The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Anna R. Meuss

Today we are to deal with the question of the ensoulment of creatures other than man, especially the question whether animals have any kind of soul. Such things appear superfluous to one who hurries by them without attention, and yet noted men of the past have already occupied themselves with them. Cartesius (Descartes), who at the beginning of the 17th Century was a keen renewer of the philosophy which decayed in the Middle Ages, put the question. But he regarded animals as machines—beings of which one could not really speak of a real ensoulment—reflex machines.

Whoever thoughtfully regards animal life can only share this view with difficulty. We need merely to point out that many animals in our environment perform actions, and enter into relationships even among themselves, which are difficult to imagine without a soul. One example is the faithfulness of the dog. We can only with difficulty give ourselves to the thought that nothing lives in its inner being analogous to what lives in man. If we consider certain performances, can we disregard a higher, spiritual activity? Let us consider, for example, a beaver's dam. This so artistically constructed performance would denote for a man a great spiritual effort. A deep wisdom lies, for instance, in the way certain beams are adapted most exactly in the correct angle, to the fall of the water, and the prevailing conditions.

Consider the ants. In each ant heap, you meet something like a wise state order of human beings—indeed transcending that of modern man. The ants are divided into three groups: workers, males, and females. It is demonstrable that the workers are very clever, the females more stupid, and the males very stupid. Everything in the structure is elaborately organized—the way they procure everything necessary for the building and for the rearing of the young, the way they lead their foraging expeditions, etc. If all this within a human state needs a soul, then we cannot deny an ensouling to these creatures. People always satisfy themselves with “instinct,” but they never attempt to think about anything underlying this “instinct.”

We must now also consider the other side, and not overlook the radical distinction between what man performs with his soul, and the animal with its soul. As an example, we will start from a definite fact. Travelers have often noticed that if they kindled a fire because of the cold, after they left it the apes would come and warm themselves at it. They never observed, however, that an ape had fetched some wood, to keep the fire going. It cannot arrive at this combination, and that is eminently important. It can never, from its own spiritual powers, do anything new, such as stir up the fire, etc.

If we want to make clear to ourselves the animal soul, we must start with this difference from the human soul. A further difference between the animal and human soul is that you can write a biography of each human soul, but not of the animal. That is very important. If you ask yourselves about your interests in different beings, you will find that you bring the same interest to an individual man as in the case of the animals, to a whole group of similar ones. Think of a lion. You feel the same towards the lion-grandfather, father, son, grandson, etc., but this idea would appear to you nonsensical, if applied to human beings.

It says nothing when a dog owner perhaps maintains that he could write a biography of his dog. You could also write a biography of a pen, or the differences in the life of a pin and a needle. That is only an overdrawn distinction. Just as strongly as one whole animal species differs from another, does the single individual person differ from another.

One common soul lives in the entire animal group. As your ten fingers are members of your hands, so are all wolves members of the wolf group soul.

Now we must enter more exactly into the nature of the human soul, which formerly was not as individualized as it is today. At one point of human evolution, man stood far closer to the group soul. Tacitus, one hundred years after Christ, gives us a picture of the different tribal groups. All members of a group then felt themselves belonging together, naturally with gradations, for everything in human evolution is in stages. All members of a group then looked alike. The markedly individual physiognomies are the sign of this freeing of the individual souls from the group soul. You still find today, among savages, more or less the same features. We must hold fast to this fact, that the physiognomy coming to expression is the proof that the individuality works formatively on the body. This will be more and more marked among the further evolved human races. A time will come when the racial character entirely recedes. If a soul incarnates, now in this, now in that nationality, then the national distinctions vanish, and each one will always only remember himself the more his individuality has worked itself out. Formerly, when marriage only took place within the tribe, the members held together like the fingers of the hand, one revenging the wrong done to another, as if it had happened to himself, etc. This cohesion disappeared more and more; the larger, and more general, the aggregation of human beings, all the more individual became the soul and character. A medley does not arise, but the more the distinctions fall away, the more does individuality arise.

Now, in what way are the human group souls distinguished from the animal? For this we must go back far into the story of their origin.

There was a time in which man did not yet live, as now, in his various bodily sheaths and spiritual germ of his being. I mean the Lemurian Age. At that time the highest beings were a kind of human-animal, with physical, etheric, astral bodies, and the tendency to the ego, but not yet the ego itself, beings that were adapted to take up the divine germ. The soul which now lives in their inner being, had not yet left the bosom of the Godhead. It still lived in a soul-spiritual stratum. Think of a vessel of water with 1000 drops, which pass over without separation into each other, thus forming a unity. Take 1000 tiny sponges, each one of which can absorb one drop, and immerse them. Then each will be filled with one drop. You must think similarly that the human sheaths absorb the divine germ; thereby they first become individual and independent.

Now imagine that in the beginning the soul did not take up its dwelling in each single one, but that one soul distributed itself as group soul among many. What today dwells in one, then inhabited a whole tribe. Here you must grasp a new concept. Such a group soul does not die. The beautiful, significant side of death is a specific privilege of the individual human soul. If one part of the group soul dies, then it immediately replaces it, like the tentacle you cut from a polypus. Thus the group soul, which does not descend to the physical plane, feels death as the loss of one member, and birth as the growing of a similar one. It has not the privilege of death. Only when a sense being says “It is I,” death begins to enter individual life. Man struggles for and attains his higher life through death. Unless death were overcome, he could not attain through it to higher life.

The soul of the animal is to be found on the astral plane, and is connected with each single member of its group by a thread. In order to understand how animal group souls arise, you must be clear what makes man the physical being that he is. When the divine germs descended, they found the bearers very different. Many were especially developed for conflict; others were similarly formed but more developed for work, for patience, etc., so that the various bodies differed greatly in development even in external form. What today exist as lower animals, as insects, etc., had already branched off during a former incarnation of the earth, and originated by themselves. We are now concerned only with animals from the fishes upwards. When that descent occurred into the waiting bodies, which outwardly (not inwardly) stood approximately at the stage of the fish body, there were no mammals yet existing. The human being who lived then had to move forward half swimming, half floating, and for this purpose had fin-like organs. That which took place in his body on earth, took place through the indwelling human soul. Only in the course of a long evolution was this body transformed to the present god-like body.

Many things remained stationary on this long path. Since, however, the earth was meantime transformed, this standing still caused a decline in the development of the bodies. Take two brothers—the one is transformed through the different ages of life, the other remains stationary at the childhood stage. At the age of 60, however, he no longer looks like a child. Thus the present fishes have come down and look different from how they looked formerly.

Humanity developed further, and fashioned everything to the mammalian body. Everywhere, again, are those who remain stationary—decadent human beings. If you really grasp aright, you will understand that all animals have aged at the youth stage, have aged too early, have adopted fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have, as it were, crystallized in their whole evolution. The upward development, indeed, now brought man into a peculiar position, with reference to certain characteristics. He lost security. Monkeys in captivity soon end through tuberculosis and other illnesses. Animals cannot stand the human way of life. Even as regards nourishment, they have a certain security. If a cow goes over a meadow, she knows exactly what plants are good for her. Man has that no more. He needs insecurity in order to come to freedom of choice. The present insecurity is necessary to reach security at a higher stage. Man adapts himself to higher stages. Thus his becoming insecure is the guarantee that he becomes independent. To have remained secure denotes something that has not advanced to the point where the ego can work in the individual being. We should wonder as little about animal wisdom as about the wisdom of our own hand. The single beaver is merely the handyman of the group soul on the astral plane.

The ant stands at quite a different stage from the beaver, and much further from us, because it already separated off at a much earlier planetary condition of the earth. In its one-sided development it has advanced much further than man. Man thinks, feels, wills, in fixed connection. If I see something which pleases me I grasp at it; the idea evokes the will. Without this interaction man would be very insecure. With the Chela, will, idea, and feeling are torn asunder, and must be quite separate. For general humanity that will first be attained at the Jupiter stage of the earth. But before he experiences this, the Guardian of the Threshold meets him, and gives him clarity about the whole of his previous life.

This falling apart into threefoldness has been gone through prematurely by certain animal group souls. As a matter of fact, individual parts in the brain of the Chela are differentiated like the ants in the ant hill. The ant has undertaken that prematurely and now remains like an unripe, clever child. The beaver group soul will have to make up for what it has missed; the ant soul has lost it once and for all, and goes quite other paths.

The animal souls are human souls that have become one-sided. Oken says: “The tongue is an ink fish.” Naturally, that is not to be taken literally. The being, however, in which the characteristics of the tongue have become too prominent, remains stationary at that point. Paracelsus uttered the profound words: If we survey nature we simply see separate letters and the word they form is the human being. Imagine all the different qualities which you find together in man, allocated to different bodies, then you need a group soul. Animals are human beings which have remained stationary in the one-sided development of their characteristics.

Man became a discoverer through the loss of security. The first element which he learned to put to his service was fire. Therewith he reached the first stage of civilization which made him a productive being. He is an encyclopedia of the different animal souls.

Now you must still be clear on one point. If you go to the lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express pain and pleasure through sound. The insects, indeed, produce noises, but they are body noises. Occult science here makes a quite decisive distinction between the sounding animals and the non-sounding ones. But, first, in man, does the inner sound become word, speech. Even the highest animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. In a later epoch the animal group souls, not the single animals, will become human beings but quite differently constituted from the man today. Even before Theosophy, Goethe felt this and expressed it wonderfully in his “Metamorphosis of Animals”; that they (animals) are like a man laid asunder, that the entire animal kingdom looks out from out of the human form.

Thus man says to all animal beings (speaking of himself), “All this, comprised in one, art thou!”

Question: Will further cleavages come in human evolution?

Answer: Yes, and in fact that is what is called in Theosophy “going through the Crisis.” We now stand in the Fifth Root Race. The Sixth Race will see quite another race, noble and beautiful, in contrast to the thrown off, decadence which will be a race of men, horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity, because these will go on developing downwards. It is shown quite clearly in the Apocalypse how the division will occur in the so-called Last Judgment. He who is quite selfless can even now become ripe for the Sixth Race. He may still indeed continue to incarnate, but only in order to help the others. Many may perhaps find that the Judgment sounds harsh, but they have, as we know, the choice. Understand me aright, not for reincarnation, but for the Sixth Race.

Question: Why do old people become mentally weak, even if the soul cannot change?

Answer: The soul, indeed, does not change. It never descends from the stage once reached. But its instrument has become weak, like a great pianist who can no longer play as he played formerly, if he has a bad instrument. You will say the soul no longer knows its own stage. Yes, the soul does not see itself as long as it is in a physical body. There is only to be found the reflection of the soul, the mirror image. Now the mirror becomes clouded or broken. Then it can no longer reflect. The Chela is really the first able to perceive his soul.

We really ought to acquaint ourselves, somewhat, with the fundamental problem and fundamental currents of Christianity, if we wish to throw light upon the two ideals of the Christian world-conception in all their profundity. You already know, through previous lectures, that the teachings of Christianity, as generally proclaimed, are based upon a so-called esoteric Christianity. You know, moreover, that even in the Gospels we find intimations concerning this esoteric Christianity, clearly expressed in the words: When the Lord stood before the people He spoke in parables, but when he was alone with His disciples He explained these parables unto them. Thus, it is clear that He gave one form of his Teaching to those who had less understanding—to whom it was necessary to speak in parables, for it was not yet possible to go into things any deeper with them; and He proclaimed another Teaching which was destined for the initiated.

In the same way, also, Paul—the great expander of Christianity—taught, before the people, an external form of that Teaching, which we know through his Epistles. On the other hand, in addition to this Teaching of Paul—which was an external Teaching, meant for the people—he expounded an esoteric Teaching, as well. External history knows nothing about the fact that Paul founded the esoteric School at Athens, which was under the leadership of Dionysius. In this School of esoteric Christianity, the same Mystery-Teaching, or Occultism, was taught, which you also—at the present time—are learning to know anew, through Spiritual Science. Scientific learning does not know very much concerning those Teachings which were proclaimed at that time, at Athens, by the esoteric companions of St. Paul, to their more intimate disciples. One even speaks about a false Dionysius, because—it is said—it is not possible to prove that any of these Teachings were ever recorded in writing.

Pseudo-Dionysius is the name given to the man who taught this form of esotericism during the 6th century. Yet only those persons can call him by that name who do not know what was customary, in earlier times, in connection with Initiate-teachings of this sort. Only in our days has it become customary for people to record everything, as quickly as possible, in writing. Whatever was contained in the holiest Truth was preserved from publicity, in those days. One to whom such a Truth was to be entrusted was first scrutinised carefully. Only within the esoteric Schools was this Truth passed on from mouth to mouth—and only to such persons as could really value it aright. Thus it was that these particular teachings of esoteric Christianity were likewise handed down from man to man—till, finally, some of them were written down during the sixth century. Since it was customary for the leaders of such a School to always bear the name of Dionysius, the leader of this School at Athens, during the sixth century, therefore also bore this name—the same name which had been borne by his great predecessor at Athens, the friend of Paul.

Let us now consider in the spirit of this esoteric School, and actually in the way in which it was taught there, the concept of Sin, or, we might say, of slander against the Holy Ghost—and the Christian concept of Grace.

If we wish to grasp the fundamental meaning of Christianity, we must return, in thought, to a very remote past in the history of human evolution; and we must realise that, through the appearance of Christ-Jesus, something entirely new has actually been impressed upon the history of the spiritual evolution of humanity. What it is that has thus been impressed finds its fervent expression in the initiation of Paul himself.

The fact that a man like Saul, through so sudden an illumination, could attain to complete conviction of the Truth of Christianity, would not have been possible before the appearance of Christ-Jesus. We have already often spoken about the form of initiation which preceded the appearance of Christ-Jesus upon earth. Let us now do this, once again, in order to understand what the Spirit of Truth really signifies, in the Christian sense. If we wish to grasp what is was that took place, in the ancient sites of initiation, we must briefly recall to our minds the nature and being of man.

We know that man consists of a seven-fold being. His physical body is built up out of the same substances as those contained in the lifeless materials of the physical world. His etheric body calls these forces into life, and works—at every moment of life—against the decay of the physical body; only at death does the etheric or life-body go out of the physical body. The crystal is able to hold its substances together, through its own forces; the living body, on the other hand, decays as soon as it is abandoned and left to itself. It is indeed a fact that, at every moment, there is a fighter battling within this body against death; if this fighter ceases to battle, death ensues.

Man's third member is the astral body, or the consciousness-body. His fourth member is the Ego; by means of this member he is the crown of creation.

All Mystery-Teachings have thought of man as being built up of these four members. In the Pythagorean School, each disciple had to be introduced, first of all, to this Teaching of the fourfold man. Only when this Teaching had become his innermost conviction, could he be advanced to higher knowledge. Hence he had to take this vow: "I vow allegiance, by virtue of what is deeply engraved in our hearts: to the holy fourfold Being, to the sublime spiritual symbol—the primal fount of all natural and spiritual Creation."

Even the most undeveloped human being has these four members. Man evolves, throughout the course of his various incarnations, to an ever greater degree o perfection, through the fact that the Ego works upon these three members of his being.

It begins, first of all, within the astral body, to work upon everything that constitutes the progress of civilisation and logical scientific learning—upon everything, that is to say, which serves to bring about a freedom from the animal stage. This is the work of the Ego upon the astral body. In the case of every moderately-developed human being, whose Ego has already worked upon the astral body, we find that the astral body divides into two parts: into the originally existing part, and that part produced by the Ego. This latter part which expands more and more—the more the human being progresses—is designated by the name of Manas or Spirit-Self.

Christian esotericism designates this part as the Holy Ghost—the Holy Spirit, in contrast to the unpurified, unholy part of the astral body.

Thus, we have learned to know the fifth member. But the Ego can also work upon the more dense, etheric body. In a certain sense, this already takes place in the ordinary human being—that is to say, unconsciously. It has often been stated that we should learn to distinguish between the work upon the astral and the etheric bodies. The ratio of speed, in the progress of the first of these, in relation to the latter, may be compared with the movement of the minute-hand of the clock, in relation to the hour-hand. If a human being surrenders himself to the impression made upon him by some lofty work of art, this has a transforming effect upon his life-body and his consciousness-body. Every great artistic impulse has this effect. Strongest of all is the effect of those religious impulses which were brought into the world by the founders of religions, and which direct the Ego toward the Eternal. The clairvoyant eye can see how the etheric body becomes more and more beautiful and pure.

That part of the human etheric body which is spiritualised by the Ego, is called Budhi or Life-Spirit; it is the transformed life-body. Christian esotericism designates this part, which is transformed by the Ego, the Christos. The fifth member of the human being is the Holy Ghost—the sixth member is the Christ, the inner Christos.

Our attention has already been called to the fact that so-called Mystery-schoolings, or preparations, have always existed for man—enabling him to become an Initiate, and to look into the spiritual world. Such a training is based upon the transformation, on a higher plane, of the etheric or life-body. For this reason, we must be quite clear in our realisation that every higher form of schooling is more than a mere acquisition of concepts and material for study. The occult training consists, rather, in the transformation of the qualities of our etheric body. Anyone who has transformed a temperament has thereby achieved far more than if he had acquired an infinite amount of scientific learning.

Now, there is a still higher form of metamorphosis, which takes place only through secret or occult schooling. Through this, the human being purifies his physical body. How much, indeed, does man know concerning his physical body! Through the fact that he examines it by dissection in an "anatomical museum" he does not by any means acquire any real knowledge concerning the laws which rule it, nor any inner control of these laws. Yet there is a possibility for him to look into himself, so that the movements of the nerve-currents, of the pulse-beat, and of the breath-streams, will become clear to him, and he can then be consciously active within these. When the human being, accordingly—through so-called occult training—is able to transform his physical body also, this now transformed body is designated as Atman, because the work upon it begins with the regulation of the breathing processes. (In German "Atmen" means: to breathe.) The seventh member of the human being is Atman—in Christian esotericism: the Father.

Thus we first attain to the Holy Ghost, to the transformed astral body; through the Holy Ghost we come to the Christ—to the consciousness of the etheric body; and through the Christ, to the Father, or the consciousness of the physical body.

If you have understood how these seven members of human nature are inter-related, you will also understand how Initiation took place in ancient times, before Christ, and how this Initia-tion took place, after Christ-Jesus had appeared on the earth.

When the human being is asleep, only his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed—his astral body is outside. When he dies, he leaves his physical body behind: only that part of the physical body which he has already transformed goes with him: forces, that is to say, not substances. What the human being thus takes with him, is very little indeed. Nevertheless, it is just this part which, in a new incarnation, serves to build up a new physical body. Materialism designates this part as the "permanent atom". And this part of the physical body, which the human being himself has transformed, is the first to leave the physical body; then the etheric body leaves it; then the consciousness-body, and then the Ego. After a short time, that part of the etheric body which the human being has not yet worked upon separates itself.

Thus it is that the human being enters Kamaloca, the Place of Purification. After another period of time, that part of the astral body which the Ego has not yet worked upon, severs itself likewise… And then there comes the time when the human being has left to him, from his three bodies, only those parts which the Ego has worked upon and transformed, through its own forces; and this is what passes through Devachan—this is the eternal kernel of man's being. It increases more and more, the more the Ego has worked upon it.

The Holy Ghost is the eternal Spirit in man. The Christ is the eternal part of the life-body; the Father, the eternal part of the physical body. These Three accompany the human being throughout all time, as that part of him which is eternal.

Before the Christian era, Initiation took place in such a way that the disciple was first prepared for everything which Mystery Teaching was able to give, until he reached the point where he was familiar with all the concepts and ideas, all the habits and feelings which are needed for living and perceiving in the higher worlds. This was followed by what was designated as the Awakening, which lasted for three and a half days and three nights. This consisted of a process whereby, through the skill of the Temple-Priest, the human being was artificially placed in a condition resembling death, for three and a half days. Whereas, normally the physical and etheric bodies remain connected during sleep, the initiating priest now drew out, during this space of time, the etheric body of the disciple about to be initiated, so that only a very loose connection existed between the etheric and physical body, on the one hand, and the remaining two bodies, on the other hand. It was a deep, trance-like sleep. The Ego of the man lived in the higher worlds, during this period of time. As the disciple had been given a knowledge of the higher worlds, he now felt at home there. The Priest was his guide. First of all, the Priest had to free the etheric body from the lethargic physical body, in order to lead it out of the physical body; in a fully-conscious state, the human being would never have been able to rise to these higher worlds ; it was necessary for him to be lifted out of such a state. Although the experiences which a human being passed through in such a process, were sublime and overpowering, he was nevertheless entirely in the hands of the Priest; he was under the power of another, and only under these conditions was he able to enter the higher worlds.

What the human being was like, after having passed through this experience, may be imagined if we bear in mind that it gave him the opportunity of experiencing his own eternal being: he was then emancipated from the part which was not eternal—his physical body—which he could not use, if he wished to move about in the higher worlds. Such a human being returned as one endowed with knowledge—as one who could bear witness, through his own vision, to the victory of life over death. Those who could bear witness, in this way, were Initiates. Their etheric body had to be lifted out of the physical body, in order that they might experience the Christos in man. These Initiates were able to say to themselves: "I have learned through my own experience that there is a part in man, which is eternal, which outlasts all incarnations. I know it, for I myself have experienced this eternal kernel of man's being". In order to attain to this, they were obliged to dwell for three days in a state of profound, dream-like sleep.

But there was something else that was connected with this—this kind of Initiation was dependent upon still another factor. And, the further we go back in time, the more we realise the truth of this. I have already characterised this to you, when I once explained that, in ancient times, there existed what we might call "close marriage", in contrast to distant marriage. In all nations, we find small communities which were inter-related; people married within these communities, and it was considered immoral to abandon them by marrying outside. The same blood always streamed through these marriages. Only very gradually was this close marriage substituted by the principle of distant marriage. Indeed, in the case of initiation, very special measures had to be observed, it was necessary to choose most carefully, from preceding incarnations, in order to produce the best possible mixture o blood. Such a genealogy then produced the one who was capable of passing through the higher grades of Initiation. In the case of persons related by blood, it is especially easy to draw the etheric body out of the physical body. In the case of distant marriages, this is by no means so easy. Throughout long generations of priests, it was their duty to see that the blood was maintained in a specially determined way. Human life is complicated; it does not always follow a straight road; and it is necessary to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddles of existence.

In ever increasing measure, this principle of close marriage was broken; the tribe extended more and more to the folk or nation. In the case of the Israelites, we see how the tribal principle rose completely to the idea of the national community. Christ extends this perspective into the far distant future: "He that forsaketh not his father, mother, brother or sister for my sake, cannot be my disciple."—In a stern, yet in a most deeply true way, do these words indicate the direction followed by Christianity. Within the national community, one would say: This is my brother, for he was born in the same nation. in the human brotherhood, which must encompass the whole human race, one should say: Because you are a human being, you are my brother. This is the most profound of all Christian principles. All narrow-mindedness contained in the other form of relationship must be torn asunder, and a common tie must unite human beings. At the same time, this implies also that the old principle of Initiation has been torn asunder; for it was based upon relationship of the blood.

The new principle of Initiation—which is not connected, since the coming of Christ, with any physical quality—is clearly indicated to us, in the case of Paul: He is initiated in the Light, not in the darkness of the Temple. This could not have taken place, earlier. When we bear this in mind, we shall be able to realise the tremendous turning-point brought about by Christ Jesus. The way to this was prepared by Moses, Zarathustra Buddha, Pythagoras;—but it was brought to fulfilment by Christ-Jesus.

Thus we see also that in the Christian Schools of Initiation this new principle is carried through, for the first time—the principle of not drawing the human being out of the physical body, in order to lead him into the higher worlds, but of leading him into the higher worlds while completely conscious in his physical body. This is what took place, accordingly, in the Christian esoteric Schools. In contrast to this, there is the old way—and this still includes a great part of humanity, even at the present time—in which there is the initiating Temple-priest, to whose stern authority the neophyte surrenders himself. Only by subjecting oneself entirely to the power of such an Initiating priest, was it possible to ascend to higher worlds.

The principle of enforced authority came to expression also in social life. The Priests were rulers. Every law of government, the whole structure of the state, was in the power of the Initiates. From the blood-community of the tribe, up to the community of the nation, this was possible. But, through the fact that the old principle of initiation was eliminated, the way was opened for an entirely new form of authority: a free authority, based solely upon trust and confidence. "Believe only in the one whom you trust"—this is the most sublime Christian idea to which we can rise, by virtue of which we all face one another as brothers, and the one who, stands higher will be recognised as the one who deserves our trust.

"Watch and pray": this is a fundamental Christian principle. The new Initiation takes place in a state of full consciousness. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free”: these are profoundly Christian words, for they signify a perspective into the farthest future of Christianity. Christianity is at the beginning of its evolution.

Let us consider the intensely close tie that existed between the initiating Teacher and the disciple, during the ancient Temple-Sleep, which lasted three and a half days—when the neophyte was being initiated into the highest Mysteries. This relation was of a kind which we cannot even imagine, to-day. The relation between the hypnotiser and the one who is hypnotised may give a faint idea of the way in which the initiating Temple-priest first called to life the Holy Ghost, and then the Christos. The disciple reflected the Holy Ghost and the Christos of the Teacher: the personalities of the Teacher and the disciple streamed into each other, and the clairvoyant could observe the process. During the three days, the Teacher and disciple were one. The Ego of the Guru thus lived on, in all of his disciples, and was deeply merged with them, during the three and a half days.

Let us observe the pyramidal structure of social life: the folk below; above the folk, the Initiates; and, above these, the Teachers of the Initiates. One and the same Spirit streamed down through all these stages. Many things, consequently, passed over into, and lived on, in those who were initiated in this way—even things that were alien to them.

As a result of the Christian principle, the individuality appeared in its full value. This explains the fundamental principle of Christian initiation. Never should the disciple become merged with the Teacher in the old way. They must not become one person, during Initiation. The Holy Ghost must arise, and awaken within the Ego of each single human being: this has become the principle of Christian Initiation. And this is also expressed symbolically, in the miracle of Pentecost. The possibility of Initiation, in that case, was given through the fact that all who were present began to speak in different tongues.

The Teacher respects the individuality of the other person; he enters into the heart of his disciple—he does not draw this out of the physical body.

We should bear in mind that, for the modern human being, everything depends upon the free and independent development, within each one, of the Holy Ghost and the Christos. We shall then realise that it is through this principle of Christianity that—for the first time, indeed—this human personality can be looked upon as free and independent. Only through Christianity has the human individuality become really free; and, for this reason, through Christianity, an entirely new relation to Truth and Wisdom has become necessary.

In olden times, the spirit of Wisdom ruled over all things, because it was centralised. Through the cleavage that followed, it became de-centralised; but Egoism arose. The more the principle of distant marriage begins to hold sway, the greater must become the power of that element which brings together human beings, now become free. And what is this element? If we consider what we may learn to-day, in the elementary parts of spiritual science, and then go back to ancient times, we shall find that this knowledge was in the possession of small communities only—and, indeed, even then, only in the possession of the highest authority. For this reason, the ruling principle was based upon compulsion. We are now approaching the time when Wisdom will become m.re and more popular. This will be the means whereby the great Brotherhood of humanity will be established.

