The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last lecture I spoke to you about the Ephesian Mysteries of Artemis, in order to draw attention to certain connections between knowledge that has come to light during the course of evolution and the knowledge that can be acquired today through clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world.

In order to supplement themes we have already studied, I want to speak today of other Mysteries which can also be said to stand at the starting-point of modern spiritual life. Although these Mysteries had taken over a great deal from earlier spiritual Movements in which the primeval wisdom of humanity was still contained, they were nevertheless an effective impulse in the spiritual Movement of the modern age.

I propose to speak to you about the influential Mysteries once centred in the troubled island of Ireland to the West of England, and mentioned in my Mystery Plays.¹

Speaking comparatively, it is much more difficult than in other cases to approach these ancient Hibernian Mysteries in what I have called in many of my writings, the Akashic Record. It is much more difficult for later vision to find in that eternal Record the pictures of these Mysteries which have remained there, than those of other Mystery centres, for in trying to approach the Hibernian Mysteries the impression is that the pictures contain extraordinarily powerful forces which repel and thrust one back. Even if the pictures are approached with a certain courage of vision—a courage which in other cases meets with less resistance than is experienced here—the opposition is so intense that it may give rise to a kind of stupefaction. Knowledge of what I am about to describe to you is therefore fraught with hindrances, as you will realise during the next lectures.

Naturally, in the Hibernian Mysteries too there were Initiates who had preserved much of the ancient wisdom of mankind and who, stimulated and inspired by this wisdom, were able to achieve a degree of seership themselves. There were also pupils, candidates for Initiation, who by the special methods in vogue there, were to be prepared to approach the secrets of the Cosmic Word. Now the preparation given to those who were to be initiated in Hibernia, was twofold. Firstly, all the difficulties attendant upon the acquisition of knowledge were brought home to the pupils; they were made inwardly aware of everything that can be called anguish on the path of knowledge which does not yet penetrate into the depths of existence but which consists in exerting to the utmost possible extent all the powers of the soul belonging to ordinary-level consciousness. The pupils were compelled to experience every doubt, every torment, every inner struggle with its frequent aberrations, being deceived by no matter how excellent logic or dialectic—all this they had to endure and to experience the difficulties that make themselves felt when one has actually attained knowledge and then wishes to bring it to expression. It will be clear to you that there are two aspects here: to have struggled to attain a truth and then to bring it to expression, to formulate it in words. Indeed when the path of knowledge has been earnestly followed, there is always the feeling that what can be compressed into words is something that is no longer absolute truth, something that surrounds the truth with all kinds of stumbling-blocks and pitfalls.

The pupil was made acquainted with experience undergone only by one who has valiantly and genuinely struggled to attain knowledge.

Secondly, the pupil was led to experience in his life of soul how little everything that may become knowledge on the ordinary path of consciousness can, in the last resort, conduce to human happiness, how little human happiness can be promoted by logic, dialectic or rhetoric. On the other hand, it was also made clear to the pupil that if a man is to maintain his bearings in life, he must also approach those things which can in a certain way bring him joy or happiness. And so on the one side the pupil was driven to the verge of an abyss, and this always caused him to doubt: should he wait until a bridge was built by which he could cross it? He had already been so deeply initiated into the doubts and difficulties connected with the attainment of knowledge that when at last he was guided from these preparatory stages to the actual approach to the cosmic secrets, he had come to this resolution: if it needs must be I will forgo even knowledge; I will deny myself everything that cannot contribute to true human happiness.

In these ancient Mysteries, individual pupils were subjected to such severe tests that they came to the point where, in the most natural and elementary way, they developed feelings which ordinary pedantic reason regards as baseless. But it is easy to say: nobody would wish to forgo knowledge; it goes without saying that one wants to gain knowledge, however great the difficulties may be.—That, of course, is the attitude of people who do not know what the difficulties are and who have not been deliberately led to experience them, as was the case with the pupils in the Mysteries of Hibernia. On the other hand it is also easy to say: we will deny ourselves both inner and outer happiness and tread a path of knowledge only. But to one who knows the truth of these things, both declarations, so often made, appear utterly superficial.

When the pupils had been prepared to the appropriate degree, they were led before two gigantic statues, two enormous, majestic statues. One of them was majestic by reason of its external, spatial dimensions, while the other, of equal size, was impressive because of its special character. The former statue was a male figure, the other, a female figure. The intention was to make the pupils aware of the approach of the Cosmic Word. In a certain way the two statues were to be the letters by means of which the pupils were to begin to decipher the Cosmic Secret confronting humanity.

One pillar-statue, the male figure, was made of a substance that was elastic throughout. It could be indented anywhere by pressure. The pupils were exhorted to press and so make indents all over this statue. This revealed that it was inwardly hollow. It was really only the ‘skin’ of a statue, but made of an elastic material so that wherever it was indented the form was immediately restored. Above this statue, above its head, which seemed to be particularly characteristic of the whole figure, was something which seemed to resemble the Sun. The whole head was of such a nature that the pupils could see that it was meant to be something like an eye of the soul; as such it was intended to be a microcosmic representation of the whole Macrocosm. This manifestation of the Macrocosm was meant to be expressed in this colossal head by the Sun.

(Dr. Steiner here made sketches on the blackboard.) The immediate impression given by the male statue was this: the Macrocosm works through the Sun and fashions the human head which has knowledge of the impulses of the Macrocosm and forms itself inwardly and outwardly in accordance with these macrocosmic impulses.

In the case of the other statue, the pupil’s eyes fell, to begin with, upon something that seemed to be composed of luminous bodies radiating inwards, and in this framework the pupil saw a female form which was everywhere under the influence of these rays. And the feeling came to him that the head was produced out of the rays. The form of the head itself was somewhat indistinct. This statue was composed of a different material; it was plastic, not elastic, and extremely soft. The pupil was exhorted to press this statue too. Wherever he pressed it, the indent remained. Each time the pupil was tested before these statues, the pressure marks he had made were repaired before the next test. So that whenever the pupils were taken to the ceremony in front of this statue, it was again intact. The statue made of elastic substance always returned of itself to its original form.

With the second statue the impression was received that it was entirely under the influence of the Moon-forces which permeate the organism and enable the head to emerge. These experiences made a most profound impression upon the pupils. As I said, the form of the female statue was always restored. From time to time, at not very long intervals, a group of pupils would be led to this statue, and to begin with absolute silence reigned. The pupils were led to the statue by those who were already initiated, and were left there. The door of the Temple was closed and the pupils were left in isolation.

Then came a time when each pupil was taken in separately and exhorted first of all to touch the one statue and feel its elasticity and then the other in order to feel its plasticity in which the indentation remained. He was then left quite alone with the impressions which, as I have said, worked with such suggestive power upon him. Through everything he had previously undergone along the path I have described to you, he experienced all the difficulties of knowledge, the difficulties also of bliss—as I must call it. Such experiences mean far more than can be expressed in the mere words in which I am describing them—such experiences meant that the pupil passed through a whole gamut of feelings. And as a result, when he was led before the two statues he was filled with the most intense longing to penetrate what appeared to him as a tremendous riddle; he longed intensely that his soul might in some way solve this riddle, might discover what this enigma meant. On the one hand the enigma itself lay in the fact that he was being compelled to undergo such experiences; and on the other hand there was the enigma of what was contained in the statues themselves, and in the question of his attitude towards them. All this made a deep impression upon the pupils. And as they confronted these statues, in their souls they faced something like a tremendous question. In their souls they appeared to themselves as a colossal question. Their reason questioned, their hearts questioned, their will questioned, their whole being questioned.

The man of today can still learn from these experiences which in earlier times were presented visually; nowadays they cannot and need not be so presented for the purpose of Initiation. He can learn how wide a gamut of feelings must be passed through in order to come near the truth which then leads to the Cosmic Mysteries. For although it is right for the pupil of today to develop along an inner path that is not dependent upon visual perception, nevertheless he must still pass through the same gamut of feelings, must experience them through intense meditative effort. So the scale of feelings to be lived through today can be ascertained from knowledge of the experiences undergone in the ancient rites by those who were to be initiated.

The Hibernian pupils then lived through a certain period of probation during which their experiences on the path of ordinary knowledge and of happiness were to be combined with what had now arisen within them as a great question.

And now, when the effects of this were inwardly experienced by the pupils, cosmic secrets relating to the Microcosm and the Macrocosm were expounded to them as far as was possible in those days, also something of what had formed the content of the Artemis Mysteries of Ephesus and already touched upon in these lectures. Part of this was presented to the pupils during their time of probation. But now, in consequence of this, the great question that had arisen in their souls was still further intensified. The result of the stupendous inner deepening experienced and endured by the individual pupil was that he was led to the threshold of the spiritual world. He entered the region experienced by the soul when it feels: Now I am standing before the Power which guards the Threshold.

In ancient times there were many different kinds of Mysteries, and individuals were led in a variety of ways to the experience arising when the feelings are compressed into words such as these: Now I am standing at the Threshold of the spiritual world. I know why this spiritual world is guarded from everyday consciousness and I realise the essential nature of its Guardian Power, the Guardian of the Threshold.

When this time of probation was over, the pupils were again led to the statues. And then a most remarkable impression came to them, an impression that stirred the very depths of their being. I can only give you an idea of this impression by rendering in modern German the utterance that it was customary to make in the language of that ancient time.

When the pupils had reached the stage I have described, each one singly was again conducted to the statues. But now the initiating priest remained in the temple with him. And after the pupil had been able to listen in deep silence to what his own soul could tell him after all his preparations and trials—and this listening lasted for a considerable time—he saw the initiating priest rising as it were above the head of the one figure. The Sun seemed to have receded and in the space now intervening between the statue and the Sun, the head of the priest appeared, as though covering the Sun. The statues were of an enormous height, so that the priest appeared small in comparison; his head alone showed above the statue and covered the Sun. Then, as though resounding from musical harmony—for the ceremony began with music—the words of the Initiator rang out. In the state in which the pupil now found himself, it seemed to him as though the words which sounded from the lips of the Initiator were spoken by the statue itself. And the words were these:

I am the image of the World,
Behold, how I lack Being.
I live in thy Knowledge,
I now become in thee Avowal.

This too, as you may imagine, made a profound impression upon the pupil, for he had been prepared to experience the power confronting him in the figure of this statue, which said of itself:

I am the image of the World,
Behold, how I lack Being.
I live in thy Knowledge,
I now become in thee Avowal.

The difficulties accompanying the ordinary path of knowledge had prepared the pupil to see in this image something that released him from these difficulties, although he could not conquer his doubts in regard to knowledge itself. Indeed he had reached the point of feeling that he was incapable of conquering it. Because of all the experiences he had undergone, he was inwardly prepared to cling to this image with his whole soul, to live with the Cosmic Power symbolised by it, to surrender himself to it. He was ready to do this because what came from the lips of the priest made the statue seem to be the lettering which conveyed to him the meaning contained in these four lines.

When the priest had withdrawn the pupil was once again left alone in absolute silence, and after some time another Initiator entered. He then appeared above the second statue. And again, resounding as though in musical harmony, came the voice of this second Initiator, speaking the words I can render somewhat as follows:

I am the image of the World,
Behold, how I lack Truth.
If thou wilt dare to live with me,
I will be thy Comfort.

And now the pupil, who after all his preparation had been led to know inner happiness, inner fulfilment—instead of ‘happiness’ (Gluck) which does not give the right meaning in German, I should rather say ‘joyful inner fulfilment’— now that he had experienced all this, when he heard these words sounding from the second statue he felt inwardly urged to regard the Cosmic Power which spoke through the statue as the Power to which he would surrender his whole being.

Again the Initiator disappeared, and again the pupil was left alone. And during this lonely silence, each one—at least it seems to be so—each one felt something which may perhaps be expressed in the following words: I stand at the threshold of the spiritual world. Here, in the physical world, man speaks of something called ‘knowledge’, but it has no value in the spiritual world. And the fact that here, in the physical world, man has difficulties with it is only the physical reflection of the worthlessness of the knowledge that can be acquired in this world concerning the supersensible, spiritual world.—And in the same way the pupil felt: Many things tell us in the physical world that we must forgo inner fulness of joy and take an ascetic path in order to come into the spiritual world. But that is illusion, deception. For that which appears in this statue expressly says of itself: Behold, how I lack Truth.

Thus on the threshold of the spiritual world the pupil almost came to the point of feeling that joy and happiness of soul must be achieved by excluding what here, in the physical world, is longed for as Truth by feeble human striving fettered to the physical body. The pupil was already aware that the world on yonder side of the Threshold must be very different from the world on this side and that many things of value on this side are worthless over yonder; that even Knowledge and Truth have altogether different appearances beyond the Threshold.

All such feelings and perceptions to some extent awakened consciousness in the pupil that he had left behind him many of the deceptions and disenchantments of the physical world. But there were also feelings that from time to time had the effect of burning flames. The pupil felt as though he were being consumed by inner fire, were being inwardly destroyed. His soul vacillated from one feeling to the other and back again. He was tested on the scales of knowledge and of joy. And during these experiences it seemed to him as though the statues themselves were speaking. He had now himself achieved something like perception of the inner Word, and hence the statues themselves seemed to be speaking. The first statue said:

I am Knowledge.
But what I am is not real being.

And then the pupil had a feeling that rayed out sheer fright. The feeling was that ideas are only ideas and that there is no real being in them. The pupil felt that if the human head is strenuously exerted, ideas will certainly come, but nowhere is there any real being. Ideas are only appearance, they have no being.

And then the other statue seemed to speak. It said:

I am Phantasy,
But what I am has no Truth.

Thus the two statues stood before the pupil, the one impressing upon him what ideas are without being, and the other, what the pictures of phantasy are without truth.

I beg you to take these things as they should be taken, for there is no question of dogma here or of formulating sentences to express items of knowledge in a particular way; it is a matter of describing the experiences undergone by the pupils in the sacred sanctuaries of Hibernia. It is not the actual content of these sentences that should be taken as the announcement of a truth but the object is to place on record what the pupils of Hibernian Mysteries experienced in the process of their Initiation.

All these experiences were lived through by each individual pupil in absolute isolation. The experiences became so intense that his power of sight ceased to function and after a time he no longer saw the statues. But at the place to which his gaze had been directed he read as though written in flames, something that was not physically there but that he nevertheless perceived with utmost clarity. Where he had previously seen the head of the statue of Knowledge, he read the word ‘SCIENCE’ and where he had seen the head of the other statue, he read the word ‘ART’.

After this he was led out of the temple and again beside the exit stood the two Initiators. One of them took the pupil’s head in his hands and turned it towards something to which the other Initiator was pointing: this was the Figure of Christ. The priest who directed his gaze to this Figure then spoke these words of admonition:

Take the Word and the Power of this Being
Into your heart

And the other priest said:

And receive from Him
What the two statues wished to give you:
Science and Art.

Such were the first two acts in the Hibernian Initiation and in this way the pupils in Hibernia were guided to perception of the essence and nature of Christianity. The experience impressed itself deeply into the souls and hearts of the pupils and now they could start on their future path of development. What can be said about this we shall be studying in connection with other matters during the next few days.

• 1. See The Portal of Initiation. Scene 7.

It will be clear to you from the description of Initiation in the Hibernian Mysteries that the goal was to achieve insight into secrets of cosmic and human existence, for the experiences of which I told you were of very far-reaching importance for a man’s life of soul. Everything that is to lead him into the spiritual world depends upon conquests achieved as the result of crucial inner experiences and upon such a radical strengthening of his powers that in one way or another he succeeds in penetrating into that world.

We heard that in the process of Initiation in Hibernia, the pupil was led before two symbolical statues—but the word ‘symbolical’ must not be misunderstood. I described to you how these statues were constructed and also what feelings and inner experiences were undergone by the pupil while contemplating them.

You will realise, of course, that the direct impression made by such majestic statues under the conditions I described had an infinitely more powerful inner effect than one received from mere descriptions. Hence after the pupil had lived through everything of which I spoke yesterday, the Initiators were able to produce in him echoes, lasting for a considerable time, of what he had experienced from each of the statues. The echoes of his experiences from the female and from the male statues continued to resound for weeks, or periods differing according to the karma of the individual concerned. The pupils were exhorted in the first place to feel in themselves the after-effects of the male statue. The tests of which I spoke yesterday were made in front of both the statues, for their effects were intended to flow together and work on in the pupil’s life of soul. Now, however, the pupil was first instructed to allow the impression from the male statue to echo powerfully within him. I will describe this to you, but naturally one has to use words that are not really suitable for depicting experiences of Initiation and the inner meaning of many things will have to be felt intuitively.

What the pupil experienced to begin with when he gave himself up to the impressions of the male statue, was a kind of numbness, a rigid numbness of the soul which set in with greater and greater intensity the more often he was bidden to let the echo persist; it was a numbness of soul which felt like a bodily numbness as well. In the intervening periods he was able to attend to all the necessities of life; but ever and again Iris soul experienced the echo and the numbness. This numbness caused a change in his consciousness, for it was an actual Initiation which, though not altogether the same as in the older, primeval Mysteries, was nevertheless strongly reminiscent of them. One could not exactly say that the consciousness was dulled, but the pupil had a sensation of which he might have said: This state of consciousness in which I find myself is totally unfamiliar to me. I do not know how to deal with it; I cannot control it.—The pupil felt that in this state his consciousness was entirely filled with the sensation of numbness. Then he felt that what was numb and frozen—namely, he himself—was being taken up into the Cosmic All. He felt as if he were being transported into the wide spaces of the Cosmos. And he could say to himself: The Cosmos is taking me into itself!

And then came a remarkable experience—his consciousness was not extinguished but transformed. When this experience of frozen numbness and of being taken up into the Cosmic All had lasted for a sufficient length of time— and this was ensured by the Initiators—the pupil could say to himself something to this effect: The rays of the Sun and the Stars are drawing me out into the Cosmic All, but nevertheless I remain here, within my own being ... When tins experience had lasted for the necessary length of time, a remarkable vista came before the pupil. Now for the first time he realised the purpose of this state of consciousness which had set in during the numbness. For now, through his various experiences and their echoes, manifold impressions of winter landscapes came to him. Winter landscapes were there in the spirit before him, landscapes in which he saw whirling snowflakes filling the air—as I said, it was all seen in the spirit—or landscapes in which he gazed at forests with snow weighing down the branches of the trees, or similar sights, always reminiscent of what he had seen here or there in his everyday life, and always giving the impression of reality. After he had been transported into the Cosmic All he felt as if his own consciousness was conjuring before him long wanderings in Time through winter landscapes. And during this experience he felt as though he were not actually in his body, but certainly in his sense-organs; he felt that he was living with the whole of his being in his eyes, in his ears, also on the surface of his skin. And then, when his whole sense of feeling and of touch seemed to be spread over his skin, he also felt: I have become like the elastic, but hollow, statue.—He felt an intimate union between his eyes, for instance, and these landscapes. He felt as though in each eye the whole landscape at which he gazed was working, as though his eyes were an inner mirror reflecting everything outside him.

And further, he did not feel himself as a unity, but he felt his Ego, multiplied to the number of his senses, to be twelvefold. And from the feeling that his Ego had become twelvefold, a remarkable experience caused him to say to himself: There is an Ego which looks through my eyes, there is an Ego which works in my sense of thought, in my sense of speech, in my sense of touch, in my sense of life. I am really scattered over the world.—And from this experience there arose an intense longing for union with a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, in order that from this union, strength and power might be acquired for mastering the splitting of the Ego into the single sense-experiences. And out of all this, the question arose in the Ego itself: Why have I these senses?

The result of these strange experiences was that the pupil now felt that everything connected with the senses and with their continuations inwards towards the inner organism, was related to the actual environment around him on the Earth. The senses belong to the Winter—that is what the pupil felt. This whole life through which he was passing, in which the changing winter landscapes tallied, as I said, with what he had seen in everyday life, but which now appeared before him in great beauty out of the spirit—all these experiences the pupil now gathered together into a fundamental attunement and tenor of his soul—a condition which may be indicated as follows: In my Mystery-winter-wanderings I have experienced what is Past in the Cosmos. The snow and ice in my enchanted winter have revealed to me deathbringing forces and impulses of destruction in the Cosmos. And my numbness on the way to these Mystery-winterwanderings was the intimation that I was to behold those forces in the Cosmos which come over from the Past into the Present but in the Present are dead cosmic forces.

This realisation was what the echo of his experiences with the male statue conveyed to the pupil.

Then he was brought to the point where his experiences with the plastic—not the elastic—statue could echo within him. And now he was not overwhelmed by inner numbness but by inner heat, by a feverish condition of the soul, accompanied at first by bodily symptoms. The pupil was aware of great inner pressure; he felt as though both breath and blood were exerting too great a pressure and he became aware of a deep, inner need. And in this state the second experience he must undergo became clear to him. Born from the need felt by his soul, the realisation that came to him and of which he was intensely conscious, might be clothed in the following words: I bear within me something that my bodily nature demands in ordinary earthly life. This must be overcome. My Earth-Ego must be overcome!

Then, when the experience of this inner fever, this need of soul, this feeling that the earthly Ego must be overcome, had lasted for the necessary length of time, something arose in the pupil of which he knew that it was not the previous, unfamiliar state of consciousness but that it was a state well known to him, namely, the dream consciousness. Whereas from the earlier numbness had come the distinct feeling that he was in a state of consciousness unknown to him in ordinary life, he knew now that his consciousness was a kind of dreaming. He dreamed; but in contrast with his earlier consciousness—although again in harmony with what he had experienced—he had dreams of the most wonderful summer landscapes. But he now knew that these were dreams, dreams which filled him with intense joy or with intense suffering, depending upon whether what came to him from the summer was sad or joyful, but in either case with the intensity of feeling accompanying dreams.

You need only remind yourselves of how a dream can affect you. It first takes the form of pictures but you may wake up from it with a palpitating heart, in heat and fear. The Hibernian pupil interpreted this experience in an elementary, quite natural way, saying to himself: my inner being has brought the summer to my consciousness as a dream; the summer has come to me as a dream.

At the same time the pupil knew that what was in his consciousness, in a state of continual transformation like an enchanted summer, was indicative of impulses leading over to the Future of the Cosmos. But now he did not feel as though he were scattered into his senses and multiplied. On the contrary, he felt inwardly gathered into a unity; he felt held together in his heart. And the culmination, the supreme climax of what he was experiencing was this sense of being held together in his heart, this feeling of inner union with the dream of the summer—not with the summer as outwardly seen. And rightly the pupil said to himself: In what the dream of summer reveals and I experience in my own being, therein lies the Future.

The next experience arising in the pupil was of two conditions the one following the other. He was looking, shall we say, into a landscape of meadows and ponds, and little lakes. Then came a vista of ice and snow which changed into whirling, falling snow, into a mist of falling snowflakes. This mist became more and more evanescent and finally faded into nothingness. And the moment this happened, when he felt himself as it were in empty space, at that moment the summer dreams replaced the winter scenes, and he realised in full consciousness: now Past and Future meet in my own life of soul.

