The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We can only understand the Apocalypse if we accept the fundamental nature of Christianity as a mystical fact. This fundamental nature is contained in the words: “Blessed are they that have believed, not seen.” What once took place in the interior of the crypts has now been carried out into the arena of world history itself. The old mystery was revealed in Christianity: that which is a mystery at one time becomes manifest at another. The content of ancient mystery books is reproduced in the Gospels; the record of future events is contained in the Apocalypse of John.

Anyone who wants to understand the spirit of such writings must, above all, know how religions work.

Today, there is a widespread belief that the simple word contains the truth, and there is an aversion to elevating the spirit. Nothing should be said against the simplicity of the word: but the inner strength from which such speech flows springs from the highest heights of the spirit. Not everyone could speak of the revelations of the highest regions. The church father had the strength, the power of the [gap in the text]

A destiny seen in mystery is described to us in the apocalypse. A lower initiation is enough to see beyond one root race, a higher one is necessary to see beyond many. To create an apocalypse, the third degree of chelaship is necessary. In the realm of highly developed astral vision, the destiny of a root race unfolds before us. From the fourth chapter on, the Apocalypse is devachanic vision. He who wrote the Apocalypse overlooked the period up to the middle of the Lemurian race and the future until sexuality ceased. The higher experiences are no different from each other. Never do two initiates report in different ways. The initiates of all times spoke as the apocalyptic did. In the Apocalypse, the author speaks from the Christian point of view.

Let us look back at the formation of the races.

Before the Lemurian race, there was a development of humanity that was quite different. The etheric body had not yet solidified; it did not walk on the ground, but floated through the etheric earth itself. Its organs were luminous. Man incarnated in fiery clouds at the beginning of the Lemurian race. The esotericist describes that transition from fine to physical matter, those beings that developed into physical density, as the eagle state of man. The eagle is therefore the human being who has developed from the ether to physical matter.

In the Atlanteans, man had a strengthened life force, he could control prana, use the seed power. During the present race, for about thirteen million years, he has only mastered physics. Later he will regain control over the etheric body and the astral body.

This second stage, in which man still has control over the etheric body, is symbolized by the lion man.

For the Aryan, who has descended completely into the physical, the symbol is the bull.

Three very definite successive stages of humanity are thus designated.

The symbolic language is understood by everyone who has learned it; they know what is meant by the special signs.

A frequently used character is two interlocking triangles: an eagle at the top, a lion on the left, a bull on the right; in the middle, a human face. This means that there is a triangle below that characterizes past conditions. The three angles therefore remain initially [gap in the text]

In the middle is the inner man, the actual permanent essence. These are the four natures, through which man is actually human, can be seen in the two intertwined triangles.

These three animals appear wherever the development of the human being is discussed. But in the Apocalypse of John, there is still another way of speaking. The apocalyptic overcomes the veils that separate him from the earlier stages. In order to be able to see himself back, the earlier organs must be enlivened. He must draw animals that see and look. Eye, all eye.

The future stages can only be grasped by someone who has an eye for the ascent, the use of the higher bodies. Now we are in the stage of the purely physical mind. This mind requires a certain moral teaching and a certain religion. In essence, the individual must seek his fortune at the expense of the other. Those who strive for the higher must already rise above the rest. In the occult school, there are three words that describe the new age. These are:

Brotherly love: the love of community as a moral ideal.

Pneumatology: the doctrine of the spirit and the spiritual as the decisive thing: scientific ideal.

Free religious principle: self-authority in religious matters.

This will be the sixth race.

A well-known occult law is that in certain time cycles, what has happened before will be repeated. The eagle, bull and lion were repeated in the first three sub-races. The fourth sub-race is referred to as “human”. In it, Christianity emerged.

The people of the first sub-race, the Indian people, had expressed the culture of thought, the highest deification of thought. They had to repeat in brief what the Lemurians had experienced. The Lemurians were people of feeling; the Indians thought in feelings; what thought radiates in feelings we find in the old Vedic culture - thought takes hold of feelings in the Indian. In cultures where thought is served more by memory, we have the culture of heroes, the long catalogs that have led to memory. Much was noted. And from the notes of the ancient Persians, the Magi, the Chaldeans, the calendar books were created. From them developed astronomy, astrology, technology, mathematics, and so on.

Thus man came to the race where he understood what it means: in man himself, the god has come to life.

The first race could fall away most easily. The feeling is not yet strong enough for the thought to really internalize.

Every day that one delves deeper into Vedanta-Alchry is a source of new admiration. On the other hand, the most abject idolatry that the people have fallen into confronts us. But the great virtues of people always have the greatest dark sides as well. The Apocalypticist seeks to make us understand this phenomenon by using the example of the community of Ephesus, symbolized by the sect of the Nicolaitans; it is intended to show us how, in the fifth root race, the most external lives alongside the highest.

Let us visualize how the early Christians viewed their Christianity.

“There are three that begat it on earth, and three in heaven.” Atma, Buddhi, Manas. Father, Son and Spirit.

To speak of the Father would have been rejected by the early Christian. He believed he could only recognize the Father through the Son, through the Word: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The highest that man can aspire to is thought, the mental. It is characteristic of man on earth that he lives in three worlds at once: the spiritual, the soul and the physical - but only in the physical consciously.

The highest for all religions was the world-creative will. When man, through the will, wants to express the thought, then it is first through the word. The word is the expression of the spirit through the will. Thus the Christian said: The Father expressed his spirit in the world through the power of the word. This is the second person of the Trinity, the third is the Holy Spirit, and He is expressed in the Word. The world is the embodiment of the Spirit and came into being through the Word of God, as the vibration of air comes through human speech. This Word is to be thought of as the Second Person, as the highest Being, much more personal than a human individuality. This highest being became man for the first Christians in the one whom they recognized as the proclaimer of the Gospel. He who does not understand this, he who wants to dispute the Word made Flesh, cannot place himself in the frame of mind of the first Christians. That the Christian has risen to devachanic vision is clear to him who knows how to read the Gospel.

The Christ-life has something essentially different from the Buddha-life, and this was understood by the first initiates. Time is suspended, the past is present: such is devachan. At the transfiguration of Christ the three disciples are uplifted to devachanic vision.

Here we have something that we do not have in the Buddha life. Buddha became luminous... here it concludes. The Christ life begins its most significant epoch with this fact. Thus the first Christians said: “We well understand the pre-announcement of this, which is fulfilled in the present, through the old religions... But blessed are those who believe, not see.

What had previously been achieved by beholding the great truths of the world in the interior of the crypts could now be experienced by those who merely believed. The mystery was brought out into the open world arena. The cross of Golgotha is the same act, erected before all eyes. The ancient mystery doctrine had to be brought to the world in a popular form. A step has been taken that leads further than the old religions.

Dear attendees!

We have reached an important point in our consideration of the Apocalypse. What more is to be said about it should lead us even deeper into certain hidden truths. We will see how this difficult-to-understand work expresses the theosophical truths in a magnificent form. When we look back at what has already been said here, we have to describe the Apocalypse as the “secret revelation” of what the human spirit is to experience in its future development. But it would be quite wrong for anyone to think that such a predestination suppresses the will of the human being, or to believe that everything must come about in a certain way, regardless of what the human being does. No, that is absolutely not the case. The great universal laws of the spirit are not given in such a way that they are imposed on man from without, but for the purpose of man inwardly absorbing them and developing himself in their spirit. According to a very definite natural law, oxygen and hydrogen must combine to form water; but human will can bring about the conditions for them to combine, and can thus be the reason why the laws take effect. When he immerses himself in the laws of nature, he himself becomes the executor of these laws. He takes them into his spirit and thus becomes a co-creator of nature himself. It is no different with spiritual laws. It is ordained in the world that it should develop in accordance with spiritual laws, as it is grounded in nature, that it should shape itself according to natural laws. And just as man can only become a worthy co-creator of nature by acquiring knowledge of natural laws, so too can he only be active in spiritual life if he makes spiritual laws his own. If we know nothing of the laws of oxygen and hydrogen, we cannot participate in the way they combine. We fulfill our human task through the knowledge and understanding of natural laws. These would be present and valid even without our knowledge. But without our knowledge, nature would pass over us. We would remain in our dullness and could only be will-less tools in its creation.

The great spiritual laws would also be active in the world without our knowledge. What is said in the Apocalypse would be true even if no human being ever grasped it, just as the law of the connection between chemical substances would be true even if no human being ever knew about it. But it is in the hands of man to approach his divine goal by observing these laws. The light that reveals itself through divine power in the world must shine into his soul. In this highest sense, the “childhood of God” must be understood by man. A father does not keep his knowledge to himself, but shares it with the child so that it may develop in the sense of this knowledge. Of course, the child would also grow older if it did not care about the laws and watched idly as the father acts. But the child would remain undeveloped. But the Father's love consists in developing it. And God's love for man consists in revealing his will in the human soul. God has called man to be perfect. God not only creates, but also reveals himself; and man's will must make the revelations of the Godhead the impulses of his will. What is to happen is certainly determined from the beginning; but it is equally determined that man himself should carry out the revelations of the Godhead. God has not excluded human action from his plan of the world, but has included it in it from the very beginning. Certainly everything necessary would be done by the Father if the child were inactive. But then the child would have no part in anything.

The Apocalypse was added to the Gospel. For the Christian, the Gospel represents the joyful message of the incarnation of God or the divine Word. This “Word” has become flesh to dwell among men. This sacrifice of God means the liberation of man from the bonds of matter. Through Christ, man is to be united in spirit with his God. By adhering to Christ, he carries the Spirit of God in his heart. But this Spirit of God is the guide to the will of the Father. And the will of the Father is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, such as the Apocalypse is one. From Christ, the strength shall flow to the Christian to understand what the Father has decided from the beginning of the world. Christ died so that man may live, live in the Spirit. In the Apocalypse lies the spiritual will of the Father. Those who are initiated through Christ in faith receive the strength to reach the Father through Christ. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” But the Christian should also reach the Father, that is, he should recognize the will of the Father in the Revelation. The Gospel is the joyful message of Christ's sacrifice for the sake of man; the Apocalypse is the revelation of the divine will of the Father. Christ said that after his death he would send the 'Spirit'. And the theologian John only faithfully wrote down what the Spirit promised by Christ revealed to him.

When the Christian looks to Christ, uniting himself with him, he receives the strength and the life to understand the will of the Spirit; when he looks to the Revelation, he knows how to apply the strength received from Christ. The Apocalypse is a book. And every book has value only if one has the strength to understand it. Life in Christ should give the Christian the strength to understand the secret Revelation. This strength is bestowed through grace, as all spiritual strength is a gift of grace. But this strength must be developed. Christ wanted to unite people into a community of children of God; but the spirit of Revelation should bring the children of God to full maturity.

Starting from this point, we will delve even deeper into the Apocalypse next time.

Today we will deal with a paraphrase of the sentence that the whole world is meaningful, that the whole world is thought. By seeing creative thoughts in the world, we can find the thought. The mystics never arranged things in an arbitrary way, but in such a way that human institutions are also an image of world thoughts.

The names of the days of the week have a regular pattern. The days of the week are named after the planets. We want to learn to recognize how the names of the days of the week were established by the Chaldean magicians. The ancient Chaldean magicians said: Each day has four parts - forenoon, afternoon, before midnight, after midnight. They had to see these four parts of the day as the first element in time, as the next time period. They related the four-part day to the seven known planets.

[Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn = daily cycle Sun, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn = weekday names]

They had the seven planetary cycles described through the four-part day until they returned to the starting point, a number of days in a row. The ancient Chaldean magicians let the planetary cycles run through the four-part day. They dedicated the first morning to the moon. The end of a cycle coincided with the seventh day. Each planet had completed a four-fold cycle by the end of the week. They named each day of the week after the planet to which the morning was dedicated.