Two occultists will never be of a different opinion. Where-ever this is the case, one of the two opinions is wrong. Wisdom is something unified—a oneness—which cannot contain differences. The more individualised human beings become, the more they will need this wisdom; for, through it, they will be drawn together. To-day, we are living in an age of transition. The principle of different viewpoints ceases entirely, through the progressive development of Wisdom. The more individualised men become, the wiser they must grow; for knowledge will lead them together. This is the Spirit of Wisdom which Christ-Jesus his promised to His followers. The Sun of Wisdom draws into itself all differing standpoints—just as the sun attracts the plants. The Spirit which will make men free, is the Holy Ghost. Against this Spirit, no Christian may ever sin. For he who sins against it, sins against Christianity itself—against that promised Spirit which is able to draw together all separate human individualities.

There is a passage which tells us that Christ-Jesus cast out demons. Demons exist only as long as the human being is not free—as long as he has not yet received into himself the Spirit of Wisdom. The human being is absolutely filled with all kinds of beings, which stream in and out of his lower members. (Perhaps we may use the trivial comparison of a piece of cheese, with maggots creeping in and out of it). We call these beings shadows, spectres, ghosts, or demons. In making Himself known as the Spirit who casts out demons, Christ-Jesus has shown that He is the Spirit of Freedom. For demons can be cast out only by calling forth the one Spirit against the others—the Spirit of Freedom against all the other spirits.

Let us now consider once more the ancient communities—extending from the tribal community to the nation. How may these human beings, who are not yet individually free, be drawn together? Imagine to yourselves that everyone who is sitting here has become truly free—that the Spirit of Truth lives in each one! Would we, in that case, ever quarrel, ever fall into dissension? No—for where the Spirit unites us, there can be no divergence of opinions. In ancient times, external law had to hold sway, in order to hold human beings together. Where two human beings know the Spirit of Truth, they will, because of this, feel themselves drawn to each other.

At the beginning of human evolution was the Law: at the end of evolution, there will be peaceful, harmonious cooperation from within. Esoteric Christianity calls this, in contrast to the Law—Grace. To be able to share, in complete harmony, the feelings of one's fellow-man: this is the profoundest concept of Christianity.

The astral body that has been filled with the Holy Ghost, is the same in all men—the Spirit of Truth, in each one, is the same. Imagine to yourselves this Spirit within a human individuality in which also the Christos has been awakened—that is to say, that principle which is active as Life-Spirit within the Life-Body. If each one of us were to permeate his etheric body with this feeling, we should then have, in every heart, the feeling for the One, unified Spirit. Human individualities are brought together by the Wisdom which is common to all; and what each one feels within himself, is Caritas—Grace.

The One who brought Grace to earth was He Who, at the beginning of our Era, contained within His own individuality the whole Christos—the One Who fulfilled, for the first time, the principle of humanity, as a whole. Christ-Jesus developed in Himself what should live in every single human being. Whatever exists through freedom and peaceful cooperation, has come into the world through Him.

"Become alive again in Christ and kill the Spirit of discord", says Paul.

A human being may sin against everything which is not contained in this Spirit. But, if he were to sin against this Spirit of a common humanity, if he were to deny this Spirit—he would no longer be a Christian.

The human being must reach the stage of being conscious of the Spirit. If he develops himself, ever more and more, his consciousness-body becomes transformed into the Holy Ghost. It is for this reason that the Sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven. In the case of an uninitiated person, the transformation of the etheric body takes place unconsciously. As long as the human being is not initiated, the unforgivable sin can be committed only within his astral body. The Initiate may not sin, even against the physical or etheric body: to the one who is not initiated, these sins may be forgiven. All of this takes place with the help of those who are the Leaders of humanity.

Speaking about occultism and the occult development of the human being, one must first and foremost clarify how the cultivation of occult development relates to actual theosophical work in the world. The latter has, since its inception, performed its task precisely by making a certain number of occult truths accessible to mankind. These truths about the super-sensible worlds, which can be learned from the theosophical literature and lectures, are essentially ancient. However, until the last third of the 19th century, it was neither usual nor necessary to share these truths publicly with the world in the form in which they exist today as theosophical truths. The cultivation of these truths was a matter of the so-called secret schools and secret societies.

One who wanted to learn some of the ancient truths about the inner world, had to be, so to speak, an accepted student, a student of the great teachers of mankind. That someone would have travelled around, as we do nowadays, to share certain elemental truths with the world, wasn't done back then. One who was admitted had to provide certain proofs of his character, his intellectual and other abilities, and within the school, there was a very strict division by degree. It was impossible, for example, to reveal to someone who had just been accepted, secrets of higher degrees. In short, everything was strictly ordered, and the world outside did not know anything about the existence of such a secret science, although this is the only true occultism.

Who were those who found their calling there? Usually, they were not known. One was a smith, one a shoemaker, a privy councillor, a carpenter. What was known was only what he represented in the world. One did not know that these people were wise ones, able to deeply look into the spiritual and super-sensible world. This changed in the last third of the 19th century. Today it is necessary that at least the elementary parts of the secret sciences reflected in theosophical texts, lectures and other writings, be made public. That this is possible and why this is so, we will see right away.

First, we must take a look at this past age, which really basically lasted into the 14th century, and also partly into the last third of the 19th century. What is happening now, the publication of certain elemental teachings of occultism had been prepared by the occult movement. This movement was founded in the 14th and 15th centuries by a high-ranking individual who became known to the world under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹ What ‘Christian Rosenkreutz’ is, or who hides behind it, only the initiates know. One thing only is certain, he belongs to the most developed individuals of the modern era, who had to shape the occult knowledge of the Middle Ages in such a way, that it would fit into modern life.

In the last third of the 19th century, some were meant to go out to announce to humanity, what it needs to know today. Theosophy is nothing else but the elementary doctrine of occultism.

If we now look back at those distant times when occultism was practised in secret, there were three avenues by which a human being could come into contact with the super-sensible worlds: First as an initiate, second as a clairvoyant, third as an adept. In the old days, these three methods were kept strictly apart, and if we really want to understand what the occult development of man is all about, then we must clearly understand these three terms.

It is actually known what is meant by a clairvoyant. I specifically note that the more important one is the clairvoyant because he, after all, possesses higher senses. It is very easy to explain what a clairvoyant is. In every human soul, hidden abilities lie dormant. These can be developed, enabling the human being to look into the world hidden from the ordinary senses. There are such secret scientific methods. If a human being practises these himself, then he will no longer be as unconscious during sleep as an ordinary human being. Practising these methods make it possible that his astral body, when it pushes itself out with the Ego, perceives the spiritual world in his surroundings. Initially perceived like flooding light, like light- and colour-phenomena, he then begins to hear during the night.

This is a real experience the human being has of himself: that he, for the time being in a transitional state, is surrounded by a spiritual world as well as by a physical one. This is the beginning of actual clairvoyance.

One who really wants to achieve the state of clairvoyance, must be able to carry across into his day-consciousness what he now sees at night, because it would only be a half-measure if one could only look at night into the astral world. Once he is able to really tune in, so that he sees not only what exists for the physical senses in humans, animals and so on, but also perceives as shining aura that which the human being and the animal feels and experiences, then the state of modern clairvoyance is reached. Therefore, a clairvoyant is someone who can really see into the spiritual world and speak about it.

Let’s assume, there was an area where people have never seen a railroad and someone from there moves to an area where there were railroads. Then he would learn about it through his own experience. He would be able to talk about it at home based on his own experience, just as the clairvoyant can testify about the spiritual world.

But someone who is such a clairvoyant, is not yet what could be called an adept, nor could he be called an initiate. If a man who, according to the example above, has become familiar with a railway by personal experience, now returns home, he would not be entrusted with the task of building a railway. The same applies to the clairvoyant. He is not able to do what someone else can do who has gained practical and scientific knowledge in the super-sensible world. This is how the clairvoyant, who has only seen what exists in the higher worlds, is in comparison to the adept.

Still different is the Initiate. Here is another comparison: Imagine a human being who can see all colours and lights, and another one who is quite short-sighted. The first one doesn’t know anything about the laws of the world of light, the other one, who can’t see far, but as a trained physicist and scientist knows all the laws well. There are people, who are initiated to a high degree, despite them not being clairvoyant; at least this is applicable to all the old schools, but not to the same degree nowadays. In the old days it was possible to work like this, because don’t forget that to teach clairvoyance or train initiates is a lengthy process. Some require many incarnations to achieve this.

Such cooperation of clairvoyants and initiates is now no longer entirely possible; for this reason the Rosicrucian School no longer keeps these things strictly separate. The selflessness, that used to operate in the secret schools, can hardly be comprehended by people today. Especially, in the Egyptian secret schools individuals worked together in this way. Today, the requisite trust no longer exists, and modern man cannot imagine this anymore. This is why initiates and clairvoyants in the Rosicrucian schools were only developed to a certain degree. In contrast, one has to deal very carefully with adeptship as one could only harm the world. Because people are very disinclined to believe that spiritual powers influence everything. A storm would be unleashed and the consequence of this would be that the preparatory understanding would be jeopardised. First, it is necessary for clairvoyants and initiates to teach the occult knowledge, and only then adepts will gradually appear.

What is an adept? They exist in all areas. Observe man himself. Man consists by his nature of a physical, an etheric, and an astral body and an ego. The various limbs of human nature develop quite differently at certain ages. This is a very important consideration. Because, for the occultist a human being is born repeatedly, first physically out of the physical mother. There the physical body is enclosed by the mother’s physical body; different blood circles and juices are moving from mother to child. Once it is physically born, the mother’s physical body is detached from the child completely. This is the first birth. At this point in time the etheric body has not been born. The second birth only happens after the second dentition begins in the seventh year of life. Until then the etheric body is enclosed by the etheric shell, which does not really belong to the specific etheric body of the child. Only in the seventh year of life will the etheric body really be born. The shell will be pushed back, and the outer expression of this process is the appearance of the adult teeth, which the human being will keep. The clairvoyant sees, how, to the extent in which the teeth appear, the etheric body is being born out of his mother’s shell. Until sexual maturity, the human being is still enclosed by its astral mother, who is there from the beginning and will remain also after the seventh year of life. Then the astral mother will be pushed aside, and only now the astral body will be born, like earlier the physical and the etheric body were born. The reaching of sexual maturity means for man, the birth of the astral body. From age twenty-one to twenty-eight only, the ego will be fully born.

Once people realise how this development proceeds, it will become clear what kind of impact this will have on education. I have given a description of this in my paper The education of the child from the perspective of the science of the spirit.² This brochure contains all the rules that need to be taken into consideration in this context. Now, you see, a teacher, who has mastered this system, would be an adept in the area of education.

This practical work appearing from the spiritual worlds is adeptship. Until age seven a kind of hardening (solidification) of forms is happening inside the human being. All forms of the brain, and the bone structures (skeleton) will be created by the seventh year of life. They will continue to grow, but what doesn’t develop by age seven is irretrievable. So something irretrievable can be neglected by education. From then onwards the etheric body becomes free. Now it becomes obvious how the teeth that a human being gets are an expression of proper solidification and formation processes of the etheric body, which is just being born, and show whether they are in correct proportion to each other. These two things are related, the emergence of the teeth and the emergence of the etheric body. Everything that is concerned with growth and reproduction is connected with it. If one of these is not correct, then the other one will not be correct either. This illustrates how the science of the spirit explains how the teeth and the etheric body are connected. For example, women who have bad teeth, are more likely to have been affected by childbed fever.

Something of the principle of solidification and something of the principle of softening must exist—these hardening and softening principles need to exist in balance. Rickits, for example, occurs when the softening principle is stronger. Let us assume that the hardening principle is predominant, then the germs are laid for tuberculosis, for arteriosclerosis.

The moment in which the human being, by applying super-sensible principles, is able to guide the development of the etheric and physical body, he will be an adept in the area of child education, just like Paracelsus,³ who is no longer understood, was an adept, as he could perceive in any moment the invisible principles. Now you can imagine the kind of storm that would break out if you would approach a university with such teachings. Humankind must be prepared step by step, and then it will come to a point where it will demand that spiritual leaders back up their teachings with works from the spiritual world. The reason for the existence of initiates is, that the spiritual world can be researched and found according to its prevailing laws by means of clairvoyance. However, when one has found it and talks about it, then all things that a clairvoyant says can be understood by common sense, and if someone maintains that he cannot understand these, then the reason is not that he isn’t clairvoyant, but that he does not want to use his common sense enough.

Thus, one can be an initiate, without being clairvoyant, but then one has to rely on the clairvoyant. In a certain respect, the theosophical movement aims to help by requiring that all their public teachings are based on clairvoyants’ experience. What do you then want an audience for? In a way, one wants to turn them into Initiates, who comprehend without being clairvoyant themselves.

This is the mission of the theosophical movement. It is also the correct relationship between the teachings that are being given and the way these are made available to the wider audience. Now, this in-depth penetration of the super-sensible world is based on very particular methods. Here, I have already once mentioned specifically the Rosicrucian method,⁴ therefore I will only add a bit.

To raise a human being up into the higher worlds, to turn him into a clairvoyant, requires him to first develop strengths which are already in him: thinking, feeling and willpower. This already includes a lot of the difficulties experienced in the first elementary grades, which are talked about if one intends to alert of dangers. Clairvoyance is for certain people a far too beautiful thing, and those who hear something about Theosophy are keen to achieve clairvoyance. They are not very thrilled when they are told it is necessary to learn something before one gets results.

The first thing one must do is to develop one’s thinking, thoroughly develop it, and certainly prior to becoming a clairvoyant. It is extraordinarily difficult nowadays, to explain what is meant by ‘develop the thinking”. If you can see into the higher world through the opening of the higher senses, you will see that these worlds look very, very different from what you have imagined here. Normally, someone who cannot yet look into them can hardly imagine what one can experience, what kind of impressions there are, and even less so in relation to the world of clairaudience, the harmony of the spheres. One thing, however, remains constant through all worlds: logical thinking. If you have learnt this here, then it is a safe guide in the astral and spiritual worlds. The impressions are totally different, but logic remains the same. This only begins to change in the highest worlds.

What is offered in the theosophical works and books is sensory-free thinking. If one doesn’t learn to do that, then one exposes oneself to a certain danger. One can enable someone else to look into the astral world, but it should not be forgotten, that, if one is not completely standing on the solid ground of healthy thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult there to tell truth from illusion. One who can’t differentiate is simply deranged, he is not spiritually or mentally healthy and thus exposes himself to the danger of losing his balance when the astral world overwhelms him.

One learns to grasp the astral world gradually, by working on one’s feelings, and this happens through imagination. I will show you how this approaches the human being, teaches him, and introduces him to the astral world. This is facilitated by way of converting all ideas a human has, which are normally expressed as dogmas and abstract concepts, into pictures which appear visually. What we are thinking and talking and learning are abstract concepts, thus initially there is speculation. This will lead no one into the higher worlds. Only when the concepts are transformed into pictures does the human being gradually gain access to the higher worlds.

How is this transformation of thoughts into pictures achieved? In the Rosicrucian school, a teacher would say to the student: Look at this plant. With its roots it strives into the ground, its stem rises up straight, on the top is the bloom and the fruit. And now compare the plant with the human being. Superficially thinking one could be tempted to compare the bloom with the human head, and what is down below in the plant with the feet of the human being. In reality, the head of the plant is the root, and what the plant holds chastely up towards the light are its fertility organs. This is exactly the opposite of what is the case with humans.

The bloom has turned these organs towards the light. Imagine this whole thing exactly—if you wouldn’t turn the plant’s fertility organs up towards the light, but down towards the centre of the earth, then they would be penetrated by desire and passion. Thus, we find in a human being a reversed plant, at once pervaded by desires and passions. Thus, the human body is flesh whilst the plant body, the chaste one, is a body that has not yet developed into flesh.

And now look at an animal: It stands between plant and human. Plant, animal and the human being upwards form the cross that extends throughout the whole of nature. Now the student is told: Look at the plant, how it turns its calyx upwards, is kissed by the sun, by the beam of light called the holy lance of love. The human being had to exchange the plant body with the one of flesh pervaded by desire, but he has a high ideal in front of his eyes.

Here we must observe the human heart and the larynx. There are two types of organs in a human body, those, which are on the path to imperfection, and which will incrementally fall away, and others that are only in the stage of formation. All the lower organs, the sexual organs will fall away. Heart and larynx, on the other hand, are organs which will only be perfected in the future, and will only then be developed.

I am speaking to you. My thoughts are within me. I put these into words that originate from my larynx, and create sound vibrations, and in this way, my thoughts communicate with your soul. The voice box is the apparatus to produce airwaves and bring out that which is in the soul. If someone would invent a device through which these waves could be solidified, then you would be able to pick up my thoughts, and my words. In the future, the larynx will not only produce words, but one day it will become the creative, reproductive organ, and will create future beings similar to humans.

During certain times the plant-like nature of the human was not yet penetrated by the lusting passionate nature of the flesh. Those specific organs, which were the latest to develop out of the animal nature, will first disappear again. These are the reproductive organs. These remained for a long time as plant organs after the human being had already appeared in flesh. For this reason, there exist pictorial collections where pictures of hermaphrodites⁵ with plant organs are on display. When the Bible tells about Eve’s fig leaf, in reality, this is a symbol of the fact that these organs were the last to develop in the flesh. In this way, the religious texts must be interpreted. The sexual organs are declining organs, whilst the larynx is in a process of complete transformation, and once the human being has become chaste again, the larynx will turn itself again towards the spiritual sun. The calyx of the plant developed into the form of the flesh filled with passionate desires, and then the larynx will once again become a chaste, pure calyx, fertilised by Spirit, which will be raised up towards the holy lance of love. This is also the symbol of the Holy Grail, its high ideal.

Compare this, try to feel and re-experience all the shivers those images aroused; then you will have only one of those images which are given to a Rosicrucian student. And while you are wandering through these, then you will realise bit by bit that your feelings become facts for you. You will perceive that these feelings radiate light. It always radiates, but the lower human being doesn’t see it. One who experiences this mystical part of imagination learns to see his feelings. This is the beginning.

Not magic, but an intimate process of imagination happens at the beginning of the rise to clairvoyance. But here one thing needs to become clear because from that moment onwards you will see everything emanating from yourself. When one actually starts to transform the inner life into light, one has to be able to bear what is then seen. This requires a strength of character which hardly anyone can imagine. For example, if you, not being clairvoyant, tell a lie this is bad enough. But if you are clairvoyant and tell a lie, and you then see how the lie becomes visible and what it means on the astral plane, then you will understand why it is said that there a lie is murder. And this is so. Just assume you have seen an event happening, and have formed an idea about it, and then tell something that is incorrect, i.e., something that is a lie. Then from the object emanates the correct and from you the false stream and these two will collide and cause a terrible explosion; and each time you do this, you attach a hideous creature to your karma that you can't get rid of until you have made good what you have lied about.

Everyone who wants to become clairvoyant needs to develop three virtues, which are crucial for him. First, self-confidence is needed to be sure of oneself. Second, self-awareness is needed so one is never allowed to shy away from recognising one’s mistakes. And third, presence of mind is needed since one will encounter many things on the astral plane that, while present around us all the time, are something else to see. For this reason these characteristics must be developed first and foremost, and it is really nonsense that some sort of schools or societies train people to become clairvoyants without guiding them in this way.

If now in a different way, a student will be taught namely through occult texts, he will be guided upwards into the spiritual Devachan world to hearing. There one must immerse oneself into those pictures which exist for the development of the human being. I will place one such picture as an example in front of your soul.

Think of the ancient times, when the human being had just come into existence in his current form. In those days Earth was a warm, glowing fireball, and all metals and minerals were melted in the glowing Earth. The physicist would say human beings could not exist there. In those days the human being climbed down from the Godhead and formed himself in the glowing matter. This transformation was a lengthy process. If you were able to see what the clairvoyant can perceive, you would see that he had wrapped himself into a body of fire.

Where has the fire that was burning on the Earth now gone? Where is it? It is in your blood. All the warmth that has been inside the human beings and the animals was and is the fire glow of the Earth. And once you will be able to transform your blood again, so that it shines—and this will be the case when the human larynx will be transformed into the Holy Grail—then the human beings will once again send out an abundance of light. If someone now immerses himself into a picture like this one, then he can achieve clairvoyance, clairaudience. I wish to point to the introduction to the Apocalypse of John which states: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.” These are pictures that have been used for development in Rosicrucian schools. The clairvoyant must learn to decipher such pictures. The development of the Earth will be the Word, and the Word will be with man, and man will create human beings through the Word.

• 1. Christian Rosenkreutz: Not recognised by public history as a real historic figure of the 14th/15th century, Christian Rosenkreutz became legendarily known from two anonymous Rosicrucian texts Fama Fraternitatis, ot the Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Highly Laudable Order of R.C., Kassel 1614, and Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the laudable Brotherhood of the highly honourable Rose Cross, Kassel 1615. According to this, he was a German of noble birth who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name appears for the first time in a text handwritten and as such distributed in 1604, and in 1616 anonymously published in the text The Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1459. Rudolf Steiner presented the author of this text, Johann Valentin Andreae, as the carrier of inspiration of Christian Rosenkreutz. Refer to Rudolf Steiner, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904-1923, GA 35. The essay is also contained in the translation of The Chymical Weddinginto New High German by Walter Weber, Basel 1978., According to Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz was a real historical personality. Compare also, The Esoteric Christendom and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity, GA 130.
• 2. The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science, first published in 1907.
• 3. Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493-1541, doctor and philosopher.
• 4. Refer to note 1(Chapter 1) above. Obviously, the deliberations of Rudolf Steiner at this point have been only fragmentarily captured by the note taker. For better comprehension it is referred to the presentation in the lecture dated 15 September 1909; Lecture 1 in The Luke Gospel cycle, GA 114.
• 5. Beings who have male and female gender characteristics.

I want to talk to you more in-depth about the previous topic of the day before yesterday, about inner or esoteric development and super-sensible knowledge. It will be quite necessary to treat what we examined then as a prerequisite because we want to build further upon what has touched our soul at that time. You will have understood from what was discussed, that the development of the human being is not something that should be taken as a joke; it is not something that should be taken lightly. Though on the other hand, one has to emphasise repeatedly, that one should not talk about the dangers of occult development in an ordinary, trivial way either. The dangers are great, but the way they are usually talked about is not correct, we have to become very clear about this. Let us just try to imagine more precisely what happens to someone who has developed himself through some kind of exercise, let’s say, by way of the type of exercises mentioned in the last lecture, and let’s compare him with someone who is not involved in such training and follows, just like everyone else, his daily routine. We will arrive at a conscious understanding, if we begin, for example, with what we know about the ordinary state of sleep.

From the previous lecture¹ you’ve learnt what the human astral body actually does at night in the normal state of sleep. While a human being is asleep, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed—but the so-called “astral body” together with the ego rises out of these and leaves them behind. And when the astral body is not in the physical body, and does not use its tools, the sense organs, to observe and reflect upon the external world, and is not kept busy by the movements and work of the physical body, then the astral body can take on a completely different task. It removes the exhaustion of both.² The removal of this exhaustion is its task. A clairvoyant can see how the astral body throughout the whole night works from the outside on the physical and etheric body to restore them so that in the morning the human being feels the renewal of his strength and feels refreshed. For this reason, sleep is such a good doctor, and if someone doesn’t get healthy and sufficient sleep he loses a lot. Many, many things that seem to be sicknesses, are only disturbances in the physical and etheric body. These disturbances remain if the astral body is unable to remove them. It is, however, able to remove these disturbances when it is not in the physical body as in the awake state, but when it is outside of the body.

Where does the astral body get its strength and abilities, that it uses to 'repair' the physical body? In my last public lecture, I have already compared the exit of the astral body out of the physical and the etheric body, to an amount of water contained in a glass. If you have about 1000 drops of water in this glass which form a body of water, then this is different from taking a thousand small sponges and sponging up every drop of water separately—and so you will have individualised each drop separately. In the same way, this happens with the astral body during the night. If all of you were to fall asleep here now, the same thing would happen as when you were to squeeze out the sponges and create one body of water. Your astral body would raise up and would join with the others. By connecting in this way, human beings come into contact with those harmonic magnificent occurrences in the universe. Our souls return in the night to the harmony of the spheres and from these the astral body with the ego—and this is the soul—acquire the strength needed for the restoration of the physical body.

What will happen to a human being who obtains an occult teacher and undergoes occult training? He is given certain tasks. One can only talk about these roughly. He receives tasks to meditate, concentrate, and so on. What is the purpose of the task assigned to the student by the teacher? The purpose is to slowly enable the astral body to see when it is outside of the physical body at night. The astral body of an ordinary human being is, when outside, unconscious within the astral world, as you would be unconscious in the physical world if you had no sense organs. Without sense organs, the world does not exist for you. The moment a human being receives the instructions to awaken the dormant forces of his soul, his astral body receives spiritual or psychic sense organs, those organs that are called Lotus flowers. These are not flowers any more than the lobes of the lungs³ are wings. Everyone knows that a hawk has wings that look quite different from the lobes of the lungs.

Lotus flowers are organs, that perform a kind of circling motion. One such organ is located underneath the forehead, one centimetre under where the eyebrows meet, in the brain. Focusing intensely on this point and simultaneously speaking a particular word, triggers a kind of flash, an appearance of light, visible to a clairvoyant from the outside. The sense organ begins to carry out a circling motion. It is said that the wheel is turning, it comes to life.

A normal average person does not have such an organ at this location, or there is at most a subtle hint of it. Through the training, the flashing appears when the astral body is outside of the physical one. The impression one gains as a clairvoyant, observing from the outside, is that of a turning wheel. This wheel is called a “swastika”. This sign, like other real symbols, cannot be explained by speculation. They weren’t randomly invented but can really be seen on the spiritual or astral plane. The swastika is a symbol of this sense organ, and all witty explanations in the theosophical literature are nonsense. One must not provide allegorical or symbolic explanations in theosophy. This would be what one must give up first: all speculation. One has to give up all this pondering about how things could be. It is only important to enter into reality itself. Located close to the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, an organ on which human development depends very much. Close to the heart is the twelve-petalled, and further down the ten-petalled Lotus, and so on.

These organs develop through the exercises that the teacher assigns to the student, in the same way as the sense organs of the physical body develop by practice, for example through the influence of light and sound. You can see one as a physical and the other as a spiritual process of exactly the same duration. You must not believe that any riotous processes, magic, or some such things, could lead someone to develop these sense organs. It is only intimate processes, learning by thinking thoughts that have the strength in them to develop such organs. Hereby it is consistently important that the human being learns what these thoughts are, and that he focuses on a particular bodily organ, for example at a point in his brain located one centimetre below the middle of the eyebrows. If a human being now focuses on this point whilst using a specific combination of words, he will awaken certain abilities inside his astral body. It is all systematically and, one could say, technically determined.

Some people don’t find this very relevant for them at all. Repeatedly, one hears phrases that are an absurdity for a true occultist: “I do not need a teacher; I have to find my teacher inside of myself”. Now, in such talks, the greatest egoism can be found—and it is nonsense. If someone would look at geometry from this perspective, what would be the result? Everyone is able to discover all the laws of geometry by way of inner development: he might need many thousand years to discover them, but he is able to find them. But is it really necessary, to discover geometry anew?

Should one not just connect to what mankind in century-long work has discovered, build upon it, and create something useful for humanity that has provided us with so much knowledge? Humanity is entitled to this. What could we spare humanity from, if we would feel devoted love towards the teachers of early mankind! In the same way, we are also not attempting to search for the sake of our own inner development, but as workers performing a great service to mankind. There were always human beings who were pioneers. They are the ones from whom we have to learn, and if we are worried about submitting to their authority then that is loveless nonsense. Working in the spirit of the teachers of mankind, to seek out those who can lead us, is an immediate and absolute necessity for occult teachers and students alike. Those things that the teachers tell us, and that were tested and known for centuries, tease the sense organs out of the astral body.

If someone gives occult advice—a real teacher won’t do this—then it can easily happen that they instruct the student on how he can gain perceptions in the astral world. It can then be perceived that the student begins to work on his astral body and starts to tease out the sense organs but begins to display worse habits and characteristics than prior to becoming an occult student. People were wondering about the fact that in the early times of theosophy many people made incomprehensible mistakes in regard to their character. Even a slight development of the astral body, instigated by the elementary teachings of theosophy, when these became first known publicly, triggered quite curious phenomena. For example, a student, who was a cashier, took off with the money, and another still did quite different things; also, people who were previously very peace-loving became quarrelsome. This is because even with a bit of occult development flowing from the theosophical concepts, if not followed up properly the bad sides of a character issue forth. However, none should be frightened because of this. Attention should simply be paid to such things as they need to be taken seriously. Using our strength of character, we just want to aim at not falling for such temptations. It will be different once a student is approached by real systematic occult training. Then work on the astral body is more extensive, and it becomes quite necessary to offer a substitute source of energy to replenish the physical and etheric bodies.

How can that be replenished which is taken from the physical and etheric bodies? To achieve this, it will be necessary to develop quite specific characteristics in a human being. In human nature and essence, it is possible to develop traits that allow the physical and etheric body to be maintained so they don’t depend on too extensive restoration. Imagine that you do something during the day that contributes to strengthening and restoring the physical and etheric body so that these will be resonating by way of their own purpose and rhythm in harmony with the great universe. Only then will you be able to use the forces for the astral body itself. This must be done, it doesn’t need to be done right away, but the time will come when it must happen. When the teacher says: “You have to concentrate the thinking”—what is meant by that is not only ordinary thinking. When told: “You have to sit down, think any ordinary thought and do not allow any other thoughts to come in, focus on the thought as intensely as possible whilst rejecting all other thoughts—this will require the human being to make a certain inner conquest—and this inner conquest is what counts. The subject is not meant to be interesting and fascinating. For example, it would be easy to focus on Napoleon, but it would be difficult to focus on a matchstick uninterruptedly for an extended period of time. This is the very essence. You will soon notice, how after some time you will reach a certain inner strength and surety. One can already feel, based on an inner experience, whether it has been effective.

Next, one must take the initiative and perform actions that one otherwise would most certainly not have done. It could be something completely unimportant. The importance of an activity is irrelevant, but it must be your own action, derived from your own original initiative. A man I told this to informed me after some time that every day in his office he would take seven steps forwards and seven steps backwards whilst imagining “Evolution and Involution”. Excellent! Not the importance of an action, but that the initiative is uniquely one’s own, is what counts.

I’ve talked to other friends about this and, to give them an example, I mentioned that one could water flowers if one had never done this before. And what did I have to deal with then? When I visited those friends, they were all busy watering flowers! That was the completely wrong thing to do because they weren’t supposed to perform “my” action, but to perform an action that they may not have invented but which is their very own, except for the invention. If this is done over an extended period, you will see its inner effect. It will harmonise and balance everything in the physical and etheric body, so that both resonate by themselves and do not require a lot of restoration work, thus enabling the astral body to withdraw a part of their strength.

Next, the human being must control himself in regard to desire and pain. In ordinary life, he is subjected to the slavery of his feelings. He laughs when someone shares something funny with him, he cries about any sad event. A student, however, has to exercise self-control, he must not allow himself to be dominated, but he himself must control lust and pain. Many think this would make them insensitive, but the opposite is the case. We thus overcome desire and pain, namely, what is egoistical desire and egoistical pain. We must find the way to sort of crawl or put ourselves into other beings, to become empathetic. None should shrink back from this exercise because of a concern about becoming insensitive—everyone will become more sensitive.

The fourth exercise is one I like best to explain by way of a legend. This legend is out of the life of Jesus Christ. Like many others it can’t be found in the Bible, it is Persian.⁴ When the apostles once walked with Jesus Christ across the countryside, they saw the half-decayed carcass of a dead dog lying around. “What nasty carrion”, the apostles said and turned away in disgust. Jesus Christ alone stopped, looked at the carcass, and after a while said: “What beautiful teeth this animal had.”—He noticed in the ugly, decaying carcass still the beautiful teeth. This gives us a hint that we should adopt and must adopt the habit to discover in all ugliness the grain of beauty, in bad the good, and in error the truth. This positive attitude must be practiced for some time, it will lead to inner harmony and inner rhythm.

The fifth exercise is, that the human being should be reasonably unbiased towards everything new that he encounters in the world. It could also be said that one is not allowed to use anything he is used to from the past to influence the future. The words: “I don’t believe this”, must completely disappear from the mind. If someone comes to you and tells you that the church tower has become crooked overnight, you’ll have to find a corner in your heart where you believe it is possible for anything to really happen. This does not mean that you should become uncritical; you should simply consider nothing to be impossible. Whoever can do this, is able to exert influence very effectively on the physical and the etheric body, so they will fall into a rhythm that feeds the astral body during the night with what has been gained for it through meditation and concentration. Because this will lead human beings gradually to the true theosophy, allowing them to gain insight everywhere into why things happen the way they do, and not in a different way. Whoever knows the mechanism of sleep, also knows why such exercises need to be practised.

Once a human being has taken steps on the occult path for some time under appropriate guidance, many things become to him visible, tangible, and able to be experienced that he would otherwise have missed. Don’t believe that the dangers that one encounters are otherwise not there in life. One just doesn’t see them in advance but goes through life without seeing them. One only learns to see what is around us in the spiritual world when one can enter into the higher planes. What man, for example, must encounter and will always encounter at a higher level, what he must cope with, and what he must prepare himself for, is the “Guardian of the Threshold”. Human beings have usually quite strange ideas about him.

What is this “Guardian of the Threshold”?—Today, we want to turn our attention to this experience by skipping many other things. You have to be clear about what a human being normally does during his whole lifetime. Let’s take the “Kamaloka life” in its true sense, the life after death, where the human being still has a certain inclination to the physical-sensory existence, and compare this life with what happens immediately prior to the beginning of the Kamaloka life. A great tableau of memories will be laid out in front of the soul of one who has just departed the physical body. Then the Kamaloka life begins.

This is very strange. For a start, it has the characteristic that the human being relives his life. In fact, he will live his whole previous life backward, by going back through the events, which happened prior to his death until his birth. In this way, one relives all events backward and will be finished with it once one reaches the own birth. One returns to every point that one has lived through. Let’s say, you’ve reached age sixty, and when you were forty years old you slapped someone in the face. When you reach this point in your backward memory experience, you will be drawn towards that human being and you will be marked, so to speak, with something strange: You will suffer the pain you have inflicted. Whilst throughout your life you might have harbored feelings of revenge, now you are feeling what the person felt, on whom you have taken or intended to take revenge. By way of backward experience, you re-live the emotions and feelings you have spread. Everything you will experience there offers you much that obstructs your further development in the history of mankind. Without the implanted mark of pain, you would get further more easily, because this inhibiting marking stays with you as a force. By absorbing those forces in the Kamaloka backward, you will, in the next life again be led by karma to where you will be able to use them to pay off the debt, to put things right, for compensation. Thus, longing develops to redeem where you have failed, and you will be attracted to do this when the human being again lives with you. This is how Karma plays out.

Another example: Four vigilante⁵ Century in Westphalia and survived until the 19^th Century. judges have sentenced someone to death and executed the judgment. Why did this happen? When the life of these four men was traced back, it turned out that in a former life the condemned man was a kind of chief who had sentenced those four men to death. The train of events that brought those five men together actually was created in the Kamaloka life. In this way, a human being always has the opportunity during his Kamaloka life, to accept those forces as inhibiting markings that will lead him again into life to pay off his debts.

After a human being has crossed through Devachan and should again return to the physical life, you will find the converse picture of what happens immediately after death. Now you will have a kind of premonition, a kind of preview of the life you are about to experience. Of course, what someone perceives at that time he will forget unless he is trained in the occult. There are verifiable cases, that human beings were so shocked by the preview that they did not want to enter into this life. It turned out that indeed the etheric body did not completely enter the physical body. In such cases, the etheric body of the head protruded quite a bit outside and caused a very specific kind of idiocy.

Now don’t think that karma plays out in such a way that we would be able to immediately pay off all the debts we have incurred in a previous incarnation, in the next one. It is not that simple. Sometimes one will have to go through many, many incarnations. If you would be able to look back for a moment and see everything, all the marks in your astral body that need to be redeemed, prior to your rising to certain heights of occultism, you would see your whole debt account.

What now confronts the student and must confront him in a symbolic and comprehensible form is what we still have to redeem, what still holds us back: the unredeemed karma. This is the Guardian of the Threshold.

It could also confront us in quite an abnormal way. I am aware of a case, where someone was incarnated at the end of the 18th century with quite an extraordinary greed to undertake certain deeds on the physical plane so that he had to experience a strange fate after death. He died; after a very long time, he left the remainder of his astral body. Usually, the astral body falls off after about a third of the time spent on earth, and remains back as an astral corpse, until it dissolves. Such astral corpses are consistently circling around us and exert a negative influence on people. He was unable to stay for longer in the spiritual world but experienced early, the urge to go down into the physical world again. Now he incurred a misfortune that very rarely happens. It is actually possible, that when a human being returns to physical existence, he finds his astral corpse is still around. This then is very bad for him because his current astral body will be penetrated by his earlier astral body, which is a horrible fate. He now has it consistently next to himself as a “doppelgänger”, and this is the abnormal form of the Guardian of the Threshold, which could occur in special exceptional circumstances.

For one, however, who is on the way to occult development, it is necessary that he, at a particular point in time, sees his ordinary astral body with all the marks of its unresolved karma, and he must try, through existing means, to balance out this unreleased karma. This is the true encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. All of this has not been told to spook you, but to give you an idea of what is meant by “self-knowledge”, in the true sense of the word. Self-knowledge is two-fold: first, it is the recognition of what the true self must do. Second, it is the knowledge of the higher self. But their knowledge is something quite different. You can read in the Bible: Adam knew his wife.⁶—This is an expression for “fertilisation”. “Know yourself” means: fertilise yourself with the wisdom inside of you, look at the soul as a feminine organ and fertilise yourself. If you want to gain self-knowledge, search inside of you, where you will be able to recognise all your mistakes. If you want to reach knowledge of the higher self, search outside of you, because there knowledge of the world is knowledge of the self. Everything is in the sun because everything is sun. We have to let go of ourselves. I have been told: “You tell us about development and such things, but we want to achieve an uplifting of the soul, of the feelings.” One who speaks like that is his own enemy. Not by gawking into ourselves, but by learning to know the world in all its parts, bit by bit, will we become selfless and able to find self-knowledge and knowledge of God.

There is no phrase worse than that one: “One only has to look within oneself”.—There you will only find the lower self. One should search outside with love and one will discover. I have known people who said: “What do I need? I don’t need anything because I am Atman.” But even if they repeatedly say “Atman, I am Atman” they will not be able to become conscious of it, because they don’t know more about Atman than that it is a five-letter word. This looking within oneself only leads to shutting oneself off. We are nothing but a limb (part) of this world. The finger is only a finger as long as it is part of the organism; if you lose it, it will no longer be a finger.

The finger doesn’t separate itself from the organism, but the human being is so “smart” to believe he could separate himself from Earth, despite the fact that you only have to transport him a few kilometres above Earth, and he will perish. The human being belongs to the sun, according to his etheric and astral body, to a whole world of sun(s). It is the biggest mistake to want to find the self within oneself. Letting go of oneself by immersing oneself in all the details of the world is the right thing. One who fertilises himself with love and humility, will find divine salvation, whilst someone who searches for God inside of himself hardens.

You will see that there is much to learn when one wants to really get to know the esoteric way. It is important to have the right idea about such things. You don’t need to think about this from morning to night, just as it is unnecessary to repeat your own name all the time. It is sufficient to know the thought. There are thoughts without which an esotericist can’t be an esotericist. If he has those thoughts, as in his daily life he has his drives and motives, then these thoughts represent steps for him, that will lead him upwards to the super-sensible plane of knowledge, they will assist him in penetrating into the wisdom of the worlds, knowingly advancing to love.

• 1. Vienna, 6 November 1907. No transcript is available of this lecture.
• 2. Translator’s Note: the physical and the etheric body.
• 3. Translator’s Note: Lobes of the lungs are called “Lungenflügel” in German i.e., wings of the lungs.
• 4. J.W.v.Goethe, Notes and Treatises for the Better Understanding of the West-Easterly Divan, section: General—Lord Jesus, who wanders through the World (Nisami).
• 5. Judges of a Vehmic Court, a form of Court without fixed laws and norms, which occurred in isolation in the 13^th 5
• 6. 1 Moses, Chapter 4, 1, Luther Translation.

When talking about the initiation of the Rosicrucian, or the Rosicrucian Initiation, we must briefly place the concept of initiation in front of our soul. Mainly, this concept is about searching for a way to penetrate, through our own experience and own adventures, into the higher worlds that underlie our sensory world. We must distinguish three paths: initiates, clairvoyants and adepts. These are the three distinct paths to establish a relationship with the higher worlds.

Today, we will talk about how man can get to know the super-sensible worlds through his own experience. We will dispense with the tripartite division for today, but keep in mind carefully that when talking about initiation, we have one method of initiation in front of us.

One will easily get over the differences in the various methods, considering that people seek the way to the higher worlds from different starting points. When we have reached the peak of a mountain, we will have a clear view from up there. To get up there, we can start from different points of departure, using different ways. It would be nonsensical if, to get to the peak, we did not use the path straight in front of us, but first went around the mountain.

Let's apply this principle to initiation. Again, we encounter different starting points because people have different dispositions. External natural science is not in a position to really study the subtle differences which we encounter here. Our physiologists and anatomists are not able, with their crude instruments and methods, to find out these subtle differences of human beings. But for someone with occult knowledge there is a tremendous difference between a person born in the Orient, and one born in Europe or in America. This is evident right down to the physical nature. There is an enormous difference between someone who still has the living immediate emotion and feeling for Christ, and a man who is completely alienated from the original Christian feeling and whose entire worldview is based on the accomplishments of modern science. Not only are the feelings and thoughts of such a person different from those of someone with a Christian spirit, but differences can be observed even in someone's physique. Such subtle differences exist, which affect the most subtle structures of the body, that physiology and biology have nothing to say about them. Therefore the individual human nature has to be considered, as one cannot lead everyone in the same way to rise up into the higher worlds through higher development.

To understand this, we must go back into former ages of mankind. Mankind has gone through a long period of development. At the time we call Atlantean, our ancestors, that is, our own souls, lived in completely different bodies in ancient Atlantis in the West between our present-day Europe and America. Floods then occurred, on which the story about the biblical flood and many other different sagas of floods are based, including those floods which caused the downfall of the ancient Atlantis. This was followed by the post-Atlantean evolution in which we still find ourselves.

We have gone through four time periods during the post-Atlantean evolution, and we are still in the fifth. The first of these time periods included the old Indian culture, where people were taught by the holy Rishis themselves, inspired human beings who modern man can no longer imagine. Then came the second cultural epoch, the Persian, with the Zarathustra-religion. The third cultural epoch was the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian one, from which the Hebrew culture slowly developed. As a fourth one, the Graeco-Roman cultural period followed, within which Christianity arose and which derived its elements from the people who had developed organically from the third culture. Now we are living in the fifth cultural epoch and heading towards the sixth.

Not only the thinking has changed, in the long time since the Atlantean catastrophe, but also the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. We must not imagine though, that all people are equally placed within our fifth cultural period. Many peculiarities of the earlier cultural traditions were preserved. What has developed one after another, still lives next to each other.

Human beings went through completely different cultural epochs. They experienced changes within their whole being, which made it necessary to adapt the introduction to the higher worlds given to them by their spiritual guides.

During the Atlantean age men were still astrally clairvoyant. They lived together with their Gods and spirits in the same way as with the external plants, minerals, animals and humans. In the post-Atlantean period, men could no longer gain access to the higher worlds. They could no longer penetrate by direct observation of the divine-spiritual into the higher worlds, but could only artificially put themselves into a state where they became ‘companions' of the Gods again. This is the basis of the Indian way of yoga initiation. This yoga introduction to the higher worlds consists mainly in the dampening of the consciousness that man had acquired in the post-Atlantean age, the external perception, and in putting oneself back into former clairvoyant states of consciousness like those which were experienced by the Atlantean man.

If we continue to trace mankind's evolution beyond the Persian and the Chaldean cultural periods, we arrive at the Christian cultural period. This brought with it the Christian initiation, which can only be attained by a direct relationship with Jesus Christ through the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. Then follows in the 13th and 14th century the first dawn of the materialistic cultural period. At that time the enlightened people were able to perceive: now the material time is coming up. Everything, that was fully realised in the 19th century, what had happened in the extreme, had been prepared long before. We find materialism not only in areas of external activity, but must confront it in all areas.

Until the turn of the 13th to the 14th century men held on to completely different feelings and emotions. A drastic change occurred in all areas, even in the most seemingly isolated ones. In the art of painting, for example, we encounter a great change in the emotions of people. Today, it seems arbitrary to the materialist when, for example, Cimabue¹ paints the background in gold on his pictures. However, this painter still followed the tradition of illustrating the higher world. When looking into the highest regions of the astral world, one will find that this golden background is a reality, an actual fact. Those, who later wanted to paint similar things, as imitators of those ancient painters who still possessed knowledge of the reality of the astral world through tradition, appear to us like barbarians compared to those who really still had a relationship to the higher world. For example, Giotto² did no longer portray what he felt to be true, but everything is painted based solely upon external tradition. At his time, it was natural to move towards that which could only be seen on the physical plane, to materialistic art. Only the greatest painters of that time still held on to tradition.

In Raffael's³ Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament) one can see how in the basic colour from the bottom to the top is indeed reproduced with a certain accuracy, the experience that someone has who ascends to the higher worlds. This experience of the gradual transition from the lower to the higher worlds, up to the illustration of the genii that emerge from the golden background, is a necessity.

Those who know the spiritual truths know that behind the physical facts something else is hidden. They know that the reason why people are materialists today is that they are under external materialistic influences. But it is not just a matter of external perception. From the occult perspective one learns to know about other reasons. Thoughts and feelings are realities that radiate out into the world. We are swarmed by materialistic thoughts. Everywhere those thoughts are buzzing around us. Even if no books and newspapers that promote the materialistic views reach a farmer out in the countryside, materialistic thoughts that matter still buzz around and influence him.

If we ask, how human beings entered into the world at times when one still knew about occult powers, we will find that in those times care was taken, for example in China, that a human being at his birth into the physical world was welcomed by people filled with spiritual thoughts. This is something completely different from being welcomed by a materialistic doctor and a materialistic thinking environment. Here quite different things are encountered by man than what was formerly the case in an environment alive with spiritual thoughts. Herein lies the reason for the materialistic attitude of man. Already since the 13th and 14th century, man dives into a materialistic atmosphere from the moment of his birth. This had to be so. But, therefore, a method also had to be created for those who wanted to rise into the higher worlds, by which they could become strong and robust enough to be able to achieve the ascent into the spiritual worlds, despite the external materialistic circumstances.

This initiation method is the Rosicrucian one, which was created around the turn of the 13th and 14th century and was first inaugurated by Christian Rosenkreutz,⁴ one of the great leaders of mankind. Strictly separated from the external world, this method worked since those times for centuries, known only to a tight circle, most closely restricted during the 19th century, the materialistic one. Only during the last third of the 19th century it became necessary to reveal to the world through Theosophy what had been taught, at least in its elemental parts, in the Rosicrucian schools.⁵

In the year 1459 the true founder of the Rosicrucian stream himself reached that level, by which he gained the power to exert influence on the world in such a way, that this initiation could be brought by him to the world.

Since that time, this individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz has appeared again and again as leader of the movement in question. Through centuries he led a life ‘in the same body'. We have to understand the expression ‘in the same body' as follows: When looking at the physical body, we find nothing is left of what it consisted of ten years ago. But the consciousness has stayed the same. Every seven to eight years a human being exchanges all parts of his physical body, but the consciousness outlasts this ongoing exchange of physical substances throughout the whole life. What we in this way experience between birth and death, an initiate will experience this by dying and, shortly afterwards, reincarnating in a new body as a child. But he makes this journey fully conscious. The consciousness is maintained from one incarnation to the next. Even the physical resemblance remains with the initiate, because the soul builds up the new body consciously based on the experience of the previous incarnation. In this way the highest leader of the Rosicrucian school lived for centuries.

Only now it has become possible to make public some of the Rosicrucian principles. Until then none of this was made accessible, only once something had been shared.⁶ That which, according to the Rosicrucian study, leads human beings up into the higher worlds, are the following seven stages: First, the Study; second, the acquisition of Imaginative Knowledge; third, learning the Occult Script; fourth, the preparation of the Philosopher's stone; fifth, the correspondence of Microcosm and Macrocosm; sixth, the union with the Macrocosm; seventh, the Divine Bliss.

This does not mean that these seven stages need to be completed consecutively. A student, who meets a Rosicrucian teacher receives his instructions for higher development according to his individuality. From the seven stages of higher development will be selected what is most suitable for him. One might begin with the first and second stage and then maybe the fourth and fifth will follow for him. Only what is called ‘the Study', everyone needs to begin with.

Here ‘Study ' means something different than what is usually understood by it in daily life. What is meant is the particular way of acquisition of ideas and concepts, which is called ‘sensory-free thinking'. The whole thinking of an ordinary man is attached to the external sensory nature. Pay attention to everything that you experience from morning to night and then mentally discard everything that you have seen and heard externally. For most people, very little or nothing will be left. But whoever wants to make his way into the higher worlds must get used to being able to think without connecting to the external world, when the source of his thinking lies only within himself.

The only type of sensory-free thinking in European countries is arithmetic. The child learns that two times two is four, first by looking at an external illustration, at the fingers or the beans or at the terrible adding-machines. But a person will not arrive at a satisfactory result in this field as long as he is not able to imagine without the crutch of the external visual aid. One can never see a circle in the external reality. Circles, which one draws on the blackboard are chalk hills strung together. Only a devised circle is exact. You must construct the circle in your mind, you must devise the circle.

Today, people's sensory-free thinking can only be found in the fields of numeracy and geometry. But for most people these are not accessible and therefore only mentioned for the purpose of comparison. The best means to acquire sensory-free thinking is Theosophy itself, because there a person will hear about things he hasn't seen. What people learn there—how the human being consists of a physical, etheric and astral body, or how the Earth itself developed by going through different stages—they cannot see. Only when we exert our thinking and perceive the inner logic of a thing, we will grasp these things with ordinary logic, provided one relies on the comprehensive basis of logic. If people today are saying that they cannot comprehend this, then this is not because they are not clairvoyant, but rather because they do not wish to apply the logic of comprehension. The experiences of a clairvoyant can be understood with simple logic; clairvoyance is needed only for research purposes. Theosophy is the only logical thing for the theoretical and practical life. In contrast, what people say about super-sensible things in a materialistic way is illogical. What the science of the spirit brings is real concrete fruitfulness in life.

If we look at the principle of education from the standpoint of a theosophical worldview and from the standpoint of a materialistic mind-set, we can draw a comparison. In the former, things are being said about the developing human being which cannot be seen from the outside. But it is so that just within this the real, the true, the concrete exists. Today's materialistic worldview does not understand the growing child. Only by considering the whole nature of a human being, not only observing the outside, does one learn to place a human being with its full potential into the world.

At the same time, someone, who immerses himself into the teachings of the theosophical worldview, has got a method to learn sensory-free thinking. The true Theosophy will always aim as much as possible to develop sensory-free thinking. When we look at Theosophical teachings we will find descriptions of conditions that we cannot see. When looking at the evolution of our Earth and where it emerged from, we describe a planetary condition where everything was different from the current stage of our Earth: that old Moon—not the current one—where no hard, mineralised Earth crust yet existed on which the human being can walk, but where the planet only existed in a kind of plant nature. In this compound, which we can compare with cooking lettuce or spinach, more solid components only existed in a form like today's crust or bark of trees. Minerals didn't exist then at all.

If this is disputed from a materialistic perspective, because one can only imagine plants growing in mineral soil, then one could admit that under today's conditions this is certainly not possible any other way. But in earlier ages completely other conditions prevailed. A materialist is not able to imagine this, because he will always relate to today's conditions.

However, by means of such pictures, one can free oneself from what one sees all around. Nonsense makes sense when we contemplate far distant circumstances. Thus we learn to educate ourselves, to get away from our sensory conditions. We learn to place pictures before our soul, that we do not know today. Thus, our thinking lifts off from what is possible today. Those who try to connect with their thinking only to what would be possible today, stick to today's conditions and can't get away from them. For study in the Rosicrucian spirit it especially matters to train one's thinking on images of conditions that no longer exist today. To let a concept emerge from a concept, out of completely sensory-free thinking, is a means to arrive at what is called the Study. One can also get there by studying a book like the Philosophy of Freedom.⁷ The author has offered in it only the opportunity that thoughts think themselves. There the individual thoughts emerge by themselves out of completely sensory-free thinking, organise themselves in such a way that no thought can be removed from its place and be placed into a different spot. Just as a hand cannot get cut off from the body and be placed into another place. This is the way of sensory-free thinking.

A burning desire to absolutely want to raise oneself into the higher worlds is something many want, but it is something unhealthy. Striving is healthy only when an inner, dignified logic is cultivated by a thinking that is completely free of sensory impressions.

One who knows one's way around the higher worlds, knows that the perceptions there are quite different from those in the physical world. But there is one thing that remains the same element in the three worlds—in the physical, in the astral and in the Devachan world: that is logical thinking. This safe leader protects us from following all the will-o'-the-wisps. Without it we will never learn to tell illusion from reality, and come to believe that every illusion is an astral reality. Here in the physical world, it is easy to differentiate illusions from reality because the external facts correct us. For example, if you have walked down the wrong street, you will not arrive at the right place. In the higher worlds we have to find the correct way ourselves by applying our own mental strength. Otherwise, we will keep getting into increasingly more difficult labyrinths there, if we have not learned to tell illusion from reality beforehand. We can learn this in a Rosicrucian training.

The second stage in the Rosicrucian training is imaginative recognition, the recognition through pictures. This is the first stage of ascending from the physical into the spiritual world. Goethe provided the leitmotif, the leading principle, with the last words of the second part of his Faust, when he said: “All that is transitory, is but an allegory.”⁸ If we begin to see everything that surrounds us as spiritual pictures, then we strive upwards into the world of imagination.

In the Rosicrucian schools and also in earlier schools, it was attempted to teach the students the evolutionary principle that applies throughout the different kingdoms. Today one speaks about evolution in relation to materialistic thinking. Theosophy also speaks about this, but it is something else to transform the concept of evolution into a picture and lift it into imagination. Normally, it is only the mind that is occupied with the evolutionary principle. We arrive at the imagination as follows: Through many weeks or through months the soul was transformed through the directions of the teachers in the following way. We can best retell this in the form of a dialogue which, however, has never happened in this way. The teacher might have said something like, look at the plant, how with its leaves and blossoms it strives up towards the sun and sinks its roots into the ground, striving towards the centre of the Earth. If you are comparing it with the human being, it would be wrong to compare the bloom with his head, the roots with his reproductive organs. Darwin⁹ drew the right comparison. He pointed out that the root of the plant corresponds to the head of the human being. The human being is the inverted plant. The root, that the plant sinks into the ground, corresponds to the head of the human being. But that which the plant chastely holds up towards the Sun, the bloom and its fertilisation organs, the human being turns towards the Earth. If one turns the plant around fully, one gets the human being. If one turns it around halfway, one gets an animal with its horizontal spine.

If we conceive these things imaginatively, then not only our thoughts, but also our feelings and our emotions will be deeply ushered into the world that surrounds us. We will learn to recognise the inner relationship between plant and human being. We will recognise the pure, chaste plant nature which has not yet been pervaded by desires and passions, and the nature of the human being in whom chaste plant substance has been transformed into flesh pervaded by desires and passions. But through this entered at the same time something higher into man's being—he gained the clear day consciousness. The plant is asleep, but the human being has gained his clear day consciousness by being incarnated in flesh pervaded by desires, passions and instincts. To do this, he had to complete a full turn. The animal stands right in between. Although it has desires and passions, it has not yet gained the clear day consciousness.

The teacher told the student: If you feel this, you'll understand Plato's¹⁰ saying, “The world soul is crucified on the world body”. Plant, animal, man, that is the real innermost meaning of the sign of the cross. What passes through the nature kingdoms as common soul substance, as ‘world-soul', appears in symbolic form as a cross. This has been taught in the occult schools as the deepest meaning of the cross.

Then the teacher said to the student; watch how the plant chastely holds its calyx towards the Sun, how the shaft of sunlight kisses the plant's bloom. This was called the chaste kiss of the sunray, the holy lance of love. In this chaste kiss of the sunray, the holy lance of love, to which the calyx of the plant opens up, is a hint towards the ideal of the future where the human being once again will develop his organs higher to the chastity of the plant. Currently, man has developed up to the stage where he is penetrated by desires. He will develop further to the stage where he will have transformed his desires and will again be kissed by the spiritual sunray; where he will, on a higher level, bring forth his own kind anew, where the reproductive power will be spiritualised. This was called the ‘Holy Grail' in the occult schools. This is the real ideal of the Holy Grail—an organ that man will have, once his reproductive powers have been spiritualised. In the past, we see the chaste plant-nature; in the present, we see man permeated by desires; and in the future, we will see man with the purified body and how he receives in the Holy Grail chalice, a higher stage of development of the plant calyx, the spiritual shaft of sunlight.

This is not abstract thinking, but a state of being, where we feel each stage of development, not only think about it. When we feel in this way what is evolving, then we slowly raise ourselves up so that we arrive through the pictures at imaginative recognition. The picture of the Holy Grail will stand before us, once we detach these pictures from the sensory appearance, and receive the picture from the higher world.

If we let such pictures affect us—those that represent specific processes in the spiritual world and that were validated in the occult schools—then we call this ‘allowing the Occult Script to affect us'. This is the third stage of the Rosicrucian training.

We will find such pictures in seals and pillars, like those that were portrayed at the Munich Congress,¹¹ of the beginning and the end of the evolution of mankind and in the Apocalypse. In former times man was on an Earth that consisted of molten magma. He has come to his current body only gradually, through many incarnations, and he will continue to evolve through many incarnations. In particular there will be a transformation of the larynx and the heart. These will be the reproductive organs in the future. Today, my thoughts, feelings and emotions only embody in words which let the emotions of my soul in this room reach your ears through vibrations and will awaken similar thoughts and feelings in your souls. Later, the human being will create warmth and finally light, just as he now communicates his thoughts in words through the air. Just as man descended from of a sphere of light and warmth in the past, he will create warmth and light himself in the future.

This is depicted on the first apocalyptical seal.¹² The original condition of mankind, when the Earth was still in a stage of molten magma, is represented by the feet of the man on the picture being submerged in a fiery metal stream. The state of the future is depicted by a fiery sword, protruding from the mouth of a man. Such a picture works not only on the imagination, but also on someone's will power, when we observe the great powers of nature in this way. Because the same power, which lives as primordial force in the will of the human being, also lives in the whole external world. By learning to train our will, the will of the world will live in us—then our will is going to become one with the will that flows through nature. Man learns this by selfless devotion to the occult scripts.

The fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training is the preparation of the Philosopher's stone. This is a high mystery, kept secret. Towards the end of the 18th century some of it was revealed. For example, there was a remark in a central German newspaper¹³ by a person who had heard something about it. It said, “The Philosopher's stone really exists, and there are only a few people who do not know it. Many already held it in their hands, without knowing that it was the Philosopher's stone.” This definition was correct verbatim, only one must understand it. It is not a mere allegory. A Rosicrucian works on reality in such a way that he will penetrate into the physiology. He works at the real transformation of the Earth and of man, deeply into the physical body, not only on what is usually known as moral uplift, refinement of morals, and so on.

Let us look at the human breathing. Regulation of the breathing process forms an important part of occult development. People breathe in, use the oxygen that mixes with the carbon inside of them, and then they breathe out carbon dioxide. If this would continue forever by itself, then the atmosphere of the Earth would incrementally be filled with carbon dioxide and that would lead to the downfall of mankind. The existence of mankind presupposes the existence of plants. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, retains the carbon and releases the oxygen again. A continuous circulation happens between humans and plants. Humans, animals and plants belong together, one is not possible without the other.

The development in the human body is like this: Today, what the plant has to do for man, namely to produce the coal ― plant corpses are still recognisable in hard coal ― will later be done by man himself. Occultism can demonstrate that through the further development of the human being and his later transformed heart and respiratory organs, man will achieve this himself. One way how the human being can take up the plant process and consciously carry this out himself, is by rhythmisation of the breathing process, so that he doesn't release the carbon dioxide to the plant, but builds up the carbon within his own body The human being learns to build up his own body within himself.

If we compare this, with what we have been told about the Holy Grail, we will have the Grail now concretely before us. Through the rhythmisation of the breathing process man learns to produce in himself the carbon, that occurs in nature as graphite and diamond, in the form of chaste plant nature. To produce within oneself the carbon, the pure, chaste substance, is called the “Preparation of the Philosopher's Stone”. One must imagine it similar to a translucent diamond, but in a softer form. Man is a mighty inner apparatus, he learns through occult training that he is working on the evolution of his own lineage to a higher form. Someone with a materialistic view, on hearing about this, very characteristically remarked, that this would be a nice thing, from which it might be possible to develop a profitable branch of industry. Not at all! Exactly this remark illustrates the necessity to keep such disclosures secret. For only when people have reached such a moral and intellectual level that they can no longer think egoistically can such secrets be revealed to them.

The fifth stage is the ‘correspondence of microcosms and macrocosms'. For everything that happens in the world outside, there is a process within the human being, that repeats this in him on a small scale. One must only contemplate what happens within oneself, then one will intuitively come across the processes in the external cosmos. For example, through a specific meditation and concentration on the inner part of the eye, man learns to recognise the inner nature of the Sun, because the eye is an extract of the essence of the Sun. Goethe once said that ‘the eye is made by the light for the light.'¹⁴ The light created the eye. Without the Sun, there is no eye. All that is essential in the Sun is in some way reflected in the eye. To recognise the light of the Sun by concentrating on the essence of the eye—this is Rosicrucian training. In this way, one can learn to know the whole world from within the human being. For example, through concentration on the liver, man learns to know quite specific creative natural forces, right into the creativity of man. Thus man learns to know the whole world through himself, because he is a small world. Here he learns how in reality microcosm and macrocosm correspond to each other.

Concentrating in a certain way on the human heart will provide knowledge of the lion nature outside. This is not only a phrase. Each human being must singularly find the way into the vast universe. Then the perception of being one and feeling one with the whole cosmos will occur by itself. When man learns fully, out of every limb of his body—also out of his etheric and his astral body—to walk the way to the vast universe with patience step by step, then he will expand his organism to one that encompasses all space. He will then be within all beings. He is then able to experience the feeling which is called ‘divine bliss'.

It is important that man lets go of himself, so he can find the way to the creative powers. The more he emerges out of himself, the more he will reach into the higher worlds. Goethe described in the poem The Mysteries,¹⁵ how someone walks to a mysterious temple to meet with various people, through whom the diverse schools of thought come together. Goethe places a cross that is entwined with roses at the entry portal of the temple. ‘Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?' says the poem. Only someone who knows that the cross entwined with roses expresses the development to a higher human state would say this. Goethe has also expressed this in those words:

And until thou truly hast
this ‘dying and becoming’
thou art but a troubled guest
over the dark earth roaming¹⁶

Man has to approach more and more a state where he, out of the dying part of himself, will be newly created inside. Like a tree whose bark outside is dying, but on the inside new shoots are developing, thus man too surrounds himself with death on the outside, to be newly created inside. Thus in former times initiates were compared to the oak and called druids.¹⁷ This ‘dying and becoming' means the human being always creates fresh life inside. The dying will become for him the preserver of new life.

Therefore, it is said:

The power that holds constrained all humankind,¹⁸
the victor over himself it no more can bind.

By this it is meant for humankind to overcome the ordinary life and turn it into a vessel, so that within it the sprouting seeds of a higher life can evolve to fruition.

• 1. Cimabue, from 1240 until after 1302, Italian painter, teacher of Giotto. 1
• 2. Giotto, 1266-1337, Italian painter and master builder, student of Cimabue. 2
• 3. Raffael, actual name Raffaello Santi, 1483-1520. 3
• 4. Christian Rosenkreutz: Not recognised by public history as a real historic figure of the 14th/15th century, Christian Rosenkreutz became legendarily known from two anonymous Rosicrucian texts Fama Fraternitatis or the Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Highly Laudable Order of R.C., Kassel 1614, and Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the laudable Brotherhood of the highly honourable Rose Cross, Kassel 1615. According to this, he was a German of noble birth who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name appears for the first time in a text handwritten and as such distributed in 1604, and in 1616 anonymously published in the text The Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1459. Rudolf Steiner portrayed the author of this text, Johann Valentin Andreae, as the carrier of inspiration of Christian Rosenkreutz. Refer to Rudolf Steiner, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904-1923, GA 35. The essay is also contained in the translation of The Chymical Wedding into New High German by Walter Weber, Basel 1978. According to Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz was a real historical personality. Compare also, The Esoteric Christendom and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity, GA 130. 4
• 5. Re the Rosicrucian method - refer to note 4 above. Obviously, the deliberations of Rudolf Steiner at this point have been only fragmentary captured by the note taker. For better comprehension refer to the presentation in the lecture dated 15 September 1909; Lecture 1 in The Lucas Gospel cycle, GA 114. 5
• 6. Rudolf Steiner refers to an article about the Philosopher's Stone by Karl Arnold Kortum (1745-1828), which appeared in a central German newspaper, the Reichsanzeiger, on 8 October 1796.
• 7. Translator's note: The book The Philosophy of Freedom is also known as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 8. Goethe, Faust, Part II, 5th act, closing choir.
• 9. Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, British Natural Scientist. His hint about the correspondence of the human head and the plant root can be found in his work The Power of Movement in Plants translated from English by Victor Carus, Volume 13, of Charles Darwin's Gesammelte Werke, Stuttgart 1881, Chapter 12, Summary and Final Remarks, Page 492 (Ending): “It is hardly an overstatement, when one says, that this tip of the root is equipped in a way that has the ability to direct the movements of the neighbouring parts, like a brain of a lower animal; the brain sits within the foremost end of the head, and receives impressions from the sense organs and directs the various movements”.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner often quoted this saying from the Timäus, Chapter 8, always using the wording of the Vienna philosopher Vincenz Knauer, from his work Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwicklung und Teilweisen Loesung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling, (The main problems of philosophy in its development and part solution from Thales to Robert Hamerling) Vienna and Leipzig 1892, page 96 (belonging to the library of Rudolf Steiner and underlined by him): The myth told in Timäus is that God created the world soul in the shape of a cross that he laid through the universe and spanned across it the world body”. In Timäus itself it says that God split the world soul into two halves “slang both parts together in the form of the letter Chi (X) and twined of each a circle, so that both met with each other across the middle, and each one with itself. To both parts he gave the uniform and in the same room happening movement of the circular reversal, but one of the circles he made into the outer one and the other into the inner one” (quoted from the translation by Otto Apelt of Die Philosophische Bibliothek, Volume 179, Leipzig 1919). In the view of the elders two circles were of greatest importance in the whole world: The equator and the ecliptic. Thus the translator (O.Apelt) remarks about this point in Timäus: “And so it is then in Plato's explanations, that by way of a mysterious process the soul extends itself to the spatial building of the ecliptic and the equator. When the position of these two biggest circles towards each other is illustrated through the form of the letter X (Chi, whereby one needs to imagine the letter not in a vertical but horizontally orientation) then this is a quite appropriate comparison. Because these two circles cut each other at an angle of 23 1/2 degrees. The reversal of the equator proceeds from East to West (that is from right to left, because the ancient ones have often, when determining areas of the world, turned their gaze towards the North); the rotation of the ecliptic proceeds from West to East.” In addition, it should be remarked that the Church Father Justin the Martyr points out in his first Apology, that the source for Plato's teaching about the creation of the world is the Old Testament: Even what Plato said in the Timäus about the Son of God for the explanation of the World, where it says “He builds him in the universe like a Chi”, was similarly borrowed by him from Moses. Because in Moses' scripts it is written that at the time when the Israelites left Egypt and were in the desert, they were confronted by poison spraying animals, adders, vipers, and all kind of snakes, that brought death to the people. Then Moses, acting on an inspiration and impulse from God, took ore and shaped a cross from it. He then erected it in the holy tent and talked to the people; “If you look at this picture and trust in it then you will find healing.” Thus, so he reports, the snakes died, but the people, he continues, escaped death. This was read by Plato, and because he did not understand it properly and believed that it was not the shape of the cross that was meant, but the form of the Chi, he made the statement that the power that is primary to the first God, was distributed in the universe like a Chi.” Quoted from Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Frühchristliche Apologeten und Märtyrerakten, Band 1 (Early Christian Apologists and Martyrs Files, Volume 1), Kempten-Munich 1913, Page 73/74).
• 11. A Congress of the Theosophical Society held in May 1907–compare Rudolf Steiner, Pictures of Occult Seals and Columns; the Munich Congress, Pentecost 1907 and its Impacts, GA 284/85.
• 12. Refer to note 10 above.
• 13. Refer to note 6 above.
• 14. Goethe once said; “The eye has been made by the light for the light”... literally: The eye owes its existence to the light. From similar animal auxilliary organs the light calls forth an organ that is capable of becoming its equal. And so the eye builds itself at the light for the light, so that the inner light can meet the outer light”. In Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (Goethe's Natural Science Writings), published by and commented on by Rudolf Steiner in Kürschner's German National Literature, 5 Volumes, 1884-97. Reprint, Dornach 1975, GA 001, Volume III, Design of a Theory of Colours, Introduction, page 89.
• 15. Re the poem The Mysteries refer to GA 98, Part 1, Lecture 4, Cologne, 25 December 1907.
• 16. “and until though truly hast, this dying and becoming..” is the final verse of the poem by Goethe Blessed longings of the collection West-Eastern Divan.
• 17. Druids were called knowledgeable of oaks, from Latin after Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus.
• 18. Goethe, The Mysteries, 22nd Verse.

If you were in the Cologne Cathedral last night you could have seen there in illuminated lettering: C.M.B. As is well known, these letters represent the names of the so-called Three Holy Kings, who, according to the tradition of the Christian Church, were called: Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar. For Cologne these names awaken quite special memories. An old legend tells us that the Three Holy Kings had become bishops, and some time after they had died their bones had been brought to Cologne. Related to this is another legend which tells that a Danish king had once come to Cologne, bringing with him three crowns for the Three Holy Kings. After he had returned home he had a dream. In his dream the three kings appeared to him and offered him three chalices—the first chalice contained gold, the second frankincense, and the third one myrrh. When the Danish king awoke the three kings had vanished, but the chalices had remained. There before him stood the three gifts he had retained from his dream.

In this legend there is profound meaning. It is hinted to us that the king in his dream rose to a certain insight into the spiritual world by which he learnt the symbolic meaning of the three kings, of these three Magi of the Orient, who brought offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh at the birth of Christ Jesus. From his realisation he retained a lasting possession: those three human virtues, which are symbolised in the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh—self-knowledge in the gold; self-devoutness, that is the devoutness of the innermost self, or self-surrender, in the frankincense; and self-perfection and self-development, or the preservation of the eternal in the self, in the myrrh.

How was it possible for the king to receive these three virtues as gifts from another world? He received this possibility because he had endeavoured to penetrate with his whole soul into the profound symbolism lying concealed in the three kings who brought their offerings to Christ Jesus.

There are many, many features in this Christ legend that lead us deeply into the most diverse meanings of the Christ principle and what it is supposed to do in the world. Among the profoundest features of the Christ legend are the adoration and the sacrifice by the three Magi, the three oriental kings, and we must not approach this fundamental symbolism of Christian tradition without a deeper understanding. Later the view developed that the first king was the representative of the Asiatic peoples; the second, the representative of the European peoples; and the third king, the representative of the African peoples. Wherever Christianity was to be understood as the religion of earthly harmony, the three kings and their homage were more often seen as a convergence of the different currents and religious trends in the world into a single principle, the Christ principle.

When this legend was given such a form, those who had penetrated into the mystery principles of esoteric Christianity saw in the Christ principle not only a force that had intervened in the course of human development, but they saw in the being that embodied itself in Jesus of Nazareth a cosmic world-force—a force far transcending the humanness that merely prevails in our present time. They saw in the Christ principle a force that indeed represents for man a human ideal that lies in a distant future development, but one, which can only be approached by man when he grasps the whole world more and more in the spirit. Initially they saw in man a small being, a small world, a microcosm, which for them was an image of the macrocosm, the great all-embracing world which contains everything that man can perceive with his external senses, see with his eyes, hear with his ears, but comprises, besides, all that the spirit could perceive including the perceptions of the lowest and also of the most clairvoyant spirit.

This was how the world appeared to the esoteric Christian in ancient times. All he saw occur in the firmament and on our Earth, all he saw as thunder and lightning, as storm and rain, as sunshine, as the course of the stars, as sunrise and sunset, as moonrise and moonset—all this was a gesture to him, something like mimicry, an external expression of inner spiritual processes.

The esoteric Christian views the world structure as he views the human body. When he looks at the human body, he sees it as consisting of different limbs: head, arms, hands, and so on. When he looks at the human body he sees hand movements, eye movements, movements of the facial muscles, but the individual limbs and their movements are for him the expression of inner spiritual and soul experiences. And just as he looked at the human limbs and their movements and perceived through them that which is the eternal, the soul in man, the esoteric Christian saw in the movements of the celestial bodies, in the light that streams down from the celestial bodies to humanity, the rising and setting of the Sun, the rising and setting of the Moon—in all of this he saw the external expression of divine-spiritual beings pervading space. All these natural phenomena were to him deeds of the Gods, gestures of the Gods, mimicry of those divine-spiritual beings. As was also everything that occurs among mankind, when people establish social communities, when they submit to moral rules and regulate their actions among themselves by laws, when from the forces of nature they create tools for themselves—although they make these tools with the help of the forces of nature, but in a form in which they have not been directly provided by nature. For the esoteric Christian, everything that man did more or less unconsciously was the external expression of inner divine spiritual workings.

But the esoteric Christian did not confine himself to such general forms. Instead he pointed to very specific individual gestures, single parts of the physiognomy of the universe, of the mimicry of the universe, in order to see in these individual parts very definite expressions of the spiritual. He pointed to the Sun and said: The Sun is not merely an external, physical body. This external, physical solar body is the body of a soul-spiritual being who rules over those soul-spiritual beings who are the governors, the leaders of all earthly fate, the leaders of all external natural occurrences on Earth, but also of all that happens in human social life, in the lawful conduct of men among each other. — When the esoteric Christian looked up to the Sun, then he revered in the Sun the external revelation of his Christos. In the first place the Christos was for him the Sun's soul, and the esoteric Christian said: From the beginning the Sun was the body of the Christos, but human beings on Earth and the Earth itself were not yet mature enough to receive the spiritual light, the Christ-light, which streams from the Sun. Humanity, therefore, had to be prepared for the Christ-light.

And now the esoteric Christian looked up at the Moon and saw that the Moon reflects the light of the Sun, but is more feeble than the Sun's light itself; and he said to himself: If I look at the sun with my physical eyes, I am dazzled by its radiant light; if I look into the Moon I am not dazzled; it reflects to a lesser degree the radiant light of the Sun. In this weakened sunlight, in this moonlight pouring down upon the Earth, the esoteric Christian saw the physiognomic expression of the old Jehovah principle, the expression for the religion of the old law. And he said: Before the Christ principle, the Sun of Righteousness, could appear on Earth, the Jahve principle had to prepare the way by sending this light of Righteousness, toned down in the Law to the Earth.

What lay in the old Jehovah principle, in the old law—the spiritual light of the Moon—was for the esoteric Christian the reflected spiritual light of the higher Christ principle. And like the confessors of the ancient Mysteries, the esoteric Christian—until far into the Middle Ages—saw in the Sun the expression of the spiritual light ruling the Earth, the Christ light. In the Moon they saw the expression of the reflected Christ light, which by its very nature would blind man. In the Earth itself the esoteric Christian saw, like the confessors of the ancient Mysteries, that which at times disguised and veiled for him the blinding sunlight of the spirit. The Earth was for him just as much the physical expression of a spirit, as was every other body an expression of something spiritual. He imagined that when the Sun could be seen shining down on the Earth, when it sent down its rays, beginning in the spring and continuing through the summer, and called forth from the Earth all the budding and sprouting life, and when it had culminated in the long summer days—then the esoteric Christian imagined that the Sun maintained the external up-shooting life, the physical life. In the plants, springing from the soil, in the animals that could unfold their fertility in these seasons, the esoteric Christian saw the same principle in an external physical form that he saw in the beings for which the Sun is the external expression. But when the days became shorter, when autumn and winter approached, the esoteric Christian said: the Sun withdraws its physical power more and more from the Earth. But to the same degree as the Sun's physical power is withdrawn from the Earth, its spiritual power increases and flows to the Earth most strongly when the shortest days come, with the long nights, in the times that later were fixed by the Christmas festival.

Man cannot see this spiritual power of the Sun. He would see it, said the esoteric Christian, if he possessed the inner power of spiritual vision. The esoteric Christian was still conscious of the fundamental conviction and fundamental knowledge of the Mystery-pupils from the most ancient times to the more recent time.

In those nights, now fixed by the Christmas festival, the mystery pupils were prepared for the experience of inner spiritual vision, so that they could see inwardly, spiritually that which at this time most withdraws its physical power from the Earth. In the long Christmas winter night, the mystery pupil was made to advance so far that he could have a vision at midnight. Then the Earth no longer shrouded the Sun,¹ which stood behind the Earth. It became transparent for him. Through the transparent Earth he saw the spiritual light of the Sun, the Christ light. This fact, which represents a profound experience of the mystery pupils, was captured in the expression ‘to see the Sun at midnight’.

There are areas where the churches, otherwise open all day, are closed at noon. This is a fact which connects Christianity with the traditions of ancient religious confessions. In ancient religious creeds the mystery students, on the strength of their experience, said: At noon, when the Sun stands highest, when it unfolds the strongest physical power, the Gods are asleep, and they sleep most deeply in summer, when the Sun unfolds its strongest physical power. But they are widest awake on Christmas night, when the external physical power of the Sun is at its weakest.

We see that all beings, who desire to unfold their external physical strength look up to the Sun when the Sun rises in spring, and strive to receive the external physical power of the Sun. But when, at a summer noon, the Sun's physical power flows most lavishly from the Sun to the Earth, the Sun’s spiritual power is weakest. In the winter midnight, however, when the Sun rays the least physical power down to the Earth, man can see the Sun's spirit through the Earth, which has become transparent for him. The esoteric Christian felt that by immersing himself in Christian esotericism he approached more and more that power of inner vision through which he could completely fulfil his feeling, thinking and his will-impulses when gazing into this spiritual sun. Then the mystery student was led to a vision of most real significance: As long as the Earth is opaque, the individual parts appear to be inhabited by people who develop separate creeds but the unifying bond is not there. Human races are as scattered as the climates, human opinions are scattered all over the Earth and there is no connecting link. But to the extent that human beings begin to look through the Earth into the Sun by their inner power of vision, to the extent that the “Star” appears to them through the Earth, their confessions will reconcile to form one great united human brotherhood. And those who guided the great individual human masses in the truth of the higher planes towards initiation into the higher worlds, were introduced as the Magi. There were three Magi, while in the different parts of the Earth the most diverse powers are expressed. Humanity therefore had to be guided in different ways. But as a unifying power there appears the Star, rising beyond the Earth. It leads the scattered individuals together, and then they make offerings to the physical embodiment of the solar Star, which had appeared as the Star of Peace. The cosmic-human religion of peace, of harmony, of universal peace, of human brotherhood, was thus brought into connection with the ancient Magi, who laid down the best gifts they had for humanity at the cradle of the incarnate Son of Man.

The legend has retained this beautifully, by saying that the Danish king rose to an understanding of the Wise Magi, of the three Kings, and because he had risen to it they bestowed on him their three gifts: firstly, the gift of wisdom in self-knowledge; secondly, the gift of devoted piousness in self-giving; and, thirdly, the gift of the victory of life over death in the strength and fostering of the eternal in the self.

All those who understood Christianity in this way, saw in it the profound spiritual-scientific idea of the unification of religions. For they were of the view, yes, they had the firm conviction that whoever understands Christianity thus, can rise to the highest grade of human development.

One of the last Germans to understand Christianity esoterically in this way is Goethe. Goethe has laid down for us this kind of Christianity, this kind of religious reconciliation, this kind of Theosophy, in the profound poem The Mysteries. Although it has remained a fragment² it shows us in a deeply meaningful way the inner spiritual development of one who is imbued with and convinced by the feelings and ideas that were just hinted at.

We first learn how Goethe points us to the pilgrim-path of such a man and indicates that this pilgrim-path may lead us far astray. That it is not easy for man to find it, and that one must have patience and devotion to reach the goal. Whoever possesses these will find the light that he seeks. Let us hear the beginning of the poem:

A wondrous song is here prepared for many.
Hear it with joy! Tell all from far and near!
The way will lead you out o'er mount and valley;
Now is the view obscured, now wide and clear,
And if the path should glide into the bushes,
That you have gone astray, you need not fear,
For by a persevering, patient climb
We shall draw near our goal, when it is time.

But no one will, despite profound reflection,
Unravel all the wonders hidden here:
Our mother earth brings forth so many flowers,
And many shall find something to revere;
Maybe that one will gloomily forsake us,
Another stays with gestures full of cheer:
For many wand'ring pilgrims flows the spring,
To each a different pleasure it will bring.

This is the situation into which we are placed. We are shown a pilgrim who, if we were to ask him, would not be able to tell us rationally what we have just explained to be the esoteric Christian idea—but a pilgrim, in whose heart and soul these ideas live transformed into feelings. It is not easy to discover everything that has been secreted into this poem called The Mysteries. Goethe has clearly indicated: a process occurring within a person in whom the highest ideas, thoughts and conceptions are transformed into feelings and sensations. What causes this transformation to take place?

We live through many embodiments, from one incarnation to another incarnation. In each one we learn things of many kinds; each one is full of opportunities for gathering new experiences. It is impossible to carry over everything in every detail from one incarnation to another. When man is born again, it is not necessary for everything that he has once learnt to come to life again in every detail. But if someone has learnt a lot in one incarnation, dies and is born again, although there is no need for all his ideas to be revived, but he will return to life with the fruits of his former life, with the fruits of his learning. His sensations, his feelings correspond to the realisations of his earlier incarnations.

In this poem of Goethe we find expressed something wonderful: we encounter a man who, in the simplest words—as a child might speak, not in particularly intellectual or abstract terms—shows us the highest wisdom as a fruit of former knowledge. He has transformed this knowledge into feeling and sensation and is thereby qualified to guide others who may have learnt more in the form of concepts. Such a pilgrim with a mature soul that has transformed much of the knowledge it has gathered in earlier incarnations into direct feeling and sensation, such a pilgrim we have before us in Brother Mark. As a member of a secret brotherhood he is sent on an important mission to another secret brotherhood.

He wanders through many different areas, and when he is tired, he comes to a mountain. He finally climbs up the path to the summit. Every step in this poem has a deep significance. When he has climbed the mountain, he sees a monastery in a nearby valley. This monastery is the dwelling of the brotherhood to which he has been sent. Above the gate of the monastery he sees something extraordinary. He sees the cross, but in a special guise; the cross is entwined with roses! And at this point he utters a significant word that only he can understand who knows how very often this password has been spoken in secret brotherhoods, “Who added roses to the cross?” And from the middle of the cross he sees three rays radiating out as if from the Sun. There is no need for him to place before his soul conceptually the meaning of this profound symbol. The perception of it and feeling for it already live in his soul, in his mature soul. His mature soul that knows everything that lies within it.

What is the meaning of the cross? He knows that the cross is a symbol for many things; among many others also for the threefold lower nature of man: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. In it the ‘I’ is born. In the Rose-Cross we have the fourfold man: in the cross the physical man, the etheric man, and the astral man, and in the roses the I. Why roses for the I? Esoteric Christianity added roses to the cross because it saw in the Christ principle a summons to raise the I from the state in which it is born in the three bodies to an ever higher and higher I. In the Christ principle it saw the power to carry this I higher and higher.

The cross is the symbol of death in a quite particular sense. This, too, Goethe expresses in another beautiful passage³ when he says,

And until thou truly hast
This dying and becoming,
Thou art but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.

Die and become—overcome what you have first been given in the three lower bodies. Deaden it, but not out of a desire for death, but to purify what is in these three bodies so as to attain in the I the power to receive an ever-greater perfection. By deadening, what is given to you in the three lower bodies, the power of perfection will enter into the I. Into the I, the Christian should take into him the power of perfection in the Christ principle, right down to the blood. This power must work right into the blood.

Blood is the expression of the I. In the red roses the esoteric Christian saw that which in the blood, purified and cleansed by the power of the Christ principle, and in the I, which in turn was cleansed by this blood, leads man upwards to his higher being—he saw the power that transforms the astral body into the Spirit Self, the etheric body into the Life Spirit, the physical body into the Spirit Man. Thus, we encounter in the Rose-Cross connected with the triple beam a profound symbol of the Christ principle. The pilgrim Brother Mark, who arrives here, knows: he is at a place where the profoundest meaning of Christianity is understood.

Full weary by a long and tiring journey,
With a sublimest motive underta'en,
A pilgrim, brother Mark, came through the thicket,
With staff in hand, his footsteps to sustain,
And longing for a little food and drinking,
One beauteous eve he reached a quiet plain.
Its wooded gorges soothing hope bestowed
Beneath a friendly roof to find abode.

But lo! a path he scarcely can distinguish,
High up a mountain steep before him wending.
He follows it, as more and more it rises,
In curvings in and out the boulders bending,
Until again by sunlight warm enveloped,
He turns and sees how fast he is ascending.
At last the summit comes within his sight,
Inspiring him with heart-felt, deep delight.

Next it the sun, majestic in its setting,
Enthroned 'mong clouds within the dark'ning sky.
Now for the peak! For all his weary toiling
He hopes to be rewarded there on high.
O'erlooking all the country 'fore him spreading,
A human home he will perchance espy.
And while he climbs, oh sound how full of cheer!
The chime of bells is wafted to his ear.

And as at length he has attained the summit,
Below a softly sloping valley lies.
His quiet look with inward pleasure brightens;
Before the forest full of joy he spies
A stately building in a greening field,
Which the departing sun with lustre dyes.
E'er long he nears through meadows dewy damp
A monastery lit with gleaming lamp.

He soon arrives outside the quiet homestead,
With hope and peacefulness his soul enfolding,
And on the arch above the closed portal
A symbol full of mystery beholding.
He stands and ponders, whispers words of prayer,
The deep devotion of his heart unfolding;
He ponders long: What does this sign convey?
The sun has set, the chiming dies away.

The sign he sees erected here on high
That brings consoling hope to all mankind,
Which many thousands pledged their lives to shield,
To which in fervour prayed the human mind,
That has destroyed the bitter powers of death,
On victors' banners fluttered in the wind:
A stream of comfort permeates his being,
He sees the cross and bows his head in seeing.

He feels anew the faith of all on earth,
The power of salvation streaming thence;
But as he looks, he feels his very soul
Pervaded by a new and unknown sense:
Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?
It is entwined by blooming, clusters dense,
Profusely spreading just as though they could
Endow with softness e'en the rigid wood.

While light and silv'ry clouds, around it soaring,
Seem heavenward with cross and roses flowing,
And from the midst like living waters streaming
A threefold ray from out one core is glowing;
But not a word surrounds the holy token,
The meaning of the symbol clearly showing.
And while the dusk is gath'ring grey and greyer,
He stands and ponders and is lost in prayer.

The spirit of deepest Christianity which can be found within this dwelling is expressed in the cross entwined by roses. And as the pilgrim now enters, he is actually received in this spirit. As he enters, he becomes aware that in this house not this or that religion holds sway—but that the higher Oneness of the world’s religions is at work here. In the house he tells an older member of the brotherhood who lives there, at whose behest and on what mission he has come. He is made welcome and hears that in this house lives in perfect seclusion a brotherhood of twelve brothers. These twelve brothers are representatives of diverse groups of people from all over the Earth; every one of the brothers is the representative of a religious creed. None is to be found here, who is accepted while still young in years and immature. One will only be accepted when one has explored the world, when one has struggled with the joys and sorrows of the world, when one has worked and been active in the world and has wrestled with oneself upwards to gain a free survey over one’s narrowly confined domain. Only then is one placed and accepted into the circle of the Twelve. And these Twelve, of whom each one represents one of the world religious creeds, live here in peace and harmony together. For they are led by a thirteenth who surpasses them all in the perfection of his human Self, who surpasses them all in his wide survey of human circumstances.

And how does Goethe indicate that this Thirteenth is the representative of true esotericism, the carrier of the Rosicrucian confession? Goethe indicates this by one of the brothers saying: He was among us. Now we are plunged into the deepest sorrow because he is about to leave us, he wishes to part from us. But he feels it is right to part from us now. He desires to rise to higher regions, where he no longer needs to reveal himself in an earthly body.

He may ascend, for he has risen to a point that Goethe describes as follows: In every creed lies the possibility of coming closer to the highest unity. When each of the twelve religions is matured to establish harmony, then the Thirteenth, who has before brought about this harmony externally, can rise up. And we are beautifully told how we can achieve this perfection of the Self. First, the life-story of the Thirteenth is related. But the Brother who has admitted the pilgrim Mark knows many more details, which the great leader of the Twelve could not say himself. Several traits of profound esoteric significance are now told by this brother to the pilgrim Mark. It is told, that when the Thirteenth was born a star appeared to herald his earthly existence. This is a direct link to the star that guided the Three Holy Kings and to its meaning. This star has an enduring significance; it indicates the way to self-knowledge, self-giving, and self-perfection. It is the star that opens the understanding of the gifts that the Danish king received through the vision that appeared to him in his dream. The star that appears at the birth of everyone mature enough to receive the Christ principle within oneself.

And other things also became apparent. It became clear that he had developed to that height of religious harmony, which brings peace and harmony of the soul. Profoundly symbolical in this sense is the vulture which swoops down when the Thirteenth entered into this world, but instead of having a devastating effect, it spreads peace around it among the doves.

We are told still more. As his little sister is lying in the cradle a viper winds itself around her. The Thirteenth, still a child, kills the viper. Hereby is wonderfully indicated how a mature soul—for only a mature soul can achieve such a thing after many incarnations—kills the viper already in early childhood; this means he overcame the lower astral nature. The viper is the symbol for the lower astral nature. The sister is his own etheric body, around which the astral body winds itself. He kills the viper for his sister.

Then we are told how he obediently submitted to what at first the family demanded of him. He obeyed his harsh father. The soul transforms its realisations, ideas, and thoughts. Then healing powers develop in the soul, through which healing can be brought about in the world. Miraculous powers develop; they find expression in his use of his sword to lure a spring out of the rock. Intentionally, we are here shown how his soul follows in the footsteps of the Scripture.

Thus gradually there matures the superior, the representative of humanity, the Chosen One, who works as the Thirteenth here in the community of the Twelve—the great secret order that, under the symbol of the Rose-Cross, has taken on the mission for all mankind to harmonise the creeds scattered throughout the world. This is how we are first made acquainted in a profound manner with the soul-state of the one who has until now led the Brotherhood of our Twelve.

At last he knocks. The myriad stars above him
Look down with shining eyes as they appear.
The portal opens, and he is bidden welcome
By brethren wont to comfort and to cheer.
So he relates how far by hill and valley
The will of higher Beings led him here.
They stand amazed, for well they see their guest
Was sent to them by heavenly behest.

They crowd around him, and their inmost being
They feel by a mysterious power stirred,
Their breath they hold to listen, for he rouses
An echo in their hearts with ev'ry word.
Like deepest lore, yet uttered by a child,
The wisdom flowing from his lips is heard:
He seems so innocent, like crystal clear,
As though descended from another sphere.

At last an aged brother cries: Oh welcome,
If with consoling hope thy path is blessed!
Thou seest us, our souls are moved within us
By thee, and yet we can but stand oppressed:
Our greatest bliss from us is being taken,
Anxiety and dread disturb our rest.
Thou comest as a stranger, yet to share
Portentous hours of mourning and of care:

For he, alas! who all of us united,
to whom as father and as friend we bow,
who light and fortitude within us kindled—
Our leader—is prepared to leave us now.
Yea, he himself his passing has predicted,
refusing though to tell us when and how:
The mystery of what must needs befall
Brings bitter tribulation to us all.

Thou seest us grey and aged ev’ry one,
By nature destined for repose and rest:
Not one was here admitted who, a youth,
Desired to fly from wordly joy and zest.
Each one has met with life's vicissitudes,
Its burdens, pleasures and its anxious quest,
Until, matured, too old to longer roam,
Within these walls we found a shelt'ring home.

The noble man who led us to this haven,
Within his heart the peace of God does dwell;
Along the path of life we walked together,
His ev'ry action I remember well;
But now his fervent praying, his seclusion,
The hour of his departing must foretell.
How small is man! Oh would that he could give
His life, so that a greater one might live!

This is my heart's profound and only wish!
Fulfilment is denied to my desire.
How many have preceded me in death!
How bitter is the thought he must expire.
Had he been here, with hearty welcome's warmth
He would have given all thou didst require;
But now in spirit-regions dwells his mind,
Already far from those he leaves behind.

Each day one hour he lingers in our midst
And speaks to us, by strange emotion stirred:
The wondrous paths that Providence has led
Within his life he lauds with ev'ry word;
We hark and heed, for after-ages hoarding
With care the merest trifle that occurred,
While one writes down his words to make us sure
His memory shall live both true and pure.

I hear him speak, but oh, how much there is
That I would rather myself relate,
For all is still alive within my mind,
The least of circumstances I would state;
Impatiently I list, can scarce conceal
How sore it is thus silently to wait:
One day I shall no more restrain my zeal,
The splendours of this beauteous life reveal.

I should disclose how first an angel's voice
His coming to his mother prophesied,
And how, when he was christened, in the sky
A star with brilliant lustre was descried,
How down a vulture swooped with mighty wings
To settle by the gentle pigeons' side,
But not to pounce on them in greedy wildness,
A harbinger he seemed of peace and mildness.

How as a child a viper he destroyed,
This is a miracle he ne'er has told.
He found his sister peacefully asleep,
The clinging reptile round her arm was rolled.
The nurse had fled and left the babe alone,
He killed the pois'nous snake, resolved and bold;
His mother came and saw the daring deed
And thrilled with joy she found her daughter freed.

He ne'er related that a spring arose
From out the barren rock before his sword,
And as a brook, with rippling waves alive,
Its plenteous waters down the hill-side poured;
E'en now, as quick as forth it gushed at first,
It bickers silver sparkling o'er the sward.
But those who saw the wondrous stream appear,
Dared not to drink, o'ercome by solemn fear.

For when a man excels by gifts of nature,
It is no wonder if his life is blessed;
In him we worship the Creator's power,
Through feeble human clay made manifest;
But he who overcomes himself has gained
The greatest triumph, stood the hardest test,
And well may he to all the world be shown:
Yea, this is he, this deed is his alone!

With all our strength we strive to live and labour,
Where'er by fate our twisting paths be wended;
Whereas the world oppresses, e'er impeding,
And seeks to tear us from the way intended;
Within this inner storm and outer struggle
Our spirit hears a word scarce comprehended:
The power that holds constrained all humankind
The victor o'er himself it no more can bind.

Thus this man, who had overcome himself, that is, who had overcome the “I” that at first is allotted to man, became the Superior of the chosen Brotherhood just characterised. And so he leads the Twelve. He has led them to a point where they are mature enough for him to be allowed to leave them.

Our Brother Mark is then conducted further into the rooms where the Twelve work. How did they work? Their activity is of an unusual kind, and we are made aware that it is an activity in the spiritual world. A man whose eyes observe only the physical plane, whose senses only see the physical and what is done by people in the physical world, cannot easily imagine that there is still other work. Work that may in some circumstances even be far more essential and important than work that is done externally on the physical plane. Work from the higher planes is far more important for mankind. Mind you, whoever wishes to work on the higher planes must fulfill the condition that he has first completed his tasks on the physical plane. These Twelve had done so. For this reason, their combined activity signifies something of high importance for the service to mankind.

Our Brother Mark is led into the hall where the Twelve were accustomed to assemble. There he encounters in a profound symbolism the nature of their combined activity. The individual contribution that each of the Brothers has to make to this joint activity, in accordance with his particular character, is expressed by a special symbol above the seat of each of the Twelve. Symbols of many kinds are to be seen there, expressing meaningfully and in very different ways what each one has to contribute to the common work. This work consists of spiritual activity, so that these streams flow together here into a current of spiritual life that floods the world and has a strengthening effect on the rest of humanity. There are such brotherhoods, such centres from where such flows emanate and impact on the rest of mankind.

Above the seat of the Thirteenth, Brother Mark again sees the sign: the cross entwined with roses. This sign is at the same time a symbol for the four-fold nature of man, and in the red roses it is the symbol for the purified blood- or I-principle, the principle of the higher man. Then we see that which is to be overcome by this sign of the Rose-Cross installed as a special symbol to the left and right of the seat of the Thirteenth. On the right Mark sees the fiery-coloured dragon, representing the astral nature of man.

It was well known in Christian esotericism that man's soul can be devoted to the three lower bodies. If it succumbs to them, then it is dominated by the lower life of the threefold bodily nature within it. This is expressed in the astral perception by the dragon. This is no mere symbol but a very real sign. In the dragon is expressed what must first be conquered. In the passions, in these forces of astral fire—which are part of man's physical nature—in this dragon Christian esotericism saw that which mankind has received from the torrid zone, from the South. This poem was written in the spirit of Christian esotericism, which spread throughout Europe. From the South stems that part of man which mankind acquired as hot passion tending more towards the lower sensory nature. As a first impulse to fight and overcome this, one sensed what flowed down from the influences of the cooler North. The influence of the colder North, the descent of the I into the threefold bodily nature, is expressed according to an old symbol taken from the constellation of the Bear, which shows a hand thrust into the maw of a bear. The lower bodily nature expressed by the fiery dragon will be overcome. What has been preserved in the higher animal species was represented by the bear. And the I, which has developed beyond the dragon nature, was represented with profound appropriateness by the thrusting of a human hand into the bear's maw. On both sides of the Rose-Cross there appears what must be overcome by it. It is the Rose-Cross that calls on man to purify and raise himself up higher and higher.

In this way, the poem really presents us with the principle of esoteric Christianity in the deepest way, and illustrates to us above all what should be before our soul, especially at a festival like the one we are celebrating today.

The eldest of the Brothers belonging to the Brotherhood, who lives here, explicitly tells the pilgrim Mark that their combined activity is happening in the spirit, that it is spiritual life. This work for mankind on the spiritual plane means something special. The Brothers have experienced life's joys and sorrows, they have endured external conflicts; they have performed work in the world outside. Now they are here, but here also work is done continuously to further the development of mankind. The pilgrim Mark is told: You have now seen as much as can be shown to a novice to whom the first portal is opened. You have been shown in profound symbols how man's ascent should be. But the second portal harbours greater mysteries—how from the higher worlds work is done on mankind. You can only learn these greater mysteries after lengthy preparation, only then can you enter through the other gate. Profound secrets are expressed in this poem.

In him I scarce as virtue may denote
The power of good which e'en his youth inspired
And taught him to respect his father's word,
When harshly he his services required,
With duties burdening his leisure hours;
The son obeyed with ardour, never tired,
Like some poor boy who, friendless and astray,
Is glad to work for but a trifling pay.

On foot he joined the warriors in the field,
In lowering tempest and in dazzling light,
The horses he did tend, the meals prepare,
And armed the soldiers ready for the fight.
Oft as a messenger, both keen and fleet,
He hastened through the woods by day and night;
To live for others both in thought and action
Seemed but to give him joy and satisfaction.

And brave and cheerful always, in the strife
He sought the arrows scattered on the ground;
Then hastily he gathered curing herbs,
With which the burning wounds he cooled and bound;
And just as if his very touch were healing,
Ere long the sufferers were strong and sound;
How all regarded him with joy and pride!
Alone his father seemed not satisfied.

E'en as a ship, despite its heavy load
From port to port with speedy lightness sailing,
He bore the burden of his parents' word
That in obedience ne'er he should be failing;
As pleasure is for boys, for youths distinction,
For him his father's will was all-prevailing,
So that he might demand whate'er he would,
Each task was soon fulfilled, each test was stood.

At last the father yielded and acknowledged
The merit of his son in word and deed;
While of a sudden all his sternness vanished,
He gave the youth a swift and precious steed;
Henceforth a sword replaced the shorter dagger,
And from his lesser duties he was freed:
Thus, destined by his birth and well acquitted,
Into an Order he was now admitted.

Ah, well could I report for many days
Amazing things to every one who hears;
And higher than the most delightful tales
His life will be esteemed in coming years;
For what in poetry and fiction charms,
Yet to our mind incredible appears,
Will here with greater pleasure still be heard,
Because it has in real event occurred.

The name of him whom Providence has chosen
That wondrous things on earth he should achieve,
Whom I may often praise, though ne'er sufficing
Whose destiny we scarcely can believe,
His name—it is Humanus, Saint and wise one,
The best of men whom I did e'er perceive:
By origin another name he bears,
Which with illustrious ancestors he shares.

The aged brother would have spoken on.
Filled with the miracles that he did know,
And he shall gladden us for many weeks
With all the stirring facts he still can show;
But he was interrupted, just as now
His heart was pouring forth in fervent flow.
The others softly in and out had passed
And deemed it time to intervene at last.

When Mark had bowed before his hosts and prayed
In gratitude for the sustaining meal,
A bowl of crystal water he requested.
They brought what he had craved with friendly zeal.
Hereafter led him to their festive hall,
Therein a sight unwonted to reveal.
Of what he saw you soon will be aware,
For everything shall be described with care.

No ornament was here, the eye deluding,
A cross-arched vault rose sternly from the ground,
And thirteen chairs against the walls, he noticed.
Were like a pious chorus ranged around,
By clever hands full delicately carven;
In front of each a little desk he found.
Devotion seemed to fill the very air,
Fraternity and restfulness and prayer.

Above each chair was hung a special shield,
Thirteen in all the number he espied.
They seemed to be important, purposeful,
No boast of ancestors in shallow pride.
And brother Mark, with longing all aglow,
Desired to learn what secret they did hide:
Lo, in the middle one the mystic sign,
The cross which clustring roses do entwine.

Each object will arouse to life and action
The soul which to its inspiration yields;
Some places are adorned by swords and lances,
While helmets hang above these other shields;
Here battered weapons are to be discovered,
Such as one may collect on battle-fields:
There spears and banners, come from distant lands,
And even fetters here and iron bands!

Each brother sinking down before his chair,
In silent prayer profoundly wrapt they rested;
Then softly chanted fervent hymns of thanks,
By cheerfulness and piety suggested;
With mutual blessing they retired to sleep,
A short repose, by fancies unmolested:
But Mark remains, surrounded by a few,
Still wishing more attentively to view.

Though tired in body, full awake his mind,
Preoccupied by many hidden things:
For here, his thirst in raging flames appeasing,
A dragon is enthroned with fiery wings;
And here between his jaws a bear is holding
An arm from which the blood it loses springs,
Both shields, in distance corresponding quite,
Hung next the Rosy-Cross to left and right.

Wherever he now turns and gazes in amazement,⁴
The more he marvels at the art and splendours
Abundant wealth seems wasted here on purpose
Has everything just made itself?—he wonders.
Should he have doubts about the work’s fulfilment?
Who so conceived the plan? ― he ponders.
It seems to him, with heavenly delight,
He’s only just beginning to live each moment right.

The paths were wonderful that led thee here,
The aged brother speaks unto his guest:
Oh let these symbols bid thee stay until
The many heroes' deeds we manifest;
Our mysteries we will confide to thee,
For what is here concealed, can ne'er be guessed;
Although thou wilt divine what here was done,
Endured and lost, and last what triumph won.

Do not believe that but of times gone by
The brother spake. Here wonders never fail;
And more and ever more thou shalt behold,
Until withdrawn is the enshrouding veil.
One portal only 'tis that thou hast passed:
And if thou feelst the call, O friend, prevail!
The foremost court as yet thou didst attain,
But worthy art the very core to gain.

After a short rest, our Brother Mark learns to divine at least something of the inner mysteries. In powerful symbols he has let the ascent of the human Self work upon his soul. When he is woken from his brief rest by a sign, he comes to a portal, only to find it is locked. He hears a strange triad: three beats and the whole as if intermingled with the playing of a flute. He cannot look in, cannot see what is happening there in the room.

We do not need to be told more than these few words to indicate in a profound way what awaits man when he approaches the spiritual worlds, when he is so far purified and perfected by his endeavours to work on his Self that he passed through the astral world and then approaches the higher worlds—those worlds in which the spiritual archetypes of things here on Earth can be found. When he approaches what is called the ‘world of heaven’ in esoteric Christianity, he first approaches it through a world flooded with colours. Then he enters into a world of sound, into the harmony of the universe, the music of the spheres. The spiritual world is a world of sound. He who has developed his higher Self to the level of the higher worlds, must become at home in this spiritual world. It is precisely Goethe who clearly expressed the higher experience of a world of spiritual sound in his Faust, when he lets him be raptured to heaven, and the world of heaven reveals itself to him through sound.⁵

“The sun-orb sings, in emulation
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round...”

The physical Sun does not sound, but the spiritual Sun does. Goethe retains this image when, after long wanderings, Faust is transported up into the spiritual worlds:

“Sounding loud to spirit-hearing,⁶
see the new-born day appearing.”
“Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes
—eye is blinded, ear amazes:
The Unheard can no one hear!”

As man evolves higher through the symbolic colour world of the astral, he approaches the world of the harmony of the spheres, the Devachan domain, that which is spiritual music. Only softly, softly going outside does our Brother Mark hear―after he has passed through the first portal, the astral portal—the chiming sound of the inner world behind our external world; of that inner world which transforms the lower astral world into this higher world through which the triad flows. And by ascending to the higher world a human being’s lower nature is transformed into the higher trinity: our astral body changes into the Spirit Self, the etheric body into the Life Spirit, the physical body into the Spirit Man.

Brother Marcus first senses the triad of the higher nature in the music of the spheres, and by becoming one with this music of the spheres, he has a first inkling of the rejuvenation of someone who enters into contact with the spiritual worlds. He sees, as in a dream, rejuvenated mankind floating through the garden in the form of the three youths carrying three torches. This is the moment when Mark's soul woke up in the morning from darkness, and where some darkness has still remained as the light has not yet penetrated it. But precisely at such a time the soul can look into the spiritual world. It can look into the spiritual worlds, just as it can look into them when the summer noon has passed, when the Sun gradually gets weaker and winter has arrived, and then at midnight the Christ-principle shines through the Earth in the Holy Night of Christmas.

Through the Christ-principle man is elevated to the higher Trinity, illustrated for Brother Mark by the three youths who represent the rejuvenated humanity. This is the meaning of Goethe's lines:

“And until thou truly hast
This dying and becoming,
Thou art but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.”

Every year anew, Christmas must remind those who understand esoteric Christianity that what happens in the external world is mimicry, are the gestures of inner spiritual processes. The external power of the Sun runs free in the spring and summer sunshine. In the Holy Scripture this external power of the Sun—which is only the proclamation of the inner, spiritual power of the Sun—is expressed in John the Baptist, whereas the inner, spiritual power is expressed in Christ. And while the physical power of the Sun continuously abates, the spiritual power rises and grows more and more in strength until it reaches its zenith at Christmas time. This is the meaning underlying the words in the Gospel of St. John, “I must decrease, but He must increase”.⁷ And He increases and increases until He appears where the sun-force has again attained the outer physical power.

So that man may henceforth be able to revere and worship the spiritual power of the Sun in this external physical power, he must learn to recognise the meaning of the Christmas festival. For those who do not recognise this meaning, the new power of the Sun is nothing other than the old physical power anew. But one who has familiarised himself with the impulses which esoteric Christianity and especially the Christmas festival should give him, will see in the growing power of the solar body the external body of the inner Christ, which radiates through the Earth, which vitalises and fertilises it, so that the Earth itself becomes the bearer of the Christ power, of the Earth-Spirit. Hence, what is born to us every Christmas night is born anew each time. Christ will allow us to inwardly perceive the microcosm within the macrocosm, and this perception will lead us higher and higher.

The festivals, which have long ago become something external to man, will again appear in their deep significance for man, if he is led by this profound esotericism to the knowledge that the external events of nature―such as thunder and lightning, sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset―are the gestures and physiognomy of spiritual existence. And at the significant points, marked by our festivals, man should realise that then also in the spiritual world important things are happening. Then he will be led to the rejuvenating spiritual power, represented by the three youths, which the I can only win by devoting itself to the outer world, and not by egotistically shutting itself away from it. But there is no devotion to the outer world if this outer world is not permeated by spirit. That this spirit should appear anew each year as a light in the darkness for all human beings, even for the weakest, must be written afresh each year into the heart and soul of humanity.

This is what Goethe wished to express in this poem, The Mysteries. It is at once a Christmas poem and an Easter poem. It aims to hint at profound secrets of esoteric Christianity. If we allow what he wished to indicate of the deep mysteries of Rosicrucian Christianity to work upon us, if we absorb its power even in part, then we will become missionaries for at least a few of those in our surroundings. We shall succeed in shaping these festivals in such a way that they are filled with spirit and with life.

When after short repose within his cell
A deep resounding bell awakes our guest,
His soul is filled with longing for devotion,
He rises quickly with unwearied zest
And hastens to the church, with all his heart
Responding to the gladly heard behest,
Obedient, peaceful and by prayer bestirred;
Alas! The door is locked, he stands deterred.

But hark! a blow on dull resounding ore
Three times in equal intervals renewed,
No chime it seems to be of clock or bells,
From time to time with tones of flute imbued;
The floating music fills the heart with joy,
Mysterious 'tis and scarce to be construed,
It sounds like singing, solemn and entrancing,
To which the couples interlace in dancing.

Bewildered and by strange emotion moved,
He hastens to the window there to gaze;
The day is dawning in the distant east,
The sky o'erflown by lucent streaks of haze.
And may he trust his eyes? A mystic light
Is fleeting through the garden's winding ways;
Three youths with torches in their hands he sees
Who haste along the paths between the trees.

He clearly sees their wonderful apparel,
The white resplendent garments which they wear,
Their girdles made of intertwining roses,
The wreaths of flowers in their curly hair;
They seem to come from some nocturnal dances,
With joy of movement thrilled, enlived and fair.
But as the stars will fade, when day is near,
Extinguishing their torch, they disappear.

• 1. A correction after the transcript by Walter Vegelahn. In the first Edition this sentence was due to a different transcript recorded in error as “then the Earth was no longer the hull”.
• 2. Goethe himself wrote an essay about this fragment in the year 1816, “The Mysteries, a fragment by Goethe”, in Essays on Literature, Contributions to the Morning paper for the educated classes, 1807-1816. Sophien Edition, Volume 41/1.
• 3. “And until thou truly hast” is the final verse of the poem by Goethe “Blessed Longings”, of the collection West Eastern Divan.
• 4. The verse “Wherever he now turns and gazes in amazement”, is missing from most Goethe Editions, but according to an original handwritten Goethe script it had been intended for The Mysteries. Refer Goethe’s works, Weimar Edition, Volume 16, Page 436.
• 5. “The Sun-orb sings, in emulation...”, Goethe, Faust Part I, Prologue in Heaven, Verse 243 et seq.
• 6. “Sounding loud to spirit-hearing..”, Faust Part II, Act 1, Ariel Scene, Verse 4666 et seq.
• 7. “I must decrease, but he must increase”. The literal translation would be “I must sink, but he has to rise”. John-3-30.

On various occasions it has been emphasised that the spiritual development, as aspired to by Spiritual Science, must bring the human being into a living relationship with the whole environment. Much in our environment that filled our ancestors with veneration has become dead and mundane for man. For example, a large number of people are alienated from and cold towards our annual festivals. The urban population in particular has only a scant memory of what Christmas, Easter and Whitsun (Pentecost) mean.

Today, mankind does no longer possess this enormous emotional content that our ancestors connected with the festive seasons because they were aware of the great facts of the spiritual world. Cold and sober people look at Christmas and Easter today, and especially also at Whitsun. The pouring out of the Spirit has become an abstract event for many people. But this will change—it will only become life and reality when mankind will come to a truly spiritual realisation of the whole world.

Today, there is a lot of talk about the forces of nature, but not a lot is said about the beings behind these nature forces. Modern man regards talk about the “beings of nature” as a rehashing of an old superstitious belief. It is considered an old superstition if someone believes that the words used for gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, as our ancestors called them, are based on reality and mean something real. First, in a certain way it doesn’t matter what kind of theories or ideas people have, but if people are tempted by these theories to ignore certain things and to apply their theories in their daily life in practice, then the issue becomes fully relevant.

Let’s take a grotesque example: Who believes in beings whose existence is bound to the air or who are embodied in water? For example, if someone says, “Our ancestors believed in certain beings like gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, but this is all imaginary stuff!”, then one would like to respond by saying, “Ask the bees.” And, if the bees could talk, they would answer, “Sylphs are not a superstition for us—we know quite well what they are to us!” Someone who is clairvoyant can trace (with his eyes) which force it is that draws the little bee to the flower. “Instinct, natural drive,” is man’s answer, but these are empty words. It is those beings, that our ancestors called sylphs, that guide the bees to the bloom’s calyx to search for food—and those beings are active in the whole bee swarm in search for nourishment.

Wherever different nature kingdoms touch, there is an opportunity for certain (elemental) beings to reveal themselves. For example, inside the Earth, where the stone touches on a metal vein, special beings will settle down. At a spring, where moss covers the stone and thus the plant kingdom touches the mineral kingdom such beings will settle in. Where animals and plants touch, in the bloom’s calyx when the bee touches the blossom, particular beings will embody themselves, and likewise where the human being touches onto the animal kingdom. This is not happening in the normal course of contact. For example, not when the butcher slaughters cattle, or when someone eats the flesh of animals—nothing like this will happen in the normal course of life. But where in the extraordinary course of events, as it happens with bees and flowers, the kingdoms touch each other in an exuberance of life, beings will embody themselves. And especially where man’s mind, his intellect, is particularly engaged in interacting with animals, such beings embody themselves. An example would be the emotional relationship a shepherd has with his sheep.

When we go back to the ancient times, we find such close relationships between humans and animals more often. In times of lower cultures, it was common to have relationships such as an Arab has to his horse, but not as the owner of a racing stable has to his horses. There we find those powers of mind that interplay between kingdoms–like between the shepherd and the lambs. Or where the senses of smell and taste will be developed and radiate across, like between bees and flowers, an opportunity is created for certain beings to embody themselves. When a bee sucks at a flower, a clairvoyant can perceive how at the rim of the flower a small aura is created. This is the effect of the taste: The sting of the bee into the bloom’s calyx has produced a certain flavouring agent – the bee perceives the taste and radiates it out like a bloom’s aura – this is the nourishment for sylph-like beings. Likewise, the element of feeling between the shepherd and the sheep is food for salamanders.

The following question is not for one who understands the spiritual world, “Then why are these beings there and not otherwise?” We should not ask about their origin, because their origin lies in the cosmos. But if one creates an opportunity for them to feed then they appear. For example, bad thoughts emanating from a person will attract bad entities to settle into his aura because they find food there. Then certain beings embody themselves in his aura.

Wherever different nature kingdoms touch, the opportunity presents itself for embodiment of certain spiritual beings. When a miner hacks away the soil—where metal nestles against the stone in the interior of the Earth—the clairvoyant can observe at various spots strange beings crouching, huddling together in a very small place. They scatter, they sputter apart when the earth is removed. They are strange beings but, in a way, not at all unlike humans. Although they have no physical body, they have reason. But the difference between them and human beings is that they possess intelligence without responsibility. Therefore, they do not feel anything is wrong about sometimes playing a prank on human beings. They are called gnomes, and numerous species of them are housed in the earth. They are at home where stone and metal touch. In the past they served mankind very well with mining—not with coal mining but with metal mining. The way how mines were constructed in ancient times, the knowledge about how the strata are layered, was learnt from these beings. They knew the most productive seams and how the layers ran inside the earth. Therefore, they were able to provide the best instruction on how to proceed with work. If one doesn’t want to work with spiritual beings and only relies on the senses, then one will end up in a dead-end road. From these spiritual entities one has to learn a certain method to explore the Earth.

Likewise at a spring beings embody themselves. Where the stone touches the spring, beings bound to the element of water embody themselves: the undines. Where animal and plant touch, the sylphs are working. The sylphs are bound to the element of the air, they lead the bees to the blossoms. Therefore, we owe almost all useful knowledge about beekeeping to old traditions. Especially about beekeeping¹ we can learn a lot from them, because the science that exists about this today is completely erroneous. The old wisdom that has spread through tradition will only be confused by this. Science proves to be useless in this context. Useful are only the old beekeeping flicks of hand whose origin is unknown, because man at that time used the spiritual world for guidance. Nowadays people also know about salamanders because if one says, “Something is flowing to me, I do not know where it comes from...”, then this is usually the effect of the salamanders.

When a human being enters into such close contact to animals as a shepherd to his sheep, then the beings who live in his surroundings will whisper insights to him. A shepherd would have received the knowledge he had about his flock from the salamanders in his surroundings. These old insights have dwindled and now must be regained through proven occult knowledge.

If we follow these thoughts further, then we will have to say to ourselves, “We are completely surrounded by spiritual beings! We walk through the air, and it is not only a chemical substance, but every breath of wind, every air movement is the revelation of spiritual entities.” We are surrounded and completely permeated by these spiritual entities. And, in the future man must have knowledge of what lives around him, if he doesn’t want to experience a completely sad and life draining fate. Without this knowledge he will no longer be able to progress. Man must ask himself, “Where do these beings come from? Where do these beings stem from?”

This question will lead us to an important realisation. To form a view about this, we have to become clear about how in the higher worlds certain facts play out, where what is detrimental and evil is transformed through certain things by wise guidance into something good. For example, the waste, the manure—this is what has been chucked out and through wise usage it is later effective in the economy as the foundation for plant germination. Higher powers pick up and transform things that have seemingly dropped off from higher development. This we encounter to a great extent in the beings we have spoken about, when we follow up on their origin. How do these “salamandrian” entities come into being? Let’s look at this in detail. Salamanders depend on the existence of a specific relation between human and animal. Animals do not have an “I/ego” such as human beings have. Such an ego exists only in modern man on Earth. These human egos are so that every human being has an ego enclosed in himself. This is different with animals. The animals have a “group-ego,” a “group-soul”. What does that mean? A group of animals of the same species, animals of similar shape, have a common ego. For example, all separate lions share a common ego, all tigers, all pikes do.

The animals have their ego in the astral world. This is as if a human being would stand behind a wall with ten holes in it and would put his ten fingers through the holes. Then the human being could not be seen, but every rational person would conclude, “there is a central power behind it that belongs to the ten fingers.” This is how it is with the group-ego. The separate animals are merely the limbs. What they belong to is in the astral world. These animal-egos are not similar to humans, although, from a spiritual perspective they could well be compared with each other, because an animal group-ego is a very, very wise being. The human being as an individual soul is not nearly as wise. For example, think of certain bird species: how wise is it that they are migrating at particular heights and in specific directions to escape winter, and return again by different routes in spring. Here we can recognise in the bird migration the truly wise powers of the group-egos. They can be found everywhere in the animal kingdom.

People are very narrow minded when they are listing human progress. Let us remember our school days, where we learnt how in the Middle Ages slowly the stream of the modern times emerged. The Middle Ages surely have something important to put on record, such as the discovery of America, the invention of gunpowder, the art of book printing and finally also of linen paper. It was probably an important progress to use this product instead of parchment, but thousands of years ago the wasp group-soul had done the same, because wasps’ nests are made from the same material as the paper produced by man; it is made of paper.

Human beings will only slowly find out how certain conjectures of his spirit are connected with what the group-souls have worked into the world.

The group-souls are in constant movement. The clairvoyant perceives a persistent flicker across the backbone of the animals. The spine seems to be enclosed by flickering light. The animals are pervaded by an infinite number of streams that are encircling the Earth in all directions, such as the trade winds, which affect the animals by streaming around the spinal cord. These animal group-souls are perpetually going around the Earth in a circular motion at every height and in every direction. These group-souls are very wise, but they are missing one thing which they do not yet have—they do not know that which on Earth is called “love.” Only in a human being is love connected to wisdom in an individual.

The group-soul is wise, but the individual animal experiences love as sexual love and parental love. In an animal love is individual, but the wise arrangement, the wisdom of the group-ego is still void of love. The human being has united love and wisdom—the animal has love in the physical life, and it has wisdom on the astral plane. Such realisations will be immensely enlightening for people.

The human being arrived at his current “I” only gradually. Previously man also had a group-soul, and the individual soul has crystallised itself only gradually. Let us follow backwards the evolution of mankind up to ancient Atlantis. In former times man lived in the old Atlantis, a continent that is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean. At that time the wide Siberian plains were covered with large oceans. The Mediterranean Sea was quite differently distributed then. Also in our European regions were wide expanses of sea. The further we go backwards into the old Atlantean time, the more all circumstances of life are changing, the more the human being’s waking and sleeping state changes.

Now when man sleeps the physical body with the etheric body remains in bed, and the astral body and the ego lift themselves out. The consciousness darkens, everything becomes dark, sombre, silent. In the Atlantean time the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so pronounced. At that time, during the waking state, the human being did not see such firm boundaries, such sharp contours, such strong colours attached to objects. When he woke up in the morning, he dived into something like a nebulous substance. For example, there was no greater clarity than when we would look through fog at lights with an aura. Instead, his consciousness did not exactly cease when he was asleep—he then saw the spiritual things.

As man progressed, the physical world gained more and more its contours, but in exchange for this the human being lost his clairvoyance. Then the difference became more and more pronounced: in the spiritual world above, it became increasingly darker and in the physical world below increasingly brighter. All myths and sagas originated during the time when the human being still perceived the astral world up there. When he ascended into the spiritual world, he learnt to know Wotan, Baldur, Thor and Loki and beings, who had not yet descended onto the physical plane. This could be experienced in former times, and all myths are memories of living realities.

All mythologies are such memories. These spiritual realities have simply disappeared from human beings. In the past, when man dived into his physical body in the morning, he got the feeling: “You are an individual, a single one.” But when he dived back into the spiritual world at night he felt: “You are not at all an individual, you are just a link in a great whole, you belong to a great community.”

Tacitus² still told that the ancient peoples, the Herules and the Cheruscans, felt themselves to be more like a tribe than as individual human beings. From an individual’s sense of belonging to a tribe—that one would count oneself as belonging to a tribal community—certain customs such as the blood feuds have originated. Everything that belonged to the whole tribal group-soul was one body. All happens gradually in evolution. Only gradually did individual consciousness evolve out of this absolute tribal group consciousness.

Also, in the descriptions from the time period of the Patriarchs, we find traces of the transition from the group-soul to an individual soul. In the time prior to Noah, memory was quite different: it reached back to what the father, the grandfather, the great-grandfather had experienced. The boundary of birth was not a boundary. In the same blood the same memory flowed on into generations far removed. Today authorities are interested in knowing an individual’s name. In the time when the human being still had a memory of what his father and grandfather had done, this was called by a common name. Then what was connected by the same blood and the same memory was given the same name. This was called “Adam” or “Noah”. Names like Adam or Noah do not describe the life between birth and death of an individual, but the stream of memories as far as it reached. The old names cover whole human communities that were alive in those times.

How would it be if we would compare certain beings: the human-like apes with the human being. The immense difference is that the apes have a group-soul and the human being an individual soul, or at least the aptitude to develop one. The ape group-soul exists in a very special situation (see drawing). Imagine the Earth (refers to sketch) as the horizontal line. Above this, the group-souls of the animals are floating in the astral world like in a cloud that extends over our physical world. Let us now focus on the lion group-ego and the ape group-ego. Each lion is a separate limb into which the group-soul pours part of its substance. When a lion dies, its physical part drops away from the group-soul, like a fingernail from a human being. Then the group-soul retracts what it had sent into the lion and gives it to a different lion, which is newly born. The group-soul stays above. It sort of stretches out tentacles that are hardening in the physical world, then drop off and are being replaced again.

Therefore, the animal group-soul does not know birth and death. The individual animal is something that “falls off” and “grows on”—the group-soul remains untouched by life and death. For the lions it applies entirely, that each time a lion dies, all that has been sent from the group-soul returns to it again.

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However, this is not so with the apes. There are individual animals that tear off a piece of the group-soul, which then cannot return to it. When the ape dies the essential part returns, but another part of it excises itself from the group-soul. What the group-soul stretches out, the ape makes it too tight, and when the ape dies part of the group-soul is excised, so that, in a sense, a part of it breaks out, rips away from the soul and does not return to it. In this way excisions from the group-soul arise. In all ape species excisions from the group-soul occur.

We find something similar in certain amphibians, in certain bird species, and especially pronounced in the kangaroo. Through these excisions something is kept back from the group-soul. What remains in this way from the warm-blooded animals will become an elemental being, a nature spirit—the salamander. These elemental beings, these nature spirits are, so to speak, waste, waste products of the higher worlds, that will be put into service by higher beings. They would, if left to their own devices, create interferences in the cosmos. Instead, the higher wisdom uses the sylphs to send the bees to the flowers. Thus, the large forces of elemental beings are placed under higher, wise leadership and the harm that they could cause is transformed into something useful.

This is how it is in the realms that lie below the human being. Now, it could also happen that a human being excises himself off from his group-soul, and as an individual does not find a possibility to develop himself further. Because, whilst being a “limb” of his group-soul, he was guided and led by higher beings, but now he is left to his own guidance. If the human being does not acquire appropriate spiritual knowledge, then he is in danger to excise himself. This is the question that arises.

What is it now, that prevents human beings from excision, from wandering around without direction and aim, whilst earlier the spiritual group-soul has provided directions? We have to become clear that man more and more individualises himself and that in the future he has to voluntarily seek to unite with other humans. In the past, a link existed based on blood relations, tribes and races. But this type of “union” comes more and more to an end. Everything in a human being leads more and more to him becoming an individual being. The only avenue possible is a reversal. Imagine there are a number of people on Earth who say to themselves, “We are going our own way. We want to find inside of us the direction and the goal of the path ourselves. We are all on the way to becoming more and more individualised human beings.” There is a danger of fragmentation. Already people are no longer able to endure spiritual unions. Today we are going as far as everyone having their own religion and presenting their own opinion as the highest ideal. But when human beings internalise ideals, then this leads to agreement, to a common opinion. For example, we recognise internally that 3 x 3 = 9, or that the sum of the three angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. This is an inner knowledge. One doesn’t need to cast a vote about such inner knowledge. No misunderstandings will arise about such inner recognitions, they lead to agreement. All spiritual truths are of this kind. What is taught by the Science of the Spirit, the human being finds through his inner forces. These lead him to an absolute unity, to peace and harmony. There are no two different opinions about a truth without one of them being wrong. The ideal is maximum possible internalisation—it leads to unity, to peace.

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First there existed a human group-soul. Then mankind was released from this group-soul in the past. But in the future of evolution people must set themselves a sure goal to strive towards. When they unite themselves in a higher wisdom, then from the higher worlds a group-soul will descend again—when free communities arise out of the bound natural communities. What the leaders of the Science of the Spirit movement hope is that we will find in it a community where the hearts stream towards wisdom, as the plants stream towards sunlight. Where a common truth binds together the different egos, there we create an opportunity for a higher group-soul to descend. By turning our hearts together towards a higher wisdom, we embed the group-soul. We are building, so to speak, the bed, the environment, in which the group-soul is able to incarnate. Humans will enrich life on Earth by developing something that allows spiritual beings to descend from the higher worlds. This is the aim of the Science of the Spirit movement.

This was now once presented in a grand, magnificent form to mankind to show that the human being without such living spiritual ideal would transition into a different situation. This is a “symbol” that can illustrate to man with overwhelming power how humanity can find the way through a spiritual union, to provide a site to incarnate for the common spirit. This symbol is put in front of us in the Whitsun community in which a number of people, glowing from a common feeling of fervent love and devotion, had assembled for common action. There were a number of people whose souls were still reverberating after the shattering event, so that in all of them the same was alive. In the convergence of this one same feeling they provided that in which a higher, a common soul could incarnate. This is expressed by the words that say the Holy Spirit—the group-soul—descended and separated itself into fiery tongues. This is the great symbol for the humanity of the future. If the human being would not have found this connection, then man would transition into an elemental being. Now humanity must search for a site for the Beings from the higher worlds that bend downwards. With the Easter festival man was given the power to absorb into themselves such mighty imaginations and to strive towards oneness of the spirit. The Whitsun Festival is the fruit of the unfolding of this power.

Through the souls’ striving together towards the common wisdom, a lively relationship must be established forever with the forces and beings of the higher worlds, and with something that currently has as little meaning for humanity as the Whitsun Festival. Through the Science of the Spirit, it will once again become meaningful to man. Once people understand the significance of the descent of the Holy Spirit for them in the future, then the Whitsun Festival will come to life again. It will then not only be a memory of that event in Jerusalem, but the everlasting Whitsun Festival of the united soul endeavour will manifest for humanity. It will become a symbol for the great future Whitsun community when mankind will unite in a common truth to allow higher beings the possibility to incarnate. It will depend on human beings themselves, how valuable this will make the Earth for the future and how effective such ideals can be for mankind. Once humanity will strive towards wisdom in this right way, then higher spirits will join mankind.

• 1. compare Rudolf Steiner - Cosmic Working in Earth and Man, Beekeeping. GA 351
• 2. Cornelius Tacitus, 55 to about 120 AD, Roman historian, in his work Germania

In the last lecture, we observed some spiritual beings who are standing below the human being, some of which have abilities that are comparable with human abilities, but they are lacking any feeling of responsibility. We have seen how they are to be considered detritus of evolution, that would be obstructive if left to their own devices, but how they, used by a higher wisdom, will be transformed out of harmful into good beings.

Today, we want to widen the multitude of entities we observe by adding some more, to show how humans are interacting with them. We want to assume initially, that at nightfall each time the human being will experience a change from waking state to sleeping state. We know that when someone is in a state of day consciousness his four bodies are connected with and are mutually penetrating each other. Further, let us remember that each night the astral body and the ego raise themselves out of the physical and the etheric body. Now we have seen how at night, out of this human connection, out of the four-bodied human entity, two separate beings, different from each other, arose. The physical body and the etheric body stay back lying on the bed—outside remain the astral body and the ego.

Modern man experiences completely different states of consciousness at night than during the day. We can compare his state of night time consciousness with the consciousness of plants. A plant has the state of consciousness of ‘dreamless sleep’. During sleep, a kind of plant consciousness adheres to human beings too—at night, during the dreamless sleep, man is also in the spiritual worlds.

To these concepts we add that every element of the human being finds expression in the physical body. The physical body is, so to say, the result of all basic elements of a human. The ego has its expression in the blood, the astral body is expressed in the nervous system, the etheric body finds its expression in the lymphatic system, and the sensory system represents the expression of the physical body. If we perceive the human physical body as an expression of the manifestation of its different parts, then we have to say to ourselves that the blood circulation is there because of the individual ego. No nervous system can exist without the astral body structuring and creating it. At night, we draw the astral body and the ego out of the physical body, but not the nervous system and the blood. However, the blood and the ego belong together, and the astral body and the nervous system belong together.

At night, man behaves extremely disdainfully towards his corporeality. In order for the human being to have tools for the ego and the astral body, the blood and the nervous system had to emerge. Now he deserts the blood and the nervous system at night. It is impossible for a physical body with blood and nervous system to exist even for one second without the astral body and the ego. The plant is able to exist without these, because it has neither a nervous system nor a blood circulation. If we would at night solely be dependent upon ourselves, we would find the physical body dead in the morning. We take away those higher powers, the astral body and the ego, which must provide for the physical body at night. What we don’t do during the night, other beings must do. At night such beings penetrate into the physical and etheric body and lower themselves into them. Every night, higher spiritual beings enter into the human being’s physical and etheric bodies and carry out the work, that during the day is performed by the individual’s own ego and astral body. They are high, noble beings, who once created the physical and the etheric bodies of the human being, who take care of them again at night. At night the astral body and the ego stay in the higher world above, and down below remain the physical body and the etheric body. They have been abandoned at night by the astral body and the ego. To the same extent that the physical and etheric bodies are being deserted by the astral body and the ego, the powers of higher beings enter into them.

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The etheric human body is not the same as the etheric body of a plant. Higher powers from a higher world stream into the physical and the etheric body of a human being at night. The following could happen: During the day, man constantly influences the physical body and the etheric one. When someone thinks and feels, then this happens in the astral body, but it reaches beyond into the etheric body and the physical body. It impresses itself into these.

In the past, the physical and the etheric body emerged purely by will of higher beings. But once a human being becomes conscious of its ego, the influences of the higher beings exit out of the physical and etheric body. That which lives in the soul is not without impact on these bodies. An anatomist, of course, cannot establish what kind of changes are taking place in a person’s physical and etheric body, but they are taking place. A large effect happens in these bodies when someone lies. Lies and hypocrisy are processes within the soul and the ego. From a materialistic perspective one could believe that lies only happen on the inside. But the occult observer knows that through lying, changes happen inside the physical body that affect the bodily structure. Such changes also come about through the countless conventional lies that live in the world.

Surveying the material reality, we know that our life is riddled with all sorts of untruths. If people tell each other something they do not mean, then this is like an impression of a signet in sealing wax. This imprint stays. All hypocrisy, untruths, slander remain like an imprint in the physical body. When someone leaves his physical and the etheric body at night, such imprints can be seen. Now the beings from the higher worlds come and find these. This is incompatible with the higher worlds. Through this something new occurs, something completely new is being created. The higher beings will now excise ‘beings’ through the physical body, which will then lead an independent life between our worlds. In the occult science these are called phantoms. They are called phantoms, because they are closest to physical perception. Furthermore, they are beings with physical regularity. They are swarming through our space. They are obstructing human development and evolution. They make what lives in the world worse than it would be if they would not exist. The phantoms are beings that mankind creates by way of lies, hypocrisy and so on, which hold back evolution.

Learning to know about the impact of the spiritual beings is much more helpful than preaching morals. Mankind in the future will know what it creates by lies, hypocrisy and slander. The most effective morals are created by learning to know the facts, not through moral principles. By existence based on the science of the spirit, the strongest moral drives and impulses are created. Phantoms are also a kind of nature beings who exist—created by the activity of man. In the evening, the human being deserts the physical body and leaves in it the signet imprints of lies, hypocrisy and so on. When he returns in the morning, then these phantoms first stream out of the physical body.

The etheric body too can be manipulated so that it creates excised beings. Once again, certain processes in the human world are causing such excisions to come into existence through the etheric body. Like all unjust things, such as unjust laws that punish in the wrong way, bad arrangements in a social community work back onto the etheric body, so that from them beings are created. In today’s superstitious time such entities are only ridiculed. These beings are spectres, ghosts. They are real and thus can be categorized as true spectres and ghosts. Mankind should make an effort to make its arrangements as well as possible, so that they are not creating such beings.

Now let us focus on the ego and the astral body during the night. Keep in mind that also the human astral body and the ego are in a special situation. They have aligned themselves to the blood and nervous system. During the night, higher powers from a higher world stream down onto the astral body and the ego. If a human being takes along certain things from his daily life, so again an excision process will occur. Again, the things that cause the excision process are things of the soul life. Let’s imagine two people have opinions that differ. One tries to convince the other and feels a longing to convince him. This longing is nowadays widely spread amongst humans. People should present their opinion to one another and wait to see if some forces stir within the other through which he would accept the opinion. There are so many opinionated fanatics, who are not at all content if they are unable to force their opinion on someone else. If something like this happens, then it is detrimental to both astral bodies. They pick up persuasions and wrong advice. Whatever is imprinted into the astral body from these persuasions and ill advice, will at night cause beings to be produced. Such beings are called demons.

These demonic beings exert particularly unfavourable influence on our human development. They whizz through the spiritual room and prevent people from developing their personal ideas. Imagine how much will be sinned in this regard in many coffee shops, at the beer table! Continuously, forces are collected for the creation of demons. These creep into the human soul. Ask yourself how many appear at this or that court hearing, when people act as witnesses. They are convinced, and therefore are not really committing perjury, because they are convinced. Once an ”experiment” was conducted and it went according to plan. Thirty people were asked to describe it. Two described the process correctly, all other twenty-eight people added things that had not happened. In this way, demonic beings are created that exert all sorts of influences. There is no other remedy for the human being than the recognition of this fact, to know what to do to free himself from the influences of these detrimental spiritual entities. They are present everywhere where there is opportunity to exert their destructive influences. The occult observer can see this in the courtroom. The beings always work into the direction from which they have emerged. Such beings that have come about through bad laws will again work so that they entice people to make more bad laws.

The human being should look into the spiritual world, so that he will become practical and not continually create obstacles. When we look across that which we have just examined, we have to say that during the waking hours of daily life people create a lot of causes for the emergence of all sorts of spiritual beings—elemental beings. We have to ask what significance they have in regard to the future development of mankind. We take a look back into ancient times, when our ancestors were living in the Atlantean world. If we would go back far enough into the old Atlantean development, then we would gradually arrive at humans in a totally different shape. Imagine back, approximately in the middle of the Atlantean time. We must imagine the human beings as follows: the part of the etheric body which today is within our head, was at that time widely extended out across the physical head, as it can be perceived even today by a clairvoyant in the horse. The same is still particularly noticeable in an elephant, who currently has a large protrusion in front of and above its physical head, just like this was the case for human beings in the old Atlantis. Evolutionary progress consisted of these parts moving closer together, so that today a human’s etheric head and the physical head are almost covering each other.

In earlier times, the human being had a twilight clairvoyance. When he would, during the day, dive into the physical body, he did not see distinct contours, but he would perceive the objects surrounded by an aura. At night, he would not recognise any boundaries at all, but only the spiritual element of things. Since the post-Atlantean time we differentiate thus far five cultural ages. In the ancient India, the first of the post-Atlantean ages, the connection of the etheric head of a human being with his physical head was very light. Increasingly, the fusion of the etheric with the physical head became stronger. During our time, the fifth post-Atlantean age, it became the strongest, as mankind descended into the physical, material world, and where they penetrated most deeply into the material substance. Throughout these many incarnations during the various epochs, people learned a lot until today in their present incarnation. Everything that happens in the world, does so in a descending and an ascending line. As truly as the etheric head always connected itself more and more strongly with the physical head, it is also true that little by little a loosening occurs. We have already arrived at a point in time where the etheric head begins to loosen again. Here we must differentiate between development of races and the development of the soul. In the future, there will be souls who have not done enough whilst the etheric head was united with the physical one. Because of the fusion of the etheric head with the physical head, many people are reluctant nowadays to embrace spiritual truths. Human beings who accept spiritual truths now, will when they return later, have absorbed enough in this incarnation, to be able to make a connection to incarnate. But those, who fail to do now what needs to happen, will not be able to find suitable bodies in the future. This is because the development of the races will create normal bodies, that are fit for those souls who have not neglected anything. Other bodies will be so that the loose etheric body cannot absorb anything. These people will be a special kind of human being, who will drop out of the progressive development of mankind.

It takes quite something to find your bearings within a future body. Imagine a soul that will live in a physical body with a loose etheric body. This soul would no longer understand if one would tell it about demons and so on. Today is the point in time where one can talk about those things. When the etheric body has loosened up again, one can no longer do this. Currently, the etheric body has a calling to quite different perceptions. The etheric body will later live in the spiritual world. This is populated with demons, and so on. Then this world of spiritual beings will be around the human being, and if he is not prepared for this now through the teachings, then he will be at a loss when he faces these beings. However, those that carry with them the knowledge obtained in this incarnation about these beings, will understand how to behave towards them. In the future, these knowledgeable individuals are destined to transform these beings into servants of the ongoing evolution. So, we understand how people can fail to complete their task to further the development of humanity and that of other beings.

All these demons, ghosts and phantoms are harmful today, but in the future they will be transformed by us into servants to human development. For this to happen human beings must prepare themselves. The development of the soul and the development of the race do not run side by side.

In the future, humanity will separate into the good and the bad. By one part developing in the proper ascending way to transform the demons, ghosts and phantoms in the future, they will push down another part. These will be the bad ones. What the human spirit creates has a real meaning—this has always been so during the development of mankind.

Another example will demonstrate how the human being co-creates in today’s world. We will focus on the fourth cultural period—on the Greek temple. The idea about the temple arose initially from the human soul. The concept for the temple is based on what we call a column, and on what this column carries. Never again has humanity achieved what it did at the time when humans succeeded to put themselves into the ‘supported space’ of the Greek temple. Let us compare a Greek temple with a modern building. Once a column becomes decorative it is no longer the true column that it is when it is free standing and really load-bearing. The human being must feel that the column consists of the right material. If we paint a thin iron column, that carries the same load as a thicker stone column, then it lies to us.

A Greek temple is a Greek spatial idea. This would be understood by people who can imagine that forces are moving from top to bottom and from right to left. We can imagine three painted angels, suspended in the air, so that one knows they are carrying each other. We find this spatial feeling with the old painters. Nowadays we can't find it anymore, not even by Boecklin.¹ On his Pietà there is an angel, that we feel could fall down any moment.

This is something that even the greatest genius might be missing when spiritual culture is lacking: a sense of space. Each time a person creates a real spatial concept, then this creates an opportunity for a higher being to fill this room. We are then ‘captivating’ higher beings to descend into the room. Quite different beings are enticed to descend by a Greek column and the horizontal beams resting upon it—quite other beings by the Gothic cathedral and its pointed arcs. The Gothic cathedral differs spiritually from the Greek temple in the following way: In the Greek temple humans have worked the spatial sense into it in an occult way, so that the temple is a crystallised spatial thought. In this way, the temple, being the way it is, is the home of a higher being, a god, even if it has been deserted by people. But to the Gothic cathedral belong people. It must be complemented by the devotions of the human beings and the folded hands they raise up. The Greek temple is an abode of a god. The Gothic cathedral is a cultural site, and an abode of a god when human beings are present. The Greek temple is, even if it has been deserted, the abode of a spiritual entity. So we can see, that people, by being in harmony with the spiritual world, are working together with it. So we can see in the spirit, how, through human deeds, more and more can be done to entice higher beings to descend.

Once again the Whitsuntide thought steps in front of our soul. The Whitsuntide thought expresses symbolically what we are able to recognise through such observation: that people through their work create sites for spiritual beings to descend to, that people are working on the spiritualisation of the world.

We must understand the spiritual science thought in such a way that it permeates into all branches of life. In our materialistic time the outer life is only in a small way an expression of the inner life. In the past, every door lock, every key was an expression of something spiritual. Now everything is comparatively insignificant. The human being will once again learn to work in such a way that the outside will be a replica of the inside. Then a railway station too will emerge as a thought, like the Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral came about. Our time too has a building style that corresponds to our time. This is the warehouse. It is the replica of the ‘utility’ thought, the replica of the human egoism. The time of usefulness has brought forth as the only original style that of the warehouse.

Previously, people put their spiritual feelings into a building style. The warehouse is an expression for the feelings of the 19th century. But already now there is a spiritual movement underway, that prepares for a later spiritualisation. Those humans who understand the anthroposophical movement in this way will make the Whitsuntide thought a reality. In the future we will see the anthroposophical thoughts crystallised in what the Earth will be covered with.

• 1. Arnold Boecklin, Swiss Painter, 1827-1901. His painting Pietà was in the National Museum in Berlin until 1945, and has since been missing.

Today, let me speak to you about many different things that can be easily linked together and in which you will readily discover some kind of relationship.

Let me speak to you above all of man's connection with the surrounding world, of man's feelings towards this world, and how these feelings can be deepened through a theosophical world-conception. Above all, I wish to awaken in you the feeling that a man with an average modern education and an average world-view does not contemplate the world in the same way as a theosophist.

If Theosophy is to be raised from the level at which it is known by so many, from the level of a theory, or number of teachings, to something that has soul, that fills our soul, purifying and ennobling all our feelings and emotions—if it is to be raised to a life content, we must be able, as it were, to experience and really apply to our daily life what we realise through Theosophy. We have only received Theosophy in the right way, when, for instance, we understand how to regard a plant, a field, a mountain, or an animal in a different way from how we were able to look at and perceive these before we became theosophists. We shall be able to enter more deeply into the meaning of these words, if we immerse ourselves into the nature of what is called self-consciousness.

You are all familiar with the self-consciousness of man. You know that we distinguish four members of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. What we call self-consciousness arises from the fact that man grows conscious of his Ego. Self-consciousness does not only enable us to gain knowledge of the surrounding world, but also of ourselves; it enables us to know that each one of us is an independent being. When we really follow this thought to the end, we will grasp how this self-consciousness in man is to be understood.

The question now arises: How do matters stand with the animal, the plant and the mineral?—Can we speak in a certain sense of self-consciousness in the case of animal, plant and mineral? People who simply say: “Why should not every stone also have an Ego, like man, only that man does not perceive it,” such people speak without any knowledge of the matter. For on the plane which we call the physical, only man is endowed with self-consciousness, with an Ego—and the animal, the plant and the mineral have no Ego on the physical plane. Man is distinguished from animal, plant and mineral by the fact that he has an Ego here, on the physical plane, in the ordinary world.

Don’t take my words to imply that there has to be a definite alternative. You must realise clearly that certain higher animals, particularly animals that live much in the company of man, such as domestic animals, have a kind of self-consciousness, resembling that of the lower savages of today. There are differences in degree everywhere. We shall not speak about transitions, but how things are mainly, in average states. From this standpoint, we may therefore say that, generally speaking, we do not come across self-consciousness in animals, here on the physical plane.

What kind of self-consciousness do animals possess? You easily rise to an understanding if you ask yourself, “Where is the self-consciousness of each of my fingers?” There you must tell yourself, “My own consciousness is the self-consciousness of my finger.” It cannot be thought of apart from your common consciousness. Your ten fingers have their common consciousness, in your Ego; there, they have their common Ego. The same applies to the other members of your body. This constitutes your self-consciousness.

Now transfer this concept to the concept of an animal species. There you must say to yourself: Everything in the animal kingdom which has the same form, all the lions, bears, frogs, fish—all of those that are similarly shaped, these lions belonging together, and so on, really behave in the same way as my ten fingers. Distance does not count. If we were to ask each finger as to its Ego, it would have to answer: It is the Ego of the man to whom we belong. In the same way, if you were to ask a lion in a menagerie, or a lion in Africa, each would point to the common Ego of the species, to the group-Ego.

All animals of the same form have a common ego. Man differs from the animal through the fact that each human being has his own Ego, whereas the animal has an Ego common to his species, a group-Ego. You cannot find the Egos of the animals in the physical world, for they exist in a world which we call the astral plane. There, you will find one being comprising all the lions. Just as here, upon the physical plane, you may encounter an individual human being self-contained within his skin, so—if you were clairvoyant—you would encounter on the astral plane the lion-Ego, the bear-Ego, as self-contained beings like the human beings here on Earth. On the astral plane they are quite intelligent beings, it’s not that they are lagging behind man. The single lion may be inferior to man, but his Ego is a very sublime being, who must understand and accomplish with penetrating wisdom the whole task connected with the lions here on Earth. These animal-Egos are therefore highly intelligent beings.

If you were now to follow clairvoyantly all these beings who constitute the collective Egos of the animals, you would see that they exercise a very strange activity. The animals’ tasks are ruled and governed by the beings whom we call the animal-Egos. These animal-Egos constantly surround the Earth.

Let me select one example out of many, in connection with the task of these animal-Egos. If you study a well-known phenomenon, about which men have thought a great deal—the flight of the birds, you will find that the birds that live in northern regions begin to gather in the autumn; they fly from north-eastern to south-western regions, and then southwards. They gather again in the spring and return north. At the foundation of these bird migrations lies the breeding and hatching of the young, and so on. The spring migration is a kind of wedding flight. The regularity of these flights is guided by the group-Souls; they command everything. You might observe the lines of flight: One species flies in this way, another in that way, some birds fly low over the ground, others high in the sky. Everywhere, you will find a deep wisdom in all these details. We may say: Everything that constitutes the souls of the animals encircles our planet, encircles our Earth. This example shows us how the wisdom of the group-Soul rules the flight of the birds.

How do matters stand with plants? They only have a physical and an etheric body. Individually, they have no independent astral body and no independent Ego on the physical plane. If you could observe yourself during your night's sleep, you would see your physical and etheric body lying on the bed. What lies on the bed has the value of a plant; the plant always consists of this. What lives in you during the day, when you are awake, what is contained in your physical body, is outside your physical and etheric body during the night.

In the case of the plant, the astral body and the Ego, which you lift out of your physical and etheric body during the night, are always outside. But this going out is also connected with something else.

Let us suppose that you were all to go to sleep here—which would, of course, not be very desirable; in that case, all your Egos and your astral bodies would be outside. They would not be so separated, as they are now separated from one another, while they live in the physical body. They would intermingle more, they would form a more uniform mass, as if they were swaying into one another. They would dissolve, as it were, in the common astral body of the Earth, and out of this astral body of the Earth, which is mingled with that of the Sun, they would draw the strength that eliminates fatigue. This is continually the case with the plants.

In the plant you see before you a physical and an etheric body. But the plant's astral body is outside. The whole Earth has an astral body in common, and that is the astral body of the plants. And the Earth also has a common Ego, and that is the Ego of the plants. Therefore you must look for the Ego of the plants in the common Ego of the whole Earth.

And now all the plants on Earth appear to you like your own fingers. You are an organism and your fingers are growing out of it. The whole Earth is an organism, and the plants are literally its members, which share in the common consciousness. What ensues from this, is literally true. You feel pain, when someone hurts you, or cuts into your flesh. Similarly, the whole Earth may feel pain under certain conditions. But the Earth does not feel pain when you pick a flower or cut a plant; this would not cause it pain. What causes pain to the Earth can be understood if we bear in mind the following:

The whole Earth must be imagined as a unified organism and all the plants as members of this common organism. The plants growing on the Earth are related to it more or less in the same way as the milk is related to the human being, or to the animal. When the calf sucks the milk of the cow, the cow experiences a certain feeling of well-being. The whole Earth has this same feeling when you pick a flower or cut a plant. Because what the Earth sends up to the Sun, what it sends out of itself, is in a different form that which lives in the milk. But if you tear out a plant with its root, it is the same as if you were to tear away a part of your body, or cut into your flesh. The Earth experiences something quite different when we cut a plant which is firmly rooted in the ground—then the Earth experiences well-being—but when we tear it out with its root it experiences something completely different. This should not be judged morally, but in accordance with the facts, and these are the facts.

Now try to feel, and not merely to think such a truth. We can feel it in the following way: When we go out in the autumn, and see a farmer mowing down the corn with the scythe, those who know how matters stand in the astral body of the Earth, can feel the feelings of desire, of joy, of pleasure which pass over the surface of the Earth, while the corn is being cut. When the reaper cuts down the corn at harvest time, the whole Earth really experiences joy. These kinds of feelings are experienced, when we know how matters stand with the group-soul of animals, the Earth-soul of plants, the group-Ego, and the Ego of the Earth. In the migrating flock of birds we can feel the wisdom; the wise arrangements of the astral beings who make these. We can even feel the wind of wisdom, like a current of air. And if we know that in the plants we encounter the soul of the Earth, we experience feelings and sensations in everything that happens to the plants. We perceive the cosmic Spirit surrounding the Earth, when we observe the Ego of the animals; and we perceive the cosmic Soul, the feelings of nature, when we pay attention to the Ego of the plants.

This is indeed so. If we look at the teachings of Theosophy not merely theoretically, if they fill our whole soul, we can feel the presence of the God who always passes through nature. And, if this is the case, then when one man faces another, he knows—does he not?—that a feeling heart beats in the other’s breast, that he has feelings similar to his own, that he does not merely think about the other, but also empathises with him. In this way, we gradually learn to experience something resembling the beat of the pulse, the warm feeling of nature. Nature becomes for us a living knowledge of spirit and soul.

Let us now imagine what it means to spiritualise nature through this teaching. We feel as if Spiritual Science enables us to bear ourselves quite differently towards everything, as if our feelings are purified and ennobled. What an indifferent matter it is to an ordinary man when the scythe passes through the corn, and cuts it down! And what a different experience this is to a theosophist, who follows the cutting scythe with his heart, and who knows that there below, where the scythe touches, is a living being, that the astral body of the Earth experiences pleasure. Thus nature gradually becomes truly full of life for us. This means that we must allow seemingly abstract theories to transition into living feelings and sensations. Every step in daily life changes, when we thus allow theory to become feeling.

Now that we understand this, let us pass on to another subject, which we may already have considered from another aspect, but which will appear to us in a new light.

You raise your eyes to the Moon and to the Sun. You have just heard how out of the theosophical wisdom a feeling can be kindled which teaches us how to empathise with the environment. This also extends to lifeless objects, even to the stones.

It is very peculiar how we learn to judge many things in our surroundings in a different way: Man often imagines things the wrong way. We think that we go out into the world equipped with knowledge and want to see what is really taking place, when something happens in the world outside. We may, for instance, come to a quarry: There, the workmen are hammering and quarrying the stone. There we come to the Ego of the stone, which is not merely connected with our earthly planet, but with our whole planetary system. The stone has its central point in that of the planetary system. The stone also has its sensations. But you must not think that the stone feels pain when it is broken up or destroyed. No! When you break or destroy a stone, this means that a feeling of pleasure ensues. You may even notice immeasurable pleasure throbbing through the quarry, when the men are working there. But when stone is joined to stone, pain is felt. It is interesting to know this.

Once the Earth was a glowing, molten object; you could not have lived there, until it had cooled down. Everything was dissolved in this glowing mass; it had to consolidate, and this process was connected with pain, whereas the separation gives joy, pleasure. The whole inanimate nature suffers, so as to enable you to build your dwelling places. Nature sighs for those who have insight into it; it sighs!

Nature will again be dissolved into its primeval elements. Lifeless nature had to be drawn together with pain, so that man might pass through his development. But when man has become so spiritualised that he no longer needs the solid Earth as a foundation, then the Earth will be redeemed with him; lifeless nature longs for this. What the Apostle Paul said, is true: “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain.”¹ It will be saved, when man approaches a spiritualised state.

It can be noticed that children, who have a certain feeling for the astral world, because they are still differently constituted from grown-ups, can still feel something of the sensations of a lifeless object that is being destroyed. Not always—for in many cases it is just naughtiness—but sometimes children destroy things because they feel such empathy. Indeed, we can see that they do not always destroy things out of naughtiness.

Things sometimes present an entirely different aspect from a spiritual standpoint. You can see, therefore, that the whole Earth is permeated with soul and spirit and that it is filled with feeling. The wonderful part of Theosophy is that it leads us into the living nature. Now you can easily understand that those who view things from the standpoint of occultists, must also look on the Sun and the Moon as endowed with soul and spirit, like the kingdom of nature. This is how it really is.

The part of the Sun that we can see when we look at it with our physical eyes, relates to the Sun's whole being, just as what we can see of the human body with our physical eyes relates to the whole being of man. The body of the Sun is the body of the Sun's spirit, and the body of the Moon is the body of the Moon's spirit. Sun, Moon and Earth belong together in a spiritual relationship—and this, to be sure, is a very complicated matter.

A whole range of spiritual beings are united with the Sun; their bodies, and not only their spirits, are in the Sun. When an occultist looks into the Sun and perceives the Sun's rays, this is not only a physical phenomenon for him, but it is connected with something else. You can get an idea of what he thus discerns, for instance, when a woman in the street raises her hand in a giving gesture towards a child. You see the movement of her hand and perhaps also the coin falling into the child's palm. Yet this is only the physical aspect. If you were to penetrate into the process expressed by the physical action, you would perceive the compassion as the impulse that causes the hand to move. In the child, too, you would see the external process as the expression of a spiritual process, perhaps of gratitude.

He who only receives the Sun's rays with his physical eyes, has the same relation to the spiritual seer, as he who sees only the woman's or the child's physical gesture has to one who also perceives the inner processes. He whose power of vision has been trained through occultism to see the Sun's rays coming towards us, also perceives how spiritual beings in the Sun overflow with feelings, and how these feelings become deeds. Their deeds are what they send down with the Sun's rays. If you observe the astral body of the Earth, you will find in it something like gratitude which is felt by the whole plant-world, as it receives the Sun's rays.

Still more wonderful is the course of a whole year! When the plants open out, this is a heart-felt psychic expression of the Earth's inner processes, and at the same time it expresses the feelings of the creative, gift-bestowing Spirits of the Sun.

Now we should note a certain contrast, but not an opposition, between the spiritual beings of the Sun and those of the Moon. The Earth, the Sun and the Moon belong together. In a very remote past, they were one body. Then the Sun severed itself from the Earth, that is to say, from the union of the present Earth with the present Moon.

Why did this take place? This can be explained in many ways. But today we shall only give one of the many reasons. When the Sun separated itself out of the Earth, all the beings who were of higher nature than those which remained behind, left the Earth with the Sun. For the Sun can be the dwelling place of far higher spiritual beings than man. Beings who far surpass man left the Earth and became the Spirits of the Sun, and the Sun became their dwelling place.

Consequently, if we look into the Sun with trained occult vision, we can see the physical Sun as a body, as the field of action and the dwelling place of sublime spirits, of the Solar Spirits. For a while, they were able to continue their development on the same planet on which we now live, but they were obliged to separate themselves from it, and, in order to continue their development in an appropriate manner, they took the finest substances away from it.

One of these Spirits of the Sun left the others, for he had been given a special task. He remained still connected with the Earth. Later on, the Moon also went out from the Earth; the Earth became independent. This Spirit, this Spirit of the Sun, who first had been given another task, a task which was not to be done from the Sun, is Jahve, or Jehovah, as cosmic intelligence.

This individuality left with the Moon, so that since the Earth was severed from the Sun and from the Moon, certain exalted Solar Spirits live in the Sun, and Jehovah in the Moon. The soul forces and the spiritual forces of these beings shine down upon the Earth together with the light that comes down to us from the Sun and from the Moon.

Man could not have developed as he did, had he been subjected to the exclusive influence of one of these beings. Man's development had to follow the course which it actually did follow.

If the Earth had only had the Sun, and not the Moon, man would have been subjected to a constant and rapid metamorphosis, and would have developed very quickly. This would not have been good for him; he would have hurried too much and passed over certain stages of his development. The best forces for the development of man are assembled in the Sun: but a quick pace had to be avoided. For this reason, Jehovah separated from the others, thus retarding the whole pace of human development.

Thus, in the course of human development, the forces of the Sun and of the Moon work together and produce the right mean.

If only the forces of the Moon had been active, man would have withered; withered, lifeless natures, mere forms, would have lived on the Earth, instead of living human beings. If you go through a museum and look at statues, you see before you the image of what the Moon would have made of you: soulless forms, of great beauty, certainly, but without soul. The Sun's forces bring life and movement into these stiff and rigid forms, but under the influence of the Sun's forces only, man would have become spiritualised too soon.

The course of earthly development has been arranged in this wise way, and this is why the Sun and the Moon, with their forces and beings, had to separate from the Earth.

If a clairvoyant could have studied the evolution of the Earth from another planet, if he could have watched how the Earth unfolded, he would have seen a strange sight. Let us suppose that someone follows the development of our Earth from a distant heavenly body: He would, in that case, see not only the physical body of the Earth, but also its astral body. If he were to observe this astral body, he would perceive in it all kinds of light-phenomena. He would follow these through thousands of years. Then a moment arrives, when the astral body completely changes, revealing new colours and entirely new processes.

There is such a moment in the evolution of the Earth, if we consider the Earth as an organism. Before this, the astral body reveals particular colours; and afterwards it shows us other colours. These two time periods of the Earth’s astral body are completely different. And if the clairvoyant observer were to investigate this moment when the astral body of the Earth experienced this radical change, he would discover that it coincides with the moment of Christ's death on Golgotha. When the blood streamed out of the wounds of Christ-Jesus, the whole astral body of the Earth changed. This is the cosmic mystery of the significance of Christ's death.

This should not be considered merely with the intellect. No occult training would be high enough to allow us to penetrate by feeling the whole significance of this event. What occurred at that time in our world-system? What brought about the change in the astral body of the Earth?

The change was brought about through the fact that from this moment onwards one of the Spirits of the Sun united his astral body with that of the Earth. We have already explained that there are several Spirits of the Sun, six in all. One of these, whom we designate as the Spirit of Christ, united his astral body with that of the Earth in the very moment when the blood streamed out of the wounds of his physical body. Since that time, the Earth has undergone an essential transformation, because it has become united with the body of Christ.

The Christ-principle descended from heavenly heights; until the death of Christ Jesus upon the Cross it lived in the body of the Sun. Through Christ's death it became united with the body of the Earth. Since then, the Earth, as a planetary body, is the body of Christ. Since then, He became one with the Earth.

Now we can understand in a deeper sense the meaning of the words: “He that eateth my bread, treadeth me underfoot.”² Imagine that the Earth is the body of Christ, and take this expression literally. The human beings walk on the body of the Earth, and eat the bread of the body of the Earth. And when the Spirit of the Earth speaks, it cannot describe this process in any other way than with the following words, “He that eateth my bread, treadeth me underfoot.”—and certainly without a grudge.

And the Lord’s Supper itself! How infinitely deeper is its meaning, if we know that the body of the Earth is the body of Christ! What is the bread that is baked from the grains of corn? How must the Spirit of the Earth address this bread?—“This is my body,”³—words that should be taken literally. And how must the Spirit of the Earth address the sap-forces of the plants? How must he, after having united himself with the Earth-Ego, talk to the saps that stream through the plants?—“This is my blood.” Just as the blood flows through the veins of your body, so literally the blood of Christ flows in the sap of the plants through the body of Christ, through the body of the Earth!

Who would not own that this gives an infinitely deeper meaning to the Holy Supper? What do we experience when we feel how the astral body of Christ unites itself with the Earth, and when we in this moment realise the meaning of the words which have just been quoted? What does the human being experience when he penetrates into all this? How profound the meaning of a sacrament like the Mystery of the Lord's Supper will become for him!

Thus we learn to consider all life around us in a different way, particularly through an occult study of these processes. We learn to understand the religious scriptures by taking them literally. And when we learn to grasp them in the way that is explained above, we begin to realise that all external interpretations of religious scriptures must disappear. For religious scriptures are drawn out of the deepest facts and express these. Genuine religious scriptures contain nothing that does not correspond with the great truths, such as the union of Christ's Spirit with the Earth, when His blood streamed out on Golgotha. How immensely our emotional life deepens, when we gain an insight into this mystery!

The task of Theosophy is to work in such a way that man once more learns to awaken in his soul the deep emotions and feelings which once lived in his forefathers—really lived there! Through the theosophical teachings we have now tried to conjure up before our souls what the soul is able to experience through this—it was the same in the past, where the early Christians also felt in this way. They could feel it deeply! These deep feelings continued to live in them until materialism came, with its intellectual judgments. Then the spirits withdrew, as it were, for nothing exerts such an estranging influence on spiritual beings as the intellect. When the intellect dissects things and encompasses them in its caustic criticism, it also drives away the spiritual beings from the human soul.

The myth of the good goblins has a deep meaning; they really existed, when as yet the light of the intellect had not been in man. This light of reason drove away the goblins. Such feelings existed, when the critical intellect had not as yet permeated the human soul.

Theosophy is there to give man again warm empathy with the whole of nature—in spite of the intellectual forces. The development of the intellect could not be held at bay; the spiritual nature had to withdraw for a time. But the spirit will return. We shall keep our intellectual powers, and in addition gain warm and glowing feelings, enthusiasm and compassion. Knowledge and feeling are united when we penetrate to the sources of life, and a new life will spring out of religious scriptures when that for which Goethe longed comes about. For, many centuries ago, the majority of mankind could not read the Bible, although they heard something of its contents. It was not until the art of printing was invented, that they were able to read the Bible. But today, they no longer read the deep, mysterious scriptures themselves; they only read the opinions expressed about the Bible by critical spirits. Goethe longed for an age in which men would once more learn to read the Bible, and not books about it. For today, they read books about the Bible! For a few pence, one can buy books that show that the Bible is supposedly a patchwork of separate documents, like the Old Testament has come about piece by piece. A book has even been written, where every sentence, printed in different colours, shows what was written at an earlier and at a later date, the additions, and so on, the so-called “Rainbow-Bible”!

These things are the outcome of the critical intellect, which can only perceive that something was written by one or the other author on the material plane. It cannot see that the authors of the Biblical writings were all of them disciples of great initiates, who possessed a direct insight into the spiritual world. The essential thing is to recognise the true spirit in the words, to penetrate into that which lies behind them, to understand that the religious scriptures were written from the depths of the true spiritual realisation.

Thus, we have seen the way in which we must understand these things. Through this, man learns what is important. Then he will rise up to the right feeling, which means to the right life.

• 1. In Luther’s translation it literally says, “The creatures are fearfully awaiting the revelation of the children of God”, Romans 8:19.
• 2. John 13:18.
• 3. “This is my body.....This is my blood”, Matthew 26: 26, 28.

What has been generally designated as the Elemental Kingdoms, since the earliest times, is not so easy to understand as we are apt to imagine after a superficial examination. For these Elemental Kingdoms belong to what lies behind the world which we generally perceive—behind the world which forces itself immediately upon our senses.

We can understand such things in the best way, if we proceed from what we can perceive through our senses—from the kingdoms of the sense-world, which are accessible to human observation. Here, in the physical sense-world, four kingdoms are spread out before our senses: the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the kingdom of man. This is common knowledge. Let us now try to form some clear idea as to the precise nature of these four kingdoms; for this is by no means clear to everyone. And for this same reason, it is also not so easy to gain an insight into the first, second and third elemental kingdoms. It is precisely when we speak of such difficult matters, that we must take great care, from the very outset, to realize that no true goal can be reached, if we believe that a concept which we have, as it were, driven like a stake into the ground, once formed it can be left rooted in this place. This may still be possible within the physical sense-world, for here, things stand one beside another; there is a division between them, just as this book, this piece of chalk, a rose, etc., are distinct and separate from one another. It is possible, in this case, to apply a term to a single object, for when we have named something, we can be sure that we have before us something distinct and limited. If, however, we went to the astral plane, that world which is immediately beyond our own, and permeates it, as the one nearest to it, we find that this no longer holds true, for the astral world is one of eternal movement. If you observe the astral body of man, which floats around him as his aura and is the expression of his desires and passions, etc., you will see that this astral body of man is in a constant motion—it is an ebb and flow fall of colours and forms, which change at every moment, for new colours shine forth and others disappear. This is what we find in the case of man. But there are other Beings which whirl about on the astral plane. Their astral bodies do not form part of a physical body, although they are no less changeable and variable, for at every moment they have a different shape, colour, or luminous force. Everything on the astral plane is the continual expression of the inner nature of these Beings. We would, indeed, find ourselves in a difficult position if we were to apply to the astral plane the rigid, unchangeable concepts of the physical world. We must learn instead to adapt ourselves to the mobility of these shapes—we must acquire mobile concepts. We should be able to use a concept, once in this way, and once in that.

This is true of the higher worlds to a still greater degree. If we consider the world from a higher standpoint, we find that everything on the physical plane is an expression of forces emanating from these higher worlds. In everything we see about us, such forces and beings lie concealed. It is precisely what accounts for the great diversity among the beings of the physical world. Observe, for instance, the mineral kingdom. All apparently lifeless beings, all minerals, belong to this kingdom. You are told, to begin with, that these minerals on the Earth have no etheric body of their own, no astral body and no Ego. But this is true only within the physical world. We must know this, in order to reach a clear conception of what actually takes place upon the physical plane. But let us now suppose that someone were to say: “The mineral is something which has nothing but a physical body.” This statement is exactly as false, as on the other hand—it would be true, were someone to say: “The mineral kingdom is something which has, upon the physical plane, only a physical body.” For, in the light of a genuine spiritual method of observation, we find that here, upon the physical plane, the mineral has a physical body, but nothing more. If we wish to find its etheric body, we must ascend to the astral plane: there, its etheric body is to be found. The moment that a human being becomes astrally clairvoyant, he is able to see the etheric body of the mineral—there, on the astral plane—and here, on the physical plane, he sees merely its physical body. If we extend our observations still further, we find that the mineral has also an astral body. This body cannot be found, however, upon the astral plane, but must be sought in the lower regions of Devachan.¹ Only in the higher Mental plane, in the Arupa-Mental² plane, do we find the Ego of the mineral—and it is from here, that the mineral is directed by its Ego. If you wish to form a rough picture of this, you must say to yourselves: I will try to imagine a human being, whose clairvoyance reaches as far as the higher Devachan. To such a clairvoyant, who is able to see into Arupa, the minerals will appear like the fingernails of the human being—because the minerals are as it were the nails of Beings whose Ego dwells in higher Devachan. It is not possible to think of the fingernails without the human being; the same thing applies also to the minerals.

Let us suppose that we observe a rock-crystal here on Earth. If we now look away for a moment, to the etheric body, which animates the physical body, there, in the astral world. Yet it would not be possible to perceive there, that any injury caused to the mineral, also causes it pain. The joy and gladness, pain and suffering of minerals can only be found on the Devachan plane—but entirely differently from the way in which we usually imagine this. A mineral's sensation of pain is not like that of an animal; we must not think that a mineral feels pain when we hammer it and break it into pieces. When workmen in a quarry break stone and they seem to harm it, this actually gives rise to a feeling of pleasure upon the Devachan plane—it is a true delight for the minerals. Thus, in their case, we find the very opposite of what takes place in the kingdom of man and in the animal kingdom. On the Devachan plane you can encounter the spirits of the minerals. Yet it is not merely one mineral which belongs, as it were, to a mineral personality, but rather a whole system—just as your fingernails do not each possess a separate soul. If someone were to imagine that everything of an astral nature must be found upon the astral plane, he would be under a delusion. It seems, of course, natural to look for the astral element upon the astral plane—nevertheless, the inner nature of a Being must be distinguished from the environment in which it lives. Just as your Ego has no physical nature, and lives nevertheless on the physical plane, so the astral body of the mineral does not live on the astral plane but in lower Devachan. We should not form schematic concepts, but must rather work our way through to a more precise determination of things.

Let us now observe the plant, just as we see it before us. Here, on the physical plane, it has its physical body and its etheric body. It has these two bodies on the physical plane—but where are we to look for the astral body of the plant? We shall find it in the astral world—and the Ego, in the lower Devachan. Let us now go a step further, to the animal. The animal has, in the physical sense-world, a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body—but its Ego is on the astral plane. That is to say: just as, here on the earth, we encounter the human being as an isolated person, as a single individuality, so you will find the Egos of the animals, as complete, self-contained personalities, on the astral plane. We must think of this in the following way: All groups of animals which have a similar form, have also a common Ego. Man, therefore, distinguishes himself from the animals, owing to the fact that every human being has an individual Ego. On the astral plane, we find for instance, the Ego of the lions, the Ego of the tigers, etc. There, they are single, self-contained Beings; the single animal group-egos inhabit the astral plane just as the human beings inhabit the physical-sensory world. For the human being it is true that for him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego have descended as far as to the physical plane. This is true, however, only when the human being is awake—when he is asleep it is otherwise. The physical and etheric bodies are then in the physical world, whereas the astral body and the Ego are on the astral plane. Thus, during sleep, the fourfold human being is separated into parts, and is to be found partly on the physical plane and partly on the one directly above this—the astral plane. On the physical plane, the human being is then of the same value as a plant (see table below).

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Now we have already learned to know, in previous lectures, the various ways in which the expressions “astral”, etc. must be used. But we shall only attain a comprehensive insight, if we realize clearly that these things cannot be pushed around like pieces on a chessboard. If we study the human being, we must observe him quite precisely, in the following way: We find in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego. It has often been emphasized here, how very important it is to form a clear conception concerning the relation of these four members. It is very easy to imagine that the physical body is the most imperfect and the lowest of these. From a certain aspect, however, it is the most perfect of all—for it has passed through four successive stages of evolution—on (ancient) Saturn, Sun, Moon, and on the Earth. The etheric body has only reached its third stage of perfection, for only on the Sun it was added to the physical body. In the future, it will indeed rise to a higher stage—although at present, it is not yet as perfect as the physical body. The astral body was only added on the Moon, it has reached the second stage of perfection. The Ego is the baby among the four members of man: for it was added only on Earth, and is thus only at the beginning of its evolution; it works continually in a corruptive way upon the other bodies. Anyone who studies, from an anatomical point of view, the wonderful organization of the physical body, is filled with wonder by the perfection of the heart and of the brain. How imperfect, on the other hand are the impulses and passions of the Ego! The Ego craves for wine, beer, etc., which exerts a destructive influence throughout life—nevertheless, the physical body withstands these attacks for decades! Let us now try to make clear to ourselves how the Ego was inserted, as it were, within the physical body and how it first arose.

To begin with, there was the ancient Saturn-evolution. This was the first stage of evolution for the precursor of our present physical body. At that time man's physical body had the cosmic value of a mineral. If you look at a mineral today, you will see in it a retarded stage of existence; it has remained behind at the same stage which the physical body had reached on Saturn. But you must not think from this that the physical body had then the appearance of a mineral of today—this would be quite wrong. The present minerals are the youngest forms in evolution. On Saturn, the human body was not so dense; this density of the physical body of man was very slight indeed.

Let us now consider the relation between the various stages of matter. The first is what we call earth—that is, everything which today may be called a solid body, iron, copper, zinc, etc. everything solid is earth. Secondly, everything liquid is water, for instance, Mercury. Even iron, in a liquefied state would be water. Every liquid metal is water in the sense of Spiritual Science. Thirdly, if you convert water or anything else into steam, it, even metal steam, becomes air. Spiritual Science goes still further, for it shows that the air may become still more rarefied—may become thinner still. In this case, we must go beyond what is physical today,—and there the spiritual scientist assumes a warmth-ether, or fire. For the spiritual scientist, fire is something distinct within itself, just like earth, water, and air—whereas modern science merely looks upon it as a state of matter.

On Saturn, warmth was the substance of man's physical body. On the Sun, the physical body of man was condensed to air; then an etheric, or life-body, entered into it, transforming this physical body. We now have on the sun a physical human body, with an integrated etheric body consisting of one member. The physical body consists of two members. In the case of the physical body on the Sun, we must distinguish a more perfect and a less perfect part—that is to say, one part was not as yet permeated by the etheric body. When picturing to ourselves this physical body on the Sun, we must realize that the inner part of this physical body has received nothing from the etheric body; it has still the same value as the physical body had on Saturn. Thus, we have one part which has already attained to the stage of a plant, and this part is at the same time permeated by another part, which is still at the stage of a mineral: yet these two parts completely permeate one another.

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Let us now consider the physical body on the Moon. Here, it is already condensed to water. The etheric body and the astral body are incorporated in it. Thus, we must now distinguish three different parts: One part is permeated by the etheric and astral bodies; another part is permeated only by the etheric body; and a third part has remained at the mineral stage.

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And now, let us consider the physical body on the Earth. Here, the Ego is added. On the Earth, four members are interwoven. One part of the physical body is permeated by the etheric body, astral body and the Ego; a second part, by the etheric body and astral body; a third part, by the etheric body only; and a fourth part remains at the mineral stage. It has the same value as a mineral, and is still at the stage of Saturn. These four parts can be clearly distinguished in the physical body. The first part, which contains all four members, consists of the red blood corpuscles. Wherever we find red blood, these four members permeate one another.

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The nerves are the second member. Wherever nerves are found, there the physical, etheric and astral bodies permeate one another. Where glands are to be found, the physical and etheric bodies interpenetrate. All the instruments of the senses, all organs which have the character of a physical apparatus, have reached merely the mineral stage. They follow exactly the same laws as do the minerals. The eye and the ear, for instance, belong to these mineral inclusions; also in the brain, such mineral parts still exist. Thus you can see for yourselves how easily one may be tempted at times to become a materialist—because something that is mineral permeates the whole body. If a materialist declares that the brain is mineral, he is in part right—that is, if he considers merely one part of the brain. Particularly in certain parts of the frontal brain—which are, however, also permeated by other irradiations, solely mineral forces are active. And were we to study the bones and muscles, it would become still more complex. When the human Ego entered into man, it began to devise the sentient soul, the rational soul, and the consciousness soul; and at the same time, it worked out the bones and muscles. If we wish to observe these things exactly, we need years of study, only to be able to keep them distinct and separate. We must trace one thing after the other, with patience.

If we now have before us a sleeping human being, his physical body and etheric body lie on the bed. But this physical body is very complicated. When the human being is awake, the astral body and the Ego work within his blood. But what happens when the physical body lies on the bed and the human being is asleep? The functions of the etheric body are indeed still carried on—yet the astral body and the Ego have to cooperatively work on the preservation of the blood. Hence, every night, the blood would be doomed to death, since it is dependent upon the Ego and the astral body, but these leave the body unfaithfully. Also the whole nervous system is abandoned disdainfully, on which the astral body must collaboratively work. Thus, we have before us the strange fact that in reality, the blood and the nervous system would have to die every night—they would fall a prey to death, if they would depend entirely upon the human being. Other Beings must come to their aid; other Beings must take over the work of man. From other worlds, other Beings must pour their activity into man, in order to preserve what he so disdainfully abandons. We shall now try to explain the nature of these Beings who become active when man is asleep, and to make it possible for him to preserve his blood intact.

We can form an idea of these Beings, if we ask ourselves: where does the human Ego really live, when it lives here, upon the physical plane? In which one of the three kingdoms does it live? And we must ask ourselves further: how much can we really know, without clairvoyant perception?—We can gain knowledge only of the mineral kingdom. This is the peculiar characteristic of the human being—that he cannot even grasp the plant completely, as long as he is not astrally clairvoyant. Materialists declare that plants are merely a conglomerate of mineral processes—just because they can see only the plant's mineral nature. When the human beings will have progressed, in their work upon themselves, as far as the first stage of clairvoyance, the life of the plants and the laws of life will then appear to them just as clearly as do now the laws of the mineral world.

If you construct a machine, or build a house, you do this in accordance with the laws of the mineral world. A machine is build according to these laws of the mineral world; but you cannot construct a plant in this way. If you wish to have a plant, you must leave this work to those Beings which form the foundations of Nature. In the future, it will be possible to produce plants in the laboratory, but only when human beings will regard this as a sacrament, as a holy rite. Only when man has become so earnest and purified, that he looks upon the laboratory-table as an altar, will he be permitted to produce living substance. Until this time has arrived, however, not even the slightest detail concerning the way in which living beings are constituted, will be revealed to him. In other words: The Ego lives, as a cognitive being, in the mineral kingdom, but it will ascend, in the future, to the plant kingdom, and it will learn to know this kingdom, just as today, it knows the mineral kingdom. Still later, it will learn to grasp also the laws of the animal kingdom; and finally, those of the human kingdom. All human beings will learn to know and to grasp the inner nature of plants, animals, and of man—these are prospects for the future. Whatever we really understand, we can also produce—for instance, a clock. But the human being of our day will never be able to produce anything belonging to the sphere of living Nature, without the help of the Beings that lie behind nature, as long as such a work has not become for him a sacramental rite. Only then will he be able to ascend from the mineral kingdom to the plant kingdom. The human being is already a human being, at the present time; but his knowledge is restricted to the mineral kingdom. The Ego of man lives within a human form, but when this human Ego looks out into the environment, its cognition is limited to the mineral kingdom. The Ego thus possesses only the capacity to vitalize the blood in a mineral fashion—it is unable to do more. Although the Ego lives within the blood, during the day—dwelling within it and vitalizing it—nevertheless it does this merely in a mineral way.

How does it do this? If you look out into the world, your cognition will reveal to you the laws of the mineral kingdom. Try to observe for yourself the peculiar quality of this human activity. You look out into the world through your senses; you grasp the mineral laws, and during your waking hours, you impress these laws upon your blood—you force them into the entire substance of your blood, thus vitalizing it in a mineral way. This is the peculiar process which takes place during the act of cognition. Now imagine the human being in accordance with the following schematic drawing as shown below. The regularities of the mineral world stream into him from all sides. However, they do not remain only in his sense-organs; but stream, while the human being is awake, together with the blood through the whole human body.

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Now, what does the plant-world do? You will understand what takes place in the case of a plant, if you bear in mind the following: You have always been told that the Ego works upon the man's other bodies and transforms the astral body into the Spirit-Self. To the same degree that this takes place, do the laws of the plant kingdom stream into the human nervous system. When the human being has reached the next stage of clairvoyance, the laws of the animal kingdom will permeate his glandular system, and when he works upon the transformation of his physical body, the laws of the human kingdom itself will flow into the human body. All this should be thought of as applying to the waking state and to the various stages of a higher clairvoyant consciousness. Thus we can say that the human being has reached, at the present time, a stage where the Ego permits the laws of the mineral kingdom to stream into the blood. But it is able to do this only during the waking state because the mineral laws can enter the blood only while man is awake. While he is asleep however, the blood must also be cared for. And because this blood has been worked upon, throughout four successive stages (of evolution), three other powers must now step in with their activity. The first of these is a power which is the most closely related to the way in which the Ego works upon the blood—but it is a power which has not descended as far as the physical plane. The blood would be given over to death, did not another Ego work upon it, while the human being is asleep. Another Ego which has remained on the astral plane, and now intervenes by taking over the work upon the blood. If we observe the human blood, this “special juice”,³ we find that while the human being is awake, the Ego of man is active within it, here on the physical plane. During the night however, the blood is worked upon by an Ego which dwells upon the astral plane. For there are such Egos.

Now I have earlier referred to Egos living on the astral plane—namely, to the group-souls of the animals. But in this case we are dealing with another species of Egos, dwelling upon the astral plane, which work upon the human being and vitalize his blood, when the Ego of man has abandoned it. By what means do they accomplish this? And what is it that they bring into the blood? They bring into it that which, ever since the time of Saturn, must always be present in the human body—namely fire, warmth. These are spirits which have never descended as far as the physical plane—spiritual Beings that live on the astral plane and have a body of fire. In the mineral kingdom, everything appears to us endowed with a certain degree of warmth. Warmth is met as a quality of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies. Now try for a moment to think of warmth as something completely separate, which does not exist as such on the physical plane. But on the astral plane, you would find such a warmth, such a fire, flowing there and thither—such a fire which moves back and forth as a self-contained being—and within it, you would find embodied Beings such as we ourselves were on ancient Saturn. These Beings enter into the blood during the night, and vitalize it with their warmth. But something else must also take place—for the astral body also abandoned the blood, and this body too, is indispensable to it. Thus it is not sufficient if these Ego-beings alone approach man during the night and work upon him with their warmth-bodies—but other beings as well are needed, who can process the blood in the same way as the astral body does. These Beings have their Ego upon the Devachan plane, and this Ego possesses a still higher body, which is not even condensed as far as warmth. The Ego which I described first, did never descend even as far as the physical world, it remained on the astral plane. The second Ego descended even less, it has never entered the astral plane—it has remained in Devachan. It permeates the blood and brings about in it the same that the human astral body does during the day.

Thus you may see how we are cared for and protected during the night by higher Beings which do not live in the mineral kingdom. The human Ego has descended as far as the mineral kingdom, and will later ascend to the plant kingdom, etc. These other Egos have remained behind the human kingdom during the successive stages of evolution; they form the hidden kingdoms, the Elemental Kingdoms, which lie behind our physical world, and which work down into it. The first Being which works in our blood during the night, has a warmth body—just as we have a physical body; it permeates the blood with warmth—and at the same time, lives upon the astral plane in its warmth body. Through this warmth-body, it belongs to the third Elemental Kingdom. These Beings, belonging to the third Elemental Kingdom, are the companions of the group-egos of the animals—they belong to the same region. And what are the capacities of these Egos? They need not have the same capacities as a human Ego, which has descended as far as the physical sense-world; but they are able nevertheless, to act as a substitute for the human Ego, from the astral plane. These Egos work down from the astral plane, in the same way that the animal group-Egos work down upon the animals. That is why we perceive them to be similar to animal group egos. This means they enliven man's astral body with impulses, desires, and passions. If we have before us an astral body—what lives within this astral body? In addition to the Ego, Beings live within it whose Ego dwells upon the astral plane. These Beings permeate the astral body just as maggots live in cheese. This is the third Elemental Kingdom: it is the kingdom which forms impulses and passions of an animal nature.

But behind this kingdom lies another, namely the second Elemental Kingdom. This kingdom is active within a purer element, where it moulds and forms the shapes of the plants. But its activity extends also to the human being—to his many elements which have a plant-like character—nails, hair, etc. These are not permeated by the astral body, but merely by the etheric body; for this reason they feel no pain. The hair and nails are products from which the astral body has already withdrawn—it is possible to cut them, without causing pain. At an earlier time however, the astral body was also within these. Many things in the human being are of a plant-like nature, and within all these plants-like elements, the Beings of the second Elemental Kingdom are active. Hence, that which builds up the body of a plant consists of the forces belonging to the second Elemental Kingdom. Within the plant, the Plant-Ego, which permeates the etheric and astral bodies, and those Beings of the second Elemental Kingdom work together. The plant-Ego on the Devachan plane is a companion of the beings of the second Elemental realm. Whereas the Ego of the plants works upon the plant from within, these other Beings work upon it from without—forming it, making it grow and blossom. The whole plant is permeated by its etheric body. But it does not possess an astral body of its own; instead the entire astral body of the Earth planet forms the common astral body of the plants. The Ego of the plants is to be found at the centre of the Earth. All plant group-egos are centralised in the centre of the Earth. For this reason, if you pull up a plant by the roots you cause pain to the Earth; but, if you pick a flower, the Earth will have a feeling of well-being, as a cow has a feeling of well-being when her calf sucks her milk. It is also a wonderful experience when the seeds and grain is mowed in autumn, to see how great waves of well-being stream over the Earth! The Beings which work upon the plants, from out of the second Elemental Kingdom, and help them to take shape, fly toward the plant from all sides, like butterflies. The renewal and repetition of the leaves, blossoms, etc., is their work. This is what acts upon the plants from out of the second Elemental Kingdom.

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In like manner, there is a first Elemental Kingdom, which gives the minerals their form. The animals received their form determined by instincts and desires from the Beings of the third Elemental Kingdom. The leaves, etc., of the plants are formed by the second Elemental Kingdom; this work consists chiefly of repetitions. But the formative forces of the minerals, which work out of the formless element, are to be found in the higher Devachan. These three Elemental Kingdoms permeate one another, flow into one another. One who imagines everything distinct and separate, will never attain to a living understanding. In the plant kingdom, the plant and mineral kingdoms permeate one another. In the animal kingdom, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms interpenetrate. And in a human being, the Ego is added to these. For, with the emergence of the Ego, the human kingdom first arose on the Earth. It is the Ego which first makes man a human being; it finds its expression in the blood. But the Ego can for the present, penetrate with its cognitive forces only into the mineral kingdom; it must leave the other kingdoms to the Beings of the Elemental Kingdoms. The mineral kingdom contains, besides this mineral kingdom itself, also the first Elemental Kingdom; for this reason, it takes on a clearly defined shape. The plant owes its form entirely to the second Elemental Kingdom—for, without it, it would be spherical. And the animal is endowed with instincts, etc., owing to the added activity of the third Elemental Kingdom. Our world consists of interpenetrating regions; only if we are able to make our concepts mobile and fluent, shall we gradually be able to understand such things.

If we wish to form a concept of how the third Elemental Kingdom is connected with the animal kingdom, the following example may be helpful. You all know the migrations of the birds. The birds take quite definite routes in their migrations; from Northeast to Southwest and from Southwest to Northeast. But who directs these migrations? It is the group-souls of the birds. In these flights the urge for regular migrations over the Earth comes to expression. They are directed by the Souls of the Species, or Group-Souls, of the animal kingdom.

On the other hand, the animals are given their form, which enables them to have certain instincts and so that it has a bearer for these instincts, by the Beings of the third Elemental Kingdom—the companions of the animal group-souls. If we wish to express this in a somewhat trivial manner, we may say: Those Egos which constitute the animal group-souls form one community on the astral plane; and the Beings of the third Elemental Kingdom form another. Nevertheless, they must work together in fair harmony—the one supplies the instincts, the other the bodies, forming and moulding them, so that the instincts can realise themselves.

The physical forms of the plants originate from the Beings of the second Elemental Kingdom. And in everything which moulds and works upon the minerals, the Beings of the first Elemental Kingdom are to be found. The forces of the minerals, active as attraction and repulsion, the atomistic forces, proceed from the group-egos of the minerals. It is the Beings of the first Elemental Kingdom who form the minerals.

Thus we obtain a perspective which reveals to us where we may seek for the effects of the various kingdoms in our world. We must however, observe these things very accurately. We may say to a plant: You are a living being; this you owe to the plant-ego. Your form, your shape however, is given to you by the Beings of the second Elemental Kingdom.

Thus the distinct kingdoms are connected. There are seven of these. The first Elemental Kingdom provides the formative forces for the minerals—for instance for the crystals. The second Elemental Kingdom provides the formative forces that shape the plants. The third Elemental Kingdom cares for the blood during the night and at the same time forms the animals’ instinctive life. The mineral kingdom is the one in which an Ego in the mineral kingdom can be formative. The plant kingdom is such, that an Ego can form a plant world within it. The animal Kingdom is such that an Ego can form an animal world within it. The kingdom of man is the kingdom into which an Ego can shape a human world.

From all this we can see that patience is necessary for the penetration of Spiritual Science. The world is constructed in a complicated way, and the highest truths are not the simplest. It is an utterly senseless way of speaking to declare that the highest things can be grasped with the simplest concepts. This is due only to convenience. It is admitted of course, that it is not possible to understand a clock at once, but the world, people want to understand immediately. If we wish to grasp the Divine, infinite patience is needed, for the Divine contains everything. In order to understand the world, people wish to apply the simplest concepts. This is simply convenience, no matter how reverently the soul may say it. The Divine element is profound, and an eternity is needed in order to grasp it. Man carries indeed, the spark of the Godhead within him, but the nature of the Godhead can be understood only by collecting a knowledge of the facts of the world.

The great patience and renunciation which knowledge entails, is what we must learn first of all. We ourselves must gradually mature in order to form judgments. The world itself is infinite at every point. And we must be modest enough to say that everything is, in a certain sense, only a half-truth. We must transform everything into moral impulses, even the organisation of man's being into ten or twelve members.⁴ Spiritual Science gives us pictures which we should unite with our feelings. For Spiritual Science is of value only when we draw not only knowledge from it, but are filled with the noblest feelings for the profundity of the world that surrounds us. All the greater then, will be the longing for the Divine. The very fact that the Divine appears to man to be suspended in distant heights, should inspire him so much the more to become strong so that he can reach the Divine again.

• 1. Devachan - Mental plane - Theosophical term for the spiritual world.
• 2. Arupa - Mental plane - the upper or higher spiritual world; Rupa - Mental plane - the low or lower spiritual world.
• 3. This relates to a statement by Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, in the Study-room - “Blood is a very special Juice”.
• 4. Compare notes to the lecture held in Berlin, 18 March 1904 in No. 29 Contributions to the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, Easter 1970.