The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

Hardly anything can make such a sublime impression as the Egyptians' idea of eternity, that man can enter the path of eternity. And on the other hand, there will hardly be a correspondence of two personalities of spiritual life in all details such as we could trace between Buddha on the one hand and the personality of Christ on the other.

However, anyone who wanted to go even further back into the old ideas of Indian religion would find that the Buddha as a personality, as he appears to us and as it is also according to the ideas of Indian religion, is only the last Buddha [of many]. It is therefore more a repetition than a first appearance of a [personality of such a nature]. Christians have lost this idea because they only know the one. We cannot follow the various Buddha figures in the life of the Indian religion.

We can only gain an insight into the origin of the Christian world once we have become aware of the origin of the Judeo-Christian idea, insofar as this is possible with an [esoteric] mystical deepening. In particular, we will become aware of how this idea of Christ living in the Egyptian religion was transformed into a historical event.

The Egyptian idea of Christ confronts us in the form that everyone who was found suitable by the Egyptian priesthood and whose talent could awaken the ability to undertake the ascent was subjected to the process of initiation by the Egyptian priests, the deeply initiated.

What does this process of initiation mean? One must first be clear what the whole basic idea of initiation is. According to the views of the Egyptian priesthood, it was intended to introduce people to the deepest secrets of existence, to the primal mysteries of the world. It is therefore the introduction of those who were admitted to initiation into that which was carefully kept hidden from the great multitude by the Egyptian priests and which was only communicated to those who wanted to make progress. Those who wanted to rise to the highest truths that could be conveyed in the Egyptian priestly schools and cults, to descend to the depths of the mysteries of the world, could only do so in a precisely prescribed way, because it was believed that only those who had gone through the entire sequence of stages could have the inner life to have certain views alive within them.

In abstract terms, this is the basic idea that leads to Egyptian initiation. It was believed that the person concerned should not only receive spiritual teachings, not only spiritual shells, for the reception of which it was sufficient if he could think logically, no, it was believed that the whole physical should also be transformed in such a way that his whole sensual perception served the spirit to a much higher degree than was the case with another.

The spiritual process that took place when the disciple was to be introduced to the Mysteries was often reminiscent of the Eleusinian drama of the Greeks and the ancient Osiris drama. The whole myth of Osiris and Isis, in which the ancient priests brought true - I do not say mere fantasy, but - imagination, insight into the deepest mysteries of the world, was to carry out practically what was to lead into this wisdom.

The cosmological, physiological and astronomical were not considered sufficient. It was believed that the whole body of man had to be transformed, that man had to be given a completely different view. They did not believe that man was born with fully developed abilities, as Western science believed. It was believed that man, as he had developed step by step up to now, had to be developed further so that life was not lost. It is therefore a matter of transforming body and mind in such a way that man can not only understand the highest knowledge logically and abstractly, but that he can also experience the deepest [life] of the world.

The priest depicted the entire development of the world in three symbols. First in the symbol of the pyramid. It has four sides. These correspond to the four elements: Earth, fire, water, air. At the top, these sides converge into a point. Each side is therefore represented by a triangle, in which the priest saw the three worlds represented externally.

In the pyramid he saw the physical nature, the primordial elements [and their] composition. In the sphinx, where animal and human are connected, he saw the symbol of the incarnation. The fact that an organic development from animal to human has taken place is again a theosophical view today.

Finally in the phoenix bird, which consumes itself in fire and then rises again from the ashes. It is the symbol of the soul. It is composed of the [mythical] primordial spirit, the [materialistic] skeleton of the world, the purely natural existence of the intermediate stages and the human soul, which is supposed to redeem the spirit from nature. The development presents itself in three stages: in the original spirit, the human soul and then in nature.

The individual human being is now included, integrated into this whole chain of development, and he should not only use his life, as the Egyptian priests were clear, to recognize the world, but to bring it a step forward. For they believed that if man is aware of his immense responsibility, he must not merely accept life, but that he must use it to do divine deeds when he works, to carry on the deeds of the gods.

With him who was at a sufficiently high level, who was as far as I have just indicated, the initiation was made. This initiation means nothing other than a repetition of the old myth of Isis and Osiris. We know that Osiris is one of the oldest gods of heaven and earth. Together with Isis, he rules heaven and earth. "Osiris can also incarnate in human form, so that they once lived as real people. They are said to have ruled our earth before the Hyksos invaded. They are therefore identical to the incarnated deities. Later, however, they all withdrew into service. That which was once worldly withdrew and was worshipped in service.

Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth-Typhon, who is the god of the abyss and fire. The god Seth-Typhon was tricked into murdering Osiris [in a coffin]. He was then dismembered and thrown out into the world.

When Isis realized this, she equipped a ship and gathered the pieces back together. Where she found a piece, she placed a church on it where it could be worshipped. Then she also found the heart again and was able to revive it through her love. It is just like in the Greek legend of Dionysus, where the heart also continued its development. Once again the god Osiris is resurrected through her love, once again [Isis] sees his head, once again a ray of light shines.

Through the ray of light, of love, she gives birth to her son Horus, who is thus in a sense a virgin-born son. He [replaces] his father. Isis and Horus continue to reign. Isis can even celebrate [the resurrection of Osiris] in a new body. Something takes place over his coffin that has been performed again and again as a kind of divine service. Thus, we are told, while their son Horus rules the people on earth, although he, according to the stay, completes his orbit on earth, also sits, as it were, at the right hand of the father.

I mean that the god Horus appears to us as the one who spiritually permeates the whole world and, according to the Egyptian priests, constitutes the soul of the world. This is a view that not only lived as a myth, but was actually dramatically presented in a tremendously grand and solemn manner to those who were to be accepted into the Egyptian priesthood. Once the imagination had been trained in a figurative way and the human spirit had assumed the form in which the god Osiris could fully live out, fully merge in the dust of the world and rise and be born on the other side, once the disciple had settled into these ideas, only then could he be led beyond the myth, then he was shown what is contained in the myth, then he was told that it is nothing other than the Logos himself, who has poured himself out into the infinite sea of worlds.

As a sign that the spirit had been poured into the infinite world sea - matter was imagined as a lake - the ceremonies were performed in places where there was a lake that represented the world sea in which the world spirit had become matter.

Horus was to be nothing other than the divine-human soul, which was poured into matter and was to bring matter back to its original existence. This cosmological truth, which relates to the individual human being, was handed down to the disciple. If he has not merely absorbed it in an abstract way, but if he has really lived into it, then he was considered worthy, since he does not merely grasp the external intellectual matter, but comprehends the great holiness of cosmology as something sublime, through which he himself believed to have become better.

Once the disciple had reached this stage, only then were the real processes undertaken with him, only then was he to experience that as a human being he is not only called to recognize, to be introduced into knowledge, but that this knowledge has to gain life.

This is expressed in a profound symbol in the Osiris myth and especially in the cult. Isis and Horus were depicted as people lying on the ground with their hands outstretched sideways. Below them they placed the cross [...]. This was the symbol for the resurrection of that which had fallen to the dust. In the cross we have the same idea as we have in Platonic philosophy, in which God, the All-Spirit, is crucified. Here it becomes a symbol and at the same time the awakener. Passing through the cross, at the coffin of Osiris, he will rise again and then be ruler anew.

This process took place for centuries in the Egyptian 'temples. The young priest was actually introduced to a new world. Mere recognition would be something egotistical. But the moment man realizes that he is only advancing a little in his development, he comes to the insight that he has made a living contribution to bringing the deity back from its envelope into its original form.

Once he had arrived here, the priest was to be shown that he must not only recognize, but that he must penetrate matter itself, that he must divinize matter, that he must not merely keep the spirit to himself, but that he must proceed from and spend the spirit for the salvation of matter.

This is one of the most important acts that should be indelibly inscribed in a soul seeking initiation. Only when this act had been completed, only when the human being had understood in a physical-spiritual way that he had to represent a symbol that had to represent eternity, the content of eternity according to Egyptian representation, only when the disciple had understood that he had nothing else to represent here as a human being in this life than a symbol of these eternal world processes, then he was able and worthy to embark on the path, which was the path of Egyptian initiation.

This process actually consisted of man allowing the process of re-awakening to take place in the physical world. This is the point to which the Egyptian priests progressed, and this is also what made the deepest impression on their disciples. They put the disciple into a three-day sleep. They completely freed the organism. The spirit should live for itself [during this time] and then take possession of its body anew. And then, when it took possession of the body again, it had the body in a new, spiritualized way. For this reason, those seeking initiation were asked to lie down on a wooden cross or simply to lie on the ground and spread out their arms. He was left in this position for three days. The fact that he regarded himself as a living symbol of resurrection was symbolized by the fact that he was carried towards the rising morning sun. The rising morning sun awakened the one who had been dead for three days to a new existence.

Now we must believe the reports we have, for what I am about to say cannot be proved experimentally. Now he had passed through the gate of death. Now he was worthy to be initiated into the deepest mysteries. It was this process which made man a symbol and through which the individual, small ego was extinguished, this process which placed him in the service of the divine world order. He had become a symbol for the eternal great world fact.

Through this, man practically experienced what Jakob Böhme wanted to say with the words: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies." Because his spirit was able to leave the body and take possession of it again, he was able to embark on the path to deification, to becoming Osiris himself, in a completely different way. We have seen from the Egyptian Book of the Dead how the Egyptians imagined eternal life in contrast to physical-sensual existence; we have seen how this initiation was brought about.

Now it is a question of making this priest a servant of humanity, so that already in this life he was brought a little further along the path of Osiris, that he did not merely transmit truth, but prepared his spirit, transformed it, so that what for others is merely external truth was for him a sacred truth, which was connected with quite different feelings and sensations. In fact, an Egyptian priest was something quite different from another person. He was a person who led a spiritualized, an internalized life because he had gone through the process of descending to the dead. He had left his body and had been in the realms of infinity, and after three days he had taken possession of his body again, awakened by the rising sun and by the father of heaven and earth, the god Ra. This process, which signifies initiation at the lowest level, was undoubtedly what the Essaeans also experienced in a higher degree. They knew the initiation process and undoubtedly took it over from Egypt with their views and customs.

The question now is: Why, how did it come about that the deepening of this ancient form of religion occurred in such a way that the undoubtedly much more exoteric worship of the Jews was again brought closer to the great worship of the Egyptians?

First of all, there are no historical, external indications. The same basis led to the birth of a Buddha so many hundreds of years ago and the same basis later led to the birth of a Christ. We must be clear about the fact that the entire Jewish spiritual life grew out of the Egyptian spiritual life. If you follow the first chapters of Genesis and the commandments in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you will find the same striking correspondence between Buddha and Jesus that I mentioned the other day. He will find in the first five chapters of Genesis what was common practice in the Egyptian priestly world. But we must be clear about the way in which Genesis came to the Jews and how it was propagated by them.

The one thing that must be clear to anyone who knows how to read Genesis is that Moses probably knew the Decalogue in the form in which he gave it. This results from the great correspondence we have in the Decalogue and in the commandments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And we must be clear that in ancient Egypt there was no other way to get this across than by being initiated.

Moses was an initiate. His task was to create other initiates in the Jewish priesthood. I will now show how even in outward appearances there is a similarity between Genesis and the ancient Egyptian myths. I will indicate one external feature which will speak sufficiently for the whole. You will see in what way the myths have been transformed. But a demonstration here would lead far too far.

The Osiris myth knows Osiris on the one side and Seth-Typhon on the other. Both are a kind of brother and sister. They are hostile to each other. They are both descended from heaven. They are sons of heaven. They are presented as incarnate deities. Next to Osiris we have Seth-Typhon. You also have this pair of brothers in Genesis as Cain and Abel.

The fact that we still have traces of the Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis is proven by the passage in the fifth chapter, which deals with the human race. Adam was 130 years old, fathered a son and named him Seth. It is the same figure. In him you have a real son of Adam. In Adam we only have to recognize a kind of god-man, actually only a figure of Ra, the highest heavenly god, translated more into human form. His sons are to be equated with the sons of Ra. [In the Seth of the Cain and Abel story we would see the Seth of the Osiris myth.] This correspondence is not accidental. It is clear that we are dealing with a profound correspondence.

I have only mentioned this to show the method. You can recognize the ancient Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis. This is how Genesis came about. The Egyptian priestly religion has been lost, but was later rebuilt from what was planted by tradition. This is why it is difficult for us to recognize the original form of what Moses handed down to us. But within the Egyptian priestly religion we can. When we reconstruct them, they correspond to the old mythical forms, to the oldest forms, so that we are in fact just as surprised by them as we were by the correspondence between the life of the Buddha and the life of the Christ.

This contemplation will give us a view of the actual reason for the emergence of the Christ figure. If we go back to the sacred books of the Indians, which were completed two thousand years before the birth of Christ, we find a most curious legend that confronts us in the form of the Indian Vedic literature. It introduces us to the whole Indian world view. You will find the legend of [Adhima] and [Heva]. The two were created as human beings on Ceylon in paradise. They are presented to us in full innocence. A serpent comes to them. It says to them: Why do you want to stay within these realms? They then wander through these areas and [Adhima] says to [Heva]: Let us see what kind of land this is that we see in the distance. - The serpent also invited them to do so and said: 'When you get there, you will be like Brahma and realize the deepest secrets of the world. - It all seems great to them. But when they get there, the whole thing dissolves into a kind of mirage and they are in harsh, barren realms. But they are comforted by Brahma, who tells them, after the world had appeared to them as an insubstantial reflection: I will send Vishnu to you.

It is the same as what we find in Genesis as the prophecy of God foretelling the coming of the Christ. You can find the sagas of the ancient Vedic literature in Genesis as well. This legend is intimately connected with the Indian world view. This Adam and Eve myth is in the deepest harmony with the teaching that has been propagated up to Buddhism and has become personal in Buddha, with the world view that what we perceive with our senses is basically a mirage, an illusion, a deceptive image and that man has a completely different goal in the eternal, in Nirvana. What is beyond nirvana is a vain appearance.

God himself made man, that is the meaning of the ancient myths. Brahma creates the first man in his own image. It is Brahma who incarnates in the first man. The primal human pair then descends further. It continues to connect with matter, and from the imprinting of the spirit in the dust arises the life that we recognize as human life.

This human life is nothing, since its only purpose is to give birth to the divine again. But a sacrifice is to descend to penetrate matter. [Brahma] must descend to attain his true, great life. This is expressed in the ancient Indian myth and this is also expressed in the Indian worldview, which sees everything in the world as illusory.

So you also have a similar harmony between the ancient myth of the Vedas and the [Jewish] worldview. They are in complete agreement with each other.

To grasp this view of the nothingness, of the mere appearance of the world, was one of the insights that the initiates were to be taught in a living way. He was not to see that which was to be seen in a coarse, crude manner. But that which the [non-initiated] people do not see, they should see. Wherever we go back to the mystical sources, be it in the ancient Vedas or in Genesis, wherever there is a deeper understanding, there is also the perception that we are dealing with a mere mirage - as in the Indian. [And this can only become what it must become when the deity appears in its form and when man not only contributes to bringing knowledge into the world, but also to permeating matter with spirit, so that not only the spirit becomes alive, but also that matter becomes alive with the spirit at the same time.

The fact that God himself has become dust is the fault of the serpent, which has to take up dust again and again. The dust-born is nothing other than the deity incarnating in matter and emerging from it again. We are dealing here with something that is not just a falling away, but a sacrifice. The deity pours itself out in order to be redeemed again. This falling away is depicted to us. The serpent is nothing other than the antitype of the deity, it is the deity in a different form. This is why the snake is the symbol for the initiation process in all religions. It consists in the fact that man not only recognizes, but that by recognizing he redeems matter from being mere matter, that he gives birth to spirit out of mere matter. The snake is the symbol for this process.

Goethe also used the symbol of the snake in the "Fairy Tale", but only at the time when he was familiar with the mystical symbols. In the myth of the Fall of Man, we are dealing with a view that we can trace both in ancient Egyptian priestly beliefs and in Genesis. We are dealing with ancient beliefs from which Buddhism and Christianity then arise. And when we look at the Egyptian priestly religion, we are dealing with a deification of man - as [with] Heraclitus.

This becoming immortal, this becoming God was the task that was to be symbolized by the three-day burial and the resurrection process. We see this process revived as a historical event in the story of Christ. We see what everyone who wanted to be initiated into the Egyptian mysteries had to go through, the coming to life after taking up the symbol of the cross, [in the Christ event] emerge in all [publicity] in an individual.

This could only take place in a time and in a community that had done the groundwork, as in Essaeanism, which could understand what was happening. From this we see that a necessary process took place, a process that must always occur if one could say - as the process took place with John the Baptist - that this is a Christ, as Brahma could say with Buddha. So it had to be prepared in advance.

In Essaeanism lived the belief [of the Egyptian initiates] that man could become divine if he stepped up to the judgment steps of Osiris in order to become God himself. To have this highest task, which man sets himself, once as a historical process before him as something lasting, that is what confronts us at the bottom of Essaeanism.

Now we come to pursue this. You must bear in mind that what took place in the Egyptian priest centuries ago, what took place in countless people, took place in a single process, but in such a way that we recognize in it exactly the plan of the Egyptian idea of eternity.

Let me add this one more passage in order to have a point of reference for the next time, namely that he who sought the entrance through the gate of death in order to enter the land of Osiris had to undergo a series of trials. He is led before 42 judges of the dead. These are nothing other than the people who have become "Osiris" in the realm of the dead; people who once lived and have already become "Osiris". He appears before them, so that the one who visits the world beyond appears before his most distinguished ancestors. And the one who is called to become an "Osiris" is nothing other than a new form, a renewed form, a link in the forty-two-membered series.

This series plays a role in the Essaean community. It is nothing other than what was already present here on earth. These 42 judges of the dead appear to us right at the beginning of the Gospel in a different form. They are nothing other than the 42 ancestors of Jesus. He has become "Osiris", the forty-second in the line. He is the one who is called to judge the living and the dead. This is why the most important progenitors of the human race are also cited as the progenitors of Jesus. It is a direct translation of an Essaean tradition that can be traced directly in the Gospel of Matthew. It is nothing other than the translation of the judges of the dead in Egyptian terms.

The fact that we are confronted with the incarnation of Jesus immediately after the genealogy has been presented: "[Mattan] begets Jacob, Jacob begets Joseph" and so on, may strike us. Next time, we will examine and get to know the reason for this.

[Answer to question:]

I just wanted to point out that we are dealing with two gender registers. One has gone through the Essaean view and the other from Matthew belongs to a different set of ideas and is linked to it.

42 members = 3 times 14 = 6 times 7 - at the boundary of the sixth round and at the entrance to the seventh round. The seven parts into which the ancient Egyptians divided man. The number 7 is not sacred because it is seven, but because they recognized the secret of the world in it. So it is not a superstition. Development is a continuous overcoming of matter by the spirit. Just as the globe once bore no people, but now people live on it, these people will develop more and more and progress to greater spirituality.

