The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The lecture yesterday brought our study of the evolution of our planet to the stage known as Old Moon. We heard that the first embodiment of our planet was that of Old Saturn, the second that of Old Sun and the third that of Old Moon. We came to the point in yesterday's lecture where it was made clear that if everything had progressed exactly as hitherto, man would not have been able to keep pace with the tempo of the cosmic evolution of other beings. Hence a kind of severance took place at a certain point during the Old Moon embodiment. The Sun, progressing as it was within the cosmic expanse, separated from the planetary body together with the finest substances and higher beings. The less progressed part of the planetary body, namely, Old Moon itself, still containing all that constitutes our present earth and present moon, remained as a kind of cloud-body. Certain conditions brought about a densification or hardening on Old Moon and the same happened to the beings inhabiting it.

When the Sun had separated, its forces worked upon Old Moon from outside. The subsequent human-animal-plant kingdom that came into existence on Old Moon now received the forces of the Sun from outside. After the separation, the three kingdoms on Old Moon came into existence. As yet there was no mineral kingdom but what took shape, after the hardening process, as the lowest kingdom was a kind of mineral-plant kingdom—mineral substance that was plantlike in character, or, if you prefer, plant substance that was mineral in character. This formed the ground of Old Moon; it was a kind of semi-solid, semi-fluid foundation. On the earth today we walk about on a mineral ground, on Old Moon it was semi-solid, semi-fluid ground, a kind of plant-mineral soil. Think of a mass of spongy, plantlike substance on which human beings walked. This was the character of the lowest kingdom on Old Moon, a kingdom that was at the same time half-living. The ground of our earth today has become comparatively static; volcanic activity is the only reminder of a certain inner life. On Old Moon there were no such conditions. We may perhaps speak later on about what an occultist has to say on the subject of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Just as organs in a plant grow and subsequently die, so did this half-living substance on Old Moon. The Old Moon was like a great organism, living and mobile, on which the beings living might have felt like parasites of today. These Old Moon plants were composed of mineral substance, had life in them and were mobile; they were plant-mineral in character. Nothing would have been found resembling our rocks of today; instead, there were horny or woody formations. In the environment of Old Moon, like a kind of atmosphere, were a few cloud-masses composed of a half-watery, half-living substance in which the beings of the next kingdom, half animal, half plant in character, were embedded. If you were to crush a tree, causing something akin to the feeling experienced by an animal, that would be remotely comparable with what was experienced by this animal-plant kingdom, which could not exist as such on the earth today.

As has often been said, not only are there pupils in school who make no progress but in the whole process of evolution there are always beings who remain at a standstill and who, together with the forms that belong to them and express what they are, become retarded. Thus, on the earth itself there were still certain moon beings who were not sufficiently advanced to keep abreast of evolution on the earth. These beings were obliged to create in their outer expressions the condition that had been essential to their life on Old Moon. As you know, plants on Old Moon were not rooted in mineral soil as they are today but in the half-living ground of the planet. Mistletoe, for example, is a descendant, a straggler, of an Old Moon form; it is obliged to take root in plant-soil. In folk myths there are many indications of this, for example, in the legend of Baldur and Loki. The latter is a being belonging to Old Moon, whereas Baldur is a being inwardly connected with earth and sun evolution. To interpret a legend or myth it is necessary to know in which sphere of occult investigation the connections can be discovered. External science could be so enriched by the fruits of clairvoyance that it would recognize in a legend much more than folk fantasy. Spiritual science must teach one to investigate with the whole soul instead of with the intellect only.

There was still a third kingdom on Old Moon, between the animal and human kingdoms; it was the animal-human kingdom. The forms of those animal-men were quite different from what is pictured by materialistic science today. They were animal-men although certain important members of their constitution were not yet actually within them. While he is asleep today, man's physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed and his astral body is outside. Fundamentally speaking, during sleep he is therefore in the physical world with only the lesser half of his constitution. Man's physical and etheric bodies belong to an earlier, cosmic stage of consciousness. Clairvoyant vision reveals this condition to have been permanent on Old Moon. The astral body then was never entirely within the physical and etheric bodies but was nevertheless connected more fundamentally and definitely with the human being than is the case during sleep today. The head of the man of Old Moon was not self-enclosed as is the case today. A residue of what the organs in the head were at that time is the place at the top of a baby's head that stays soft and open for a long time. On Old Moon the head of the human being was still open. Were you to draw a line vertically downward from this soft area, you would meet the pineal gland. Today it is stunted and withered but it was an important organ during the Old Moon embodiment. It was a kind of sense organ that connected man's physical and etheric bodies with his astral body. Through this organ, which was a delicate, luminous body, man's astral body radiated into the other bodies. His consciousness was neither that of sleep nor of waking life. He did not perceive outer objects. His consciousness might be compared with that of the dream to-day. The pineal gland at that time was a kind of warmth organ, emitting powerful, luminous rays of warmth. When on Old Moon man was moving about, the function of this organ was to show him the direction he must take. Man's perception on Old Moon consisted in something like a dream picture rising up within him. There was as yet no seeing or perceiving objects but man felt an inner up-and-down surge of living pictures of which the dream pictures of today are only a feeble shadow. Everything a man set out to do on Old Moon, how he searched for his food and so forth, was always activated by these pictures that were connected with the outer world. He could allow himself to be directed and led by them. When he was looking for food he was guided by certain pictures that rose up before him, and he was warned of danger also by them. The astral body extended far beyond the physical and the etheric bodies; the form of the physical body alone could be called human.

On Old Moon man's inner warmth was not yet constant. Today, on the earth, this has been achieved. On Old Moon man absorbed warmth from the warmth around him and emitted it again, just as he inhales and exhales air today. The process became visible in his organ of warmth. It gleamed and was luminous when he was absorbing warmth and darkened when he was exhaling it. If you could have seen what was happening, the process would have suggested the image of a fire-breathing dragon. All these happenings have a deep significance. Figures such as the Archangel Michael with the fire-breathing dragon under his feet, or St. George. fighting with the dragon, are pictures reminiscent of those conditions. The fire breather of Old Moon, the ancient Dragon, is a figure that once actually existed. It portrays a stage that would have to be surmounted.

This is the explanation of such matters that is derived from occult knowledge. Later on, when spiritual science is more widely known, there will be a different view of truths that have been preserved in imagery and pictures of this kind. This animal-man form was quite different from that of man today because the astral body did not sink into the physical body as deeply as it did later on the earth. Man is the figure he is today because the astral body eventually sank right down into him. It could be said that what did not, during the Old Moon period of evolution, allow itself to descend into the depths of the physical world, now resolved to do so during the earth period. But if this process in the cosmos had taken place at an earlier time, man would have remained at a much lower evolutionary stage. During the period of earth evolution, he succeeded, with the help of the spirit, in acquiring for himself the noble, godlike form that is now his. If the possibility of developing this stature had already existed on Old Moon, the descent of the astral body would have taken place prematurely. The divine Guides have always chosen the right moment. The essential achievement of Old Moon evolution was that time was left for the evolution of the physical body, and on the earth man was to be permeated by the astral body after having evolved physically on Old Moon at a lower stage. Then again there took place a certain recession of the Moon into the Sun, which had previously separated; the Old Moon globe was again absorbed by the Sun and everything passed into a cosmic sleep, a pralaya. This began at the time when the Moon returned again into the Sun.

Hence the evolution of Old Moon proceeded by the following stages: firstly, a kind of preparation; secondly, separation into Sun and Moon; thirdly, formation of three kingdoms on Old Moon; fourthly, return into the Sun; fifthly, ebb; sixthly, the cosmic sleep.

The fourth metamorphosis of our earth, our own planet earth itself, then came forth from the cosmic sleep. This first configuration of the earth was, of course, quite different from its configuration today. When the earth emerged from the cosmic night, from the darkness of twilight, it was gigantic in size, for again sun and moon were contained within it; the separations took place later on. So enormous was the size of the earth that it reached as far as the Saturn of today. Differentiation in the solar system did not take place until a much later time. As far as is possible in terms of philosophical thinking, the Kant-Laplace theory is an entirely intelligible exposition of this first form of our earth. It speaks of a kind of archetypal nebula in which everything was dissolved and out of which the whole solar system came forth. Through the rotation of this nebula, rings took shape; they densified and then, still as the result of rotation, the planets were formed. In schools this process is often illustrated by means of an experiment. A globule of oil in liquid of equal density is made to rotate by a simple mechanical device. It can then be observed that this globule flattens, that drops separate from it and form themselves again into globules that circle round the central globule. In this way one can see in miniature a kind of planetary system coming into being through rotation. This has an immensely suggestive effect. Why should we not picture the process in this ways This experiment shows how a planetary system comes into existence through rotation; it is there before our very eyes.

But one thing is forgotten. One of us, or the teacher, actually causes the rotation! Nothing is really explained by this external illustration. No cosmic system comes into existence out of nothingness. It does not arise of itself from the nebula, but it comes into existence because many spiritual beings have been working on it and at a certain point in their evolution have drawn out the finest substances from the chaotic root substance and cast out the coarser substances, namely, the moon.

During the first period after pralaya, the earth, in which all the substances and beings were again united, recapitulated the Saturn condition. At the beginning of this phase of evolution the earth was not a globe of gas as has often been falsely assumed, but a globe of warmth. For it (the earth) was re-capitulating the condition of the Saturn embodiment and extended to the sphere of the present Saturn. At a certain stage the spiritual beings involved take their substances with them. Spirit is the foundation of everything, both when the Sun separates and during the evolution of Old Moon. No external factor was responsible here; it was an inner necessity for one section of the beings. The higher beings separate what they need from the chaotic substance. Everywhere it is the spirit that directs the external reality. When the earth first came into existence everything was contained in it; the spiritual beings indwelling it were at different stages of their evolution. We shall bear this in mind during the following studies.

Thus after pralaya the earth first of all recapitulated the Saturn condition; it was a condition of warmth. Then this gigantic globe of warmth condensed to the gaseous state and only when a definite point had been reached was it possible for the globe to form the fluid element and recapitulate the Old Moon condition. At this point on the earth there was a repetition of what had previously happened on Old Moon: the sun separated from the earth and earth-plus-moon became one independent body, containing the substances and beings of earth and moon, as they are still present today. Thus for a time earth and moon, and sun were one united whole. The earth-plus-moon was ejected because man could no longer keep pace with the tempo of the sun. Had the sun remained in the earth man would have been old practically at birth. The beings of the cosmos are at entirely different stages of evolution. It will only be possible to indicate the most important features of this evolution during the fourth period, that of the earth. Even the more mature beings belonged to grades at every possible level. There were some who could neither profit by the rapid tempo of the sun nor by the slow tempo of the earth. These beings departed already before the separation, when sun, earth and moon were still united. They created special arenas for their activity and these were the domains suitable for their rulership. It was thus that the outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, were formed.

During the recapitulation of the Saturn embodiment, Uranus, Vulcan and Saturn separated from the earth. During the recapitulation of the sun embodiment, Jupiter and Mars separated. After the sun had left the earth, Mercury and Venus separated from it. After the separation of the sun, the earth cast out the moon. The dispersal of Old Moon was brought about by the forces of the progressed beings who drew out the solar body, while the normal and retarded beings produced the moon circling around it. In all the mysteries these happenings were called the strife in heaven. The detached planetoids are the ruins of that battlefield. It is here that the primal secret of the origin of evil must be sought.

The planetary spirits involved could not have waited until the sun separated from the earth because they would not have found the right soil for their activity; evolution at this time was turning into different channels. The planetary conditions of space and movement are all the expression and effect of the activity of their beings; these conditions indicate the evolutionary rank of the spiritual beings inhabiting the planets. Beings who had believed that they, too, could accompany the sun because this had formerly been possible but who could not now do so, separated from the sun, but only after it had itself separated from the earth. These beings separated from the sun after this event and are at a far higher stage of evolution than men. Venus and Mercury are the two bodies that, having separated from the sun after the latter's separation from the earth, formed the inner planets of our solar system.

After the severance from the sun a difficult, sombre period now began for the earth, in a certain respect its darkest, hardest era. While still united with the moon, the earth drew into itself all the forces that were retarding evolution. To obstruct life is characteristic of the forces principally active in the moon. During this period, these obstructive forces were working far too strongly in the earth. If the earth had remained connected with them, life would not have taken its course in the right tempo. Man would have hardened to the stage of mummification. The earth would have become a veritable cemetery, one vast graveyard containing statues of mummified human bodies. No procreation would have been possible. When the sun had left the earth, fearful desolation and hardening of all life took place. So already at that time there were periods when the human physical body was abandoned by its spiritual members, just as today the physical body is abandoned by its spiritual members at death.

In that past era, withdrawal and emergence of the being of spirit and soul from the physical already took place and a new search for the physical body began, as happens today when incarnations are to take place. But more and more frequently it happened that when the being of soul and spirit desired, while the moon was still united with the earth, to find a human body again, none was to be found, because bodies were no longer fit to receive the being of spirit and soul. Just imagine that great masses of human beings were to have died today and because of the character of the physical substance these bodies had become so decadent that the souls would have said: We cannot make use of these bodies, they are too decadent for us, they offer no possibility of further evolution. Suppose that because of an extensive spread of alcoholism, for example, successive generations had gradually become so degenerate that the bodies were simply useless for the descending souls. This is more or less a picture of the state of the earth at that time, before the exit of the moon. Everything that should have been habitable down below was often hardened, crusted, withered, mummified. There was actually a period when souls were seeking in vain for bodies for their own evolution on earth. The consequence was that certain beings simply could not at that time have returned to the physical plane as men. They could not have incarnated again on the earth. These beings then went to other cosmic bodies that had separated from the sun, namely, to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. There was a time when the majority of these beings who should normally have incarnated on the earth according to their nature and their stage of evolution, placed themselves under the protection of the beings of Mars, Jupiter, Venus or Saturn, having ascended to and populated these cosmic bodies. Only the strongest souls found it possible to cope with the stubborn bodies and keep them flexible. Please understand me well. It was only the best soul material that then came again to the earth, because its power to master the stubborn bodies was the greatest. But under such conditions evolution could not have progressed.

The beings of the highest rank belonging to our solar system now adopted a new procedure. The most impermeable substances were extracted and separated from the earth; the severance of the moon was brought about. The result of this was that the forces that had remained behind were no longer frustrated in their evolution. But it was not until later that this moon became what it is today. The time had now come when the physical and etheric evolution of man could find the tempo befitting its stage. The forces both of the sun and the moon now worked upon the earth from outside, maintaining the balance. Gradually, while the moon was emerging, a kind of softening, an amelioration of the bodies of men, again took place. The period just described is called in occultism the Lemurian epoch, the epoch of the separation of the moon during the physical embodiment of the earth. The epoch when the sun left the earth is called the Hyperborean age, and the epoch when the sun, moon and earth were still united is called the Polarian age.

During the whole period when the sun was separated from the earth and the moon produced a hardening process on the earth to begin with and then left the earth during the whole of that period, sublime beings were influencing the differentiation. Their most important servants were the Spirits of Form, called the Exusiai in Christian esotericism, also Spirits of Revelation, Powers.

On Saturn it was the Thrones, the Spirits of Will who made the sacrifice of pouring out from their own substance the material for man's physical body. On Old Sun it was the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom who provided the substance for the etheric body, and on Old Moon it was the Spirits of Movement or Mights who made possible the formation of the astral body. On the earth the Spirits of Form or Powers instill the ego, bringing it about that in this phase of evolution the ego enters gradually into what had come into existence, namely, man's physical body, etheric body and astral body. This is the work of the Spirits of Form. In order that an ego-man could come into existence at all as the expression of ego consciousness, and that this coordination of the physical, etheric and astral bodies could take place, everything that has now been described was essential. The separation of sun and moon from the earth was necessary; it was also necessary for man to undergo a process of hardening followed by a certain softening. This could take place because the wise beings who guided and directed these happenings undertook it all as probationary measures for the good of evolution. A great deal in the evolutionary process of the earth is still done today by the sublime beings concerned, as probationary measures.

What, then, is the anthroposophical movement? It came into the world because the lofty beings we call the Masters, who live in human physical bodies but have reached the far higher stage of evolution than the average man of today, poured out a certain amount of wisdom from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards. The living influx of this wisdom from higher realms into our culture is the actual basis of our anthroposophical movement. Do not imagine that there was no possibility of the attempted influx of wisdom falling upon deaf ears in humanity. Even if there had been deaf ears, the Masters would have said that an attempt must be made later on, when human beings would be ready to receive the wisdom. In occultism this is known as the test of maturity in men. The fact that wisdom pours into humanity from higher beings such as these is not in itself sufficient; what matters is how it is received; the success of the test depends upon that. Such tests have already been made several times but have not always succeeded. It was often within narrow limits that humanity proved to be ripe for the tests; receptive souls and hearts were not always to be found. When the ego of humanity was to be instilled, the test consisted in gradual attempts to permate what had formerly been astral body only, with the ego. Then it turned out that the astral body, permeated by the ego, was incapable of penetrating the physical body. Adjustment was therefore necessary and this was made possible by the separation of the moon. It was in the middle of the Lemurian epoch that the entry of the ego, the Christ principle, was first achieved.

But the following was connected with this. During and after the separation of the moon, the earth was depopulated. We have heard that the bodies had become so contaminated that they could no longer provide habitations for the souls. Cosmic happenings such as these have been preserved in legend and saga, but occult investigation reveals their true origin and teaches us that while the separation of the moon was taking place, when the earth was depopulated, many souls were searching for suitable embodiment in cosmic space; they departed from the earth and assumed bodies on other planets. But when the moon had finally left, it became apparent that the earth was capable again of providing suitable bodies. Now, the souls, who during the latest Lemurian epoch and thereafter in the Atlantean period had gone to the planets, presented them-selves again on the earth and incarnated in the bodies there. Groups of human beings now formed on the earth. Some provided bodies for souls coming from Jupiter incarnations, or from Mars, Venus or Saturn. These souls now found bodies that were appropriate for them. This grouping of souls gave rise to the birth of races. Hence there is a certain connection between the races and cosmic bodies and thus it was possible to speak of Saturn men, Jupiter men and so on. What can be called the concept of race had now, for the first time, its justification.

On Old Moon, and also on the earth while it was still united with the moon, there were human beings at different stages of evolution. This can be perceived right on into the Lemurian epoch, when owing to the exodus of the moon, differentiation took place in humanity. Thereafter the concept of race arose and from then on began to have a certain meaning, a certain significance. Race is something that comes into being and subsequently passes away again. The epoch of the formation of the races is that embraced by Lemuria and Atlantis. Today only stragglers of the races are present.

The lecture yesterday covered the steps up to the Lemurian epoch in the evolution of our earth. During that epoch a great cosmic event took place, namely, the exit of the moon from the substance of the earth. The direct result of this was that the right tempo was introduced into the evolution possible for man. In respect of form and temperature the earth at that time was essentially different from what it is today; its temperature was so much higher that contemporary man could not have lived upon it. Gradually the earth densified and solid substances were formed. When in the lecture yesterday it was said that bodies “hardened,” this is not to be understood in the physical sense but as meaning in respect of strength and quality. Certain substances dissolved. The whole earth was in a seething-fluidic state and it solidified only be degrees. But it must not be thought that this means hard and dense in the modern physical sense; it relates only to strength and quality. These forces would have mummified human beings. Out of the seething-fluidic state of the earth, formations resembling islands emerged and the beings living on them were slightly similar to our present animals and plants. During the first half of the Lemurian epoch, man himself did not live actually on the earth but in the sphere above the earth, in a fine, rarefied corporeality; his constitution was much more spiritual. At the beginning of the Lemurian epoch man had not, as yet, his later bodily nature, nor did he take the more solid kind of nourishment. Indeed, even at the end of the Lemurian epoch you would not have found even the densest forms of man's body equipped with bones such as exist today. The substance of man's physical body at that time was still flexible, gelatinous, hardly distinguishable outwardly from the surrounding sub-stance. The souls who had descended to the earth too soon drew this kind of densest substance into their bodies, with the result that then there were living on the earth men whose constitutions were least spiritual, while the others were still living above the earth.

It was only now, during the Lemurian epoch, through the ejection of fine ashes and fiery-fluidic metallic masses, that the first foundation of the mineral kingdom was laid. These masses formed the beginning, as it were, of islands. This is a more pictorial way of expressing it but that is how the process of gradual densification presents itself to clairvoyant sight. Out of these masses there emerged what we may call a plant kingdom and only later on the animal kingdom. It would lead too far if I were to attempt to tell you in detail how the physical world densified. Everything really descended out of higher spheres, including the continents as they densified. But the being who is man today still tarried, as it were, in a sphere above the earth. Men lived within this more ethereal sphere and there developed their finer bodies. The human etheric and astral bodies there were not yet connected strongly with the physical body but were freer from it. With the solidification of the physical body, which now became progressively denser, however, the connection with the etheric and astral bodies became closer. Instead of hovering and floating above the earth, man became a being who now trod the earth itself.

At this time an important influence asserted itself upon man. If there had been no such influence, what would have happened to him? For long, long ages he would have remained a being without initiative, without inner independence, an automaton, propelled by the forces of higher spiritual beings. Forces from the spiritual beings streamed perpetually into his physical, etheric and astral bodies. Among these beings there were some who worked chiefly upon his astral body and had themselves remained backward in their own evolution; these were the luciferic beings. They drew man down to the physical plane more quickly than the good, normally evolved spiritual beings had done.

The luciferic beings were spirits who ought in reality to have completed their task on Old Moon. Had they asserted their influence upon men then, they would have been able to work only upon the astral body for that was the highest member of man's constitution on Old Moon. They were, however, incapable of this because they were retarded beings. Nor could they affect the ego, because on Old Moon they had not known of its existence. The luciferic beings had eventually evolved to the stage of being able to work upon man's astral body, but man himself had meantime progressed and the ego had been membered into him. The luciferic beings could not yet have worked upon the ego; higher beings were doing so, and also upon the astral body, but only through and by way of the ego. These higher beings would not have allowed themselves to work directly upon the astral body, for that was a task they had already accomplished during the Old Moon period. If the luciferic beings had failed to have any influence upon man, the higher beings alone would have worked upon his astral body by way of the ego and so have purified the astral body. Instead of this, however, during the Lemurian epoch the luciferic beings worked directly upon man's astral body from every side and consequently the astral body was exposed to all the influences that should have been worked out on Old Moon. As a result there were implanted into man urges, desires and passions that would not have been his lot if the higher beings alone had worked upon him. The gods would not have allowed these influences to have access to him. The luciferic influence had a twofold effect upon man. Firstly, a certain enthusiasm, a certain zeal could be kindled in him to do one thing or another; but this zeal was not guided by his ego, not influenced by the higher beings working in him. Secondly, it was made possible for him to secede from the higher beings, to do evil, but also to have freedom. Thus, initiative, enthusiasm and freedom for man were due to the luciferic beings but the possibility of doing evil also existed. The luciferic beings insinuated themselves into man's astral body. Fundamentally speaking, this is still the case today; it is they who on the one side make man free and on the other entice him to evil.

Owing to the fact that man's astral body was permeated by the luciferic beings, he was led prematurely down to the earth from the atmosphere above it. For this the luciferic beings are essentially to blame. They were the cause of the deterioration and premature densification of man's astral body; otherwise, he would still have remained for a long time in the atmosphere. This, in the Bible, is called Paradise.

Thus, the expulsion from Paradise was due to the influence of the gods. You should therefore picture the earth in its seething fluid condition and man being led by the luciferic beings too soon down to the earth on which continents were forming. At that time man's astral body still had a far greater influence upon his environment, greater magical powers than were his later on; there was as yet no such drastic separation between the laws of nature and the will of man. In this connection an evil man today would be unable to cause any special damage to nature. He would be incapable of this. In that early period it was different. Evil lusts in the soul of man had a visible, magical effect in nature; they attracted the forces of fire above and on the earth. Through his evil lusts and magic will, man set the forces of nature ablaze. Today this is no longer possible, but at that time fire flashed through the air when men were evil.

Through the wickedness of masses of human beings and the fact that man succumbed too completely to the influence of the luciferic beings and lent himself to evil, the forces of fire in Lemuria were kindled. Thus, Lemuria perished as the result of the raging fires and the wickedness of a large section of its population. The human beings who were saved went to the West, to a continent lying between the present Africa, Europe and America, namely, Atlantis. There the evolution of humanity continued for long, long ages. The number of human beings gradually increased and the souls who had gone to Jupiter, Mars, and so on, during the period of desolation, came down to this continent. The process lasted for a long time. It was thus that the concept of race developed in ancient Atlantis. In occultism it is said that there were human beings in Atlantis whose bodies were inhabited by souls who had previously been on Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so on. They were called Mars men, Jupiter men, for example. The external forms of the bodies differed for this reason. During the whole first half of Atlantis the texture of the human body was much softer, much more flexible, and yielded to the forces of the soul. These soul forces were essentially more powerful than they are today, and they both shaped and overpowered the physical body. A man of ancient Atlantis would have been able to break a railroad track, let us say, with ease, not because his physical forces were strong, for his bony system had still not developed, but through his magical, psychic forces. A cannon ball, for example, could have been repulsed by this psychic force. The density of flesh developed only later. A similar phenomenon is still to be found today in certain lunatics who on account of the liberation of strong psychic forces—in that condition the physical body is not properly connected with the higher bodies—can lift and throw heavy objects.

Because in Atlantis man's physical body was still pliable, he could more easily adjust himself to processes in the life of soul; the physical stature could be made to decrease or increase in size. If, for example, a man in Atlantis was, let: us say, stupid or sensual, he fell into matter, as it were, and became a giant in stature. The more intelligent human beings developed a delicate constitution and were smaller in stature; those who were dull-witted were giants. Man's external form was far, far more strongly influenced by the forces of soul than is the case today when substance has become rigid. The bodies of men developed in accordance with the qualities of soul, and this accounted for the great differences in the races.

When myths and legends have described the dwarfs as being clever and the giants as dull-witted, we recognize once again the reflection of a profound, occult trend. When a soul came down again to the earth from Mars, the qualities with which it had been connected there continued for a long time to influence it and the body it inhabited. This fact explains the differences in races and racial characteristics.

If the evolution of humanity until the middle of the Atlantean epoch had proceeded without the influence of Lucifer, man would by then have developed a picture consciousness imbued with a high degree of clairvoyance. There would have been in his soul something that through its power would have revealed the external world to him in inner pictures; he would not have perceived objects outside through his eyes. As a result of the luciferic influence man had perceived the physical world at an early stage, but not rightly. He saw the external world through a veil, as it were. Evolution as provided for him by the divine-spiritual beings was that in place of the dull, clairvoyant consciousness with which his inner world was perceived in pictures, he would have seen the external world but in such a way that behind everything material, spirit would have been present. He would have seen the spirit behind the physical world. All of a sudden—but please do not take that literally, for the process was obviously lengthy—the external world would have appeared to man at a certain time; he would have awakened. The inner world would have suddenly vanished but the consciousness of the spirit whence that world originated would have remained. Man would have seen not only the plants, animals and so forth but simultaneously the spirit whence they had come forth. Because the luciferic beings drew man down to the earth too soon, the external world had the effect of hiding the world of spirit from him; physical matter became opaque for him. Otherwise, he would have seen through it to the primordial spiritual ground of the world. Because man had come down too soon into matter, it proved to be too dense for him and he could not penetrate it. But from the middle of the Atlantean epoch onward, other retarded spiritual beings were able to impregnate this matter, in consequence of which it was as if clouded, made turbid, and man was again no longer able to behold the spiritual. These were the ahrimanic or Mephistophelian beings. Mephistopheles—Ahriman is not the same being as Lucifer. Through untruth Zarathustra calls Ahriman the liar. He beclouds the purity of the spirit of man, conceals the spiritual from him. Ahriman comes after Lucifer and instils into man the illusion that matter is a reality in itself. So in his progress, during which the divine-spiritual beings wanted their influence to work upon him, man allowed himself to be subject to two other influences: those of Lucifer who assails man in his inner nature, in the astral body, endeavoring to confuse and mislead him, and Ahriman, who, working from outside, deludes man to a certain extent, causing the external world to appear to him as maya, as matter, We must speak of Lucifer as the spirit who is active within man. Ahriman, on the contrary, is the spirit who spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes recognition of the spiritual world impossible. These two spirits hold man back in his development to spirituality. It was especially the ahrimanic influence that asserted itself in man and caused the Atlantean part of the earth to perish.

In Lemuria, with their magical forces, men had a strong effect upon nature. They could, for example, control fire. The Atlanteans were no longer capable of this. But with their will they could control the germinal forces in which deep secrets lie hidden—the forces of air and water. Fire was beyond their control. Let us be clear that when we look at a locomotive today, constructed by and controlled by man, this is something quite different. Today man understands how to make the forces contained in coal serve his purposes, to turn them into a propelling power. This process means that he controls the lifeless, mineral force in the coal. The Atlantean, however, controlled the actual life force contained in seeds. Think of the life force that causes the blades of grass to sprout from the earth. This life force was extracted from the seed by the Atlanteans and put to use. In their sheds where the Atlanteans kept their “air ships” they laid up enormous stocks of seeds, just as we today store coal. With the force accumulated from the seeds they propelled their vehicles. When the clairvoyant looks back to that epoch, he sees these vehicles near the earth in the air that was still dense to a certain extent; equipped with a kind of steerage apparatus, they rose up and moved. The Atlanteans controlled these forces. Now it is unthinkable to imagine that the forces of plants—soul forces, that is to say—can be applied by magical means without at the same time influencing the forces of air and water. When the will of the Atlantean turned to evil and used these forces for egotistic purposes, he simultaneously evoked the forces of water and of air, released them, and ancient Atlantis perished as the result. The continents came into existence through the cooperation of the elements and man. But now the ahrimanic influence was gradually able to become so strong that man could no longer see the spiritual. Behind physical matter he could see nothing except the mineral element, the inorganic, and therewith the magical powers vanished ever more completely from him.

In the Atlantean epoch man was able to control and master the life force in the plant kingdom. In the Lemurian epoch it lay within his power to control the seminal forces of animals, and indeed it actually came to the point of Lemurian man applying these seminal forces of animals to transform animal forms into human forms. Every such magical action performed by man with the seminal forces, causes a release of the forces of fire. When such will becomes evil, the worst forces of black magic are generated and evoked. Today the most evil forces on the earth are still released when black magicians mishandle forces that are, generally speaking, withheld from mankind. These forces are powerful and at the same time holy. They are forces that, in the wise hands of worthy guides, can be applied in the highest and purest service of humanity.

Man now gradually became incapable of moulding his body. Cartilage and bones, the hard constituents, were integrated into it and man's resemblance to his present stature constantly increased. It was in the Atlantean epoch that what has been described first took place and it is therefore comprehensible that ancient Atlantis cannot be found by modern researchers. Hopes cherished by learned men of still being able to find traces of human evolution in those olden times, will never be fulfilled, because man was then a being whose limbs still consisted of soft, flabby substance. Such a body cannot be preserved, just as after a hundred years no remnants of the soft-bodied mollusks are to he found. Remnants of animals from ancient periods can still be found because the animals had already hardened while man's constitution was still soft and pliable. The animals came down into matter too soon; they were not able to wait. Out of the earliest human figures who had become physical too soon the most stunted human figures have come into existence. The noblest human figures stayed above the earth the longest, and remained soft and pliable. They waited until they were able to avoid an epoch during which they would have been obliged to remain stationary at a certain stage of hardening, as in the case of the animals. Because they were not able to wait, the animals have remained at a stage of rigidity and hardening.

The evolution of the earth has now been described up to the time when the forces of water were unleashed and ancient Atlantis perished. The human beings who were saved from Atlantis made their way on the one side toward America, on the other, to the Europe, Asia and Africa of today. These great migrations continued for long ages.

We will now think once more of ancient Atlantean culture. In the earliest period man possessed strong magical powers. With these powers he controlled the seed forces, mastered the forces of nature and in a certain way was still able to see into the spiritual world. Clairvoyance then gradually faded. Men were destined to found the culture belonging to the earth; they were to descend to the earth in the real sense. Thus, at the end of Atlantis there were two kinds of human beings within the peoples and races. Firstly, at the height of Atlantean culture there were seers, clairvoyants and powerful magicians who worked by means of magical forces and were able to see into the spiritual world. Beside them were people who were preparing to be the founders of present humanity. They already had within them the rudiments of the faculties possessed by men today. They could emphatically no longer equal the achievements of the old Atlanteans but they were able to make preparation for intelligence, for the power of judgment. They possessed the elementary faculties of calculation, computation, analysis and so forth. They were the people who developed the rudiments of the intelligence of today and no longer made use of the magical forces applied. by the Atlantean magicians at the time when their application was already fraught with danger on account of the powerful ahrimanic influence. They were those “others,” the despised people, rather like the anthroposophists today who meet together in small groups, or like the first Christians in ancient Rome who gathered together in the catacombs.

Now in Atlantis there were also centers of culture and ritual—we will call them the Atlantean Oracles—where what is called the Atlantean wisdom was harbored and practiced. In accordance with the differences in human souls due to their having come down to the earth from different planets, there were necessarily different Oracles for men of different constitutions. There was a Mars Oracle, a Jupiter Oracle, a Venus Oracle, and so on. These Oracles were sanctuaries where the initiates, who were sages of a certain degree, guided and led the Mars race, the Jupiter race, and so on. All these Oracles, however, were in turn led by the still more powerful Sun Oracle. This was the leading center of the Mysteries whence the cultural instructions for the other Oracles proceeded. As well as this highest leadership, all Mars men were under that of the center where the initiate of the Mars Oracle resided, together with his pupils; all Mercury souls were led from the Mercury Oracle, all Jupiter souls from the Jupiter Oracle, and so on. All these Oracle centers, however, were subject to the authority of the great initiate of the Sun Oracle.

This great leader of the Sun Oracle, the greatest initiate of Atlantis, directed his attention above all to that section of human beings who differed from the ordinary population in ancient Atlantis. They were simple people who were looked down upon and who no longer possessed magical powers. But it was they who were gathered together by the great initiate because they had developed the new faculties, even if only in a primitive form. It was from them that understanding of the new age was to be expected. The great initiate gathered together this useful material for the future, and also those old initiates or magicians who had not persisted in clinging egotistically to the former practices. Our present age presents a similar picture and can be compared with the conditions prevailing in Atlantis at that time. Today, too, there are on the one side the influential figures in the prevailing forms of culture, people who in their own way are magicians, working only with what is inorganic; on the other side, there are the despised people who still today want to work for the future. At that time, in Atlantis, the representatives of culture, the old magicians, also looked down with disparagement upon the small number of those who had developed the new faculty, which was useless in ancient Atlantis. The great initiate of the Sun Oracle did not, however, despise these people; today, too, the proud bearers of our culture look down upon a small number of human beings, upon the anthroposophists who gather in small, insignificant meeting places and are said to engage in all kinds of foolish activities. Generally speaking, they are unprofessional laymen who claim to be inaugurating the future. These are the people who are developing and preparing in themselves a faculty that to the others seems useless, but because it has a foreboding of the future is able to create a connection again with the spiritual world. In Atlantis long ago it was a matter of finding the connection with the physical, material world; the task today is to discover the spiritual again. Just as at that time the old initiate gathered his host together locally, directing his call to the simple, despised people, so today again, under different—not local—conditions, a call goes forth from the great Masters of Wisdom who are allowing certain spiritual treasures of wisdom to flow into humanity. Those possessed of certain qualities respond to this call as did certain human beings long ages ago; they were individuals who had within them primitive talents for calculation, computation and so forth.

This wisdom is not imparted in order that theosophical dogmas shall be grasped by the intellect but that they shall be understood by the heart. A man is then strong enough to know why theosophy is there today. It is there to meet a great challenge of evolution, and he who knows this also finds the strength to conquer all obstacles, come what may. He proceeds along his path because he knows that what is intended to come to pass through theosophy must come to pass for the further progress of humanity on the path to the spirit.

The great initiate of the Sun Oracle led the small group of human beings and founded a kind of cultural center in Asia. He drew these individuals to him in order to make them capable of founding post-Atlantean culture. During the great migration, everything that had come into existence in Atlantis had been mingled, jumbled together. It follows that in the post-Atlantean epoch one should no longer speak of races but of civilizations, cultures.

We will now turn to consider the consecutive civilizations in the post-Atlantean epoch, the first of which is the ancient Indian. A remarkable mixture of peoples had been saved after the Atlantean catastrophe and had congregated in primeval India. The human beings who lived there still had the deepest, overwhelming yearning for the spiritual world, knowing that from it they had been born and that now they had lost it. Thither the great initiate of the Sun Oracle sent the seven Holy Rishis. With longing fraught with pain, the man of ancient India maintained that the world of the senses is untrue and that the spiritual world from which he has descended is the only true world. It was, therefore, easy for the Holy Rishis to teach what they had to say about the primeval wisdom, about the Mysteries, to those who still harbored a longing for the spiritual world. To the ancient Indians the material world was maya, the great illusion.

Already a different attitude of soul prevailed in the second post-Atlantean epoch of culture, the ancient Persian epoch. Western thinking and research in the physical world realize that this wonderful world, constructed as it is according to laws of perfect harmony is worthy to be penetrated by the spirit. The people of Zarathustra had a boding realization of this. Those who have knowledge of the people of ancient Persia will be able to distinguish clearly between them and the people of India. To the latter, everything around them was maya, illusion; the spiritual world alone was real and a worthy goal of aspiration; that world alone was permeated by the highest self. Such an attitude of soul could not master the physical world. This became possible for the first time with the culture inaugurated by Zarathustra, the great pupil of the mighty initiate of the Sun Oracle. He knew and taught that the world outside is not maya but the expression of divine-spiritual reality, that behind it lies what Ahriman had hidden from man. What thus lies behind the world of sense must be disclosed and Zarathustra's aim was to find the spirit in the material world. That was his mission. In Ormuzd and Ahriman light and darkness are pitted against each other.

In the third epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian, man had already formed a close link with the physical world. Lifting his eyes to the stellar script in the heavens, the deeds and the wisdom of the gods were revealed to him and he tried to understand and fathom them. The wonderful stellar wisdom of the Chaldean priesthood is a memorial of these strivings.

The fourth culture, that of Greece and Rome, leads man right down to the physical plane. He has now come to love it so dearly that he has quite forgotten his origin. He no longer understands the spiritual world. This is clearly indicated in the saying of the Greek hero, Achilles: “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.” The wonderful sculpture of Greece and the citizenship of Rome are the hallmarks of this fourth epoch of culture. The fifth cultural epoch is our own. Materialism and the department store give it a certain characteristic stamp.

The purpose of all these cultures is, after all, that the physical plane shall be gradually mastered by man. Two fundamental streams come to expression in the cultures that have existed until today. The views and trends of feeling of the Eastern and Western worlds confront each other at the present time. The Eastern world calls the physical plane maya or illusion and does not want to be entangled with it either in thoughts, acts or feelings. The basic aim of the Western conception of the world, however, is to penetrate into this material world, come to grips with it. Outwardly, therefore, things may come to a confrontation but each world has its own complete justification. Let the Western world concern itself with external culture and by this means develop the forces of the soul, and let the Eastern take its path. At the summit they come together.

Thus we think of the Indian who leads an inner, spiritual life, withdrawn from the outer, material world, and the Persian who still sees something inimical in matter but nevertheless infuses spirit into it. The Egyptian contemplates the spirit and its laws; the Chaldean sees in the movements of the stars the script of the gods in space and reveres the stellar wisdom as the expression. of divine-spiritual beings. We see the Greek who knew how to imprint in matter itself the ideal of beauty and perfection of what nature has created; the Greek personifies the epoch when we can marvel at the marriage between spirit and matter in the physical masterpieces of art. Reference must be made here to a deep, occult background. Think of the Greek temple in its majestic purity and beauty; it is the actual dwelling place of the god. The essential difference between these works of architecture and sculpture and those of other cultural epochs is that the Greek temple in its pure form is so supreme in the perfection of its lines, even from the architectonic, artistic standpoint, that nothing can equal it. if the soul steeps itself in these lines—in the ruins of the temple at this is still to be seen—if it contemplates a Doric or an Ionian temple and has something of what is called space consciousness, it perceives how these lines are actually integrated in space. You yourselves are aware that certain currents, certain streams, are present in space. The Greek temple follows the inevitable courses of these streams and presents them in physical reality. The Greek creates in space what he has actually found there. The essential secret of the Greek temple is the presence within it of the god himself. Whereas the congregation of the faithful is an integral part of the Gothic cathedral, the Greek temple is a whole in itself. The Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arches and windows, is only conceivable together with its congregation, whose hands, folded in devotion, mirror its forms and together with it constitute a whole. Spirituality was actually present in the Greek temple; it afforded the spiritual being an opportunity to descend and find a dwelling place.

But during this epoch, which has so well understood how to adorn the earth with masterpieces of art, men increasingly lost connection with the spiritual world. The physical world was full of brightness and light for a man but when he passed through death during the epoch of Greco-Latin culture, the spiritual world was barren, cold and dark for him. During the post-Atlantean era, man had conquered the physical world but in the spiritual world sadness and gloom were his lot. Even the initiates, who both here and in yonder world are the teachers of mankind, could bring no consolation. When they told those who were living between death and a new birth about happenings in the physical world, those human souls became even more sorrowful; with every fiber of their beings they clung to the material world that was now taken from them. Here, too, a change took place through the event of Golgotha and the appearance of Christ Jesus on the earth. After His death on the Cross He descended into the Underworld—this is called the journey to Hell—and to those who were no longer living in a physical body He proclaimed that in very truth life had been victorious over death. It was thereby again made possible for souls to rise into the spiritual world.

It has often been emphasized that the present can best be understood in the light of the past and its happenings, and we shall most easily discover and understand the characteristics of our spiritual ideals for the future by looking back into times of remote antiquity. Today, therefore, we will consider developments that took place after the destruction of ancient Atlantis and, in connection with those developments, man's experience during the life after death.

The conditions experienced by the soul between death and a new birth have not always been the same. They, too, have changed in the course of evolution. During the great cultural epochs—the ancient Indian, the epoch of the Holy Rishis; the ancient Persian, epoch of the Zarathustrian culture; the Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin and our present epoch—man has connected himself ever more closely with the physical plane, which he grew to love more and more intensely. In every such epoch the human soul descended deeper into the material world. The greater the understanding acquired by man for this world, the stranger the spiritual world became for him after death. This was the case most strongly in the Greco-Latin epoch. The Greeks loved the physical world because in their glorious art, in that splendid adornment of physical existence, their whole soul could live joyfully. The physical world was dear to the Roman because in his discovery of the ego, the “I,” the feeling of his own personality could develop to the full. The concepts of Roman citizenship and Roman rights are hallmarks of this cultural epoch. The Roman felt at home in this physical, material world. The concept of rights has existed only since that epoch, so it is quite correct to say that jurisprudence began in the Roman Empire; it is the sign of reverence for the single personality. Death was the great unknown and evoked fear. The utterance of Achilles: “Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of Shades,” aptly indicates the conception prevailing in that epoch of the soul's experience during the life after death in the spiritual world. The more fully these souls had given expression in the realm of earth to all their faculties, the more did the capacity to find their bearings in the spiritual world after death depart from them. The soul felt isolated in the spheres it had now entered. Even in spiritland (Devachan) the soul felt that everything around it was dark, empty and cold. The soul was no longer capable of experiencing the spirituality of yonder world. Even the great leaders of mankind, the initiates, could not change this condition, yet they are the teachers of men not only here on earth but also in yonder worlds. When they told the dead anything about the world this side of the threshold, these souls felt still greater pain at having been obliged to leave the physical world that had become so dear to them. The teachers could bring with them nothing that would help or be of value to the dead, all of whom longed for reincarnation. A human being felt as though he were shut away from his brothers, abandoned even in the realm of the spirit. Had these conditions remained, love and brotherliness would also have gradually disappeared from the earth. For this sojourn in the realm of spirit would have meant that these souls would bring egoism with them into the physical world and into a life wholly centered in the individual self.

In the ancient. Indian epoch man still regarded the earthly world as maya, but things changed in the course of evolution. Zarathustra already proclaimed that the spiritual can also be found by man in the physical world. He revealed the path by which the people were ultimately to realize that the sun with its light is only the external body of a sublime spiritual being whom he called Ahura Mazdao, the Great Aura, in contrast to the little human aura. His aim was to proclaim that this being, as yet far off, would one day come down to the earth in order to unite with its very substance and to work further in the evolution of humanity. For the people of Zarathustra this heralded the same being who in later history lived on the earth as Christ. To his pupils Zarathustra proclaimed, “If you learn to understand that the spiritual is present in everything physical and material, that the physical is permeated by the great Sun Aura, by Ahura Mazdao, then Ahriman will no longer lead you astray.”

At other times Zarathustra said, “So great, so mighty is He who has revealed Himself to me in the sun that I sacrifice everything to him. Gladly I offer to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, the expression of my deeds, the astral body.”

This was the pledge once made by the great Zarathustra. He announced to his pupils that the great Sun Spirit would reveal Himself directly in the earth itself, in the realities of earthly existence. Thus did Zarathustra inaugurate the teaching that the material is only the physiognomy, the expression of the spiritual.

Then came the time when the being who had been heralded by Zarathustra revealed himself to Moses in the burning thornbush and on Sinai. Moses taught that this Sun Being is also the Ego Being, the highest principle that can be membered into man. But it is not only into man that a particle of the Sun Spirit has descended; it has also descended into everything in external nature, into the elements, everywhere. The same divinity who, in the name of the “I am the I am,” the principle once revealed to Zarathustra as Ahura Mazdao, as the innermost core, the primordial ground of all existence, was proclaimed by Moses to a whole people as the supreme being whose name was inexpressible and might be uttered only in the innermost sanctuary by the officiating priest. The Godhead who dwells in man, who does not reveal Himself only in the elements, in the flaming fire, is He who is here proclaimed.

Thus we can regard Zarathustra as the herald of Jehovah, of the same being who at the beginning of our time-reckoning dwelt for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the same God who had been proclaimed by Moses and Zarathustra.

Christ says, “How shall ye believe me if ye have not believed )Moses and the prophets?” Herewith Christ confirms that the Old Testament had proclaimed in advance, only under different names, the same God whom He, Christ also proclaims. All events in the world need a certain time to take effect. On Sinai, in the burning thornbush, this Sun Being, descending from the heights of the spiritual world, had reached the point where He could announce Himself to man through the elements. He now came nearer and nearer to the earth, into the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in the Jordan, and when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth and the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, this was not only the expression of a great cosmic event but also of the greatest of all earthly events: the Christ passed into the earth's aura as the Spirit of the earth. A new impetus had been given and could be perceived by clairvoyance, for at that moment the earth's aura changed, revealing particular colors. New colors were revealed and new powers were incorporated in the earth's aura. At the moment when the blood that is the physical expression of the ego flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha, at that moment the ego of Christ united with the earth. But the moment had also come when conditions in the spiritual world could begin to change for souls after death. This was the meaning of Christ's descent into Hell.

A clairvoyant, living before the event of Golgotha, would not have seen in the earth's aura what could be seen there later on, when Christ Jesus had passed through the death on Golgotha. Let us now think of the event of Damascus. Saul who, as an initiate of the Jewish Mysteries, knew full well that the “Great Aura,” Ahura Mazdao, would one day unite with the earth, rebelled against the belief that this being could have died on the shameful cross. Although he had participated in the events in Palestine, he did not believe that this great spirit had dwelt on the earth in Jesus of Nazareth. It was when he became clairvoyant near the gates of Damascus that in the earth's aura he beheld the Christ spirit, the living Christ, who could not previously have been seen there. He then said to himself, “Yes, it was predicted that the earth's aura would change, and that has now come to pass.” Then Saul became Paul. Paul spoke of himself as one who had been born prematurely, one who had become clairvoyant through grace; his was a premature birth because maturity had not yet been fully reached; he had not descended so deeply into matter and was less firmly connected with the physical body. Those who follow the course of Christianity know that the personality in it of supreme importance is Paul. He achieved more than anyone else for its propagation.

It was an occult fact, an occult event, by which Paul was converted, and it can justly be said that through that clairvoyant experience humanity was led to Christ. At that time a change took place in the earth's aura, and since then it has been changed. The words of St. John's Gospel were thus fulfilled: “He who eats my bread treads upon me with his feet.” Since then Christ has been the Spirit of the earth, the planetary Spirit. The earth is the body of Christ; His habitation is within the earth. This profound utterance in St. John's Gospel is not to be understood in an adverse sense or as a pointer to Judas who betrayed Christ. Rather, the reference is to the Christ-Jehovah Divinity and His relation to the earth.

When the occult investigator compares the effect of the art of the Greeks and post-Christian art upon the world man enters after death, he still finds that when a clairvoyant contemplates with physical eyes a Greek temple with its Doric pillars—for example, the ruins at Paestum-he may well be entranced by the harmonious forms that follow the spiritual lines of direction and thereby make this temple an actual dwelling place of the god. Just as a soul feels drawn to the body that is fitting for it, so does the god descend into these forms that harmonize so perfectly with his nature and being. But when a seer turns his eyes to the spiritual counterpart of his temple, he finds nothing in the spiritual world. The temple seems to have been obliterated from that world and a space left empty there: nothing of the temple is to be seen. If, on the other hand, a seer is contemplating works of art of the post-Christian era or, for example, contemplating the Gospel of St. John or the passages in the Old and New Testaments that have to do with Christ-Jehovah or Raphael's Madonnas—if the seer contemplates these creations first with physical eyes and then with clairvoyant sight, they are by no means invisible in the spiritual world but radiate there in even greater splendor. This is especially true of the Gospel of St. John. It is in the spiritual world that the greatness of that creation is first realized. It is in the spiritual world that whatever is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha first becomes radiant and clear in the fullest sense.

Simultaneously with the historical event on the physical plane, a spiritual happening, which was also a symbolic happening, took place when the blood flowed from the Redeemer's wounds. When Christ was no longer living in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, at the moment when He died on Golgotha, He appeared in the spiritual world to the souls living between death and rebirth, and the darkness abated. The spiritual world was suddenly filled with light. Just as the objects in a dark room suddenly become visible when a ray of light shines into the room and you see the objects that were always there although you could not previously detect them, thus did light pour into the world of the dead. The souls there were again able to perceive what was around them, to feel united in the realm of spirit with their brothers and could now bring into the physical world the qualities of love and brotherliness. Thus a new light came into this world of the dead, for the Mystery of Golgotha has significance not only for the world in which it took place physically but for all the worlds with which man is connected in the course of his evolution. If the spiritual world had remained as the dead experienced it during the Greco-Latin epoch, if the human soul had remained in the icy coldness and loneliness then prevailing, brotherliness and love would have gradually vanished from the world. Man would have brought with him from Devachan the longing for seclusion. For the light that then streamed into the earthly world and also into the world of the dead was meant to establish the kingdom of brotherliness and love on the earth. That is the mission of the Christ impulse.

We will now consider from still another side the Mystery of Golgotha and the secret of the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer.

We know that man on the earth has received an inheritance from Old Moon. The three lower bodies, physical body, etheric body and astral body had been prepared for him and it was on the earth that the ego was first added—the ego as the expression of human freedom and independence. In ancient times it was important to establish the homogeneity of mankind. At the beginning, conditions were such that the relations of one human being to another were saved only by being given a physical foundation. The blood is the expression of the ego. Blood kinship and the ties of blood were the ruling principles. The physical blood was the medium operating from man to man. This was how things were in times of antiquity. But through Christ Jesus love became a non-material bond. The activity of the human group ego declined. In earlier times the human being belonged to a communal tribal ego and he felt safe and secure within it, within the bosom of Father Abraham. This kinship was much more important to him than his personal identity. His higher self continued to exist in the ties of blood kinship. In the Old Testament we hear of Noah and other tribal fathers that they lived for hundreds of years. We are there led back to times when the human being not only had a memory of what he himself had experienced but also to a time when this memory extended far back into the generations. He did not say “I” of himself but he lived in his “I” right back to remote ancestors. His life did not begin with his birth; it was not then that he began to say “I” of himself but he said “I” of everything his ancestors had experienced.

It was against love based on blood that the luciferic beings at all times directed their sharpest attacks. Their aim was to make each single human being dependent upon himself alone, to instill consciousness of self into man even between death and a new birth. But divine beings, bearers of love, strove to bring individuals together through bonds other than those based on ties of blood, which take no account of freedom. The Christ principle unites with the full expression of the “I” the power flowing from the spirit of love and lets it hold sway from individual to individual. Hence there is a saying, Christ is the true Lucifer (Christus verus Luciferus) or Light-bringer, and finally the opponent of the fallen Lucifer. The love based on blood was transformed by Christ into spiritual love, into the brotherly love streaming from soul to soul. Christ's utterance, “He who forsakes not father and mother cannot be my disciple,” is to be understood in the sense that love based on blood must be transformed into the brotherly love that embraces all human beings with equal strength. Spiritual science takes nothing away from any of these biblical utterances but when it is rightly understood can only enrich them with a deeper understanding of Christian grace. The power of spiritual love was brought to the souls of men for the first time by Christ when He appeared on the earth; and with the blood that flowed on Golgotha from the wounds of the Redeemer the superfluous blood of humanity was as it were sacrificed. Through this act the teaching was confirmed that individual must confront individual as human brothers. In the world today there is still little understanding of Christ. Mankind has first to learn to realize the greatness of this most. mighty cosmic event. A few individuals have always had a divining of the whole significance of the Christ Being and His appearance on the earth. How have they thought of that event? Think of the human beings and peoples who preserved for some considerable time the connection with the spiritual world. The ancient Indian set little store by his connection with the physical world. He was intent upon the acquisition of super-sensible truths and lofty spiritual life in the spiritual world but had no desire to love physical existence. Let me tell you about an Eastern saga, which indicates in a splendid way how the Christ principle was tentatively grasped there.

In the course of time, so runs this saga, there appeared the power that guides our earth. An oriental legend, which reports it, was narrated in the temples of Northern Tibet to the pupil of the wisdom of the Buddha, and has been preserved ever since. This Eastern legend narrates that Kashyapa, the worthiest pupil of the Buddha, lived at a time when, even in the East, little understanding of wisdom was to be found. When he felt his end approaching he withdrew into a cave where he lived for long ages; his corpse was to be preserved there to await the appearance of the Maitreya Buddha in order then to ascend to heaven.

The gist of this legend follows. If there had been no special event, that is to say, if Christ had not appeared on the earth, neither the East nor the West would have been able to find the path into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa is pre-served until the Maitreya Buddha releases the corpse from the earth. This means that in the future man will again have powers whereby what is earthly can be spiritualized. The sublime being who conducts Kashyapa's body into the spiritual world will have descended more deeply than any being has ever done. Christ Himself releases the body of Kashyapa. In the period following this event the body is no longer there. What does this mean? It means that the body was immediately transported into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa can be liberated in the element of fire. Where is this fire? When seen by Paul before Damascus it was spiritualized. Thus the appearance of Christ on the earth is the great turning point when man can ascend again from the physical into the spiritual world.

Now think of the Buddha's teaching. Through observing old age, illness, death, and so forth, the great truth concerning suffering dawned in him. He now taught of the cessation of suffering, of release from suffering through the elimination of the desire for birth, for physical incarnation.

Now think of humanity six hundred years later. What do you find? Humanity reveres a corpse. Men gaze at Christ on the cross, Christ who dies and through His death brought life. Life has vanquished death.

One: To be born is suffering? No, for Christ entered into our earth and henceforward for me, a Christian, to be born is no longer suffering.

Two: Illness is suffering? But the great medicine will exist, that is, the power of the soul that has been kindled by the Christ impulse. In uniting himself with the Christ impulse, man spiritualizes his life.

Three: Old age is suffering? But whereas man's body becomes frail and infirm, in his real self he grows ever stronger and more powerful.

Four: Death is suffering? But through Christ the corpse has become the symbol of the fact that death, physical death, has been vanquished by life, by the spirit; death has been finally overcome by life.

Five: To be separated from the being one loves is suffering? But the man who has understood Christ is never separated from the one he loves, for Christ has brought light to the world stretching between death and a new birth; so a man remains united with the object of his love.

Six: Not to receive that for which one craves is suffering? He who lives with Christ will no longer crave for what does not come to him, or is not given to him.

Seven: To be united with what one does not love is suffering? But the man who has recognized Christ kindles in himself that universal love that envelops every being, every object according to its value.

Eight: To be separated from what one loves is no longer suffering, for in Christ there is no more separation.

Thus for the illness of suffering, which Buddha proclaimed and recognized, the remedy has been given through Christ.

This turning of humanity to Christ and to the dead body on the cross is the greatest transformation that has ever come to pass in evolution.

We have heard that the Atlanteans were still consciously at home in the spiritual world where they experienced day consciousness. So-called night consciousness was experienced in the physical world. We have subsequently followed the descent of humanity during the post-Atlantean era through the different cultural-epochs up to the Greco-Latin when Christ Jesus appeared on the earth.

We will now once again study our own time, the fifth cultural epoch. Because men's intelligence today is being directed solely to the physical plane, humanity has descended far more deeply into the physical world than was the case during the other main epochs of culture. Materialism has led to a tremendous upsurge of intellectual power and activity, with merely the satisfaction of physical needs in view. The typical hallmark of our epoch has crystallized, for example, in the department store. The culture of the present age works only for the needs of the physical plane, but it works with a subtlety hitherto unachieved. It is therefore clear to occultism why the contrast between religion and science, expressed as it is in the many different movements is so great and the cleft between them so wide. The conflict between religion and science, under which art also suffers, is always in evidence when the level of culture declines. This can be detected in the science of today, which has become irrevocably entangled in a materialistic and abstract mode of thinking. Philosophy is not something absolute but a mode of thinking that has come into existence in the course of evolution; it has certain antecedents and must be amenable to change. Before philosophical thinking, (which originated in the sixth century B.C. among the Greeks,) came into existence, the kind of knowledge then current was an extract of the wisdom contained in the Mysteries. The source of this wisdom was inner experience in the soul, experience in which the secrets of world happenings were revealed. When the human soul lost the ancient faculty of intuitive vision the intellectual analysis of sensory and soul perceptions began. But in the early days, through inner vision that was still possible for the philosophers, or through tradition, they still knew of the existence of the old Mystery wisdom and applied to it the intellectual faculty that was then developing. Seership was still the source of the wisdom of Pythagoras and Plato; Aristotle, the founder of logic, was the first to apply the technique of pure thought. Aristotelianism dominated thought throughout the Middle Ages, experiencing its heyday in Scholasticism. But an abyss gradually opened between knowledge and faith. Between reason and its mental technique on the one side and super-sensible truth on the other, a cleft arose, finding its ultimate expression in Kant. There is to be found in Kant and his philosophy one of the blind alleys into which materialistic thinking had led, and Kant, unfortunately, was the one who fertilized the whole of modern philosophy.

But it is not with the object of criticizing modern science that the spiritual investigator draws attention to such facts. He reveals them in order to shed light on the path that can lead away from the fossilizing of thoughts. There is only one solution, which is that science, art and religion, the three branches of culture, must again be united and mutually enrich each other; spiritual life must stream from them. To achieve this union is the task of Western spiritual science. It must establish harmony between faith and knowledge, the two aspects that the soul can no longer unite within itself. Even in our material. world nothing whatever takes place in which the spiritual is not an active factor. The spiritual is always the creator of the physical. The much vaunted philosophical pragmatism of James can only be designated as pseudo-spirituality, having a materialistic conception of the spiritual. For all that, however, it has also done a certain amount of good.

Our epoch places stress on the tremendous importance of heredity. In reference to this it must be said, from the point of view of the science of the spirit, which regards the physical as a product of the spiritual, that in the pathological manifestations attributed to heredity the spiritual is being obstructed by the physical and cannot take effect. But the spirit has, after all, only descended into physical matter and will ascend again when its experiences in the physical have been gathered. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, so too physical man and his organs. We know that man's physical body contains organs that today no longer function. They are organs of the past, the remnants of which we still bear within us. We also have within us the foundations for organs of the future, organs that today are in process of transition or transformation. First and foremost of these organs is the human heart, which contains striated muscle. The heart is a veritable nightmare for materialistic anatomy because it is an involuntary organ that consists of smooth as well as striated muscle, which is to be found in all voluntary organs in man. In point of fact, unsuspected by science, it is an organ of the future and is on the way to becoming a voluntary organ in the human being. In the initiate today it has already developed. The larynx, too, is an organ of the future, connected with the deep mystery of procreation. There is an indication of this at the present time in the break of the voice at puberty. In the far distant future, man will “utter” his offspring into existence, for the larynx will become a creative organ. The future of humanity lies in giving shape to the soul and spiritual in material forms. Man is on the way to spiritualization, in order to work ever more consciously at the transformation of his bodies. It behoves us to engender strength for this future task by adopting a spiritual conception of the world. Moreover, the feeling of becoming collaborators in this glorious evolution should fill us with happiness and vigor.

Let me now say a few words about the the great cosmic laws of karma and reincarnation. On Old Moon these laws were not yet in existence. The beginning of a process of reincarnation such as exists at present can first be spoken of when the ego is being incorporated into the earth, that is to say, from the middle of the Lemurian epoch until the middle of the Atlantean. For the animal, whose ego is the group soul, there is even today no reincarnation. The connection between an animal species and the ego belonging to it is to be found in the astral world. For the group soul of lions, for example, the death of a lion here on the physical plane means as much as it means to you to cut a fingernail. A lion is at first an astral structure, reaching down like a strand from the group soul; it descends to the physical plane, densifies, and at the death of the individual lion this astrality passes back again to the astral plane. The group soul draws it in again like a limb. On Old Moon the human soul underwent the same process. The human soul was then a member of its group soul and returned to it. The soul, as the Bible puts it, is sheltered in the bosom of Father Abraham.

Reincarnation and karma first began to have meaning during the Lemurian epoch and in time will cease to have significance. Man will then enter permanently into a spiritual world in which he will continue to be active. When, for example, man has developed the impulse of brotherliness in himself, the growth of races will cease, will be overcome. In the sixth cultural epoch, human beings will already understand better how to arrange their lives; concepts of race will no longer have validity. Men will no longer order their lives according to external, physical considerations but rather on a spiritual basis. In the seventh cultural epoch, which will reflect that of ancient India, there will once again be distribution into castes, but a voluntary distribution. Changes in the process of evolution constantly take place, yet continual progress is certain. In the Atlantean epoch, the middle epoch of our earth's evolution, the significant point occurred that is designated by the now complete penetration of the ego into man's physical body. The process began in the middle of the Lemurian epoch after the exit of the moon from the earth. Humanity has continued to evolve and when the concept of brotherliness finds practical fulfilment on the earth, races will be superseded. Karma will also then be overcome.

What is the law of karma? The principle of making good in a subsequent incarnation what was reprehensible in a preceding one. Differentiation must be made between karma that takes effect inwardly and one that has more external results. Karma taking effect inwardly is connected with the forming of character, talents and habits. Karma that manifests in more external ways takes the form of the conditions of life in which a man is placed, such as family, nationality and so forth. We will now consider more closely how karma works in physical life. For example, what appears in one life as urge or impulse, desire and ideation, emerges in the next life, or one of the following lives, as habit. From good habits a fine, well-knit, healthy physical body will come into existence in the next incarnation. A bad habit snakes its appearance in another life in the form of an illness or as a tendency to illness. Thus, the causes of illnesses are to be sought in the inclinations and habits of a previous life. The actual destiny of an individual is, on the contrary, the result of his former deeds. A person who radiates much love in one life will, in another, be able to stay young, inwardly as well as outwardly, for a long time. A person who harbors many feelings of hatred in one life will age prematurely in another. Individuals who abandon themselves to an ordinary, indolent life, which avoids all forms of spirituality, deprive themselves of something for their subsequent life that will be difficult for them to retrieve.

Now let me add a few words on the subject of initiation. At all times the leaders of humanity have drawn upon its fountainhead. The great individualities who presided over the Mysteries and whom we call the Masters have guided and led humanity. To understand this better we will consider the principle of initiation. Truth to tell, it is only possible since the time of the Atlantean catastrophe to speak of an initiation available to human beings because the process of initiation has also been subject to development and change in accordance with the needs of human beings. This is true not only in its outer forms.

Why is man in sleep unaware of sensory impressions although he is surrounded by a material world? It is because during the night his intellect is not working. The physical and etheric bodies of a man asleep remain in bed; his astral body and ego emerge and are in the spiritual world. But why is it that he perceives nothing of the spiritual world that is all around him and into which his astral body and ego enter during the night? It is because the astral body of the average human being who leaves the physical body during sleep at night has no astral sense organs. Hence, it is impossible for him to perceive any-thing in the astral world. Through initiation or spiritual training, the chaotic astral mass, which the astral body of the average individual reveals itself to be, is organized in such a way that it gradually begins to develop organs and can then have perceptions during the night. In normal life man is not yet able to form organs in his astral body. To be capable of this the power in his inner life must be essentially strengthened. This is achieved through definite exercises of meditation, concentration, and other indications. In his feelings and life of thought the pupil must give himself up to certain mental pictures, choosing subjects that tally only slightly or not at all with reality. Mental pictures that represent objects in the outer world are not suitable for developing organs in the astral body. But visualize a figure, for example, such as that of the Rose Cross, the black cross with the seven red roses, and if you practice the exercise with the necessary vigor and patience, you will experience something through it according to your degree of development. You will transform your astral body thereby, generating organs in it. These mental pictures should riot be abstractions; the right feelings and perceptive experiences must be involved. Only then will the desired results be achieved.

There are three different kinds of initiation, all of which lead to the same goal. There are three paths, the choice of one of which depends upon a man's individuality. One initiation is that of wisdom; it is the fitting goal for Indian and Oriental training. This path is fraught with great dangers for European and Western bodies and is therefore not the right one. The, second initiation is based upon the life of feeling; it is the fundamentally Christian path. Only few individuals can still take this path because it demands a strong power of devotion and piety. The third path of initiation is the Rosicrucian training, the path of the initiation of thinking and of will. It leads to union with the forces of the other paths of initiation. The final goal is definite in the case of every initiation, but in the course of evolution it must be adjusted in accordance with the current needs of souls and the possibilities offered by the human body.

The pupil of the old initiation was compelled to be entombed in a grave for three and a half days and was as if dead. His etheric and astral bodies were outside his physical body and in the spiritual world. The hierophant watched over the process and called the neophyte back to life. After his awakening he was a witness of the spiritual world. Such was the form of the old initiation; today that process is no longer necessary. The Christian and the Rosicrucian initiations have such powerful effects that the human being involved can achieve what, through the old initiation, was meant to be brought about by the emergence of the higher members from the physical body. The impressions from the spiritual world are now imprinted into the astral and etheric bodies without lethargy being induced for three and a half days. The modern initiation, if we like to call it so, once the purification or catharsis of the astral body has been achieved, brings about effects that lead to genuine spiritual sight and knowledge of the spiritual world based on actual experience; the impressions received by the soul in the spiritual world are then imprinted in the astral and etheric bodies. That is what is called illumination in the course of occult development.

We shall discuss a few intimate questions of reincarnation that can be examined only in a circle of well prepared anthroposophists. By this we mean not only that they should be well prepared in theoretical knowledge but also that they have developed their sensitive faculty by working with others in a branch. For we all remember that our perceptions and sensibilities for truth have changed by virtue of this collaboration. What today we do not merely believe but perceive as truths that are beyond the realm of faith used to be incredible to us in earlier days and today still appears as fantastic nonsense or reverie to outsiders. Thus it is an indication of advancement if people have become accustomed to really living in these perceptions for only then can they begin to consider special questions. Much of what will be mentioned here seems to be remote, and yet even though we will first have to go back to far-distant periods of human evolution, all these things have an enlightening effect on our understanding of life and its phenomena. We must start by putting before our souls how the process of reincarnation takes place in general.

When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences. Their first experience is the feeling that they are growing larger or that they are growing out of their skin. This has the effect of the human being attaining another perception of things than was the case earlier in physical life. Everything in the physical world has its definite place—either here or there—outside the observer, but that is not so in this new world. There, it is as if the human being were inside the objects, extended with or within them, whereas earlier he or she was only a separate object in its own place. The second experience after death consists of a human being's attaining a “memory tableau” of the life just completed, so that all events in it recur in comprehensive memory. This process lasts a definite amount of time. For reasons that cannot be stated here today, the duration of this memory is shorter or longer, depending on the individual. In general, the duration of this state can be determined from the length of time each human being was able to stay awake during the past life, continuously and without once succumbing to the forces of sleep. Supposing that the outer limit for a person's staying awake continuously had been forty-eight hours, then the memory tableau after death will also be forty-eight hours. And thus, this stage is like an overview of the past life.

Then the etheric body leaves the astral body, in which the ego is living. All three had been connected from the time they left the physical corpse, but now the etheric body separates itself from the other two and becomes an etheric corpse. However, today's human beings do not lose their etheric body completely but take an extract or excerpt along with them for all the times to follow. So in this sense the etheric corpse is cast off, but the fruit of the last life is carried along by the astral body and by the ego. If we want to be quite precise, we will have to say that something is taken along from the physical body as well: a kind of spiritual abstract of this body—the tincture medieval mystics spoke about. However, this abstract of the physical being is the same in all lives; it merely represents the fact that the ego had been embodied. On the other hand, the essence of the etheric body is different in all lives, depending on what one has experienced in a life and on the degree of one's progress in it.

There follows the condition of what is called kamaloca, the time of weaning the soul from the effects of physical, sensuous existence, which lasts about a third of the time of a person's physical life. After the etheric body has been cast off, the astral body still contains all the passions, desires, and so on that it had at the end of life; they must be lost and purified, and that is kamaloca. Then the astral body is cast off and here, too, the fruit, the astral essence, is taken along; but the rest—the astral corpse—dissolves into the astral world. The human being now enters devachan where he or she prepares in the spiritual world for a new life in the future. Here human beings live with spiritual events and beings until they are again called into the physical world, be it because the karma of a person demands it or because an individual is needed on the physical earth.

This is a general description of the process. However, life in the spiritual realm progresses steadily in that the future joins itself to the past, and coming events are shaped with the help of past events. If one considers the details of this process, there is much among the wondrous things that become apparent, which is not contained in a simple presentation of the process of reincarnation. It is, after all, clear that great differences exist when one looks at the course of human development and that the extracts or abstracts of their bodies can have different values depending on the kinds of fruit they were able to extract from life. And when we remember that there are great leaders of humanity, initiates who lead other human beings into the spiritual worlds, then we have to ask ourselves this question: What causes the accomplishments of the initiates to be preserved for the future? External history is, of course, incapable of providing an answer to this question. What we have to do is scrutinize the reincarnation of the initiates and then apply the results of our investigation. We will begin with the oldest initiates.

Before humanity inhabited the continents as we know them today, the physiognomy of the earth was quite different. The area that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean used to be the continent of Atlantis, which was destroyed by great catastrophes, as is reported by many peoples in their “saga of the great flood.” The Atlanteans—and that is we ourselves—had their great leaders and initiates, and even in those days there existed places of instruction or schools where the initiates taught. The existence of these schools can be verified today by clairvoyant investigation. A good name for these schools where the leaders taught and lived is the word “oracle.” the most important leader lived in one of the largest and most important oracles—the Sun Oracle. His main task consisted of revealing the secrets of the SUN—not the physical, external sun, but the real SUN. The latter consists of spiritual beings who make use of the physical sun much in the same way as human beings make use of the earth. To perceive and reveal the inner secrets of this Sun-existence was the task of the Great Sun Oracle. For it, sun light was not something physical, but rather every ray of sunshine represented the deed of the spiritual beings who reside on the sun. These great beings were exclusively on the sun during the time of ancient Atlantis. Later, when the great Being who was to be called the Christ united with the earth, this was no longer the case. Therefore, one can also call the Sun Oracle the Christ Oracle. The unification of the Christ-Being with the earth took place when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ at Golgotha. That is when His essence united with the atmosphere of the earth, as can be perceived even today in clairvoyant retrospection. That is how the Christ-Being came down from the Sun to earth. When the light of spiritual illumination fell on Saul-Paul near Damascus, Paul beheld the Christ that was united with the earth and knew immediately that it was He who had shed His blood at Golgotha.

The sun oracle of ancient Atlantis had already prophesied the coming of Christ, of the Sun-God. To be sure, he was named the Christ only much later, but we can still say that the Sun Oracle is the Christ Oracle. These oracles had many successors in later periods, such as the Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Vulcan oracles, each with its great mysteries and teachings. Toward the end of the Atlantean era a group of advanced human beings was formed in the vicinity of what is today Ireland. The Great Leader chose a few from their midst who should carry on cultural life when the impending catastrophe would finally take place. However, enormous migrations had taken place a long time before to the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which were beginning to rise out of the sea. Many successors of the old oracles came into being on these continents, but not without gradually losing the significance of the old oracles. The Great Leader, however, chose the best people in order to lead them into a special land. They were plain and simple people who were different from most other Atlanteans in that they had almost completely lost their clairvoyance. You will remember that the majority of the Atlanteans were clairvoyant. When they fell asleep at night, they did not lose consciousness, but rather the sense world disappeared and there arose in its place the spiritual world in which they were the companions of divine-spiritual beings. The advanced people in Atlantis had begun to develop their intellect, yet they were simple people who possessed inner warmth and were deeply devoted to their leader. He took this select group East to the center of Asia, where he founded the center of the post-Atlantean culture. After the group had arrived in central Asia, it was kept in isolation from the human beings who were unsuited to the task. The descendants of this group were educated with special care, and only they developed the qualities necessary to make them great teachers.

All this happened in a mysterious way. It was the task of the Manu, the Great Leader, to make the necessary preparations for preserving for the new race everything that was good in the Atlantean culture and thus to lay the foundation for the progression of a new culture. The sages living in the smaller oracles were unable to devote themselves to this task because only the Manu had preserved from the great initiates of the oracles that which we call the etheric body. As we have seen, this etheric body normally dissolves as the second corpse, but in certain cases it was preserved. The greatest of these sages in the oracles had worked so much into their etheric bodies that the latter had become too valuable simply to be dissipated into the general etheric world. Therefore, the seven best etheric bodies belonging to the seven greatest initiates were preserved until the Manu had developed the seven most outstanding people from his group in such a way that they were suited to absorb the preserved etheric bodies. Only the etheric body of the Great Initiate of the Christ Oracle was, in a certain sense, treated differently from the others. And so the seven sages, or Rishis, who had received the seven etheric bodies of the greatest initiates, went to India, where they became the founders and great teachers of Indian culture.

This very ancient, holy culture of the pre-Vedic era originated from the seven Rishis who bore the preserved etheric bodies of the initiates of the various oracles, such as Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and so on. In a way, a copy of those initiates, a repetition of their capabilities, came to be at work in these Rishis, even though they were plain and simple people when seen from the outside. Their significance was not evident from their external appearance, nor was their intellect commensurate with the loftiness of their prophecies. Possessing their own astral bodies and egos but being endowed with the etheric bodies of those great sages, these Rishis were not scholars and did not rank so highly in terms of their power of judgment as did many of their contemporaries, or even as many people in our times. But in inspired ages they were, in a way, seized upon by these oracle beings whose etheric bodies became active in them. In that sense they were only instruments through whom that ancient wisdom was proclaimed—those Vedas that are far too difficult, if not incomprehensible, for human beings in our age. And this is how the old wisdom of the ancient oracles was revealed, with the exception of the Sun, or Christ, Oracle which could not be completely revealed in such a way. Only a faint reflection of the Sun-wisdom could be transmitted because it was so lofty that even the Holy Rishis could not grasp it.

We can see here that reincarnation does not always proceed as smoothly and in such general ways as is often supposed. Rather, if an etheric body is especially valuable, it is—to express it metaphorically—preserved like a mold that can be imprinted on human beings of later ages. Such an occurrence is not all that rare, and many a plain person can have an extremely valuable etheric body that is preserved for later use. Not all etheric bodies dissolve after death, but some of those that are especially useful are transferred to other human beings. But the “I” of the individual receiving the etheric or astral body is not at all identical with the ego of the donor. Disregarding this fact can easily lead to great misconceptions on the part of someone who investigates a human being's past with faulty clairvoyant methods. It is for this reason that the occult theories about the earlier lives of human beings are often completely wrong, just as it would be wrong to say that the seven Rishis had the same egos as the initiates whose etheric bodies they had received.

Only when we know such things can we gain clarity about much that is important in human evolution, such as the preservation of human achievements for nature's economy. It is through the transmission of these seven etheric bodies that the highest values of the Atlantean culture were saved and preserved for posterity.

Let us discuss another example, which could not be mentioned earlier, and look at the ancient Persian time, the period of Zarathustra's culture.¹ We consider it an important period because it was the first post-Atlantean time in which greater emphasis was placed on the conquest of the physical world. During the Indian epoch, the longing for the spiritual realm dominated the thinking of human beings. Most of them considered the spiritual world as being real and felt like strangers in the physical realm, which to them was transitory, illusory, maya.² This consciousness changed in the prehistoric Persian culture through the teachings of Zarathustra, that is to say the teachings of the original and first Zarathustra, because there were many Zarathustras after him. His task as a leader was to draw the attention of human beings to the physical plane, to make inventions, manufacture instruments and tools, and thus to conquer the physical world. This was necessary because human beings had to become acquainted with the physical world as something that was important to them. However, the tempter within a human being tells him or her that the physical is the only reality and that there exists nothing beyond the earthly realm. This belief, Zarathustra teaches, is false because behind the physical there is the spiritual world, just as the physical sun is for us the external sign of the great Sun-Being, of the Spiritual-Divine, of the Great Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd. These names designate a Being that is now physically invisible and lives far away from the earth on the sun. But, as goes Zarathustra's teaching, some day this Being will reveal Itself; later It will make Its appearance on earth, just as It is now present on the sun.

Zarathustra initiated his most intimate students into these mysteries, but the most profound teachings he imparted to two of them. The first one was primarily instructed in everything that concerns human judgment, such as natural science, astronomy and astrology, agriculture, and other disciplines. All this knowledge was transmitted to this one disciple by a secret process of communication between the two. This prepared the disciple in such a way that in the following reincarnation he was able to carry the astral body of his teacher; and he was reincarnated as Hermes,³ the great teacher and sage of the Egyptian Mysteries. Born with Zarathustra's astral body, Hermes became the bearer of the great wisdom.

The second intimate disciple was instructed in the subject matters that express themselves especially in the etheric body and are deeper in substance. This disciple received in the following incarnation the etheric body of Zarathustra. The stories about this in religious documents are comprehensible only through these explanations. At his reincarnation, the student had to be animated in a very special way, that is the etheric body had to be strong before the astral body could be awakened. That could be achieved through the circumstances surrounding the birth of this reincarnated disciple, who was none other than Moses. The fact that he was placed into a box made of bulrushes that was allowed to float on the water and so on had the purpose of awakening completely the etheric body of the child. That enabled Moses to survey in his memory times long past, to pictorially record the genesis of the earth, and to read in the Akasha Chronicle.⁴ And, thus, one sees that these things are at work behind the scenes, as it were, and that through this process everything valuable is preserved and re-utilized.

There are other examples from later times, for example Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus),⁵ a curious personality of the fifteenth century. Here we can see the interesting case of how the research of this man, as it were, laid the groundwork for the entire body of the teaching of Copernicus,⁶ who lived in the sixteenth century. To be sure, this body of teaching is not yet quite as ripe in Cusa's books as in those written by Copernicus, but they contain all the essential ideas, a fact that confounds most traditional scholars. The fact is that the astral body of Cusa was transferred to Copernicus even though the ego of the latter was different from that of Cusa. This is how Copernicus received the foundation and all the preparations for his own doctrine.

Similar cases occur often. What is especially valuable is always preserved; nothing vanishes. But this fact also enhances the possibility of error in any attempt to establish correspondences, especially when people attempt to investigate the earlier lives of a human being with the help of a medium in séance. The transfer of an etheric or astral body to a human being in more modern times usually happens now in such a way that an astral body is transferred to a member of the same language group, whereas an etheric body can be transferred to a member of another language group.

When a pioneering personality dies, his or her etheric body is always preserved, and occult schools have always known the artifical methods by which this was accomplished. Considering now another characteristic case, we can say that it was important for certain purposes in the more modern age that the etheric body of Galileo⁷ should be preserved. He was the great reformer of mechanical physics whose accomplishments were so tremendous that one can say many of the purely practical accomplishments of the modern age would not have come about without his discoveries, for all technical progress rests on Galileo's science. The tunnels of St. Gotthart or Simplon have become possible only because Leibniz,⁸ Newton,⁹ and Galileo developed the sciences of integral and differential calculus, mechanics, and so on. With regard to Galileo, it would have been a waste in nature's economy had his etheric body, the carrier of his memory and talent, been lost. And that is why his etheric body was transferred to another human being: Michail Lomonosov,¹⁰ who came from a poor Russian village and was later to become the founder of Russian grammar and classical literature. Lomonosov, however, is not the reincarnated Galileo, as might be supposed as a result of superficial investigation.

And thus we see that there are many such cases and that the process of reincarnation is not so simple as most people of our time think. If, therefore, people investigate earlier incarnations with the help of occult methods, they have to exercise much greater caution. In many instances, it is nothing but childishness if people state or imagine they are the reincarnated such and such, perhaps Nero, Napoleon, Beethoven, or Goethe. Such silly things must, of course, be rejected. But the matter becomes more dangerous when advanced occultists make mistakes in this regard and imagine that they are the reincarnation of this or that man, when in fact they carry only his etheric body. Not only is this an error that is regrettable in itself, but the human being coming to these conclusions would live under the influence of this mistaken idea, and that would have nearly catastrophic consequences. The result of such an illusion would be that the whole development of the soul proceeds in the wrong direction.

We have seen not only that the egos are capable of reincarnation, but that the lower members of the human constitution in a certain sense undergo a similar process. The result of this is that the whole configuration of the process of reincarnation is much more complicated than is usually supposed. And thus we see that the ego of Zarathustra was reincarnated as Zarathas—Nazarathos, who in turn became the teacher of Pythagoras.¹¹ On the other hand, Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses. Therefore, nothing is lost in the world; everything is preserved and transmitted to posterity, provided it is valuable enough.

• 1. The “original” Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) Rudolf Steiner refers to in these lectures is not the historical religious teacher and prophet of ancient Persia whose dates are ca. 628–551 B.C., but the prophet who, according to early Christian tradition and according to Plutarch was born about 6400 B.C. He gave the impulse for the founding of the second post-Atlantean epoch.
• 2. The term maya in the Hindu Veda means magic power, but in Mahayana Buddhism it denotes illusion or non-reality; and this is how Steiner uses the term.
• 3. Historical scholarship usually considers Hermes as a mythical figure in ancient Egypt, but Steiner thinks he was a living prophet who appeared about 4200 B.C. when the sun moved into Taurus. According to historical speculation the so-called Hermetic books—metaphysical pronouncements about the community of all beings and things—were authored by the Egyptian god Thoth (the Thrice Great), whose name was often translated into Greek as Hermes Trismegistus.
• 4. The “Akasha Chronicle” is an occult “script” containing the complete story of the universe. Occultists of all ages have tried to “read” it by freeing themselves from the limitations of time and space. Rudolf Steiner had refined his spiritual faculties to such a degree that he was able to read the “Akasha Chronicle.” To understand his work, it is necessary to assume that he did possess this capacity. For a thorough description of the nature of the Akasha Chronicle, see Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory, pp. 38–41.
• 5. Nicholas of Cusa (1401?–1464) was a German humanist, scientist, and philosopher of the highest rank who became Bishop of Brixon in 1450. His astounding achievements in science included a theory that the Earth revolves on its axis around the sun and that the stars are different worlds.
• 6. Polish-born Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) was the founder of modern astronomy. His main work on the orbits and revolutions of heavenly bodies, completed in 1530, but not published until 1543 when he was on his deathbed, expressed his views on the structure of the physical universe.
• 7. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was the great Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who laid the foundations of modern experimental science. The time of his death in the text (toward the end of the seventeenth century) is an error in transcription.
• 8. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) was the famous German philosopher, mathematician, and statesman who invented calculus independent from Newton and is widely regarded as the founder of symbolic logic. His philosophical achievements include the Theodicy and the famous Monadology.
• 9. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was the great English mathematician and physicist whose works marked a turning point in modern experimental science. Few people know that in the later years of his life Newton spent much of his time in the study of theology and alchemy.
• 10. Michail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1712–65) was perhaps the most outstanding scientist, scholar, and writer of eighteenth-century Russia.
• 11. Pythagoras (c. 582–c. 507 B.C.) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and mathematician of whose personal life traditional science knows little. He migrated from his native Samos to Gotona and established a mystery center. The followers of Pythagoras believed, among other things, in the transmigration of souls.

Berlin, February 15, 1909

You will have been able to see from the one lecture given here on the more complicated question of reincarnation that the spiritual scientific view of the world continues its progression. Hence, what in the beginning could be presented as elementary truths is undergoing a metamorphosis, so that gradually we rise to ever higher truths. It is therefore correct to present general cosmic truths in their initial stage in as simple and elementary a form as possible. Thereafter, however, it is also necessary to advance slowly from the simple ABC's to the higher truths, because you will agree that through these higher truths we gradually attain what Spiritual Science intends to give us: the opportunity to understand and penetrate the very world that surrounds us in the sentient—the physical—sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go in our ascent before we shall be able to somehow draw the connecting links in the spiritual lines and forces that exist behind the world of the senses. But you will agree that this or that phenomenon in our existence has become clearer and easier to explain just by what we have been discussing in the last few lectures. So today we want to advance a little in this specific area and again take as our subject matter the more complicated questions of reincarnation—of reembodiment.

Above all, we want to see clearly that there are differences among the beings who occupy leading positions in the human evolution of the earth. We have to distinguish such leading individualities in the course of human evolution who, as it were, developed from the beginning with humanity on this earth as it exists, but with the important distinction that they progressed more rapidly. We might put it this way: If we go back in time to the most ancient Lemurian Age, we find the most varied stages of development among the human beings then incarnated. All the souls incarnated at that time have been repeatedly reincarnated—reembodiedduring the successive Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. The speed with which these souls developed varied. Some souls are alive that developed relatively slowly as they went through various incarnations; they still have long distances to traverse in the future. But then there are also those souls who have developed rapidly and who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations in a more productive way. They are now on a high plane of soul-spiritual development, one that will be reached by normal human beings only in the far-distant future. But as we dwell on this sphere of soul life, we can nevertheless say this: No matter how advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above normal human beings, yet within our earthly evolution they have made a journey similar to the rest of humanity, except that they have advanced more rapidly.

In addition to these leading individualities, who in this sense are like other human beings but stand on a higher plane, there are also other individualities—other beings—who have not gone through various incarnations as have the other human beings in the course of human evolution. We can visualize what lies at the bottom of this when we tell ourselves the following: There have been beings in the time of the Lemurian evolution under consideration—beings who no longer needed to descend into physical embodiment as the other human beings just described. They were beings capable of accomplishing their development in higher, more spiritual realms who did not need to descend into corporeal bodies for their further progress. However, in order to intervene in the course of human evolution, such beings can nevertheless descend vicariously into corporeal bodies such as our own. Thus it can happen that such a being appears; if we test it clairvoyantly in regard to the soul, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace it back in time and discover it in a previously fleshly incarnation, then trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on. Instead, we will have to admit that in tracing the soul of such a being back through the course of time, we may not arrive at an earlier fleshly incarnation of such a being at all. However, if we do, it is only because the being is able to descend repeatedly in certain intervals in order to incarnate vicariously in a human body.

Such a spiritual being who descends in this way into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being is called an “avatar” in the East; such a being gains nothing from this embodiment for himself and experiences nothing that is of significance for the world. This, then, is the distinction between a leading being that has emanated from human evolution and beings whom we call avatars. The latter reap no benefit for themselves from their physical embodiments, or even from one embodiment to which they subject themselves; they enter a physical body for the blessing and progress of all human beings. To repeat—an avatar being can enter a human body just once or several times in succession; but when it does, it is then something different from any other human individuality.

The greatest avatar being who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of our lectures here, is the Christ—the Being whom we designated as the Christ, and who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth when he was thirty years of age. This Being, who did not come into contact with our earth until the beginning of our era, was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh and has since that time been in contact with the astral, i.e., the spiritual, sphere of our super-sensible world; this Being has a unique significance as an avatar being. Although other, lower avatar beings can reincarnate several times, it would be in vain for us to seek the Christ-Being in an earlier human embodiment on earth. The difference between the Christ and the lower avatars does not lie in the fact that the latter incarnate repeatedly, but that they derive no benefits for themselves from their earthly embodiments. Human beings give the world nothing; they only take from it. By contrast, these beings only give; they take nothing from the earth. To gain a perfect understanding of this idea, you have to distinguish between such a lofty avatar being as the Christ and lower avatar beings. Such avatar beings can have the most varied missions on earth; and in discussing one of those missions, we want to avoid speculative language and take a concrete case as an illustration for such a mission.

You all know from the ancient Hebrew story of Noah that a large part of post-Atlantean, post-Noah humanity traces its ancestry back to the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japhet. It is not our purpose today to elucidate what Noah and these three tribal ancestors represent in other respects. We simply want to elucidate here that Hebrew literature, speaking of Shem as one of Noah's sons, traces the whole tribe of the Semites back to him as its ancestor. A genuinely occult perception of such a matter, of such a story, is always grounded in deeper truths. Those who are able to conduct occult research into such things know the following about Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

When such a personality is destined to become the forefather of an entire tribe, care must be taken from his birth—and even earlier—to insure that he can become such a forebear. Now, what preparations were necessary to ensure that an individuality such as Shem could indeed become the forefather of a whole people or tribal community? In the case of Shem it was done by giving him a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when human beings are born into this world, they structure around their individuality an etheric or life body, along with the other members of their being. A special etheric being must somehow be prepared for the ancestor of a tribe because it has to be, as it were, the prototype of an etheric body for all the descendants in succeeding generations. And so it happens that we have in such a tribal individuality a typical etheric body, a prototype as it were. Because of blood relationship in successive generations, the etheric bodies of all descendants of the tribe are in a certain sense copies of the ancestor's etheric body. Thus, every Semitic person's etheric body had something like a copy of Shem's etheric body woven into it. Now, by what means is such a condition brought about in the course of human evolution?

Let us look at Shem more carefully. We find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because an avatar had woven himself into it. It was not such a high avatar that we can compare him with other avatar beings, but still a lofty avatar descended into his etheric body. This avatar individuality was not connected with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, however, but was woven into his etheric body alone. From this example we can study what it means when an avatar being partakes in the constitution and composition of a human being. What does it mean, then, when a human being who, like Shem, has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people should in a way have the essence of an avatar woven into his body? It means that every time the essence of an avatar is woven into the soul of a fleshly being, any one member—or even several members—of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied and split into many parts.

The fact that an avatar being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body made it possible for countless copies of the original to come into being and to be woven into all the human beings who became the descendants of this ancestor in subsequent generations. Thus, the descent of an avatar being is, among other things, significant in that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the being who is animated by the avatar. As you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body was present in Shem, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted avatar and then woven into Shem so that it could descend in many copies to all those who were destined for consanguinity with him.

As we have already said in a previous lecture, a spiritual economy exists by virtue of the fact that something of special value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard not only that the ego reincarnates but also that the astral body and the etheric body are capable of doing the same. Aside from the fact that countless copies of Shem's etheric body came into being, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world because it could later be useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. Remember that all the peculiarities of the Hebrews had originally come to expression in this etheric body, and if at any time something of special importance was to happen to them—if one of them should be assigned a special task or mission, then this could be best accomplished by an individual who bore the etheric body of the ancestor within himself. As a matter of fact, an individual bearing the etheric body of Shem later played an important part in the history of the Hebrew people. We have here indeed one of those wonderous complications in the evolution of humankind that can explain so much to us. We are dealing here with an exalted individuality who, as it were, was compelled to condescend in order to be able to speak to the Hebrews in a comprehensible manner and to give them the strength necessary for a special mission. By analogy, if an intellectually advanced individual had to speak to a primitive tribe, he would have to learn its language, but this does not mean that the language in question would elevate him personally; all the individual would have to do is to take the trouble of acquainting himself with the language. In this same way, an exalted individuality had to make a strong personal effort to become one with Shem's etheric body to be able to give a definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality was the very Melchizedek¹² you find in Biblical history. In a way, he wore Shem's etheric body so that later he could give Abraham the impulse that you find so beautifully in the Bible. What was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied because an avatar being was incarnated in it, and all this became interwoven with all the other etheric bodies of the Hebrews. In addition, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give the Hebrews an important impulse through Abraham.

This is how finely interwoven the facts behind the physical world are, facts that are needed to elucidate to us what happens in the physical world. Only by being able to point to such facts of a spiritual nature that are behind the facts of the physical world do we learn to interpret history. History can never become comprehensible through considering physical facts alone.

Now, if the descent of an avatar being affects the soul-spiritual components of the human being in that he or she becomes the bearer of the avatar's soul, and if this results in multiplication and transmission of the archetypal copy onto others, then this phenomenon becomes especially significant with the appearance of Christ on earth. Because the avatar essence of Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible not only that the etheric body but also that the astral body and even that the ego were multiplied innumerable times; by ego, I mean the “I” as an impulse that was kindled in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth when Christ entered his threefold sheath. However, foremost in our consideration is here the fact that the etheric and astral bodies could be multiplied because of the presence of the avatar being.

Now, one of the most significant turning points in human history was the appearance of the Christ principle in earthly evolution. What I have told you about Shem is actually typical and characteristic of pre-Christian times. When an etheric or an astral body is multiplied in this way, the copies of the original are usually transmitted to those people who are related by blood to the ancestor who had the prototype. Hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe, but when the Christ Avatar Being appeared, all this was changed. The etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied and the copies preserved until they could be used in the course of human evolution. However, they were not bound up with this or that nationality or tribe. But when in the course of time a human being appeared who, irrespective of nationality, was mature and suitable enough to have his own etheric or astral body interwoven with a copy of the etheric or astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, then those bodies could be woven into that particular person's being. Thus we see how it became possible in the course of time for all kinds of people to have copies of the astral or etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their souls.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is normally described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences. It is for this reason that far too little attention is given to what is most important—the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the developmental progress of Christianity will easily perceive that the manner in which Christianity was disseminated was different in the first few centuries from that of later centuries in the Christian era. In the first few Christian centuries the dissemination of Christianity was, in a way, bound up with everything that could be gained from the physical plane. We need only look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how they emphasized physical memories, physical connections, and everything that had remained in a physical state. Just consider how Irenaeus,¹³ a man who contributed so much in the first century to the dissemination of Christian doctrine in various countries, stressed that memories should extend back to those who had listened to the disciples of the Apostles. It was important to prove through such physical recollections that Christ Himself had actually taught in Palestine. It was specially emphasized, for example, that Papias¹⁴ himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles' disciples. Even the places were shown and described where such personalities had sat—people who could still be cited as eyewitnesses to the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine. The physical progress in memory was what was especially emphasized in the first few centuries of Christianity.

How much stress remained on everything that was physical can be seen from the words of the old St. Augustine¹⁵ living at the end of this era, who said: “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to do so.” To him, the physical authority's telling him that something exists in the physical world was the important and essential thing. The determining factor for him was that a corporate body had preserved itself within which one personality is linked back to another until one arrives at one who, like Peter, was a companion of Christ. Hence, we can see that in the dissemination of Christianity during the early centuries, it was the documents and the impressions of the physical plane to which the greatest importance was given.

All that changes after the time of St. Augustine and into the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. It was then no longer possible to appeal to living memories or to consult the documents of the physical plane because they were too far removed from the present. Something entirely different was present in the whole mood and the disposition of the human beings, especially the Europeans, who were then embracing Christianity. It was the feeling, the direct knowledge, of the existence of Christ, of His death on the cross, and of His continuing life. From the fourth and fifth up to the tenth and twelfth centuries, a large number of people would have considered it foolish to be told that they could doubt the events in Palestine because they knew better. People like these were especially common in European countries, and they had always been able to experience inwardly in miniature a kind of Pauline revelation, that is the experience through which Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus.

What made it possible for a number of people in those centuries to be able to receive revelations about the events in Palestine that were in a sense clairvoyant? It was possible because the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been preserved and were in these centuries woven into the etheric bodies of a large number of people who wore these multiplied copies as one would wear a garment. Their etheric body did not consist entirely of the copy of Jesus' etheric body, but it had had woven into it a copy of the original. There were indeed human beings in those centuries who were able to have such an etheric body and who could thereby have an immediate knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ.

All this, however, had the effect that the Christ image was no longer associated with the externally historical and physical transmission of the story. The highest degree of such disassociation is evident in that wonderful literary work of the ninth century, the Heliand.¹⁶ This poem was written down by a seemingly simple Saxon in the time of Louis the Pious, who reigned from 814–840. The Saxon's astral body and ego could not match what was in his etheric body because the latter had had woven into it a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. This simple Saxon priest, the author of the poem, was certain from immediate clairvoyant vision that the Christ existed on the astral plane and that He was the same Christ who had been crucified at Golgotha! And because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to resort to historical documents or to physical mediation in order to know that the Christ does exist. Therefore, he describes the Christ detached from the whole Palestinian setting and from the peculiarities of the Jewish character. This poet, then, depicts the Christ as if He were something like a leader of a Central European or Germanic tribe, and he describes those who surround Hirn as His followers—the Apostles—as if they were vassals of a Germanic prince. The entire external scenery has been changed, but the structure of the events and the essential and eternal aspects of the Christ figure remain the same. This poet did not have to hold rigidly to historical events when he was speaking of the Christ because he had a direct knowledge of Him that was built upon a foundation as important as a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. What he had acquired as immediate knowledge, he draped with a different external setting. Even as we have been able to describe this writer of the Heliand poem as one of the peculiar personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into his own etheric body, we can find other personalities in this period who also carried a copy within themselves. We see, therefore, that the most important things take place behind the physical occurrences and that these things can explain history to us in an intimate way.

If we continue to trace Christian development, we come to the period from about the eleventh or twelfth up to the fifteenth century, and it is here that we discover an entirely different mystery that now carried evolution forward. If you remember, first it was the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane, followed by the etheric element being woven into the etheric bodies of the pillars of Christianity in Central Europe. But later, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, it was numerous copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that became interwoven with the astral bodies of the most important pillars of Christianity. In those days the human beings had egos capable of forming extremely false ideas about all sorts of things, yet in their astral bodies a direct force of strength, of devotion, and of the immediate certainty of holy truths was alive. Such people possessed deep fervor, an absolutely direct conviction, and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What sometimes must strike us as being so strange especially in these personalities is that their ego development was not at all equal to that of their astral bodies because the latter had copies of the astral body of Jesus Christ woven into them. Their ego behavior often seemed grotesque, but the world of their sentiments, feelings, and fervor was magnificent and exalted.

Francis of Assisi,¹⁷ for example, was such a personality. We study his life and cannot, as modern people, understand what his conscious ego was; yet we cannot help having the most profound reverence for the richness and range of his feelings and for all that he did. This is no longer a problem once we adopt the perspective mentioned above. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own astral bodies, and this enabled him to accomplish what he did. Many of his followers in the Order of the Franciscans, with its servants and minorites, had such copies interwoven with their astral bodies in a similar fashion.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become lucid and clear to you as soon as you set this mediation in world evolution between that time and previous times properly before the eye of your soul. The important distinction that must be made for these people of the Middle Ages is whether what was woven into their souls from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth contained more of what we call the sentient soul, more of the intellectual soul, or more of the consciousness soul. This distinction is important because, as you know, the astral body must be envisioned as containing, in a certain sense, all of these three components, as well as the ego, which it encompasses. What was woven into Francis of Assisi was, as it were, the sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth, and the same is true in the case of that remarkable personality Elisabeth of Thüringen, who was born in 1207.¹⁸ Knowing this secret of her life will enable you to follow the course of her life with your whole soul. She, too, was a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into her sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

If you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul, or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, you will above all comprehend that little understood and much maligned science that has become known as scholasticism.¹⁹ What tasks did the scholastics set for themselves? They set out to find, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications and proof of those phenomena for which historical links and physical mediation did not exist and which could no longer be known with the direct clairvoyant certainty possible in previous centuries through the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people set themselves the task by saying: Tradition has communicated to us that the Being known as Jesus Christ has appeared in history and that, in addition, other spiritual beings of whom religious documents bear witness have intervened in human religion. Then, from the intellectual soul, that is from the intellectual element of the copy of Jesus Christ's astral body, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that their literature contained as mystery truths. Thus arose the strange science that attempted what was probably the most penetrating intellectual venture ever undertaken in the history of human thought. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but for several centuries this school of thought developed the capacity of human reflection and thus put its imprint on the culture of the time. Scholasticism accomplished this by an extremely subtle discernment between and outlining of various concepts. As a result, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the school implanted into humanity the capacity to think with acute and penetrating logic.

The special conviction that Christ can be found in the human ego arose among those who were imbued more strongly with the copy of the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, because the ego functions in the consciousness soul. Because these individuals had within them the element of consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesas of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent within their souls, and through this astral body they came to know that the Christ within them was the Christ Himself. These were the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart,²⁰ Johannes Tauler,²¹ and all other pillars of medieval mysticism.

Here you see how the most diverse manifestations of the astral body, multiplied by the fact that the exalted Avatar Being of the Christ had entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth, continued to work in the following age and brought about the real development of Christianity. This is an important transition in other respects as well. We have seen how humanity in the course of its evolution was otherwise dependent upon having incorporated within it these copies of the Jesus of Nazareth Being. In the early centuries people had existed who depended entirely on the physical plane; then in the following centuries there were human beings who were susceptible to having the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies. Later, human beings, one might say, became more oriented toward the astral body, and that is how the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could now be incorporated into them. The astral body is the bearer of judgment, and it was the human capacity to judge that was awakened between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries.

This awakening of the astral body can also be observed in another phenomenon. Before the twelfth century, the depths of mystery contained in the Holy Communion were especially well understood. It was not widely discussed, but rather was accepted in a manner that enabled a human being to feel everything that was contained in the words, “This is My body and this is My blood.” Christ meant with these words that He would be united with the earth and become its planetary spirit. And because flour is the most precious thing on earth, bread became for human beings the body of Christ, and the sap flowing through plants and vines became to them something of His blood. Through this knowledge, the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished but was, on the contrary, enhanced. People in the early centuries felt something of these infinite depths, and they continued to do so up to the time when the power of judgment was awakened in the astral body. It was only then that disputes began about the meaning of the Lord's Supper. Just think about the discussions about the meaning of the Lord's Supper among the Hussites, Lutherans, and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists.²² They would not have been possible in earlier times when people still had an immediate, direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper!

Here we see verified a great historical law that should be of special significance to the spiritual scientist: As long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was, they did not discuss it. They began to discuss it only after they had lost direct knowledge of it. Let us consider the fact that people discuss a particular matter as an indication that they do not really know it. Where knowledge exists, knowledge is narrated, and there is no particular desire for discussion. Where people feel like discussing something, they have, as a rule, no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of decline regarding the seriousness of a subject matter when discussions about it are to be heard. Discussions portend the decline of a particular trend. It is very important that time and again in Spiritual Science we learn to understand that the wish to discuss something should actually be construed as a sign of ignorance. On the other hand, we should cultivate the opposite of discussion, and that is the will to learn and the will to gradually comprehend what is in question.

Here we see an important historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can also learn something else when we see how, in the centuries of Christianity characterized above, the power of judgment, this keen intellectual wisdom, is further developed. Indeed, when we focus our attention on realities and not on dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished since its inception. Take scholasticism. What has become of it when we look not at its content, but perceive it as a means of cultivating and disciplining our mental faculties? Do you want to know? Scholasticism has become modern natural science! The latter is inconceivable without the reality of medieval Christian science. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon and Giordano Bruno²³ a Dominican, but that all thought forms with which natural objects have been tackled since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the Christian science of the Middle Ages from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. There are people today who look up passages in scholastic books, compare them with recent findings of natural history, and then say Haeckel and others aver something entirely different. Such people do not live in reality but in the world of abstractions! Realities are what matters! The work of Haeckel, Darwin, DuBois-Reymond, Huxley,²⁴ and others would all have been impossible had the Christian science of the Middle Ages not preceded them. These modern scientists owe their mode of thought to the Christian science of the Middle Ages. That is the reality, and it is from that science that humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.

But there is more. Read David Friedrich Strauss²⁵ and try to observe his mode of thinking. Try to realize what his chain of reasoning is: how he wants to present the entire life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know where the keenness of his thinking comes from? He gets it from the Christian science of the Middle Ages. Everything used today to combat Christianity so radically has been taken over from the Christian world of learning in the Middle Ages. Actually, today there cannot be an opponent of Christianity of whom it could not easily be shown that he would be unable to think as he does had he not learned his thought forms from the Christian science of the Middle Ages. If one considered that fact, one would indeed look at world history as it really is.

What, then, has happened since the sixteenth century? Since that time the human ego has increasingly come into prominence and with it human egotism, and with egotism, materialism. Everything that the ego had absorbed and acquired was gradually unlearned and forgotten. Human beings now were compelled to limit themselves to what the ego could observe and to what the physical sensory system was able to give to the ordinary intelligence. That is all the ego could take into its inner sanctuary. Culture since the sixteenth century has become the culture of egotism.

What must now enter into the ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and has made its way as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity itself. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity and then apply the thoughts to the external world, it must now become possible for the ego to become a Christ-receptive organ. This ego must now rediscover the wisdom which is the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, of Christ Himself. And how is this to be done? It must be done through a more profound understanding of Christianity through Spiritual Science. Having been carefully prepared through the three stages of physical, etheric, and astral development, the inner organ would now have to open itself to its human host so that he or she could henceforth look into the spiritual environment with the eye that the Christ can open for us.

Christ descended to earth as the greatest avatar being. Let us view this in the right perspective and try to look at the world as we would be able to do after we have received the Christ into ourselves. Then we would find the whole process of our world evolution illuminated and pervaded by the Christ Being. That is to say, we would describe how the physical body of human beings originated on Old Saturn,²⁶ how the etheric body made its appearance on Old Sun, the astral body on Old Moon, and the ego on the Earth. Finally, we would find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual in order to incorporate into the evolution of the earth the very wisdom that passes from the Sun to the earth. In a way, Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of a cosmic view for the liberated ego.

So you see how Christianity has gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical ability to cognize truth, later with his etheric capacity, and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity to cognize truth. Then Christianity in its true form was repressed for a while until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian evolution. But after this ego had learned how to think and direct its vision to the objective world, it is now mature enough to perceive in all phenomena of the objective world the spiritual facts that are so intimately linked with the Central Being, the Christ. Thus, the ego is now capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most diverse manifestations as the foundation of the objective world.

Here we stand at the point of departure for spiritual-scientific comprehension and perception of Christianity, and we begin to understand what a task and mission has been assigned to our movement for spiritual knowledge. In so doing, the reality of this mission becomes evident to us. Just as the individual human being has a physical, an etheric, and an astral body in addition to his or her ego, so it is with the historical development of Christianity, and both continue to rise to ever more lofty heights. We might say Christianity, too, has physical, etheric, and astral bodies, as well as an ego—an ego that can even deny its origin as it does in our time. To be sure, an ego can become egotistic, but it still remains an ego that can receive the true Christ Being into itself, thereby rising to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality; and that includes its historical evolution.

If we look at the matter in this way, a perspective of the far-distant future opens itself before us from the spiritual-scientific point of view, and we know this perspective can touch our hearts and fill them with enthusiasm. More and more it becomes clear to us just what it is we have to do, and then we realize that we are not groping in the dark. This is so because we have not devised ideas that we intend to project into the future in an arbitrary fashion, but we intend to harbor and follow only those ideas that have been gradually prepared through centuries of Christian development. It is true that only after the physical, etheric, and astral bodies had come into existence could the ego make its appearance; now it is to be developed little by little to spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. By the same token, modern human beings with their ego form and present thinking, could have developed only from the astral, etheric, and physical form of Christianity. Christianity has become ego. Just as truly as this was the development of the past, so it is equally true that the ego form of humanity can appear only after the astral and the etheric forms of Christianity have been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future. It will offer humanity far greater things, and the Christian development and way of life will arise in a new form. The transformed astral body will appear as the Christian spirit self, the transformed etheric body as the Christian life spirit. And in a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, spirit man shines forth before our souls as the star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing throughout with the spirit of Christianity.

• 12. Melchizedek was the king of Salem and “Priest of the Most High God,” who blessed Abraham after the defeat of Chedorlaomer (Genesis 14:18-20) and who was later to typify the priesthood of the future Messiah (Psalms 110:4; Heb. 5-7).
• 13. St. Irenaeus (c. 125-c. 202) was a Greek theologian, Bishop of Lyons in 177–78, and the first Father of the Catholic Church to systematize Christian doctrine.
• 14. Papias was a second-century Christian theologian and Apostolic Father of the Church.
• 15. St. Augustine (354–430) was the Bishop of Hippo in what is now Algiers and one of the four Latin fathers. His famous book The City of God is a justification of Christianity against pagan critics, and his Confessions is a classic of Christian mysticism.
• 16. Heliand, the title of the epic (c. 825) is an Old Saxon word for German Heiland = the Savior. The poem had 5,983 lines and was written in alliterative verse.
• 17. The Italian St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was one of the greatest Christian saints and founder of the Franciscan Order.
• 18. Elisabeth of Thüringen (1207–1231), the young widow of a German margrave who had died on a crusade in 1227, chose a life of poverty, humility, and charity and became the typical saint of the late Middle Ages.
• 19. Scholasticism was the school of thought in the Middle Ages in which theology and philosophy were conjoined. The German term Scholastik normally designates this medieval school of thought, whereas Scholastizismus, the linguistic equivalent of the English term, is used exclusively to denote sophistry and casuistry.
• 20. Meister (Johannes) Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), a Dominican-trained German theologian and the most profound of the German medieval mystics, was probably the first writer of speculative prose in German.
• 21. Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) was a German Dominican mystic and a disciple of Meister Eckhart.
• 22. The Hussites advocated communion in both kinds, i.e., both wine and bread, for laity as well as priests. Lutherans believed that a change takes place by which the body and blood of Christ join with the bread and wine. This principle of consubstantiation was rejected by the Zwinglians who saw only symbolic significance in the communion. Finally, the Calvinists believed that Christ was spiritually, but not physically, present in the Sacrament.
• 23. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was a noted Italian philosopher and mystic who, although a member of the Dominican Order in his youth, was in constant opposition to religious orthodox schools. He was tried by the Inquisition for heresy and burned to death.
• 24. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1932) was a renowned German zoologist and, like the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), developed a theory of evolution. Emil DuBois-Reymond (1818–1896) was a famous physiologist in Berlin. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and writer.
• 25. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) was a philosopher and theologian whose writings mark a turning point in the critical study of the life of Jesus. In his main work, The Life of Jesus (2 vols, 1835–36), Strauss applied the “myth theory” to the life of Jesus and denied all supernatural elements in the Gospels.
• 26. (Old) Saturn, (Old) Sun, and (Old) Moon are names for former evolutionary forms through which the Earth has passed. The reader is referred to An Outline of Occult Science (Anthroposophic Press, 1972), for a thorough discussion of this topic.

Munich, March 7, 1909

It is now my task to speak to the various groups about the more intimate aspects of reincarnation and various matters related to it because deep inside we must become more and more familiar with this subject matter and allow it to penetrate our being. In this context, we will also have to say a few things about the significance of the topic for the life of all humanity. Although we will also little by little discuss relevant questions of importance to the present age, we shall have to take very ancient times as our starting point. This is necessary because the method of inquiry in Spiritual Science differs from that employed by other theories of life or by the disciplines studying social problems. We in Spiritual Science treat the facts of life first in a general way, and then we elaborate on the details.

First of all, we express our world view in the most elementary sense through the statement that the human innermost core—an individual's divine ego—continues to develop from one life to another in successive incarnations. In the second instance, however, such a statement covers the question of reincarnation only in a very elementary way, and that is why we now want to speak about these things in greater detail and in a more intimate sense. Just saying that the ego of a human being hurries from one incarnation to another is not enough; there are many other phenomena connected with the subject of reincarnation, and only a discussion of how they are related to life itself will shed the right light on the issue. Let us begin to characterize reincarnation from this point of view by looking back into ancient times.

We have often talked about the fact that humanity must consider its ancestors to have come from ancient Atlantis, a former geographical region situated between what is today Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. All the souls that are present today had already been incarnated in Atlantis, but in bodies that were in part considerably different from the ones we are accustomed to seeing. The Atlantean humanity had its own special form of leadership, and the soul-forces—indeed all the faculties—of the Atlanteans differed greatly from those of human beings. Hence, leadership as we know it today was nonexistent. In Atlantis, for example, there were no churches, ceremonial centers, or schools in the modern sense, but there existed an intermediate institution between ceremonial center and school; that is what we call the mystery sanctuaries or centers. Leadership of the Atlanteans with respect to learning and the conditions of external life was vested in these sanctuaries, and one could say that the spiritual leaders were at the same time kings of the Atlantean tribes. Initiates, whose mission can be circumscribed by a word of later coinage, by the word oracle, imported knowledge and exercised leadership in the mysteries. We therefore designate the great centers of Atlantean culture as the “Atlantean Oracles.”

We have to get a clear understanding of the function of these oracles. They had to impart knowledge to human beings about the spiritual world behind the physical world. Knowledge such as this is different from ordinary knowledge in many ways; to stress only one difference, spiritual knowledge is not confined to space as is our present knowledge of the physical world. Anyone who, for example, knows about the mysteries of Mars also knows a great deal about the spiritual mysteries of the entire universe. All the heavenly bodies of our solar system are interconnected, and as such they are the exterior expression of spiritual beings. The individual who knows these spiritual beings also knows the forces that are at work from one planet to another as well as in the spiritual world during the time between death and rebirth. And so it was the primary task of one oracle in Atlantis to transmit and proclaim to human beings the mysteries of Mars, whereas the primary task of another was to communicate the mysteries of Jupiter, and so on; and these compartmentalized insights made it possible to lead certain sections of the population. We shall speak about the reason for this at another occasion since our task today is a different one.

The Atlanteans were divided into groups, and part of the whole developmental process was that one group of human beings had to be governed especially by the forces that could be acquired through the knowledge of Mars. Other groups had to be governed by the forces acquired through the knowledge of Venus, or Mercury, and so on. In ancient Atlantis there were actually human beings alive whom we could call “Jupiter People” or “Mars People,” and there were seven oracle centers because the populace in ancient Atlantis was divided into seven groups according to racial characteristics. The names applicable to these oracle centers corresponded to the names of the planets, but they were assigned to the oracles at a later time. The leadership of, and supreme sovereignty over, all other oracles was vested in what we may designate as the Atlantean Sun Oracle. Whatever oracles existed in the post-Atlantean periods—in Greece, Egypt, Asia, all were successors of the Sun Oracle in Atlantis. This is true also for the Apollo Oracle in Greece. The initiate who headed this Sun Oracle was the guardian of the deepest mysteries of our solar system. Together with his subordinates, he was called upon to investigate the nature of the spiritual life on the sun itself. His role was to proclaim to Atlantean humanity the secrets of the whole planetary system and to exercise supreme authority over the other oracle centers.

A very special task devolved on the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. It was to guide humanity in such a way that when the great catastrophe culminating in the submergence of Atlantis was over, the human race would be able to propagate and establish what we have often discussed as the postAtlantean cultures. Specifically, the task of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle was to prepare human beings during the Atlantean time in such a way that they could enter the ancient Indian, Persian, Egypto-Babylonian-Hebraic, and Graeco-Roman cultures. To put it differently, the Great Initiate had to see to it that enough suitable soul material was available for these cultural epochs.

We must now inform ourselves a little about the task of this Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. What were the essential features of Atlantean culture? Certainly it was quite different from later cultures. In ancient Atlantis, an individual belonging to the highest level of cultural life—the levels at which today's great leaders in, say, scholarship, art, industry, or commerce can be found—was one who possessed extraordinary clairvoyant faculties and who was especially skilled in the use of magical powers. The qualities usually attributed to a leader or to a scholar were nonexistent in those days, or they were known only in the most primitive form. But although modern arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were unknown to the Atlanteans, they did possess primitive clairvoyant faculties and powers with which they could pierce into the spiritual worlds. Without the modern ego-consciousness, the Atlanteans saw into the spiritual world, and those whose vision was the most penetrating became the pillars of Atlantean culture. We have already stressed that the Atlanteans were able to manipulate certain inner forces of nature, for example the seed forces of plants; they propelled their vehicles with them, just as we utilize coal to propel our vehicles.

To repeat, the leaders of the Atlantean culture were not the people who tried, as the leaders of our time try, to unlock the secrets of the universe with their intellectual powers; rather, the leading individuals in Atlantis were those who excelled as clairvoyants and magicians. And those human beings who had the first rudimentary inkling about arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were in a certain sense despised because of their simplicity and were not considered as belonging to the aristocracy of cultural life. But it was precisely those human beings who possessed the very first rudimentary knowledge of the aforementioned skills and who were the most lacking in clairvoyant and magical powers whom the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle gathered from all regions. Yes, he assembled the most simple and, in a sense, the most despised people of ancient Atlantis—those who had first developed intellectual capacities. But those who were then at the highest level of cultural life and who were the acknowledged masters of a dimmed clairvoyance were not suitable material to be led through and beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe. No, the call of the Initiate went out to the simple people.

Incidentally, it may be said that we are living in an epoch today when a similar call is once again going out to humanity. To be sure, this appeal is what is appropriate for today, a time when humanity sees only what is in the physical world. The call to humanity issues from unknown depths of the spirit, depths that humanity will gradually become acquainted with, asking that humanity prepare itself for a new culture of the future, which will be permeated with clairvoyant powers. As with Atlantis, a catastrophe will occur, and afterwards a new culture imbued with spiritual capacities will arise, and it will be linked to what we call the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity.

But today, as in Atlantean times, the call cannot go out to those who stand at the highest levels of cultural life because they will not understand. The Atlantean clairvoyants and magicians, who were in a way destined to die out with their culture, occupied a position similar to that of people in contemporary life who occupy the highest positions in the realms of scholarship and external industrial life—the great inventors and discoverers of our time. No matter how much the present leaders feel there is still to be done, they nevertheless occupy the same position as their Atlantean counterparts. Contemptuously they look down on those who are beginning to feel something of the spiritual life to come. The consciousness of this fact must be awakened in the soul of anyone whose cooperative efforts in the theosophical workshops are to be strengthened. When leading representatives of modern culture look contemptuously down at these small circles, those who are participating diligently in the preparation of future conditions must say to themselves that the intellectual giants of today cannot be counted on to lead the way in this task. It is precisely the people who are held in contempt because they are not considered to have reached the heights of contemporary erudition who are being assembled today, just as the leader of the Sun Oracle once gathered around him the simple of Atlantis. These disdained people are being assembled to prepare the dawn of a new culture whereas erudition of the modern form will bring about the twilight of our culture. This is mentioned in passing to fortify those who have to endure and hold their own against the attacks of the people who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle gathered his simple people in a region approximately to the west of present-day Ireland. Now we have to get a clear picture of the situation. It took Atlantis a long, long time to come to its end. Great masses of people were continually moving from the West toward the East. In the various regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa there were tribes who had arrived at different times and had intermingled. Then the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle took His small group of chosen people and made His way to Central Asia, where he established a colony from which the currents were to emanate that would later found the post-Atlantean cultures. However, in addition to His simple people, the Great Leader has taken something else with Him. And here we arrive at one of the chapters of human evolution, the truth of which we can comprehend only if we draw on the inner assurance gained by a steadfast engagement in Spiritual Science.

The Great Leader inspected, as it were, the other oracle centers for the purpose of finding in them the most notable initiates. Now there is a certain method by means of which “spiritual economy,” as it may be called, can be put into practice. As you know, it is quite correct to say that the etheric body dissolves after a human being has died; what remains is an extract, and that is taken along. But the extract is only the elementary truth, which must be modified as one advances to higher levels of spiritual knowledge. It is not the case that the etheric bodies of all human beings are dissolved in the universal ether. Etheric bodies such as those possessed by the most notable initiates of the seven Atlantean Oracles are valuable. The spiritual achievements of these initiates were woven into their etheric bodies, and it would be against the principle of spiritual economy if the etheric bodies of the great initiates had simply been dissolved. They were to be preserved as prototypes for a later time, and it was incumbent upon the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to preserve the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates for this purpose. While leading His small group of simple people to Asia, He carried the etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates of Atlantis with Him. Such a thing is possible through the methods that had been developed in the mystery centers. You have to visualize this as purely a spiritual process and not in the way as if one could wrap up etheric bodies and put them into boxes for safekeeping. What is certain, however, is that etheric bodies can be preserved for later times.

Over in Asia, the following happened. The simple people around the Leader propagated from one generation to another. Above all, these people had a tremendous devotion to and affection for their Great Leader. Their education was guided with wisdom and insight so that after many generations certain things occurred through one of the methods worked out in the mystery centers. Such methods are employed behind the scenes of external life, and we shall presently see how they take effect. Today's lecture will be the first in a series of several lectures designed to explain some of the details.

When a human being is descending to a new incarnation, he must envelop himself again with a new etheric body. Now, through the methods alluded to above, it is perfectly possible to weave into this new etheric body an old one that was preserved. And so after a diligent educational process, when the time had come, there were to emerge from the immigrants and their descendants seven individuals whose souls at their birth were sufficiently prepared to have the preserved etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the Atlantean Oracles woven into their own etheric bodies. Thus, the preserved etheric body of the most important Saturn initiate was woven into that of one of the individuals gathered around the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle, the etheric body of the Mars initiate into another, the etheric body of the Jupiter initiate into a third, and so on. Hence the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle had seven individuals whose etheric bodies were interwoven with those of the most important initiates of the ancient Atlantean Oracles.

If you had met these seven individuals somewhere in everyday life, you would have found them to be simple human beings, for they were not the reincarnated egos of the Atlantean initiates; they were merely simple human beings possessing the new faculties of the post-Atlantean era. Their egos were not much different from the egos of those who became the bearers of the first primitive and simple culture immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. What made them different was that their etheric bodies contained the forces of the seven great Atlantean initiates, so we are dealing here not with a re-embodiment of the ego, but rather of the etheric bodies of these great initiates. Thus we see not only that the ego but also that the second member of the super-sensible constitution—the etheric body—is capable of reincarnation. The seven individuals from among the followers of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle were inspired human beings simply by the fact that they had received these etheric bodies containing the forces and powers of the Atlantean era. At certain times their etheric bodies were capable of letting the forces stream into themselves that unveiled the mysteries of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Hence they appeared to be inspired individuals, but their utterances certainly exceeded anything their astral bodies or egos were able to understand.

What these seven inspired individuals taught from various parts of the world sounded like a wonderful harmonious choir, and after the seven had been united in the Lodge of the Seven Rishis, they were sent to India to inspire that country's ancient culture. Much that was profound in this culture has been preserved in a magnificent form in the Vedas,²⁷ and just as many wonderful ideas that give testimony to the deeply scientific nature of Indian culture have been preserved in the Upanishads,²⁸ in the Vedanta philosophy, and so on. However, the teachings of the ancient Holy Rishis, given in times when nothing was recorded, far exceed in beauty anything conveyed to us by the Indian scripts. What was written down in later times is at most a faint echo, for no records were kept of the primeval, sacred culture inspired by the Rishis; everything they taught was transmitted in a spiritual way through the mysteries.

We are interested today in learning how etheric bodies can be reincarnated, how the legacies of the ancient Atlantean epoch were transmitted by the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle into the post-Atlantean era, and how they were then carried into the first culture of that era—into the resplendent Indian culture.

The mysteries of the Sun Oracle itself could not be directly revealed in ancient India, and that is why the seven Rishis spoke of a Being beyond their cognitive reach. They spoke of a Being who is the Leader of the Sun and directs its forces to the earth; they spoke of Vishva-Karman as a Being beyond the range of their knowledge. Vishva-Karman is none other than the Christ who was to appear later and whose coming had already been proclaimed in the ancient Indian culture.

The most important disciple of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to receive the secrets of the Sun's essence was Zarathustra, who was subsequently to establish the second post-Atlantean culture. He was not the Zarathustra history talks about however. It was customary in ancient times that the successor of a great teacher or humanity took the name of his esteemed predecessor. No document contains any reference to the Zarathustra of whom we are now speaking; only his last successor is mentioned in history books. Yet it was the original Zarathustra who founded the primordial Persian culture and who was the first to point out to his Persian peoples that the sun not only possesses physical energy but also spiritual power that streams down to earth. In his endeavor to awaken in his people a realization of this truth, Zarathustra's argument was as follows: If we direct our eyes to plants and everything else around us that contains life, we have to ask ourselves what we would be without sunlight. But together with the physical sunlight, a spiritual force also streams down to earth under the direction of a great sublime Being. Just as a human being has his or her physical body and an aura—we call it the small aura—so the sun has its physical body and its aura. Ahura Mazdao, the “great aura,” consists of the group of great sun beings and their leader. Zarathustra spoke of this Ahura Mazdao, or Aura Mazdao—the Great Aura—and proclaimed the power of the sun aura by which the flow of evolution was made possible. However, Zarathustra also proclaimed that the forces of Ahriman would oppose the Sun Being. This then is what can be said about the external teachings of Zarathustra, but there is more to be said about him.

Zarathustra had some close disciples whom he initiated into the great mysteries of the world. We shall mention two of them in this context. To begin with the first, Zarathustra communicated to him all the wisdom necessary to bring about clairvoyance in the astral body, as well as the ability to perceive in one's present time frame simultaneously everything that is happening and all the mysteries spread out in both physical and spiritual space. To the second disciple Zarathustra transmitted what one might call the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, and this is nothing less than the clairvoyant power of the etheric body enabling the human being to perceive the successive phases of evolution in time. Thus, one disciple received the ability to perceive simultaneous events, and the other the vision of the Akasha Chronicle to perceive successive events that could lead to an understanding of the evolution of the earth and sun. By imparting these faculties to these disciples, Zarathustra had a profound effect on the continuation of culture in the postAtlantean era.

The first disciple was reincarnated as the great individual who was to inspire and inaugurate the new currents of Egyptian culture, the being whom we know by the name of Hermes or Hermes Trismegistos. Through processes that are known, the astral body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Hermes so that he could proclaim the message of the higher worlds and their mysteries and incorporate them into Egyptian culture. Thus by processes we will gradually learn to understand, the astral body of Zarathustra was preserved and was transmitted to one disciple when he was born again as Hermes. Hermes wore Zarathustra's astral body as if it were a garment.

The other disciple was also reincarnated, and in him everything was meant to be revealed that is presented to the earth in the Akasha Chronicle. Since the etheric body of Zarathustra was to be woven into that of a disciple, a very special event had to take place to make this possible. The forces of the new etheric body somehow had to be illuminated in the disciple for his awakening. The Biblical story relates to us in a beautiful and marvelous way what this special event was. Allow your souls to visualize how it had to unfold.

You must first realize that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra possessed his own astral body and ego, and he was now to have the etheric body of Zarathustra woven into his soul. As a small child, he first had to feel how the forces of the etheric body of Zarathustra became active in him, and he had to feel this before the powers of judgment could be activated by his own astral body and before his own ego was able to interfere. So the special event that had to take place was some sort of initiation. The forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple when he was a very small child, that is before his own individual development could come into play. For this reason, the child was placed into an ark of bulrushes that was then put into the water, so that he was completely cut off from the rest of the world and was unable to interact with it. That is when the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body that had been woven into him germinated and, as we said earlier, became illuminated.

I am sure you know by now that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra was none other than Moses. The Biblical story about his abandonment is really a presentation of that profound mystery behind the scenes of the external world dealing with the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. And this is how Hermes and Moses were able to guide the post-Atlantean culture through its recorded stages.

After hearing about these examples of the reincarnation of etheric bodies and of an astral body, we know it is insufficient to speak only of the reincarnation of the ego. Rather, the other members of the human constitution that we have become acquainted with—the etheric body and the astral body—can also be reincarnated. It is a principle of spiritual economy that what has once been gained cannot perish, but is preserved and transplanted on the spiritual soil of posterity. However, what we have described can be accomplished in another way. We shall see from an example that there are still other methods whereby the past is transported into the future.

You will remember a personality mentioned in the Bible: Shem, a son of Noah and progenitor of the Semitic people. Occult research confirms that there is an individual behind Shem that must be regarded as the tribal individuality of all Semitic peoples. When a number of human beings are to descend from a particular progenitor, a special provision must be made for this in the spiritual world. In the case of Shem, the provision was that an etheric body was specially woven for him from the spiritual world, which he was to carry. This enabled him to bear in his own etheric body an especially exalted being from the spiritual world, a being who could not otherwise have incarnated on earth because it was incapable of descending into a compact physical body. This being was capable of incarnating only by virtue of the fact that it could now enter the etheric body of Shem. Since Shem had his own physical, etheric, and astral body, as well as his ego, he was first an individual in his own right. Beyond that, however, he was an individual whose etheric body was interwoven with the etheric body of another high being of the spiritual world, specially prepared for the purpose of founding a nation, as characterized above. If clairvoyant perception had confronted Shem, it would have seen Shem himself, but with a second entity extending out of him like a second being, yet still united with Shem's etheric body. This higher being was not Shem, but it incarnated in Shem—the human being—for a special mission. Unlike ordinary human beings, this higher being did not undergo various incarnations, but descended only once into a human body. Such a being is called an avatar. An avatar does not feel at home in the world as a human being would; he descends but once into this world for the sole purpose of carrying out a certain mission.

The part of a human being that is indwelled by such an avatar being acquires a special character in that it is able to multiply. When a grain of seed is sown into the ground, the stalk grows from it, and the grain is multiplied into the ears of grain. In the same way, the etheric body of Shem multiplied into many copies, and these were woven into all his descendants. That's what happened, and thus the copies of the etheric body that had been specially prepared in Shem as the prototype were woven into the etheric bodies of his direct descendants.

But this etheric body of Shem was later used in yet another way. How this was done can best be placed before our souls by the visualization of an analogy. You may be a highly cultured European, but if you want to acquaint the Hottentots with your culture, you simply must learn their language. By analogy, the exalted beings that descend to earth to guide humanity must weave into themselves the forces by which they will be put into a position to communicate with human beings on earth. Now in the later phase of the evolution of the Semitic people, it became necessary that a very exalted being descend to earth in order to communicate with them and provide an impetus to their culture. Such a being was the Melchizedek of Biblical history who, as it were, had to "put on" the preserved etheric body of Shem—the very etheric body that was still inhabited by an avatar being. Once it was woven into him, Melchizedek was able to transmit to Abraham the impulse necessary for the continued progress of Semitic culture. Here, then, we have become acquainted with another unique way in which an etheric body develops in a particular human being and is subsequently allotted to a specially selected individuality for the fulfillment of a mission.

Such examples can be found up to the most recent times, and as we trace them, we gradually realize the truth of what occultism is able to say today about this subject matter. Occultism conveys to us that most human beings living at present no longer have etheric or astral bodies that were originally woven anew from the general fabric of the world Almost every human being has in his or her etheric and astral body a fragment that has been preserved from ancient times because the principle of spiritual economy is at work preserving useful elements for repeated utilization.

Let us mention two more examples from the modern age that can illustrate to us how mysteries are at work from one epoch to another. The first example is related to the personality who is discussed in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nicholas of Cusa. He called one of his writings De docta ignorantia, a Latin title that can be translated “Learned Ignorance”; yet it contains more erudition than many a book claiming to contain learned knowledge. There were certain reasons for the title. If you read other writings by Nicholas of Cusa, you will find that a prophetic presentation of the Copernican picture of the universe is woven into them in a curious way. Those who read carefully cannot fail to recognize it. Yet it was not until the time of Copernicus that the world was mature enough to accept this view of the universe in its actual form. Investigation into the connection reveals the following: One of the members of Cusa's super-sensible constitution contained an ancient individuality of the highest rank, and that made it possible for the astral body of Nicholas of Cusa to be preserved and then to be woven into the astral body of Nicholas Copernicus. The wisdom once possessed by Nicholas of Cusa could, as it were, be resurrected in Copernicus, and that is an example of how the astral body has reincarnated.

The second example deals with Galileo, who has been immensely important for modern thought, as many of you who have thought about the matter know. Without him, there would have been no physics in the modern sense because the whole mode of thinking in terms of physics today must be attributed to Galileo. Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. Thus, if we throw some object, it will travel forward by its own momentum until it is stopped by an obstacle or outer force. This is how we think today, and this is what children in school learn from their textbooks. However, people living before Galileo thought in a different manner. They thought that if a stone were thrown, its flight could not continue unless the air drove or pushed it from behind. So we see that the laws of falling bodies, of the pendulum, and of simple machines are all derived from Galileo.

Galileo received his insights through a certain inspiration. I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. A human being who can be inspired in such a profound way has an etheric body of enormous richness; to allow it to perish would contradict the law of spiritual economy.

It is for this reason that Galileo's etheric body too was preserved and reappeared after a comparatively short period of time in an individual whose achievements were also to be of great significance. It was woven into a personality who grew up in a remote peasant village in Russia, ran away from his parents, and journeyed to Moscow. The great talent of this young man became apparent very soon, and he rapidly absorbed the knowledge of his day in the schools of Russia and Germany, so that he had soon encompassed the total of the general knowledge available in the culture of his time. All he had to do was to accumulate the knowledge developed on earth since he had died—in his etheric body—as Galileo. And then this very same person became, so to speak, the founder of the whole classical literature movement in Russia, creating lasting literary treasures practically out of the void. But more than that, he also provided important stimuli to every scientific discipline related to physics and chemistry, and particularly to all areas of mechanics. This individual was none other than Michail Lomonosov, whose achievements and reforms were possible only because the etheric body of Galileo had been woven into him. Galileo died in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Michail Lomonosov was born early in the eighteenth century with Galileo's etheric body, representing one of those intimate reincarnations where a member of the super-sensible constitution of the human being other than the ego is reincarnated. Such things lead us toward a deep understanding of the entire evolutionary process and of many other factors that have developed in the course of time, leading to the conditions prevailing at present.

The greatest avatar on earth was Christ Himself, who lived for three years in the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Christ lived in the three bodies of the super-sensible constitution of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for the latter's etheric and astral bodies, and of the ego too in a lesser degree, to multiply in the same way as we have discussed it before. After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. If an avatar enters a human sheath, the essence of the host is dispersed into many replicas. In contrast to the copies of Shem's etheric body, the copies of the astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth had another special characteristic. The copies of Shem's etheric body could be implanted only into his own descendants whereas the copies of the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted into all human beings of the most diverse peoples and races. A copy of the archetypal astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted in anyone who through his or her personal development had become ready for this transfer, no matter what race such an individual belonged to. And we see how in this subsequent evolution of Christendom, strange developments take place behind the external historical facade, and only such developments can render the external course of events intelligible.

Now, how did Christianity spread? We can say that in the first few centuries the dissemination of the idea of Christianity depended on what happened on the physical plane. In this era we see that Christianity is decidedly propagated through everything that lives on the physical plane. The Apostles stressed the fact that the propagation of Christianity was based on direct physical perception of eyewitnesses. "We have laid our hands into His wounds" was a statement of proof that the Christ had walked on earth in a human body. In other words, the stress was put on anything on the physical plane that could serve as documentation for the development of Christianity. Time and again during those first few centuries, it was asserted that those who had been disciples of the Apostles themselves were responsible for the continuing propagation of Christianity, and it was emphasized that they had known the immediate followers of the Lord Himself. So we see that people in this era relied, as it were, on eyewitness reports, and this continues in a still deeper sense up to the time of St. Augustine, who said: “I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so.” Why, then, did he believe? Because it was his conviction that the visible Church has propagated the Gospel on the physical plane from one decade and from one century to another. However, in the following centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, Christianity was propagated in a different way. Why and how? It is instructive to learn the answer to this question if we are interested in following the spiritual progress of human evolution.

You can visualize the method of propagation in this next period by considering, for example, the Old Saxon gospel epic entitled Heliand. In this work, a kind of initiate presents his readers with his version of the Christ idea and with his perception of the Christ-Being. The Heliand, the Savior, presented by this Saxon initiate is a super-sensible being. Yet, He is portrayed not within the context of the events in Palestine, but rather as a prince of a Germanic tribe. The disciples are individuals from Germanic lands, and the whole of Christianity is clothed in Central European imagery. Why was this done? It was done because the initiate who wrote the Heliand at the suggestion of Louis the Pious had clairvoyant faculties, so that he was able to see Christ in a way similar to Paul's perception of Christ at Damascus. Through the event at Golgotha the Christ-Being had united Himself with the astral body of the earth, thereby infusing His power into the aura of the earth; and when Paul became clairvoyant, he could clearly perceive: The Christ is present! Paul did not allow himself to become a believer merely on the strength of what was reported to have happened in Palestine. Only after he had seen the being that was woven into the earth with his own eyes did he change from Saul to Paul. In a similar vision, the Risen Christ, the eternal Christ living in the spiritual world after Golgotha, was revealed to the writer of the Heliand, and He was more important to him than was the historical Christ of Palestine. And so he presents Him in another setting because the spiritual Christ was more important to him than was the external image of the Christ. You may want to ask why the author of the Heliand was able to communicate such an image from clairvoyant perception. He was able to do this because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This was the case because during these centuries—starting with the fifth or sixth and ending with the ninth or tenth century—the etheric bodies of those who were destined to do something for the advancement of Christianity were interwoven with a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and one of these special individuals was the writer of the Heliand.

Since there were many others who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric body, we can readily see that human beings in these centuries lived in imaginations that were closely related to the events on Golgotha. All those who created the original artistic portrayals of the Savior on the cross and of Mary with the Jesus Child had been inspired to do pictorial representations of anything connected with the event on Golgotha by one and the same thing: a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the etheric body of each of these individuals. If the paintings of the events on Golgotha seemed like representations of a type, this points to the fact that all the artists were clairvoyant; what they created was then transmitted to posterity by the forces of tradition. In these early centuries, not all the inspired individuals destined to propagate the idea of Christianity were, of course, artists. Take, for example, John Scotus Erigena,²⁹ the scholastic philosopher, who in the days of Charles the Bald wrote the famous De Division Naturae. He, too, had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into his own etheric body.

If human beings were born during the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies, human beings living in the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries received copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth rather than copies of His etheric body. Only by considering this fact do we fully understand some of the important personalities of that time. How will a personality whose own astral body is interwoven with a copy of the astral body of Jesus appear to the outside world? After all, the ego of Jesus is not incarnated in such an individual; each personality retains his or her own ego. Ego judgment can cause many an error to creep into the life of such an individual; but because the copy of the great prototype has been woven into his or her astral body, devotion, all the feelings, everything in short that permeates and weaves through this astral body will come to the fore as the intrinsic essence of the astral body, even though it may perhaps be at variance with the ego itself. Think of Francis of Assisi. There you have a personality into whose astral body a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven. You may have found many extremes in the biography of Francis of Assisi, and if you did, you should consider that they were caused by his ego, which was not on the same level with his astral body. But the moment you study his soul under the assumption that his ego was not always capable of making the right judgments about the wonderful feelings and the humility contained in the astral body, then you will understand him. A copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was reincarnated in Francis of Assisi, and this was the case with many individuals of that time—Franciscans, Dominicans, and all other personalities of that time who will be intelligible only when studied in the light of this knowledge. For example, one of those personalities was the renowned St. Elisabeth of Thüringen.

And so what has happened in the external life of our existence becomes fully intelligible only when we see how spiritual impulses are conveyed in each era and how they are propagated in the course of time.

When Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, something like an imprint of the ego was made in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. When the Christ-Being entered the astral body, we can easily conceive that something like a replica of the ego could be produced in the surrounding parts of the astral body. This copy of the ego of Christ Jesus produced many duplicates that were preserved, so to speak, in the spiritual world. In the case of a few individuals who were to be prophets for their own age, something was woven into their ego. Among them were the German mystics who proclaimed the inner Christ with such fervor because something like a copy of the ego of Christ was incarnated in them—only a copy or image of Christ's ego, of course. Only human beings who prepare themselves gradually for a full understanding of the Christ and who understand through their knowledge of the spiritual worlds what the Christ really is, as He surfaces time and again in ever changing forms during the course of human evolution—only those human beings will also gradually gain the maturity necessary to experience Christ in themselves. They will be ready to absorb, so to speak, the waiting replicas of the Christ-Ego, ready to absorb the ego that the Christ imprinted in the body of Jesus.

Part of the inner mission of the universal stream of spirituality is to prepare human beings to become so mature in soul that an ever-increasing number of them will be able to absorb a copy of the Ego-Being of Christ Jesus. For this is the course of Christian evolution: first, propagation on the physical plane, then through etheric bodies, and then through astral bodies that, by and large, were reincarnated astral bodies of Jesus. Now the time is at hand when the ego-nature of Christ Jesus will increasingly light up in human beings as the innermost essence of their souls. Yes, these imprinted copies of the Christ Jesus individuality are waiting to be taken in by human souls—they are waiting!

And now you see from what depths the universal stream of Spiritual Science flows into our souls. Spiritual Science is not a theory, not the sum total of concepts given merely for the intellectual enlightenment of human beings; it is a reality, and it intends to offer realities to the human soul. Those who wish to gain a spiritual understanding of Christianity and experience it within themselves will strive to make a personal contribution so that either in the present or in a later incarnation a copy of the Christ Jesus individuality can be woven into their own egos. A person who understands the true, inmost essence—the actuality—of the universal stream of Spiritual Science will prepare himself or herself not just for knowledge, but rather for an encounter with actual reality. You must develop a feeling that we in our world movement are not concerned with the mere communication of theories, but rather with preparing human beings to accept facts. We are also concerned that human beings receive what is waiting in the spiritual world and what they have the power to receive, provided they prepare themselves for this task in the right way.

• 27. The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Veda is the literature of the Aryans who invaded NW India about 1500 B.C. and pertains to the fire sacrifice central to their religious beliefs.
• 28. The Upanishads constitute the last section of the Hindu Veda and are said to have been composed around 900 B.C. As the wellspring of Hindu speculative and religious thought, they became the basis for the later schools of Vedanta. “Vedanta” literally means “The end of the Veda” and refers to how the Upanishads are to be taught and interpreted.
• 29. John Scotus Erigena (c. 810–c. 877) was an Irish scholastic philosopher.

What happened at Golgotha as a germinal event has undergone a slow and gradual development. This mystery built the bridge from the past to the future because the soul life of humanity underwent a profound metamorphosis. This becomes especially clear when one looks at two great individuals who prepared the way for Christianity: St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. To understand these two men properly, it will be necessary to look at the old mystery centers where the highest knowledge was taught. Not to do this would make it impossible to gain a thorough understanding of these personalities.

As we know, all nations or peoples in the past had the so-called mystery centers. Here we shall point out only their most basic features and refer to them henceforth as “Mysteries.” First of all, these were institutions in which the church and school were subsumed. They taught first of all the origin of creation and its continuation, but their teaching was not a dull doctrine like the modern doctrine of creation, but rather a body of knowledge that culminated in clairvoyant perception. In the true Mysteries there was no separation between belief and knowledge. They were divided into higher and lower Mysteries, with the latter describing the evolution of the earth in magnificent images, so that everything was permeated by art and beauty. Art, religion, and knowledge all derived from the same source.

The individual who wanted to advance further was given elementary and general exercises. What today we call theosophical knowledge was then only a preparation. This was followed by exercises similar to the ones we have described in recent lectures, although they were conducted in a different manner and were not Christian or Rosicrucian in nature. This is how the astral body was organized for many years. Then the following happened, something that is no longer necessary today because of changed conditions: When the hierophant saw that the astral body of the person to be initiated had matured sufficiently, a death-like state was induced in the subject for a period of three and a half days so that the body was similar to that of Lazarus. This was also the occasion when the etheric body, together with the other two higher bodies, was almost completely removed from the physical body. The disciple during these three and a half days had a vision of the spiritual world and experienced a state of illumination that enabled him to reach into the highest regions and perceive everything that is related to past and future. After the three and a half days, the disciple was awakened and was then able to relate what was happening in the higher spheres. He had been able to see that Christ, the leading Spirit in our evolution, would be lying in the grave for three and a half days. It is this fact that makes the Mysteries historical reality.

The Mystery of Golgotha was the culmination of what was happening in the lower Mysteries because earlier presentiments became fact in it. Whereas the “I” of the disciple had earlier been successful in changing the astral body through exercises of the imagination, the Mystery of Golgotha brought about a metamorphosis of the etheric body. Whatever was changed in the astral body became manas, or spirit self—the actual spirit, the higher “I.” On the other hand, whatever part of the etheric body was changed constituted buddhi, or life spirit. Then the disciple could also try to change his physical body, and this resulted in atma: Atmung,³² so called because in reality the transformation of the physical body was attained through special breathing exercises. Only through the formation of buddhi can the human being recognize and perceive Christ as spiritual essence.

Why was it necessary to remove the astral body first? Had the astral body continued to be tied to the physical body, it would not have had the strength to imprint certain impressions onto the ether body. The Christ has liberated us from this three and a half day test, and it is through Him that the exercises mentioned above have become possible without intercession by the hierophant. We see the first example of this in Saul when he became Paul. What happened to him on his way to Damascus must be interpreted as something similar to an initiation. The reason that he needed only a few minutes for it was that he had attained a certain maturity in the preceding life. The line between the connecting point in the present life and the one in the previous incarnation, in which a certain learning experience took place, may be interrupted by several intermediate incarnations, and it is also possible for such a previous learning experience not to surface until late in the present life. This explains why the conversion of Saul, that is his connecting himself with his previous development, took place at a relatively mature age. In addition, Paul did not have to project himself into higher worlds in order to perceive the Christ, as would have been necessary for other initiates of the pre-Christian era. After all, Christ did remain on earth as He was intimately united with its astral body. Had a clairvoyant observer perceived the events from another star, he would have been able to see the tremendous transformation that the Mystery of Golgotha had brought about.

To gain knowledge in ancient times, everything had to be learned and understood in the Mysteries, but things are different in more modern times, as the lives of St. Augustine and Thomas of Aquinas prove. Before these men lived, it would have been futile to talk about the spiritual hierarchies because one who was not initiated was not able to perceive them. We can attribute this inability to gaze into the spiritual world to the fact that the Mysteries had ceased to exist six hundred years before Christ, and initiations no longer took place after that. The schools of philosophy took the place of the genuine Mysteries, and philosophy itself took the place of the initiation. However, philosophy was not always as abstract a system as it is today; on the contrary, especially in the beginning it was more or less completely reminiscent of the Mysteries. Aristotle³³ was the last from whom we have such a philosophy, but the resonance of the Mysteries was already reduced to a bare minimum in his philosophy. After Aristotle, things went so far as to make people forget that every philosophy must be traced back to the wisdom of the Mysteries. What came later is only an infiltration of abstract terms, similar to the construction of a thatched roof.

The first step forward is characterized by the Mystery of Golgotha. Up to this time the human faculties, for example reason, were little developed. Human beings could not make any progress because their minds were bound to their sense organs, and the time when the mind could develop independently was not yet at hand. What happened at Golgotha could not be grasped just by using one's mind. However, when Christ left the material world, innumerable copies of His etheric and astral body came into being; these were destined to be woven into the bodies of human beings suited to disseminate Christianity. One of them was Augustine, who descended to the physical plane for a new incarnation and wanted to form a new etheric body for himself. It was then that one of the copies of the etheric body of Christ was woven into his own etheric body, and this is how it became possible for him to find in himself the sources of his doctrine about the true form of Christian mysticism. But because he had received only the etheric body of Christ, his ego was subjected to error, and it was possible for him to succumb to his passions. And this is how Augustine developed his ego, but also committed errors and went through all stages of doubt in regard to Christ's teaching. What we see in him is a sort of higher materialism because even in those days people fell into the mistake of wanting to materialize everything. Only the person who frees himself or herself from this tendency will understand spiritual things. When Augustine finally found the spirit of Christianity in the words of John and Paul, the etheric body of Christ began to work in him, for he speaks not of the physical body but of the etheric body, which is the same as what he calls “soma.” In speaking of the “sense,” he refers to the astral body, and he says of the ego that it can rise in him through purification. The transformation of the astral body he calls “laying hold of the truth,” and that of the etheric body he delineates as “being joyful and enjoying spiritual things.” Finally, his term for the highest degree of spiritualization is “the vision.” The writings of Augustine are a good preparation for us because they present the inner development of a mystic. One can clearly recognize the moment in which he enters the spiritual world. Augustine is the best interpreter of Paul's letters.

Now let us look at another great representative of Christianity: Thomas Aquinas. Comparing him with Augustine, we see that he was not caught up in the errors of Augustine and that, beginning with his childhood years, he did not experience doubt or lack of faith. This is not surprising because judgment and conviction reside in the astral body, and Christ's astral body was woven into his own. The implantation of any principle into the human body can take place only when an external event changes the natural course of things. When Thomas was still a child, lightning struck nearby and killed his little sister. This seemingly purely physical event made him suitable to receive into his own astral body that of Christ.

Thomism coincides with the time when the human mind as we know it began to develop. The strongest impulse of this formative process came from Arabism, a truly intellectual science. Whereas before the old sages knew why they were able to gaze directly into the spiritual world, the new philosophy could make good use of Aristotle because he was one of the first great thinkers who preferred intellectual work to the wisdom of the Mysteries. The latter disappeared completely with the purely intellectual speculation of Arabism. Such speculation could at best culminate in a pantheism of rational concepts, but it could not conceive of more than this idea of a unified whole. Now, Thomas adopted the intellectual science accessible to him, but he left revealed knowledge intact and made use of dialectics in order to understand it.

The New Testament contains everything of revealed knowledge, so that Thomas had only to add the finely polished science to the explanations. Scholasticism, which is not much appreciated these days, made this intellectual science possible; but by using progressive dialectics, Thomas also made it possible for human beings to elevate themselves again to the divine idea. Scholasticism comes from the Greek scole and therefore means “paying attention,” but was erroneously translated as scuola, school. The scholastic system was the most perfect web of logic, and it enabled Thomas to think anew the pre-creational divine thoughts, freed from error and delusion as they can be conceived of only in monastic seclusion far away from the noise of the world.

Human beings are eager to comprehend quickly, to adopt an idea and make it their own, and to simplify everything. But the divine is not that simple! With Thomas Aquinas, human thought rises to new heights. Being no less a mystic than a scholastic, Thomas was able to give us such vivid descriptions, similar to those of the seer Dionysius the Areopagite³⁴ because he saw the spiritual hierarchies and thus he was able to solve the most difficult problems during his long nightly meditations in front of the altar. Therefore, we find combined in him the qualities of the mystic and of a brilliant thinker who is not influenced by the senses. No important concepts were added after him, not even the term “evolution,” which, by the way, can already be found in Aristotle's writings and is perhaps even better described there.

We have already stated before that the New Testament contains everything. Specifically, it also contains the seed of mysticism, and we have seen how this seed has ripened and how an infinite number of treasures have been unearthed from the Gospels. Nowadays, we have theosophy; later there will be other spiritual waves, and new treasures will be found in the Gospels. The revelation of John concludes the future of the earth.

Today I have tried to show you how the liberation of the intellect was the first stage of Christianity. This is only one leaf, but others will grow on the mighty plant of Christianity, one after the other. The blossom will be the total beauty of the earth, renewed through Christianity, and the fruit will be the new world for which today's earth is the preparation.

As Christ taught, is still teaching, and will be teaching to the end, He can be found by those who seek Him.

• 32. The German noun forms Atem and Atmung mean breath and breathing, respectively, whereas the verb for “to breathe” is atmen.
• 33. The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) became the basis of medieval scholasticism and had a decisive influence on Catholic theology.
• 34. Dionysius the Aeropagite is said to have been the first Bishop of Athens, Greece, in the first century A.D. Tradition has made him a martyr and Acts 17:34 tells of his conversion by Paul.

Malsch, April 6, 1909

Today we are gathered for the dedication ceremony of our anthroposophical branch in Maisch. Although this “Section” of our Society has been fully at work for a while, we are able only today to officially celebrate its opening.

Many of our anthroposophical friends have come to this celebration from the most diverse regions to which our anthroposophical endeavors have spread. By coming here, they have demonstrated that they wish to unite their anthroposophical feelings and thoughts with those of serious and hardworking people in this group. One might say this group of people in Maisch has been thrown into these remote mountains, but surrounded by all the beautiful, great, and noble forces of nature, they will successfully unfold anthroposophical life. Those of you who were able to look around in the vicinity of this hospitable house in Malsch will have noticed that much has been done for its external appearance, as if the people responsible wished to say externally that the spiritual life by which all of us are inspired shall find special expression in this beautiful spot.

Let us look back at the modest beginnings of our anthroposophical life at the founding of our German Section, into which the Section in Malsch is now being incorporated. At that time we began with but a small group of people of spiritual scientific enthusiasts. Then, as we look at events such as this one today and observe the large number of souls who unite with us in spiritual scientific feelings and sentiments, we can be satisfied with the last few years of our endeavors.

The Stockmeyer family has spared no efforts to help with the unfolding of spiritual life on this beautiful piece of land although the spirits of nature have clearly aided their efforts. Also, this family must find great satisfaction in seeing how many genuine and true friends have hurried to this hospitable place, and I am sure all anthroposophical friends may be justly called genuine and true friends. This is so because anthroposophy must above all be truth in our hearts, and truth is sincerity. Anthroposophy, therefore, must be sincere; and anthroposophical friendship is expressed by your participation in such a dedication festival. Everything must be imbued with sincerity because honesty in friendship unites us with those who have worked so industriously so that here, too, there would arise a working sphere of anthroposophic activity. The hearts of those who have come here will be filled with gratitude for the efforts of the Stockmeyer family, who can be assured of our truly sincere anthroposophical appreciation.

On the other hand, the very success of such a dedication festival with so many souls present shows that Spiritual Science in our time is a powerful magnet for human striving, and on this occasion it may also be fitting to say that we can certainly look beyond the rooms that, surrounded by the spirits of beautiful nature, enclose us today and look at the rest of the world. It is possible to say that life and the endeavors of Spiritual Science today appear as phenomena whose existence results from an inner necessity. Really, it is as if many a page in the book about the life of old cultures, which sustained European and Western humanity for millennia and gave security and strength for life to it, were now beginning to wither and appear cold and lifeless to human hearts. That is why we see today a longing for spiritual scientific truths in so many areas of life. I, for one, having been permitted to speak to you here, sense something like a future force at work because of what has been taking place around me in the last few days.

We are here surrounded by green trees, the budding life of nature, and also by the magnificent sunlight that shines on us benevolently at this dedication since it animates everything and is imbued with spirit. This, then, is a perfect place to relate to you the words of our great harbingers of the new wisdom, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings.

A few days have passed since I was permitted to speak in the same spirit in a lecture cycle in Rome, and this event symbolized to me what a magnet spiritual striving is. I was to speak to those who harbor a spiritual scientific longing in their hearts, but their longing is still fairly undefined at times. Yet the place where I was to speak looked differently, and it was on ground that actually had been entered only by cardinals in pursuit of spiritual endeavors or by others who work out of the convictions of the most positive and orthodox Catholicism. And so the air of the rooms where normally nothing but the official message from the orthodox center of Rome was proclaimed resounded with the free pronouncements of the spiritual scientific world view.

This shows us that although the free contemporary spirits of these Northern lands feel more attracted to anthroposophy, they can nevertheless look with a certain satisfaction to the souls who long to escape from an old, iron-clad orthodox tradition. It is certainly a good indication of the spirit of the times that it was possible to speak as freely and frankly about anthroposophic truths on territory heretofore reserved for cardinals, and as freely as this would be possible in the North. For what has been said before holds true everywhere: anthroposophy is sincerity; and where souls are in need of it and a call is issued, anthroposophy will follow it. But at no time will anthroposophy deviate in the least from the overall precepts that inspire its pronouncements, just because the consideration for the territory on which these pronouncements are made may make this expedient.

Wherever anthroposophical truth is proclaimed and where the spiritual element that pulsates through us is cultivated, there our message must be delivered in the light of sincerity, even when it is still surrounded by the thoughts of those who hate anthroposophy. However, in the midst of those who hate anthroposophy there are souls who, more or less consciously, long for the light of anthroposophy. And especially a strong contrast such as the one I have experienced during the past fourteen days can show us what a strong magnet anthroposophical life is.

The observation of our immediate present teaches us that this anthroposophical force is now strong enough to justify our joyful and satisfying hope that the small seedling planted today will in the future grow into a mighty tree. As theosophists, we are today in the same position humanity was in during the ancient Atlantean time. And just as life has become different since that time, so it will change again in the future, up to a time following a catastrophe. The wide perspective will now be made to appear before our souls.

Let us call to memory a similar movement in the last third of the Atlantean epoch that started small just like ours. The Atlantean soul life, which in many ways was still clairvoyant, had reached a high point during that time, but it did not yet have the consciousness of self, the strong feeling of the “I.” Instead, Atlanteans had a certain ability of clairvoyance and also certain magical powers, and this enabled them to look into the spiritual world. Those who had progressed to be leaders of this civilization were the ones best able to gaze into the spiritual world in the old ways and to bring forth the most knowledge from the astral realms. This clairvoyance disappeared little by little; in fact, mankind had to lose it completely in order to conquer for itself the consciousness of self in the physical world. But it is certain that clairvoyant knowledge in the last third of the Atlantean era had reached a special climax.

You will remember the technological achievement of the Atlanteans. They flew over the earth in small space vehicles—close to the earth because the atmosphere was saturated with thick fog formations. They propelled their small vehicles through this sea of air and water with energy derived from sprouting plants. The leading creators of this technology can be compared to today's industrial wizards who construct ingenious machines from lifeless forces. And those Atlanteans who could relate the most from the spiritual world can be compared to today's leading scholars and natural scientists.

However, within this Atlantean humanity a segment of people began to evolve who had only minor clairvoyant faculties, but possessed the ability to regard the external world with affection. The first rudimentary beginnings of arithmetic and counting could be observed in these people, but their participation in the great advances of the Atlantean industry—the construction of ever mightier vehicles for this sea of water and air—was very limited. And thus a small, insignificant group of people had developed in this last third of the Atlantean period who, in a certain sense, were despised for their comparative lack of clairvoyant power and their inability to participate in this great industry. However, this group of people prepared the way for seeing and knowing that is prevalent today, the way of seeing and knowing of which the external world today is so proud since it developed it in such a one-sided way.

Those leaders of the Atlantean civilization who had mastered everything that could be known from the vantage point of the Atlantean consciousness, including technology, conceived of a technical idea toward the end of the Atlantean era that has become fully productive in modern times. We can compare it to another measure of progress in our time that will carry over into the next catastrophe. During their golden age, the Atlanteans had vehicles that moved through air that was heavily mixed with water. Later, however, when their culture was already in a state of decline, it also became necessary to navigate the water, and this led the last cultural races of the Atlantean era first to embracing and then to realizing the idea of navigation and the conquest of the seas. This momentous idea in the Atlantean era not only of traversing the air but also of navigating the ocean water was quite a sensational idea that was put into reality by the last Atlantean races. After long experiments to navigate the waters, success came during the time when Atlantean culture was already in its decline.

Those responsible for this tremendous progress were not the ones who could be recruited for the task of transmitting the legacy of the actual spiritual life from the Atlantean era to our time. Rather, this task was reserved for the plain and simple people because they had been the first ones to be endowed with the ability to relate to the physical world. They were the ones whose clairvoyant faculties, though deteriorated the most among the several groups of people, were still adequate for those who were messengers from the spiritual world. These people, despised by the great scholars and inventors, were gathered by an eminent initiate whom we call The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. This small group was comprised of people who had least preserved their technical abilities and who were disdained by the leaders and by the great scholars and inventors. Yet it was precisely they whom the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle led from the West to the East, through Europe and into Asia. And it is also this small group of people that made the foundation of the post-Atlantean cultures possible.

The best of what was subsequently developed by the various cultures, the mighty tree of post-Atlantean knowledge and wisdom, emanated from the descendants of the despised simple people from the Atlantean era. Above all, something else emanated from the midst of the descendants of this group of modest people. Let us place the external events side by side with the internal events of our evolution. Let us look at the great sensation of the Atlantean era when the secondary racial group, whose descendants were the Phoenicians, invented navigation. What was accomplished by this invention?

We need only to remember the great events from the beginning of modern times, such as the great voyages of discovery by Columbus and other seafarers, which would have been impossible without navigation and the invention of ships, and we shall see how this sensational invention led to the gradual conquest of the physical plane on earth. PostAtlantean peoples were confined to a small radius of activities, but through the invention of ships the circle defining the earth became rounded out so that we now have a completed configuration of the physical plane. And thus, the sensational invention of the Atlantean world reaches into our time and promotes further progress on the physical plane.

However, the greatest conquest in the Atlantean era emanated from the descendants of that group of plain people gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. And when those descendants, through their own development, had prepared the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, GraecoLatin, and our cultures, the earth became capable of yielding the material into which the Christ could be born. Therefore, the greatest spiritual event and deed of the post-Atlantean era had its beginning in the people who belonged to the most despised human beings in the eyes of the leaders of the Atlantean civilization, and this event gave rise to the immense spiritual progress that supports and maintains all spiritual life in our time—weaves through it and makes it productive.

The events in Atlantis are paralleled by those of our time. Seeing that the germinal beginnings of man's ability to do arithmetic and to count were present in Atlantis, we can recognize how these capabilities are today furthered in a marvelous conquest of the physical plane and how they brought about all kinds of technical progress. We also see how the great inventors and discoverers today have reached the culmination, in a sense, in applying those forces that first began to germinate with the small group of despised people in the Atlantean time. And what was then clairvoyant knowledge is today knowledge of nature and of the physical world. There is also a similarity between the spiritual leaders of the Atlantean civilization and today's natural scientists and scholars. On the other hand, a class of plain people exists everywhere—irrespective of positions its members might hold in the world, whose hearts are filled with the mighty magnet that attracts us to spiritual life, just as people in Atlantis were attracted to a life in which the external faculties for the physical plane could be developed.

Despite these similarities, there is also a certain difference between the modern and the ancient situation. In the old days referred to, the last remnants of clairvoyance were still present in people so that they were able to behold the Great Initiate. In a certain way, things today are more difficult for human beings when a call from the spiritual world issues to an equally small group of people, something we designate as the call of the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. But since people today are placed on the physical plane, these Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings are at first unknown to this small nucleus of human beings that has crystallized itself out of the mass of people. As we can deduce from the facts of the present time, this small group feels in its hearts that there is such a thing as a new spiritual message that is meant to have an effect on the future just as the message in former ages has had an effect on the present. These human beings who today come from all walks of life and whom we can find everywhere are the true theosophists because they carry in their hearts a longing for a spiritual life that is meant to lay the foundation for future cultures. The true theosophists in our time are emerging—just as we now encounter a sensational discovery similar to the one in the Atlantean era.

In ancient times water was conquered through the highest technological progress; the same is true today in the case of air. This conquest will, of course, extend into a later epoch. But just as ships in our times have brought about mastery of the physical plane only, so the air ship that will lead human beings into the atmosphere and beyond will empower the pilots to find only matter—material things. Granted, new realms of the physical plane will be conquered, and this will be beneficial for the external world. However, the inner spiritual life is borne in the hearts of those who feel spiritually fulfilled by the promise of being able in the future to look into the spiritual world while being conscious of self.

Look into life and you will find out there our leaders of civilization, the pillars of external culture, active as inventors and discoverers, as scholars and natural scientists. They look with scorn and contempt on a small group such as the one assembled here today that constitutes itself as a new bearer of culture and that unites its members with others in spiritual scientific associations. The events of the ancient Atlantean era repeat themselves.

However, when the spiritual life touches your hearts with such force that you can compare yourselves with dignity to those who were gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle, then you will be the bearers of spiritual life in later ages. In addition to offering humanity the external, material, and corporeal realities, such a life would also make possible a renewed immersion in the spiritual world. Although the Great Initiate gathered human beings around Himself in ancient times, today the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings fulfill a similar function and issue their call to you. If you feel your mission from a sense of history, then your hearts will become strong enough to withstand all the ridicule and disdain that the so-called pillars of civilization heap on Spiritual Science from the outside. And if you understand your mission in this spirit, then your thoughts will be strong and any doubt that may reverberate into your souls from the outside will be unable to shake you in your conviction. Your thoughts will be spiritually refined by the very force that can issue from such a knowledge of our mission. Even if we have to review thousands of years and establish far-reaching ideals, it is worth the effort because where such ideals are established, life is transmuted, and where they are absent, life is dead. Ideals transform themselves into the force of a moment even if they have been taken from vast periods of time and may seem to make the person subscribing to them appear somewhat petty and despondent. You will be strong for the most insignificant task if you are capable of extracting your ideal from the loftiest heights. This will make you stand fast when those who govern the world with their erudition talk with disdain and contempt about the little spiritual scientific associations where those people sit who “do not want to go along with contemporary culture.” Oh yes, they do want to go along, and they also know to appreciate the accomplishments of the external, physical world, but they also know that just as a body cannot be without a soul, no external culture can exist without spiritual life.

Just as the despised human beings characterized above gathered around the Great Initiate and after generations made the existence of Christ on earth possible, so the anthroposophical movement must facilitate a comprehensive understanding of Christ. Christ descended to earth in the fourth major era, and those who wish to understand Him completely will be able to do so from the anthroposophical vantage point.

Why do people who have heretofore been nourished by the positive, orthodox religions, come to Spiritual Science as if responding to an undefined longing in their consciousness? Why do they listen to the anthroposphical message when before they listened only to the Vatican? Why? Is it still permissible today to say anthroposophy exists only for those who regard the greatest spiritual fact of our age—the Christ Impulse—with indifference? What do the people coming to us need from us? They want us to tell them who Christ was and what He accomplished! They are coming to us because those who consider themselves to be the privileged bearers of the Christ-name today cannot tell them who Christ was, whereas anthroposophy can. Today's cultural leaders use the denial of Christ to oppose the external tradition emanating from various religions, but they cannot effectively challenge the moribund positive religious movements. Those who do not know what the Great Christ is, those who deny His spirituality will be no match even for the old religious movements. But only the spiritual movements that place themselves in the midst of those who claim an exclusive right to the Christ-name, the movements who know how to express the true essence of the Christ even to those who wish to hear the opposite, only those spiritual movements will attract human beings to their cause who carry the future in their hearts. The ancient religious trends will prove to be stronger than all religious nihilism.

We do not conceive of anthroposophical life in a petty, dogmatic sense, nor do we want to comprehend it with the help of individual tenets or maxims, but rather by recognizing and understanding the mission and the task of our time. We want to embrace anthroposophical life in such a way that the true spirit of our time speaks to us and that the most significant event of our post-Atlantean era can be expressed through the words of anthroposophy. If these words are not just recited but rather put into practice as an expression of the spirit of our time, they will become a dynamic force of life in our souls, and this will make people understand what anthroposophical life is.

When we truly feel this, we will increasingly grow stronger, and the newly gained strength will help us to embrace our ideal firmly. Then we will know how this ideal can be justified, regardless of whether this happens in an environment where an old culture yearns for a new content, or in this environment here, where nature and the magnificent, spirit-endowed sunrays glittering around us encircle what the daily efforts of anthroposophy achieve. We will again learn to recognize the spirit within these sunrays and know that when the sun has set, the spirit indwelling in it will look into our hearts. We will also learn what it means to behold the sun and its spirit at midnight, and in understanding what this spirit is, we will see how it has descended and how it is now united with the highest impulses of our age. It is necessary that humanity understand the Christ-Impulse and that we can say who the Christ was. Such an understanding is now only in the beginning stages, but in direct proportion to its increasing spiritual insights, mankind will gradually understand how the Christ-Impulse has penetrated this worldly edifice.

To feel this way at the dedication of a branch of our movement is especially appropriate when, as is the case here, the members were united in wanting to express a heartfelt desire and name this branch after Francis of Assisi, whose life is enveloped by a deep spiritual mystery.

When Christ descended to the earth, He enveloped Himself with the threefold physical, etheric, and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth and lived three years in this sheath as Christ, the Sun-Spirit. With the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ descended to the earth; but aside from what is known to all of you, something else special happened by virtue of the fact that Christ indwelled the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly the astral and etheric bodies. After Christ cast off the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, they were still present as spiritual substance in the spiritual world, but multiplied in a great many copies. They did not perish in the world ether or in the astral world, but continued to live as identical images. Just as the seed of a plant, once buried in the ground, reappears in many copies according to the mystery of number, so the copies of Jesus of Nazareth's etheric and astral bodies were present in the spiritual world. And for what purpose were they present, considering the large framework of spiritual economy? They were there to be preserved and to serve the overall progress of the human race.

One of the first individuals to benefit from the blessed fact of these countless copies of Jesus's etheric body being present in the spiritual world was St. Augustine. When he again descended to earth after an earlier incarnation, not just any etheric body was woven into his own, but rather the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. Augustine had his own astral body and ego, but his etheric body was interwoven with the image of the etheric body of Jesus. He had to work through the culture of his ego and astral body, but when he had made his way to the etheric body, he realized the great truths that we find in his mystical writings.

Many other human beings from the sixth to the ninth centuries had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into their own etheric bodies. Many of these individuals conceived the Christian images that later were to be glorified in the arts in the form of the Madonna or the Christ on the cross. They were the creators of religious images who experienced in themselves what the people living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha had experienced.

In the period spanning the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries the time had come when a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the astral bodies of certain reincarnated souls. From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries many human beings, for example Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen, had the imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into them while their own astral bodies—the source of their knowledge—were formed during reincarnation. This enabled these individuals to proclaim the great truths of Christianity in the form of judgments, logical constructs, and scientific wisdom. But, in addition, they were also able to experience the feeling of carrying the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within themselves.

Your eyes will be opened if you allow yourselves to experience vicariously all the humility, the devotion, and the Christian love that was part of Francis of Assisi. You will then know how to look at him as a person prone to make mistakes—because he possessed his own ego—and as a great individual because he carried a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within his own astral body. All the humble feelings, the profound mysticism, and the spiritual soul life of Francis of Assisi become comprehensible if we know this one secret of his life.

Having such knowledge, we can see with our inner eye that the future of this new branch augurs well as it climbs upward under the guiding light of this great individual, for those who, like Francis of Assisi, received the grace and the calling to guide Christian humanity in the West will at all times let their spiritual light radiate into the areas of spiritual activity. And especially if this Francis of Assisi Section works in a genuinely spiritual sense, the unison of thoughts and feelings of this branch will be the reflection of the harmonizing light of Francis of Assisi, which he received as a gift of grace, as we mentioned before, by an infusion of his own astral body with a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Something of this light will radiate into this very branch.

In letting such perspectives roll by our inner eye, we who are assembled today in this modest branch for the purpose of dedicating the new branch will leave the proper feelings behind us when we depart. Let us look up to the light of Francis of Assisi; let us take along with us what can be ignited in us in this moment, and let us remember this branch in the future. In doing so, our feelings and thoughts will hover invisibly over this Francis of Assisi Branch, so that the impulses struggling upward from below may prove to be worthy of the light that shines into our souls from the outside. In such a moment we become conscious of the fact that we are here to work for the true and real measures of progress in our post-Atlantean era. Surely, when the founders of this branch felt the need to name it after Francis of Assisi, their souls must have sensed something of the great progress.

What was the most decisive turning point of our entire evolution? It was the time when the Christ descended to earth. Let us look back six hundred years from that event and then compare the earth to what it was six hundred years after Christ, a period spanning some twelve hundred years. First, let us look at Buddha, who lived six hundred years before Christ. In him we see an individuality of such greatness that words of admiration should be superfluous. Specifically, let us look at the moment where he is led out into life, but not into the life he wanted to live. Consider how he first meets a helpless child and how from this experience he forms the perception that there is suffering in the journey that human beings begin with their birth. And upon seeing a sick person, he says to himself, “Not only is there suffering in this world, but human beings on this plane are also subjected to illness.” He sees an old person who no longer is able to move his limbs and says to himself, “Aging involves suffering.” And when he sees a corpse, the sight of it conjures up in him the perception that death is suffering. Another perception is that to be separated from a loved one creates suffering, as is the case when one is united with someone whom one doesn't love. Finally, not to obtain what one desires is suffering too.

This, then, is the teaching that spread as the teaching of Buddha, some six hundred years before Christ. Let us fix in our minds the moment where Buddha steps out into the world, sees a corpse, and stands face to face with death. It was six hundred years after the event of Golgotha when for the first time one particular image came into being: the image of the cross with the corpse of the Savior hanging on it. Thousands of people were there to look at it. Now when Buddha looked at a corpse, it was to him a personification of all suffering on earth. The believers of the Christian community six hundred years after Christ would look at the corpse and see it as the victory of all spiritual life over death, the claim to bliss. And here we see how a faithful community looked at a dead body six hundred years before Christ, and then six hundred years after the event of Golgotha.

What can the Christ-Event tell us about the other pronouncements of suffering? Is birth suffering, as Buddha expressed it? Looking at Christ on the cross, the part of humanity that really understands Him will say, “Through birth we step into this existence—an existence that was found worthy of harboring the Christ. We are born into a life in which we can unite with Christ.” Likewise, sickness is not suffering if one understands Christ. People will have to learn to understand through the Christ-Impulse what, from a spiritual point of view, creates health. Illnesses will be healed in a spiritual way through the innermost, Christianized life. By dying to the outer world, we become assured that the treasure acquired in connection with the Christ-Impulse is carried into every other life. Through Christ's victory, death appears to us as a bridge that leads to the spiritual world, and we learn to understand the meaning of death for this spiritual world through this Christ-Impulse.

Also, it is no longer possible to say that the separation from the object of one's love creates suffering because the power of Christ will unite us, as one soul to another, with everything we want to love. Moreoever, the power of Christ will tie those together who love each other. The suffering that could arise through the separation of those loving each other is overcome through Christ.

Let us learn to love all people, lest our interpretation of the world be that to be united with what one does not love means suffering. Rather, let us learn to love every creature in its own right, and when our spiritual wells start to flow, our desires will be purified in such a way that we can partake in everything our souls are destined to receive, once the hurdles of the physical world are eliminated. And those spiritual fountainheads can begin to flow through the Christ- Impulse. People who will be content to obtain through the Christ-Spirit what they want will have their desires purified.

The new spiritual life has placed itself next to the old spiritual life through the Christ-Impulse. That is how deep progress in spiritual life ran before and after the Christ-Impulse had surfaced. This is keenly felt by someone who turns to one of the most ardent and joyful admirers and messengers of the Christ-Impulse—Francis of Assisi; his name, therefore, may well be bestowed on an association in which spiritual life is to be cultivated. May this name be a good augury, and may the work in this branch proceed in the true spirit of our time, properly understood, because this is necessary for the programs we have envisioned in our souls.

Let us consecrate this branch of our movement in the spirit expressed by the preceding words and by calling down the benediction we used yesterday when we broke ground for the outer temple. Let us conjure up the same spirit one more time so that it may hold sway and weave in this Francis of Assisi Branch.

May the feelings of those who have come to this dedication ceremony unite with this spirit and also unite in a brotherly way with those who are at work here in serious, anthroposophical endeavors so that spiritual life may germinate in the midst of the trees, forests, and sprouting plants of this sunny piece of nature. It matters little whether the bright sunrays outside indicate what is beautiful or magnificent in nature, whether snow be piled up outside, or whether a thick cloud cover be out there to obscure the external, physical sunlight. In times when nature renews itself or when she wears her somber garb, may the spirit of a higher life always imbue those who will be engaged in spiritual activities, and let us now conjure up this spirit to aid all the human beings in this branch.

With this, let us dedicate, from the bottom of our hearts, the Francis of Assisi Branch and hope that it will continue its work in the spirit in which it began—through the spiritual force of the Masters of Truth and of the Harmony of Feelings that streams into every branch. May it also continue its work through the good spirit with which it has endowed itself by naming itself after the splendid bearer of Christ.

May this branch continue as it began. Good spirits will guide its course as it becomes one of the centers where the kind of life is cultivated of which our time is clearly in need and where the seeds for the requirements of a far-distant future are sown. Let us hope the people who will soon have to work in solitude here emerge strengthened from today's festivities, where so many sincere friends united their feelings with them! Then the spiritual life cultivated in this place will flow back to all people involved and coalesce with the great harmony of anthroposophical life. Thoughts that originate in this place will encounter our thoughts, just as our thoughts will flow here from distant places. This harmony is something like an external garment of spirituality, and spirituality must pass through human evolution like a spiritual breath of air if beneficial forces are to reign over humanity.

May this branch be dedicated in the fullest sense of the word; may it become a field of activity into which we can always place our hopes with the same love and inner satisfaction as is the case in today's dedication ceremony.

Goethe,³⁵ one of the most inspired spirits in modern times, knew how to depict in a touching way the strength and the power of sounds at Easter—the sound of the Easter bells. When his character Faust, the representative of striving humanity, has reached the outer limit of earthly existence, he seeks death. Goethe, however, also makes clear to us how the sounds of Easter bells, similar to the brightness of Easter itself, can conquer the thought and the impulse of death in Faust's heart.

The inner impulse of the sounds of Easter that Goethe places before us is the same impulse that passed through the entire development of humanity. In the not too distant future, human beings will understand through a renewed absorption in spiritual things how our festivals are intended to connect the human soul with everything that weaves into and lives in the universe. Then people will feel in a new way how their souls expand with joy during these first days of spring and understand the manner in which the sources of spiritual life can liberate us from the material world and from the narrowness of an existence that is tied to material things.

Especially during Easter will the human soul feel most fervently how an unshakable faith is being poured into it, which indicates that there is a well of the eternal, divine existence deep inside every human being. This fountainhead removes us from all constrictions and allows us to be one with the source of universal existence without losing ourselves. We can find a new life in this source at any time, provided we are able to rise to its knowledge through illumination. That which constitutes the true essence of Easter is nothing but an external sign of the Christian Mystery, the most profound experience mankind has ever had. And thus, we feel at this time of the year as if the external festivities and the manifestations of Easter were a symbol of the truths that human beings were able to discover only at the beginning of evolution, as well as a symbol of the knowledge that was available to them exclusively from the depths of the Holy Mysteries. What we call Easter was widely celebrated by ancient peoples, and wherever it was celebrated, it grew out of the Holy Mysteries. And everywhere such celebrations conjured up the notion and the conviction that the life that is lived in the spirit can conquer death, because death resides in the material world. In whatever way the human soul became convinced of this truth in ancient times, the substance of this conviction was ultimately derived from the very core of the Holy Mysteries.

However, the progression of human evolution consists precisely in the fact that the secrets formerly known only to holy places and to the Mystery Centers are now increasingly accessible to all of humanity and will eventually become common knowledge. In today's and tomorrow's festivities we will therefore observe, and attempt to present, how this notion—this feeling—was at first confined to the few in ancient times but has increasingly gained ground in the course of human development and is now known to an ever increasing number of people. Today let us look back into the past so that tomorrow we will be able to describe the feelings people in our time have toward Easter.

Our Christian Easter is only one among humanity's many forms of celebrating Easter, and what the sages of mankind had to say about conquering death through life was a result of the strongest convictions and sprang from the deepest wells of wisdom. These insights were built into the Easter symbols, and we find there elements that are designed to awaken in us an understanding of Easter, of the resurrection feast of the spirit. A beautiful and deep oriental legend tells us the following.

Shakyamuni, the Buddha, was a great oriental teacher who made many oriental regions happy with his deep wisdom. Since this wisdom had sprung from the primeval wells of spiritual existence, it warmed the hearts of humanity and filled them with utter bliss. Shakyamuni preserved for later ages that ancient wisdom of the divine-spiritual worlds that had beatified the hearts of human beings when they were still able to look into the divine world. The Buddha had one great disciple, Kashyapa, who was able to understand his teachings, whereas his other disciples were more or less incapable of grasping the comprehensive wisdom taught by Buddha. He was one of the initiates most profoundly in tune with the teaching of Buddha and one of his most important successors. The legend tells us that when it was time for Kashyapa to die and when, because of his maturity, he was ready to enter the state of Nirvana, he went out to a steep mountain and hid in a cave. There his body remained after his death in an imputrescible state; only the initiates knew about this secret and about the location of Kashyapa's body. However, Buddha himself had once predicted the coming of Maitreya-Buddha, his great successor who was to become the new teacher and leader of humanity and who, when he had reached the zenith of his preordained earthly existence, would seek out the cave of the illumined Kashyapa to touch his imperishable corpse with the right hand. Then from the heavens a fire would stream down in which Kashyapa's body would be transported to the spiritual world.

The very degree by which the oriental legend differs from what we know as the content of the Easter story affords us an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Easter. Only through a gradual approach can we grasp the primeval wisdom contained in this legend. We could begin by asking why Kashyapa—in contradistinction to the Savior in the Christian report of Easter—does not conquer death after three days; or we might ask why the corpse of the oriental initiate remains in this imperishable state for such a long period of time until it is finally moved upward to the celestial spheres by a miraculous fire.

Today we can only allude to the hidden depths of such things, and only little by little can we get an idea of the wisdom expressed in such profound legends. It is especially important at festivals such as Easter to keep a modest and respectful distance and to gradually raise our consciousness to the heights of wisdom by engaging ourselves in the ritual of celebration. We must not give in to the temptation of wanting to grasp the meaning of these legends quickly with our dry intellect. No, these truths can be approached and ultimately understood only by gradually attuning our perceptive sensibilities and feelings to them. Only after this ripening process can we grasp the great truths with the zeal and full warmth of our sensibilities.

For today's humanity, two closely related truths shine as mighty lights and emblems on the horizon of the spirit—important points of reference for a developing humanity that is striving within the spiritual realm. The first emblem is the burning bramblebush of Moses, and the second is the fire appearing under lightning and thunder at Sinai from which Moses received the pronouncement of the “I am the I am.”³⁶ Who is that spiritual being in the two apparitions announcing himself to Moses?

Anyone who understands the Christian message in a spiritual sense will also understand the words that announce to Moses the Being in the burning bramblebush, and later in the fire on Mt. Sinai—the Being who places the Ten Commandments before his soul. The writer of the Gospel of St. John tells us that Moses prophesied the Coming of Christ Jesus, and the Evangelist John expressly lets him point to those places in the Bible where the force in the burning bramblebush and later in the fire at Sinai announces Himself as the Being who was later to be named “the Christ.” No godhead other than the Christ is intended to be introduced by the words “I am the I am.”

The God who later appeared in the human body and who confronted mankind with the Mystery of Golgotha reigns invisibly after He had announced Himself earlier in the fire element in nature, in the burning bush, and in the lightning fire of Sinai. And you can understand the Old or the New Testament only if you know that the God proclaimed by Moses is the Christ who was supposed to walk among people. That is how the God who is supposed to bring salvation to human beings announces Himself in a way as no being in human form would. He announces Himself in the fiery element of nature, the element in which Christ is living. His divine essence makes itself known in many forms. The same Divine Being that reigns throughout all of antiquity now makes His visible appearance through the Event in Palestine.

Let us look back to the Old Testament and ask ourselves whom the ancient Hebrews actually revered. Who is their God? The members of the Hebrew Mystery Centers knew it; they worshiped the Christ and recognized Him as the speaker of the words, “Tell my people: I am the I am.” But even if nothing of this were known, the very fact that God, within our cycle of humanity, announced Himself in the fire would be sufficiently authentic evidence to the person capable of seeing into the deep mysteries of nature that the God of the burning bramblebush is identical with the God who announced Himself on Mt. Sinai. He came down from spiritual heights in order to fulfill the Mystery of Golgotha through His descent into a human body. For there is a mysterious connection between the fire that ignites the elements of nature out there and the fire that pulsates through our blood in the form of body temperature. We have often emphasized in our Spiritual Science that the human being is a microcosm juxtaposed to the large world, the macrocosm. Therefore, when we perceive things in the right way, the inner processes of a human being must correspond to processes taking place outside in the universe. For every inner-process we must be able to find the corresponding outer process, but to understand the meaning of this requires that we enter deep shafts of Spiritual Science. We are touching here the fringe of a deep mystery, of a truth that answers this question: What in the external macrocosm corresponds to the origin of human thought within us?

Human beings are the only creatures on earth who really think, and through their thoughts they are able to experience a world that extends beyond the earth. The manner in which thoughts flash up in the human being has no parallel in any other creature on earth. What is taking place within us when a thought is ignited, when either the simplest or the most enlightening thought flashes into our minds? To answer this question, let us say that the ego and astral body are simultaneously activated within us when we let our thoughts pass through our souls. Our blood is the physical expression of our ego, and that which in our nervous system is called “life” is the physical expression of our astral body. Not a single thought would flare up in our souls if ego and astral body did not work in concert, thus giving rise to a commensurate, interdependent functioning of the blood and of the nervous system. The future science of human beings will some day be amazed at today's scientific theory, which holds that thoughts originate solely in the nervous system. This belief is incorrect because the process responsible for the origination of thoughts must be seen as a dynamic interaction between blood and nervous system.

A thought flashes up in our soul when our blood, our inner fire, nervous system, and air cooperate in such a way. The origination of the thought inside our soul corresponds to rolling thunder in the cosmos. Likewise, when lightning flashes in the air, and when air and fire interact to produce thunder, this corresponds to the fire of our blood and the activity of our nervous system. This produces what one might metaphorically call an inner thunder that echoes in our thoughts, albeit gently, quietly, and imperceptibly. The lightning in the clouds corresponds to the fire and to the warmth in our blood, whereas the air outside, including all the elements it contains in the universe, corresponds to everything that passes through our nervous system. And just as lightning in its counterplay with the elements produces thunder, so the counterplay of blood and nerves produces the thought that flashes up in the soul. Suppose we looked out into the world that surrounds us, saw lightning flashing up in the air, and heard rolling thunder discharging itself. Then suppose that, as we looked into our soul, we sensed an inner warmth pulsating in our blood and felt the life that passes through our nervous system, a thought would flash up within us to tell us that both the external and the internal event were one.

That is really the truth! Although our thoughts take place within ourselves, the thunder rolling in the sky is not just a physical, material phenomenon. To assert that it was so would be nothing but materialistic mythology. However, individuals able to perceive that spiritual beings weave and radiate through material existence will look up to the sky, see the lightning, hear the thunder, and to them this will be a true and real indication of God's thinking in the fire, of His intention to announce Himself to us. That is the invisible God who weaves and radiates through the universe. His warmth is in the lightning, His nerves in the air, His thoughts in the rolling thunder; and it was He who spoke to Moses in the burning bramblebush and in the lightning fire of Sinai.

The elements fire and air in the macrocosm correspond to blood and nerves in the human microcosm. Thoughts in the human being are what lightning and thunder are in the macrocosm. By analogy, the God whom Moses saw and heard in the burning bush and who spoke to him in the lightning fire of Mt. Sinai appears as the Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. By thinking like a human being and by being in a human body, Christ's influence as the great model for human evolution extends into the far-distant future. And thus, two poles in the human evolution meet each other: the macrocosmic God on Mt. Sinai who announces Himself in thunder and lightning fire, and the same microcosmic God who is embodied in the human being of Palestine.

The sublime mysteries of humanity have been derived from the most profound wisdom. They are not invented legends, but a truth so profound that we need all the means available to Spiritual Science in order to unveil the mysteries that are woven around this truth. Let us ask what kind of an impulse mankind received through its great model, the Christ-Being, who descended to earth and united Himself with the microcosmic copies of the elements that are present in the human body.

Let us look back one more time to the prophecies of ancient cultures. All of them, back to the very distant past of the post-Atlantean era, probably knew what the course of human development would be. The Mystery Centers everywhere taught what is now proclaimed by Spiritual Science as follows: Human beings consist of four parts: the physical, the etheric, and the astral bodies, and the ego. They can rise to higher stages of development: through individual effort on the part of their ego, when they transform their astral body into spirit self—manas, when they transform their etheric body into life spirit—buddhi, and when they spiritualize the physical body into spirit man—atman. All the members of this physical body must be gradually spiritualized in our life on earth so that everything that makes human beings out of us through the influx of the divine breath is profoundly spiritualized. And because spiritualization of the physical body begins with the spiritualization of the breath—of the odem, the transformed, spiritualized physical body is called atma or atman, from which the German word for breath, atem, derives. The Old Testament tells us that the human being received the breath of life in the beginning of his earthly existence. Likewise, all ancient Schools of Wisdom perceived this breath of life as something that must gradually be spiritualized by the human being, and they saw atman as a deification of the breath—as the great ideal human beings must strive for—so that they will be imbued with the spiritual breath of air.

But there is still more in the human being that has to be spiritualized. If the entire body is to be spiritualized, it is necessary not only that the breath be spiritualized but also that the blood—the expression of the ego that is constantly renewed by the breath—be spiritualized. The blood must be infected by a strong impulse toward the spiritual. Christianity has added to the ancient mysteries the mystery of the blood and of the fire that is enclosed in the human being. The ancient mysteries say that human beings have descended to earth in their present earthly form and physical corporeality from spiritual heights. Having lost their spiritual essence and having wrapped themselves into a physical corporeality, they must return to spirituality by casting off the physical sheath and by ascending to a spiritual existence.

The religions could not teach what one might call the self-induced salvation of the human ego as long as the ego, whose physical expression is in the blood, was not touched by an impulse now present on earth. And thus we are told how the great spiritual beings—the great avatars—descend and incarnate themselves from time to time in human bodies, especially when humanity needs help. These are beings who do not need to descend into a human body to enhance their own development because they have completed their own human development in an earlier cycle of the world. They descend for the sole purpose of helping human beings. For example, when mankind is in need of help, the great god Vishnu descends from time to time into an earthly existence. Krishna, one of the incarnations of Vishnu, speaks of himself and explains clearly what the essence of an avatar is. In the divine poem, the Bhagavad Gita, he himself explains what he is. Here we have the wonderful words that Krishna, in whom Vishnu lives as an avatar, says about himself: “I am the spirit of creation, its beginning, its middle, its end; I am the Sun among the stars, fire among the elements, the great ocean among the waters, the eternal snake among all snakes. I am the basis of everything.”³⁷

No words can proclaim more beautifully and more magnificently the all-embracing, omnipotent divinity. The godhead whom Moses saw in the elements of fire not only weaves and radiates through the macrocosmic world but also can be found inside the human being. That is why the Krishna-Being indwells in anything human as the great ideal to which the human core strives to develop itself from within. And if, as the wisdom of antiquity endeavored to do, the human breath can be spiritualized through the impulse that we absorb through the Mystery of Golgotha, then we have realized the principle of salvation through that which itself lives within us. All avatars saved mankind through the forces they caused to radiate from spiritual heights down onto earth. The avatar Christ, however, saved mankind by means of what He Himself extracted from the strength of mankind, and He showed us how the strength to be saved and to conquer matter through spirit can be found within ourselves.

Now we can see how even such an illuminate as Kashyapa could not yet be fully saved even though he had made his body imperishable. This body of his had to remain in the secret cave until the Maitreya-Buddha came to pick it up. Only when the physical body has been so spiritualized through the ego that the Christ-Impulse can stream into it does one no longer need the wonderful cosmic fire in order to attain salvation; what is needed for salvation is the fire raging in the blood of the inner human being. And that is why we can utilize the light that radiates from the Mystery of Golgotha in order to illuminate such a wonderfully profound legend as the one told about Kashyapa.

At first blush, the world appears to us dark and full of riddles, but we can compare it with a dark room containing many splendid objects that we are unable to see when we first enter. However, when we ignite a light, it illuminates the whole splendor of the objects in the room and everything else represented by these objects. The same can be true for the human being who strives for wisdom. The human being strives at first in the dark; looking in this world first to the past and then to the future, he or she can at first see nothing but darkness. However, once the light coming from Golgotha is ignited, everything from the farthest past to the remotest future becomes illuminated. Since everything material is born out of the spirit, the spirit will again rise from matter. To express this certainty is the meaning of today's celebration of Easter—a festival that is tied to the events of the world. Mankind must realize what it can attain through Spiritual Science: if the human soul, by gaining knowledge of the mysteries of existence, can acquire a lively feeling for the mysteries of the universe on important symbolic occasions such as Easter, then it will also feel something of what it means to live not simply in one's own narrow, personal existence but also in a symbiosis with the light of the stars, the splendor of the sun, and with everything that lives in the universe. The soul will become increasingly more spiritual as it feels extended into the universe.

The spiritual Easter bells echo their sounds through our hearts, indicating that we must pass from a human to a universal life through the resurrection. Hearing these spiritual Easter bells will make us lose any doubt we may have about the spiritual world, and we will then be sure that death in the material world cannot harm us. When we understand these spiritual Easter bells, we will return to the life in the spirit.

• 35. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was Germany's greatest poet. Early in his academic career, Steiner spent several years editing Goethe's scientific writings, and during his lifetime he did not tire of extolling Goethean perception and thinking. The main seat of the Anthroposophic movement in Dornach, Switzerland, is still called the “Goetheanum.” Steiner gave several lecture cycles on Goethe's great poem Faust. These have been published as Faust, der strebende Mensch, Vol. I, and Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's “Faust” Vol. II (Rudolf Steiner Verlag: Dornach, 1974).
• 36. Exodus 3:14
• 37. Bhagavad Gita is a religious Hindu poem consisting of dialogues between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, who reveals himself as the avatara (incarnation) of Vishnu. The transcription of the quotation from the “Gita” is probably a contraction of several textual citations on pp. 452, 522, and 529, among others, of Bhagavad-gita AS IT IS. Complete edition (Collier Books: New York, 1974).