From then onwards the pupil had learnt to say of this outer world as a truth which was to remain with him for all future time: In this world that surrounds us, in this world from which we derive our corporeality, something is perpetually dying. And the snow-crystals of winter are the outer signs of the spirit that is perpetually dying in matter. As human beings we are not yet capable of feeling in all intensity this dying spirit which in external Nature is rightly symbolised in snow and ice, unless Initiation has been achieved. But through Initiation we know that the spirit is all the time dying in matter, announcing this in freezing, benumbed Nature. A void is continually being produced. And out of this void something is born, something resembling, to begin with, the dreams of Nature. And the dreams of Nature contain the seeds of the Cosmic Future. But Cosmic Death and Cosmic Birth would not meet if Man were not there in the middle. For if Man were not there—as I said, I am simply relating to you the experience inwardly undergone by the pupil during the Hibernian Initiation—if Man were not there, the processes revealed through the consciousness born from the feeling of frozen numbness would be an actual Cosmic Death, and no dream would follow, no Future would arise. Saturn, Sun and Moon would be there, but no Jupiter, Venus or Vulcan. In order that the Future of the Cosmos may be joined to the Past, Man must stand between the Past and the Future. This became known to the pupil through the experiences he had undergone.

All these experiences were then summarised by the Initiators. The first condition, that of the state of numbness, when the pupil had felt himself transported into the Cosmic All, was summarised for him by the Initiators in words which I can render to you as follows:

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

These words summarised the feelings that had been experienced.

Then the feelings accompanying the condition brought about by the second statue were summarised as follows:

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

You will remember that at the stage of which I spoke at the end of the lecture yesterday, as the pupil was being realised, the words SCIENCE and ART appeared in the place of the two statues. The word Science appeared in the place of the statue which had said: I am Knowledge, but what I am is not real Being. And the word Art stood there in the place of the statue which had said: I am Phantasy, but what I am has no Truth. The pupil had known the terrible heaviness of heart resulting from his soul’s allegiance to something that was not truly Knowledge. For it had become clear to him that the knowledge acquired on Earth consists of ideas only, of pictures only, and lacks real Being. Now he lived through the reverberations of this experience and had come to realise that man himself must find Being for the content of his knowledge by losing himself in Cosmic Space.

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

For this was indeed the feeling. He had stormed into Ether-distances which are bounded by the blue of the infinite expanse and had united himself at last with this expanse. But then it seemed to the pupil that the Earth had become so dissipated in the infinite expanse that it was as though transformed into Nothingness. He had learnt to experience Nothingness by beholding the enchanted winter landscape. And he knew now that it is only Man who can stand firm in the infinite expanse leading to the blue of the Ether-distances.

Through the second experience a man realises that he finds in the depths of his own being what he must overcome, what he must face as the Evil that is rooted and surging within him, the Evil that must be overcome by the impulse of the Good in human nature in order that the world may have a future.

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

The pupil had come to know that the tendency of Phantasy is to avoid Truth, to be satisfied with a relation to the world consisting of arbitrary, subjective pictures. But now, from the dreamlike, enchanted summer-experience he had acquired insight which enabled him to say: Whatever rises up in me as creative phantasy I can carry out into the world. Out of my inner being, like the pictures of phantasy, grow the Imaginations of the plants. If I have the pictures of phantasy only, then I am a stranger to what is around me. But if I have Imaginations, there grows out of my own inner self everything that I can then find in this plant, in that plant, in this animal, in that animal, in this man, in that man. Whatever I find in my own being is to be found in something that is outside me. And for everything that confronts me in the external world I can find something that rises up out of the depths of my own life of soul and is connected with it.

This sense of twofold union with the world was an experience which, accompanied by a feeling of inner triumph, came to the pupil as an echo of the experiences connected with the two statues. In this way he had learnt to expand his soul spiritually on the one side into the Cosmos and also to penetrate deeply into a region of his inner being where the forces are not working with the monotony customary in everyday consciousness but where they work as if they were only partly real, pervaded through and through with magical dreams. The pupil had now learnt to balance this intensity of inner impulses with the intensity of external impulses. Out of his experience of the winter landscape and his experience of the summer landscape, enlightenment had come to him concerning external Nature and his own essential Self. And he had become deeply and intimately related to both.

He was then prepared for a recapitulation of all his experiences. In this recapitulation his Initiators put very clearly to him what he must do: You must make a deliberate pause when recapitulating the numbness your soul experienced. You must pause while recapitulating the flight into Cosmic distances and again while recapitulating the experience of feeling dispersed into your senses and multiplied. You must be inwardly clear about each of these conditions and be able to distinguish exactly between them; you must have an etheric, inner experience of each of the three conditions.—And when the pupil, now with full consciousness, called up again before his soul the state of numbness, there appeared before him the experiences he had had before he came down to the Earth out of spiritual worlds, before the earthly conception of his body, when he was drawing together out of the Cosmos the etheric impulses and forces in order to clothe himself with an etheric body. In this way the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries was led to experience the final stage preceding his descent into a physical body.

He had then to recapitulate and add emphasis to the inner experience of being transported into the Cosmos. This time, in the recapitulation, he no longer felt as though he were being drawn up by the rays of the Sun and Stars but he felt as though something were coming towards him, as though from all sides of the Cosmos the Hierarchies were coming towards him; and he had other experiences as well. And then he became aware of conditions still further back in his pre-earthly life. Next, he had consciously to recapitulate the experience of being poured out into his senses and dispersed in fragments in the world of the senses. This brought him to the middle point of his existence between death and a new birth.

You can see from these indications that the powers enabling the Initiate to penetrate into these hidden worlds—to which, nevertheless, man really belongs—can be attained in the most diverse ways. And from the indications given yesterday and on many occasions you will realise too that vision of the supersensible world was achieved by methods differing widely in the several Mysteries. In later lectures we shall speak of why it was that such differences were considered appropriate, and why a uniform spiritual path was not adopted in all the Mysteries. Today I will merely mention the fact. But the purpose of all these different paths was to unveil the hidden aspects of world-existence and human existence which have been indicated again and again in our present studies as well as in other lectures and writings.

It was made clear to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries that he must also recapitulate inwardly and in his life of feeling the other conditions he had experienced as aftereffects of the second statue; each condition was to be evoked in full consciousness. He carried out these instructions, and in recapitulating the state I described yesterday as a kind of need of soul, he felt what would be the soul’s experience after death.

Then came the vision of outer Nature as revealed in summer landscapes, but this was a dream. When he recapitulated this experience and now consciously distinguished it from the other, knowledge came to him of the further course of his life after death. And when he was able to make the experience of being held together in his heart vividly alive in his consciousness, his vision extended back as far as the middle point of existence between death and rebirth. Then the Initiator could say to him:

Learn to perceive in spirit
Winter-existence,
And thou shalt behold
he pre-earthly life.

Learn to dream in spirit
Summer-existence,
And thou shalt experience
The post-earthly life.

Please notice carefully the words I have used, for in the relation between ‘beholding’ the pre-earthly and ‘experiencing’ the post-earthly lies the difference between the two experiences undergone by the candidate for Initiation in the Mysteries of Hibernia.

The place of this Initiation in the whole historical setting of human evolution, its significance in the evolutionary process and in what way a deeper meaning was indicated when at that stage of Initiation which I described yesterday, something like a vision of the Christ came to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries—of these things I shall speak tomorrow.

I have told you certain things about the Hibernian Mysteries and you heard yesterday that through the remarkable development which it was possible for individuals to achieve in Ireland, insight came to them into what the human soul can experience as a result of its own inner activity. All the preparations undergone by the candidate for Initiation made it possible for pictures of landscapes to be conjured up as though by magic before his senses—landscapes which in other circumstances were seen in the ordinary way. The impressions received in the Mysteries were not fantastic or hallucinatory but what the pupil had been accustomed to see now seemed to have been like a veil which he knew well was concealing something behind it. And the same applied when the pupil had directed his gaze into his own inner being, when the enchanted vision of the dreamlike summer landscape was conjured up before him. He was now made ready to have Imaginations which, to begin with, were linked with what in other circumstances he perceived with his outer senses. But he knew that these Imaginations would lead him to something altogether different.

I have told you how the pupil reached the stage where he was able to have a vision of the time before his earthly existence, and also of the time after that existence, to the point midway between death and rebirth; he also had a vision of the time immediately preceding the descent to Earth, and again to the point midway between death and rebirth. But something else happened as well. In that the pupil was led to intensify and deepen his consciousness of the experiences he had undergone, his soul was strengthened by the vision of pre-earthly and post-earthly life and of the perpetual dying and rebirth of Nature. Then with even stronger inner force and energy he was able to intensify his experience of the numbness and of being taken up into the Cosmos, as it were winging his way out into the blue Ether-distances; and again the experience was intensified of having felt himself to be a personality only in his senses, when he was unconscious of all the rest of his being, aware only of existence in the eye, in the whole tract of hearing or of feeling, and so on—when he was as it were nothing but sense-organ.

With strong inner efforts the pupil had learnt to intensify Iris experience of these conditions and then to face what was to lead to a further stage. When he had undergone the experiences I have described, he was exhorted to recapitulate the condition of inner numbness deliberately, with the result that he felt his own organism as a kind of mineral, as something quite foreign to him, and his soul as though it were merely hovering over and surrounding this mineral structure. Then, in the resulting state of consciousness, he had a clear vision of the Old Moon-existence preceding the Earth embodiment.

At this point you will remember how I have described this Old Moon-existence in the book Occult Science ¹ and in numbers of lectures. What is there described came to life in the pupil’s consciousness and was actual reality to him. The Old Moon-existence appeared to him as a planetary body in a watery, fluid state—a state not similar to that of water as it is today, but gelatinous, congealed. He felt himself to be an organism within this semi-soft mass. And he felt the structure of the whole planet streaming out, as it were, from his own organism.

You must realise how greatly experiences at that time differed from those familiar today. Today we feel bounded by, enclosed within, our skin. To assert this is, of course, a tremendous error, for directly we consider the volume of air in a human being it is obviously nonsensical to feel enclosed within the skin. As I have often said, the air I now have inside me was, a short while ago, not inside but outside me and the air that will soon be inside me is at the moment outside. In respect of the air, therefore, we cannot rightly think of ourselves as cut off from the external world. We are wherever tire external air is present. Fundamentally speaking there is no difference if at one moment you have a piece of sugar in your mouth and the next moment it is in your stomach—for it has taken a certain path; the same is true if at one moment a certain volume of air is outside and the next moment is in your lungs. The piece of sugar goes one way, the air goes another, through the organs of respiration. And anyone who thinks otherwise should not maintain that his mouth is part of himself but insist that his body begins with his stomach! Therefore it is nonsense, even in this modern age, for a man to imagine himself enclosed within his skin.

During the Old Moon period it was utterly impossible to imagine any such limitation. Objects such as the pieces of furniture here which can be touched and taken hold of did not then exist; everything was a Nature-product. And when one stretched out the organ which can be compared in a certain respect with fingers today, this organ could be drawn in again and disappeared; the arm could be drawn in, one could make oneself thin, and so on. Today, if you touch the blackboard here you do not feel that it belongs to you; but at that time, you felt that whatever you touched actually belonged to you, in the sense that the inbreathed air is part of you today. So that one’s own structure was felt to be a part of the whole structure of the Old Moon planet.

All this came into the consciousness of the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries. He also had the impression that the gelatinous fluidity was a temporary condition of the Old Moon-existence, that there were certain epochs when in this gelatinous fluidity something appeared which, physically, was much harder than our solids today. It was not ‘mineral’ in the sense in which emerald, corundum or diamond are mineral today but it was hard and horny. There was no crystalline mineral substance as we ourselves know it but the forms taken by the horny, mineral-like substance were quite obviously the product of organic secretion, in the sense that we do not speak today of the crystalline structure of a cow’s horn, knowing that the horn can be where it is only because it has been projected from an organism; and the same is true of a deer’s antlers or similar formations. Fundamentally, the same is true of bones—but they are mineral. And so at the time of the Old Moon evolution a mineral-like substance was produced out of organic material.

The Beings who at that time had already passed through their human stage and who had only part of their fully human nature to complete during Earth-existence, are the Individualities of whom I have spoken as the great and wise primeval Teachers of humanity on the Earth and who now have their abode in the Moon-sphere.

All this became known to the pupil during the condition of frozen numbness. And when he had passed through these experiences in the way that satisfied his Initiators, it was impressed upon him that he must advance still further, to the stage where he could let his benumbed being stream out to the Ether-distances, to the point where he could feel: the paths to the Heights bring me out into the far distances of the blue Ether, to the very boundaries of Space.

And then, when this experience was repeated, the pupil felt that everything was in a certain way moving outwards towards the far distances of the Ether. But as he himself moved towards the Ether-distances, after the Heights had uplifted him and carried him thither, he felt as though at the very end of the world of space something penetrated into and vitalised him. It was what we today should call Astrality. It was an element that was experienced inwardly and at that time united with the human being far more forcefully than is the case today, although it could not then be experienced with equal intensity. It united with the human soul, but even more forcefully than, for example, a feeling that might arise within a man today if he were to expose himself to the instreaming, revivifying light of the Sun to the point where he becomes sensitively aware of each of His organs. By paying only a little attention you will be able to feel, if you expose yourself freely to the Sun, allowing it to stream through you but not to the point of inner discomfort—if you expose yourselves to the Sun in such a way that you let its instreaming light and warmth bring comfort to your body, then you will become aware of each organ much more vividly than before. You come unmistakably into a condition where you can describe the very make-up of your organism.

The fact that there is so little knowledge of such things today is due only to a lack in the capacity of modern man to be genuinely attentive. If this capacity were not lacking people would be able at least to give dreamlike indications of what is revealed to them in the instreaming sunlight. In earlier times, of course, the pupil was instructed about the inner constitution of the human organism quite differently from the methods current today. Corpses are now dissected and anatomical diagrams made. This does not require much attentiveness and it must be admitted that even this is not forthcoming from many students. But at all events, not much attention is required! Once upon a time the pupil of the Mysteries was taught by being exposed to the Sun and then trained to become sensitively aware of his inner constitution while reacting to the pleasant, instreaming sunlight; and after this experience he was well able to describe his liver, his stomach, and so on. This inner connection of man with the Macrocosm can become a reality provided only that the right conditions are established. It is quite possible to be blind and yet to feel the form of an object by touching it. And so too, when one of your organs is made sensitive to another by attentiveness to the effects of the light, you can describe such organs, at any rate so that at least you can have a shadowy picture of them in your consciousness.

At an advanced stage in the Hibernian Mysteries, when the pupil was transported as it were into the blue distances of the Ether, and when the Astral light streamed into him, his predominant experience was that he did not feel his own identity but he felt in his consciousness the existence of a great and mighty World—a World of which he said: I am living in an element together with other Beings; this element is pure, innate Nature-goodness. For out of this element in which I am swimming—forgive me for using an expression possible only in a much later terminology—out of this planetary element in which I am swimming like a fish in water although it consists of light, volatile components, I feel comfort streaming into me from every side.—The pupil felt the astral light pouring into him everywhere, forming him, building him. ‘This Element is pure Nature-goodness,’ he could have said, ‘for everywhere it bestows something upon me. I am surrounded by pure Goodness. Goodness is everywhere, but it is a Nature-goodness that envelops me. This Nature-goodness is also creative, for its forces enable me to exist, give me my form and sustain me as I hover and move in this Element.’—And so the impressions received were those of innate, Nature-born morality.

A modern comparison for this experience might be expressed as follows.—Suppose a person had a rose in front of him and in smelling its scent were able to say with inner sincerity: ‘Divine goodness spread through the whole Earth-planet is also streaming into this rose; and when the rose communicates its own essence to my organ of smell I become aware of that Divine goodness.’ Anyone saying this honestly and sincerely today would be experiencing something like a faint shadow of what in those ancient times was felt inwardly as the very life-element of the individual human being. And that, my dear friends, was the experience of the Old Sun-existence which preceded our Earth. Thus the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries could experience the Old Sun-existence and Old Moon-existence—the predecessors of the Earth.

And further, when the pupil had been led to be aware of himself in his senses only, had experienced something like a discarding of his whole organism, leaving nothing but the experiences of his senses so that he was living only in his eyes, in the auditory tract, in the whole range of his feeling, then he became aware of what I have called in the book Occult Science, the Saturn-existence—an existence ² where man lived in the element of warmth, hovering and moving among the differentiations of the warmth. He felt himself then not as a being of flesh and blood, not as having bones and nerves, but solely as an organism of warmth—the planetary warmth of Saturn; he was aware of warmth when the outer warmth differed in degree from the inner warmth. Weaving in warmth, living through warmth, a feeling of inner warmth in contact with outer warmth—such, in effect, was the Saturn-existence.

This was experienced by the pupil when his whole being seemed to be living in his senses. The senses themselves were not so highly differentiated as they are today. This awareness of warmth, this life in and through warmth was the all-important experience. But there were moments when the pupil, aware of himself as an organism of warmth, approached a different degree of warmth and felt something in himself like a burst of flames; he now seemed to be living in an element not merely of streaming, weaving and billowing warmth but at a certain moment he seemed to be aflame. There was also something like a sensation of taste, not taste as felt on the tongue, for naturally it could not have been so at that time, but taste which the pupil felt was kindled in him by contact with another being ... and so on. Thus the Saturn-existence became living reality in the pupil’s consciousness.

So you see that in these Hibernian Mysteries the pupil was actually led into the past of the Earth’s planetary existence. He came to know the Saturn-, Old Sun- and Old Moon-existence as the successive metamorphoses of the Earth.

Then he was also exhorted to recapitulate experience which guided him into his inner being and which I described to you as a feeling of inner oppression, as though the air inside him was densifying; the corresponding condition experienced by a man of today would be the feeling of incapacity to exhale, the feeling of the breath pressing from every side.

This was the first condition which the pupil had now to call up in his soul by exerting his own will. And when he did this, in the dreamlike state in which Nature was revealed to him in summer landscapes—when he had induced this condition, then suddenly, at a particular moment, he had a remarkable experience. In order to give you any idea at all of this experience I must describe it in the following way.—Imagine that as a human being living on the Earth you come into a warm room. You feel the warmth; then you go outside where the temperature is perhaps several degrees below zero and you feel the cold intensely. You feel the difference between warmth and cold, but it is a bodily experience, having little or no connection with your life of soul. And as an earthly human being you certainly do not feel when you come into a warm room that it is filled with something around you like a great Spirit is enveloping you with love. This warmth is comforting to the body but you do not feel that it is of the nature of soul. In the same way you shiver in the cold, you feel cold in your body, but you have no feeling that out there, on account of the prevailing climatic conditions, demons are approaching you, bringing such bitter frost that your very soul feels cold. Physical warmth is not at the same time an experience of your soul because as an earthly man you do not, in your ordinary-level consciousness, feel the element of soul with any intensity. An earthly man can feel warmed by the friendship or love of another; he can feel chilled by his coldness, perhaps also by his philistinism, and that is understood to be a quality of the soul. But just think how little a man of today, when he goes out in the summer into the warm atmosphere is prone to say: Now the Gods arc loving me! Or how little he is prone to say when he goes out into the wintry cold: Now only diose Sylphs who arc the pedants in their world are flying through the air.—Such expressions arc never heard at the present time!

This awareness which I have tried to characterise from another side was something that came naturally to the pupil after he had experienced the feeling of oppression. He felt warmth as a physical quality and simultaneously as a quality of soul, and this was possible because his consciousness was projected into the Jupiter-existence that will follow the Earth. For we shall become Jupiter-men in that we unite physical warmth with soul-warmth. As Jupiter-men, in caressing another person or a child lovingly we shall at the same time actually transmit warmth; love and outstreaming warmth will not be separate as is now the case. A man will be able to pour warmth into his surroundings as a quality of soul as well.

The pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries was brought to the point of experiencing this—not, of course, in the physical world but while he was transported to another world—and thus the Jupiter-existence was revealed to him, not in physical reality but in a picture.

The next intensification of consciousness was that the pupil was to feel deeply the inner need of which I spoke yesterday, for he now realised the stern necessity to overcome his own ‘I’ which would otherwise become the source of evil. When he had brought about this inner mood of soul, something arose in his consciousness with the result that he not only felt soul-warmth and physical warmth as a unity but this unity began to shine. The secret of the radiance of soul-light dawned upon him and thereby he was transported into that future time when the Earth will be metamorphosed into the Venus embodiment.

And when the pupil felt all that he had hitherto experienced streaming together in his heart, as I described yesterday, everything that his soul had experienced was revealed to him as being at the same time the experience of the whole planet. The picture that arose in the pupil was this.—Man has a thought; this thought does not remain inside his skin but begins to sound', the thought becomes Word. What man thinks forms itself into Word. The Word expands throughout the Vulcan-planet. Everything in the Vulcan-planet is articulate, living reality. Word resounds to Word; Word is clarified by Word; Word speaks to Word; Word learns to comprehend Word. Man feels himself to be the World-comprehending Word, as the Word which comprehends the Cosmic Word. When this experience arose as a picture before the candidate for the Hibernian Initiation he knew himself to be transported to the Vulcan-existence, the last metamorphosis of the Earth-planet.

It will be clear to you that the Hibernian Mysteries belong to what Spiritual Science calls the Great Mysteries. For the Initiation achieved by the pupils gave them a vista of man’s pre-earthly and post-earthly life. At the same time it gave them a vista of the cosmic life with which man is interwoven and out of which he is born in the course of the ages. Thus the pupil learnt to know the Microcosm, that is to say, himself as a being of spirit, soul and body in relation to the Macrocosm. But he also learnt to know how the Macrocosm itself evolves, how it arises, undergoes metamorphoses and ultimately passes away. The Hibernian Mysteries were verily the Great Mysteries.

They were in their prime during the era preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. But the essential feature of the Great Mysteries was that in them the Christ of the Future was spoken of, just as men spoke later on of the Christ as One was connected with events already past. And when, after the first Initiation the image of Christ had been shown to the pupil as he was leaving the Temple, the purpose was to bring home to him that the whole evolutionary course of the Earth in cosmic existence is orientated to the Event of Golgotha which at that time lay in the future.

On the island which later endured so many sore trials there was a centre of the Great Mysteries, a centre of ‘Christian’ Mysteries before the Event of Golgotha—a centre where the spiritual gaze of human beings living before the Mystery of Golgotha was directed in the right and true way towards it.

And when eventually that Mystery actually happened, when in Palestine those remarkable occurrences took place which we describe when speaking of Christ Jesus on Golgotha and of His environment—at that very time solemn Festivals were celebrated within the Hibernian Mysteries themselves and the community associated with them, that is to say by people who belonged in some way to the Mysteries. And what was actually happening in Palestine was revealed in Hibernia in pictures that were not memories of anything in the past. On the island of Hibernia men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in pictures, simultaneously with the historical occurrence in Palestine. And when, later on, the Mystery of Golgotha was presented in pictures in the various temples and churches and was experienced in this way by the people, the pictures were reminders of something that already belonged to the past and was therefore an historical fact which ordinary consciousness could recollect. But these pictures were seen on the island of Hibernia at a time when they could not have been memories of past history but were a direct revelation from the spiritual world. The events that took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era and were visible there to physical eyes, were beheld spiritually in Hibernia. Men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in the spirit. And this was the basis of the greatness inherent in everything that subsequently went out from Hibernia into the rest of the civilised world but disappeared as time went on.

