The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Man's connection with the various planetary bodies. The earth's mission.

For the more exact understanding of our particular subject let us first consider the great world and then look down to the limited circle of our immediate earthly existence. We shall be able in this way to form a clear idea of what in Spiritual or Occult Science is understood in connection with the three conceptions we have brought together—Universe, Earth, and Man.

You will have already gathered from what has been said that in Spiritual Science one can by no means speak of the world as a mere material thing. We have seen how the manifold world beings (we may not say world-bodies) that have been brought before you as the different embodiments of our earth—Saturn, Sun, and Moon are quite other than mere material globes, each being, as we have seen, the dwelling-place of a host of spiritual beings, and created only according to the needs of the spiritual beings that live on them.

We saw how the sun separated from the earth because it had to be the home of certain highly exalted Beings who could only make use of the finer substances for their evolution, while man had to retain the other substances on the earth. Were we to investigate the whole wide world we should nowhere find anything that is material alone, everything is connected with a spiritual part. We have seen how the various earth-beings are connected with spiritual-beings. Stones and the minerals of the earth have their ego in that which surrounds us in the universe. Plants have their ego localised in the centre of the earth-planet, while their astral principle, which brings about the development of the flower, encircles them above the earth. Everything is pervaded by spirit, and thus our conception of a world-body is enlarged. We look up to some heavenly body and we know that it is but the expression of certain spiritual beings connected with a material planet.

Now, by developing certain capacities which are to be found slumbering within him, man is actually in a position to gain knowledge for himself regarding these bodies existing in space, and today we shall consider man in relation to the various planets.

We are surrounded on earth by minerals, plants, animals, and human beings, moreover we know that earthly affairs are regulated by higher beings who in Christian esotericism are described as Angels, Archangels, and Archai; we also know that there are other beings concerned with the earth, even though they send their forces from the sun and the moon. Today we have something to add to this. The question might rise in the mind of anyone: To what extent may one of the planets of our solar system be compared with another in respect to its inner nature?

To help us, let us consider the beings that visibly confront us in the present cycle of humanity, and enquire: How are the beings which surround us here as minerals, plants, animals, and men related to other beings in the universe? Of course we are dealing with this question from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, from knowledge gained through the development of clairvoyant consciousness; and of this development we shall speak later. In the first place let us ask: Are there on the other planets men such as those developing on our earth? Can clairvoyant consciousness discover such men? Clairvoyant consciousness answers: We do not find men on other planets in exactly the same form as upon earth, but we do discover that each planet, each heavenly body, has its particular mission. Nothing in the universe is repeated, other planets have other missions.

Our earth has originated from three preceding embodiments; the stage of existence we are now passing through (the human stage) has been passed through already by other beings; by Angels, for example, on the ancient Moon, by Archangels on the ancient Sun, and by Archai upon ancient Saturn. It is easy to make the mistake that these were men like ourselves, but we must bear in mind that on the ancient Moon there was no solid stone or mineral and therefore the beings who passed through their human stage there did so under entirely different conditions.

We know this, but we have to speak of it as the human stage. The Archangels, or Fire-Spirits, passed through their human stage in entirely different conditions, for the ancient Sun consisted only of warmth and gas, and beings passing through their human development there could not have bodies such as we have, with solid muscles, bones, etc. In earthly evolution nothing is repeated, every stage has its particular mission in the great household of cosmic existence.

Let us now consider for a time the evolution of our earth. If it is observed occultly we see it as a body inhabited by man on which he carries out his development. This development has only been made possible through the sun and the moon having separated from the earth, so that its forces were held in balance between the two. At the time when the earth was itself still sun (if we may call it so), it passed through an evolution in which it was incorporated with the sun. The sun was then itself at the planetary stage of existence, and was inhabited by Archangels, but because of advancing development it was possible for part of that which was embodied in it to rise to a higher existence at the cost of that other part which it sent forth as the earth-moon. In the great universe evolution proceeds in such a way that things which for a time have progressed side by side separate; the one expanding into higher regions, the other descending into a lower state. In order that certain beings might develop high enough the sun had itself to become a body fitted for their habitation; it advanced from planetary existence to fixed-star existence. We have to realize that a world-being like our sun has developed occultly from a planet to a sun. A sun is a planet that has progressed.

As was pointed out in the last lecture, after everything had united again, and the sun had once more at a certain period separated from the moon-plus-earth, man continued to dwell for a long period upon the earth, on into the present earth-period, without the spiritual Sun-Forces. Then through the advent of Christ the spiritual forces of the sun found again a place upon the earth. Now, if the Christ is embodied in the earth man must become more and more mature through receiving into him the Christ-Principle; the material form of a planet depends on what it evolves in the way of beings.

Exactly in the same way as the sun evolved to its present exalted position, by withdrawing the finer substances because the Sun-being had need of them, so also will the earth. The substances of the earth will have then so changed as to be suited to man, or rather to what, in the distant future, will have developed from man and from the earth-beings he bears along with him; for when man has become powerful he will draw other earth-beings along with him. What will happen then? If man fills himself ever more and more with the Christ-Principle, if he absorbs more and more of the Sun-Forces which descended to earth with the Christ, he will himself grow ever more Christ-like, and will irradiate the whole heart with the Christ-Principle.

What is this Christ-Principle? Before we can know what it is we must know what the mission of the earth is, so that we can describe it by one special word. What is the mission of earthly existence? Let us ask first, What was the mission of the Moon's existence?

If we cast our clairvoyant vision back to the ancient Moon we find at the beginning, in the ancestors of all the beings on our earth, a very remarkable quality. These beings possessed a great deal, but one thing they lacked at the very beginning of the Moon period, and this thing we now find everywhere around us on our earth. The forces of the Moon, the predecessor of our earth, worked at first unwisely; the conditions on the Moon to begin with were such that nowhere could one have perceived a harmonious working together in wisdom. If one follows the evolution of the ancient Moon clairvoyantly one sees how the wisdom of the cosmos was gradually embodied in the beings who dwelt upon the Moon, by other beings who were round about it and who worked on it from without. Because of this the ancient Moon is called the Planet of Wisdom.

When the Moon period came to an end, wisdom was in all things. Life on the Moon then went through an intermediate condition resembling a world-sleep called “pralaya,” and when the beings again came forth from pralaya, and the earth appeared, they brought with them the wisdom with which they had been imbued on the ancient Moon. The consequence of this is that wisdom is implanted in all we observe around us. In all the creations which are the result of the Moon evolution, and which have a yet further mission, we find wisdom. Look where you will: take, for example, the leaf of any plant; the more closely you observe it the more wonderful it appears, because the several parts are arranged according to the highest wisdom. Take a portion of the human thigh-bone; there also the constituent parts are arranged according to the highest wisdom so as to form a support capable of carrying the upper part of the body.

No engineering skill of today can equal the bridge-building of this mighty wisdom. In all the other human organs, and indeed in all the surrounding world, we see wisdom at the root of everything. Man can only absorb this wisdom in a bungling way into his inner being on the earth. Microcosmic wisdom is something only to be learnt from the objects that surround man here. Wisdom is in all things, including those parts of man in which he does not consciously participate.

Following the course of history, we often extol human wisdom. How wonderful it seems to us when we learn that at a particular time man made this or that discovery. The art of paper making, for example, was discovered in recent times; it was an accomplishment of human intelligence—but wasps knew how to do it long before man. A wasp's nest, however, is not built by individual wasps, but by the group-soul of wasps; it is built of exactly the same material as our paper. These group-souls possessed long ago something which human wisdom will only gain gradually. This wisdom, which is found deeply ingrained in everything that exists on earth, had to take form gradually, and we shall see how this was brought about throughout the Moon period; how at that time wisdom warred against un-wisdom, and how the ancient Moon then bequeathed to the Earth the germs of beings in whom wisdom had been implanted.

What is to be implanted in a similar way in the beings of our Earth? Just as wisdom was implanted in our predecessors on the ancient Moon, so love has to be implanted on our planet. Our planet (the Earth) is the planet of love. The development of this, the first instilling of love, had to be in its lowest form. This happened during the Lemurian epoch, when the ego of man took shape; at that time the development of love in its lowest form began through the separation of the sexes. All further development consists in the continual refinement, the spiritualizing, of this love-principle. Just as in the Moon-period wisdom was instilled into Moon-beings, so one day, when our earth shall have attained its goal, all earthly beings will be filled with love.

Let us now turn for a moment to the next planetary existence, that which is to succeed our Earth—the Jupiter planet. When the beings reappear who will inhabit Jupiter they will regard all those in their environment with their own spiritual powers of perception; and just as with our intellect we admire the wisdom contained in stones, plants, and animals, and indeed in everything that surrounds us—just as we draw wisdom from them that we also may have it—the Jupiter-beings will direct their forces to all that surrounds them, and the love which had been implanted in them during the Earth evolution will be wafted to those who now surround them. In the same way that we analyse objects and learn from the wisdom contained in them, so the Jupiter-beings will edify themselves with the outpourings of love that proceed from the beings about them. This love which is to develop on Earth can only develop through earthly egos being related one to another in the way described. Development in this direction can only take place through men being torn away from group-soul qualities; through one man drawing close to another; only thus can true love develop. Where egos are united within the group-soul there is no true love. Beings must be separated from each other so that love may be offered as a free gift. Only by such a separation as has come about in the human kingdom, where ego meets ego as independent individual, has love as a free gift become possible. This is why an increasing individualism and a uniting of separate individuals had to come about on earth.

Think of the various beings that are united within a group-soul; the group-soul directs them as to how they shall act. Can it be said that the heart loves the stomach? No, the heart is united to the stomach by the being within who holds them together. In the same way the several animals in a group are united one with the other within the group-soul nature, and what they have to do is regulated by the wise group-soul.

Only when the group-nature is overcome, and individual confronts individual ego, can the sympathy of love be offered as a free gift from one being to another.

Man could only be prepared for this mission gradually, and we see how he passes through a kind of preparatory school for love before he is fully individualized. We see how, before he possessed a complete ego of his own, he was gathered into groups that were related by blood by guiding beings, and the members of these groups loved each other because of the blood tie. This was a great time of preparation for humanity. We have already pointed out that at this stage love was not a free gift, but was directed by a remnant of the cosmic wisdom; we have seen how Luciferic beings worked here and opposed with their strong liberating force everything that gathered mankind into families and peoples through the power of the blood; these Luciferic beings strove to make man independent.

Thus man continued gradually to mature that he might eventually receive the highest potency of love—the Christ Principle, which expressed its nature in the words, “He who does not forsake father, mother, son, and daughter, he who does not take up his cross and follow Me, is not worthy of Me.” These words are not to be understood trivially, but in the sense that, through reception of the Christ Principle the ancient blood brotherhood had to assume a new form, a feeling of “belonging to each other” which, regardless of material foundations, must pass from soul to soul, from man to man. The Christ-Principle has given the impulse by which man can love man, and that through being Christened human love may become more and more spiritual. Love will become more psychic and more spiritual, and through this man will also draw along with him the lower creations, and will thus transform the earth. In a far distant future he will transform the entire substance of the earth, and so mature the earth-body that it will be enabled to unite again with the sun. Christ as Spiritual Sun has given the impulse by which the earth and the sun can again be united in one body at a future day.

We have surveyed the course of the evolution of the world; we have seen how the body of the sun first separated from the earth, and how the mighty Christ Impulse descended, and how the impulse was thereby given towards a reunion of earth and sun so that they might rise to higher stages of existence. We have also realized that the earth is to produce human beings who have this as their mission. Therefore, when we look around upon the human kingdom, and desire to learn about man, we can find him only on the earth, for only here are conditions produced for such men as exist today. You may now ask: How is it with the other kingdoms of the earth? Let us consider the vegetable kingdom. When clairvoyant vision sweeps out into the universe and we investigate the other planets belonging to our system, we find in all those belonging to our sun a vegetable kingdom entirely corresponding to our own—so that in our vegetable kingdom we have something that in its systematic life is a part of our whole universe.

Our solar system is peopled by a vegetable creation, and were the whole matter to be considered occultly we should see that each planet is peopled also by its own kind of human beings. It is easy to perceive an inner relationship between plants and the sun, and how the life of the plant is intimately connected with the life of the sun. If this is the case it must also be connected with all the planets belonging to the solar system. When we allow our thoughts to sweep back to the condition of the earth when it was still a Sun planet, we know that man consisted of physical and etheric body, that is, he was at the stage of a plant. Man at that time had the value of a plant; he was in the position in which the vegetable kingdom is now. This kingdom is composed of beings consisting of physical body and etheric body. These confront us in a way that moves us to say that they have remained true to the sun; even now they clearly reveal their relationship with the sun.

Let us consider the nature of a plant according to Rosicrucian wisdom. We see the plant fixed in the ground by its roots, that is, the organ which leads it towards the centre of the earth—to its ego and we see how it turns its organs of reproduction to the sun and absorbs its chaste rays.

Let us now turn to man. It is not difficult to imagine man as a reversed plant. If we think of a plant exactly reversed in position we have a man; his reproductive organs are turned to the centre of the earth, and his root towards space. The animal stands half-way between these. Hence one can say in a spiritual sense, when the soul-nature of the world passed through the various kingdoms it passed through a vegetable, an animal, and a human existence. Plato expresses this in a beautiful way. He says: “The world-soul is crucified on the cross of the world body.” Man has passed through the plant stage which directed him to the centre of the earth. The position of animals is expressed in the horizontal position of the spine. Man's position is that of the plant, only reversed. Thus the cross arose.

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On it the world soul is crucified; this is the profound esoteric meaning of the cross. In the plant of today we have a being which strives towards the sun, which has, in a certain sense, remained united with the sun, hence it has the opposite direction to man. Animal forms on the various planetary existences are partly alike and partly different; even here the animal stands midway between man and plant.

If we now pass to the mineral kingdom we find in the forms of crystals something that directs us into space far beyond our solar system. In the formative forces of the mineral kingdom we find forces which reach far beyond the solar system. We are led, especially when considering those forms of the mineral kingdom through which the light passes, to a perception of what takes place far beyond our solar system. The most abstract thing, and that which has least individual existence, yet forms at present the foundation of our life, is the mineral. It has a universal existence; the higher the being the more it is suited to the system of our earth and sun.

We will now consider this point with regard to man. If man were adapted to forces that ruled on the earth alone he would be condemned to exist only on the earth; he could never become a citizen of the universe; he could speak of nothing that takes place beyond the earth. Though he is adapted, through his outward form, to the conditions of the earth, he has also through his higher powers a part in all the higher beings who are connected with the earth. That which limits man to the earth has reference to his body alone; the spiritual powers with which he is furnished lead him far beyond the earth. Here again we have to distinguish between different forces. In order that we may understand them let us dwell first on those forces that can be easily classified.

We have in the first place the power which called up pictures before our spiritual eyes during the Atlantean epoch. Man's consciousness, to begin with, was a picture consciousness; only as evolution progressed was he gradually able to comprehend external objects by means of his objective consciousness. The consciousness which at the present time presents the sense world to us so that we see colours with our eyes, hear sounds with our ears, smell, and taste, was only differentiated at one time from out the general perception of warmth by the organ which was then like a kind of lantern—the pineal gland. Objective consciousness is purely of the earth. Wonderful as it may seem, all the sensations man is aware of, such as the colour of objects, resounding tones, have only existence on earth, and if we were to consider the beings of another planet we would find that at first we could not understand them. For instance, if we were to say something to these beings about the colour red they would not know what was meant; on their planet they have a different way of perceiving beings and things. What we call sense-perception applies only to our particular planet.

I have already explained that before sense perception was differentiated it was inwardly connected with reproduction. Precisely as sense perception is of the earth, so also is the form of reproduction (as it exists at present) of the earth, and is only adapted to this planetary existence: it exists for the purpose of providing the first foundation of that which is the mission of the earth, namely, love—for love is to be developed upon the earth.

We now come to another human power. Suppose you observe some object; as long as your eyes are turned to it you know that you are in correspondence with the object; it acts upon you; now turn your eyes away and hold the idea-picture of it in your memory; the object has gone but the image remains. If man had not the capacity of retaining such images he would be an entirely different being, for as soon as his gaze left the object the image of it would also have disappeared, and in consequence he would not have power to connect the qualities of the things observed with his own qualities. That capacity of consciousness which makes the man of today able to retain the image of an object even when the object itself is gone, was his even on the ancient Moon; it is the same capacity which then enabled him to see what was external to him in pictures. He could not at that time see outer objects as he does today, but when anything approached him an astral vision rose before him like a vivid dream picture, but it was related in a particular way to the object he perceived.

Man's consciousness was then a picture consciousness, not an objective consciousness. Now he is in touch with the objects themselves, the picture he sees is the object. A last remnant of picture consciousness has remained in our power to form memory pictures. These are of greater value than the mere observation of external objects. In observing a number of objects that are similar to each other we bring them under one general idea. For instance, you have here so many pieces of chalk you group them under the general conception “chalk.” In this way man rises to general conceptions for which no outer object exists. Man can work inwardly with his ideas, and if with this inward activity—with this power of ideation—he were to come in touch with beings outside our planetary existence he would be able, without having to refer to any object, to make himself more easily understood by them. Both the picture consciousness (which man possessed before he could perceive outer objects, and which was a dim clairvoyance) and also the imaginative consciousness which he will develop later are more far reaching than mere sense observation.

When picture consciousness is acquired through occult development and man is able to perceive not only outer objects, but also, for instance the human aura; when in pictures he sees around him things of a soul and spirit nature; when that which exists in the world rises before him in pictorial symbols, he has gained with his imaginative consciousness the power to connect himself with other things inhabiting other planets.

There is a yet higher degree of consciousness. This was possessed by man dimly during the Sun period, and to a slight extent he has it still—it is dreamless sleep consciousness. Man is not without consciousness when asleep; neither is a plant without consciousness; its consciousness is the same as that of man in ordinary sleep. Sleep is only a lower degree of consciousness, when things escape man's attention and he does not observe them.

Through developing certain forces man can gain the power to perceive what is around him during the state of dreamless sleep. This is a higher state of consciousness than picture consciousness; it is the consciousness plants have, but in a sleeping form. If one rises to this consciousness but permeates it with one's ego in clear day-consciousness one has attained to the degree of inspiration or, in occult development, to inspired consciousness. This consciousness does not act merely by means of pictures. When something flows from the object and passes into the observer it is a tone-consciousness, and cannot be compared with picture-consciousness. The man who experiences it enters into a spiritual world of tone; this is the consciousness described by Pythagoras as “the Harmony of the Spheres.” The whole world then utters forth its nature, and when man is asleep at night and the astral body and ego are withdrawn from his physical and etheric bodies, the harmonies and melodies of cosmic music pervade his astral body. The astral body is then immersed in true spiritual existence, and from the music of the spheres it draws power by which to restore its exhausted forces. Man is plunged at night within the music of the spheres, and through the tones ringing within him he feels strengthened and refreshed anew when morning comes. When conscious of this he is Inspired, and is capable of perceiving all that is contained within the solar system.

Through his ordinary senses and the intellect associated with them man perceives only the things of the earth; through Imagination he comes in touch with the various planets; when he has attained to Inspiration he comes in contact with the solar system. This fact has always been known in certain circles. Goethe, who was an Initiate, knew it; hence in the prologue to Faust, the scene of which is set in the spiritual world in heaven—he represents the Angel as saying: “The sun intones his ancient song, 'Mid rival chant of brother spheres.”

From this we see that he knew that the secrets of the solar system are expressed in tones, and that one who can raise himself to Inspiration can learn these secrets. Goethe did not write this by chance, as we can see, for he maintains the character. In the second part of Faust, when he takes us up into the spiritual world he says again very much the same thing:

“Sounding loud to spirit ears,
Lo! the new-born day appears.”

Spirit ears are the ears of the clairvoyant, who is able to perceive the harmonies of the solar system. If you could perceive the Sun-Forces streaming down on to the bodies of plants as they grow (these bodies whose roots and leaves terminate in flowers bathed round by the astral body, into which stream the forces of the sun); if you could perceive these forces secretly entering the earth through the flower, you would perceive them as spiritual music—the music of the spheres. This can, however, only be heard by spiritual ears.

Spiritual sound enters into flowers, that is the secret of the development of plants, each separate flower is the expression of the tones which give it form, and give to the fruit its character. The sun tones are caught up by the plant, and these rule within it as spirit.

You perhaps know how form can be imparted by sound in the material world; you may remember the experiment of the Chladnic sound forms. How dust scattered upon a disc assumes certain figures as the result of sound; in these figures we have the expression of the sound that produces them. Just as physical sound is caught up, as it were, in this dust, so the spiritual sound of the sun is caught up and absorbed by flower and fruit. It is hidden mysteriously in the seed, and when a new plant grows from the seed it is the sun-tone it has absorbed that conjures forth its form.

Clairvoyant consciousness looks around upon the vegetable kingdom, and in the flowers which form the variegated carpet of the earth's surface it sees everywhere the reflection of sun-tones. What Goethe says is true, “The sun intones his ancient song,” but it is also true that these sun tones stream to earth, are absorbed by plants, and reappear when new plants spring from the seed. For in the forms of plants is heard the sun-tones which re-echo into space the music of the spheres.

Herein we see how universe and earth, how fixed star and planet, are spiritually in touch with each other, and we learn not only to look at what is in our environment in the physical world, but we also gain an inkling of how those who partake of Inspiration ascend to the sun.

There is a still higher state of consciousness, which, in the true sense of the word, we call Intuition; through it man can creep within the very nature of things. This is more than inspirational consciousness; here a man sinks himself into beings, he identifies himself with them. This leads him still further. Where does inspirational consciousness lead him? It leads him to where he feels one with the earth planet, for the egos of the plants are in the centre of the earth. When he perceives the sun-tone he becomes one with the planetary being that dwells in the centre of the earth; he becomes one with his planet; he can also become one with all other beings. He then goes through experiences that reach far beyond our solar system; his vision is extended from system-consciousness to cosmic-consciousness-intuition carries him beyond the several solar systems.

Thus we see that in the mineral kingdom we have something which in a homogeneous form furnishes us with a basis that extends far beyond our ordinary existence. We see that the present human form is a physical earthly form, but that man will raise himself once more from ordinary earthly consciousness to planetary-consciousness through imagination; to system-consciousness through inspiration; to cosmic-consciousness through intuition.

This is the path humanity has to travel in so far as it is connected with the entire evolution of the world. In the next lecture we shall descend from this study, which has led us outwards to that which has taken place in more recent ages of earthly existence, in the Egyptian and Grecian ages, and in our own age. We shall see how the macrocosm, the mighty universe of which we have formed some idea today, is reflected in the life and conception of individual man—the microcosm.

The progress of man. His conquest of the physical plane in the post-Atlantean civilizations. The beginning and up-building of the “I am.” The chosen people.

Our task today is to comprehend the spiritual horizon within which man stands by investigating his origin. We have seen that in the course of his development throughout the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs he has gradually acquired his present form; we will now extend our study of this second epoch, the Atlantean, on into our own age so far as is necessary to an understanding of our subject.

We know that previous to the middle of the Atlantean epoch the conditions of the consciousness of man were quite different to what they are today. While in his physical body during the day he then saw objects by no means with the same sharp outlines he does now, everything was more or less blurred; and when at night he left his physical body he did not sink into dreamless sleep, but was able to perceive Spiritual Beings in a spiritual world.

We will now deal further with the fact that these beings (who also sought embodiment in Atlantean bodies) entered into a certain companionship with man, but will only remind ourselves that at that time man had a conviction, based on direct experience, that above the human kingdom to which he himself belonged there were other kingdoms—that of the Angels and of the Archangels; and that he learned to recognize these higher beings face to face, just as we now learn to recognize each other in the physical world. Then came the time when objective day consciousness became ever clearer and clearer, and, on the other hand, when dimness and darkness enveloped man at night. This was the period when the first rudimentary germs of ego or “I am” were laid down in man. By learning to perceive the objects around him he at the same time gained that form of self-consciousness it was intended he should develop.