Morning – Moon = Monday
Afternoon – Mercury
Before midnight – Venus
After midnight – Sun

Morning – Mars = Mars Day = Tuesday – Tin
Afternoon – Jupiter
Before midnight – Saturn
After midnight – Moon

Morning – Mercury = Wednesday, Mercury day, Wednesday – Wotan
Afternoon – Venus
midnight – Sun
After midnight – Mars

Morning – Jupiter = Thursday – Donar, Jupiter day
Afternoon – Saturn
Before midnight — moon
After midnight — Mercury

Morning — Venus = Friday, Venus day
Afternoon — sun
Before midnight — Mars
After midnight — Jupiter

Morning – Saturn = Saturday, Saturn Day, Saturday
Afternoon – Moon
Before midnight – Mercury
after midnight – Venus

Morning – Sun = Sunday
Afternoon – Mars
Before midnight – Jupiter
After midnight – Saturn

Commercial culture no longer understood the naming of the days of the week after the stars. It is namely a very specific relationship, namely of four to seven, the fourfold related to the seven principles. The naming of the days of the week is a human institution. However, it was not done arbitrarily, but in the way it was prescribed by the circumstances. The people of that time allowed the cosmic conditions to resonate from everything and allowed the institutions to relate to each other in the same way that the microcosm relates to the macrocosm.

If you look at the environment properly, you will see that it is based on a very specific view of the world and life. It is a kama-manasic view that belongs to the lower mental plan. If people wanted to move on to such determinations, which contain measure and number, they would have to be inspired by the rupa plan of the mental.

Let us note that the time when such a thing could happen had to be inspired by the Rupaplan of the mental. So these labels came from a time when people were inspired by the Rupaplan of the mental.

The next plan they are inspired by is the astral plan. The relation of inspiration to the various plans, as it expresses itself in the various sub-races of the five root races, is as follows.

Let us assume that inspiration emanates from the astral plane and that kama is thus ordered. From the mental plane, inspiration also came about in terms of spatial relationships - for example, the inspiration for the construction of pyramids, whose proportions are based on the orbits of the stars. Kama can be ordered from the astral plane by permeating it with the idea of justice; ordering human instincts and feelings according to justice.

If we descend to a lower level, we come to the physical plane. There, human actions can no longer be ordered according to the idea of justice. There, the principle of action must be placed within each individual person. What used to be justice on the astral plane and measure and number on the mental plane must be placed in the heart of the human being on the physical plane.

The Arupaplan lies above the Rupaplan, measure and number cease; the determination according to very specific relationships and forms ceases; there is only the direct inflow of the divine. Thus, in the time of the Arupaplan, when the mind still allowed itself to be inspired by the Arupaplan - in the first sub-race, the Indian race - there was direct inspiration of the divine. At that time the Rishi culture existed. The Vedas emerged with incredible speed. Afterwards, the influence slowed down to the physical plane and became slower and slower. What was the principle of love in detail on the physical plane is now rising again to take hold of a majority. On the next Rupaplan, community life is now being organized according to measure and number. The peoples themselves determine races and classes according to their own reason. On the Arupaplan, a fully collective consciousness then follows.

These seven periods are in fact spread over the seven sub-races of the fifth root race.

1. The first sub-race, the Indian, belongs to the inspiration of the Arupa plan, the Rishikultur.

2. The peoples who allowed themselves to be inspired by the Rupaplan are the Persian and Chaldean Magi, the Persian race.

3. Inspired by the astral plan are all those who correspond to the same principle, the principle of justice. They were the peoples who gave commandments, the ancient Israelites, all those who prepared Christianity in the time before Christianity, the Semitic-Celtic sub-race.

4. The Greco-Latin race, which in its end developed the principle of love in Christianity.

5. The gradual development of the communal is reserved for our race. But it will only achieve this at the end, the Germanic sub-race.

6. The sixth

7. and seventh sub-races are races of the future, which have to develop socialism out of the spiritual. The nations will give themselves their organization.

In order to bring order into oneself, one must understand something like this. We were embodied in all the races. In the second sub-race, measure and number were involved in us. In the next incarnation, we had to develop measure and number. This will be fruitful as karma of the sixth sub-race, in which man will make arrangements according to measure and number. Likewise, inspiration will emerge on the Arupaplan in the seventh sub-race. We, in the fifth sub-race, live out what was taught in the third sub-race: justice.

The fourth sub-race is a special phenomenon: love. It has an effect in everything, but only expresses its own nature in the sixth root race. True Christianity will only be expressed in the sixth root race. In the sixth sub-race, the forms will be created into which the life of the sixth root race will be poured. Our sub-race has not progressed further than a sufficient sense of right and wrong; this was laid down in the third sub-race. The principle of justice.

The Theosophical Society is to prepare the communal life of the fifth sub-race. This can only come into its own in the second half of the sixth sub-race. The Theosophical Society upholds the principle of love throughout this development. Communal life must be created; that is a physical necessity. But love must be maintained - through the cultivation of humanity.

In the Slavic race live on those who have learned their activity in the second sub-race, in which measure and number were. Personalities like Robespierre were also present in the third sub-race.

In the sixth sub-race, the magicians from the second sub-race live again.

Those in the seventh sub-race will be those who have worked in secret – adepts or masters – during the other sub-races. After the first sub-race, they remain in secret.

That which is being must first have been activity. The activity of the third sub-race becomes being in the fifth sub-race. The activity of the fourth sub-race is complete in itself.

Laocoon is the representative of the old priesthood of justice, which is taken by surprise by Odysseus, whose snake - cunning - is taken by surprise, like Troy by the Greeks, like the third by the fourth sub-race. The saga of the wooden horse was written by an initiate. This is the great karmic question that determines the cyclical nature of human life.

The development through the races proceeded at an ever slower pace until the physical state, but then ever faster. The future events will not be long in coming; a certain number of people will be saved, who will bring culture from the fifth [root race] to the sixth [root race].

From the Question and Answer session

During evolution, man gradually discarded the various lower kingdoms, which then continued to exist alongside him as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms - cold- and warm-blooded animals. The forces from which these kingdoms developed were previously necessary for man himself to develop. But then there came gradual times when these forces would have hindered his development. Therefore, they were stripped away, distilled out of human nature. When this happened, the corresponding faculties looked quite different from the present mineral, plant and animal forms. By stripping away certain natures, man has gradually attained certain higher powers. That is why the other realms, and especially the animal realm, have a very specific relationship with him, which can be traced back to the individual animal species. The horse symbolizes such a connection. In the time of the second race, the Hyperboreans, man acquired the ability to receive intellectual activity by shedding what later developed into the horse in the animal kingdom. He had to shed it, otherwise he would not have been able to receive Manas later. He was ready to receive Manas in the third race, in the middle of the Lemurian period. The horse only developed in the way we know it in the fourth race, in the Atlantean period.

Thus, the development of the mind in humans is in some ways related to the horse, to the nature of the horse. That is why the horse was considered sacred by all ancient peoples and often used as a symbol, for example in the Apocalypse. The ancient peoples, especially the Atlanteans, were aware of these connections without knowing them directly. One figure from the saga, the centaur, actually existed in the transition period when man gradually shed what became the horse nature. The mind was now what enabled man to rise to the higher, divine. Therefore, a horse was given as a symbol to those who had overcome their lower nature, who understood how to fully carry out the elevation, who had become an initiate into the essence of the higher nature.

If we want to understand the migrations of the fifth post-Atlantic races, we must be aware that it is difficult to see clearly in this chaos. Descendants of all previous races have settled here, and we are already working in the fourth [root] race with a population that is spreading out in a radiating manner, as it were, and is itself mixed with descendants of other races. In the fifth race, the situation is most complicated. Everywhere we find remnants of populations that once already had a culture. As far as we look at the peoples of the southern Asian continent, we have remnants of the ancient Lemurian population. In the interior of Australia, their descendants can still be found. In western and northern Asia, in Central Asia and southern Europe, we find remnants of the fourth Atlantic epoch. This is the soil into which the branches of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch sink. So here we have the result of two currents: the Lemurian-Aryan on the one hand, and the Atlantean-Aryan on the other. All these cultures, however, have absorbed an even older one; Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Russia, China even have remnants of the Hyperborean culture. These mixtures are difficult to unravel. Let us try to trace the course of the Aryan cultural impact.

From a point in Central Asia, near the Gobi and Khamo deserts, this cultivation spread outwards in a radius. It was a decidedly priestly culture that prepared a spiritually highly educated race to enter the chaos of nations, to send out colonies from which new civilizations would arise. This small tribal people emerged from the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites of the fourth Atlantic epoch. We must bear in mind that these Ursemites were given their specific task, which is expressed in the Law of Manu, to offer to people in the broadest sense what is expressed in the words of Jesus: 'The kingdom of God does not come with external gestures, but the kingdom of God is among you'. Everything that came before was only a preparation for this point in time. It was what became the guiding tendency of Christianity: the sanctification of the personality, the full descent to the physical plane. This mission first had to be carefully prepared.

From the very beginning, the Manu in the root race placed very little emphasis on what goes beyond birth and death in man. These teachings had played an important role in the past and were now slowly dying out to gradually disappear. The Manu of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch wanted to lead people down to the physical plane in order to understand the physical heart, brain, and lungs. So these teachings, which went beyond birth and death, slowly faded in the first three post-Atlantic cultures. For even a Manu cannot direct fate and events as he wills, but must accomplish everything in accordance with the great laws of nature. Two things were available to him: the culture that still existed from the Lemurian population in southern Asia, and the remnants of the Atlantean culture in Africa. He sent his colonies there with initiated priests. Some to India, others to Africa. He gave them the teaching of non-reincarnation, the teaching [about life] between birth and death. In fact, the oldest Vedas contain nothing of what goes beyond birth and death. He said to himself: “Peoples who know nothing about reincarnation are coming together with those who have a precise knowledge of it. The result will be the right one.

In Egypt, they came together with the Atlanteans, who did not have such a sharp doctrine of reincarnation. For while the last Lemurians had trained them to the highest degree, it had already been distorted by the Atlanteans; with them, everything had come to a head in memory; the memory of the Atlanteans was so sharp that it outweighed everything else, that all that was physical lived in them through inheritance. So in this first excerpt we have two branches: the Indo-Aryans and the Hamites.

In India, the immigrating Indo-Aryans, who came with the old teaching of the word revealed by God - Veda word - took up the doctrine of reincarnation, and in Brahmanism we have what comes out so beautifully as the doctrine of reincarnation. This was brought about by the Manu. Meanwhile, the subjugated Lemurians became pariahs, and the Indians became the four castes. This is the principle of the initiates: the blending of the new with the old, here the powerful manasic spirituality with the doctrine of reincarnation.

In the Hamitic branch – Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth – the doctrine of reincarnation receded somewhat. It was less clear on the surface. The Egyptians placed more emphasis on the preservation of corpses. The inheritance system was more emphasized, which places the main value on physical continuity. The value of the individual life was emphasized and already transformed the ancient Rishi doctrine. A less decided doctrine of reincarnation mixed here with the doctrine of personality.

The second migration consists in the fact that a new branch was sent out, as it were. We can follow it if we first look eastward to the Medes and Persians and then to the tribe that passed through Chaldea and found its historical expression in the migrations of Abraham - from Ur in Chaldea. On the one hand, the tribe that went west also came into contact with the remnants of the Atlantic culture, namely with the fourth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Turanian population, who had been engaged in agriculture.

Thus a peculiar mixture arises. Grafted onto that Turanian branch was the practice of magic – and it had to be grafted on firmly! From here came the teachings of the Medes and Bactrians. Here the first Zarathustras were active, endeavoring to use the external techniques of magical time in the service of external culture. The result is a mighty flourishing of agriculture and viticulture; in them we have the revival of the old magical skills.

A colonist branch goes further west and came across remnants of the undrawn Ursemites of the Atlantean race, and these form what is called the ancient Semitic tribe: Chaldeans, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs. They form a new Semitic culture.

The most significant events occurred first among the Medes and Persians. They are contained in an ancient saga that has undergone many transformations and finally comes to us in the form of Cyrus: King Astyages had a daughter, Mandane, who married not a Mede but a Persian. The father dreamt that a tree was growing out of his daughter's womb. The dream was interpreted to mean that the Persian tribe would overshadow the Median tribe. The ancient saga of Cyrus has a uresoteric meaning. Cyrus represents the agricultural Persians in contrast to the non-agricultural Medes, and the [peasant] signifies that agriculture will win out: ancient culture will pass to the farmers.

How this came about can be seen from the institution of the Persian character. Physically strong they should become. There were no Lemurians here; the Atlanteans had prepared the ground for the development of personality. The Persians emphasized personal virtues above all. It is a remarkable trait that they had lessons in telling the truth; this was a main subject for boys, along with gymnastic exercises. And that is very important. They were preparing for what would lead to personal prowess reaching its peak.

Now we come to the point where the original Semitic element mixed with the new. Priest-Rishis migrated over and found decadent Old Semites and also decadent Akkadians. Thus the Manu formed a new branch by combining his immigrants with the decadent Semites, those who had developed arithmetic during their Atlantean heyday. What emerged from this was the Chaldean wisdom. [...] Astrology, astronomy, the observatories, the calendar, weights and measures emerged. The immigrants who had encountered the Akkadians, the ancient trading people, were used to create new colonies in this mixture. These were the Phoenicians.

Another excerpt followed: A colony of Rishis with followers went over to Europe. Here he found the old Hyperborean element, and in the south the Atlantic one. The Hyperboreans had already mixed with the Atlanteans; so only a small remnant of them remained. In the south, Hyperborean was almost non-existent. Here, on the soil of ancient Greece, the Pelasgian population arose with a kind of nature service that is reminiscent of Egyptian practices in many ways; only here it is more of a local cult instead of an ancestral cult: we find sacred trees, sacred caves; it is more closely tied to nature. There was a belief that the sacred is more closely tied to the place than to the tribe - Zeus of Dodona and others. The physical place becomes sacred. That was the new formation.

In Italy, too, a mixture of ancient Atlantean and Rishi culture is being brought into the physical plan again. Here, what had developed in the Atlanteans as a social being and as an attachment to technical culture penetrated: in the social legislation and technical skill of the Etruscans.

In the north, the mixture of Hyperborean and Rishi culture gave rise to the new formation of Celtic culture. What was found was an Atlantean-Hyperborean culture that was of little use. A new influence had to be given, and the result is the Celtic mixture with the Druid culture. This has so much spirituality because it absorbed the highly spiritual, which went beyond the spirituality of the Atlantic and Lemurian. Because it had the Hyperborean element in it, the Celtic could not quite withstand it and was absorbed by the later cultures.

We now come to the third sending forth. It is very complicated. It goes partly into what was previously prepared by the first two. We have preserved it in the representations of different peoples. Wherever the strong, powerful people are already in the foreground in the traditions. Thus, above all, a group of initiates went west and fertilized the already fertilized pre-Semitic element once again. Because it is about summarizing everything that was originally poured into the great idea of state-building. The result of this third sending out according to this poetry is Genesis, the Old Testament.

Another dissemination was the one that went to Asia Minor and formed what is preserved in Trojan culture and its daughter cultures, one of which is Albalong culture. These initiates had the task of taking over state formation as soon as it suited the various peoples.

We have thus become acquainted with three groups of initiates, the first of which had the task of creating the religious culture, the second of creating the material cultural basis - Persia - and the third of forming the state and consolidating the passions. This happens in forms adapted to the different peoples, as in Troy, or Alba Longa, or the theocratic state of Palestine. But essentially these were only preparations, made with peoples who were not called to form states. Among the people who were most called upon to carry the spiritual out onto the physical plane through their culture, the formation of states was least successful: the Greeks are above all the people of art. The highest personal thing brought out onto the physical plane: that is art. The initiate of the third group - in the case of the Greeks - is the hero, the strong man.

Over there in Asia, the peoples had already mixed repeatedly. And those who had received the highest legislation, the Jews, had mixed so much that they had already become hypertrophied. In contrast, in Europe, in central Italy, there had been a simpler mixture. We find a very strong Atlantic element there. The Etruscan colony had cooperated with Alba Longa, the priest state, and brought about Rome. Here there was simple racial formation and a great deal of Atlanticism in it. The two traits were enough to establish what is called the Etruscan-Roman culture, with the priestly influence that had to lead to the institution of the Pontifex Maximus. The conditions were simple, and so the people of the Roman Republic emerged, who developed personal bravery purely for themselves. The Roman citizen, the cives, was the fully-fledged human being who felt entirely as a personality. The Greeks had to feel themselves above all as wise men and artists. When they cultivated what most emerges from the personality, oratory and law, they had to perish. Private law and oratory, eloquence, were only developed to perfection in Rome. The Greek first sensed [...] and then developed the perfect personality by representing it in his gods. The Roman represents in his person the perfected personality as a citizen, as a real human being. The works of Greek sculptors, so to speak, arise in the Romans and come to life.

Thus, in Rome something was being prepared that the Lodge of the Initiates could use to give a further impetus. The highest peak of spiritual life had to be taken for this purpose. This could only be found where most spiritual impacts had occurred, namely in the Near East. There spirit was grafted onto spirit:

1. The self-impact: the fifth sub-race of the Atlantians Ursemites on the first sub-race of the Aryan population.
2. The move into the area of the Euphrates and Tigris.
3. The patriarchal period - the time of the heroes.
4. The theocracy.

This wonderful mixture is expressed in all branches of intellectual life. The new influence there could only come from a personality who came from far away, not from their own country.

The lodge carefully selected the family from which an initiate was to come. The old Rishi culture had prepared, foretold the initiate who must now come. It was written in the Sibylline books.

Thus, in secret, away from Judaism, in Galilee, the Messiah of the fourth sub-race was being prepared. There in Galilee, Judaism had never gained a firm foothold; it had not penetrated there. The Galileans are very mixed in racial character. It was important that He should have nothing of the Galilean, that He should come as from the hidden. That is why the apocrypha tell of him as being a son of his mother, and speak of his unchaste birth. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean. He was initiated to the third degree of a disciple. Now it was a matter of making him the highest initiate for everything that was to be realized on the physical plane. This was done by taking possession of the whole personality by another, who represents the whole fifth root race, by the Christ. In the Greco-Latin culture, the whole fifth post-Atlantic epoch emerged, and this is symbolically represented in the descent of the dove. If one wanted to express the truths at issue here, one could only choose the highest form.

The Manu said to himself, “I will make the fourth sub-race into a union of all the previous impacts and endow it with the spirit of the entire fifth root race. The Christ can do this, who is the actual impact of the entire fifth root race. The Manu prepared it, and Christ, as it were, entered into what had been prepared. The revelation of the actual secret of the fourth race was to take place. Earlier it had only been prepared, the highest initiates had seen it, the others prepared. That was the darkness into which the light came.

If we survey the development, we have results that are prepared by the fact that the first three sub-races are gradually educated to become personalities - until in the fourth the most profound part of the personality is seized, as the equality of all people before God.

Initiates who were sent out were not begotten by the father and mother of the race in question. They were sexless everywhere.

This is really said in the Gospel of John:

He came to that which is His own, but His own did not receive Him. And as many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God, even to those who believe in His name: <5>they were born, not of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Christ is the inwardly divine principle; he must pour himself into forms and takes the form of the law from the theocratic state, from Judaism. The Jews could not accept the new forms, they already had their own; that was the highest. But He had to accept them, step by step He had to emerge onto the physical plane. So He expressed His wisdom through the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Now this wisdom had to be understood. This wisdom could be understood where the physical plane had already been conquered, where philosophy existed. That is why the first church fathers came from the Greeks. In their philosophy, they had developed the ability to understand that which emerged on the physical plane. When the will emerged in the personality, they could also understand this personality.

The people who had formed a Zeus, who had incarnated a God in their art of sculpture, could also understand the idea of an incarnated God. This idea could only come to life through the Roman people. The human being who had formed the personality could have this idea. That was the Roman.

The Christ Himself is formed in the Jewish people, He is understood through Greek gnosis and the Greek apostles: Paul and the Greek evangelist John. But all this could not have led to the spread of Christianity on the physical plane, but at most to an understanding. The Romans, who adopt Greek culture, destroy Jerusalem, go to Asia, become Christians.

So:
The Jews form Christ.
The Greeks understand Christ.
The Romans become Christians.

Therefore, Christianity spread only after the destruction of Jerusalem and has a specifically Roman form. In Rome, the physical vessel for the Christ had already been prepared, namely the state, which was already founding the empire, and the priest who could administer it, the Pontifex Maximus. This brings us to the fourth sub-race. We have seen that it was carefully prepared. The fifth sub-race is still in the process of being formed.

We have reached the summit or center. The following teachers are therefore those who have to preserve what has been created in order to apply it again on the particular physical. It is a matter of some initiates specifying these summits for the individuals. Thus we have preserved the Christian tradition in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. Christianity is constantly degenerating and degenerating. So it is a matter of continually giving new impetus from what is called the Mount Montsalvatsch, the Grail. These impacts take on a different character. Again, it is the Rishis who experience the actual teaching in a Christian way and only ever want to protect original Christianity from degeneration.

In this way, the most diverse attempts at regeneration have been made. The first attempt can be traced back to an initiate who cannot yet play a historical role because this is still prehistory. However, he is mentioned in legend. He is the German apostle Boniface. He is the source of the original form in which Christianity came from Ireland to Germany, with a mixture of Druidic culture, Indian influence, and the impact of Dionysius the Areopagite.

A new influence was given and a new possibility created by the initiate known as Lohengrin. This initiation proceeded from a very complicated point of view, as all initiations become complicated. For it was necessary to connect the original Christianity, which had developed continuously from Dionysius the Areopagite through Scotus Eriugena up to scholasticism and mysticism. This current could indeed have an effect on peoples through preaching; but gradually it had been lost to the people because it went to the highest heights of thought. Therefore, a fertilization had to be brought from the original spiritual element. A high point had been reached, but it was also an impasse, and in order to have an effect on the initiate Lohengrin, a new fertilization from the Orient had to be brought about through the crusades. The essential thing that emerged from this is the Knights Templar, the actual messengers of the Holy Grail. They build a place of wisdom at the site of Solomon's Temple and after they are prepared there, they become servants of the Holy Grail, are initiated there by the Grail. This happens at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is prepared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Now we are in the preparatory stage of the fifth sub-race, the Germanic-English. From the Temple service we can see that it is about the application of Christianity to a new race. The service of the Temple Knights prepares for the transition of Christianity to full externality [...] in Christianity, which later leads to Protestantism. This helps us to understand the actual confession of the Knights Templar and their secret cult. They said to themselves: The Christ represented by the Western Church means nothing to us, because he is the Christ on the cross. But we proclaim the Christ who walked in Jerusalem and received initiation from the Baptist; our teachers about Christ are therefore not church teachers and church fathers, but John the Baptist, the initiator himself. Therefore, the main ceremony consisted of spitting out the crucifix symbol of Western worship and the unconsecrated wafer. This symbolized the contempt of Roman Christianity, the one that had developed into Catholicism, and it was prepared to turn away from Catholic Christ back to evangelical Christ. That was one principle. Another was:

1. We again accept the belief in the elementary forces of the world.
2. We believe that the destinies of men are a result of the interrelationships of the stars and that man himself is born out of the great interrelationships of the stars, the laws of nature.

Out of these two principles the culture of the Anglo-German race has developed: the religious-Protestant on the one hand, the scientific of the physical world on the other.

But this was only the vessel. The content came in a roundabout way

through the Moors. So here we have a Semitic influence again. There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared.

The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race.

The Apocalypse must be regarded as a document by which one of the Christian initiates - who received their teaching after the proclamation by deed - said the most profound thing that was to be revealed only later as a secret. In this teaching, we encounter an agreement with ancient wisdom: the presentation of human development in the Apocalypse. We overlook this profound agreement with the other great wisdom religions in this document.

The other thing that emerges from it is that it has an esoteric and an exoteric content – a content for everyone; that it also offers to those who come to such a form through preparation.

The Apocalypse confirms the old teachings, written in the sense of the saying: “Blessed are those who believe”; but also for those who see. Only those who can penetrate deeper into themselves can understand the Apocalypse. It leads us out, solving the great riddles of the world, through which we can look back into our own inner selves. Although the eye looks out, if it wants to be informed about what is going on out there, it has to turn around and look inside. How is that?

The underlying reason for this is that the human being is a spirit of the general spirit of God, always creating from the past and also in distant years. But if the human spirit is a part of the spirit of God - it is in itself - then look within yourself - you are something related to all creation. “I and the Godhead are one.”

Man lives for himself, but he projects himself into the distant past and into the future. Whatever lives in me, I have been there. Not just to think abstractly with our thoughts, but to express our feelings with them; and when this thought lives in us, then we are also such a force, we must ignite our feelings.

The materialist says: The eye is touched by the light and the eye feels it; the mystic says: By perceiving the light, I know that it comes from outside; but how is it that my eye perceives it? We must say that man has developed organs in himself. In the embryonic state, man repeats everything he has gone through before. Animals that crawl into a dark cave lose their eye light, so that their offspring are born without eyes. So light has once worked that we have organs. Light is a power that creates the eye for us. Light is also from within - and creates the spiritual eye. “If the eye were not solar, how could we see the light?” The light is within us.

We can experience the creative light within us. Plato spoke of the light in us. To understand Plato, one must live deeply within him, one must not criticize him like a student. He says: The eye emits rays, as if the eye were the active one. Plato still knew it, it still lived, the bright light that formed the eye. This light, of which the mysteries speak, is an inner light. From here the light flows, the light of the aeons, the astral light in which we live; it only appears to us from the outside, we illuminate the world with it. We shine into the opaque [...]

Those who experience the creative light within themselves experience the mysteries; mystics experience from such a vision; they become visionaries, as John was – a reality that the materialist doubts.

When we grasp this reality, when we place ourselves in this way before the mystical, we enter into the mood to understand the Apocalypse. The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. But sparks fly from the letter when we read it through the spirit.

Now one understands what it means to “recognize the reality of the symbols.” The seven churches are named by seven chandeliers. Seven stars are the seven angels. Let us take a closer look at this concept.

But are we talking about seven communities in Asia? Everything in time has its representation. The seven sub-races are to be imagined in such a way that one continues while the other begins.

I - Sub-race Indian. This ancient Rishi culture still exists.
II - Persian race
III - Chaldeans, Babylonians
IV

There were already wisdom schools that preserved the secrets of the future.

The seven representatives of the seven sub-races already existed at that time. Such seven brother lodges are called the seven municipalities, they are the seven chandeliers of the seven sub-races, the seven leaders of the seven sub-races. They have nothing to do with the external, but with a realistic / gap in the transcript]

But what do such brotherly lodges mean? When a person presents himself to us, he has organs that together make him up, and in this person the soul can only lead its existence within them, it dwells in this temple – body. If the hand wanted to go its own way, personality would not be possible. A selfless devotion of each organ. Man must become as his organs show him.

The eye does not claim its own life, it gives itself away. The ear is more complicated than the piano. Man is not ready for it. As if the eye wants to experience color within itself, it gives itself away and places itself at the service of the other organs. The organs of man thus live much higher than he himself. [...] Man could not hear through the ear if it wanted to feel for itself. But he must become so. He must give himself to other people, give himself as an organ to yield a spiritual being.

Those who give themselves in this way are called a brother lodge. Just as the soul can sink into the organism, so a higher being can sink into a brother lodge. When people are so united that several of them are the organs, a higher being descends into them; so that a higher soul-being can embody itself. Because they – the people – have become like organs, a higher being can descend into the community in order to embody itself.

Pythagorean School also like that.

Where all feel the same, where each lays what he has on the altar of the community, there the higher being descends.

Those who have had experiences of such descent know that then such higher beings are candlesticks, then they have become guides who take from this community the substance to materialize themselves.

These are the seven angels: this is based on a Christian saying. He said: “I am with you all days until the end of the world.” - This also includes: “When two or three are united in my name.” —

Without community, no higher being can embody itself, individually we are nothing. “When two or three are united in my name, then I am in the midst of them.”

Throughout the ages, this activity was known only to initiates. John recounts that he was on the island of Patmos. This island is the school of mystery; “an angel announced” means: mystical representation of a fact; living reference to the root race. The hand of brotherhood is extended to all sub-races.

To the church at Ephesus:

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These things says He who holds the stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands: I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast labored, and hast not fainted. But I have this against you: You have left your first love. (Rev 2:14)

To leave the first love - the Rishis are meant.

The second race, the Persian, had to lean more towards the practical: Be faithful unto death and so on. Here the devil is already mentioned, as are the devil's creations – the asuras. And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things says the first and the last, who was dead and has come to life: I know your works and your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich), and the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are of Satan's school. Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I know your deeds, the tribulation you have undergone, the testing by Satan, and the persecution and suffering you have borne because you are a man. But I tell you, do not be afraid. I am the first and the last. I am he who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, amen. Have courage, I tell you. Be faithful, even to death, and I will give you the crown of life. [Rev 2:8-10]

Justice is developed in the third race, the pre-Asian religion.

And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges; I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. But I have a few things against you, because you have there those who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put up an obstacle before the children of Israel, to eat food sacrificed to idols and to commit fornication. So you also have those who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans: I hate that. Repent; but if you do not, I will come to you quickly and will make war with them by the sword of my mouth. [Rev 2, 12-16]

Fourth race, the direct worship of Christianity:

And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first. But I have this against you: You let that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, teach and seduce my servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. And I gave her time to repent of her immorality, and she did not repent. Behold, I will throw her into a bed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds; and I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your works. But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching and who have not recognized the deep things of Satan (as they say), I say: I will not put on you any other burden; but what you have already hold fast until I come. [Rev 2,18-25]

Then the following in the future: [Church of Sardis, Church of Philadelphia, Church of Laodicea]. The leading entities can be understood when it is studied with the whole person, it cannot be grasped with the mind alone, then it is doubted, but they are real realities. One will now ask: Why was such not proclaimed immediately? Because the founders of Christianity experienced the truth [gap in the transcript]

The first way to read the Apocalypse is to accept the word in naive faith. The second way is to look for the allegorical sense in it; this is good because it leads to the third highest way of reading, which is to take everything literally.

We have to be confessors of the doctrine of reincarnation, we have to say: the person standing before me has been here and will come back; to accept the truth in him as the Samsara - the world in which we live, the world of eternal change, the cycle of rebirths. To believe in re-embodiment - I then experience re-embodiment. They taught it and lived in this spirit. It has been taught in all ages; what was taught many centuries ago, the community faith grows out of this faith. That is the deepest essence of theosophy. As we explain this, we feel what happened then. The one who was is sitting next to us, we feel united with the one who comes after us. Thus we rise, thus we can banish the higher spiritual. I wanted to show what community life is – something profound can be drawn from every line of the Apocalypse, the whole theosophical movement can be explained from it.

We understand karma to be something that began in the middle of the Lemurian period and will end at the close of the sixth root race. Individual karma comes into being through birth and death. A being that does not extend into the phenomenal form with a part has no individual karma. A world body passes from one form of appearance into another. But we call that which expresses itself through good and evil karma; only what lies between birth and death belongs to the chain that we call individual karma. How did karma come into the world?

Let us visualize the situation in the middle of the Lemurian period. The formative design was present to such an extent that a human body was there into which thought could enter. But before that, what we call the human soul had connected with this body; it had come over from the moon man, and bodies had been created according to his pattern. Initially, they were endowed with two sexes. Built up, but not perfect. We still have to treat these bodies as perfect animals; they only become human after Manas has moved in. So, just as with animals, we cannot speak of karma in humans either.

The bodies were gradually perfect; likewise, the souls that had come across were shaped according to different degrees of perfection: Solars, Pitris, seven low Pitris; there were also normal ones and those who always remained at one level. So there were seven degrees of development. The most perfect could already use power to control the bodies. The others had not yet reached that stage; people were like a machine that they did not have the power to control. Such Pitris became people of all the most perfect kinds: the first Arhats. They had perfect bodies, perfect kamic creativity, perfect Manas, but few and exquisite: teachers, rulers, rulers. Through pronounced high Arhats, Kamisches was achieved. They had superhuman abilities and perfect insight into what creativity is, almost at the level of earlier stages. As matter, man was much finer and therefore easier to create. They were initiated into nature. The spark of Manas did not help the others quickly, because that can only be when Kama sets the physical particles of the brain in motion. The thoughts are as if in a bed. It was a dream-like thinking that took hold here: dreamers, highly developed animals, dull humans.

They would have continued to exist on earth if a third group had not intervened. Arhats could not build up karma because they surveyed everything and chose good; these because they were unable to recognize.

There were three groups of Pitris who refused to take possession of these bodies and who wanted to wait until they themselves took possession of the bodies, until they could fully control them on their own. The bodies at that time could only move manas automatically. They waited, and from this the third group arose; they waited until they had been prepared by the second, i.e., the iyanic entities, to such an extent that they themselves could control them. So the bodies were there, but were not occupied. They were seized by much lower kamic entities. The consequence was that they descended, that they regressed, becoming like animals, and these are the amanasic entities. This is the original sin, which consists in the fact that manas has not taken possession of the bodies, and therefore something different has arisen than was foreseen in the normal plan of the world. It was an act of freedom.

The Arhats, of course, only inherited perfect qualities, the dream beings inherited human qualities in ever-increasing potency. These inherited a deteriorated human form, and that is original sin. Through this step of freedom, man is a self-determining conscious being. Only these Pitris, whom we call the luciferic ones, have been able to achieve freedom.

It would have been in the will of the Elohim for all to incarnate. These beings came under the influence of those who had remained at an earlier level of dhyan; these refused to incarnate. Now the possibility of illness also arose. These bodies, left to themselves, were subject to elemental influences. When the Pitris had matured, they found their bodies had already deteriorated. The shock of going down into the physical nature must be improved, and that is karma; original sin, one's own sinful body.

The Bible first presents this as the influence of the serpent. Further on, in magnificent images. First, those who had become arhats under the influence of the Elohim; they were absolutely under the guidance of the Elohim. They could use the natural forces that were already there, not learn. The others, who came later and who later inhabited the bodies, had to create according to their own immediate view. They were now further removed from their own creative beings, and this is very beautifully depicted in Cain and Abel.

Without sin there would be no freedom, no possibility for self-conscious man. This is how what we have called the Luciferic principle is linked to the development of man. Man owes the fact that he could use the seed power during the Atlantean period to the Luciferic principle.

Only through the people created in this way could science and art come into the world. What the Arhats taught was unearthly knowledge, the ancient wisdom that our theosophy brings. Earthly knowledge was created by these beings subject to karma.

The mixing of humans with animals: Because the bodies deteriorated, the ape-like creatures emerged, and these mixed with the bodies inhabited by lower Pitris. The most highly developed apes are those people who have lost themselves in a cul-de-sac and missed the connection. They sometimes have more developed astral bodies than lower people because they have guilt-free kama.

The animal species are destined to become human, not the individual animals; pets become faster, monkeys slower. The human generic soul is dhyanic; the generic souls of those Pitris refused and these were Lucifers.

The Arhats are not to be confused with the Buddhas and Boddhisatvas.

From the Q&A

If man had kept what he had rejected, he would not have developed so finely. His high development thanks to / gap in the transcript]

In the folk, ancient facts live, which are not based on arbitrariness but on deep connections. They all know the wooden horse. Odysseus is the clever, cunning representative of the mind, and thus the main characteristic of our fifth root race. At that time, the saga was developed in such a way that Odysseus came up with a wooden horse.

We also find the horse as a representative of the fifth root race. Pegasus; often in the Bible; in Indian legends, in which Vishnu rides on the horse Kalki. All before Christ. In the Apocalypse, when the seals are opened to us, the horse also appears to us, only then /gap in the transcript] then yellow. The horse is depicted as something special, as in connection with the fifth root race. Even with ancient Germans, who received it from Druid priests. There is hardly a nation of the fifth root race that does not honor the horse in a special way. Occult facts.

Certain animals had to be stripped so that certain characteristics could develop. In the past, it was only memory, but now intellectual mental activity was developing. He would not have been able to develop this activity if he had not given the characteristics that prevented him from doing so to odd-toed ungulates. We have to go back to even older times than the Lemurian era. At that time, what was to become odd-toed ungulates was peeled out. At that time, it was designed differently. Every being can only develop as its environment allows. Back then, there were watery air masses, thin water. Everything was fog. Niflheim.

They had to work their way through the states of condensation and thus became what they are today. Their form developed from completely different shapes, and this form arose at the time when the Atlanteans developed their intellect. These were therefore coherent for them. They said to themselves [gap in the transcript]

We must therefore relate to the horse in a very special way. If we had this organization within us, we would never have been able to ascend to our intellectual activity. It is, as it were, the flip side. Thus, in the horse, the human being of the fifth root race worships that to which he owes his intellectual activity. This is the reason for the solution of the seals in the Apocalypse.

Natural science should also be able to recognize this, or prove it, if the occult experience is correct. We would have to find the ancestors of our horse in the debris of Atlantis.

The uppermost layer of the earth is alluvium, under it diluvium, further tertiary layers. Then Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, formations in the rock. There we also find human-like skeletons. If we dig deeper, we come to the chalk, Jurassic formation. Now we find fossilized horse bones in the Eocene layers, and this is the layer of the Atlantic race. Intellectual knowledge is characterized by the fact that it has the object outside of itself and forms concepts about it. This was different with the original Atlanteans and Lemurians. They had an instinctive knowledge that was attached to the brain. This feeling has been lost, only present in pure sexuality, instinctive sense of belonging that man used to have in spirit. They had also perceived the relationship of their minds to horses. Thus man owes his higher qualities to what he has left behind in nature.

If we go back to the time of the Hyperborean race, we find that very specific human characteristics were acquired when very specific animal groups split off. The ancient peoples have always had a vivid awareness of their original kinship with very specific animal forms. The totemism of certain peoples is based on this feeling. They kill everything except certain animals; these are taboo for them. The tribe names itself after this animal and declares the animal to be taboo, not killable. Totemism thus leads occultly back to the splitting off of certain animal entities.

In the latest cultural studies, it has been noticed time and again that certain peoples had Darwinism within them as a feeling. This is not a game of imagination, but rather they have had animal splitting as the content of their memory from a primal consciousness. It is a splitting of forces. In some tribes there is an institution that cannot be explained to modern people, but which can be traced back to the fact that there are interactions that arise from perceptions other than external perceptions: psychic forces. Hence the custom of the man-child bed among some primitive peoples. That original influence of man upon man, which has been completely lost in the fifth root race. Customs are preserved which have lost their meaning. In just this way, an influence went from the whole of nature to man, he felt an original kinship with the animal: totem bear, bear-taboo, inviolable. Naivety does not invent symbols, they are based on facts. This was very clearly demonstrated in the centaurs. Man has withdrawn from the horse and has retained this memory. Odysseus has the cunning within him and he represents it externally, in that which conquers Troy.

Now there is something else underlying the love of the horse. In the next rounds, what had been rejected will be absorbed again. The generic souls will be redeemed again. What the human being develops in the fifth round will again be what will redeem him to the horse. So that the human being now develops his intellect at the expense of the generic soul of the horses. In the sixth round, he creates into the manasical-animalistic. He will give life himself, the qualities he owes to the horse will become activity and world karma in him. The horse carries him over, and it is thanks to the horse that he later becomes manasically creative. This is why Plato uses the image of the two horses that pull the soul; this is why there is Pegasus and the steeds of the sun chariot.

Anyone walking down the street today among the Christmas trees that have been put up might easily be led to believe that the Christmas tree itself is something very old. But it is precisely the Christmas tree that allows you to see the change in people's customs and traditions, because the Christmas tree, which is now found in almost every home, is not even a hundred years old. A century ago, you would not have been able to walk down streets occupied by Christmas trees. You would also look in vain in the poetry of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago for a song, for a poem that sings of the Christmas tree. But that should be a striking phenomenon for you, because the Christmas tree is something that has been sung about by poets in the time when it was once there. It is a very new phenomenon, something that only became common in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Christmas tree as a symbol of Christmas only appeared around 1800, but Christmas itself is ancient, not just Christian. It was celebrated in the same way in all times of which we can have historical knowledge.

In Christianity itself, Christmas has only been taken as a symbol of the birth of the Christian Redeemer since the fourth century AD. In no way was December 25 celebrated as the birthday of the founder of Christianity in the first centuries of Christianity; it was only in the fourth century that it was understood as such. But a festival was celebrated in the Roman Empire during this time, a festival was also celebrated at the same time by the ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples and with a similar idea already in ancient Egypt and in many other areas. What was celebrated there was something else; it was only in the fourth century of our era that it was linked to the birthday of the founder of Christianity.

Now one could conclude from this that the Christian church would have done something that would historically go against all tradition, and would have wanted to correct something with it, so to speak. But that is not the case. Anyone who truly understands the meaning of Christmas recognizes the ancient wisdom that lies hidden in such a festival. Festivals such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost are nothing more than dates, dates inscribed in time by our ancestors, with whom they showed us, their descendants, how they understood the relationship between the world and man and the great mysteries of existence. Whoever knows how to decipher the writing that has been laid down for us in the great festivals, whoever knows how to decipher the hieroglyphs that time itself presents to us, will glimpse into the deep and meaningful mysteries of all human becoming. I said – and we will see in a moment in which sense this applies – that Christmas has been celebrated since the time when we have history. The times about which we know historical documents go back to the third sub-race of the fifth root race. The times of our own sub-race, in which physical science and physical culture have developed, go back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. This was preceded by another race, and this goes back to the ninth or eighth century BC, to the times when Homer was singing his poems to the Greeks. This period tells us about the feelings and deeds of the fourth sub-race that preceded us.

Then we come back to the even older times, but these already lead us back to the gray antiquity, to the time of ancient Babylon and Assyria, to the ancient times of the Jewish people, to the times when the Egyptian priests preserved their wisdom and only brought it to the people in an exoteric way. Then the historical tradition ceases. What has been handed down to us from Persian history was only recorded much later. What is communicated to us as the sublime religion of ancient India, what is recorded in the Vedas and in the Vedanta philosophy, these are late records compared to the times in which the great thoughts of the ancient Indian Rishis, which they received directly from the divine spirits themselves, flowed through them to humanity. Thus we look back from the time in which we ourselves live, and which will last for a long time yet, to the Greco-Roman epoch, which is transformed into Christianity, and then to the epoch in which the Egyptian priests were active. But then the paths become lost. Only those who can follow history in other ways can know anything about ancient Persia. We are led even further back into the times that only the occultist can see.

Now, if you want to understand the Christian festival, you have to look back in time to the point where a new wisdom was taught to newly emerging humanity for the first time. We have come back to the time when the ancient Atlantean civilization disappeared due to the tremendous flooding of a large continent and a new human civilization - to which the epochs I have already enumerated belong - was established. A completely new way of thinking and feeling has emerged with this new humanity. Nothing of the actual culture of the Atlanteans, let alone of the even older culture of the Lemurian peoples, who once lived in ancient times and perished in a fire, has been preserved directly. However, what humanity has once gone through must be gone through again briefly when a new turning point in development has been reached. Thus the first sub-races of the fifth root race were destined to briefly repeat three important epochs in the development of humanity.

In ancient India, the wise Rishis looked back to those times when humanity was still at a very different stage, to those times when there was not yet a male and a female

sex, when man was still a unity. Then they looked back to that great unity in the human race, to that primeval man Adam, who is also called Adam Kadmon in various secret teachings, who was man and woman at the same time. They expressed that primal unity of humanity in a spiritual way by hinting at the supreme world being with the indefinite sacred name Brahman. Brahman is originally that out of which, as out of the All, out of the divine ground of unity, all manifoldness has emerged. On the earth itself, this unity was only present for man in a certain way in the times when there was not yet male and female, in the times when the diversity that we have now did not yet exist. What we are confronted with here is a reflection from the spirit of the great Indian Rishis: the divine Primordial Unity of man, the pre-human Adam Kadmon, in whom there was still peace, spirit, clarity and harmony; he speaks from the Vedic word as it flowed from the lips of the Indian Rishis. This was the first epoch of our human race after the great flood. It was not yet the case that there was talk on our earth of a trinity, of a threefold divine person. People only spoke of a primal unity, of Brahman, in which everything is contained, from which everything originates.

Then there came a time when the Persian Zarathustra priests, the wise men of the Parsees, looked back to that epoch when man, of both sexes, was born out of fire, when that man was born who represents a dual, a twofold. And with the birth of man out of the fire, something came into our earthly world that had not been there before; only then did evil come into the world. Evil did not exist in the human sense before the origin of the sexes. These originated in the middle of the Lemurian period. And good and evil have only existed since that time. Good and evil filled the last Lemurian period and the first Atlantean period.

It is interesting to research, according to the spiritual documents called the ‹Akashic Records›, how these two forms of humanity express themselves. In the next issue of the magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis” you will find an explanation of how the duality in man unfolds, how, when man really appeared in two sexes, man's soul and man's physical willpower were initially distributed among the sexes. Even those who today, as occultists, decipher the wonderful records that have been preserved for us in the Akasha Chronicle may be amazed at how fundamentally different the masculine and feminine appeared on our Earth in those early times, because it is so different from our present-day conception. Woman initially developed the soul, under the guidance of the wise leaders of humanity; man developed the will element. This is how a duality of will and soul arises. They face each other in the Atlantic epoch in the two sexes of humanity. Because soul came into the physical body and thereby into humanity, evil came into humanity. And because our humanity had to repeat that epoch, which is characterized by the difference between good and evil, the fire religion, the Parsee religion, the doctrine of Ormuzd and Ahriman emerged. This precedes our history as a Persian cultural period.

The concept of “good and evil” lived on in the religion of Zarathustra. At that time, there was no talk of a trinity. This came only later, at about the time when our historical documents begin. The Akasha Chronicle does not report a trinity in prehistoric times. It was only when people knew how to distinguish between good and evil that they were forced to look to a third party. And so we see the mediator, in the form of the mediator, in the form that most clearly presents itself to us in the so-called Mithras mysteries, which spread from Persia across the whole world. We see the mediator, the reconciler, the redeemer of humanity from evil, the guide from evil to good.

In these ancient times, one must always see in the earthly an image of the divine, an image of what has taken place in the great vault of heaven. If you look at the zodiac, you will see that in this zodiac the signs of Cancer, Gemini, Taurus and Aries or Lamb follow one another. According to certain laws, the sun, or rather the sun's vernal point, advances, so that in ancient times the sun rose in spring in the sign of Cancer, later in the sign of Gemini, still later in the sign of Taurus, and still later in the sign of Aries or the Lamb. Around the time of the eighth century before the birth of Christ, the sun had reached the constellation of Aries or the Lamb in the celestial vault. Now, in our cultural era, it enters the constellation of Pisces.

Depending on what happens in the spiritual realm, what happens on earth takes shape. You are familiar with the sign of Cancer, but its true significance is not always known. This sign of Cancer must be understood; then one will also understand how it points to the dawning of a completely new era. They are two intertwined spirals or two intertwined vortices. When something important happens in the world, when one stage of development is replaced by another, when something completely new enters the world, then two such vortex movements intertwine. In this one vortex you have the end of the Atlantean culture, and in the other you have the beginning of the Aryan culture. Our ancestors saw the outer sign for the rise of the new Aryan culture in the sky above. Then, in later times, the sun entered the sign of Gemini. Gemini is a sign for good and evil; Gemini is the sign of the zodiac that dominated Persian thinking. Then the sun enters the sign of Taurus. This brings us to the third sub-race; it has the worship of the bull, the Egyptian Apis, in Babylonia the service of the bull, and finally in what was later to become Persia the bull sacrifice, the service of Mithras. Man brought the bull sacrifice down from heaven because it was marked there.

The fourth sub-race, which saw the rise of Christianity, begins with the sun entering Aries. An important saga – the bringing of the ram skin by the Greek hero Jason – indicates this important turning point in history. And a further important turning-point is indicated by the sacrifice of the mystic Lamb on the cross. This is the historical expression of the mystery that is indicated by the fact that the Sun, the ruler of the world, has reached the point in the vault of heaven that is signified by the Lamb or the Ram.

But now we have to understand this whole development in the right way. After the duality of good and evil, the trinity appears in human consciousness. This occurs in various religions. We only need to get to know it in what we know in the different countries around the Mediterranean as the Mithras mysteries. Let us look at one of these mystery temples. For those who only participate in the lesser mysteries, a symbolic act takes place. For those who are allowed to participate in the greater mysteries, the same thing takes place as a fact in the astral realm. I can only speak about the lesser mysteries of the Mithras service. The symbolic bull becomes visible. The mediator, the god, rides on it. He then holds the bull's nostrils shut and plunges his sword into its side. A snake comes, a scorpion; above the head of Mithras one sees a bird, and above the whole group, on one side, one sees the genius with a lowered torch and, on the other side, with a raised torch, which symbolizes the sun on its course through the vault of heaven.

Human life, as it was experienced in the consciousness of that time, is thus presented to us. Man had come to seek redemption within himself, the third divine principle, which leads him away from evil and can reconcile evil with good. Evil is the passions, that which pulls man down to earth, all the way to what is symbolized by the bull. But what can lead man up to the higher self, what appears as the immortal, is the mediator who has killed the lower being when he symbolically thrusts the sword into the bull's loins. Thus, as mediator between good and evil, that is, in the third sub-race, a trinity in the divine appears, and with that, humanity has grasped what is called Atman-Budhi-Manas in theosophy. The moment the mediator appears, the mystical secret is fulfilled: the trinity in the consciousness of man awakens.

Thus man was led through the human realization of unity, duality and trinity to Atman, Budhi, Manas. Atman or the spirit is the unity that man is able to perceive within himself when he has developed to it. Budhi or the spirit of life will express itself in man in that evil will be overcome by good, that duality will on the one hand purify the lower instincts or desire and on the other hand reconcile the higher so-called fire instincts or love, in that all evil will be consumed in the fire of love. Manas or the spirit self is the spiritual principle that already governs human development. Just as the Messiah, the redeemer, creates unity in the world, leading from disharmony to harmony, so duality dissolves through the trinity, in which evil is overcome by good.

Thus the human race had come so far that it saw its entire destiny in the trinity. But it sees fate in this trinity as imposed on people as an eternal world order. Man looks up to the threefold aspect of the Godhead, beholds a divine trinity in the world and sees himself as dependent on this divine trinity. He truly experienced that this divine Trinity descended directly to him in a human brother. This was the great event at the beginning of our era. For human consciousness, the Trinity has become something completely new as a result.

But we can only understand the deeper meaning of Christmas if we understand the mediator in the right way. From unity, duality has developed, from duality, chaos, from which harmony is to develop again. This harmony can only develop if the mediator creates this harmony. This harmony can only find expression in an eternal lawfulness, and this eternal lawfulness found its symbolic expression - in the time when the Mithras service originated - in the fact that an image was seen in man himself, this creating the eternal world harmonies of the world law.

In the same mysteries that I have already mentioned here, in the secrets of the Persian religion, you will find a sevenfold initiation for those who were admitted to the sacred secrets. The first degree included those who learned about the very first secrets: this was the degree of the “ravens”, as the symbolic name indicates. The second degree was that of the Occultists. The third degree was that of the fighters or for sacred truth. The fourth degree was that of the so-called Lions, and the fifth degree was that of the Persians. Only the latter was regarded as a full Persian, in whom the consciousness of the highest spiritual in man had awakened, which we call Manas. He in whom this had awakened could be called a fifth-degree initiate, and he was called a Persian. He was a member of a nation in the truest sense of the word. He represented the destiny of his people. And if he was initiated one degree higher, he no longer represented the personality of his people, but that of all mankind. He then represented not the karma of a people, but of all mankind, insofar as it had developed from the middle of the Lemurian race and further into the fifth root race. Then such an initiate was called a sun runner or a “sun hero.” All those whom you find in the books as solar heroes are none other than such initiates of the sixth degree. Then came the “Father”; he was connected with the evolution of the future of humanity.

What does the name Sunrunner mean? If you could look back into the primeval times of our solar system, you would see that this solar system emerged from the struggle of thermal chaos, and that harmony itself has established itself in our world of disharmony, that peace and the laws have developed out of discord and disharmony. But how did they come about? They came about like this: The sun has such a regulated course that we cannot even imagine that the sun could deviate from its path for a moment; our world is so firmly grounded in harmony that the sun is firmly determined in its direction by its path through the world, that nothing can bring it out of this direction. In this course of the sun across the vault of heaven, the ancient Persian initiate saw his own inner destiny in the sixth degree. The sun of his own inner being, the sun of his spirit, had to shine so firmly for him that he could not deviate from the path of good and wisdom any more than the sun could deviate from its path. A person who had reached the sixth degree of initiation had to be so imbued with this lawfulness that he could not possibly deviate from his path; then he was a solar hero, a sun-runner.

All the earlier degrees of initiation had no other purpose than to give the human being this inner security, this inner sun-likeness. Thus, the person who knew something of these mysteries saw a deep harmony between human destiny and the path of the sun across the vault of heaven. The sun – so he said – causes the days to grow shorter and shorter, nature to die towards autumn, everything to withdraw into the interior. And when we approach the time that is celebrated today as Christmas, a new turn occurs: the light emerges, the days become longer in nature, nature can awaken again. The birth of the light – that was the moment celebrated since the times when it was said that the light is the symbol of revelation in the world and in man. So that in the East all peoples of our root race regarded the light as the garment for the wise ordering of the world. In the light they saw the garment for world wisdom. When we direct our eyes into the universe, light appears, harmoniously and firmly imprinted, in the stars outside. In reality, the spirits of wisdom reveal themselves through the light that the ancient religions saw as the garment of wisdom in the world.

Thus the trinity appeared to the ancient religions, that they first celebrated unity, primordial wisdom, then duality, light and darkness, and finally, as a trinity, also the enlightened man, the teacher and mediator, Mithras.

But mankind could not attain salvation in the sense of this consciousness until the consciousness of this universal harmony was born out of human hearts themselves. That which lives outside in the world as light, as the birth of light, must at the point in time we are now approaching arise in the human heart itself. The external mystical fact that has taken place is the founding of Christianity. In Christ, that which has been present on our earth from the very beginning, but which has remained hidden from humanity throughout the ages we have just spoken of, has appeared. During this time, humanity has gradually repeated those three stages. But now a new point of view, a new high point can be reached: the light can be reborn. Just as after the light grows weaker and weaker as we approach autumn, and then, when we come to the winter solstice, the light is reborn, so too was the savior, the Christ, born to humanity in the fourth sub-race. He is the new solar hero who was not only initiated in the depths of the mystery temples but appeared before the world, so that even those who do not see can be blessed by believing! It was therefore a natural consequence that when it was realized that the Divine can descend to the level of personality, one could at that moment replace the birth festival of the Light with the birth festival of the solar hero of the fourth post-Atlantean race.

This happened in the fourth century of our fourth sub-race. What had never been there before was now there, namely, the possibility that man could give birth to the light within himself. He could do so because the light principle had been incarnated in a human being for the first time. With this happening, the winter solstice festival was necessarily associated with Christmas. The entire significance of the preceding sub-races is determined and established with the transfer of the celebration of the birth of Christ to the winter solstice festival. At first, wisdom and light appeared to people from outside, but now the light was to be brought forth from within the human heart. Christ was to be born within man himself. Therefore, the event also had to take place in Palestine, a mystical event and an historical fact.

We are therefore dealing with a historical event, and that is precisely the great mystery that is so little understood: that what happened in Palestine happened literally as it is described in the Gospel of John, and that at the same time it is a mystical fact. Those who do not understand the event in this way do not yet understand it at all. But if you understand it that way, then you will also understand why from this moment on God is to be imagined as a personality, and that the Trinity, which had been imagined differently before, is to be imagined in the form of three divine persons. Christ had now become a person, and with that the proof was delivered that the divine can be realized in man. With that a firstling had appeared on earth, in whom the divine once dwelt. And this could henceforth become a lasting, an undestroyable ideal for mankind.

All the earlier great teachers of wisdom - the Egyptian Hermes, the ancient Indian Rishis, the Chinese Confucius, the Persian Zarathustra - they spoke the word of the divine, they were the great teachers. With Jesus, who was the Christ, the divine itself walked on earth in a living form for the first time. Before that, we only had the way and the truth on earth. Now we have the Way, the Truth, and the Life. That is the great difference between the earlier religions and Christianity, that the latter is the fulfillment of the former, that in the case of Christ we are not dealing with a teacher of wisdom – for teachers of wisdom are also present in all other religions – but with a human personality who must at the same time be venerated as a divine personality. This is why the disciples' message is so important: “We have laid our hands in his wounds, we have heard his message.” This is also why they relied on appearances, on direct sensory impressions; that one should not just listen to the word, but also look at the personality. And this is also the reason for the conviction that he was the world solar hero in a completely unique way. If we grasp this, we also understand that the old festival of the winter solstice used to mean something different from today's Christmas. In Egypt we find Horus, Isis and Osiris, the archetype of what also lives in Christianity. In ancient India we have the birth of Krishna from the Holy Virgin. Everywhere we find echoes of this myth. But what is important about Christianity is what I have just mentioned: the fact that not only the trinity, but the tetrad has become sacred, that the sacred has descended to the personality. Before that, the sacred was divine and enthroned at an inaccessible height above human beings. The old teachers of wisdom, the holy Rishis, revered it as the indefinite, unutterable Brahman; the old Zarathustra disciples saw it in the duality of good and evil; in Egypt, as already mentioned, it is the triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus. But that the Divine dwelt among men, that it became personality, that was the secret of the fourth sub-race. This is the most important event of our human epoch, that Christmas, which has always represented the birth of an initiate, now represents the birth of the greatest solar hero, the Christ Himself. Thus we see the necessity of these two things resonating in the course of the world. If we look at the fourth sub-race and compare it with the point in time at which we ourselves stand, then we see the divine having moved down even further. And it has taken on a peculiar form in our present time, a form that one must understand if one wants to fully decipher the Christmas festival. Go back to the fourth sub-era, to the twelfth or thirteenth century: everywhere you will find full understanding of the real personality of Christ among those who know it; this personality of Christ is so comprehensively described that, for example, in the poetry of 'Heliand', German conditions are transferred to the Christ. The Christ stands so firmly within humanity that the conditions of other countries can be related to his redemptive deed. He is so firmly rooted in humanity as a whole as a personality. But then a different mood sets in. There is a certain shaking of faith in this archetype of humanity. Something occurs that is a step forward on the one hand, but on the other hand a much larger circle of humanity enters into the further evolution of Christianity. But in return, people cease to understand that the center of his thinking, feeling and willing can lie in the individual personality of Christ. There are fewer and fewer people who dare to say that it is not the doctrine but the personality of Christ that is at issue. Finally, it dissolves altogether into the worship of the abstract ideal, which one thinks only spiritually and towards which man strives. In the time of the first sub-race it was Brahman, in the time of the second it was light and darkness, in the time of the third it was the Trinity. Then, in the time of the fourth sub-race, this Trinity had descended and become a person. The personal aspect descended even further, to the level of mere intellect, which has dissolved the human personality and is only worshipped as an abstract ideal.

In our fifth sub-race, however, the moment that must still come is already approaching, and it must bring us faith in the new initiates, in the 'Fathers'. Those initiated in the seventh degree are called the Fathers, and in the spiritual scientific world view we speak of the realization of the Masters, because it is not just one, but because it will be the Masters to whom man will look in gratitude and adoration as the great leaders of humanity. Thus the fifth sub-race connects us with our future. And so this fourth sub-race appears to be placed right in the middle of the great process we are going through, the process of Advent, that is, of the three preceding races, of which the three-week Advent is a reflection, because in a short time people will once again go through the process of how, in earlier times, the light dawned at Christmas time. Then comes the life in the light. That is why Christmas is not something temporary for Christians either, not a commemoration of what has passed; because the Christmas antiphon is not: Christ was born, or Christ was born, but it says: Today Christ was born. Today is always spoken of. That is important and significant. Today is spoken of in the sense that Christ Himself spoke: 'I am with you until the end of days'. This is something that stands before us anew every year and reveals to us the connection between man and heaven. It shows us that what has taken place in heaven must also take place in man. And just as the sun could not deviate from its orbit by a single inch without causing confusion, so too must man keep to his path. He must achieve that inner harmony, that inner rhythm, which is given to him by Christ, who was incarnated in Jesus and who will work in the Fathers, whose guidance man must follow in the times of the future.

This is the connection between man and heaven: the sun should not only move unerringly in the sky and gain new strength at the winter solstice, it should also bring about a birth of light from deep within in man, a resurrection, a solar heroism of the fifth root race. Hence the Christmas saying: “Gloria in excelsis deo et in terra pax”, “Peace on earth to those of good will”. Inner peace will also bring humanity's evolution into a rhythmic process, just as the sun has brought its own process into a regular rhythm. In the sun we have an image of the eternal cycle of the cosmos. It has overcome chaos within itself and brought it to peace. In this sense, Christmas is a festival of peace, from which the mood of peace and harmony should also radiate. Then it is celebrated in the right way, when the power of peace and harmony radiates from this festival. With the Christmas bells, not only the sounds of the Church resound, but the sounds of all striving humanity, which is working and has worked on present-day culture and its further development, ever since the Earth with its spirituality rose again from the great frost.

What the preceding races longed for as their future was born into the fourth post-Atlantean sub-race. And what the three following races must strive for, that resounds from the Christmas sounds. The harmonies of the heavens truly speak to us when we understand what Christmas expresses. Every festival of the year is so firmly grounded in ancient wisdom.

It is no coincidence that these festivals have been set, they have not sprung from arbitrariness, but are drawn from the deepest wisdom of the world, and those who can truly understand and celebrate them with full understanding will find in them the scriptural characters of ancient wisdom for what has happened from the beginning and will happen in the future. In this way the festivals take on a new meaning; they cease to have the conventional significance that they have for many people. To read the great truths of the world is to celebrate the great world festivals in the right spirit. With the heart, with the mind, with the soul you read the primal truths of heaven when you celebrate the great world festivals. Then they are truly celebrated out of the spirit, then they are something for humanity again.

Spiritual science is not mere abstract thought, not a tangle of dogmas. It has a great task and a world mission to revive what humanity has forgotten, to strike the fire out of what has been given to us by our ancestors. Then human selfishness will also cease. They will learn to live in the unified spirit of the world. This is the wisdom that, among many other things, emanates from spiritual science, and it is practical in a good sense; it gives us inner support and secure hope. And that is why the spirit of peace and spiritual confidence that emanates from the Christmas festival can inspire those who strive for spiritual knowledge in their innermost being.

The exalted spiritual leaders of humanity once prescribed this festival for us in primeval times. Let us visualize this as genuine Christmas wisdom at the end of this hour: Advanced human brothers are the leaders of the spiritual movement, advanced human brothers who were already present at the beginning of the fifth root race when the great world festivals were established, and who, as the great teachers of humanity, are still revealing such truths to us today. They do not give us the wisdom teachings out of speculation, out of their own opinion, but because they were there when the things were revealed. They have prepared the peace that shall one day flow over humanity, and they have composed the holy scriptures in the festivals, from which we shall read the message of peace, the message of inner soul bliss, which we shall regain through spiritual science. If we live in the spirit of the masters of harmony, then we live more and more towards the great ideal that they themselves exemplify to us. Spiritual science reminds us of those exalted leaders of humanity when we are seized by the Christmas spirit, which speaks to us of peace and of the sacrifices of the great masters. This peace flows into the future of humanity. We see it completely surrounded by the splendor of this spiritual light and the harmony of feelings. In this glory in which they appear to us, we recognize them as the fathers who lead us towards the future. We follow in their footsteps, and out of our own soul is born a life that is immersed in peace, in harmony and unity - in that harmony that is an image of the sun's path around the world.

The birth of peace at Christmas time is a reflection of the sun's passage around the celestial vault. This is taught by the wise magicians, the great masters, and spoken by those who not only have blind faith in these masters, but who also know and say out of their full knowledge: the masters they are, and the spiritual world movement under the guidance of the masters is the great and lofty peace movement that leads people to that world harmony in which human souls will live with the same harmonious regularity and imperturbability with which the sun moves through the worlds, showing us the way to the radiant beauty of the spiritual sun.

Let us survey a few cosmological facts. Evolution is focused on the development of states of consciousness. The present state of consciousness is one stage – it is the fourth. It has been preceded by three and will be followed by three. We are now in the waking state.

The seer, looking back into the past, finds that this was preceded by a dream state; somewhat lighter than in our more highly developed animals; and duller, but more comprehensive than present-day man can imagine. This consciousness included the plant world. Man could then see life flowing through the plants, germinating, sprouting. It is something that we still find in some mediums: a duller but more comprehensive state of consciousness.

Before that, we find a state that we can call sleep trance; it is even duller and even more comprehensive; the entities were able to see not only life, but also directly pain and joy; today we can only see the gestures of it. The dream state symbolized pain and joy through form, just as dreams still symbolize today. Everything was expressed in symbolic forms in those days, and our present-day symbolizing is an atavism of the earlier state of consciousness. Even the sleep trance, this dreamless sleep consciousness, can still be studied in mediums today.

The third state of consciousness – looking backwards – is the deep trance; it is also called the induced trance. It is very rare today, but can be achieved in pathological states, and then the medium constructs chains of worlds.

So we have come to know four states of consciousness: deep trance, dreamless sleep, the dream state and waking daytime consciousness. Man has gone through these four states. What has been achieved at each stage must be summarized and passed on to the next in the bud.

This gathering together is called Pralaya, the unfolding is called Manvantara; the state of consciousness itself is called a planet.

The next state that awaits us is the psychic state, which is similar to the previous one and is associated with an expansion, but at the same time a maintenance of the waking state of consciousness. The consciousness now advances in stages: the expansion occurs, but with an alert daytime consciousness. This is the development of the clairvoyant. All the theosophical teachings come from this expanded state of daytime consciousness. This psychic state of consciousness now grants the clairvoyant insight into the beautiful life stream that can be seen flowing through all plants; it can be seen when you subtract the plant, it can best be compared to the color of a peach blossom and can also be seen in humans, only - clouded by Kama.

The next super-physical consciousness extends to all sensations, to pain and feelings. The clairvoyant learns to see them when he can see the astral body – and also the lower mental world.

The highest spiritual state of consciousness provides insight into the higher mental world and extends to the planets.

Thus, all further development is based on seven states of consciousness.

Each state of consciousness has seven life stages to go through. These are also called the seven kingdoms. They are: the first, the second, the third elementary kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

The physical body has already passed through the seven stages, the astral body will only penetrate them in the next round.

The passage through a realm is called a round.

Each state of life must again pass through seven states of form.

Between each state of life and the next there is another small pralaya.

The form states are designated as arupa (the actually still formless, only striving for development), rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, archetypal. The seventh state is the result of the six preceding ones; after the chela has been able to form himself plastically and intellectually, he creates, as it were, the skeleton to which the following can attach themselves, which in turn has to shoot out of the germ. It is the archetype.

Beyond the spiritual state of consciousness is the mastery; the spiritual state of consciousness is the highest that the chela can reach, in which he can see over all the others. After that, the mastery begins for him.

Our present physical state would shine for the clairvoyant in a color that most resembles a beautiful green; the astral state in a bright yellow; the rupa-form state in orange; the arupa-form state in rose red. The color tones of the future phases are blue, indigo, violet.

In the esoteric language, the preceding planets are called the “moon” and the sun.

The state of consciousness that man reached on the moon gave a result, as did the previous one; the first state of consciousness gave the deepest result.

The mystic finds within himself what he saw spread around him; what is now our inner life was once all around us; what our life with the world is now will later be our inner life; we have to assimilate everything. Our entire outer nature will fade away, but it will become inner life. What is spread out is called evolution, what is gathered together is called 'involution.

Thus, the mystic will find the earlier stages of expansion within himself when he delves into himself. The result of these earlier stages is ego-consciousness; the earth has the task of developing this ego-consciousness - Ahamkara the Indian calls it.

The ability to perceive is linked to the third state of consciousness, that of dream sleep; the mystic experiences it again, swimming directly in the stream of life, and he experiences it to an increased degree, since he transfers his present day consciousness to that state. The Indian calls this state Chita, the mystic language calls it “the waters, the sea of life”; Suso, Ruysbroek, Böhme - speak of a “merging in the heavenly tincture,” of a “tasting of life” - through direct insight into earlier states, which are found again in the depths of consciousness. It is a wandering back in time, not in space.

If you go back even further, you will find a state of consciousness that is only known to the chela who has maintained the continuity of consciousness even through sleep. The laws of nature are the only thing you can grasp from this state of consciousness. Today they are present in the rudimentary manas; manas is what is left of it. The chela perceives thoughts in a state of deep sleep – devachan. This state is created by raising the dreamless sleep to consciousness. The Indian calls it

The last state of consciousness, in which everything that can be seen in the rounds and planetary development is experienced, is deification or union with God, in fact: union with the primal creative power of a cosmos. “Mokscha” is what the Indian calls it. The chela only reaches it immediately before adeptness. What flashes up in man is not only the perception of thoughts, but also of the ‘I’. It is a merging with humanity; it is the realization: Budhi. That teaching, which has flowed out of the conscious seeing of Budhi, is therefore called ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.

We have thus become acquainted with the states of consciousness just described under the names: Ahamkara, Chita, Jujuksha or Manas, Mokscha or Budhi.

Through Ahamkara, man becomes aware of himself.

Through Chita, he becomes aware of the expressions of the beings around him.

Through manas, he becomes aware of the inner life of beings.

Through budhi, of the essence of the beings around him.

This continuous thread of development, which takes the states of consciousness through 343 stages, we call the Pitri.

How does evolution take place? One has a sum of circles of existence that are internalized later. This is the case throughout the universe.

Let us now consider the development of man. His physical body is fully developed in the present race. But the astral body of man is at present in an undeveloped period. It must develop to the point where it has sensory organs, like the physical body. These sensory organs, which will allow man to live consciously on the astral plane, are called chakras. These are in the appendix today. One sits above the larynx and is called the sixteen-petalled lotus flower because of its shape. It is formed by the person speaking today. An organ on the higher plane arises from an activity on the lower plane. This is also referred to in the third verse of 'Licht auf den Weg'. This is a guide. All those words that contain criticism, judgment, rejection, and barbs directed outwards do not contribute to setting the wheel in motion. So only selfless speech can make this organ effective on the higher plane. So that it is not asceticism, withdrawal from the physical plane, that makes the theosophist, but working on it. When our service becomes sacrifice, the two-petalled lotus blossom on the forehead is set in motion.

Everything that is, is the result of activity or karma. — How did eyes come about? Man had to carry out an activity that led to the formation of the eyes. The now rudimentary pineal gland was a kind of heat organ, like a mobile eye, when the bodies were not yet glowing and man moved in a mist of fire. He used it to probe the environment and could perceive temperature differences in a wide circle. The result of this perception is the perception of such bodies that glow when heated. Then this organ receded and the two eyes formed as a result. The Cyclops saga is a reminder of this.

It is clear to us how grandiose the metamorphoses are that man has undergone: they must take place in such a way that the outer formation of form becomes inner strength.

We are in the fourth round. When man came over from the moon, he was generally Moon Pitri. He had brought dream consciousness to its highest development. This was unable to perceive an object that was outside. Such an object was not even there. For that to happen, one object would have had to be opposite the other. The first three rounds were such that everything was internal, man was secluded within himself. The Pitris carried all available matter within themselves, there were only humans. If man had kept the mineral kingdom within himself, he would never have developed. Therefore, he had to put it out of himself. In the first round, he separates everything he cannot use out of himself; by leaving behind a lower being, he rises up. That is a deep law of occultism.

During the second round, he populates his earth with the plant kingdom; during the third round, he leaves behind everything that is cold-blooded. Now that sleeps over into the fourth round as a germ. He goes through the arupa, rupa and astral state and enters the thinnest physicality. As he is, he could not become intelligent, he still has to shed one thing, and these are the warm-blooded animals, they are, so to speak, decadent, stunted people.

By the middle of the Lemurian period, development had progressed to the point where the following could occur. Until then, a being could emerge from another being; sexual reproduction did not exist. Back then, when all beings reproduced asexually, the earth was in a completely different state. Everything that was solid mass was dissolved at that time, liquid element. The change brought about what we call sexual reproduction. Sexuality is connected with hardening; one being could no longer produce another on its own, so even molluscs had to adapt to the new conditions.

How did sexuality arise? A measure of strength -<1> let's call it that — was necessary to bring forth a new being. This is not possible through hardening. 1 is split into 2, half of the force goes into reproduction, the other half is split off. One half condenses into the brain, becomes spiritual, and is thus ennobled reproductive force, the other half becomes more brutal as a result. These are the two poles.

The split-off power, the spiritual, could be fertilized by Manas and became the carrier of Manas. That is why symbols were taken from the sexual to symbolize the highest. When later races came, the pure symbols were misunderstood and also led to excesses. Material science, which only starts from the physical plan, has only seen this.

This spiritual power, before it reached the phase where we are today, went through many phases. At first, the imagination was much more imbued with full sensual ideas; it was not yet diluted enough to live as memory, and it had magical power, could have a reproducing effect with appropriate training. The merely sensual part of man was hardened in a rough way, and then the productive power took effect. He had to give this up to the extent that he developed higher. The memory was what developed during the Atlantean period, and the power of reason during the Aryan race. Thus, power waned at the expense of refinement.

The purpose of evolution is that a higher level develops while a lower one is left behind. Thus we have left behind the wild peoples from whom, erroneously, the cultural history derives us.

Now, after the higher animal kingdom has been rejected, we are in the middle of the fourth round. Man must gradually take up again everything he has previously rejected; he must redeem everything. In the astral state he will be able to do so. The entire extended higher animal kingdom consists of the passions that man has externalized. With the more powerful organs of the developed, purified astral body, he can take up the externalized power again and use it to elevate himself. That is the development of the three future globes. So that when our development is complete, the higher animal kingdom, which has a mineral structure, will no longer be; the whole mineral kingdom will be absorbed.

So during the fifth round, only the plant kingdom, the lower animal kingdom and man himself are there. He now absorbs the plant kingdom and the higher part of the lower animal kingdom. It is a different physical state, the mineral kingdom will not be, but the plant will have an even denser physical state. There is no volatilization into the ether, but a physicalization of the plant. It will be a growing skeleton with secretions of a plant-like nature. Certain substances that are still air today will be water in which germs can swell.

When the sixth round begins, only the animal kingdom will be there, and that will be the advanced, now lower, forms, and man. The animal kingdom will be absorbed. And in the seventh round, man will reach Godlikeness. God rests on the seventh day. Man is creator and develops to that maturity which is necessary to start a new development.

I now want to expand my view to include all seven planets, our entire planetary chain.

A physical state must occur on each planet; all earlier ones are preparations for this, all later ones are discharges. They prepare the matter into which the physical can then flow. The etheric body belongs to the physical, is the refinement of it. We have, as is well known, to think of physical matter in seven aggregate states, of which the ether is in four; thus: solid, liquid, gas and the corresponding etheric states.

The physical state in the middle with its solid forms is enveloped and permeated by the astral aura. There is an essential difference between this aura before and after physical development. Before, it is dependent on the forces that act on it from the outside; it is cosmic. The physical development must organize it from within. It manifests itself – separate from the physical body – roughly in the shape of a ring, at least that is how it appears to the ordinary clairvoyant. But it is a ring that has been created by two vortices, two spirals, intertwining; seemingly disappearing into nothing, they are suspended, as it were, on the threads of the universe.

By mastering thoughts and feelings, the human being becomes independent, as it were, cutting himself off; the chakras develop at the center of the two vortices, as it were on the axis. So one can say that the essential purpose of physical life is to have one's center within oneself, instead of being pulled by strings in the universe. When the astral body descends after the physical state, it has the result of this within itself.

So each round works out the self. The first round works out the mineral, the second the vegetable, the third the kamic or animal, the fourth the real self.

Before that, the matters are prepared, afterwards they descend, and this process is repeated on each planet.

The foundation for the original planet was the result of an earlier planetary development. The beings had developed the deep trance consciousness. They are the human monads, the Pitris. They were originally there. These beings began to become objective to themselves. To understand this, imagine yourself one night transported to a completely different celestial sphere, with an erased memory. You would not be able to identify yourself in this new environment. This would only be possible if you had retained all your memory, but not if it was lost and the environment was different.

This gives you the difference between objective and subjective. For the first time, the very subjective beings must now come to an objectivity; they must mirror themselves, look at something. And that is the task of the first planet. As one stone bumps into the other, so to speak, the first dull consciousness comes. So that the essential thing is that the subjective Pitris have each lost themselves in another. In esoteric language, this moment is called 'descending into the abyss'. That is, they become objective, have a second self outside of themselves.

Figuratively speaking, they come to the stage of a ball or egg in the physical. The original point is an egg or a ball in the reflection.

The planet is then extremely thin and consists of spheres. You could say that it looks like a big blackberry. Everything is swirling around; man himself is a mineral in a spiritual material form; it is a rapid arising and passing away, like soap bubbles. Everything is mobile in itself.

What is experienced during the following six rounds is an inundation of these first impressions, a consolidation of this state.

The second planet already has a pralaya between itself and the first; and each of these beings already enters with a special experience. For example, there was already a difference in spatial orientation, there was a north pole and a south pole. These experiences are now coming out.

During the first stage, there is a brief repetition, and a higher state of consciousness has to find its way into the earlier experiences. During this second stage, ordering by number, measure, weight and harmony begins. Mental development begins. So the spheres, which previously did not differ, now begin to express their experiences through different proportions. This is the first rudimentary development of the plant kingdom; the beings arrange themselves in such a way that they face each other in threes and fours, in fours and fours, and so on. Everything in the world in terms of number, measure, weight and harmony originated at that time and only changed in the following stages. Man is a plant; the legends that allude to this origin have their source here. This is a beautiful world, in the chaste form of the plant kingdom. Esoterically, this planet is called the “Sun” or “Jupiter”. It is a paradisiacal state of real innocence; that is why the description of this state is one that always fills the initiate with sacred awe.

The following states or rounds are there to reinforce and to subside. All that we have in the way of crystal forms and plant species originated in the layout at that time.

On the moon planet, after a pralaya, we are again dealing with a brief repetition of the two conditions, and only with the third does the new emerge: the condition of beings that develop into desire, into the Kamischen, which not only arranges itself with others, but desires them. This is where unchastity begins; the number does not place itself next to the other in order to be beautiful, but desires it. The two desires the three. Chemical affinities arise, we stand in elective affinities.

Then the flooding follows: the astral states develop. Particularly strong ones give the impression – when you put yourself in them – of glowing, incubating. It is the feeling of being surrounded by the glow of passion; the air that surrounds you is passion, the wind is blowing passion.

Those who were not initiated to a higher level, who did not know that this is only a point of passage, rightly described this world as a demonic world, as hell. It makes sense, then, to speak of 'hellfire'. We find the same thing, albeit cooled, in the lower regions of the astral world, and it is therefore rightly said that people's strongest enemies are there. — The following rounds were intended to absorb this: the glowing passions were absorbed; what used to be atmosphere was absorbed into the beings. They became passion-beings – Kamawesen, Mondpitris – the entities that formed these things.

They naturally had the opportunity to remain at each of the following levels, so there are seven classes of Pitris, the highest of whom have reached the final phase of refined Kama development, of noble, purified Kama. Those of the fifth stage, for example, have already directed their passions towards higher things, towards something that resembles fanaticism, for example; or those of the sixth have the passion for beauty as their disposition; those of the seventh: the passion for good. - The calmly contemplative manas is missing.

Manas now enters the fourth planet, our Earth. The three previous states, the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal round are repeated, because man must now discard what he cannot use to advance in his development; in the fourth round, the new state of consciousness only emerges, the bright consciousness of day. Something completely new is emerging. The mineral, vegetable and animal nature has been cast off. Warm-bloodedness arises as a result of the passions, and the power that absorbs the new is retained.

The descent continues until the third race; the Atlantean race is right in the middle, the Aryan race is in the ascent. During the

During the Lemurian race, Manas was, as it were, placed in the seething mass of Kama and there tried to gain existence, in order to develop later in the Atlantean race as memory; this continuous thread of Manas attaches itself in the fifth race to intellectual combination; Manas is now working within itself.

During the sixth root race, which will replace our Aryan one, the working-in of Manas will continue to proceed. The chakras, the mental organs, and the human ego will develop during the following round.

How does such a development take place? What happens during an initiation? No body can develop beyond its environment; the physical body is dependent on physical powers; man, as a physical being, cannot develop beyond himself. But he can develop his astral body so that he becomes at home in the knowledge of what we call the astral life. He will get to know the origins of evil that lie there. In this way, he has become an artificial fifth rounder. But a certain discrepancy must occur in him, because in a normal further development his physical body would also have become different. He must either renounce what now constitutes life, or there will be a certain discord.

During the fifth round, they can then act as teachers and guides for the fifth round of humanity, just as they already do for the fourth round of humanity. Such fifth-rounders can reach far beyond the present development; but if they are still at the beginning and not at the highest level of fifth-roundership, they will seem like dreamers to others. These are the geniuses who, when they intervene in practical life, act as reformers. Cromwell could be cited as an example. If they are in the middle, they can give us such profound teachings as Goethe; or if they have reached the pinnacle and are already ripe for the sixth round, such as Heraclitus or Plato. Humanity can only progress if such artificial five-rounders take on a human form.

The artificial six-rounder consists of gaining complete clarity about the mental world. A complete insight into the interrelationships, the creative forces of the world, is provided by a leader like Buddha. All that remains for him to do is to complete his mental body; he is completely free in the astral and physical. A six-rounder like this can almost reach the point of attaining human godlikeness. However, this is not possible with the current average body. Such a body must be slowly prepared through chelaship so that the God of our Earth can take possession of this body in later life. Such a process occurred in the third race when the chela Sig made his body available to an artificial seven-rounder. This was even more the case when the chela Jesus of Nazareth, in his thirtieth year, placed his body at the disposal of the Christ principle, the God-Man. It is only in the sixth root race that humanity will be ready for a seven-rounder who has passed through all the stages of humanity to fill the human body with the Christ principle expressed in it. [...]