I beg you now to pay attention to the following.—Anyone who studies purely external history can find much that is splendid and beautiful, much that is uplifting and enlightening when he looks back to the ancient East or to ancient Greece or Rome. Again, he can learn many things when he comes, let us say, to the time of Charles the Great and on through the Middle Ages. But just think how scanty the historical accounts become in the period which begins a few centuries after the birth of Christianity and ends approximately in the ninth or tenth centuries of the Christian era. If you examine the records that exist, in all the earlier and more honest historical works you will find only very few and very meagre accounts of events in these centuries. It is only after that period that records begin to be more detailed.

Admittedly, later historians feel a certain professional shame at having to deal with the available material so unsatisfactorily. They cannot describe matters of which they have no knowledge and so they think out all kinds of fantastic interpretations which are inserted into the history of these centuries. But it is all so much nonsense. If external history is presented honestly, accounts of the period during which the downfall of Rome took place are very meagre, and the same applies to the migrations of the peoples— which as a matter of fact were outwardly not nearly so striking as people today suppose but were striking only because of their contrast with the previous and subsequent periods of tranquillity. If you were to calculate quite simply today—or rather, if you had calculated in the pre-War period—how many people let us say, leave Russia for Switzerland every year, you would find that the numbers would be greater than they were during the time of the migrations over the same area of Europe. All these things are relative. So that if one were to continue talking in the style adopted when trying to describe the migrations of the people, one would have to say that up to the beginning of the War, migrations were taking place all over Europe and also across to America. And the emigrations to America were more numerous than the streams of folk-migrations. But this is not realised.

It is nevertheless a fact that records of the period described as that of the folk-migrations and their aftermath are very scanty. Little is known about what was actually happening; little is said, for example, about what was going on in this neighbourhood, or in France, or in Germany. But it was precisely in these regions that faint echoes of what had been revealed in the Hibernian Mysteries streamed over Europe; it was here that the effects and impulses of the Great Mysteries of Hibernia penetrated into civilisation, even if only in faint echoes.

But then two great streams met. What I am now saying must not be taken as casting even the faintest shade of sympathy or antipathy upon anything, but merely to describe the historical fact. Two streams met. The one that came over from the East by way of Greece and Rome reckoned with the increasingly prevalent faculty connected with intellect and the senses and worked on the basis of historical remembrance of outwardly visible, outwardly experienced events. From Palestine, through Greece and Rome, came the tidings which spread abroad and were received by men into their religious life—the tidings of something that had taken place in Palestine in the physical world through Christ, the God.

These tidings were accessible to man’s faculty of understanding which was now entirely dependent upon what we know today as the ordinary-level consciousness, based upon reason and the senses. The tidings spread far and wide and finally superseded what came over from Hibernia, from the West, and as a last echo of the ancient, instinctive wisdom took account of the fact that the traditional wisdom of humanity was now shedding its light into a new kind of consciousness. From Hibernia there spread across Europe an impulse which in the matter of spiritual illumination did not depend upon physical vision or upon ‘proof’ based upon evidence of any actual historical event. This impulse spread in the form of cult, in the form of Hibernian cult and wisdom. It was concerned with illumination that comes to man from the spiritual world, even in the case of an event which, like the Mystery of Golgotha, had taken place simultaneously in physical reality in another part of the world. In Hibernia, the physical reality of the event in Palestine was seen spiritually.

But the mentality that could grasp only physical reality overshadowed the impulse which relied upon the spiritual upliftment, the spiritual deepening and enrichment of man’s life of soul. And gradually, because of an inevitable necessity of which we have spoken in other connections, the impulse connected exclusively with physical existence gained the upper hand over the impulse connected with purely spiritual vision. The tidings of the Redeemer who had been present in a physical body on the Earth obscured the wonderful Imaginations that came over from Hibernia and could be presented in cult and ritual—these tidings gained the upper hand over the majestic Imaginations which portrayed the Redeemer as a spiritual Being and took no account, either in the corresponding rituals or descriptions, of the fact that what had come to pass was also an historical event. Still less could this aspect have been taken into account before the actual event, for the cults had been instituted in the pre-Christian era.

So the time drew on when men became immune to everything that was not physically perceptible, when they came to the point of no longer accepting as truth anything that was not physically perceptible. Hence the substance of the wisdom that came over from Hibernia was no longer understood; nor was the art which came from there felt to be an expression of cosmic truth. The consequence was the ever-increasing growth of a science which was not a Hibernian science but one concerned only with what the senses perceive, and also of a form of art which was not Hibernian art but one—including even the art of Raphael—using sense-perceptible objects as models, whereas Hibernian art set out to give a direct presentation of spiritual reality itself.

And so the time came when a certain darkness fell over the spiritual life, when men sought only to develop reason and the life of the senses, and founded philosophies which were intended to show that in some way or other the senses were able to discover the secret of Being, or actually to reach Truth.

Finally there came the remarkable phase when human consciousness was no longer accessible to spiritual influences. And where can one see this more precisely than in what was given to humanity in a work such as The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz ³ I have written about it recently in the journal Das Reich. I called attention there to the strange circumstances connected with this work. Valentin Andreae was the physical author; he wrote it down immediately before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. But nobody who has read the biography of Valentin Andreae will believe for a moment that the man who afterwards became a pedantic cleric and wrote several unctuous treatises, was the real author. Just compare the Chymical Wedding, or The Organisation of the World, or certain other writings of Valentin Andreae—he was naturally the same physical personality—with the sanctimonious stuff written by Pastor Valentin Andreae in his later life. It is a really remarkable phenomenon. Here is a youth, hardly out of school, writing works such as The Organisation of the World or The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, and we have to make strenuous efforts to find any meaning in them at all. The young writer himself understood nothing of their real content as he showed in his later life, for he became a sanctimonious, unctuous parson. And yet it is the same man!

This fact alone makes it reasonable to state, as I did in my article, that the Chymical Wedding was not written in the ordinary sense by a human being, or at least only in the sense in which, for instance, Napoleon’s ever nervous, undercover secretary wrote his letters for him. But after all, Napoleon was a man who stood firmly on the ground, who was a very physical personality. The one who wrote the Chymical Wedding was not a physical personality and he simply made use of his ‘secretary’ who subsequently became the unctuous Pastor Valentin Andreae.

Picture to yourselves this extraordinary occurrence immediately preceding the Thirty Years’ War. A young man lends his hand to a spiritual Being who writes down, through him, a work such as the Chymical Wedding! This was only a specially striking example of what was often wont to happen in those days but was not recognised or preserved. Something of great importance for humanity at that time was given in such a way that the intellect was incapable of grasping it. The onward flowing spirituality was still revealing itself but men were no longer capable of experiencing it within themselves.

And so it is the case that in regard to this period, in history books—however voluminous they might be—there would inevitably be many blank pages, for men were living at that time in two currents: the one current was taking its course in the physical world below, where people were becoming more and more prone to believe only in what their reason and their senses told them; but above there was an onflowing spiritual revelation which could be announced through human beings but which they could not themselves experience. And one of the most characteristic examples of this spiritual revelation is a work such as The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz.

What was revealed passed through men’s heads even though it was not understood; it passed through men’s heads, became weaker and also distorted. Magnificent, truly poetical material degenerated into the kind of gibberish of which verses in the Chymical Wedding are sometimes examples. And yet they are revelations of something truly great: imposing, macrocosmic pictures, majestic experiences. If with the vision that is possible today we read the Chymical Wedding, we learn to understand its imagery. The meaning of the pictures becomes evident. They are coloured by the brain through which they have passed but glorious realities are apparent behind them.

Such things are a proof that what humanity once experienced had lived on in the subconscious. In the earlier period of the devastating Thirty Years’ War, it had all been dissipated. Then, in the first half of the seventeenth century there was an inflow of what had once been glorious spiritual truth. The Mystics alone preserved its impress in their souls, but the real substance, the spiritual substance, was lost. Reason began to conquer, and to prepare the epoch of freedom.

And today we look back at these things and find our gaze directed to the Hibernian Mysteries with an intensified activity of soul, for they are, fundamentally speaking, the last of the Great Mysteries, the last Great Mysteries through which the secrets of human and cosmic life could be revealed. Today, when we penetrate into them again, the Hibernian Mysteries are revealed in all their grandeur, but our vision cannot really penetrate into their depths if we have not first fathomed them by dint of our own, independent efforts. And even when this has been achieved, a strange thing happens. When one approaches the pictures of the Hibernian Mysteries in the Akashic Record, one feels that something is repelling one. It is as though one were being held back by some force, as though the soul could not pierce its way through. The nearer one approaches, the darker the goal becomes and a kind of stupefaction comes upon the soul. One has to work one’s way through this stupefaction and the only possibility of doing so is to rekindle one’s own, independently acquired knowledge of similar matters. And then one understands why it is so difficult to approach the Hibernian Mysteries. It becomes evident that they were the final echo of an age-old gift to humanity from the divine-spiritual Powers, but that when these Mysteries withdrew into a shadowy existence they were at the same time surrounded by an impenetrable wall, so that a man cannot fathom or have vision of them if he maintains a passive attitude of soul; he can approach these Mysteries only by kindling spiritual activity, in other words when he has become a modern man in the true sense. Access to the Hibernian Mysteries was closed in order to make it impossible for men to draw near them in the old way; they were to be compelled to experience with the full activity of consciousness that which must be discovered inwardly in this age of freedom. Neither by a scrutiny of history nor by clairvoyant vision of ancient, great and wonderful secrets can these Mysteries be discovered, but only by the exercise of a man’s own inner, conscious activity.

The Great Mysteries of Hibernia thus provide the very strongest indication of the fact that a new Age begins at the time when they faded into the land of shadows. But they can be seen again today in all their glory and majesty by a soul sustained by inner freedom; for through true inner activity they can indeed be approached and the menace of stupefaction overcome. The soul has nevertheless to confront obstacles standing before the revelations that were once accessible to those who were to be initiated— revelations of the ancient secrets of the spiritual wisdom, instinctive it is true, but none the less sublime, which once poured over men on the Earth as a primeval power of the soul. The most beautiful and significant memorials in later time to the primeval wisdom of men, to the grace of divine-spiritual Beings manifesting in the earliest stage of human life on Earth, the most beautiful tokens of that Age are the pictures which can be revealed to us when we direct our spiritual gaze to the Mysteries of Hibernia.

• 1. pp. 137-61 in the 1962/63 edition of Occult Science: an Outline.
• 2. pp. 115-28 in the 1962/63 edition.
• 3. A translation in English by Carlo Pietzner is contained in the volume entitled A Christian Rosenkreuz Anthology, compiled and edited by Paul M. Allen. (Rudolf Steiner Publications, Blauvelt, New York.) Andreae’s work appeared in the year 1616.

Let us once again recall the deeply significant fact that the knowledge and truths contained in the Mysteries of Hibernia gradually lost force and influence as they moved from the West towards Central Europe and the East; and in place of a knowledge of the Spiritual—even in matters pertaining to religion—physical perception, or at any rate a tradition based upon physical perception, made its appearance.

You will remember the picture to which we came at the end of the last lecture. We spoke of the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Over in Hibernia were the Initiates with their pupils; and there, without any means for physical perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and without any possibility of receiving information of the Event, the Mystery was none the less celebrated with all solemnity, because the Initiates knew from their own insight that the Mystery of Golgotha was happening—externally—at that very time.

These Initiates and their pupils in the Mysteries of Hibernia were thus under the necessity of experiencing an actual physical reality, an event in the world of the senses, in a spiritual way. But for their peculiar disposition of soul and for the orientation of knowledge then customary in Hibernia, there was no need to have anything more in the physical world than the Spiritual alone. In Hibernia the Spiritual was always predominant.

By all manner of secret streams in the spiritual life, what had been begun in Hibernia was carried over to the British Isles and to Brittany, to the lands that are now Holland and Belgium, and finally by way of the present Alsace to Central Europe. Though not recognisable in the general civilisation of the first centuries of Christian evolution it can nevertheless be discovered in all these regions; here and there we find single individuals who are able to understand what had come over from the Mysteries of Hibernia. In order to find these individuals we must set out with a deep and intimate longing for knowledge. In the first Christian centuries they are still fairly numerous, but later on, from the eighth and ninth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they become very rare. Yet in these centuries too, individuals are still to be found who gather around them, in silent places far removed from the great world and its civilisation, little groups of pupils through whom what had been begun in Hibernia in the West of Europe could be fostered and continued.

In general, we find instead all over Europe that for which spiritual perception is not required; people receive readily the historical tradition of the physical events which took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. From this stream proceeded that element in human history which takes account only of what happens in physical life. Humanity in general was less and less able to perceive the contradiction which lies in the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, an Event that is comprehensible only by means of the deepest spiritual activity, should be referred to an external phenomenon, perceptible to the physical senses. This line of development became necessary for a time. Fundamentally speaking, it had been gradually prepared over a long period, but it could be realised only because a very great deal of the old Mystery knowledge, even such as still existed in Greece, had been forgotten.

Now these Mysteries of Greece were divided into two kinds. One kind was engaged in directing man’s senses towards the spiritual world, towards the actual guidance and ordering of the world in the spirit; while the other investigated the secrets of Nature, all that rules in Nature, and especially the forces and beings connected with the powers of the Earth. Many of the candidates for the Mysteries were initiated into both kinds. Of these candidates it was said that they had knowledge on the one hand of the Mysteries of the Father, the Mysteries of Zeus, and had been initiated into them, and that on the other hand they had also been admitted into the Mysteries of the Mother, the Mysteries of Demeter. When we look back into those times we find a spiritual perception which though somewhat abstract can extend into the highest regions, and side by side with this, a conception of Nature capable of descending into the depths. And as has been said, we also find what is of special significance—the union of the two.

Now in this union of the heights and the depths a fact was perceived that today is but little noticed. It is the fact that man has certain external substances of Nature within him, but not certain others. This fact was observed and studied in its deepest meaning in the Chthonic Mysteries in ancient Greece. You know that iron is part of man’s make-up. There are also other metals in him, calcium, sodium, magnesium, and so on; but there are many more metals which are not in him. If we were to try to find these other metals in man by the use of ordinary scientific methods, that is to say, by analysing the substances in him, then by means of this external investigation we should find in him no lead, no quicksilver, no tin, no silver and no gold.

That was the great riddle which occupied the Initiates in the Greek Mysteries, eventually finding expression in the question: How does it come about that man carries iron in him, that he carries sodium, magnesium and other substances which can also be found in outer Nature, but does not, for instance, carry lead or tin in him? They were deeply convinced that man is a ‘little world’, a microcosm, and yet it would appear that man does not carry in his make-up these other metals—lead, tin, copper and so on.

Now we may truly say that the older students and Initiates in Greece were of the opinion that this was only apparently the case; for they were steeped in the knowledge that man is a real microcosm, which means that everything which reveals itself in the Cosmos, man must also carry in himself.

Let us consider for a moment the mood of a man about to be initiated in Greece. He would be instructed somewhat as follows—and here I must, of course, gather together into a few sentences an instruction that extended over long periods. He would be told the following.—Observe how the Earth today carries everywhere in it the iron which is also in man. Once upon a time, when the Earth had not yet become Earth, when it existed in a previous planetary condition, when it was Moon, or perhaps even Sun, and also contained in itself lead, tin, and so on, all the Beings who partook in this earlier form of the Earth shared in these metals and their forces, even as man today shares in the forces of iron. But after the various changes which the ancient form of the Earth underwent, the iron alone persisted in such strength and density that man could permeate his being with it. The other metals named are also still contained in the Earth, but they are no longer of such a nature that man can directly permeate himself with them. They are however also to be found, in an infinitely rarefied condition, in the whole cosmic space which surrounds man.—

If I examine a small piece of lead, I see before me the well-known greyish-white metal, which has a definite density. I can take hold of it. But this same lead which appears in the lead ores of the Earth exists in infinitely fine rarity in the whole cosmic space surrounding man, and it has significance there. For it radiates its forces everywhere, even where there is apparently no lead, and man comes into contact with these forces of the lead, not through his physical body, but through his ether body; because outside the lead ores of the Earth lead exists in a rarefied, fine condition such as can work on the ether body of man. And so in this condition of rarity, and spread out over the whole of cosmic space, lead works upon man’s ether body.

The pupil of those ancient Chthonic Mysteries in Greece learned that, just as today the Earth is rich in iron—for it is a planet concerning which the inhabitants of another planet could say: that planet is rich in iron, the only other planet rich in iron being Mars—just as the Earth is rich in iron, so Saturn is rich in lead. What iron is for the Earth, lead is for Saturn; and we have to imagine that once upon a time, when Saturn separated from the common planetary body of the Earth (as described in my book, Occult Science), this fine division of lead took place. One can say that Saturn took the lead out with him, as it were, and through his own planetary life-force, through his own planetary warmth, retained it in such a condition that he is able to permeate the whole planetary system to which our Earth also belongs, with this finely divided lead.

You must therefore imagine the Earth and in the distance Saturn filling the whole planetary system with finely distributed lead; and then imagine this fine lead substance working in upon man. You can still find evidence that this was taught to those who were to be initiated in ancient Greece, and that they learned to understand how this lead worked. They knew that without it the sense organs, especially the eye, would claim the whole of man’s being, and not allow him to come to self-dependence. Man would be able only to see, and not to think about what he had seen. He would be unable to detach himself from what he saw and say: ‘I see’. He would, as it were, be overpowered with seeing, unless this lead influence were present in the Cosmos. It is this working of lead which makes it possible for man to be independent in himself, placing him as Ego over against that sensitiveness to the outer world which is in him. It is these lead forces which, entering first the ether body of man, and then from the ether body impregnating also, in a sense, the physical body, bestow upon him the faculty and power of memory.

It was a great moment for a pupil of the Chthonic Mysteries in Greece, when after having learned all this, he was led on to know what follows. With deep solemnity and ceremony he was shewn the substance of lead, and then his senses were directed towards Saturn. The relationship of Saturn with the lead of the Earth was brought before his soul, and he was told: ‘The lead which you see is concealed in the Earth, for in its present state the Earth is not in a condition to give the lead a form in which it can work in man; but Saturn, with his very different condition of warmth, with his inner life-forces, is able to scatter this lead out into the planetary spaces, and make you an independent human being, possessing the power of memory. For you are a human being only through the fact that today you can recollect what you knew ten or twenty years ago. Think how the human part of you would suffer if you did not carry within you what you experienced ten or twenty years ago. Your Ego-force would be shattered unless this power of memory were present in full measure. The power of memory is due to what streams to you from distant Saturn. It is the force which has come to rest in the Earth in lead, and in this state of rest cannot now work upon you. The Saturn lead-forces enable you to fix your thoughts, so that after a time these thoughts can arise again out of the depths of the soul and you can have continuity in your life in the external world, and not merely live in a transitory way. You owe it to the Saturn lead-forces that you do not merely look around you today and then forget the objects you behold, but retain the memory of them in your soul. You can retain in your soul what you experienced twenty years ago, and can cause this so to live again that your inner life is transformed and becomes again as it was at that time.’

It was a deep and powerful impression that the pupil received. With great and solemn ceremony this knowledge was brought before him. And now he learned also to understand that if these Saturn forces alone were active— giving him the power of the Ego, the power of memory—he would be completely estranged from the Cosmos. Inspired by Saturn with the power of memory, he would become, as it were, a hermit. And then he was told that over against the Saturn force another force must be placed—the force of the Moon. Let us suppose that these two forces act in such a way that the force of Saturn and the force of the Moon approach from opposite sides, and flowing into each other, descend to the Earth and to man upon the Earth. Then what Saturn takes from man, the Moon gives to him. And what Saturn gives to man, the Moon takes from him. And just as in iron the Earth has a force which man can inwardly transmute, and just as Saturn has a corresponding force in lead, so the same force is possessed by the Moon in silver.

Now silver, as it exists in the Earth, has arrived at a condition in which it cannot enter directly into man, but the whole sphere that is embraced by the Moon is actually permeated by finely divided silver; and the Moon, especially when its light comes from the direction of the constellation of Leo, works in such a way that man receives through these silver-forces of the Moon the opposite influence to the lead-forces from Saturn, and he is therefore not estranged from the Cosmos, in spite of the fact that he is endowed by the Cosmos with forces of memory. It was a deeply solemn moment when the Greek pupil was led to see this opposition of Saturn and the Moon. In the holy solemnity of night he was told: ‘Look up to Saturn surrounded by his rings. To him you owe the fact that you are an independent being. Look to the other side, to the Moon streaming out her rays of silver. To her you owe it that you are able to bear the Saturn forces without being cut off from the rest of the Cosmos.’

In this way, with direct reference to the connection between man and the Cosmos, teaching was given in Greece which we find caricatured later on in Astrology. In those days it was a true wisdom, for men saw in the stars not merely the points of specks of light above them in the sky; in the stars they beheld living spiritual Beings. And the human being of the Earth they saw to be in union with these living spiritual Beings. Thus they had a natural science which reached up into the heavens and extended right out into cosmic space. Then, when the pupil had received such an insight, when this vision of light had been deeply inscribed into Iris soul, he was led into the real Mysteries of Eleusinia. (You have heard how these things took place in my description of other Mysteries— for instance, the Mysteries of Hibernia.) The pupil was led before two statues. The first of these two statues represented to him a Father Godhead—the Father God surrounded by the signs of the planets and the Sun. It showed Saturn, for example, raying out in such a way that the pupil remembered: Yes, that is the lead radiation of the Cosmos; and the Moon so that he was reminded: Yes, that is the silver radiation of the Moon. And so on with each single planet. Thus in the statue which represented the Father nature, there appeared all the secrets which stream down to Earth from the planetary environment and are connected with the several metals of the Earth, of which man is now no longer able to make use in his inner make-up.

Then the pupil was told the following.—‘The Father of the whole World stands there before you. In Saturn He carries lead, in Jupiter tin, in Mars iron—iron which is closely connected also with the Earth, but in a quite different condition; in the Sun He carries radiant gold, in Venus the radiantly streaming copper, in Mercury the radiant quicksilver, and in the Moon the radiant silver. You yourself bear within you only so much of the metals as you were able to assimilate from the planetary conditions through which the the Earth passed in earlier times. In its present condition you can assimilate only the iron. But as an earthly human being you are not complete. The Father who stands before you shows you in the metals that which today cannot exist within you as coming from the Earth but which you have to receive from the Cosmos; and in this you have another part of your being. For only when you look upon yourself as a human being who has lived through the planetary transformations of the Earth—only then are you really a complete human being. You stand here on Earth as a part only of man. The other part of you the Father carries around His head and in His arms; he bears it for you. That which stands here on Earth together with that which He carries forms the real ‘you’. You stand on the Earth, but the Earth was not always as it is today. If the Earth had always been as it is today, you could not be on it as a human being. For the Earth today carries within it, even though in a dead condition, the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars (in that other state), the gold of Sun, the silver of Moon, the copper of Venus, and the quicksilver of Mercury. It carries all these things within it. But the condition in which the Earth carries these metals within it today is no more than a memory of the condition in which, once upon a time, silver lived during the Old Moon-existence of the Earth, or gold during the Sun-existence of the Earth, or lead during the Saturn-existence of the Earth. That which you see today in the dense metallic ores of lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, quicksilver— with the exception of the iron as you know it, which is not essentially earthly but belongs to Mars—all these metals, which you now see in dense, concentrated form, once poured from the Cosmos into the Earth in quite different conditions. The metals, as you know them today on the Earth, are the corpses of what they once were; they have remained as the corpse of the metal substance and metal nature which played a part on the Earth in her ancient form—during the Old Saturn period, and later on in a different stage during the Old Moon period. Tin played a part, together with gold, during the Old Sun period of the Earth, in an altogether different condition. And when you behold this condition in the spirit, then this statue becomes for you, in what meets you today, a true “Father statue”.’