We must conceive of everything in the world as graded; that just as there are all possible grades of beings in the animal and human kingdoms so also there are many different grades among the beings above man. Some beings in the kingdom of the Angels are very close to man, and others are at a higher stage; many grades are met with when we direct our gaze to the higher worlds. We have in the first place to understand clearly that at the time when man rose at night through dim clairvoyant consciousness into higher worlds these beings (to put it trivially) gained something from man through their intercourse with him; their own being was enriched. For though these beings stood above man they were still inwardly connected with him; they inspired him and influenced his imaginative consciousness, which was, however, dim. So that we must think of man in that ancient period as being in such a condition that when he withdrew from his physical and etheric bodies it was as if a higher being, or, in a wider sense, a whole host of higher beings, took possession of him. Fundamentally this is also the case today, only man is not aware of it, whereas at that time he was, though in a dim clairvoyant way. It has already been explained in other lectures that sleep is by no means unnecessary for man; it serves a very great purpose.

During the day man is continually making use of his physical and etheric bodies. The life we lead from morning till evening exhausts these bodies, and what we feel as fatigue is nothing more than the expression of the fact that indirectly through the astral body all kinds of perceptions have been taking place in us as well as impulses of joy, of sorrow, and of pain; all these have been playing through us. This wears out our physical and etheric bodies, and in the evening we are tired because all day long we have been destroying them.

When at night we leave these bodies on the bed the astral body and ego are not inactive; all night long they send their forces into the physical and etheric bodies; they work at repairing the disorganized and exhausted forces of these bodies; this they could not do if, on their withdrawal, they were not taken up into a higher kingdom. Above the human kingdom a spiritual kingdom is outspread, the kingdom of the Angels, Archangels, and other beings. It is as if ozone streamed from the Spiritual Beings that then surround us, and from whom we are separated during the day, because with our perceptions we are enclosed within the shell of our bodies. At night we plunge into this spiritual ozone; from it our astral body absorbs forces which it then pours into the physical and etheric bodies to repair them. Today man is unconscious of this, but at the time when he still possessed dim clairvoyant consciousness he saw how his astral body and ego left the other members and was absorbed into the divine spiritual world.

Things seen in one way in the physical world have a very different appearance above. One might even say that the Gods profit by participating thus in humanity. In order rightly to understand the relationship of man to the universe we must try to form a conception, which is not so easy, but is, however, necessary, if we are to understand his true position. We have said that the earth is the planet of love, that love will be first rightly developed upon the earth. To put it crudely, it will be bred here, and through their participating in mankind the Gods will learn to know love, though in another sense it is they who bestow it. It is difficult to picture this.

It is entirely possible that one being may impart a gift to another, and only come to know his gift through the other. Picture to yourselves an exceedingly rich person who has never known anything but riches, nor ever experienced the deep satisfaction of soul which results from well-doing. Picture this person now as doing something good; he gives to the poor. The gift calls forth great thankfulness in the soul of the needy individual; this feeling of gratitude is at the same time a gift; it would never have existed if the rich person had not first given. He is the originator of the feeling of gratitude, although he does not himself feel it, and is only acquainted with it through its reflection, which streams back to him from the person in whom he roused it. It is approximately in this way that the gift of love is imparted to man by the Gods. They have progressed so far that they are able to kindle love in man so that he feels it, but they only learn to know it as a reality through man. From their heights the Gods reach down into the ozone of humanity and feel the warmth of love. We know that the Gods lack something when man does not live in love. The more human love there is on earth the more food for the Gods there is in heaven; the less love there is, the more the Gods hunger.

The sacrifice of man to the Gods is nothing else than the love which streams up to them, which man has produced. It is not difficult to picture that in ancient times, when man was still conscious of the Divine, this reciprocity—this mutual giving, from man and from the Gods—was quite different to what it became later. Indeed, there were some among divine Spiritual Beings who, because man could no longer rise by means of his dim clairvoyant consciousness, could no longer descend, or reach the sphere of humanity. Throughout the Atlantean epoch man lived with numerous divine beings, and the less capable he became of looking up to the Gods the less could a certain category of divine beings experience all they had formerly been able to experience through man. When Atlantis came to an end there were among the Atlantean gods some who suffered hunger, if we may so express it, because they could no longer find the way to man.

We must now picture the further development of man from this standpoint. We know that there was a realm in the neighbourhood of Ireland where dwelt the most advanced beings of the Atlantean epoch, those who were best prepared to pass through an advanced development. These now journeyed from the West to the East, populating Europe, where some remained at a particular stage of evolution, while others went further. The most advanced passed on to the neighbourhood of Central Asia, others into Africa. There were already in these parts some people left over from the older Lemurian and Atlantean epochs; these now mixed in diverse ways, and from them arose the people whom the Greeks represent in many artistic forms as the Satyr, the Hermes, and the Zeus types.

We must picture to ourselves that the condition of human consciousness changed from this time more and more. Those who had come over from Atlantis still possessed a remnant of ancient clairvoyant consciousness, but this continually decreased. At the time of the Atlantean catastrophe there were some even among those who had journeyed towards Asia, Europe, and Africa who had already lost every trace of clairvoyance, and, again, others who still had some remnants of it.

Everywhere under certain conditions there were some who (between sleeping and waking, for example) were able to obtain a clear view into the spiritual worlds. The spiritual being known as Wotan, for instance, was a “personality” well known to the Atlanteans; we might say that all the ancient Atlanteans were more or less in close touch with him, as some men today come in touch with a monarch, but the conscious connection was gradually lost. Among the peoples of Europe, especially the ancient Germans, there were many who in an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking could enter into relationship with Wotan, who actually existed in the spiritual world; but owing to the advance in evolution he was limited and could no longer make himself so generally known as before. There were people in Asia also who knew him, and this knowledge continued on into later times to which even history refers, a time when there was an original natural clairvoyance, and man could speak of the Gods from his own experience.

We must keep before us the fact that man was descending more and more into the material world; and because of this the Gods were less and less able to maintain their connection with him; many were able only to have companionship with certain outstanding beings. Certain of the Gods were unable to descend to ordinary humanity, but could only get in touch with personalities who rose to meet them, who developed themselves up to them. The varied dispositions of men, and the remnants of old clairvoyance, as well as the principle of initiation, mingled in a strange way, and this intermingling was preserved in the consciousness of the Germanic people.

During the Atlantean epoch men knew that during sleep, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, they rose into the kingdom of the Gods, the Gods were known to them, and they knew they would meet them there again. It was felt as a kind of punishment when, after death, man was for a time unable to behold the Gods and to be received into their company; when, after death, he had to pass through a period of probation owing to his having become too much entangled in material existence.

Among those who were in a position to value material life less than non-material life the conviction grew that they were not bound to the material world, but that immediately after death they could enter the kingdom of the spirit, which was well known to them. The opinion was held by the various peoples inhabiting Europe that those men who fought bravely and met death on the field of battle, who valued the honours of war more highly than material honours, were not dependent on material existence. They were convinced that in such a case the hero met with some deity or other immediately after death. Those who did not die on the battlefield, who had not learnt to value spiritual possessions more than material life, were said to have died ignobly, and not to be mature enough to be taken immediately into the realm of the spirit, but would first have to enter a kingdom in which they would have to undergo certain trials.

This idea is expressed in the meeting with the Valkyre, and is connected with an ancient clairvoyant memory. It was thought rightly that the man who met death on the field of battle was taken up by the Valkyre, and it is quite in harmony with such an idea that in its further development it should have been pictured in ancient Europe as symbolic of initiation. Among other peoples other ideas had developed, but in Europe personal bravery and personal excellence were considered to be most valuable.

It was always understood, and rightly so, that as regards initiation man might experience even during life that which normally he only experienced after death, namely, direct communication with the spiritual world. As the warrior experienced his first meeting with the Valkyre upon the battlefield, it was obvious that those who sought initiation had to experience this in physical life. In one part of Europe Siegfried was looked on as the last of the heroes of initiation. This fact is preserved in the legend of Siegfried, which tells how the hero united himself with the Valkyre during life, just as dying warriors did upon the battlefield.

Let us now try to enter into the mentality of those who migrated from the West towards the East. They had risen in a certain way up to the point where they were fitted to enter upon a further development. They had not become ossified, and had within them the germs of a more perfect development, but they had retained a comparatively strong clairvoyant capacity. Among all the people who had gone forth from Atlantis the Europeans were most gifted with clairvoyance; it was less strong among those who peopled Africa. Those who had emigrated earlier into Asia, and who were among the most advanced, came upon a still older people who were in possession of a still older clairvoyance, so that there was much clairvoyance in those parts.

Then there was a certain small colony consisting of the most advanced men of the Atlantean epoch who had settled near the Gobi desert. What kind of people were these, and what do we mean when we say they were the “most advanced?” It means those least able to see into the spiritual world, for advancement consisted in their having proceeded from the spiritual world and having entered into the physical world. They were the people who felt constrained to say: “Formerly we had connection with the spiritual world, but we have it no longer.” This loss filled their hearts with sorrow; they longed for the spiritual world from which they had come and which they valued more than that in which they now dwelt.

Conditions varied among the different European populations. Under certain conditions many could still see into the spiritual worlds. When the Mysteries still existed in Europe, and Initiates—who through occult development could rise in full consciousness to the spiritual world—spoke of those worlds and of the beings dwelling there, or of the varied parts men had to play after death; when the initiates brought all this in mighty pictures before the people by means of myth and legend, they found some who understood them, for some still had vision. The peculiar conditions of life and of environment in ancient Europe caused even uninitiated persons to experience the spiritual world. Though they could not come in contact with the higher Gods they believed in the spiritual worlds and trusted in them. These worlds were real to them, hence they felt their humanity in a quite different way from other peoples. Let us try to enter into the feelings of these ancient Europeans. They said: “I am indeed connected with the Gods.” Through consciousness of this a strong sense of personality developed in them, a special sense of the divine worth of the human personality, and, above all, a strong sense of freedom. We must picture this state of feeling vividly, for it was this consciousness of the personality which the people of Europe took with them when they went south and peopled the Grecian and Italian peninsulas. We can note stragglers from those who were possessed of this feeling, particularly among the ancient Etruscans. Even in their art we can observe this strong sense of freedom, for it had a spiritual foundation. Before the rise of the true Roman kingdom there was an Etruscan population in the Italian peninsula which had a high degree of freedom in its system of government; on one hand it was somewhat hierarchical, and, on the other, free in the highest sense. Each town made provision for its own freedom, and an ancient Etruscan would have felt any kind of confederacy, in our sense of the word, as unbearable. Everything which passed southwards in the peninsula as a sense of freedom, or a feeling for personality, sprang from the causes we have mentioned.

Those other people who had gone the farthest into Asia included a small company from whom the divine spiritual world had withdrawn the most. In its place they had acquired something else, something that had been saved from the world, which had withdrawn into profoundest darkness—this was the ego, or the “I am.” They felt that what was preserved within them as the “I am” was the eternal core of their being, and that it had sprung from the spiritual world; they felt all the forms they had previously seen were like a sacred memory, and that their strength depended upon this firm core which remained within them. As yet they did not perceive the ego in its complete form; this only came later, but those who were the most advanced, who had descended most deeply, developed a certain tendency which they might have expressed as follows: What we have to treasure above all else is the consciousness of our divinity, consciousness of that in which is to be found the deepest memories of our soul. Even if this soul has forgotten the divine beings which once it knew, we can find the way back to them by looking within our own being—by being conscious of our ego. In short, the consciousness of a formless God was now evolved, a God who does not appear in outward form, but who must be sought within man's innermost being. This conception, which is a very old one, was transformed in the course of man's further development into the commandment: Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image or likeness of thy God.

In primeval ages man experienced God by means of an image. Now the image had withdrawn into the invisible world, and man strove with all his strength to bring forth a conception of God from out his own ego. There, where God is formless, man strove to form an idea of Him and to realize His power. This was not immediately possible; during the first post-Atlantean civilization the memory of what had been lost was still too vivid. Man felt in his soul “The door is shut,” and the longing to enter again into the spiritual world was too strong. Hence in the first age of civilization the people were filled with longing for the hidden world of the spirit; they looked with great reverence up to the Initiates and besought them to allow them to become partakers of this lost world. The first great age of post-Atlantean culture was founded under the influence of Initiates by means of colonies. This was the wonderful awe-inspiring pre-Vedic culture, the last remnants of which are to be found in the Vedas; in it the longing for the spiritual world was so great that men strove by artificial means to regain contact with the Spirits and Gods which they had lost. The longing to fly from the physical world into which they had entered was overwhelmingly strong; we find this feeling in the souls of those who were instructed by the Initiates—the Holy Rishis.

We see the feeling developed in them which they might have expressed as follows: “The world of the physical plane into which we have now entered, which we see spread out around us, is merely illusion; it is worthless; it is Maya; but the world lying behind this illusory physical plane is valuable.” Thus a feeling of the worthlessness of the physical plane was developed, a feeling of the need to flee from it in order to attain that which was spiritual. A feeling evolved which was the basis of this ancient civilization, that man must lose his strong sense of personality if he was to be conscious of his divine origin. He strove for complete absorption in divinity, with extinction of his personality; this was of more value to him than life within that personality. We must try to understand the mood of this ancient civilization, we shall then understand this turning away from all that was material, and how, if man desired to seek the divine he had to free himself from the bonds of sense and get away from all illusion, from Maya.

Such was the nature of the first post-Atlantean age; but the mission of the whole epoch is that man should make the surroundings in which he lives more and more his own, that he should master them more and more.

In the Persian, that is, the pre-Zarathustra, civilization we see the first phase of the conquest of the external world. The ancient Persians (we refer here to the prehistoric Persians) had already a different consciousness from that of the ancient Indians; they regarded the physical plane as something real. It no longer appeared strange to them; they said: “We can bring spirit into the physical plane and can cultivate it here.” They paid attention to the physical plane; they did not study it as yet, but they considered it; the ancient Persians still perceived a hostile element in their surroundings, but thought that the enemy could be overcome. The Persian made a friend and companion of the God Ormuzd in order that he might redeem matter. He worked into the physical world gradually; he began to perceive that this is not only Maya, not merely soulless appearance, but a reality which must be taken into account.

In the great migration towards the East there was another group which moved more towards Asia Minor and Africa, where the Chaldean and Egyptian civilizations were founded. Through them a further step forward was made in the conquest of the physical plane. Here the condition of the people was such that they no longer regarded what is of the senses as merely hostile or illusory. When they looked up to the stars they said: “Those stars are not Maya, they are not mere appearances!” They thought much about the stars, and studied how one star approached another and what changes took place in the constellations. They felt the stars were an outward expression of the ruling Gods; they were a script which the Gods had written what they saw was not merely appearance but a revelation of the Gods.

A further advance had been made; sensible matter was now considered as an expression of Divinity; man began to look for wisdom in things of sense. In the Egyptian world man's gaze was turned from the heavens and directed to the earth; geometry was studied so that the earth might be measured. That to which the spirit could attain was thus joined to substance perceived by the senses—an essential advance in evolution. Thus, step by step, evolution progressed.

Now, there was formed within the third age of civilization a small company which separated off in a certain way and absorbed all that could be gained from ancient tradition as well as from recent knowledge. This small company, whose Initiates had preserved the ancient wisdom and the earlier companionship with the Gods, knew how to impart what they had gained as experience from the spiritual world, and they had also absorbed the wisdom of the Chaldeans—the writings of the Gods in space—as well as the wisdom of Egypt, which expressed the union of spirit with that which is physical. This group of people, who, in a certain sense, may be called the “chosen people,” had to make preparation for the greatest period in the world's history; they are the people of the Old Testament, who in their Testament possessed the greatest and most significant document regarding long-past events and also those that were to come. It is not only an error in learning, but a farce, when some historical work is thought even to approach the Old Testament in value; for it portrays in mighty pictures man's descent from divine heights, and shows at the same time how historical experiences are connected with cosmic events. All this is contained in the Old Testament, and, above all, its contents correspond exactly with the events of evolution.

We have now seen how the rudimentary germ of the human ego was prepared step by step in earthly evolution. We have seen that this rudimentary germ would never have been able to evolve if the sun, and afterwards the moon, had not separated from the earth. It was only possible for it to develop through man's horizon with regard to the spiritual world being gradually limited and then closed.

Let us consider how this rudimentary germ developed. What had man gradually learnt during the earth's development? We must first look back to those ancient times when he was as yet unable to see physically, when he lived in the spiritual world; then came the time when the external objects of the physical world appeared to him as if blurred, when he could still see in the spiritual world as well. Who was it prepared man so that in later times, when he was to behold the sun clearly, he should be ready for this change? It was the God we call Jehovah who brought man to full maturity; He who separated Himself from the Elohim in order, from the moon, to prepare for the most important moment in the earth's evolution. While man was still unable to see the outer world Jehovah instilled ego-consciousness into Him. It was He who in the time of the old dim clairvoyant consciousness entered into man at initiation, and it was He who appeared to man in dreams and prepared him slowly to receive the “I“ which he could obtain fully only through the coming of Christ.

Christ has not only come once, but only once in personal form; His last coming was in Jesus Christ. In ancient times He worked also through the Prophets. Christ Himself indicates this in the Gospel of John, where He says that those who did not believe Moses and the Prophets would not believe Him either, for Moses and the Prophets spoke of Him, not indeed as already on earth, but as one whom they foretold. In this sense Christ has a certain story in earthly evolution. If we go back to the ancient Mysteries we find everywhere the story of Christ and His descent. Let us for a few minutes consider the European Mysteries. We find in all of them a certain tragic feature. If one transports oneself into these ancient Mysteries one always finds that the teachers told their pupils: “You may raise yourselves to divine heights, and receive a high degree of initiation, but there is something you cannot yet know fully, something for which you must wait and which we can only indicate: this is the coming of Christ.”

They always spoke of Christ in the northern Mysteries as “He who would come”; they knew Him everywhere, but not as One already on the earth. The Initiates in Asia and Egypt also knew Him as the approaching Christ. “One day,” they said, “He will appear.” They knew also that the olden Mysteries could not lead men to the highest stage of development. This idea has been preserved symbolically, only too much stress must not be laid on such things; they must be accepted generally, partly as truth and partly as allegory, and not be outlined too sharply. Some echo of this tragic feature regarding the ancient Gods and the waiting for the Christ has survived. The glory of the old Gods was to disappear before the glory of Christ.

This is found even in the most recent legends of the Teutonic gods, where something remarkable is ascribed to Siegfried—he was invulnerable and had the strength of an Initiate according to the European Mysteries; he was, however, vulnerable in one spot. He was wounded in this spot, and thus met his death. In what place was he vulnerable? The place on which later the cross was laid on Him for Whom they were looking with such expectation. The place where Siegfried was vulnerable was covered by the cross in the journey to Golgotha. This legend contains a last memory of that tragic feature which passes through all the ancient European Mysteries. But in those other Mysteries into which Moses was initiated, from which the Old Testament has proceeded, and which Moses implanted in his people so far as seemed possible to him, this strange feature in human evolution is often referred to. It is more than a mere picture; there is something which imparts deep reality to it, which we might illustrate as follows. Let us think of a man as regards his astral body, his ego, his etheric and physical bodies; let us think of these four principles as shone upon by the sun.

Through Christ's coming to the earth man has become able to absorb both the physical and spiritual forces of the sun. Previously this was different. Then, during sleep, when at night the astral body and ego were outside the physical body and etheric body, the direct sunlight did not fall upon man, only sunlight that was reflected from the moon. Man absorbed this reflected light, not the direct sunlight. This is exactly the same (in an external, symbolic, yet true form) as in the case of the Christ, Who lived as the spiritual part of the sunlight, and with Jehovah, who reflected the true Christ-light until such time as men were sufficiently mature to receive it direct. Jehovah sent the Christ down to humanity as from a mirror.

Men spoke of Him when they spoke of Jehovah. Hence Jehovah says to Moses: “Say to thy people, I am the ‘I AM.”’ This was the name later applied to the Christ. He would not as yet turn His own countenance to men. Jehovah prepared humanity; he sent them the image of Christ before Christ Himself descended, for man had to learn to comprehend the complete descent of Christ into the physical world with His “I am” in the depths of his own being. Therefore this people, which had been prepared in the truest sense for the coming of Christ, held most firmly to the conception of a formless God. They had to attain to a new conception of God, not merely to remember an old form. This people with its Jehovah-religion became in fact those who prepared for the coming of the Christ.

Now, we must clearly understand that everything that has to be specially striven for in the world must proceed from strong impulses; hence the idea of the power of the formless God spread through all the Old Testament; an entirely abstract God, condensed within the centre of a mere I-principle, stands at the centre of the religion of the Old Testament—an image-less I-God.

How could this God first obtain a form that could be comprehended by a people living on the physical plane which they had to conquer? Through a wise dispensation something remarkable originated in Southern Europe.

Emigrations had taken place from Asia and Africa; these mingled with other streams coming from the North. Those that came from the East brought the firm conviction of the worthlessness of Maya, of the need to change the material kingdom of men into a kingdom of the spirit; these mingled with others who had gained a stronger feeling of personality. Those with the greatest spiritual force, who had remained longest behind in the emigration from West to East, met in Asia Minor and in the Grecian and Italian peninsulas; here the fourth age of civilization was built up, and the conquest of the physical world advanced another stage.

The mission of the third age, the Egypto-Chaldean, had been to perceive and comprehend the profundities of God; from it had to spring a people who were able to seek God in an abstract way, as a Spiritual Being with the least content of anything sensely. Meanwhile in Southern Europe another group was being formed. Certain men had come down from the north with their strong northern consciousness of personality in them; a union was formed between matter and the human soul. The result of this we see and admire in the art of Greece, in the temples of Greece, and in the tragedies of Greece, in which man began to represent his own destiny. In these tragedies he secreted his own spirit in matter, incorporating it with external objects. One might say that we have here a marriage between what is spiritual and what is physical, wherein each has an equal share. In all that the Greeks produced spirit and matter had an equal share, and this was also the case in a certain sense with the Romans; they knew that spirit dwelt in them, that spirit could become personality in them.

It was only at this stage of human evolution that that which had been foretold could assume actual form upon the physical plane. Christ could only descend to the physical plane when man had conquered it. A Christ would not have been possible in the old civilizations, when the physical plane was only seen as Maya, and a longing for the past filled the souls of men. At the time the union occurred which we have seen represented in Greek art man had turned more and more to the physical plane; this was expressed in the strong consciousness of the Roman citizen; it was also the time when the Christ-principle was able to appear in the flesh.

We have to consider all those who worked previously to the coming of Christ as being indeed acquainted with Him, but we must look on them as Prophets who could only foretell; they beheld in the coming of Christ the fulfillment of that for which they themselves had striven.

In the following lectures we shall see how Christianity is mingled with other elements in the era subsequent to the coming of Christ, and how this produced the conditions that now surround us. Today the period has been described when, through the conquest of the physical plane, man made himself sufficiently mature to understand the God-man—the Christ.

The reflection in the fourth epoch of man's experiences with the ancient Gods and their way of the Cross. The Christ-Mystery.

In the last lecture we learnt that man had gradually conquered the physical plane during the post-Atlantean epoch; he had come gradually to understand that the physical world into which he had entered is the expression of the spiritual powers lying behind it. We learnt also that when the Greeks and Romans were the leading peoples in human evolution man had established a kind of balance between his understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds. He had come to terms with the material world; he had learned gradually to understand and to love it.

We must not think that such processes did not have corresponding parallels in the spiritual world. Even if we go further back in human evolution we find, to the same extent as outward conditions alter as regards man's observation and perception of the physical world, conditions alter essentially also as regards other states of consciousness. So far special stress has been laid on the state of consciousness when man is withdrawn from his physical body during sleep. We saw that in the Atlantean epoch he perceived only blurred outlines when awake, but that divine spiritual beings appeared before him when he exercised the dim kind of clairvoyance he then possessed. In order that we may understand the entire human being we must take into account these alternating conditions of consciousness which are connected with what we call death and what lies beyond death; we shall then see that the ordinary life we observe between birth and death has also an essentially different side.

