, the epoch that will follow our own, the human body will be shaped quite differently again. Today, too, people must experience the thought forms that can provide the basis for the human body to take on the right proportions in the next cultural epoch; this must be demonstrated to people. Today man is formed according to the measurements of 50 : 30 : 300. In the future he will be formed quite differently. How is the thought-form given to man today, through which the future form of man will be formed in the next race? It has already been said that this is given in the measurements of Solomon's Temple. The measurements of Solomon's Temple are a profound symbol of the entire organization of the form of man as he will be in the next, the sixth race.

All the things that are effective in humanity happen from within, not from without. What is thought and feeling in any one period is external form in the following period. And the individualities that guide the development of humanity must implant the thought forms into humanity many millennia in advance, which are to become external physical reality afterwards. There you have the function of thought forms, which are stimulated by such symbolic images as Noah's Ark, the Temple of Solomon, and the four apocalyptic figures of man, lion, bull and eagle. They have a very real significance. We have thus already said something about the images that guide the human being when he devotes himself to them. Yesterday we also mentioned images in the four forms of man, lion, bull, and eagle; and today we are talking about images. Images lead the human being to an interest in the world that directly borders his own.

When we ascend to an even higher world, we no longer deal with mere images, but with the inner relationships of things, with what is called the sound of the spheres, the music of the spheres, the world of sounds. When we travel through the astral plane, we essentially have a world of images that are the archetypes of our things here. The higher we ascend, the more we enter into a world of sounds and tones. You must not imagine, however, that the world of sounds is a world of sounds in the external sense. You do not hear the devachan world with the outer ear. You cannot compare the essence of the sounding spiritual world with our physical sounds, which are only an external manifestation of the devachanic world of sound. The spiritual tones are substances of the devachanic world, of the spiritual world, which begins where the world of images passes into the world of sounds. These worlds are thoroughly interwoven. Here, around the physical world, is both the astral and the devachanic world; one permeates the other. It is the same as if you were to lead someone born blind into this illuminated room; the colors and the burning candles are around him, but he cannot perceive them; only when he acquires sight through a successful operation can he also perceive what has been around him all along. Likewise, the astral and spiritual worlds around us are only perceived when the senses are opened to them; then it is also perceived that these worlds do not border on each other, but penetrate each other. One can perceive everything that is in one world in the other worlds.

What spiritual music is in the Devachan world is reflected in the astral world and expressed through numbers and figures. What is called Pythagorean music of the spheres is usually taken as an image by abstract philosophers. But it is a true, genuine reality. The sound of the spheres is there, and the one who trains his hearing - the expression is not quite correct, but we have to use it - in order to perceive in the higher worlds, perceives not only the images and colors of the astral world around him, but also the sounds and harmonies of the spiritual world. Just as the things around us on the physical plane are revelations of the astral world, so they are also revelations of the spiritual world, which express themselves through the mediation of the astral in the physical. The spiritual world expresses itself in all our physical things, and the more uplifting and meaningful the sensual things are, the clearer, more beautiful, more magnificent they also show themselves as expressions of the spiritual world. If we take an insignificant thing of our physical plane, it is usually very difficult to trace it back to its spiritual archetype. On the other hand, when we look at more significant, uplifting things in the physical world, the spiritual archetypes reveal themselves with great beauty. For example, we have given an expression of the spiritual world in the interaction of the planets of our planetary system. What is present in our planetary system in the most diverse forms can be traced back to what is called the harmony of the spheres for those who can recognize these things. The movements of our planets are such that he who is able to perceive this in the spiritual world 'hears' the mutual relationships of the movements of our planets. For example, from the point of view of higher worlds, Saturn moves 2 1/2 times faster than Jupiter. This movement of Saturn is perceived in the spiritual world as a correspondingly higher tone, “with spiritual ears,” as Goethe puts it.

Let us visualize the relative speeds of the planets in our solar system. If you take the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to Jupiter, then Saturn moves 2 1/2 times as fast as Jupiter, that is, at a ratio of 2 1/2: 1, and the speed of Jupiter's movement in relation to Mars is 5 : 1. For the spiritual ear, the movement of Jupiter in relation to the movement of Mars is therefore perceived as a much higher tone. If you take the speed of the movements of the Sun, Mercury and Venus, which is approximately the same, this stands in relation to the movement of Mars at 2:1, so it is just twice as fast. If you take the movement of the Sun, Mercury and Venus in relation to the Moon, this ratio is 12:1, so the speed is twelve times as great. From a spiritual point of view, if you consider the movement of all the stars visible to us in relation to their background, the starry sky advances by one degree in one century. And the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to the starry sky is 1200:1.

We therefore have

Saturn: Jupiter = 2½ : 1
Jupiter : Mars = 5 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Mars = 2 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Moon = 12 : 1
Saturn: Starry sky = 1200 : 1

These ratios are expressed for spiritual perception through tones that can be perceived in the spiritual world by the spiritual ears. These are the real backgrounds of what is called “music of the spheres”. These numbers actually indicate harmonies that really exist in the spiritual world. So you see, just as the clairvoyant sees images and colors in the astral world, so the clairaudient hears the spiritual harmonies of things in the spiritual or Devachan world. For the one whose spiritual ear is trained for it, everything that manifests itself here in the physical world has tones as a spiritual background. Thus, for the occultist, the four elements of earth, water, air and fire produce different tone relationships that are quite beyond the perception of the ordinary person. The initiates have recreated tone relationships in the physical world that they could hear from the spiritual background of earth, water, air and fire. And the result of these tone vibrations has been captured in the original tuning of a musical instrument, the lyre. The lyre's string vibrations correspond to the notes that the initiates recognized as the four elements. The bass

string corresponds to the Earth
the D string to Water
the A string to Air
the G string to Fire.

In this way we would be able to understand much if we could go back to times long past, and we could then see how many things in culture that today are taken for granted by man have been developed out of observations in the spiritual world. The physical tones of the lyre are modeled on what first existed spiritually as the relationship of the four elements to one another.

The fundamental idea underlying this is that everything that happens in man, in the microcosm, should be modeled on what lives in the macrocosm. When everything in the microcosm resonates with the macrocosmic spiritual events, then the world and man are in harmony; and because there is no disharmony, man can truly connect with the evolution of the world and feel at one with it. But when man leaves this harmony, when he does not join the world-sounds, then his outer condition also becomes disharmonious, and it becomes impossible for him to go on with the course of the world.

All this should give us an idea of how the symbols were created out of the higher worlds, which are real facts in these higher worlds. Many of the things in our culture are symbols, symbols to be realized, through which it is ensured that the human being can be prepared to develop in the future on the physical plane that which is only on the higher planes today. It is the course of evolution that everything that is in the higher worlds today descends into the physical world. Since man is called upon to help create the outer world, he must descend with his thoughts into the physical world. He forms the world around him, and he also forms what is in his own physical being. Through Theosophy, man must develop a feeling for the fact that everything he does, feels and thinks in one time continues to have an effect in another time, in the future. When man builds temples, works of beauty, or when he creates statesmanship for the social coexistence of people, these are all things that have significance for the future. What man builds today with the help of natural forces, he forms the natural products of the future. When man builds a Gothic cathedral, for example, he assembles it according to mineral laws. It is true that the substance, the materiality, the bricks and stones, of which the cathedral is composed, will disintegrate. But the fact that the form once existed is not meaningless. The form that was imprinted on the matter by human beings remains, it is incorporated into the etheric and astral body of the earth and develops as a force with the earth. And when the earth has passed through the present stage of development and the pralaya and reappears as Jupiter, this form will grow out of the earth as a kind of plant being. We are building the works of art and beauty today, we are not building the works of wisdom in vain on our earth. We are shaping them so that they will later merge with the earth as natural products. And just as we build cathedrals and houses today whose forms are lasting, which combine with the earth and will emerge again in the future as a kind of plant, so too have our present-day plants and crystals been shaped by what our predecessors built in the pre-world, by the gods and spirits that preceded us. Everything that man incorporates into the earth from the point of view of knowledge, wisdom and beauty and of true social life, everything that he brings into the outer world in the form of symbols, even if he only forms them in his thoughts, becomes a great, joyful, progressive force for the further development of the earth; they will be real forces and forms of the future. Our machines and factories, however, everything we make to serve external utility, the principle of utility, will be a harmful element in the next embodiment of our earth. If we imprint symbols on matter that are expressions of higher worlds, they will have a progressive effect; our machines and factories, on the other hand, which only serve external utility, will have a kind of demonic, corrupting effect in the next incarnation of our earth. Thus we ourselves shape our good forces and also the demonic forces for the next age of humanity.

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch, we are most deeply immersed in matter and creating the worst demonic forces for the next epoch. Where we transform the ancient and sacred into physical and mechanical things, we are working down into the physical plane. What man fashions in this way will become the underworld. It must be clearly understood that the evil powers of the earth's evolution must also be integrated. At the time when they must be overcome, man will have to expend a tremendous amount of energy to transform evil and demonic forces back into good. But his strength will grow as a result, because evil is there to steel the strength of man by overcoming it. All evil must in turn be transformed into good, and it is providentially designed to develop strong, energetic effects in man, much higher than if he never had to transform evil into good.

All the things we think up in the physical world with our minds have a spiritual background, and we can see these things in the spiritual world. I would now like to give an example of how something that is conceived on the physical plane expresses itself in the spiritual as a figure: the Caduceus, the rod of Mercury.

Our present consciousness is the so-called bright day-consciousness, where we perceive through the senses and combine through the mind. This day-consciousness has only developed to its present level. It was preceded by another consciousness, a dream-like pictorial consciousness. At the beginning of the Atlantean period, man still perceived the world and its spiritual and soul entities clairvoyantly in astral and etheric images. Today's dream is still a last remnant of this atavistic pictorial consciousness. Let us draw a picture of this. First we have the bright day consciousness. This was preceded by consciousness, which today only plants have, which we can call sleep consciousness in humans. Then there is an even duller consciousness, as our physical minerals have it today; we can call it a deep trance consciousness. (During these explanations, the following was written on the blackboard, from bottom to top: day consciousness, image consciousness, sleep consciousness, deep trance consciousness. See drawing next page.) We can connect these four consciousnesses with a line (drawn as a straight line from top to bottom). However, man does not develop in this way. If man were to develop in the same way as the straight line, he would start from a deep-trance consciousness, then descend to the sleep consciousness, then to the image consciousness and finally to today's day consciousness. But it is not that simple for man; instead, he has to go through various transitional stages. Man had a consciousness of deep trance on the first earth embodiment that we can trace, on Saturn; there he developed this consciousness to various degrees. We draw it here in such a way that we let consciousness develop in this line. Man separates himself from the straight line and reconnects with it on the sun, where he undergoes the sleep consciousness, then continues as this spiral line shows to reach the image consciousness on the moon. And today, after various transformations, man stands at the level of bright day consciousness. Man now retains this clear day consciousness for all subsequent periods, and consciously acquires for himself the states of consciousness which he had in a dull form on earlier levels. In this way he consciously acquires for himself the pictorial consciousness again on the Jupiter condition of the earth; this will enable him to perceive again soul-life around him. This development takes place, however, in such a way that his clear day-consciousness is not weakened or dulled, but that on Jupiter he will have the image consciousness in addition to his day-consciousness. One could say: the day-consciousness brightens up into the image consciousness (see drawing: broken line). Then he will again have the sleep consciousness that he had on the sun when the earth was in its Venus state; this will enable him to look deeply into the beings, as today only the initiate can do. The initiate goes the straight way; he develops in a straight line, whereas the normal development of man is a winding one. And then, ascending, man also regains on Vulcan the first consciousness, the consciousness of trance, while retaining all the other states of consciousness. Thus man undergoes an evolution in a descending and one in an ascending line. You can see this line recurring again and again. This path of descent and ascent is a real line that has found expression in the Caduceus, in the staff of Mercury.

[The following section is only incompletely reproduced in all the lecture notes.] Thus we see how the symbols that we obtain in this way are deeply rooted in the whole essence of our world process. And a line like the Caduceus also has an educational significance for people when they devote themselves to this figure in meditation. No one can memorize this figure without it having a profound educational effect on them. The seer brought this line out of the spiritual worlds to give people something that would make them future seers. What one must develop when meditating on this line are certain sensations. At first you feel a dull darkness. You stare into the darkness, and gradually it begins to brighten and take on a violet color, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and now back, with a certain reflection of the evolution taking place, until you have risen again to violet. As you follow this shaded line, your feelings will change from the quality of the color nuances to moral feelings. If you do not perceive this line merely as a chalk or pencil line, but, by looking into the black, try to imagine the dark before your soul, and at the violet imagine the devotion, and so on through the other colors, blue, green, yellow, orange, then call the joyful before your soul with the red, then your soul will go through a whole gamut of sensations, which are first color sensations and then become moral sensations. By reflecting the form of the staff of Mercury in sensations, something is incorporated into the soul that enables it to develop the higher organs. Through the real symbol, it is transformed so that it can receive the higher organs within itself.

Just as the influence of outer light once magically transformed indifferent organs into eyes, so too does devotion to the symbols of the spiritual world magically transform the organs for the spiritual world. It is quite impossible to say: I still cannot see what is to arise there. That would be just as if the person who had not yet had eyes had said: I do not want to let the light work on me. We must first be taught what can lead to the development of the inner organs, then we can perceive the secrets of the spiritual world around us.

I would like to discuss some more characteristic symbols and signs today, so that we can become clearer and clearer about the actual basic theme of our lectures, which should consist of showing how signs and symbols relate to the astral and spiritual worlds, also called the devachanic world.

We have seen that the symbols and pictures and the numerical and formal relationships really taken from the nature and essence of the higher worlds, when absorbed by the soul, evoke in it real soul forces in the form of perceptions, thoughts, ideas and feelings, which have a formative effect. Yes, we could even see that Noah's Ark was formative for the present physical body of man, and that the Temple of Solomon, when it works in its forms on the people of the present, will have a great significance for the shaping of man in the sixth race. From these statements you can already see that the path taken by the guides of humanity, who are constantly working on the course of human development, is actually similar to that taken by the individual in the elementary secret schools. There, too, we are dealing with a concentration of sensations, thoughts, images, and so on - many other things are added - that are effective and formative for the human being.

In many cases, the various occult currents of the present day are of the opinion that in our time there may be an ascent into the higher worlds by other means than through the application of imaginative and symbolic ideas. And for people of the present day, ascending into the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If you raise the question: Are such states of fear justified?, then you can say: Yes and no. In a certain respect they are justified; in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really go up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world. It is a mistaken assumption if someone thinks that he can pass through the astral world blindfolded. You must realize, however, that the spiritual world as such has different regions. Man has descended from the spiritual world into the physical world, and he must ascend from the spiritual world back into the spiritual world. What must be avoided is that man, in his development, falls back into earlier states. Man must never fall back into earlier states. Every mediumistic state is a falling back into an earlier state, whereas true secret schooling is an ascent into higher states. Man must ascend through the astral world with full, bright day-consciousness in order to reach the higher regions of the spiritual world. Whatever longings, passions, instincts today's man carries within himself is anchored in the astral body, of which the astral body is the carrier. If a person wants to ascend to higher worlds, he must work with feelings and sensations; there is no other way. But the point is that he should never try to ascend to the higher worlds other than by fully maintaining the achievements of our physical world, that is, never with a damping of consciousness. When we look at mediums, we always find that they are thrown back into an earlier state of consciousness. Their bright day consciousness is dampened down, weakened, and an earlier state of consciousness, which the person has already overcome, is evoked. Anyone who wants to become a clairvoyant in the modern sense must retain their present bright day consciousness and take it with them. He can only do this by passing through the point of “sensuality-free thinking”, and nothing can ever happen when a person passes through sensuality-free thinking. Let us be quite clear about what this means.

Sensual thinking and imagining is anything that starts from the sensual perception of the objects around us. If you form your ideas in such a way that you first look at an object, perceive it, and then keep it in your memory, and your thoughts are such that you are stimulated by such ideas, then you have sensual thinking. This thinking fills by far the greatest part of the soul experiences of the present human being. And when a person examines himself to see how much remains to him when he throws out of his soul all ideas that are caused by sensory perception, then he will first become aware of what content is still there in the soul. When the ideas that were stimulated by external impressions have been removed, then he will grasp what the Greek philosopher Plato meant when he wrote over the entrance to his school, “No one unfamiliar with geometry shall enter.” This means that no one should enter who has not been able to rise to thinking free of sensuality. He did not demand ordinary geometry. Nor is it required today by those who want to ascend to higher worlds. Nor would it be necessary today for intrinsic, objective reasons. But from geometric representations one can form an idea of what thinking is that is free of sensuality. If you put three beans here, add three more beans, and another three beans, then you can learn from this sensual impression that 3 times 3 = 9. The child or primitive man learns it by the fingers. This is sensual thinking. When you no longer need the fingers or the beans, but when you learn the same thing through pure mental contemplation, then it is sensual-free thinking. The child starts learning from a bridge [beans or fingers] and only later rises to sensual-free thinking. If we draw a circle on the blackboard, it is not really a circle; what we draw there is a collection of little chalk mountains. You will not be able to grasp what a real circle is with sensory perception alone. Only the spiritually viewed, inwardly constructed circle is free of sensuality.

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.

Let us make a schematic drawing for ourselves. Some things become unclear due to incorrect symbolic drawing. So, although it is sufficient for understanding certain relationships if the physical plane, the astral plane and the devachan plane are drawn on top of each other, it is more correct to imagine the physical world as a self-contained sphere, where the astral is all around, and the devachanic is around that again. Instead of drawing horizontal layers, it is good to draw it this way (see drawing), because this provides a way to distinguish two areas of the astral plane from each other. If we look into two very specific areas of the astral plane, which we indicate here with arrow 1, we see that in the astral world, what we call the male and the female here on earth are the two opposites of “form” and “life”. Form and life are opposites on the astral plane. Now, if we want to encounter form and life on the astral plane, we will only encounter them if we go in that direction (from the center upwards, see arrow 2). If we go in the other direction (center downwards, see arrow 3), we will by no means encounter the beneficial contrast of form and life, but rather the contrast of “decay” and “disease”. So if we start from the physical world, we encounter the opposite of form and life on the astral plane above; this corresponds to the opposite of decay and disease in the astral world below, i.e. going down below the physical plane. Whenever we go to one side, where we see beneficial properties for the physical world, these correspond on the other side to destructive, harmful influences for the physical world. We now have an opportunity to distinguish between the parts of the astral plane. There are actually two quite different areas of the astral plane that affect the human soul. If we want to form an idea of how these two very different areas affect the soul, we have to imagine that in a human being we have: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body; and depending on their development, which has been described many times: manas or spirit self, budhi or life spirit, and atma or spiritual man; and in between we have, filled by the I, the soul. So that we can distinguish in a certain respect: body - which actually includes the three bodies -, soul and spirit. Now the three lower members, astral body, ether body and physical body, are reflected in the soul. Insofar as the physical body, ether body and astral body are reflected in their original nature, they introduce lower, downward-pulling qualities into the human soul. But that which is higher is also reflected in man: manas, buddhi, atma, and thus we also have uplifting, purifying elements in the soul. In strict Christianity, people also knew about this twofold way of being reflected in the human soul. One saw that the higher human nature was reflected in the soul, or the lower nature was reflected in the soul. Many sensed this, even if they were not esotericists. That is why it was said: When a person dies, he perceives the reflection of the spiritual world as the collection of laws of Moses; and when the lower nature is reflected in the soul, the devil reads the record of sins to the soul in death.

This means that the soul is presented with all the qualities that adhere to it: That which is reflected from above is held up to it as the tablets of the law of Moses; and that which is reflected from below is described by saying: the devil reads the soul's record of sins to it. If the soul does not take the right path, it can indeed sink into its lower passions; that can happen. But this must not be presented to man as a deterrent.

All imagistic, pictorial representations educate the human being in order to gradually bring him to that point in the development of life where he learns to look more and more into the higher worlds. Pictorial representations, such as the image of the old moon, are a powerful educational tool in this direction. Through such images, the idea of development is introduced to the human being in the right esoteric way. If one only presents dry, abstract concepts to the human being, he remains on the physical plane with his thinking, because ordinary thinking as such never comes from the physical plane. It is indeed a reflection of the Devachan plan; but the thought that the human being entertains is something that belongs to the physical plan, it is only a shadow image of the higher processes. No matter how fine your conceptions may be regarding the process of development, how a being on the first step of existence differentiates itself, descends and envelops itself, these are all only conceptions that give you ideas of the physical plan, but do not help you in your development. Only concepts and ideas that are both sensual and supersensible can gradually help you to really advance one step. First, you have to transform the concepts into images, into imaginations, and then repeat this process over and over again.

If one were to express this process, which was taught, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools, in a dialogue between teacher and student, one could put it like this: - In reality, such a dialogue never took place in this way, but we can present it in this way to show what the student had to go through step by step in long, drawn-out experiences. The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant and see how it directs its root into the earth, how it grows towards the sun with its stem and blossom, and how it develops its fruit organs. And now imagine the human being in contrast. The human being is poorly compared to the plant when one compares his head with the flower and his reproductive organs with the root of the plant. Even Darwin, the great naturalist, used this comparison correctly by comparing the head of the human being with the root of the plant, so that even for Darwin, the plant is the human being turned upside down. What the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam, its reproductive organs, man directs to the center of the earth. Thus, in man we have to think of an inversion of the plant, in that he freely directs all the forces that in the plant are directed toward the center of the earth to the sun-filled cosmos, and shamefully directs those organs that the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam toward the earth. The animal stands in the midst of it.

If we therefore want to draw the real directions of power that exist in the world, we can do so as follows: the true esoteric meaning of the sign of the cross is a sum of forces. One direction of force goes downwards: the plant being is directed by this force. In the human being, it is directed in the opposite direction. The animal has a horizontally aligned spine, and in it this force is manifested as orbiting the earth horizontally. The soul principle ascends from plant existence to animal existence to human existence. And Plato, who so often expressed things that originated in the mysteries, spoke the beautiful sentence: The world soul is crucified on the world body. That is, the world soul passes through the plant, animal and human; it is crucified in the forces of the three realms: plant, animal and human. And if we thus inscribe the cross into the three natural realms, then the cross becomes for us the sign of the direction of development.

Now the teacher said to the student: You have to imagine how the plant stretches its calyx towards the sunbeam, how the fruit organs reach maturity when the plant is kissed by the sunbeam. - The development into a human being happens through the fact that the pure, chaste plant substance is permeated by desires, instincts and passions. In this way man conquers his consciousness, in this way he becomes human by passing through his animal nature. By interweaving the lower nature of desire into the pure plant nature, man has ascended from the dull plant consciousness to the bright consciousness of day.

From this level of present-day man, the teacher pointed the student to a higher level. Just as man has developed from a state similar to that of a plant, so too will he purify his instincts and desires to a higher, chaste level. The teacher showed the student the structures in the physical body of man through which the higher levels of consciousness can be attained and human substance can in turn become a substance similar to that of plants. Every being must use a physical body if it wants to appear on earth. But the body of man will change more and more in the future. We distinguish between a descending and an ascending development with regard to the human organs. Some human organs are in a state of descending development; in the course of time, which admittedly counts in millennia, the human being will discard them. Other organs are in the process of becoming; in the future they will undergo an upward development, for example the human larynx; it is only at the beginning of its development. The human heart will undergo a further upward development, becoming a completely different organ in the future. While other organs have already passed their zenith, becoming detached from human nature and withering away, we have an organ in the heart that is only at the beginning of its development.

We can distinguish between striated and longitudinally striated muscles in the human body; these are voluntary and involuntary muscles. The voluntary muscles of the hand, for example, are striated. The muscles of the intestines, on the other hand, which involuntarily push food forward, are longitudinally striped. The heart is an exception here, and this is a crux for today's physiological and anatomical scientists. The heart belongs to the involuntary muscles, but it has striated musculature. Therefore, our anatomists cannot understand the heart either. They consider all organs to be the same. If we consider the organs spiritually, they may well consist chemically of the same components, but one may be in a descending development and the other in an ascending one. The heart is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle in the future; its anatomical structure already bears the characteristic features for this. Today, however, it contributes to the effect of emotional experiences on the blood. You can see how, when you feel fear, the blood mass withdraws from the periphery of the body and moves inward, or how, when you feel shame, the blood is driven from the center of the body to the periphery. In the future, in addition to the transformation of the heart, there will also be a transformation of our larynx. Today, the larynx serves to translate my thoughts into words by making the air vibrate. You can pick up and hear my words with your ears; this is caused by the vibrations of the air. The present human larynx is capable of transforming into air vibrations what is going on in the soul. The human body of the future will transform its larynx into a fertilizing organ, and the word, which today only creates in the air, will in the future become creative in our environment. Reproduction will then take place through the larynx, which will create the race of the future.

Just as the teacher pointed out to the student the chaste chalice of the plant, and how he pointed out to the human being who, in descending, has permeated his plant substance with the lower nature of passions, desires and instincts, but But in exchange for this, has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, the teacher showed how the present human being will ascend to higher states of consciousness, and how the future human being will transform the substance, filled with desires, back into pure and chaste organs. The pupil's attention was drawn to the past, present and future. Just as the chalice of the plant extends chastely towards the sun and its fruit organs grow towards the sun, this will be there again on a higher level, where man will offer his larynx as a chalice to the spiritual sunbeam. This spiritual chalice, the transformed organ of speech, was called the Holy Grail. This is a real ideal. The beginning, middle and end of human development: here you see the idea of human development transformed into a picture.

Through the feelings that we develop from these pictures, the forces flow to us that truly open up the higher worlds for us. All this takes place without magic. The images stimulate the feelings that lead the human being into the higher worlds. Feelings and sensations lead the human being into the astral world, just as the will leads him into the devachanic or spiritual world. Thinking corresponds to the physical world, feeling to the astral world, and the purified will to the devachanic world.

If we look at the plant in its original chaste substance, we find green as the color in the life of the plant. The plant is permeated by chlorophyll, by what is called chlorophyll, in those parts where the etheric body is actively alive. The etheric body has a basic law, which is the law of repetition. If only the etheric body were active in the plant, then one and the same form would be repeated again and again; leaf by leaf it sets in. But when the astral body of the earth begins to affect the plant, it completes growth and sets in the flowering. The effect of the etheric body is revealed in the repetition. This principle also applies to human growth. The etheric body shows its influence in the formation of the spinal vertebrae, but this only goes as far as the arching of the cranial vault, where the astral body begins to take effect. We can therefore only influence the etheric body through the principle of repetition. When you think and comprehend, you only affect the astral body. But when you pray or meditate, for example, and repeat the same prayer or meditation every day, you have an effect that extends into the etheric body. The way it is in the cosmos is that the principle of repetition first manifests itself in the deeds of the etheric body, then the principle of closure through the astral body. Where the astral body withdraws, the principle of repetition naturally reappears. This is how your hair and nails grow, because the astral body has withdrawn there. It doesn't hurt when you cut your hair, because pain is an expression of the astral body.

We initially have the pure, chaste plant substance, where the plant, subject only to the law of the ether body, adds leaf after leaf. Now this pure, chaste plant substance is increasingly permeated by what is called kama in theosophy, the realm of instincts and feelings, the realm of desires, right up to the images. And now, in man, that which has developed in him since he had a plant nature is to be overcome again. As man developed, he took in the red blood. The red blood brings about in the human being that which makes him self-conscious. The chlorophyll of the plant, permeated by astral substance and the I, has been transformed into the red blood. If you could permeate the green plant substance with the I and the astral substance, you would get the red blood. Now think of the image of the cross. In the image of the cross you also have something that points to the future of man. Where does man's future lie? He is to regain his plant nature, but connected with the higher level of consciousness that today's man has already gained. The red roses of the Rose Cross signify what has been gained through blood, but also what he had as plant nature and is to have again. This is prefigured in the rose. It has a plant nature, and it also has the red color of blood. The etheric body is active in the green leaves, and the astral body is active in the red blossom, where the closure is; the rose blossom owes its red to the most intense effects of the astral body of the earth.

In the future, the human being's astral body will become free and consciously active from the outside, from outside the physical body, just as the earth's astral body now acts on the rose. Then what is now present as a plant rose at a lower level will appear at a higher level as the human rose. Thus, in the wreath of roses surrounding the black wood of the cross, we actually have a sign of the development of the human being. In the black wood we see what dies; it is an image of what will also die in man. And in the red rose we see what will continue to develop until it becomes that chalice which, like the chalice of a plant towards the sun, holds out towards the spiritual sun-rays. And the rose cross, where the red roses surround the black cross, presents this process to us in an image.

The important thing about the symbols is that we do not merely think them, but that we feel and sense them. For only when we feel that the red rose is saying: that is what you will become one day, that is what the goal of human development represents to us – and when our hearts open and our feelings become pure, then the forces within us are released that lead us up into a higher world. Thus these symbols are workers at our soul. They permeate and interweave our soul; they are the greatest and most effective educators of our human race.

Just as we place images and imaginations before our soul here, so in still higher spheres the inner forces of numbers are placed before man. Man must learn to feel the inner relationships of numbers like spiritual music. One can describe the relationships of the physical body, ether body, astral body and I to one another by attempting to provide images of the relationship between these four aspects of human nature. In doing so, one experiences a kind of imagination. Thus, one can describe the relationship between the physical body and the etheric body by saying: the physical body comes into being because all the forces and substances that are spread out in the mineral kingdom are connected by the etheric body; it would disintegrate if the etheric body did not permeate it; the etheric body is an inner fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. In this way we work our way up to an image of the etheric body.

And if we try to gain a pictorial representation of the astral body, we imagine how it moves out at night and works on the etheric and physical bodies from the outside, by removing the fatigue substances. Let us make this clear to ourselves pictorially. But there is an even higher way of imagining this relationship; here one has to imagine the inner value of certain numbers. You have to recognize that the ratio of 1:3 is something quite different than the ratio of 1:7. This is not irrelevant. With the ratio of 1:3, you have to imagine that the 3 is differentiated within itself, and you have to imagine the interrelations of the individual quantities to the others.

But what is important is the ratio of 1:3:7:12. If you understand the relationship between these numbers as a tone ratio, in that you imagine that a tone makes three vibrations in a certain time, another seven vibrations in the same time, and yet another twelve vibrations, then you have expressed in these numbers the ratio that indicates the ratio of the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in spiritual music.

I = 1
astral body = 3
etheric body = 7
physical body = 12

There is good reason for this in the existence of the world. If we were to follow the development from the oldest Saturn existence to the present earthly existence, we would soon be able to find how this is rooted in the human existence. The Earth, in its first, in the Saturn embodiment, was surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. They provided the first germinal formation of the physical body. Through the influence of the corresponding signs on the body, this relationship of the number twelve to the individual limbs of the physical body came into being. The seven planets influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was a sun, the other planets were around it, and so the number seven influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was in its lunar embodiment, it was first affected by the Sun. But then, as a result of the Sun and then the Moon separating from the Earth, three bodies emerged from one body, and so the number three was effective in the formation of the astral body. And when the I came down from the higher worlds, this was expressed in the number one. The ratio of 1:3 gives you the ratio of the I to the astral body, to 7 the ratio to the etheric body, and to 12 the ratio to the physical body.

1:3:7:12 thus denotes the ratio of the four elements of human nature, which you must feel inwardly. It is not easy to awaken the sensations that one has to imagine the physical body as the most perfect of the four parts, the etheric body as the less perfect, the astral body even less perfect, and the I as the “baby” among the four members of human nature. We must think of the physical body as being twelve times more perfect than the I, the etheric body as being seven times more perfect, and the astral body as being three times more perfect. These numbers indicate the degrees of perfection for the four aspects of human nature. These numbers are therefore profound symbols for the real conditions.

Occult schools provided instructions for gradually becoming familiar with the numerical values. For example, the significance of the number three was taught by saying: “Let us consider the development of a plant and pay attention to three things.” Let us start with the plant germ. You have an inconspicuous, small plant germ, from which the plant gradually develops. We can depict this in a drawing by letting the plant germ diverge in a radiating manner, up to the leaves, flowers and fruit. Now the germ has become a plant and then the plant germ has become a plant again. What has diverged in the plant to become leaves, flowers and fruit is all wrapped up together in the germ; it has, as it were, slipped into the germ. In a developed plant, everything is revealed in the senses. Then the senses enter into a completely different realm, into the germ. There we have in the germ the senses as small as possible and the spiritual as large as possible.

But a third thing also takes place. While the germ is forming out of the plant and the new plant is developing out of this germ, elemental forces from the environment are continually acting on the plant from the outside. The germ is there, which developed from the plant, and out of it the new plant develops again; but the third comes from the whole surrounding world; and it is this third that changes each plant again a little. The higher a being stands, the more the influence of the third changes it.

Let us now turn again to the human soul and consider how it lives between birth and death. There it spreads out what it has brought with it as the fruits of a previous embodiment. Just as external influences affect unconscious plant life, so man consciously experiences the most diverse influences from outside in the life between birth and death. And everything he experiences there was not yet present in the seed; it is something entirely new, an enrichment, the fruits of which the person takes with him into a later life, into a following incarnation. What was present in the old plant continues to work in the new plant; but in the development of the new plant something else appears that was not present in the old plant.

Thus, in all development, we have three aspects to consider: first, the unfolding from a, as it were, wrapped-up state; we call this development or evolution. Then, what lies in the germ must come into being through the reverse process, the wrapping or involution. These two processes alone, however, do not yet give progress. Only when a being is able to take in influences from outside and process them into inner experiences can something new and progressive come into the world. That is the third thing; it is called creation out of nothing. You are constantly developing what is predisposed in you from the past, constantly taking in something from your environment that you transform into experiences, and then you carry that into a new embodiment. In all life, the trinity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing is at work. In the case of human beings, we have this creation out of nothing in the work of their consciousness. They experience the processes in their environment and process them into ideas, thoughts and concepts. Dispositions come from previous embodiments, but all progress in life is based on the production of new thoughts and new ideas. The circumstances of the environment are “consumed”, and the inner experiences lead to new thoughts and ideas. Therefore, three is the number of life, it is called the number of creation or of action.

On the other hand, another number is called the number of revelation. You can easily imagine which number is called the number of revelation. If you look at anything in the world, it must always reveal itself in a duality. As we cannot perceive light without darkness, so we always encounter an attenuated or opposite aspect of every real concept. Light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. Duality reigns in all that is revealed. Therefore, the number two is the number of revelation. Opposites are only united in the realm of the occult, which lies beneath the revealed. Therefore, the number one is the number of unity. Evolution and involution are not contradictions, because they would always unfold in the same way without the third - from germ to plant and from plant to germ. Only in connection with the third, creation out of nothing, does the new arise, which is expressed by the number three.

Thus, in the first three numbers you have important symbols of the spiritual world. It should be indicated to you by individual examples how that which is called symbols relates to the higher worlds, and how, for example, symbols such as the Holy Grail or the Rosicrucian in the picture express higher development.

Another beautiful symbol is the image of the mirror. We often call that which surrounds us a mirror of the spiritual, because in truth nothing external shows us anything other than the reflection of spiritual beings. You can observe this yourself in physical life. When you perceive a physical object, what does your eye see? Your eye would not see the object at all if the sun's rays did not fall on it and reflect off the object into your eye. In truth, your eye does not see ordinary objects, but the sunlight reflected from the objects, and that is how an object appears to you in a certain form. In truth, you do not see yourself when you look in the mirror either, because your spiritual part is outside of your physical being. What you see in the mirror is the reflection of the rays that fall on you from the spiritual world. What you see reflects the light of the spirit just as ordinary objects reflect sunlight. The outer body of man is actually the mirror in which his true being is reflected.

In the Atlantean period, man did not see objects outside at all. He knew that he was in a spiritual substance and therefore could see spiritually inwardly. Only in the last third of the Atlantean period did the spiritual light go out, and man only saw the reflected rays of the spiritual light. Imagine looking into a glass pane and being aware of your own spiritual qualities. Now someone applies a mirror substance to the back of the glass pane; as a result, you no longer see your own being in the glass pane, but only the image reflected by the mirror. Man now sees his image; and now the illusion arises for him that what he sees there is his ego. This illusion is wonderfully expressed in the Bible. Man lost Paradise when he became so absorbed in sensuality that he saw himself. Before that Adam and Eve had not “seen”; now “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” And because here an illusion actually occurred, legend attributes the fact of the externalization of objects to the Luciferic principle.

In Eastern Europe there is a folk tale that tells of a monk who wanted to test whether the biblical saying was based on truth: Those who seek will find, and to those who ask, it will be given. He wanted to test whether this was really true, so he prayed for what he wanted to beg for. He wanted nothing more nor less than the king's daughter herself. He proposed to the king's daughter. She told him that she would be his on one condition: he had to bring her an instrument in which she could see herself from top to bottom. This was at a time when there were no mirrors. So he went off searching, and met the devil, who told him the secret of the mirror principle. When he returned with this, he received the princess's hand in marriage; however, he later renounced her. So in order to obtain the mirror, he had to resort to the devil.

In the manifold signs and symbols that have come to us in these lectures, we have been able to see the real meaning of these images. Sensory perception is the content of the physical world. Images and imaginations are the expression of the astral world. Harmony of the spheres, sound of the spheres is the expression of the spiritual world. Those who ascend to this spiritual world perceive its inner spiritual sonority, it penetrates into them. Inspiration is the vital element of the spiritual world, just as imagination is the vital element of the astral world. A truly inspired world is created out of the spirit. IV

A Mongolian Legend. The Hermaphrodite. Man’s Victory over the Physiognomy of Death; the Skeleton. The Flight of Birds.

The different lectures given on the subject of sagas and myths have shown us that ancient knowledge of the spiritual world is contained in narratives which have survived among the peoples or have spread in some other way through humanity. The spirit of man has preserved in these myths a kind of thinking and feeling which once enabled humanity to possess a far higher form of knowledge than can ever be attained by the intellectual observation that is bound up with the outer senses. But one who has the gift of real discernment can perceive the deep wisdom-truths radiating from these brief legends and narratives.

We know that there was once a great migration from West to East; as certain sections of the Atlantean peoples moved from the West across to the East, they carried with them remembrances of conditions prevailing in old Atlantis and in still earlier times. In those who ponder the indications contained in the legends of these peoples with insight quickened by Spiritual Science, a knowledge of ancient times will begin to dawn and feelings that may well be stirred by these wisdom-truths then find their bearings in the divine World Order. The more closely wisdom approaches intellect, the colder, more devoid of feeling it becomes; the higher it ascends, the warmer, the more full of feeling it becomes.

Is there anyone whose feelings glow with real warmth while he is studying some scientific theory? The theory of physical heredity or adaptation never stirs the feelings. But if someone hears how humanity has lived through the conditions of Saturn-, Sun-, and Moon-existence, through the epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis—if he hears these things and remains inwardly unmoved, then the state of his soul cannot be really healthy. Such narratives strike chords in the very heart of a man whose mind and feelings are open and unbiased. Truths of this nature are contained in the sagas and myths and even if a man does not understand them, he will surely glimpse something of their profundity and wisdom in the feelings which arise in him.

Among the Mongolians in Asia there is a simple tale which has found its way to regions in Europe where Mongolian sagas still survive. It is a short, deeply moving narrative.

There is a mother who has at the top of her head a single eye. She wanders despairingly through the world, for she has lost her only child. On her wanderings she picks up every stone she sees, holds it in front of this eye and then, in utter disappointment, casts it away so that it splits into a thousand fragments. She has realised that this is not her child. Believing that she will find the child in every object, she seizes it, holds it in front of her eye and casts it from her. And so she hurries on, never at rest, always meeting the same experience.

This narrative is nothing else than a remembrance living in the peoples who wandered farthest to the East and who in Atlantis had still known of primeval conditions of our Earth, when men themselves were still able to see into the spiritual worlds. You all know that the bones at the top of a child’s head close only by degrees. In very ancient times there was, at this place in the head, a channel of communication between the human being and the outside world. If one had been able to see this connecting-link, it would have appeared as a body of light at the top of the head, raying outwards into the world.

This organ was not an eye but an instrument of feeling—particularly for warmth—by means of which the human being was able to look out freely into the astral world, to perceive not only bodies but the beings within those bodies around him. This organ has shrivelled away to become the pineal gland, as it is called, now covered by the vault of the skull. But as a heritage of this ancient organ which enabled him to experience the spiritual worlds, man still has something within him today, namely, the longing for those worlds which have been shut away from him by the closed door of his head. This longing in the souls of men finds expression in the religions. Just as in days of yore man saw around him beings aglow with warmth and feeling, so nowadays he sees himself surrounded by physical objects.

Truly it is a moving narrative. The woman, the mother of humanity who has the power of clairvoyance, wanders through the world, seeking for something that will satisfy her longing but she does not find it in any of the outer objects which are disclosed to mankind today through the senses. It is with this profundity that the spirit of man speaks to us in the sagas and myths whose real meaning can only be discovered with the help of Spiritual Science. It might be thought that the story is sufficiently explained by linking it with the remembrance of a condition actually prevailing among mankind, but in reality it is far deeper. With these narratives it is not only a matter of what is said but also of how it is said. They contain something deeper still.

There may seem to be a contradiction in the fact that the woman in whom this organ is preserved perceives and recognises external objects with a single eye, whereas the things of the outer world can be perceived only with the two eyes as they are today. But precisely here lies a deep mystery-truth, only to be fathomed by turning our gaze to the happenings in which humanity has been involved. We shall see how applicable this knowledge is in practical life when it is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science.

When a scientist is examining a human body in the dissecting room or studying physiological processes from outside, he feels that the same approach can be made to every one of the organs; he uses the same instruments when dissecting the heart or the stomach; he thinks that the only matter of real importance is that of the particular chemical constituents of which these organs are composed. He has no inkling whatever that they differ fundamentally, according to the sources of their form and structure. None of these organs would exist if an astral body were not membered into man, and because the nervous system is excreted, as it were, from this inner member, the nerve-substance is, in its very essence, different from other substances. The shapers and architects of the nerve-substance have their life and being in the astral world.

In certain realms there are forces, akin to the human ego, which gave the primary impulse for the formation of the red blood. Ego-beings are the shapers and architects of this red blood. They were working from outside before the Ego was able to come down into man. The animals have not an Ego; they are ‘possessed’ by the red blood. But man attains freedom because he is possessed by his ‘I’, by his own very self. It was necessary that he should take possession of himself in order that he might be able to achieve self-mastery.

In the glandular organs the etheric body is working—that is to say, the beings who are active in etheric space. In order to understand the glands we must be clear about one thing;—if there had been no astral body in man, but only an etheric body, then only such beings as are active in etheric space would have worked on the organs in animal and man; the organs we know as glands could never have arisen but only organs similar to those we find in the plant-kingdom around us, for there too the etheric body is working. Every new and additional principle works upon and transforms whatever is already in existence.

Because the astral body penetrates into man and builds the nerve-system, it also works back upon the ether world and transforms the original plant-organs in such a way that they become glands.

If we go back to the original organs from which the liver or spleen or gall-bladder have been formed, we find something altogether different from what comes to light when these organs are dissected with ordinary scientific instruments. When our knowledge of organs is drawn from the higher worlds and then applied in practice, medical science which can be effective in the real sense, will come into being. This is only in the preparatory stage today but will become reality in the future.

In studying the human body it is particularly important to know that certain organs have assumed their present form at a comparatively late stage, whereas others have existed in their present form since primeval times. The organs which only received their present form at a late stage are destined, in a not far distant future, to decay, to wither and fall away from the human body. Other organs are only now in their initial stage of development. These latter organs are destined in the future for an important role in everything that comes to pass through man. Everything connected with the heart and with the larynx will be a creative force. The heart and larynx are still only at the beginning of their development. They will become organs of reproduction, of procreation. An indication of this can be found in the change of the male voice at puberty. Heart and larynx will be transformed into greater and greater perfection of form and later on will bring forth human beings.

On the other hand the procreative organs as they are at present, are in the dying stage; they will harden more and more and sever themselves from the human body. We only understand man’s body when we know how the dying part is related to the progressive part in its evolution. Man has within himself something that is on the way to death and something that is budding more and more into new life. Occult observation can confirm in the case of each of man’s organs whether it is on the way to death or whether it is in the youthful stage.

Once upon a time the pineal gland was very active and powerful; it has now become an organ of almost no importance. The methods for attaining clairvoyance will again conjure forth a new organ from the present pineal gland. Certain organs are imbued with life again when they have reached the stage of death; others die off entirely, disappear from the physical plane and then arise in a new form. Let us study those organs in man which are most obviously on the descending path leading to death, and those in which young life is unfolding on the upward path. The organs of greatest importance are those in which both death and life are contained. The use to which they are put is, from a certain point of view, of supreme importance.

You are all acquainted with the elementary fact that man consists of physical body, etheric body and astral body; within the astral body is the ‘I’, the Ego. The ‘I’ works, to begin with, upon the astral body, continually transforming one part of it. When the ‘I’ came down from the bosom of the Godhead and began for the first time to work upon the astral body, this astral body was, in point of fact, a gift bestowed upon man. Let us picture man at the moment when the ‘I’ penetrated into him. The physical body, the etheric body were there, and penetrating them, the astral body. Then, from above, the ‘I’ strikes into this body and begins to work in the human being. The part of the astral body that is shaped by the ‘I’ is therefore twofold—one part is also possessed by the animal and another arises in the human being because the ‘I’ has worked upon the astral body. In the animal there has been no such incision of the ‘I’; the astral body of the animal has been formed in a particular way, but by powers outside. Everything that comes from the higher worlds shapes and brings about new transformation in the old organ. It is from this standpoint that we must study the relations between these three bodies.

The physical body is composed of the physical and chemical substances existing in the external world; with these alone, without the other bodies, it would simply be mineral. But the ether body, or life body, permeates it in all directions.

What is the function of the life-body? At every moment it counteracts the destruction of the physical body, fights against this destruction; without the life-body the physical body would succumb to the chemical and physical forces and disintegrate, as indeed it does as soon as the life-body has abandoned it at death. While the two are united during life, the etheric body fights all the time against this disintegrating process.

And what is the function of the astral body? It is very important to study this. In a certain sense the astral body is occupied during waking life—not during sleep—with killing the etheric body all the time, with suppressing the forces unfolded by the etheric body; hence the body becomes exhausted during the day. The astral body is constantly destroying the etheric body. But if this did not happen no consciousness would arise. Consciousness is not possible without the gradual destruction of life. The spiritual activity of life which we are describing, the wonderful, scintillating life in the ether-world and the constant suppression of this rhythm by the astral world—this is what gives rise to consciousness. These processes in the spiritual worlds express themselves in the physical world in the following way:—The moment consciousness shoots into what is merely life, a process of hardening, of ossification, begins in the physical body. The more the soft, organic life-masses are permeated inwardly by hard, bony formations, the nearer does the animal approach to a conscious state. In the molluscs and snails these hardened inner organs do not yet exist; the hard shell is excreted in order that the dim consciousness possessed by these animals may arise. In animals with a higher degree of consciousness, all osseous substance is secreted as a secondary activity; the hard, cartilaginous tissues and bony structure are separated out from soft, gelatinous masses. In the highest animal this process has almost reached its culmination in an organic system that is practically finished and complete.

In man, something special happens:—A new incision takes place which partially transforms the astral body. A new direction is given to the earlier tendency towards ossification. If man had left the astral body unchanged and had worked only in the direction of skeleton-formation, no culture would have been possible on the earth. The part of the astral body which was kept separate, brought about a new tendency, a particular task. The hardening process in the skeleton-formation is governed by the astral body.

How does this tendency make itself manifest? Whereas the former tendency led more and more towards hardening, towards fixing a culminating point for the astral system in evolution, the astral body in man keeps something back, something that has a tendency to soften again. This makes it possible for evolution to advance. If this tendency had been absent, if everything had streamed into the bony system, there would be no progress, no culture. Animal species do not progress; the evolution of the tiger species, the lion species, has reached its culmination and goes no further. Man, however, with the part of the astral body which has been kept separate, is able to take what has hardened back again and new organs, soft and pliable organs, can be formed. This is extraordinarily significant! In the animal there is no such tendency.

Let us think of a living human being, with his tendency towards hardening on the one side and on the other, his tendency to hold something back. We see that these two tendencies separate when the human being reaches the age of seven—the time of the change of teeth. The tendency which culminates in ossification is manifest in the teeth. But the human being keeps back sufficient life-force to enable him to evolve. Up to the seventh year in the life of the human being it is only what belongs to the species, the genus, that can come to expression. At this point he is able to take his place in the cultural progress of the times and the school period begins. These two things are inwardly connected: the hardening tendency which comes to expression in the formation of the teeth and the tendency towards softening where something must be kept back, something that the etheric body—which becomes free at the seventh year—needs for its development. The two are connected.

There are many phenomena between which it is difficult to perceive any connection if they are not observed from the vantage-point of the spiritual investigator. Puerperal fever,¹ as it is called, usually goes together with faulty teeth. The connection between the two tendencies, the tendency to hardening in the teeth and the tendency to carry evolution forward, to give play to the procreative force, becomes evident here; if the one has been impaired, the other is injuriously affected. It is important for these two tendencies to be kept in balance and endeavours must be made to adjust life accordingly. It may happen that the tendency to softening gets the upper hand. For example, workers on the land—whose place in civilisation is essentially different from that of town-dwellers—may be brought into the towns. They would be able to adjust themselves if they and their forefathers had grown up in these conditions; but as things are, there is no harmony, no equilibrium between the hardening and the softening forces of their organism. One of the two will get the upper hand. But if the hardening tendency preponderates, the soft tissues of the organism will begin to harden in a remarkable way. Then when the hardening process becomes unduly strong tuberculosis appears.

As long as animals live in their right environment, no illness of this nature will befall them. But if they are removed from this right environment they too will be prone to this disease in which the hardening tendency preponderates—as for example, in the case with monkeys.

Thus do the spiritual worlds work into our physical world and we can only understand the latter by going back to its spiritual foundations. Just let us reflect how closely everything that has been said is connected with man’s happiness or suffering. Equilibrium in the life of man depends upon his organs having assumed their right form in the evolutionary process at the right time. If an organ remains at an earlier stage, if hardening or softening comes about in the wrong way, a life of unhappiness is the result. Each organ must reach a definite stage in its evolution at a definite time. The development even of those organs in man which are not visible may lag behind or hurry too far ahead. In future times, tuberculosis will no longer be injurious because then certain parts of man’s organism must harden. Diseases that are due to the conditions of civilisation differ from all others.

Do we not hear an echo of this in the tale of the Mongolian woman who vainly seeks her lost child? She has the organ in her head at the wrong time. It brings her woe; never pausing, she hastens through the world and finds nothing that can give her eye satisfaction. She seeks in vain for what belongs to her. What deep wisdom has been woven by the Leaders of humanity into this legend!

Let us now go further and consider man as he is today; he consists of organs on the ascending and descending lines of evolution. Stage by stage the astral body has been membered into him. There was a time when his organs were like plants, of the nature of plants. As the result of the astral body having built the nerve-system, the plant-body took flesh upon itself. This process was only gradual and did not affect all the organs at the same time. If we were to go back to pre-Lemurian times in evolution we should find that the human body still had organs of an entirely plantlike nature.

All the organs in the human body in which the sensual desires work less strongly were the earliest to be transformed into organs of flesh; the organs in which the sensual appetites work most strongly—the sexual organs—were the latest to be so transformed. For long, long ages these organs retained their plant-nature and they will be the first to wither away and pass over into a plantlike existence. It was not until sensual desire had already taken deep root in the human being on his path of descent that the sexual organs were transformed from their plant-nature into organs of flesh. Spiritual Science looks back to a godlike age in remote antiquity when the sexual forces were as yet unknown to man. Such a being could have been seen in the ancient Mysteries—a human being still without sex. At the places where the sexual organs are now situated we should have been able to see in this being creeper-like plant-formations, organs permeated by the etheric body only, untouched as yet by the astral body. Such a being was the figure of the Hermaphrodite in the Mysteries; he appeared in the form which Spiritual Science can confirm as having been a man’s actual form in those remote ages. He has plant organs at the place where the organs of reproduction are situated today and creeper-life plants go out from his loins. We can now understand why among very ancient people and in the Bible legend, the fig-leaf is spoken of. It was not there as a cover but pointed to an ancient, sacred existence when the human being was still plantlike at this place in his organism.

But there is still more to be said. We can observe this overcoming of the hardening tendency in man in yet another way. It is noteworthy that in the occult schools particular account was taken of this. When the ‘I’ of man descended to the Earth from the bosom of the Godhead, it was necessary for this hardening tendency to be overcome. But even before that time there were other creatures in whom this development had already taken place, namely the birds. The birds have an ‘I’ but an ‘I’ that lives much more in the outer external world. Therefore there is something in which they have not shared, something that is important for all human occult development. It is what comes to expression in the development of certain parts of the skeleton, in the development of the bone-marrow. The bones of the birds are hollower than the bones of a human being and the other animals; they have retained a much more ancient condition which man, and the higher animals too, have left behind.

Man sends the forces of the ‘I’ right into the marrow of the bones and a considerable part of his occult development consists in changing the passive relationship in which he stands to his bone-marrow into a conscious one. At the present time he can only work upon what is contained within the bones of the skull, upon his brain, but preparation is being made to enable him to work upon that semi-fluid element which permeates the bones. The fact that the essential force in man penetrated into the very bones, made his present evolution possible; in future time he will acquire the forces to work upon the actual substance in his bones and so to transform his body down to the very bones. First of all he gains dominion over his blood and the blood will then be the instrument whereby he can work right into the bone-substance. The bones are a mineralisation of man’s being. When, down to the very bones, man has gained full mastery over what expresses itself, at the wrong time today, as rickets, then he himself will create his own form; he will transform himself into Atma.² He has then gained the victory over the hardening principle, the principle that leads to death, that which expresses its real physiognomy in the human skeleton. The skeleton is a true image of death.

Man will conquer the physiognomy of death when he controls through the power of the spirit the form he now controls from outside through the mechanical organs of the muscles. His thoughts today penetrate into his bones; later on it will be his feelings—and then he will have gained the victory over the physiognomy of death.

What abundant blessing the sciences will bring to man when they come to know about the hardening and softening processes! That is what is meant by saying that Spiritual Science must be put to practical application in life. If legends like the ancient Mongolian fairy-tale have still survived, the truths it contains will be expressed in a different form. Man will observe the world with different senses and be able to understand many of its riddles—for example, the secret of the flight of the birds will then be unveiled. By miraculous ways they travel hundreds upon hundreds of miles from the cold North to the warm South and then back again in the spring by different routes. I have said that the birds are a species that has remained behind at earlier stages of existence.

Progress on the Earth in the real sense began only when the Moon separated from the Earth; before then, when the two were united and there was only Sun and Earth-Moon, this Earth-Moon moved around the Sun with one side always turned towards it. All living creatures on the Earth moved once around the Moon during one of the Moon’s revolutions in order to receive the forces and influences of the Sun. And in the flight of the birds, something of that journey round the planets has been preserved. The birds split off from the progressive course of the evolution of humanity before the ‘I’, the Ego, came to the Earth. With advancing physical evolution, the sexual element entered into possession of each single body. Previously, the astral body—which is filled with desires and works upon the single bodies—was not present. The desires were previously a cosmic force, streaming from the ancient Sun to the ancient Moon. This was the force which directed those ancient movements around the planets, for it determined the manner in which procreation took place. The circling of the birds around the planet is thus nothing else than a bridal procession. In the birds the sexual element is still in the surrounding world and this cosmic force is the directing power, guiding and leading the migration. It guides the birds from outside, whereas in the other case it has penetrated into the single bodies. These are the same forces which work within the body and lead one human being to another in the different sexes. The sexual force that works in man does not work from within in the case of the birds; it comes to expression in the flight around the planets.

When man has acquired the faculty to be united with the whole cosmos, he will also possess the power to work outwards again into the cosmos. The woman of the Mongolian legend too will then again be present. But those forces of spiritual perception which are an attribute of the single eye in the head and which being unappeased made her cast aside and shatter every created thing—those forces will then permeate man. He will then perceive not merely the outer physical objects, but that which lies behind and expresses itself in them. The now hardened physical body will then again be spiritual; the woman of the Mongolian legend will live again and look out as of yore into the spiritual world. And what she then takes hold of she can press lovingly to her heart; she can find in a world made spiritual that which she can hold in her loving embrace.

The evolution of man is towards ascent into the cosmos. Were man unwilling to share patiently in this evolution, the force, the fluid contained in the eye of the men of ancient time would not stream through his whole being, would not permeate his organs. This force would spend itself and man would wither away from lack of love. But the mission of man is to permeate with love everything that lives upon his planet, to pour his forces into the universal All. There can be no redemption of the individual without the redemption of what lies outside us. Man has to redeem his planet together with himself. There can only be redemption when man pours his forces into the cosmos; he must not only be one who is himself redeemed, but he himself must become a redeemer.

• 1. Puerperal fever is fever caused by uterine infection following childbirth.
• 2. Atma or Atman (anthroposophical term: ‘Spirit Man’) is the highest principle of the human being which is now only in its germinal state and will be fully developed only in the last stage of the cosmic evolution from the Old Saturn to the future Vulcan.

Anthroposophy, when properly understood, will guide us back more and more into that immediate life from which a materialistic way of thinking, quite paradoxically, estranges us.

We have said this frequently, here and at other places, at many different occasions, and always in order to characterize the mission of our anthroposophical movement. The above statement will make a strange impression on many of our contemporaries, for they are of the opinion that true life, or what they call life, is to be sought elsewhere than in what anthroposophy has to give; and they are also of the opinion that anthroposophy is least qualified to show them how to lead a practical everyday existence. Such is not the case. Anthroposophy will help us in all ways, great and small! Its teaching, when thoroughly assimilated, will enable those who are engaged in public or other matters to solve the problems of the day in the way in which they should be solved if mankind is to lead a complete life. The many disorders and unhealthy conditions of our age which are now being approached, from one standpoint or another, in a more or less amateurish manner, could, if our contemporaries were to permeate themselves with anthroposophical truths, be successfully handled. I just wanted to touch on this issue, it will not be the focus of our contemplation today.

Today it will be more the emotional aspect of anthroposophy with which I ask you to occupy your thoughts. It will be noticed how to a deeper, feeling permeated comprehension of life, a time like the present must seem to be abstruse, uninteresting, matter-of-fact and theoretical. When Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide approaches, we can see how certain outward forms and external ceremonies are adhered to But there is very little left of what our forefathers felt to be alive in their very souls—that deep current of feeling penetrating into the soul which was peculiar to our forefathers with regard to the relationship of mankind to the whole cosmos and its divine foundations. This feeling was particularly alive at the time of such festivals. Then it was something tangible for the soul, for then it received impressions different from those gained during the rest of the year.

No true conception is formed today of that which filled the souls of our ancestors when the days grew shorter, the end of the year approached and the birthday of Christ Jesus was about to be celebrated; or when, at the festival of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, the snow was slowly melting, and what the earth had hidden appeared once more on the surface. It would seem indeed that our life were concrete. In reality the feelings of our contemporaries have become abstract, matter-of-fact and empty. People pass through the streets, and hardly feel more about Christmas than that it is a time for giving and receiving presents. Should they have any other feeling, there is little connection between it and that deep feeling which absorbed our forefathers at that time of the year. Mankind has lost its true relationship with life. To show how to regain this relationship is one aspect of the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science.

One who only grasps with his mind and understanding what is usually called the anthroposophical conception of the world has understood only the very least part of anthroposophy. It is only understood by him who realizes that the whole of man’s feelings and emotions must be altered when anthroposophy lives itself into the heart and soul. What was abstract for a certain time, and even forgotten in its significance—the true meaning of our festivals—will again penetrate into our souls when the intimate connection of the whole surrounding world with man is realized again, as it may be through a spiritual perception.

The deeper meaning of the Christmas festival has often engaged our attention at this time. Today, we shall look at it from another aspect. This can only be done if at first we make quite clear to ourselves what impression anthroposophical thoughts and ideas produce on our feelings, how they really have the power of making out of a human being something quite different from what he is at present, something through which he will again know what it is to have an immediate experience of the pulsation of the spiritual life of nature—actually to feel the warmth which passed through creation, animating every being. When a man looks today at the starry sky with the help of the abstruse science of astronomy, he sees it inhabited by abstruse material worlds. But these celestial bodies will again appear to him as the bodies of souls and spirits; space will once more appear to him permeated by spirit and soul. He will experience the whole cosmos as filled with warmth, and have the feeling that he has when reclining on the bosom of a friend; though of course experiencing the spirit of the cosmos is much more majestic and sublime.

We know that we have to seek in man alone such a soul as we are cognizant of in man—an individual soul, which, so to say, lives in a single body. The soul of the other creatures which surround us, we must seek in another way and in a different form. The animals which live in our midst also have souls, but we shall look in vain for them here on the physical plane. The animal-ego, which we name a “group ego”, is to be found on the astral plane; and a whole group of related animals, for example the lion-group, the tiger-group, the cat-group, all separate groups of related forms, have each of them a common soul, a common ego. The separation by space here on earth makes no difference; every lion belongs to the same lion-ego, whether one lion is here in a zoo, and another in Africa. The spiritual scientist can find the animal ego on the astral plane; and there these group-egos are individual personalities, just as your personality here on the physical plane is individual. As your ten fingers belong to your individual personality, so does every lion belong to the group-ego of the lions. If we could become acquainted with the individual group-egos on the astral plane, we would find that wisdom is their most conspicuous characteristic, although to us here on earth separate animals may not appear very wise. Nobody ought to judge the characteristics of the group-ego, of animal individuality on the astral plane, on the basis of the characteristics of the separate animals here on earth. Just as little as your ten fingers show the characteristics of an individual ego, just so little does the single animal show the characteristics of the group-ego.

These group-egos act very sagaciously, and are wiser than you imagine; for what you know here as the achievements of animals are brought about by these group-egos. They live in the atmosphere surrounding our earth, they are to be found round about us. If you follow the flight of birds as they migrate at the approach of autumn from the north-east to the south-west, and at the approach of spring return once more from the south-west to the north-east, you might ask yourself: who guides their flight so wisely? In your search for the individual directors and rulers you will come, as a student of spiritual science, to the group-egos of the different genera or species. The astral ego, which is just as much an ego on the astral plane as the human ego is here, lives in every animal community. The group souls or personalities or astral egos, who have their individual members here on the physical plane, are much wiser than the egos of mankind on the physical plane; everything which is so wisely organized in the animal-world is the manifested wisdom of the group-egos of animals. We walk differently through the world if we know that at every pace forward, we step through beings whose deeds we are able to see.

Now let us look at the plant kingdom: the egos of this plant world are to be found in a still higher world than the one in which the group-egos of the animals live. The egos of plants (there are actually very few of them) are to be found in the spirit-world or Devachan; each one of the plant-egos embraces many, very many, of the individual plants which are found here on earth in such great variety. If we should seek the place where these plant-egos are to be found in space, we would come to the center of the earth. All plant-egos are united at the center of the earth.

It would reflect a rather primitive mental life if, when considering the spirit of the egos, you were to ask: Is there room enough for all these different egos? In the spirit everything in-terpenetrates. He who does not understand this comes to the point of view expressed just now in a book which is particularly recommended to theosophists. This book certainly speaks of spiritual worlds, but speaks about them by using arguments such as: If in the course of a thousand years thirty billion people had lived whose souls are now in the atmospheric surroundings of the earth, then there would be such a great number of souls, that there would scarcely be room for them all in the earth’s periphery.—This book is well intentioned, but it is extremely trivial. (“Unknown Powers,” by C. Flammarion.)

We have to seek the plant-egos in the center of the earth, because the earth itself as a planet is a complete organism. In the same relation in which the hairs of your head art to your organism, so are the plants to the organism of our earth. These plants are not independent beings but are members of the earth organism.

Feelings of pleasure and pain in plants are the pleasure and pain of the earth’s organism; we need only recall what you were told a few weeks ago about pleasure and pain in the plant-kingdom. He who is able to observe these things knows that if you injure a plant in the part above the earth, the injury is not connected with a feeling of pain in our earth organism. On the contrary, it gives a pleasant feeling to the earth, in the same way in which the cow suckling her calf gets and bestows a pleasurable sensation. Thus the green of the plant which springs out of the earth, even though fixed, may be compared with the milk of the animal organism. And when in autumn the reaper cuts the grain with his scythe, it is more than an abstract occurrence to one who understands how to transform anthroposophical ideas into feelings of the soul. The reaping calls forth a breath of joy which goes over the whole field, and the mowing of the grass fills the field with pleasurable sensations.

Thus we learn to feel with the earth organism as we feel on the bosom of a friend. We feel pain with the earth when we understand that as soon as we tear out the plants by their roots, the earth feels pain. It ought not to be objected here that under certain conditions it might be better to transplant a whole plant with roots rather than to pick its blossoms. Such an objection is not relevant here. If a person begins to get grey hair, and in order to remain younger looking pulls out the first grey hairs, does the action hurt the less?

Thus we learn to feel with nature around us; more and more we learn to experience nature as permeated by soul and spirit. When we enter a quarry and watch the men breaking stones, this act remains with us as something concrete, not abstract, if we deepen our anthroposophical ideas on the subject into feelings of the soul. Then we do not only see the stones flying out of the rocks—not even if a rock were blasted would it seem abstract to us. On the contrary, we learn to feel what nature, permeated by soul and spirit, is feeling outside us. If we have a glass of water before us and throw into it some salt or a lump of sugar, and watch how the salt or sugar dissolves, this arouses the feeling that there is soul in it. If we would know what kind of a soul is contained therein we must not bring forward ordinary analogies. It would be very easy to believe that when the quarry-man breaks off the stone, his action causes nature to feel pain, but in reality the exact opposite is the case. What is called division into fragments in the mineral kingdom gives nature the greatest joy, an internal sensation of well-being. There is also an internal sensation of well-being when we dissolve a piece of sugar or salt in water. Feelings of pleasure flow through the water during the dissolving of the mineral bodies. It is different under different circumstances.

We can call to mind the primeval age on earth—that time when our earth was a fiery-fluid body with every mineral and metal dissolved in it. It was not possible for our earth to remain in such a state, it had to become the place on which we live, the solid body on which we can walk about. The metals and minerals had to solidify out of the liquid element; it was necessary for them to harden, to pull themselves together. Everything that was dissolved in the liquid element had to congeal and become crystallized. A similar process to what can be observed with salt dissolved in a glass of water: let the water evaporate and you will be able to see the salt crystals as firm particles. If you follow the feelings which are brought into action by such happenings you will see that pain can be felt even in the apparently dense mineral kingdom. Everything which appears to us as demolition and breaking into fragments gives a feeling of pleasure to the earth; whereas consolidation, compression, crystallization give a feeling of pain. The minerals and rocks of the planet on which we live have been formed under conditions of pain. And this has, more or less, been the case during the hardening of the earth’s crust.

If we look into the future development of our earth, we must imagine that what is firm and solid will become more and more flexible and liquid, until at last the earth changes into that which is called the “astral earth.” Thus the earth matter will have become rarer and rarer; so that we, in the first half of our earth’s evolution, must regard the elements of the mineral kingdom as that which, under the influence of pain and suffering, has formed the solid stage for our existence. Towards the end of the earth’s evolution there will be more peaceful feelings, the whole earth will be full of feelings of joy; it will change into a heavenly planet, which, in the cosmos, will be astral.

When the initiated talk about these things, deep mysteries lie hidden in their words. They express themselves in such a way that their words have several levels of meaning, because they contain so much. St. Paul, who was an initiate, spoke with words which always had several hidden meanings. The further we advance in the comprehension of the cosmos, of the spirit worlds, the better we shall understand these expressions of St. Paul and their hidden meaning. St. Paul knew that the earth suffered during the time it was becoming firm, and that it is longing for its release into a spiritual, heavenly state: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, waiting for the adoption.” (Romans viii, 22) By these words the initiate Paul referred to the pain accompanying the formation of the hard minerals whereon we stand and move.

So long as we only consider Anthroposophy as a system of thought we do not understand it rightly. It is the characteristic mark of Anthroposophy, that ideas must change into feelings, and we become different beings when, at every step, we feel and are conscious of all that we see about us. Those who really understood the esoteric teaching of Christianity were also of this opinion. You can follow the Christian writers as far as the eighteenth century and discover many who had sympathy with all the pleasure and all the pain of living nature. In their writings they use words which are for mankind today but empty sounds, or at the most allegories or pictures, whereas to those who understand them they are truths: “You shall not alone think upon nature, but you shall perceive it and taste it and feel it!”

They meant that when the reaper cuts the grain, we should taste the feeling that passes over the field during this action.

When we see the man in the quarry breaking off the stone, we should enjoy with nature her sensation of well-being. When we notice a deposit of earth where a river flows into the sea, we should at the same time learn to feel the pain which accompanies the deposition of earth.

Thus we can begin to experience nature completely permeated by soul. Our souls will then gain the power of growing out of their confinement. Feeling streams into the world in which we live, and we become one with the whole of nature. When we become one with it, piece by piece, we will also feel the spirituality and soul-nature of the great yearly occurrences. In the spring, when the days gradually become longer and longer, and more light falls on the earth; when out of her womb the plants, whose seeds were in the earth, spring up, and when everything is once more clothed in green, then we feel that not only what we see—as the shimmering green- is coming forth, but we feel as well that something akin to soul activity is taking place.

When winter draws near, the days grow shorter, less light falls on our earth, the plants retire to their winter sleep, and the green changes, we too experience a similar feeling to that which we have at night when we fall asleep. On the other hand, the awakening of external nature in the spring draws from us its corresponding feeling, for these events are no allegory, but realities. We feel the changes in nature, and also the changes in the soul and spirit of nature. In the latter half of the summer we feel how everything seems to decline, how the soul of our earth approaches sleep.—Then in the evening, when we ourselves fee1 sleepy, we have a real example before us of the living process which we have often described. Gradually, the astral body with the ego withdraws from the physical and etheric body, frees itself, and floats as it were into its own, its very own original world. If a man could do today, in the present condition of the evolution of humanity, what he will be able to do in the future, a spiritual consciousness would light up when the astral body lifts itself out of the etheric and physical bodies; spiritual forces and a spirit world would surround the body; man would simply leave his physical body in order that he might enter into another form of existence. This, in fact, he does today too, but he knows nothing about it in his present stage of development.

The same thing also occurs to our earth. The astral body of our earth changes during the year. (The changes are not the same in the two opposite hemispheres, but this does not concern us today). The astral body of our earth is occupied with the external natural existence of our earth during the time in which plants and life generally spring up out of the earth. When plants grow, it is the astral body that looks after everything that grows and flourishes on the earth. In the autumn, when a kind of sleepiness comes over the earth, this astral body returns to its spiritual activity.

Those who are able to really feel this earth-process know that during the height of the sun—from spring right into autumn -in everything which grows and increases out of doors, they must see the outer revelation of the spirit of the earth. But when autumn approaches they are directly in contact with the liberated astral body of the earth; when the days are shortest, that is, when the outer physical life approaches nearest to sleep, then the spiritual life awakens. What is this “spiritual life” of the earth? Who is the “spirit of the earth?”

This “spirit of the earth” described Himself as such when He spoke these words: “He that eateth My bread, treadeth Me with feet”; and when He made reference to that which the earth brings forth as true nourishment for man and said, “This is My body!” and again when He was referring to that which flows as the sap of life and said, “This is My blood!” In these sayings He described the earth itself as His organism.

This was quite different in pre-Christian times—different from what it is in the Christian era at a definite moment of the earth’s evolution. During the short days when the sacred mysteries of the ancients were being observed, those who were initiated turned with their whole soul towards the sun; at midnight on the day which we know as Christmas Day, those about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries were advanced so far that they were able to see the sun at the midnight hour. They were then promoted to being clairvoyant. We today cannot see the sun at the midnight hour because it is then at the other side of the earth; but the physical earth presents no obstacle to the seer, he can see the sun. He sees it in its spiritual essence. When the seers saw the sun at the midnight hour in the holy mysteries they saw the sun’s sovereign ruler—the Christ. Those saw Him who were able to come into contact with Him, but at that time still in the sun.

The flowing of blood from His wounds on Golgotha was an event fraught with meaning for the whole of the earth’s evolution. Nobody understands that event who has not the power of understanding that Christianity is built upon a mystical fact. If someone with clairvoyant sight could have watched the development of the earth from a distant planet for some thousands of years, he would not only have seen the physical body, but the astral body of our earth as well. This astral body of the earth would have emanated definite lights, definite colors and definite forms during those thousands of years. In one moment this was changed.

Other forms appeared, other lights and colours shone forth -and this moment was when the blood flowed out of the wounds of our Saviour at Golgotha. This was not only a human, but a cosmic event. Through it the Christ-Ego, which up to this time could only be discovered in the sun, passed to the earth. It linked itself with the earth, and in the spirit of the earth we find the Christ-Ego, the sun ego. The initiate is henceforth able to see in Christ himself the sun-spirit which formerly, at the time of Christmas, was only to be seen at the midnight hour on the sun in the holy places of the ancients.

Christian consciousness, not only the consciousness of the ordinary Christian, but the consciousness of the Christian initiate, lies in the living feeling of union with the spirit of Christ. This takes place every year when the days are becoming shorter and the physical earth is beginning to fall asleep. It is then possible for us to come into direct connection with the spirit of the earth. Therefore, to place the birth of our Savior in the time of the shortest days and the longest nights was not the outcome of an arbitrary decision, but the result of initiation. Bound up with the shortening of the days and the lengthening of the nights, we see something infinitely spiritual, and we feel at the same time that in this event there is a living soul—the highest soul which we are able to feel in the earth’s evolution.

When the first Christians uttered the name of Christ, they did not express any doctrine or any particular mode of thought. It would have seemed quite impossible for them to call anyone a Christian who believed only the words which Christ Jesus spoke as a Christian teacher. It cannot be denied that these doctrines are also to be found in other religious beliefs, and no one wishes to regard them as something singular. Today, however, for the first time in history, par-ticularly in the educated classes, special stress is laid on the fact that the teaching of Christ Jesus is in harmony with other religious beliefs. It is quite true that it is difficult to find a single precept which had not already been taught before; but this has nothing to do with the matter. Not by doctrine alone is the Christian made one with Christ. He is not a Christian who believes in the doctrine, but he is a Christian who believes in the Christ-Spirit. In order to be a Christian we must have the feeling of union with Him, the feeling of union with the Christ who actually dwells on earth. Simply to avow the teaching of Christ is not preaching Christianity. To preach Christianity means to be able to see in Christ the Spirit Whom we have just characterized as the regent of the sun; Who in the moment when the blood flowed out of His wounds on Golgotha, transferred His work to the earth and through this act drew the earth into the work of the sun.

On this account those who were the first to preach Christianity laid very great stress on proclaiming the person of Christ Jesus, and very little stress on His words: “We have seen Him when He was with us on the holy mount.” They attached great value to the fact that He was there—that they saw Him. “We have placed our hands in His wounds.” They valued the fact that they had touched Him. What was felt at the time was that the whole of the future evolution of mankind on earth proceeds from this historical event. On this account the disciples said: “We value the fact that we were with Him on the holy mount; but we also think it a great thing that the words of the prophets have been fulfilled in Him—those words inspired by very truth and wisdom.” What the prophets foretold has been fulfilled. By “prophets” was then meant initiates, men who could predict the Christ, because they had seen Him at the midnight hour at Christmas time in the Holy Mysteries. The first disciples considered the event on Golgotha as a fulfillment of that which has always been known; and a rapid and total change took place in the feelings and thoughts of the initiated.

If we look into the time before the Christian era, and even let our thoughts wander further to a more remote time, we find that all love and affection is bound up with the tic of blood relationships. In the Jewish race, out of which Christ Himself issued, we see love only between those who are kinsfolk—we see that those love one another in whom the same blood flows; even earlier than this, love always rested on the natural foundation of a common blood-relationship. Spiritual love, which is independent of flesh and blood, was first introduced on earth by Christ. On this depends the fulfillment of the saying: “Who forsaketh not father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, cannot be My disciple.” He who makes love conditional upon the natural foundation of blood-relationship, is not according to this sense a Christian. Spiritual love, which as a great fraternal bond will permeate all mankind, is the result of Christianity.

Christianity teaches mankind how to acquire the most perfect freedom and inner cohesiveness. The ‘Psalmist said, “I remember the days of old and ponder times long past”. To look back upon one’s first ancestors was a persistent experience of the olden times. The men of old could feel the blood of their ancestors flowing through their veins, and felt that their ego was connected with the ego of their ancestors. If it were desired to really feel this connection, even amongst the old Jewish people, it was customary to utter the name of Abraham; he who uttered this name felt that some of the blood which descended from Abraham flowed through his veins. When he wished to express his highest nature the Jew said: “I am one with Abraham!” After the death of his body, his soul returned into Abraham’s bosom—this has a deep, a very deep meaning. At that time man was not in possession of the self-dependence which first entered his consciousness through Christ Jesus. The conscious understanding of the “I am” was awakened by Christ Jesus. At that time they could not have felt the whole divinity of the inner divine being of man. They felt “I am,” but they connected it with their ancestors; they felt it in the common blood which flowed through their veins since the time of Abraham. Then Christ Jesus came and with Him the consciousness that there is something older and more independent in mankind. The “I am” is not only to be sought in what is common to a nation, but is something in the individual personality, which therefore must again seek love with its own personality, beyond itself. The ego which is today confined in you, cut off from everything outside itself, seeks spiritual love beyond itself.

This ego does not feel itself one with the father who was in Abraham, but with the spiritual Father of the world: “I and My Father are one!” A more profound saying than this—although this is the most impressive—because it appeals more to the understanding, is the one in which Christ made it clear to mankind that they are not expressing the utmost when they say, “I existed before in Abraham.” He points out that the “I am” is of older date, emanating from God Himself:

“Before Abraham was, I Am.” In this way does the saying appear in the original—which usually is so expressed that nobody quite understands what it means—“before Abraham was born, I am.” The “I am,” the innermost spiritual being, which everyone has within him, existed before Abraham.

One who understands this saying penetrates deeply into the essence of Christian intuition and life, and understands why Christ also refers to it in the words: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!” Therefore we also ought to feel the true hidden meaning of the expression in the Christmas hymn, which tells us every year anew at Christmas the original secret of the existence beyond time of the “I am.” The hymn is not sung as a reminder, “Today we remember that Christ was born”, rather we sing every time: “Christ is born in us today!” For this event is eternal, and that which once took place in Palestine can happen anew every Christmas night for those who have the power of transforming the teaching into feelings and experiences.

Anthroposophy will help mankind really to feel and understand again what is meant when we celebrate such a festival. Its mission is not to teach an abstract doctrine, an abstract theory, but to lead man back into fuller life—to make this life appear not as something abstract but as something which is filled with soul. We feel this soul when we go into the quarry and watch the stones being split off; when we see the migration of birds; when we see the scythe going through the grain; when the sun rises and sets. And the more profound the events we contemplate, the deeper do we feel their soul nature. At the great turning-points of the year we feel the most important soul events. What is most important for us is that we shall again learn to feel at those great turning-points of the year which are marked out in our festivals.

Thus our festivals will again become like a living breath permeating the soul of man; at the time of such festivals man will again become familiar with the whole weaving and working of the full soul and spirit nature. The anthroposophist must for the present act as a pioneer with regard to what these festivals may once more become when mankind understands their spirit anew—understands anew what is called “the festival spirit.” It will belong to those forces which will once more lead man out into the cosmos, when anthroposophists at such festivals feel and realize something of the feelings and sensations of nature, and remember at these important moments what Anthroposophy is able to restore to mankind through its teachings. Anthroposophy will then become a living factor in the soul, and will be genuine “life-wisdom”, vitaesophia. Anthroposophy can accomplish this best when the world-soul comes down amongst us, and is united with us in an especially intimate manner at the festival of the birth of Christ.

Today we shall have to speak from the aspect of Spiritual Science about various facts and beings of the higher worlds and about their connection with man. It must be pointed out from the outset, although in such a working group it might seem unnecessary, that today's lecture is intended for those students of spiritual matters who have reached a more advanced stage. This must be possible from time to time. One who is a newcomer at these Monday lectures may perhaps feel somewhat surprised by what is said today, yet we should make no progress if we did not sometimes discuss things pertaining to the higher spheres of spiritual science. It is possible that someone who has only lately met the truths of Spiritual Science and is waiting to be convinced may find a sort of craziness in many things to be expressed today, but such provinces must be touched upon from time to time.

You will have gathered from the lectures given here recently that when we ascend with clairvoyance into the higher worlds we there meet with beings who, it is true, do not belong to our physical world, but who are in themselves so independent that we can describe them as ‘persons’ for those worlds, just as we call men here on the physical plane ‘persons.’ You have seen that groups of animals of the same species together belong to a group-soul or group-ego and that on the astral plane we come upon the lion-soul, the tiger-soul, and so on, as independent personalities whom we can meet there as we meet the human being on the physical plane. In the same way we find in still higher regions, on the devachanic plane, the egos of quite large plant groups, and in the highest parts of Devachan we find the egos of the minerals, personalities as distinct as men are here on the physical plane. We saw in this way that in these higher worlds we meet with certain beings who, so to speak, extend part of their organism, their separate members, down into the physical plane. If a man were to extend his fingers through openings in a curtain or partition we should only see the ten fingers, the man himself would be behind the partition. So it is with the group-egos of the animals. Here with the physical eye we see what is extended down below as members by higher beings of the astral world, and the actual ego is behind the partition, behind that wall which separates the physical world from the astral world. And in a corresponding way this holds good for the other group-egos, the group-egos of the plant or the mineral world. When we raise ourselves from the physical world into higher worlds we meet not only these beings who have been described as extending their members down below here, but we meet a whole number of other beings who may equally well be considered personalities for those worlds, but whose physical members are not so directly visible and evident as those of the group egos of animals, plants, and minerals.

The astral plane and devachanic plane are in fact densely populated worlds. We find many kinds of beings there whose effects are manifested here on the physical plane though not obviously, and who have much to do with the physical plane, with our whole modern human life. One does not understand this life if one does not know that beings who live above in higher worlds are active within it. In the human body itself much goes on over which man is not master, which is not the expression of the human ego but the deed, effect, manifestation, of beings of higher worlds. It is of these things that we will speak today.

When we observe the astral plane we come upon certain beings there—only one kind among many—who seem to have no expression or manifestation among the beings found on the physical plane, but who are yet connected with it. There on the astral plane we meet with them as astral beings—with pronounced will, pronounced purposes, and so on. Within our immediate world they have this existence on the astral plane, but they are related, belong, to the same sort of beings as inhabit our present moon, having even a certain physical existence on the moon. One who is able to approach these things clairvoyantly knows that on their scene of action, the moon, these are beings in a certain respect similar to man, but that they are dwarfs in comparison, scarcely reaching the height of a six or seven year old child. Upon the moon, however, a particular opportunity is offered them for their activity. The physical conditions are quite different there, the atmosphere for instance is quite different and in consequence when these beings withdraw, so to speak, to their habitat they acquire the faculty of a tremendous roaring, of uttering immensely powerful, frightful sounds. These dwarf-like beings can maintain an astral existence within our world. You must in fact picture conditions in the higher worlds as being much more complicated than people are wont to do.

As soon as we speak from the aspect of the higher worlds, there exists an unbroken connection between the different planets and so the moon is connected with the earth just as for instance Berlin and Hamburg are connected by the telephone. Beings that live on the moon can therefore carry out their operations on the earth with the aid of astral forces. One might call them the reverse side of other beings whom we also find in the astral world, beneficent beings who, compared even with the mildest human nature, are yet much, much milder—in their speech too, very mild and gentle. The speech of these beings has not that aridity of human language which a man must ponder over a long time if he is to express himself, and clothe his thoughts and ideas in words. One could say that the thoughts of these beings flow from their lips—not merely the expression of the thoughts in words, but thoughts themselves flow in a gentle language from their lips. These beings are likewise to be found within our astral world; they have their actual scene of action on another planet. As the first-named beings are at home on the moon, these second are at home on Mars, they inhabit Mars and are in fact the main population—as certain human races are the principal population on our earth. If we then mount up higher to the devachanic plane we find certain beings who in their own way are also of a mild, peaceable nature and who in a certain respect are extraordinarily clever. These beings to be found on the devachanic plane have their actual home on the planet Venus, as the other beings on moon and Mars. On Venus too we find yet a second species of beings who—in contrast to the gentle, amiable kind—present a wild and furious vitality, and whose principal occupation consists in mutual fighting and plunder.

Again we find on the higher parts of the devachanic plane certain beings who are very difficult to describe. We can only do so comparatively by saying that they are infinitely inventive: at every moment of life they devise something—for it would be false to say that they think it out. Their inventive gift is rather as if one were to look at something and at the same instant—even in the beholding—one had the impression of how one could form it differently. Invention comes to them spontaneously. These beings, who have their home on Saturn, are again confronted by others who seem to be their reverse side; savage, horrible beings who possess to an infinitely higher, more frightful degree all that lives in man as wild, sensual greed and inordinate desire.

Now all these beings who have been mentioned are by no means unconnected with our existence. Their deeds, activities, manifestations, are definitely extended into our life and their action is particularly to be traced by clairvoyance when certain conditions appear on earth. Thus the beings who—naturally as astral beings—are at home on the moon are present on earth in the most varied circumstances, when for instance a man falls a prey to illusionary ideas, or where insane people are gathered. Such astral beings show special preference for the neighborhood of insane asylums. They are, moreover, almost always to be found near mediums and somnambulists; these persons have such beings swirling round them, and a large proportion of the influences that are exercised upon them is derived from the presence of these creatures. Where on the other hand love and kindliness prevail, where humanitarianism is unfolded, there you find the mild, gentle Mars beings present as astral creations, taking part in the forces which are there at work. That is nourishment for them, the atmosphere in which they can live and whence they exercise their influence on man.

Whenever human discoveries are made, where engineers are at work, in technical workshops, there the atmosphere is created for the inventive Saturn beings. On the other hand where some sort of activity is developed which has to do with presence of mind, beings are there who have their seat on Venus.

So you see how man in the most varied circumstances is continually accompanied by such swirling elemental beings, as they may be called. Man is really never alone; whatever he does and whatever he undertakes is at the same time an opportunity for the development of a number of beings. Man's deeds, both fine and crude, deeds of idealism and the most ugly deeds, all give an opportunity for the presence of creatures who encroach into man's forces and occupy themselves there and whom one must know if one is to get a true view of life. He who does not realize these things passes through life in complete blindness. We are not concerned here with mere theory or a theoretical challenge; all these things are directly practical. For man will only little by little in the future earthly evolution learn to act and frame his conduct on right lines, when he begins to recognize what creatures are summoned in response to certain deeds and circumstances. Everything that man does is like a summons to unknown beings. It is not only the insane or mediums that these moon beings—among whom are thoroughly malevolent little rascals, can venture to approach; when, for instance, young children are overfed in such a senseless way that they become greedy, then these beings can sidle up to them and spoil their development. You see then how necessary it is for man to know what he stirs up around him through his behavior and whole attitude in the world!

Now these beings in yet another respect are by no means unconnected with man. They have on the contrary a deep relation to our human structure. Of all that exists in the human body, there is actually only one thing that belongs or can increasingly belong to man—and that is his blood. Man's blood is the direct expression of his ego. If however he is not perpetually careful to strengthen his ego inwardly through a strong and vigorous will, through strong forces of his soul, if so to speak, he loses control of his ego then other beings can fasten upon his blood, and that is very grave and evil for him. On the other hand, many other beings are anchored in other parts of the present human organism. We will now see all that actually stretches its feelers into the human body, all that is anchored there. But we must first examine the human body a little.

You are aware that the blood as it flows through the arteries and spreads out in the body is the expression of man's ego and that it becomes a stronger and stronger expression as the ego itself finds its centre, finds its inner centre of strength in an increasing degree. Man's ego will only in a far distant future obtain control of other enclosed portions of the organism. Many other beings are still contained to-day in these other constituents of the human body. Let us call to mind, for example, the three bodily humors, the three juices, chyle, lymph, blood, in order to study them more closely. You perhaps know the significance that these three kinds of fluid have for man. You know that when food is taken in, it is first conveyed through the preparatory organs into the stomach, mixed and prepared with the right juices secreted by the glands so that it can be worked upon through the intestines. There the food is brought into a pulpy condition, the chyme, which is conveyed forwards through the intestines. Whatever can form nutritious material for man is then passed into the body through minute vascular organs called the ‘villi’ in order to serve as nutritive juices for renewing the body. This is one of the substances which we have in the body and which we call the ‘chyle.’

Then perhaps you also know that besides the chyle, which is produced through the entry into the human body of food from outside, there are other vessels inside the body of a similar nature which conduct a species of fluid resembling in a certain respect the white substance in our blood. This juice flows through the whole human organism in certain vessels which very largely take the same course as the blood vessels we call veins, because they contain blue-red blood. These even take up the chyle too. The fluid which they contain is the lymph. This is a juice which one might say is spiritualized in comparison with the uniform food juice, the chyle. The vessels which convey the lymph take their course throughout the whole body, in a certain respect they even pass through the bone marrow and what they convey then absorbs the chyle too. All the lymph which is spread out and runs through the left half of the body and lower extremities—that is the left side of the head, left side of the trunk, the left hand and both legs—all this is collected, flows into the left clavicular vein and then empties into the blood circulation. Only the lymph contained in vessels on the right side of the head and the right side of the trunk, unite and enter the right clavicular vein so that in this way the lymph vessels become the expression of an important fact.

You see how man is divided into two parts; not, indeed, symmetrically, but so that one part comprises all the lower parts of the body with the left half of the trunk and head, while the other part is formed from the right side of the trunk and head. Lymph is a second fluid pulsating in man, a fluid that stands much nearer to the soul than does the chyle, the gastric and intestinal juices of the chyle. It is true that the digestion and the whole circulation of the chyle are also influenced greatly by the soul conditions, but these are much more deeply connected with the lymph. In a man who is very active and energetic the lymph flows much more vigorously than in a man who is heavy, lazy and inactive. We could instance many conditions of the soul which are connected with the course of the lymph in the human body.

The third fluid is the blood, of which we have often spoken. It comprises a red life-giving blood, rich in oxygen that flows in the arteries and a blue-red blood rich in carbon that flows in the veins. And as our blood is the expression of our ego, so is the lymph in a certain direction the expression of the human astral body. Such things do not manifest themselves merely in one direction. From another aspect the nerve-system is the expression of the astral body. To-day we will consider the aspect in which the deed, the revelation, the expression, of the astral body is the lymph. Just as a man can fill two professions so too can the astral body be on the one hand the builder of the nerve-system, and on the other hand the builder, the creator, of the lymph. In the same way man's etheric body is the builder and creator of the whole glandular system, as well as in another aspect the organizer, creator, and controller of the circulation of the chyle. Here you have the connection of these fluids taking their course in the human body, with the members of human nature itself.

Now we must be clear that in the human astral body and etheric body, the ego is definitely not the only master. Gradually in the course of evolution man's ego attains to a greater control over his astral body and his etheric body as he changes the former into spirit-self or Manas and the latter into life spirit or Budhi. But as long as man has not control of these parts of his being, other beings are connected with these human members.

In the human astral body other beings are embedded like the maggots in cheese—forgive the unappetizing comparison—but so it is. And in fact the astral beings which are embedded in, and connected with, the human astral body are those whom I have described as having their real habitat on the moon or Mars, according as they are benevolent or malevolent. They anchor themselves there. And lymph, the whitish juice that courses through man, belongs to the body of beings who live in our astral world. To be sure, these beings of the astral plane, with their real home on the moon or Mars, are not so obvious as are the animal group-egos. But they are of such an astral nature that in a certain other direction we can say: just as in an animal group, a group of lions, for instance, we have a kind of manifestation of the distinct personality on the astral plane, the lion-ego, so in the lymph passing through the human body we have, though not so obviously, the manifestation, the extended members, of these astral beings.

Then—you may ask—have these astral beings as much a kind of physical existence as the group-souls of the animals, as the group-ego of the Lion-species in its manifestation in the single lions here on the physical plane? If you ask this question, one would have to answer: yes, they have. Just as in the case of the animals we saw that the astral group-ego extends its separate members into the separate lion-individuals, so these astral beings also extend their physical being here. They could not, however, extend it from outside into the physical plane; for this they need beings on the physical plane whose parasites they are, into whom they fasten and bore. They are here the parasites of men. If there were no human race here on earth they would very soon take their departure; they could find no dwelling place, it would not suit them here. But there are beings, men and higher animals, who have lymph and there these beings have their physical manifestation. Thus not merely a material substance pulses through our body but in such circulation move whole hosts of these beings. They revolve through man, move along through him and have their bodies in the lymph—whereas the actual human being, the ego-man has his body, to begin with, merely in the blood. And the preponderance of moon beings or Mars beings of this nature circling through a man gives his lymph its special character. If more moon beings circulate through his body he is a man who inclines more easily to wrong-doing, irritation, and anger, if more Mars beings, then he is a man who is more inclined to gentleness, kindliness, mildness. You see how man is not traversed merely by fluids but also by spirits, and how one only understands man when one knows that spirits pass through him and not fluids merely.

Now if you examine clairvoyantly what one calls chyle, that is, the external expression of the human etheric body, you find that similar beings are also incorporated into this. The beings primarily anchored there are those whom we have already characterized as the good and the evil Venus beings, those having their home on Venus and existing in our devachanic world. There they are personalities for clairvoyant vision and they have their expression, their manifestation, here in physical life in the human chyle—however strange that may seem. Living in this fluid that courses through the human body, these beings have their actual home on the devachanic plane, and in so far as they take on a physical body, have their physical life on Venus. And since Venus is connected in a certain way through its forces with our whole earthly vegetation and all that lives on earth, you will realize the connection existing between man's nourishment and the effect produced in him through what he takes in as nourishment. That most assuredly is not a matter of indifference. Influences of the Venus beings live in all the plants and naturally also in the animal kingdom. The influences may come on the one hand from the good, gentle, mild Venus beings, or on the other hand, from the wild beings who have been described to you as greedy for plunder and engaged in conflict with each other. According as the one or the other kind work upon our animals and plants, so are virtues or vices built into man's body when the flesh of these animals or the food obtained from these plants are transformed into the chyle.

By this you can see, from a higher standpoint than could he presented in earlier lectures, how important it is to know about human nutrition from the aspect of spiritual science, to know the influences under which the various plants and animals are standing. You can gather, for instance, that one who knows that plants and animals standing under certain celestial influences flourish in a certain country, can also learn to grasp how a quite definite national character must arise. For in everything that man consumes from his environment he eats, not only the substances analyzed by chemistry, he eats at the same time definite spirits, and it is these spirits which enter through his mouth into the stomach and spread out through his being. There the perspective opens to us of how the character of a people can be known from the deeper geographical constitution of a country.

Do not forget a remark which you can find in the lecture on the¹ where such a fact was presented from quite a different aspect. There it was stated that man stands in a certain relation to his whole people through his etheric body, and is connected through his astral body with his nearer surroundings.

Here again you see illuminated from a still deeper aspect how folk-character is formed from the spiritual beings which are absorbed into man with his food. It is one of the means by which the great spiritual guidance of the earth distributes the different national characters over the earth; foods which produce one or another effect have been distributed in such a way that the character of a certain people arises from the nourishment that it obtains. That does not lead in a round-about way to materialism: spiritual science shows how everything of a material nature is a revelation of the spirit and how in a way unknown to man spiritual influences are themselves diffused within him.

It is more difficult to understand the way in which the Saturn spirits work upon man. There are on the one hand Saturn spirits who directly they observe anything immediately make some invention, on the other hand there are those who develop terribly disordered passions of a sensual nature, in comparison with which all that man can develop in this direction is child's play. These Saturn spirits insinuate themselves into the human body in a still more hidden way, namely, through sense perception. When we turn our eye to a beautiful, pure and noble thing, a concept is aroused in us; when we turn our eye to a sordid, ignoble thing then a different concept is aroused. Now when a concept is called forth in the soul through outer impressions there slip into man at the same time these Saturn spirits—the good and the bad. And through all that man by his mere sympathies and antipathies unfolds around himself as environment, as what he hears and sees and smells, he exposes himself to the insinuations of the one or other order of the Saturn-spirits. When man is sensing they draw into him through eyes and ears and the whole skin. It is quite frightful, for instance, to observe occultly what dissolute spirits insinuate themselves into the nose of persons out of their surroundings, through many perfumes that are highly prized in human society—quite apart from what slinks into the nose of those who carry these perfumes on their own person.

We see from this how finely and closely one must observe the most everyday things from the spiritual standpoint if one wants to be clear about life. Much could be told you of people who more or less consciously knew how to command spirits which particularly work upon man through scents and slip into him with the perfume. If you had a deeper, more intimate knowledge of various things in history, particularly the history of France at the time of Louis XIII, XIV, and XV, with all the arts developed there, where in fact aromas played an important part in the drama of intrigue, you would then have an idea of what men are able to do—consciously or unconsciously—who know how to command the spirits which creep into human sense perception in perfumes. I could refer you to quite an attractive book² that has been written recently by the Minister of a little Court. He wrote it naturally without any knowledge of these facts, but he was quite clear about the effects. It is a very interesting book about this little Court where a notable catastrophe took place in recent years, and where the Minister and dignitary concerned describes from his Memoirs the machinations of a person³ who in a certain way knew how to command aromas and their spirits. And he describes it with a certain satisfaction because he was armed against it and had not fallen a victim. You see, these things are not without significance and effect for practical life. When one understands life not as a blind materialist, but as a seeing man, then one can trace the spiritual influences everywhere—and if the influences are known, life is understood for the first time.

So you see how we must picture man to ourselves as quite a complicated being, as an associate of many kinds of worlds, many kinds of beings. One who advances on the path of occult development to ever higher stages of knowledge learns to know these beings in their special nature and thereby becomes independent of them, he is able to view them from an independent standpoint. To take into oneself the truth concerning higher worlds means to become really free, really mature, for we are then aware of the activities and impulses which pulse and flow through our life. Learning to know one's way means at the same time to become free and independent.

And just as one can point to certain fluids pulsing through man, so can certain human organs be indicated in which beings of the higher worlds likewise find their expression and manifestation. Thus, for instance, the beings just described to you as Saturn beings find their expression in a certain respect in the human liver. You must of course be clear that if one really wants to understand Spiritual Science one discovers it to be a very complicated domain.

You are aware that in the Saturn development of human evolution the first inception of the senses came into existence through the forces of Saturn. In a similar way Saturn still works into man and among his inner bodily organs it is the liver upon which the Saturn forces have a strong and intensive influence. The human being who is on the way to evolve beyond everything of a Saturn nature, must therefore grow beyond the forces which are anchored in his liver. And although certain forces are present in the liver from which man must free himself, yet they were necessary to enable him to come to his present form and shape; they must however be overcome. You can prove this in a certain way by external evidence. You can discover, for instance, that in the period before birth and directly after birth, when the human body is being built up, the liver occupies the greatest space in relation to the rest of the body and that then it becomes smaller and smaller. In fact the ratio at birth could be given as 1:18 whereas the relation later is 1:36. The liver decreases approximately by one half, and thus by purely natural development man overcomes the forces rooted in it.

Inasmuch as earthly man is intended to evolve to higher and higher spirituality he has acquired as an outward physical expression the power to overcome the liver forces. In a certain way the lungs represent the counter-organ to the liver. They do not enclose everything egotistically in themselves as the liver does, they open man fully outwards, he stands in continual communication with the world through the air that he takes in and again gives out. A combustion goes on in the lungs. The blue-red carbon-rich blood enters the lungs and is transformed through its combination with oxygen into red life-giving blood. Just as in a burning flame the substances unite with the oxygen, so in the lungs there is a process of burning. Breathing may be called a combustion process, and with this breathing and combustion process man has been endowed with the prospect of attaining a higher and higher evolution. The forces which built him up have reached their ultimate stage in the liver. The forces which he receives like a fire from the air will rescue him from the forces chaining him to earth. The fire which man receives from the air and which is expressed in his breathing is that which leads him upwards to ever higher spheres.

Myths and legends are always deeper and more filled with wisdom than our apparently advanced science. In the Prometheus myth we have a magnificent expression of what has just been related from the facts of human life. The myth says that Prometheus brought man fire from heaven and indicates in this way that Prometheus participates in the process which is expressed in the human breath and which leads man upwards. But a wonderful explanation is given: because Prometheus raises himself above the forces which chain man to the earth and opposes them, because he is the one to give man this force of the fire, therefore he must suffer for it. The suffering is wonderfully represented as the fact underlying the Myth, namely, a vulture devours the liver of the fettered Prometheus. How could it be shown more finely and wisely that the forces streaming into us with the breathing process gnaw at the liver and that he who accomplishes in advance what is accomplished by mankind in a far future, stands there like a crucified one—how that which sinks down out of the air, eats into the liver!

Thus the initiates have expressed the mighty truths of existence in the myths. There is no myth really drawn from the Mysteries which does not express deep wisdom which can afterwards be checked. When, equipped with the knowledge of spiritual science, we approach the myths we must stand before them in reverence. They have been revealed by the higher Spiritual Beings to man so that he may first learn in pictures what he must later attain in clear concepts. More and more it will be realized that the myths contain wisdom and if one would find deepest wisdom displayed in any sphere of life, one must go to the myths. This has been known to those who have created out of the depths of art. Deep truth, for instance, underlies Richard Wagner's relation to mythology, and it has come to expression in his work in an artistic way. Our time is one which will reascend from a merely physical commonplaceness to a completely spiritual stream. If you look into what pulsates in our time from this standpoint you will understand in ever deeper sense the task of Spiritual Science.

Thus, starting from the study of higher worlds we have come to recognize the actual mission of Spiritual Science. It is to enable man to learn to know life, and when he is working and creating to show him what is secretly working with him when he moves his hand, when he creates with spirit, soul, and body. Through spiritual knowledge he will become more and more conscious of the beings who are his companions, and will live and create with them in harmony. Thus spiritual research will reveal to him the fullness of reality and enable him to bring knowledge and wisdom into life.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Lord's Prayer, Anthroposophic Press, New York.
• 2. Dr. Vladan Georgevitch: Das Ende der Obrenovitch (Leipzig, 1905).
• 3. Draga Maschin, who was murdered with Alexander I of Serbia at Belgrade on June 11, 1903.

In the lecture today we shall make a rather far-reaching sweep into cosmic space. This will reveal to us, in broad outline, the inner course of world evolution, and at the same time its intimate connection with human evolution on the Earth. Everything in the universe is interconnected. To be able to follow these complicated connections naturally takes a long, long time, and it is only very gradually that man can find his way, so to speak, into the intricate workings of the cosmos.

In previous lectures you have heard how certain beings who have their abode on other cosmic bodies exercise an influence upon our own life, how they are related to what we call lymph, to the digestive fluids, also to our sense-perceptions. This will have given you a picture of the wide-spread operations of the spirit throughout cosmic space. We shall study a different aspect of these things today, reminding ourselves, to begin with, that our Earth, like man himself, has passed through different embodiments and will pass through others in times to come.

We look back to three previous embodiments of our Earth: to the immediately preceding embodiment which we call the Old Moon (not to be confused with our present moon); then to that of the “Sun”; and still further back to that of “Saturn.” And looking forward we see prophetically that our Earth will be transformed into a “Jupiter,” a “Venus” and a “Vulcan.”

These are the successive embodiments of our planet Earth. If you give a little thought to these stages of our Earth's evolution, you will realize that what in occult science we call a “Sun” is—like our present sun—a heavenly body around which a number of planets revolve. When, apart from this, we also speak of a planetary Sun-existence, saying that our Earth itself in an earlier state of evolution, was “Sun,” we imply, in a certain respect, that the sun which is today the centre of our planetary system, was not always a sun. It has advanced, so to speak, to the rank and dignity of a sun in the Cosmos. It was once united with the substances and forces contained in our Earth and then, taking away, as it were, what was the best and most capable of the highest development, it separated from the Earth, leaving us, together with certain forces which were destined for a slower evolution, behind. The Sun took with it certain higher beings and together with these higher beings established itself at the centre of our system. Therefore two stages earlier, what is contained in the sun today had a planetary existence only and it has risen from this to the form of existence belonging to the fixed stars. This will show you what mighty changes in evolution take place in the universe. At the outset, a sun is not a sun. A fixed star has not, from the very beginning, been a fixed star, but has had to pass through the lower school of planetary existence.

Now you may quite naturally ask me: What, then, happens when a fixed star evolves to a further stage? As truly as the Sun-existence—a fixed star existence—has risen from a planetary existence, so truly does its evolution proceed to further stages of life in the cosmos. We shall of course understand this evolution still better if we study the further evolution of our Earth.

It is true that for a certain period of its cosmic evolution our earth has been separated from the sun. The sun and its beings advance along a more rapid evolutionary path. Our earth and the beings belonging to it take a different course. But these beings, and the earth as a whole, will one day have progressed to the stage where union is again possible with the sun—after a separate existence has enabled them to complete and perfect their present phase of development. For our earth will again unite with the sun. During the stage of Earth-existence itself, the earth will reunite with the sun, just as during the same phase of evolution it separated from the sun. But during the Jupiter-stage there must again be a separation. The earth-beings must again be separated from the sun during the Jupiter-condition. Again there will be a reunion, and during the Venus-condition our earth will be united permanently with the sun, will have been taken up for all time into the sun. During the Vulcan-condition our earth will itself have become a sun within the sun and have contributed something to the sun-evolution, will have added something which, in spite of their higher rank, those beings who have always remained in the sun, could never themselves have achieved. Earth-existence was necessary in order that men might evolve as they have evolved, with a consciousness that alternates between waking and sleeping. This is connected with the separation from the sun. Beings who live always in the sun do not have day and night. The sense-consciousness which we call the clear consciousness of day and which in times to come will evolve into higher conditions, carries with it into the sun-evolution the fruits of experiences connected with the things of outer physical space. In this way the earth-beings give something to the sun, enrich the sun. And out of what is thus acquired on the earth, augmented by what is acquired on the sun, the Vulcan-existence comes into being. This Vulcan-existence is actually a higher condition than that of our present sun-existence. The earth evolves, the sun evolves, until they can unite to constitute the Vulcan-existence.

You may ask me: When a planet has evolved in this way to a sun-existence, what does this sun become in the course of further cosmic evolution? When our earth reaches the Venus-condition it will itself have become sun, and all the beings on Venus are sun-beings—actually at a higher stage than the beings of the present sun. What, then, is the further stage of such planetary evolution?

The following will seem grotesque, even preposterous, to those whose concepts are rooted in modern astronomy. Nevertheless it is a truth of cosmic evolution that when a planet like our earth has risen to sun-existence, when it has gradually achieved union with the sun and even sun-existence is transcended, there arises, as a still higher stage of evolution, something that in a certain sense you can perceive in the heavens: there arises what we today call a “Zodiac”—it is the stage higher than that of a fixed star. Thus when beings are no longer restricted to the form of existence belonging to a fixed star but have expanded their evolution so powerfully that it extends beyond fixed stars and the fixed stars lie like bodies embedded in it—then a higher stage is reached, the stage of Zodiac-existence. The forces which work from a Zodiac upon a planetary system themselves evolved, in former ages, in a planetary system and have advanced to the stage of a Zodiac.

And now cast your minds back to the old Saturn evolution, the first embodiment of our Earth. This Saturn once glimmered, as it were, in cosmic space, as the first herald of the dawn of our planetary existence. You know, too, that on this old Saturn the first germinal inception of our physical body was brought into being. Even at its greatest density this Saturn was not nearly as physically dense as our earth. It was a condition of utmost rarefication. That which today permeates all beings as warmth—known in occultism as “fire”—was the matter of Saturn. We may picture to ourselves that around this Saturn, this first, dawn-condition of our planetary system, there were the constellations of the Zodiac—but not yet as they are today. The single stars composing the Zodiacal constellations around that ancient Saturn were scarcely to be distinguished from each other. They glittered only very faintly, like beams of light streaming out from Saturn. The best way to picture this is to think of ancient Saturn encircled by beams of light, just as our earth is encircled by a Zodiac. And in the course of Earth-evolution itself these light-masses developed into the present star clusters comprised in the Zodiac. So that the Zodiac—to use an abstract expression—has differentiated out of that original ocean of flame. And from what did this ocean of flame itself arise?

It arose from the planetary system which preceded our own. Saturn itself was preceded by planetary evolutions in an age which, speaking in the sense of occult astronomy, can by no means be described as “time” as we understand time, for its character was rather different. But for the human mind today the concept is so fabulous that we have no word with which to express it. Speaking in analogy, however, we can say that the forces which preceded our planetary system in an earlier cycle of planetary existence went forth in the light-streams, and out of a small portion of matter gradually gathering together at the centre, this first, dawn-condition of the Earth arose; this was ancient Saturn and the forces contained in the Zodiac radiated down upon it from the cosmic All.

Something rather remarkable comes to light when we compare planetary existence with zodiacal existence. The occultist makes use of two words to indicate the difference between them. He says: Everything that is contained in the Zodiac is under the sign of “Duration”; everything that is comprised within planetary existence is under the sign of “Time.” You can get an idea of what this means if you remember that not even the farthest reaches of the mind can conceive of changes having taken place in the Zodiac. Each single planet may have undergone considerable change through long and greatly differing periods of evolution; the forces working in the Zodiac remain, relatively speaking, fixed and permanent. These concepts can, in any case, be only relative. The only difference in these changes of which we can conceive is in respect of the speed. Changes in the Zodiac take place slowly; changes in the planetary world and even in the existence of a fixed star take place rapidly—in comparison, that is to say, with what happens in the Zodiac.—The difference is always relative, only relative. As far as human thinking is concerned, we can say that planetary existence belongs to the sphere of the Finite, whereas Zodiacal existence belongs to the sphere of Infinitude. This, as already said, must be taken in the relative sense, but for the present it is sufficiently accurate.

And now I would ask you to pay special attention to the following: What has been achieved in a planetary existence and has become sun, ascends to “heavenly” existence, becomes zodiacal existence. And having reached zodiacal existence, what does it do? It offers itself in sacrifice! Please take account of this particular word. The first dawn-condition of the Earth, ancient Saturn, arose in a mysterious way as the result of sacrifice on the part of the Zodiac. The forces which caused the first, rarefied Saturn-masses to gather together were those which streamed down from the Zodiac, producing on Saturn the first germinal inception of physical man. This continued without cessation. You must not picture it as happening only once. Fundamentally speaking, what is happening continuously is that within what we call a planetary system the forces which evolved to a higher stage after having themselves passed through a planetary system, are sacrificed. We can say in effect: what is at first contained in a planetary system evolves to a “sun” existence, then to zodiacal existence and then has the power to be itself creative, to offer itself in sacrifice within a planetary existence. The forces from the Zodiac “rain” down continuously into the planetary existence and continuously ascend again; for that which at one time became our Zodiac must gradually ascend again. The distribution of forces in our earth existence may be conceived as follows:—on the one side forces are descending from the Zodiac and, on the other, forces are ascending to the Zodiac. Such is the mysterious interplay between the Zodiac and our earth. Forces descend and forces ascend. This is the mysterious “heavenly ladder” upon which forces are descending and ascending. These forces are indicated in various ways in the different scriptures; you find them indicated, too, in Goethe's Faust:

“What heavenly forces up and down are ranging,
The golden vessels interchanging.”

As far as our human understanding goes, these forces began to descend during the Saturn-existence of our Earth and when the Earth-existence proper had reached its middle point, the stage had arrived when they gradually began again to ascend. We have now passed beyond the middle point of our evolution, which fell in the middle of the Atlantean epoch; and what human beings have lived through since then is a phase of existence beyond the middle point. In a certain sense, therefore, we may say that at the present time, more forces are ascending to the Zodiac than are descending from it.

When, therefore, you think of the whole Zodiac, you must picture that some of its forces are descending and some are ascending. We think of the forces which are now involved in the ascending line of evolution, collectively, as Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra—because they actually belong to these constellations. These seven constellations comprise the ascending forces. The descending forces are comprised, approximately speaking, in the five constellations of Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. Thus forces rain down from the Zodiac and ascend again: seven constellations of ascending, five of descending forces. The ascending forces also correspond, in man, to the higher members of his being, to his higher, nobler attributes. The forces which are in the descending phase of evolution have first to pass through man and within him to attain to the stage at which they too can become ascending forces.

In this way you will realize that there is interaction between everything in cosmic space, that everything in cosmic space is interconnected, inter-related. But it must never be forgotten that these operations and activities are going on all the time, that they are ever-present. At any given moment in our evolution we can therefore speak of forces which are going forth from man and forces which are coming in; forces are descending and forces are ascending. For all and each of these forces there comes, at some point, the moment when from being descending forces they are transformed into ascending forces. All forces which eventually become ascending forces are at first descending forces. They descend, so to say, as far as man. In man they acquire the power to ascend.

At the middle point of its evolution, when our Earth had passed through the three planetary stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon, had reached the fourth planetary condition, having in front of it the stages of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan (as Earth, therefore, it is midway in the span of its existence)—it had passed through three “life-conditions” (also called “rounds”). It has passed through three of these life-conditions and is now in the fourth; it has passed through three “form-conditions”—the arupic, the rupic, and the astral, leading down to physical existence. Therefore in respect of the “form-conditions,” our Earth is in the middle phase of its evolution. As physical Earth, in the fourth form-condition of the fourth life-condition of the fourth planetary existence it has had upon it three great races: the first, the Polarian race; the second, the Hyperborean race; the third, the Lemurian race. The Atlantean race is the fourth. In the Atlantean race, humanity was in the middle of those phases of evolution of which we are speaking. Since the middle of the Atlantean epoch humanity has passed beyond this middle point. And since the middle of the Atlantean epoch there have begun, for men in general, those conditions in which the ascending forces preponderate. If we were speaking of the proportion of forces descending from and ascending to the Zodiac before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, we should have to say: they were in equal proportion. We should have to speak differently of the conditions then prevailing, enumerating as the ascending forces: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo—counting Libra with the other descending forces.

But something else is connected with all this. You must realize that in speaking of these cosmic processes, we are not speaking of physical or etheric bodies but of beings in-dwelling the several heavenly bodies. When we speak of man in terms of Spiritual Science we say that the whole man—and we think of man only in this sense—is a seven-fold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit, spirit-man. His development is not yet complete but will be when his sevenfold being has fully developed. But in the great cosmic All there are beings other than man, beings of a different nature. There are, for example, beings in the cosmos of whom we cannot say that, like man, they have the physical body as one of their members. There are beings of whom we must speak differently. The members of which man is composed can be enumerated as follows:

7. Spirit-Man
8. Life-Spirit
9. Spirit-Self
10. Ego
11. Astral Body
12. Etheric Body
13. Physical Body

Now there are beings whose lowest member is the etheric body; they too are sevenfold, having an eighth member, higher than spirit-man. We begin to enumerate thus: etheric body, astral body, and so forth, finishing with a member above our spirit-man (Atma). There are other beings whose lowest member is the astral body; above spirit-man they have an eighth and yet a ninth member. Again there are beings whose lowest member is the ‘I,’ the ego, and who therefore have not a physical nor an etheric nor an astral body in our sense but whose Ego streams outwards without the three sheaths. They are therefore beings who send forth ‘Egos’ in all directions. These Beings have an eighth, a ninth, and a tenth member; they are described in the Apocalypse as beings who are “full of eyes”. Then there are beings in whom spirit-self (Manas) is the lowest member. They have yet an eleventh member. And finally there are beings whose lowest member is the life-spirit and who have yet a twelfth member. You must therefore think of beings who, just as man's lowest member is a physical body, have life-spirit (Budhi) as their lowest member and above, a highest member best designated by the number 12. These are most sublime beings, far transcending everything that man is able to conceive. How is it possible to form any kind of idea of these most wonderful, most sublime beings?

When we try to characterize man, in one aspect, it is obvious that with respect to the universe, he is a being who receives. The things and beings of the world are outspread around you; you perceive them, you form concepts of them. Just imagine that the world around you were empty, or dark. You could have no perceptions, nor would there be anything of which you could form concepts. You have to rely upon receiving from outside the content of your inner world. It is characteristic of man that he is a being who receives; he receives the content of his soul-life, his inner life, from outside; things must exist in the world if his soul is to have content. The nature of man's etheric body is such that it could experience nothing in itself were it not beholden to the whole surrounding universe for all experiences, for everything that enters into it. These beings of whom I have just told you, who have life-spirit as their lowest member, are in an entirely different position. In respect of their life, these beings are not dependent upon receiving anything from outside; they are “givers,” they are themselves creative. You know from what I have often told you, that the ‘I,’ the ego, works in the etheric body and that ‘Budhi’ is nothing else than a transformed etheric body. In respect of substance, therefore, the life-spirit too is an ether body. The twelfth member of these sublime beings is also an ‘ether body’ but one which pours forth life, which works in the world in such a way that it does not receive life but gives it forth, offers life in perpetual sacrifice.

And now let us ask: Can we conceive of a being who is in any way connected with us and who radiates life into our universe? Is it possible to conceive of life that is perpetually streaming into the world, imbuing the world with life?

Let us think for a moment of what was said at the beginning of the lecture, namely that there are ascending and descending forces—forces that are ascending to the Zodiac and forces that are descending from the Zodiac. How has man reached a position which makes it possible for something to stream from within him? What has happened to man that enables something to stream forth from him? He has reached this position because his ego, after long, long preparation, has steadily unfolded and developed. This I, this ego, has been in course of preparation for long, long ages. For truth to tell, the object of all existence in the Saturn-condition, the Sun-condition and the Moon-condition when the sheaths into which the I was to be received were produced—was to prepare for the I. In those earlier conditions, other beings created the dwelling-place for the I. Now, on the earth, the dwelling-place was at the stage where the I could take root in man and from then onwards the I began to work upon the outer, bodily sheaths from within. The fact that the ego is able to work from within has also brought about a surplus, a surplus of ascending forces; there was no longer a state of parity. Before the ego was able to work within man, the ascending forces gradually evolved until the middle point had been reached; and when the, ego actually entered into man the ascending and the descending forces had reached the stage where they were in ‘balance.’ At the entry of the ego, the ascending and the descending forces were in balance and it rests with man to turn the scales in the right direction. That is why the occultists have called the constellation which was entered at the time when the ego itself began to operate, the ‘Balance’ (Libra). Up to the end of Virgo, preparation was being made for the deeds of the ego in our planetary evolution, but the ego had not itself begun to work. When Libra had been reached the ego itself began to participate and this was a most important moment in its evolution.

Just think what it means that the ego had reached this stage of evolution:

From then on it was possible for the ego to participate in the work of the forces belonging to the Zodiac, to reach into the Zodiac. The more the ego strives for the highest point of its evolution, the more it works into the Zodiac. There is nothing that happens in the innermost core of the ego that has not its consequences right up to the very Zodiac. And inasmuch as man with his ego lays the foundations for his development to Atma, or spirit-man, he develops, stage by stage, the forces which enable him to work upwards into the sphere of Libra, the Balance, in the Zodiac. He will attain full power over Libra in the Zodiac when his ego has developed to Atma, or spirit-man. He will then be a being from whom something streams out, who has passed out of the sphere of Time into the sphere of Duration, of Eternity.

Such is the path of man. But there are other beings whose lowest sphere of operation is man's highest. Let us try to conceive of these beings whose lowest sphere of operation is man's highest (Libra in the Zodiac). When we relate man to the Zodiac, he reaches to Libra. The Being whose innermost nature belongs wholly to the Zodiac, whose forces belong wholly to the Zodiac, who only manifests in planetary life through his lowest member, which corresponds to Libra (as man's lowest member corresponds to Pisces)—this is the Being who spreads life throughout the whole of our universe:

Just as man receives life into himself, so does this Being radiate life through the whole of our universe. This is the Being Who has the power to make the great sacrifice and Who is inscribed in the Zodiac as the Being Who for the sake of our world offers Himself in sacrifice. Just as man strives upwards into the Zodiac, so does this Being send us His sacrificial gift from Aries—which is related to Him as Libra is related to man. And just as man turns his ego upwards to Libra, so does this Being radiate His very Self over our sphere in sacrifice. This Being is called the “Mystical Lamb,” for Lamb and Aries are the same; therefore the description ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ or ‘Ram’ is given to Christ. Christ belongs to the cosmos as a whole. His I, his Ego, reaches to Aries and thus He becomes Himself the “Great Sacrifice,” is related with the whole of mankind and in a certain sense the beings and forces present on the earth are His creations. The configuration of forces is such that He could become the Creator of these beings in the constellation of Aries, or the Lamb. The designation “Sacrificial Lamb” or “Mystical Lamb” is drawn from the heavens themselves.

This is one of the aspects revealed to us when from our circumscribed existence we look up into the heavens and perceive the interworking of heavenly forces and beings in cosmic space. Gradually we begin to realize that the forces streaming from heavenly body to heavenly body are akin to those forces which stream from one human soul to another as love and hate. We perceive soul-forces streaming from star to star and learn to recognize the heavenly script which records for us what is wrought and effected by those forces in cosmic space.