Dear guests!

Last time I concluded with a reference to the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Today I would like to follow on from this remark that the Gospel of Matthew begins by tracing the birth of Christ back to a forty-two-member family tree. In fact, this beginning of Matthew's Gospel shows us how the nature of Jesus Christ was understood by those from whom Matthew actually took his view of this nature. The forty-two ancestral line can only be understood if we manage to understand that we are dealing with the Egyptian view of the 42 judges of the dead, before whom the one who wants to ascend to divinity, i.e. who wants to become "Osiris", has to appear. This is also a factor in the Essaean doctrine. [The Essaeans] know this series, which must be gone through. According to the Essaeans, every person who is on the path to becoming God is about to pass through these 42 stages. They symbolize the 42 points of passage. When he has then reached the forty-third stage, he is already in the higher spheres, where becoming God already begins, or - if I express myself in Egyptian terms - where he becomes "Osiris". The fact that there are still divisions there, too, is of little interest to us for the time being.

The main point is that man now appears on a level in which he is "Osiris, divine being. I have said that these are views that Matthew has simply adopted. This can be seen from the fact that Matthew speaks of 3 times 14 ancestors = 42 ancestors. However, since he only really lists thirteen in the end, we can assume that he is well aware that the number 42 plays a major role, but that he has unconsciously omitted the last step. We therefore have to look less at how the matter is expressed in detail.

We are therefore dealing with the view in Matthew that man has 42 stations on his path to ancestors and that when he has passed through [these stages], he enters divinity

ness. These stations, these ancestors, can be spread over many lives. But only the one who has passed through forty-two stages can enter the world as Buddha" or "Christ. It is quite the same. Buddha also had to go through the same series of ancestors. With Buddha we also have 6 times 7 = 42 stages or embodiments. It is therefore the case that we not only have a deep similarity between Jesus and Buddha, but that we also have before us in the transcendent Jesus nature the same thing that is in the Buddha nature. We are dealing with a person at a higher stage of development who has gone through all the stages that one has gone through when one has survived life with all its trials and when one has entered the stage where one can be the judge of the dead. He will return again after he has come down to judge the living and the dead, he will enter the realm of the judges of the dead, he, Jesus, who has passed through the forty-two-link chain of the judges of the dead. It is just as it says in the Buddhist legend, where the Buddha passed through forty-two stages. He then entered the stage where he himself became God; the man who has become God is now no longer dependent on passing through the eternal necessity of the limbs. He appears on a divine counsel. Hence we are told with Jesus and Buddha that they are sent by divine decree and [...] by the will of the Father. The individual links in the chain of ancestors proceeded according to a world order.

So with the Essaeans we are dealing with a Christ, with the Buddhists with a Buddha, with an entity which, after having undergone all the trials that have to be passed through, appears within mankind as a man who has become God. This tells us nothing other than the Egyptians' and the Buddhists' way of looking at things. We are therefore dealing here with a real Buddha and a real Christ.

This can only be understood from this point of view. You will [otherwise] never understand how Matthew came to juxtapose the chain of ancestors and [the supernatural descent] of Jesus. He says in chapter 1, verse 17: "All the links from Abraham to David are fourteen links. From David to the Babylonian captivity are fourteen members. From the Babylonian captivity to Christ there are fourteen members." [Up to verse 17] you have given the natural genealogy of Jesus and immediately afterwards you have told how Joseph is told by the angel that there is a supernatural birth and that it is about Jesus coming into the world through the Holy Spirit. This is a complete contradiction in terms. However, it is a doctrine that must stand as such, a doctrine that we find everywhere where it is a question of indicating the reincarnation of a personality that has already reached the "Osiris stage". Such a personality experiences a double birth.

It is extremely difficult to talk about this. For Theosophy and for a real Theosophist, this is incredibly elementary. For those who have already penetrated a little deeper into the Theosophical teachings, it seems understandable when they say that they have reached the forty-second stage. For others, however, it is quite incomprehensible. Perhaps I can make myself understood by suggesting a path that almost every modern, thinking person will have to take if he wants to move from the most modern views into Theosophy. This path throws a weighty light on all these things. We must indeed say that for the Occident, at least for our European education, there is no more plausible way of arriving at those things which we find expressed here in such a difficult-to-understand way than from natural science. This is also the same path that leads to what underlies what Matthew drew from. I am convinced that - more than all Western religions are capable of - this path will lead to the goal if the teachings of natural science are to flow into Theosophy.

I would like to shed some light on the path that natural science will take in order to reach the point where Theosophy stands when it draws on ancient wisdom teachings. We must not take a completely pessimistic view of our Western development of spiritual life, even if we see how disregarded some people are of religious beliefs. This is because they have no idea of what is esoterically written in these scriptures. When we also see how amateurish the latest phenomena are.

It was only a year ago that a detailed discussion of Messiah Consciousness was published by Wrede, not August Wrede. Before that, one could be pessimistic. But science can no longer do anything other than end up where Theosophy seeks to take Western humanity. This is not too difficult to say. But in order to fully feel the thought, to penetrate it completely, to understand its full implications, where it shines into the whole of spiritual life, where it no longer lets us go once we have grasped it, [for this it is necessary to have suffered from the scientific ideas and to have carried them around with us as a confessor; for this it is necessary for those who go through the natural science of our days with their minds, the realization, the metamorphosis of that process, without getting completely caught up in this materialism. ]

Anyone who has confronted materialism and - like Goethe - has seen it with spiritual eyes, and who is able to see and understand these mysteries in their full scope, will not be able to harbor pessimistic views, even if he looks at the natural sciences of the last decade in particular.

I have personally had the best experiences with the natural sciences. In 1889, I wrote an essay in which I stated that, according to our scientific findings, the concepts of substance, matter and force are not even scientifically clear in the sober, mindless conception of force and substance found in Büchner and Strauss. Anyone who penetrates the facts of nature scientifically comes to the conclusion, directly as an experience, that natural science provides us with the proof that there is no substance, but that everything we call substance is nothing other than another form of spirit. Substance is only an apparent form of spirit that is expressed in a certain way. The world is spirit. That will have to become our confession.

The person who knows how to look at natural science with the eyes of the spirit comes to this realization. At that time I stated that what natural scientists have imagined as matter does not exist, that matter is nothing other than the lowest manifestation, the lowest form of spirit, and that natural science itself will come to this realization. Soon afterwards, in the richly fragmented literature of natural science, a natural scientist emerged with a work in which he expressed exactly the same thing in almost the same words as I did.

Whoever realizes that [natural] science can only be a factor in spiritual life, only a part of spiritual life, must be pleased when a chemist comes along who explains that what has been regarded as a substance cannot be justified scientifically as long as the substance is regarded as the carrier of natural science.

Unfortunately, Ernst Haeckel could not bring himself to accept what sprouted from our natural science. There is no doubt that we are no longer dealing with the old theory of matter. Only [today] the chemist - and also the physicist - will say that he is dealing with energies, because he is only dealing with expressions of force. The other, however, sees spirit in it. Natural science will go its own way in order to finally rise to the view that even that which underlies an apparently material process is nothing other than that which underlies the Indian wisdom teachings, that it is nothing other than that which materializes the Logos. Pessimism no longer clings to us today.

Natural science has incorporated a great good into us, namely the idea of development. Science has rediscovered this idea for itself in the field of biology. It has treated a special chapter in the way in which the theosophists of all times have regarded spiritual beings. They have looked at living beings from the point of view of development. And what does this development consist of? You need only put together the views of an eighteenth-century naturalist and those of a nineteenth-century naturalist. Linn& says that there are as many plant and animal species on earth as were originally created by so many acts of creation. The natural sciences of the nineteenth century allowed the juxtaposed forms to emerge one after the other, one after the other. What came into being later arose from what came before. In this way, natural science has eliminated the miracle from the world. In the past, there were only juxtaposed miracles. Theosophy has always stood on [the standpoint of development]. It transformed everything side by side into a succession. When a higher living being leads back to an earlier product of life, he who looks at it from a spiritual point of view sees stages of development.

The human being who has reached a higher stage, who has attained a higher degree of perfection, has not done so through a genius fallen from heaven. Genius, of which those who do not know what it is speak the most, is nothing other than the miracle transferred to natural science. Natural science has long since set aside this concept, which is still in use today - especially among the so-called aesthetes - in its own field, and has long since consigned it to the dustbin. Theosophy has never regarded genius as a miracle, but as a higher stage of development [of the personality]. It has seen in it nothing other than a personality that has gone through exactly the same thing as any other individuality, only it has gone through what another individuality goes through in this period in an earlier stage of development. What is experience for me today, what is stored up in me today, appears to me [later] as something self-evident, as a mature product, seemingly like a miracle. But it is only what I have acquired. I had to practise for a long time before I acquired, let's say, a movement that I then perform unconsciously. I also had to learn for years to grasp mathematics. But once I have the concept, it soon becomes a habit.

This is theosophy. Transfer that to the big world whole, to the big world events. What you have absorbed as experience appears as that which reappears on a higher level. In this way we can explain the most varied experiences of life and natural science through spiritual insight and deepening and make them fruitful for Theosophy. By contrasting two personalities, you will see that there is a spiritual explanation for a large number of things and phenomena in ordinary life, and that basically we are not dealing with anything other than attention and spiritual comprehension. You can thus see the beginnings of theosophy in scientific books.

[Perhaps take an elementary book of natural science, such as Topinard's "Anthropology", which explains how the individual organisms have developed. It tells us how the lowest levels of organization developed first, then we come to animals, apes and humans. Topinard repeats how Ernst Haeckel wrote about these things and says that Haeckel forgot something; he forgot to enumerate "the twenty-third degree in which Lamarck and Newton shine". You can continue to write this anthropology for the spirit, you can transfer what the natural scientist undertakes to the spiritual. There are countless degrees in the spiritual life. When you consider this, you realize what it is all about.

Goethe and Schiller are the two personalities I am referring to. They attended a meeting of natural scientists in Jena. Batsch had given a lecture, but it did little to satisfy Schiller and Goethe. Basically, Schiller and Goethe lacked the intellectual bond, the big picture. Schiller sensed this. And when he left the meeting with Goethe, he said: "It is dreary to see plant after plant lined up next to each other without an overview of the whole. There must be something common in all plants." Goethe answered him by talking about the original plant, of which all the others are only special forms. Then he said, "But that can be made clear in another way," took his pencil and drew the original plant with a few strokes, noting that it does not exist, but that this original plant can be recognized in every plant. Yes, said Schiller: "But that's not experience, it's an idea." But you can only achieve this if you go through all the plants and examine what they have in common. Then you get the general idea. "If that is an idea," Goethe replied, "then I see my ideas with my eyes." In fact, Goethe did not need to know all the plants. He only needed to see the essence of the individual plants. He saw the spirit, the truth of the plant. Schiller is quite right from his point of view when he says that [this was an] idea. And Goethe is also right when he says that he sees this idea, sees the whole thing at a glance. He is on a higher level. That is also what Schiller recognized without envy. This can be seen from Schiller's letters, where he described Goethe's nature in a magnificent way. We can see from this that such a spirit also had to go through this work. You can study this throughout Goethe's life. His whole conception was to see the spirit in nature. A seven-year-old boy does not otherwise do what Goethe did at that age. The embodiment of Goethe is a further, higher stage of development that Schiller still had to go through in Goethe's life. The seven-year-old Goethe took the stones from [his father's] mineral collection and used them to build himself an altar on the music stand, took a small incense burner and lit it through a burning glass by the light of the sun because he wanted to offer his service in this way.

Why does Goethe see the idea of the primordial plant and Schiller does not? Either we do not see the spiritual in the same way or we absolutely must extend our view of nature to the spiritual. Then we arrive at that spiritual development which is a content of all times.

I need not tell those who are familiar with theosophical literature that theosophical authors would present us with miracles in exactly the same way as the natural science of the eighteenth century, which presented the individual plants and animals and their genera as miracles. But through the ability to judge the spiritual as well as the physical, the views of the advanced natural science of the nineteenth century have passed over to the theosophical point of view. It is a question here of being able to judge the spiritual in the same way as the physical.

It is undoubted that with consistent thinking and when the natural sciences are supplemented by younger forces, a spiritual science will emerge from the natural sciences, as has already happened in the field of chemistry. Whoever thinks scientifically and has the inner courage to extend this scientific way of thinking to the spiritual world and to observe it after awakening the spiritual sense organs, must be led from natural science to Theosophy and its views.

Let us now turn again to Matthew's views on the personality, the essence of Jesus. We are dealing here with the view that sees Jesus as a personality who emerged after attaining the greatest possible number of re-embodiments. It is a personality that has reached the highest level of developmental possibility, which brings into the world as a finished disposition everything that other personalities are only on the way to achieving. Out of it is born that which others must first struggle for. That which appears as the spiritual when the transition from the forty-second to the forty-third stage takes place is the beginning and the transition of the human into the divine. Just as the purely physical and chemical in the organism has a higher nature and perception, so the physical on the level of divinity also has a higher nature and perception. The physical body, the physical organization is no longer what it was or what it is. It disappears in relation to the spiritual process. In fact, it has a metaphysical, transcendental past within itself. Just as it is born of the flesh, it is born of the divine. We must be clear about the fact that a new higher level of development of materiality has been reached and that the material itself has spiritualized to a higher level, so that we are not dealing with a birth out of the physical, but with a taking up of the physical birth by higher divine powers. We are therefore dealing with a direct emergence from primordial matter, which only becomes worldly at the moment of birth. There this primordial matter, which was not yet embodied, which was still decided in the pure spiritual, first passes over into the material. So in the forty-third degree, on the forty-third stage, we are dealing with the birth of primordial matter that has not yet entered into union with physical matter. This is what the ancient teachings refer to. The Egyptians say of the birth of Horus that the eye of Osiris shone above Isis, that a purely spiritual birth took place. In the birth of Horus you have the birth of the god out of still virgin matter.

If we go back to the Egyptian myth, we are dealing with three eternal great symbols for what we call the father, the mother and the child. This juxtaposition of Osiris, Isis and Horus is the original symbol. The child has remained on the Christian cross. The material on the one side has become merely evil, the father principle on the other side merely good. On Golgotha we see this symbolized in the three crosses. On the left we have evil, on the right good and in the middle the child. This symbol has been transformed, has become something else.

Now I come to a very important point. The striking thing that confronts us is the following: We can still trace the origin of the Christian symbol from the Egyptian symbol in the Christian myth of the earliest times. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in all the other contemporary literature - apart from the Gospels themselves - although this myth is discussed in the most diverse ways, including by Jewish mystics, we do not find one thing that we actually only find in Matthew and Luke, namely the Holy Spirit. This is something that is actually not present. This is in addition. This Holy Spirit is nothing other than the transformed Isis. As a result, the virgin birth, which is still conveyed in the Osiris myth, was actually replaced by the real, natural birth. God the Father brought about this virgin birth through his magical influence, so that this birth is mediated on the one hand by the Father and on the other by the Holy Spirit, who is now the representative of the Father.

We encounter this Holy Spirit in the first period of Christianity [...], where the Christian view [of the virgin birth] emerges. We can therefore say that because the Holy Spirit first appears in Christianity, we see in it a division of the originally feminine principle of the world symbol. We have a spirit that gives the child its origin. [The origin from the divine tree arose within the Essaean community, where one actually stood on the standpoint of asceticism, where one already saw something evil in the sexual in itself. There it was impossible to receive the feminine in the same way as in ancient Egyptianism, as was the case with the Osiris service of the Egyptians, where the overshadowing of Osiris by Isis is transformed into the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit]. This is a temporary means by which the ancient Egyptian teaching was transformed into the Christian one. We have thus seen that we are actually dealing with the same way of looking at things. The Christian view sees in the Christ-personality a deified human being in exactly the same way as the Mystery Cult has always seen these [deified] human beings.

What doctrines may have underpinned this whole view? Anyone who really knows how to read the Gospels sees nothing in the Gospels other than, I would say, a more detailed account of the ritual, which was intended to initiate the Mystics into the Mysteries. And if we visualize what the initiation is about, if we want to be clear about what such a Myst wanted to achieve, should achieve, why he, the Myst to be initiated, the Myst was placed on a cross, why he was placed in a death-like state, we must say to ourselves, remember, that it is about the awakening of a higher life force, that it is about bringing him to resurrection on the third day. And if we ask ourselves how the initiation was accomplished for the mystics, we must say to ourselves that the mystical view was clear about the fact that the individual human being has to go through the whole process of creation in his own body. This was presented as a return to the Godhead, as a continual deification of the world.

Matter is what the spirit pours itself into in order to return to divinity via a detour through matter, in order to be as a soul what it originally was as a spirit. That is where we get the path. The Myste should bring matter within himself to the point of dying so that matter is no longer the ruling force in him. His soul should be reborn so that his material body also reaches a higher level. They were to be spiritualized at higher levels. It was not a higher scientific education that the myst was striving for, but for the myst to spiritualize matter, to bring matter one step further in its development. Everything that the myst had to go through had as its goal the [resurrection] with a spiritual body, with a reborn body.

The Myste had to go through this path of [returning] the soul to the Godhead. It was also made clear to him that he was not going through what he was going through for himself, but as part of the great universe, which was going through a degree of development in him. We know that the whole process at the initiation is described to us in such a way that when the sun awakens the Mystic on the third day, the thunder rolls, just as it did at the resurrection of Jesus. These events are told to us as components of the mystical process.

The mystic should be made aware that his own process has its foundation in the cosmic world process, that God has carried out the world process with the help of the Creator Word, the Logos, that this God is himself, and that the world process is carried out in reality in the mystic, that the process which man has to go through is like the world process. The world process is synonymous with the description of the path that the mystical individuality has to go through. This was an important part - not only with the Egyptians - of what was demonstrated to the mystics and then became flesh and blood.

Take together what is communicated individually, but which we must keep together. Take the whole parallelism between the Gospels and the Old Testament [and the Egyptian tradition], then if you follow the matter in this way, you will indeed be able to see that indeed the most devout confessors of Christianity in the later centuries had traces of the human process being the great cosmological world process. In some passages of St. Augustine's "Confessions" you can find such traces and hints. They may not be entirely clear, but he shows that in the individual events such as the birth, transfiguration, ascension of Christ and so on, he is dealing with nothing other than a repetition of the cosmic process. Thus he says at one point: "God also created the Christ of our earth. Our earth was desolate and empty. Ignorance weighed upon us. We left our darkness and turned to you. We were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord." - He describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ with the words of Genesis. So here there was still an awareness of what was in the Mysteries themselves. In the Mysteries there was no difference between the process that the Myste had to undergo and the cosmic process. Therefore, every ritual was written in the same way as the description of the creation of the world. If we could compare within the Egyptian teaching the description of the path of the Egyptian mystics, we would see that it is one and the same as the cosmic development process. It is translated into the microcosmic what has taken place in the macrocosmic.

I would like to point out that such traces are not only to be found in Augustine. We also find them in other church scholars [for example in Eusebius] when they describe the life of Jesus. However, we have to go back to the fourth century, where the descriptions were even more fluid; we even have to go back to the third and second centuries. When we read or hear descriptions of the whole course of life, when we hear stories of the resurrection and ascension, then for those who are able to judge these things, it sounds like the translation of the Mystery initiation process.

After all, the Gospels, which later became authoritative and in which the view was crystallized and fixed, can no longer be interpreted. Eusebius was still Myste. So I think that if we look at the Gospels, we can still see from the style that something has remained of these old institutions of correspondence between the cosmological process and the initiation or initiation process:

Take the Gospel of John. What is it but a betrayal of the mystical - in style and layout nothing but individualized cosmogony? "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God" and so on. This beginning of the Gospel of John starts in exactly the same way as Genesis. We are dealing with a Genesis. These phenomena show us directly the clear traces of the fact that we are actually dealing with initiatory writings in the Gospels, which did not exist in the first centuries of the Christian era. Only [oral] tradition existed at that time. We essentially owe the Gospels to the second century.

If we hold all this together, we will see even in the Gospels how this trace is still present of the correspondence between cosmogonic and individual development. Such a thing as is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew cannot be understood at all if it is not interpreted theosophically, if the same thing is not seen in it that the Buddhists have gone through in forty-two stages. We are absorbed by God and born out of him again.

He who has developed this way of looking at things within Essaeanism, who has stepped out of the first teachings before he stepped out, must have been deeply imbued with this fact, must have had clearly before his eyes through a higher revelation what every other man must first laboriously gather together. It must have dawned on him in a single great glance.

Now we have in the Gospels - and this is the question I still have to raise - the indication that we are dealing with a personality who, in a single glance, encompassed everything that can be described as teachings of the past, as the result of past experiences. In a single vision we have the content of the Gospel, and now we must ask: Is it a real renewal in this period of time of this world mystery that is otherwise present in the symbol, this world mystery that is present to us in Father, Mother and Child? Is there such a view? I believe that it is the whole personality, the real personality, which underlies this, which radiates out as if renewing the past. This seems to me to be the apparition on the holy mountain, the apparition that Jesus had when he had only his most intimate disciples with him - Peter, James and John, his brother - and the apparition of Moses and Elijah.

If we visualize this apparition, if we understand it in this way and interpret it, then it becomes clear to us what we are dealing with here. Only from this apparition can we come to a full understanding of what this personality was through whom Christianity came into the world.

We can now understand what was going on, and once we have understood that, then we come to a mystical understanding of Christianity. This is the most important moment of this vision, where the founder of Christianity is not actually something isolated, but something in which the deepest mystery of existence was resolved, in which the deepest experience of man is concentrated.

It is impossible, since the time is too far advanced, to show what is radiated in the teachings and in the life of Jesus. When we understand this phenomenon, the necessary light will spread within us.

Our task will be, in the few hours remaining to us this winter, to carry [our reflections on] the mystical views of the Christian era as far as possible to Scotus Eriugena. From today we have six more hours: March 22, 29, 5, 12, 19, 26 April. By the ninth century A.D., I hope to move forward and touch on the consolidation of Christianity when St. Augustine deepened Christian doctrine.

If we look back at what we have let pass us by this winter, it was mystical views that were prepared in Greek and Egyptian antiquity. We have seen that the most outstanding of the Greek philosophers drew from what we have called the Mysteries. [We have seen that the Greek mythology presents us with mystically deepened experiences, that is, that what is represented externally in the myths was experienced internally in the mysteries.] We have seen how this mystical experience was philosophically transformed into the teachings of Heraclitus and Plato. And we have seen how the practical side was developed among the Egyptian priests, how a secret path was cultivated within the Egyptian priesthood, through which man could be led to the goal more quickly than if he left himself to fate and waited until [the initiation] came.

The Egyptian mysteries and mystery priests reached their climax in initiation. The initiation process also belonged to the cults of the Indian religion and was also carried out there. The process consisted of the great Osiris drama being performed on the individual personality as a process of initiation. The individual personality had to submit to a process whereby sensuality and the physical were purified to such an extent that it could comprehend the world in a spiritual way. The process was carried out within the Egyptian priestly mysteries in such a way that the person who was considered mature enough to be subjected to an etherization of the body was put into a kind of higher hypnosis, placed in a coffin, in a tomb. He lay there with his hands outstretched in a mystical sleep, from which he was to be awakened on the third day. The awakening from the mystical sleep was accomplished by the rising morning sun. But now this whole process made such an impression on him that he actually led a new life when he had gone through this process. Now he could understand when the Egyptian and Indian world views claim that the earthly is nothing and that the world of the senses no longer means anything. Goethe's words for this were: "Die and become."

If you study the mystical writings, you will often find this "Die and become". There, where the spiritual awakens and the lower, the tangible really evaporates. The lower, the tangible becomes nothing compared to the higher that awakens in us. Hence this mystical confession in various ways. Anyone who studies mystical writings will often have come across this expression. It can be found, for example, in Jakob Böhme, who expressed it in the words: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies". For those who have not achieved this, the situation is such that they must undergo the process on higher levels or in a next life.

This initiation process was intended to lead people up to their goal, to take them a step further on the path to divinity. Man was destined to transform the gross sensual world into a purely ethereal one. We are told that man then took on a new body, that he was endowed with a new body, that he was transfigured. Such an initiation process is described to us as taking place amidst tremendous natural phenomena, with thunder and lightning. It was this process that gave him the experience, the realization of the spiritual. Once he had achieved this, he realized that it was not matter that was real, but the spiritual.

Anyone who has lived a mystical life will always reveal this to us at some point. I would like to show this in Goethe's "Faust". You will find allusions to the dawn in it. You need only look up the passage where Faust speaks the words before summoning the earth spirit: "Only now do I realize what the wise man says: The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, disciple, undaunted, bathe your earthly breast in the dawn." The dawn is the light by which the initiate awakens. When Faust, bathed, steps out of Lethe's flood, he sees the dawn again. We also have such a passage in the "Prologue in Heaven": "The sun sounds the old way in brotherly spheres Wettgesang, and its prescribed journey it completes with thunder" and so on. All things, as Goethe has expressed them, are to be taken in such a way that they are initially comprehensible even to those who do not penetrate into the depths. But the initiate will see that there is something more behind it. These are Goethe's own words.

So it is the initiation process that we have in Christianity as the content of the Christian creed. From here we must penetrate [further]. We will then see that we can only understand certain parts of Christianity in this way.

When we open the Gospel of Matthew, certain passages only become understandable to us from this theosophical starting point. Last time I showed how the Essaeans were the representatives of this [mystical] view through their lives. There we find the doctrine of the nothingness of the material. If we understand what is transmitted to us about the Essaeans, then we find that through Essaeanism this secret teaching has been transplanted into Judaism, that man can experience an inner deepening and that at the same time the view has been formed that it can be promoted through the initiation process.

Let us now ask ourselves: Do we also encounter the initiation process in the New Testament? If this were the case, then we would have to say to ourselves that in Jesus of Nazareth we are dealing with a secret teacher who took it upon himself, who saw in himself the main mission of no longer excluding anyone, at least from an inkling of this mystical process, who could not bring himself to pursue the depths of this science only in secret.

Now let us see if we can discover traces that Jesus belonged to the so-called initiates. According to the Gospel of Matthew, without question. We see that we are dealing with a person at the highest level of reincarnation, with a "Buddha" or "Christ". Such a person, however, could be none other than a member of the Essaean community, according to the whole matter in question. Nor could he be any other than one who belonged to the initiates of the Old Testament. Christ saw the [outer] world disappear in the face of what he saw as a vision. - Visions in the early stages are not realities. In the higher stages, however, this changes completely - it is the content that is conveyed in such a vision. Let us take the vision that the Christ had with Elijah and Moses, which brought him to the perfect transfiguration, where not only he but also his clothing was transfigured. That would be and was the highest revelation that a human being could receive, the participation in divinity itself. From there it also became clear that he was not merely a messenger of God, but an incarnated God. The Essene view makes it possible to understand that man can attain this level. This is expressed in the New Testament when [Christ wants to show the disciples] what he is going through, what he wants them to suspect, what he must let them suspect, by drawing their attention to the fact that the divine could creep in "like a thief in the night": the day of resurrection will appear, an awakening will take place. He wants to awaken this awareness in every human being. And awakening this consciousness was his mission. It was what the Essaeans themselves wanted. But the Essaeans wanted to make individual chosen ones. Jesus was also only chosen as an individual. But he wanted to bring everyone to it. But he could only show the path to those who had the good will. And only someone who was an initiate among the initiates could do this.

If you follow the writings of the first Christian centuries, especially the early ones, you will see how clear they were about the question of infallibility. This already existed at that time, the possibility of different interpretations by different personalities. Admittedly, everyone could interpret the nature of Jesus' personality in their own way. This is understandable when we remember that we are dealing with people who were at different levels. Even if we follow the Gnostics, we find that we are dealing with a secret doctrine. Just as it was the case with the mystics.

The priest felt he was the bearer of a secret doctrine. He knew that people could only be led to the secret teachings step by step. He knew that he had to give them in a form that would open everyone's heart, but that the meaning would still be conveyed. We can even assume that the one who wrote down the messages also understood the meaning. Jesus was both a secret teacher and a great public speaker. You only need to have the parable to recognize a higher truth in it. But the one who gave the parable could only be an initiated personality. The parables have their origin in the depths of the world soul. [Jesus] had an insight into the views of the spiritual world. He knew what the initiation process was all about. He was one who was able to experience the secrets of the spiritual world through his own inner revelation. Because he was at the stage of perfect incarnation, he was one who could and did carry out the initiation himself.

This is something that only the mystical teaching can represent. Only the mystical doctrine can read certain parts of Scripture correctly. They can follow the passages. They will always remain mysteries if they are not understood in the mystical sense, in connection with the Egyptian initiation process. Jesus emerged from the deep spiritual bed of the Essaeans in order to work in the sense of Essaean wisdom. He was also able to perform the initiation as it was undoubtedly part of the Essaean cult. But you have to understand how to read the Gospel, namely from John, who was also an initiate [of the Essaeans]. He tells it to us in a very masked form.

Those who have understood the Gospel will always find the point, they will find it emphasized, namely the point that must have been the cause of Jesus' death. This is the point where Renan, in a rather materialistic way, gets a certain uneasy feeling about the crucifixion and where he cannot explain why the most important miracle, the raising of Lazarus, should have had such a profound effect, why it might have been connected with the crucifixion of Jesus. The story of the resurrection of Lazarus cannot be understood, cannot be understood exoterically, by those who take it as it is given [in the Gospel]. Anyone who wanted to see a mere parable in the resurrection of Lazarus would get nowhere. Nor would anyone who understood it as a realistic depiction of what happened to the fig tree. One [- Luke -] understood and told it as a parable, the other, Mark [- and also Matthew -], tells it as a real miracle. The resurrection of Lazarus, which is undoubtedly the most important of the miracles that Jesus performed, had nothing in common with all these miracles. And this resurrection of Lazarus can only be understood if it is understood esoterically. It is an initiatory process that is described to us in a veiled manner. If we have the resurrection of Lazarus before us and know that it is an initiation process that is only told to us in a somewhat masked way, then we also have the reason why the commentators are so sultry from the moment when this initiation process is carried out into all the world. It became a great symbol. From now on, people believed in Jesus. People now knew what he was, a great secret teacher who wanted to preach the gospel to the whole world.

Now let's look at the initiation process itself. Such things are revealed to us by the sounds that are struck, which signify mystical symbols. And if you know how to understand mystical symbols, if you are used to reading mystical writings, then you are pointed out - as a Freemason is pointed out that he is dealing with another Freemason - you are pointed out when a deeply mystical theme is struck, just as in the Gospel of John the resurrection of Lazarus is told.

Lazarus lies prostrate with an illness. It only relates to his previous life. It is the initiation process that is to be carried out on him by the Christ himself. We are dealing with a sick man who has already succumbed to death. The translation is not bad. But it is also about the two sisters Mary and Martha being presented to us. "Mary is not just a proper name, Mary is the same as Maya in the Indian world view. She means nothing other than matter, the virgin matter into which the spirit must pour itself in order to pass through the various stages of embodiment, through the stages of inorganic nature, of plant and animal life and of man back to divinity. This Mary is [the being] from which the spirit must be born out of the as yet unmixed matter.

So we are dealing with Mary on the one hand and her sister Martha on the other. We will see that both sisters are described to us in a special way, we will see the significant contrast between these sisters. "It happened that they were walking. ... There was a woman named Martha. She took him into her house. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus' feet and listened to him speak." - Mary is the symbol for the material existence, the one from which the spirit must be born again, and "Martha" is the one who provides services, who leads the spirit further along the path, the sister of the material, the actual symbol of the spiritual. Just as man walks in limbo between the material and the spiritual, so Lazarus walks between the two sisters - not with his sisters. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord and dried him with her hair.

The whole thing is then described to us as a kind of medical history. The sisters said to him: "Lord, behold, the one you love is sick. When Jesus heard this, he said: "The illness is not for death, but for the glory of God." It is the opposite of new life. He therefore wants to carry out the initiation process on Lazarus. The illness is for the glory of God, so that the person is led to divinity. "But Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus ... Now when he heard that he was sick ... He stayed two days where he was." The initiation process had to last three days and on the fourth day the one who was sleeping as if dead was to be awakened. "Then he said to the disciples, "Lazarus, our friend, is asleep" - the one whom Jesus loved - "but I am going to wake him up." The disciples misunderstood. Jesus said: "He is sleeping the death that passes through real death. Lazarus has died, he has lived through the mystical death." "Thomas said to the disciples: "Let us go and die with him."" - Lazarus was in the tomb for four days. [Gap in the transcript].

Of course, such a secret teacher could only be persecuted by orthodox Jewish teaching. The whole narrative is, as I said, masked. But it testifies to us that we are dealing with an initiation process and with the resurrection on the fourth day. If we follow these secret teachings, we realize that people in the first Christian centuries knew what they were dealing with.

He who was initiated into the initiation process is also initiated into the Apocalypse. There, too, we are given ample indication in various ways of what we are dealing with. When we read it under the conditions that have now been created, we are literally told that we are dealing with Christ as an initiator. [Gap in the transcript]

The beast is the sensual nature of man. "Their corpses will lie in the street. ... After three and a half days, the spirit of life from God entered them and they stepped on their feet." Here you have the initiation process in a more dogmatic way. To cite a [passage] from the Apocalypse, we are shown this. "I am the root of the race of David, the bright and morning star."

Understanding all this is necessary if we want to understand how Jesus worked the raising of Lazarus, the initiation process. If you consider everything that is attached to it, then you will see for yourself that it cannot be about anything else - if only because of the whole atmosphere that spreads around this initiation process.

I would like to raise the question once again: What was the most serious crime according to the views of the Jewish court? We know from allusions in Greek history - from Plutarch, for example, and so on - what a tremendous guilt was incurred by the one who made the mysteries public. Plutarch says that he will be careful not to reveal any of the mysteries publicly. It was [Jesus] who first formed the opinion that these premonitions must be awakened in every human being. The Jews could not do this, they had the law, the faith. The mysteries were considered bad because they took away people's faith. That was [in the eyes of the Pharisees] the great crime, that Jesus taught the initiation process, publicly.

What was the main point of the condemnation? People ask if he had a secret teaching. He said it was not a secret teaching, but that it was his job to teach it to the world. He was expressly questioned as to whether he had taught his doctrine to the whole world or whether he had preserved the mysterious. According to the opinion of those who had to judge Jesus, it was a kind of treachery that he had communicated what he should not have communicated to the people according to the opinion of those who condemned him. So we see that there was indeed a deep reason for the unease that appears in various commentators, and we also see that in the raising of Lazarus according to John, we are dealing with an outstanding initiator in Jesus.

Answer to the question:

The Church has made the initiation process an inspirational process. In doing so, the Church has made its mission possible for the millennia.

Christianity is a religion for the masses and also for the initiated.

The mystics admit that revelation is within them.

When science advances to the laws of nature, there also comes a period when faith is no longer effective and eventually leads them back to the theosophical.

The Church should carry out this work of initiation and make it accessible to the great masses.

The Church can no longer understand Theosophy, but Theosophy can understand the Church.

In Judaism, only the pure law was allowed to be taught, although the Talmud also contains secret teachings.

What Christ says of himself [and his] mission: "I know that you always hear me, but for the sake of the people I do this." Raising Lazarus from the dead.

We saw last time that the initiatory process is the antithesis of the great world doctrines of the origin of the cosmos in the spiritual sense, and that there is a strict correspondence between the small and the great world, so that we can almost see how the images of Genesis, which have to do with cosmological views, with contemplations of the universe, recur in the history of the Redeemer.

The personality of Christ is to be placed at the center in such a decisive way that it was not only a consequence of the Messiah-consciousness of Christ himself, but that it was also something that lay in the whole time at that time. The whole time had the need to place a personality, a person reborn on the heights of spiritual development, at the center of the whole world view, so that there was a profound need not only among those who founded Christianity, but also in the spirit of the time, not only in the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish people, but also among the pagan peoples. So there was also an urge to come face to face with this personality, to see him. We see that one or the other could be mistaken for him. Paganism virtually created a counter-image in Apollonius of Tyana. He is perhaps as interesting a figure in paganism as Socrates, Plato and so on. But he still has a special interest in that a pagan-human deity was to be tendentiously created, which was to be contrasted with Christ. There is, however, a clear difference between the world of thought associated with Christ and that associated with Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is seen more as a man loved by God. Basically, it is the same view that emerged from the Jewish consciousness. I would say, from the pagan point of view, while the deity is emphasized more in Christ, in Apollonius it is said more that he is a man who has come to divinity, a man loved by God, not a god.

And this man loved by God appears to us only as a later development of Socrates, of Plato. [Just as Plato had a special relationship with the god of medicine, Asclepius, the son of Apollo, so did Apollonius:] He was a healer, a sage, and likewise prophecy is said to have been one of his gifts. These ideas were formed from Pythagorean ideas. Just as these live on in the people, following in secret, mystical connection, Apollonius was imagined to be the reborn Plato, a savior.

We are told of Apollonius that he traveled far and wide, seeking less to enrich his own wisdom - which was available to him as he was at a higher stage of reincarnation - than to connect the various religions through a spiritual bond. A cosmopolitan [religion-uniting activity] is attributed to him. He is said to have been with the Indians, Persian magicians and Egyptian priests. Among the Indian sages he was immediately recognized as a deified personality. We are also told that he got to know the Egyptian religion in its various forms, but that he was able to tell the Egyptian priests more than they could tell him. He was able to tell them that they should have their religious ideas about India. He was able to show them their own in the Indian. Thus we see how Apollonius endeavored to see the common ground in the various religions, and so he appears to us at this time as the bearer of a real theosophical striving. He set himself the task of searching for the common ground in all religions. Therefore, when we delve into his teaching, it appears to us as an extract from all the religious teachings existing at that time. He had collected the extract from all of them. It is also a mature teaching. The idea of reincarnation appears to us to have been fertilized in the old Pythagorean sense.

He speaks of the popular religions as an external symbol of what it is really supposed to be. Apollonius draws attention to a very important idea that he can only have drawn from pagan mysticism. He draws attention to the fact that in the various acts of worship performed with the mystic, we are not only dealing with events that represent the world process, but that we are also dealing with the representation of phenomena of nature in symbolic acts. Apollonius therefore presents us with a highly important concept that leads us into the relationship that exists between Christianity and the time. He shows that everything we can see around us and also what is in the starry sky, the stars, can be regarded as a symbol, that all this is nothing other than a symbol of spiritual processes that dominate the world cosmos. Those who heard my lecture on Goethe's "Faust" the day before yesterday will remember that something similar was said there: Everything external, "everything transient is only a parable". This is what Apollonius says. But it is the common view of the entire age at that time.

I must draw attention here to a misunderstanding which consists in the belief that this great symbolism between the small and the great world, between man and the small world occurrences and the great world mysteries is a product of the imagination. In our nineteenth century this doctrine has developed. We see in the popular religions the fairy tale that creates religion, the imagination that creates religion, which personifies the processes [in nature] in the circle of air, lightning, thunder and so on in manifold ways and forms gods for itself. The laws that the stars obey are seen as the expression of a divine-spiritual world order. But within the actual priestly theosophy there was the conviction that when the sun is followed as it moves across the celestial vault, it is not only the process of moving across the celestial vault that is to be seen. This process is only a symbol for the process taking place behind it. That which the popular imagination originally possessed in an exoteric way was later taught as a symbol by the priest. But he saw in the laws - we know that there was a highly developed astronomy in the Assyrian empire - he did not see in the laws the dry naturalistic law, he saw in them the language of the deity, only a symbol for the deeper spiritual process.

For Apollonius of Tyana, the subordinate folk symbolism was only one stage. The initiate was later given a higher parable. David Friedrich Strauss, Darwin and so on were wrong in saying that the imagination [of the people] had imagined the lightning passing through the clouds as a divine fact, that it had then progressed from that to the gods, to the god Zeus and so on. But these were only ideas of the imagination, of popular mythology. In this way they have stripped away everything religious. The [scientific] truth has taken its place. But this matter has never been represented [in this way] within the mystical teachings. Even if there was an ascent from [the ideas of] popular religion to the scientific investigation of the course of the stars, the divine was first sought behind the phenomena. Not that which man absorbed within himself was to be a symbol for the external process, no, just the opposite. The whole of nature itself became a parable. In the mysticism of those centuries we have to do with exactly the opposite of what the materialistic scholars of the nineteenth century imagine. They believe that what the ancients thought up was only a parable. No, it is just the opposite. The scientific idea is only a parable for what lies behind it.

Oriental scholars knew that Christianity drew from the same source as they did. They therefore long regarded Christianity only as a Persian sect.

However, this whole context of the theosophical doctrine of the whole world as a parable for the eternal divine [...] confronts us clearly and particularly deeply in the Apocalypse, which is nothing other than an interpretation of the older mysteries in Christian terms.

But first I have to say something in advance. I said that the whole of external nature was regarded as a parable, as was the case with Assyrian-Babylonian or Persian scholars. They had a precise idea of the laws to be observed in the course of the stars. This will also be clear to other circles because you have heard Professor Delitzsch's lecture on "Babel and the Bible". I could have started from Asian ideas, you find the same thing everywhere. If science now unearths things of which Theosophy must claim otherwise for other reasons, we will nevertheless see confirmation through the excavations of Babylonian antiquities. One finds the results of the excavations compiled in an easy and fine manner by this Professor Delitzsch. I said that from Oriental priestly religions a part of the views emerged which regarded nature as a parable for the eternal divine. You can understand this if you look at the oriental religions. The Egyptians attached more importance to great monuments and laid them down on the outside, while the Orientals sought the parable more in the [theoretical].

When we follow the literature of the pagan writers, we see how the awareness becomes clearer and clearer that in the teachings of astronomy we are dealing with a language for the eternal word of the gods in the world. I only wish to draw attention to a few facts which will make the whole matter clearer. [In the writer Apollonius of Rhodes], then also in Plutarch - although there only sparsely - one finds precise references to this and to the world of legends - such as the legend of Heracles, the legend of the Golden Fleece - and so on, which I have already dealt with earlier. But we can also see from their writers that these legends also presented themselves to the first Christians in such a way that they concealed great world truths.

We see that the sun, in its annual course, in its annual movement, is a symbol of the eternally changing, sinking and renewing world. Given the brevity of time, I can only hint at what the main point is. It is not without reason that the twelve labors of Heracles have been related to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. It is a repetition of what happens in the sky above. The upper and lower correspond to each other.

When we follow these views, we find that great importance is attached to the fact that the sun, the god of light, was worshipped with the annual arrival of spring - just as in theosophy, which sees light symbolized in the sun and truth in the light. It was not the sun itself that was worshipped, but the sun was only a symbol. With the rejuvenating sun, it was seen as a symbol of eternally reborn nature, of spiritual rebirth, of the God who renews himself again and again.

What the Egyptians saw in the firmament is also seen in the sun renewing itself in spring. And the fact that the sun [in spring] is in the sign of the lamb, the ram, means that the sun gains power in the world order through the lamb. This becomes a symbol for the world redeemer. This is why we encounter the lamb, which signifies the rebirth of the sun in spring, the rebirth of the new God. This is why the beginning of spring was also referred to as the point at which the young god is born. The virgin at Sais gives birth to the new god Heracles.

Where the legends are not completely correct, we can prove where the changes came from. The same legends are interpreted by pagan writers in the same way, namely that nothing else can be found in them than what can also be read in the sky. The mystics of that time saw the serpent in the sky as a symbol of the downfall of the god in dark matter. The passage of the sun in the snake symbolizes this. On December 21, in the middle of winter, when the days are getting longer, the sun enters the constellation of Sagittarius. In the middle of winter, Virgo receives the child. Easter is actually the resurrection, the redemption. There the sun enters the constellation of the Lamb of Aries. In summer we have the lion reflected in the course of the sun. What takes place in the individual personalities first took place in the celestial vault. Seen in this way, the course of life of the individual personalities is a mystery of the eternal course of the world. Also in the Greek mysteries, also in the Orient and in Persia, [Zeus] transforms himself into the Golden Fleece at this time.

So we see that the passage of the sun through Aries is given to us as a resurrection festival. Nonnos] mentions a relationship between Zeus and his son Dionysus. He is to ascend to his father and sit at his father's right hand. Here you have the pagan version of the Christian creed. Christianity means the new form of the teachings of paganism. A large number of Christians can be shown to have been inspired by pagan mysticism. These ideas appear again and again in Christianity. There is an indication even in Christianity that isolated spirits of paganism have turned to Christianity and then sought a symbolic expression for the fact that they were able to understand Christianity all the more. The expression can be found in the Gospel, namely that magicians follow the stars to find Christ. They read the stars, and all they had to do was follow what they read in the stars. After following [the star], they see what is given to Christianity. Christianity is represented there in a single person. That is why the Indian scholar said: "In Christianity, we are dealing with nothing other than a Persian sect."

If you take the sun myth and try to translate it into the personal as the course of life of a single personality, then you can say nothing other than that the Christians sought the truth in a humanized way, which was previously sought in the firmament.

The fact that at Easter time the sun passes through the constellation of the Lamb, the Ram, is quite natural [for that time]. At other, earlier times, the Lamb was replaced by Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. This has to do with the fact that these ideas were formed at a time when the position of the constellations was different [from today]. They are always shifting. Our astronomical data is also no longer correct today. So we can say that this Christianity was actually born out of the ancient mysteries and religions. This is not a degradation, but merely shows that it was a necessity of the times.

I have shown how the individual teachings in the Orient are already pre-formed. What interests us in particular, however, is how they are incorporated into the Apocalypse. If one does not grasp the basic idea in this way, it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood that the world of imagination, the sum of [religious] feelings, was already present and reappears in a new form in Christianity. The author [of the Apocalypse] was aware of this. He did not want to reproduce anything other than the old mystical mysteries. He says that everything he has read from the starry world has now taken place as a direct experience in the life of an individual personality. What you previously only saw as cosmic-historical events has become the life of an individual person. That is the basic idea of the Apocalypse. We see how the old priestly concepts confront us in all the descriptions: the seven trumpets, the seven seals and so on. In all this we see nothing other than the expression of ancient, long-existing mysteries, and what is presented to us in the Apocalypse is nothing other than the fulfillment of these things in Christianity. At one point I will show how this old teaching is presented to us there and how the new teaching is then brought into connection with it, how the new teaching develops out of the old. I will deal with the earlier chapters later. First the whole passage from the middle.

The 11th chapter: Measuring the temple of God. Two witnesses killed and alive again. [Gap in the transcript] The seventh trumpet.

"1 And there was given me a reed like a rod, and he said, Arise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. (2) But the court outside the temple, throw it out and do not measure it. For it has been given to the nations, and they will trample the holy city underfoot for forty-two months. 003 And I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. 004 These are the two olive trees and the torches that stand before the Lord of the earth: 005 And if any man will hurt them, fire shall proceed out of their mouth, and shall devour their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he shall be put to death. 006 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. 007 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war with them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. 008 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. 009 And some of the nations and kindreds and tongues shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not leave their dead bodies in graves. 10th And they that dwell on the earth shall rejoice over them, and shall live well, and shall send gifts one to another: for these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth." - Being born again is nothing other than being born again in the initiation process. - 11 "And after three days and a half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon those who saw them. 12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up here! And they ascended into heaven in a cloud, and saw their enemies. 013 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell: and in the earthquake were slain seven thousand names of men: and the rest were afraid, and gave glory to the God of heaven. 014 The second woe is past; behold, the third woe cometh quickly. 015 And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying: The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."

It is to be described here that, whereas previously only the individual was permitted, now the Good News is to be brought to all people through Christ.

The 12th chapter: The woman clothed with the sun and the dragon. Michael's conflict with him: "1 And there appeared a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 002 And she was with child, and cried out in travail, and was in great pain in childbirth. 003 And there appeared another sign in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. 004 And his tail drew away the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. 005 And she brought forth a son, a little child, which should feed all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. 6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that she may be nourished there a thousand two hundred and threescore days. 007 And there was a battle in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon fought with his angels. 008 And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. 009 And the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. 010 And I heard a great voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ; because that accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before God day and night. 011 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell therein. Woe to those who dwell on the earth and on the sea! For the devil cometh down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. 013 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. 014 And the woman was given two wings like a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she would be nourished for a time and times and half a time before the face of the serpent. 015 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water like a flood after the woman, that he might drown her. 016 But the earth helped the woman, and opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The stream from the serpent's mouth symbolizes nothing other than the element through which man must return in order to find his way back to God.

The 13th chapter: Seven-headed beast from the sea. "001 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 002 And the beast that I saw was like a pardel, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. 003 And I saw one of his heads as if it had a deadly wound, and his deadly wound was healed. And the whole earth marveled at the beast, 4. and they worshiped the dragon that gave power to the beast, and worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like the beast, and who can war with him? 005 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and it was given unto him to continue with him forty and two months. 006 And he opened his mouth to blaspheme against God, and to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 007 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. 008 And all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 009 If any man have an ear, let him hear. 010 If any man lead into prison, he shall go into prison: if any man kill with the sword, he shall be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints."

Two-horned beast from the earth.

"11 And I saw another beast come up out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb, and speaking as a dragon. 012 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 013 And he doeth great signs, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven in the sight of men: 014 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 015 And it was given unto him to give the spirit to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 016 And he made the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the free and the bond, all put a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 017 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom! Let him who has understanding consider the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."

The secret of the mysteries was generalized, was brought to all people. This can be clearly seen in the symbol in the Apocalypse of the four beasts and the three powers that are above the beasts, so that we are confronted by seven powers. We are then told that ten kings, the kings of the new kingdom, will overcome these seven old powers. Now we have to see what all this means.

First I would like to develop it as it has been stated in the ancient mysteries. Then you will realize it for yourself. The Apocalypse sees the world and man as made up of seven principles. The four lower or inferior principles or powers are represented by the four beasts. These must be overcome. By overcoming the lower, the three upper ones are built up. After this has been presented to us, we are shown how the entire seven-membered nature of the world and of man is scorched in fire, that the divine lightning strikes and that the entire material, in which the seven-membered nature is immersed, is once again overcome. The eighth stage is when the actual material, the evil, really perishes. We are then shown that in addition to the three spiritual elements, the fourth physical element appears as an overcomer; the fourth physical element is seized by the three spiritual elements and then also the three lower ones. The fourth element is man himself. Eagle, [bull], lion and man. Man represents nothing other than KamaRupa. The fourth, the human being, combines the three lower physical elements and the three upper ones and gives birth to three new ones from the three physical elements. The physical elements are spiritually reborn, as it were. So we have ten elements instead of seven. This is what the Apocalypse wants to depict with the ten kings.

These are ancient mystical teachings, nothing other than what pagan ideas already knew. From the transformation and victory of the ten kings, we can see that they represent nothing other than the victory of the spiritual over the material, the victory of the Mystery Doctrine.

At the opening of the first six seals, John saw four horses, a white horse, a red horse, a black horse and a pale horse. Death and hell followed them. "And when the fifth seal was opened, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held." This killing symbolizes being born again in the spirit and the killing of the lower nature. Man must devour the book, he must become one with the book. The same is also indicated by a Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius. He said: ["Friend, it is enough. If you want to read more, go and become the scripture and the being yourself."] - With this he concludes his "Cherubinischer Wandermann".

The ancient mysteries were a preparation for Christianity. They were reborn through the Lamb. Those who cannot fully comprehend that they have to go further, that they actually have to seek bodily death and spiritual resurrection in Christ, are not yet mature. They are the ones who are to be admonished.

The Apocalypse is one of the most important books of the New Testament. It must not and cannot be understood in any other way than that we see in it a fusion of the Christian mystery truths with the ancient mysteries. It contains the ancient mysteries born out of Christianity.

We began to characterize the Apocalypse last time. It represents a late product of the various views that developed around the time of Christ's birth, especially in the schools from which the deeper theological teachings of Christianity emerged, which only later took on a popular form. We can imagine the process that took place in the first and perhaps also in the second century after Christ in such a way that the old teachings that came from the Mysteries were cultivated in the most diverse ways in the most diverse places of learning, in the most diverse mystery schools, and in particular experienced a spiritual, that is, a theological deepening; these old teachings and this theological deepening are undoubtedly the basis of later Christian theology. With this later Christian theology, it is the case that ecclesiastical Christianity, under the leadership of the spiritual world, the bishops and so on, then tries to popularize it. Now I believe that we can gain an insight into the way in which what is now presented to us as Christian mystical theology was formed in the first centuries [after the birth of Christ] if we follow how Christian dogma was formed in its actual spiritual quality. One then gets the impression that it was formed essentially under the influence of the most diverse mystery cults. What is the relationship between the Apocalypse and this world of mystery cults and later theology? It can still be seen in the Apocalypse that it emerged from the endeavor to absorb and process the teachings of the ancients and to teach them as a preparation, as it were, as something that is ordered towards the new Christianity, as something that is called to replace the old mysteries and to proclaim the deeper content of the same as a world gospel.

If you follow the Apocalypse in its entire composition, you can clearly see this twofold character. You can clearly see the old views precisely represented in the basic components and then you can also see them shimmering through: Now the time is fulfilled, a new way of salvation has come into the world. This new way is the one that has been lived out in Christianity.

So we can trace the two interwoven components of the Apocalypse, which are presented to us in a double number seven, a number seven with a view to the past and a number seven with a view to the future. Everything that is told to us at the opening of the seven seals refers to the past, and everything that is told to us at the sounding of the seven trumpets refers to the future. The fact that the book with the seven seals only refers to the past is clear from the solution to it. If you want to understand the whole situation, you have to visualize it: What has been taught in the theosophical-mystical schools? One must also have an idea [of] who the writer of the Apocalypse was. It is not the specific personality that matters, but what these views arose from, what they were formed from. It was only in the middle of the second century that they were worked together into the form in which we have them now. The author emerged from Gnostic schools that still flourished everywhere in the second century AD. They were a continuation of the old Gnostic schools, which did nothing more than further develop the mysteries. It is difficult to find out what was taught in these Gnostic schools. There are only a few documents that can give us the necessary clues about the actual spiritual world [of these schools]. These Gnostic schools, which were widespread throughout the world at that time, had a spiritualized view of the ancient mystery cults. I do not mean to say that it was a higher level. The spiritual in knowledge does not have to be a higher level than that when one penetrates down into life and grasps the spiritual there. The actual Gnostics, on whom the Christian doctrine is based, were essentially theologians and philosophers who cultivated a very intellectual doctrine. The main thing with the Gnostics - the basic nerve that we can distil from the various schools - was in fact a kind of longing to connect the world of man with the great world of the cosmos. Last time I showed that the Christ doctrine is the cosmic conviction that the redemptive history of humanity is a model of what takes place in the individual human being.

I would like to give a summary of the world view, which perhaps has not really been cultivated in any Gnostic school, but which emerges as an average conception. We must imagine that it is a matter of showing a strict parallelism between the course of the great world and the life of the individual human being. The Gnostic wanted above all to depict the individual human life as that which repeats the macrocosmic microcosmically on its path at the various stages of development, just as the historical aspects of world life are also repeated.

[To show how the historical world life lived in the Gnostic view - to illustrate how it was expressed - I will use the "Exodus from Egypt"). It is an allegory of the inner development of the soul. The land is to be understood as the body of the individual. [The exodus from Egypt thus corresponds to the entry into the "Garden of Eden and the exodus from the sensual body" in the story of the Israelites.] The Gnostic seeks to overcome this, to move out, as it were. By approaching the higher, he is led out [from the sensual nature] by the Initiate. He is not immediately led to Palestine, to the "Promised Land". He must first go through various stages of development. We have a symbol in the 'brazen serpent' set up by Moses as a remedy against the many snakes. Anyone who was bitten by a snake had to die. At the sight of the brazen serpent, however, he was to remain alive. The brazen serpent was nothing other than the prophetic foretelling of redemption through Christ Jesus. The serpent has always been an important symbol. The people then reached the inner world, the life of the soul, the Promised Land, where the Messiah must appear. This is how the Gnostics understood this event: as an allegory of the inner life of the soul. The serpent is regarded everywhere as a symbol of the development of spiritual life passing through matter. The [brazen] serpent symbolizes the destruction of the last material manifestation. The very last stage, the coarsest stage, is precisely that in which the Logos, the highest spirit of God, expresses itself, from which man, human individuality, must [wriggle] out. The turning back, the return of the earthly to the divine must be undertaken. The bronze serpent is the symbol for the exemplary human being who is so far advanced that he can contribute to the spiritualization of the rest of the world through his spiritualization. The Gnostics interpreted all historical events in this way. They saw them as allegories for individual soul processes of the actual human being and thus grew into the divine world processes.

I would like to present one such idea, in which the cosmological grows out [from the depths]: the idea of the initial state of the world. Formed out of the general nothingness, the Gnostic imagines the beginning of the world. Two great world lights then appear: [the Father and the Son; the eternal world spirit and the image of the eternal world spirit]. The All-Mother then appears as the third. The All-Mother is the material principle, and here the non-existence of matter triumphs. The Gnostics imagined matter as something that must be overcome. The highest of these is the Father with the Son. These divine entities work to recognize themselves in order to become life. This is what the development of the world means, what the actual becoming is.

When the world spirit - Father and Son - merges in the womb of the All-Mother, what is called the four elements - fire, earth, air and water - comes into being. These four elements represent in their spiritual essence what the Gnostics thought of as the highest Christ. They envisioned a supreme being that emerged through the marriage of the spiritual and the material. The material, as dark matter, was initially the primordial principle under the image of the All-Mother [who was just as primordial as the Father]. The two supreme spiritual entities unite with these four elements: Father and Son, and produce a spiritual-material entity: [the Christ]. The Christ strives back to the primordial ground of existence.

Then we find that [the Gnostics] thought of heaven as a kind of closed circle. However, they did not imagine the vault of heaven as such. Heaven with Father and Son is first of all the Logos, the spiritual-material entity that is now hidden in the universe and represents the Christ: As the highest celestial, spiritual-etheric entity, they thought of him as the cosmological entity of the universe. In addition to the fertilization of the "All Mother, however, a droplet of light flowed out into the chaos under the name of Sophia, Wisdom. Through this secondary light, which as a lost one in the world space has entered into a different kind of connection with matter than that which is represented in Christ, through this secondary light, through this Sophia, everything has come into being that has led to the formation of humanity - according to the view of the Gnostics. This is the lower, that which we will get to know further. Because it also originates from the two primordial lights, there will be a kind of parallelism with the Upper. Through the connection of Sophia with the chaotic, with the material element, that which is actually described to us in Gnosis comes into being. The whole doctrine of the origin of the world, as it is found in Gnosis, first arose from these small secondary planets of the "great light". The 'Sophia-World-Mother' - in contrast to the "All-Mother" - has fertilized matter once again. From this union of the droplet Sophia emerged the son Jaldabaoth. He produced seven more sons, and these are the seven powers, the seven spheres. We have before us the seven basic forces of the visible world, that is, that from which the world nature is built up, from the actual matter, from the life principle, from the astral body, from the animal soul and from the upper three spiritual forces. The whole human being is built up from these [seven basic forces]. But these emerged from the marriage of Sophia with the elements, so that Gnosis renewed the origin of the world. While Christ represents the actual product of the marriage of the earthly light, Jaldabaoth represents a kind of sub-deity that [worked] down to human existence and brought forth man. This is therefore a cosmological doctrine that reaches down to man.

How does the Gnostic now imagine the formation of man? He has man built up from the seven basic parts. But they are formed through the marriage of Sophia in such a way that they take the downward path. We have to make our way back again. So we have to find our way back. This is how the Gnostics imagined it: Jaldabaoth had gotten into some kind of argument with Sophia, who is from the heavenly lights themselves. If Jaldabaoth had formed man alone, then man would undoubtedly have been lost. It was only because the dispute resulted in a continuous cooperation between Jaldabaoth and Sophia that man was able to find his way back to God.

We have to imagine the story of creation in connection with the story of man in mystical allegorical form. The divine spark of light, the "Sophia", remained with mankind. They led it back, as it was a descent from the spiritual to the material. But the way back was not possible through their own strength. It was only possible because help came to man from the next sphere. This happened through the connection of a perfect human being with that which had previously developed into the highest sphere. This is symbolized in a gnostic way. The return of man to God was envisioned by the Gnostics in such a way that man was able to enter and complete the path to heaven, that he could gradually approach the divine in the course of the various lives. When man has then come so far that he has developed his memory to such an extent - this is gnostic - that in retrospect he can survey the whole cosmological development, as I have now presented it as a general gnostic conception, in such a way that he has it before him not merely as a doctrine but as a fact, when man has again traveled a part of the path in such a way that he sees the rest lying clearly before his spirit, then he is the one who is able to make the waters of the Nile flow upward.

Such people - so the Gnostics assume - exist. The Gnostics knew such people. These are the "messiahs". Now comes something that [the Gnostics] see in Christianity. There is a beginning, a connection halfway between Jesus and Christ. A personality is embodied in Jesus who is able to ally himself with the Christ of the upper region. This is how the Gnostics saw the emergence of the "Son of Man" - and also the emergence of the Buddha - on the one hand; and on the other, the descent of the Christ, the world spirit, and its connection with these "gods" developing from below.

I hope that I have at least evoked a general idea [of gnosis]. [In its essence] gnosis consists in the fact that man can reach this high degree of development in the course of various re-embodiments, and that he has reached the highest when not only his personal life lies before his memory, but when he can look back in this way, when his memory is so far extended that he is able to embrace all embodiments in his memory. This is how far Jesus was, who emerged from the small droplet of sidelight. He is ripe to receive the Christ from the upper regions as "Vahän", as a "vessel". The human being becomes the bearer of the Christ. Thus we have the Christ born out of the spiritual world and the Jesus Christ of the Gnostics.

This is the concept of Christ that gradually emerged in the first two centuries. It is the Christ [who develops an initiated person up to higher levels]. An initiated human being is the one who is developed. An initiated human being is the one who has developed to the highest human state, and a Christ is the one who has ascended to the highest spiritual. According to the Gnostics, it was a halfway connection.

We see this view again in the Apocalypse, only now it interprets the matter in the following way - I would like to present it in the following manner: The person who is on the path of perfection goes back step by step the elemental forces. One by one, the seven seals are unsealed. In this way he follows the initiatory path of the ancients. This path is there at the turn of the Christian world age. But there is also something higher, the gospel of Christ, which consists in the fact that through the long preparatory study man has become mature in his entirety to receive the gospel within himself. Thus what used to be a place of worship is now to be replaced. It is now to be replaced by the entirety of humanity. It is to be the temple of God.

Later it was said that it would be the church that took the place of the temple, and the cult of the past would be replaced by the new sacrifice of the Mass.

In the four parts of the Mass we see the spiritual life and its transformations expressed. First the spiritual, the Gospel - the way back is proclaimed. It goes through two parts of the Mass; bread and wine are offered. It then goes on to the consecration, in which the body and blood are actually transformed into the divine. And in communion, where man receives the divine, Christ is received through Jesus.

Later Christianity only externalized what was cultivated in the Gnostic schools. The person who sees and understands a Catholic mass will see nothing but an embodiment of what the Gnostics saw from their point of view as man's path to Christ, nothing but a popularization of the old mystery teachings. Whereas previously the individual had to be initiated, this initiation is now built up for the whole community, every day this symbolism is repeated for the community, and this repetition is intended to awaken those who are called to it.

Later Christianity endeavored to blur the old. It wanted to emphasize that it was something new, that a new era had dawned. Nevertheless, it will also be possible to rediscover many Gnostic views in the external symbolism, and thus to find old mysteries. But at the same time it will be seen that only those to whom the real meaning of the matter will dawn will be able to penetrate and reveal Christian symbolism. But it is a matter of popularization, and therefore [the Mass] must be repeated over and over again.

The Church Fathers - in their standpoint against the Gnostics - are almost on the same [standpoint]. Their endeavor was to blur what came over from the "old", and yet we can still find all the teachings expressed in symbolism, in the new church, which should be and wants to be "universal". In essence, the Apocalypse represents this replacement of the former, of the mysteries by the general communion of saints. The Apocalypse is nothing other than the paraphrase of the one sentence: The mystery is to become popular. Nothing else is to be achieved than that in the idea of the one-time original initiation - in the repetition of the mass action - it is pointed out again and again that everyone should walk the path and that he will find it when he is ripe for it.

I would just like to draw attention to one passage in the final chapter. The angel says to John: "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy in this book, for the time is near..." and so on. These things will show us that for us the Apocalypse is a paraphrase of the sentence: The mystery is to become popular. It is to revive as a church.

We only need to look at the whole skeleton of the Apocalypse to see that it is nothing other than a popularization of the stages of the Gnostic view. The seven seals signify the return path of man. At the opening of the first seal we are symbolized: the overcoming of the material. At the opening of the second seal: how man develops the higher spiritual forces within himself. At the opening of the third seal: how the understanding of the measure, order and harmony of the universe arises in him, how the spirit-matter becomes clear to him, where the great mystery of the world reveals itself to him.

So at first man is caught up in the material, then he comes to the principle of life.

On the fourth stage, matter is overcome, spirit and matter, through death. At the opening of the fifth seal, we see the spiritual powers of man emerge, the spiritual soul of man is unsealed, "the souls of those who were strangled for the word of God". After they were born again, "they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Lord, holy and true, how long have you not judged and avenged our blood on those who dwell on the earth!"

At the opening of the seventh seal, the day of wrath breaks out, the day on which the wrath of God is poured out on all material things, where the higher is born out of the lower, the Budhi powers, the wisdom. Man becomes mature enough to sense what is actually divine. He becomes mature enough to sound the actual trumpets. This proclamation happened in the Gospel, and there we see how this maturity is expressed in the new message: Christ has come into the world and resounds through nature.

The seven trumpets represent the spiritualization, the coming to Christ of all human principles. While the Apocalypse initially follows the old mystery path, the sounding of the trumpets is intended to show us a new path that we are to find. In the Apocalypse we also see a kind of 'Exodus from Egypt' - in the second part. This is why we always have a reference to the plagues of animals, frogs and locusts. The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt to Palestine can be read as a parallel.

The exodus from Egypt is tailored to individual people. Where the writer then comes up to cosmological primal spirits, where he is in the midst of the heavenly world powers and what is represented in the higher heaven - in the middle the Lamb, the Christ - there he sees these cosmological ideas.

The book with the seven seals opens up the views of the ancient mystery cults to him. He imagines that I am being led before the Savior, Christ Jesus. The seven seals of the book are unsealed for me. That means nothing other than: It becomes clear to me that the world is built on the basis of seven principles that have flowed out of the Eternal. New things will now be proclaimed after man has reached the highest level, after wisdom and spiritual powers have developed, when the first trumpet sounds, the voice of the Lamb. Then Christ leads man further. In a larger human community, humanity is led back to the divine. We can see particularly clearly that this is the case when we see how the seventh vision [that of the New Jerusalem] is described last. This is nothing other than the new, larger community compared to the earlier, narrower community. The New Jerusalem is the new church, the new community. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth." In the past, heaven and earth were also depicted: The light of dawn shone into the burial chambers.

Christ once called himself the cornerstone, the highest point of the pyramid. He is the one who has reached the highest. - "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." She is the new bride who is to be married in the new spirit. The Spirit is to unite with the church and it is to present the temple. "And he who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new! And he said to me, 'Write, for these words are true and certain. And he said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the thirsty from the fountain of living water freely." The living water is the way up. Man has to make his way upwards through material things, he has to turn upwards. "He who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be his God and he will be my son." The new Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb is the new church.

Four roads lead to the new city. It "had twelve gates, and on the gates were twelve angels and names written on them, namely the twelve families of the children of Israel". Each path leads through three gates. "From the morning three gates, from midnight three gates, from noon three gates, from evening three gates." The twelve gates and twelve angels are twelve powers. The length, width and height of the city are the same - like the pyramid. The wall measures "one hundred and forty-four cubits, according to the measure of a man, which the angel has". ... "The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb." ... "The foundations of the wall were adorned with precious stones." ... "The twelve gates were twelve pearls." ... "I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty is its temple and the Lamb." - This states that the outer place is replaced by the spiritual temple. "The city has no need of the sun or the moon." These old lights are replaced. "The lamp is the Lamb." All the old symbols have merged into the Lamb, who brought the actual Gospel. But they prepared Christianity.

I would like to briefly summarize once again the basic character of what the Apocalypse wants to say: the Christian church has absorbed the ancient mysteries. What the ancient mysteries tell us is the doctrine of the sevenfold path of man. What Christianity tells us is presented in a generally understandable way. In place of the former temples, the Church places the return of the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. We can only understand the Apocalypse if we understand it from the gnosis: that we see in Jesus Christ the Paschal Lamb who has overcome the world, that through his religion he has made himself the bearer of all humanity and then the mystery temples are replaced by the Church. And this is the main proposition to be expressed by the Apocalypse.

[Dearly beloved present]

After we have been able to see from our previous observations how the then prevailing mystery views were used in the formation of Christianity, today we want to look at two main representatives of early Christianity to see how they placed themselves in the whole development, in the formation process.

There is no doubt that Paul saw in Christ the mediator between God and man, a personality at such a high level of the development of existence that this person undoubtedly overcame death in Paul's opinion and really appeared to him in a spiritualized body in the hour of his conversion. That is Paul's faith. This is also what gave him the confidence to teach. Convinced of the mediator between God and man, of the risen Jesus Christ, he went out and preached the gospel.

Where did the components [of these teachings] come from, which presuppose a very specific philosophical conception, and especially those which came to us as a reinterpretation of the [ancient initiation] rituals? Where is the origin of the life of Jesus to be found? We can certainly say: within the sermons preached to the large Christian community in the first century. Within it, Paul probably did not hold the view that we encounter in the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus is the second form of God who became man. Paul never held this strictly metaphysical, theosophical view. But John [did]. Since the Apocalypse is undoubtedly from John, we are dealing with a spiritualized personality in the school of John, which understands Christ as God incarnate - not merely as the mediator between man and God, not merely as an exemplary personality - but we are dealing with a spiritualized personality in the personality that is based on John. We see a spiritualized personality taking hold.

We know that John spent time in Ephesus, that he wrote his most important writings there and then had a relationship with the presbyter John. Whether the teachings of the Logos are taken from Egyptian-Greek philosophy is more or less irrelevant to us. But it is clear that the metaphysical-theosophical conception came from John.

There was a whole series of Christian communities in Ephesus and Asia Minor. There were certainly many more than seven. Strictly speaking, the Apocalypse is only addressed to seven churches to whom the teaching is to be revealed. When John comes to Ephesus, he plays a very special role. He is one of the most important personalities. He doesn't actually have any special influence in the administration of the church. The administrators are completely different. If one such church leader dies, another is simply elected without any thought of putting John at the head. All the statements that we know from this time indicate that there was a certain opposition [to Paul] - but not conflict - that John's direction and Pauline Christianity must have gone side by side. This is a very important fact. It can only be explained by the fact that, in view of the completely different Jesus figure in John's Gospel and in view of something else that I will say later, we see in John's school a special school [in which was taught] what was not preached to the great masses. We even know that John's teachings were first considered dangerous for the masses. In the school of John we are probably dealing with a kind of secret school, a mystical community, from which the Gospel of John emerged and which also influenced the Synoptic Gospels. It was not written down in the form of history, but only the teachings were written down. The language became the universe. But the story was not written down until the end of the first century at the earliest.

This indicates that we are dealing with the great

Christian community in Ephesus and the surrounding area - and with a mystical theosophical school of John. Everything that we have in terms of historical-allegorical moments in Christianity emerges from this school of John, while in Pauline Christianity we have nothing other than the Christ who died for humanity and what he taught, including that he introduced the communion of the Lord's Supper. That was the common bond by which the Christians of that time recognized each other.

The fact that we are dealing with a mystical church can be seen from the fact that we are dealing with seven churches [in the Apocalypse]. Right at the beginning of the Apocalypse we are dealing with an allegorical school, while in the Gospel of John we are dealing with a mystical-theosophical school. The school of John was not the only one. We may get to know another one today, if there is still time.

So what came into Christianity through the St. John school? The things I have already mentioned. The resurrection of Lazarus, which is nothing other than the representation of an initiation process. These [things] come from schools that were very familiar with the mystery rites. This raising of Lazarus is undoubtedly part of a secret school, and [it was not included in the Synoptic Gospels]. The facts speak for this.

What we need to look at now is: Within the secret school must have arisen what is called the Apostles' Creed. This is nothing other than a result of the mystery cults[, those mystery cults which can be read in the presentation which I have given to the members. Those who have embarked on the path of initiation have had to make a profession of faith, into the meaning of which they have been initiated. I would like to outline such a creed for you. It cannot be made up arbitrarily, but is based on what has been handed down to us:

1. [The person to be initiated] must first believe in a supreme deity, because the deity is deeply hidden, but a perspective opens up for those who want to walk the highest path to the [mysteries]. [God] is the Father of all things. That was the first article.

2 Then he has to believe in the second Logos. The first Logos was the Father himself, who then entered into things. This is how he came to take the form of the second Logos.

The second Logos is therefore a kind of image of God, a spiritual reflection of God. It descends and takes on material form. This is called "the absorption of God in a material existence. It condenses and takes on material form. The world at large is nothing other than the materialized second Logos, which develops up to the human soul in order to find its way back to God from there.

When man searches through matter, he finds the spirit in matter. However, this is nothing other than the spirit that previously entered matter. This descent is presented to us mystically in the figures of Dionysus, in the various mystical figures such as Osiris, Isis and so on. In the mythological processes we have the various transformations of this process. In short: I believe in the materialized Logos.

[B-] Why did God make this sacrifice of materialization? Why did he descend? It means the whole process of development itself. The world would not be there. The Initiator professes this. The Logos has descended into matter and is now in its ascent again.

This general view was repeated microcosmically, as it were, in every single person. There was the view that the same procedure takes place in man as took place with God.

The initiation cults were there to make this particularly clear to the person being initiated. As a rule, such mystery cults were held near lakes. And in Athens they were also held near ponds. The lake, the water - as we know from the Egyptian initiation ritual - were regarded as a symbol of material existence. The descent into material existence was to be reflected by those seeking initiation [by descending into the water]. Water was regarded as a symbol of material existence. That is why this cult was held near lakes.

Something very strange happened. You can find this if you follow the Apostles' Creed, which was established by the various councils: The whole processes that are described there in the Creed are nothing more than the same points, the same processes, which can also be found in the initiation process. The Apostles' Creed still clearly shows the initiation process. If you leave out [for the time being] only the words "suffered under Pontius Pilate", you will see that it is an initiation process. A confession is made of God, then of the materialized God, the second Logos, then of the ascent [of the Initiator]. Three days in sleep, the descent to hell, to be awakened again on the third day and then to emerge from the process as an initiate.

However, there is the difficulty that on the one hand we have the second Logos, Christ Jesus - the Gospel of John identifies Jesus with the second Logos - and on the other hand the personality of Jesus, so that we can assume that [in the creed] we are dealing with a reinterpretation of the second Logos into the personality of Jesus. So [the second Logos] has been Christianized.

Now I come to a hypothesis - I will call it a hypothesis for now - I mean the words: "suffered under Pontius Pilate". We have them from the writings of the time, but we know nothing of the events. We know that Pilate existed, if not in Jerusalem, then at least in the Assyrian Empire. But that cannot convince us that a very strange process must have taken place. So we cannot help but see the Apostles' Creed as a transformed initiation rite. The second Logos has been transformed into a personality. So how does "suffered under Pontius Pilate" come into it? You only need to omit a single letter from Pontius and instead of Pontius just say Pontus and take Pontus in the sense of the sea. This may seem a little daring. But such insertions - don't call them forgeries, because they are made in good faith - occurred every now and then in the first centuries. This confession describes the various stages of initiation according to the Mystery rituals. However, these were held in various individual places, almost always on a lake. It has also always been said that these things took place at some lake here or there. We would therefore be quite surprised if the fact that the event took place on a lake were not to be found in a mystery ritual. We therefore have reason to assume that we are dealing with the [view of an initiatory process], so that it would mean nothing other than the descent [of the Logos] into matter or the undergoing of the process of initiation.

We are therefore dealing with an application of the ritual and with a fusion of what was taught and what flowed into Christianity from various cults. In the most diverse places, the most diverse cults have also been cultivated within Christianity.

Paul started out from a teaching that pointed towards Judaism. He also accepted Gentiles, but always paying attention to what was already there. He also says: "The Jews put more emphasis on signs, the Greeks more on wisdom. I treat both the way they want to be treated." He did not create something that perplexed people, but he shaped what he had before him. To a much greater degree, the others seem to have done the same. To imagine that Christianity was a uniform doctrine from the beginning would be a childish notion.

Paul and Peter were highly divided, and there were also disputes in the churches. Paul often tried to settle such disputes. So [early Christianity] was not a strictly uniform doctrine, but one could see the rays coming together from the most diverse points. The centralization took place much later.

In addition to the popular Christianity of Paul, there was also an esoteric view, the school of John. We owe the related information to a series of written works. They emerge in the sixth century AD and later form the basis of various church writers. Later they are attributed to the [Areopagian writer] Dionysius, who is said to have been converted to Christianity by Paul in Athens. All this has often been considered false. But you can't understand what that means. Perhaps the only way to understand it is that Dionysius did not write the writings himself. But if we follow these writings, we find an even deeper understanding of Christianity. The author is not named, but the references made by church writers show that these writings existed. All traces indicate that they were not present in [early] Latin Christianity, but that we received them quite late. We are therefore dealing with writings that reflect the views of the early church fathers of the Greek Church. The author presents them to us as a development of the old mystery relationships, as the belief in God that is only accessible in a mystical way.

We are then shown how the imperfect beings emanate from this God and in this way a descent takes place to the forms to which man himself belongs. Then it is shown how a return to the God is to take place through the various forms. We find more detailed accounts in Scotus Eriugena, who wrote his "Classification of Nature" in this spirit. What we learn in these writings indicates that from the second century onwards we are dealing with such a mysterious school, very similar to the school of St. John in Ephesus. It too cultivated such mystical-theosophical teachings.

So such traditions, which aim to show that we are dealing with a "pseudo-Dionysius", indicate that such a school existed, which did not write down its teachings, but propagated them orally, and that these teachings can be traced back to Dionysius, who was converted by the apostle. Such secret schools undoubtedly existed in the early days of Christianity. We must therefore distinguish between the popular view and the view held by the individual initiate himself.

When we follow the writings of [Hermas], we can almost grasp with our hands what lies behind the form of expression. [Hermas] does not break with the [Christian mystical] tradition, but stands on the same point of view.

However, we are dealing with teachings that have a deeper understanding of Christianity, which they strive to translate into symbolism, in the creed, which is built up piece by piece in the councils and built up in the ritual acts and rites.

We can almost follow this in the writings of the Church. Sometimes we cannot understand what is contained in such a symbol, but we must accept such a symbol with faith and believe that the meaning will gradually become clear to us. Now if this man [- Hermas -] speaks of there being four degrees of initiation, as described in the scriptures, then we can only say that there must have been an esoteric teaching in addition to the exoteric teaching.

Whoever received the symbol, [to whom] for example the sacrifice of the Mass was presented, is not disturbed by the fact that something is presented to him [which he does not understand], but is given a symbol. Soon he will penetrate the mysterious meaning of the symbol.

In the church writers of the third and fourth centuries we see that the [students of the] deeper teachings of Christianity have to go through various stages of initiation. For the great masses, the esoteric teaching was brought to light in the symbol.

Now let us see how the esoteric teaching has developed and how the esoteric has adapted itself to the exoteric. And how the church strives for worldly power as a result. We want to see how this [esoteric] character has gradually been lost and how traces of it have evaporated right into scholasticism. This is connected with the most important events that took place in church history and with the transfer of events in Christianity from Ephesus in Asia to Rome in Italy.

In the first and beginning of the second century, the most important center for the spread of Christianity was Ephesus. This seat then moved from Ephesus to Italian Rome. We also speak of Ephesus as an Asian Rome, and of a direction that did not concern Johannine Christianity but Pauline Christianity. So we see an esoteric Christianity in the doctrine of John, while in the Pauline direction we have the popular form.

Answer to the question:

Pontus = lake. Pontius Pilate was governor of Caesarea. ["Suffered under Pontius Pilate" therefore means suffering caused by passing through the stages of matter.

"I am Osiris N. Growing among the blossoms of the fig tree is the name of Osiris N."

"Go thy way", see in the Book of the Dead.

Pontius Pilate is mentioned by the Roman or other writers as governor of Caesarea.

The Holy Spirit is nothing other than the third Logos, which we find in matter and in our souls.

The resurrection of the flesh points to the doctrine of reincarnation. Not demonstrable in the Johannine school, probably did not even exist. The Church replaced initiation with inspiration with faith. The secret teachings were canonized [dogmatized]. Why the doctrine of reincarnation was not popular is quite clear to me today. Even today it is difficult to make it popular. It is seen as a political danger. The doctrine of reincarnation in its true form cannot be popularized. The doctrine of reincarnation has led to the wildest superstitions, [the doctrine of] transmigration through animals and so on.

Christianity does not regard the doctrine of reincarnation as a doctrine that could be handed over to the masses. Substitutionary atonement in Pauline Christianity is something that cannot be reconciled with reincarnation and karma.

It was my task to show that Christianity underwent a development in the first centuries, and I emphasized that the conclusion of this development actually occurred relatively late, at least much later than the "orthodox" churches imagine this conclusion to have been.

This development also went through a mystical epoch. The main idea was that everywhere in the Mediterranean region, in Europe and far into Africa, there was a deepening of the religious worldview before our era, before the first century of the Christian era, and that this deepening of religious life moved in exactly the same direction and virtually grew towards Christianity, indeed formed the direct basis for many currents in Christianity.

When we sift through Christian writers from the first century, we cannot say what comes from these or those. The Apocalypse was nothing more than a popularization of ancient mystery ideas. Initiates into the mysteries often converted to Christianity later. They then expressed themselves in the same way as the pagan writers. This became particularly clear to us with the pseudo-Dionysius, Dionysius Areopagita, who is said to have been converted by the apostle Paul. The writings of this Dionysius probably date back to earlier times. They are imbued with mystical ideas; they also contain theosophical ideas. We are dealing with an ancient Egyptian priest who was initiated into the Egyptian or Eleusinian mysteries, who then expresses the truths in this way. Or we can also assume that the mysticism of Dionysius was expressed again in Alexandria. In the first century, we are dealing with a teaching that is in the process of development. In fact, we can say that it was not until the fourth century that the very specific doctrine known in the West as Christianity took hold.

The first writer to testify to the first purely Christian mysticism was St. Augustine, who concerns us today. In him we have the first Christian mysticism before us. Thus the riddle that the mysteries of the ancients underlie primitive Christianity will appear most clearly to us. The Gnostics were Christian mystics of the first century. I said that these Gnostics taught the ancient theosophical teachings of the Logos, of the Logos embodied in matter, and that they spread what they had gained from the ancient Mysteries. I said that they assumed that man can only ascend to a real vision through the various degrees of knowledge - they recognized a spiritualized Christ as their own - that they made use of all the means of the Christian mind in order to carry over as many teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as possible into those teachings which you can still guess from the Gospels today. There were also various sects among the Gnostics. Those teachings are essentially nothing more than ancient mysticism translated into popular form. If we think of this spirit [of the old teaching poured into new forms], then we have what the Gnostics represented. They were also the ones who said that the best cannot be entrusted to Scripture, but that the highest levels can only be transmitted from personality to personality.

So the Gnostics were the bearers of a spiritualized Christianity. We also have such confessions in Alexandria. We could list a whole series of Christian confessions, but we can no longer say what was taught by the various ecclesiastical writers who were labeled false teachers by the Church Fathers.

If we were to go through these various opinions, we would see that in the first years of Christian development we are dealing with a diverse, not a uniform doctrine, with a doctrine that has gained influxes from all sides. It is therefore the case that we are not dealing with a self-contained doctrine in the first century. Today's Christianity is a creation of the two councils of Nicaea and Constantinople.

We must see the most important personality within the Christian mystical development in Augustine, because he sought in himself a deepening that was not achieved in such a way by any later one, nor could it be overtaken, because the later time was [indeed] more Christian, but not more mystical. Augustine presents us with the beginning of that - in the fourth to fifth century - which can show us the basic difference between what must still have been present in [earlier] Christianity and what later took the place of this original Christianity.

I would like to say right away that those who approach the study of Augustine themselves - the deep life of the mind - will find the greatest satisfaction. I would like to say that I would not like to compare any personality with Augustine in terms of greatness and perspicacity of thought. But even among modern philosophers there are probably few and only a few that I would place alongside Augustine. Whoever takes Cartesius and studies him, whoever compares him with him, will find that Cartesius is only a one-sided education. Augustine, however, is one of the most profound thinkers of all time.

What we know about the Gnostics indicates that in addition to the ancient religious systems of the whole world, the Gnostics also had in their basic views that which was still widespread as mysteries, that in Gnosticism everything was indeed represented which we today seek to awaken in the teachings of Theosophy. He who tries to penetrate Gnosticism will be able to say to himself nothing other than that it is undoubtedly the case that this basic Gnostic view is still permeated by the sentiments and ideas which constituted the essence, the deepest core of the old religious systems, that only the documents do not speak to us clearly and distinctly enough.

If we take the doctrine of re-embodiment, of reincarnation, it is this which alone corresponds to an eternal world order, which is strictly self-contained, which alone shows us how the world and God can be identical, because only on the premise of this doctrine can a complete balance, a harmony between the true and the false, in short a complete harmony between all apparently divergent ideas, be possible. I mean that man not only feels at one with some divine being, but with the eternal spirit which pervades the whole world, and feels this spirit not only as the one deity, but also as the individuality which passes through each individual life; I mean, therefore, the re-embodiment of the spirit which also confronts us in the Buddhist doctrine, which has not one, but many Buddhas. This doctrine [of re-embodiment] was undoubtedly something that was contained as a keynote in the ancient teaching of the Gnostics. We now understand why deeper initiates, disciples of Dionysius, used this apostle's name over and over again. Like the Pythagoreans, they were of the opinion that the spirit of the founder still lived on in them. They recognized him in themselves, just as the Pythagoreans recognized their forefather in themselves. It was only later that the teachings [of Dionysius] were recorded. The one who recorded them regarded himself as a personality who reached up in spirit to the time of the founding of the order.

This is the basic phenomenon of Christianity, that this doctrine of the general spirituality of the world, this esoteric view, is gradually being overcome, forgotten and disappearing. Christianity without this view of the world, without this basic mood, first appears to us clearly and distinctly in Augustine. He represents a view that is free from the transformation of the soul and free from the transformation of the spirit. In Augustine we therefore encounter the first mystic who only deals with the one personal human life. What lies between the individual personalities, what the old religions interposed between the individual personality and the All-Unity, has fallen away with Augustine.

The great and significant thing is that despite this, a personality appeared in the Church that reached an immeasurable depth, even though it knew no intermediate links between personality and all-unity. This is what gives us an understanding of Augustine's teachings. They contain a mysticism without the foundation of an ancient mystical view, a mysticism in which everything that the ancients placed between the two is placed in the Godhead. What is between man and the Godhead is placed within the Godhead. This is why Augustine also writes: "I have transferred into the Godhead that which men formerly perceived as their world. When people used to look at the whole world and then at their personal characteristics, they said to themselves: This world is not a boundary. It includes personalities before and after; and the balance that I cannot find in myself, I find in the whole world. What I lack in one place at one time can be replaced in another place and at another time. For people, therefore, everything is only seemingly limited, isolated, because sooner or later it balances itself out again. This whole question: How is it that a single personality with these or those characteristics appears in such a way that a peculiarity that destroys others turns to the good in this one? - This question stood before Augustine as a great riddle. He solved it in a way that it can only be solved. This man of wisdom appears to be inhuman, apparently carried away by the worst fanaticism when he speaks about this question, because he does not have the opportunity to answer in the sense of the theosophy of the ancients. That is why he had to burden a God with it, that is why he had to say: It is not the personality that determines its own existence in the eternal development of the spirit; this individual personality, he had to say to himself, stands there all by itself; and what stands opposite it is the infinite perfection of power [of God]. He had to say to himself as a logical thinker: So all the characteristics of man, regardless of whether he comes into the world as a sinner or as a good person, as a genius or imbecile, stem from the Godhead. This cannot be explained by anything else in the world. It can only lie in the Godhead, if all intermediate elements are removed. Hence the harsh teaching of Augustine: man is either predestined to eternal bliss or to eternal damnation.

It would have been impossible for a personality who suffered as much as he did to have taught such a harsh doctrine if he had not at the same time sought to build up a world system within this view in a logically consistent manner. In the last lecture, i.e. today over eight days, we will see how this doctrine was reversed immediately after Augustine by a highly significant inconsistency into a completely different doctrine, in the case of an equally profound thinker, Scotus Eriugena.

This is what makes St. Augustine understandable to us, this is what explains why this personality clings to it so rigidly: Man is predestined for good or for bad. That intermediate link [- re-embodiment -] which the Gnostics still had, has been lost to him. Now begins that Christian development which has eliminated the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, palingenesis.

Augustine is considered the greatest authoritative and most important Doctor of the Church. Let us now take a look at this great personality of St. Augustine himself. There will hardly have been a second personality in the Christian Church who combined all three characteristics in such a harmonious way. Let us disregard what the Christian Church had lost at that time and consider St. Augustine as a Christian mystic. Clear thinking, sharply based on reason, depth of mind and at the same time the noblest will and character. These were the qualities that were present in rare harmony in this man. We therefore also see that his life is a continuous process of self-initiation, which is sought by most mystics. We see how he is religiously educated by his mother Monika, but how he is not satisfied by the ordinary teachings of the Church; we see how he falls into doubt, how, after finding no satisfaction in the teachings that his mother could give him, he joins the Manichaeans, a sect.

This sect shows us that the Persian worldview had penetrated the Christian doctrine, in which two opposing forces play a role: Good and Evil. They regard Christ, as the Logos, as the helper who leads people entangled in the bonds of evil back to good. The Manichaeans are [destined] to explain evil. For them, evil is an original power and should only be overcome.

According to the theosophical view, evil arises merely through a sacrifice that the deity itself makes by entering into existence in an external way, by incarnating itself. This creates the appearance of evil, of falsity, of error. The error arises because the complete connection within the world cannot be made clear to us. It is concealed by the various material intermediate grounds between individuality and allness.

This teaching of the Manicheans satisfied Augustine for a time because he had felt the bad, the pulling down, the evil passions, desires and impulses in his youth. He could not explain this in any other way than that these forces are present in the world. However, something in St. Augustine resisted this view. And so it was that within this doctrine a contradiction arose and confronted him. He could not explain how two original elements could exist: a good All-One and an evil All-One. He could not grant error the same right [as truth] in his progressive thinking.

Now came something that must come over every human being who has progressed to this stage. The period arises when evil and good, ugliness and beauty actually confront him like two equal forces. The Buddha is approached by Mara, the Christ by Satan. Only life, immersion, can bring about victory. No knowledge that is given to us beforehand is capable of doing so. We ourselves must bring about victory through our own work on ourselves. There are two ways. We can perhaps advance to this conquest of evil through mystical guidance, or if this is not possible, as it was for Augustine, who could not have any external mystical guidance, then the only possibility is to fight for that victory from within ourselves, to climb that step.

Augustin found this guidance in Christianity, which he grasped as deeply as possible [...]. He did not find this path immediately. At first he did not find people who could help him. His own strength was not so well developed. He did not find anyone who could have taught him from the Christian tradition itself what he later called "the spirit over the letter". It was therefore necessary for him to go through the most terrible doubts into which he now fell. He himself became a doubter, a skeptic and went through the most bitter doubts of knowledge before he became a Christian in the sense [that] is called "soteric".

It was the Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who introduced him to the spirit as opposed to the letter. We can still see the doubts he went through page by page in his "Confessions". This work should be read by everyone, Protestants and Catholics alike. They will read through the book with the greatest satisfaction. And so will everyone else who does not belong to these confessions.

Luther himself was an Augustinian monk, was a Catholic and regarded [Augustine] as the first saint. Anyone who has grown up in theosophical ideas will find in Augustine a mysticism that actually went as far as one can go without the missing teachings that I have mentioned. Doubt emerges everywhere between the lines in the "Confessions". He shows us how he fought throughout his life. And he became a victor over doubt.

What kind of doubts were these? We also have doubters in our time that we have to confront. But you have to study Augustine's doubt, and then you have to see and say: there is a right to doubt once you have reached this level of Augustine. The doubts that come from people who do not want to conquer them, or from people who have taken them from philosophy, seem to us like a frivolity of knowledge compared to Augustine's doubt. But Augustine's doubt, which is based on the question of how good and evil can be in harmony, is overcome in spite of everything. Augustine struggles through under the guidance of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He describes this development in his spiritual journey. We see that Augustine achieved everything that could be achieved in the current of thought in which he was placed. We even see in him an echo of Indian teachings. His path of knowledge appears to us in seven limbs. Within the seven limbs, however, everything that must be missing is missing, since the primal element is missing.

Man develops out of material existence. He is at the same stage as plants and animals. That is the first stage. You will find these stages somewhat different from what is known about them in Theosophy. Man then develops from this material stage to the organic stage, he develops his organs, his organic activity, his sensory activity, his memory activity. He now also lives in the outside world. There he is on the second stage. There he works cognitively in the sensory element. Then he comes to the third stage. It introduces the spirit into the outer world. The spirit takes possession of the outer world, from the simple technical activities up to that which appears to us as our formulation of the spirit in the world, up to that through which the spirit receives its strength for practical work. And then, when man withdraws again, when he has become a willful being, when he feels the spirit of goodness and truth, then he is on the fourth stage. He reaches the fifth stage when he senses that the divine dwells in the true and receives a "prospect of the divine thoughts. He reaches the sixth stage when he not only feels the divine within himself, but also senses it in his eternal existence. He is on the seventh stage when he acts with willpower like the deity.

The Buddha teachings show us how man has to go through certain stages. When he has reached a certain stage, he sees the cosmic in-breath and out-breath; he sees how man emerges from one house, as it were, and then later enters another house. Thus the spiritually developed person sees how the human being enters the process of re-embodiment from the spiritual world and then returns to the spiritual world. This is what had to be distinguished in the Buddha teaching. In Augustine's teaching, which otherwise appears to us to be similar to the Buddhist teaching, we lack this poignant element, which had been forgotten in Christianity. Augustine's seven-limbed path lacks the gripping description given to us five hundred years before the birth of Christ on "The visible fruits of the ascetic life". It is a writing that no one will read without receiving the greatest impressions of the meaning of what was present in the Buddha community.

[Are they not words of deepest knowledge about Augustine that confront us in the wisdom of Augustine's biography?] What we previously encountered as a bone of contention appears to us [in Augustine] in a transfigured way. For example, the Trinity, which has led to countless sectarian formations. When we encounter this in Augustine, he refers us to our self-knowledge. He says: I immerse myself in my own personality, and this confronts me as a threefold. I feel myself first as my "being", then as the "knower" and then as the "willer". I am these three in one person. And just as I am these three in one person, so it is in that of which the personality is only an image. - The divine lives in man. Man can therefore only find the divine by penetrating into his inner being, in the inner truth that we can find through our self-knowledge.

The fact of thinking is the deepest fact there is for him. There he finds the most poignant words to describe it for him, which also gave him the certainty of the divine [primordial One]. "I went out into the world and looked at the most diverse natural things. I could find that they are divine, but I could not find that they are God. I look at people and finally look inside myself. I see that I must be divine, but I also see that I am not "God. I first had to come to complete certainty within myself, I had to become better myself. Then I discovered the "good in me." - Self-deepening must come first: That is true mysticism. If you have not first discovered what is within you, all previous self-knowledge will be of no avail. First awaken this primal One in you, then you will also be able to find the deepest. - He wanted to doubt that he is alive, doubt that he thinks; but he cannot doubt that. And what is this primordial One? "I asked the earth, the sea, I asked the winds" - see the "Confessions" - "they answer: We are not God." He could not recognize the spiritual [there]. He only saw it under symbols. He believed [at first] that this was it. But that was his mistake. He felt it was the highest good to see the spiritual also spiritually. - I now see the eternal goals, the eternal ideas, as the Pythagoreans saw them. I don't just see counted, understood things, but I see in such a way that I see into the numbers, into the things, that I see the purely spiritual itself.

In Scotus Eriugena we will get to know a personality of infinite, mystical depth. But we must say to ourselves that in Augustine we have found such a leading personality for Christianity that it becomes clear to us from Augustine's teaching and personality what Christianity has lost in terms of its old mystical views. It becomes clear to us to what depth it was able to reach despite what it had lost. St. Augustine experienced everything that was possible for him, because he was a personality who had lived through everything, who had found the law of truth as the primal law of life. This is the teaching of St. Augustine, which cannot be ignored when speaking of Western mysticism.

Answer to the question:

Question: It is strange that Augustine, despite his inner vision, despite his mystical deepening, did not find the doctrine of re-embodiment.

Answer: Those who follow Augustine's teaching achieve a harmony between cognition, feeling and moral love. This gives them the perspective of the divine, which they recognize as the innermost human being. This is a level of vision in which the divine does not take shape. However, this is possible when vision has reached the point where the spiritual presents itself to us on the most diverse levels. Its seven stages therefore also appear to us as the most important thing not contained.

Through contemplation, he can penetrate mysticism, and mysticism means life in the divine to him.

Buddha's personality is higher than the personality of Augustine.

The truly mystical has never been lost. The esoteric has permeated the exoteric both in Buddha and in the first Christian centuries.

Dear guests!

Of course, this can only be a kind of artificial, provisional conclusion, brought about by the fact that I still have to deal with the theosophical-mystical view of Scotus Eriugena.

I have undertaken to deal with this personality because this personality forms a conclusion to the Christian research that lies ahead of him on the one hand and on the other hand the starting point of what is actually called the Christian Middle Ages.

Scotus Eriugena shows us clearly that what is called the Christian view was by no means as fixed until the ninth century as it was later regarded. What was meant by genuine, true Christianity was not so fixed that it would not have been possible for such a mind to have views on the Christian teachings of the Church that differed from the majority of others.

However, this is already the great battle that the centralized Catholic Church is waging against such views. Christian doctrine is [still] fluid on all sides. Debates are still taking place as to how the various dogmas should be interpreted. With Scotus Eriugena you can clearly see that at that time it was still possible to have a free interpretation of the Bible. He is a completely theosophical interpreter of the Bible. He cites the sentences of the Old and New Testaments as symbols for spiritual processes alongside the historical side. He chooses those symbols and interpretations which correspond better to his own views. This free custom dwindled [in the course of time] in the Catholic Church, dwindled more and more. The faith established by the administration is asserting itself more and more. However, it had been preserved as a tradition that only those who had reached a certain high level of life were called to interpret the Bible and the teachings of the Church. I don't think it would be easy to prove that almost lay interpretations of Scripture could have asserted themselves; I don't think anyone would have dared to criticize the dogma who had not already attempted to do so through their pursuit of wisdom. Belief in authority was taken for granted. What St. Augustine, for example, had written and said was not regarded as the opinion of a single person, but as a teaching given to us through the indwelling of the power of wisdom in such a person. These views must be understood according to their intention.

Those who were later condemned, who were heretized, grew out of the material that the Church preserved and which first had to permeate those who became involved in such things in the first place, who believed they were called to approach an interpretation of the Church and the Church's teachings.

It would be wrong to compare the philosophy of Scotus Eriugena with any other. It can only be understood in and within Christianity. It must also be viewed in this way and not in the same way as Giordano Bruno. I have already mentioned a person who lived in the first century and left behind writings. [I am referring to the works of the "false" Dionysius, whose author is said to have lived in Athens with the Apostle Paul.] We know that these writings represent a mystical deepening. At the end of the fifth century, we realize that we are dealing with ancient teachings. They must also be understood as such. The teachings can be traced back to the time when the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse were written. They were probably [given] by the one who founded the [Athenian] school.

Finally, we come to the point where wisdom ceases to be wisdom, where it must pass over into life. This is a view that underlies gnosis. It endeavors to turn wisdom into immediate life. The practical meaning of gnosis lies in bringing the spirit down into the material. This view in turn has as its equivalent the view that wisdom cannot be attained through the mere pursuit of wisdom, but only the prospect of it.

There are two different views: "positive theology" and "negative theology". The primary source of the former is sensory perception. One sees, hears, feels this being, this thing; this thing has these and those properties. Negative theology, however, says that behind what we see, hear and so on lies the original source of existence. Nothing can lead us to penetrate it completely; it is only the [inner] life that leads us on the path to penetrating that primordial existence.

This is the path to the heights of mystical knowledge as opposed to external scientific knowledge. Positive theology, which therefore really says something for man, is only a down payment. This knowledge only becomes negative theology because man is forced to say to himself that there is something hidden in the primal grounds of existence. So where, above all, the realization of inadequacy emerges, where the right to doubt awakens, where the feeling awakens that knowledge is only a support in the effort to advance towards divinity - this is where negative theology arises.

You do not reach divinity through concepts, not through the mind. If you imagine divinity as personality, you see divinity in the superpersonality, as essence in the superessential, as perfection in the superperfect! It is most remarkable that the Western world could be surprised by the word "superman", which we encounter so often today. In Dionysius we see a word that takes us much higher, in that he speaks not only of the superman, but of the "supergod". This is in contrast to the God who is human-like, in contrast to what was then called "positive theology", the vital theology that was behind the negative one. Nicholas Cusanus said - after he had acquired all the knowledge that science could give him, after the realization had dawned on him during a voyage across the great sea of how the spiritual eye must become clear at a glance - that these are not expressions for something that exists, but only for symbols that can awaken a perspective in us.

These writings by Dionysius Areopagita were given to Louis the Pious by the Greek owners and have been in Paris ever since. When Scotus Eriugena was favorably received by Charles the Bald, he was commissioned - he was one of the few who knew Greek - to translate these writings. In this way he immersed himself in the spirit of the first Christian centuries, and so we see a Christian tinged theosophy emerging in his works. The writings of Augustine supported him in this. They became a great help for monks and priests, and for the Church in general.

What was probably still present in the Gnostics of the first centuries and what the Christian Church has not preserved is completely missing in [Augustine]: the awareness of a pervasive individuality and any mention of transmigration. Nothing is interposed between personality and divinity. Augustine had to attribute every human peculiarity to the will of the Godhead, so to speak. He could say nothing [else], since he knew nothing of a pervasive individuality. That which appears in me as my own personality is the result of that which reaches out backwards and forwards. But [Augustine] must trace this back to the will of the Godhead. Thus we create a boundary between the Godhead and the will of the individual. And this is how the [so-called predestination] controversy arises. On the one hand, we have those who are saved, and on the other, those who are not allowed to enter divinity: despite the immense love, the realization of the terrible. In other words, dualism.

With such a doctrine, it was extremely difficult to work within the church. One can only imagine that this doctrine could only be presented to a generous mind; it was not possible to present it to the congregations. Nevertheless, it was clear to the church that the wisdom of Augustine set the tone. This [drastic] doctrine of predestination could not be maintained, so they tried to conceal and weaken this hard, cruel doctrine. It was said: "It is quite undoubted that from the very beginning sinners were predestined to eternal damnation, the righteous to bliss; but then the possibility was introduced that a crossing over [to the other side] could take place. In short, they tried to get out of the dilemma. The only way out, which is given in the transmigration of souls, was now sought to be bridged by the half-measure of the Augustinian doctrine. A French monk, [Gottschalk], stood up against this half-measure of Augustine's teaching at the court of Charles the Bald in France. Although he did not name Augustine, he represented him completely and he taught the entire Augustinian doctrine [of absolute predestination] again.

Scotus Eriugena was then presented with the question [of the correctness of this doctrine], first by the Church and then by his master, Charles the Bald. Gottschalk had been publicly flogged. He was flogged in [Mainz at the synod of 848 AD and in Quierzy at the synod of 849 AD]. A treatise had been written against him on predestination. It said that Gottschalk should have been burned, that he should have been dealt with by fire and sword - the heretic judgments began much later. So the only options were condemnation or public flogging.

Scotus Eriugena contrasted himself with Gottschalk. Nevertheless, he emphasized that the doctrine that prevailed in the church was not the right one either. He himself also stated that the theosophical-mystical element always and repeatedly breaks through in large-scale natures. He said that Augustine could only be misunderstood in a view that places divinity beyond the world and where the divine [does not] permeate the whole world, i.e. only in such a teaching. From such a deepening we see the meaningful writing of Scotus Eriugena "On the Division of Nature" emerge. The stream of the divine runs through the world. But the divine must be sought in the world in various stages. He advocates a kind of pantheism of which Boehme would say that he does not mix the world with the divine, but rather evaluates it by saying: The things of the world are indeed the divine, but not in such a way that it can be found in the individual things. They only lead to it, they are the guides [to the divine]. Thus we also see in Scotus Eriugena's objection to Augustine's doctrine that he says: "If one part of the world were indeed to be regarded as bad, as an apostasy against the original good and the original beauty, if it were a dualism between good and evil, then it would be impossible for the divine to permeate the world, for the divine would then also have to be present in the bad. But then the bad would be a manifestation of the divine - or one would have to speak of an impotence of the divine.

Whoever has gained an insight into the depths of the world as a whole cannot possibly recognize two world powers in this way or think of the world as constructed in this way. He must think of the world as constructed in a unified way, so that what we regard as error must be founded in a [unified] way. He cannot suppose that the divine has determined a part to be unattractive, he can only suppose that the divine has determined the aim and purpose of the world; he can only suppose that the beautiful and the ugly only appear, that the world is not divinity itself, is not the entity existing in unfathomable divinity, but that the divine has poured itself out in the world. Evil arises through diversity, through multiplicity. It only has an existence if we express it in earthly terms, it only appears to us as evil [if we do not see through the world as maya, not as illusion]

Jakob Böhme has an idea that is very similar to this. He compares the world to an organism. Every single limb is alive. The hand is just as necessary to the whole of the organism as the foot or any other part of it. It is what it is only in the context of the organism. When the hand is separated from the organism, when it dies, it is no longer a hand; as a hand it must be permeated by the organic. Thus the manifold is only good because it is connected with the original source. Can this prevent one hand from injuring the other? Because the organism is made up of parts, it is possible for parts to come into conflict with each other. Thus disharmony is not rooted [in the organism]. But it can arise if the organism appears to us as a manifold. When the parts of the manifold have returned to unity, then disharmony can no longer come about, then the forces can no longer be turned against each other. As long as the world is a manifold, parts of it will continue to turn against each other. Although the whole is good and in harmony, disharmony is still possible. If we could see through time and space at a glance, then every single thing that seems bad to us would turn out to be good, every disharmony would cancel itself out in the harmony of the whole. We only see a part because we ourselves are a member of the manifold. Thus, for Scotus Eriugena, this doubt is resolved by the fact that he does not assume God's dominion, but God's integration into the world. Thus evil must also have only an illusory nature, and necessarily so, because God assumed matter.

In four parts, in four forms of existence, Scotus Eriugena breaks down nature by treating Augustine's teaching:

First, into that which cannot be attained, the uncreated, creating nature, which we only have in truth if we say to ourselves: all concepts are not sufficient to attain that which underlies everything.

The second is the development out of the [un]created: the created and creating nature. For him, these were the primordial spiritual forces. They are creating and created. That which Plato calls the world of ideas, that which symbolizes unity for us, has separated into multiplicity. This world-spirit, this all-soul, this world-pervading spirituality, which is manifold, which is divided into intelligence and unintelligence - but in a spiritual way - in short, this whole Platonic world of ideas, which as a spiritual world underlies our world, these primal reasons of existence, those thoughts which lived in the Godhead as model images, the eternal primal thoughts of the Godhead - we form the ideas, but they have lived themselves out in the Godhead - they are the "Worb. The things of nature are created according to the patterns of this word. He equates them with the eternal Son of the Godhead. The infinite wisdom, the spirit full of wisdom: This to him is the Son, the second entity, which, as he expresses it, is to the first entity as in the relation of the Son to the Father. This relationship then reached a historical personality - Jesus: Jesus Christ. This Christ is an existence free of desire, an existence beyond the world of desires and senses, he can be wisdom without will and once came into the world, says Scotus Eriugena.

Then comes the third stage of the forms of existence of nature: the created, but non-creating nature. Man, who has assumed matter, is not created and not creating, but existing.

The fourth stage is nature that is neither created nor creating. The divine nature is its goal, to which all beings return in their eternal bliss, resting in themselves. A return of the Godhead to itself is for him the world process in the most eminent sense of the word. All beings are permeated by the Godhead, where they rest in bliss within themselves. They should regard this as their goal.

However, this is how Scotus Eriugena appears to us as a theosophical interpreter of Christianity in the West. It also seems theosophical to us that, in a seven-fold ascent, he outlines the path for people to strive for union with the Godhead.

He therefore distinguishes between four natural powers. Under the first he understands God as the reason for creation, under the second the Platonic world of ideas, under the third the world of bodies, under the fourth God as the final purpose of creation. This is why he calls the process return, "reversio>, "deificatio. To him, the whole process is the return of unity to unity, which only transforms from a creative to a non-creative one.

The beings who undergo the process of development go through it in seven stages. The people who have theosophical aspirations and are engaged in theosophical studies always come to seven stages.

The first stage is the body. The second stage is that which animates the body, the life force that flows through it. On the third level, the sense is animated. From this arises the animal soul. Fourthly, the spirit awakens within the sense. The higher stages, which are no longer bound to the elements, no longer bound to the senses, are contained therein, thus fifthly: the receptivity for the spiritual hovering above the senses. Then, sixthly, bliss, spirituality, develops. The spirit is [...] turned towards the senses, thus still permeated by the body of desire, which chains it to material existence; at the seventh stage this ceases, there the spirit steps before itself in its pure existence. [This makes it possible to embark on the path to return to God, to the divine. The divine would then be the [highest] level.

Then we also see a view in Scotus Eriugena that cannot be integrated into his other teachings. He cannot logically explain the contrast between the elect and those who do not attain beatitude. He cannot bridge this contrast. But this contrast does not exist at all in Christianity: it has only been possible for those minds in the West to find the ideas and truths unconsciously slumbering in Christianity, [which had clarity about the idea] that the essence [of man] is rooted in eternity. If we explore Christianity in and according to its depths, we will find that these ideas lie dormant in Christianity.

It is therefore a matter of awakening the depths of religion. Christianity only needs to be grasped deeply enough to awaken its content. We must therefore reach the point where we can find out what unites them all in the great religious systems, to see how one spirit is expressed in all of them.

It must therefore fill us with great satisfaction to see how in Theosophy we encounter the common spirit in all religions. As we ponder and penetrate the ancient wisdom of Buddhism and see the infinite deepening of spiritual life in these oriental teachings, we will also notice that this spirit has emerged in our scientific endeavors and also in Christianity. In the teachings of natural science, the core also rests in the same way as in the world religions. But it is not from the best core of the same. It is basically the same whether we open the great book of nature or pick up a religious book and look it up. Both lead to the great theosophical convictions. I believe that even the wing of natural science that is [not] on the side of Christianity is fighting in this direction: even the battles that are being waged against the Church are Christian ways of fighting. Those who see the deeper context see this direction in the way modern researchers fight Christianity. What Christianity and the Church have forged is being used against them.

A direct balance cannot be found between two such powers. But that which can lead us to believe that reconciliation must be possible is shown to us by spirits such as Scotus Eriugena. They do not yet recognize the sharp distinction between the two wings: Natural science on the one hand and religion on the other. Scotus Eriugena could still be a good Christian, and he could still describe the whole world as nature in a Christian world view. It seems that this is no longer possible for the minds of people today. It seems to me that the only salvation lies in continuing along the path that has been followed in the West for decades. We must draw new courage from the sources of light in the Orient, from the two rivers that flowed together back then, and create reconciliation.

If we immerse ourselves in oriental wisdom, reconciliation will still be possible. For me, it is proof of this that the light that came from the Orient still lived in Scotus Eriugena in a more or less unconscious way in undivided unity. What has carried people for so long will continue to carry them in such a way that they must find the path through this light. And what has brought the spirit into harmony will continue to do so. But for this we need to delve deeper into the theosophical teachings. If we find the path that reunites the two, then it will mean the reconciliation of natural science with Western religions, then it will become clear that they are seeking the same thing on different paths.

The outer forms of the phenomenal world have, in addition to their outer significance, an inner meaning. They are, as it were, symbols of an earlier phase of development. “All that is transitory is but a parable” to him who looks more deeply. To the psychograph, which looks with astral power into the inner becoming, into the soul of the world, the things of the phenomenal world reveal their inner history. The eye of the Dangma sees the transformations of the Logos in a developmental series. The sacred books of the Vedas and the Rosicrucian Chronicle speak of ten such avatars or metamorphoses of our present Sun Logo. For the clairvoyant, the present-day lancelet (Amphioxus lanceolatus) is the memory sign of an incarnation of the Sun Logo and a parable for the foreshadowing of the vertebrates. This can be imagined when one thinks of the signs Sickle, Scorpio, Fish and so on in the calendar, which symbolize processes in the world of the stars. The vertebrae, from which in succession fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals have developed, were present in the Vorahn only in the first stage, just as in the present-day lancelet the organ of touch is indicated by a single nerve cord, from which in later developments the brain of aquatic animals, of fishes, organized itself.

The first metamorphosis of the Sun Logos is expressed by the Rosicrucian Chronicle in the following words:

The single mother substance of spiritual light dawned upon itself. And from the dawning density of matter, a spiritual peculiarity escaped, empathizing with the dawn of matter.

The World Spirit lives in this feeling as the soul, whose body is the waters.

Indian: Matsya = Fish

First Avatar.

The Solar Logos incarnates as an example and guide in the midst of a new phase of development. Originally, the spirit dawned upon itself, spirit and matter are still undifferentiated in each other. Thus, mollusks and worms today show no separate nervous life; sensation permeates all of the unified substance of which they are composed. In the first avatar, the spirit separated from the egg-shaped astral, fine shell of matter and formed a luminous point within it, permeating it with its rays. All development is polar.

And the spirit light generates within itself an even higher spirituality; it brings forth an even finer mental matter – into which the brain later integrates itself – the sentient astral matter is pushed back, enveloping itself protectively at its outermost pole with an even more solid matter, from which the physical matter later develops. This would be the second avatar, the second metamorphosis of the deity, which the Rosicrucian chronicle expresses in the following words:

And feeling escaped from the body of water, drawing to itself the solidity that slumbers in the waters. The material solidity became the suffering of feeling. Trembling, the garment was adapted to the life of the world soul; the soul created harmony in the trembling garment.

The symbol of remembrance of the second avatar is Kurma, the turtle (amphibian). That is why Paracelsus saw animals in the amphibians that are even closer to the deity in their nature. Second third of the second round.

In the third metamorphosis of the Logos, spirituality withdraws even more into itself, astral matter expands, becomes stronger and more solid, and the developing human being lives completely in its powerful strength and might, while the spirit is in a state of slumber. The astral substance first had to become resistant in full selfhood in order to be overcome again later.

The symbol of remembrance for the third avatar, at the beginning of the third round, is called Varaha, the boar. The Rosicrucian Chronicle says:

The Keide should be firm against the storms of the material: it should be a strong cover for its spiritual Lord, and in

Therefore the soul of the world clothed itself in the garment of strong animality.

In the fourth avatar (first third of the fourth round) this beast-man became ruler. Giant in his power of matter, he drew all spirituality into himself and made himself lord of it, protecting it with his mighty strength. A small part remained as a warner, and united with the All-Soul the Soul was symbolized as a dwarf – the Nara-simha, the man-lion's power.

And the strong animality became the Self, self-power streaming through the loins of matter, repelling the power of the enemy from the tender spirit-self that slumbers as a warner in the strong animality of the man-lion.

But the dwarf of the spirit, Vamana, pours his invigorating power through the limbs of the giant, guides him and makes himself the ruler of the man-lion, just as the giant Goliath was ruled by the dwarf David. And now the warner, too, is drawn completely into the material world and loses the last connection with the universal soul. Man is now completely left to his own resources and has reached the extreme degree of separation. In the beginning this spirit, separated in the material, fights in selfishness and arbitrariness against the other separated spirits; it becomes unrestrained because the Warner is missing and the guidance. It is the physical man, and the fifth avatar reads:

And the Warner became the ruler of the strong beast-like nature of man-lion. The dwarf conquered the giant's mighty strength: and he awakened spirit-life in the beast-like nature's massive limbs.

Now the sixth avatar appears as the first lawgiver, and the law now severely punishes the abuse of the warrior's strength. It is the epoch of Parashu-Rama (father of Rama). He leads the warriors and bends them under the harsh but good law.

Sixth Avatar:

From now on, the body's loins should not stretch without the spirit life's judgment. Such stretching, alien to the spirit, would become evil. The spirit life stepped into the midst of the loin-gifted warriors, and the good law wanted to punish the forces alien to the spirit.

Now, as the seventh metamorphosis of the Logos, Rama, the son of Parashu-Rama, appeared, and he softened the hardness and strictness of the commandments in love, and the warriors loved the law in willing obedience. He was the first legendary ideal king of the Indians and all other peoples.

Seventh Avatar:

The spirit's compulsion was strict and stern. So it gave birth to gentleness within itself. In love, hard law was dissolved.

Now Krishna appeared as the eighth incarnation of the god, teaching people to feel love as bliss and living as an example of bliss:

And the seed of love blossomed and bore the fruit of love, which is called bliss. And bliss itself was human.

Up to this point, the human life was an ascent to the height of Budhi, of bliss, but now the path had to be traveled down again, to learn wisdom and to release Manas through work, through karma, and to connect it with Budhi. And so Buddha appeared as a guide and archetype, so far ahead of human development to show them the way. Thus is the name of the ninth avatar: Buddha.

And Bliss sent her son to Earth, who is called the Embodiment of Wisdom. And she dwelled in the mortal body of the king's son. — Buddha.

The tenth avatar: that is, he who is to come; Kalki, says the Indian. The Rosicrucian Chronicle reads:

But when the times are fulfilled, the eye opens, and the destiny of man becomes luminous within, let the luminous figure choose as guide: then destiny itself becomes law and loving volition. He whose eye opens sees living roses growing from the cross.

For the Rosicrucians, Christ was this coming one, Christ as the ever-evolving crystallization into the shining example of evolving humanity, who as Jesus took upon himself human karma and remains connected to the karma of Christianity through ever new incarnation, guiding and directing it until the end of this race.

All the life legends of the Nirmanakayas, the teachers of humanity, are similar, they follow a certain pattern: life, temptation, sacrificial death and transfiguration, chosen for the common purpose of descending into matter: Zarathustra, Hermes, the Druid teachers, Buddha, Christ. The lives of Jesus and Buddha are the same until the transfiguration; from here on, there is a change, and Christ descends the deepest into matter, for he has been given a special task. When Mahaguru's individuality incarnated as Buddha, his teachings had led to misunderstandings and divisions; he had given too much. Once again, Buddha had to incarnate as Shankaracharya, and it was from him that the Tibetan teachers, the Mahatmas, were then trained. These teachers handed over the teaching of theosophy to the public in part, in order to convey to the various religions the esoteric content that underlies them all, and to raise the fallen spiritual level of humanity. When the individuality of the Mahaguru incarnated in Christ, he did not choose, as was his custom, a virgin embryonic matter, pure and free of karma, but descended lower, in order to bring, in full brotherhood with humanity, the densest matter to spiritual transfiguration, laden with karma, as flesh from their flesh. Thus the mystery of Christ came about: that the Mahaguru took possession of the body of a lower Mahatma, a chela of the third initiation, the thirty-year-old Jesus, whose body had already passed through life and formed karma. From now on, the great teacher of humanity appeared as Christ. Up to the transfiguration, the life of Jesus resembles that of the Buddha, but from here the tragedy of the Christ begins. He was destined to experience death on the cross and resurrection in an exemplary and public way, in his own body, which otherwise were only carried out symbolically in seclusion. Through this sacrifice, he was also to uplift the masses and lead them towards redemption from lower matter. Thus, on the one hand, Buddha stands on a higher level because he remained untouched by the lower matter and only taught, and on the other hand, Christ stands higher because he made the greater sacrifice and, by descending into the densest physical matter, brought it back spiritualized.

Christ did not leave any records like other great teachers of mankind. His task was to live these teachings, which were already present, to live in an exemplary way for humanity and thus to release the mystery teachings in order to bring as much of humanity as possible to a faster spiritual evolution. Thus he made the greatest sacrifice for humanity: his enlightened spirit descended into the darkest matter.

The Bhagavad Gita, which contains the most sublime teaching of virtue in the Indian world view in poetic form, is a self-contained episode from one of the most famous and oldest of the two great heroic epics of the Indians, the Mahabharata, which means the great war.

What the Homeric poems are to the Greeks and the Nibelungenlied to the Germanic peoples, that is the Mahabharata to the Sanskrit people. Its core is formed by the ancient war songs and heroic sagas from the time of the great migration and the conquest struggles on the Ganges. The origins of this poetry go back to the 10th and 11th century BC and provide a faithful portrait of the mores of this, the most ancient of India's heroic ages. These descriptions are based as much on historical facts and personalities in poetic guise as on other folk songs.

The centerpiece is the struggles of the two related clans of the Kurus and Pandus, which end with the decline of the heroic age of the Kurus. The Bhagavad Gita is the account of a wonderful religious and philosophical conversation between the hero Arjuna and Krishna, the incarnate God. The luminous and exalted wisdom teachings and the extremely finely differentiated capacity for feeling and discernment in the most subtle ethical questions not only suggest that our tribal ancestors had an unrivaled culture in this area, but they also seem like direct revelations of the divine spirit. Wilhelm von Humboldt was so moved by the incomparable beauty and depth of this poetry that he exclaimed enthusiastically: “It is worth living so long to get to know such a poem.” At the beginning, the two hostile armies face each other ready for battle. Arjuna the hero has his golden chariot, drawn by white steeds, steered into the middle of the battlefield to take a closer look at the battle-hungry enemies. But when he discovers blood relatives in their ranks, fathers, sons, grandsons, cousins and brothers, who are about to kill each other in a rage, his noble heart trembles in wild sorrow, and overwhelmed by compassion, his already tensed bow falls away from him. He shudders at the thought of bloodshed, preferring to renounce glory and kingship rather than incur this sin; he would rather die at their hands than be responsible for the death of one of his relatives. But Krishna approaches the fainthearted man and settles the fight within him by explaining to him his duties as a warrior, his dharma. Arjuna the hero is the human being, and his inner being is the battlefield where the hard struggles of the soul are fought. Torn between the earthly and heavenly parts of our mental life, in the conflict of feelings, plagued by anxious doubts, we often do not know where to turn, what our duty is. For every special being has its own special duty, its dharma, which it must recognize.

What does the Indian mean by “Dharma”? Dharma has many meanings, but they are all complementary and interrelated. Dharma is closely linked to karma; they are related to each other like fruit and seed. Dharma is the result of past karma, of past activity, and Dharma is the present creative principle within us, again creating the karma of the future. Dharma is the guiding force of our own thoughts and actions, our own personal truth. It denotes our inner nature, characterized by the degree of development achieved; it is the law that determines growth for the future period of development, the continuous thread of life. Like ring upon ring, incarnation follows incarnation, a continuous chain. Dharma is our past, present and future at the same time and works in us as father, mother and son. The Father as the Overself, as the higher self, as one's truth and law; the Mother as the developing being and the Son as the future. An incarnation is worthless and lost if it does not become a stepping stone to higher development through activity; likewise, striving and desiring perfection that has not been acquired through previous activity is futile. There is no leap in development; we patiently weave our way through the loom of time, garment upon garment. What has been practiced in a past stage becomes a predisposition in a future one, and activity in an earlier period becomes skill in a later one.

It is always difficult for us to find our own dharma, the law of our personal existence, to fulfill the commandment “know thyself”. It takes a long time to become accustomed to being able to immerse ourselves in ourselves, uninfluenced by the things of the sensual world, by our own desires and admired role models, and to listen to the inner voice that shows us the path of our duty, which our position, our relationships, the circle into which we were born impose on us. When we correctly recognize the level of our being, our degree of imperfection, when we become quite clear about what the truth and duty is at our level of development, then self-knowledge does not serve selfishness, but that is Dharma, because Dharma is the observance of the law in the sense of true self-knowledge. We then find our personal note and can make it resound powerfully in the eternal harmony of the world. We must learn to understand our intimate connection with the cosmos, as a part of it; our vibrations must harmonize with the rhythmic movement of the cosmos. Injustice and sin are nothing more than disharmony, when our irregular vibrations cause disruptions and disturbances in the lawful course of cosmic events. The more we feel at one with the cosmos, the more it will reveal to us. Only the spirit speaks to us, which we have learned to understand. According to the extent of our knowledge, divine inspiration is bestowed upon us, the higher self, which is of divine nature, reveals itself to us.

We can only recognize a part of that great, eternal truth, to the extent and magnitude that we have brought it to manifestation in us through our own activity, through our karma. Life after life, this scope increases in our process of development, we progress in knowledge and insight, for it is our destiny to gradually absorb the whole conceptual content of our world, our cosmos, into ourselves. We can never do this without gradually experiencing the whole richness of the world of phenomena. Nature lives in us when we fully grasp it. Calm, peace and contentment with one's life must overcome everyone who clearly recognizes that he has been born into the circle for which he had prepared himself through his past karma and which he must now fulfill with all his loyalty and exhaust in its entirety through his activity. In this way he has gained a field of knowledge through his own life and is now working in his own line to expand it, in order to create higher and better conditions of existence for himself in the future. And so he will also reach out his hand in loving understanding to his brother, who is trying to climb up under him on the ladder of beings, to help him, because he himself was still on the same rung not so long ago, struggling laboriously upwards, stretching out his hands to his brothers who had gone before him.

Thus we see how each of us has different duties, how clearly we must learn to distinguish in order not to be led astray, to maintain our balance, to follow our law. With wise foresight, the high leaders and enlightened kings had divided the Indian people into castes. As cruel as this may seem to us Westerners, who are accustomed to freedom and unrestricted choice, there is a deep meaning behind this strict compulsion. The caste system of the ancient Indians corresponds entirely to the natural division of the human race. Each person is born through his own karma into the caste appropriate to him; he must first fulfill the full range of duties within that caste before he becomes ripe for a new incarnation in the next higher caste. As long as one's judgment is still undeveloped at a lower level, one must learn obedience; one must acquire the virtues of loyalty and devotion through service, and so the caste of the Sudra is the school for unconditional obedience and subordination – these practiced virtues that make one capable of self-conquest, self-determination, and a loving and mild rule.

In the second caste, the Vaisya, man, engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry, will enter into the most intimate relationship with the surrounding nature. He will learn to work the soil with the sweat of his brow, he will sow and reap and thus produce food for his fellow brothers; he will practice all the virtues of a farmer. Then he will become a merchant, engage in trade and industry, accumulate riches and undergo many of the vices of his class. It is only through selfishness and avarice that he will often learn the first wisdom of economics and the proper use of his wealth for the benefit and worship of his fellow citizens. When he has learned his lesson to perfection at this level, he will be born as a Kshatriya in the next incarnation, in the warrior caste. Here he must use his powers to protect and defend his homeland; he must gain strength through courage and bravery and self-denial to be able to face any danger. He can only do this if he is prepared to sacrifice his life to duty at any moment. The warrior must give up his physical life, then his soul acquires the spirit of self-denial and is the creator of an ideal. The body is solely intended to help the development of the inner life; it must disappear when the soul needs a new body, that is, a more suitable garment for its advanced development. War is the school that must be passed through to reach that highest caste of the Brahmins, for whom - at their level of development and knowledge - fighting and killing is a mortal sin. “Kill your enemy” is commanded to the Kshatriya, but he knows that he can never truly kill one of his brothers nor be killed by him, as Krishna says to Arjuna in consolation.

Only by attaining the highest perfection in all the duties of the other castes does one become qualified to enter the Brahmin or priestly caste. The Brahmin must keep away from fighting and quarrelling; he collects and guards the highest goods of humanity, he is its spiritual leader and teacher. He imparts peace and wisdom and knowledge to his weak brothers, and in him rest all the experiences of the past centuries as an ability to guide humanity to its eternal destiny.

Thus we see how each stage of development must fulfill its own dharma. What is considered good at one stage must be avoided as evil at the other stage. Good and evil have their place in the eternal world order; in it they lose the meaning that we attach to them. They are necessary because they are the poles of development, they have emerged from a single origin. Good and evil, action and reaction, condition and complement each other like sleep and waking, like rest and activity, like light and shadow, like brightness and darkness, and they belong to each other like spirit and matter. It is Atma as purest light, the original source of all being, and Aima as its mirror image, darkest point and germinal power in the densest matter, which gives the impetus for the development and refinement of matter in the eternal change of form structures, until the contrariness has risen to the light source of the spirit and reunites with its starting point in Nirvana. From the original unity of world harmony, the eternal reason of all things, being, contrast breaks away – the eternal becoming of matter, which develops out of itself and upwards in countless changing forms to fulfillment, in order to merge from the diversity of appearances, the many, back into a unity, enriched with the countless experiences of the separate units. With Nirvana, the circle closes: the beginning and return to the eternal original spirit.

For the Western world view, which sees the highest goal in the development of the present being, Nirvana means nothingness. However, there is nothing of what is considered a perfect being in Nirvana. Nirvana is the nothingness of karma; no more karma can arise because Dharma has become apparent.

Past worldviews looked at what is not yet, and the present being was an imperfect transition to something higher. They saw every state of activity as an intermediate link between imperfection and absolute perfection in Nirvana. The goal and ideal for them was the state of an entity that has revealed all its dharma and thus burned its karma and enters nirvana.