So far we have considered the destiny of man during his life between birth and death from the Atlantean epoch to the age of Greece and Rome; we must now inquire as precisely as possible into his destiny between death and rebirth; for the life of man continues after death. From the moment during the Lemurian epoch when he entered for the first time into earthly incarnation, and life within a physical body first alternated with life outside of it, man has led, to a certain extent, a two-fold life—one upon earth and one in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Though some people believe that changes only occur in the physical world, and that between death and rebirth everything can be described in a few typical words, this belief is absolutely incorrect.

Destinies change in the spiritual period of human development also. We shall best understand how these changes occur if we glance at the life man leads here in the physical world, and at his relationship to the other kingdoms around him. Man, as at present developed, is by no means a being who exists absolutely by himself; he is related in various ways to all that surrounds him.

Think only how man's consciousness, his self-consciousness, depends upon that which surrounds him. If no other kingdom surrounded us, no mineral, no vegetable, no animal kingdom, if there was no atmosphere, no clouds which reflect the light to us, our ego as it is now would not have been kindled by the outer world. Man, as regards his self-consciousness, is immersed during the day in the world that surrounds him.

Between birth and death he is plunged into a certain environment through having an etheric and physical body. He draws his food from the lower kingdoms of nature, these give him the substances and forces which pass through him. We might say that up to the time of birth he evolves, and then, on entering earthly existence, he comes in contact with the lower kingdoms of nature. It is true he only enters these when he takes on a physical body, and has then to assimilate them as his means of support; in the physical world man is not an absolute being. Only think how he must continually inhale a certain quantity of air; so that he is by no means enclosed within his skin, his being extends into the air. On entering physical existence he enters into a certain relationship with the kingdoms below him; he dips into them; on leaving his body he rises into higher kingdoms, into that of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai, and indeed into still higher kingdoms. Just as through the needs of his physical body he enters into relationship with the lower kingdoms, so after death he enters into relationship with higher kingdoms.

Let us now pass to the epoch when man first began to enter upon his earthly incarnations. This was in the Lemurian epoch, when, though he did enter a physical body, he had very little connection with the physical world. He had as yet the merest trace of sense organs, and had therefore hardly any perception of the outer world. Man actually passed through a condition at the beginning of his incarnations when his connection with the physical world was very slight; because of this he was all the more at home in the worlds of the spirit. This was also the period when, having passed out of his physical body—not only during sleep but also after death—man entered a world full of spiritual light where he perceived spiritual beings; where, to a certain extent, he drew strength from these beings as he now draws it from the physical world; it was a time when he reached out into the kingdoms above him as he now reaches out into the physical world. His being extended into the kingdom of the Angels, Archangels, and even into higher kingdoms which interpenetrate his own. His consciousness was dim, and only at death did he gain true consciousness. He only drew into the physical world gradually, nourishing himself spiritually with the vision of divine spiritual beings.

Man only gained his ego in the course of time as he passed through his various incarnations; he did not have it at an early stage. Other beings of whom we said that they had passed through their human stage at an earlier period already possessed egos, and man learnt to know the ego through beholding them, but he only came to know it truly in the period between death and rebirth.

When a man died at that time he had the feeling that only when he could see divine spiritual beings did he really begin to live; it was actually the case that the farther he left death behind him the higher the stage to which he attained. He grew even more and more conscious until the time came (between death and rebirth) when the mighty Being appeared who had first given true content to his life, regarding whom he felt: “From Him I have come; I belong to Him.” This was the same Being, seen in a primeval period, who later incarnated on earth as the Christ. It was not possible in the Lemurian period for man to behold Christ in a physical body, but he did behold Him midway between death and rebirth; he thus became a part of Him and knew Him in the spiritual world.

As time passed on man grew ever more conscious in the physical world. Full consciousness came first in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, but it came gradually. The more conscious man became in the physical world and the more the rudiments of the ego had entered into him, the less did his consciousness reach up into higher worlds after death. At first he was not able to expand to the vision of the Christ; he only saw Angels and Archangels, and later, in the Atlantean epoch, even this was denied him; it was only granted to those who were most advanced. Normally, man only perceived Angels through his ancient dim clairvoyance; these were Angels also in the Christian sense, and are those who were referred to by the Greeks as Zeus, and by the Germanic people as Wotan, and were regarded as deities.

We have already said that in the Atlantean epoch, during sleep, man was the companion of the Gods; this was especially the case in the period between death and rebirth. These Gods were Angels, or, at the highest, Archangels, and only when man had prepared himself in this life by what he felt to be good deeds, was the vision of Christ, under certain circumstances, vouchsafed to him, through these subsidiary beings. Man still knew the Christ, however, through the deeds and the nature of the Angels and Archangels. Just as light is still light though tinted by passing through coloured glass, so the Christ-form was seen, but with waning strength. It was none other than the Sun-Spirit who thus appeared with waning strength, because man was attracted more and more to the physical side of existence and had learnt to love it.

So humanity developed through the different ages of post-Atlantean civilization, and in each of them appeared the remembrance of earlier epochs; these were actually experienced. In the Egyptian age we find a memory of the Lemurian epoch.

How did Initiates at that time represent the life after death? It was their endeavour that men should experience after death—if only as a faint echo—what men experienced in olden times when they raised themselves up to that in which they felt as if hidden, to that supreme Being—the great Sun-Spirit. This is the meaning of what the ancient Egyptians called the judgment of the Dead; when the dead person appeared before his judge, who weighed his deeds. If these were found to be worthy he might, through the merit acquired in the physical world, become a part of the Being looked up to as God of Light, the Sun-God, This was the same being who was called Osiris. It was the journey to Osiris—the union with him that was imparted to the dead as a recollection of an actual previous evolutional condition. This is how we must understand what is contained in the Book of the Dead, that most remarkable record of the Egyptian people.

From the nature of the conditions laid down in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, the full esotericism of such things can obviously not be given out, but the fact remains that these things might be gone into very much more deeply. According to the ancient Egyptian idea, if a soul according to its deeds was found worthy of this vision it might be united with Osiris; indeed it was actually addressed as an Osiris, because united with Him. The words are: “Osiris was cleansed in the pool to the south of the field of Hotop and north of the field of locusts, where the Gods of growth wash in the fourth hour of the night and in the eighth of the day, with the image of the heart of the God passing from the night to the day.” It is impossible to express the full depth of meaning of this formula but it is important to understand the expression, “from the night to the day.” Previously it had been night; the soul is led over to a day—to a spiritual day—when it will be united with Osiris, when it may itself become an Osiris. The soul in this way actually experienced its destiny in another world, the world lying between death and birth.

Consciousness between death and rebirth darkened more and more, though it was never lost completely; it was never extinguished, though it grew dim. The more affection man developed for the sensible physical world, the more he had to content himself with the vision of lower beings, and the less communion could higher beings have with him. All the beings who were his good companions during the Atlantean epoch, when he was still clairvoyant, disappeared, especially in the period between death and rebirth, and gradually the connecting link between man and those ancient Gods was lost.

We know that remnants of ancient clairvoyance endured up to the later ages of European culture; that there were some people who in certain states of consciousness could still rise to the vision of the Gods. Such people also enjoyed a more vivid communion with the Gods after death; they had a more intimate life with them. Such a communion was good not only for men but also for the Gods, for man takes up with him the love he has won in the physical world; the Gods received back from him as a sacrificial offering that which as love he had acquired in the physical world. Men, however, grew ever less and less fitted for this communion with the Gods, because their love for the physical world continually increased. The souls of those dwelling in the districts from which the Germanic peoples have since sprung gradually participated less and less in the vision of the Gods, so that they had little fellowship with them between death and rebirth. Through this an idea developed that the Gods were losing their connection with the earth which they had themselves created, and losing also their rulership over it. This feeling gave rise to the conception of the “Twilight of the Gods.”

This is the actual foundation of the drama. It was felt that the Gods had to withdraw from the world they had themselves created. The Gods who, even as late as the Atlantean epoch, had descended into the bodies of the most advanced human beings and had taught them important secrets in the Mysteries were obliged gradually to withdraw, and they could only come in touch with the physical world by using the more advanced human beings as their instruments or vehicles. This actually happened in the Atlantean epoch; and those who were initiated into the ancient Druidic Mysteries knew, for example, that an ancient Atlantean individuality known as Sig appeared for long after the Atlantean catastrophe in many different ways in European bodies.

All such names as Siegfried and Sigurd preserve exoterically the remembrance of the repeated appearances of this individuality who was finally only perceptible to those who had been initiated into the Mysteries. He united himself with high Initiates, and it became more and more necessary, the nearer we approach our age, for him to seek out those who had already gone through many, incarnations in which they had purified themselves. Now, in order that we may understand our age, it is necessary to touch the fringe of a great mystery which throws light on much that had taken place in our time.

Let us turn once more to the middle of the Atlantean epoch, when the physical world was first disclosed to man. A sort of parting of the ways then took place for the Gods—those who had been the ancient companions of men in higher realms. Coming from spiritual heights man had plunged deeper and deeper into the physical world. He had already passed through three great epochs; the third being the Lemurian, the fourth the Atlantean and this will be followed by three others. We are living at present in the fifth epoch. The Lemurian epoch came to an end through great fire catastrophes; the Atlantean through mighty catastrophes of ice and water; our epoch will come to an end through other forces, through a mighty increase of egoism in human nature, and, on account of this, through the war of all against all.

Only those who turn to a spiritual life will survive the catastrophe, which, in this case, means the war of all against all, just as only a small group of people escaped from the catastrophes of Lemuria and Atlantis. The war of all against all will be still more terrible for those involved in it than were those of fire and water, however terrible we may picture them to have been. Those who are now turning towards a spiritual life should feel it their duty to do all that is possible to rescue the good seed of our age and carry it over into the sixth age, which will follow the present one. This age is made up of great subdivisions; the ancient Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greco-Latin, and the present one, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh right on to the time of the war of all against all.

The present position of evolution is that we have passed the middle of the Earth age. Had human beings turned towards the spiritualizing of themselves before they had completely entered the physical world, the conquest of the physical plane, of which we spoke in the last lecture, would never have taken place. Man has, however, taken a path that leads him deeper and deeper into physical evolution; he has gone beyond the point that would have represented the deepest stage if at that time he had turned to self-spiritualization.

This point (which lies in the middle of the Atlantean epoch) was an important parting of the ways for certain spiritual beings. They had then to decide whether they would sink into a kind of abyss from which they would rise again later all the stronger (for through their fall they would have developed greater powers) or whether they would take the direct way. Certain spiritual beings, those who had formerly been the companions of man, took the direct way; they decided never again to enter human bodies, but to remain in the realms of the spirit. The subsequent development of humanity passed them by with hardly a trace.

There were, on the other hand, other divine beings, a number of whom have been preserved in the memory of the people of Europe and elsewhere under such names as Zeus, Wotan, etc.; they decided, for the salvation of humanity, to descend again and again into human bodies, that they might work for humanity. It was not possible for all of them to descend to the same extent, for through man having entered so deeply into the physical world human bodies became ever less suitable instruments for divine beings.

Only those men who had purified their bodies in a certain way, who throughout the course of many incarnations had developed such noble etheric and physical bodies that they had completely banished from their souls certain connections with the physical world, who, through their whole disposition, had lived less in that which was of the earth than in that which was not of the earth—only such men were still able to receive into themselves the souls of high Spiritual Beings as they would receive their own soul. So it happened that those into whom Spiritual Beings had entered could not, as it were, descend far enough into physical existence; they therefore held a very unique position in the world.

Let us picture some such being, one who for many incarnations had developed the forces of his body, had won an inner victory over it so that he lived more in the spiritual than in the physical world, and was, on this account, fitted to be the vehicle of a higher being. Was it possible for such a being to be fully understood by those who had descended completely into physical existence, who had developed a love for the physical world and strove to work on this physical plane? Would he not be better understood by those who had preserved the character of an earlier epoch, who were stragglers from an earlier epoch? He could, in truth, be much better understood by these stragglers from the Atlantean epoch.

The Mongolian peoples have not descended so deeply, nor have they entangled themselves so much in the physical plane nor done so much towards its conquest as the people of Europe. We see that external physical civilization is accomplished by western nations rather than by the stragglers from Atlantean civilization who had remained stationary, and were therefore not at home in a world of post-Atlantean development, because they had retained certain qualities and had then degenerated.

It is often pointed out that the Japanese are going through a significant development today through the qualities of their own character. This is an illusion. They are not developing through the force of their own qualities. In the last war against Russia they conquered with the help of battleships and cannon invented by Europeans; they made use of a foreign civilization. It is only progressive development when a people develops from out its own being. It is on this that development depends.

Spiritual individualities who were still the companions of men in the Atlantean epoch could be understood better by nations who had in a certain way remained stationary, and who represented, in a later epoch, conditions beyond which the people of Europe had developed because of their individual self-consciousness and feeling for freedom. Hence the teaching of these spiritual individualities had to be directed to such people, and we see here the consummation of a great mystery.

We see beings who, when the people of Europe were at an earlier stage of evolution, were fully understood, incarnating and appearing later as teachers in the schools of initiation, and on this account being honoured as Gods. We see Wotan, who had previously dwelt as an Initiate in a human body and taught in the Mysteries, being able, because he had not descended so deeply, to incarnate in a nation which, in a certain way, was backward, and on this account had preserved a feeling for the nothingness of the physical plane, of its unworthiness as an expression of the Deity, who looked on it as a place of sorrow and pain, and who held that the only real bliss was in leaving it. This individuality, known as Wotan and who had taught in the Mysteries of the Germanic peoples, is the same who appeared later as the Buddha, and with the same mission. (It is possible to touch on such secrets as we are speaking of in the privacy of an Anthroposophical Lodge.) Buddha, who mediated between our world and the higher worlds, is the same individuality who passed over Europe and is remembered there under the name of Wotan.

We see from this how those people who had preserved certain tendencies and connections with earlier conditions were provided for. Knowing this, the historical fact of the good reception Buddhism received among the Mongolian peoples is comprehensible, and entirely in accordance with the wise guidance of man.

As humanity had to conquer the physical plane more and more, it was no longer possible, in a later age, for such spiritual beings to incarnate directly in a physical body. It required a mightier Spiritual Being to do this, One who had been foretold by all the earlier teachers. Even the ancient Egyptians when they spoke of Osiris recalled their connection with the ancient Spirit of the Sun, and said: “The kingdom of Osiris will be established again upon earth.”

Before this could come to pass a Being like the Christ was needed. In that He had withdrawn more and more from the kingdom of the dead (and we do really see Him disappearing from the other side of life), He had drawn ever nearer to this side, until in the fourth age of civilization He incarnated in a human body visible to all, but in a body that had been very specially prepared.

The Christ-principle could not assume a human body in the same way as those did who descended entirely to the physical plane. Even such a Being as Jesus of Nazareth, Who had gone through many incarnations and attained to a high degree of initiation, was not capable at birth of being the vehicle of the Christ-individuality. Only after preparing himself through a life of thirty years had he succeeded in so far cleaning and purifying the outward physical sheaths—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies—that the Christ individuality could make use of them. In the thirtieth year of his life the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth left the outer vehicles which he had purified.

This took place at the baptism by John in Jordan. A change of individuality took place at this time, when the Christ took possession, not of an ordinary human body, but of a purified body. Then followed three years, during which Christ walked the earth in the body of Jesus, the years described in the Gospels between the baptism and the Mystery of Golgotha. We have here an Individuality Who had not appeared as in the ordinary course of events, where a form is provided at birth in accordance with the experience of many incarnations; but because this Individuality had entered into a body which for thirty years had been entangled in the physical world, and had received a mighty impulse through the Christ, something of profound importance took place which esotericists can read in the Gospels when they really know how to read them. There it stands; but such things are veiled.

At the baptism in Jordan, when the significant symbol of the dove appeared above the head of Jesus, he was not merely inspired but directly intuited by the Christ. On that occasion something shot through the entire body of Jesus of Nazareth, even into those parts which, at the present stage of human development, are most withdrawn from the influence of man—the very bones. I am now about to say something which to the materialistic consciousness of the present day seems nonsense; but that is of no matter. At the moment when the body of Jesus of Nazareth was permeated and fired by the Individuality of Christ—the great Sun-Spirit—the effect reached even into the bones.

If you burn a bone the cartilaginous part is consumed and the bone ash is left. The mineral substance of the bone and the cartilage are held together by a power which is opposed to fire, but also, therefore, associated with it. This power is at present entirely beyond the control of man's will, but it was under the control of Him Who was later to pass through the Event of Golgotha. Man can at present move his hand, but has no power to affect the chemical forces of his bones; he has become solid through them. The body of Jesus of Nazareth, through its having been intuited by the Christ, is the only body on earth that has ever acquired control over the force that holds cartilage and bone-ash together.

Through this control over the bones a force entered the world which is positively able to conquer death; for the bones are guilty of the death of man. Man has become entangled in the mineral part of the earth through being so constructed that he has incorporated into himself solid bony substance. Death came to him because of this, and it is not without cause that death is represented by a skeleton—the symbol is fully justified. The Christ-Impulse is the living force that is able to again transform the bones that is, to lead men gradually towards that which is spiritual; and this will come to pass in future evolution. This is why no external force was permitted to interfere with the bony structure of Jesus Christ: no bone of Him was to be broken. The others who were crucified with Him had their bones broken, but in Him the words of the prophet had to be fulfilled: “No bone of Him shall be broken!” This was in order that what had been imparted as a mighty central impulse to the earth should not be spoilt by any outside influence.

In this way the mighty Sun-Spirit worked at that time in the mystery which took place at the baptism in Jordan. It was the same Sun-Spirit who through His withdrawal from the earth had made it possible for man to enter physical matter, by which ossification took place, and Who continues to work on him so that he may perceive the impulse by which he can again uplift or spiritualize this tendency towards ossification.

Risky as it may be to speak of such matters, it is the mission of the Anthroposophical movement to declare those things that have always been known, taught, and seen within the Mysteries. Only because this mystery had been accomplished, and because of this alone, did another mystery become possible.

We know that the several parts of the human body correspond to the principles of man. The physical body corresponds to itself; the glandular system to the etheric body; the nervous system to the astral body; and the circulatory system (that of the blood) to the ego. The ego entered physically into man through his being endowed more and more with blood, thus becoming ever more capable of devoting himself to the material world.

A time came when the surplus blood had to be sacrificed. Horrible as it may sound to the chemist, it is nevertheless true that the superabundant ego, that which would have brought humanity to the war of all against all through excessive egoism, flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha. At the moment when the wounds of the Redeemer bled there was implanted within humanity the seed of the power by which it might raise itself again out of the state into which it had sunk so deeply.

If man had taken the upward turn in the middle of the Atlantean epoch he would never have attained to complete independence. He had to conquer the physical plane, but then on this plane the impulse by which he could rise again had to be all the stronger; and this impulse was given by the Christ. Because the Christ was stronger He could not only lead mankind out of the depths, but could do something else, something of very great importance! A part of the world is to be conquered by man, a part that will be united with the spiritual world that will be led back to the spiritual world.

It was shown in the last lecture that during the Greco-Latin age man had progressed so far in the conquest of the physical world, had become so deeply entangled in it, that he had to have a God in human form before he could recognize Him, for he could no longer penetrate to the spiritual world and perceive Him there. Meanwhile conditions on the other side of life—between death and rebirth—had also changed. Through man having descended so much further into the physical plane, and having developed so great a love for it, and derived so much pleasure from it, what was on the other side of life became ever less perceptible to him. He retained a considerable remembrance of this world when he lived on the other side between death and rebirth, and much of this has been preserved in legend. When we read in a book of Greek origin that the hero says: “It is better to be a beggar in the physical world than a king in the land of the shades,” it exactly expresses the feeling of that period. Because man had conquered so much of the physical plane he longed to come back to it, for at that time he could not take much over with him. Only through Christ having come to earth, and through man having already experienced Him in a preparatory way in the time of the Old Testament; only because man had received the Christ into his thoughts during life, could he take over with him that which brought light again to him on the other side. What he took with him made the other side clear and bright and restored the Christ to him with even greater splendour than in this world. Hence we see how consciousness on the other side became darkened more and more as the time approached which we described yesterday; and how it then grew clearer through man learning to know the Christ here. For what man learns of Him in this world is not lost in the period between death and rebirth; he takes his knowledge with him; and this is what the expression “To die in Christ” means.

From what has been said you will see that throughout evolution the life not only of the living changes, but also that of the dead. Because the dead are nourished on what they have learnt here concerning the Christ, because they take the fruits of this with them to the life between death and rebirth, returning here again in ever recurring incarnations, they will appear also in ever mightier, more Christ-filled bodies, and will make the earth more and more into an expression of what Christ can be to a transformed world when in the future He leads the earth to higher and ever higher conditions.

Thus we see how life, both on this side and on the other, cooperates in maturing the earth for what is to come; when the earth through being filled with the Spirit of Christ will be united once again with the sun, and will thereby rise a stage higher in the cosmos.

The Christ Event—the coming of Christ—is therefore not only a fact of great importance to man, but is of infinite importance also to the evolution of the whole of the cosmos.

The reversing of Egyptian remembrance into material forms by way of Arabism. The harmonizing of Egyptian remembrance. The Christian impulse of power in Rosicrucianism.

In the previous lectures wide reaches, both of human evolution and also of world evolution, were brought before our souls. We saw how mysterious connections in the evolution of the world are reflected in the civilizations of the different nations belonging to the post-Atlantean period. We saw how the first epoch of earthly development is reflected in the civilization of ancient India; the second, during which the separation of the sun from the earth took place, is reflected in the Persian civilization; and we have endeavoured, as far as time permitted, to sketch the various events of the Lemurian epoch—the third in the course of the earth's development—in which man received the foundations of his ego, which is reflected in the civilization of Egypt. It was pointed out that the initiation wisdom of ancient Egypt was a kind of remembrance of this, which was the first period of earthly evolution in which man participated. Then, coming to the fourth age, that in which the true union between body and spirit is so beautifully presented in the art of Greece, we showed it to be a reflection of what man experienced with the ancient gods, the beings we have described as Angels. Nothing remained that could be reflected in our age—the fifth—the age now running its course. Secret connections do, however, exist between the different periods of post Atlantean civilization; these we have already touched on in the first of these lectures.

You may recall how it was stated that the confinement of the people of the present day to their own immediate surroundings, that is, to the materialistic belief that reality is only to be found between life and death, can be traced to the circumstance of the Egyptians having bestowed so much care on the preservation of the bodies of the dead. They tried at that time to preserve the physical form of man, and this has not been without an effect on souls after death. When the bodily form is thus preserved the soul after death is still connected in a certain way with the form it bore during life. Thought-forms are called up in the soul, these cling to the sensible form, and when the person incarnates again and again and the soul enters into new bodies these thought-forms endure.

All that the human soul experienced when it looked down from spiritual heights upon its corpse is firmly rooted within it, hence it has not been able to unlearn this, nor to turn away from the vision which bound it to the flesh. The result has been that countless souls who were incorporated in ancient Egypt are born again with the fruits of this vision, and can only believe in the reality of the physical body. This was firmly implanted in souls at that time. Things that take place in one age of culture are by no means unconnected with the ages that follow.

Suppose that we represent here the seven consecutive cultural periods of post-Atlantean civilization by a line. The fourth age, which is exactly in the middle, occupies an exceptional position.

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We have only to consider this age exoterically to see that in it the most wonderful physical things have been produced, things by which man has conquered the physical world in a unique and harmonious way. Looking back to the Egyptian pyramids we observe a type of geometric form which demonstrates certain things symbolically. The close union of spirit—the formative human spirit—and the physical form had not yet been completed. We see this with special clearness in the Sphinx, the origin of which is to be traced to a remembrance of the Atlantean etheric human form. In its physical form the Sphinx gives us no direct conviction of this union, although it is a great human conception; in it we see the thought embodied that man is still animal-like below and only attains to what is human in the etheric head.