And in the spirit—as it were in a real vision—the Father statue of the true Mysteries of Eleusis became alive, and handed to the female figure standing beside it the metals in the state they then were. In the vision seen by the pupil, the female figure received this ancient form of the metals and surrounded it with what the Earth could give out of her own being, when she became Earth. This wonderful process the pupil now beheld. Once upon a time, what the pupil now saw in a symbolic way had actually happened. The mass of metal streamed or rayed forth from the hand of the Father statue; and the Earth, with its chalk and other stones, came to meet that which streamed in, and surrounded these instreaming metals with earthly substance. A hand outstretched in love from the Mother statue came to meet the metal forces coming from the Father statue. This made a deep and powerful impression upon the pupil, for he saw how the Cosmos worked together with the Earth in the course of the aeons; and what the Earth has to offer—that he learned to perceive and understand in the right way.

Look at the metal substance in the Earth today in all its variety! You find it crystallised and surrounded with a kind of crust which is from the Earth. The metal is from the Cosmos; and that which is of the Earth receives with love what comes from the Cosmos. You may see this all around you if you walk about in those parts of the Earth where metals are found, and interest yourself in them. That which came to meet the metal was called ‘Mother’.¹ The most important of these Earthly substances which, as it were, placed themselves there before the Heavenly metals in order to receive them, were called the Mothers. And this is also one aspect of the ‘Mothers’ to whom Faust descends. He descends at the same time into those pre-earthly periods of the Earth, in order to see there how the mother-like Earth takes into herself what is given, father-like, by the Cosmos.

Through all this a deep inner feeling was aroused in the pupil of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He felt that he was indeed sharing in the life of the Cosmos; he began to know, with a knowledge that is of the heart, the products and processes of Nature upon the Earth.

When a man of today observes the products and processes of Nature, it is all dead for him, it is nothing but a corpse. And when we occupy ourselves with physics or chemistry, are we really doing any tiling else with Nature than what the anatomist does when he dissects the dead body? The anatomist has before him the dead remains of what is made and intended for life. In the same way we with our chemistry and physics dissect a living Nature! A very different natural science was given to the pupil in Greece—a science of what is living, which enabled him to see, for example, our present lead as the corpse of lead. He had to go back into the times when lead was alive. And he learned to understand the mysterious relation of man to the Cosmos, the mysterious relation of man to all that is around him on the Earth. And now, after the pupil had experienced all this and it had been deepened in his soul by contemplation of the Father-like statue and the Mother-like statue, which made present for him in his soul the two opposing forces, the forces of the Cosmos and the forces coming from the Earth—after this experience he was led into the very holiest place of all. There he had before him the picture of the female figure suckling at her breast the Child. And he was introduced to the meaning of the words: ‘That is the God Jacchos who will one day come.’

Thus did the Greek disciple learn to understand beforehand the Mystery of Christ. Those who sought Initiation in Eleusis also had the Christ placed before them; and it was again in a spiritual way. At that time however, men could only learn of the Christ as of One Who was to come in the future, as of One who was still a child, a Cosmic Child, who must first grow up in the Cosmos. Those who were to be initiated were called Tellists—that is to say, those who have to look towards the end and goal of Earth evolution.

And now came the great turning-point. Now came the great change which finds such clear and even historic expression in the transition from Plato to Aristotle. It was indeed a remarkable happening. As the fourth century approached in the evolution of Greek culture and civilisation, human thought underwent the first ‘turn’ in the direction of becoming abstract. And then, at a time when Plato was already an old man and near the end of his life’s course, the following scene took place between him and Aristotle.

Plato spoke to Aristotle somewhat as follows. (I have to clothe it in words, but of course the whole event took place in a much more complicated way.) ‘Many things that I have said in my lectures have not seemed to you quite correct. All that I have taught to you and the other pupils is however nothing else than an extract from the ancient and holy Mystery wisdom. But a time will come in the course of evolution when human beings will acquire a nature and an inner organisation which will gradually lead them to a stage that is in truth higher than what is now represented in man; at the same time it will become impossible for them to accept natural science as it is current among the Greeks.’ (I have explained to you what this means. ... All this Plato made clear to Aristotle.) He continued: ‘Therefore I intend to withdraw for a time and leave you to yourself. In the world of thought for which you are specially endowed, and which is destined to be the world of thought for humanity for many centuries—in this world of thought try to build up and develop in thoughts what you have received here in my School.’

Plato and Aristotle then remained apart, and in this way Plato fulfilled, through Aristotle, a high spiritual mission.

I am obliged, my dear friends, to describe the scene as I have done. If you look in the history books, you will find the same scene described, and I will tell you how it is given there. Aristotle, so runs the story, was in reality always a headstrong pupil of Plato. Plato once said that Aristotle was indeed a gifted pupil, but was like a horse that has been trained and then turns and kicks its trainer. As time went on, the trouble between them led at last to this result, that Plato withdrew from Aristotle, was annoyed, and never again went into the Academy to teach. That is the account given in history books.

The one story is in the history books; the other, which I have related to you, is the truth. And it bears within it an impulse of great significance. For the writings of Aristotle were of two kinds. One set of writings contained an important natural science, which was the natural science of Eleusis, and which came to Aristotle indirectly through Plato. The other writings contained the abstract thoughts which it was Aristotle’s task to develop in pursuance of Plato’s instructions—in fulfilment, that is, of the mission that Plato had in his turn received from the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Now what Aristotle had to give to mankind, besides being of two kinds, followed also a twofold path. There were his so-called logical writings, which owe their most productive thoughts to the ancient Eleusinian wisdom. These writings, which contained only little natural science, Aristotle entrusted to his pupil, Theophrastus, through whom, as well as through many other channels, they came over to Greece and Rome, and formed throughout the Middle Ages the whole wisdom and learning of the teachers of philosophy in Central Europe, who in those days also participated actively in the civilisation of their time.

The development which I described in the last lecture came about because men were destined to reject and turn away from the Mystery wisdom of Hibernia and there was left for them only the tradition of the Event that had taken place in the physical world of the senses at the beginning of our era. With this was now united what had become separated out from the wisdom of Plato, that wisdom which existed still in Aristotle, and which was in reality the wisdom of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The true natural science, bearing within it still the spirit of the Chthonic Mysteries which flowed over into the Eleusinian Mysteries, this natural science which, in order to find an explanation for the Earth, reached out to the Heavens and soared aloft into the wide spaces of the Cosmos—for this the time was past in Greece. Only so much of it was saved as could be saved by Aristotle becoming the teacher of Alexander, who made his campaigns into Asia and did everything possible to introduce Aristotelian natural science to the East. In this way it passed over into Jewish and Arabian schools, whence it came back and across through Africa to Spain, and there, in a diluted form, had a certain influence upon those isolated individuals in Central Europe who, as I explained to you in the last lecture, still carried—within a newer civilisation—something of the impulse of the Hibernian Mysteries. Theophrastus had given his Aristotle to the teachers and fathers of the Church in the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great had carried the other Aristotle over to Asia. The Eleusinian wisdom which in a very much weakened and diluted form had made its way through Africa into Spain, lights up here and there in the Middle Ages; notwithstanding the utterly different general character of the civilisation, it was studied and cultivated in certain monasteries—for example, by Basil Valentine, who is looked upon in our time almost as a mythical personality. It lived on—hidden as it were within the general civilisation, under the surface; while on the surface prevailed that culture of which I spoke in the last lecture, a culture that had no place for such truth as could still be taught in the time of Aristotle. For even then it was taught that the Christ must be known and recognised. The third picture, the female form who carried at her breast the Child, the Jacchos Child, had also to be understood; but it was said that what would bring the understanding of this third figure was still to come in the evolution of humanity. This truth Aristotle made clear again and again to Alexander the Great, although he was not able to write it down.

So we see how there lies in the bosom of time the demand to understand in its pristine reality what has been so beautifully put before the world by the Christian painters—the Mother with the Child at her breast. It has not yet been fully understood, neither in the Madonnas of Raphael, nor in the Eastern Ikons. It still awaits understanding.

Something of what is necessary to acquire such understanding will be spoken of in the lectures to be given here in the near future. In the next lecture I will describe the path along which many occult secrets travelled, on their way from Arabia into Europe. This will help to place before your souls a certain great historical event; and in the course of lectures ² which will be given to the delegates at Christmas and are intended to show the occult foundation of the historical evolution of humanity, I shall have occasion to explain to you the full significance of the journeys of Alexander the Great, in their connection with the teachings of Aristotle.

• 1. In English still called the ‘Matrix’. (Note by Translator.)
• 2. The title of these eight lectures is, World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (English translation by George and Mary Adams, 1950) Rudolf Steiner Press.

After what I told you yesterday, you will perhaps understand me when I say of Aristotle—who in the fourth century b.c. collected together the whole knowledge of ancient times—that although we find what was spread over Europe by his influence to be no more than a kind of system of logic, he nevertheless stood upon the ground of the Greek Mysteries, and indeed of all the Mysteries of his time. I can go further and say that anyone who is in a position to receive a world-conception not merely with his intellect, but with his heart and understanding, will be able to feel even in the logical and philosophical writings of Aristotle that they have implicit within them a close and intimate connection with the secrets of Nature.

To spread over Europe a system of logic was the destiny of Aristotle rather than, if I may so express it, his proper path of development. For after all—to give an illustration of this fact—it would be almost unthinkable that Plato should have been Alexander’s teacher, whereas Aristotle could be. Plato, it is true, continued the teachings of the old Mysteries. But he did so in his own way, in the form of ‘ideas’; and for this very reason he was the one who led man away from the secrets of Nature, whilst Aristotle led back to them—as you will have gathered from the short account of him given in my book, Riddles of Philosophy. We can come to realise this in more detail and completeness when we are able to form an idea of the content of the seven years’ instruction given by Aristotle to Alexander. Let me now summarise for you in brief the content of this teaching which was drawn from the ancient Mysteries.

In those times it was so that whenever one spoke in an authentic way about Nature, one did not understand by the word what the Natural Science of today understands— namely, the purely earthly phenomena, from which one then goes on to infer in an external manner the phenomena of the Heavens beyond the Earth. No, Man was thought of always as a member and part of Nature in the widest sense; and this necessitated looking also for the Spirit in Nature—for to regard man as devoid of soul or devoid of spirit was quite impossible in those olden times.

And so in the Mystery teaching about Nature, we find that Nature was thought of as extending far out into the Cosmos, as far indeed as the Cosmos was in any way accessible to man through his relationship with it.

Now you must understand that all teaching that was seriously undertaken in those olden times did not make appeal primarily to the intellect or to the faculty of observation. What we think of today as ‘knowledge’ was really of very little account in those ancient times, even as late as the days of Aristotle. And if a modern historian of some particular science wants to give an account of the progress of thought in that domain of knowledge, he should really begin with Copernicus or Galileo, for anything he may add to his account by going further back, is beside the point. And if he goes back as far as to the knowledge of Greek times, then what he tells is mere phantasy. It is a continuation of the present back into earlier times which is utterly unreal. For even in the time of Aristotle any education that was taken seriously involved a complete change in the very nature of the pupil, for it made appeal not merely to thought and observation but to the whole life of the human being. The essential thing in the Mysteries was that the human being should become through his education an altogether different being from what he was before. And in Aristotle’s time the endeavour was made to bring about this change by subjecting the soul to two diametrically opposite impressions.

In the first place the pupil who was to attain to knowledge step by step, was exhorted to feel his way as Man right into the Nature that was all around him. ‘Behold now,’ it was said to him, ‘you breathe the air. And in summer the air you breathe is warm, while in winter it is cold. In winter you can perceive your own breath in the form of vapour. Your breath is invisible when you breathe the warm air in summertime.’

A phenomenon like this was taken as a starting-point. The teacher of those olden times did not try to make the connection with Nature by saying: ‘Here is a body that has such and such a temperature. I warm it in a retort and it undergoes such and such a change.’ No, he brought Nature into direct contact with the human being himself, by making him attentive to the feeling he experienced in connection with the breathing process. And the pupil learned to develop a true feeling, on the one hand, of the warmed air. ‘Picture yourself,’ said the teacher, ‘what it really means—warmed air. It wants to rise; and you must feel, when the warmed air comes toward you, that something is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. And now feel, on the other hand, as a contrast, cold water in some form or other. You do not feel at home in the cold water. In the warm air you feel at home, you feel how it is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. In the cold water you feel strange. And you feel that if you go away from the cold water and let it do what it will away from you, then it will make the snow crystals that fall down upon the Earth. You feel yourself in your right place outside the snow crystals, watching them from without. The warm air you can only feel in you, and you would gladly let yourself be carried out into the far spaces of the worlds by the ascending warm air. The cold water you can only really feel outside you, and in order to have a relationship with it, you would rather observe it in its results by means of your senses.’

These were the two opposite experiences to which the pupil was brought. If we describe it as ‘learning to feel the difference between what is within man and what is outside him’— that is an empty expression! It really does not say very much. But ‘warm air’ and ‘cold water’ mean a great deal! Through these opposite experiences man is placed into the world with his whole inner being. ‘Outside’ begins to have meaning and reality when we think of it as damp and cold, and ‘inside’ when we think of it as warm and gaseous. The contrast was experienced as having a qualitative character; man learned to feel how he is placed qualitatively into the world. And then the teacher ceased speaking of things, and spoke of the human being himself. He told how the ‘warm air’ leads to the Gods in the Heights, while the ‘cold damp’ leads to the demons under the Earth.

With the journey to the sub-earthly demons is connected the knowledge of Nature. Only the pupil must bring with him into the lower regions the knowledge and experience he has gained through the warm air in the heights, lest the lower regions have evil designs upon him.

And when with this inner experience of the contrast between the warm air and the damp cold, the pupil afterwards approached Nature, he was able, through further experience of the things and processes of Nature, to look far into the real being of the whole world. Today, the chemist examines hydrogen and attributes to it certain properties. Then he observes the spaces of the worlds, finds there something which reveals the same properties as hydrogen does in the laboratory and draws the conclusion that hydrogen is present also out there in the far spaces. Such a method of instruction would have seemed sheer nonsense in Aristotle’s time. One went to work then in quite a different way.

When the inner experience of the pupil had been deepened in the way I have indicated, the teacher led him to observe what is living in the flower as it raises itself upwards and opens out into the far spaces; he had now to pass on to knowledge of the plants. ‘Look into the opening petals of the flower,’ he was told, ‘and observe the impression it makes upon you as it rays out into the World.’

And when the pupil, whose feelings had been deepened in the way I have explained, gazed out over the opening blossoms of the plants, an inward knowledge, an inward illumination, dawned within him. The flowers became for him the proclaimers upon Earth of the secrets of the Cosmos: they spoke to him of the far spaces of the Worlds. And with deep earnestness, though always only in the way of gentle hints and intimations, the teacher then led the pupil to find for himself the secret that streams from the wide spaces of the World into the being of the flower. The teacher put the question: ‘What do you really perceive when you look at the opening flower, when you gaze at the opening petals and see how the stamens push forth and out to meet you? What do you then really perceive?’ And by-and-by the pupil became able to say in answer: ‘The plants tell me that the heavy, cold Earth has compelled them to take up their abode on the Earth; they say that they really do not come from the Earth at all, but have only been placed there and made fast in the Earth. In truth they are water-born, and in a previous condition of Earth existence’—it is the condition I have described in Occult Science as the Old Moon condition of the Earth—‘they enjoyed their true and genuine existence as water-born beings in all their livingness.’

The pupil was led to perceive that in the flowers he can see a reflection of the secrets and Mysteries of the Moon, which has gone out of the Earth and still preserves something of the old, pre-Earthly Moon condition. For the flowers did not tell him the same thing every night! What the flowers said when the Moon stood before Leo was different from what they said when the Moon stood before Virgo or before Scorpio. The flowers on the Earth told what the Moon experienced as she passed round the whole circle of the Zodiac. The secrets and mysteries of the World-All— it was of these that the flowers on Earth told. It was really so that through what came to the pupil in this way he was able to say out of the depth of his heart:

I look into the flowers.
They reveal to me their kinship with the Moon.
Captives on Earth are they,
For they are Water-born.

The pupil was able to have this feeling, because he had previously experienced the impression made on him by the cold, chilling water. That experience enabled him now to come to this knowledge about the flowers.

And when the pupil was sufficiently familiar with the secret of the Moon as it was disclosed to him in this way by the plants that grow up out of the Earth, he was led a step further, and had to contemplate the metals of the Earth— the principal metals, lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, quicksilver, silver.² We spoke of them in another connection yesterday. And when he approached the metals, with his feeling and understanding deepened in the way I have indicated, then he gradually made himself familiar with the secrets that they spoke to him; and from the metals he learned the secrets of the whole planetary system. For the lead explained to him about Saturn, the tin about Jupiter, the iron about Mars, the gold about the Sun, the copper about Venus, the quicksilver about Mercury, and the silver again about the Moon—that is to say, the Moon not now in her relationship with the Earth but as a member of the WorldAll. Just as the pupil had discovered the secret of the flowers, so now he discovered for himself the secret of the metals. First he learned the flower secret, and then the metal secret.

This secret or mystery of the metals which was given expression in the male statue of the Eleusinian Mysteries by means of the great Planisphere that I described to you yesterday, still formed part of the education given in Aristotle’s time, and in this secret of the metals was revealed the secret of the planets. Man’s feeling and perception were not so coarse as they are today. When the pupil directed his eyes to a piece of lead, the lead did not merely show itself blue-grey in colour to his eye, but this blue-grey had a very remarkable effect upon his inner eye. In a sense this blue-grey of the fresh lead extinguished all other colours, and the pupil felt as if he were one with this blue-grey metallic nature, is if he were moving with it. He came into a state of consciousness where he had experience of something utterly and entirely different from the present. He came really into a condition of soul when it was as though the whole past of the Earth rose up before him, as though the present were blotted out by the blue-grey. Saturn stood revealed!

In the case of gold, people point to external analogies to account for the fact that the ancients saw in gold a representative of the Sun. It was by no means due to some mere external analogy, such as that the Sun is regarded as something precious and valuable on Earth. Really nothing is too stupid for modern man to ascribe to the ancients! When the man of olden times looked upon the gold with its brilliant yellow colour—a colour that is, so to say, complete in itself—and saw how plain and unpretending and at the same time how proud it is in its outward appearance, then he felt in very truth that here was something that was allied to the blood-circulation in himself. Of the very quality of gold man had the feeling that he himself was within it. And through this perception he was able to come to an understanding of the nature of the Sun and of all that belongs to the Sun. For he felt how the quality of gold is allied to something of the Sun that works in man’s blood.

And so, taking the metals one by one, the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came to a perception of the whole planetary system. And as he learned to apply his thought to these things—we arc not, of course, to imagine his thinking to be abstract as is the thinking of the present day—he came to think of the metals in the following way:

I ponder on the metals
They reveal to me their kinship with the Planets.
Captives on Earth are they,
or they are Air-born.

For it is a fact that the metals that we find in the Earth today came out of the Cosmos in the form of air, and only during the Moon-existence gradually became fluid. They came first in the form of air, when the Earth was in her Old Sun condition; they acquired fluid form during the Moon-existence, and during the time of Earth they were taken captive and bound into hard solid form. That was the second mystery that was disclosed to the pupil.

The third mystery had to be approached by the pupil learning to observe how different are the peoples of mankind all over the Earth. If one were to go to the hot country of Africa with its own peculiar climate, one would find there people who are quite different even in the colour of their skin from the people of Hellas. Or if one travelled across to Asia, there one would find people who were different again. The Greeks had a fine feeling for all these external differences in human beings.

One of the most interesting of all the writings of Aristotle that have come down to later times is his book on Physiognomy, by which we are to understand not merely the physiognomy of the human countenance, but the physiognomy of the whole man studied with a view to becoming familiar in this way with the true nature of the human being. He points out, for example, how man’s hair is curly or smooth according to the climate in which he lives, and how it is not only the colour of his skin that varies with the climate of the land where he is born, but the whole expression of the human form.

In the flowers the pupil learned to see a reflection of the mystery of the Moon, and in the metals a reflection of the Planets; and now by means of this third teaching he came to know the mystery of man himself on Earth. The Natural Science of those times made great progress in the study of the variety of man on Earth, and it went far towards obtaining an answer to the question: What is the true and original form of Man that lies behind the purposes of the Gods?

As the pupil was introduced in a living way to the physiognomy, to the various forms of man over the Earth, he felt rise up within him the secret of the Zodiac. For the Zodiac influences the elements on the Earth; in conjunction with the Planets and with the Moon it carries the winds in one direction at one time of year and in another direction at another—now wafting warm air over some region, now again sweeping it with storms of cold rain. All these conditions affect man, they enter deeply into his life. And the researches into Nature in Grecian times sought for the origin of these natural conditions in the influences that stream down upon the Earth from the stars of the Zodiac, modified by Planets, Sun and Moon.

The Natural History of those times looked with great interest on the fact that a man had black, curly hair, a ruddy countenance, a nose of such and such shape, and so on. It was said: ‘That is a man who refers me to the Sign of Leo—Leo with his forces weakened or strengthened by tire Planets according to their position. He is a man who in accordance with his karma has such and such qualities in his liver. If, for instance, he has a quality in his liver that brings a trait of melancholy to his life of soul, then it is due to the fact that at a certain point of time Venus stood in a particular relation to Jupiter, and that gave a special character to the Leo rays. In the particular nature of the temperament in connection with the nature of the liver, I can behold how the man has been determined from the Cosmos. I can extend this to all the qualities of the different peoples of the Earth. In what the human being experiences from the whole atmosphere around him, I can behold the mystery of the Zodiac.’

And when the pupil had been led to this point, once again he felt a clear knowledge arise in his heart which he now clothed somewhat in the following words:

I experience the mystery of the Zodiac in the variety of men;
There stands before my soul the kinship of this variety of Men
With the Fixed Stars.
As Captives on Earth live Men in their variety,
For they are Fire-born.

(Born, that is, from the warmth ether—from the warmth ether under the influence of the Zodiac.)

Thus did man feel himself in his physiognomy as born of the Fire or Warmth. He knew that he had undergone change during the Moon-existence, and again during the Earth-existence, but that what he attained to in the old Saturn time was his true and original condition. Just as he perceived the metals of the Earth to be Sun-born, Air-born, and the plants and flowers to be Moon-born, Water-born, so did he perceive man to be Warmth-born.

Man had been prepared for all this by the feelings and perceptions he had been able to experience with the warm air and the cold water.

In the time of Aristotle men were able to perceive when they observed a human being, the effect he had upon the warm-and-gaseous in its combination with the cold-and-watery. Owing to the development they had undergone in their souls they were able, by looking at the physiognomy of a human being, to answer the question: How much does this man give to the warm-and-gaseous, how much does he take from the cold-and-watery? Men learned to look at the human being in this way, and gradually, little by little, they learned to look upon the whole of Nature in this aspect. This prepared the way for the old and genuine Alchemy that afterwards came across Africa to Spain and spread over certain parts of Central Europe. Every thing in the world, every flower, every animal, every cloud, every rolling mist, sands and stones, seas and river, woodland and meadow,— all were viewed in the light of the impression they made of the warm-gaseous and cold-watery.

And so men came to acquire a fine faculty of perception for four qualities in Nature. When they perceived the warm-gaseous, they developed a perception for the warmth, and at the same time for the air; they felt what the warmth is for the gaseous. And in the cold they developed a perception for the damp and the dry. They acquired fine faculties of perception and feeling for these differentiations, for their power of perception enabled them to stand with their whole being right within what the world offered.

Having once adopted this standpoint, it was natural for Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, to regard the whole region in which they both lived from this point of view. And being permeated throughout with the impressions that came to him through this faculty of perception of which we have been speaking, Alexander felt in the whole Greek nature, in so far at any rate as it revealed itself in Macedonia, the qualities of damp and gaseous. And that determined and constituted the mood of his soul at a particular time in his life. This perception that he attained through what one may call a special kind of Initiation received through Aristotle, he took to be an indication of the fundamental character of the world immediately surrounding him, the world of his own experience. It can only be the half of the world—so he said to himself. You see, in those times, people were taught about Nature in such a way that they experienced her. And their experience could lead up to an instruction such as the following:

Here you have a wind blowing from the North-West (if Macedonia were in the centre) and here a South-Westerly direction of wind, here again a North-Easterly wind, and lastly here a South-Easterly.

Now Aristotle’s pupil Alexander had learned from his own experience to feel, in what came from the climatic influences and the winds of the North-West, the damp and cold; and in what came from the South-West, the warm and damp. In this way he had a perception for only half of the world. In the instruction he received, this perception was completed for him, and he himself was able also to feel that what he was taught belonged to what he already knew by his own experience. He was taught how from the winds that blow from the North-East came the dry and cold, while the wind from the South-East brought the dry and warm. So now he had learned to have in the four directions of the four winds the perception of dry and cold, dry and warm, warm and moist and cold and moist. Being a true man of his time, he had the desire to reconcile these opposites. Here in Macedonia one’s experience was limited to the cold and damp and the warm and moist; these must be united with the cold and dry and the fiery and dry, must be united with what blows over from the North of Asia, and with what blows over from the South through Asia.

Here you have the source of the irresistible urge that lived in Alexander to make expeditions into Asia. And from this example you may see how different things were then from the conditions that prevail in more recent times. Think of the education a prince receives today! Think of what he is taught, and then think of the education he receives ‘on the march’ with the troops. Try to make a clear picture of what kind of relationship exists between the instruction in physics given to a prince by some tutor, and what that prince experiences later on in the campaigns of war! Among the things that come out of a retort one does not as a rule find deeds done in a campaign of war! Such an example may help you to see how very far removed today is the knowledge that it is thought fit to teach a child in order to form his inner being, from what the child has actually to be later in external life. In the case of Alexander you have an era when complete unity was still striven for in knowledge between what was given the human being to mould and form him inwardly and what was given him to enable him to take his right place in the world. In those olden times history began in the schoolroom. But the schoolroom was a place that had affinity with the Mysteries, and the Mysteries meant the World ... and the World was seen to be the result of the forces that were in the Mysteries. It was this kind of education that gave the impulse to carry across into Asia the Natural Science of those ancient times.

In a much sifted condition this Natural Science came across Spain into Europe. It can still be traced in the writings of Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and Gichtl, and many more besides who later had connections with men like Basil Valentine and others.

For a time it was inevitable that whatever of the knowledge could be expressed in logical forms of thought won the day and the other part of Aristotle’s knowledge had to wait. But now the time has come when this other part has fulfilled its time of waiting and all this knowledge of Nature must be rediscovered. It was really so that Alexander had to bury these secrets of Nature over in Asia, for it was nothing but their corpses that were brought across to Europe. It is not our task to galvanise these corpses but to rediscover the original living truth. And we shall only really find the necessary enthusiasm for such a task when we can develop a warm feeling for what took place at that turning-point of time, when we can perceive and appreciate the real purpose of Alexander’s campaigns. For only to outward appearance were they campaigns of conquest; in reality their object was to find the other side of the compass, to open up the other half of the world. They were also a search for a personal experience. And the personal experience consisted in this, that a certain discomfort, a certain lack of satisfaction was felt in the milieu of the cold-and-damp and moist-and-warm alone, and this needed to be complemented and satisfied by the addition of the other perception.

Of the immense historical significance of this event in the evolution of the whole Western world, I shall have to speak in the lectures that are to be given in the near future at the Delegates’ Meeting, on the subject of the occult foundations of the history of Man on Earth.

• 2. ee Lectures III to V of the volume True and False Paths in spiritual Investigation. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

During these last weeks I have lectured on many forms of the Mysteries. We have been trying to gain insight more especially into those Mysteries which, in a certain sense, were the last of the great Mysteries connecting man’s inner life directly with Nature, with the spirit of Nature-existence. These were the Mysteries of Hibernia. And on the other hand we have seen how, through insight into Man himself, through insight of an altogether intimate, spiritual kind, individual and personal, the Greek Mysteries penetrated into the inner being of Man. One may indeed say: Just as in external Nature various regions of the Earth bear various kinds of vegetation, so in the course of human development in the different regions of the Earth the most manifold influences upon Man appear from the side of the spiritual world.

If we were now to proceed Eastward—as we shall be doing in the course of the next few days in our study of historical connections—we should find there many other forms of the Mysteries. Today, however, since all our visitors are not yet here, rather than start on something new, I will add to what we have already been considering. Looking back on the evolution of man we may describe it as a threefold development, as it appears with all clarity to the Imaginative consciousness. I say the ‘Imaginative’ consciousness, for by extending the epochs of which I am about to speak further and further into the past, we should of course arrive at a greater number than the threefold; and it would be the same if we were to penetrate farther into the future. Today, however, we will take for our study those middle stages of human evolution which do not appear first to Inspiration, but quite clearly even to Imagination. We will consider these today from a particular standpoint.

As late as the Egyptian epoch mankind was still at the stage when for the European-African as well as for the Asiatic peoples there was for the consciousness of man no such thing as what we call matter. There was no external coarse substance of any kind for human consciousness, much less those abstractions which we now call carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, and so on. There were none of these things; everything in outer Nature was immediately seen as the embodiment of divine-spiritual Beings who manifest themselves throughout the whole of Nature. If today we go into the hills and pick up a stone, we look upon it as a substance like any other. Nothing at all comes into our consciousness such as came into the consciousness of the ancient Egyptian and Oriental.

If we today stand before a man and look, let us say, at his finger, we do not consider what we find there as human finger to be an object just like any other. We regard it as belonging to the human organism as a v/hole. If we were to look, for example, at the last joint of the index finger, we could not do otherwise than speak of it as a part of a whole organism. Thus it was for the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians; and thus too it was for the consciousness of the ancient Orientals. If they came upon a stone and took it up, it was not for them merely a stone as it would be for us today; it was not ordinary earthly substance at all; it was a part of the divine body which the Earth appeared to them to be. Men of old regard the outer surface of the Earth just as we in our consciousness regard the human skin. Again, we may meet a man, and become conscious that he reminds us of someone else we already know, who is perhaps not now present; and if it afterwards transpires that the person we met is the brother or sister of the other, then we see at once : these two arc of the same flesh and blood, they belong in a special physical way to one another. When the ancient Greek or Oriental raised his eyes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then looked at the Earth, he saw in the Earth the divine body of the God of the Earth, but at the same time he saw also in the Earth the sister or brother of the planets—in short, he saw a family likeness to the planets which revolve out there in space around the Earth,—Jupiter, Mars, Saturn.

Thus, in their perception of the Cosmos as a whole, and in their perception of the Earth as part of the Cosmos, there was for these ancient people something of soul and spirit. You must picture to yourselves what an utterly different experience this was from the experience modern man has in his perception. It means something, indeed, to gaze at the divine body of the Earth, and to see in the Earth a member of the great family of the planets of the Universe! The people of old did indeed think of the Universe as God-enfilled. For them not only was the whole Earth filled with the Gods, but the great planetary world-bodies, each single planet—all were God-enfilled. In stone and tree, in river and rock, in cloud and lightning, some spiritual being was revealed. This consciousness was awake in wide circles of people on the Earth, and this consciousness was intensified in the various forms of the Mysteries to be found here and there on the Earth.

To turn now to the Greek nature, at the time when the external political greatness of Greece sank into a kind of chaos and the Macedonian power arose, we find a new current flowing into human knowledge. It is what we came to know last time as Aristotelianism, as that which Alexander the Great in a spiritual connection had made his task. When we look at the culmination of the greatness of Greece on the one hand, and on the other the fall of Greece and the rise of Macedonia, we are faced, first of all, with what external history tells us, which is in reality a mere legend. But we can also see something else. In the subconsciousness of the deeper thinkers we perceive an impulse which came from those Mysteries to which Aristotle was very near—despite the fact that he never spoke of them outwardly. They were those Mysteries which, in the deeper sense, awakened to full life in their hearers the consciousness that the whole world was a theogony, a divine process of being, and that we see the world in an altogether illusory way if we believe anything comes to being in the world other than Gods alone. It is Gods who are manifested in the beings and entities of the world. It is Gods who have experiences in the world, it is Gods who perform deeds. And what we see in clouds, what we hear in thunder, what we behold in lightning, what we see on the Earth in rivers and mountains, in the mineral formations—all are revelations, expressions of the coming-into-being of the destinies of the Gods hidden behind them. And what appears externally as cloud, lightning, thunder, trees or forest, mountains or stream, is nothing else than a revelation everywhere of Gods’ existence—-just as the skin of a man reveals his inner nature of soul. And if everywhere there are Gods, then, as the pupils of the Mysteries were taught in Northern Greece, one must differentiate between the lesser Gods who are in single Nature-beings and Nature-processes, and the greater Gods who manifest as Beings of the Sun, of Mars, of Mercury, and of a fourth who cannot be made externally visible in an image or a form.

Those were the great Gods, the great planetary Gods, who were presented to man in such a way that his gaze was led out into the cosmic expanse, to see with his eyes, to see too with his whole heart, what lives in Sun, Mars, Mercury—yes, and what lives not only out there in one little circle in cosmic space but what lives everywhere in cosmic space. This was what was first of all revealed to man.

And then, after what I may call a majestic impulse had been awakened in the pupil of the Mysteries of Northern Greece, in that his gaze was directed out to the planetary spheres—then this insight was deepened within him in such a way that the eye was, so to speak, taken hold of by the heart, so that he might see with the soul. Then the pupil understood why, on the altar facing him, three symbolically formed vessels had been placed.

Here in Dornach we once introduced a portrayal of these vessels in a Eurythmy performance of Faust. They were presented there exactly as they appeared in the Samothracian Mysteries of Northern Greece. The important fact is that with these vessels in their whole symbolic form there was associated an act of consecration, an act of sacrifice. A kind of incense was put into them and lighted, and as the smoke streamed up, three words (of which we shall speak tomorrow) were uttered with mantric power into this smoke by the Father who was celebrating; and there appeared the forms of the three Kabiri. It happened in the following way. The human breath, as it was exhaled, took shape through the mantric word that was spoken, and communicated its form to the ascending, evaporating substance that had been incorporated in the symbolic jars. When in this way the pupil learned to read in the stream his own breath, to read what the stream of his breath wrote in the smoke, he learned at the same time to read what the mysterious planets said to him from out the wide Universe. For now he knew: as the one Kabir was formed through the mantric word and its power, so in actuality was Mercury; as the second Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Mars; and as the third Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Apollo, the Sun.

When we look at those fashion plate figures—if you will forgive such plain speaking—such as we see only too often in the galleries, of the later Greek plastic art, and which are only so greatly admired because people have no idea of the majesty from which they have declined, when we direct our gaze to those figures of an Apollo, a Mars, a Mercury, we must look at them with the gaze with which Goethe looked, during his Italian journey; for then we may gain some idea of what Greek art really was in the productions that are now lost—lost and destroyed along with so much else in the first centuries of the Christian era, in the frightful devastation which befell those times. If we look penetratingly at those late Greek plastic figures, held to be so great (and rightly on the one hand), as pointing the way, but on the other hand wrongly because they are mere imitative reproductions of the earlier—if we look through them back to that from which they arose, we see how in the older Greek times it was nothing less than the revelations accompanying the sacrificial rites that were reproduced in art—revelations that in those earlier times were even more majestic and grand than later on in the Kabiri Mysteries of Samothrace. We look back into times when the mantric word was uttered into the incense smoke, and the true figures of Apollo, of Mars, and of Mercury appeared.

Those were times when man would not say, in the abstract: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God—for then he could say something quite different. He could say: In me the outgoing breath takes shape, and inasmuch as it shapes itself in an ordered way, it shows itself as an image of cosmic creating; for it creates for me, out of the sacrificial smoke, forms which are for me living fines of writing, telling me what the planetary worlds would say to me.

When the pupil of the Kabiri Mysteries at Samothrace approached the gates of the places of Initiation, then through the instruction he had received the feeling came to him: Now I am entering the place that holds for me the magic acts of the celebrating Father. (The Initiate who celebrated in these Mysteries was called the Father.) What did the magic power of this celebrating Father reveal to his pupil? Through what was laid within man by the Gods, through the power of speech, the priest-magician and sage wrote into the sacrificial smoke the writing which expressed the secrets of the Universe.

Thus it was that the pupil, as he approached the gate, said in his heart: I am entering that place within whose shelter dwells a powerful Spirit, within whose shelter dwell the greater Gods, who unveil on Earth the secrets of the Universe through the sacrificial acts of man.—There, my dear friends, words were spoken and a writing written that appealed not only to the intelligence but laid claim to the whole man. In the Samothracian Mysteries there was still present something of a knowledge that is today quite dimmed. Modern man is perfectly able to speak with truth something of what he feels a quartz crystal to be like, he can say what hair feels like, or the human skin, or the fur of an animal, he can say how silk or velvet feels to him. Modern man has the capacity of realising such things through his feeling. In the Samothracian Mysteries something still existed by means of which man could truly say how the Gods let themselves be felt. For the sense of feeling, the sense of touch, was still capable of that of which in ancient times it had always been capable; it was still able to feel the spiritual, to touch the Gods.

And now the wonderful thing is this. We must certainly go back to very ancient times even to speak of how man could say with truth: I know through my finger-tips what the Gods feel like. In the Samothracian Mysteries, however, man had another way of touching the Gods. It was as follows:

When the priest-magician spoke the words into the smoke rising from the incense, when he intoned the words into the exhaled breath, then in the outgoing breath he felt as man otherwise feels when he stretches out the hand to touch; and as one knows that one touches differently with the fingertips in passing them over different substances—in feeling velvet, or cat’s fur, or the human skin,—so did the Samothracian priest-magician perceive with the outgoing breath; he perceived the exhalation which he breathed out towards the incense smoke as an expression of something coming out of himself, he felt it as an organ of touch reaching towards the incense smoke. He felt the smoke, and in the smoke he felt the great Gods, the Kabiri coming to meet him. He felt how the smoke forced itself and how the forms there shaping themselves came into the exhaled breath, so that the exhaled breath felt: here is something spherical, there is angularity, there again something is catching hold of me. The whole divine figure of the Kabir was touched and felt by the breath clothed in the form of the word. With the speech issuing from the heart the Samothracian wise men ‘touched’ the Kabiri, that is, the greater Gods descending to them in the smoke of the incense; it was a living interchange between the word within man and the word without in cosmic space.

When the initiating Father led the pupil to the sacrificial altar, and, step by step, taught him how man can feel with speech, and when the pupil progressed further and achieved for himself this ‘feeling with speech’, he came at last to that stage of inner experience in which he first had clear consciousness of the form of Mercury or Hermes, of Apollo, and of Ares or Mars. It was as if the consciousness were wholly raised up out of the body, as if that which the pupil earlier knew as the content of his head, had gone up above his head, as if the heart were located in a new place, being thrust up out of the breast into the head. Then, in the one who had in this way really gone out beyond himself, there arose a knowledge that inwardly formed itself into the words: Thus do the Kabiri, the greater Gods, will thee! From that time the pupil knew how Mercury lived in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, Mars in his speech.

So you see it was not by any means only natural processes and beings in the outer world that were presented to the pupil in ancient times. What was presented to him was something neither one-sidedly naturalistic, nor one-sidedly moral, but he was given something wherein Morality and Nature flowed into one. That was the secret of the Samothracian world—that to the pupil it was granted to have the consciousness: Nature is Spirit, Spirit is Nature.

To those times which found their last echo in the cult of the Kabiri, is to be traced the insight which brings earthly substances into connection with the Heavens. In olden times, when one saw that red-brown mineral with the coppery sheen, which we call copper, one could not simply say as we say today: ‘That is copper, that is a constituent of the Earth.’ It could not be thought of in this way. For the ancients it was no constituent of the Earth. They said: ‘Wherever copper is manifest, there is manifest a deed of Venus on the Earth. The Earth has only suffered rocks and stones to appear, such as sandstone, or chalk, in order to take up in her lap what the Heavens have planted on to the Earth.’ As little as we now should venture to say of a seed that it had merely grown out of the Earth—-just as little in those times would one have been able to say that copper ore was a constituent of the Earth. One had to say: The Earth that is here with its sandstone, or any other stone, is the ground within which something of a metallic nature has been planted by some planet. The metal is a seed planted in the Earth by a planet. Everything within the Earth was viewed as proceeding from the influence of the Heavens upon the Earth. Today the Earth and its substances are described as you may see it done in any mineralogical or geological work, and as it would never have been in the science of the ancients. In those times when man let his gaze wander over the Earth, looking at a substance meant looking up to Heaven and there in the Heavens beholding the essence and reality of the substance.

Copper, tin, lead, only apparently lie in the Earth; they are seeds planted in the Earth-existence during the time of Old Sun and Old Moon. This was still the teaching of the Kabiri in the Samothracian Mysteries. And this it was ultimately that worked upon Aristotle and Alexander—if only as an atmosphere or mood of knowledge. And then a beginning was made for something quite different.

Man did not, with his insight, come right down at once on to the Earth; he went through an intermediary stage. Even in the echoes of those ancient times, in the Samothracian Mysteries, if men wished to describe the metals of the Earth or other earthly substances such as sulphur or phosphorus, it was in fact the Heavens they were describing, just as one describes a plant when one wants to know the nature of a seed.

If you have a seed of corn before you, you cannot recognise its nature and kind unless you know the plant. What would you do with a seed which looks like this, for example, if you did not know what the aniseed plant looks like? What then, the men of old would have asked, would you make of the copper appearing in the Earth, if you did not know what Venus looks like, in spirit, soul and body, up there in the Heavens?

From the knowledge of the Heavens, gradually a knowledge of the environment of the Earth, a knowledge of the atmosphere, was gained. When man regarded what was of the Earth, instead of describing what the stars are, in their essence and nature,helookedtoabeingofEarthandsaid to himself; There lives in it first of all what we see in the firm soil; and there lives in it that also which we see as fluid with the tendency to form into drops, and there lives within it too what tends to spread out on all sides, the aeriform, which lives, for example, in human breath and speech. And then there lives in it the fiery element which decomposes the single being so that from the scattered, disintegrated parts a new being may arise. Thus did man behold the elements in every earthly formation.

And as in the ancient Mysteries men looked to the Salt—true, it is also cosmic in nature, but it is formed and moulded by the Earth—as they looked to everything of a salt-nature and saw in it that which Mother Earth has brought to meet the metals, so they looked on the other hand to Mercury, and they saw the Mercurial in that which comes from out of the Universe and is destined to become metal.

It is really so utterly childish to try to give descriptions, as modern man does, of what was thought of as Mercury in olden times! Persistently in the background is the idea that by Mercury, even in the Middle Ages, something like quicksilver, some single metal, could be intended. This is not the case; no single metal alone is denoted. Mercury means every metal in so far as it stands under the influence of the whole Cosmos. For what would copper look like if the Cosmos alone, in its periphery, worked upon it? Copper would be globular like quicksilver. If the Cosmos alone affected it, what would lead be like? Lead would be globular, like quicksilver. What of tin, if it were affected only by the Cosmos? Tin would be globular. Every metal if affected only by the Cosmos would be quicksilver. All metals are Mercury in so far as the Cosmos acts upon them. But what about Mercury, the actual present-day Mercury which still takes on a globular form on the Earth? What, then, is it?

I will tell you. The other metals—let us say, lead, copper, tin, iron—have progressed beyond the globular form. If the whole Earth were still under the influence of the spherical Cosmos all metals would be mercurial. They have progressed beyond the mercurial form. Today they crystallise into other forms. Only the true quicksilver, in the present-day sense of the word, has remained at that stage. What did the ancients and even the mediaeval alchemists say of quicksilver? They said: copper, tin, iron, lead are tire good metals which have progressed with Providence. Quicksilver is the Lucifer among the metals, for it has remained at an earlier form. Thus it was in earlier times; when the terrestrial was spoken of in this way, in truth men were really speaking of the celestial.

Thence could men come to speak of that which lies between the periphery and the Earth. Between the periphery and the Earth there lies first, below, the Earth itself, then the watery element, the aeriform, and the fiery.

Thus did the ancients see everything on the Earth in the aspect of the Heavens. And thus did the men of mediaeval times, which came to an end in the first third of the fourteenth century, see everything in the aspect of the surrounding atmosphere. Then, in the fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries came the great change. Man, in his outlook, fell down right on to the Earth. And now to his consciousness the elements of water, air, fire, split up; they split up into sulphur, carbon, hydrogen and so forth. Man sees everything in its terrestrial aspect.

Therewith begin the times which I indicated when describing the fading of the Hibernian Mysteries—the times when man comprehended the Earth with his knowledge, but the Heavens became for him a matter of mathematics. He calculated the size of the stars, their movements, their distance away, and so on. The Heavens became an abstraction to him.

Nor was it only the Heavens which became an abstraction. The reflection of the Heavens in the living human being is his head, and what man can learn of the Heavens is in his head. Since man has learnt to know only the mathematics of the Heavens, that is, the logical and abstract, therefore from this time onwards only the logical and abstract lived in his head—only that which is of the nature of concepts and ideas. Man lost all possibility to receive what is of soul and spirit into his life of concepts and ideas. Then, when the spirit was sought for, there began that great struggle between what man could attain with the idea-content of his head, with his brain-content, and what the Gods desired to reveal to him from the Heavens. This struggle was fought out at its fiercest, and in its grandest aspects, in Rosicrucianism—in the true forms of what are called the Rosicrucian Mysteries in the Middle Ages.¹ There the helplessness of modern man was perceived as a preparation for true knowledge. For, even then, in circles of true Rosicrucian Initiation something very powerful made itself felt. And it was this. The pupil became—not abstractly, but inwardly—livingly illumined to perceive: As modern man you can penetrate only to the world of ideas; thereby, however, you lose the very essence of your being as Man.

And the pupil felt that what the new age was giving him could not lead him on to that which was his own true being. He felt: Either you must despair of knowledge or you must go through a kind of death of the pride in abstraction.

The Rosicrucian, the true Rosicrucian pupil, felt as if the master had given him a blow on the cheek, to indicate to him that the abstractions of the modern brain are not suited to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, and that he must make a recantation of the merely abstract, if he would enter those worlds.

That was indeed a great moment of preparation for what we may call the Rosicrucian Initiation.

• 1. See Rosicrucianism and Modem Initiation. Six lectures given at Dornach, 6th to 13th January, 1924. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

The Mysteries were, as I said yesterday, spread in varied form over many regions of the Earth; and every region, according to its population and other conditions, had its special form of the Mysteries. But now there came a time which was of extraordinary significance for the Mysteries. It was the time in the Earth’s evolution which began some centuries after the foundation of Christianity.

In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, it can be seen that what happened on Golgotha gathered together, in a certain sense, what had previously been distributed in the various Mysteries throughout the world. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, differs from all the other Mysteries which I have been describing, in that the Mystery of Golgotha stands so to speak on the stage of history before the whole world, while the older Mysteries were enacted in the obscurity of the inner temples and sent out their impulses into the world from the dim twilight of these inner temples.

If we look into the oriental Mysteries or into those I described to you as the Mysteries of Ephesus in Asia Minor, or again if we look into the Greek Mysteries, be it the Chthonic, or the Eleusinian, or those I spoke of yesterday, the Samothracian, or finally if we look into those Mysteries I have characterised as the Hibernian—everywhere we see how the Mystery in question was enacted in the obscurity of the inner temple, and thence sent out its impulses into the world. Whoever understands the Mystery of Golgotha—and merely to know the historical information available is not to understand it—whoever really understands the Mystery of Golgotha has understood thereby all the Mysteries which had gone before.

The Mysteries which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, and culminated in it, all had a unique quality in respect of the feelings aroused by them. In the Mysteries many tragic things took place. He who attained to Initiation was obliged to undergo suffering and pain. You know these things; they have been described by me time and again. Before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, if a candidate was to go through an Initiation and was warned beforehand that he would have to face manifold tests and trials, to suffer pain and sorrow, he would still have said: ‘I will go through all the fire in the world, for it leads to the Light, it leads into the Light-regions of the spirit where I may attain to a vision of what can be only dimly divined in ordinary human consciousness on Earth.’ It was really a great longing, and a longing at the same time full of joy, that took possession of one who sought the way to the older Mysteries; he was filled with a deep and sublime joy.

Then came an intervening time. In the lectures that are to follow in a few days I shall have to characterise these things from the historical standpoint. The intervening time led ultimately to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when, as you know, a new epoch began in human evolution. And now we find an altogether different mood in those who are setting out on a search for knowledge of the higher worlds.

We will first of all look once again, by means of the Akashic Records, into the ancient Mysteries. There we find joyful faces, deeply serious but filled notwithstanding with joy. If I were to describe to you a scene which even in these days can be brought to light again from the Akashic Records, a scene for example in the Samothracian Mysteries, I should have to say that the countenances of those who entered the innermost temple of the Kabiri, were full of depth and seriousness but were nevertheless joyful, happy countenances.

But now came the intervening time. And afterwards we come to that which had not exactly a temple, but was rather a gathering together in the moral or spiritual sense, as indeed was already the case also in the ancient Mysteries. We come to what is often described as the Rosicrucianism of the Middle Ages.

If we want to characterise the pupil of Rosicrucianism in the way I have just done for the ancient Mysteries, we shall have to say something very different of the pupil of the Rosicrucian Mysteries. For those who strove after knowledge in mediaeval times, those who endeavoured to make research into the spiritual world, bore not joyful but very tragic countenances. And so true is this that we may say: Those who did not bear a deeply tragic expression were certainly not sincere in their efforts. There was abundant reason why such men should wear a tragic expression on their countenances.

Let me now give you a picture of the way in which those who strove after knowledge learned gradually to relate themselves differently to the secrets of Nature and of the Spirit.

Yesterday I demonstrated to you how the phenomena and processes of Nature were for the man of olden time nothing less than divine. They would as little have thought of treating a phenomenon of Nature apart by itself, as we should think of considering a movement of the human eyes as a thing in itself and not as a revelation of the soul and spirit of man. The phenomenon of Nature was treated as an expression of the God who revealed himself through it. For the man of olden time the surface of the Earth was as truly the skin of the divine Earth-Being as is our skin the skin of an ensouled human being. We really have not the least understanding of the mood of soul of a man of antiquity, unless we know that he spoke in this way of the Earth as a body of the Gods, and of the other planets as brothers and sisters of the Earth.

But now this direct and immediate relation to the things and processes of Nature, which saw in the single object or phenomenon the revelation of the divine, underwent a change. That which is divine in the phenomena of Nature had, so to speak, withdrawn. Supposing it could happen to one of you that people saw in you merely the body—as we do the Earth—neutral, soul-less—it would be horrible!

But this horrible thing has really come about for knowledge in recent times. And the men of knowledge of the Middle Ages felt the horror of it. For as I said, the divine had withdrawn, for man’s knowledge, from natural phenomena. And whereas in ancient times the objects and processes of Nature were revelations of the divine, now comes this intermediary time, when they are only pictures, no longer revelations but only pictures of the divine.

The man of today, however, has not even any right idea of how the processes of Nature can be regarded as pictures of the divine. Let me give you an example, one that is quite familiar to anyone who knows a smattering of chemistry; it will show you what sort of conception of science these men had, who did at any rate still view the objects and processes of Nature as pictures of the divine.

We will take a quite simple experiment which is continually being made by chemists today. You have a retort and you put into it oxalic acid which you can procure from clover, and you mix the oxalic acid with an equal part of glycerine. Then you heat the mixture, and you obtain carbonic acid. The carbonic acid is given off, and what remains behind is formic acid. The oxalic acid is transformed by the loss of carbonic acid into formic acid. This experiment can easily be made in a laboratory: you can see it performed there before you, and you can look upon it as a modern chemist does, namely as a complete and finished process.

Not so the mediaeval man. He looked in two directions. He said: Oxalic acid is found especially in clover; but it occurs in a certain quantity in the whole organism of man, in particular in the part of the organism that comprises the organs of digestion—spleen, liver, and so on. In the region of the digestive tract you have to reckon with processes that are under the influence of oxalic acid. And the oxalic acid that is present in a higher degree in the lower part of the body, is acted upon by the human organism itself in a way that is similar to the action of the glycerine in the retort. Here too we have a glycerine action. And note the remarkable result: under the influence of the glycerine action the transformed product of oxalic acid, namely formic acid, goes over into the lung and into the breath. And man breathes out carbonic acid. You send out your breath, and with it you send out the carbonic acid. You can imagine instead of the retort the digestive tract, and where the formic acid is collected, you can imagine the lungs, and higher up you have once more carbonic acid, in the air breathed out from the lungs.

Man is however not a retort! The retort demonstrates in a dead way what takes place in man in a living way. The expression is absolutely correct, for if man never developed oxalic acid in his digestive tract he would simply not be able to live. That is to say, his etheric body would have no sort of basis in his organism. If man did not change the oxalic acid into formic acid, his astral body would have no basis in his organism. Man needs oxalic acid for his ether body and formic acid for his astral body. Or rather, he does not need the substances, he needs the work, the inner activity that goes on in the oxalic acid process and in the formic acid process.

This is of course something which the chemist of today has yet to discover; he still speaks of what goes on in man as if it were all merely external processes.

This was then the first question put by the student of Natural Science in mediaeval times, as he sat before his retort. He asked himself: Such is the external process that I observe; now what is the nature of the similar process in man?

And the second question was this: What is the same process like in the great world of Nature outside? In the case of the example I have chosen, the researcher of those days would have said as follows: I look out over the Earth and see the world of plants. In all this plant world I find oxalic acid. True, it occurs in a marked degree in wood sorrel and in all kinds of clover; but in reality it is distributed over the whole of the vegetation, if sometimes only in homeopathic doses. Everywhere there is a touch of it. The ants find it even in decaying wood.

The ant-swarms, which we humans often find so troublesome, change the oxalic acid that occurs all over the fields and meadows and is found indeed wherever there is vegetation, into formic acid. We continually breathe in the formic acid out of the air, although in very small doses, and we are indebted for it to the work of the insects who change the oxalic acid of the plants into formic acid.

Thus the mediaeval student would say to himself: In man this metamorphosis of oxalic acid into formic acid, takes place. And in all the life of Nature the same metamorphosis is present. These two questions presented themselves to the student with every single process he carried out in his laboratory. There was besides something else most characteristic of the mediaeval student, something that has today been completely lost. Today we think: Why, anyone can do research in a laboratory! It does not matter in the very least whether he is a good or bad man. All the formulae are there ready; you have only to analyse or synthesise. Anyone can do it—In the days, however, when Nature was approached quite differently, when men saw in Nature the working of the divine, of the divine in Man, as well as of the divine in the great world of Nature, then it was required of the man who did research that he should at the same time be a man of piety. He must be apt and ready to direct his soul and spirit to the divine-spiritual in the world.

And it was a recognised fact that if a man prepared himself for his experiments as though for a sacred rite, if he were inwardly warmed in soul by the pious exercises he went through beforehand, then he would find that the experiments led him inward to the revelation of the human being and outward to the investigation of external Nature. Inner purity and goodness were regarded as a preparation for research.

I have now given you a description of the transition from the spirit of the ancient Mysteries to Mysteries such as were able to exist in the Middle Ages. If we are speaking out of what was preserved as tradition, then we can say that a great deal of the content of the ancient Mysteries found a place also in the Mysteries of mediaeval times. Nevertheless it was impossible in the Middle Ages to attain to the greatness and sublimity even of the Mysteries that survived comparatively late, such as the Samothracian or the Hibernian.

As a tradition we have still in our day what we call Astrology. As a tradition, too, has come down to us what we call Alchemy. For all that, we know nothing whatever today of the conditions of a true astrological or of a true alchemical knowledge.

It is quite impossible to come to Astrology by empirical research or thought. If you had suggested such a thing to those who were initiated in the ancient Mysteries, they would have replied: You might as well try to get to know a secret a man keeps from you, by empirical research or by sitting down to think about it. Suppose there were a secret known to one man and no one else, and someone were to contend that he was going to find it out by making experiments or by thinking about it. It would of course be absurd. He can learn the secret only by being told it. A man of antiquity would have found it equally absurd to try to arrive at a knowledge of astrological matters by thinking about them or by making experiments or observations. For he knew that it is the Gods alone, or as they were called later, the Cosmic Intelligences, who know the secrets of the starry worlds. They knew them and it is they alone who can tell them to man. And so man has to pursue the path of knowledge that leads him to a good understanding and relationship with the Cosmic Intelligences.

A true and genuine Astrology depends on man’s ability to understand the Cosmic Intelligences. And upon what does a true Alchemy depend? Not upon doing research after the manner of a chemist of today, but upon being able to perceive within the Nature processes, the Nature Spirits, upon being able to come to an understanding with the Nature Spirits so that they tell one how the process takes place, and what really happens. Astrology was in olden times no spinning of theories or fancies, neither was it mere research through observation; it was an intercourse with Cosmic Intelligences. And Alchemy was an intercourse with Nature Spirits. It is essential to know this. If you had gone to an Egyptian of olden times or more especially to a Chaldean, he would have told you: I have my observatory for the purpose of holding conversations with the Cosmic Intelligences; I hold conversations with them by means of my instruments, for my spirit is able to speak with the help of my instruments.—And the pious student of Nature in the Middle Ages who stood before his retort and investigated on the one hand the inner being of man, and on the other the weaving, moving life of great Nature—he would have told you; I make experiments, because through the experiments the Nature Spirits speak to me. The Alchemist was the man who conjured up the Nature Spirits. What was taken for Alchemy later was no more than a decadent product.

The Astrology of olden times owed its origin to intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, the ancient Astrology, that is to say, the intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences, was gone. When the stars stood in opposition, or in conjunction, and so forth, then reckoning was made accordingly. Men had still the tradition that was left from the days of old. Alchemy on the other hand, remained. Intercourse with the Nature Spirits was still possible in later times.

And when we look into a Rosicrucian alchemical laboratory of the fourteenth or even the fifteenth century, we find there instruments not unlike those of the present day; at any rate, one can gain some idea of them from instruments in use today. But when we look with spiritual vision into these Rosicrucian Mysteries, we find everywhere the earnest and deeply tragic personality, of whom Faust is a later and indeed a lesser development. For in comparison with the student who stands in the Rosicrucian laboratory with his deeply tragic countenance, who has so to speak done with life—in comparison with him, the Faust of Goethe is something like a newspaper print of the Apollo of Belvedere as compared with the real Apollo when he appeared at the altar of the Kabiri, taking form in the clouds of sacrificial smoke.

It is verily so; when one looks into these alchemical laboratories of the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, one is confronted with a very deep tragedy. The tragic mood and tone that belonged to the serious and earnest people of the Middle Ages is not to be found recorded in the history books, for the writers of those books have not looked into the depths of the soul of men.

But the genuine students and researchers, who made investigations with retorts to learn about Man and about the wide world of Nature, are none other than glorified Faustian characters in the early Middle Ages. They are all deeply conscious of one thing. They can all say: ‘When we experiment, then the Nature Spirits speak to us, the Spirits of the Earth, the Spirits of the Water, the Spirits of the Fire, the Spirits of the Air. We hear their whispered murmurs, we hear their strangely wandering sounds, beginning with a humming and growing ever into harmony and melody that again turns back upon itself, melody unfolding melody. We hear them when Nature processes take place, when we stand before a retort.’ In all piety of heart, they steeped themselves in the process that was taking place. For example in the very process of which we have spoken, where they experienced the metamorphosis of oxalic acid into formic acid, when they asked the question of the process, and the Nature Spirit gave the answer, then it was so that they could as it were make use of what the Nature Spirit gave for the inner being of man. For then the retort began to speak in colour. And they were able to feel how the Nature Spirits of the earthy and of the watery rise up from the oxalic acid and assert themselves, and how the whole passes over into a humming melody, into a harmonious shaping of melodies that then again turns back into itself. Such was their experience of the process that results in formic acid and carbonic acid.

And if one is able to enter in this living way into the process and feel how it passes from colour into tone and music, then one can enter also with a deep and living knowledge into what the process has to tell concerning great Nature and concerning Man. Then one knows: The things and processes of Nature reveal something else, something that is spoken by the Gods; for they are pictures of the divine. And one can turn the knowledge to good account for man.

Throughout these times the knowledge of healing was closely and intimately bound up with the knowledge of the whole Universe.

Let us imagine we had the task of building up a therapy based on such perceptions. We have a human being before us. The same complex of external symptoms can of course be an expression of the most varied conditions of disease. With a method however that arises from this kind of knowledge—I do not say it can be done today as it was done in the Middle Ages for today of course it has to be quite different—but with such a method we would be able to say: If a certain precise complex is manifest, then it shows that the human being is unable to transform enough oxalic acid into formic acid. He has somehow become too weak to do it.—We would perhaps be able to provide a remedy by giving him formic acid in some form or other, so that we bring help to him from outside, when he cannot himself produce the formic acid.

Now it might easily happen that in the case of two or three people for whom you have made the diagnosis that they cannot themselves produce the formic acid—when you treat them with formic acid, it works quite satisfactorily; but in a third case it gives no help at all. Directly you give oxalic acid, however, the patient is at once better. Why is this? Because the deficiency in force lies in another place, it lies where the oxalic acid has to be changed into formic acid. In such a case, if we were to think on the lines of a researcher of the Middle Ages, we should say: Yes, under certain circumstances the human organism, when given formic acid, will reply: I do not want it. I do not ask for it in the lung or other organ, I do not need it brought into the breath and the circulation. I want to be treated in quite another place, namely in the region of the oxalic acid, for I want myself to change the oxalic acid into formic acid. I will not have the formic acid. I want to make it myself.

Such are the distinctions that show themselves. Naturally a great deal of swindling and stupidity has gone under the name of Alchemy, but for the genuine student who was worthy of the name, this was always the subject of his research: the healthy nature of the human being studied in connection with diseased conditions.

And it all led to nothing less than intercourse with the Nature Spirits. The researcher of mediaeval times had the feeling: I am in touch with the Nature Spirits, I converse with them. There had been a time when men have had intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences. That is barred to me.

And now, since the Nature Spirits too have withdrawn from human knowledge, and the things and processes of Nature have become the abstractions that they are for the physicist and chemist of today, we no longer find the tragic mood of the student of the Middle Ages. For it was the Nature Spirits who awakened in him the yearning after the Cosmic Intelligences. These had been accessible to the men of antiquity; but the mediaeval student could no longer find the way to them with the means of knowledge at his disposal. He could only find the way to the Nature Spirits. The very fact that he did perceive the Nature Spirits, that he was able to draw them into the field of knowledge, made it so tragic for him that he was not able to approach the Cosmic Intelligences by whom the Nature Spirits were themselves inspired. He perceived what the Nature Spirits knew; but he could not penetrate through them to the Cosmic Intelligences beyond. That was the feeling he had.

Fundamentally speaking, the cause of this tragedy was that while the mediaeval alchemists still had knowledge of the Nature Spirits they had lost the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences. And this in turn was the cause of the fact that they were unable to attain to a complete knowledge of man, although they were still able to divine where such a complete knowledge of man was to be found. When Faust says:

‘And here, poor fool, with all my lore, I stand, no wiser than before.’

we may really take the words as reminiscent of the feeling that prevailed in many a laboratory of the Middle Ages. This teaching gave men the Nature Spirits, but the Nature Spirits gave them no true knowledge of the soul.

Today we have the task to find again much that has been lost even to tradition. These students of mediaeval times had still the tradition, they still heard tell of repeated Earth-lives. As they stood in their laboratories, however, the Nature Spirits spoke of all manner of things in connection with substances or, by way of description, of the happenings of the world, but never once did they speak of repeated Earth-lives. They took no interest in the subject at all.

And now, my dear friends, I have placed before you some of the thoughts that gave rise to the fundamentally tragic mood of the mediaeval student of Nature. He is indeed a remarkable figure, this Rosicrucian student of the early Middle Ages, standing in his laboratory with his deeply serious and sorrowful countenance, not sceptical of human understanding but filled with a profound uncertainty of heart, with no weakness of will but with the consciousness: I have indeed the will! But how am I to guide it, so that it may take the path that leads to the Cosmic Intelligences?

Countless were the questions that arose in the heart of the mediaeval student of Nature. The monologue at the beginning of Faust, with all that follows, is no more than a weak reflection of his numberless questionings and strivings.

Tomorrow we will look a little further at this earnest student with his deeply-moving countenance, who is really the ancestor of Goethe’s figure of Faust.

We will utilise the last lecture before the Course which is to be given here, by bringing together what has been said about the various Mysteries belonging to this or that region of the Earth, and attempting to describe to you, at any rate from one point of view, the very nature and being of the Mysteries, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.

I do not speak of this epoch because it is particularly complete in itself but because it can be used to show the form human striving was taking during that period in the most civilised parts of the Earth. The spiritual striving of that period is often described under the name of the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but it must not be confused with the charlatan element we often meet in literature without realising how much charlatanry there is in the things of which we read. The name ‘Rosicrucian’ must direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, Central, Western and Southern. We must realise that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep striving of soul, with all his earnest effort, is a later figure, no longer anything like as profound in soul as many a researcher to be found in the mediaeval laboratories. These are individuals of whom nothing reaches us by way of history but who nevertheless laboured earnestly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I spoke in the last lecture of the tragic note that predominates in the investigators of this epoch. The outstanding trait in them is the feeling that they must needs strive after the highest knowledge that can be creatively active in man; and yet they felt, not only that they could never reach this highest goal but that from a certain point of view the very striving after it gives ground for serious doubt.

I have said that we do not find among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories a knowledge that is ready-made and theoretical but a knowledge that is intimately connected with the whole human being, with the innermost feelings and deepest longings of the heart; it was indeed a knowledge of the heart.

What was its origin? You will most readily understand it if I try now to give you a picture of this tragic scepticism of the mediaeval investigators. Let me first direct your attention once again to the form taken by human cognition on the Earth in very ancient times.

The most ancient form of human knowledge, intimately bound up as it was with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature as to lead man to look up to the planets and perceive the grandeur and sublimity of their mathematical movements, such as men reckon out and devise today. At that time, each planet, as all else spread out in the Heavens, was a living being, and not only a living, but an ensouled being, nay even a being of spirit. Men spoke constantly of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for they knew that just as there exists a blood-relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship between the members of a planetary system. There was an absolute parallel between what is to be found in man and what reveals itself outside in the Cosmos.

Let us take on region of the Earth as an example, and show from that the kind of knowledge man learned to acquire in the most ancient of the Mysteries when he looked up to the Sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries arranged with a specially prepared skylight, so that at certain definite times of day the Sun could be seen in a diminished light. Thus you must imagine the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple with a skylight in the roof and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense but a material through which the orb of the Sun was seen in a dim light as of twilight at a certain time of day. The pupil was prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right mood and feeling. He had to make his feeling receptive and sensitive, he had to quicken the inner perception of his soul, so that when he exposed it, through his eye, to the orb of the Sun, the latter made an impression on him of which he could form a clear idea in consciousness.

Now, of course, many people today look at the Sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their power of feeling to receive the impression in such a way that it remains in their soul as a very special impression. The pupil in those ancient Mysteries, however, received a very definite impression of the dimmed solar orb after he had undergone long exercises beforehand. A man who was able once to have such an impression could truly never forget it.

With this impression the pupil also gained more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. Thus after he had been prepared by the majestic impression made upon him by the Sun, the special quality of the substance gold was allowed to work upon him; and through this Sun-preparation, the pupil actually came to a deep understanding of the quality of gold.

When one looks into these things, it is painful to realise the triviality of our modern consciousness, when we find in so many historical works the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the Sun or gave the same symbol to gold and to the Sun. Man has no longer any idea that what was thus known in those olden times, proceeded from long exercises and preparations. A pupil who looked with his whole soul, who as it were steeped his sight in this dimmed light of the Sun, was thereby prepared to understand the gold of the Earth.

How then did he understand it? His attention awoke to the fact that gold is not receptive for that which constitutes for living organisms the breath of life, namely oxygen. Many, indeed most of the other metals are thoroughly receptive to oxygen, but oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that in which man, as you know, has his very life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. He received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now neither can the Sun approach life directly; and the pupil learned that it is well that neither gold nor the Sun can directly approach life. For then he was gradually led to realise the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, the breath of life, when it is introduced in a certain dose into the human organism, it has a quite special effect. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but it has a direct relation to what lies in human thinking.

My dear friends, just consider how far thinking is removed from life—especially in our modern age! A man can sit like a block of wood and think quite abstractly. He can even think quite livingly in an abstract way. But on the other hand, he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man’s thought has become more and more powerless. But this thinking is set in motion by the Egoorganisation, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism, can bring back power to thought. It restores to the life of thought the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus through the working of gold man is quickened in his thinking.

One of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries was the secret of gold in connection with the Sun. This relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the Sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries. In a similar way the pupil was led to experience the working of the opposite pole of gold. Gold is an impulse for the quickening of human thinking, so that human thought can work down as far as into the etheric body. But what would be the opposite pole of that?

Ego-organisation, astral body, etheric body and physical body are the members of the human organism, and we may say that through gold the Ego-organisation becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then go further and work upon the physical body, but gold brings it about that one can actually hold the thoughts in all their power as far as the etheric body.

Now what is the opposite pole of this? It is an activity that manifests itself when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature. For as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen, repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and has therefore no direct influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but only on the thought-world of the Ego-organisation—as gold repels oxygen, so carbon on the other hand has in man a direct affinity with oxygen.

We breathe out carbonic acid gas. We make it by uniting carbon with oxygen. And the plants require carbonic acid for their life. Carbon possesses the exactly opposite property of gold.

Now carbon played a great part in the very ancient Mysteries. They spoke on the one hand of gold as a very specially important substance in the study of man, and on the other hand of carbon. Carbon was called the Philosopher’s Stone. Gold and the Philosopher’s Stone were very important things in olden times.

Carbon appears on Earth in a variety of forms. Diamond is carbon—a hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coal is carbon; anthracite is carbon. Carbon appears to us in most diverse forms. Through the methods which were practised in the ancient Mysteries, men learned however to understand that there exist still other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on Earth. And in this connection the pupil in the Mysteries had to undergo another preparation. For besides the Sun-preparation of which I have spoken, there was also in addition the Moon-preparation.

Along with the ancient sanctuaries of the Sun Mysteries we find too a kind of observatory, wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the forms of the Moon. Whereas in the Sun-training the pupil had to behold the Sun at certain times of day in a diminished light, now for weeks at a time he had to expose his eyes to the different forms which the orb of the Moon assumes by night. Gazing thus with his whole soul, the pupil received a definite inner impression, which gave him a new knowledge. Just as the soul by exposing itself to the Sun became endowed with the power of the Sun, similarly, by exposing itself to the phases of the Moon, the soul became endowed with the power of the Moon. Man now learned what metamorphoses the substance of carbon can undergo. On the Earth, carbon is coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the Moon that which we find here on the Earth as diamond or anthracite or coal—is silver; and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon is silver on the Moon. Carbon is the Philosopher’s Stone, and on the Moon it is silver.

The knowledge that was impressed so profoundly on the pupil in the ancient Mysteries was this: any substance whatsoever is only what it seems in this one place, at this one time. It was sheer ignorance not to know that carbon is diamond, coal or anthracite only on the Earth. What exists on the Earth as diamond or graphite, on the Moon is silver. If we could at this moment dispatch a piece of ordinary black coal to the Moon, it would there be silver.

A vision of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil attained in those ancient times. It is the foundation, not of that fraudulent Alchemy of which one hears today, but of the true Alchemy. This ancient Alchemy cannot be acquired by any such abstract means of acquiring knowledge as we have today. We observe things and we think about them. Alchemy could not be attained in that way at all. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he determines parallel axes and the like, and reckons and reckons; or if he wants to study a certain substance, he applies the spectroscope and so on. But everything that can be learned in this way is infinitely abstract compared with what could once be learned of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this true astrology, could only be learned, as I explained in the last lecture, by establishing a real and living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. That itself was attainment of knowledge, when man was able to hold converse, in his soul and spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

What gold signifies for the human organism is connected with the secret of the Sun; and through exposing his soul to the Sun-existence, man thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Sun. They it was who could tell him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Moon.

And man learned to know how the Intelligences of the Moon were themselves once in olden times the great Teachers of Earth-humanity, who taught on Earth the primeval wisdom. They were the same who today let their forces and impulses work from the Moon. They withdrew from the Earth at a certain time in evolution, and there on the Moon they founded, as it were, a colony after the Moon had separated from the Earth.

Thus those Intelligences who once lived on the Earth and are today the Moon-Intelligences have to do with this second secret, the carbon-silver secret. Such was the character of knowledge in ancient times.

Let me quote another example. As the pupil could receive impressions from the Sun or from the Moon, so by means of a still further preparation of soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained was that relating to Venus. Venus is studied today through the telescope, and is regarded as being like any other star or planet. The human body, on the other hand, is studied by investigating, say, a section of the liver and then a section of the brain, and analysing them according to their cellular structure, just as though brain substance and liver substance were not radically different. And in the very same way a student will direct his telescope to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and so on, believing all of them to be composed of substances of a like nature. But in ancient times it was known that if a man were considering the Moon or the Sun, he was able to come to an idea of them by means of that which has direct relation to the physical Earth: the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. And if he extended his observation in a spiritual way to the Moon, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, then he knew that he came into a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as physical Venus is but the external sign for something which lives and has its being in the astral, in the astral light. Physical light is in the case of Venus something quite different from physical Sunlight, for instance. For physical Sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the Earth as Earth-produced fight; whereas Venus-light—it is childish to think it is simply reflected Sunlight—Venus-light shines forth from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul to this light, he learned to know the Intelligences connected with Venus.

These were Intelligences who lived in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the Sun; and a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the Sun. Men spoke, with a certain justification, of a continual conflict between them. There were starting-points of such conflicts, when the Venus Intelligences began to combat the Intelligences of the Sun. There were times of intensified conflicts, there were culminations, catastrophes and crises. And in that which lay between an attack and a catastrophe or crisis, you had, as it were, a section of that great battle of opposition which takes place in the spiritual world, and appears in its external symbol only in the astrological and astronomical relationships between Venus and the Sun. It worked itself out in successive phases. And no one can understand the inner impulses of history on Earth if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the Sun. For all that takes place here on Earth in the way of conflict, all that happens in the evolution of civilisations, is an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this conflict of Venus versus Sun.

Such knowledge existed in the ancient Mysteries because there was a relation between the human beings on the Earth and the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Then came the epoch of which I have spoken, the epoch from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries a.d. The mediaeval investigators in their alchemical laboratories were no longer able to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could get only as far as the Nature Spirits. They made countless experiments—of which I gave you an instance in the last lecture, when I spoke of the transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—countless experiments of such a kind as would reveal to them the divine working and weaving in the processes and things of Nature; but they could only do so inasmuch as they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I told you; then, through their experiments, the Nature Spirits spoke to them. Now let us realise quite clearly the position of such an investigator at that time.

He stood in his laboratory, and he could say: ‘I bring to my laboratory the substances, the retorts, the heating ovens, and I make various experiments. I put certain questions to Nature. And when I do this the Nature spirits enter my laboratory with their revelations. I can perceive them.’ This went on even as late as the fifteenth century. The Nature Spirits could still approach the Rosicrucian investigators who were prepared in the right way. But the Rosicrucian investigators knew that in ancient times investigators had not merely been able to reach the Nature Spirits, but could come in touch with the higher Cosmic Intelligences who spoke to them of the gold-secret connected with the Sun, of the silver-secret and the carbon-secret connected with the Moon, and of the important secrets of history connected with Venus, and so on. It is true they had records preserved from still older traditions, records that told them how there had once been this knowledge, but the records were not specially important for them; if one has once been touched by the spiritual, then historical documents are not so terribly important as they are for our modern materialistic age. It is really astounding to see how infinitely important it is to many people when some discovery is made such as the recent case when the skeleton of a dinosaurus was found in the Gobi desert. Of course it is an important find, but such discoveries are never anything but isolated, broken fragments; whereas in a spiritual way we can really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos. Historical documents were certainly not likely to impress those mediaeval investigators. It was in another way that the mediaeval alchemist acquired a knowledge of how man had once been able to attain this cosmic knowledge but that he could now reach only the Nature Spirits, the Spirits behind the Elements. It happened in this way. In moments when certain observations of Nature were made, or certain experiments performed, when these investigators were thus approaching the sphere of the Nature Spirits, then certain Nature Spirits were there present and told how there had once been human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. That was the pain that gnawed at the heart of these mediaeval investigators! The Nature Spirits spoke to them of a former age when man had been able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. And the investigators had to say: ‘These Nature Spirits tell us of a past age now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and human existence.’ Thus this gift of the mediaeval alchemist, his gift of access to the Nature Spirits, was really a doubtful one. On the one hand he approached the spiritual of Nature, the spiritual of air, and of water—he approached Gnomes, Sylphs and Undines in all their living reality. On the other hand, there were some amongst these beings who told him of things that overwhelmed him with despair, telling him how humanity had once been in connection not only with the Nature Spirits but with the Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Nature Spirits themselves were still connected but whom man could no longer reach. That was the feeling of these mediaeval alchemists and it often came to expression in a far more sublime, a far more grandly tragic manner than we find in Goethe’s Faust, beautiful and powerful though it is!

The utterance which Faust addresses to the Moon, to the silver shining light of the Moon in which he would fain bathe, would have been made with much greater depth by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Nature Spirits told them about the secret of carbon and silver, a secret which again is closely and intimately bound up with man. For what was it that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the Sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and similarly how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and pulsing through his head, and at the same time he felt it as a picture of the whole Earth, this streaming of the blood through the head. And in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by bone, where it opens downwards towards the heart and the breast, he felt a copy in miniature of the rising up of the atmosphere from the Earth. Thus in what man learned from the Cosmos he recognised the metamorphoses that went on in his own organism; he could follow the planets as he passed through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of the penetrating words of Mephistopheles, where he says, ‘Blood is a very special fluid’. For in its metamorphosis our blood reflects the magnificent metamorphosis from carbon to silver. It all lives in man’s blood.

Thus did the mediaeval investigator regard man’s loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. And it is in reality but a faint reflection of this experience that we find in Faust when he opens the Book of the Macrocosm and wants to rise to the Cosmic Intelligences, then shuts the Book again because he cannot do it, and contents himself with the Spirit of the Earth. We have here only a faint echo of the tragic mood we find in these mediaeval investigators, whose names even have not come down to us. They had to hear from the Nature Spirits, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, how there had once been a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.

Now all this is very deeply linked with what had to develop in ancient Greece when it became necessary for the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be diluted and weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, which then played such an important role in the Middle Ages. All the time, below the surface of what we know as Aristotelianism, there continued to work powerfully, although tragically, right on into the fifteenth century what I have been able to sketch for you in this fragment out of those times.

Behind the Macedonian epoch lie two kinds of Mysteries. There lie the Mysteries that saw deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences; and there lie, too, the Mysteries with which man began to descend from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Nature Spirits. Man’s vision was closed to those Cosmic Intelligences, but it was turned for that very reason to the Nature Spirits. That was the crisis which came to fulfilment at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. In all that happened at that time we can still see how the abstractions of Aristotle are rooted in the ancient Mysteries. Anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle that have come down to posterity—his most important writings have not come down to us—but anyone who reads what is written there relating to the secret of the Moon, will at once understand the connection with those olden times.

These are things which will be illuminated in the lectures ² I now intend to give on the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

• 2. Eight lectures given in Dornach, 24th to 31st December, 1923. English translation published with the title: World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

To link Richard Wagner¹ with mysticism, as we shall do in today's consideration, will easily give rise to objections based on the misconception that to speak about an artist from a particular spiritual-scientific viewpoint is impermissible. Other objections will be directed against mysticism as such.

Today we shall look at Richard Wagner's relation to art on the one hand and mysticism on the other. The objection can be made that Wagner never spoke, or even hinted at, some of the things that will be mentioned. Such an objection is so obvious that anyone would have thought of it before speaking. It must be borne in mind that when a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner is to be considered, one cannot be limited to say only what Wagner spoke about. That would make a discussion on any issue from a higher point of view impossible.

No one would suggest that a botanist or a poet should refrain from expressing what he discovered, or what he felt about plants and other phenomena. When discussing issues, whether cultural or natural, one cannot be limited to say only what the phenomenon conveys. In that case the plant should be able to convey to the botanist the laws of its growth; and the feelings and sentiments it aroused in the poet would be unjustified. The reality is that in the human soul, precisely what the external world is unable to say about itself is revealed.

It is in this sense that what I have to say about the phenomenon that is Richard Wagner must be taken. Certainly a plant knows nothing of the laws, however, it nevertheless grows and develops. Similarly, an artist need not be aware of the laws inherent in his nature of which the observer with spiritual insight is able to speak. The artist lives and creates according to these laws as the plant creates according to laws that are subsequently discovered. Therefore, the objection should not be made that Wagner did not speak about things that will be indicated today.

As regards other objections concerned with mysticism, the fact is that people, educated and uneducated alike, speak of mysticism as of something obscure. In comparison with what is known as the scientific world view, they find it nebulous. This has not always been so. The great mystics of the early Christian centuries, the Gnostics, have thought otherwise, as does anyone with understanding of mysticism. The Gnostics have called it “mathesis,” mathematics, not because mysticism is mathematics, but because genuine mystics have striven for a similar clarity in the ideas they derive from spiritual worlds. Properly understood, mysticism, far from being obscure or sentimental, is in its approach to the world crystal clear. Having now shown that the two kinds of objections are invalid, let us proceed with today's considerations.

Richard Wagner can indeed be discussed from the highest spiritual scientific viewpoint. No seeker after Truth of the nineteenth century strove, his whole life long, more honestly and sincerely to discover answers to the world-riddles than Richard Wagner. His house in Bayreuth he named, “Inner Peace” (Wahnfried), saying that there he found peace from his “doubts and delusions” (sein Wähnen Ruhe fand). These words already reveal a great deal about Richard Wagner.

What is meant by error and delusion is all too well-known to someone who honestly and sincerely pursues the path to higher knowledge. This happens irrespective of whether the spiritual realm a person believes he will discover finds expression through art, or takes some other form. He is strongly aware of the many deluding images that come to block his path and slow his progress. That person knows that the path to higher knowledge is neither easy nor straightforward—that truth is reached only through inner upheavals and tribulations. Moreover, he is aware that dangers have to be met, but also that experiences of inner bliss will be his. A person who travels the path of knowledge will eventually reach that inner peace that is the result of intimate knowledge of the secrets of the world. Wagner's awareness and experience of these things comes to expression when he says: “I name this house ‘Inner Peace’ because here I found peace from error and delusions.” (“Weil hier mein Wahnen Ruhe fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus genannt.”)

Unlike many artists who attempt to create out of fantasy that lacks substance, Wagner saw from the start an artistic calling as a mission of world historical relevance; he felt that the Beauty created by art should also express truth and knowledge. Art was to him something holy; he saw the source of artistic creativity in religious feelings and perceptions. The artist, he felt, has a kind of priestly calling, and that what he, Richard Wagner, offered to mankind should have religious dedication. It should fulfill a religious task and mission in mankind's evolution. He felt that he was one of those who must contribute to their era something based on the fullness of truth and reality.

When spiritual science is properly understood, it will be seen that, far from being a gray theory remote from the real issues, it can help us to understand and to appreciate on his own terms a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner.

Wagner had a basic feeling, an inner awareness, that guided him to the same Truth about mankind's origin and evolution as that indicated by spiritual science. This inner awareness linked him to spiritual science and to all genuine mysticism. He wanted a unification of the arts; he wanted the various branches of art to work together, complementing one another. He felt that the lack, the shortcomings, in contemporary art forms was caused by what he called “their selfishness and egoism. Instead of the various art forms going their separate ways, he saw their working together as an ideal, creating a harmonious whole to which each contributed with selfless devotion. He insisted that art had once existed in such an ideal form. He thought to recognize it in ancient Greece prior to Sophocles,² Euripides³ and others. Before the arts separated, drama and dance, for example, had worked together and had selflessly created combined artistic works. Wagner had a kind of clairvoyant vision of such combined endeavor. Although history does not speak of it, his vision was true and points back to a primordial time when not only the arts but also all spiritual and cultural streams within various people worked together as a harmonious whole.

Spiritual science recognizes that what is known today as art and science are different branches originating from a common root. Whether we go back to the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, India or Persia, or to our own Germanic origin, everywhere we find primordial cultures where art and science are not separated. However, this is a past that is beyond the reach of external research, and is accessible only to clairvoyant vision.

In the ancient civilizations, art and science formed a unity that was looked upon as a mystery. Mystery centers existed for the cultivation of wisdom, beauty and religious piety before these became separated and cultivated in different establishments.

We can visualize what took place within the mysteries, with in these temples, which were places of learning and also of artistic performances. We can conjure up before our mind's eye the great dramas, seen by those who had been admitted to the mysteries. As I said, ordinary history can tell us nothing of these things. The performances were dramatic musical interpretations of the wisdom attained within the mysteries, and they were permeated with deep religious devotion. A few words will convey what took place in those times of which nothing is known save what spiritual science has to say. Those admitted to the Mysteries came together to watch a drama depicting the world's creation. Such dramas existed everywhere. They depicted how primordial divine beings descended from spiritual heights and let their essence stream out to become world-substance that they then shaped and formed into the various creature's of the kingdoms of nature: the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and that of humans. In other words, divine essence streamed into and formed everything that surrounded us, and it finally celebrated a kind of resurrection within the human soul.

Thoughtful people have always felt that the world is of divine origin, that the divine element attains consciousness in the human soul, and, as it were, looks out through human eyes observing itself in its own creation. This descent and resurrection of the divine element was enacted in Egypt, in the drama of Osiris, and dramatized also at various places of initiation in Greece. Those who were permitted to watch saw how art and knowledge combined to depict in dramatic form the creation of the world. Deep feelings of religious piety were called up in the onlooker by this drama, which might be said to be the archetypal drama. With reverence and awe the onlooker watched the gods descend into matter, to slumber in all beings, and resurrect within human beings. Filled with awe, the onlooker experienced a mood described once by Goethe in the following significant words: “When man's whole being functions as a healthy entity, and he feels the world to be a great, beautiful, worthy and estimable unity; when pleasure in the harmony gives him pure delight, then, had it self-awareness, the whole universe, feeling it had reached its goal, would shout for joy, and admire the pinnacle of its being and achievement.” A wondrous, deeply religious mood filled the hearts of those who watched this drama of the creation of the world.

And not only was a religious mood created, but the drama also conveyed the kind of knowledge that was later imparted in scientific concepts to explain the creation of the world and its beings. However, at that time one received, in the form of pictures, a knowledge that was both scientific and religious. Science and religion were one.

Richard Wagner had a dim feeling that such harmony had once existed. He looked back to a very old culture in ancient Greece that still had a religious character. He saw that in gray antiquity music, drama, dance and architecture did not operate as separate undertakings; they all functioned in conjunction with one another: Knowledge, art and religion were a unity. He concluded that as they separated the arts became self-seeking, egoistical. Wagner looked back as it were to a far distant past when human beings were not so individual, when a person felt as a member of his dass, of his whole tribe, when the folk spirit was still regarded as a concrete reality. In that ancient time a natural selflessness had existed. And the thought came to him that man, in order to become an individual, a personality, had to leave the old clan-community to enable the personal element to assert itself. Only in this way could man become a free being, but the price was a certain degree of egoism.

Wagner looked back to what in a primordial past had held people together in communities, a selflessness that had to be left behind so that human beings could become more and more conscious. He had an intuitive presentiment about the future; he felt that once individual freedom and independence had been attained, humans would have to find the way back to fellowship and caring relationships. Selflessness would have to be consciously regained, and loving kindness once more would have to become a prominent factor of life.

For Wagner the present linked itself with the future, for he visualized as a distant ideal the existence of selflessness within the arts. Furthermore, he saw art as playing a significant role in evolution. Human development and that of art appeared to him to go hand in hand; both became egoistical when they ceased to function as a totality. As we see them today, drama, architecture and dance have gone their independent ways. As humanity grew more and more selfish, so did art. Wagner visualized a future when the arts would once more function in united partnership. Because he saw a commune of artists as a future ideal, he was referred to as “the communist.”

He aimed to contribute all he could to bring forth harmony among the arts; he saw this as a powerful means of pouring into human hearts the selflessness that must form the Basis for a future fraternity. He was a missionary of social selflessness in the sphere of art; he wanted to pour into every soul the impulse of selflessness that brings about harmony among people. Richard Wagner was truly possessed of a deep impulse of a kind that could only arise and be sustained in someone with a deep conviction of the reality of spiritual life. Richard Wagner had that conviction.

Already his work The Flying Dutchman bears witness to his belief in the existence of a spiritual world behind the physical. You must bear in mind that I do not for a moment suggest that Wagner himself was conscious of the things I am indicating. His artistic impulse developed according to spiritual laws, as a plant develops according to laws of which it is not conscious, but which are discovered by the botanist.

When a materialist observes his fellowmen, he sees them as physical entities isolated from one another, their separate souls enclosed within their bodies. He consequently believes that all communication between them can only be of an external physical nature. He regards as real only what one person may say or do to another. However, once there is awareness of a spiritual world behind the physical, one is aware also of hidden influences that act from person to person without a physical agent. Hidden influences stream from soul to soul, even when nothing is outwardly expressed. What a person thinks and feels is not without significance or value for the person towards whom the thoughts and feelings are directed. He who thinks materialistically only knows that one can physically reach and assist another person. He has no notion that his inner feelings have significance for others, or that bonds, invisible to physical sight, link soul to soul. A mystic is well aware of these bonds. Richard Wagner was profoundly aware of their existence.

To clarify what is meant by this, let us look at a significant legend from the Middle Ages that to modern humans is just a legend. However, its author, and anyone who recognizes its mystical meaning, is aware that this legend expresses a spiritual reality. The legend, which is part of an epic, teils us about Poor Henry who suffered from a dreadful illness. We are told that only if a pure maiden would sacrifice herself for him could he be cured of his terrible infliction. This indicates that the love, offered by a soul that is pure, can directly influence and do something concretely for another human life.

Such legends depict something of which the materialist has no notion, namely, that purely spiritually one soul can influence another. Is the maiden's sacrifice for Poor Henry ultimately anything else than a physical demonstration of what a large part of mankind believes to be the mystical effect of sacrifice? Is it not an instance of what the Redeemer on the Cross had bestowed on mankind; is it not an instance of that mystical effect that acts from soul to soul? It demonstrates the existence of a spiritual reality behind the physical that can be sensed by man, and led Wagner to the legend of The Flying Dutchman—the legend of a man so entangled in material existence that he can find no deliverance from it. The Flying Dutchman is with good reason referred to as the “Ahasverus of the sea,” that is, The Wandering Jew of the sea.

Ashasverus' destiny is caused by the fact that he cannot believe in a Redeemer; he cannot believe that someone can guide mankind onwards to ever greater heights and more perfect stages of evolution. An Ashasverus is someone that has become stuck where he is; human beings must ascend stage by stage if they are to progress. Without striving, he unites himself with matter, with external aspects of life, and becomes stuck in an existence that goes on and on, at the same level. He pours scorn on Him that leads mankind upwards, and remains entangled in matter. What does that mean? Existence keeps repeating itself for someone who is completely immersed in external life. Materialistic and spiritual comprehension differ, because matter repeats itself, whereas spirit ascends. The moment spirit succumbs to matter, it succumbs to repetition.

That happens in the case of The Flying Dutchman. Various peoples related this idea to the discoveries of foreign lands; the crossing of oceans and reaching foreign shores was seen as a means of attaining perfection. He who lacked the urge, who did not sense the spirit's call, became stuck in sameness, in what belongs solely to matter. The Flying Dutchman, whose whole disposition is materialistic, is abandoned by the power to evolve, by the power of love, which is the means to ascend to ever greater perfection. He becomes entangled in matter and consequently in the eternal repetition of the same. Those who suffer inability to ascend, who lack the urge to evolve, must come under the influence of a soul that is chaste and pure. Only an innocent maiden's love can redeem the Flying Dutchman.

A certain relationship exists between a soul that is as yet untouched by material life and one that has become entangled in it. Wagner has an instinctive feeling for this fact, and portrays it with great power in his dramas. Only someone with his mystical sense, and perception of the spirit behind the physical, would have the courage to take on a cultural mission of the magnitude Richard Wagner has assigned to himself. It has enabled him to visualize music and drama in ways no one has thought of before. He has looked back to ancient Greece, to a time when various art forms still played an integral part in performances, when music expressed what the art of drama could not express, and eternal universal laws were expressed through the rhythm of dance.

In older works of art, where dance, rhythm and harmony still collaborated, he recognized something of the musical-dramatic element of the artistic works of antiquity. He acquired a unique sense for harmony, for tonality in music, but insisted that contributions from related arts were essential. Something from them must flow into the music. One such related art was dance, not as it has become, but the dance that once expressed movements in nature and movements of the stars. In ancient times, dance originated from a feeling for laws in nature. Man in his own movements copied those in nature. Rhythm of dance was reflected in the harmony of the music. Other arts, such as poetry, whose vehicle is words, also contributed, and what could not be expressed through words was contributed by related arts. Harmonious collaboration existed among dance, music and poetry. The musical element arose from the cooperation of harmony, rhythm and melody.

This was what mystics and also Richard Wagner felt as the spirit of art in ancient times, when the various arts worked together in brotherly fashion, when melody, rhythm and harmony had not yet attained their later perfection. When they separated, dance became an art form in its own right, and poetry likewise. Consequently, rhythm became a separate experience, and poetry no longer added its contribution to the musical element. No longer was there collaboration between the arts. In tracing the arts up to modern times, Wagner noticed that the egoism in art increased as human beings egoism increased.

Let us now look at attempts made by Wagner to create something harmonious within the artistic one-sidedness he faced. This is the sphere that reveals his greatness as he searched for the true nature of art.

To Richard Wagner, Beethoven⁴ and Shakespeare⁵ represented artists who one-sidedly cultivated the two arts he particularly wanted to bring together, music and drama. He only had to look at his own inner being to recognize the impossibility of conveying, merely through words, the whole gamut of human feelings, particularly feelings that do not manifest externally through gestures or words. Shakespeare was in his view a one-sided dramatist because dramatic words on their own are incapable of expressing things of deeper import. Only when inner impulses have become external action, have become part of space and time, can they be conveyed through dramatic art. When watching a drama, one must assume the impulses portrayed to be already experiences that are past. What one witnesses is no longer drama taking place within the. person concerned; it has already passed over into what can be physically seen and heard. Whatever deeper feelings and sensations are the basis for what is portrayed on the stage cannot be conveyed by the dramatist.

In music, on the other hand, Wagner regarded the symphonist, the pure instrumentalist, to be the most one-sided, for he conveyed in wonderful tone and scales the inner drama, the whole range of human feelings, but had no means of expressing impulses once they became gestures, or became part of space and time. Thus, Wagner saw music as able to express the inner life, but unable to convey what came to expression outwardly. Dramatic art, on the other hand, when refusing to collaborate with music, only conveyed impulses when they became externalized.

According to Wagner, Shakespeare conveyed one aspect of dramatic art, and Mozart,⁶ Haydn⁷ and Beethoven another. In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Wagner sensed something that strove to break away from the one-sidedness of this art form, strove to burst the Shell and become articulate, strove to permeate the whole world and envelop mankind with love. Wagner saw it as his mission not to let this element remain as it was in the Ninth Symphony, but to bring it out still further into space and time. He wanted it not only to be an external expression of a soul's inner drama, but also to flow into words and action. He wanted to present on the stage both aspects of dramatic art: in music, the whole range of inner sensations, and in drama, the aspect of those inner sensations that come to external expression. What he sought was a higher unity of Shakespeare and Beethoven. He wanted the whole of humanity represented on the stage.

When we watch some action taking place on the stage, we should become aware of more than can be perceived by eyes and ears. We should be able to be aware also of deeper impulses residing in the human soul. This aspect caused dissatisfaction in Wagner with the old type of opera. Here the dramatist, the poet and the musician worked separately on a production. The poet wrote his part, the musician then came along and interpreted what was written through music. But the task of music is rather to express what poetry by itself cannot express. Human nature consists of an inner as well as an outer aspect. The inner cannot be portrayed through external means; the outer aspect can indeed be dramatized, but words are incapable of conveying impulses that live within human beings. Music should not be there to illustrate the poetry, but to complete it. What poetry cannot express should be conveyed by music.

That was Wagner's great ideal and the sense in which he wanted to create. He assigned to himself the mission to create a work of art in which music and poetry worked together selflessly. Wagner's basic idea was of mystical origin; he wanted to understand the whole human being, the inner person as well as what he revealed outwardly. Wagner knew that within human beings a higher being resides, a higher self that was only partially revealed in space and time. He sought to understand that higher entity that rises above the everyday. He felt that it must approached from as many sides as possible. His search for the superhuman aspect of man's being, for that which rises above the merely personal, led him to myths. Mythical figures were not merely human, they were superhuman: They revealed the superhuman aspect of a person's being. Characters like Siegfried and Lohengrin do not display qualities belonging to a single human being, but to many. Wagner turned to the superhuman figures portrayed in myths because he sought understanding of the deeper aspects of the human being.

A clear look at his work reveals how deep an insight he had attained into mankind's evolution. In The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal we witness, powerfully presented, great riddles of humanity's existence. They reveal his intuitive perception, his deep feelings for all mankind.

We can do no more than turn a few spotlights on Wagner's inner experiences as an artist. In so doing we soon discover his strong affinity with what could be called "man's mythical past." His particular interest in the figure of Siegfried can easily be understood when seen in connection with his concept of mankind's evolution. Looking back to ancient times, Wagner saw that formerly the bond between human beings was based on selfless love within the confines of a tribe. Human consciousness at that time was duller; he did not yet experience personal independence. Each one felt himself, not so much an individual, but rather as a member of his tribe. He experienced the tribal soul as a reality.

Wagner felt that especially traits in European culture can be traced back to the time when natural instinctive love united human beings in interrelated groups, a time of which spiritual science also speaks when showing that everything in the world evolves, and that today's clear consciousness gradually evolved from a different type, of which there are still residues. In pictures of dream-consciousness Wagner recognized echoes of a former picture-consciousness that had once been the normal consciousness of all mankind. The waking consciousness of today replaced a much duller type; while it lasted, human beings were much closer to one another. As Wagner recognized, those related were bound together by natural love connected with the blood. Not until later did individuality, and with it egoism, assert itself. However, this constitutes a necessary stage in man's evolution.

The subject I shall now bring up will be familiar to those acquainted with spiritual science, but others may find it somewhat strange. The lucid day-consciousness now existing in Europe evolved from the very different consciousness of a primordial human race that preceded our own—a humanity that existed on Atlantis, a continent situated where the Atlantic Ocean is now. Those who take note of what goes on in the world will be aware that even natural science speaks of an Atlantean continent. A scientific journal, Kosmos, recently carried an article about it. Physical conditions on Atlantis were very different; the atmosphere in which the ancestors of today's European lived was a mixture of air and water. Large areas of the continent were covered with huge masses of dense mist. The sun was not seen as we see it, but surrounded by enormous bands of color due to the masses of mist. In Germanic legends a memory is preserved of that ancient country, and given descriptive names such as Niflheim or Nibelungenheim. As the Hood gradually submerged the Atlantean continent, it also gave shape to the German plains. The Rhine was regarded as a remnant of the Atlantean "Being of Mist” that once covered most of the countries. The water of the Rhine was thought to have originated in Nibelungenheim or Nebelheim (Nebel means “mist”), to have come from the dense mist of ancient Atlantis. Through a dreamlike consciousness, full of premonition, all this is told in sagas and myths wherein is described how conditions caused the people to abandon the area and how, as they wandered eastwards, their dull consciousness grew ever more lucid while egoism increased.

A consequence of the former dull consciousness was a certain selflessness, but with the clearer air, consciousness grew brighter and egoism stronger. The vaporous mist had enveloped the people of Atlantis with an atmosphere saturated with wisdom, selflessness and love. This selfless, love-filled wisdom flowed with the water into the Rhine and reposed beneath it as wisdom, as gold. But this wisdom, if taken hold of by egoism, provides it with power. As they went eastward, the former inhabitants of Atlantis saw the Rhine embracing the hoard of the gold of wisdom that had once been a source of selflessness. All this is intimated in the world of sagas that took hold of Wagner. He had such inner kinship with that lofty spiritual being who preserves memory of the past, whose spirit lives in sagas and myths, that he extracted from myths the whole essence of his view of the world. We therefore witness, dramatized on the stage and echoing through his music, the consequences of human egoism.

We see the Ring closing, as Alberich takes the gold of the Rhine from the Rhine Maidens. Alberich is representative of the Nibelungs, who have become egoistic, of the human being that forswears the love through which he is a member of a unity—a dan or tribe. Wagner links to the plan that weaves through the legend the power of possession—that the ancient world arises before his mind's eye, the world that has produced Walhalla, the world of Wotan, and of the ancient gods. They represent a kind of group-soul possessing traits that a people have in common. But when the Ring cioses around man's “I,” the individual too is taken hold of by greed for gold.

Wagner sensitively portrays what lives in Wotan as group-soul qualities, and in human beings become egoistic craving for the Rhine-gold. We hear it in his music; how could one fail to hear it? It should not be said that something arbitrary is at this point inserted in the music. No human ear could fail to hear in that long E-flat major in the Rhine-gold the impact of the emerging human “I.” Wagner's deep mystical sense can be traced in his music.

We are shown that Wotan has to come to terms, not with the consciousness that had become individualized, but with that which had not yet become so, and still strongly acts as group-consciousness. When he tries by stealth to take away the Ring from the giant, he meets this consciousness in the figure of Erda. She is clearly representing the old all-encompassing consciousness through which knowledge is attained clairvoyantly of the whole environment. The words spoken at this point are most significant:

To thee is known
What lies hidden in the deep,
What weaves in air and water
Through mountain and valley.
Thou breathest through The wele of existence;
When heads ponder Thy sense emerges.
It is said that to thee All things are known.

The old consciousness that held sway in Nebelheim cannot be better described than in the words:

My sleep is a dreaming
My dream is a musing
My musing is ruled by wisdom.

The old consciousness was a dreaming consciousness, but in this dream human beings knew of the whole surrounding world. The dream encompassed the depth of nature and spun its wisdom from person to person, whose musing and actions all stemmed from this dreaming consciousness. Wotan meets it in the figure of Erda with the result that a new consciousness arises.

What is of a higher order is always depicted in myths and sagas as a female figure. In Goethe's Faust it is indicated in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.” Various peoples have depicted a person's inner striving towards a higher consciousness as a union with a higher aspect of the being that is seen as feminine. What is depicted as a marriage is a person's union with the cosmic laws that permeate and illumine his soul. For example, in ancient Egypt we see Isis, and as always the female figure that is looked up to as the higher consciousness has characteristics that correspond to those of the particular people. What a people feels to be its real essence, its true nature, is depicted as a female figure corresponding to this ideal—a feminine aspect with which the individual human being becomes united after death, or also while still living.

As we have seen, man can rise above the sensual, either by leaving it behind, and in death uniting with the spirit, or he may attain the union while still living by attaining spiritual sight. In either case, this higher self is depicted in Germanic myths as a female figure. The warrior who fought courageously and died on the battlefield is regarded by ancestors of today's Middle European as someone who, on entering the spiritual world, would be united with this higher aspect of his being. Hence, the Walkyries are shown to approach the dying warriors and carry them up into spiritual realms. Union with the Walkyrie represents union with the higher consciousness. The Walkyrie Brunnhilde is created through the union of Wotan and Erda. Siegfried is to be united with her and guided into spiritual life. Thus, the daughter of Erda represents the higher consciousness of initiation. Siegfried represents the new, the different human being that has come into existence. Because of the configuration and higher perfection of his inner being, he is united with the Walkyrie already in life.

The hidden wisdom in Germanic legends comes to expression in Wagner's artistic creation. He shows that through the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the old group-soul consciousness must die out as the new individual consciousness develops in Siegfried. Wagner had a deep awareness of the great mysteries connected with mankind's evolution. A human being's inner experiences he expressed through music, his action through dramatic art.

His sense for the mystical aspect of evolution enabled him to portray a person's higher development. It made him place at the centre of one of his dramas the figure of Lohengrin. Who is Lohengrin? He can be understood only when seen an the background of the momentous upheavals taking place all over Europe at the time when the legend was living reality. Only then can we understand what Wagner had in mind when he depicts Lohengrin's relationship with the Lady he names as Elsa von Brabant. Throughout Europe a new epoch was dawning; An individual's striving personality was coming to the fore. Though described in prosaic terms, these phenomena hide events of greatest significance. In France, Scotland, England and as far away as Russia, a new social structure was developing, in the form of the “Free City.” In rural districts, people still lived in groups, in clans; those who wanted to escape flocked to the cities. The urban environment promoted individual consciousness and feelings of independence. People in the city were those who wanted to strip off the bonds of clan or tribe; they wanted to live their own lives in their own way.

In reality a mighty revolution was taking place. Up till then a person's name decided where he belonged and his status. In the City, a person's name was of no importance, family background of no concern. What counted was personal ability; in the city individuality developed. The evolution from selflessness to individuality became an evolution from individuality to brotherhood. The legend depicted this. In the middle of the Middle Ages the old social structure was being replaced with a new structure, within which each person contributed according to his individual capacity.

Formerly, Leaders and rulers, were always descended from priestly and aristocratic families. The fact that they came from such a background was what mattered; they must have the “right” blood. In the future that would be of no account; someone chosen as leader might be completely unknown as regards descent, and it would be regarded as irreverent to link him with a particular name. The ideal was seen in the great individuality, in the anonymous sage who continued to grow and develop; he was not significant because of his descent, but because of what he was. He was a free individual acknowledged by others just because his achievements were his own.

In this sense, Lohengrin comes before us as representative of man, leading men to freedom and independence. The lady who becomes his wife represents the consciousness described as that of city-dweller of the Middle Ages. He who mediates between the Lofty Being that guides mankind and the people is always associated with great individuality, and is always known by a specific name. Through spiritual knowledge he is known by the technical name “Swan,” which denotes a particular stage of higher spiritual development. The Swan mediates between ordinary people and the Lofty Being that leads humanity. We see a reflection of this in the legend of Lohengrin.

If we are to do justice to the wisdom found in legends, to things revealed through Wagner's artistry, we must bring to it an open mind and mobile ideas. If taken in a narrow, pedantic sense, we are left with empty words instead of being inwardly fired with enthusiasm by the far-reaching vistas opened up through his work. I must be permitted to bring these things before you in concepts that point to a greater perspective. A figure like Lohengrin must be presented in light of its world-historical background and significance. And we must recognize that an understanding of this significance dawned in Wagner, enabling him to give it artistic
form.

The same also applies to Wagner's comprehension of the Holy Grail. We concerned ourselves with the Holy Grail in the previous lecture: “Who are the Rosicrucians?” It is indeed a remarkable fact that at a certain moment there arose in Wagner an inkling of the great teaching that flourished in the Middle Ages. Before that happened, another idea, as it were, prepared the way, but first it led him to create a drama called The Victor; this was in 1856.

The Victor was never performed, but the idea it embodied was incorporated into his Parsifal. The Victor depicted the following:

Ananda, a youth of the Brahman caste, was loved by a Tschandala maiden; because of the caste system he cannot reciprocate the love. Ananda became a follower of Buddha, and he eventually conquered his human craving: He gained victory over himself. To the maiden was then revealed that in a former life she was a Brahman and had overcome her love for the youth who was then of the Tschandala caste. Thus, she too was a victor. She and Ananda were spiritually united.

Wagner renders a beautiful interpretation of this idea, taking it as far as reincarnation and karma in the Christian-Anthroposophical sense. We are shown that the maiden herself, in a former life, brought about the present events. Wagner has worked on this idea in 1856.

On Good Friday, 1857, he was sitting in the Retreat, “the sanctuary on the green hill.” Looking out over the fields watching the plants come to life, sprouting from the earth, an inkling arose in him of the Power of the germinating force emerging from the earth in response to the rays of the sun: a driving force, a motivating force that permeates the whole world and lives in all beings; a force that must evolve, that cannot remain as it is; a force that, to reach higher stages, must pass through death. Watching the plants, he felt the force of sprouting life, and turning his gaze across the Lake of Zürich to the village; he contemplated the opposite idea, that of death—the two polar concepts to which Goethe gives such eloquent expression in his poem, Blessed Longing.

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

Goethe rewrote the words in his hymn to nature saying: “Nature invented death to have more life; only through death can she create a higher spiritual life.”

On Good Friday, as the symbol of death came before mankind in remembrance, Wagner sensed the connection between life, death and immortality. He felt a connection between the life sprouting from the earth and the Death on the Cross, the Death that is also the source of a Christian belief that life will ultimately be victorious over death, will become eternal life. Wagner sensed an inner connection between the sprouting life of spring and the Good Friday belief in Redemption, the belief that from Death on the Cross springs Eternal Life. This thought is the same as that contained in the Quest for the Holy Grail, where the chaste plant blossom, striving towards the sun, is contrasted with human desire filled nature. On the one hand Wagner recognized that human beings steeped in desires; on the other he looked towards a future ideal—the ideal that human beings shall attain a higher consciousness through overcoming their lower nature, shall attain a higher fructifying power, called forth by the Spirit.

Looking towards the Cross, Wagner saw the blood flowing from the Redeemer, the symbol of Redemption, being caught in the Grail Chalice. This picture, linked itself within him to the life awakening in nature. These thoughts were passing through Wagner's soul on Good Friday, 1857. He jotted down a few words that later became the basis from which he created his magnificent Good Friday drama. He wrote: "The blossoming plant springs from death; eternal life springs from the Death of Christ." At that moment Wagner had an inner awareness of the Spirit behind all things, of the Spirit victorious over death.

For a time other creative ideas pushed those concerned with Parsifal into the Background. They came to the fore once more near the end of his life, when, clearer than before, they conveyed to him a person's path of knowledge. Wagner portrayed the path to the Holy Grail to show the cleansing of a human beings' desire nature. As an ideal this is depicted as a pure holy chalice whose image is the plant calyx's chaste fructification to new creation by the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. The sunbeam enters matter as Amfortas' lance enters sinful blood. But there the result is suffering and death. The path to the Holy Grail is portrayed as a cleansing of the sinful blood of lower desires till, on a higher level, it is as pure and chaste as is the plant calyx in relation to the sunbeam. Only he who is pure in heart, unworldly, untouched by temptation, so that he approaches the Holy Grail as an "innocent fool" filled with questions of its secret, can discover the path.

Wagner's Parsifal is born out of his mystical feeling for the Holy Grail. At one time he meant to incorporate the idea into his work Die Wibelungen, an historical account of the Middle Ages. He wanted to elevate the concept of Emperor by letting Barbarossa journey to the East in search of the original spirit of Christianity, thus combining the Parsifal legend with history of the Middle Ages. This idea led to his wonderful artistic interpretation of the Good Friday tradition, so that it can truly be said that Wagner has succeeded in bringing religion into art, in making art religious.

In his artistic new creation of the Good Friday tradition, Wagner had the ingenious idea of combining the subject of faith with that of the Holy Grail. On the one hand stands the belief that mankind will be redeemed, and on the other, that through perfecting its nature humanity itself strives towards redemption; the belief that the Spirit permeating mankind—a drop of which lives in each individual as his higher self—in Christ Jesus foreshadowed humanity's redemption. All this arose as an inner picture in Wagner's mind already on that Good Friday in 1857 when he recognized the connection between the legend of Parsifal and Redemption through Christ Jesus.

We can begin to sense the presence of the Christ within mankind's spiritual environment when, with sensitivity and understanding, we absorb the story of the Holy Grail. And it can deepen to concrete inner spiritual experience when we sense the transition from the midnight of Maundy Thursday—events of Maundy Thursday—to those of Good Friday, which symbolize the victory of nature's resurrection.

Wagner's Parsifal was inspired by the festival of Easter. He wanted new life to pour into the Christian festivals, which originally were established out of a deep understanding of nature. This can be seen especially in the case of the Easter festival, which was established when it was still known that the constellation of sun and moon affected human beings. Today people want Easter celebrated an an arbitrarily chosen date, which shows that the festival is no longer experienced as it was when there was still a feeling for the working of nature. When the spirit was regarded as a reality it was sensed in all things. If we could still sense what was bequeathed to us through traditions in regard to the festivals, then we would also have a feeling for how to celebrate Good Friday. Richard Wagner did have that feeling, just as he also perceived that the words of the Redeemer: “I am with you to the end of the world,” called human beings to follow the trail that led to the lofty ideal of the Holy Grail. Then people who lived the Truth would become redeemers.

Mankind is redeemed by the Redeemer. But Wagner adds the question: "When is the Redeemer redeemed?" He is redeemed when He abides in every human heart. As He has descended into the human heart, the human heart must ascend. Something of this was also felt by Wagner, for from the motif of faith he lets sound forth what is the mystical feeling of mankind in these beautiful words from Parsifal:

Greatest Healing Wonder
Redemption for the Redeemer!

These words truly show Wagner's deep commitment to the highest ideal a person can set himself: to approach that Spiritual Power that came down to us and lives in our world. When we are worthy, we bring what resounds at the dose of Richard Wagner's Parsifal: Redemption for the Redeemer.

• 1. Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a major German opera composer.
• 2. Sophocles (c. 495 B.C.–406 B.C.) was a great Athenian dramatist and one of the founders of Greek tragedy
• 3. Euripides (c. 480 B.C.–406 B.C.), a Greek dramatist.
• 4. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer born in Bonn.
• 5. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor-manager of the Globe Theatre.
• 6. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Austrian composer.
• 7. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Austrian composer who established the accepted classical forms of the Symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata.