The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eight days ago, we discussed important connections between the human organization, the physical build and the astral world on the basis of the Germanic creation myth. We have seen the interesting connection between the twelve pairs of cranial nerves and the twelve currents that our ancestors saw through their kind of clairvoyance in the astral plane, and which are nothing other than the inflows of that which then forms the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human being. We have also seen how the softer parts of the human body, so to speak, what belongs to the larynx, what belongs to the heart and to the lower organic parts, how all this is connected with the roots of the world ash - which is of course an astral phenomenon - and how the formation of the human brain is connected with the treetop and branches of the world ash. Here we have looked deeply into the connection between what the myth tells us and what we can acquire through our knowledge. We have also seen that the signs and symbols that the myth offers us are not things that have been thought up or invented by the imagination, but that they correspond to real observations in the astral world. This must be emphasized again and again, that all the beating about the bush with regard to symbols and signs that comes from the intellect and from speculation is worthless. For the real symbols that play a role in occultism are renderings of experiences and encounters in the spiritual world.

Today we will take an even deeper look into this area. We will come to a chapter that can really only be discussed in a working group that has been dealing with these questions for some time. Now, younger members are still being added to such working groups. They have to get used to hearing things that may still be shocking to them. But we would not make any progress if we did not want to discuss what applies to the advanced. This does not mean advanced in terms of study and knowledge, but what is meant by “advanced” is that the members who have been here for a long time have acquired a certain feeling that one of other worlds in the same way as if they were things or people that one encounters in the physical world, and with whom one can, under certain circumstances, associate and converse as familiarly as with the beings one encounters when one steps outside into the street. In this sense, I mean “advanced” so that they are not shocked when the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants are spoken of in an unbiased way. And the younger members may at least for the time being have the good will to listen to such a thing and accept it as naturally as a story from the ordinary sensory world. The composition of the lecture today will also be somewhat colorful. But that does not matter. We will get an overview of an important chapter of the spiritual world on the one hand and on the other hand we will get the connection with our own human physicality.

You know that within our sensual world there is a second world that we call the astral world, which initially presents itself as a flowing sea of light, in which colors and forms flow. For the researcher in the astral world, these color formations arrange themselves into certain entities, which he recognizes as astral entities, which are just as real there as plants and animals are here in the physical world. Then there is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of Devachan, which can be recognized by clairaudience. We will discuss this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to the astral world from a few points of view.

Anyone who studies the astral world with the means that those who study these things in depth can gradually learn through their own development will find that this world is much, much more populated than our physical world. For the astral world has a property that the physical world does not have, and in occultism this property is called 'permeability'. Astral beings can pass through each other; physical beings cannot do that. From this you can already see that the astral world can be much more populated, can contain many more beings than the physical world. This is also the case.

Just think back to the time when a large number of people were still able, even without occult training, to see into the spiritual world through their natural abilities. You will get a slightly different idea of some of the old pictures that earlier painters have painted. I would just like to remind you of the 'Sistine Madonna', which is in Dresden. Even if some have not seen the Sistine Madonna themselves, they are at least familiar with the good engravings that exist of it. You will have seen that in the background the whole atmosphere is filled with the heads of angels or genii. Just as the observation of nature otherwise makes cloud formations grow out of the air, so here angelic or genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy, but something that is a complete reality for those who can see the astral world. The astral world, which surrounds us as a surging sea of light, is filled with beings that, as it were, spring from space at every point with infinite vitality. This is how the astral plane appears in every respect; it is a moving spiritual life. Now it is not to be said that the painters who lived at the time of Raphael had this full understanding. That would be too much to say; but there were great predecessors of these painters, whose works have long since been lost, who in some respects were real clairvoyants, who, from their clairvoyance, indicated the tradition in such a way that a painter like Raphael, even if he was not clairvoyant, knew from tradition: this is how it is, and was therefore able to reproduce it appropriately. Even more appropriate are older pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries. If you go back to a time that is best known through the painter Cimabue, you will see how the strange phenomenon of the gold background appears in the pictures, and how angelic or genie-like figures emerge from it. This, too, corresponds fully to the reality of the astral vision. Down to the golden background, this corresponds to reality. For indeed, when we enter the higher regions of the astral plane, the flowing sea of light, which shines and is illuminated in other color tones, transforms into such a flowing sea of light that appears to be glowing with gold. This is beautifully depicted in a painting by Raphael, in a fresco, the “Disputa”, opposite another painting called “The School of Athens”, a name that should actually be crossed out. In the “Disputa” you have at the very bottom the disputing people - who are believed to be church fathers, popes, doctors of the church - then the region of the apostles and prophets begins, and then the region that Raphael depicts in the heads of the genii is divided, which is the region that we can call the lower astral plane. Higher up on the same picture, you can see the region of the higher astral plane, glowing with gold. That is why the pictures of these old painters are so convincing, because those who know these things find the truth of the inner vision reflected in them. They are also convincing for those who do not know this, because they can feel in their subconscious the deep truth from which these things are created. I mention this to draw attention to the way in which people in earlier times were aware of these higher realities and also reproduced them in pictures.

Today we want to discuss something about this world, which we have now tried to characterize as the painters have reproduced it in pictures. Today we want to draw attention to very specific entities that the clairvoyant person encounters in the astral world, partly in the lower, partly in the higher astral world. There are such entities that are shaped like a very complicated bird body, but of tremendous beauty, endowed with mighty wing-like organs and with a head similar to the human head; that is how they appear formed and shaped. These are definitely realities of the astral plane. The great teachers of the religions, who were able to see into it, were well acquainted with this type of being. And when in the most ancient times one tried to depict these beings - the cherubim, or the somewhat less correct, but at least well-intentioned griffins - then one painted such strange figures, which are something between a genius and a mythical creature.

If we recall the old legends, we see in them an attempt by people to recreate these higher, genially beings. They are shaped in the most diverse ways, and those who worked in the secret schools and knew them have, as it were, characterized this choir of beings. These types of entities are grouped into six classes. There are six regents, six leaders of these hosts. They have been named in various ways, these six main geniuses of the higher astral plane, the golden region. The Persian Secret Doctrine calls them “Amshaspands”; it speaks of the six Amshaspands.

A second type of such astral entities, occurring in a somewhat lower region, looks different; it does not at all resemble forms that exist here on the physical plane. But one can at least make oneself understood by trying to express their forms through those of the physical plane. This is what the secret teachers did when they gave the mythologies to the nations and the art of which we have spoken, which emerged from the secret teachings. There are no figures that look exactly like these beings, so we can only characterize them by depicting them as having a kind of human body with all kinds of different animal heads. The Egyptians, who knew a great deal about this area of the astral plane and were quite familiar with the spiritual beings of this sphere, tried to recreate this category of astral plane spirits in the various forms, such as human forms with the head of a sparrowhawk or human forms with other animal heads. These are not arbitrarily invented fantasies either, but rather forms with which one can interact on the astral plane just as one can with humans and animals on the physical plane.

Then there is a third kind of entity. There are now innumerable such beings, and it is no longer really possible to characterize them by drawing comparisons from the animal or human world, but rather by trying to draw the plant kingdom or the lower animals for their physicality and the human head as their head, so that the whole is somewhat similar to a plant body from which a human head grows, or a fish body with a human head. All this roughly gives a picture of the beings that are present on the astral plane.

As I have told you, there are six types of such genies, which the Persians called “Amshaspands”. You now also know the second type, which is best characterized by human form with an animal head; they are formed in the most diverse ways. If you go through these figures, you get about twenty-eight to thirty-one groups, and each of these groups is headed by a regent, so that you have twenty-eight to thirty-one such entities as regents in the astral plane. The Persian secret teachers called these regents the twenty-eight or thirty-one “Izards”. Those beings that I have discussed as the third category, they called “Farohars”. These are innumerable, and one would not be finished if one wanted to divide them all into classes according to their number. Today we are only interested in the six Amshaspands with their hosts and the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards with theirs, because they have a very remarkable significance for all human life. Those who have insight into the spiritual world can answer the question that someone might ask: What do these beings of the astral plane actually occupy themselves with? What do they do all the time? It would be quite wrong to believe that these geniuses and spirits are only there to form groups. One could easily think, if one takes certain poetic descriptions, that they are only assigned to the different spheres to form groups. That would, of course, be a very boring existence for these spirits. The formation of living groups is not an issue in the spiritual world. All these beings have their mission in the world plan. These entities, which the Persians called Amshaspands and Izards, were also known to the ancient Germans, the ancient trotters and druid priests, they only list them differently. According to some traditions there are twenty-eight, according to some thirty or thirty-one. We will hear in a moment why the number is uncertain. Those entities that the Persians call Amshaspands are higher spiritual entities that preside over and guide the natural forces around us. The natural forces, that which causes plants to grow, animals to flourish, and humans to live, these forces that are around us, that we call light, heat, electricity, magnetism and so on, nervous energy, blood power, reproductive power – call it what you will – are not merely unspiritual forces. It is a superstition to think that they are unspiritual forces. These forces are the external expression of spiritual entities. The great forces of existence, light, air, warmth, electricity, and the great chemical forces that permeate the world, they are all the external expression of the working Amshaspands and their hosts. There they work within. If I may express myself trivially: they “boil” in the world. For the senses they are behind the scenes. But you can still get an idea of them if, for example, you think of them as in a puppet theater, an actor, a performer who is not visible himself, but can be recognized by the way he works through wires and strings. Just as in a puppet theater the actor works behind the figures, so the spiritual beings stand behind the forces of nature. It is bad for a materialistic superstition if it only sees the puppets and is unaware that spiritual entities are behind them. This is the business of the Amshaspands, the six great genii who, as the Persian doctrine of the gods says, stand by the good god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd as executive genii.

They are assisted by the twenty-eight Izards. What is the significance of these? This is best revealed by direct clairvoyant observation, observing them day after day. You will understand me best if I talk quite bluntly about these twenty-eight Izards. If the six Amshaspands were to work with light, air, warmth and so on without the Izards, this world structure of ours would not come about as it is. There must be a lower level of assistance for this world to come about. There must be subordinate, executive spirits. These are the twenty-eight Izards. And there is a very curious hierarchy to be observed. If you observe the way they work, day after day, you will see that the six great group genii, the Amshaspands, work constantly, continually, evenly. They are tireless. But the subordinate twenty-eight Izards have a substantially shorter working time. They relieve each other, so that on one day you see one category of Izards as helpers, on the second day the second category, and on the third day the third, and so on. This is what makes it possible for the world to move forward at all. When a certain type of plant comes up in spring, the Amshaspands are at work. Although they are always working tirelessly, one of them takes the lead for a period of time; this one is the most active. The others are also active, but they are not in the lead. After some time, another one takes the lead. When a plant species emerges in spring, the Amshaspands work in the manner of the great natural forces, and the lower forces, the Izards, work in such a way that everything fits and is right on a specific day. For example, one category of Izards ensures that the climate is right, that the temperature is just right on that particular day. Plant growth would not be able to continue if another category of Izards did not arrive on the other day. After twenty-eight days, however, the first category arrives again, and so it continues. This is actually the mechanism in the spiritual order that underlies nature. There we look right into the workings, we see how the work is done on the astral plane.

Let us now recall what we said eight days ago. We said that the part of the Germanic myth that we discussed then ties in with the exodus of the chosen few near present-day Ireland, which was once part of Atlantis, whose population had advanced in development and then moved east. What is called the more advanced race of the Atlanteans founded the eastern cultures. The story of the World Ash expresses the becoming of the new man as it was seen in the astral world at that time. It was seen how the twelve currents, which we described last time, flow down from the north and have been flowing in for a long time. These twelve currents are really present on the astral plane, even today. If you follow the twelve pairs of nerve cords that pass through your head and extend the lines further out into the world, they all merge with the twelve basic currents that are present on the astral plane. They actually flow in through the six openings of the head, through two eyes, two ears and two nostrils. Inside, they become twelve currents again, two and two. And who sends them in there? After light and air, which work outside as natural forces, are directed by the six Amshaspands, at the highest level of human formation these twelve currents are sent into our head to form our head nerves. The secret teachers saw this in the six Amshaspands. They saw the six directing spirits sending the twelve currents into the head, so that man acquires the ability to perceive the world through his nervous system. So you see the human head as being connected to these six genii as in a kind of telephone or telegraphic connection. You have them to thank for the ability to perceive through your senses. Thus man stands as a microcosm, as a small world, in connection with the great world, the macrocosm.

And what do the subordinate spirits do, the twenty-eight Izards? You see, before man was ripe to receive the high powers of the Amshaspands within himself, he was already ripe to receive the powers of the Izards, which express themselves in his lower nerves. Just as the above-mentioned currents flow into the nerves of the head and build them up, so the currents of the twenty-eight izards flow into the human trunk, which was built earlier than the head. Before man was able to absorb the forces of the amshaspands and form the head from them, man's trunk was able to absorb the inflows of the twenty-eight izards. Does he also have the powers of the Izards within him now?

If we examine the human spinal cord, we find that it passes through the spine in a nerve cord that has a whitish matter on the outside and a gray matter on the inside, whereas in the brain the inside is white and the outside is gray, exactly the opposite. This has a special significance. It is interesting to note that nerve cords extend from the spinal cord along the entire length of the backbone, supplying the lower functions of the body. They extend downward from above and spread throughout the entire body. How many such nerve cords are there? If we want to understand how many there are, we must first answer the question: Where do they come from? — These are the cords that are formed by the influxes of the twenty-eight Izards; therefore, there are twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of such left and right nerve cords. You know that before man was formed on earth, he went through a moon formation. During the moon formation, only twenty-eight such nerve cords were initially formed as a disposition. Then, as the moon developed towards the earth, two to three new ones were added. Therefore, the number of the original twenty-eight Izards, which already served the higher genii on the moon, was increased by three. Because the higher education of man had to be prepared on earth, three more Izards had to be added. These latter three are Izards that only affect man; they have no function in nature outside of man. This is very interesting to survey.

Now it is even more interesting to follow all these processes in such a way that we observe them not only in man, but also outside in the great nature. For man has been formed little by little according to the constellations of the great nature outside. If our Earth were not in the vicinity of the Sun, around which it moves in one year, if the Moon were not in its vicinity, moving around it in one month and showing itself in four phases, then man would be different, because all these things are strictly connected. Light and air have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a certain point in the sky, and they have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a different point. Why is that so? Because the apparent progress of the sun is precisely connected with the fact that the Amshaspands take turns in governing. From month to month, through six months, the Amshaspands take turns in governing. This is connected with the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. After every six months, it is the turn of another Amshaspand, so that we have one reign of the Amshaspands in the months of summer and the other in the months of winter. Each year, an Amshaspand has to rule for one month twice, and during this reign the Izards take turns, they take turns exactly with the change of the moon. Therefore, the moon needs twenty-eight days to return to its original form through its four phases. The orbit of the moon regulates the work of the Izards, and the orbit of the sun regulates the guidance of the Amshaspands.

And so the formation of the human brain with its twelve pairs of nerves is connected with the course of the sun over the year and with the twelve months. What the twelve months are outside in nature, that the twelve pairs of nerves in our head are inside, and what the twenty-eight lunar days are outside, that the twenty-eight nerves of the spinal cord are inside. And because it was necessary that a new order emerge from the old lunar form when our Earth was newly formed, three new izards were added, whereby the order was established in which the months with thirty or thirty-one days must necessarily vary. Today's astronomical division is not quite exact, because the three supernumerary izards have a special effect on humans and less on nature. If a month always had thirty-one days, then all thirty-one Izards would actually work on the human being. They regulate the functions of the organic body below the head, and so these functions of the organic body are actually connected with the different reigns of the Izards, even if they shift in the individual human being. Originally they are connected with the arrangement of the great nature.

Here you can see deeply into the connection between the inner human structure and the spiritual world of the astral plan. In the various popular theosophical works, one speaks of the “formers”. Here you can see them at work, how they work into you from the outside and build you up; here you can also see what a complicated being man is, what kind of beings are at work so that man, this complicated being, can be built up. Six categories of spirits must be present so that his cognitive head can be built; and twenty-eight to thirty-one lower spirits must be present so that his trunk and all the functions of his trunk can come about. That is a wonderful connection between man and the spiritual world. Now you will understand that it is not enough for the knowledge of the relation of man to the Infinite to just prattle about the fact that man is built out of the spiritual world, but that we must patiently study what it is like. Occultism knows the entities of every organ that is in man, which have built the organ together from the outside. This is an occult anatomy that leads you from the effects in the sensory world to the causes in the spiritual world. The effects can be seen by anyone who looks at the world with an open mind; but the only way to learn to recognize the causes is through occultism. From this you can see that we are not trying to provide abstract proof of the existence of a spiritual world with all kinds of logical conclusions. Because anything that can be proven can also be refuted. You can object to anything. That is not the point. But if you piece together the individual insights so that the things match the effects that are present in the sensory world, then you can come to recognize as true what is recognized by the occultist, how the human being is constructed from the spiritual world. It did not occur to the Persians to count the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord; they saw the twenty-eight Izards at work. You can find the whole human being in the mythologies and legends. That is what gives the real occult study of the world of legends its great appeal.

These phenomena that we have studied can be found everywhere in the secret schools from Persia to the Druids in Central Europe. Whether you call the supreme spirit presiding over the Amshaspands, Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd, or Huu - as he was called in the Druid schools - does not matter. The spiritual beings that were given to humans in the mythologies were known. The individual gods and spirit figures are not fantastic inventions of a popular imagination. Anyone who speaks of “popular imagination” has a certain right to do so, but the imagination does not lie with those who gave the figures to the peoples, but the imagination lies with our present-day scholars, who speak of a popular imagination that does not exist at all. And in many cases, scholarship is a much worse superstition than what scholarship designates as superstition. In myths and legends, a much, much deeper wisdom can often be found, because they go back to the origins of things that were in the invisible beyond the sensual. When one engages in such contemplation, it is as if one were to cease being confined to one's own skin and one's existence were to continue from the inside out. One becomes familiar with the beings that are in the spiritual world; they have put one together and one can come into relationship with these beings again. For it is a real coming into relationship with these entities, which we attain through the path of knowledge that leads to the higher worlds. We ascend from the effects visible to the senses to the supersensible, invisible causes. Through the path of knowledge, man becomes one with the universe again.

We could cite many, very many more examples along these lines, but today we will conclude this reflection - so as not to prolong it too long - with a fact from Germanic mythology that will show you how, on the one hand, things happen in the development of humanity, and how, on the other hand, these events are preserved in myth, how many things are preserved in simple popular belief.

What is physical today was entirely spiritual in the beginning. Before these twelve brain nerves took shape, there were only the astral currents that entered them. Before the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord were formed, the corresponding astral currents were there. How do these nerve deposits arise in the human being? In the following way: Imagine that originally there was a watery, muddy fluid. Think of the brain in this way. You can still see this today in the part of the brain that has remained fluid and watery; if it remains too strong, a so-called hydrocephalus develops. Our brain emerged from such a watery brain and then became gelatinous. At first astral currents coming from outside flowed through this watery mass in all directions, and along these astral currents the gelatinous mass became structured and hardened, and nerves developed. Where nerves run today, there were originally astral currents, then etheric currents, and finally they became physical nerves. Imagine man gradually hardening. The mass was hardly cartilaginous when the first rudiment of the backbone appeared. The bony covering was still soft. The astral currents flowed in on the right and left, which later became the spinal nerves. We are looking back to an ancient time when the twenty-eight Izards began to send their currents - first astral - into man.

The twenty-eight Izards also had a leader, a controller who had a dignity between the Izards and the Amshaspands in the middle; this leader of the Izards was a kind of foreman, a divine spiritual being. When we look back into the ancient times, we see him working in such a way that he commanded the twenty-eight Izards and directed them to channel the astral currents into human beings. The whole earth was surrounded by this astral sphere; and just as today the winds flow through the earthly atmosphere, so the astral currents flowed into the human bodies. The old clairvoyants really saw these currents flowing into the heads and spines of people in the Atlantic Age. That was a living astral image. When the physical nerves gradually formed, this image disappeared, and that meant: their origin was forgotten, it was forgotten how the currents had been directed into the body.

The leader of the twenty-eight Izards initially commanded the forces of nature as they worked day after day. In the great course of the year, all this worked rhythmically and harmoniously. In the course of the day, it worked somewhat irregularly. Terrible lightning, thunder, and storms flashed through that air in the earth's orbit, which still had the astral in it. Then the god, the leader of the Izards, who had been working out there, changed his scene and worked inside, in the twenty-eight nerve currents of the spinal cord. He went out of that spiritual earth orbit and finally unfolded his powers in man. Germanic myth calls this god Thor or Donar. He is the same according to the Germanic view, who is later called Jupiter according to the Roman view. He is correctly worshipped as the thunderstorm god who caused the storms. He is also seen as being married to Sif, the astral earth atmosphere; these two now have a daughter who is something very special. How does this daughter come about? Because Thor has withdrawn into the inner being of the person and works through the twenty-eight nerve cords. Through the twenty-eight nerve cords, people do not perceive the astral on the outside, but in certain states of emergency they do perceive it, for example in a dream-like state of sleep. Those who were particularly predisposed to perceive this then said according to popular belief: “I am being pressed by Thrud” – and this is none other than the daughter of Thor. There people still knew that Thrud was born where Thor lives with his wife. That is why they called it “Thrudheim”.

You see, that is how closely folk tales are related to the occult truths. In this way, little by little, we can gain a deep insight into that wonderful structure that has been built by so many beings, into the human being. How childish and small a materialistic science appears to us, which wants to understand this wonderful structure in such a trivial way. In older times, this was felt quite differently. They expressed what modern science knows through realization with feeling. And when the old poet looked around and sensed how man, as the wonderful final structure, stands among the beings he sees on the physical plane, as the work of so infinitely many entities, he was allowed to speak the beautiful grand word that emotionally expresses such a deep truth:

Many powerful things live,
but nothing is more powerful
(than what can be seen)
than man.

It has been requested that we also talk about what is usually called “white and black magic” and that this be linked to some other concepts that theosophists are familiar with.

Now, what needs to be touched upon here is a very wide-ranging and extensive field of occult and spiritual-scientific observation, and it will therefore only be possible to touch on a few elementary things in this area, so to speak. But even these presuppose that what we are now considering is taken up as if it were meant only for students of spiritual science and not for anyone else who is not equipped with a spiritual scientific attitude and way of thinking. Certain conditions must be met if one is to speak about such a subject.

The words “white and black magic” are often used in theosophical circles, and we are confronted with the term “black magician” as an accusation all too often, even from those who work in the theosophical tradition. Some of you will have heard it said with a light heart that this or that is “black magic”. Yes, it has even happened that after reading our “Mitteilungen” - as it seems to me it was the first issue - people in one place said: What happened at that general assembly and was reported in the “Mitteilungen” is black magic. At the time, some people had actually claimed that an evil spell must have been cast over the proceedings of that general assembly. This is just one example of something that occurs more often and that stems from a rather trivial conception not only of the term “black magic” but of the term “magic” in general.

We must first be clear about what is meant by “magic” in order to then understand what is meant by “black magic”. Many people believe the following: They say that occult powers can be acquired, and usually have in mind quite inferior, elementary occult powers. This is because those who talk about such things usually know nothing about higher occult powers; they generally have no idea at all of what occult powers actually are. Usually people then add that someone is practising black magic if they use such powers in the service of personal selfishness. Such a statement is one of those of which it cannot even be said that it is wrong. But it does not matter much that it is said to be right, because nothing special is said with it. It is the outgrowth of a completely abstract way of thinking. He who wishes to speak of such things must, above all, stand firmly on the ground of reality, whether it be physical or spiritual reality; he must know what is real, and then he will no longer prattle about all kinds of things that have no connection with reality.

Does such a statement, that occult powers should not be used for personal selfish ends, not in some respects represent an impossible demand for people in the present day? This question must be answered first. Of course, those who say this make “Thou shalt not be selfish” their first commandment! That is certainly a supreme commandment. But for the real thinker, the question is not whether such commandments should be established, but whether such commandments can be fulfilled at all. And anyone who believes that the commandment not to be selfish can be fulfilled by people of the present day without further ado is labouring under a very great illusion. He who recognizes it as his duty to dispel illusions must also dispel the illusion that such a commandment can easily be fulfilled.

Perhaps someone will say: I want to work in the world in an entirely selfless way! - At first he cannot know that among the forces with which he works, there are a great many occult forces. Occult forces emanate from every human being. If someone says they want to work in the world in a selfless way, that is a very, very beautiful ideal. But if you try to ask further: Why do you want to be selfless, why do you impose this commandment on yourself, to be selfless? - you will get strange answers, for example: Through selflessness I gradually ascend to higher levels of perfection; I cannot bear to be a worthless person; I want to be a person who is valuable in the world. If you were to analyze this feeling, you would discover that behind the reasons for selflessness there is often the most incredible selfishness, often much greater selfishness than is found in people who do not want to be selfless at all, but simply give in to their selfish instincts. Imagine the thought, and you will see how much selfishness there is in the urge for selflessness.

And how could it be otherwise? Selfishness is a force that was not planted in human nature by the gods for man to so readily deny or negate. Selfishness is one of the most essential things through which man works. When we inquire into the reasons for selfishness, when we ask ourselves why the gods, the kind gods, have implanted selfishness in man, Since this is something so abominable in the opinion of so many people, we are born out of real occultism the answer that selfishness is a very powerful protection against what would happen to man in the world if he did not have this selfishness. Do you know what best protects man from using certain rather evil powers, which we will talk about in a moment? It would be easy today for someone who wanted to practice black magic themselves to take on a student and teach them certain techniques and machinations of real black magic; they would be able to work in the most horrific ways in the world. But most people won't do that without further ado. And do you know why not? Not for the simple reason that they are afraid, because they fear for their personality. They perceive a little of the consequences in spirit and fear selfishly. And that is quite good, that they are afraid and therefore leave it at that. If, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people had received everything that exists in terms of forces to affect the astral, the etheric and the physical body, then these people would have done terrible things in the world. But selfishness was given to them, and that causes man to first take care only of himself, and to be completely absorbed in caring for himself. The gods have erected selfishness around people like a protective wall. It is selfishness that veils man's insight into the things that lie behind the world of appearances. It is extremely important to consider this. It is one of the wise brakes that the gods have set up so that man does not intrude too quickly into the spiritual realms. So that is egoism; it is a good protective device.

So we should not be throwing words around like that, because there is still a long way to go before man can become selfless, before he can become ripe for selflessness. There is no need to point out how all preaching of selflessness looks so strange in our age, in the age of the most potent egoism, where everyone wants to grab as much as they can of what is established in the social order. So this “selflessness” leads to surrounding oneself entirely with a whirlwind of illusions. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't think about it thoroughly, how people today wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions, how, in particular, “theories” allow our contemporaries to wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions. Social theories are being shaped and preached by professors and non-professors alike. But a large part of the theories about the social remedies of the social body are nothing more than an expression of “professorial psychopathy”. You can see it in practice, how people think and act wrongly. Wherever you go, in any society or community, you will find people pondering this or that remedy, for example against unemployment. When there is unemployment, there is hunger. But how do we go about remedying this? Then the decision is made: people have to be given work. And now we invent something to give people work, to keep them busy, so that they get money and can buy what they want. This seems to be a very effective way of averting social damage: giving people something to do. But giving people work at any price is a very dangerous strategy, as long as we don't distinguish between productive and unproductive work. As long as this distinction between productive and unproductive employment is not made, this is even a terrible means in its effect on society. Imagine the radical case: someone wanted to quickly provide work and bread to a number of people in a certain area because a new machine had been invented that had left a number of people without work. He invents an article in which he uses worthless waste products for toilet articles. The people can then earn something and buy bread. But this is only a means of transferring poverty from one side to the other, because nothing is produced in this way, nothing is created. Everyone can consider the following case for themselves: someone sits down in a restaurant in the countryside and says, “Waiter, give me ten postcards!” and sends them off without considering how many postmen have to go up four or five floors to deliver them, and without considering that this does not set any real power in motion in the world. No thought is given to the fact that nothing real is achieved that benefits the mind and body. If you tell the person concerned this, he will of course have an excuse. He could say, for example, that new postmen could be hired, thus giving more people work. But no thought is given to the fact that if new people are hired, nothing new is created by their work, but that poverty is only redistributed. This shows that people must first know something about the distribution of work on earth before they can begin with the smallest idea of reform. In the context of the world, ignorance that wants to reform is terrible. It is terrible that people often do not have the patience to wait until they have learned to have an overview of how to help, but instead engage in clubby activities to get this or that done. These are all illusions with which people shroud themselves. And it is also an illusion when people speak of selflessness in trivial theosophy. If we want to teach ourselves about white and black magic, we must first bring to mind some of the concepts of “magic”, of which those who have heard the last lectures already know something. I have also touched briefly on the nature of magic in public.

What is magic? In all the old occult schools, there were three ways of ascending to the highest realms of knowledge. The first way was that of the initiate, the second way was that of the clairvoyant, and the third way was that of the magician. These are three fundamentally different things: initiation, clairvoyance and magic. Let us first make clear to ourselves, by means of a simple comparison, what an initiate, what a clairvoyant and what a magician is. Imagine some region where no one has ever heard of railways, steamships and so on, where people live without railways and without steamships. In such a region, the fact that there are railways and steamships is pure occultism. Occult means something like secret, something that people know nothing about. Now when someone from the area where there are no railways and so on travels to another area where he sees railways and steamships, and then returns to his homeland, he tells his people that there are railways and steamships. He knows it from his own experience, because he has seen into a world that is still a secret for others.

Anyone who is introduced to the higher worlds through occult training is, in this respect, a clairvoyant. He knows from his own experience that there are spiritual worlds and beings, spiritual forces. The spiritual worlds have different levels. A person at one level can be clairvoyant, can see some phenomena but not others. Now you have to remember something that has been said here often: to find and independently explore occult truths, clairvoyance is needed. But clairvoyance is not needed to understand these truths. For that, ordinary human understanding is sufficient, if it is only applied correctly in a sufficiently comprehensive way. Anyone who says that they can only understand what is communicated in occult reports if they are a clairvoyant is simply not using their mind sufficiently. Man cannot find the occult truths with the mind, but he can see them. Everything that is told from spiritual research can be understood if one is willing to think about it thoroughly. However, one cannot find the occult truths without clairvoyance; clairvoyance is needed for that. So what is proclaimed by Theosophy can also be understood by those who think about it thoroughly.

You can receive the stories up to the highest realms of occult experiences, and then you can understand them. So there were always clairvoyants in the occult schools who learned to see into the spiritual worlds through the methods that were used. These were often very lengthy methods. But besides these clairvoyants, there were always initiates. These were those who, through their comprehensive and willing application of their powers of mind, had come to understand the facts and laws of the higher worlds. These were initiates. Today, this relationship between initiates and clairvoyants is hardly possible anymore because today every person is afflicted by the great selfishness of wanting to see for themselves. People today can hardly imagine the love and trust that prevailed in the occult schools of the past. There was the clairvoyant, who perhaps through incarnations, in a self-denying way, applied the methods and trained himself to look into the higher worlds, who could see much in these higher worlds, and who refrained from learning the laws of these higher worlds, in order not to be held back by laws, but to prove a greater service to humanity through a more rapid development of clairvoyant abilities. This renunciation is not to be taken lightly. It is a great and mighty step when anyone decides to become a seer without at the same time becoming acquainted with the whole system of laws in the higher worlds; and if he waits, perhaps for thousands of years, before he attains this, he can only do so on condition that he places himself under the strict care of a chosen guru or teacher. For if he approached the things of the spiritual world as a mere clairvoyant, without knowing its laws, he would soon go astray and into the most dreadful errors if he did not accept the guru's advice in all important matters.

There were others who renounced the development of higher clairvoyant gifts altogether because they wanted to be initiated into the laws of the higher worlds. They trusted in love and devotion what the seers told them, but they knew the laws. To explain this, one can cite an example from the ordinary world. Imagine a person who sees extremely well, who can see all kinds of phenomena with his eyes, but who understands nothing of the laws of light phenomena. And imagine another person who is very short-sighted and can hardly see a few centimetres in front of his eyes, but who is well acquainted with the physical laws of light phenomena. The two can work well together, one person knowing the laws and the other not knowing them at all, but instead seeing the phenomena. And this applies even more to the higher spheres. It is possible for one to become an initiate of higher degrees without laying claim to clairvoyant powers. In the old occult schools it was quite usual for these two classes to be side by side. Clairvoyants willingly accepted the advice of initiates who were not clairvoyant at all. This was especially necessary for cases where a high degree of clairvoyance and a high degree of initiation were required, for example, for everything related to the astrological field. It was the case that those who wanted to fully comprehend the complicated laws of astrology usually had to do without the high level of clairvoyance that the astral clairvoyants had to acquire. They complemented each other. Only in recent times, when man thinks and feels in a materialistic way, must it be realized that it is impossible to separate these two fields strictly, and therefore no distinction has been made between the two classes since the fourteenth century, so that the teacher gives no one an initiation without at the same time giving a certain degree of clairvoyance. This is necessary because it cannot be reconciled with the selfishness and lack of trust that prevail today. Therefore, no distinction is made between the two, because people today cannot be selfless.

Now, however, the magician differs from both the clairvoyant and the initiate. For someone who can see into the higher worlds, it does not follow that he can already control and apply the forces that are at work in the material world. Or do you think that a person who has brought knowledge of the locomotive, the steamship and the steam engine to a region could also build such a machine? He can tell them what such things look like, but he will not immediately understand how to build them. The fact that the clairvoyant can see into the higher worlds does not yet mean that he also knows how to control and apply the forces that work in the sensory world. Only he is a magician or adept who knows how to apply the higher forces, of which all physical events are an expression, in the world here, who is thus able not only to call upon the physical forces and powers when something is at stake in his actions, but who can set the higher forces in motion. In our time, it is no small thing to be a magician or adept. There has never been a time in the development of humanity when the path of the magician or adept was so completely opposed to our own as it is today. And today, under certain circumstances, one best serves humanity by limiting oneself to spreading the knowledge of the higher worlds, and even - perhaps with a bleeding heart - refraining from it in cases where the application of magical powers might be appropriate. For today's public life is so alien to the concept of magistery that under certain circumstances the influence of higher worlds on this world would mean a setback if magical powers were applied directly. He who has practised the use of these powers to a certain extent, and who has acquired the knowledge of the mechanism as well, must in certain cases refrain from using these powers, for the simple reason that it is impossible today to go against the current of the world. Not only clairvoyance and initiation belong to the magician, but also practice. That is what it is all about. The magician must practice certain tasks with great dedication over a long period of time. Just think about how much you can know - even in the physical world - without being able to actually do what you can talk about, what you know something about. You can be initiated into many things. You can know exactly how a locomotive is constructed, but without anyone giving you the order to build a locomotive, because he would risk throwing the money out the window. It is the same in the higher realms. Practice makes the magician, perception in the higher worlds makes the clairvoyant, knowledge and realization of the laws in the higher worlds makes the initiate.

In times gone by, it was absolutely forbidden to perform any magical operation without being in harmony with the leaders of the world, the “earthly government”, also known as the great masters of the so-called white lodge. All occult schools, all schools that exist at all and all teachings can only be the lowest step towards higher development; on this step, higher and higher steps must be built up, right up to the actual leaders of earthly development. Those who not only know wisdom but also “rule” the earth in its development, who let wisdom flow into earthly evolution, are on the highest level. They alone are able to indicate for each individual action, based on spiritual forces, whether it disturbs or does not disturb in the whole context. When you build a house and lay out the plan for the house, each individual workman on the house must work in harmony with the plan. And if someone comes along and decides to make a window different from what is provided for in the plan, no matter how beautiful and magnificent that window may be, the whole house is disturbed. If anyone in the world wants to accomplish something through spiritual powers, no matter how significant and grandiose it may be, if it does not fit into the original plan of earthly development, it disturbs earthly development and sometimes throws it back for a long time. A man who applies no spiritual forces can never disturb this plan of earthly development. And why not? Because in relation to spiritual forces, what people do without knowledge of the higher worlds is to natural phenomena as a house is to a house. Whatever is ruined by the weather, by heat and sunlight, must be ruined; that is self-evident in a certain sense. So it is with the intentions of those who have no connection with the higher world. But the actions of those who have some connection with the higher worlds behave, when they do something that is not in harmony with the spiritual world, like someone who hits something with a hammer. So what is necessary for the progress of the human race to take place? When occult forces are applied, it is absolutely necessary that the connection with the central spiritual powers of the world be maintained, and it is absolutely necessary that the spiritual forces not be delivered to anyone who does not want to seek this connection. It is connected with this that in all real occult schools a secret is held over the imparting of spiritual forces, and that no secrets are delivered to anyone who does not undertake to maintain the connection with the leading spiritual entities. Only the “central government” of the earth has the possibility of knowing what is at stake. And this must be known if one is to apply spiritual forces. If one imparts anything to another in an unauthorized manner, whereby this other person can oppose the great plan of earth development, then one commits the first kind of black magic act. Therefore, the following is a basic principle: The first black magic act is the betrayal of occult secrets. Gossip and divulging of occult secrets is the first case of black magic, because in doing so you surrender the occult secrets to those who oppose the central leadership of the earth's development because you do not know the context. Where does this occur, where does it become real? It becomes real wherever occult secrets are used in the service not of the entire earthly leadership but of some limited body that does not want to have any connection with the earthly leadership that serves humanity. If, for example, a person receives the things that he is only allowed to use when he has overcome all national and racial prejudices, earlier delivered, he uses them before he has overcome these prejudices and before he has an idea of what it means to be a “homeless person”, then exactly the same thing that is otherwise white magic goes into the service of black magic. Exactly the same. If that which is intended to serve humanity is used in the service of a separate race, for example to give that race supremacy over the earth, then on a large scale that is black magic, because it does not happen in accordance with the way the earth is run. It is the first requirement: to go beyond what connects us only to one part of humanity. For a modern white magician, this is the first principle. Man should not strive for unselfishness, but for love for all mankind. He can extend the field of his love. He can do that, and that is what it is all about.

Now it happens very often that people try to force through some machinations to get something that can never be communicated to them otherwise. Now we come to the actual methods, to the machinations that are necessary to carry out in order to gain possession of black magic powers. This is something that can be described in great detail. You have seen the first means, the first way to gain possession of black magic powers; it is to let the appointed powers and beings communicate the means to you. Yes, what are they then, these magical means? They are the means by which we can use the spiritual powers to work here in the world of the senses, to achieve results and success here. These are such means. But there are no other effects in the material world than those that emanate from the spiritual worlds. All effects, successes and deeds in the material world emanate from the spiritual worlds. Therefore, anyone who does not want to come to these things by the rightful way of slow study - through those who are initiates or clairvoyants or even adepts or magicians - can only choose another way, and that consists in , instead of turning to those who are the embodiments of higher spiritual entities, he turns to nature itself and tries to eavesdrop on nature and to discern how the spiritual forces have flowed into it. For everything in nature flows into it from the spiritual worlds, and we can again divine these spiritual forces through certain machinations and activities. But the moment we do not let nature act in regard to what we do not know, but instead carry out what we want ourselves, thus acting where we know nothing, in that moment we are also able to obtain forces from the realm of black magic. If we do not want to obtain the inner forces of nature indirectly through wisdom and insight, and if we avoid everything that happens through wisdom and insight on the path of developing inner forces, but choose other means, then we are always on the way to black magic through these other means.

You see, anyone who wanted to become a black magician today would have a large fund for black magic activities from the outset if they were a terrible coward and had a dreadful fear of everything that could happen to them. Such fear within a person is a very good starting point for a black magician, because this fear is only compressed selfishness. Suppose a person intends to practice black magic on a large scale. He would first look around in the world for individuals who are as cowardly as possible. For this stock of fear is a good material that can be so transformed and converted that the cowardly individuals in question acquire certain other powers and strength, without knowledge or insight, to a much greater extent than a person can otherwise have. What would such a magician have to do who wanted to have such arts? He would first have to set up a laboratory in which he trained these cowards to do so. I am speaking radically, but it will be most clear to you this way: to harden themselves completely by the means of constantly cutting into living flesh and seeing blood run. What the hare foot has to a high degree in terms of fear as a certain outward force can be converted into something opposite if one teaches people to harden themselves by cutting into living flesh. For a person who has no fear, this procedure would be of no use at all.

This is, so to speak, the ABC, the very first thing done in black magic. And when that was done, what had formerly been fear in man would change into powers by which he could indeed gain a certain influence over his surroundings; and he who would make use of such assistants would be able to perform the most incredible atrocities in the world. But he who, without assistants, wants to become a great black magician himself sometimes does something quite different. Such a black magician once wanted to become a man of the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, whom the profane world called “Knight Bluebeard”. This man sought to gain powerful occult powers, not by the rightful path of learning, but by transforming certain deeply-held selfish feelings. At the same time, he was an excellent observer of himself. Please excuse me if I use a word that will sound strange. This man was what one might call 'the most radical Christian egoist' or 'egoistic Christian'. There have been and still are people like that. They are the kind of people who see Christianity above all as a bridge to gain as much as possible for themselves, because it is clear to them that a good Christian can go far in bliss. Through self-knowledge he noticed this in his nature and when he had noticed it in himself, he already knew the best means by which one could transform this into incredible magical powers. He was indeed stopped early. He was put on trial and it was shown that the man had started to murder one child after another in 1432 in order to develop his special occult powers. He saw the destruction of life as a special means of extracting from nature the knowledge that he could not obtain himself. During the trial it came to light that the man had murdered 800 children in a short period of time. Now some of you who have read the novel by Mabel Collins, Flita: True Story of a Sorceress, will understand why there is a murder at the beginning. It is part of it. The novel “Flita” was written by someone who knows this. What the black magician wanted could only be developed under the influence of this murder, which is at the starting point of the story.

And now take a serious look at this story and ask yourself what could protect most people from these procedures that I have mentioned, and through which man could certainly be led to the mastery of black magic powers. Selfishness is a very good means of protection against it. Not everyone will be able to overcome themselves to cut into living flesh; most people would faint, and fainting is nothing more than an expression of selfishness. So, in its physical effect, it is a good means of being deterred from practising black magic. It is also difficult to become a Bluebeard; most people are protected from that by their perfectly healthy selfishness; it acts as a barrier to putting oneself in the shoes of the means of acquiring black magic powers.

Well, you see, I just wanted to mention that so as not to use empty phrases. That is not my style. I prefer to talk about real facts. I wanted to show you by example what the acquisition of machinations in the field of black magic consists of. The betrayal of occult secrets to the profane is the first and simplest kind. But the actions I have just characterized are among the teaching methods of black magic, they are, so to speak, the ABCs. And what comes after these ABCs, in which black magic students are taught to “read” – if I were to tell you about that, several of you here would probably faint. So we will stop at this first stage. These things are not at all something to be trifled with, not even in words; they are something most serious; and they are, unbeknownst to people, unfortunately all too widespread in the world. Most people do not even have the will to consider how these things are spread in the world.

Now the development of such things is intimately connected with the whole evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of a planet, and we understand such a thing in the right way only when we have an idea of the fact, a planet spiritually affects its successor, the next planet, how, for example, the moon affected the earth, and how, in turn, the earth affects its successor, Jupiter. You all know that the Earth is, in a sense, led by the so-called 'white lodge', in which certain highly developed human individuals are united with individuals of an even higher kind. What are they doing? They are working, they are guiding the evolution of the Earth. While guiding the evolution of the Earth, they are working out a very specific plan. It is actually the case that a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers during the evolution of each planet. While the Earth is evolving, the plan for the details of how Jupiter, which is replacing the Earth, must be, is being drawn up in the so-called “white lodge” of the Earth. The entire plan is developed in every detail. And herein lies the blessing and the good fortune of progressive development: that we act in accordance with this plan. When a planetary development comes to an end, when our Earth has reached the end of its planetary development, then the Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations will also have completed the plan they have worked out for Jupiter.

And now, at the end of such a planetary development, something highly peculiar happens. This plan is simultaneously infinitely reduced and infinitely multiplied by a procedure, so that an infinite number of copies of the entire Jupiter plan are available, but in miniature. It was the same on the moon. The plan of the evolution of the Earth was there, infinitely multiplied and infinitely reduced. And do you know what it is that was worked out by the Masters of Wisdom on the Moon at that time? These are the atoms, the atoms of the Earth. And it is the atoms of the Jupiter evolution whose plan is being worked out by the leading “white lodge” on our planet. That is the real atom, and all other talk about an atom is nothing. Only he recognizes the atom of a planet who recognizes in it the reduced plan of the evolution of the planet. If you want to gradually recognize this atom, which underlies the earth, then the very measures that emanate from the great magicians of the world will confront you with the knowledge of this atom. Now, of course, we can only hint at these things, but we can at least get to know something that gives us an idea of what this is about. In a certain sense, the Earth is composed of these atoms of hers, and every being, all of you yourselves, are in a sense composed of such atoms; and you are in harmony with the whole evolution of the Earth in that you carry within you, in infinite numbers, the reduced-scale plan of the Earth planet, which was worked out earlier. This plan for the earth could only be worked out on the preceding planetary state of our earth, on the moon, and thus on the planet that preceded our development on earth, through the activity of leading beings in harmony with the entire planetary development of Saturn, the sun, the moon, and so on. Now, however, the point is to give the infinite number of atoms that which brings them into the right relationships, arranging them in the right way. The leading spirits of the moon were only able to give them this if they steered the development of the earth in very specific directions. I have already described the paths into which they steered the development of the earth. When the earth emerged again after the development of the moon, it was actually not yet our present earth. It was the earth plus the sun plus the moon. These were one body. If you were to mix today's Earth with the Moon and the Sun and make a single body out of it, you would have what the Earth was at the beginning of its development. First the Sun separated from the Earth, and with it all those forces that were too thin, too spiritual, for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualized too quickly. If man had only been under the influence of the forces contained in this sun-moon-earth body, he would have spiritualized very quickly, he would not have developed down into physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain a self-awareness, an I-consciousness, which he had to attain.

You all know that there is imaginative knowledge and occult characters [in which imaginative knowledge is expressed]. I can only give you two occult characters now. To discuss further would take us too far. The occult symbol for those forces that would have worked and given direction to the whole evolution of the earth if the sun had remained united with the earth, the occult symbol for those forces that would have spiritualized the earth too soon, is this: in this symbol, the one who is a student of occultism can recognize the forces that quickly lead humanity to spirituality. On the other hand, if humanity had separated from the sun with the whole earth but remained united with the moon, it would very quickly have become ossified and hardened. If the earth had kept the moon within itself, people would very soon have become a kind of puppet, a marionette. They would have descended too deeply into matter, as on the other hand they would have spiritualized too quickly, if the Sun had remained connected with the Earth. Therefore the Moon had to come out of the Earth. And all those forces that have been transported out and that today rule from the Moon and work in from the outside on the Earth, all these forces are represented together in this sign, which looks like a double hook. This is the sign of the beast or the lamb with two horns from the Apocalypse.

The one symbol is called Nachiel, the other Sorat. This second symbol is also called the symbol of the demonic element on earth. All the forces that the black magician develops by using such hideous methods lead to an occult increase on earth of the forces that belong to the demonic nature of the earth and that lead to the hardening of the earth. If many people became black magicians, the result would be that the earth would become more and more like the moon, while through the forces of white magic the earth would become more and more like the sun, like the forces that are in the sun's rays.

So what would an increase of black magic on our earth lead to? It would lead to the hardening of the globe, to the globe becoming a moon. The same forces that were eliminated with the moon, that had developed out of the substance of the earth, are still present in the layers of the earth as an inclination. In addition to all the forces that have the good inclination to become solar forces, the forces that have the inclination to become lunar forces are also still present. Through white magic the earth is more and more approximated to the nature of the sun; through the forces of black magic it is approximated to the nature of the moon. Through white magic everything must be conquered that does not lead to the control of spiritual forces on the path of enlightenment, of wisdom. For all such procedures, such activities, as they have been called, do not lead to the mastery of spiritual forces on the path of wisdom, of insight, not by really looking into them, but they are the nature of the trickery and procedures by which forces are to be gained without enlightenment. Thus the apocalyptic seal is at the same time the sign for the conquest of black magic by white magic. Through the human powers that are transformed, solar powers are born of man himself, so that the lunar powers lie at man's feet.

That is the path the magician must take on our Earth. Then, through the nine steps, which you will get an idea of if you read my 'Theosophy', the forces become the nine stars. So what must the true black magician say to his disciple? Very simple:

Despise reason and science alone,
Let the lying spirit only encourage you
In works of deception and magic,
Then I have you absolutely already!—
To him fate has given a spirit
That always presses forward, unrestrained
And whose hasty striving
skips over the joys of the earth.
I drag him through the wild life,
through shallow insignificance,
he shall fidget, stare, stick,
and his insatiability
shall make food and drink float before greedy lips:
He will beg for refreshment in vain,
And even if he had not given himself over to the devil,
He would still have to perish!

And even if he had not given himself over to the devil, It would be easy, tremendously easy, and here we come to a very subtle chapter on the one hand of human development and on the other of magic - it would be easy to simply wait until all people would be able to see things correctly, which they must first see before they can progress on the path of magical development. That would be quite easy under certain circumstances. But then one would delay the course of human development. It must be possible in some way to put people in charge of the dissemination of occult truths — and in a sense this is always something of the dissemination of occult powers — and to use these so that they have the right effect in the world. People must be given more occult truths and teachings so that they can, in a sense, become occult teachers. |

Now one might ask: But is not everyone who spreads occult teachings in some way a black magician? It is absolutely true that someone who spreads occult teachings today can easily become a black magician. This is the case when he is unable to grasp the full scope of the effects of his occult teachings. Therefore, the occult schools must ensure that no one spreads real occult teachings who is not able, through his own development, to grasp the scope and effect of occult truths. Today, occult teachings can be spread by one disciple repeating them to another or copying them from him. If the person wants to be a disciple or a disciple, that is all right, because in that way he spreads the original from which he has heard. But let us talk about the case when someone would spread occult teachings independently and even add his own judgment. If someone wants to spread occult truths in an independent way, then, above all, precautions must be taken to ensure that this person has the maturity to spread occult truths independently, and that does not depend on intellectual training, but the occult schools make it dependent on something quite different, namely on how the individual members of human nature develop gradually.

You know from the essay on “The Education of the Child” that at birth the physical body is born, that by the age of seven the etheric body comes out, by the age of fourteen the astral body, and by the age of twenty-one the I comes out. We can follow this up and see that by the age of thirty-five, or rather between the ages of thirty-five and forty, the etheric and astral bodies of the human being are so free that only then can the human being have the necessary sense of responsibility for the dissemination of occult truths. Therefore, all occult schools have the strict law that no one may act as a teacher of occult truths before reaching this age. And it is this law that the great poet Dante set forth when he says right at the beginning of his Divine Comedy: “It was in the middle of life that I lost my way in the forest...” and so on. If you do the math: In 1300, Dante was thirty-five years old. All these great things happened to his soul.

This is a strict law. If you look at this strict law and consider some of what is happening in the present, then you will simply know from this point of view that much of what is being spread does not come from occult sources. No occult school allows people to independently spread occult truths that have not reached that age. Of course, this does not mean that one cannot start learning something early enough. But to act as a teacher of occultism, one cannot start late enough. Much, much evil would be avoided if people really knew the occult and the strict laws that prevail.

These are things that must be considered in connection with the subject of “white and black magic,” which is not so easy to treat, and of which I have really only said a few words. If you take up some of the things that could only be hinted at here and develop them further in your meditation and serious study, you will see that even these imperfect suggestions provide the initial steps for many paths to further knowledge. Above all, you will have convinced yourself that one cannot talk about such things as white and black magic at all with ordinary, trivial terms, that one must even first formulate new terms if one wants to talk about such lofty or such hideous things. It is important today to know such things, because there is much in the world of which the ordinary person knows nothing, but which he should know in order to save himself from the influences of magical arts. People are also aware of some of it, but see it as something harmless. But it is not harmless at all.

We can only make a start when we discuss such a topic, and then we will make progress in this area. The beginning is best made when a sense of the seriousness and importance of such a matter could be awakened. Even though the presentations could only be incomplete in the short time available, I still hope that the fact that they were spoken in real terms has passed some of it on to you, in order to encourage you to consider the matter with the utmost seriousness.

On several Mondays here in the Besant-Zweige, an attempt was made to characterize the occult basis of Germanic myths, and on the last Monday an expansion of the entire mythical material was begun, as it extends in a broad spiritual belt from Persia through the East of Europe and through Europe itself. It might not be appropriate today to continue exactly there, because many of our friends who are present today were not present then. And so we will try to make today's lecture more independent; we will try to present some of the circle of European myths in general, without the prerequisites of the last two lectures. This means, of course, that today we have to treat some things very aphoristically in our consideration.

I would like to remind you that the number twelve of the higher gods, which is only the double number six, as we found it last time in the Amshaspands, also recurs in the Germanic number of gods, the number of gods whose meaning we learned eight days ago. Today we want to highlight only a few gods and only a few of their attributes to show the occult foundations of such gods and such divine qualities. We have recognized the relationship between Germanic mythology and Persian mythology. We have rediscovered how the same thing is presented in the mythology that originated in Asia as in the Central European myths. In the forces of the six Amshaspands, we recognized the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head, and in the twenty-eight Izards, we recognized the forces that emanate from our spine.

You all know that Wotan-Odin belongs to this Germanic circle of gods as a kind of supreme god; furthermore, we have shown Thor and his daughter, the Truth, in their occult significance; and we have touched on Tyr, who was a kind of slaying deity, a god of war, but a strange god of war, and in some ways corresponds to the more southern Mars or Ares; it corresponds to him to the extent that Tuesday, as Tyrstag or Tiustag, is also dedicated to this god. But it is strange that we are told of other spiritual beings that play a certain role in the events that take place between the Germanic gods, and there a remarkable god, or let us say a family of gods, that of Loki, is brought into a certain relationship with Tyr. You know – and the occult basis has been explained to the members of the Besant Branch – that this Loki, who stands alongside the other Nordic gods, is descended from those fire powers whose southern origin we have characterized. While the Nordic gods are descended from the union of the fire element from the south and the cold, misty element from the north, in Loki we have an older god or at least an offshoot of an older deity, a kind of fire god. We may therefore say that Loki, who develops so much enmity towards the other gods, belongs to an older race of spiritual beings who had to cede their rule for a while to those to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong. Therefore, he has declared war on them and lives in conflict with the Aesir, with those gods who only came to power when the Atlantean human race developed out of the earlier conditions and evolved into the post-Atlantean human race; that is when the Aesir became important. The spiritual beings to which Loki belongs come from much earlier times. Among others, this Loki has three offspring of a very strange kind from his wife Angrboda, who came from the race of giants: the Fenris wolf, the Midgard snake and Hel, the goddess of the underworld. These three beings, which can be traced back to earlier times, must first be tamed by the new gods, the Aesir, so that the new states of consciousness can develop in humanity. The Midgard Serpent is tamed by being forced down into the sea and wrapped around the continents, so that it bites its own tail and is powerless for the time during which the new gods, the Aesir, rule, having replaced the earlier gods. The Fenris wolf is tamed and bound by all sorts of means, but it is precisely this that gives rise to a certain relationship between the god Tyr, the imperious god of war or battle, and his family and Loki. The god Tyr has to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf in order to be allowed to bind himself, and thereby loses his right hand. This is a very remarkable feature of Germanic mythology, which can only be understood from the occult point of view. We will visit this hand of Tyr later and see where it actually is. Hel, however, was banished to the underworld of Niflheim or Mistheim, where all those who did not fall on the battlefield had to come to her. Those who fell on the battlefield were reunited with the family of the gods; the Valkyrie appeared to them at death and took them up to the Aesir themselves. They died honorably. Those who have died the so-called death on the straw, who have fallen victim to an illness or old age, have a different fate; they must go down into the realm of Hel, where sorrow, deprivation, hunger and torment prevail. The dead who died on the straw were of no use to the realm of the Aesir, they were banished to Hel so that there would be peace during the reign of the Aesir. In this way, the children of Loki were shut out from the rule of the Aesir. Loki himself, however, was tricked and captured by the gods when he had transformed himself into a salmon. He was chained to three rock slabs and suffered great torment.

All these sagas take on a special coloration due to the fact that a remarkable tragic trait, which we have spoken about several times, is poured over all this divine existence of the Aesir. Those who have heard the lectures on Norse mythology know that this tragic trait was very much in evidence in the initiation sites of the Nordic mysteries. It was also transplanted into the myths of the gods. The Nordic gods, the Aesir, live in constant fear of their destruction, for they know that their realm will one day come to an end. We are confronted with a tragic element that tells us why this realm will come to an end. This tragic feature is that since the beginning of war and discord on earth, the seeds have been sown for what will one day be the great devastating world conflagration, when everything that the gods once bound will break free, when the Fenris wolf, the Midgard serpent and Loki himself will be freed and prepare the downfall of the Aesir. A particularly outstanding spirit from the realm of fire will come, Sutur, and the Aesir will have to yield to his power. The twilight of the gods will have come, and out of the world-fire of the old the new world will arise. Again, there is a strange feature which the saga tells us: when the Fenris wolf is released, it will open its jaws so wide that the upper jaw will reach up to the sky and the lower jaw will sink into the earth; its breath will burn up the whole world.

You all know this mythology. And now let us look at the occult basis of the traits we have just mentioned. In doing so, we will once again recall the fact that the Aesir, the gods to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong, have taken up their rule, have become world-ruling powers, after man in the late Atlantean period made the transition from an earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness, where he could still see into the spiritual world, to the post-Atlantic state, where he was only in the sensory world, in the world of externally, physically visible facts. We know that the first little group of people formed at the exact point on the Earth where warmth and cold met. We know that the ancient Atlantis was a land where the air was still completely filled with masses of haze and fog, with widespread water vapors. If we were to research the early times of Atlantis, we would recognize two regions: dense, cooler water vapors in the north and hot water vapors rising from the south. The Atlanteans had a very special memory of this time. This is evident in the part of the saga that alludes to the clash between the cold Nordic and the hot southern. As I have shown, this equalization of forces made it possible for that atmosphere to arise from which emerged what became the post-Atlantean spirituality. What the ancient Atlanteans had, spiritual perception, has departed from human beings; it has come to the gods. The gods, of course, have preserved the old clairvoyance, but they can only speak to people from the outside and influence them because people themselves no longer had clairvoyance. What people used to have themselves, clairvoyance, they now only attributed to the gods, who live far from them, above them.

Let us now recall how the heavy masses of fog from ancient Atlantis gradually descended, how Atlantis was flooded by great masses of water, and how gradually the physical emerged from the purifying air. Let us remember how that came into being which had never existed before, which could only come into being when the downpours ceased and the air gradually cleared: the rainbow arose. The rainbow was a phenomenon that people saw for the first time with the sinking of Atlantis. As the old clairvoyance of men vanished, they saw the rainbow rising for the first time, which had to form the bridge between them and the gods. That is the bridge Bifröst. All this men really saw, and the sagas only relate what they saw.

What have people lost as a result of this discovery? They have lost what they used to receive from the surrounding waters of wisdom. When the waters still filled the air, they whispered wisdom to people. The trickling of the springs, the rustling of the wind, the lapping of the waves – all this whispered wisdom to them. All this was understood by men; all was a language of spiritual beings, and this was now sunk down into the sea, into the rivers. This had been a different spiritual world from the world of the Aesir; it was a world which still contained within itself the last remnants of man's origin from the spiritual. All that had filled the air had sunk down into the sea. Wisdom had sunk down with the waters. This is a real fact. In the waters that had wrapped themselves around the continents and touched each other, the ancient ancestors of the Central European population saw the Midgard Serpent. It preserved the old wisdom that had sunk down, that people had possessed in the past and that they could no longer possess now. The power of clairvoyance had to disappear from the human race. The gods could never have ruled from without as long as the humans themselves were still clairvoyant. The Midgard Serpent, a daughter of the fire powers, had to be cast down into the sea.

The last descendant of these fire powers was Loki. Loki was the enemy of the gods. He had given people what was left of their clairvoyance: the Midgard Serpent, which was now bound. But Loki had given people something else, something else came from the old original fire beginning of the human race in the land of the Lemurians, which, however, could only develop in the land of the Atlanteans. What had gradually developed there as people developed from clairvoyance to reason? Language! We have often spoken about this. While man gradually learned to walk upright - that was in the Atlantean time - language also developed, little by little it developed, so that it was only finished at the end of the Atlantean time. When the Atlanteans, with their well-developed minds, moved east, language was already developed. But as long as it was the language of the Atlanteans, it was a unified language that was based on the unified sounds of nature itself. It was an imitation of what the Atlanteans had heard during their periods of clairvoyance and clairaudience, from the trickling springs, the roaring winds, the rustling of the trees, the rolling of the thunder, the lapping of the waves. They translated these sounds into their language, and that was the common language of the Atlanteans. It was only in the post-Atlantean period that what one might call the difference between the individual languages and idioms, the elements of the different languages, developed and became structured. The old Atlantean language, which was taken from the elements of nature, from those forces with which Loki is so intimately interwoven, had to take on different forms when the Aesir became rulers and men divided into nations and tribes. The separation of men into nations and the struggle of the individual nations among themselves led to what is called war. What was this war waged for? Why did it come? Through speech, man was given something for his development, through which he can turn his innermost feelings outward. From the occult point of view, it is one of the most important advances in evolution when the soul comes to utter its own pains, joys and desires in sounds. Language, when articulated from within, when it makes the soul resound, is something that gives man a mighty power. This power had to be suppressed by the Aesir, otherwise they could not have ruled. How did the Aesir suppress the old unified language? They did so by splitting people into different tribes and thus into different tongues. The undivided nature of the language was a mighty power – the Fenris wolf. To prevent this power from asserting itself on the stage of the Aesir, the Aesir had to tame the Fenris wolf, that is, they had to dismember the language, they had to make the language different so that they could rule over men. In doing so, they created war. War is connected with this diversity of languages. But one thing was necessary for the Aesir to become rulers: the god of war had to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf, and he had to leave his hand there. The hand of Tyr, the god of war, is stuck as a tongue in the jaws of the Fenris wolf. It is the human tongue that causes the different languages. The human tongue had to form in such a way that the old unity of language was lost. It is the individualization of language that is indicated in this profound myth of the Fenris wolf. In the myth, every organ is associated in some way with the influences of the gods from without. Here you have the organ of the tongue and the way in which the progressive organic development of man is expressed in images.

Something else occurred when the Atlanteans were gradually being prepared for the later post-Atlantean epoch. The individual states of consciousness of man were quite different at the time of ancient Atlantis than they are today. We have already mentioned that a certain degree of clairvoyance still existed; but this meant that the Atlanteans did not know the difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking as we know it today. The great difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking only arose in the post-Atlantean period. Of course, it was slowly preparing itself, but the preparation only gave the basis for what the change between waking and sleeping meant in the post-Atlantean period.

The old Atlantean dreamed during the day and dreamed at night. The dreams of the night corresponded more to reality than the dreams of today's man. And the dreams of the day were a real perception of the spiritual world that lived around the Atlantean people, especially in the early days of Atlantis. But it was only with the onset of this sharp change between the waking state of consciousness and the completely unconscious state of sleep that what is connected with the relationship of the astral body to the other bodies actually gained its full significance. Human illnesses in their present form only gained their significance in the post-Atlantic period. In the first Atlantic period, these illnesses did not yet exist; then, little by little, the illnesses that people got got worse and worse. You all know the healing influence of the astral body when it is outside the physical body during sleep. During the Atlantean period, the astral body was no longer completely outside the physical body, but it was still more outside than in the case of present-day man, and therefore it was still able to exert its healing influence. It was precisely through the penetration of the astral body into the etheric body and the physical body that completely new and different conditions arose between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and this is how the diseases we know today were created. The diseases only gained their significance when the astral body could no longer work on the physical body even during the day.

This is also expressed in the myth. Only those who fall on the battlefield die in such a way that they do not fall prey to the powers of the underworld; they still belong to the higher powers, and may go up to the gods in Valhalla. But the others, who succumb to the forces of disease, must go down to Hel, which is black on one side and white on the other, clearly expressing the change between the states of consciousness of day and night. The Aesir save themselves by taking up only those who, through death on the battlefield, can unite with the astral world, while the others must go down to Hel, who leads them into her realms. This is a profound feature of Norse saga, and this feature, too, is thoroughly based on fact.

Now all legends that are based on occultism, and all really great legends have emerged from the secret schools, always contain prophecy. Here, too, we have a reference to a future state in the development of humanity and the earth. Man will only be afflicted with seeing only the external sense world for a time. But he will ascend again to the perception that he originally had. In the distant past he was clairvoyant, but he had to descend to physical perception in order to become self-aware, and he will ascend again to clairvoyant vision. This coincides remarkably with the entire constitution of the human being. You know, at least those of you who have followed the earlier lectures, that the legend ascribes the gift of the nervous system, the ability to perceive external things as they are perceived by today's human beings, to the influx of divine powers through the gates of the senses. But you now have a very remarkable difference in your senses, which is magnificently reflected in the legend. If you take the sense of hearing: its tool is a single organ, it is localized in the ear; if you take the sense of sight: its tool, its organ is localized in the eye; if you take the sense of smell: its tool is localized in the mucous membranes of the nose; taste is localized in the tongue and palate. But now let us take the sense of feeling, the sense of warmth; where is it localized? It extends over the whole body. It differs quite essentially from the other localized senses. The organ by which man perceives warmth is curiously distinct from the other sense organs.

Let us take this sense of the saying that the forces of the gods enter through the individual human sense organs. We must say to ourselves: the forces that live in the world of sound enter man through the ear; the forces that live in the world of light enter through the eye, and so on. But the forces that live in the all-animating and all-pervading warmth fill the whole human being; they have the whole human being as their organ of perception. When the human being emerged from the bosom of the deity at the beginning of his development, it was quite different. Then the human being had no senses for perceiving the environment. First, that peculiar organ of feeling developed in him, which one would wrongly call an eye; that organ developed from the radiations and inflows into the upper layers of his being. This organ was a continuation of the human being outwards; you can still feel the soft spot in the skull of a child today, where this organ protruded, like the hole that was open where these currents entered. This organ was then the localized sense of warmth, which is now spread throughout the entire body of the human being. Man had this organ in ancient Lemuria, the hot land of fire. He could use it to find out where he could go, he could use it to feel whether the temperature was agreeable to him or not. Today this organ has shrunk and become the pineal gland. In the future, what is now spread over the whole body will reappear in a transformed form at a higher level, localized in a certain other organ.

You see this expressed in the myth through the rule of Sutur in the southern region, in Lemuria. The power of fire is represented by Sutur. You see hinted at in the myth how Sutur comes under the rule of the other gods, the Ases, whose power flows into people through the localized senses. But Sutur will return and rule in the place of the Ases. Man will return to the elemental forces of fire, and the sense of warmth will no longer be spread over the whole body, but will again be localized in one organ. The saga wonderfully reflects what also corresponds to the facts that we know through spiritual science. What has man retained from that ancient world of fire, from that fire and warmth environment, which he perceived with his ancient organs, what is it? It is not the Sutur itself. For in order to enliven this area, in which the Sutur was, man needed his old organ, the organ of feeling, which protruded like a lantern from his head. It is that “descendant” of the old sense of feeling that must experience the destinies of the whole human body, that is completely interwoven with the destiny of man, and that is the son of Sutur, Loki. Loki is chained to the triple rock of the human head, the human torso and the human limbs, so that he cannot move and is therefore exposed to all human torments and sufferings.

This leads you even deeper into this world of Germanic myths, which are of an almost impenetrable depth. You really have to dig very deep to see what kind of enthusiasm, for example, seized an artist like Richard Wagner and drove him to his work. It should never be said that Richard Wagner could have specified the individual legends in the same way as it happens through occultism. But the spiritual powers that stood behind him and inspired him directed and guided his artistic inspirations so that his art became the most beautiful expression of what the myth is based on. That is the great thing, that one does not see in the work of art what is behind it, everything has flowed out in sound and word. A remarkable instinct - if one wants to call it trivial, otherwise one would have to call it artistic inspiration - prevails in Richard Wagner. It was like a spiritual hearing of those ancient modes of speech that arose in him. He sensed those most ancient modes of speech very well and [that caused him] not to remain in the end rhyme, for that belongs to a later stage, a stage of understanding, but to choose that stage of speech development that is an echo of the the rushing waves that splashed out of the mists of ancient Atlantis: that is alliteration, that is trochee, which, for those who can feel it, repeats in sound what can be called the music of the waves.

In Germanic mythology, it is prophesied that the twilight of the gods must come because the cause of the wars has arisen. Because Tyr lost a hand in the jaws of Woltfes, the seeds of the later downfall of the gods developed. The prophetic view of the Germanic saga of the twilight of the gods points to the state where people will understand each other again, where they will no longer be separated by languages. The saga tells us that after the Atlantean population had moved east, it split up and fragmented. Only those peoples who descended from the Mongolian race and who came under Etzel or Attila - Atli, the Atlantean - have retained something of the old Atlantis. They alone have preserved the life element of the Atlanteans, while the other peoples who had remained in Europe have developed out of the old blood community through splitting and have fallen apart into wars between the individual tribes. Thus these peoples in the West are always divided and at war. They are unable to withstand the impact of the Mongolian element, which has retained the old Atlantean foundations of life. Attila's or Etzel's march is not stopped by the Germanic tribes, because the individual tribes are something that cannot impress Attila, who has retained his old great spirit - a kind of monotheism. What opposed him as individual tribes could not stop him. A remarkable feature of the saga is that Attila was immediately persuaded to turn back when he was confronted by something that went beyond blood relationship, when he was confronted by Christianity, personified in the then Pope. Then Attila saw the spiritual powers that will unite men again, and that is what the Atlantean initiate bows down to. Christianity is to prepare the way for that state of humanity when Sutur will reappear and, regardless of the differentiation of people into individual tribes, will bring peace to the world. Thus, to the people of that time, Christianity seemed like a first announcement of the twilight of the gods and the return of the old days, when people were not yet divided, not yet divided and divided by wars. This is how Christianity was perceived, especially in the very first centuries of its spread, when it was not yet Christianity that was proclaimed from Rome, but when it came from the north and west through secret Christian societies that originated in England and Ireland, and later also in France, and which were completely independent of the external authority of Rome. It was Winfried, Boniface, who emerged from the ranks of those western secret students and made his peace with Rome, whereby Christianity could then gradually adopt the special coloration of the Roman-Christian Church.

Thus we see what forces were at work in the spread of Christianity out of the memory of an ancient time and as a prophetic indication of a later future. What first appeared in Christianity in Central Europe were the feelings that lived in those people at that time and filled the outlook of those people who belonged to the secret schools and who had been taught and inspired by the secret schools.

Let us pause for a moment at this phase of Central European spiritual development and visualize what Europe was like at that time, when the old world of the gods - as described in the Germanic sagas - was gradually dying away in the twilight brought about by the religious world of Christianity. The advent of Christianity was felt to be a harbinger of the great twilight of the gods, the twilight that would one day sweep away the powers of the old gods. Christianity brought about the fading of the old world of gods, the downfall of the old gods themselves will bring the great twilight of the gods, which will then bring as reality what Christianity only brought as faith. This is how it was felt.

Now let us put ourselves in this mood, which was there. The tribes of the Goths, the Franks and so on, were all under the impression of the approaching Mongol tribes, the Hun king Attila or Etzel, on the one hand, and the gradually spreading Christianity, on the other. As a result of the events we have characterized, they were divided into different tribes; they spoke in different tongues, they had fallen apart among themselves. In the end, of all these tribes, only one actually survived: the Franconian tribe; it remained, in name and in significance. What remains to remind us of all the tribes that once roamed here, if not history: the Lombards, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, the Cherusci, the Heruli, and so on? The Franconian tribe was actually the one that triumphed over the others. But how did those feel who belonged to the dying tribes? These feelings were most vividly felt by the secret schools and the knowledgeable of these dying tribes. Let us take a look at one such tribe, the Visigoths. They lived in northern Spain and southern France, although they had once migrated far to the east. As you know, the westward migration was only a retreat. The abilities they had were still an echo of the ancient Atlantic times. When these tribes had migrated from the east to the west, they had lost the old abilities during their wanderings, but a kind of clairvoyance still lived in people as an echo of those old abilities. These people were no longer completely clairvoyant, but at certain times they could still see into the spiritual worlds. However, they often experienced this as something unknown and oppressive, and that is where the name 'Alp' comes from. Alp – what kind of being is that? It is an astral being that people sensed but no longer really knew, that they had known in Atlantean times, in the days of old seeing and clairvoyance, and that now appeared like an intruder into the world, like the Truth that we got to know last time. Nevertheless, some people felt it as the looking in of a higher, astral world into the physical one. Especially with those tribes that could not adapt to the new conditions, one felt “when the nightmare came and oppressed” that one could look into the higher worlds. In all tribes, especially the Goths, but also the Burgundians and other Germanic tribes, there were always individuals who could withstand such states of emergency and interpret them as the astral world reaching into the physical world. One such man was the Goth King Alphard, who is mentioned in those times when the Goths inhabited southern France. He was King of Aquitaine and ruled there at the time when Attila was undertaking his march from east to west. Alphard's son was the legendary Walther of the Walthari Lay. It presents us with a true transition from that time when people still knew something from their fathers about the old abilities and the connections between the old tribes. How the tribe and tribes belonged together in ancient times - the fathers knew it; therefore, the father of Walther, Alphard, had long since discussed with the king of the Burgundians that his daughter Hildegund should become the wife of Walther, in order to bridge the threatening gap between the peoples. But the tribes were unable to withstand the onslaught of the Huns, who still possessed the old vitality that they themselves had lost. Therefore, Walther, the son of Alphard, Hildegund, the daughter of the Burgundian king, and Hagen of Tronje, a hostage from the Frankish court, were forced to go down to the court of Etzel, the king of the Huns. Because Gunther, the son of the King of the Franks, Gibich, could not yet be given as a hostage, Hagen, the descendant of the old Tronje line, had to be given as a hostage. We need not relate the content of the Song of Walthari further. At the court of King Etzel, they distinguish themselves as capable warriors, but there is one thing they cannot do: they may well be able to conquer what elevates man to the ego, but what brings the ego back to peace, they cannot acquire that, it is impossible for them. Each individual was efficient in his own place, and so they are efficient warriors even in the land of the enemy, at the court of Etzel or Attila. But when Gunther came to power in the Frankish Empire and no longer maintained a friendship with Etzel, they could no longer stand their ground and had to flee. Now something remarkable occurs. There is an older version of the Song of Walthari, in which Walther, after fleeing with Hildegund, fights against the pursuing Huns. This version comes from the Franconian region. We then have a later version, which was mentioned yesterday, that arises from purely Christian intentions; it was last brought into its present form in the 10th century by Ekkehard I, a monk at the monastery of St. Gallen. The two versions differ greatly from one another. The older version originated in the land of the Franks. It comes from those who were influenced by the current in which the original Christianity still lives as a secret Christian current, which wanted to teach: Turn to the new ideas, and you will overcome what is still in you of the old that confronts you physically in the Huns. This interest could only have been taken by someone who came from the land of the Franks. But the man who reinterpreted the saga in the monastery of St. Gall to teach Christians no longer had this interest. He had a different goal; he wanted to tell people: If you stick with the old conditions, you will consume yourselves. He showed them vividly how they were consuming themselves. And indeed, it was not the Huns who consumed them. When Walther and Hildegund return to their country, it is Gunther himself who confronts them with Hagen of Tronje. Now it is the three representatives of Germanic tribes themselves who tear each other apart in battle, leaving the leg of one, the eye of another and the hand of a third on the battlefield. Walther was cut off his hand, Gunther lost his leg, and Hagen lost an eye. The one who wrote down the saga knew why he had the hand cut off the one who descended from Alphard. He represents the discord between tribes and peoples. The cutting off of the hand is meant to remind them of what happened to Tyr, the god of war. Where tribes fall out, the individual loses his hand. This motif continues down to Götz von Berlichingen, who also loses his hand; it is the same motif that appears in Germanic mythology. Thus Ekkehard wanted to say to his people: If you cling to these old views, you will tear each other apart, for discord has been brought into your midst. What can bind you together is the spirit of Christianity. He presents to them in such a way as to evoke in their souls a feeling of repulsion. That was Ekkehard's Christian intention.

In the face of this Walthari-lay, one must be especially careful not to speculate or interpret anything into it. The individual traits: the striking out of the eye, the cutting off of the hand, the cutting off of the leg and similar traits are such that something of the type and form of the saga continues to work in them, and that returns when it seems necessary. It was rightly said yesterday that the person who wrote this Waltherilied is an initiate. But it must also be emphasized that it was a Christian initiate who wanted to present a very specific Christian teaching to people.

Thus we see how spiritual science can help to clarify these phenomena of human intellectual life, and how we can shed light on areas that are still little understood by today's philology. And if you have seen this morning the way in which spiritual science can intervene in everyday life, and add to what has been said now, then this will be proof to you of the inner truth of the spiritual facts brought down from the higher worlds. Our world needs such a deepening again. But you can also see from this the way in which we have to work, and that external agitation cannot be what can really bring the theosophical world movement into the right channel. If you just come with dogmas and want to explain them to people, then they have every right to tell us that this is all fantasy. Only he who penetrates deeply into what the theosophical stream can offer, and who penetrates into it from all sides, will gradually see the theosophical truths. We need not be surprised if followers of materialistic currents find what we say foolish. How should they understand it otherwise? And how can we succumb to the delusion that Theosophy could be something that can be spread by external propaganda, like popular monism? Only through positive work, by spreading the teachings as best we can, only in this way can Theosophy become established. No matter how many failures we have, we must not let them hinder or disconcert us in any way. Therefore, the Theosophical Society can be nothing more than a place within which theosophical work is carried out. The Society can never be the main thing; the main thing must be our spiritual science itself. Perhaps the Society will even be only - to use the Nietzschean word you have probably heard before - a “bridge” and a “transition to a higher” level, to a free theosophical current in the world. At present, however, we need this place from which we can work, and without which we cannot let spiritual science flow into the world. But we must adopt the liberal view that distinguishes the human being and the cause, and that puts the cause above any institution that comes from external organization.

This brings us to the end of our program for our time together.

During the last evenings of our study group, we dealt with the occult explanation of Central European legends and myths and saw the deep truths and insights contained in these legends and myths. Just two weeks ago today, when we were able to draw attention to the very deepest and most important of such truths, we were able to take a look at a related mythology, the Persian one, which originated over in Asia and which is quite similar to what we have on European soil as Germanic or similar mythologies. We have seen what is hidden behind the name of the Persian Amshaspands and behind the name of the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards. We have rediscovered the forces emanating from these spirits of the astral realm in the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head and in the twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of nerves that emanate from our spine.

In Germanic and European mythology, we are told that the three gods Wotan, Wili and We - who also sometimes appear under other names - created man. As they once walked on the seashore, they found two trees there, and from these trees, Ask and Embla, they created the first human couple. Wotan gave these first humans spirit and the general soul life, Wili gave form, understanding and movement, and We gave countenance, speech, hearing and sight. If we hear this in European myth and have already been able to convince ourselves of the deep meaning of the other myths, then we may certainly also seek something deeper in this triad and in the endowment of man with various characteristics through the triad of gods. But we would do well to link the story of the creation of man as told in the Central European myth with the way in which the creation of man appears in the related Persian mythology. There it appears in a much larger context. At the same time, something very special can unfold for us about the spiritual power of human beings that forms myths and about the essence and nature of the human being and his connection to the earth. We know, of course, that myths and legends must not be interpreted through speculation, that their meaning must not be sought through speculation, but that we must try to clarify the origins of human knowledge and insight for ourselves, as they appear to us in the legends, in the original creative folk spirit on the one hand and in the gifts of the initiated priests on the other.

Legends and myths are nothing other than astral, spiritual perceptions. We have seen how the ancient Teuton or member of the old European population really saw the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, on the astral plane, how he heard the twelve currents that entered his head as forces and formed his twelve main nerves. We have come to know all of this as astral influences and not through some fantastic, ingenious speculation.

Now, let us first briefly and sketchily visualize the Persian myth of the origin of the world and the destiny of man. But let us bear in mind that the ancient Persian people – not the people you have met in history, but the ones from whom these legends of the gods actually originated – belonged to the most advanced part of the masses of peoples who migrated eastward from ancient Atlantis. When the old Atlantis was swept down, it was the peoples who later moved down to India and mixed with the peoples living there, and those who settled on the soil of present-day Persia, Bactria, Media, who moved furthest east; the other peoples had remained on the soil of present-day Europe.

In all these peoples, myths and legends took shape in the most diverse forms and guises, and in all of them, what was told in the images of their mythologies was nothing more than what individuals could see, either permanently or in special states, with their weak but still present clairvoyant abilities. People saw what the myths and legends tell. From this astral point of view, the members of this part of the population, which extended over the area of present-day Persia, told what they saw and what the great religious founder Zarathustra then clothed in a certain form and rounded off. Let us briefly sketch out what the people told. They traced everything that exists back to a unified cosmic ground, which they called “Zaruana Akarana”. This was a common source from which, according to this view, everything has arisen, everything that is mineral, plant, animal and human, but also everything that is higher spiritual, insofar as it is perceptible to humans. If one wanted to translate this expression “Zaruana Akarana”, one would have to do it with “luminous source” or “luminous background”. Now out of this “luminous source” emerged a deity with qualities of goodness, with qualities of intellectual spiritual perfection, a wise, good, spiritual being, Ormuzd, and another being that was opposed to this good spirit Ormuzd. This other spiritual entity is usually called Ahriman. So within the Persian myths and legends we have these two spiritual entities: Ormuzd and Ahriman; a good deity and an evil opposing deity. Ahriman could be translated into English with the term 'the resistive' or 'the opposing-minded'; that would be the sense of this term.

If we now want to relate the Amshaspands and the Izards to these spiritual beings, then we have to imagine that the higher spiritual beings, which we have come to know as Amshaspands and Izards, radiated and emanated from Ormuzd. They are the hosts through whom Ormuzd works, so that he is the supreme ruler who assigns them their places, dividing them according to the twelve months of the year and the twenty-eight or thirty-one days of the month, after which they change their dominion. But now the Persian myth of Ahriman tells us: He also descends from the general “illuminated source”, but from the very beginning he showed himself unruly and rebelled, opposing the six Amshaspands with his six evil spirits, the Devas or Devs, lower and higher. So you have to imagine that each of the Amshaspands has an adversary, and just as the Amshaspands belong to the regent Ormuzd, so these Devas, in the sense of the Persian myth, belong to the following of Ahriman. He has set up his hosts so that they may constantly confront the good hosts of the Amshaspands in a long-lasting battle. And likewise he has arrayed his countless hosts of the lower devas against the hosts of the Izards.

This Persian myth thus shows us all the events of the world in a certain way entangled in a long-lasting struggle. Everything that happens today is to be seen in the sense of this Persian myth in such a way that it is the outflow of this struggle. What is happening should actually be presented in such a way that in such an event in the world, on the one hand, the forces of good emanating from the Amshaspands and the Izards are on one side, and on the other hand, the forces of evil emanating from the Devas are on the other. Only when we understand the interaction of good and evil forces will we understand, according to the Persian myth, the events and facts of the present world.

We must now ask ourselves: Are the stories that confront us in these images also astral perceptions? We will see that they are, down to the last detail. To understand this fact, you will be helped by the circumstance that a certain role in ancient Persian worship is played by what could be called the worship of fire. This worship of fire should not be imagined as worship of physical fire; that is not the case. It is not worshiped, nor is there any special cult associated with physical fire. For Persian myth and Persian cult, physical fire is nothing more than a symbol, an outward expression of a certain spiritual power that reigns in fire. For the spirit of fire, the external, physical fire is the expression.

Now let us see where this fire worship comes from. It has a deep occult origin. Let us recall how, in our theosophical world view, the origin of the world is told. We know that our Earth was once united with what now accompanies it as the Moon, and that the Moon only separated from it after a certain time. We know that in even earlier times, our Earth was united with what is now the Sun. These were the two important cosmic events that preceded the evolution of man. These three cosmic bodies – the sun, moon and earth – once formed only one single body, which we can imagine as if we mixed the sun, moon and earth together and formed a single large cosmic body out of them. First the sun separated out, and while it had previously given its light to the beings from inside the earth, it now sent it to the earth and its beings from the outside. That was at the time when the earth still had the moon within it. It was the moon that had the bad forces within it, and these bad forces had to come out. If the moon had remained inside, the earth would never have been able to undergo the development that allowed it to become the setting for present-day humanity.

When the moon had separated, man was not yet on earth in his present form; he was not yet endowed with a soul, insofar as he existed at all as a physical being. Immediately after the moon had separated from the earth, this human form still led a plant-like existence. In this human form, which was present on the earth that had been abandoned by the moon, there was nothing more than the potential for today's physical body and today's etheric body. That which is present in man today as the astral body was not yet united with the earthly. Just as clouds float in the air today, so the astral bodies floated around in those days, and later sank into the physical human bodies. And the human bodies that walked around as the physical ancestors of today's man were in a state of perpetual sleep. Just as plants are in a perpetual state of sleep, so man at that time was in a kind of sleep state, he was endowed only with the physical and etheric bodies. Up to that time there was no being on earth at all that had the most important quality for today's humanity and higher animal world, the quality of red, warm blood: inner warmth.

If you would go back in time with me and examine the creatures of the old moon, you would find that all these creatures of the old moon, on which the ancestors of present-day man were already present, still had the warmth of their surroundings, just as the lower animals that have retained this stage still have today. They had, as one says, body fluids that could change their temperature, they had the warmth of their surroundings. What occurs as internal warmth in humans and higher animals, and what belongs to it, the red blood, was by no means present in the beings of that time.

But now we have heard that at the same time as the separation of the Sun and the Moon from the Earth, another cosmic event took place: the passage of Mars through the Earth. The substances of the two cosmic bodies, Mars and Earth, were so thin at that time that Mars was able to pass through the Earth's body in terms of its substance. It left behind a substance that the Earth had not had before: iron. The Earth only incorporated iron after the passage of Mars, and this iron was the necessary precondition for the formation of red blood. What was the consequence? When the Moon moved away from the Earth and the Earth remained alone, the Earth was in a kind of fiery state; it was surrounded by a warm atmosphere. And now we come to an idea that I ask you to grasp very precisely. Imagine all the warmth that is inside the bodies of the millions of warm-blooded humans and animals that inhabit the earth today, imagine that it lived as a warm atmosphere around the earth: then you have approximately the state in which the earth was immediately after the moon had gone.

The beings did not yet have the inner warmth; the warmth immediately surrounded the entire globe, it was still outside. So we can imagine the earth at that time as a still liquid body, in which the metals were dissolved in the most diverse ways, and which was surrounded by this sea of fire or warmth. Into this sea of warmth the sun, which was outside, sent its rays of light. For the occultist, light is by no means merely physical light. Rather, this physical light is the bodily expression of spirit. Thus, with the sun's rays, the essence of the spirits of the sun streamed down to earth. Light as an expression of the spirituality of light streamed into the fiery atmosphere, into the warm atmosphere of the earth. Imagine this vividly. You have the Earth, it is surrounded by the atmosphere of warmth, and falling into it are the rays of the sun, which for us are rays of spirit. Through the fact that these sun spirits in the sun's rays fall into the warmth of the Earth, the collective soul was formed first, the collective astral body of all humanity and of the higher animals. Down on the ground, there were these sleeping human plants, which had an etheric body and a physical body. And just as it would be today if all of you sitting here were to suddenly fall asleep – which, of course, is not desirable! -, then all your astral bodies would leave your physical bodies and mix with each other, so it was in those days; only then they mixed even more, they were an undifferentiated mass when they had the common warmth, into which the light of the sun, which was the expression of the spirit, shone. As is well known, the astral body of modern man is also called an aura because to the modern seer it appears as a halo of light surrounding the human being, somewhat like an oval, egg-shaped form of light radiating from all sides of the human being. In those days, the human being's astral body was contained in this warm atmosphere of the earth; it was not yet divided into the individual astral bodies; and the light of the sun, which was the bearer of the spirituality of the sun, shone into them.

Now imagine your own cosmic-universal development at that time. What is today your physical and etheric body, was then a plant existence, and grew, as it were, out of the earth. And what lives in you today as soul and spirit came from the atmosphere surrounding the earth, and was gradually absorbed by your physical and etheric body. And this had been prepared in the common aura of the earth, which must be conceived in physical terms as a common warmth, permeated and suffused by the sunlight filled with spirit. Thus you have absorbed the warmth that once enveloped the earth. What lives today in your warm blood is part of this primeval fire that flows around the earth. If it were possible today to draw all this warmth out of the bodies of animals and human beings, it would be possible to restore the ancient state of the primeval fire. The warmth that lives within us today is the divided warmth that once surrounded the earth as a sea of warmth, and the light flowed into this common blood body. This light, too, has been divided, little by little, and has created man's higher spirituality. Naturally, only dull, lower spirituality was present in the merely physical-etheric bodies. What is rooted in the human mind today, the higher spirituality, that which has been formed by the influx of the Amshaspands, comes from the spiritual forces of the sun.

And now imagine yourself in the astral vision of the clairvoyant. What does he see? He sees how the earth is formed, how the moon separates; the earth is surrounded by fire mist, by the collective warmth, into which radiates, wonderfully illuminating it from within, the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world, which comes from the sun, transforms the sun-drenched earth into the earth aura. This is seen by the astral clairvoyant. And the old Persian clairvoyant called this “Aura Mazda”, the great aura, Ahura Mazdao, the great aura of wisdom from which the individual auras of human beings have emerged. Ormuzd is only a transformed expression for Ahura Mazdao, the great aura.

Now let us go a little further. How could this state, which the astral clairvoyant must perceive in such a great and powerful way when he transports himself back to this time, this state that is described in the Persian myth, which is, after all, a retelling of the results of astral clairvoyance? This condition is brought about by the fact that spiritual entities are also linked to the sun. For the materialist, only physical rays stream forth from the sun. But for the one who sees things occultly, it is the case that with the sunlight, the forces of the spiritual inhabitants of the sun stream down to the earth. Just as the earth is inhabited by people, the sun is also inhabited by mighty beings, who differ from the earthly beings in that they are much, much more developed than people. The Genesis, the Old Testament, calls these sun dwellers the Elohim, light beings. Just as people have a body of flesh, so these sun dwellers have a body of light. They are light beings. And their powers are not limited to a confined space; they can radiate out to the Earth. The deeds of the sun spirits, the Elohim, flow to all earthly beings with the sunlight. In every ray of light, in every ray of sunshine, we see the deeds of the sun dwellers. Human beings will only reach this level when the Earth has reached the state of Vulcan. You know that the evolution of the Earth proceeds from Saturn via the Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter and Venus to Vulcan, which we indicate as the last embodiment of the Earth. When the Earth has developed to the state of Vulcan, then human beings will have reached the stage that the present inhabitants of the Sun have reached in their evolutionary process today. This is also where we find the Amshaspands living today. Their actual home is in the sun, and from there they send us their deeds through the sunlight.

This is how the deeds of the Amshaspands could come into being in humans, as I have described to you. They sent their twelve currents into the human head and thus brought about the development of thinking and spirituality in humans. On the moon, the Izards had worked on the human being first and developed the twenty-eight spinal nerves. Then came the endowment of the human being with the twelve nerves of the head, which came from the Amshaspands, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao. But each time, certain entities were left behind in the evolutionary process of a world body. They do not come along. Not only high school students are left behind, but also world beings remain at a level that the others have already surpassed. During the moon phase of the earth, the Elohim, the sun-light spirits, have risen to the level that allows them to live in the sun and send their deeds to the earth and to earth humanity. Other spirits, who were already on the same level as the Elohim at that time, remained behind, “stayed seated”; they were unable to bring their development on the old moon so far that they could begin a higher existence with the sun as their arena. It was therefore not initially destined for these lagging spirits to work in the sun's rays, to work from the outside in. Rather, in their further development, they had to seek what they had not yet experienced on the moon in a lower existence, one connected with the earth itself, with the earthly sphere.

What was the new condition that now emerged on earth, giving the beings new characteristics? It showed itself in the fact that the warm atmosphere, the warm environment, now entered into the blood. Warm blood was created. In this state, the retarded spirit hosts sought to make up in their development what they had previously been unable to achieve. They sought to carry the deeds that they could not place in the sun's rays into the warmth, which was transformed into inner life.

Let us visualize this vividly, as it can be seen with clairvoyant vision. [During the following explanations, a drawing was made on the blackboard, but the scribes did not record it.] We see that the deeds of the Amshaspands and the Izards, which emanate from Ahura Mazdao, flow into the head and spine of man, while the inside of man is filled with warm blood. The human body, as it were, absorbs the warm blood; it is conducted from all sides from the outside into the interior of the body. And if we examine the occult anatomy of man, we find that each such stream, sent from the regions of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, was accompanied by another stream of warmth flowing in from without, and this accompanied the nerve current. With this incoming warm blood, the forces of those spirits who had been left behind entered the human being; these were the hosts of Ahriman, who now, with warmth, sent their forces into the human being just as the Amshaspands sent their light force. So it is that we have sent a blood stream in the opposite direction to each of the currents of the Amshaspands. In this red blood stream, which flows parallel to the nerve currents, the opposing forces of the devas also flow. In the red blood flowing to the Amshaspands, what comes from the opponents of the Amshaspands and Izards, from the devas, the hosts of Ahriman, flows in the opposite direction. And now we feel pulsating in the blood that which came from the hosts of Ahriman.

That which the clairvoyant can see flowing into the physical body on the astral plane is reflected in a profound and inspired way in the Persian myth. We see the interaction of the great light of Ahura Mazdao with the incoming warmth that makes blood the power in man that it is. Now we know that blood is the expression of the I. And so we see how everything that flows out of the great wisdom, out of Ahura Mazdao, is accompanied by egoism, because it is confronted by the currents of Ahriman in the blood. Egoism flows into all of the spiritual activity of the human being. We see it flowing in properly when we devote ourselves to this imagination. In this way, you must work your way up to a true visualization of what has happened on our earth.

And now we remember that these spirits, who had remained behind from the lunar existence and did not make it to the solar existence, that these spirits on the moon were the same kind of beings as the sun spirits, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao, who had reached beyond the lunar existence. On the moon they had reached the stage of the I; they only remained behind and just preserved this stage. As long as they were on the moon, the spirits of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, and the spirits of Ahriman were on the same level, of the same kind, they were of an ego-like nature. This ego, the original ego, Zaruana Akarana, is the divine ego that has not yet entered the body, that still rests in the bosom of the deity. Where this ego had developed to the point that it could have a solar existence, it formed an astral body that is under the rule of Ormuzd. But a lower power is incorporated into this, the power of the retarded hosts of Ahriman.

So you have now seen the emergence of this fourth link of human nature, the I, and the third link of the human being, the astral body, which is spiritualized by two entities. Incorporated into it are the good powers of Ormuzd and the powers of the egoistic nature, of Ahriman. The ego is placed in the struggle raging in one's own astral body between the good and the evil forces; it is the original entity Zaruana Akarana that splits into the good, true forces of the astral body and the opposing forces that are the forces of Ahriman. Ahriiman or Angramainyu means something like the one who resists or the spirit of opposition. Thus we understand how such a myth is actually nothing more than the retelling of what the ancient astral clairvoyants have seen.

Now let us take a closer look at these forces radiating from the Sun to the Earth and to man. What the Persian myth calls Ormuzd or Ahura Mazdao is actually an expression for “great soul”; it is the same as what the Hellenes call Psyche; and what we understand by the human astral body is the “little soul”. The human soul is composed of thinking, feeling and willing. These are the three basic powers of the soul, which for the occultist are actually three independent entities; we will learn more about this later. Just as the human soul is divided into these three parts, so is the great soul, the great aura, divided into three parts. This same trait can be found in Persian as well as in Central European myths. The Central European myth now calls these three basic forces Wotan, Wili and We, with Wotan representing the thinking, Wili the willing and We the feeling force.

We can immerse ourselves deeply in the whole astral contemplation of these ancient times when we see how the syllable “We” resonates with an original designation for the feeling force. In fact, all higher feeling, even when it is full of relish, has emerged from sorrow and pain. And why? Imagine once more the original human form, which, as it were, sprang out of the earth, the plant-human being with a physical body and an etheric body. Just as it sprang out at that time, the senses were only present as an inclination, just as a blossom is already contained in the plant germ. Man could not yet see. Eyes such as we have today only arose after a long, long process of development. These eyes, which today see the glory of sunlight, how did they arise according to occult physiology? Originally, when only the physical body and the etheric body were present, there was nothing here in these places where the eyes are now. However, these places proved to be particularly sensitive to the sun's rays sent to the earth. And what the sun first caused as an impression was pain. Two suffering points arose on the human body at these points, pain points that were constantly being injured. It was exactly the same as if you cut yourself and a scab formed at that point. So too, scabs formed at those sensitive points, and from these scabs the magnificent miracle of the eye gradually formed; albeit after a long, long development. What pain had torn out of the body became the glorious eye.

Nothing can arise in the world as enjoyment, as pleasure, that does not have pain as its basis. Just as satiety, with its enjoyment, has hunger as a prerequisite, so all knowledge and also all joy has pain as its basis. That is also the reason why, in tragedy, pain satisfies us like the presentiment of an expected release. Everything that will achieve perfection in the future undergoes a state of pain and suffering in the present. But this offers us consolation because we know that what is pain and suffering today will be states of perfection in the future. Overcome pain will become perfection in the future. The perfect eyes of today owe their existence to the earlier painful points on the human body; pain that has been overcome. This is what the initiate Paul meant when he uttered the mighty word: “All creatures groan in pain, awaiting adoption as children,” or “All creatures are afraid in the pain of existence and await adoption as children,” which expresses nothing other than the longing for a relationship of childship to God that will one day be attained again. He who comprehends existence sees pain flooding through all existence.

Now let us imagine the good spirits, whether we call them Ormuzd, as in the Persian myth, or Wotan, Wili and We, as in the Germanic myth, and see how these solar powers stream towards us. When the waters of Atlantis had been lost and the sun had been released, they worked in the sun's rays and permeated the air. That is why the light spirits are also air spirits, which were described as Wotan's wild army; these spirits were felt in the three parts Wotan, Wili and We. We want to get an idea of how it presents itself to the astral clairvoyant. Take the human being; when he was still a plant-human being, consisting of a physical and etheric body. The sun's power was at work through Wotan in thinking, through Wili, who gives everything will-like, and through We, who gives everything feeling-like; everything feeling-like rests in Weh, we feel this from the name.

How must this now be told if it is to be told appropriately? Wotan, Wilii and We were walking on the seashore; they found plants there and endowed these plants with their powers: Wotan with spirit and the general soul life, Wili with form, mind and movement, with everything rooted in the will, We with countenance and color, with speech, hearing and sight, with everything rooted in the feelings. Thus the first humans came into being. In these pictures of the Central European myth of the walk of the three gods on the seashore, of the finding of the trees and the bestowing of the divine powers and qualities upon them, we recognize how these spirits living in the sun gave their powers from their great aura and let them flow into the individual human aura. Through occultism we can take things literally again. We see how the images of mythology are based on real facts; and we look deep into the clairvoyant visions of the wise man who taught in the mystery schools and who, through his astral perception, was able to tell the people, who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance, about these visions in imaginative images. He gave the people truths that he experienced in a half-awake, clairvoyant intermediate state. He knew that he could count on understanding from those people who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance. If we immerse ourselves in the soul of such ancestors from the point of view of occultism, our view expands. Never can the arrogance and conceit of the Age of Enlightenment come over us, saying: How have we come so gloriously far! Is it not a terrible arrogance, the conceit of the people of the 19th century, that in the face of the truths that the 19th century has found, everything that people knew before is only childish fantasy, and that what is found today must apply for all time? Is it not a terrible arrogance when those who preach today from the lecterns of the universities and courtrooms, and those who tinker around, claim that the only form of truth is that which the last decades have produced? They consider themselves humble, but there is the worst kind of arrogance in this attitude. Beyond this attitude, the spirit-seeker is brought to the realization – which must seize his heart, his thoughts and his soul – that other times have also possessed the truth, only in a different form, that there are many forms of truth. And he also overcomes the other pride, that what is said by today's scholars should apply for all eternity. Just as the forms of knowledge have changed since our ancestors, as they told stories in pictures, which we today proclaim in a different form, in the form of occultism, so future times will proclaim the truth not in our forms, but in other forms that will have grown far beyond our own. We know that truth is eternal, but we also know that it flows through human souls in the most diverse forms.

One thing is that our view broadens; and the other is how such insights must flow into our inner being in a living way. We will realize this when we consider the following: What actually is this astral body that we carry within us? It is a part of that great wisdom aura, a part of the aura of Mazda, which is the body of wisdom of the whole earth, and to which forces flow from the sun. Thus we walk about on the earth and feel that we are the bearers of the sun's forces, which have been absorbed into the earth's aura. Our feeling grows for something that we have to develop: that this human body and these human bodies have been given to us by the great wisdom of the world, the great spirit of the world. In occultism, the human body is also called a temple. And we are responsible for bringing back to the radiant source what we have received, back in a corresponding refinement, purification and perfection. In this way we learn to feel at one with the existence of the world. Not in a fantastic way, but bit by bit we learn to be a note in the great orchestral music that resounds through the cosmos and which we call the music of the spheres. Our sense of responsibility grows, along with a certain elation, but combined with feelings of humility in the right balance. This is what theosophy teaches us: it teaches us in a precise way, not just that we are human beings and what kind of human beings we are, but it makes us spiritual people who know our place in the spiritual and cosmic existence. This is the ethics, the moral teaching, that flows from knowledge. When we grasp this, then moral feelings pulsate through us that have nothing of sentimentality and philistinism. A natural moral teaching passes through us when we perceive the moral teaching as a direct consequence of knowledge. Theosophy, when properly understood, cannot help but bring people the highest moral concepts, because it brings knowledge, the realization of how man is placed in the whole context of the world. Theosophy will never stoop to admonishing or preaching. No one becomes better when admonished: Be good! or: Do this, for it is good! - because that leads people to sentimentality and philistinism under all circumstances. Theosophy shows us what man is and how he is connected with the whole world, and it regards it as somewhat unseemly to approach man with moral principles, because man is so constituted that he follows the right morality all by himself out of knowledge - when he knows himself. Not in the lower, but in the higher sense, the occultist feels it as a violation of spiritual shame if he were to address himself directly and immediately to the feelings of men. He addresses himself directly to the intellect, but he presents the knowledge in such a way that the feelings attach themselves to it. He presents the objective facts to man, and then the feelings come of themselves. He does not approach man because he has the greatest respect for man, and because he has the sense that in every man the perfecting man is to be respected and esteemed. When a person learns the truth, he becomes good, because the soul of truth is kindness. When a person absorbs the knowledge of the truth, he absorbs kindness with it. This kindness does not follow from lower knowledge, but it follows from higher knowledge. Therefore, basically, the will to knowledge should flow into people through the theosophical current, because that is the sure path to perfection, to goodness.

And so we have seen at the same time how a directly practical question of life arises for us from such considerations, and how spiritual wisdom is incorporated into our culture and into our whole life.

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.

In these lectures, some of the occult signs and symbols will be discussed in such a way that the meaning and significance of such symbols and signs will be revealed not only to the mind but also to the senses and the soul.

You all know that in occultism, in Theosophy, the most diverse symbols and signs are used, and you also know that sometimes a great deal of ingenuity and speculation is applied to interpreting such signs and symbols. These lectures will now show us that much of this acumen and speculation is misplaced, and that speculation and acumen are not at all the abilities by which one can come close to the real meaning of occult signs and symbols. For the occultist, signs and symbols are by no means limited to what is listed as such in the usual manuals and writings. Rather, we find occult signs and symbols most frequently where we might least expect them: In myths and tales rooted in the people, deep occult truths are hidden. The mistake usually made in the interpretation of such myths and legends is simply that too much ingenuity, too much speculation is applied; one might almost say that too much is sought in a rational, too much reason is sought in a deep sense. Of course, a series of four lectures cannot exhaust this subject, but only treat it aphoristically. Nevertheless, what we discuss should be presented in such a way that we can form a conception of the relationship between the occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds, namely, what is called the astral world and the devachanic or spiritual world.

You know that even in ordinary language, when we want to imply something higher, we often use certain figurative similes. For example, if we want to use an image for knowledge or for insight, we say “light” or also “light of knowledge”. Behind these simple expressions of our language there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound. Those who use such expressions are often not even aware of the origin and therefore often have no idea how, for example, the image of light relates to knowledge or insight. They take it as a figure of speech, just as poets use figures of speech today. We would be quite wrong if we thought of occultism only in terms of such a figurative meaning. Things are much, much deeper. What in modern language is called symbolic, what is called pictorial, and what is also called an allegory, is as a rule misleading. It is easy to think that a sign has been arbitrarily chosen for something. In occultism, no sign is ever chosen arbitrarily. When a sign is used in occultism for a thing, there is always a deeper connection.

However, we will not be able to truly understand this connection between occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds if we do not delve a little into how man, from the point of view of occultism, relates to his environment. When occultism, or that elementary part of occultism that is proclaimed today as Theosophy, will one day fulfill its mission in the world in a deeper sense - with that only a beginning has been made - when it will one day come to the various branches of our life and culture are permeated by the truths and impulses of occultism, then the whole emotional and intuitive life of man, his whole relationship to the world around him, will change fundamentally. If we want to describe how today's human being relates to the environment, we have to say: for a number of centuries, the human being has increasingly developed a relationship to the environment that is very abstract, very intellectual, very materialistic. A person walking through the fields today, whether in spring, summer or fall, usually sees what meets the eye, what the senses can perceive, what the mind can combine from the sensory perceptions. If a person is aesthetically inclined and has a poetic sensibility, they imbue their perceptions with feelings and emotions, feeling sadness and pain at one natural phenomenon and elation, joy, and delight at another.

But even where, in the case of modern man, dry, sober sensual perception gives way to poetic and artistic feeling, it is actually only a beginning of what must be given through occultism, not to reason, not to the mind, not to the heads, but to the souls and the hearts. Only then will Theosophy become a significant factor in life, when it gives us not just a mental summary of all kinds of events in the physical, astral and devachanic planes, but when it becomes so ingrained in our souls that our souls feel, sense and learn differently. We must realize that through Theosophy and Occultism there will really come to pass more and more what we emphasized in our lecture yesterday: Humanity will learn to see in what is expressed in the outer world, as it presents itself to the senses, the physiognomy, the gestures, the facial expressions, through which what is soulful and spiritual is revealed behind things. We will learn to see an expression of the spiritual and soul-life in what is going on outside in the surrounding world, in the movements of the stars, just as we see an expression of something soul-like in the hand movements or in the gaze of a person. And so we will learn, for example, to see in the brightening air an external manifestation of internal processes of spiritual beings that truly permeate the air, the water and the earth.

Let us try to imagine how nature appears around us when we elevate ourselves to a concept of the soul and spirit that lives around us. Once we have opened ourselves up to this, we have to ask ourselves: What about the souls of the creatures living around us on the physical plane, the souls of animals, plants and minerals? What is in these three kingdoms of nature, besides what is physically presented to our senses? If we consider the animal kingdom, it differs quite substantially from the human being in spiritual and mental terms. What we have in the individual human being, enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, we do not have in the same way in the individual animal. The individual animal can rather be compared to an individual limb of a human being. We can compare all formally identical animals, so for that matter all lions, all tigers, all pikes, all flies and so on, everything in the animal kingdom that has the same form, with a limb of the human being, for example with the fingers of the hand. If we take the ten fingers of the human being, we will not be tempted to ascribe a soul to each of the ten fingers that would be endowed with ego. We know that all ten fingers belong to a single human being. We ascribe the I-soul to the individual human being. Just as we ascribe the I-soul to a single human being, we ascribe an I-soul to an entire species of animal; whether you call it the same group or species soul is not important. What is important is that we think of things as flowing into each other, fluctuating. Thus, in the case of a group of animals of the same form, we must assume that the same thing underlies them as underlies the individual human being: the I-soul. However, we must not look for this soul of the animal groups where we look for the I-soul of the human being. The place where this I-soul of the human being is between birth and death is the physical plane. This is not to say that this I-soul, by its nature and essence, belongs only to the physical plane, but the human I-soul lives on the physical plane. This is not the case with the group I-ness of animals. For these group Iches of animals, to which the individual animals belong that are of the same nature, it does not depend on the place where the individual animals are; whether a lion is in Africa or here in a menagerie, it makes no difference. The individual animals all belong to the same group I, and the group I is on the astral plane. So if we want to find the ego of a group of similarly shaped animals, we have to go clairvoyantly to the astral plane; and on the astral plane, the group ego of the animals in question is as complete a personality as a human being is on the physical plane. If a man puts out his ten fingers, and you put up a wall here, and the man puts his ten fingers through the ten holes in the wall, then someone standing outside the wall sees only the ten fingers; if he wants to find the ego behind the ten fingers, he must go behind the wall. So you must imagine that we have to see the individual lion as part of the group ego of all lions. If you go to the astral plane, you will find there a lion-genus individuality or personality of all lions, just as you find the individuality for the ten fingers of the human being behind the wall. The same applies to the other similarly formed animal species. And when you “walk” on the astral plane, you will find the astral plane populated by these animal group-I's, which you will encounter there just as you would encounter individual people here on the physical plane. The only difference is that these group-I's reach out for the separate animal individuals on the physical plane, just as you reach through the wall for the individual ten fingers.

But there is an enormous difference between the nature, the inner character of the group-I of the animals and that which is the character of the individual human being. This difference will seem very paradoxical to you, but it exists. There is a peculiar fact here: if you compare the intelligence and wisdom of the animal group-I on the astral plane with the intelligence and wisdom of humans here on the physical plane, you will find that the animal group-I are much cleverer. Everything they have to do is done with the greatest matter-of-factness. In the course of evolution, the human being must first bring his I to that wisdom which the animal group-Iche already have on the astral plane. These animal group-Iche lack one thing, however, which the human being here on the physical plane has to develop throughout the entire evolution on earth. This specific element is not to be found at all in the animal group-Iche. This is the element of love, everything that is love - from the simplest form of blood love between blood relatives to the highest ideal love of a universal brotherhood of man. This element is being developed by humanity within the evolution of the earth. The animal group-egos also have feelings, perceptions and volitional impulses. The mission of the human being here on earth is to develop love; this is lacking in the animals. The basic element of the group ego of animals is wisdom, just as the basic element of the human ego is love.

If we now want to find out how we ourselves are to perceive the revelations of these animal group-Iche within the surrounding nature, we only have to remember that everything around us here are revelations of spiritual events and spiritual beings. Those who are not endowed with clairvoyant abilities cannot, of course, take those “walks” on the astral plane whereby they encounter the population of animal group-Iche there as they encounter physical human Iche here on the earth. But even those who are not clairvoyant can perceive the effects, the deeds of what the group-Iche do here on the physical plane. He can observe how every year, when autumn approaches, the birds fly in the direction from northeast to southwest to the warmer regions, and how they fly back in very specific paths when summer approaches. If you compare the individual paths according to their height and direction for the individual bird species, you begin to suspect that there is wisdom, deep wisdom in all of this. Who is in charge of all this? The animal group egos are in charge. Everything that the various animal species accomplish here on our planet is an effect, an action of the animal group egos. And if you follow these actions of the animal group egos, you will find that, essentially, these animal group egos span the circumference of the earth, that they unfold as forces around the circumference of the earth. The earth is circled by forces of the most manifold kind, by forces that go around the earth in the most manifold convolutions, in straight and crooked and snake-like lines. Man can see these forces here only in their effects, in their revelations. When he grasps these revelations, he can divine what, with clairvoyant ability, leads him to the group Iches of the animals. Thus we can learn to empathize with the wisdom that takes place in our animal kingdom. What the genera and species do reveals something of the deeds of the animal group-I.

The situation is different for the plant world. For the plant world, too, the occult observer sees a series of I's, but there are far fewer I's for the plant world than for the animal world; they are more limited in number. Again, whole groups of plants belong to a common I, and these lie, when we visit them, in an even higher world. While the animal group I's are on the astral plane and live out their lives in the astral that flows around and envelops our Earth, the plant group I's are to be found in the lower regions of the Devachan plane, in what we are accustomed to calling in Theosophy the Rupa parts of the Devachan plane. There they live as closed personalities; just as people do here, the group-I-ities of plants walk there. Along with other beings that do not have a physical body at all, the plant-I-ities are there and form the population on the lower devachan plan.

How does a person find their way into the perception of these plant group-I-ities? The perception itself is ultimately tied to the development of clairvoyant abilities. But this development leads from lower levels upwards, ever higher and higher. What one must first develop in order to ascend to these abilities is feeling and sensation for the matter. Real, true clairvoyant abilities are always based first on the development of feelings and sensations, but not on trivial, egoistic feelings, no, on deeper and more devoted feelings. This is something completely different.

When you look at a plant, you must first of all focus your attention on the fact that the plant develops its roots into the soil, that it pushes its stem upwards, unfolds its leaves upwards, gradually transforming them into sepals and a corolla, in which the fruit then forms. It is important to realize that we cannot compare the plant to the human being in this way. We must not compare the human being to the plant in such a way that we compare the head of the human being to the corolla of the plant and his feet to the root. That is completely wrong. In occult schools, it has always been pointed out and said: You must compare the plant and the human being. But you have to compare them in such a way that you compare the head of man with the root of the plant. Just as the plant turns its root towards the center of the earth, so man turns his head into the universe; and just as the plant chaste turns its blossom and its fruit organs towards the sun, man shamefully turns his fruit organs straight down, where the plant turns its root. That is why occultism says: Man is the upturned plant. The plant appears like a human being standing on its head; the animal stands in between.

In what is usually called a plant, only the physical body and the etheric body of the plant are present. But the plant also has its astral body and its I. But where is the astral body, and where is the I of the plant? We can ask about this place, because it is only a general definition of the matter when one says that the group I of plants is on the lower Devachan plan. We can indicate quite precisely where the astral body of the plants and where the ego of the plants is. The astral body of the plants, and indeed the astral body of all plants that exist on our globe, is the same as the astral body of the earth itself, so that the plant is immersed in the astral body of the earth. In terms of location, the plant-I am in the center of the earth. From the occult point of view, we can understand the earth as a great organism, as a living being that has its astral body; and the individual plants that are on our earth are the limbs. Individually, separately, they only have the physical body and the etheric body. In the individual plant, the individual lily, the individual tulip and so on, there is no consciousness; the earth has its consciousness, its astral body and its I. But there are not only plant 'I's; there are also other spiritual entities. We must not ask whether there is room for all of them. They are interwoven, and they can get along very well there. So when you look at the individual plant, you can only ascribe to it the properties of a physical body and a life body, but not consciousness as an individual being. But plants do have a consciousness, and it is connected with the consciousness of the Earth, it is part of the consciousness of the Earth. Just as we human beings have a consciousness that encompasses joy and sadness, and these interpenetrate each other, so the individual astral bodies of plants permeate the astral body of the Earth, and the plant 'I's permeate the center of the Earth. The living plant occupies the same position in the organism of our earth as milk in the animal organism. Similar astral forces underlie the process by which the plant sprouts from the earth, greens and flowers, and by which the cow gives milk. When you pick a plant with its flower, it does not feel unpleasant for the earth. The earth has its astral body and has feelings there, and when you pick a plant, it feels the same as when a calf sucksleaks, it feels a kind of sense of well-being. When you remove what has grown out of the ground, the earth does not have the individual plant - a sense of well-being. If, on the other hand, you tear out the plant by the roots, it is for the earth as if you were tearing flesh from an animal; it has a kind of feeling of pain.

If we delve into this, not just in the abstract terms of group-I-ness, but in such a way that we transform the empty abstract concepts into feelings and sensations, then we learn to live with the processes of nature; our observation of nature becomes a living sensation. When we walk through the fields in autumn and see the man with the scythe mowing the grain, we get an inkling that, to the same extent as the scythe passes through the stalks and cuts them off, something like spiritual winds is breathing feelings of well-being over the field. And so it is. What the clairvoyant sees in the astral body of the earth is the spiritual source of what has just been described. For the one who sees into these things, the mowing of the grain is not an indifferent process. Just as one can feel and see in a person, through one experience or another, that astral forms of a very specific kind arise, so one can see these astral expressions of the earth's sense of well-being sweeping across the fields in autumn. It is different when the plow cuts furrows through the earth and reworks the roots of the plants. The plowing through with the plow causes pain to the earth; we see feelings of pain emerging. In response to what has just been said, one could easily object that it would be better under certain circumstances to remove plants from the earth by their roots and replant them than to walk across a meadow and tear up all kinds of flowers out of idleness. Such an objection may well be correct from a moral point of view, but here we have a completely different point of view. It could, of course, be better for a person who is just beginning to go gray to pluck out the first gray hairs if he finds this right for aesthetic reasons, but it still hurts him. It is a completely different point of view when we say: plucking the flowers does the earth good, and when we dig up the plant by the roots, it hurts the earth. Life enters the world through pain. The child that is born causes pain to the mother who gives birth to it. This is an example of how we must learn not only to recognize but also to empathize with nature in our environment.

This extends to the mineral kingdom. Minerals also have their I, only the I of minerals lies even higher; it lies in the upper parts of the Devachan plan, which theosophical literature is accustomed to call the Aupa-Devachan. These group 'I's of the minerals are also partially self-contained entities, just as the human 'I's are on the physical plane, as the group 'I's of the plants are on the lower devachan plane, and as the group 'I's of the animals are on the astral plane. On the physical plane, you have only a physical body of minerals, but the minerals also have an astral body and an etheric body. The seer sees the living connections; he knows that when he goes out to a quarry and sees the workers cutting stones there, something is felt there just as when you cut into the flesh of an organism. And while the workers are at work, astral currents flow through the stone realm. What belongs to the mineral as an astral body can be found in the lower parts of the Devachan plan, and the I of the minerals is to be found in the upper parts of the Devachan plan. The group I of the stones feels pain and pleasure. When you break stones, the mineral group I feels pleasure, pleasure. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it is true nonetheless. If you only think in analogies, you might believe that when you smash a stone, it hurts the stone just as much as if you were to wound a living being. But the more you smash the stone, the more pleasure the mineral ego feels. Now you may ask: When does the mineral ego feel pain? You can perceive pain for the mineral ego in the following example. Take a glass of water in which table salt has been dissolved. Now cool the water in the glass until the salt separates out as solid crystals, thereby re-solidifying the mineral substance. Pain arises in this separation of the solid. Similarly, pain would arise if you were to reassemble all the individual pieces into which you had broken a stone. In the group ego of the minerals, pleasure arises whenever the mineral dissolves, and pain arises whenever it solidifies. A feeling of well-being arises when you dissolve salt in heated water, and a feeling of pain arises when the cooling of the water causes the salt to crystallize.

If we imagine this in a larger, cosmic context, we can see how the formation of our earth and our minerals is connected to such a process. If we trace the formation of our Earth far back in time, we come to ever higher temperatures, to ever greater warmth of our Earth; and we encounter a state of our Earth in the Lemurian period when the individual stones had dissolved, when even the minerals that have now crystallized into solid form ran out, as iron runs out today in ironworks when it is liquefied. All our minerals have undergone a process similar to the one you are experiencing on a small scale when the dissolved salt is deposited in a glass when the water cools down. In this way, everything has solidified and contracted on earth. This solidification has taken place in such a way that solid crystals have gradually been embedded in the liquid earth through contraction. Only through this solidification could the earth become the dwelling place for today's physical humanity.

However, this solidification is to be understood in such a way that it reached a peak in a certain period of time. This peak has now been passed in a certain way, and today we can already see a process of dissolution to a greater or lesser extent. When the Earth has reached its goal, when people have purified and spiritualized themselves to the extent that they can no longer draw anything out of the Earth, then the Earth itself will also be spiritualized again. Then all its mineral inclusions will have become fine and ethereal, so that the Earth can pass into an astral state, which it also had before it became physical. The physical process of dissolution is a transitional state to this.

When we look at the earth at the time when it was preparing to become the solid place, the solid ground on which we walk at our present stage of development, we see an ongoing process of suffering for the earth. As it becomes more and more solid, it suffers and “groans in pain”. Our existence has been achieved through its pain. And we find an increase of this pain in the early part of the so-called Atlantean period. From the time when man gradually brought about his own purification, the earth also attained liberation from pain and suffering. This process is not yet far advanced. The greater part of the solid ground that lies under our feet still suffers today, and when we turn our clairvoyant gaze to it, the solid ground is a revelation of the sighs of the earth's being. Whoever studies these facts from the occult and then rediscovers them in the great religious scriptures, will realize from what depth of the spiritual world these scriptures are written. We develop more and more a feeling of reverence for these religious documents. Through our experience, we can thus empirically recognize, by looking at the facts of the outer world, what real foundations underlie St. Paul's saying: “All nature groans in pain, awaiting adoption as a child.” Translate this saying of St. Paul's for yourself: All becoming earth is a becoming under pain, a drawing together into the firm under pain, so that afterwards for their beings the “adoption as children,” the spiritualization, can take place.

In what is really called the Secret School we must begin with such images from our environment, which, when they are looked at, awaken feelings in us. One begins by imparting to the pupil who wishes to undergo a training such images and concepts that enable him to see what is happening in nature not only as an external process, but to feel it as an inner experience with his whole soul, to feel how the becoming of our earth, its solidification, is like pain. This image of pain represents a real spiritual fact. In true occultism, images are not something invented, but are derived from real spiritual facts. No philosophy, no speculation, not the greatest acumen can unravel such an image; only the knowledge of the facts of the higher worlds leads to understanding. In occultism, all images are expressions of spiritual facts.

I just wanted to give you a hint today of how what we acquire in elementary theosophy as ideas, concepts and notions gradually leads to experiences; and every image in occultism is taken only from experiences. If you take, for example, the well-known image of the swastika, you can find the most astute interpretations for this image in the various scriptures. How did it originally come into occultism? This image is nothing other than the reflection of what we call the astral sense organs. Through a certain approach, through training, the human being can develop astral sense organs. These two lines (it is being drawn) are actually movements in the astral body, which are seen by the clairvoyant as fiery wheels or flowers. They are called lotuses.

For these wheels or lotus flowers – of which, for example, the two-petalled one is located in the area of the eyes and the sixteen-petalled one in the area of the larynx – for these astral sense organs, which appear as a luminous phenomenon in the astral world, is the sign, the image, the swastika. Or let us take another symbol, the so-called pentagram. You cannot find the original meaning of the pentagram by speculation or philosophy. The pentagram is a reality; it is a picture of the working of currents, of force currents that are found in the etheric body of the human being. There is a certain flow of forces in a person from the left foot up to a certain point on the head, from there to the right foot, from there to the left hand, from there through the body, through the heart to the right hand, and from there back to the left foot, so that you can draw into the person – into his head, arms, hands, legs, feet – the pentagram.

You have to imagine it as a force effect, not just as a geometric figure. In the etheric body of the human being you have the pentagram. The force effects follow exactly these lines of the pentagram. The lines can take the most varied contortions, but they always remain drawn as a pentagram on the human body. The pentagram is an etheric reality, not a symbol, but a fact.

Thus every symbol in occultism is an image of a fact in the spiritual world. One recognizes its significance only when one can point to the world in which this fact is rooted. Therefore, even the greatest acumen cannot lead to the interpretation of occult signs. The meaning of occult signs and symbols can only be found through experience [of spiritual worlds], and only with the realization of their meaning can man do something with them. It is therefore by no means useless for man to be told and told something that was first found through clairvoyant ability. And from the fact that has been researched, man can in turn be led back to the causes of that fact itself.

The same applies to signs and symbols as to ancient legends and myths. It is a theory based on erudition that legends and myths were invented by folk poetry. The people do not make up stories. All legends and myths are remnants of a time when man was still clairvoyant to a certain extent. What we are told in European legends and myths are records of facts that people saw in the past. Everything in these legends, fairy tales and myths was originally seen clairvoyantly and is the retelling of original clairvoyant experiences. That is what mythology is all about: the retelling of clairvoyant experiences.

Even today we can follow all the events related in mythology on the astral plane. The deeds of Wotan or Odin are real happenings. We must seek realities behind the occult signs, symbols and seals. And the less one allows oneself to be tempted to undertake an interpretation of these signs out of speculation, the better it is.

This lecture series is intended to guide us into the factual sense of occultism. No sign is invented or conceived; it is a picture or reproduction of a real process in the spiritual world. And all the stories we encounter in mythologies are renditions of what people saw when a large proportion of people still had clairvoyant powers.

After yesterday's introduction, we want to move on to discussing some very characteristic signs and symbols today.

We emphasized yesterday that only humans, as they live here on the physical plane, have an individual soul, an ego, and that the animals that surround us have a group ego, a group soul, which lives on the astral plane and can be found there as a closed entity. Thus, when we look at them spiritually, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom are on opposite sides, the animal kingdom as group soul or group ego and the human kingdom as individual ego. We must not imagine that there are no transitions between the individual entities in the universe. Although the saying that nature does not make leaps is not at all correct for the occultist, transitions can be found everywhere. And so you will also find a transition between the group souls of the animal kingdom and the individual soul of the human being. It would be wrong to imagine that a person, upon entering earthly existence, had a fully developed individual soul, and that this soul would then incarnate again and again in the same form here on earth. It is much more the case that the human being today is in a gradual transition from a group soul, which he had in ancient times, to the fully developed individual soul, which he still does not have today. He is only on the way to the complete integration of his individual soul into his physical body. He will only have this completed individual soul when the earthly existence is more or less complete. For the vast majority of people today, their ego is an intermediate product between a group ego and an individual ego. The further back we go in the past, the more the human ego is still a group ego. At the beginning of their existence on earth, when the souls first descended from the divine worlds into our physical plane, human souls were still group selves. Several people belonged together to a group that had a communal soul, a group self.

On the one hand, we want to hold on to that. On the other hand, we now want to take a closer look at the members of human nature itself. You are well aware, since it has been said over and over again, that man initially has four members of his being: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body and the I. And this I, when we look at it more closely, appears to us again divided into three parts, which we know under the names: sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul. In the sentient soul and in the mind or emotional soul, the independent I first dawns, and only in the consciousness soul do we have the first announcement of the self-conscious I. Only then does that which is called the fifth part of his being, the spirit self or manas, gradually shine into the human being. So, in today's human being, we have the following structure: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body; then, intimately connected with the astral body, the sentient soul, which is embedded in him; then the mind soul and the consciousness soul; and again in the consciousness soul, which is the actual I-soul, the spirit self or Manas is incorporated. This is roughly how we would have to imagine today's human being.

Now we must realize which of these human limbs is the most developed, the most perfect. Some of you have already heard me say that, as man is developed today, the physical body is the most developed, the most perfectly developed limb. One must not confuse “most developed and most perfectly developed” with “higher natured”. Certainly the etheric body and the astral body are of a higher nature than the physical body, but the etheric body and the astral body will only achieve the perfection of their development in the future. In its way, the physical body is the most perfect part of the human being today. Anyone who studies the physical body, not just anatomically and physically, but penetrating its mind and heart, will stand in awe of the tremendous wisdom built into the physical body. Our physical body shows us the perfect, wise structure in every smallest of its limbs. If you take just a piece of the thigh bone from this physical body, the uppermost part of the thigh bone, it is not a solid mass, it is a wise construction, wonderfully put together from small beams. If you study how the fine beams are joined together, you will find that everything is built to produce the greatest amount of force with the least amount of substance, so that the upper body can be supported by these two pillars of the thigh bone. Even the most accomplished engineering skill today cannot build a bridge or any kind of scaffolding with such wisdom, where such a small amount of material is used to develop such a large amount of strength. Human wisdom lags far, far behind the wisdom with which the human physical body is built. It is the same with all parts of the physical body. If you look at the brain with the nervous system, it is a miracle. And if you look at the human heart, which is only on the way to its perfection and which will reach much, much higher degrees of perfection – it is something wonderful! If you compare the perfection of the physical body with the astral body, with its drives, instincts and passions, we have to say: Although it will one day be higher than the physical body, it is still at a relatively low level today. In everything that man develops today in the way of desires for pleasures, he delivers hundreds and hundreds of attacks on the physical body. Everything that man desires and satisfies in pleasures that he procures for himself, such as alcohol and all kinds of other things, are basically heart poisons, with which he continually attacks the wisdom and wonder of his physical body. It will take a long time of development before the astral body has reached the level of perfection that the physical body has today.

From the doctrine of development, as given by our theosophical cosmology, you know that the physical body was already present on the old Saturn and underwent further degrees of perfection through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth. You know that in the second stage, on the old sun, the etheric body was added, which is therefore one degree lower in development than the physical body today. You know that on the old moon the astral body was added; it has only the moon evolution behind it and that part of the earth evolution that we have gone through so far. The I is only added on earth; it is the “baby” among the four members of human nature. Actually, the wisdom we spoke of yesterday, which permeates the group souls of animality, is imprinted in the physical body of the human being; it has passed over into the individual physical body of the human being, which is built full of wisdom. The etheric body of the human being is only on the way to its completion; in the course of its earthly development, it will absorb everything it needs to fulfill itself.

When the Earth has reached its goal, it will pass into the astral state and then into even higher states, and later transform into a planet that will replace the Earth and which we call Jupiter. Then the etheric body of man will be completed in its kind, as on Earth the physical body of man is completed in its kind. In the next incarnation of the Earth, which we are accustomed to calling the future Venus, the astral body of man will have reached its completion; it will then stand at the stage at which the physical body stands today and at which the ether body will stand in the next planetary state. And finally, when the Earth has reached the volcanic state, then our I will have reached its completion. So that we can actually say: On earth, only the physical body of man is human; in the next planetary state of our earth, the etheric body of man will become human; then it will be impregnated with what the earth can give to man: with love.

What the physical body of man carries today as its characteristic properties, it owes to the old moon. In occultism, the old moon is called the Cosmos of Wisdom. Back then on the old moon, what you now find in the physical body of man was gradually prepared. And just as what our physical body is was imbued with wisdom on the moon, so what you will find in the later Jupiter state of the earth is being prepared through the Cosmos of Love: the etheric body is completely permeated by the element of love. And just as we today admire a piece of bone in the physical body in its wisdom, so will the people of Jupiter admire the etheric body, because it is permeated with love in the same way as the physical body on earth is shaped by wisdom.

If you hold on to this, you will come to the realization that only man's physical body is truly human, only truly at the human level. The human etheric body is not yet at the human level, it is still at the level of animality, and the human astral body is still at the level of plant-like existence. When you are sleeping at night and your astral body is raised out, then the physical and ether bodies sink into a dreamless sleep; this is the state that plants are in all the time. In relation to its state of consciousness, the human being's astral body is at the level of plant-ness. The I is only at the level of the mineral kingdom. The state of consciousness of the human being is definitely on the level of the mineral kingdom. Try to examine yourself according to this truth, to see what insights you can have; try to recognize them correctly. What can a person understand? He can understand the physical laws of the mineral kingdom, according to which he can build machines and factories, erect buildings and so on. All this happens according to the physical laws of the mineral kingdom. With plants, man rightly says that he cannot grasp life itself with the intellect. The time will come when man will understand plants just as he understands minerals today; then he will also be able to build plants as he builds his cathedrals and houses and machines according to the laws of the mineral kingdom. All the laws of the mineral kingdom are imbued with the I.

Science is waiting for its ideal to be fulfilled, to produce living beings in the laboratory. It will not be able to do so unless humanity has reached a certain necessary stage of moral development. It would be a bad thing if humanity were already able to do so today. Just as one makes a clock according to mineral laws, or builds a house, so in the future man will produce living beings according to the laws of the living. But then he must be able to impress life itself upon the living thing. Whoever stands at the laboratory bench must be able to transfer from himself those vibrations, let us call them, that are in his own etheric body, to that which is to be animated. If he is a good man, he transmits good; if he is a bad man, he transmits evil. But there is a law in occultism: the knowledge of the White Lodge, which is called the secret of generation, will not be delivered to humanity until man has learned the secret of sacramentalism.

“Sacramentality” is an expression of the fact that human action must be imbued with moral perfection, with holiness. Only when the laboratory bench where he does his work becomes an altar for him and his actions become sacred, only then will he be mature enough to receive this knowledge. Consider people today with all their materialism – how far removed their laboratory bench is from an altar!

You see how man's consciousness is raised from mineral consciousness to plant consciousness. Again it is an occult sentence: Man will only attain the state of plant consciousness when he is no longer able to separate his own good from the good of all other people. As long as the individual seeks his own good at the expense of other people, the condition has not yet been reached that consciousness could be raised one step higher.

Thus, with the physical body, we are only at the stage of the actual human being, with the ether body still at the stage of animality, with the astral body at the stage of plant-like existence and with the I at the stage of the mineral. Of these truths, we want to hold on to one: we stand with our ether body on the level of the animal. The ether body transforms itself more and more during our earthly existence to the level of the human being. More and more, it permeates itself with that love that can no longer separate the good of the individual from the good of others. Just as we first developed the physical body and brought it to the level of the human being, so now the ether body, and later also the astral body and the ego, will rise to the level of the human being. The ego is still at the mineral level; it has only been incorporated into the human being on earth.

Let us now consider the relationship between our soul, that is, our sentient soul, our mind or emotional soul, our consciousness soul and the spirit self or manas enclosed in the consciousness soul, and our etheric body. Our etheric body itself is at the level of the animal. Below (written on the board - see diagram: from bottom to top) at the level of the human being, we have the physical body. We will leave out the etheric body for the time being (see points in the diagram). Our astral body, in which the sentient soul is enclosed - this is the first link in our soul -, we have at the level of the plant; then we have the mind or emotional soul. All this is on the level of the plant. Further up we then have the I or consciousness soul, in which the spirit self or manas is included, insofar as it can already be found in humans today.

We have initially left out the etheric body at the level of the animal. Now we must be clear about the fact that in every limb of the human being, the other limbs are expressed in a certain way. Thus, the human physical body has expressed within itself the revelation of the physical body itself. We find the physical principle expressed in the physical body when we look at the sense organs. In the eye we have a kind of photographic camera, in the ear a kind of piano. In short, the physical principle expresses itself in the sense organs. When we look at the human glands, we find the etheric body expressed in them; in the nervous system we have the expression of the astral body, and in the blood we have the expression of the ego. “Blood is a very special juice!” Whoever has the blood has the human ego. If the devil has human blood, he has the ego.

In the same way, every other limb expresses itself in the physical body of the human being to the extent that it protrudes into it. The blood pulsates unconsciously because the I, to the extent that it is active in it, is unconscious of its physical processes. Just as the nature of the other limbs is expressed in the physical body, so too is it expressed in the etheric body, only there it is expressed not “humanly” but “animal-like,” and in the form of certain animals, in a form that bears a certain similarity to our outer animal forms. Thus, what lies beneath the etheric body, the physical body, expresses itself like a silhouette; this part of the etheric body, in which the physical limb of the human being expresses itself, is called the “human being” (it is written on the board). The astral body, the sentient soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body, is called the “lion” because of the similarity of its etheric form; the mind soul, which expresses itself in the etheric body is called the “bull” or the cow, and the consciousness soul with the spirit self is called the “eagle” because of the similarity that its etheric form has for the clairvoyant eye.

So here you have (in diagram form) the four signs of the apocalypse: man, lion, bull and eagle – as the four expressions of the human being in the etheric body. You can see from this that those of our ancestors who conceived these profound symbols, these animal images for the human being, did not create them out of their imagination, philosophy or speculation, or out of any kind of ingenuity, but out of the world of facts, out of the occult world of facts.

Now we must realize that these four expressions do not emerge in the same way in every person; one of the expressions predominates in one person and the other in another. However, we must consider the development of all humanity. If you look at where the physical body expresses itself most strongly, we find the strongest expression in the declining, red race, in the Indians, in the particular development of the bone system that prevails here. If you want to see where the etheric body physically expresses itself particularly, you have to look for it in another human race: in the black race, in the glandular system. In the secretion of carbon you find an expression of the plant nature. The people in whom the nervous system is particularly strongly expressed on the physical level and with it the sensitive, are to be found in the malatic race, and the race in which the blood system is particularly expressed is the Mongolian race. The part of man that begins to develop the principle of manas is found in the Caucasian race. Thus you see that the classification of the human races is based on occult truths. What is found in the present-day human being is distributed throughout humanity, with one or the other predominating or receding in one human species or another.

You also find such differences in the etheric body of humans. When the clairvoyant gaze looks at the etheric body, as the physical gaze looks at the physical body, it finds humans divided into human-humans, lion-humans, bull-humans, and eagle-humans. Their group ego is astral in nature. On the astral plane, the clairvoyant finds the human group ego standing between the animal group ego and the human individual ego. The further back in time we go, the more we find that people take on one of these four forms in relation to their etheric body, and we assign one human group soul to each of these four soul groups: a human group soul to one, a lion group soul to the other, a bull group soul to the third, and an eagle group soul to the fourth. You would only get a wrong idea of these if you were to press these names, which are taken from physical animal forms, too hard. This etheric body of the lion people is much more similar to the group soul of the lions than to the individual lion here on the physical plane. Christianity has been presented by the evangelists as not being like ordinary human souls, but as comprising whole groups of people. This is due to the similarity that Christian esotericism attributed to the souls of the individual evangelists. We shall understand this more clearly when we see that the human being is on the one hand in a descent and on the other hand in an ascent. Here on earth, at the lowest point of materialism, the human being acquires the disposition of the individual soul. Man has descended from the ancient times when the individual group souls were more distinctly distinguished: man-man, lion-man, bull-man, eagle-man. When people ascend again in the future, they will retain their individual soul and develop it to a higher level with a higher consciousness of what they previously only had in a dim consciousness, the four group souls. That is why in Christianity the evangelists are given these qualities.

Let us hold on to this concept of the group souls of people for a while longer. These group souls lived much more in space than in time. When we look at animal group souls, we say that when we take a group of lions or a group of whales, they have their common group soul on the astral plane. But when we look at human group souls, we have to consider time more. A human group soul is born in the etheric, so to speak, at the boundary between the physical and the astral planes at a certain time and in turn transforms itself in a certain time. These four types of group soul that we have discussed are only the four main types, but there are countless intermediate stages. We have only indicated the most characteristic forms of man, lion, bull, eagle, which can occur in all possible mixtures.

Let us consider a group of people, say, for example, a tribe; let us take any of the old Central European tribes, for example the tribe of the Cheruscians. Such a tribe comes into being once, and then it passes away. The materialistic world observer sees in what the tribe of the Cheruscans is actually only something abstract, a concept that holds them together. But that is something unreal. The occultist sees in the tribe of the Cherusci a group soul, which comes into being, is born, at the time when the tribe of the Cherusci enters history; it grows as the power of the Cherusci grows, and it dies when the Cherusci disappear from history. Behind the developing tribe of the Cherusci, the occultist sees an evolving etheric being. Now there is a difference between an etheric being and a physical being here on earth. A physical being is born on the physical plane, grows, reaches a peak in life and dies again. Birth and death is the characteristic of the beings on the physical plane. This is not the case with the beings that live on the higher planes. If we follow animal group souls on the astral plane through thousands of years, their arising and passing away cannot be expressed by the words 'birth' and 'death'. Something quite different underlies it. It is based on transformation, metamorphosis. If you, with clairvoyant powers, were to encounter an animal group soul on the astral plane today and remember one of its previous embodiments, how it was with this animal group soul 1500 years ago, it will not appear to you as it would if you were to look at a younger person. You will, however, see the group soul passing through youth, middle age, and old age, but it does not give up consciousness in old age; it does not die. It is constantly transforming itself without passing through death. You can trace the animal group soul back to times immemorial – you will only encounter metamorphosis, not birth and death.

Something similar is the case with group souls such as that of the Cherusci tribe. When the Cherusci tribe appears on the physical plane as a number of physical people, the Cherusci soul has just formed; but it has not been born, but has transformed itself from another time, transformed. It grows with the power of the Cherusci, reaches its peak when the Cherusci tribe reaches its peak in history, and when the Cherusci tribe degenerates and disappears on the physical plane, the Cherusci soul rises anew in youth to become the soul of another tribe; it metamorphoses. Physical birth and physical death do not exist when we consider souls on higher planes. Birth and death, as we know them, only exist on the physical plane, not on the higher planes. Occult wisdom has expressed this well and has paid great attention to numbers. They have tried to determine an average number of times that a group soul, as it belongs to a particular human community, arises, metamorphoses out of another, grows and reaches its peak, only to undergo a descending development and then transform into another group soul. If we assume an average human lifespan of 75 years – calculated in lunar years – and multiply it by seven, we get the lifespan of a human group soul in its four types until its next transformation. Seven here refers to generations. Taking into account that we are dealing with lunar years, we arrive at a figure of approximately 500 years. And so it was said in occultism: The life of a group soul lasts 500 years; after 500 years it becomes another, it gives birth to itself anew without losing its consciousness.

If we look at the ego of such a group soul and look for a means of expression for the ego externally in the physical, it is indeed the blood. For the occultist, blood is the expression of fire: a substance glowing with fire. Just as the human physical body is the expression of the earth, the etheric body the expression of water, and the astral body the expression of air, so the I, not yet chained to selfishness, is the expression of fire. We therefore say – we will discuss this further tomorrow – that through selfishness, blood has found death. The human ego “consumes itself in its own fire,” through itself. This is an occult expression. Only when man overcomes egoism does he attain immortality. The human group ego is consumed by its own fire. When 500 years have passed, it burns and creates a new form out of itself. In occultism, this was represented in such a way that the group ego generally lives for 500 years, then it burns and is reanimated from its own fire, and this was called the “bird Phoenix”. The beautiful saga of the bird Phoenix has its factual background here. The Phoenix is the group ego with the characteristics of the four types, which burns itself after seven generations and is restored - one generation calculated at 75 lunar years of age.

This is the real background of the Phoenix legend. Here you have new proof that such ancient legends as that of the Phoenix are created from the deepest occult facts. It is not intended to speculate here, but to show what has been taught in the occult schools throughout the centuries, and what is a real actual experience, for which the occult signs and seals are the expression.

Again and again, when we hear such expressions of occult truths and compare them with what humanity has preserved for us in its signs and symbols, we are reminded of how much human consciousness had already created before it became mind-consciousness. Man likes to believe that we have come a long way today. But his intellect lags behind the creative consciousness of the pre-world, which, however, only the initiates had, and they hid it in the legends. The symbols of the four animals are not invented; not the thought is the starting point, the origin of it, but the vision.

When I say that the group soul is in the etheric at the boundary between the physical and astral planes, you must not imagine a boundary line. If we start from the physical plane, we have (as shown here) seven subdivisions of the physical plane; then there are seven subdivisions of the astral plane. Of these, the three lowest correspond to the three highest of the physical plane. We must consider the astral plane and the physical plane pushed together in such a way that the three uppermost parts of the physical plane are at the same time the three lowest parts of the astral plane. We can speak of a fringe zone, which is the one that our souls cannot leave after death if they are still tied to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka.

So we have definitely seen in the occult signs, symbols and seals, which we have chosen here as the first examples, something gained from the depths of the occult facts, and you would be quite mistaken if you were to ignore the deep wisdom of the past in the occult schools or to consider it in any way superseded by our modern wisdom. Where the wisdom of occult teaching comes to you in signs or symbols, it will always present itself in such a way as to be confirmed by immediate occult observation. An example of how the teaching of occultism has worked in comparatively recent times is that symbolic meanings have been read into names and words, but in such a way that there was a real meaning underlying them: facts of the higher world. We will not go back to the origin of word formation in the sense of philology; what I am about to say is not something that you could verify with philology. Even if philology were to find it wrong, the word symbolism would still be right.

The further you ascend from the physical plane through the astral world to the devachan world, the more everything presents itself to you as a mirror image of the physical plane, which you first have to learn to read. The easiest way for the student to learn this is by numbers. Suppose you have the number 543 here on the physical plane, this number can be read as a mirror image on the astral plane, i.e. 345. Likewise, all other things and events are to be read as mirror images. I will give you a blatant example: Here on the physical plane, you can see how the old chicken lays the egg and how the young chicken develops from the egg. If you look at the same event on the astral plane, you have to go backwards: first you see the young chicken, then the chicken gets smaller and smaller and finally merges with the egg. Time also runs backwards. You can see how extremely confusing this must be for the student at first glance. The passions that emanate from the person are seen as in a tableau; they radiate from the center. The reflected passions appear as if you were being stormed by animals. The lower passions man sees as all kinds of wild animals, as mice, rats and so on around him. If the student has not learned this, and the first experience of it comes to him when he sees his own passions rushing at him as mice and rats, then pathological conditions such as persecution mania and so on can easily occur.

What I have now expressed as a fact about the relationship between the higher and lower worlds was symbolically expressed in the theory of evolution in a play on words. When human beings entered into their existence on earth, they entered from a spiritual state into a sensual state - through Eve. In Eve, people saw the state where spiritual humanity became physical, and therefore sinful. If humanity is now to be led back up to the spiritual, and if the opposite is to be expressed to the woman who brought mortality into the world, then that which is to bring the immortal back into humanity must be expressed in reverse; the name must be reversed. Therefore the Angel of God addresses Mary with the words “Hail Mary!” Eve becomes Ave; this reversal has a symbolic character. Whatever a more or less incorrect philology may say about it, it does not matter. What matters is to show how the symbolic in the wording can work in occultism. The aim of this wording was to make the person, by pronouncing the words, aware of the occult fact that the physical and spiritual worlds have opposite directions in their currents.

This has a very deep meaning. Do not see anything arbitrary behind it. The best you can see behind it is that people were taught to recognize occult laws in their language. By letting people do such exercises to recognize the occult laws in language, they are consciously or unconsciously working on their occult training. The principle of symbolism is at the same time a principle of training.

We need only recall the fact that the physical and etheric aspects of the human being, as he stands before us today, are denser forms of the astral. Man was previously a purely astral being before he became an etheric being and then a physical being. In truth, all the denser substances, that is, the etheric substance and the physical substance, are differentiated out of the astral substance, just as ice is differentiated out of water. Just as water condenses and becomes ice, so the astral substance becomes 'condensed into etheric and then into physical substance. In the time when man was still a being like you are today, when you sleep, where you are outside your physical and etheric body, the forces that shaped his astral substance were pure powers of sensation and imagination. The astral substance works quite differently from the etheric or physical substance. The astral substance is in perpetual motion. Every passion, every instinct, every desire is immediately realized in the astral substance, so that in the next moment it is of a completely different form, if it is the expression of a different passion. Today, the mental no longer has such an easy effect on the dense physical body of man. Nevertheless, the mental and the emotional still have an effect on the physical body of man. You only have to observe that when a person is frightened or afraid of something, they turn pale. This means that the entire blood mass is moving differently in the body than in a normal state. It pushes the blood mass from the outside inwards. Or take the blush of shame, where the blood is driven from the inside to the periphery, outwards. These are only slight effects that the soul still has on the body today. But if you consider long periods of time, you will find much more significant effects of the soul and the mind on the body. If you could follow the human forms through the millennia, you would see that the shape, the whole physiognomy, everything about the human being changes. This happens in such a way that the soul and spiritual processes are there first. Man has certain ideas, and as he forms his ideas, so in the course of millennia his physical form and physiognomy are formed, even if this is not immediately noticeable to an external biological observer. Everything is formed from the inside out. Our external materialistic science is still far from understanding how these effects relate to each other over the course of millennia. But they are there.

To make it clear to us what such connections are like, let us just recall the first appearance of Gothic architecture, where certain processes in the development of humanity were expressed for the first time in Gothic architectural forms. Those people who devoted themselves to prayer in rooms built in the Gothic style experienced the thoughts that were the inspiration for the Gothic buildings. These thoughts, which were active in the souls of men, formed the souls, the inner powers of man, right into the etheric body; they reshaped the powers of man. And after centuries, as a consequence of these impressions received by the senses, and the ideas formed after these sensory impressions, that mystical movement emerged, which we find in Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and others. In what they devised, we have the after-effects of what their ancestors had received as impressions from Gothic buildings. And those higher individualities who lead humanity in its development consciously guide this process of human development. They consciously look ahead into the centuries and millennia, and at a certain time humanity is given what is to develop these or those qualities. Thus we see how, here in the course of a few centuries, by looking at the external forms of Gothic architecture, the pointed arch style, that mysticism striving towards heaven is expressed in Meister Eckhart, Tauler and so on. If we were to consider millennia instead of centuries, we would see how even the human body forms according to the thoughts and feelings and ideas that people had millennia ago; and the great leaders of humanity give people the right ideas at the right time in their development, so that even the human form is transformed.

Now let us imagine ourselves in the period of transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period. We know that our ancestors, indeed our very souls, lived in other bodies, in ancient Atlantis. In the last days of Atlantis, this continent, especially the northern parts, was largely covered by masses of fog, and everything that lived on the earth, on this continent, was shrouded in dense fog. And if we go back even further, we come across times when there were not only masses of fog, but where our air circle is today, there were masses of water trickling down. The first Atlantean man was even more of a water creature. It was only gradually during the Atlantean period that he transformed into an air being. At that time, man had a completely different distribution of his etheric and physical bodies. Today, the etheric body and the physical body are distributed in such a way that they are almost the same in shape and size in the upper parts. This is by no means the case with other beings. If you were to look at a horse's etheric body, you would see the horse's etheric head shining out far above its physical head. In humans, too, the etheric body of the head used to extend far beyond the physical head, and it was only towards the end of the Atlantean period that the two parts merged. A point that is now within the head used to be outside it, and only gradually was it drawn in. These two points drew closer and closer together, and in the last third of the Atlantean epoch they coincided. That was the time when the pre-Semitic race descended from the northeast of Atlantis, from the area of present-day Ireland. At that time, man acquired the ability through which the two points coincided and came to overlap. Due to the etheric body of his head being outside, the Atlantean man had a kind of misty clairvoyance. He could not calculate or count, nor develop any kind of logic of thought. This is only a result of the post-Atlantean time. But they had a kind of primitive clairvoyance because they were much more out of their heads than in them with the ether part of the head. At that time, when this ether part of the head was outside the physical head, the thoughts and feelings of the astral body also had a much greater influence on this part of the ether body and thus on the formation of the physical body. That which first lived in the astral body as feelings, sensations and thoughts continued as a process of movement in the etheric body and shaped the physical body into its present form.

Where did the present length, width and height of the physical body actually come from? It is an effect of what was first present in the astral body and in the etheric body. First there were thoughts, images, sensations and so on. You will be able to understand this better if you remember the process that occurs immediately after physical death; the physical body is first left by the etheric body and then by the astral body. During sleep, only the ego and the astral body go away, while the etheric body and the physical body remain in bed. Death differs from sleep in that the etheric body also leaves with the astral body and the ego. A peculiar phenomenon occurs, something that could be described as a sensation, but which is linked to a certain idea. The person feels as if he were growing, as if he were expanding in all directions; he takes on dimensions in all directions. This expansion of the etheric body, which it takes on immediately after death, this seeing of the etheric body in large dimensions, is a very important concept. In the ancient Atlantean man, this idea had to be awakened when the etheric body was not yet as closely connected to the physical body as it is today. The fact that it was awakened, that man was introduced to the magnitude that he feels today when he grows after death, is how the cause, the thought form, was formed to bring the physical body into the form that it has today. When, in those days, when the physical body and etheric body were still more separated, man was presented with these forms, these measurements, it stimulated the physical body to take on the form it has today. And these forms were suggested by those who are the leaders of human evolution. In the various flood legends, especially in the biblical flood legend, there are traces of precise details. If you imagine the human being surrounded by the forms that his etheric body must have in order for the form of the physical body to be formed in the right way, then you have the size of Noah's Ark. Why does the Bible state that Noah's Ark was 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits high and 300 cubits long? Because these are the proportions that a person needs in the transition from the Atlantic to the post-Atlantic period in order to form the right thought form, which is the cause that the body of the post-Atlantic person was formed in the right way in length, height and width. In Noah's Ark you have a symbol for the proportions of your present body. These proportions are effects of those thought forms which Noah experienced and which he had built into the ark in such a way that by looking at them the world of thought was created according to which the organism of the post-Atlantean man was to be built. Mankind was educated through effective symbols. Today you carry within you the proportions of Noah's Ark in the dimensions of your physical body. When a person stretches out their hands upwards, the dimensions of Noah's Ark are contained within the dimensions of the human body.

Thus man has passed from the Atlantean era into the post-Atlantean era. In the sixth cultural epoch, the epoch that will follow our own, the human body will be shaped quite differently again. Today, too, people must experience the thought forms that can provide the basis for the human body to take on the right proportions in the next cultural epoch; this must be demonstrated to people. Today man is formed according to the measurements of 50 : 30 : 300. In the future he will be formed quite differently. How is the thought-form given to man today, through which the future form of man will be formed in the next race? It has already been said that this is given in the measurements of Solomon's Temple. The measurements of Solomon's Temple are a profound symbol of the entire organization of the form of man as he will be in the next, the sixth race.

All the things that are effective in humanity happen from within, not from without. What is thought and feeling in any one period is external form in the following period. And the individualities that guide the development of humanity must implant the thought forms into humanity many millennia in advance, which are to become external physical reality afterwards. There you have the function of thought forms, which are stimulated by such symbolic images as Noah's Ark, the Temple of Solomon, and the four apocalyptic figures of man, lion, bull and eagle. They have a very real significance. We have thus already said something about the images that guide the human being when he devotes himself to them. Yesterday we also mentioned images in the four forms of man, lion, bull, and eagle; and today we are talking about images. Images lead the human being to an interest in the world that directly borders his own.

When we ascend to an even higher world, we no longer deal with mere images, but with the inner relationships of things, with what is called the sound of the spheres, the music of the spheres, the world of sounds. When we travel through the astral plane, we essentially have a world of images that are the archetypes of our things here. The higher we ascend, the more we enter into a world of sounds and tones. You must not imagine, however, that the world of sounds is a world of sounds in the external sense. You do not hear the devachan world with the outer ear. You cannot compare the essence of the sounding spiritual world with our physical sounds, which are only an external manifestation of the devachanic world of sound. The spiritual tones are substances of the devachanic world, of the spiritual world, which begins where the world of images passes into the world of sounds. These worlds are thoroughly interwoven. Here, around the physical world, is both the astral and the devachanic world; one permeates the other. It is the same as if you were to lead someone born blind into this illuminated room; the colors and the burning candles are around him, but he cannot perceive them; only when he acquires sight through a successful operation can he also perceive what has been around him all along. Likewise, the astral and spiritual worlds around us are only perceived when the senses are opened to them; then it is also perceived that these worlds do not border on each other, but penetrate each other. One can perceive everything that is in one world in the other worlds.

What spiritual music is in the Devachan world is reflected in the astral world and expressed through numbers and figures. What is called Pythagorean music of the spheres is usually taken as an image by abstract philosophers. But it is a true, genuine reality. The sound of the spheres is there, and the one who trains his hearing - the expression is not quite correct, but we have to use it - in order to perceive in the higher worlds, perceives not only the images and colors of the astral world around him, but also the sounds and harmonies of the spiritual world. Just as the things around us on the physical plane are revelations of the astral world, so they are also revelations of the spiritual world, which express themselves through the mediation of the astral in the physical. The spiritual world expresses itself in all our physical things, and the more uplifting and meaningful the sensual things are, the clearer, more beautiful, more magnificent they also show themselves as expressions of the spiritual world. If we take an insignificant thing of our physical plane, it is usually very difficult to trace it back to its spiritual archetype. On the other hand, when we look at more significant, uplifting things in the physical world, the spiritual archetypes reveal themselves with great beauty. For example, we have given an expression of the spiritual world in the interaction of the planets of our planetary system. What is present in our planetary system in the most diverse forms can be traced back to what is called the harmony of the spheres for those who can recognize these things. The movements of our planets are such that he who is able to perceive this in the spiritual world 'hears' the mutual relationships of the movements of our planets. For example, from the point of view of higher worlds, Saturn moves 2 1/2 times faster than Jupiter. This movement of Saturn is perceived in the spiritual world as a correspondingly higher tone, “with spiritual ears,” as Goethe puts it.

Let us visualize the relative speeds of the planets in our solar system. If you take the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to Jupiter, then Saturn moves 2 1/2 times as fast as Jupiter, that is, at a ratio of 2 1/2: 1, and the speed of Jupiter's movement in relation to Mars is 5 : 1. For the spiritual ear, the movement of Jupiter in relation to the movement of Mars is therefore perceived as a much higher tone. If you take the speed of the movements of the Sun, Mercury and Venus, which is approximately the same, this stands in relation to the movement of Mars at 2:1, so it is just twice as fast. If you take the movement of the Sun, Mercury and Venus in relation to the Moon, this ratio is 12:1, so the speed is twelve times as great. From a spiritual point of view, if you consider the movement of all the stars visible to us in relation to their background, the starry sky advances by one degree in one century. And the speed of Saturn's movement in relation to the starry sky is 1200:1.

We therefore have

Saturn: Jupiter = 2½ : 1
Jupiter : Mars = 5 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Mars = 2 : 1
Sun, Mercury, Venus: Moon = 12 : 1
Saturn: Starry sky = 1200 : 1

These ratios are expressed for spiritual perception through tones that can be perceived in the spiritual world by the spiritual ears. These are the real backgrounds of what is called “music of the spheres”. These numbers actually indicate harmonies that really exist in the spiritual world. So you see, just as the clairvoyant sees images and colors in the astral world, so the clairaudient hears the spiritual harmonies of things in the spiritual or Devachan world. For the one whose spiritual ear is trained for it, everything that manifests itself here in the physical world has tones as a spiritual background. Thus, for the occultist, the four elements of earth, water, air and fire produce different tone relationships that are quite beyond the perception of the ordinary person. The initiates have recreated tone relationships in the physical world that they could hear from the spiritual background of earth, water, air and fire. And the result of these tone vibrations has been captured in the original tuning of a musical instrument, the lyre. The lyre's string vibrations correspond to the notes that the initiates recognized as the four elements. The bass

string corresponds to the Earth
the D string to Water
the A string to Air
the G string to Fire.

In this way we would be able to understand much if we could go back to times long past, and we could then see how many things in culture that today are taken for granted by man have been developed out of observations in the spiritual world. The physical tones of the lyre are modeled on what first existed spiritually as the relationship of the four elements to one another.

The fundamental idea underlying this is that everything that happens in man, in the microcosm, should be modeled on what lives in the macrocosm. When everything in the microcosm resonates with the macrocosmic spiritual events, then the world and man are in harmony; and because there is no disharmony, man can truly connect with the evolution of the world and feel at one with it. But when man leaves this harmony, when he does not join the world-sounds, then his outer condition also becomes disharmonious, and it becomes impossible for him to go on with the course of the world.

All this should give us an idea of how the symbols were created out of the higher worlds, which are real facts in these higher worlds. Many of the things in our culture are symbols, symbols to be realized, through which it is ensured that the human being can be prepared to develop in the future on the physical plane that which is only on the higher planes today. It is the course of evolution that everything that is in the higher worlds today descends into the physical world. Since man is called upon to help create the outer world, he must descend with his thoughts into the physical world. He forms the world around him, and he also forms what is in his own physical being. Through Theosophy, man must develop a feeling for the fact that everything he does, feels and thinks in one time continues to have an effect in another time, in the future. When man builds temples, works of beauty, or when he creates statesmanship for the social coexistence of people, these are all things that have significance for the future. What man builds today with the help of natural forces, he forms the natural products of the future. When man builds a Gothic cathedral, for example, he assembles it according to mineral laws. It is true that the substance, the materiality, the bricks and stones, of which the cathedral is composed, will disintegrate. But the fact that the form once existed is not meaningless. The form that was imprinted on the matter by human beings remains, it is incorporated into the etheric and astral body of the earth and develops as a force with the earth. And when the earth has passed through the present stage of development and the pralaya and reappears as Jupiter, this form will grow out of the earth as a kind of plant being. We are building the works of art and beauty today, we are not building the works of wisdom in vain on our earth. We are shaping them so that they will later merge with the earth as natural products. And just as we build cathedrals and houses today whose forms are lasting, which combine with the earth and will emerge again in the future as a kind of plant, so too have our present-day plants and crystals been shaped by what our predecessors built in the pre-world, by the gods and spirits that preceded us. Everything that man incorporates into the earth from the point of view of knowledge, wisdom and beauty and of true social life, everything that he brings into the outer world in the form of symbols, even if he only forms them in his thoughts, becomes a great, joyful, progressive force for the further development of the earth; they will be real forces and forms of the future. Our machines and factories, however, everything we make to serve external utility, the principle of utility, will be a harmful element in the next embodiment of our earth. If we imprint symbols on matter that are expressions of higher worlds, they will have a progressive effect; our machines and factories, on the other hand, which only serve external utility, will have a kind of demonic, corrupting effect in the next incarnation of our earth. Thus we ourselves shape our good forces and also the demonic forces for the next age of humanity.

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch, we are most deeply immersed in matter and creating the worst demonic forces for the next epoch. Where we transform the ancient and sacred into physical and mechanical things, we are working down into the physical plane. What man fashions in this way will become the underworld. It must be clearly understood that the evil powers of the earth's evolution must also be integrated. At the time when they must be overcome, man will have to expend a tremendous amount of energy to transform evil and demonic forces back into good. But his strength will grow as a result, because evil is there to steel the strength of man by overcoming it. All evil must in turn be transformed into good, and it is providentially designed to develop strong, energetic effects in man, much higher than if he never had to transform evil into good.

All the things we think up in the physical world with our minds have a spiritual background, and we can see these things in the spiritual world. I would now like to give an example of how something that is conceived on the physical plane expresses itself in the spiritual as a figure: the Caduceus, the rod of Mercury.

Our present consciousness is the so-called bright day-consciousness, where we perceive through the senses and combine through the mind. This day-consciousness has only developed to its present level. It was preceded by another consciousness, a dream-like pictorial consciousness. At the beginning of the Atlantean period, man still perceived the world and its spiritual and soul entities clairvoyantly in astral and etheric images. Today's dream is still a last remnant of this atavistic pictorial consciousness. Let us draw a picture of this. First we have the bright day consciousness. This was preceded by consciousness, which today only plants have, which we can call sleep consciousness in humans. Then there is an even duller consciousness, as our physical minerals have it today; we can call it a deep trance consciousness. (During these explanations, the following was written on the blackboard, from bottom to top: day consciousness, image consciousness, sleep consciousness, deep trance consciousness. See drawing next page.) We can connect these four consciousnesses with a line (drawn as a straight line from top to bottom). However, man does not develop in this way. If man were to develop in the same way as the straight line, he would start from a deep-trance consciousness, then descend to the sleep consciousness, then to the image consciousness and finally to today's day consciousness. But it is not that simple for man; instead, he has to go through various transitional stages. Man had a consciousness of deep trance on the first earth embodiment that we can trace, on Saturn; there he developed this consciousness to various degrees. We draw it here in such a way that we let consciousness develop in this line. Man separates himself from the straight line and reconnects with it on the sun, where he undergoes the sleep consciousness, then continues as this spiral line shows to reach the image consciousness on the moon. And today, after various transformations, man stands at the level of bright day consciousness. Man now retains this clear day consciousness for all subsequent periods, and consciously acquires for himself the states of consciousness which he had in a dull form on earlier levels. In this way he consciously acquires for himself the pictorial consciousness again on the Jupiter condition of the earth; this will enable him to perceive again soul-life around him. This development takes place, however, in such a way that his clear day-consciousness is not weakened or dulled, but that on Jupiter he will have the image consciousness in addition to his day-consciousness. One could say: the day-consciousness brightens up into the image consciousness (see drawing: broken line). Then he will again have the sleep consciousness that he had on the sun when the earth was in its Venus state; this will enable him to look deeply into the beings, as today only the initiate can do. The initiate goes the straight way; he develops in a straight line, whereas the normal development of man is a winding one. And then, ascending, man also regains on Vulcan the first consciousness, the consciousness of trance, while retaining all the other states of consciousness. Thus man undergoes an evolution in a descending and one in an ascending line. You can see this line recurring again and again. This path of descent and ascent is a real line that has found expression in the Caduceus, in the staff of Mercury.

[The following section is only incompletely reproduced in all the lecture notes.] Thus we see how the symbols that we obtain in this way are deeply rooted in the whole essence of our world process. And a line like the Caduceus also has an educational significance for people when they devote themselves to this figure in meditation. No one can memorize this figure without it having a profound educational effect on them. The seer brought this line out of the spiritual worlds to give people something that would make them future seers. What one must develop when meditating on this line are certain sensations. At first you feel a dull darkness. You stare into the darkness, and gradually it begins to brighten and take on a violet color, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and now back, with a certain reflection of the evolution taking place, until you have risen again to violet. As you follow this shaded line, your feelings will change from the quality of the color nuances to moral feelings. If you do not perceive this line merely as a chalk or pencil line, but, by looking into the black, try to imagine the dark before your soul, and at the violet imagine the devotion, and so on through the other colors, blue, green, yellow, orange, then call the joyful before your soul with the red, then your soul will go through a whole gamut of sensations, which are first color sensations and then become moral sensations. By reflecting the form of the staff of Mercury in sensations, something is incorporated into the soul that enables it to develop the higher organs. Through the real symbol, it is transformed so that it can receive the higher organs within itself.

Just as the influence of outer light once magically transformed indifferent organs into eyes, so too does devotion to the symbols of the spiritual world magically transform the organs for the spiritual world. It is quite impossible to say: I still cannot see what is to arise there. That would be just as if the person who had not yet had eyes had said: I do not want to let the light work on me. We must first be taught what can lead to the development of the inner organs, then we can perceive the secrets of the spiritual world around us.

I would like to discuss some more characteristic symbols and signs today, so that we can become clearer and clearer about the actual basic theme of our lectures, which should consist of showing how signs and symbols relate to the astral and spiritual worlds, also called the devachanic world.

We have seen that the symbols and pictures and the numerical and formal relationships really taken from the nature and essence of the higher worlds, when absorbed by the soul, evoke in it real soul forces in the form of perceptions, thoughts, ideas and feelings, which have a formative effect. Yes, we could even see that Noah's Ark was formative for the present physical body of man, and that the Temple of Solomon, when it works in its forms on the people of the present, will have a great significance for the shaping of man in the sixth race. From these statements you can already see that the path taken by the guides of humanity, who are constantly working on the course of human development, is actually similar to that taken by the individual in the elementary secret schools. There, too, we are dealing with a concentration of sensations, thoughts, images, and so on - many other things are added - that are effective and formative for the human being.

In many cases, the various occult currents of the present day are of the opinion that in our time there may be an ascent into the higher worlds by other means than through the application of imaginative and symbolic ideas. And for people of the present day, ascending into the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If you raise the question: Are such states of fear justified?, then you can say: Yes and no. In a certain respect they are justified; in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really go up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world. It is a mistaken assumption if someone thinks that he can pass through the astral world blindfolded. You must realize, however, that the spiritual world as such has different regions. Man has descended from the spiritual world into the physical world, and he must ascend from the spiritual world back into the spiritual world. What must be avoided is that man, in his development, falls back into earlier states. Man must never fall back into earlier states. Every mediumistic state is a falling back into an earlier state, whereas true secret schooling is an ascent into higher states. Man must ascend through the astral world with full, bright day-consciousness in order to reach the higher regions of the spiritual world. Whatever longings, passions, instincts today's man carries within himself is anchored in the astral body, of which the astral body is the carrier. If a person wants to ascend to higher worlds, he must work with feelings and sensations; there is no other way. But the point is that he should never try to ascend to the higher worlds other than by fully maintaining the achievements of our physical world, that is, never with a damping of consciousness. When we look at mediums, we always find that they are thrown back into an earlier state of consciousness. Their bright day consciousness is dampened down, weakened, and an earlier state of consciousness, which the person has already overcome, is evoked. Anyone who wants to become a clairvoyant in the modern sense must retain their present bright day consciousness and take it with them. He can only do this by passing through the point of “sensuality-free thinking”, and nothing can ever happen when a person passes through sensuality-free thinking. Let us be quite clear about what this means.

Sensual thinking and imagining is anything that starts from the sensual perception of the objects around us. If you form your ideas in such a way that you first look at an object, perceive it, and then keep it in your memory, and your thoughts are such that you are stimulated by such ideas, then you have sensual thinking. This thinking fills by far the greatest part of the soul experiences of the present human being. And when a person examines himself to see how much remains to him when he throws out of his soul all ideas that are caused by sensory perception, then he will first become aware of what content is still there in the soul. When the ideas that were stimulated by external impressions have been removed, then he will grasp what the Greek philosopher Plato meant when he wrote over the entrance to his school, “No one unfamiliar with geometry shall enter.” This means that no one should enter who has not been able to rise to thinking free of sensuality. He did not demand ordinary geometry. Nor is it required today by those who want to ascend to higher worlds. Nor would it be necessary today for intrinsic, objective reasons. But from geometric representations one can form an idea of what thinking is that is free of sensuality. If you put three beans here, add three more beans, and another three beans, then you can learn from this sensual impression that 3 times 3 = 9. The child or primitive man learns it by the fingers. This is sensual thinking. When you no longer need the fingers or the beans, but when you learn the same thing through pure mental contemplation, then it is sensual-free thinking. The child starts learning from a bridge [beans or fingers] and only later rises to sensual-free thinking. If we draw a circle on the blackboard, it is not really a circle; what we draw there is a collection of little chalk mountains. You will not be able to grasp what a real circle is with sensory perception alone. Only the spiritually viewed, inwardly constructed circle is free of sensuality.

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.

Let us make a schematic drawing for ourselves. Some things become unclear due to incorrect symbolic drawing. So, although it is sufficient for understanding certain relationships if the physical plane, the astral plane and the devachan plane are drawn on top of each other, it is more correct to imagine the physical world as a self-contained sphere, where the astral is all around, and the devachanic is around that again. Instead of drawing horizontal layers, it is good to draw it this way (see drawing), because this provides a way to distinguish two areas of the astral plane from each other. If we look into two very specific areas of the astral plane, which we indicate here with arrow 1, we see that in the astral world, what we call the male and the female here on earth are the two opposites of “form” and “life”. Form and life are opposites on the astral plane. Now, if we want to encounter form and life on the astral plane, we will only encounter them if we go in that direction (from the center upwards, see arrow 2). If we go in the other direction (center downwards, see arrow 3), we will by no means encounter the beneficial contrast of form and life, but rather the contrast of “decay” and “disease”. So if we start from the physical world, we encounter the opposite of form and life on the astral plane above; this corresponds to the opposite of decay and disease in the astral world below, i.e. going down below the physical plane. Whenever we go to one side, where we see beneficial properties for the physical world, these correspond on the other side to destructive, harmful influences for the physical world. We now have an opportunity to distinguish between the parts of the astral plane. There are actually two quite different areas of the astral plane that affect the human soul. If we want to form an idea of how these two very different areas affect the soul, we have to imagine that in a human being we have: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body; and depending on their development, which has been described many times: manas or spirit self, budhi or life spirit, and atma or spiritual man; and in between we have, filled by the I, the soul. So that we can distinguish in a certain respect: body - which actually includes the three bodies -, soul and spirit. Now the three lower members, astral body, ether body and physical body, are reflected in the soul. Insofar as the physical body, ether body and astral body are reflected in their original nature, they introduce lower, downward-pulling qualities into the human soul. But that which is higher is also reflected in man: manas, buddhi, atma, and thus we also have uplifting, purifying elements in the soul. In strict Christianity, people also knew about this twofold way of being reflected in the human soul. One saw that the higher human nature was reflected in the soul, or the lower nature was reflected in the soul. Many sensed this, even if they were not esotericists. That is why it was said: When a person dies, he perceives the reflection of the spiritual world as the collection of laws of Moses; and when the lower nature is reflected in the soul, the devil reads the record of sins to the soul in death.

This means that the soul is presented with all the qualities that adhere to it: That which is reflected from above is held up to it as the tablets of the law of Moses; and that which is reflected from below is described by saying: the devil reads the soul's record of sins to it. If the soul does not take the right path, it can indeed sink into its lower passions; that can happen. But this must not be presented to man as a deterrent.

All imagistic, pictorial representations educate the human being in order to gradually bring him to that point in the development of life where he learns to look more and more into the higher worlds. Pictorial representations, such as the image of the old moon, are a powerful educational tool in this direction. Through such images, the idea of development is introduced to the human being in the right esoteric way. If one only presents dry, abstract concepts to the human being, he remains on the physical plane with his thinking, because ordinary thinking as such never comes from the physical plane. It is indeed a reflection of the Devachan plan; but the thought that the human being entertains is something that belongs to the physical plan, it is only a shadow image of the higher processes. No matter how fine your conceptions may be regarding the process of development, how a being on the first step of existence differentiates itself, descends and envelops itself, these are all only conceptions that give you ideas of the physical plan, but do not help you in your development. Only concepts and ideas that are both sensual and supersensible can gradually help you to really advance one step. First, you have to transform the concepts into images, into imaginations, and then repeat this process over and over again.

If one were to express this process, which was taught, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools, in a dialogue between teacher and student, one could put it like this: - In reality, such a dialogue never took place in this way, but we can present it in this way to show what the student had to go through step by step in long, drawn-out experiences. The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant and see how it directs its root into the earth, how it grows towards the sun with its stem and blossom, and how it develops its fruit organs. And now imagine the human being in contrast. The human being is poorly compared to the plant when one compares his head with the flower and his reproductive organs with the root of the plant. Even Darwin, the great naturalist, used this comparison correctly by comparing the head of the human being with the root of the plant, so that even for Darwin, the plant is the human being turned upside down. What the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam, its reproductive organs, man directs to the center of the earth. Thus, in man we have to think of an inversion of the plant, in that he freely directs all the forces that in the plant are directed toward the center of the earth to the sun-filled cosmos, and shamefully directs those organs that the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam toward the earth. The animal stands in the midst of it.

If we therefore want to draw the real directions of power that exist in the world, we can do so as follows: the true esoteric meaning of the sign of the cross is a sum of forces. One direction of force goes downwards: the plant being is directed by this force. In the human being, it is directed in the opposite direction. The animal has a horizontally aligned spine, and in it this force is manifested as orbiting the earth horizontally. The soul principle ascends from plant existence to animal existence to human existence. And Plato, who so often expressed things that originated in the mysteries, spoke the beautiful sentence: The world soul is crucified on the world body. That is, the world soul passes through the plant, animal and human; it is crucified in the forces of the three realms: plant, animal and human. And if we thus inscribe the cross into the three natural realms, then the cross becomes for us the sign of the direction of development.

Now the teacher said to the student: You have to imagine how the plant stretches its calyx towards the sunbeam, how the fruit organs reach maturity when the plant is kissed by the sunbeam. - The development into a human being happens through the fact that the pure, chaste plant substance is permeated by desires, instincts and passions. In this way man conquers his consciousness, in this way he becomes human by passing through his animal nature. By interweaving the lower nature of desire into the pure plant nature, man has ascended from the dull plant consciousness to the bright consciousness of day.

From this level of present-day man, the teacher pointed the student to a higher level. Just as man has developed from a state similar to that of a plant, so too will he purify his instincts and desires to a higher, chaste level. The teacher showed the student the structures in the physical body of man through which the higher levels of consciousness can be attained and human substance can in turn become a substance similar to that of plants. Every being must use a physical body if it wants to appear on earth. But the body of man will change more and more in the future. We distinguish between a descending and an ascending development with regard to the human organs. Some human organs are in a state of descending development; in the course of time, which admittedly counts in millennia, the human being will discard them. Other organs are in the process of becoming; in the future they will undergo an upward development, for example the human larynx; it is only at the beginning of its development. The human heart will undergo a further upward development, becoming a completely different organ in the future. While other organs have already passed their zenith, becoming detached from human nature and withering away, we have an organ in the heart that is only at the beginning of its development.

We can distinguish between striated and longitudinally striated muscles in the human body; these are voluntary and involuntary muscles. The voluntary muscles of the hand, for example, are striated. The muscles of the intestines, on the other hand, which involuntarily push food forward, are longitudinally striped. The heart is an exception here, and this is a crux for today's physiological and anatomical scientists. The heart belongs to the involuntary muscles, but it has striated musculature. Therefore, our anatomists cannot understand the heart either. They consider all organs to be the same. If we consider the organs spiritually, they may well consist chemically of the same components, but one may be in a descending development and the other in an ascending one. The heart is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle in the future; its anatomical structure already bears the characteristic features for this. Today, however, it contributes to the effect of emotional experiences on the blood. You can see how, when you feel fear, the blood mass withdraws from the periphery of the body and moves inward, or how, when you feel shame, the blood is driven from the center of the body to the periphery. In the future, in addition to the transformation of the heart, there will also be a transformation of our larynx. Today, the larynx serves to translate my thoughts into words by making the air vibrate. You can pick up and hear my words with your ears; this is caused by the vibrations of the air. The present human larynx is capable of transforming into air vibrations what is going on in the soul. The human body of the future will transform its larynx into a fertilizing organ, and the word, which today only creates in the air, will in the future become creative in our environment. Reproduction will then take place through the larynx, which will create the race of the future.

Just as the teacher pointed out to the student the chaste chalice of the plant, and how he pointed out to the human being who, in descending, has permeated his plant substance with the lower nature of passions, desires and instincts, but But in exchange for this, has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, the teacher showed how the present human being will ascend to higher states of consciousness, and how the future human being will transform the substance, filled with desires, back into pure and chaste organs. The pupil's attention was drawn to the past, present and future. Just as the chalice of the plant extends chastely towards the sun and its fruit organs grow towards the sun, this will be there again on a higher level, where man will offer his larynx as a chalice to the spiritual sunbeam. This spiritual chalice, the transformed organ of speech, was called the Holy Grail. This is a real ideal. The beginning, middle and end of human development: here you see the idea of human development transformed into a picture.

Through the feelings that we develop from these pictures, the forces flow to us that truly open up the higher worlds for us. All this takes place without magic. The images stimulate the feelings that lead the human being into the higher worlds. Feelings and sensations lead the human being into the astral world, just as the will leads him into the devachanic or spiritual world. Thinking corresponds to the physical world, feeling to the astral world, and the purified will to the devachanic world.

If we look at the plant in its original chaste substance, we find green as the color in the life of the plant. The plant is permeated by chlorophyll, by what is called chlorophyll, in those parts where the etheric body is actively alive. The etheric body has a basic law, which is the law of repetition. If only the etheric body were active in the plant, then one and the same form would be repeated again and again; leaf by leaf it sets in. But when the astral body of the earth begins to affect the plant, it completes growth and sets in the flowering. The effect of the etheric body is revealed in the repetition. This principle also applies to human growth. The etheric body shows its influence in the formation of the spinal vertebrae, but this only goes as far as the arching of the cranial vault, where the astral body begins to take effect. We can therefore only influence the etheric body through the principle of repetition. When you think and comprehend, you only affect the astral body. But when you pray or meditate, for example, and repeat the same prayer or meditation every day, you have an effect that extends into the etheric body. The way it is in the cosmos is that the principle of repetition first manifests itself in the deeds of the etheric body, then the principle of closure through the astral body. Where the astral body withdraws, the principle of repetition naturally reappears. This is how your hair and nails grow, because the astral body has withdrawn there. It doesn't hurt when you cut your hair, because pain is an expression of the astral body.

We initially have the pure, chaste plant substance, where the plant, subject only to the law of the ether body, adds leaf after leaf. Now this pure, chaste plant substance is increasingly permeated by what is called kama in theosophy, the realm of instincts and feelings, the realm of desires, right up to the images. And now, in man, that which has developed in him since he had a plant nature is to be overcome again. As man developed, he took in the red blood. The red blood brings about in the human being that which makes him self-conscious. The chlorophyll of the plant, permeated by astral substance and the I, has been transformed into the red blood. If you could permeate the green plant substance with the I and the astral substance, you would get the red blood. Now think of the image of the cross. In the image of the cross you also have something that points to the future of man. Where does man's future lie? He is to regain his plant nature, but connected with the higher level of consciousness that today's man has already gained. The red roses of the Rose Cross signify what has been gained through blood, but also what he had as plant nature and is to have again. This is prefigured in the rose. It has a plant nature, and it also has the red color of blood. The etheric body is active in the green leaves, and the astral body is active in the red blossom, where the closure is; the rose blossom owes its red to the most intense effects of the astral body of the earth.

In the future, the human being's astral body will become free and consciously active from the outside, from outside the physical body, just as the earth's astral body now acts on the rose. Then what is now present as a plant rose at a lower level will appear at a higher level as the human rose. Thus, in the wreath of roses surrounding the black wood of the cross, we actually have a sign of the development of the human being. In the black wood we see what dies; it is an image of what will also die in man. And in the red rose we see what will continue to develop until it becomes that chalice which, like the chalice of a plant towards the sun, holds out towards the spiritual sun-rays. And the rose cross, where the red roses surround the black cross, presents this process to us in an image.

The important thing about the symbols is that we do not merely think them, but that we feel and sense them. For only when we feel that the red rose is saying: that is what you will become one day, that is what the goal of human development represents to us – and when our hearts open and our feelings become pure, then the forces within us are released that lead us up into a higher world. Thus these symbols are workers at our soul. They permeate and interweave our soul; they are the greatest and most effective educators of our human race.

Just as we place images and imaginations before our soul here, so in still higher spheres the inner forces of numbers are placed before man. Man must learn to feel the inner relationships of numbers like spiritual music. One can describe the relationships of the physical body, ether body, astral body and I to one another by attempting to provide images of the relationship between these four aspects of human nature. In doing so, one experiences a kind of imagination. Thus, one can describe the relationship between the physical body and the etheric body by saying: the physical body comes into being because all the forces and substances that are spread out in the mineral kingdom are connected by the etheric body; it would disintegrate if the etheric body did not permeate it; the etheric body is an inner fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. In this way we work our way up to an image of the etheric body.

And if we try to gain a pictorial representation of the astral body, we imagine how it moves out at night and works on the etheric and physical bodies from the outside, by removing the fatigue substances. Let us make this clear to ourselves pictorially. But there is an even higher way of imagining this relationship; here one has to imagine the inner value of certain numbers. You have to recognize that the ratio of 1:3 is something quite different than the ratio of 1:7. This is not irrelevant. With the ratio of 1:3, you have to imagine that the 3 is differentiated within itself, and you have to imagine the interrelations of the individual quantities to the others.

But what is important is the ratio of 1:3:7:12. If you understand the relationship between these numbers as a tone ratio, in that you imagine that a tone makes three vibrations in a certain time, another seven vibrations in the same time, and yet another twelve vibrations, then you have expressed in these numbers the ratio that indicates the ratio of the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in spiritual music.

I = 1
astral body = 3
etheric body = 7
physical body = 12

There is good reason for this in the existence of the world. If we were to follow the development from the oldest Saturn existence to the present earthly existence, we would soon be able to find how this is rooted in the human existence. The Earth, in its first, in the Saturn embodiment, was surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. They provided the first germinal formation of the physical body. Through the influence of the corresponding signs on the body, this relationship of the number twelve to the individual limbs of the physical body came into being. The seven planets influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was a sun, the other planets were around it, and so the number seven influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was in its lunar embodiment, it was first affected by the Sun. But then, as a result of the Sun and then the Moon separating from the Earth, three bodies emerged from one body, and so the number three was effective in the formation of the astral body. And when the I came down from the higher worlds, this was expressed in the number one. The ratio of 1:3 gives you the ratio of the I to the astral body, to 7 the ratio to the etheric body, and to 12 the ratio to the physical body.

1:3:7:12 thus denotes the ratio of the four elements of human nature, which you must feel inwardly. It is not easy to awaken the sensations that one has to imagine the physical body as the most perfect of the four parts, the etheric body as the less perfect, the astral body even less perfect, and the I as the “baby” among the four members of human nature. We must think of the physical body as being twelve times more perfect than the I, the etheric body as being seven times more perfect, and the astral body as being three times more perfect. These numbers indicate the degrees of perfection for the four aspects of human nature. These numbers are therefore profound symbols for the real conditions.

Occult schools provided instructions for gradually becoming familiar with the numerical values. For example, the significance of the number three was taught by saying: “Let us consider the development of a plant and pay attention to three things.” Let us start with the plant germ. You have an inconspicuous, small plant germ, from which the plant gradually develops. We can depict this in a drawing by letting the plant germ diverge in a radiating manner, up to the leaves, flowers and fruit. Now the germ has become a plant and then the plant germ has become a plant again. What has diverged in the plant to become leaves, flowers and fruit is all wrapped up together in the germ; it has, as it were, slipped into the germ. In a developed plant, everything is revealed in the senses. Then the senses enter into a completely different realm, into the germ. There we have in the germ the senses as small as possible and the spiritual as large as possible.

But a third thing also takes place. While the germ is forming out of the plant and the new plant is developing out of this germ, elemental forces from the environment are continually acting on the plant from the outside. The germ is there, which developed from the plant, and out of it the new plant develops again; but the third comes from the whole surrounding world; and it is this third that changes each plant again a little. The higher a being stands, the more the influence of the third changes it.

Let us now turn again to the human soul and consider how it lives between birth and death. There it spreads out what it has brought with it as the fruits of a previous embodiment. Just as external influences affect unconscious plant life, so man consciously experiences the most diverse influences from outside in the life between birth and death. And everything he experiences there was not yet present in the seed; it is something entirely new, an enrichment, the fruits of which the person takes with him into a later life, into a following incarnation. What was present in the old plant continues to work in the new plant; but in the development of the new plant something else appears that was not present in the old plant.

Thus, in all development, we have three aspects to consider: first, the unfolding from a, as it were, wrapped-up state; we call this development or evolution. Then, what lies in the germ must come into being through the reverse process, the wrapping or involution. These two processes alone, however, do not yet give progress. Only when a being is able to take in influences from outside and process them into inner experiences can something new and progressive come into the world. That is the third thing; it is called creation out of nothing. You are constantly developing what is predisposed in you from the past, constantly taking in something from your environment that you transform into experiences, and then you carry that into a new embodiment. In all life, the trinity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing is at work. In the case of human beings, we have this creation out of nothing in the work of their consciousness. They experience the processes in their environment and process them into ideas, thoughts and concepts. Dispositions come from previous embodiments, but all progress in life is based on the production of new thoughts and new ideas. The circumstances of the environment are “consumed”, and the inner experiences lead to new thoughts and ideas. Therefore, three is the number of life, it is called the number of creation or of action.

On the other hand, another number is called the number of revelation. You can easily imagine which number is called the number of revelation. If you look at anything in the world, it must always reveal itself in a duality. As we cannot perceive light without darkness, so we always encounter an attenuated or opposite aspect of every real concept. Light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. Duality reigns in all that is revealed. Therefore, the number two is the number of revelation. Opposites are only united in the realm of the occult, which lies beneath the revealed. Therefore, the number one is the number of unity. Evolution and involution are not contradictions, because they would always unfold in the same way without the third - from germ to plant and from plant to germ. Only in connection with the third, creation out of nothing, does the new arise, which is expressed by the number three.

Thus, in the first three numbers you have important symbols of the spiritual world. It should be indicated to you by individual examples how that which is called symbols relates to the higher worlds, and how, for example, symbols such as the Holy Grail or the Rosicrucian in the picture express higher development.

Another beautiful symbol is the image of the mirror. We often call that which surrounds us a mirror of the spiritual, because in truth nothing external shows us anything other than the reflection of spiritual beings. You can observe this yourself in physical life. When you perceive a physical object, what does your eye see? Your eye would not see the object at all if the sun's rays did not fall on it and reflect off the object into your eye. In truth, your eye does not see ordinary objects, but the sunlight reflected from the objects, and that is how an object appears to you in a certain form. In truth, you do not see yourself when you look in the mirror either, because your spiritual part is outside of your physical being. What you see in the mirror is the reflection of the rays that fall on you from the spiritual world. What you see reflects the light of the spirit just as ordinary objects reflect sunlight. The outer body of man is actually the mirror in which his true being is reflected.

In the Atlantean period, man did not see objects outside at all. He knew that he was in a spiritual substance and therefore could see spiritually inwardly. Only in the last third of the Atlantean period did the spiritual light go out, and man only saw the reflected rays of the spiritual light. Imagine looking into a glass pane and being aware of your own spiritual qualities. Now someone applies a mirror substance to the back of the glass pane; as a result, you no longer see your own being in the glass pane, but only the image reflected by the mirror. Man now sees his image; and now the illusion arises for him that what he sees there is his ego. This illusion is wonderfully expressed in the Bible. Man lost Paradise when he became so absorbed in sensuality that he saw himself. Before that Adam and Eve had not “seen”; now “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” And because here an illusion actually occurred, legend attributes the fact of the externalization of objects to the Luciferic principle.

In Eastern Europe there is a folk tale that tells of a monk who wanted to test whether the biblical saying was based on truth: Those who seek will find, and to those who ask, it will be given. He wanted to test whether this was really true, so he prayed for what he wanted to beg for. He wanted nothing more nor less than the king's daughter herself. He proposed to the king's daughter. She told him that she would be his on one condition: he had to bring her an instrument in which she could see herself from top to bottom. This was at a time when there were no mirrors. So he went off searching, and met the devil, who told him the secret of the mirror principle. When he returned with this, he received the princess's hand in marriage; however, he later renounced her. So in order to obtain the mirror, he had to resort to the devil.

In the manifold signs and symbols that have come to us in these lectures, we have been able to see the real meaning of these images. Sensory perception is the content of the physical world. Images and imaginations are the expression of the astral world. Harmony of the spheres, sound of the spheres is the expression of the spiritual world. Those who ascend to this spiritual world perceive its inner spiritual sonority, it penetrates into them. Inspiration is the vital element of the spiritual world, just as imagination is the vital element of the astral world. A truly inspired world is created out of the spirit. IV