The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in the “Heidelberger Zeitung”, April 1905

The Theosophical lecture given by Dr. Steiner on Monday evening in the small Harmoniesaal was received with great interest. However, the number of visitors was not large compared to what the evening offered. The extraordinary wealth of ideas that the speaker displayed in every respect should be emphasized. The treatment of the topic turned out to be substantially different than one might have assumed. Under the heading “Wisdom Teachings in Christianity”, the speaker brought up completely different things, much deeper things than are currently in the memory of general Christianity. He spoke of mysteries, of seeing, of the development of higher powers of perception, of higher worlds, and explained that at the time of the first Christians, certain specific methods and exercises of the soul were used to develop and research the spiritual human being. The monthly magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis” contains the lectures of the speaker, Dr. Steiner, partly printed and also some very interesting articles from his pen (more details through the local Theosophical Society, office at Kettengasse 23). The lecture, which was received with great applause, concluded with various quotations from Goethe and Schiller, with a particular reference to the latter's aesthetic letters.

Throughout the millennia, different peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in life through religion. In our time, it is easy to misjudge the significance of the religious aspirations of nations. It is easy for a modern person to harbor illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the wisdom of religions, some light will also be shed today on the aims and tasks of the Theosophical movement in general.

At first, our topic was discussed by learned religious scholars from a cultural-historical point of view. In the past, such things were not considered at all. In the past, individuals were aware that they could find the truth in their religion. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that people decided to compare different religions. This has revealed a remarkable fact: a consensus in the various religious beliefs of different human races. But they did not get much further than the assumption that the childlike imagination of the nations forms ideas about God and man in the same way. It has become common practice to see in the different religions of different peoples childlike stages of human spiritual development, and no more. If one delves deeper into the question hinted at here, one comes to the conclusion that one underestimates even the simplest religious ideas if one does not take them deeply and thoroughly. If you go deeper, you acquire the right kind of humility, the humility that says: You understand something of the great, powerful images, but there is still much you cannot fathom. You learn to recognize more and more by climbing the ladder of human development yourself.

Go down to ancient Egyptian culture. There you find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. If you learn to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, it reveals itself as a meaningful religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and the individual pieces were buried in different places. The idea is associated with this that everything that lives on earth emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on earth is seen as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. The earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

Now let us go up to the legends and myths of the Nordic world. There we meet the giant Ymir, who was overcome by Wotan, will and woe. We learn that he was dismembered, that the rocks were made from his bones, the streams and seas from his blood, the vault of heaven from his brain, and so on. This Earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. She is a sleeping giant.

We find similar ideas in the religions of different peoples everywhere. We should not believe that the religions of “lesser” peoples are childlike compared to our own. Let us take an example of how a sublime religion can be found in another nation. When the ancient Indians of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the latter believed that they were far superior to the North American Indians. At a meeting with the Europeans, a Native American chief gave a speech that beautifully reflects the religious beliefs of the Native American tribes. The way the chief spoke is how many representatives of these peoples spoke about God.

They had been promised land, but this had not been done. The chief now said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn about God and what He says from books, in which small black characters appear. The white man only knows about his God from the black signs in the books, but the brown man recognizes the great spirit as it speaks to him from the whispering of the wind, from the lapping of the waves, [from lightning and thunder]. You promised us to give us land, but did not do it. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, etc.

This is how many peoples thought about the great spirit before there was what we call religion. Religion comes from “religere”, to reconnect. We want to understand why religion is important for reconnecting.

Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantic continent, between America and Europe. This continent was inhabited by the Atlantean race. There they lived, the Atlanteans, with a peculiar spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly wild, but in fact only backward culture on the periphery of the former Atlantis.

There they felt in a primitive and elementary way what one might call the equivalent of religion. What was the religion of the most ancient ancestors of early man is preserved in the form that we can find in the religion of China, in the so-called Tao religion.

When the Chinese pronounce the Tao, they feel something similar to how that Indian spoke of the great spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of belonging to the whole world. Man did not feel like a special being, as we do today. Today's man does not think much of breathing in and out. The breathing process is carried out as a purely mechanical process. In the ancestors of yore, a feeling was awakened in response to breathing. They felt gratitude to the great spirit. They felt that he united with them with every inhalation. They united with him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the great spirit. They felt at one with the universal spirit. The breath was spirit to them, the blood that pulsed in their veins was spirit to them. They felt part of the great world spirit. One must try to feel what is going on in a human soul that feels itself as one piece with the great world spirit flowing through it, the divinity within itself, and within the divinity, how our ancestors were completely blissful in this sensation, one must learn to empathize.

There is only one feeling that comes close to this - when the Vedantist feels the “Tat twam asi”: “That art thou,” he says to the world around him. But in the main, our nature has lost the feeling of our ancestors. Sympathy for the whole world was called Tao. Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is in man, what pulses through him as his life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking is itself a product of development. Those who felt the Tao did not yet have this intellect. It is precisely a characteristic of our present race. When our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking developed from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. Now people learned to think in terms. The consequence of conceptualization was that man strictly separated himself from his environment. This had a significance when man conquered intellect. The Atlanteans did not feel that they were separate from others. Tao was the blood, the air, Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose in them through the intellect working within. Everything they felt in the world, they had to experience within.

The God who pulsed through man was a unity that flowed outside and flowed inside. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere” - “reconnect” had to occur, the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives in religion to reconnect with the divine All-Spirit.

On the basis of what has just been said, one must ask oneself: How can man of our present cycle imagine his God? He must first seek him within himself. But when he realizes that this is the same God as out there, then he has achieved something in his own way, as the ancient Atlantean felt in Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples, the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are only an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. This religion of ancient India can be brought to life within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and words. It is a religion of life, which assumes that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in the past people felt the connection with the God in their environment, in ancient India people sought the God in the separate individual soul. They sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives in the individual soul lives in all souls. If one could experience one's own divinity in this way, if one had found what led beyond all separateness; beyond the deception of separateness, then one called it the divine Brahman. One could not theorize about that. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually came to recognize this unified divinity from three points of view. This is found in all religions, these threefold aspects, under which the Brahman is sought.

The three aspects of the divine are understood roughly as follows in the intimate life of the different religions: The divine spirit lives in you. But the divine spirit also lives outside in the universe. And a spark of this divine spirit lives in you. The spirit that lives in you when you have an urge, a passion, an ideal, also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and sense everything. The deeper you penetrate into the structure of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine spirit has worked in you. Your passions, your sense of truth, are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It continually attacks the wonderful organism that the Deity has built as a housing for man. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is wonderfully designed. It is composed of fine beams in such a skillful way that no engineer today could imitate it. The thigh bone has a reciprocating structure that allows it to support the body with the least amount of force.

The higher bodies of man are much more imperfect than the physical. This perfect physical casing was built by the great spirit; then he was drawn into this shell like a spark. Now take this whole world of this structure that lives around you, apart from what lives in you as a soul, and you have the third aspect of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow brothers and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have everything that surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives in it as soul, that is the Son. That which the Son will become and that to which we will come through the Son, what we will be at the end of the days, that is the first aspect, the Father. Religions look at the primal essence from these three aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You can go through all religions and you will always find this Trinity as the basic concept of all religions. The disciples were spoken to in this way countless times. When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then the vibrations go out to the other souls. Imagine that the organ of hearing is switched off – I speak – the words could be made visible – then you could see what I am saying. Imagine that you could turn the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine that you could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie at the bottom of the ground. This is how religion imagines everything around us, only by thinking the macrocosm formed similarly to how the words do here.

The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Now the deity spoke a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and so everything came into being. This is how rock crystal was formed too. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God, everything was spirit. That from which the spirit emerges is the original word. The Word of God that resounded into space was called the “Word”, the second aspect of the Deity. The thought of God that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was the Father-God, the beginning. A deep connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning, the Father-God, and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul lives the Son as the Word. Veda - Edda means: the word. That which is called the actual revelation in the different religions always goes back to the word. The divine documents express this word. That is why they are also called the Word. In the religious records is that which the Spirit of God has spoken into the world. An echo of this lives in the human soul.

Another part of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that man is in a process of development, that he can reach ever higher and higher levels of development. The soul can increasingly resemble God. In my body, I see that the forces and materials of nature have worked together to create the perfect physical body for me. Plants and animals are experiments. A development has taken place. In the human being, the keystone of this development is opposed to us. In us, we carry the spirit germ like a bud. This is how we participate in the spiritual world. Thus, the human being lives in a physical environment and, on the other hand, grows into a spiritual world. Within himself, he has powers and abilities through which he is connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, animals are beings in different degrees of perfection. The soul also exists in various degrees of perfection, existing in a sequence. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We have to live ourselves into a community with supersensible beings, with spiritual beings that form the connection between man and the Supreme Divinity, Devas, Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, etcetera. Everywhere, in all religions, there is the core of wisdom of a spiritual world, of a sum of entities of a supersensible nature. Just as man belongs to the rest of the [physical] world through his physical body, so he belongs to the spiritual world through his core of being.

Another core wisdom of all religions is that all development occurs in cycles, which can be compared to breathing in and out, day and night. The life of a human being, the life of the soul, also runs in such cycles. Man alternates between this side of existence, where he gathers experiences, and another where he lives in community with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In rhythmic succession, physical life on earth appears again and again, and again the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is one among many is a common basic law of all developed religions.

It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric form, it teaches reincarnation. It just doesn't teach it on the outside. Christ spoke to his intimate disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with his disciples, he explained many things to them on the mountain. He only spoke most intimately to his most intimate disciples, James, John, Peter, at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” is there. (Mk 9,5) These are the most intimate disciples who have risen to the level where huts are built. You experience what you experience when you can build huts. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest secret is shown to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means Way. Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the middle. The Way, the Life, the Truth. This ancient wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in bodily form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, raptured state. Christ said to them: Elijah has returned. They just did not recognize him (Mk 9:19). He spoke to them of reincarnation, but continued: “But do not tell anyone until I return” (Mk 9:9). The Second Coming refers to the point in human development when they will be ready to find the inner Christ.

Angelus Silesius points to the essence of this inner Christ and its significance:

A thousand times if Christ were born in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be a thousand times lost.

The inner experience of Christ enables us to grasp the Christ in the world. When people have come so far, then one can speak again of reincarnation. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a living awareness: This is one life among many. In the other life, I will be like the one who now commands me. Thus he recognized the law of reincarnation and karma, the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. He felt this to be the law of his life. Then we understand the deep significance that the law of karma and reincarnation had in the souls.

But this humanity would have only looked up and lost the appreciation of the one life between birth and death. Once the soul had to go through a life where it knew nothing of reincarnation. About 1500 [or 2600] years is the period that elapses between two embodiments. In the 2000 years after Christ, the soul has gone through one such embodiment. Therefore, the disciples should not teach reincarnation until people could grasp the Christ within themselves.

The doctrine of reincarnation is contained in Christianity, not as a mere teaching, but as a legacy for the future. The teaching was not lost in Christianity by accident or disgrace, but was deliberately not taught for 2000 years. Man has grown out of the whole of nature. Goethe felt the Taoist feeling in the words he addressed to nature in the Hymn to Nature. This contains an examination of how he empathized with nature.

Man had to become a special being, but then he had to be reconnected to the divine. The search for the way back to the divine is what the old mystics of the Middle Ages called deification. This is how man expresses that he is eminently created for a development. In order for him to grow towards deification, the divine must be present in him in a seed-like way.

To make this one's content is to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it is theosophy. This is, in another form, what religions give to man. It makes religions understandable to him. Divine wisdom is the antitype of the soul's content, which itself is permeated and pulsated by the truth. The earlier religious conceptions were more or less the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised into full, bright day-consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that it permeates us completely with its living content, so that the soul thereby reaches the goal of deification; that is what Theosophy will lead us to.

Question: What is Christianity's position on the doctrine of repeated lives on earth? Why is it not officially taught? How did Christianity come to avoid touching on this question?

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the development of the human race. In ancient times, four thousand years before our era, all people knew about it. The ancient Egyptian slaves who had to build the pyramids under cruel tormentors already took comfort in it. In the time of Christ, the consciousness of it was still vividly present. On Mount Tabor, Christ Jesus forbade his intimate disciples to speak of re-embodiment in the next two thousand years. “On the mountain” means “in the innermost sanctuary”. There, the disciples wanted to “build huts”, which means the second degree of chelaship, discipleship. By appearing transfigured with Elijah and Moses, Jesus showed them the context of continuous life.

Elias - El = the Way, Moses = the Truth, Jesus = the Life! And then they saw Jesus alone, who is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6), in one person. Then he said, “Tell no one until I come back.” Christ will come again when humanity is one step further in its development. All this was known to the mystics. Today's humanity, which has gone through external Christianity, has found its bliss in the person of Jesus Christ. It will be different in the sixth sub-race. Angelus Silesius already says:

And if Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in you, you would still be lost forever.

The wooden cross cannot save you from evil where it is not also erected in you.

Only when Christ has become an experience in us, can Christ appear in another form.

If the eye were not sun-like,

The sun could never see it.

If God's own power did not lie within us,

How can we be filled with divine rapture? (Goethe).

Thus man can see Christ in the world only where he is to be seen, when he himself has become Christ-like. Until then, the teaching should not be taught. Why should this be so? Christianity is universal; it is to permeate all of life. If life between earth lives was to be made holy, then it also had to make the earth life holy. In order to recognize the importance of the sacredness of the lower life on earth, everything had to be done to sanctify it; that is why the human race should go through life once, without knowing about the repetition of the same. This has now been achieved for many.

It is completely wrong to conclude from this that the punishments in hell are eternal. The one-time experience of a life without knowledge of re-incarnation should teach man to take life seriously. It is assumed that re-embodiment takes place after 1500 to 2000 years for each soul, and that during this period all human souls have probably gone through such an earth-life without knowledge of repeated earth-lives. And so the time has now come when this teaching is being proclaimed again.

Jesus fulfills his will. He said:

He has guided Christianity through the darkness up to this point, and now He is allowing the teaching to shine forth again, now that Christianity was in danger of freezing. The teaching, which is new to many, is intended to bring old Christianity back into flow; it will produce new blossoms and fruits when it now takes up the teaching again. This is an ideal that can only be realized gradually. If the teaching is first understood and accepted as a theory, it will not be long before we hear theosophical concepts and thoughts from the pulpits. Theosophy will imbue everything old with new, fresh life, and when it no longer stands and appears as something special, it will have made itself superfluous as a doctrine.

Report in the “Frankfurter Nachrichten” of January 21, 1906

“The wisdom at the core of religions” was the subject of the third Theosophical lecture, which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave in the Gutenberg Hall on Friday.

All religions have certain similarities; they all have something fundamental in common. Only the theosophical school of thought, which is so much misunderstood, was called upon to shed new light on these mysterious things, for one of its main tasks is to research the wisdom teachings of all the religions of the world.

What is religion? The word means connection; through religion, the human soul is connected to the divine, it is the bridge between the soul and its spiritual-divine origin. All religions have become, have developed; they used to be different from what they are today. Recent natural science is convinced that a mainland once existed between Europe and Africa, between Africa and America – we call it Atlantis after the ancients – on which lived different people than we do today. They did not have the same intellectual powers as we do, but they had others that we lack, which are similar to the abilities that our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; instead, the outside world appeared to them in images, symbolically, as it does in dreams. They also felt their divine origin, because they felt at one with all life, with that of plants and animals.

This view of the Atlanteans is peculiar to all the early beginnings of religions. The soul's experience of all of nature, this empathic feeling for natural forces in higher spiritual vision, gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit”, which is revealed in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, out of the soul's dream state, out of symbolic contemplation, intellectual life in the modern sense developed. People scattered to different countries and adapted to their climate and other conditions. What had previously been felt as a spirit now had to take on a different form; religion had to be proclaimed in different forms to correspond to the changed circumstances. The Atlanteans developed the images from the soul world, but now the outside world approached man and was different everywhere. Consequently, the bond between the soul and its divine origin had to be knitted in new forms. Hence the diversity of religions, but also their common ground, the agreement regarding the basic truths, regarding the core of wisdom.

Spiritual leaders and guides of humanity, the “Brotherhood of Initiates”, have always existed, even among the Atlanteans; and it was they who proclaimed the wisdom core of the original religion to all times and all peoples and thereby preserved it. All the founders of religions, the authors of the Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the magi of the Chaldeans, the priests of the Babylonians, the world sages of the Greeks, the Zarathustras, Confucius, yes, the German mystics, Paracelsus, Angelus Silesius and Jakob Böhme – they were all, together with the greatest initiate, Jesus Christ, such guardians of humanity, such proclaimers of the religious core of wisdom. He explained what speakers understand by this core of wisdom using the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, which returns more or less developed in all religions.

Freedom is a word that makes every heart beat faster, a word to which the ideals of our best human brothers have turned, for which the noblest spirits of humanity have devotedly sacrificed their work, their lives and their very selves. Freedom is that, about which great thinkers have said that it has something to do with the whole development of humanity. Hegel calls the history of man “a progression of people in the consciousness of freedom”. He says: If we look at the Orient with its mighty monarchy, we see how countless people languish in bondage and how only one is free. In later history we see how more and more people become free, and how through Christianity the inner aspiration to freedom has been placed in the heart and soul of every person, and how whole masses of people have shed their blood to make real what Christianity has presented as divine truth. The feeling of freedom in Christianity lies even deeper. The Lord said:

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free! (John 8:32)

If we enter the quiet study of the thinker and philosopher, we will see how the deepest minds have seen it as their task to explore what human freedom encompasses, for example Leibniz and Fichte. They asked: How should we relate to this central concept of our entire human spiritual life? Is man free, or is he under a necessary compulsion? Can we really face the criminal in the same way if we know that he was predestined to do an evil deed, or know that he was free, that he committed his deed of his own free will? — It could well be that, precisely because the question of freedom lies so deep, it is one of the deepest human riddles.

The theosophical worldview speaks of the ability of the human being to develop his higher senses. In its path of knowledge, it describes the most diverse qualities and virtues that one must acquire in order to come to knowledge; the last of these qualities is the will to freedom. This is part of the process if one wants to develop higher. If you want to approach this human puzzle in a completely natural and perfect way, you have to ask this question a little differently than it is usually asked. Usually one asks: Is man free, or is he under a necessary compulsion?

A large number of human thinkers say: People are free; another part of the thinkers says: No, anyone who believes that does not realize that in some way there must be a cause for everything a person does. — In truth, such a thinker says to himself that man is unfree, and that even if he appears to act freely, there is some condition behind it. If there were no particular reasons for an act, he would not do it. An example is given here of the donkey that stands in the middle between two bundles of hay and cannot decide which one to eat, and therefore starves to death because he is not free and the causes on the right and left are equal.

Perhaps one could say: Freedom is something that one first acquires; then man is neither completely free nor unfree. As he develops towards freedom, he becomes more and more free. The development of man is the way to his freedom. - There we come closer to the view of those who see the freedom of man as something that he can acquire through experience and knowledge. - Look at the child. We can always tell what will drive it to do a certain act under certain conditions. The question, “Is man free?” makes no sense, but the question, “Does man become freer through development?” does make sense.

With a mechanism, we can always say exactly what must happen according to the forces and conditions inherent in it. If we turn to plants, we cannot say so definitely what will happen to them. With animals, we can predict even less with certainty what they will do. Something like arbitrariness comes out even with the higher animals. If we then go up to man, we see more and more the area of necessity being restricted. In the savage, however, we see only a spark of freedom; but the more man develops, so that he comes to moral concepts, the less one can assume with certainty what he will do under given circumstances. — With the leaders of mankind, one cannot assume at all what they will do. They always do what is original. He who merely executes those things which the chain of necessity has brought up to him adds nothing new to the development of humanity. But he who brings something new from the source of illumination into humanity adds something that was not there before. Originality brings about progress, and originality must go beyond the realm of mere necessity.

Man can be understood in such a way that we divide him into the lower nature, which finds expression in the physical body; and into the higher, soul-like, spiritual nature, which at first only glows like a spark, but which increasingly becomes the ruler of his being. In a child, one finds many traits that speak to the heart but bear a strong resemblance to those of the parents, relatives, etc. But then the spark of originality and freedom begins to stir. The innermost part of the soul begins to express the person, the being itself, in what lives.

The more originality a person has, the more this is written into the features and movements of his entire being. Then the human being emerges from his inner being into his surroundings. First he writes his innermost being into his character; his facial features, his gestures become an imprint of his soul. The more perfect the human being becomes, the more he leaves the footprints of his existence on his surroundings; he influences ever widening circles. How does the human being acquire the ability to have this effect, first on himself and then on his surroundings?

Freedom is never arbitrariness, but something quite different. The drives and instincts are the purest tyrants, and if we follow them, we are subject to arbitrariness. Goethe said: Only he is worthy of freedom who has first gained mastery within himself and over himself. — First we must control the drives and passions, then we have a claim to real freedom.

We must rise from everyday knowledge to the knowledge of the interrelationships of the world. What is important here is not intellectual knowledge, but spiritual-soul knowledge; then this knowledge is the beginning of freedom. - When we enter into our existence, we are born into a body. At birth, man is already endowed with a certain amount of abilities and with a certain degree of perfection.

We ask: Where did this come from? — The laws of the spiritual powers of the world have built it up. We are placed into the world, and the laws of the world have worked on us and with us to this point. We must live ourselves into the laws of the world; we must rise to the creative powers in the world. By making the laws of the world our own, we free ourselves more and more. Knowledge of the laws of the world, absorption in the laws of the world, that is what makes us free. He who is forced to act is not free; but he who recognizes the laws of the world becomes free. To understand that one should do something is to act freely. As long as we do not recognize the highest divine, we act under compulsion. But when we recognize the divine, we act as co-knowers of the thoughts of God: then we become free.

Master Eckhart meant this when he spoke so beautifully and powerfully of freedom in his sense. There is much in this that, with a wonderfully intimate, fine power, detaches the understanding of freedom from the human being. It is impossible for one who is filled with knowledge of God to do evil; for him, good action becomes a matter of course.

In his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, Schiller developed a pure concept of freedom. The whole thing culminates in giving people a concept of human freedom.

In an epigram, Schiller has turned very sharply against the concept of virtue of Kant, who saw the suppression of instincts and passions as necessary.

If a person acts according to Kant's concept of virtue, then he is a slave to his ideals, to the necessity of reason. If he blindly follows his urges and passions, then he is a slave to his baser nature. In neither case is the person free; he only becomes free when he is able to achieve the middle state between the two. This conception of freedom is what makes Schiller so exquisitely refined. A person is only free when he has so ennobled his impulses and instincts that he will not want to do anything other than what his duty commands. In this way, by following his passions, man then follows the highest moral ideals.

Sensuality and morality, naturalness and spirituality then meet in such a person. One acquires such a state through an inner work on oneself. Such a state has been called: enthusiasm, that is, being in God; so refined have his instincts and passions that even the basest instincts only want what they should want under the divine law of the world.

Man is free to a certain extent, insofar as he has ennobled his instincts and desires, and unfree insofar as he has not yet done so.

Art should serve to educate people for freedom. — The eye, a sensual view, conveys enjoyment in works of art; but the soul also shines forth from the work of art. As we look with our senses, something spiritual flows into us at the same time. Art should elevate the sensuality of man to spirituality, deepen him.

It is a becoming of man from bondage to freedom. Among the means of education that are intended to lead to entry into the spiritual worlds, the will to freedom is also mentioned.

Many questions have been asked incorrectly; they must be asked correctly: this also applies to the question of freedom. It must also be asked correctly in order to understand how the laws of reincarnation and karma work. In the beginning, man must first learn to use his body as a tool to connect with the world around him. He must learn how to use himself as a lower human being. Through many lives he learns the way to freedom, the way to unleash the deepest nature of man, to live in the divine nature. There is a calm and security in living in freedom. The philosopher Fichte spoke the word that gives strength to the soul: “Man can do what he should; when he says he cannot, he does not want to.”

We must first learn to will; our deed becomes free when our will is imbued with knowledge. Freedom grows in man through continuous assimilation of knowledge. We absorb such power when we learn to view the laws of the world in the right way. Spirit and law must be in the world if we are to find spirit and law in the world. We take the lawfulness out of the world; therefore, the world lawfulness must already be there. If man wants to think thoughts about the world, then the world must be built according to thoughts. Those who shaped the world first placed thoughts into it.

The one who has recognized and appropriated the laws of the world acts as a conscious being in the freedom of the world and becomes an assistant to the gods in the world. Through knowledge of the law we become free; then we can act consciously.

Joy is a gift for the present; but we learn to appreciate suffering when it is gone, because suffering is a source of knowledge. A God who would take suffering out of the world would not be doing people any service. The path of suffering is the path of knowledge, and only knowledge makes us free.

Only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life.

Development is the way to freedom. Christ called Himself the Way, the Truth – Knowledge – and the Life – Development.

Man must follow this principle: “Die to what is lower within you and awaken to what is higher.” “Die and become” is what has always worked through the whole education of humanity towards the development of freedom.

The Bible text says this; it tells us the great, serious, redeeming truth that by permeating ourselves with the will of the law, we make ourselves great participants in world events. In this sense, Christ Jesus says:

You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

Two prejudices exist against Theosophy. Firstly, it is accused of being unscientific – I will deal with this later in my lecture on “Haeckel's World Riddle and Theosophy” – and secondly, it is accused of turning people away from their religion, namely Christianity.

What is the theosophical position on Christ? The way in which the Christian religion has been taught so far arose from childish prejudices. But the striving person is not satisfied with that; he must go beyond it. Many of them have rediscovered their Christianity through Theosophy. Through Theosophy they learned to find the core of wisdom in it; for Theosophy and Christianity are completely compatible. All of our Western culture, the work of our great thinkers, and all artists as well, have been shaped by Christianity and are permeated by the source of Christianity. Theosophy has to unfold the core of truth in it.

That this is its purpose was also stated by the important Indian brahmins Chakravarti at the 1904 congress in Chicago: materialism has taken hold of all circles, including the Indian people; Theosophy has given us the opportunity to return to the old ideal of truth; she has a world vocation, so she has a mission to all religions, including Christianity. Once we accepted the faith of our ancestors with faith and simplicity. Through science, many have become doubters. If the faithful turn to Theosophy, something completely new will open up for them, the doubters or unbelievers will return to Christianity and recognize the infinite greatness of it. All religions have the same truth; only Christianity has expressed the ancient wisdom in its best form.

What is this truth? Let us first look at the Gospel of John in the New Testament. Christianity is based on the truth that there is a lower and a higher human being in us. This higher human being can be born out of the soul through immersion, contemplation, and integration. The everyday person strives to follow his desires, his inclinations, while the other seeks to ennoble himself, endeavors to make something visible of this higher human being. The divine nature in us can be awakened in two ways: lower way: by awakening the moral inclinations; higher way: in an ever higher aspiration for the divine nature in us.

Higher nature is only just beginning to be noticeable in us; we divide the lower nature into: firstly, the physical body, secondly, the etheric body, thirdly, the astral body.

We divide the higher nature into: manas, budhi, atma. What is manas? Translated literally, it means “spiritual self”. Everyone reflects and seeks to understand the world around them, in their own way. I don't just mean the scholars, but everyone; the farmer behind the plough has his ideas and mental images. But if there were no original world thoughts, man would have no thoughts; they arise in him only as thought-images.

To develop the spirit itself, cooling and warming are necessary, and here we come to the second element, to Budhi, that is love. We have to compare the things of the spiritual world with the things outside. A comparison in the sensual realm is, for example, the warmth radiating from the brooding bird to call new life into existence. That is a form of sensuality. We can also speak of spiritual lust in the elaboration of thoughts. The birth of thoughts, that is the element of spiritual love. Any artist can express it to you. Anyone who sends original thoughts out into the world can feel it. The great leaders of mankind all knew it.

Take the greatest of them all: Christ Jesus. He was permeated by this spiritual sun-glow, by this love. It is this that transforms thoughts into forces. This is called Budhi or Chrestos; or the Christ principle. That, then, is Budhi! The third element is Atma, the Father. This only comes to expression in man gradually; and through work everyone can bring about the manifestation of these three within him. The most significant event in world history was the appearance of this Christ Jesus; through him, the principle of truth was brought to our realization.

In the past, there were schools of initiation — among the Egyptians, the Asian peoples, the Greeks — with different levels leading to knowledge, to the new birth.

First stage: Man must gain the knowledge to distinguish between higher and lower in the world; for example, the plant needs the mineral soil for its nutrition, thus the kingdom below it; the animals need the plant kingdom. They could say to the plant kingdom: We owe our existence to you. And man? All kingdoms are subservient to him; and he must be grateful to them, these kingdoms. So we see: one must perform the lower services in order to serve the higher. Thus man must develop a feeling of gratitude towards everything that is below him, that serves him. And he who wants to be great must be a servant. This first step of initiation is symbolically expressed in the washing of the feet. This is a stooping down to be a servant to all in a free way.

The second step is to develop strength within oneself, to become insensitive to all the hostility we face from the outside world. This means enduring blows to the cheeks, scourging, and bearing everything so that we stand firm in the face of it all.

The third step is to remain inwardly calm in the face of all the contempt and scorn that the world brings us. This is symbolized by the crown of thorns.

The fourth stage is reached when one becomes indifferent to one's own body as if it were a foreign body. Then the soul is ready to lead its independent life; then it no longer lives in the body, but takes it upon its shoulders like a burden: the carrying of the cross.

Fifth stage: Everything becomes objective for man; he dies to all ordinary life. He suffers the mystical death, and there he grows together with the whole earth; and this is the sixth stage or the sixth act: the burial.

The seventh stage is resurrection and ascension.

The initiate must experience all of this; only then has he resurrected the higher man within himself. This took place in the mystery centres; first in the temple and then through years of association with initiates. But it took place only in the astral body. Now it should also take place in the ether body, that is, the ether body must also be freed from the physical body with the astral body. A state of sleep was needed for this.

When a person sleeps, only the astral body is released. But in lethargic sleep, the etheric body could be freed. Such a state of sleep lasted three days; then the sleeper was awakened; he was now also freed from the etheric body and the Chrestos had awakened in him.

During such sleep he entered into the supersensible life. The supersensible had now conquered the sensual.

Who was it that could know this? Those who had seen it! They had become blessed, they had penetrated the spirit with the soul. That was the pre-Christian state. But now something new was coming; all this took place as a historical event in Palestine. Now the physical body of the earth experienced all this. The symbol became a reality, a truth. In this personality, this Christ Jesus, they who believed could experience it even if they did not see. In the past, only those who had seen it in the mysteries could become blessed; now the physical eye could experience it through faith in the manifestation.

The wisdom teachings are the same everywhere; but Christ Jesus brought the inner experience to external view. And therefore he could say:

Logos used to be a teaching; he made Logos come to life. The Christian mystics of the Middle Ages recognized this. Master Eckhart put it this way:

Most people look at Christ as one loves a cow. One must first let him live in oneself so that one can recognize him in the outside world.

For Tauler, the life of Christ was not a theory; for him, these facts were real. In order to understand these facts, one must first have experienced the inner Christ. Angelus Silesius expressed this most beautifully. He says:

The body must come to life in the soul, but the soul must come to life in God if you want to live in bliss. And elsewhere:

If Christ were born a hundred times in Bethlehem and it were not born in you, you would be lost forever.

Why did this faith without vision take the place of the old initiation? Because it had become a necessity for the outer man. At the time when the pyramids and other structures that appear to us as miracles were built, the world forces had developed within man. Now the spirit had to develop in the physical world; the spiritual eye had to be opened. But what has become of the world forces, the physical forces of man? They have receded, regressed, as an eye regresses when it is not kept active – for example, in the animals in the Kentucky cave.

In the first 2000 years of Christianity, the doctrine of karma receded. On Mount Tabor (“mountain” is synonymous with solitude, seclusion from people), Jesus explained something to his disciples, his most intimate students, Peter, James and John, and led them into the sanctuary. He showed them something they could only see outside their bodies, Elijah and Moses. His testament spoke to them of reincarnation and karma, of his return: “until I return to you” (Mk 9,9). What is this return? The awakening of the Christ in the soul of man. As long as people were to live in the world of the senses, it was enough for them to satisfy their spiritual needs by observing historical events. Thus Theosophy is not hostile or opposed to Christianity, but seeks to be a servant of Christianity.

It has been several decades since a certain scientific method of comparing different religions was developed. Those who devote themselves to this comparison are struck by how much agreement, even similarity, there is between the different religions. The most diverse evidence is cited to show that a certain core of belief underlies them all, from the Indian to the Germanic, the Near Eastern to the Greek, and that it can even be found in the uncivilized peoples of Africa and North America. The childlike predispositions of the various peoples have worked in the same way and have wanted to give enlightenment about the soul, the world, and God in the same way; for everywhere man is subject to the same powerlessness in the face of impending fate. The so-called Enlightenment assumes that people have attributed divine beings and forces to natural phenomena; it starts from the point of view that all religious beliefs are childish fantasies and that, finally, nations have now entered the age of reason, when people finally know how to understand these things.

But a thorough investigation teaches us otherwise. By comparing the Indian and Germanic intellectual spheres, we realize that before a thorough research, that doctrine of fantasy figures does not hold up. The deeper one penetrates, the more that hypothesis of enlightenment collapses, and two things prove that it is nothing: Firstly, we discover a deep meaning in the childlike ideas of recognized wild peoples. The more impartially we look at them, the deeper such folk religions appear to us; images and animals are the content of ideas that have an infinitely deep meaning.

Secondly, the people do not create poetry in the way that the gentlemen at the green table of scholarship imagine it. The people do not personify natural phenomena. Thus, the saga of Indra, which tells of how he set out with seven priestly sages to reclaim a number of cows that had escaped him to culture, was interpreted as if the god Indra personified the dawn and the seven cows personified darkness. Likewise, Buddha was seen as the sun god and it was said that his life was a personification of the sun – in short, the people personify natural phenomena.

Such a poetic folk poetry does not exist. Only those who are strangers to the people can arrive at such a view. Those who penetrate deeper will become more and more familiar with what spiritual research teaches in the Secret Doctrine.

The childlike religious ideas proceed from pure higher spiritual ideas and from the fact that a common, similar view underlies the various myths. This teaching is called the secret teaching of humanity. It has always been supported by the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Religions come not from the poetic folk poetry, but from the great initiates.

The original wisdom is the same, only it is structured according to the abilities and talents of the different peoples; thus we find a different form for the Greek peninsula, another for American, Indian, Germanic peoples. The different images are adapted to the different ways of life and talents of the individuals.

The profound spiritual basis reveals to us that a secret primordial revelation underlies all these religions. To many, this truth seems incredible, but only because of unfamiliarity with the facts, which appear to be imperfect because the great leaders can only give them such an expression as will be understood.

The very general secret doctrine of the fundamental primal generation is interesting in the history of the development of nations.

Although it is a sin against the holy spirit of modern monism to regard man as a two-part entity, and one risks being called a dualist, despite the unified origin , which of course underlies what we call “human”, the two-part nature of his being can be justifiably demonstrated, just as the existence of water can be demonstrated from hydrogen and oxygen. The two substances are present in it despite the unity of the whole. In the same way, it can be shown that the higher and lower selves of the human being have a common source. How a person's nature expresses itself, how he lives, strives and works, is revealed in a duality, just as water is revealed in the duality of hydrogen and oxygen. We therefore distinguish:

Firstly, the lower nature, which is more physical, more of the lower nature of matter.

Secondly, the higher nature, which is more spiritual, more of the higher nature of the spirit.

Development consists in ennobling the lower nature. No one has presented this better than Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters,” where he says: Man is subject to the necessities of nature on the one hand, he is their slave as long as he clings to them, but he is also a slave to ironclad necessity of reason. Only he awakens to freedom who ennobles the lower nature through the higher nature. It is not the man who denies his lower nature who stands high, but he who ennobles it so that he can abandon himself to it.

The Secret Doctrine teaches that man overcomes his sensual nature through the spiritual and transforms his being in such a way that he receives a new impression of spirituality. The mystics often say: Man is a small world, and what surrounds him is the great world. He contains in miniature everything that the great world has around him. Schiller writes to Goethe in the first letter:

They take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, they seek the explanation for the individual. Goethe wanted man to be recognized as a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, the great world. Paracelsus expressed it in the beautiful image: When we observe the individual phenomena of nature outside, they appear like letters, man as the word composed of them. Everything that is scattered outside in the great is in the small man.

In the sense of the secret teaching, the struggle that is fought within man and finally receives his purification is an image of the great struggle in nature outside. Just as in man the lower nature of the physical-visible is opposed to the spiritual nature of the invisible, so the Secret Doctrine opposes the nature of the visible universe - stones, plants, animals - as the second, the forces of nature, which are hidden in the individual things.

The divine part of man also corresponds to a divine part here. The Secret Doctrine also distinguishes here between the visible and the invisible, the physical and the spiritual. The man before you seems to be what is outwardly expressed in his plastic form, but through deeper causes, in the outburst of his passions, the forces of his lower nature are revealed. Likewise, nature, like man in his body, finds physical expression in physical forms, in which forces are hidden just as they are in the lower nature of man. The lightning flashes in the cloud. The Secret Doctrine not only shows this comparison as fundamental, but also that the divine entities in nature are related to what rules and lives in man as his spirit. The same thing that ennobles the lower nature of man has overcome the lower nature in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are the plastic expression of the nature of God in descending order, while the invisible spirits in nature signify, for the Secret Doctrine, the ascent into the higher nature. They are more advanced entities than man. Animals, plants and minerals are further advanced on the descending path.

A picture of this development is given by coal. It is stone, a mineral. Millions of years ago it was part of living beings, plants. Great forests have perished and become these stone masses. What was once a living being has become a fossil. This is admitted by science.

In the sea basin, limestone formations are piled up in many different ways, created by animals that secreted lime shells. Here we find vast masses of limestone, prepared by living things. The dead is nothing other than a product of life.

The question arises: how does the living emerge from the dead?

In truth, not only does the living emerge from the dead, but all that is dead emerges from the living. Even rock crystal is a differentiation from the primal living.

If we follow the line of descent downwards from animals to fish, we finally find cartilaginous fish that have not yet developed any bones. In the same way, the physical human being has ancestors that had cartilage instead of bone, who are not yet at the stage where the petrification process has begun. Just as human bone turns to stone, so granite masses have also emerged from what was originally soft living matter.

Where does everything come from? From an original living organization, and this from original spirituality. — We find the overcoming of the lower by the higher everywhere, even outside. The lower has detached itself by the higher detaching itself.

But then there must be a great unity: as between the spiritual and the physical in man, so also a great unity between the great spirituality and the lower nature outside.

This unity is expressed by the various creeds. Just as it is clear that those who have today thrown off the lower nature were once struggling and striving beings, so the initiates are simply more advanced than their brothers; they have overcome the struggle and therefore know more.

At the bottom of all creeds we find the premise of the struggle of the higher nature against the lower and the conviction that there are initiates who are the leaders of humanity. — How has the Secret Doctrine been expressed among the Germanic peoples? There too we find the interpretation that the people have been poetizing, symbolizing the forces of nature.

We find a basis for the theosophical world view in a work by Ludwig Laistner: “Riddles of the Sphinx” on myth research. As is so often the case, the theosophist can learn the most from the non-theosophist, so we may start from his basic principles here. Let us start from a simple folk tale, the legend of the Midday Woman. She lives in the most diverse areas and has the following content: If you go to the field early in the morning to work and fail to go home at the appropriate hour, during the lunch break between twelve and one o'clock, the midday woman appears and asks him questions that are difficult to answer, about weaving, flax cultivation and the like, related to his work. During the whole of the lunch hour, questions are asked of him, all of which he must answer. If he misses even one, she comes with the sickle and cuts his throat. In some areas, it is said that you can get rid of her by reciting the Lord's Prayer, but it is not that simple, it has to be recited backwards, not from the beginning, but from the end. There is another spinning room saying related to this legend: “You ask like the midday woman.” Laistner interprets it as follows: This legend has its origin in the state that is brought about in a person when he stays outside in the field and falls asleep. Then the environment has such an effect that the dream always takes on this form in a similar way. Laistner traces all these legends back to the riddle of the Sphinx. It is the same torment of questioning that is found in this. In between lies a whole world of myths and legends. It has nothing to do with folk poetry, but can be explained by what the dream does to the sleeper. The dream is the main symbol. You catch a frog in your dream, wake up and find the corner of the bedspread in your hand. Legends and myths simply have their origin in the dream fantasy. From there, Laistner would have had only one step to the theosophical view, according to which there is not only the ordinary everyday state of consciousness, but another state of consciousness that, like the dream images, gives the outer things a different meaning: the tip of the bedspread is transformed into the image of a frog. The dream, a means of occult development, gives symbols of a higher spiritual world. Then, in contrast to this ordinary dream state, a higher state of consciousness arises in which the human being becomes aware of sensory perceptions. What shines into the dawning consciousness from the higher state of consciousness is the dream. This state is also present in a dull form in mediums in a trance: daytime consciousness is extinguished and a dusky consciousness has set in.

Everything in the world has developed, including man's consciousness today. Just as his organs have changed, so has he changed in terms of consciousness. He used to have no daytime consciousness, but a dim clairvoyant consciousness. Just as the body has organs whose significance fades, so the state that the person who misses the lunch break falls into is an echo of the old clairvoyant consciousness. It works in such a way that the untrained person sees everything the wrong way round; things appear as if in a mirror image. So, for example, you have to read 365 563. In this higher spiritual world, the astral world, man sees his desire. Everything in this plan attacks him in a retrograde direction, in the opposite order. The people therefore say quite correctly: If you want to escape the midday woman, you have to say the Lord's Prayer backwards, namely do something that does not correspond to the laws of this world.

These legends and myths deal with a different state of consciousness. It is only in this light that they can be explained to our medieval ancestors. Our ancestors had a clairvoyant consciousness, and the legends are echoes of it. This is the secret of the Germanic myths in particular. If you look behind the scenes of nature, you will see how the myths are expressed.

The dragon fight of the Siegfried saga is nothing other than the fight of higher wisdom against lower wisdom. The ancient Germans were a nation of warriors, their god was a warrior god, and their fight was a fight against dragons.

The astral picture, perceived clairvoyantly, can also be found in the Baldur saga: the primal struggle of the older brothers, the gods, against the lower ones, which has its echo in the forces of nature. The people see this and express it clairvoyantly as the real overcoming of Baldur by the blind Hödur.

It is said that Baldur represents the sun god, who was overcome by the winter god. But the saga means the struggle between beings of light and beings of darkness. The old Teuton remembers the primeval times, when he saw the darkness illuminated by spiritual light, when he saw the darkness illuminated by astral light - Hödur means astral blindness. — The clairvoyant consciousness has experienced the saga of Baldur. The Secret Doctrine, which tells us that there were initiates, also presents Wotan as an initiate. He was not a divine being, but a man who had raised himself up. The story that he hung on the gallows for nine days, wriggled through gorges and crevices like a snake to Gunnlöd, in order to receive the drink of initiation from the Valkyrie's cup, is consistent with the ancient cross initiation, with Egyptian mysticism. For three days and nights, Wotan is with Gunnlöd as a snake, which refers to the initiates. The higher soul, through which the ascent to higher levels is accomplished, is designated by the feminine.

The saga of Siegfried is also a picture of initiation. Siegfried acquires invulnerability, that is, he becomes insensitive to physical impressions, and thus becomes a companion of the Valkyrie. The initiates become invisible through the magic hood, that is, invisible as initiates, otherwise they remain visible (physically).

What then is initiation? Every nation has developed its secret teaching in a way that corresponds to its customs and traditions. The Germans were warriors, and a hero was called one who had fallen on the battlefield; he began the journey to Valhalla. The Valkyrie met him, that is, his own higher soul meets him when he passes through the gates of death.

“He who does not die before dying, when he dies, perishes.” That is, he who does not learn about that world beforehand, dies with death. Initiation is the forefeeling of what awaits the soul when it passes through the gates of death. The blessed warrior is united with the Valkyrie when he enters Valhalla: Siegfried with Brünhild. The leaders of the people clothed the initiation in this form. Even in this part of the saga, the Secret Doctrine finds expression in language that the people can understand.

The divine world, which has suppressed its nature, we find again in the giants.

The Secret Doctrine also tells how the migration of the peoples took place. Between Europe and America lay the Atlantic continent. Even the “Kosmos,” a magazine that swims in the Haeckelian direction, presents this as a hypothesis in the tenth issue. It only recognizes the existence of plants and animals, but that does not prevent the presence of humans, because science always lags behind.

From then on, people turned eastwards. Those who moved as far as Central and Eastern Asia form the basis of ancient Indian Asia, those who remained behind form the basis of the Celts and Germans. The Celts have progressed furthest in the transformation from the old dull clairvoyant consciousness to the present sensual consciousness. The Germans remained with the astral consciousness of the Atlanteans long after the Asians had developed to the day consciousness.

In the epoch before the Vedas, the teaching arose that was based more on ordinary day-consciousness. But man can never lose the connection with the spiritual, and so the longing arose there to find the way to the old clairvoyance by artificial means. That artificial clairvoyance arose there, which the wise strove for through inner development - yoga. Thus in India we have artificial clairvoyance with complete consciousness during the day, while among the Teutons the old consciousness of clairvoyance is still preserved. Among the Teutons, myths and legends form a dim expression of the secret doctrine as compared with that obtained by the initiates of modern times through artificial clairvoyance. For the people who no longer have clairvoyance, the divine worlds must be depicted. That is where the idol images come from, artificially prepared replicas by man. Among the ancient Germans, the old myths still lived in the people, in the old, retained symbolism, while in ancient India, the secret doctrine is artificially expressed by those who aspire to it. What we obtain from India is therefore more of an intellectual form, but the same secret doctrine that is expressed much more directly in the old Germanic myths.

The idols of the Indians and the theosophical doctrine: The renewal of the more theosophical doctrine of artificial clairvoyance in India goes completely parallel with what still lives in the old legends in Germania. Therefore, we do not need any Indian terminology in Europe, we only need to understand and revive what is original in Europe. We can get to the bottom of a great European secret doctrine and will get there.

The course of the secret teaching is determined by something else. The course of the future is prophetically expressed in the old Germanic secret teaching. The reference to Christianity is expressed in a powerful way. The research into legends, which is connected with the secret teaching, finds a coherent truth in the legend and in Christianity. Krimhild betrays her husband by attaching the cross. What does this deep trait indicate? It indicates the prophetic reference to the cross of Christ. Siegfried, the initiate, is invulnerable all over his body; only one spot is not invulnerable for the great initiate, the spot where Christ bears the cross. With the spread of Christianity, this spot has also become invulnerable.

In India we have a secret teaching that expresses itself rationally and symbolically, in Europe the old Germanic myth remained in the astral expression until Jesus Christ. Through Christianity, the myth has been replaced.

The task of Theosophy is to work in the sense of this spiritual development of humanity, to establish the deep connection between the ancient Germans and modern times. We cannot simply propagate the culture of the Orient; we must take into account the Germanic and Christian original culture. We must not seek the basis of the secret doctrine in Sanskrit dogmas, but we must seek the core of truth in those forms of religion that are appropriate to the European folk substance, seek what exists as an emanation of the secret doctrine in the Germanic world of legends.

That was the artist's intention when he gave a new culture by transforming the Germanic saga, that was Richard Wagner's intention when he reworked the old German sagas.

Theosophy also seeks the traces of the ancient secret teachings that live at the heart of the Germanic saga. Those who follow these traces will gradually find their way into Theosophy. However, we must not think in the same way as those who have “come so gloriously far”. For every nation has done its part in its own way. And in this sense, we in the Brotherhood must place unity and the harmony of the basic teaching above the differences in our views and presentations. If we seek the truth in every opinion and place brotherly love above the selfishness of our opinions, then we are acting in the true sense of the theosophical view of life.

Report in the “Münchner Neueste Nachrichten”, April 1906

Theosophical lectures. The theosophical speaker Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave two well-received lectures in the Prinzensaal of Café Luitpold on “Germanic and Indian Secret Doctrine” and on “Inner Development”. In the first lecture, the speaker tried to argue that the origin of legends and myths cannot be traced back to the personification of natural phenomena by the poetic fantasy of the people, as Ludwig Laistner had already suggested in “Riddle of the Sphinx” another explanation for the origin of certain myths, but that the strangely profound meaning of myths and legends point to regarding them as the symbolic expression of primal truths, which are intuitively recognized by primitive peoples themselves in images and symbols, and are also presented by the great teachers of humanity, who are initiated into the “primal secret teachings,” in images adapted to the understanding and character of the peoples of Asia, America, Africa and Europe. Thus, for example, we find the struggle of the higher nature with the lower, the spiritual battle of development, the primal fight, which takes place in the macrocosm as well as in the microcosm, and which the gods, that is, the beings who were the first to fight for spiritual development, fought in primeval times, is illustrated in the myths of the fight of the gods and heroes with the dragon. In the cycle of Teutonic myths we also find the fight against the dragon and the fight against the giants, the powers of the lower nature. For the warlike Germanic peoples, who regarded bravery as the highest virtue, the doctrine of the higher and lower self also found expression in the fact that the warrior who fell on the battlefield, elevated by his heroic death, moves up to Valhalla to meet his own higher soul, the Valkyrie, who comes to meet him. The speaker then expressed the view that the Theosophical Society in Europe had the primary task of working for an understanding of the great truths and beauties of the Germanic world of legends, as well as for a deeper understanding of the symbols of Christianity, since the forms of the Orient cannot be transferred to Europe without further ado. It must shine into the depths of the beautiful and true of the Germanic world of legends, which the great master Wagner artistically resurrected, and utilize it for her spiritualized conception of the world and life, as well as the primal truth of the Christianity brought to the Germanic world, which was destined to replace the old myths.

Only those who view mythologies superficially can overlook the profound wisdom that is expressed in them, and only they can fail to recognize that something much deeper is hidden there than mere poetic fantasy, popular fantasy. Real spiritual research knows that there have always been select personalities who stood higher than other people. Such superior personalities were, for example, Buddha, Pythagoras, Moses and the greatest initiate, Christ Jesus. These are individuals who are far ahead of other people; it is such individuals who know the higher worlds from their own experience, who have knowledge of what lies hidden behind the physical world. They know the spiritual world themselves. They have brought a part of the truth to the nations to which they came. The wisdom is the same at all times. But it must be brought differently to different peoples at different times. That which is true is preserved by the great leaders, the initiates of humanity, and they clothe it in those concepts that any people can understand at a particular time. The various religions are the one truth, adapted to different peoples according to their aptitude and their character.

The collective wisdom, which we also call the secret doctrine, expresses itself in the most diverse religious beliefs. To understand why one people have these ideas and another people have different ideas, we must get to know the nature of the people. We must examine the nature of the ancient Germans and the Indian peoples.

First, we will give a brief sketch of the secret doctrine, which is preserved by the initiated leaders of humanity. The basic tenet of the common secret doctrine of all these different peoples is that man is a dual being, that he consists of a spiritual-soul part and a physical-corporeal part, and that the spiritual-soul part is called upon to uplift, ennoble, purify and bless the physical-corporeal part. Schiller speaks of the purification of the lower parts of man in the letters on the aesthetic education of the human race. There he speaks of how the whole development of man consists in purifying and refining the lower nature. The whole development of man consists in his ascending to ever higher and higher levels in this purification. This view connects the Secret Doctrine with a very specific idea about the relationship between man and the world. All mysticism calls man the microcosm in comparison to the macrocosm, to the great world. If you now go through the natural kingdoms and then examine the powers, abilities and qualities of man, it turns out that man is a confluence of all the powers that are out there in the world. Paracelsus said: “When you look out into nature, you see the letters everywhere, and man is the word that is composed of these letters.” Schiller wrote to Goethe about his conception of man: “I see how you take all of nature to explain man. You look for the parts everywhere to explain man from the totality of appearances.” All the essences of the individual forces of nature have merged in the essence of man; this is how the Secret Doctrine presents man.

Man's foundation is also an image of that cosmos. The battle between the lower and higher nature in man is an image of the great cosmos. Man is a battleground of the spiritual against the physical. This is also the case in nature. But man is still in the middle of the battle. He looks back to a time when he was still in the midst of the battle and to a future when he will have overcome the struggle. The spiritual, the physically invisible forces, are fighting against the physically visible world. This struggle is presented in various ways to the most diverse peoples in the Secret Doctrine. The story of the battle of spiritual forces of nature can be found among all peoples. Out in the world, the battle has already been decided. There the lower nature kingdoms have been left behind. When man in the future has cast off his lower nature, he will have achieved what the gods have already achieved. The nature kingdoms are the traces left behind by the gods. Man looks up to the divine beings, who give a picture of what man will one day be. The gods are the elder brothers of man. Man is on the way to becoming a god. Outside in the world, man also sees the conquest of the lower nature by a higher one. This is expressed in the old legends and myths in some images common to them. In ancient India we find the god Dhyans, in new India the god Indra. He conquers the serpent. In Germanic mythology we find the god Dhin or Dhinz. It is said that he overcame a dragon in ancient times. The gods Wotan, Wille and Weh overcame the giant Ymir and formed the microcosm out of him. The old gods Wotan, Wille and Weh emerged from what remained in nature. Another concept of the Secret Doctrine is that man is the younger brother of the gods and that he who is an initiate comes closer to the gods. He has passed through certain stages to become divine. The various mythologies have regarded nature as the traces left behind by the gods. This secret doctrine found different expressions depending on the different dispositions of the peoples. The Germanic peoples had a very special expression for it.

To understand how the ancient Germans arrived at their ideas, one must delve deeper into their way of thinking. The ancient Germans did not simply make up their sagas as scholars have believed. German scholarship could have provided a good basis for a correct understanding. There is a work that presents a thorough study of legends: Das Rätsel der Sphinx (The Riddle of the Sphinx) by Ludwig Laistner. He used to take the same view as the old German scholars of legends that people have symbolized natural phenomena. In his work, Die Rätsel der Sphinx, he has succeeded in getting to the bottom of the legends that still live in the people today. There is a widespread legend, the legend of the Noon-Day Woman. If a farmer stays out in the fields instead of going home at noon, the Noon-Day Woman appears and asks him three questions. Those who cannot answer these questions will be killed by the Noon-Day Woman. In some areas, it is said that you can only ward her off by reciting the Lord's Prayer. Ludwig Laistner has shown that this legend is nothing more than a reflection of what a person actually encounters when they stay out in the fields at midday. They fall asleep and enter a state in which they perceive their surroundings as the symbol of the witch of noon.

Dreams are symbolic. The ticking of the clock next to our bed is perhaps symbolized as the clatter of horses. Dreams are symbolic, even when they are about external sensory events. That is the peculiarity of dream experiences: they are symbolic.

Everything in the world has developed, including consciousness. The present day consciousness has developed from a kind of somnambulistic consciousness. Everything has gradually come into being. Thus, from a certain clairvoyant consciousness, today's consciousness has emerged. Some organs that used to serve a purpose are now only present as rudiments. The dream is also a rudimentary state. It is the last remnant of an earlier so-called astral consciousness. In the clairvoyant, out of the dream consciousness, the clairvoyant consciousness is developed. He attains a consciousness that is not only the physical consciousness, but also a spiritual consciousness. The somnambulists seek to tune down the ordinary physical consciousness in order to induce the so-called trance consciousness. With the advent of the day consciousness, people have lost the astral trance consciousness. In the past, people needed a somnambulistic, clairvoyant consciousness. In the future, the earlier clairvoyant consciousness will return and will be developed alongside the daytime consciousness. People who have less developed intellect often still have traces of the old clairvoyant consciousness. It is not uncommon for people in the countryside to have a clairvoyant consciousness.

If we go back in time, we would find people who use their senses very little but still have the old Atlantean clairvoyant consciousness. They knew that the gods are nothing more than creations of the old astral consciousness. The soul of the people has retained remnants of the astral consciousness. Germanic mythology is an expression of spiritual experiences. Our ancestors still had spiritual consciousness. The ancient Germans preserved their astral experiences in their mythology. The ancient German saw the gods fighting with the lower forces of nature in the astral world. The whole of Germanic mythology comprises tales of experiences within the astral world. The sagas describe how ancient clairvoyant humanity moved downwards. Baldur once dreamt that he would soon die. All creatures swore an oath not to harm him. But Loki used mistletoe, which had been forgotten, to make Hödur, the blind Hödur, kill Baldur. Humanity, which has become blind to the spiritual world, is Hödur. His ancestor with the old somnambulistic consciousness is Baldur. Only that which belongs to him can kill him: mistletoe, which dates back to an earlier epoch of development. At that time there was a mineral kingdom on earth that was half plant-like; plants grew in it as if in a living being. Mistletoe is a remnant of that plant kingdom that can only grow on another living plant.

The ancient Germans realized that the spiritual world is also a world of light, but that humans cannot perceive it. Baldur is a man of light from this spiritual world. He can perceive the astral world. Hödur, however, is the new man who does not see the astral world. Germanic mythology also expresses that man is a younger brother of the gods. In Germanic mythology, we are told how Wotan hung on the gallows of the cross for nine days and nine nights and that Mimir gave him a drink. This is reminiscent of Christ Jesus. Here, too, the crucifixion is presented as a symbol. Wotan is portrayed here as an initiate. It is then said that Wotan crawls through the crevices of the earth as a snake and that he reaches Gunnlöd, the Valkyrie. He stays there for three days and three nights. She hands him the potion of wisdom. The initiate remained in the cave in lethargy for three days and three nights. There he was to unite with his higher soul. The higher consciousness of man has always been represented as something feminine. The feminine is the higher consciousness that man attains when he enters the realms of the spiritual world.

The story of Wotan is adapted to the abilities of the human race at that time, which is told by all initiates. Gunnlöd is the Valkyrie. She is the higher consciousness. This is also referred to as the Valkyrie in other Germanic legends. Siegfried also reaches the Valkyrie when he attains his higher consciousness. — This portrayal of the Valkyrie Gunnlöd takes us deep into Germanic mythology. The Germanic peoples were a warlike people who placed the greatest value on bravery. A warrior who fell on the battlefield was led to Valhalla by the Valkyrie. Those who fell on the battlefield reached their higher soul part. This came to meet him as the Valkyrie. The human being who passed through the gate of death had to unite with the Valkyrie. That is why Wotan stayed with Gunnlöd. In Germanic mythology, every initiate was thought of as being connected to the Valkyrie.

Siegfried is said to have worn the magic hood of invisibility. The initiate is hidden in a certain way. People do not recognize the initiate. The hood of invisibility hides him from people. Siegfried is an initiate; he unites with the Valkyrie Brunhild. He becomes invulnerable like all initiates. He remains vulnerable only where he carries the cross, between the shoulder blades. A greater initiate is promised, who will also be invulnerable there. Because the ancient Germans had retained their astral beliefs for a long time, the secret teachers were able to give them the teachings in the astral consciousness.

Almost all Asian peoples are descended from the ancient Atlanteans. Their ancestors came from Atlantis. The ancestors of the ancient Germans had also come from Atlantis. They had remained in Europe, while another part had continued to migrate as far as Asia. Those who had advanced further had first developed sensory consciousness and intellectual consciousness. They were already living with advanced spiritual ideas. Hence the urge arose in India to take an artificial path to penetrate into the other worlds. For this, the Indian needed an artificial path. This is what is called yoga, a certain training that leads from the sensual world to the spiritual world. A yogi is a person who seeks to find his way back to the spiritual world. In India, the intellect found expressions for the artificial clairvoyance that was developed through the practice of yoga. The ancient Germans also had astral vision. In India, on the one hand, artificial clairvoyance developed, and on the other hand, intellectual philosophy. Those who no longer have astral vision need external symbols and rituals, as found in Indian symbolism. These are sensual expressions for the spiritual worlds. In India, what had now developed in its most glorious form was also in Christianity. Germania had also been pointed to Christianity. In Siegfried, one saw an initiate who was invulnerable except for the one spot. Kriemhild pinned the cross to that spot. This is a picture that prophetically points to the future of Germania. Here is the place where the cross will lie, making it invulnerable. Thus the old saga points here to Christianity, which made this place invulnerable.

Because the Germanic world felt so close to what came over through Christianity, that is why Christianity found such an entrance there. Within Europe, there was no need for Indian philosophy. We could do without it altogether. What is gained from the correct immersion in the Germanic sagas of the gods must appear even more profoundly.

These concepts will come to life again when that which is still alive, albeit veiled, in the soul of the people is awakened to life. This treasure will be unearthed; then we will understand in a unique way what our European ancestors have to say to their descendants.

Theosophy is intended to create a brotherhood across all of humanity, causing people to carry into the future what they understand from the past.

The name Lucifer inspires a slight sense of dread in some, and is usually associated with notions of antipathy. Is this justified? The name Lucifer means: light bearer, light bringer. Medieval beliefs were different, but for those who have studied the deep knowledge of the world, Lucifer actually denotes something quite different.

Spiritual beings play a role in human life. The religions of the East speak of deva and dhyani chohan, the more Western religions, such as Christianity, speak of angels and archangels. To those who are familiar with the spiritual worlds, they represent something true and real. Higher beings play a role in human life. Lucifer is also understood to be among the guiding personalities, the leading or seducing ones.

Here we must be clear about dualism – duality – which plays a role in all areas of life. The ancients, including Pythagoras, speak of this duality: light and darkness, male and female, positive and negative magnetism, and we could cite many more such dualities. – When we make a glass rod electrically positive by rubbing it, we simultaneously make the rubbing material electrically negative. The electricity of glass and that of the rubbed material are related to each other as light is to darkness. In the Persian creation myth, we find Ormuzd and Ahriman: good deity, evil deity. Everything that drives the world forward is done by the good god, while everything that hinders it is withdrawn by the evil god. They place man in the middle.

Remember that everything in the world has a good and an evil side. What do human beings, with their culture, not owe to fire. And on the other hand, how destructive the power of fire can be in volcanic phenomena. Germany's great poet Schiller sang gloriously about this in “The Bell”: “Beneficial is the power of fire...” and so on.

This duality also works in man himself. For centuries, the one principle was seen as evil. A distinction was made between divine - good, and luciferic - evil. In the story of creation, the luciferic principle was represented as a snake. Man had to grow out of a dull nature, so the snake came and opened his eyes to good and evil, and thus another principle was opposed to the divine one. The ancient Indians called the Rishis a snake.

We have to go much deeper into the development of the human soul to see what reality underlies the Lucifer principle. In more recent times, views on this have undergone changes. These were already evident in the old Faust saga. Goethe reshaped it to meet human needs. Faust not only wanted to immerse himself in divine science, he also wanted to make a covenant with evil powers. Then he no longer wanted to approach theology, he wanted to remain a medical doctor. He put the Bible behind the bench and that was considered a reason to fall into the hands of evil forces. In Goethe's work, the crux of the matter is in the second part of Faust: “Whoever strives, we can redeem.” So it is not something destructive, but rather a power is evoked that is not opposed to the deity.

If we want to understand this power, we must realize how man fits into the world around him. Man forms one of the kingdoms; alongside him we have the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. Man perceives himself as a self-aware being and carries within himself all these kingdoms; he is the bearer of all these natures. He has a physical body in common with the mineral, and he also shares the etheric or life body with the plant. Through his world of feelings, which, as the astral body, is the carrier of passions, instincts, desires, he has something in common with the animal. Thus, man is in an interdependent relationship with the three realms.

Man can only sustain his life by breathing. He draws in the air of life – oxygen – into himself, combines the latter with carbon in his body and exhales this poison – carbonic acid. But man and animal could not live if the plant did not continually renew this air of life. Man and animal owe the possibility of life to the plant. The plant owes it to the mineral. It is only logical to extend this chain of development beyond man, not only to lower beings but also to higher ones. Just as man belongs to lower beings, so he also belongs to higher ones. The fact that man does not see higher beings is no reason why they should not exist. Higher senses can bring man this perception.

Man is first of all a tetrad: physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I. He is a developing being. How does his development take place? A savage still follows his animal instincts, he follows every urge; the one who is higher up only follows certain urges, and those who are very high up, let us say, for example, Schiller or Francis of Assisi, follow even fewer of the lower urges, but transform them into ideals. This results in an upward development of the astral body. The inferior man also has an astral body, but he has done little work in it. A superior man raises his astral body from the animal stage to a higher, nobler and more perfect form. The astral body consists of two parts: what other entities have given him, and what he himself has worked into it. That which he has worked into it himself, we call “Manas”, spirit self, and we thus designate the fifth limb of man. Manas is nothing other than the transformed astral body. But man can do much more than transform his astral body. An undeveloped person knows nothing of morality, law, logic; he has developed little Manas.

But there are even deeper changes. In the ninth and tenth centuries, people did not all have such perfect ideas, but much of what they had learned was incorporated into their astral bodies, because it is the carrier of everything we can learn in the world. What we learn changes quickly, but habits and temperaments change more slowly. We could compare what changes quickly with the minute hand of a clock and what changes more slowly with the hour hand. But there is also the opportunity to change what we are used to, and in doing so we change the etheric or life body: because it is denser, it makes it more difficult for the ego to change. As much as the human being changes his etheric body, so much 'budi' arises in him. Religions are instructions on how to work “Budhi” into the etheric body, while morality only changes the astral body. In the highest sense, art does the same as religions.

Thus you can now find the human being with six limbs, even if manas and budhi are only present in him in a germinal state. But there is already secret training that develops the etheric body. What is taught to the individual is doctrine; what transforms humanity is an influence on the budhi, is secret training. A chela, an occult disciple, works in his etheric body.

But what is hardly present in the seed is the Atman. It is such a strong power that a person can work with it right into his physical body. What can a person do in his physical body today? A person who can develop as an artistic human being, as a chela, can become master of his habits. But the person who has worked this seventh link, this Atman, into himself, also learns to control his pulse. And with this, he becomes partaker of the eternal. This is an achievement of mastery.

Now we see the human being with manas, budhi and atman. We now know that man, we said the I, stands in relation to the three lower realms, and now we see that he stands in relation to a realm above him, the divine realm, through what he has worked into himself as Manas. In this divine realm we have to seek the Elohim, divine spirits, of whom the Bible, as Jehovah, names one.

Through his Manas, his spiritual self, man is linked to the higher worlds. Therefore, we speak of man as one who is becoming, an evolving God. Christ Jesus says, “You are gods.” (John 10:34) Man will one day look back on his present spiritual level and he will feel like a human being who has grown out of it completely.

If we believe in evolution, we must also consider this for other beings, and looking back, we see that our older brothers, the Elohim, with them Jehovah, on an earlier planet or on the earlier embodiment of the earth, occupied the same stage that man now occupies on the present embodiment of the earth. The law of embodiment is not only the basis of man, but of all beings. Goethe speaks of the Earth Spirit: “In the flood of life, in the storm of action, I surge up and down,” and so on. The Earth was seen by individuals as a spiritual being and man as its members. The Earth was often embodied and in its previous embodiment it brought the present gods to the level of man. And in a later incarnation, the present-day human being will take on the level of his older brothers, the Elohim or gods. God, the Nameless, the Unfathomable, is not spoken of here. Elohim or Deva, better translated into German as: spirits.

To illustrate this “progressive” view, I will give an albeit trivial example: just as a student passes through different classes, the class that present humanity is going through is what the gods went through in their previous incarnation on Earth. Students also remain in classes, and so there were beings that did not go through this class completely.

Where do they stand today between humans and gods? They are higher beings than humans, but lower than the gods. In a sense, they are familiar with humans. The following law exists: Each of the basic parts of the human being is developed in an incarnation on earth. In the present incarnation on earth, the manas is developing; in the earlier incarnation, the astral body. The essential thing in this development on earth was that man has changed his entire astral body, that he no longer has anything of the animal in him. Through the development of the manas, he can enter into contact with manasic beings. Only when the atman is developed can he develop independently. Today, older brothers work, later still older ones in budhi and still older ones in atman. The higher spirits that have remained are related to the human astral body. They have already tasted of the Divine. Just as in Manas, demigods also help us to assert ourselves and to glow with the Divine. We would remain trapped in lower instincts if it were not for this stimulation. Thus the passions are transformed into higher instincts. There would only be a barren realm of moral principles, but they would not pulsate in man.

The Old Testament has wonderfully developed this law. The entities that evoke enthusiasm, the glow of love for the manasic, are called Luciferic entities. Thus, Lucifer is the one who evokes the astral passion for the divine in man. He thus arouses in him the desire to learn to love the divine, not as a duty, but as an inclination. He adds independence to submission. He is the instigator of human freedom.

Man becomes free only by following the divine out of his own urge. This is reflected in the biblical story of creation. God guided man, he could not choose. Then the serpent came, and the thought came into man, not only to live in God is desirable, but to become God himself, to carry the image of the deity in [himself] as a personality. Through Lucifer — biblically expressed through the serpent — the human body became the light bearer, as Lucifer himself was the light bearer, until Christ entered the world as “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) and realized the principle of love for the divine. External knowledge, knowing what the laws of the world are, now seems dull to man. This external knowledge should grasp our inner being, should intervene directly as theosophy, as an independent inner experience. This is how Lucifer anchors himself in man. This research is called the school of Luciferian striving. These people are called: children of Lucifer.

If the gods gave science, Lucifer gave enthusiasm.

God: Revelation.

Lucifer: freedom.

We have a filial relationship with God; Lucifer awakened the feeling of being an independent being, of freedom. Devotion was a voluntary sacrifice. As everywhere, there must be a duality: God and Lucifer.

Thus, the Luciferic entities have not been left behind for no reason. They are those who strive to lead us to the divine by our own free choice. To do so, man must also have the opportunity to be evil. He can certainly become divine without it, but only through free choice.

If the Supreme is to be free, then it must be anchored in the other nature. In this way, God and luciferic entities work towards perfection and freedom.

Question & Answer: Question: [What does the] sphinx mean?

Rudolf Steiner: What the mind is trying to grasp today is nothing new as a concept. The pyramids represent the ancient views of our ancestors: there are four lines on which they stand = the fourfold nature of the human being, physical body, etheric body, astral body with the I. That is the foundation. Above it rises the triangle, representing the three basic parts that the ego works out of the four: Atman, Budhi, Manas. The trinity is not yet complete. If you want to feel this, then you must look at the sphinx. She represents the lower nature and from the eye the riddle of future development radiates towards you. In it, man prophetically seeks his future.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Rudolf Steiner: There are two writings – they are not actually writings in the strict sense – one is kept by a religious community, a church in secret, the other is kept by a master, a great leader of humanity.

A few weeks ago, I spoke about the principle of Lucifer and his significance in the world. Today, we will discuss the principle in connection with the drama of the same name by Edouard Schuré. I do not want to talk about the work of art itself.

In this work of art, we have something that few works of art have; for it arose out of the theosophical view. Schur took his material from events and occurrences of the fourth century AD and thus artistically shaped the two great currents of human development.

Today I want to talk about the two currents, about what one might call the Luciferic principle and which deals with the deification of man, in contrast to the other principle, the humanization of God, or of the gods. In fact, such two currents meet in man.

In the mysteries, these greatest secrets of world events were spiritually depicted; the passage of God through all the kingdoms of nature, until finally up to man – and the ascent of man through the physical and astral nature up to deification. Edouard Schur€ shows how these two currents crossed.

For us, the most important thing is the so-called Fall of Man, the expulsion from paradise. Today we want to talk freely about this event in the development of man. You know that man has a series of embodiments behind and in front of him. Everything that is and lives on earth is subject to the same law of embodiment; so are the great beings we call planets. The earth was also in a different planetary state in the past; it too has planetary ancestors. The purpose of such transformations is for these beings to ascend to higher levels: humans, animals, plants, and minerals existed earlier, but in a lower form. It would be an incomplete view to assume that the ascending series ends with humans. Huxley says, “When you look at the truths this way, there is nothing to prevent perfection from passing through humans and ascending to God.”

Occultism says about the development of man on the earlier planets: Man was not yet man there; there were other beings. And when the earth merges into another planet, then the present man will stand spiritually as high as those beings, and other beings will stand below him. The predecessors of humanity had a very different form and different activity. Like them, even if not exactly the same in spirit, man will develop.

These beings now also appear in the biblical creation story as Elohim or spirits of light. These beings rose from humans to gods as the former planet progressed. In the next stage, humans become Elohim. The Bible contains theosophical truths. If we want to understand the task that fell to these Elohim, we must first realize that there are initially three types of activity. The first is to perceive, the second to live, and the third to create. Every being must pass through these three stages. The Elohim first attained the stage of life and then proceeded to creation. Man was initially in the stage of beholding, then he came to life, and in a later stage he will create. “In the beginning God created man and blew into him the living breath. Then man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) One of the seven Elohim is Yahweh or Jehovah. His task was to create at the beginning of the earth. We say: Man originated in the third root race, but the present man is quite unlike the Lemurian primeval man.

The mainland of Lemuria was interspersed with mighty masses of fire and perished at that time due to volcanic upheavals. The air circle was not only a mass of water, but filled with substances that had not yet settled.

The land that emerged later, Atlantis, was submerged by floods. With it perished the fourth root race.

The civilization of the fifth root race is spread over Europe, Asia and Africa.

What happened at the beginning of the physical sex? What came over from the earlier planet?

First, the highest humans. And then, between the present-day animal and man, there was a human animal, such as no longer exists today. In the ancient Lemurian times, however, these animals did not walk around, for they were semi-ethereal beings with a touch of matter. Like a breath, they swept over the earth's surface. Opposite them was a sequence of physical beings, very different from minerals, plants and animals; but the latter developed from them. The physical part of the three realms was formed from the earlier planet, and the individuals who were able to evolve were able to lay the foundation and the basis for further development into human beings. This is expressed in the Mosaic creation story with the words: “And God formed man out of the dust of the ground.” (Genesis 2:7)

How did this transformation take place? It was the work of the creative Elohim. These spirits of light transformed the earlier creation; their work was directed towards man, they did not need to create the soul. For that came down from the earlier world as a breath. Thus, in the highest beings of the Lemurian period, there lived a physical being that stood higher than its predecessors on the earlier planet. These beings were tripartite. They had a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In the new human being, the “I” now also worked and helped to build the physical body. Thus, the new human being had four parts, and the fact that he became “I” was the work of the spirits of light.

This fourfold nature is considered the most important mystery. The threefold nature is being transformed into the fourfold. If you can visualize these structures, you will understand the dual nature of man: the outer shell and the divine. The seven Elohim work here, and Jehovah has the task of transforming the dual-sex nature into a single-sex one. Thus, male and female sex only came into being on Earth. With the creation of Jehovah, with the creation of the single-sex human beings, humanity on earth begins to receive its true task. The earlier planet was the planet of wisdom, the earth is the planet of love, and the attraction of the sexes is the lowest degree of love. What is love today was wisdom in the past. Every part of the human body, when we examine it, the brain, the sense organs, whatever it is, gives us the impression of wise arrangement. This is because man has gone through the world of wisdom. The planet at that time was pulsating with wisdom, the present one is pulsating with love. Every planet has its task. With this love, man was given not only the relationship between the sexes, but all, all the newly acquired earthly goods that man has.

To indicate what the result of this newly emerging love was in ancient times, let us follow man from the point where the dual sex begins. In those days there were small communities of people descended from one couple. Blood relatives married each other. And consanguinity is the only reason that love remains in the same blood, beyond man and woman. Only later did long-distance marriage occur instead of close marriage. This relationship of love as blood relationship can be traced back to the time of ancient Judaism. National love is implanted in sex love. The Jews form one big family, as it were. Jehovah implanted what was inherited; the Jehovah principle is inheritance, and inherited love is connected with that.

We know that in ancient times, blood relatives had a very different memory. Such a person remembered the experiences of previous generations. Personal memory arose from family memory. Adam, Cain, Seth denote a continuous memory. Everything connected with this memory is called the Jehovah Principle. All truth, wisdom, knowledge is connected with it. What man today regards as a phrase was then truth.

I would like to quote a conversation between Rosegger and Anzengruber here. In Rosegger's work, the peasant figures are all carefully studied, and you can feel it in them; in Anzengruber's work, they come to life before us. Rosegger noticed this and said to Anzengruber: “It would be better for you to look at farmers.” Anzengruber replied: “I have never looked at a farmer; but my ancestors were farmers, and that is in the blood!” Such is the last remnant of something that used to be common. It was not just poetic creation, but a way of looking at things. One did not just see the ancestors, one saw the process of the earth itself. What is present as ancient wisdom is not written down in any other way; it is in the blood. Only Rosicrucian theosophy approaches it differently. This is how man has become, how wisdom and love have been implanted in his blood; it “arises” from the love of the two sexes, to use Jakob Böhme's expression. There is an intermediate stage between human beings and those Elohim. In everyday language, I compared it to a student being held back in a school class. Thus, some of the Elohim remained on the planet that preceded the Earth. These are the luciferic spirits, with Lucifer as their leader or most outstanding one. So, above man are Elohim and the retarded. The latter must now make up for what they have missed. What kind of beings are they? A complete being has developed its seven basic parts. A human being has not yet fully developed them. Man, with his four-part entity, is on the way to developing the seven basic parts. The luciferic entities had not developed an Atma; most of them only came to the development of Budhi, the spirit of life. This makes them superior to man, but inferior to the Elohims. The beings that achieved Budhi were in the Venus state. Venus was the sixth basic part or Budhi. They did not fully develop on the planet of wisdom and did not achieve creative love. They could create in the outer wisdom: art, science, but not in what man creates within. The Jehovah principle creates within: love, community, states; everything that works on the outside, such as art and science, has been handed down from the previous planet and works like a second principle. That is why this appears as a kind of enemy. While the Jehovah principle seeks to uplift us to love, this one to wisdom. It makes the ego a wise being. On the previous planet, wisdom had not yet been implanted as an ego, because the ego had not yet been developed. There was no selfish wisdom.

Wisdom and love are two great currents that have been at work as forces within the process of becoming a human being. Then the striving for freedom intruded. The Luciferic principle does not have the struggle for existence as its goal; war is not the purpose; the purpose is freedom, independence, science, knowledge. A change in the interaction of these two principles occurred with the appearance of Christ Jesus. Then a completely new impulse was given to the development of the earth. An ancient saying goes: “Whoever does not leave wife and brother and sister cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Love, linked to blood relationship, must extend to larger communities. Through Jesus Christ, all barriers must cease, and the beginning must be made to love everyone. The Christ principle must be extended to all of humanity, and love must be purified to the highest degree. What began in weakness in the lower sexual instinct could be transformed into love for humanity. And only with that did the Earth become the planet of love. What was grounded in the Jehovah principle was raised to the highest level by the son principle, and from that point on the possibility was gained of contrasting strong love with wisdom.

Since the Christ Principle has been active on Earth, Christ and Lucifer have been standing opposite each other as two poles. The Christ Principle has internalized love and made it the essence of the soul. In the first centuries of Christianity, Hellenism, Greek culture, brought the outer world to its highest level. Whether in sculpture, drama, or the political state, everything the Greeks created was a one-sided external representation of the Jehovah principle.

How did this Greek way of life develop? What happened? Plato was called an Attic Greek-speaking Moses. Plato gave a solid form to the formless ideas of the initiated Moses. If we are broad-minded enough to understand them, wisdom and love breathe towards us in Hellenic culture and present themselves in the god Dionysus. The divine that appears to us has split into individual works of art. Spirit has become form in the Dionysian Greek culture. If the Hellene has become entirely the body of culture, then love in Christ has become entirely the soul of culture. The spirit in the body and in the soul that is inward, occultism represents: female = the soul, male = the body, which is permeated by the spirit. The body filled with spirit is opposed to the soul.

Schuré contrasts Phosphoros, the representative of the Hellenic spirit, the wisdom that creates the outer form, with Kleonis, the Christian soul, which is entirely based on the theosophical spirit.

In all great poetry, the aim is to depict human development, and it is an achievement that we are once again seeing the creation of works of art that have arisen from a theosophical spirit.

In ancient times, there were children of God who proclaimed revelations inherited from above. There were also children of Lucifer who presented themselves as fire spirits and were the teachers of wisdom.

And Jehovah implanted love in them until they matured into the Christ-principle, into a wisdom that can generate love at the same time, and a love that can generate wisdom at the same time. Then the children of God and the children of Lucifer will meet, then the two currents will merge into one. This happens in Christ: He is God become man and man become God.

When the Christian virgin Kleonis united with the pagan spirit Phosphoros, love and wisdom united. The struggle between love and wisdom was present. But when the children of Lucifer and the children of God unite, the medieval idea that the children of Lucifer are opponents of God will fade away. But with that, the great mission of man on earth will be fulfilled.