What confronts us on the physical plane is ennobled in the fourth age in the forms of Greek plastic art; and the moral life, the destiny of man, we find depicted in the Greek tragedies. In them we see the inner life of the spirit played out upon the physical plane in a very wonderful way; we see the meaning of earthly evolution in so far as the gods are connected with it.

So long as the earth was a part of the sun, high Sun-Spirits were united with the human race. By the end of the Atlantean epoch these exalted Beings had gradually faded, step by step, along with the sun, from the consciousness of man. Human consciousness was no longer capable of reaching up after death to the high realms where vision of the Sun-Spirits was possible. Assuming that we are at the standpoint of these Beings (which we can be in spirit), we can picture them saying: We were once united with humanity but had to withdraw from them for a time. The divine world had to disappear from human consciousness so as to re-appear in a newer, higher form through the Christ-Impulse.

A man who belonged to Grecian civilization was incapable as yet of understanding what was to come to earth through the Christ; but an Initiate, one who, as we have seen, knew the Christ aforetime, could say: That spiritual form which was preserved in men's minds as Osiris had to disappear for a time from the sight of man, the horizon of the Gods had to be darkened, but within us dwells the sure consciousness that the glory of God will appear again on earth. This certainty was the result of the cosmic consciousness which men possessed and the consciousness of the withdrawal of the glory of God and of its return is reflected in Greek tragedy.

We see man here represented as the image of the Gods, we see how he lives, strives, and has a tragic end. At the same time the tragedy holds within it the idea that man will yet conquer through his spiritual power. The drama was intended as a presentation of living and dying humanity, and at the same time it reflected man's whole relationship to the universe. In every realm of Greek culture we see this union between things of the spirit and things of the senses. It was a unique age in post-Atlantean civilization.

It is remarkable how certain phenomena of the third age are connected as by underground channels with our own, the fifth age. Certain things which were sown as seed during the Egyptian age are re-appearing in our own; others which were sown as seed during the Persian age will appear in the sixth; and things belonging to the first epoch will return in the seventh. Everything has a deep and law-filled connection, the past pointing always to the future. This connection will best be realized if we explain it by referring to the two extremes, those things connecting the first and the seventh age. Let us turn back to the first age and consider, not what history tells us, but what really existed in ancient pre-Vedic times.

Everything that appeared later had been first prepared for; this was especially the case with the division of mankind into castes. Europeans may feel strong objections to the caste system, but it was justified in the civilization of that time, and is profoundly connected with human karma. The souls coming over from Atlantis were really of very different values, and in some respects it was suitable for these souls, of whom some were at a more advanced stage than others, to be divided in accordance with the karma they had previously stored up for themselves. In that far off age humanity was not left to itself as it is now, but was really led and guided in its development in a much higher way than is generally supposed. At that time highly advanced individuals, whom we call the Rishis, understood the value of souls, and the difference there is between the various categories of souls. At the bottom of the division into castes lies a well-founded cosmic law. Though to a later age this may seem harsh, in that far-off time, when the guidance of humanity was spiritual, the caste principle was entirely suited to human nature.

It is true that in the normal evolution of man those who lived over into a new age with a particular karma came also into a particular caste, and it is also true that a man could only rise above any special caste if he underwent a process of initiation. Only when he attained a stage where he was able to strip off that which was the cause of his karma, only when he lived in Yoga, could the difference in caste, under certain circumstances, be overcome. Let us keep in mind the Anthroposophical principle which lays down that we must put aside all criticism of the facts of evolution and strive only to understand them. However had the impression this division into castes makes on us at the present time, there was every justification for it, and it has to be taken in connection with a far-reaching and just arrangement regarding the human race.

When a person speaks of races today he speaks of something that is no longer quite correct; even in Theosophical handbooks great mistakes are made on this subject. In them it is said that our evolution runs its course in Rounds, that in each Round there are Globes, and in each Globe, Races which develop one after the other—so that we have races in each epoch of the earth's evolution.

But this is not the case. Even in regard to present humanity there is no justification for speaking of a mere development of races. In the true sense of the word we can only speak of race development during the Atlantean epoch. People were so different in external physiognomy throughout the seven periods that one might speak rather of different forms than races. While it is true that the races have arisen through this, it is [in]correct to speak of races in the far back Lemurian epoch; and in our own epoch the idea of race will gradually disappear along with all the differences that are a relic of earlier times. We still speak of races, but all that remains of these today are relics of differences that existed in Atlantean times, and the idea of race has now lost its original meaning. What new idea is to arise in place of the present idea of race?

Humanity will be differentiated in the future even more than in the past; it will be divided into categories, but not in an arbitrary way; from their own spiritual inner capacities men will come to know that they must work together for the whole body corporate.

There will be categories and classes however fiercely class-war may rage today, among those who do not develop egoism but accept the spiritual life and evolve toward what is good a time will come when men will organize themselves voluntarily. They will say: One must do this, the other must do that. Division of work even to the smallest detail will take place; work will be so organized that a holder of this or that position will not find it necessary to impose his authority on others. All authority will be voluntarily recognized, so that in a small portion of humanity we shall again have divisions in the seventh age, which will recall the principle of castes, but in such a way that no one will feel forced into any caste, but each will say: I must undertake a part of the work of humanity, and leave another part to another—both will be equally recognized.

Humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear. Led, as it were, through a secret channel, the seventh age will repeat that which arose prophetically in the first. The third, the Egyptian age, is connected in the same way with our own. Little as it may appear to a superficial view, all that was laid down during the Egyptian age re-appears in the present one. Most of the people living on the earth today were incarnated formerly in Egyptian bodies and experienced an Egyptian environment; having lived through other intermediate incarnations, they are now again on earth, and, in accordance with the laws we have indicated, they unconsciously remember what they experienced in Egypt.

All this is re-appearing now in a mysterious way, and if you are willing to recognize such secret connection of the great laws of the universe working from one civilization to another, you must make yourselves acquainted with the truth, not with all those legendary and fantastic ideas which are given out concerning the facts of human evolution.

People think too superficially about the spiritual progress of humanity. For example, someone remarks about Copernicus that a man with such ideas as his was possible, because in the age in which he lived a change in thought had arisen regarding the solar system. Anyone holding such an opinion has never studied, even exoterically, how Copernicus arrived at his ideas concerning the relationship of the heavenly bodies. One who has done this, and who more especially has followed the grand ideas of Kepler, knows differently, and he will be strengthened even more in these ideas by what occultism has to say about it.

Let us consider this so that we may see the matter clearly, and try to enter into the soul of Copernicus. This soul had lived in the age of ancient Egypt, and had then occupied an important position in the cult of Osiris; it knew that Osiris was held to be the same as the high Sun-Being.

The sun, in a spiritual sense, was at the centre of Egyptian thought and feeling; I do not mean the outwardly visible sun; it was regarded only as the bodily expression of the spiritual sun. Just as the eye is the expression for the power of sight, so to the Egyptian the Sun was the eye of Osiris, the embodiment of the Spirit of the Sun. All this had been experienced at one time by the soul of Copernicus, and it was the unconscious memory of it that impelled him to renew, in a form possible to a materialistic age, this ancient idea of Osiris, which at that time had been entirely spiritual. When humanity had sunk more deeply within the physical plane, this idea confronts us again in its materialistic form, as the Copernican theory.

The Egyptians possessed the spiritual conception and it was the world-karma of Copernicus to retain a memory of such conceptions, and this conjured forth that “combination of bearings” that led to his theory of the solar system. The case was similar with Kepler, who, in his three laws, presented the movement of the planets round the sun in a much more comprehensive way; however abstract they may appear to us, they were the result of a most profound conception. A striking fact in connection with this highly gifted being is contained in a passage written by himself and which fills us with awe when we read it. Kepler writes: “I have thought deeply upon the Solar System. It has revealed to me its secrets; I will carry over the sacred ceremonial vessels of the Egyptians into the modern world.”

Thoughts implanted in the souls of the ancient Egyptians meet us again, and our modern truths are the re-born myths of Egypt. Were it desired, we could follow this up in many details; we could follow it up to the very beginnings of humanity. Let us think once more of the Sphinx, that wondrous, enigmatic form which later became the Sphinx of Oedipus, who put its well-known riddle to man. We have learnt already that the Sphinx is built up from that human form which on the physical plane still resembled that of animals, although the etheric part had already assumed human form. In the Egyptian age man could only see the Sphinx in an etheric form after he had passed through certain stages of initiation. Then it appeared to him. But the important thing is that when a man had true clairvoyant perception it did not appear to him merely as a lump of wood does, but certain feelings were necessarily associated with the vision.

Under certain circumstances a callous person may pass by a highly important work of art and remain unmoved by it; clairvoyant consciousness is not like this; when really developed the fitting emotion is already aroused. The Greek legend of the Sphinx expresses the right feeling, experienced by the clairvoyant during the ancient Egyptian period and also in the Grecian Mysteries, when he had progressed so far that the Sphinx appeared to him. What was it that then appeared before his eyes? He beheld something incomplete something that was in course of development. The form he saw was in a certain way related to that of animals, and in the etheric head we saw what was to work within the physical form in order to shape it more like man. What man was to become, what his task was in evolution, this was the question that rose vividly before him when he saw the Sphinx—a question full of longing, of expectation, and of future development.

The Greeks say that all investigation and philosophy have originated from longing; this is also a saying of clairvoyants. A form appears to man which he can only perceive with his astral consciousness; it worries him, it propounds a riddle, the riddle of man's future. Further, this etheric form, which was present in the Atlantean epoch and lived on as a memory into the Egyptian age, is embodied more and more in man, and re-appears on the other side in the nature of man. It reappears in all the religious doubts, in the impotence of our age of civilization when faced with the question: What is man? In all unanswered questions, in all statements that revolve round “Ignorabimus,” we have to see the Sphinx. In ages that were still spiritual man could rise to heights where the Sphinx was actually before him—today it dwells within him in countless unanswered questions.

It is therefore very difficult for man at the present time to arrive at conviction with regard to the spiritual world. The Sphinx, which formerly was outside him, is now in his inner being, for a Being has appeared in the central epoch of post-Atlantean evolution Who has cast the Sphinx into the abyss—into the individual inner being of every man.

When the Greco-Latin age, with its after-effects, had continued into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we come to the fifth post-Atlantean age. Up to the present new doubts have arisen more and more in place of the old certainty. We meet with such things more and more, and if desired we could discover many more instances of Egyptian ideas, transformed into their materialistic counterpart in the new evolution. We might ask what has really happened in the present age, for this is no ordinary passing over of ideas; things are not met with directly, but they are as if modified. Everything is presented in a more materialistic form; even man's connection with animal nature re-appears, but changed into a materialistic conception. The fact that man knew in earlier times that he could not shape his body otherwise than in the semblance of animals, and that on this account in his Egyptian remembrances he pictured even his gods in animal forms, confronts us today in the generally held materialistic opinion that man has descended from animals. Darwinism is nothing but an heirloom of ancient Egypt in a materialistic form.

From this we see that the path of evolution has by no means been a straightforward one, but that something like a division has taken place, one branch becoming more materialistic and one more spiritual. That which had formerly progressed in one line now split into two lines of development, namely, science and belief.

Going back into earlier times, to the Egyptian, Persian, and ancient Indian civilizations, one does not find a science apart from faith. What was known regarding the spiritual origin of the world passed in a direct line to knowledge of particular things; men were able to rise from knowledge of the material world to the most exalted heights; there was no contradiction between knowledge and faith. An ancient Indian sage or a Chaldean priest would not have understood this difference; even the Egyptians knew no difference between what was simply a matter of belief or a fact of knowledge. This difference became apparent when man had sunk more deeply into matter, and had gained more material culture; but in order to gain this another organization was necessary.

Let us suppose that this descent of man into matter had not taken place; what would have happened? We considered a like descent in the last lecture, but it was of a different nature; this is a new descent in another realm, by which something like an independent science entered alongside the comprehension of what was spiritual. This occurred first in Greece. Up till then opposition between science and religion did not exist; and would have had no meaning to a priest of Egypt. Take, for instance, what Pythagoras learnt from the Egyptians, the teaching regarding numbers. This was not merely abstract mathematics to him; it gave him the musical secrets of the world in the harmony of numbers. Mathematics, which is only something abstract to the man of the present day, was to him a sacred wisdom with a religious foundation.

Man had, however, to sink more and more within the material, physical plane, and it can be seen how the spiritual wisdom of Egypt reappears—but transformed into a materialistic, mythical conception of the universe. In the future, the theories of today will be held to have had only temporal value, just as ancient theories have only a temporal value to the man of today. Perhaps men will then be so sensible that they will not fall into the mistake of some of our contemporaries who say: “Until the nineteenth century man was absolutely stupid as regards science; it was only then he became sensible all that was taught previously about anatomy was nonsense, only the last century has produced what is true.” In the future men will be wiser, and will not give tit for tat; they will not reject our myths of anatomy, philosophy, and Darwinism so disdainfully as present-day man rejects ancient truths. For it is the case that things which today are regarded as firmly established are but transitory forms of truth.

The Copernican system is but a transitory form, it has been brought about through the plunge into materialism, and will be replaced by something different. The forms of truth continually change. In order that all connection with what is spiritual should not be lost, an even stronger spiritual impulse had to enter human evolution. This was described yesterday as the Christ-Impulse. For a time mankind had to be left to itself, as it were, as regards scientific progress, and the religious side had to develop separately; it had to be saved from the progressive onslaught of science.

Thus we see how science, which devoted itself to material things, was separated for a while from things spiritual, which now followed a special course and the two movements—belief in what was spiritual, and the knowledge of external things—proceeded side by side. We even see in one particular period of development in the Middle Ages, a period immediately preceding our own, that science and belief consciously oppose each other, but still seek union.

Consider the Scholastics. They said: Faith was given to man by Christ, this we may not deny; it was a direct gift; and all the science which has been produced since the division took place, can only serve to prove this gift. We see in scholasticism the tendency to employ all science to prove revealed truth. At its prime it said: Men can gaze upwards to the blessedness of faith and to a certain degree human science can enter into it, but to do this men must devote themselves to it.

In the course of time all relationship between science and belief was, however, lost, and there was no longer any hope that they could advance side by side. The extremity of this divergence is found in the philosophy of Kant, where science and belief are completely sundered. In it, on the one hand, the categorical imperative is put forward with its practical postulates of reason; on the other hand, purely theoretical reason which has lost all connection with spiritual truths and declares that from the standpoint of science these cannot be found.

Another powerful impulse was, however, already making itself felt, which also represented a memory of ancient Egyptian thought. Minds appeared that were seeking a union between science and belief, minds that were endeavouring, through entering profoundly into science, to recognize the things of God with such certainty and clarity that they would be accessible to scientific thought. Goethe is typical of such a thinker and of such a point of view. To him religion, art, and science were one; he felt the works of Greek art to be connected with religion, as he felt the great thoughts of Divinity to be reflected in the countless plant formations he investigated.

Taking the whole of modern culture, we have to see in it a memory of Egyptian culture; Egyptian thought is reflected in it from its beginning.

The division in modern culture between science and belief did not arise without long preparation,—and if we are to understand how this came about we must glance briefly at the way post-Atlantean culture was prepared for during the Atlantean epoch.

We have seen how a handful of people who dwelt in the neighbourhood of Ireland had progressed the furthest; they had acquired those qualities which had to appear gradually in the succeeding epochs of civilization. The rudiments of the ego had been developing as we know since the Lemurian epoch, but each stage of selfhood in this small group of people, by whom the stream of culture was carried from West to East, consisted in a tendency to logical thought and the power of judgment. Up to this time these did not exist; if a thought arose it was already substantiated. The beginning of thought that was capable of judgment was implanted in these people, and they bore the rudiments of this with them from West to East in their colonizing migrations, one of which went southwards towards India. Here the first foundations of constructive thinking were laid. Later, this constructive thinking passed into the Persian civilization. In the third cultural period, that of Chaldea, it grew stronger and with the Greeks it developed so far that they have left behind them the glorious monument of Aristotelian philosophy.

Constructive thought continued to develop more and more, but always returned to a central point, where it received reinforcement. We must picture it as follows: When civilization came from the West into Asia one group, that having the smallest amount of purely logical thinking capacity, went toward India; the second group, which traveled towards Persia, had a little more; and the group that went towards Egypt had still more. From within this group were separated off the people of the Old Testament, who had exactly that combination of faculties which had to be developed in order that another forward step might be taken in this purely logical form of human cognition.

With this is associated the other thing we have been considering, namely, the descent to the physical plane. The further we descend the more does thought become merely logical, and the more it tends to a merely external faculty of judgment. Pure logical thought, mere human logic, that which proceeds from one idea to another, requires the human brain as its instrument; the cultivated brain makes logical thought possible. Hence external thinking, even when it has reached an astonishing height, can never of itself comprehend reincarnation, because it is in the first place only applicable to the things of the external sense world that surrounds us.

Logic may indeed be applied to all worlds, but can only be applied directly to the physical world; hence when it appears as human logic it is bound unconditionally to its instrument, the physical brain. Abstract thought could never have entered the world without a further descent into the world of the senses. This development of logical thought is bound up with the loss of ancient clairvoyant vision, and was bought at the cost of this loss. The task of man is to re-conquer clairvoyant vision, adding logical thought to it. In time to come he will obtain imagination as well, but logical thinking will be retained.

The human head had in the first place to be created similar to the etheric head before man could have a brain. It was then first possible for man to descend to the physical plane. In order that all spirituality should not be lost a point of time had to be chosen for the saving of this, when the last impulse to purely mechanical thought had not yet been given. If the Christ had appeared a few centuries later He would have come, as it were, too late, for humanity would have descended too far, would have been too much entangled in thought, and would not have been able to understand Christ. Christ had to come before this last impulse had been received, when the spiritually religious tendency could still be saved as a tendency leading to belief. Then came the last impulse, which plunged human thought to the lowest point, where it was banished and completely chained to physical life. This arose through the Arabs and Mohammedans. Moslem thought is a peculiar episode in Arabian life and thought, which in its passage over to Europe gave the final impulse to logical thinking—to that which is incapable of rising to what is spiritual.

To begin with, man was so led by what may be called Providence or a spiritual guidance that spiritual life was saved in Christendom; later, Arabism approached Europe from the south and provided the field for external culture. It is only capable of comprehending what is external. Do we not see this in the Arabesque, which is incapable of rising to what is living, but has to remain formal? We can also see in the Mosque how the spirit is, as it were, sucked out.

Humanity had first to be led down into matter, then in a roundabout way by means of Arabism, and the invasion of the Arab, we are shown how modern science first arose in the sharp contact of Arabism with Europeanism which had already accepted Christianity. The ancient Egyptian memories had come to life again; but what made them materialistic? What made them into thought-forms of the dead? We can show this clearly. If the path of progress had been smooth the memory of what had taken place previously would have re-appeared in our age. That which is spiritual has been saved as a whole, but one wing of European culture has been gripped by materialism. We also see how the remembrance of those who recalled the ancient Egyptian age was so changed by its passage through Arabism that it reappeared in a materialistic form. The fact that Copernicus comprehended the modern way of regarding the solar system was the outcome of his Egyptian memory. The reason why he presented it in a materialistic form, making of it a dead mechanical rotation, is because the Arabian mentality, encountering this memory from the other side, forced it into materialism.

From all that has been said you can see how secret channels connect the third and the fifth age. This can be seen even in the principle of initiation, and as modern life is to receive a principle of initiation in Rosicrucianism let us ask what this is.

In modern science we have to see a union between Egyptian remembrances and Arabism, which tends towards that which is dead. On the other side we see another union consummated, that between what Egyptian initiates imparted to their pupils and things spiritual. We see a union between wisdom and that which had been rescued as the truths of belief. This wondrous harmony between the Egyptian remembrance in wisdom and the Christian impulse of power is found in Rosicrucian spiritual teaching. So the ancient seed laid down in the Egyptian period re-appears, not merely as a repetition, but differentiated and upon a higher level.

These are thoughts which should not only instruct with regard to the universe, earth, and man, but they should enter as well into our feeling and our impulses of will and give us wings; for they show us the path we have to travel. They point the path to that which is spiritual, and also show how we may carry over into the future what, in a good sense, we have gained here on the purely material plane.

We have seen how paths separate and again unite; the time will come when not the remembrances only of Egypt will unite with spiritual truths to produce a Rosicrucian science, but science and Rosicrucianism will also unite. Rosicrucianism is both a religion and at the same time a science that is firmly bound to what is material. When we turn to the Babylonian period we find this is shown in myth of the third period of civilization; here we are told of the God Maradu, who meets with the evil principle, the serpent of the Old Testament, and splits his head in two, so that in a certain sense the earlier adversary is divided into two parts. This was in fact what actually happened; a partition of that which arose in the primeval, watery earth-substance, as symbolized by the serpent. In the upper part we have to see the truths upheld by faith, in the lower the purely material acceptance of the world. These two must be united—science and that which is spiritual—and they will be united in the future. This will come to pass when, through Rosicrucian wisdom, spirituality is intensified, and itself becomes a science, when it once more coincides with the investigations made by science. Then a mighty harmonious unity will again arise; the various currents of civilization will unite and flow together through the channels of humanity. Do we not see in recent times how this unity is being striven for?

When we consider the ancient Egyptian mysteries we see that religion, science, and art were then one. The course of the world evolution is shown in the descent of the Gods into matter; this is presented to us in a grand dramatic symbolism. Anyone who can appreciate this symbolism has science before him, for he sees there vividly portrayed the descent of man and his entrance into the world. He is also confronted with something else, namely, art, for the picture presented to him is an artistic reflection of science. But he does not see only these two, science and art, in the mysteries of ancient Egypt; they are for him at the same time religion, for what is presented to him pictorially is filled with religious feeling.

These three were later divided; religion, science, and art went separate ways, but already in our age men feel that they must again come together.

What else was the great effort of Richard Wagner than a spiritual striving, a mighty longing towards a cultural impulse? The Egyptians saw visible pictures because the external eye had need of them. In our age what they saw will be repeated; once more the separate streams of culture will unite, a whole will be constructed, this time preferably in a work of art whose elements will be the sequence of sound. On every side we find connections between what appertained to Egypt and modern times; everywhere this reflection can be seen. As time goes on our souls will realize more and more that each age is not merely a repetition but an ascent; that a progressive development is taking place in humanity. Then the most intimate strivings of humanity—the striving for initiation—must find fulfillment.

The principle of initiation suited to the first age cannot be the principle of initiation for the changed humanity of today. It is of no value to us to be told that the Egyptians had already found primeval wisdom and truth in ancient times; that these are contained in the old Oriental religions and philosophies, and that everything that has appeared since exists only to enable us to experience the same over again if we are to rise to the highest initiation. No! This is useless talk. Each age has need of its own particular force within the depths of the human soul.

When it is asserted in certain Theosophical quarters that there is a western initiation for our stage of civilization, but that it is a late product, that true initiation comes only from the East, we must answer that this cannot be determined without knowing something further. The matter must be gone into more deeply than is usually done. There may be some who say that in Buddha the highest summit was reached, that Christ has brought nothing new since Buddha; but only in that which meets us positively can we recognize what really is the question here. If we ask those who stand on the ground of Western initiation whether they deny anything in Eastern initiation, whether they make any different statements regarding Buddha than those in the East, they answer, “No.” They value all; they agree with all; but they understand progressive development. They can be distinguished from those who deny the Western principle of initiation by the fact that they know how to accept what Orientalism has to give, and in addition they know the advanced forms which the course of time has made necessary. They deny nothing in the realm of Eastern initiation.

Take a description of Buddha by one who accepts the standpoint of Western esotericism. This will not differ from that of a follower of Eastern esotericism; but the man with the Western standpoint holds that in Christ there is something which goes beyond Buddha. The Eastern standpoint does not allow this. If it is said that Buddha is greater than Christ that does not decide anything, for this depends on something positive. Here the Western standpoint is the same as the Eastern. The West does not deny what the East says, but it asserts something further.

The life of Buddha is not rightly understood when we read that Buddha perished through the enjoyment of too much pork; this must not be taken literally. It is rightly objected from the standpoint of Christian esotericism that people who understand something trivial from this understand nothing about it at all; this is only an image, and shows the position in which Buddha stood to his contemporaries. He had imparted too many of' the sacred Brahmanical secrets to the outer world. He was ruined through having given out that which was hidden, as is everyone else who imparts what is hidden.

This is what is expressed in this peculiar symbol. Allow me to emphasize strongly that we disagree in no way with Oriental conceptions, but people must understand the esotericism of such things. If it is said that this is of little importance: it is not the case. They might as well think it of little importance when we are told that the writer of the Apocalypse wrote it amid thunder and lightning, and if anyone found occasion to mock at the Apocalypse because of this we should reply: “What a pity he does not know what it means when we are told that the Apocalypse was imparted to the earth 'mid lightning and thunder!”

We must keep in mind the fact that no negation has passed the lips of Western esotericists, and that much that was puzzling at the beginning of the Anthroposophical movement has been explained by them. The followers of Western esotericism never find in it anything out of harmony with the mighty truths given to the world by H. P. Blavatsky. When we are told, for example, that we have to distinguish in the Buddha the Dhyani-Buddha, the Adi-Buddha, and the human Buddha, this is first fully explained by the Western esotericist. For we know that what is regarded as the Dhyani-Buddha is nothing but the etheric body of the historic Buddha that had been taken possession of by a God; that this etheric body had been laid hold of by the being whom we call Wotan. This was already contained in Eastern esotericism, but was only first understood in the right way through Western esotericism.

The Anthroposophical movement should be especially careful that the feeling which rises in our souls from such thoughts as these should stimulate in us the desire for further development, that we should not stand still for a moment. The value of our movement does not consist in the ancient dogmas it contains (if these are but fifteen years old), but in comprehending its true purpose, which is the opening up of fresh springs of spiritual knowledge. It will then become a living movement and will help to bring about that future which, if only very briefly, has been presented to your mental sight today, by drawing upon what we are able to observe of the past.

We are not concerned with the imparting of theoretic truths, but that our feeling, our perception, and our actions may be full of power.

We have considered the evolution of Universe, Earth, and Man; we desire so to grasp what we have gathered from these studies that we may be ready at any time to enter upon development.

What we call “future” must always be rooted in the past; knowledge has no value if not changed into motive power for the future. The purpose for the future must be in accordance with the knowledge of the past, but this knowledge is of little value unless changed into propelling force for the future.

What we have heard has presented to us a picture of' such mighty motive powers that not only our will and our enthusiasm have been stimulated, but our feelings of joy and of security in life have also been deeply moved. When we note the interplay of so many currents we are constrained to say: Many are the seeds within the womb of Time. Through an ever deepening knowledge man must learn how better to foster all these seeds. Knowledge in order to work, in order to gain certainty in life, must be the feeling that pervades all Anthroposophical study.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the so-called theories of Spiritual Science only attain final truth when they are changed into something living—into impulses of feeling and of certainty as regards life; so that our studies may not merely be theoretical, but may play a real part in evolution.

by Marie Steiner

The cycle of lectures now appearing in book form was given by Rudolf Steiner in 1908, and the following words of his might well serve as its motto: “The mission of our age is to bring forth not an ancient wisdom, but a new wisdom, one that points not only to the past but that works prophetically into the future.”

The previous year at the memorable congress of the General Theosophical Society at Munich, Doctor Steiner clearly indicated the direction that the revival of the Theosophical movement should take, for the movement was threatening at that time to degenerate into one-sidedness influenced by Oriental ideas which did not accommodate themselves to the mental and soul-life of the people of Europe.

As against the many grievous misunderstandings that had arisen, Rudolf Steiner gave out something positives teaching that was suited to the growth of humanity. He also gave for the first time on that occasion a fitting artistic setting to the spiritual teaching he had to offer. The colours of the walls, and the pictures of the Seals represented the Rosicrucian spiritual aims; the motive of the column-forms portrayed the future, and this was aided by the dramatic reproduction of “The Sacred Drama of Eleusis” by Edouard Schuré, which presented in a living way the Mysteries of ancient Greece. With these Rudolf Steiner connected the Mythology of northern Germany. He had something new to give which hitherto had not been offered to the blind followers of a submissive Anglo-Indian Theosophy.

The courage with which Rudolf Steiner trod new paths stirred up spiritual opposition among the leaders of the Theosophical Society, who sought constantly to hamper and fetter him. This opposition forced him to withdraw from the post he had held in the Society. The conditions under which he had undertaken office were: that he should be free to allow that which threw light on the mystery of Christ to flow into European culture, which since the Event of Christ had become western esotericism. When certain leading theosophical circles recognised the remarkable spiritual capacities and the knowledge that Rudolf Steiner was able to bring to bear on this problem, means were sought to hamper his activity. They considered that the best way to do this was to proclaim the coming of Christ again in the flesh, in the body of a Hindu boy, and the centre from which a few years later Krishnamurti was to appear as a future world teacher was cautiously prepared.

It was whispered that Rudolf Steiner would be compelled—by the appearance of Krishnamurti—to divulge Christian secrets concerning which he would ordinarily have been silent. This interfered with his quiet and steady aim in building up the system and organisation of his teachings. He considered it his task to instruct humanity in the methods of initiation suited to present conditions of consciousness. Beside the reverent pursuit of ancient wisdom, it was necessary to waken an understanding of the changed form in which this wisdom was now to be given, and to show how such forms are subject to a continual up-rising, maturing, and decay, in order that new life may spring ever and again from what is dead. An historical sense had to be aroused in men, not merely a wonder-filled contemplation of ancient manifestations. The mysterious connection of the great cosmic laws uniting one age of civilization with another had to be made known. No one had ever described in so powerful and sublime a fashion the primeval wisdom which streamed down to earth from spiritual heights as Rudolf Steiner had done. No one before him had been able to speak in terms of modern consciousness of the reflection of the great Cosmic Existence in individual man—the microcosm.

All this teaching culminated in the central event of human evolution: the descent of the Sun-Spirit into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Rudolf Steiner showed how the sun forces were thereby able to penetrate and spiritualize the planet, summoning men to fit themselves for the task that was before them. By the death on Golgotha an incisive mystic fact was consummated; it could endure no repetition, otherwise it would have taken place in vain.

In order that these truths might be brought to humanity, fact by fact had to be introduced in gently balanced stages. The foundations had already been laid before Krishnamurti was presented to Europeans. In this cycle, in the year 1908, the path had already been entered, the logical sequence of events from civilization to civilization had been described, the great central event clearly illuminated. There are occasions when the time in which a truth is to be given out may be hastened; it may be necessary to confront certain challenges with facts which one would rather have allowed to speak for themselves. This does not mean that something was done which otherwise would not have been done; it had to be done because it was rooted in the deepest necessities of present evolution, both cosmic and human; and, with complete self-sacrifice, the responsibility was assumed as the task of a life-time. The Theosophical Society cut itself off from this influx of new wisdom, it rejected what would have infused new life into it, and to the admiring recognition of an ancient honoured wisdom would have given new meaning to historic events.

The Theosophical Society would have been led with ripened wisdom from India by way of Persia, Chaldea, and Egypt deeply into the mystery of the chosen people, and the reason for this choice would have been made intelligible to it; and thence it would have been led to the Mystery places of Asia Minor and southern Europe. Further, the soul-life of the expectant peoples of central and northern Europe would have been touched on, and the whole teaching would have culminated in the Event of Golgotha, by which the hidden mysteries which until now had been veiled stepped forth on to the plane of universal history.

The individual personality evolves within the general evolution of humanity, and must learn to find within itself the central point of its purpose, which is primarily in spiritual experience. The tragedy of the personality lies in its severance from the spiritual world; in its seeking, erring, and striving, through the approaching night of separation from what is spiritual, till finally it perceives in spiritual darkness its tragic fate.

Comprehension of such things is necessary if we are to understand ourselves. Into this night of darkness shines a light, the light of Christian esotericism which was kindled in Palestine and passed thence into Europe. It broke with wonderful clearness over the island of Hibernia, where, notwithstanding the repression of the monastic colonies by a Church, fettered by Roman Imperialism, its radiance endured in secret as a stream of spiritual force.

Through this there arose the spiritual orders of knighthood and the desire for religious communities. German mysticism appeared as a rich blossom of deep religious fervour. In order to keep pace with events, above all with the conquests of science, and in order that faith might stand firm in the darkness of a materialistic age, something further had to emerge. The power of Belief had to yield to the certainty of Science. This new force was the aim of the Rosicrucian schools. They concerned themselves with the newly evolving forces of consciousness in the coming age. Rosicrucian esotericism, with its earnest striving after the new forces of human knowledge, with the tragic fate and spiritual tests laid upon its followers, was yet able here and there, as Rudolf Steiner has shown us, to raise the veil of its mysteries. New forces of spiritual consciousness were born from it that were able to overcome materialism by cognition. In the hard struggle to recover the faculty of spiritual perception, once given to man and now lost, but which must be regained through the power of the ego, through the death and re-birth of the personality, the ego-being of striving humanity grows strong. When man consciously grasps this ego-being he can rise and unite himself once more with the Godhead. That this might come to pass the Divine Ego descended—once—to earth. The unique character of this event must be recognised as the decisive turning point of the earth's destiny. Rosicrucian teaching sums it up in the motto “In Christo Morimur”; in Christ we die to live above, to live upwards to the Spirit. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus”; through striving towards the Christ we gain true life, we become awake in the Spirit out of which we once were born.

The personality had to come into being, it had to comprehend itself, to take itself in hand and recognize itself as a centre, to confront and then overcome itself, to learn to die, that it might realize itself again as a free ego-being whose central point is the Divine Ego.

This is the path of western esotericism; the European cannot avoid it. Formerly his task was to complete the education of the personality, entangled as it was in egoism; his present task is to overcome egoism, to transmute it by liberating the divine-willing, strong ego-nature within him. This he can only do through controlling the forces of his consciousness through knowledge and cognition. He must be willing to recognise the smallest in the greatest. He cannot eliminate whole epochs of time with their tremendous significance for human development. Power will be given to him if today he desires knowledge and cognition of the Universe, Earth, and Man.

This knowledge is now called Anthroposophy. It gives its teaching and declares its creed quite openly; it hides nothing, for it knows the time has come when what was once nurtured in secret must step forth on to the plane of history.

In describing the descent of man from the Divine and his way back again to Divinity, Anthroposophy might have felt secure within genuine Theosophy, they are so far one and the same “Ex Deo Nascimur”—Out of God we are born to the Godhead we return when we have received the Christ unto us.

But men turn names to their own particular ends. Societies arise which no longer express their true nature—they may indeed become the very opposite of what they were at first. If one has such a contradiction before one, as for example the pseudo-Christian statement engineered by the Theosophical Society, one cannot strengthen it by means employed in the advocacy of truth.

From his sense of responsibility to truth Rudolf Steiner declared it impossible, in the lectures which under pressure from the members he was forced to print, to employ the term “Us Theosophists” any more. The Theosophical Society is fast stuck in Oriental dogma, and rejects the intellectual permeation of Christian truths to which a rightly guided Theosophical movement should necessarily have come. That which the Theosophical Society did not accept is now represented by those calling themselves Anthroposophists.

It has been necessary therefore in the publication of any cycles of lectures to employ the word Anthroposophy, or Spiritual Science, instead of Theosophy. The ancient holy name Theosophy has been caricatured and falsified, and especially to the outer world must we make clear the difference, especially in all this confusion between Societies bearing great and honourable names.

It is undoubtedly our duty in memory of Rudolf Steiner to throw light upon the conditions of that conflict which aimed at crippling his world-embracing activity in Christian esotericism. It is our duty to show how necessary his action was in separating from a Society which saw in Thibetism, Hinduism, and Buddhism the sum of all wisdom, but in the Mystery of Golgotha only the karmic fate of a noble personality not yet matured to ultimate perfection. The leaders of the Theosophical Society were determined to get control of the Society and run it in their own way.

With their pseudo-Christ, to whom in various circumstances they ascribed varying names as it appeared to suit, they hope to win adherents of other forms of belief and satisfy the longings of western hearts, and in this way gradually and gently to turn the tide of European thought back into the stream of pre-Christian spirituality.

Let us close these observations with words of Rudolf, Steiner which are directly connected with the above.

“We see a primeval wisdom preserved in the Mysteries of past epochs; but our wisdom must be an apocalyptic wisdom, of which we must plant the seeds. We have need once again of a principle of Initiation wherein the original connection with the Spiritual world can be reestablished.”

This is the task of the Anthroposophical world movement.

Spiritual Connections between the Culture-streams of Ancient and Modern Times.

If we ask ourselves what spiritual science should be for men, then presumably, out of all sorts of reactions and feelings that we have developed in the course of our work in this field, we will place the following answer before our souls: Spiritual science should be for us a path to the higher development of our humanity, of all that is human in us.

Thus we set up a life-aim, which in a certain way is self-understood for every thinking and feeling person, a life-aim that includes the achieving of the highest ideals and also includes the unfolding of the deepest and most significant forces in our souls. The best men in all ages have asked themselves how man can rightly bring to expression what lies within him, and to this question the most diverse answers have been given. Perhaps none can be found that is terser or more telling than the answer Goethe gave out of a deep conviction in his Geheimnisse:

“From the power that binds all beings
That man frees himself who overcomes himself.”

Deep meaning lies in these words, for they show us clearly and pregnantly what lies at the heart of all evolution. This is that man develops his inner feeling through rising above himself. Thereby we lift ourselves, so to speak, above ourselves. The soul that overcomes itself finds the path that leads beyond itself to the highest treasures of humanity. This lofty goal of spiritual research should be borne in mind when we undertake to treat such a theme as the one that is to occupy us here. It will lead us beyond the ordinary horizons of life to sublime things. We will have to survey wide reaches of time if we take as our subject an epoch stretching from ancient Egypt down to our own day. We will have to pass millennia in review, and what we gain therefrom will really be something connected with the deepest concerns of our souls, something that grips our innermost soul-life. Only apparently does the man who strives toward the heights of life remove himself from his immediate surroundings; just through this he comes to an understanding of his daily concerns. Man must get away from the troubles of the day, from what his routine brings to him, and look up to the great events of the history of the world and its peoples. Then for the first time he finds what is most sacred for his soul. It may seem strange to suggest that connections, intimate connections, should be sought for between our own time and ancient Egypt, when the mighty pyramids and the Sphinx appeared. It can at first seem remarkable that one should understand his own time better by directing his gaze so far back. But just for this purpose we are going to look backward over much wider and more comprehensive epochs. This will bring the result we seek: The possibility of transcending ourselves.

To one who has already carefully studied the ideas of spiritual science, it will not seem strange that one should look for a connection between widely separated periods of time. It is one of our basic convictions that the human soul continually returns, that the experiences between birth and death occur repeatedly for us. The doctrine of reincarnation has become ever more familiar to us. When we reflect on this we may ask: Since these souls that dwell in us today have often been here before, is it possible that they were also present in ancient Egypt during Egyptian cultural epoch, that the same souls are in us which at that time looked up at the gigantic pyramids and the enigmatic Sphinxes?

The answer to this question is, Yes. Our souls have beheld the old cultural monuments that they see again today. The same souls that lived then have gone through later periods and have appeared again in our own time. We know that no life remains without fruit; we know that what the soul has gone through in the way of experiences remains within it and appears in later incarnations as powers, temperament, capacities, and dispositions. Thus the way we look on nature today, the way we take up what our times bring forth, the way we view the world, all this was prepared in ancient Egypt, in the land of the pyramids. We were then prepared in such a way that we now look at the physical world as we do. Just how these widely separated periods link themselves together is what we will now explore.

If we want to grasp the deeper meaning of these lectures, we must go a long way back in earthly evolution, We know that our earth has often changed. Before ancient Egypt there were still other cultures. By means of occult research we can see much further back into the gray primeval times of human evolution, and we come to times when the earth appeared quite other than it is today. Things were entirely different in ancient Asia and Africa. If we look back clairvoyantly into primeval times, we come to a point where a tremendous catastrophe, caused by water-forces, took place on our earth and fundamentally altered its face. If we go still further back, we reach a time when the earth had an entirely different physiognomy, when what now forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and America, was above water, was land. We come to a time when our souls lived in entirely different bodies than today; we reach ancient Atlantis, of which our external science can as yet say little.

The regions of Atlantis were destroyed through colossal deluges. Human bodies had different forms at that time, but the souls that live in us today lived also in the ancient Atlanteans. Those were our souls. Then the water-catastrophe caused a movement of the Atlantean peoples, a great migration from west to east. We ourselves were these peoples. Toward the end of Atlantis all was in movement. We wandered from the west toward the east, through Ireland, Scotland, Holland, France, and Spain. Thus the peoples moved eastward and populated Europe, Asia, and the northern parts of Africa.

It must not be imagined that those who, in the last great migration, wandered out of the west into the regions that have gradually developed into Asia, Europe, and Africa, did not encounter other peoples. Almost all of Europe, the northern parts of Africa, and large parts of Asia were already inhabited at that time. These areas were not peopled from the west only; they had already been settled earlier, so that this migration found a strange population already established. We may assume that when quieter times set in, special cultural relations arose. There was, for instance, in the neighborhood of Ireland, a region where, before the catastrophe that now lies thousands of years behind us, there lived the most advanced portions of the entire population of the earth. These portions then migrated, under the special guidance of great individualities, through Europe to a region of central Asia, and from that point cultural colonies were sent out to the most diverse places. One such colony of the post-Atlantean time was sent from this group of people into India, finding a population that had been seated there from primeval times and had its own culture. Paying due heed to what was already present, these colonists founded the first post-Atlantean culture. This was many thousand years ago, and external documents tell us scarcely anything about it. What appears in these documents is much later. In those great compendiums of Wisdom called the Vedas, we have only the final echoes of a very early Indian culture that was directed by super-earthly beings and was founded by the Holy Rishis. It was a culture of a unique kind, and we today can form only a feeble idea of it because the Vedas are only a reflection of that primeval holy Indian culture.

After this culture there followed another, the second cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean time. Out of this the wisdom of Zarathustra flowed and the Persian culture arose. Long did the Indian culture endure, long also the Persian, reaching a culmination in Zarathustra.

Then arose, under the influence of colonists who were sent into the land of the Nile, the culture that is comprised under the four names, Chaldean-Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian. This third post-Atlantean culture arose in Asia Minor and northern Africa, and reached its summit, on the one side, in the wonderful Chaldean star-lore and, on the other, in the Egyptian culture.

Then comes a fourth age, developing in the south of Europe, the age of the Greco-Roman culture, which dawns with the songs of Homer and goes on to produce the Greek sculptures and the art of poetry that appears in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Rome also belonged to this period. The epoch begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in 747 B. C., and lasts until the fourteenth or fifteenth century A. D. After that we have the fifth period, in which we ourselves live, and this in turn will be followed by the sixth and seventh periods.

In the seventh period, ancient India will appear in a new form. We shall see that there is a remarkable law that enables us to understand the working of wonderful forces through the various epochs and the relationships of the epochs to each other. If we begin by looking at the first period, that of the Indian culture, we will find that this first culture later recrudesces in a new form in the seventh period. Ancient India will then appear in a new form. Mysterious forces are at work here. And the second period, which we have called the Persian, will appear again in the sixth period. After our own culture perishes, we will see the Zarathustra religion revive in the culture of the sixth period. And in the course of these lectures we will see how, in our own fifth period, there takes place a sort of reawakening of the third period, the Egyptian. The fourth period stands in the middle; it is peculiar to itself, and neither earlier nor later does it have a parallel.

To make this mysterious law somewhat clearer, we should add the following. We know that India has something that strikes our humanitarian consciousness as strange. This is the division into definite castes, into priests, warriors, merchants, and laborer. This strict segregation is foreign to our modern views. In the first post-Atlantean culture it was not strange, it was entirely natural; in those times it could not be otherwise than that the souls of men should be divided into four grades according to their capacities. No harshness was felt in it for men were distributed by their leaders, who had such authority that what they prescribed was accepted without question. It was felt that the leaders, the seven Holy Rishis who had received their instruction from divine beings in Atlantis, could see where each man should be placed. Thus such a classification of men was something altogether natural. An entirely different grouping will appear in the seventh period. The division in the first period was effected by authority, but in the seventh period men will group themselves according to objective points of view. Something similar is seen among the ants; they form a state which, in its wonderful structure as well as in its capacity to perform a relatively prodigious amount of work, is not rivaled by any human state. Yet there we have just what seems to be alien to us, the caste system; for each ant has its particular task.

Whatever we may think of this today, men will see that the salvation of humanity lies in division into objective groups, and they will even be able to combine division of labor with equality of rights. Human society will appear as a wonderful harmony. This is something we can see in the annals of the future. Thus ancient India will appear again; and in a similar way certain traits of the third period will appear again in the fifth.

Glancing at the immediate implications of our theme, we see a large domain. We see the gigantic pyramids, the enigmatic Sphinx. The souls that belonged to the ancient Indians were also incarnated in Egypt and are again incarnated today. If we follow our general line of thought into detail, we will discover two phenomena that show us how, in superearthly connections, there are mysterious threads between the Egyptian culture and that of today. We have observed the law of repetition in the different periods of time, but it will seem far more significant if we follow it in spiritual regions. We are all familiar with a painting of great importance that has surely passed before all our souls at least once. I mean Raphael's famous painting of the Sistine Madonna, which by a chain of circumstances has come to be located among us in central Germany. In this picture, which is available in countless reproductions, we have learned to admire the wonderful purity poured out over the whole form. We have all felt something in the countenance of the mother, in the singular way the form floats in the air, perhaps also in the deep expression of the child's eyes. Then, if we see the cloud-forms round about from which numerous little angel-heads appear, we have a still deeper feeling, a feeling that makes the whole picture more comprehensible to us. I know it seems daring when I say that if one gazes deeply and earnestly on this child in the arms of the mother and on the clouds in the background forming themselves into a number of little angel-heads, then he has the feeling that this child was not born in the natural way, but that it is one of those that float round about in the clouds. This Jesus child itself is such a cloud-form, only become a little denser, as though one of the little angels had flown out of the clouds onto the arm of the Madonna. That would be a healthy feeling. If we make this feeling live within us, then our view will expand and free itself from certain narrow conceptions about the natural connections of life. Just out of such a picture our narrow vision can be expanded to see that what must happen in a certain way according to modern laws could at one time have been different. We will discern that there was once a form of reproduction other than the sexual one. In short, we will perceive deep connections between what is human and the spiritual forces in this picture. This is what lies in it.

If we allow our gaze to wander back from this Madonna into the Egyptian time, we are met by something similar, by an equally sublime picture. The Egyptian had Isis, the figure connected with the words: I am what was, what is, and what will be. No mortal has yet raised my veil.

A deep mystery, heavily veiled, manifests itself in the figure of Isis, the lovable goddess who, in the spiritual consciousness of the ancient Egyptian, was present with the Horus child as our Madonna is present today with the Jesus child. In the fact that this Isis is presented to us as something bearing the eternal within it, we are again reminded of our feeling in contemplating the Madonna. We must see deep mysteries in Isis, mysteries that are grounded in the spiritual. The Madonna is a remembrance of Isis: the Isis appears again in the Madonna. This is one of the connections that I spoke of. We must learn to recognize with our feelings the deep mysteries that show a superearthly connection between ancient Egypt and our modern culture.

Still another connection can be brought before you today. We recall how the Egyptian handled the dead; we remember the mummies, and how the Egyptian concerned himself that the outer physical form should be preserved for a long time. We know that he filled his tombs with such mummies, in which he had preserved the outer form, and that as mementos of the past physical life he gave to the deceased certain utensils and possessions suited to the needs of physical life. Thus what the person had had in the physical was to be retained. In this way the Egyptian bound the dead to the physical plane. This custom developed more and more and is a special earmark of the old Egyptian culture. Such a thing is not without consequences for the soul. Let us remember that our souls were in Egyptian bodies. This is quite correct; our souls were incorporated in these bodies that became mummies. We know that when man, after death, is freed from his physical and etheric bodies, he has a different consciousness; he is by no means unconscious in the astral world. He can look down from the spiritual world, even though today he cannot look up; he can then look down on the physical earth. It is not then indifferent to him whether his body has been preserved as a mummy, has been burned, or has decayed. A definite kind of connection arises through this. We shall see this mysterious connection. Through the fact that in ancient Egypt the bodies were preserved for a long time, the souls experienced something very definite in the period after death. When they looked down they knew—that is my body. They were bound to this physical body. They had the form of their body before them. This body became important to the souls, for the soul is susceptible to impressions after death. The impression made by the mummified body imprinted itself deeply, and the soul was formed in accordance with this impression.

These souls went through incarnations in the Greco-Latin period, and in our own time they are living in us. It was not without effect that they saw their mummified bodies after death, that they were repeatedly led back to these bodies; this is by no means unimportant. They attached their sympathies to these bodies, and the fruit of their looking down upon them appears now, in the fifth period, in the inclination that souls have today to lay great weight upon the outer physical life. All that we describe today as the attachment to matter stems from the fact that the souls at that time, out of the spiritual world, could look upon their own embodiment. Through this man learned to love the physical world; through this it is so often said today that the only important thing is the physical body between birth and death. Such views do not arise out of nothing.

This is not a criticism of the practice of mummifying. We only want to point to certain necessities that are connected with the repeated incarnating of the soul. Without this pondering on the mummies men would not have been equal to developing further. We would by now have lost all interest in the physical world had the Egyptians not had the mummy-cult. It had to be thus if a proper interest in the physical world was to be awakened. That we see the world as we do today is a consequence of the fact that the Egyptians mummified the physical body after death.

This cultural stream was under the influence of initiates, who could see into the future. Not through any whim did men make mummies. Particularly in those days mankind was led by high individualities who prescribed What was right. This was done under authority. In the schools of the initiates it was known that our fifth epoch was connected with the third epoch. These mysterious connections stood at that time before the eyes of the priests, who instituted mummification so that the souls might acquire the disposition to seek spiritual experience in the external physical world.

The world is guided through wisdom; this is a second example of such connections. That men think as they do today is a result of what they experienced in ancient Egypt. Here we glimpse deep mysteries that reveal themselves in the cultural streams. We have barely touched these mysteries, for what has been shown of the Madonna as a remembrance of Isis, together with what we have seen of mummification, gives only a feeble hint of the real spiritual connections. But we will throw more light upon these relationships; we will consider not only what appears outwardly, but also what lies behind the external.

External life runs its course between birth and death. Man lives a much longer life after death, in what we know as kamaloca and the experiences of the spiritual world. The experiences in the super-sensible worlds are no more uniform than the experiences here in the physical world. What did we experience as ancient Egyptians in the other world?

When our eyes looked on the pyramids and the Sphinx, how completely different was the course of our lives, how differently did our souls live between birth and death! That life cannot be compared to the life of the present day; such a comparison would have no meaning, and the experiences between death and a new birth have been far more dissimilar than the experiences of outer life. During the Egyptian epoch the soul experienced something quite different than in the Greek world, or in the time of Charlemagne, or in our own time. Also in the other world, in the spiritual world, evolution takes place, and what the soul experiences today between death and a new birth is something quite different from what the ancient Egyptian experienced when he laid aside his outer form at death. Just as mummification worked on in its peculiar way, causing the mood of the present day, just as this external life repeats itself from the third into the fifth period, so does evolution continue in those mysterious worlds between death and birth. This also we will have to study and here again we will find a mysterious connection. Then we will be able to grasp what lives in us as the fruit of that ancient time. We will be led into deep recesses of the labyrinth of the earth's evolution. But just through this we will recognize the full connection between what the Egyptian built, what the Chaldean thought, and what we today live. We will see what was then achieved flaring up again in what surrounds us, in what interests us in our environment. Physically and spiritually we will obtain clues to this connection. It will also be shown how evolution proceeds, how the fourth period forms a wonderful link between the third and the fifth. Thus our souls will lift themselves to the significant connections of the world, and the fruit will be a deep understanding of what lives in us.

The Reflection of Cosmic Events in the Religious Views of Men.

Yesterday we looked at certain connections in the spiritual relationships of the so-called post-Atlantean time. We saw how the first cultural epoch of this period will repeat itself in the last, the seventh; how the Persian culture will repeat itself in the sixth; and how the Egyptian culture, which will occupy us during the next few days, repeats itself in our own lives and destinies in the fifth period. Of the fourth culture, the Greco-Latin, we were able to say that it occupies an exceptional position in that it experiences no repetition. Thus we could point in a sketchy way to the mysterious connections in the cultures of the post-Atlantean time, which follows after the time of the Atlantis that perished through powerful water-catastrophes. This age that follows Atlantis will perish in turn. At the end of our fifth great epoch, the post-Atlantean, there will be catastrophes that will work in a way similar to those at the close of the Atlantean epoch. Through the War of All Against All, the seventh culture of the fifth epoch will find its conclusion. These are interesting connections that are indicated in certain repetitions, and when we follow them more closely they will throw light into the depths of our soul life.

In order to lay a proper foundation, we must today allow still other repetitions to pass before our mind's eye. We will let our glance rove far into the evolution of our earth, and we will see that these wide horizons must have an intimate interest for us.

But let us begin with an admonition, a warning against a mechanical approach to the repetitions. When in the realm of occultism we speak of such repetitions, saying that the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth, etc., it is easy to let a certain gift for combinations get the upper hand, so that we try to apply such schemes or diagrams in other contexts also. It is easy to believe that we can do this, and many books on theosophy actually contain a good deal of rubbish of this sort. Hence there must be a strong warning that such combinations are not controlling, but only perception, spiritual vision, without which we go astray. Such combinations must be warned against. What we can read in the spiritual world may be understood, but not discovered, through logic. It can be discovered only through experience.

If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more clearly, we must achieve a general view of the evolution of the earth as it presents itself to the seer who can direct his spiritual gaze to the events of the most remote past. If we look far back into the evolution of the earth, we can say that our earth has not always appeared as it does today. It did not have the firm mineral base of today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; the earth did not bear the same plants and animals, and men were not in such a fleshly body as they have today; men had no bony system. All that was formed later. The farther we look back, the nearer we come to a condition which, if we could have observed it from cosmic distances, we would have seen as a mist, as a fine etheric cloud. This mist was much larger than our present earth, for it extended as far as the outermost planets of our solar system and even farther. It included a far-reaching nebular mass, wherein was contained all that went into the formation of the earth, and also of the planets and even of the sun.

If we could have examined this mass of mist closely, if an observer could have approached it, it would have seemed to be composed entirely of fine etheric points. When we see a swarm of gnats from a distance, it looks to us like a single cloud; close-up, however, we see the single insects. Thus, in the most remote past, the mass of our earth would have appeared, although then it was not material in our sense but was condensed only to an etheric condition. This earth-formation consisted of single ether-points, but something special was connected with these ether-points. Had the human eye been able to see these points, it would not have seen what the clairvoyant would have seen or what he actually sees now when he looks back. Let us make this clear by a comparison. Take the seed of a wild rose, a fully developed seed. What does one see who observes this? He sees a body that is very small, and if he did not know how a rose seed looked he would never imagine that a rose could grow from it. He would never derive this from the mere form of the seed. But a person who was endowed with a certain clairvoyant capacity would experience the following. The seed would gradually disappear from his sight, but to his clairvoyant eye would appear a flower-like form growing spiritually out of the seed. It would stand before his clairvoyant view, a real form, but one that could be seen only in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what later grows out of the seed. We would err if we believed that this form was exactly like the plant that grows from the seed. It is not at all like it. It is a wonderful light-form, containing streams and complicated formations. One could say that what later grows out of the seed is only a shadow of this wonderful spiritual light-form beheld by the clairvoyant.

Holding fast to this picture of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, let us now return to the primeval earth and the single etheric points. If now, as in the previous example, the clairvoyant contemplated such an etheric point in the primeval substance, there would arise for him from the point (as from the seed in the previous example) a light-form, a beautiful form, which in reality is not there but rests slumbering in the point. What is this form that the seer perceives, looking back at the primal earth atom? What is it that arises? It is a form that is different from physical man, as different as is the archetype from the physical plant. It is the archetype of the present human form. At that time the human form slumbered spiritually in the etheric point, and the whole earth-evolution was necessary in order that what rested there might develop into present-day man. Many, many things were necessary for this, just as much is also necessary for the seed. This seed must be sunk in the earth, and the sun must send its warming rays, before it can develop itself into a plant. We will gradually understand how these points became men if we make clear to ourselves all that has happened in the meanwhile.

In the primeval past all the planets were connected with our earth. However, we will first consider the sun, moon, and earth because they are of special interest to us. At that time our sun, our moon, and our earth were not separate, but were all together. If we could stir these three bodies together like a broth in a great world-kettle, and if we thought of this as one cosmic body, we would have what the earth in its original condition was—sun plus earth plus moon. Naturally, man could live there only in a spiritual condition. He could live only in this condition because what is in the present sun was then united with the earth. For a long, long time the cosmic body contained our earth, sun, and moon within itself, as well as all the beings and forces connected with them. In those times man was still only present spiritually in the primal human atom. This changed only in a time when something important occurred in world-evolution, when the sun split off and became a separate body, leaving earth and moon behind. After this, what was formerly a unity appears as a duality, as two cosmic bodies, the sun and the earth-plus-moon. Why did this occur?

All that happens has, naturally, a deep meaning, and we understand this when, looking backward, we find that there dwelt on earth at that time not only men but also other beings of a spiritual nature who were connected with them. These were not perceptible to the physical eye but were nevertheless present, as truly present as men and the other physical beings. Thus, for example, there are connected with our earth, living in its environs, beings whom Christian esotericism calls angels, Angeloi. We can best conceive these beings if we reflect that they stand at the stage at which man will be when the earth completes its evolution. Today these beings are already as far along as man will be at the end of his evolution on earth. A still higher stage is occupied by the archangels, Archangeloi, or Spirits of Fire, beings whom we can perceive when we direct our glance to what concerns entire peoples. Such concerns are guided by the beings called archangels or Archangeloi. A still higher type of being is called the Primal Beginnings or Archai or Spirits of Personality. We find these when we look at whole epochs of time and at many peoples, with all their connections and contrasts, contemplating what is usually called the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Time. When we examine our own time, for example, we find that it is guided by higher beings called Archai or Primal Beginnings. Then there are still higher beings called, in Christian esotericism, Powers or Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Thus there are innumerable beings connected with our earth who are related to man in a sort of ladder of successive stages.

If we begin with the mineral and rise from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and then to man, man is the highest physical being, but the others are also there; they are among us and permeate us. In the beginning of things, when the earth emerged from the womb of eternity as a sort of primeval mist, all these beings were bound up with the earth, and the clairvoyant would have seen how other beings pervade this picture at the same time as the human form. These were the beings named above, and beings of still higher types such as the Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and finally the Seraphim. All of these beings were intimately connected with that powerful etheric dust, but they are at various stages of development. There are those whose sublimity man cannot fathom, but others are closer to him.

Since these beings were at different stages, they could not go through their evolution in the same way as man. A dwelling place had to be created for them. Among these high beings there were some who would have been greatly handicapped had they remained bound to lower beings. Therefore they split off. They took the finest substances out of the mist and built their dwelling in the sun. They created their heaven there, and there they found the proper tempo for their evolution. Had they remained in the inferior substances that they left behind in the earth, they would not have been able to continue their evolution. This would have hindered their development like a lead weight. This shows how material occurrences, such as the split in the cosmic substance, do not proceed from merely physical causes but rather from the forces of beings who need a site for their development. It happens because they must build their cosmic house. We must emphasize that spiritual causes lie at the foundation.

Man remained behind on the earth-plus-moon, and with him higher beings of the lowest hierarchy, such as angels and archangels, as well as beings who stood lower than man. But a single mighty being, who was already ripe enough to migrate to the sun, sacrificed himself and stayed with earth-plus-moon. This was the being who was later named Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the sun and became the leader of affairs on earth-plus-moon. Thus we have two dwelling-places: the sun and earth-plus-moon. On the sun were the most exalted beings, under the leadership of an especially high and sublime being whom the Gnostics attempted to conceive under the name Pleroma. We must picture this being as the regent of the sun. Yahweh is the leader of earth-plus-moon. We must make it especially clear that the noblest loftiest spirits went out with the sun, leaving the earth behind with the moon. The moon was not yet split off; it was still within the earth.

How should one conceive this cosmic event of the separation of the sun from the earth? Above all, one must feel the sun and its inhabitants to be the most august, pure, and sublime element that was formerly connected with the earth, whereas earth-plus-moon was the lower element. At that time its condition was still lower than that of our present earth. The latter stands higher because there came a later period during which the earth unburdened itself of the moon and its grosser substances, in the presence of which man could not have developed further. The earth had to expel the moon.

Just before this, however, was the darkest and most dreadful time for our earth. Everything with a noble evolutionary disposition came under the control of bad forces, so that man could progress further only by eliminating the worst conditions of existence along with the moon.

We must realize that a sublime light-principle, that of the sun, was opposed to the principle of darkness, that of the moon. Had one clairvoyantly observed the sun, which had already withdrawn, one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it, but also something else would have been perceived. What had withdrawn itself as the sun would have shown itself not only as a cluster of spiritual beings, nor would it have appeared as something etheric, for that belongs to a coarser realm; it would have appeared as something astral, as a mighty light-aura. What one would have sensed as a light-principle, one would have seen as a shining aura in cosmic space. The earth, through allowing this light to go forth, would suddenly have appeared densified, though not yet coming to a firm mineral consistency. A good and an evil, a bright and a dark principle, stood opposed to each other at that time.

Now let us see how the earth looked before it expelled the moon. It would be entirely wrong to think of it as resembling our present earth. The core of the earth was then a fiery seething mass. This core would have appeared as a nucleus of fire surrounded by powerful water-forces, although these would not have been like our water of today, for they contained the metals in fluid form. In the middle of all this was man, but in entirely different form.

Thus the earth appeared when it expelled the moon. Air was not to be found on the earth; it simply was not there. The beings then existing needed no air; they had an entirely different breathing system. Man had become a sort of fish-amphibian, but he consisted of soft fluid material. What he sucked into himself was not air but what was contained in the water. This is approximately the way the earth looked at that time. We must see that the earth at that time was in a lower condition than at present. It had to be so. Otherwise man could never have been able to find the right tempo and the means for his evolution, if the sun and moon had not separated themselves from the earth. Had the sun remained in the earth, everything would have gone too fast; whereas everything would have gone too slowly with the forces that now work on the moon. As the moon withdrew from the earth amid tremendous catastrophes, there prepared itself slowly what we may call the separation of an air-sheath from the water-element. Air was then entirely different from the air of today, for all kinds of vapors were still contained in it. But the being that was then gradually preparing itself was a sort of sketch of the man of today. We will describe all this more fully later.

We have learned to know man in three relationships. First, as he lived in earth-plus-sun-plus-moon with all the higher beings in a single cosmic body. Here he presented himself to the clairvoyant eye in the way described above. Next we see him under unfavorable conditions on earth-plus-moon. Had he remained in this condition, he would have become a malicious and savage being. When the sun had separated itself, there was the contrast of the sun on one side and moon-plus-earth on the other side. The sun, in all its streaming glory, glittered as a great sun-aura in space. On the other side remained earth-plus-moon with all the sinister forces that drag down the nobler elements in man. A twofoldness arises, which is followed by a threefoldness. The sun remains as it is, but the earth separates itself from the moon. The grosser substances withdraw and man remains behind upon the earth.

Looking at the third period, man feels the forces as a threefold principle. He asks: Whence come these forces? In the first period man was still connected with all the high forces of the sun. The forces that developed in the second period then went out with the moon. Man felt this as a redemption, but he had a memory of the first period in which he was still united with the sun-beings. He learned to know what longing was; he felt himself to be a cast-off son. With the forces that had gone out with sun and moon he could feel himself as a son of the sun and of the moon.

So, our earth evolved from a unity to a duality to a trinity: sun, earth, and moon.

The time when the moon split away, when man first received the possibility of developing himself, is designated as the Lemurian epoch. After great fire-catastrophes had terminated this Lemurian epoch, our earth gradually entered a condition that could produce the relationships prevailing in ancient Atlantis. The first beginnings of land emerged from the water-masses. This was long after the moon broke away, yet it was only because of that breaking-away that the earth was able to evolve as it did.

In Atlantis man was entirely different from today, but he had reached the point where he could move about within the air-sheath as a soft, swimming, floating mass. Only gradually did he develop a bony system. About the middle of Atlantis he had progressed so far as somewhat to resemble our present form.

But in Atlantis man had a clairvoyant consciousness. Our present consciousness developed only in much later times, and if we wish to understand the man of that time we must bear this clairvoyant consciousness in mind. We can understand this best through a comparison with the consciousness of today. Today man perceives the world from morning to evening by means of his senses. Through his sense-activity he continually receives impressions of sight, hearing, etc. But at night this sense-world sinks into an ocean of unconsciousness. For the occultist, this is really not so much a lack of consciousness as a lower grade of consciousness.

At this point we must make it clear that today man has a double consciousness, a bright day-consciousness and a sleep or dream consciousness. This was not at all the case in the first Atlantean times. Let us examine the alternation between waking and sleeping in those early times. During a certain period man dipped down into his physical body, but he did not perceive objects in the same sharp outlines as today. If we picture ourselves walking through a dense fog when the street lamps seem surrounded by a light-aura, we will have a rough idea of the Atlantean's object-consciousness. For the man of that time, everything was surrounded by such a fog; everything was as though enveloped in mist. That was the look of things by day. By night things looked entirely different, although still not the same as today. When the Atlantean went out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness but found himself in a world of divine spiritual beings, ego-beings, whom he perceived around him as his companions. As truly as man today does not see these beings at night, so truly did he in those times plunge into an ocean of spirituality, in which he actually perceived the divine beings. By day he was the companion of the lower kingdoms; by night he was the companion of the higher beings. Man lived in a spiritual consciousness, though this was dim; and, though he had no self-consciousness, he dwelt among these divine spiritual beings.

Now let us recapitulate the four epochs in the evolution of our earth. First, let us bring to mind the epoch in which sun and moon were still united with the earth. We must say that the beings of this earth are pure ideal beings, while man is present only as an etheric body, visible only to spiritual eyes. Then we come to the second epoch. We see the sun as a separate body, visible as an aura, and moon-plus-earth as a world of evil. Then we come to a third epoch, where the moon separates itself and on earth there work the forces that are the result of this threeness. Then we come to a fourth epoch. Here man is already a being in the physical world, which seems misty to him, and in sleep he is still the companion of divine beings. This is the epoch that closes with huge water-catastrophes, the time of Atlantis.

Now let us go one step further, to the man of the post-Atlantean time. As stated earlier, he has evolved through many thousands of years. We see him pass through the cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time; the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin culture, and our fifth culture. What, above all things, had man lost? He had lost something that we can conceive when we bear the description of Atlantis in mind.

Let us try to imagine the sleep-condition of the Atlantean. Man was then still the companion of the gods; he actually perceived a world of the spirit. This he had lost after the Atlantean catastrophe. The darkness of night surrounded him. In recompense there came a brightening of the day-consciousness and the development of the ego. All this man had achieved, but the old gods had vanished from his sight; they were now only memories. In fact, during the first post-Atlantean time all that his soul had experienced was merely a memory, a memory of his earlier inter-course with these divine beings.

We know that souls endure, that they reincarnate. Just as in ancient Atlantean times our souls were already present, were already living in bodies, so were they also present at the separation of moon and sun from the earth, and also in the earliest times of all. Man existed in the etheric dust or points, and the five cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time, in their views of the world, in their religions, are nothing else than memories of the ancient epochs of the earth.

The first period, the primeval Indian, developed a religion that seems like an inner lighting-up, an inner repetition, in ideas and feelings, of the very first period, when sun and moon were still bound up with the earth, when the lofty beings of the sun still dwelt on earth. We may imagine that this had to awaken a sublime view. The spirit who, in the first condition of the earth, in the primeval mist, connected himself with all angels, archangels, high gods, and spiritual beings, was for Indian consciousness summed up as a single high individuality under the name of Brahm or Brahma.¹ This first post-Atlantean culture recapitulated in the spirit what had happened earlier. It is a repetition of the first epoch of the earth, in its inner aspect.

Now let us look at the second cultural period. In the principles of light and darkness we have the religious consciousness of the primeval Persian period. The great initiate saw an opposition between two beings, one of which was personified in the sun and the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, the Light-aura, is the being whom the Persians venerated as the highest god. Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings who belonged to earth-plus-moon. The religion of the Persians is a remembrance of the second epoch of the earth.

In the third cultural epoch, man had to say to himself, “In me are the forces of the sun and of the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and of the moon appear as my father and my mother.” Thus we have unity in the primeval past as the attitude of the Indian; while the duality that appeared with the separation of the sun is reflected in the religion of the Persians; and in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians we find the trinity that appeared in the third epoch, after the separation of sun and moon. Trinity appears in all the religions of the third period, and in Egypt it is exemplified in Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

But what man had experienced in his consciousness in the fourth earth-epoch, the Atlantean, as a companion of the gods, emerges as a memory in the Greco-Latin period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods whose companion man was in Atlantis, the gods whom he saw clairvoyantly in etheric forms when he had risen out of his physical body at night. As truly as man today sees outer objects, so truly at that time did he see Zeus, Athena, etc. For him these were real figures. What the Atlantean felt and experienced in his clairvoyant condition reappeared, for the man of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the pantheon. As the Egyptian time was a memory of the trinity that prevailed in the Lemurian epoch, the experience of Atlantis remained as a memory in the Hellenic hierarchy of gods. In Greece and elsewhere in Europe these were the same gods whom the Atlantean had seen, but under other names. These names were not invented; they are names for the same forms that walked beside man in the Atlantean time when he went out of his physical body.

So we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolical expression in the religious views of the different post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during sleep in the Atlantean time lives again in the fourth period.

We are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What can we remember? In the first period the ancient Indians could conceive the first earth-epoch; in the second period the Persians had the principles of good and evil; the ancient Egyptians could picture the third epoch in its trinity. The period of the Greeks, the old Germans, the Romans, had its Olympus. It remembered the godlike figures of Atlantis. Then came the modern time, the fifth period. What can it remember?

It can remember nothing. This is the reason why in this period, godlessness has been able to make headway in many respects. This is why the fifth period is driven to look toward the future rather than the past. It must look toward the future, when all the gods must arise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared in the time of the bursting-in of the Christ-force, which worked so powerfully that it could again endow man with a godly consciousness. The god-pictures of the fifth period cannot be memories. Only if man looks forward will life again become spiritual. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, consciousness must become apocalyptic.

Yesterday we examined the relations of the single cultures of the Post-Atlantean time. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

Our fifth period stands at a central point in the world, hence it must look forward. The Christ must for the first time be fully grasped in this period, for our souls are deeply interwoven in mysterious connections. We shall see how the repetition of the Egyptian time in our fifth period gives us a point of departure, and how we can actually pass over into the future.

• 1. It may occur to the reader that India, even in ancient times, was notable for the multiplicity of its gods rather than for their unity. In this connection the following passage from the Upanishads may be illuminating:
  
  Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him: “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  He answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Thirty-three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Six.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Two.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One and a half.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One.”
  (Brih. Upan., ii, 2, iv, 4.)

The Old Initiation Centers. The Human Form as the Subject of Meditation.

Yesterday we spoke of the mysterious connection between the earlier evolutionary conditions of our earth and the various world-conceptions of the successive post-Atlantean periods. The remarkable fact emerged that when the Atlantean catastrophe had altered the face of the earth, the holy pre-Vedic Indian culture, in its philosophical conceptions, showed something like a mirror-picture of the events that, in the beginning of the, earth's evolution, took place in that remote past when sun, moon, and earth were still united. What the eye of the spirit beheld at that time was nothing but a spiritually conceived form of what actually existed when our earth stood at the beginning of its evolution.

The second condition of the earth, when the sun had detached itself but earth and moon still formed one body, came to light during the second cultural period, the old Persian, as a philosophic-religious system in the opposition of the light-principle in the sun-aura to the principle of darkness, the opposition of Ormuzd to Ahriman. The third period, the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian, is a spiritual reflection of what took place when earth, sun, and moon had become three bodies. We also pointed out that the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus reflected the third epoch's astral trinity of sun, earth, and moon.

This separation occurred in the Lemurian time. After this followed the Atlantean time, the fourth evolutionary condition of the earth, in which there prevailed conditions of consciousness entirely different from those of today. Through these different forms of consciousness man lived with the gods, he was acquainted with the gods who were later named Wotan, Balder, Thor, Zeus, Apollo, etc. These were beings whom the Atlantean man could perceive with his clairvoyance. We have a repetition of the Atlantean perception of divine-spiritual beings in the memory of the peoples of the Greco-Latin time, and also among the peoples of northern Europe. It was a memory of the experiences of earlier conditions of consciousness. Be it Wotan or Zeus, be it Mars, Hera, or Athena, all were a memory of the spirit-forms of that old world of gods.

Today we must gradually penetrate a little more into the souls of the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultures. If we want to form a true picture of the religious experiences of these ancient cultures, we must bear in mind that, the most important parts of the population among these ancient peoples, including the seers, prophets, and enlightened persons, were successors of men who had already lived in the Atlantean time. Furthermore, it was by no means the case that the whole of Atlantean culture was destroyed immediately after the great catastrophe; on the contrary, what remained was gradually carried over and planted into the new time. We will best understand the souls of the post-Atlantean descendants if we steep ourselves in the soul-life of the last Atlanteans.

In the latter Atlantean time men were different one from another, some having retained a high degree of clairvoyant ability. This faculty did not vanish suddenly, but was still present in many of the men who took part in the great migration from west to east. In others, however, it had already disappeared. There were advanced persons and retarded persons and, in accordance with the whole nature of evolution at that time, we can understand that the least advanced were those who were the most clairvoyant, for in a certain way they had remained stationary and had preserved the old Atlantean character. The most advanced were those who had already achieved a physical perceiving of the world, thus approaching our form of day-consciousness. It was they who, ceased to see the spiritual world clairvoyantly at night, and who during their waking hours saw objects with sharper contours. That little handful of whom we have already spoken, who were led by the greatest initiate (generally known as Manu¹ ) and his pupils deep into Asia and thence fructified the other cultures, just this handful, being composed of the most advanced men of that time, first lost the ancient gift of clairvoyance for the ordinary relationships of life. For them the true day-consciousness, in which we see physical objects sharply contoured, became ever clearer. Their great leader led this group farthest into Asia, so that they could live in isolation; otherwise they would have come too closely in touch with other peoples who still preserved the old clairvoyance. Only because they remained separated from other peoples for a time could they grow into a new type of man. A colony was established in inner Asia, whence the great cultural streams could flow into the most varied peoples.

Northern India was the first country to receive its new cultural current from this center. It has already been pointed out that these little groups of cultural pioneers nowhere found un-populated territory. Earlier still, before their great migration from west to east, there had been other wanderings, and whenever new stretches of land rose from the sea, they were peopled by the wanderers. The persons sent out from this colony in Asia had to mix with other peoples, all of whom were more backward than they who had been led by Manu. Among these other peoples were many persons who had retained the old clairvoyance.

It was not the custom of the initiates to establish colonies as this is done today; they colonized in a different way. They knew that they had to start with the souls of the persons whom they met in the lands that were to be colonized. The emissaries did not impose what they had to say. They reckoned with what they found. A balance was reached that took into account the needs of the old inhabitants. This reckoned with their religious views, which were based on the memory of earlier epochs, and also with the old clairvoyant disposition. So it was natural that only a handful of the most advanced could develop true concepts. The great masses could form only ideas that were a sort of compromise between the old Atlantean and the post-Atlantean attitudes. Therefore, we find in all these countries, in India, in Persia, in Egypt, whenever the different post-Atlantean cultures appeared, religious ideas which for that age are less advanced, less cultivated; which are nothing but a sort of continuation of the old Atlantean ideas.

To understand what kind of conceptions really appeared in these folk-religions we must form a picture of them. We must transport ourselves into the souls of the last Atlantean population. We must bear in mind that in the Atlantean time man was not unconscious at night, but that he could then perceive just as he perceived by day—if we can speak at all of night or day in that time. By day he perceived the first traces of what we today so clearly see as the world of sense-perceptions. By night he was the companion of the divine spiritual beings. He needed no proof of the existence of gods, just as we today need no proof of the existence of minerals. The gods were his companions; he himself was a spiritual being during the night. In his astral body and ego he wandered about the spiritual world. He was himself a spirit and he met beings who were of like nature with himself.

Naturally, man did not meet only these higher spiritual beings. He also met beings lower than those who were later known as Wotan, Zeus, etc. These were the choicest figures, but by no means the only ones. It was like seeing kings and emperors to day. Many do not see them, yet still believe that there are kings and emperors.

In this state, which was common to everyone, man perceived the surrounding objects in a way different from his perception today. This was true even while he was conscious during the day. We must try to understand what this consciousness of the latter Atlanteans was.

We have described how the divine beings became imperceptible to man when he dived down into his physical body in the morning. He saw objects as though they were surrounded by mist. These were the images of his waking day at that time. But these pictures had another remarkable property, which we must grasp clearly. Let us suppose that such a man approached a pond. He did not see the water in the pond so clearly defined as we do today, but when he directed his attention to it he experienced something quite different. In approaching the pond a feeling arose in him, merely through looking at it, that was like a taste of what lay before him physically, without his having to drink the water. Simply through looking at it he would have felt that the water was sweet or salty. It was not at all like our seeing water today. We see only the surface and do not penetrate into the inner qualities. But while a dim clairvoyance still prevailed, the man who approached the pond had no alien feeling toward it. He felt himself as being within the properties of the water; he did not stand over against the object as we do; it was as though he could penetrate into the water.

If we had encountered a block of salt at that time, we would have noticed its taste as we approached it. Today we must lick it before we perceive what was then given through mere sight. Man was, as it were, within the whole, and he perceived things as though they were ensouled. He perceived beings that imparted a salty taste to the block. Everything was ensouled for him; air, earth, water, fire. Everything revealed something to him. He could feel himself into the interior of objects; he experienced their inner essence. Nothing appeared to him as a soulless object in the modern way. Therefore man felt everything with sympathy and antipathy because he saw its inner nature. He felt, he experienced, the inner being of the objects.

Memories of these experiences remained everywhere. The parts of the Indian population encountered by the colonists had such a relation to things. They knew that souls lived in things. They had preserved the ability to see the properties of things. Let us bear in mind this whole relationship of men to things. At that time man could perceive how the water tasted as he approached the pond. There he saw a spiritual being, who gave the water its taste. He could meet this spiritual being during the night if he lay down by the water and fell asleep. By day he saw the material; by night he saw what lived in things. By day he saw stones, plants, and animals, he heard the wind blow and the waters roar; by night he saw within himself, in its true form, what he only sensed by day—the spirits that live in all things. When he said that spirits live in the minerals, in the plants, in the water, in the clouds, in the wind, this was for him no poetic license, no mere fantasy, but something that he could see.

We must live, deeply into these souls in order to understand them. Then we understand what dreadful folly it is when our scholars speak of animism and allege that it is the “folk-imagination” that ensouls and personifies things. There is no such folk-imagination. One who really knows the folk does not speak in this way. Repeatedly we find this singular analogy; just as a child, bumping against a table, strikes the table in revenge because (so say the scholars) it thinks of the table as having a soul, so did the primeval man in his childishness ensoul the objects of nature, such as the trees. This is repeated ad nauseam. Certainly there is imagination here, but it is the imagination of the scholars rather than of the folk. It is the scholars who are dreaming. Those who originally saw everything as ensouled were not dreaming; they only reported what they actually saw.

As a sort of remnant, this kind of perception emerged among the ancient peoples as a memory. But the error in the above analogy is that the child does not see the table as ensouled; he does not yet feel a soul in himself, but regards himself as a lump of wood. Feeling himself soulless, he places himself on the same level as the soulless table that he bangs. The fact is just the opposite of what we read in the learned books. Whether we look at India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, or any other place, we find everywhere the same images that were described above, and into these images was poured the culture that was given out by the old initiates.

In ancient India the Rishis guided the culture. We must try to understand something of what gave the impulse to a form that developed into one of the most important forms of the Indian outlook. We know that in all ages there have been so-called mystery schools, where those who could develop their spiritual faculties learned to see more deeply into the world-all, awakening the slumbering faculties so as to see the spiritual connections of things. From these mystery-places proceeded the spiritual impulses of the various cultures. In order really to understand the initiates, we usually consider them as they were in post-Atlantean times, since their nature at that time is most easily comprehensible. But in Atlantis we could encounter something similar to initiate-schools. In order to understand them thoroughly, let us examine the methods of such an ancient Atlantean initiation-school.

If we go back to those times, we find that the above-described conditions of consciousness prevailed and also that man did not then have his present shape. He had quite a different form.² Let us go back to the first half of the Atlantean period. Man consisted already of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, plus the ego, but the physical body still looked quite different. We might compare it with the bodies of certain sea-animals, transparent, hardly to be seen, although laced with luminous threads in certain directions. It was much softer than today, having as yet no bones. It is true that there was already cartilage in some parts, but in these ancient times the physical body was definitely not of its present form.

The etheric body was a much more important member. The physical body was then more or less the same size as now, but the etheric body was extraordinarily large. This etheric body varied among individuals, but one could perceive four different types. One part of mankind would resemble one type, another part another. These four types may be designated by the names of the apocalyptic beasts: bull, lion, eagle, man. It would not be correct to imagine that these beasts were exactly similar to the present animals, but the impression that they made reminds us of these. The impressions that the etheric bodies made can be understood through the picture of a lion, bull, eagle, or man. We can compare with the bull the portion of mankind that gave the impression of having powerful reproductive forces or an unusual appetite. Another portion lived more in the spiritual; these were the eagle men, who felt less at home in the physical world. Then there were men in whom the etheric body was already similar to the present-day physical body; it was not quite identical, but it was like the human form. However, we must not imagine that each man represented only one type; all four types would show some traces in each person, but one or another would predominate.

Such were the etheric bodies of the Atlantean population. As to the astral body, it was especially powerful but largely undeveloped, while the ego was still wholly outside of man. People were entirely different at that time from today. Naturally, some men matured earlier and assumed the ultimate form before the others, but in the main one can describe the men of that time as we have just done. This was the normal condition of the average man.

It was entirely different with the more advanced persons, with the pupils of the mystery-places, who strove after the initiation of the ancient Atlantis. Let us enter in spirit such a center of initiation and try to picture what the teacher had to give. First, what was this teacher himself?

If one meets an initiate today, there is nothing in his general appearance by which he can be recognized. Few persons would recognize him today. The initiate must live in a physical body, and the physical body has developed a long way; hence it differs from others only in certain inner refinements. At that time, however, the initiate was vastly different from other men. The others still had a more animal-like form; the physical body was small in comparison with the gigantic etheric bodies, forming a clumsy animal-like mass. The initiate differed from these in that his physical body was more similar to the modern formation; his countenance was similar to that of modern man, and he had a forebrain such as that of the average man of today. His brain was highly developed, which was not true of other men at that time. These initiates had their schools, into which they admitted pupils who, having proved themselves mature and sufficiently developed, were selected out of the ordinary run of men by special methods.

We must bear one thing in mind if we wish fully to understand what follows. We must realize that in the course of time the power of man's spiritual members over his physical body has almost completely disappeared. The man of today has a certain degree of control over his body. He can move his arms and legs, pedal on bicycles, and exercise some command over his physiognomy, but this is only a last meager remnant of the mastery over the physical body that obtained in ancient Atlantean times. In those days the thoughts and feelings had a much greater influence over the physical body. If today a person were to concentrate for weeks, months, or even years on a certain thought, only in exceptional cases would this influence more than the etheric body. Seldom would the physical body be influenced by a meditation. If, for example, someone should succeed by this means in making his brain move further forward, thus working even on the bones of his forehead, this would be an astounding achievement. Very, very seldom does this happen today. Extraordinary energy would have to be developed today for a thought to work on the physical body. It is easier to affect the blood-circulation or the breathing, but even this is difficult. Thoughts can work on the etheric body today, and in the next incarnation they will have worked so powerfully as to alter the external physical structure. Man should work today in the knowledge that he is working not for one incarnation but for many incarnations to come. The soul is eternal; it continually returns.

Things were different in the ancient initiation schools. Thinking had such mastery there that it could influence the physical body in a comparatively short time. The pupil of the mysteries could mold his own organization until it resembled the human. One could accept a pupil out of the normal run of men and had only to give him the right impulse. The pupil himself did not have to think; through a sort of suggestion thoughts were implanted in his soul. A definite spiritual form had to stand before his soul, and the pupil had to steep himself in this form. Everywhere the Atlantean initiates gave to their pupils a thought-form, into which the pupils had to immerse themselves over and over again. What kind of picture was this? What did the pupil have to think? What did he meditate on?

We have already pointed to the original condition of the earth, sketching out the whole of evolution and mentioning the light-form in the primeval dust. Had one at that time looked about clairvoyantly, the archetype of the man of, today would have arisen. This grew out of that pollen, out of that primeval atom. Not the form of ancient man or of Atlantean man, but the form of modern man grew out of that atom. And what did the Atlantean initiate do? He placed before the soul of his pupil precisely this archetype that reared itself out of the primeval seed.

The pupil had to meditate on this archetype. The initiate placed before the pupil's gaze the human shape as a thought-form, with all the impulses and feelings that were contained in it. Whether the pupil was of the lion type or of one of the others, he had to hold before himself this picture of what man was to become in post-Atlantean times. He received this thought-picture as an ideal. He had to will the thought, “My physical body must become like this picture.” Through the power of this picture his body was so influenced that it became different from the bodies of other men. Certain parts were transformed, and gradually the most advanced pupils became more similar to the man of today.

Thus we look back on remarkable mysteries, the mysteries of ancient Atlantis. No matter how the various men might be formed, there floated before their souls, as a picture, a thing that was already present as a spiritual picture when the sun was still united with the earth. This picture emerged more and more as the meaning of the earth, as what lies spiritually at the foundation of the earth. This picture did not appear to them as this or that form, as the picture of this or that race; it appeared to them as the universal ideal of mankind.

This is the feeling that the pupil was to develop through this picture: “The highest spiritual beings have willed this picture, through which unity comes into mankind. This picture is the meaning of the earth's evolution; to bring this picture to realization the sun separated itself from the earth and the moon detached itself. Through this man could become man. This is the One who will at last appear as the high ideal of the earth.”

Into this high ideal streamed the feelings that enlivened the pupil in his meditation.

So did things stand about the middle of the Atlantean epoch. We will see later how this picture, which stood before the pupil as the human form, transformed itself into something different, and how this was salvaged after the Atlantean catastrophe. This is what lived again in the Indian initiation-teaching, where it was summed up in the ancient sacred name of Brahm. What the God-head willed as the meaning of the earth was the most sacred thing for the ancient Indian initiate. He spoke of it as Brahma. From this sprang later Zarathustra's teaching and the Egyptian wisdom, both of which will be discussed later. How it transformed itself from Brahma to the Egyptian wisdom we will see tomorrow.

• 1. Echoes of this term were preserved by many peoples: e.g. Menes in Egypt, Manu in India, Minos in Crete, and Manitu in America.
• 2. The genesis of the human form is much discussed in this and succedding chapters. The reader will find Dr. H. Poppelbaum's book Man and Animal (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1960) to be a helpful companion in this study.

The Experiences of Initiation. The Mysteries of the Planets. The Descent of the Primeval Word.

Yesterday we closed with the discussion of an extraordinarily important event in the inner life, in the real spiritual life of man. We attempted to bring before our souls an impression that the seeker for initiation had at the beginning of the last third of the Atlantean epoch. We saw how there stood before the soul of the neophyte an ideal human form, a thought-picture, on which he had to concentrate in meditation, and how this filled the would-be initiate's life of thinking, feeling and willing. This thought-picture had to become ever more the model for the man of the future.

Now we must try to conceive roughly how this thought-picture looked. It was not entirely similar to the man of today. If we can think of a kind of combination of man and woman in which the lower part is omitted, a sort of double figure in which only the upper part of the body is clearly perceptible, then we have the sensible-super-sensible picture that stood before the meditating person at that time. This picture worked so strongly that the neophytes could make their external bodies actually resemble it.

It is important that the meditating neophyte had within him, facing him, a sort of human form. If he had been sufficiently prepared to have this picture livingly before him, then he had to realize the following clearly, “As I look upon this picture I transport myself into the earliest condition of the earth's evolution, when earth, moon, and sun were not yet divided. At that time the earth consisted of the primeval atom, but in this atom the clairvoyant could see the picture that now arises before me. This picture was already present at the beginning of the earth when as yet there were no mineral, plant, or animal forms. At that time the earth consisted only of the human atom, of reawakened human beings.”

It is true that the first beginnings of the animals were created during the ancient Moon condition of the earth; animals already existed then.¹ But we know too that a planetary system, when it disappears, goes into a Pralaya, in which all forms are dissolved. Thus, although the ancient Moon was already populated with animal forms, the earth at first contained nothing similar to animals and plants. These first appeared later. Only after the separation of the sun did the animals gradually appear. The earth was purely human in its first beginnings.

The neophyte looked back upon this primeval condition of the earth. He saw in the primeval atom the ideal human form. Keeping this form before him, he realized, “Thus I transport myself into the earliest condition of the earth. What lives in the earth, the ideal human picture or form, tells me that the Godhead works from eternity to eternity. It has poured itself out into these forms. It has breathed out this original human form.” Then he asked himself what happened to the animals, plants, and other beings.

In spirit the neophyte saw the primal form of the Godhead. He saw the animals and plants as accompanying forms, which appeared on earth only at a later time. Everything in the lower kingdoms was regarded by the Atlantean neophyte as having proceeded from the human form. We understand this thought if we recollect how coal is formed. Think of the huge primeval forests that once flourished and are now coal. The plants have remained behind, evolving out of a higher kingdom into a lower one. The plants have hardened into stone.

Thus the pupil of the Atlantean mysteries saw everything in the world about him as the product of the human form. In primeval times, this impression was conjured before the soul of man. These impressions were retained in memory through the time of the flood. The ancient Indian initiators again called up in the souls of their pupils this picture of primeval man, of the man who had been breathed forth by the eternal self. When the Indian pupil had this picture before him, he felt that everything had sprung from it, that what appeared in this picture as the blood had become the waters of the earth, etc. This picture expanded until it became the foundation of the universe. Then the following was put before his soul. It was said to him, “In this picture you have two things before your eyes. First, the picture itself; but then, also, what lights up in you as your innermost essence when you contemplate this picture. Without is the macrocosm; within you is what you feel as a sort of extract, the microcosm.”

When the Greeks, under Alexander, pressed into India and met the last echoes of what the pupils had felt in ancient times, they experienced the following: When the pupil contemplates what is spread out in the universe as man, then he has Heracles before him. The Indians gave the name of Vach² to what lives as the forces of the world-all. But in man, as a sort of extract of the whole, they felt what they called Brahman. Thus the Greeks expounded these echoes of what occurred in the soul of the pupil of the ancient holy Indian culture. This was the fruit of the Greek's campaign to India under Alexander the Great.

Out of precisely this fundamental feeling developed the sacred doctrine of the ancient Indian initiates, which appears like a spiritual image of that primeval state of the earth when it still contained the sun-forces and high beings, for whose sublimity man later yearned. Hence it was a great moment in his spiritual life when the pupil was initiated and could allow to arise within him what was grasped as Brahman. This was a mighty event in the human soul. It was a rising into higher worlds. In no other way could a man be initiated and achieve real vision, than by rising into higher worlds.

The world around us is the physical world. Within and around it surges the astral world. Higher stands Devachan, the world of the gods. The pupil must penetrate to the highest regions of Devachan if he is to feel Brahman, the primeval self, in the macrocosm. Then he is in highest Devachan, the world of the gods, whence springs the noblest that is in man. It was a realm of the highest and most perfect order into which the pupil was transported, a realm that offered much knowledge in addition to what has been described here.

Before we go any further, we must learn to know the teachers also. All of you have heard of the holy Rishis, who were the original founders of the ancient holy Indian culture and had Manu for their own teacher. Who were these seven great teachers of ancient India? As far as possible, we must explain the nature of the holy Rishis. This requires us to look again into the universe. We must be quite clear that what we perceive with the physical senses is a result of what is spiritual. If we think of the entire surrounding world as spiritualised, we can compare it with a primeval etheric mist. This mist then gradually became denser; it descended into the condition of matter and the various heavenly bodies condensed out of it. Sun, Moon, and Earth detached themselves.

But why did the other Planets split off? For it also occurred that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury detached themselves. Why did this happen? We shall understand this if we realize that in the great universe there occurs something similar to an event in our trivial everyday life. It is not only in school that pupils sometimes fail to be promoted, but also in the cosmos there are beings who remain behind and cannot progress with the others. Let us be quite clear about this. There was one group of higher beings who could not continue with the earth's tempo. These abstracted the finest substances and formed therefrom the sun as their dwelling-place. These were the highest beings connected with our evolution, although they also had gone through an evolution of their own. Thus there were beings who were in the act of becoming sun-spirits, and others who had remained behind, standing lower than the sun-spirits but higher than man. These could not continue with the sun-spirits because they were not equally mature. They could not go out with the sun, for it would have scorched them. But on the other hand they were too noble for the earth. Therefore they abstracted certain substances, which were between sun and earth in fineness and corresponded to their nature, and built themselves dwelling-places between the sun and the earth. Thus Venus and Mercury were separated off. Here we have two groups of beings who are not as high as the sun-spirits, but are further along than man. They became the spirits of Venus and Mercury. These are the beings who caused the appearance of these two planets. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were formed earlier for other reasons, and they also became dwelling-places for certain beings.

Thus we, see how spirits caused the appearance of these planets. Now one should not believe that these beings inhabiting the various bodies of the solar system have no connection with the inhabitants of the earth. We must see that the physical boundaries are not the real boundaries, and that it is possible for the beings of the other heavenly bodies to exercise magical influences upon the earth. Thus the influences of the spirits of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mercury extend into the earth. The two latter stand nearer to the earth, and after the sun had withdrawn they helped men to prepare the earth as we have it today.

Here I would like to add one thing, because misunderstandings have crept into the naming of the planets. In all occult nomenclature, what the astronomers call Venus is called Mercury, and vice versa. Astronomers know nothing of the mysteries behind this, because in the past it was not desired that the esoteric names should be revealed. This happened in order to conceal certain things.

All these spirits of the other planets influence the earth. From every planet influences descend upon man. To begin with, however, these influences had need of an intermediary. Through the great Manu this was provided by the seven Rishis being initiated in such a way that each understood the mysteries and influences of a single planet. Since there were seven planets there were seven Rishis, who collectively formed a sevenfold lodge that could transmit to the pupils the secrets of the solar system. We find hints of this in many ancient occult writings. When, for example, it is said that there are mysteries beyond the seven, the reference is to those preserved by the holy Manu himself concerning the time before the splitting-off of the planets.

The forces preserved by the planets were the subject of the mysteries of the seven Rishis. This choir of seven Rishis, in complete harmony with Manu, cooperated in the wonderful wisdom that was transmitted to the pupils.. If we were to characterize this, we would have to say that this primeval teaching contained approximately what we learn today as the evolution of humanity through the planetary conditions of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The mysteries of evolution were secreted in the seven members of the lodge, each of whom typified one stage in the progress of humanity.

The pupil saw this—not only saw it, but heard it—when he raised himself into Devachan, into the Devachanic world, for this is a world of tones. There he heard the harmony of the spheres, of the seven planets. In the astral world he saw the picture; in the Devachanic world he heard the tone; and in the highest world he experienced the word. When the Indian pupil raised himself into upper Devachan he perceived through the music of the spheres and through the word of the spheres how the primordial spirit, Brahma, is divided through evolution into the seven-fold planetary chain. He heard this out of the primal word Vach. This was the designation of the primal tone of creation that the pupil heard. In it he heard the entire world-evolution. The word, split into seven members, the primal word of creation, worked in the soul of the pupil; this was the primal word, which he described to the uninitiated approximately as we today would describe our world evolution. What he perceived is described in an elementary way in my book, Theosophy, An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge. The description we find again in the ancient sacred tradition of the Indians, in what was called the Veda,³ or the Word. This is the true meaning of the Vedas, and what was later written down is only a last memory of the ancient sacred doctrine of the Word. The Word itself was only passed from mouth to mouth, for an ancient tradition is impaired by being written down. Only in the Vedas can one feel something of what flowed into this culture at that time. When the pupil experienced this in his memory, he could say to himself, “What I experience in my soul as Brahman, what I have in my soul as primal Word, this was already present on ancient Saturn; on Saturn resounded the first breath of the Veda-word.”

Evolution had now progressed through the Sun and Moon stages, as far as the Earth. The word had become continually denser, had taken on ever denser forms, and the picture of man in the primeval seed of the earth was already a condensation of the condition in which the primeval word existed on Saturn. What had happened here?

The divine Word, primeval man, had sheathed itself in ever new coverings, and we must see what sheaths the Word assumed in the evolution of the earth. The pupil knew that nothing in the universe repeats itself exactly, and that each planet has its mission. What on the ancient Sun he saw shape itself as life, what on the ancient Moon was injected into the foundation of all things as wisdom, was followed by the task or mission of the Earth, which is to develop love. This was not yet present on the ancient Moon. What was present on the latter planet in a much more spiritual (but also in a much colder) form, the primal image of man, clothed itself in a warm astral covering. On the Moon, what man was supposed to become was clothed in a warm astral sheath, and it is this part which on Earth enables the inner human life to develop love from the lowest to the highest form.

To the Indian pupil the human form, the primal image, became clearly perceptible in higher Devachan. In lower Devachan it then surrounded itself with an astral sheath, which contained the forces for developing love. Love, or Eros, was called Kama.⁴ Thus Kama acquires a meaning for earth-evolution. The divine Word, Brahman, clothed itself in Kama, and through Kama the primal Word resounded to the pupil. Kama was the garment of love, the garment of the primal Word Vach, which lies at the root of the Latin vox.

In his innermost being the pupil felt that the divine Word had taken on an astral garment of love, and he said to himself, “Man, who today consists of four members, physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, has his ego as his highest member. This ego descended into the garment of love and formed Kama-Manas for itself. Kama, in which Manas clothed itself, was the innermost essence of man. This was the ego. But we know also that this innermost essence will evolve three higher members. These transform the lower members, transform even the physical body. As Manas grows out of the astral sheath, as Buddhi on a higher stage corresponds to Prana, so will the physical body, when it has been entirely spiritualised, be Atma.”

All this already existed germinally in the Vach, and a verse of the Veda recalls how the pupil brought the mystery of the innermost being to expression.

We know that the physical body first appeared on Saturn, the etheric on the Sun, the astral on the Moon, and the ego on the Earth. The true and original human germ, the primal Vach, however, already contained the three following members in itself. Man may still expect three higher members as well, and then only will he be a true image of the Word of creation, the primal Word. It was pointed out to the pupil that only to the initiate could the true nature of the physical, etheric and astral bodies be made clear. Today man is himself only when he expresses his “I am,” when he keeps in mind what is entirely his own. Only then is he fully Man. The other members are manifest, but in them he is still unconscious. In the fourth, however, the Vach becomes manifest.

“In the fourth, Man speaks.” This was the verse of the Veda. When the word of the ego resounds, the fourth part of the Vach resounds. The verse of the Veda reads, “Four parts of the Vach are manifest; three are visible; three are now concealed; in the fourth speaks Man.”

Here we have a wonderful description of what we have so often heard. This stood before the pupil's spiritual perception. His gaze was directed backward to the condition in which nothing was as yet separate, in which there was still a primeval earth, in which the full Vach spoke. This is expressed in another verse of the Veda. “Formerly I knew not what the I am is. Only when the first-born of the earth came upon me did the spirit become filled with light, and I had a share in the holy Vach.” In this is reproduced the vision that the initiate had.

In all this we have a hint of the experiences of the ancient pupils of the Rishis, of the wonderful teachings that flowed into the Indian culture, were transmitted to the following epochs, and were transformed in accordance with the needs of other peoples. But all of these understood the primeval Word, Vach.

We shall understand many things better if we keep in mind one mystery in its full scope. We must imagine that at that time the teacher's influence on the pupil was entirely different from what it is today. Such an influence is now possible only when the pupil has already been brought to a certain stage of initiation. The forces exerted by the teacher on the pupil were much stronger at that time. Not only what the teacher could transmit by word or writing had an effect. In reality, all this worked only on the intellectual soul, but apart from this, mysterious magical forces worked from the teacher to the pupil, and it was essentially the teacher's forces that were able to fill with brightness and living force the pictures that the teacher called up before the pupil's soul. This singular influence was lost only in the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the Greco-Latin culture. These forces simply change. When one of the old Egyptians confronted a young person, it was quite different from a teacher confronting a pupil today. Entirely different forces worked from age to youth. This will be recognized by anyone who seeks to understand what was still described in ancient Greece. Socrates actually had telepathic powers, which he allowed to work on his pupils while he instructed them. Such things can no longer work in our time, but they are hinted at in Plato's writings. What was entirely justified then would be rejected as a misdemeanor today. Changes take place, and today no one has a right to copy such methods. Certain phenomena today may remind us of this, but they must be considered reprehensible.

In ancient times, forces proceeded from the teacher to the pupil. Even in ancient Egypt there were still a great many people who could absorb forces in this manner. If a person who was especially sensitive stood before someone who had learned to strengthen his thoughts, a strong thought worked in such a way that it appeared as a picture in the soul of the sensitive person. In ancient Egypt such a telepathic influence was eminently possible, and thought-transference was present to a high degree. If a strong will-nature confronted someone who had not been strengthened, this was often the case. In Egypt one was able to guide and direct in a high degree through thoughts, in a way we today cannot imagine at all. Today such forces would be woefully misused. In ancient Egypt, however, initiation rested principally upon forces of this kind. This was likewise true in ancient India and Persia.

These forces also reinforced the method which, if an exoteric expression is desired, might be called medical. By this we do not mean the official medical practice of today. The Egyptian physician and initiate would have laughed to scorn what modern man calls medicine. The Egyptian physician knew one thing—that the conditions that prevailed in ancient Atlantis, and that could still be perceived in initiation, could in a certain sense be reawakened. The consciousness in which man lived in Atlantis was a dim clairvoyant consciousness. At that time (said the Egyptian initiate) the spiritual beings could exert a much greater influence on man. Today, when he sleeps, man knows nothing of the higher worlds, but the Atlantean, in his shadowy clairvoyant consciousness, then lived with the gods. If modern man can raise himself to an ideal, this is better for him than all moral teachings; similarly, the Egyptian initiate worked on his pupil through pictures of higher spiritual events. This had no mere external effect; it worked deeply within, and in such a way that a definite result ensued.

Let us think of a sick person, who is sick because certain bodily functions do not proceed in a normal way. What is the cause of this? A person with occult training knows that when the physical body functions irregularly, the cause does not lie outside the latter. On the contrary, all illnesses that do not come from outside the Physical body, originate in the fact that the etheric body is not in order. But the etheric body is ill because the astral body is out of order. If an Atlantean was threatened with a disorder in the distribution of fluids, this was quickly taken care of. In a sleeping condition he received from the spiritual worlds such force that through his sleep the disturbed functions were restored to order, and he was brought back to health. He rebuilt the healing forces through sleep.

The ancient Egyptian physicians did something similar. They reduced the patient's consciousness to a sort of hypnotic sleep, during which they could govern the soul-pictures that arose around the patient. They guided these pictures in such a way that they were able to work back on the physical body and make it healthy. This was the significance of the temple-sleep that was applied for internal ailments. The patient was given no medicine, but was allowed to sleep in the temple. His consciousness was damped down, and he was allowed to look into the spiritual worlds. Then his astral experiences were guided in such a way that they had the power to pour health into the body. This is no superstition; it is a secret that was known to the initiates. They introduced the spiritual into the patient's experiences. In this medical art, which we find so closely connected with the principle of initiation, the Atlantean conditions were artificially recreated during the healing. Since man did not work against himself through his day-consciousness, those forces could be active that were necessary for healing. This is how the temple-sleep worked.

In the Egyptian culture there still reigned that principle which, in India, reigned among those wise Rishis who guided affairs, who transmitted the planetary forces, who were the pupils of Manu, the great teacher of that first sublime culture. In the first post-Atlantean culture it was the Rishis who brought the sublime teaching that led men into lofty spiritual worlds, even into the world of higher Devachan. In the succeeding cultural periods, what was seen there was led down as far as the physical plane. Until the fourth post-Atlantean period there continued to descend into the physical plane that Being whom we learned to know as Brahman in the Indian period and whom we now designate as Christ. No longer does he transmit the spiritual; he himself became man in order to radiate over all men the mysterious power of the primal Word.

Thus the primal Word descended, in order that it might lead man upward again. Man must understand how that happened, if he is to make himself an instrument through which he can work into the future. We must learn to know what happened before our time, so that we ourselves can cooperate in an ever higher molding of what exists around us and for us.

We must create a spiritual world in the future. To do this, we must first understand the cosmos.

• 1. Throughout this and the following lectures much is said of the development of human and animal forms. For an attempt to systematize Dr. Steiner's views in this field and to bring them into connection with ordinary scientific knowledge, the reader is again referred to Poppelbaum, Man and Animal (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1960).
• 2. The Sanscrit word is Vach or Vac; see Maurice Bloomfield's Religion of India (New York, Putnam, 1908), pages 191 and 243. Dr. Steiner uses WHA in German, but the first letter should be pronounced like the English V, hence the WHA becomes VHA in English.
• 3. Selections from the Vedas are given in Sacred Books of the East (Oxford University Press, 1879-1910) but there seems to be no complete translation or index in English.
• 4. Kama is a Sanscrit word meaning desire, the nature of the astral body.

The Influence of Osiris and Isis. Facts of Occult Anatomy and Physiology.

Many of you, in reflecting upon what we have said in the last few days about the evolution of the earth and the solar system in relation to man, will have encountered what seems to you a curious contradiction of many present-day highly prized notions. You will have said to yourselves, “Yesterday we heard that the worst forces in evolution were connected with the moon, that when the moon separated from the earth the worst forces went out with it, and that only through this did the earth achieve a condition in which man could pursue his evolution. When we hear all this, what about the romantic aspect of the moon, what about all the poetry that speaks with such true feeling of the moon's wonderful influences upon man?”

This is only an apparent contradiction. It is resolved if we do not regard the facts one-sidedly, if we place the whole complex of facts before our souls. It is certainly true that if we examined the physical mass of the moon we would find that it was not fitted to support life as we know it here on earth. We must also say that everything of an etheric nature that is connected with the moon and its physical substances appears in large part inferior, even decadent, when compared with the etheric in our own corporeality. Furthermore, if we should observe the astral nature of the individual moon-beings clairvoyantly—and we are entirely justified in speaking of them—we would be convinced that the worst and basest feelings that we have on earth are as nothing compared to what is found on the moon. Thus, in respect of the astral, the etheric, and the physical parts of the moon, we may speak of beings, of elements, that had to be expelled so that our earth could pursue its way, free from injurious influences.

But now we must recognize another fact. We must not forget that we cannot simply stop with what is base or evil, for everything that becomes base or evil in evolution is subject to a significant fact. As long as this is at all possible, everything that has sunk deep down into lower spheres must be purified through other, more perfect beings, must be raised up and purged, so that it may again be used in the economy of the universe. If we find a place in the cosmos where especially base beings congregate, we may be sure that with these baser beings are connected other higher ones, who have so great a power for the good, the beautiful, and the noble that they are fitted to lead even the lowest forces toward the good. It is true that all the basest things are connected with the moon's existence, but on the other hand, very high beings also are connected with it. We already know, for example, that the high spiritual personality of Yahweh dwells on the moon. So exalted a being, possessed of such power and glory, has under him vast hosts of ministering beings of a benevolent nature. We must understand that, although the basest forces departed from the earth with the moon, there also remained connected with the moon certain beings who are capable of transforming the bad into good, the ugly into beauty. They could not have done this had they left the ugly in the earth; they had to withdraw it.

But why did evil and ugliness have to come into existence at all? They had to come into existence because without them something else would never have come to birth. Man would never have been able to become a self-forming, self-contained being.

Let us recall the foregoing lecture. There we saw how man's lower nature was rooted in the water, how he was half sunk in the dark water-earth. There were no bones at that time, no firm human shape. There was a flower-like form, which perpetually metamorphosed itself. Man would have remained like this if the forces had not developed further, under the influence of the moon. Had the earth remained exposed to the sun alone, the mobility of the human form would have been enhanced to the highest degree. The earth would have attained a tempo impossible for man, and man would never have been able to develop his present form. On the other hand, if only the moon forces had been influential, man would have rigidified immediately; his form would have been frozen at the moment of birth; he would have become a mummy. Today man evolves between these two extremes, between unlimited mobility and complete rigidity. Because the forming forces are in the moon, the physical moon has become slag. Only the exalted and powerful beings who are connected with the moon can extend their influence into these forms.

Thus two types of forces influence the earth; the sun-forces and the moon-forces, the one stimulating and the other mummifying. Let us imagine that a giant steals the sun away. In that moment we would all become stiff like mummies, so stiff that we would never again be able to lose this form. But if the giant took the moon away, all the beautiful measured movements that we have today would become convulsive. We would become inwardly entirely mobile; we would see our hands prolong themselves to the gigantic, and then shrink up again. The power of metamorphosis would be vastly intensified. Now, however, man is inserted between these two forces.

Within this cosmos, many things are wisely arranged, not only in the various forms and substances but in the relations of things to each other. In order to bring this endless wisdom before our souls we shall now consider a relationship associated with the figure of Osiris.

In the figure of Osiris, the Egyptian saw the influence of the sun upon the earth in the time when mists and vapors still covered the earth, when there was still no air, and he saw that when breathing began in man, the unitary being, Osiris-Set, split. Set or Typhon caused the breath to enter into us. Typhon separated himself from the light of the sun, while Osiris worked only as the light of the sun. But this is also the moment when birth and death entered into the being of man. Into what was forming and unforming, which was previously like putting on and taking off a garment, a great change had entered. If man had been able to experience the effects of those high beings who later went out from the earth with the sun in the time when the influences proceeding from the sun had not yet left the earth, he would have looked up with thankfulness to these sun-beings. But as the sun separated itself from the earth more and more, and as the vapor-sphere—which for man at that time was the realm of his higher nature—refined itself more and more, then man, who was able to perceive the direct influence of the sun less and less, acquired the consciousness of what the forces in his lower nature were, and he came to the point of grasping his ego there. When he dived down into his lower nature, he became conscious of himself for the first time.

Why has the being whom we know as Osiris become darkened? The light ceased to work when the sun departed, but Yahweh remained with the earth until the moon split off. Osiris was the spirit who contained the force of the sunlight in such a way that, when the moon later departed, he accompanied it and received the task of reflecting the sunlight from the moon to the earth. Thus at first we see the sun depart; Yahweh remains behind on earth with his hosts, with Osiris. Man learns to breathe, and at the same time the moon departs. Osiris withdraws with the moon and is given the task of reflecting the sunlight from the moon to the earth. Osiris is laid into a chest, i.e., he withdraws with the moon. Until this time man had received the Osiris-influence from the sun. At this point he begins to feel that what previously came to him from the sun now streams down upon him from the moon. Man said to himself when the moon shone down, “Osiris, it is you who from the moon send me the light of the sun, which belongs to your nature.”

But this light of the sun is reflected in a different form every day. We have the first form when the moon appears as a tiny crescent in the heavens. On the next day it has grown to the second form, and so on through fourteen days until we have the fourteenth form in the full moon. In fourteen days Osiris turns himself toward the earth in the fourteen forms of the illuminated moon-disk. It is of deep significance that the moon, i.e., Osiris, takes on fourteen forms, fourteen phases of growth, in order to guide the light of the sun to us. In the cosmos this activity of the moon is connected with the concurrent fact that man has learned to breathe. Only when this phenomenon was fully established in the heavens was man able to breathe. Thereby he was attached to the physical world, and the first germ of the ego could originate in the being of man.

The later Egyptian knowledge felt all that has been described here, and recounted it by saying, “Osiris ruled the earth in past times. Then arose Typhon, the wind. (This is the time when the waters sink so far that the air appears, through which man becomes an air-breather.) Typhon overcame the Osiris-consciousness, killed Osiris, laid him in a chest, and committed him to the sea.”

How could the cosmic event be better described in a picture? First, the sun-god Osiris reigns, then he is driven out with the moon. The moon is the chest that is pushed out into the ocean of cosmic space; thereafter Osiris is in cosmic space. But we recall that in the myth it is told that when Osiris was found again, when he arose again in cosmic space, he appeared in fourteen forms. The myth says that Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces and was buried in fourteen graves. Here in this profound myth we have a wonderful reference to the cosmic event. The fourteen aspects of the moon are the fourteen pieces of the dismembered Osiris.¹ The complete Osiris is the whole moon-disk.

At first this appears as though it were all only a symbol. But we shall see that it had a real significance. Now we come to something without which the mysteries of the cosmos will never be clear to us. If such a constellation of sun, moon, and earth had not arisen, if the moon had not appeared in fourteen aspects, then something else could not have arisen, for these fourteen aspects caused something special. Each of them has had a great and powerful influence on man in his evolution on earth. Now I must tell you something that is strange, but true.

At the time when all this had not yet happened, when Osiris had not yet withdrawn, man in his light-form did not have the foundation for something that today is of the greatest importance. We know that the spinal cord is important. The nerves proceed from it. Not even the beginnings of these were present in the time when the moon had not yet departed. These fourteen aspects of the moon, in the order in which they follow on one another, were the cause of fourteen nerve-filaments being annexed to the human spinal cord. The cosmic forces worked in such a way that these fourteen nerve-filaments correspond to the fourteen phases or aspects of the moon. This is the result of the Osiris influence. But something else also corresponds to the moon-evolution. These fourteen phases are only half the phenomena of the moon. The moon has fourteen phases from new moon to full moon, and fourteen phases from full moon to new moon. During the fourteen days leading to the new moon, there is no Osiris influence. Then the sun shines upon the moon in such a way that the latter gradually turns its unilluminated surface to the earth as the new moon. These fourteen phases from full moon to new also have their result, and for the Egyptian consciousness this result was achieved through Isis. These fourteen phases are ruled by Isis. Through the Isis influence fourteen other nerve-filaments proceed from the spinal cord. This makes a total of twenty-eight nerve-filaments, corresponding to the different phases of the moon. So we see, from the viewpoint of cosmic events, the origin of specific members of the human organism.

Many will now object that this does not account for all the nerves, but only for twenty-eight of them.² There would have been only twenty-eight had the moon-year coincided with the sun-year. But the sun-year is longer, and the difference between the two caused the surplus nerves. Thus from the moon the influences of Isis and Osiris were built into the human organism. But something further is connected with this.

Up to the moment when the moon began to work from outside, here had been no duality of sex. There had been only a human being who was both male and female. The division occurred first through the alternating influences of Isis and Osiris from the moon. Whether a person became male or female depended upon whether the Osiris nerves or the Isis nerves exercised a certain influence on the organism. An organism in which the Isis influence predominated was male, whereas a body in which the Osiris influence prevailed became female. Naturally, both forces, Isis and Osiris, work in every man and in every woman, but in such a way that in men the etheric body is female, while in women it is male. Here we have something of the wonderful Connection between the single being and the situation in the cosmos.

We have seen that man is influenced not only through the forces but also through the constellations, or positions, of the heavenly bodies. All that belongs to the male or female organisms formed itself under the influence of these twenty-eight nerves proceeding from the spinal cord. Now we will bring forward something that will give an insight into the cosmos and its connections with human evolution. These forces form the human shape, but man does not rigidify in it; an equilibrium is achieved between sun and moon influences. In the following, we must not think that we are dealing with mere symbols; it is solid facts that concern us.

What is the original Osiris, the undismembered Osiris? What is the divided Osiris? What previously was a unity in man is now divided into the twenty-eight nerves. We have seen how in ourselves he lies dismembered. Without this, the human form could never have come into being. What formed itself under the influence of the sun and moon? Through the joint working of all the nerves there was brought into being, not only the externally male and female, but also within man something arose through the influence of the male and female principles. There arose the inner Isis-result, and this is the lungs. The lungs are the regulator of the influences of Typhon or Set. What works on man from Osiris, by stimulating the female influence in a masculine way, causes the lungs to be made productive through the breath. Through the influences that proceed from sun and moon, the masculine and feminine principles are regulated: in every female, something masculine—the larynx; in every male, something feminine—the lungs.

Isis and Osiris work inwardly in every person, in respect to his higher nature. Thus every person is double-sexed, having both lungs and larynx. Every person, whether man or woman, has the same number of nerves.

After Isis and Osiris had thus torn themselves out of the lower nature, they bore the son, the creator of the future earth-man. Together they produced Horus. Isis and Osiris begot the child, which was sheltered and nurtured by Isis: the human heart, sheltered and nurtured by the lung-wings of Mother Isis. Here in this Egyptian image we have something that shows us that in these ancient mystery-schools what had become the higher nature of man was looked upon as male-female, which is what the Indian recognized as Brahma. The Indian pupil was shown, in the original man, what later appears as that loftier form. Horus the child was shown to him, and he was told that all this had arisen through the primeval sound, through the Vach, the primeval sound that differentiates itself into many sounds.

What the Indian pupil experienced has been preserved for us in a remarkable verse in the Rig-Veda. In this is a passage that says, “And there come over man the seven from below, the eight from above, the nine from behind, the ten from out the foundations of the rocky vault, and the ten from within, while the mother cares for the suckling child.” This is a remarkable passage. Let us imagine Isis, whom I described as the lungs, and Osiris, whom I described as the breathing-apparatus, and let us think how the voice works into this, differentiating itself into throat-sounds, lung-sounds, as in the letters of the alphabet. These letters come from different sides; seven come from below out of the throat, and so on. The singular working of everything connected with our air-apparatus is shown here. The place where the sound differentiates and divides is the higher mother, who fosters and nurses the child: the mother—the lungs; the child—the human heart, which is molded by all the influences, and from which come impulses to ensoul the voice.

Thus the mysterious working and weaving within the cosmos was revealed to the neophyte. Thus it built itself up in the course of time, and we shall see how the other members of man built themselves into this web. In this Egyptian occult teaching we have a chapter of occult anatomy as this was cultivated in an Egyptian mystery-school, insofar as man had knowledge of cosmic forces, of cosmic beings, and their connection with the human physical body.

• 1. For confirming material see E. A. Wallis Budge: Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (London, P. L. Warner, 1911), pp. 19-21.
• 2. There are generally thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves.