The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Persian legend speaks of two contrary divinities, of Ormuzd, the good god, and of Ahriman, the bad god. Both divinities battle for the human being, generally for everything that develops here on earth as life. One holds out in prospect that once the good divinity wins the victory over the bad divinity.

Whatever one thinks about this legend, everybody sees a portrayal of this idea in nature, in the surrounding world. To get an example, look at the fire on one side. We owe our culture to it, our comfort and our advancement here within our life, and on the other side look at the destroying power of the forces related to the fire in any respect as for example the earthquakes and the volcano eruptions. So, on one side, beneficent, preserving, life-sustaining, and life-giving powers prevail, and, on the other side, life-destroying and hostile powers. The scene on which the fights of these both powers take place is not only the external human being but also the internal one. The human soul is torn between hostile powers: between pain, evil, grief, and the beneficent powers of existence, fulfilling us with joy, raising our hearts and pointing us to the spiritual spheres of heaven.

Deeper natures have always seen the unity, basically, the harmony between these two contrary powers. I need only to remind of something completely known and you imagine how a choice spirit of our own German culture expressed the unity and uniformity of these contrary powers. Schiller's Song of the Bell contains the nice words just in this regard:

Benevolent is the fire's might,
If man tames and watches it,
For what he builds what he creates,
He owes to this heavenly power;
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off the shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own,
This free daughter of nature.

The same under two different points of view!

If we look at the external and internal human being in such a way, we see reluctant powers in him everywhere. One of these powers of which since ancient times prudent and not prudent people have spoken shall be an object of our today's consideration: that power which one always called Lucifer.—Not only from the scientific, historical point of view, but also from the internal, the so-called esoteric point of view we want to deal with this subject.

The word Lucifer means light bearer (Latin: lux—the light, fer, ferre—bear). If we keep this word in mind, we must already say to ourselves, those who named this power could impossibly mean only that which various positive religious convictions summarise as the destroying, grief, and downfall bringing power that they see in the symbol of the snake and the evil dragon.—However, the religious system best known in Europe, the Christian one, complies with what in the vernacular one calls devil or Satan, whom one regards as the life-destroying power and as that power which draws us down. You all know the snake as the seducer of humanity. You can read it at the beginning of the Genesis, the Bible, and it lives in the consciousness of many people that way.

Not always and not in all confessions the snake was regarded as the symbol of the evil, as the ruining power, as power that draws us down. If we look at the Christian-Jewish myth, it cannot appear to us completely that way. For who would today count that power which brought the knowledge of good and evil to the human beings, of which one says that it opened men's eyes, absolutely to the hostile powers? A big change has taken place just in the last century.

We only need to remind of the name of the great genius Goethe to say which changes have taken place in the course of the last centuries. You all know that Goethe transformed the medieval Faust legend, not only covered it anew. If you pursue this medieval Faust legend, Faust stands there as the representative and type of the human striving, of the striving that is built on freedom and independence and on science, not of that which should be built on revelation, on faith.

Even in the 16th century, the folk spirit represented this Faust, this genius of the liberal striving for human knowledge so that he must absolutely become a slave of the evil, life-hostile powers. Faust must go to ruin because he turned away from the faith, from the tradition of the millennia, from revelation. One tells of him that he did no longer want to be a theologian; one says of him that he laid the Bible behind a bank and became a worldly person. A worldly person was such a person who wanted to found his existence on own knowledge and on own insight of the forces. Such a person had necessarily to become a slave of the evil forces, according to the point of view at that time. Goethe shows us this fight in a new way. How does he close Faust's destiny? He lets the choir of angels sing: “For him whose striving never ceases we can provide redemption.” In addition, here, Faust makes the pact with the powers that are connected with Mephistopheles, but he is redeemed, although he founds himself on freedom and self-determination. Faust reaches to the pacification of his existence. This soul change took place there. Lucifer is no longer recognised in the old way as fateful.

If we look around in the old religions, Lucifer was not always fateful. In the old Indian religions. One called the sages, the leaders, those who illuminated the human beings with spirit “snakes.” It is similar in many religions. Why? What does Lucifer represent in these old religions? What does he represent, finally? This and the like shall occupy us today. What does he represent to the occultists, the explorers of the forces slumbering in nature, of the deeper forces of nature who speak about Lucifer in the sense of this knowledge as that who shall bring the light to the human being who builds on himself and does not build on revelation and faith, but on knowledge and science?

If we want to penetrate into this matter, we must touch something that leads us to bygone times of human existence, so to speak, to the starting point of human evolution. This object, which can only be touched here at the beginning, occupies us completely when we speak about the evolution of the planets. Nevertheless, we have to start already today from this time of human evolution. Evolution is that which appears to us today as a magic word and wants to make the human existence comprehensible, what faces us today in certain perfection and completion and from which we hope that it advances to higher and higher levels of perfection. We attribute everything that lives round us to a development from imperfect to the perfect. That applies to the human being also, to the human being who enters existence according a deeper teaching of development before ancient times in which our earth still did not look like today and in which its natural forces worked quite differently. In the sense of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview, we also speak about this starting point of human evolution, but we speak of an evolution that leads us back to times that are even more distant and to a starting point, which are before our earth evolution. I can only indicate this.

When the human being entered into existence, he was alone, so to speak, with and among the physical realms in the world. If we look at the human being in such a way, he appears to us as the highest member, as the last link in a developmental chain compared with the remaining physical realms, compared with the mineral, plant and animal realms. However, as foolish as it would be if a plant, a stone, or an animal spoke: with me the development ends—, as foolish and senseless it would be if the human being spoke of himself: with me the development ends, I am the highest of the beings, which are possible here on earth.—We must look up at other beings, which we cannot reach with the sensuous eyes, which we reach, however, if the slumbering deeper, spiritual forces are woken if the spiritual eyes are opened.

The theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview has to bring a consciousness of these advanced beings again who are related to the human beings as the human being to the lower realms of nature. When the human being entered into existence, he was not created from nothing, but he originated from former developmental links. In addition, other beings went through such developments. They outranked the human being. The religion, also the Bible speaks of these beings. It speaks of beings who could feel as perfect at that time as the human being feels once when he has finished his present development on earth. We say in the spiritual-scientific worldview, in the human being, in his deepest inside a god is originating. With the Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages we speak that the human being can rise to realms which stand above those in which he lives today. The Christian mystic Angelus Silesius says this: “If you rise above yourself and let God prevail, your spirit experiences Ascension.” Then he does not merely receive from the creative powers like today, but he is then a creative, a spiritualised and deified being.

At the starting point where the forces, which have reached certain levels of perfection today, were still in their childhood, there were beings beside him who had already gone through such stages which he has to finish today. They were that—if we understand the Bible rather internally—from which the gods descended. The gods have also developed, even in the sense of the Bible. The Elohim are not something that simply stands there, but they are something that has become and has developed to that height. They stood on that level in the past to which the human being develops once. These gods have reached a certain completion. However, as well as on the stages of our present existence beside more developed human individuals also those are who have only reached a lower degree of perfection, at that time still beings also stood between human beings and gods who were higher than the human beings, but lower than the creative gods. I know how ambiguous such things are, even if one takes them seriously. I know that the materialistic worldview almost forbids, because it regards it as superstition, to speak of developmental stages of such beings.

However, this cannot prevent us from facing the truth and from speaking of developmental stages of the human being. The gods were in lofty heights above the human beings, and immediately about these were beings who stood in their development between the gods and human beings, but did not complete it at that time. They went through their development among the human beings, because they were closer to them. These beings made up as it were on our earth within their development for that which they had omitted earlier. The secret doctrine, occultism complies with the old religions and the deeper profundities of our time. They subsume these powers as Lucifer. The theosophical worldview shows that a god lives in the human being who expresses himself in the slumbering dispositions that are, however, divine dispositions one day, that the human being has developed at the end of the evolution, but also the luciferic principle lives in the human being and belongs to his soul.

After we have made this clear to ourselves, we are free to speak of gods and luciferic powers, of the divine and of the luciferic principles in us as the physicist speaks of electricity and magnetism. The gods stood there as elated beings. Now we must realise both—gods and luciferic powers—as the big principle which lives in any development and work. Look once at nature round yourselves. As the lowest of a sequence the lifeless world of the mineral, then the plants, then the animal and finally the human realms face us; and then even further up the realms of the higher beings. If the plant could open the eyes and look with bright, clear knowledge around it, then it would say to itself, I owe my existence to this mineral realm, which lives round me; if it were not, I could never be. From it, I get my vitality. This realm forms the ground, from which my roots grow. Without this realm, I could never be there.—Again, if the animal could look at the lower physical realms in the same way, it would be the same. It would have to look down at the lower plant realm and say: I have grown out of it, I owe my food to it; if the plant realm did not exist, I would not be.—

It is the same with the human being. He also has to say to himself: I have grown out of these lower realms of nature, I owe my existence to them; if they were not, then I would not be. There the higher realm faces the lower one again and helps, so to speak, to further its existence. Imagine only once that the mineral realm would only have developed on earth! What would the earth have become? A rigid, lifeless body that hurried through the space. Life would have remained in the mineral realm like slumbering in a grave. Now this life has escaped, so to speak, to a higher realm, to the plant realm, and the mineral realm on earth is made again a living one by the plant realm. The mineral holds and carries the plant realm; the plant realm transforms the mineral perpetually in the living circulation. Consider what the plant makes with the mineral forces on earth! If there were no plants on earth, the substances of the mineral realm rested in the dead rock. However, because there is a plant realm, it soaks up the substances, revives itself with them, and returns them. The lower realm offers the basis and forces to the higher one, and the higher realm helps again to preserve the existence of the lower one. Thus, it is with any next higher realm. The animal realm lives together peacefully with the plant realm, it inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid; the plant builds up its body from the carbon and delivers oxygen for it.

What is about the human being? He also lives by means of the lower realms of nature. There we gradually come up to the human being who approaches the spirit, subsists on the spirit. If we go over to the spiritual powers, there is exactly the same relation between the gods and the human beings as between the lower realms of the universe, a relation, similar to that between the plants and the minerals or between the other higher realms of the universe. We know what the plant contributes to the formation and stimulation of the mineral realm, what do the spiritual realms contribute, what do the gods do with the human being at the starting point of development and in its progress? What did they do with the human realm?

The gods have completed their development. They have no immediate interest in the human realm—if we want to speak here evidently, even if not quite appropriately. However, they have an indirect interest; they give it the forces, which bring the slumbering and solidified life in the human being back to existence, as well as the plant gives the dead stone life. Have a look at the mineral, the plant, and the animal realms. How are they opposing each other? The esoteric who investigates the deeper forces of nature says, the mineral, the plant, and the animal realms face each other like wisdom, life, and love.—Try to understand that!

If you look at the mineral realm as it faces us in nature: everywhere you try to understand it with your intellect and wisdom. You investigate the stars and their orbits, the physical principles of the mineral world. The plant pulls wisdom and the world regularity out of the mineral world. We say without thinking, wisdom, regularity rests in the mineral realm; it is the embodied wisdom. However, poor, sober, and dead would this mineral realm be with its wisdom unless the plant world had come along and its stimulating principle had woken the sprouting life in this slumbering wisdom. Love and wisdom exchange the forces with each other, while the plants and minerals interact with each other. In a similar way, it is also between the gods and the human beings. When the human being began his development on earth, life rested in him at first; the gods stoked it up again for a new earthly development. What is associated with this earthly development? Again, the human realm and the divine realm are related to each other like wisdom and love.

Hence, esotericism, all deeper confessions—also Christianity—speak of the fact that God or the gods are love, the stimulating principle. This principle causes the sensual love at first. That is why Jehovah is shown in the Jewish religion of the Old Testament as the bringer of the sensual desire, as the giver of growth and reproductivity. In the sensual desire lies the principle of the further development that drives from the imperfect to the perfect that is the development from the animal realm up to where love founds states. In this love, which appeals, so to speak, the human beings for communities, which penetrates what is solidified in the human being with sprouting life, as the plant appeals the stone for life, we have the revealing, original divinity in it at first. This is the case in all religions and in the esoteric science too. Now we must take stock of the fact that we have here to see the divine driving forces in the human evolution. The human being had forever to regard that which propels him, which furthers him, as a gift, as a revelation of a divine principle.

The luciferic principle enters among him and the gods. Thereby he is enabled to take charge of that which lives unconsciously as a divine principle in him, in his unaware desire of reproduction and development. Thereby he ascends to independence and freedom in his development. Why this? Because that which lives in Lucifer is closer to him, so to speak, is a younger brother of the divine principle. When the development was still in an older phase, the gods were on the level of humanity; there they looked for their own development independently within the human level. However, after they have developed, the human being is a creature among them; they control the human being and work in him. Now the luciferic principle comes along. This still has a more familiar and more intimate relation to the human being; it has not yet completely outgrown the level of humanity. It is something that rises above the present point of view of humanity, but is associated intimately with it, so that it melts more together with the human being and works as own desire in the human being to further himself. These are three levels, which work in the human being as his developmental forces: his humanity, the luciferic principle, and divinity. If we want to understand the human being, as he faces us on the present level of development, then we must see in the sense of the spiritual-scientific worldview that he has developed the so-called four lower principles. At the same time, I assume something that the theosophical worldview teaches. I want only to give a short explanation of it.

At first we have the physical body of the human being, then the principle of the etheric body, the stimulating one, the formative one, then his desires and passions, the animal in him; this has awoken to independence due to the fourth principle, to the real ego of the human being with which he has outgrown the animal. This human ego is that which develops, actually. This ego lives in three lower principles. It is the fourth. Within this fourth principle, the divine powers work which have already passed the fourth principle in their development and control it from above. We have the luciferic powers still associated with the fourth principle. The gods have ascended from the level of egoity to unselfishness, to devotion and to the overcoming of any special existence. The luciferic in the human being is enclosed with the bigger part of its being still within the ego; it is still within the human interests. With it, we see that everything that lives as unselfishness and willingness to make sacrifices in the human being is the divine principle in the human being, and that beside this divine principle another driving force is in him. Who practices true introspection learns to recognise the other principle. It is the luciferic one.

It strives for divinity, not only in complete devotion sacrificing its self, but it strives for the high stages of perfection, with enthusiasm, indeed, but just from the deepest interest of the self: not only because I love it, but because the higher perfection coincides with that which I must love. I want to strive for it as a human being in divine freedom. The divine powers do not strive for this perfection. By the luciferic striving, however, I make the divine perfection my very nature.

That is why we can say, if this luciferic principle were not in the human being, the gods would him leave in a certain passiveness, in a certain idleness, and they would lead him to. He would be in the state of being a child of the gods. Indeed, his being would strive to perfection, but not he would be that who strives in such a way but the God in him.—Besides, the other, the luciferic strength is added. It makes this striving its own issue. It sets itself the goal of perfection. The biblical myth also shows this also wonderfully. The gods created Adam and Eva, fated to be led by the divine powers to divine perfection without any own activity. However, because the snake comes that gives knowledge and freedom and thereby the possibility of perfection, it brings the possibility of the bad too.

Because the decision between good and bad is now laid in the man's own hand and knowledge, the desire, the love is made the bearer of an unaware, but divine striving for perfection. Everything that should live in this striving for perfection should be aglow with this love, with that which reveals itself to the human being in this love. On the other side, that power opposes it leading the human being, while it takes possession of this fourth principle, of the ego, it wakes him for own choice, gives him light to own knowledge, so that he walks to perfection in the light. Thus, we have the bearer of love and the bearer of light as two real forces prevailing in the human being.

I have expressed in modern form what you can find in all confessions, in all occult worldviews as the divine principle and the luciferic principle. Only those confessions which have gone over more and more to founding themselves only upon revelation, only on faith have felt what works in the human being and lives as own principle of perfection as the bearer of the bad. Therefore, Lucifer, the light bearer, became the seducer from that who invokes the human being for freedom, for independence, for the bright, clear knowledge.

This is one side. All those religions which have left their starting point—for they all have the right view of God and Lucifer at their starting point—which only search for the God who leads the human beings in unconsciousness to bliss, at the same time they all feel that in which the God himself works also as something causing ruin. They feel nature as sin; they feel the mind, the bright, clear knowledge as the perverting Lucifer. Goethe pronounced this, “Nature is sin and Intellect the devil, hermaphroditic Doubt their child, which they together foster” (Faust). Yes, it is true, very true that the doubt is between divine revelation and striving for freedom. However, it is also true that this doubt is necessary to the human being if he really wants to strive for godliness from his own ego by his own merit. We have to go through the doubt, and not before we can doubt all truth, we are able to take possession of truth really. Who has never doubted does not know how the human being is connected with truth. However, who overcomes the doubt gains higher knowledge than if it has become his possession out of blind revelation. This is the pedagogic value of doubt. Therefore, it stands rightly between the divine that cannot be separated from nature and is regarded as sin, between that which is diabolical, is luciferic and the level of perfection.

Considered this way, the human development seems to be put in a certain perspective. The whole development of the Old Testament appears to us in such a way that the God prevails as love in the progress of the human race, in the sensuous love and in everything that it founds: blood relationship, family, clan et cetera. We have perfect with the Jewish people in Jehovah. He is nothing else than the personified power of nature, if one notes how he prevails in the mineral realm, in the sprouting plant realm, in the animal realm feeling joy and sorrow, and in the human being himself. The human God, the Christ impact allows the mineral to form the crystal, it makes the plant sprout and the animals go through the instinctual life, and it leads the human being from the imperfect to the perfect. Ascended the human being to the higher realms, he would remain a mere nature being unless the other spirit, but the spirit beneficent to the human being, Lucifer, prevailed in him who evokes selfishness, indeed, but also independence and freedom. He makes the human being his own being, a special being and raises him above the mere power of nature that way. As true, as it is for the feeling of the servant of Jehovah that Jehovah himself is the basis of the human world that he is the godhead, as it is true that Lucifer rebels against this power of nature and leads the human being to knowledge, calls on him for a clear consciousness.

Thus, the human being raises himself to independence. He releases himself from the ties of the blood relationship, of the clan and the people. He becomes gradually a personality, indeed, an egoistic personality. There Jehovah approaches him out of the same spirit, the governor of the higher life, who regulates the development by law, by commandment. If we have the god working in nature by the sensuous love with necessity, we have him as legislator now, as the god of the Ten Commandments. We have him as Jehovah, who gives the human beings the law, which they have to obey, which shall arrange the awaking personality, which shall harmonise and balance it. What is sensuous love below is a commandment of morality above. That should also be raised which works not only as a physical power, as a commandment which strives not only out of divinity to perfection, but it should also be raised to the human ego. Thus, the general physical lawfulness gives that the mere power of love changes into the principle of spiritual love that Christ originates from the sensuous Jehovah. This spiritualised love does no longer work only in the physical instinct but spiritualises life, which once law could only control.

Thus, Christ becomes the founder of the law that does not approach the human being from without like the usual law, but becomes a soul force like the innermost desire of morality. If Jehovah gives the commandment, Christ gives the power of working. If the god Jehovah determines what is good, Christ prevailing in the human being gives birth to the good out of the strength in the human being himself. The forces of nature are raised to the soul; what was sensuous love becomes spiritual love due to Christ. The law itself is warmed up by the divine, it works in the world as divine grace—using a Christian term.

Thus, we see with the big progress in the turn of the eras the sensuous love, the principle of the natural force only imagined as divine, being refined and spiritualised to the mental love, to the power which does no longer work on the physical plane but on the moral plane.

At first the Christian caritas, the Christian love is the refined power, which produces a moral coherence among the human beings. This coherence considers the human beings strictly as human beings and makes them all equal compared to the highest perfection. It immerses morality in love, as instincts were once immersed in love. This is the first time of Christianity. Hence, the Christian virtue became the virtues of community, the virtues of the harmony of the human souls. The god who brings together the human beings wanted to work in mental love, and this is the principle of the Christian religion. As once, body found body in the natural principle, now in Christianity soul meets soul in the higher love due to the Christ principle. As the Jehovah principle created human communities based on blood, based on family, clan, and people, Christ was called to cause that souls find souls without mediation of the blood. The sensuous love is refined to the self-sacrificing devotion; the physical power is refined to the moral action of the god. As well as in the course of the Old Testament the other principle worked, the luciferic principle, as a divine natural force penetrating the human beings bringing them independence and freedom, in the newer times this principle penetrates the human development as a bearer of light, as bearer of freedom. It is not the opponent; it is the necessary supplement of the Christ principle. It is connected with this Christ principle in a unity, as well as all reluctant forces of nature are imagined as connected by those who have understood nature and universe. As well as Schiller speaks of it:

Benevolent is the fire's might,
If man tames and watches it,
...
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off the shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own,
...

It is the same here. On one side, the Christian caritas, the Christian love, the divine that leads soul to soul and, on the other side, the bearer of light, the bearer of independence and freedom.

By the soul love, humanity would also live only in an unconscious perfection. However, because the soul is impregnated and warmed up, is illumined with the bright, clear knowledge, warmed up by the light of the spirit, because in the human being the bearer of light lives and works, the Christian love thereby works on the free development of the human being also in future. Thus, both powers—revealed wisdom and science gained by the human being—face each other. Soul and consciousness face each other in such a way: the soul glows in spiritual love, and the consciousness penetrates and illumines this spiritual love with the principle of clearness and freedom. Thus, the human being lives between these poles of his being; he works and lives between these powers. To somebody, who looks deeper at the things, Lucifer, the bearer of light, is no hostile power. Lucifer—even if he himself casts off his shackles and strides along his own track, as a free will of the universal power—, always creates the good—to speak with Goethe's words—even if he wants the bad. Lucifer opposes us inevitably as that which must complement another principle in the human being. He proves to be the close friend of the human being who faces him as a brother, whereas on the other side the human being looks up at the elated gods to whom he obeys in quiet devotion, who bear him in their love.

Thus, life appears really as a fight between light and love. It is that way in the present stage of development. As well as the physicists put positive and negative electricity, positive and negative magnetism as two poles, which belong together inevitably, light and love in the higher area of human life belong together like two poles of human existence. Never there originates only one kind of electricity; if you rub a glass rod with a cloth, it becomes positively electric; however, the cloth becomes negatively electric. That applies everywhere. Never can work only one force in the development of life, always the other force must be added as necessary complement. In the human life, the two poles are love and light. The one is not possible without the other.

As well as the old law, the commandments of Jehovah, which he gave symbolically on Sinai, changed because of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, love also changes. Love is something mental that appeared as a higher stage of the physical power in the sensuous love. That is why it is also possible that on the higher stage something clearer appears, namely knowledge.

What was knowledge? It was, if you look back, something that is similar to Jehovah's law, the Ten Commandments, and it has to be remelted. As by Christ's death the love of the sensuous stage was remelted to the mental stage, the principle of mere knowledge, the luciferic knowledge, has to be transformed into a higher one.

We are included in this change today. In certain respects, we experience such a renewal of that which took place in Christianity. As the law changed into grace, science has to change into wisdom. As grace must be borne by our own soul, wisdom has to be borne by the human soul. As Christ is the god who can also prevail in the human being and enables him to become his own legislator in grace, wisdom is born out of the human science. As our science is built on external experience which is given from the outside like the Jews got the commandments on Sinai, this science will be born in wisdom as the law has been born anew by and in Christ. This is the spiritual-scientific striving. We have science given from without, given by the senses, up to now and this has reached the highest level in our cultural life in certain respects. The future must bring that the human being produces this science from his inside as his very own possession, that he changes Lucifer into that who lives and works from the human being. Spiritual science wants nothing else than such a deepening of knowledge. Just as the law or commandment became internal in the Christian virtue and as in the Christ virtue the human development advances in love in the soul life, our material science will progress emotionally if it is reborn from the soul. Spiritual science should aim at this rebirth.

There is a quite analogous event of the human development: Christianity has put up moral virtue instead of the mere physical power in love. The future development brings inner virtue by evoking inner, concealed forces in the human being. As we look back to a development that brought internalisation, law, we see back in the external academic life to a scientific striving, which brings internalisation. As the law was deepened to grace, science will be deepened to wisdom. That means, however, to look for inner development. The law was transformed into the soul by Christian grace. Our science is transformed out of the strength of the own soul into human skill and achievement. Spiritual science wants to rouse the inner, slumbering abilities.

If the Christian works out of the love of his soul compared to the servant of Jehovah, somebody who recognises works out of the wisdom of his heart in the future and attains an even greater deepening of the human development with it. Christianity also promises development of the external soul life. Christianity promises a citizen of the spirit, who connects human being with human being externally without distinction of race and gender. This striving will make the human being such a citizen in the higher spiritual worlds by inner esoteric development.

This is the relation between spiritual science and the external Christianity: the external Christianity looks for external virtue to gain the spiritual with it; the occultist rouses inner virtues slumbering in the human being to gain the even deeper sense of the higher spiritual worlds. What we are talking about is only a deepening of Christianity itself. The Christian principle deepened the law; the spiritual-scientific principle will deepen science. We have the luciferic principle in the entire human development not as an enemy, but as a pole belonging inevitably to the other pole. We have put it to Christianity, as it was up to now. However, just there we have recognised that the principle of the light bearer associates with the principle of love to a higher unity. If inner spiritual abilities are added by the development of the only external Christian virtues, we have an even deeper Christianity, a Christianity that cannot be dictated by the church but that everybody develops by the abilities still slumbering in himself today. Everybody develops the god by own strength, and all souls co-operate in free striving. Lucifer adds freedom, science, and independence to love and goodness. Only that who wants to stop at an epoch of human development can bring himself to turn away the look from that auspicious future perspective.

Any past would be infertile unless it contained a new higher future within itself. The understood spiritual science makes hearts leap for joy and fulfils them with another enthusiasm. What could be achieved by the external institutions up to now could be forced upon the human being in noble, but external kind. The human being once produces that out of the strength of his own soul. An inner church, an inner temple will be there that transfigures and spiritualises the external one. Everybody will be a Christian because Christ shall awake in him, because the inner Christ lives in him and comes along to the Christ who released humanity as a whole. Christ redeemed this humanity as a whole; the human being will understand this if he is internally free and redeemed, if he believes not only in the redemption, but relives this redemption.

Those remind us always who want to point us to Christianity: you aim at self-redemption, but you misunderstand what Christ did. That is not right with which spiritual science is confronted. Spiritual science is not an adversary, but a friend and co-worker of Christianity; not of the Christianity of the last time, but of that Christianity, which knows what Jesus said, “I will be with you, to the end of time” (Matthew 28:20), of that Christianity, which develops to higher and higher perfection. Spiritual science is not hostile to the redemption principle of Christ, because it does not stand on the one-sided point of view that every human being should do something only for himself. This would be the most destructive egoism, even if the human being wanted to strive only in himself for the noblest forces. Humanity is a whole, and if a single—Christ—accomplishes the death of redemption, this death of redemption is for the whole humanity. However, one has to penetrate it with consciousness; any single human being has to relive it. The redemption itself must be reborn in freedom. The principle of St. John's Gospel of the new birth of the human being also applies to it. Anybody is no real human being who is not reborn in spirit and in truth. Christ Jesus said this. He still lives according to his sentence today, he says in no uncertain manner about his own death of redemption, indeed, I died once for the whole humanity to bring humanity the certainty that death can be defeated by life, but this death must be reborn in the soul of the single human being. The redeemed human being is really redeemed only if he has also reborn the redemption in himself.

This is the living Christ principle, deepened by spiritual science. Thus, the soul is in every single human being that develops love with the noblest ideals of humanity. This love is added to the mere sensuousness as spiritual love and leads the human being to divine perfection. On the other side, the Lucifer principle is illumined by science, freedom, and independence. Love in bright clearness, the consciousness is added to the soul. The soul brings the strength of love, and consciousness penetrates and illumines this strength of love with bright clearness. The human being walks through the soul and consciousness to perfection.

He would progress to divinity by a trial not clear to him if he were only a feeling soul; he would rise to the cold, only reasonable perfection if he were only consciousness. Nevertheless, soul and consciousness have always to penetrate each other. Therefore, someone who strives for spiritual science looks back and forth. He looks at the soul with its feeling and its sensation, and he looks at the consciousness with its light and wisdom and says to himself, I want to be not the human being living in dullness, but the human being prospering in bright clearness.—Those virtues have to be added to all other virtues that are founded on science, freedom, and independence. However, freedom has to be deepened by love; otherwise, it becomes arbitrary and brings the human being only nearer to his instincts.

On the other side, love must deepen science: then it becomes wisdom, true spirituality carried by action. Otherwise, it gets cold, desolate, and abstract. Independence must also combine with love, otherwise, it becomes blind egoism, and otherwise, it becomes rigid. This is the deeper truth of life of the spiritual scientific worldview and lifestyle that again three virtues must completely develop as the necessary principles of the human soul: science, freedom, and independence, which must be deepened, however, by the strength of love. Then love transforms science into wisdom, freedom into willingness to sacrifice, into the devotion and admiration of the divine, and independence into unselfishness, into that principle in the human being that overcomes the special being and is merged in the universe and gains divinity in freedom this way.

A week ago, I spoke before you about the idea of Lucifer. In connection with the last talk, I would like to explain something about the same idea and its significance for the human evolution and I may connect with an excellent piece of art, with The Children of Lucifer (1900) by Édouard Schuré (1841-1929, French writer, theosophist).

Someone who regards theosophy only as a sum of teachings and dogmas or the Theosophical Society only as a sect that deals with particular religious-philosophical or other ideas and aims at a corresponding lifestyle that is maybe somewhat surprised about the subject of this talk. However, who regards theosophy as something that one has to regard as deepening of our whole spiritual life, even more, as deepening of our whole culture, finds it comprehensible that theosophy is not only looked for within the narrow borders,, but in all regions, in all branches of life and, hence, also in art above all.

Many people have a point of view that leads them to believe that theosophy is something unworldly, even somewhat life-hostile. Those who believe in such a way have not yet adopted the real basis of the theosophical world movement.

Just a piece of art like Édouard Schure's The Children of Lucifer shows us that the living creating of the artist not only is not impaired by the theosophical deepening, but that the true theosophy and the true theosophical life is just able to inspire art in the most eminent sense and give it exceptionally strong impulses.

Indeed, I would like to link to this drama The Children of Lucifer. However, if we just embark on the mode of formation of this dramatic poetry in our time and on the peculiar structure of the spirit out of which this piece of art has arisen, we are able to look deeper at the theosophical life at the same time.

Schuré has probably drawn the best forces of his work just from the theosophical worldview, and he belongs certainly to the most exquisite authors in the theosophical field. Who wants to find access to the theosophical life from any other point of view than that of the known compendia and smaller manuals can do it with the help of Schuré's works. Already the characteristic how Schuré came to that which should inspire his mind to express artistically what we have in The Children of Lucifer is theosophically extremely interesting.

It is told to us in the fine monument he erected in honour of somebody who had influenced his soul life the conceivably deepest. An extremely interesting fact of the modern cultural life confronts us here. Édouard Schuré published a book and provided it with an introduction that comes from a personality who had deeply looked into the secrets of existence. It is a book in which one recognises the artist. In this book a spirit breathes, which differs from that which we can find, otherwise, in similar writings, a spirit that has immediately processed and taken up real theosophy in himself as life. Schuré calls this personality—Marguerita Albana Mignaty (1827-1887), who wrote about Corregio (Antonio Allegri da C., 1489-1534. Italian painter)—his leader during her life, he calls her the spirit of his soul after her death. One cannot express that more appropriately than he did if one looks into the psychology of Schuré's creating.

In the last third of the 19th century it was granted to some deeper inclined natures to look into true spiritual life once again, after one had understood the word spirit hardly as anything else than a sum of abstractions long time, after one did not connect, actually, anything real with the word spirit long time.

If—on one side—we delve into Schuré's creating and—on the other side—into the mind of that personality which he calls his leader, we are immediately recalled of that which was understood within the Greek mystery view in the aurora of our western cultural life by the concepts of god and of the divine life. The word theosophy originated later. The first to use it was the apostle Paul. However, it was a common property of all deeper recognising people. We need to get involved only in that which existed within the spiritualised Christianity as theosophy, as a divine concept, as a concept of the divine life, and you are able to grasp the fact of the spirit immediately in another way than it is possible with the modern concepts, as they are still quite usual. The Greek understood by god, by the divine being still nothing else than such a being that surmounts the human being, indeed, concerning his qualities, concerning his abilities, but that is similar to the human being. He calls the human being a becoming god, and he understands any god in such a way that he has once gone through the school of humanity. If the Greek looked up at his god, he said to himself, the gods once went through the sufferings and joys, the experience of life, which I have to go through now. They once went through this school of life, which I have finished now, and I soar those spheres of creating later, on which the gods are today.—The Greek calls his gods older brothers in the entire cosmic evolution, and regarded the human being himself as a draft that should become the same once as the gods are today.

This gives another relation to the divine than that which only looks up at something divine, only foresees something in the beyond. As well as here in the physical world for the Greek the external physical realms establish, the sensory physical realms, from the mineral, to the plant and animal realms up to the human realm, the hierarchy, the sequence of the gods outranked the human. He considered the realms beyond the human one as the world of the gods. He did not call that which the Greek should experience in those schools—which were cult sites at the same time, which one called mysteries—abstract, only scientific knowledge of some higher principles, of some forces of nature. The Greek did not understood it symbolically but as something real that the human being associated with the gods in the schools. The mystery pupil did not feel towards the gods, unlike the child feels if it looks up at the adult who has already reached what it itself reaches in a future life epoch. Something completely real was this experience to the Greeks. Hence, theosophy was for those, who coined the word first, not knowledge of the gods, but the knowledge that was obtained in this peculiar way by the contact with the higher spiritual beings. Anybody who was initiated into the mysteries not only obtained knowledge, but he was enabled to associate with the gods, with the spirits, as well as he associates here on our earth with human beings. One called natural knowledge that knowledge that the human being acquires with the senses.

However, one called that knowledge, which one received from the gods, divine knowledge: theosophy. I know very well that the most people of those who think from the modern point of view regard such a phrase, as I have just used it, as nothing but an only poetic picture, as a symbol or something extremely fantastic and superstitious. It is neither this nor that; it is something that the human being can really experience. The human being can bring himself to turn his look to the spiritual beings outranking him as he directs his look to the sensuous beings. These spiritual beings avoid the sensuous eye, like all senses, because they have accomplished the stages of spirituality and do no longer have any existence for the senses. The mysteries of the Greeks aim at this: a development of the human being to get contact with the higher beings.

In the last third of the 19th century, it was granted, as I said, again to some deeper natures to understand something of that which is meant, actually, with such a thing. Above all, a person was part of it like Marguerita Albana. However, I would like to say that such a personality was not initiated by means of that big spiritual art which somebody had to go through who wanted to maintain the contact with the gods within the Greek mysteries. Such a personality was an initiate by nature as there are poets by nature. However, I cannot get involved further in the fact that a soul, which is initiated by nature in the former stages of existence, is already over some experiences, so that that which it experiences now is only recollections of former stages of existence. However, the possibility to behold in the higher world, transforming particular lower forces of our existence, forms the basis of such a spiritual person like Marguerita Albana. What does that mean?

Any means of higher knowledge are transformations of subordinated forces. What still the undeveloped human being had in far-away prehistoric time as undeveloped vague senses can be transformed into the eye which opens the splendour of the sunlight to us. On the other hand, visualise once how imperfect the organ of the ear is on the lower developmental stages! All higher organs that open the marvellous nature round the human being are transformations, metamorphoses of lower forces. Human forces can also today be transformed into higher senses.

Thus, some human beings were equipped with higher senses just in the last third of the 19th century. That is why they could behold into the spiritual environment. What other human beings have only in abstractions or notions, the reality of the divine existence, was to them as certain as the sensuous things to the other human beings. Such personalities could give information of the higher worlds. Just such persons could inspire the receptive nature of Édouard Schuré to the nicest and biggest. Édouard Schuré combined soul, mind, and deep esoteric knowledge with a real Schillerean diction and strength of language in this drama, whose translation you can receive from Marie von Sivers here. The drama The Children of Lucifer is something that is created not only out of the spirit of the present, as it is embodied in few people now, but it is created almost out of the spirit of the next human future. In this work, those who have the disposition and talent may develop something according to the highest and most significant theosophical ideas. Édouard Schuré just realised what took place in the Greek mysteries and in those acts of consecration.

You all know that also within the German cultural life in the last third of the 19th century a breath was to be felt that originated from a kind of understanding of the Greek mysteries. Richard Wagner (1813-1883, German composer) and his circle was inspired by the spirit of the Greek mysteries in certain ways. We still have to speak something about this chapter in the next talks. You know also that one of those spirits who were close-knit with Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher), wrote his first work about the Greek tragedy and that he wanted to show how this Greek tragedy came into being from an ancient spiritual life. He did not go as far as Édouard Schuré, not into the mysteries, however, to the gates of the mysteries when he wrote the work The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1869).

Two words faced his mind: the Apollonian, on the one side, and the Dionysian, on the other side. What did Nietzsche mean with these words? He understood two spiritual currents by them.

The Dionysian, he says, is that which completely lives in that element of the human cultural life, which is at one with the cosmic spirit all around. The Dionysian is to Friedrich Nietzsche a rapture that the human being experiences if he completely penetrates his being with that core of the highest spiritual life, which flows through the whole universe. Nietzsche anticipated such a thing that the Pythagoreans called music of the spheres, something of that old choir of which also Goethe speaks while he lets his Faust begin with the words:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with tread of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

Nietzsche anticipated something of that mysterious hearing and listening to that which flows through the universe, which makes the planets dance around the sun, which animates the spheres. He anticipated that in this dance something divine enjoys life and that the human beings can penetrate themselves with the breath of the divine, and that the human being then feels at one with the whole universe. Then, Nietzsche thinks, the human being lives in a kind of rapture, then he experiences what flows through the whole universe, then an echo of that god whom the Greek calls Dionysus lives in him.

As to Nietzsche, this god is that who poured out into the material world round us who is buried in the material world and who celebrates his resurrection then in the human mind, in the human soul. So that the disciple of Dionysus accomplishes his songs, his inspirations under the influence of this god and allows to flow out what one calls the immediate Dionysian art arisen from the divine. Thus, the Dionysus dancer and Dionysus singer was the representative of the divine Dionysian principle in the world. Nietzsche regards this Dionysus drama as the original drama, the later drama originated only from the fact that an image was created, a quiet, dreamlike image of the original Dionysian rapture. The Dionysus disciple receives what arises before his senses, and he can mirror this in serene Apollonian kind. Thus, the Apollonian art is something that was created afterward as an image of the Dionysian art. It is the image, the notion of something that lived in old Greece. Nietzsche pointed already to the primeval times, in which the Dionysus disciples did not only speak of the god, but lived the divine in their movements, in their voices and works as the original artists. Any later art appeared to Nietzsche only as a late echo of this old art. Any science appeared to him only as a shadowy image of the forces represented once by the human beings.

In Richard Wagner's art, Nietzsche saw a renewal of that great art which connects the human beings again with the divine. Therefore, it was clear to Nietzsche that Richard Wagner could not bring human figures on the stage, but that he needed supernatural figures which did not show only what happens in this world, but also what works behind this world in spirit. As well as in the Dionysus drama the Greek artist was able to do it, Richard Wagner's figures, put down on the stage, had also to have outgrown the usual human in the sense of Nietzsche, so that they can embody something about which the human being can say, they are there to that which comes once. In his book Le drame musical. Richard Wagner, son Suvre et son idée (1875), Schuré also created out of this spirit which was round Wagner, and he represented the idea of the musical drama greatly; for Marguerita Albana had introduced him in the true spiritual world, in the spiritual reality. Inkling became reality to him, and with it, he could find the key to the inside of the Greek mysteries. Better than someone else, he was capable to illumine what took place within the holy mysteries of Greece. In his work Sanctuaires d'Orient (1898), he was able to rebuild the so-called Greek original drama with great ingenuity. What was now the Eleusinian original drama?

It is a reproduction of an experience which cannot be experienced at all within the sensuous world which can be experienced only if the human being himself develops to that level where higher senses awake in him where he realises that all physical principle, which he get to know, are real thoughts of the beings whom the Greeks called gods. As well as the human being creates with his thoughts today, and as he puts his thoughts into his works, his older brothers, the gods, put their thoughts into the world of existence.

Let us get into the mind of such a Greek mystery pupil who has been initiated. He said to himself if he could have spoken with our words: look at a piece of art, at a machine, what are they? They are works of human beings, formed according to human thoughts. If you stand before the piece of art, before the machine, you see also the artist, the mechanic through their work, and I understand the work if the principles are disclosed. What are these principles? They are what lived first in the head, in the spirit of a human being.

The thoughts of the mechanic, of the artist are crystallised as it were in the material tool, in the marble piece of art. As I look from the piece of art and from the machine at the artist and at the mechanic, the Greek artist looked from the earth at the higher beings. If he wanted to understand the principles that build up an animal, he said to himself, thoughts of beings of divine nature are therein. As well as the thought of the mechanic is in the machine, the thoughts of a creator, of a god are in the animal, in the crystal, in the starry heaven.—This god is to him a being to whom he feels related, who is on a level that the human being himself reaches once. The Greek regarded the god as a being, which has arisen from a human level, and the human being is a being that once attains a divine level. Thus, he associated with the gods in the mysteries. He associated with the gods like with older brothers, and the feeling, which expresses itself in it, is something quite natural. One has only to settle in such a kind of thinking. From such a kind of thinking, the mystery pupil looks up at those beings that are slumbering, as it were, or are embodied in their thought in the whole nature surrounding us.

The mystery pupils saw the slumbering divine thoughts in the whole nature. The being of the divinity poured out into it, and the human being is there only, so that in him these divine thoughts can recover their very own existence. All thoughts in the soul of the human being are the resurrection of the god in the world. Placed in the universe in such a way, the own human life appears as an after-image of the descent, the suffering and death of the godhead and the grave of the godhead in the matter. The human being is called to redeem the gods again from the matter. This is the way of Dionysus, the way that all gods have taken. Thus, the gods live in their thoughts.

Theosophy calls Dionysus the last-born of the gods. You know that in the legend he is a son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. One says that his divine father snatched him from his mother when Zeus struck her with a streak of lightning. Then, however, the mother of the gods, Hera, became inflamed with jealousy against this child not stemming from her. She set the titans against the child who tore it and scattered the pieces all over the world. Pallas Athena saved its heart only and brought it to Zeus who formed Dionysus anew.

We realise that this god was there already before, and we realise that this divinity has a special relation to the world. What is it? It was shown in the mysteries as the creator of that in the human being, which humanity attained last. The human being appears partially as originating from the hands of the gods. In the first years of his life he also faces us in such a way, because he has not yet formed own existence. Bit by bit he matures and becomes independent. Then he works and forms on his own existence. More and more the strength awakes in him that makes him the creator of his innermost being, the creator of his soul strength and mental power. Now one says within the mystery schools that as it were the last step in the life that the human being receives from nature or from God is connected with the god Dionysus.

There we touch one of the deepest secrets of the Greek mysteries, namely the sexual maturity of the human being. The time, when he comes out of the undifferentiated sexual life to the differentiated one of man and woman, is still the last step which nature accomplishes with the human being leading him to this maturity, where in him the desire awakes for the other sex. What he then makes of this desire, how he refines it, how he penetrates it with soul, and what he makes of love in spiritual respect, this is the own work of the human being. The last step that the gods accomplish with the human being is that they develop him to the young man and woman during puberty. The force that expresses itself everywhere in nature, in any knowledge, in any sensuousness and in all mental forces on the different levels, the mystery pupil also recognises it now in the proclivity of one sex for the other.

How does the human being perceive any way, the Greek mystery pupil asked himself, how does any being perceive anyway? If we imagine an animal eating the plants instinctively, which are useful and necessary for its prosperity, it is a kind of perception. Nevertheless, it is a higher level of percipience if our eye turns to the light and soaks it up as it were. Sensuousness is percipience, vision is percipience, and it is percipience if one sex inclines towards the other. Then the transformation of the lower forces to higher and higher ones takes place. The last step which nature, or God, spoken in the freer sense, has undertaken with the human being can also be transformed. Sensuousness changes into love. It spiritualises itself; it ensouls itself. Dionysus was the god who represented this strength of sexual maturity to the Greek of the mystery. Dionysus did not only have this function with it, because the sexual maturity is still connected with something quite different. Dionysus is understood as the last-born of the gods only with it.

If we look at the human being as he faces us today, we have a being before us in which the more astute human being—and someone who embarks on the theosophical worldview is led to this deeper look bit by bit—sees something that has become man and woman gradually. You need only to read Plato and to take him seriously in order to understand the Greek kind of view and you find how he points to a time when there was not yet man and woman, while the human being was still man and woman at the same time. The biblical legend points also to such an undifferentiated human race, and the Fall of Man is nothing else than the symbolic representation of the sexual differentiation. If we understand that the human being, as he faces us, originated from a bisexual being, we say to ourselves, in the course of evolution, the human being acquired his one-sided sexuality. He developed from the double sexuality to uni-sexuality. He lost half of his productive power. This half has awoken on the other side as the strength of our soul, as the strength of our mind. So that the human being became unisexual—a deeper look into nature shows this—, the human being became productive spiritual-mentally because he has given away half of his physical productive power.

Thereby the human being became capable of self-consciousness and could say to himself “I”, he is an independent being that—if we may express ourselves figuratively—was dismissed from the hands of the gods and became his own creator. Thus, it is connected in the development that the human being feels that strength which forms, indeed, the basis of his egoism that makes him, however, a free, self-conscious being. Hence, on every stage the emancipation of the human being recurs where sexuality finds its further development in any way.

The god Dionysus is the last-born of the gods. That means that the Greeks imagined that he developed the human being up to his present independence. Zeus, Cronus, the older gods, created the human being up to the point when he was a double-sexual being that lived in a vague consciousness, when he was not able to say “I” to himself, when he was without self-consciousness and without freedom. The creator of independence is Dionysus. With it, the divine principle poured out uniformly into the whole nature up to the point when the human being became independent. Then the human being faces us in countless individuals.

Let me illustrate this. If we put back ourselves in the time when the human being was not yet independent when he was still a double-sexual being with dim consciousness. There one could say, as well as my hand is a limb of my own organism, the human being was a limb of the whole divinity in those days. His consciousness still rested in the bosom of the divine consciousness. One could still see through the human being to the divine soul. Now, after the human being became independent, was separated from the divine consciousness, this soul is divided in as many individuals as there are human beings. This was greatly symbolised in the divided god Dionysus, who was dismembered by the Titans. Pallas Athena was the symbol of the human wisdom. We felt her with our hearts, with our higher minds as the common consciousness of the whole humanity. While we feel at one again, a mind of the same kind develops in the whole humanity, the heart of the god Dionysus is saved and again carried upwards to the dwelling of the gods. Thus, the Greek imagined that the god Dionysus led the human beings up to the separation of the sexes and, finally, to sexual maturity. One regarded the proclivity of one sex to the other as one of many forces, which come from the god Dionysus. Then two spiritual currents work on the human being, who stands in the world as a creature of the god Dionysus. These spiritual currents are the starting point of our own culture.

One current is that where the spirit works in the external, serene form and in wisdom to develop the beauty of the external form and the order in the sensuous urge. It should not work fiercely and irregularly, by which Dionysus brought the human being up to the present level, but it should comply in harmony and order. One sees this principle of the external formal creation of Dionysus best of all in the Greek and Roman art, in the Greek beauty and in the Roman statecraft. They introduced order and beauty in the social life of the human beings created by Dionysus as independent beings. The soul which animates and ensouls this urge was refined and deified by Christianity; everything that regulates the human community in such a way that not blind urge, but spiritualised, deified urge prevails is caused by the understood Christianity. Spirit and love are two currents in the human development.

The present development and that of the last millennia face the poet of The Children of Lucifer. He considers what Greek spirit and Roman statecraft created as a living and uplifting principle of the Dionysian human being and on the other side the deepening of the principle of love by Christianity. Now we also understand how Édouard Schuré got around to processing these ideas in a piece of art that he called The Children of Lucifer.

In Dionysia, a city of Asia Minor, the following happened. This city had a cult that was dedicated to the god Dionysus. These Dionysian mysteries were celebrated in Dionysia and had there a mystery site. Then this Dionysian current was intermingled with the second current. It was in the fourth century of the Christian calendar. It was the Roman world domination and made those who were worshippers of Dionysus, who knew that a spark of a divine soul lives in them, members of the Roman statecraft. Now the Greek spirit and the Roman statecraft conflicted with each other. The original spirit must revolt. Why must it revolt? It must revolt because the external form wants to integrate the independent. This can easily become an external order. That which should make order, harmony, and unity easily becomes that which suppresses and subjugates the human freedom and independence. This also applies to the Roman spirit—which was born out of the Dionysian spirit—in the fourth century. These two currents of the human spirit face us in Dionysia: on one side the spirit, on the other side the stiffened state formalism. These are two currents that extend via the Dionysian mysteries to Christianity, which should spiritualise the drive of the human being to the other human being, which should refine the actions of Dionysus and put them in a higher light purifying the mere desire.

However, it degenerated in that time, in the fourth century, to an external formalism that subjugated and suppressed what it should refine. Thus, we look at the subjugating Caesar on the one side and on the other side at the subjugating Christian priest who does not get love out to refine it, but to deaden it. We see how in Édouard Schuré's drama two persons as representatives of the Greco-Roman spirit meet, on one side a young man, who is called Theokles first and then Phosphorus, and on the other side a virgin who was consecrated to the service of Christianity as chaste sacrificial virgin. We see Phosphorus revolting who wants to originate the Dionysian human being in the highest refinement against the solidifying, the Caesar principle, and on the other side the Christian virgin who is not so spiritualised that she is world-enraptured but so spiritualised that she herself is called to work and create in this immediate world. These two persons deepen each other. How nicely, greatly and tremendously the development of these persons is shown. Phosphorus sees the Caesar principle subjugating his hometown on the one side, the Christian principle subjugating it on the other side. On one side, he sees the divine Caesar, on the other side the merely good, world-enraptured shepherd and those who should adore him. He is led to an old person, whom one calls the old man of the unknown god in Greek.

It is a big transformation that our Phosphorus experiences. In a distant canyon, he looks for a landmark, and he encounters one of the temples, which were considered as initiation temples. He meets an old priest there, one of the sages of the unknown god. Which god? That god whom one does not confess whom one does not revere in this or that figure. That god who does not answer if one asks him because everybody must answer to himself what is not to be put into words what lives, however, as a spark in every human being. As true as it is that the human being becomes aware of the divine spark, he can also realise that he is on the way to the big god all his life through. This god forms the basis of that which lives in the stars which is in the human breast, and what still forms the basis of everything that the human being performs on his higher level. For he is not a god of the past, but a god of the future, not a god of the thought of the past or the present, but a god of the thoughts, which the human being once is able to think as the highest on the current developmental level.

That is why he is called the unknown god because the human being cannot serve a god who gives him a completed existence, but because he wants to serve a god who can stand there in perfect figure only in the future. Therefore, the free human being adheres to the divine spark in his breast; therefore, he adheres to that which exists as the dismembered Dionysus at first in the world outdoors. Then he cannot find strength from anything else than from this separated divine spark, the strength of the upward development, then, however, he also knows that this upward development is connected with the passage through knowledge and suffering, with the passage through the bad because the human being is detached, according to his inner spirituality, from the divine. Hence, free forces must emerge in him to lead back this spark to divinity. If we had remained in the bosom of the gods without splitting in the sense of the Dionysus legend, the divinity itself would lead us to godliness. Thus, we appear like apostatised sons of god. This strength in us, which should lead us as sons of Dionysus to this godliness, is Lucifer's strength, the luciferic principle, that light, which the human being freely kindles in himself, in order to find the whole god as a part of the divine being once.

The strength that works in him is the light. Lucifer, the bearer of light, is the teacher and leader who bears the light in the human being and in the whole humanity. All those who develop such an attitude like Phosphorus are the children of Lucifer. Thus, they are not anti-Christian. They are so minded that they say: in Christ, the god appeared who became a human being who descended and enjoyed life in the human body. However, the human being has to develop so that he unfolds the god in himself in such a way that the deified human being meets the incarnate god that the human being who ascends from below finds a similar being. As Christ is now that who descended the deepest from above as the revealing god, Lucifer is the god whom the deified human being meets. Christ and Lucifer belong together, understood in the right sense. Thus, we find Phosphorus, while any Caesarism cannot keep him by any suppression of the free Dionysian principle in the world from rushing to the temple of the unknown god to receive the light that carries him upwards to become a son of Lucifer that way.

As well as Phosphorus pursues this way and raises his mind up to that view which recognises Lucifer as the developmental principle, Kleonis develops from a Christian virgin to a universal principle. She should solely direct her love to the incarnate god. She develops to such a degree that she anticipates that love can be refined in the human being in such a way that the divine love of the incarnate god combines with the human love in the human nature itself. Thus, the Christian virgin soars the point where she can meet the unknown god. Christ has come to life in the Christian virgin because she joins not only in the view and in admiration with the divine, but achieves that she rises to the Christian love. Phosphorus has ascended to the point where the spirit shines to him in the light. With it, the mind of the man and the soul of the woman are on the same level. They now work together on the same level, namely in such a way that always instead of Dionysus the free human couple stands at first which embodies the inkling of a future which should still arise once. Christianity and Caesarism developed to that which unfolded in Dionysia: it subjugated and enslaved the human beings. However, they both stand there upright and freely.

They are expelled. They cannot save the old Dionysia. The old Dionysus, who perishes in Romanism and in the external Christian formalism at first, cannot host both who have got free; they are expelled. While they show the life of the future in the present, they must live in the present. They find the way to the unknown temple again. Where Phosphorus was consecrated, where the star of Lucifer appeared to him, the clear star of Lucifer appears to them in the hour of death, both ways uniting. Lucifer leads the human beings in freedom to the highest development, and we attain the cross of Christ, the symbol of redemption, if the incarnate god touches the deified human being.

Thus, both who got free have to save at death what they have achieved. They cannot save Dionysia. That is the course of human development. This was something that one already experienced in the Greek mysteries in a higher life: that life forever overcomes death, that death is only something apparent with the single human being and something apparent in the entire human culture. Thus, we anticipate at the end of Schuré's drama that that which they both gained in themselves has an everlasting significance beyond the grave. The whole drama ends magnificently, in the sure certainty that the spirit must overcome matter.

As well as death is the winner over life here, one can represent it only if one knows anything about the true and real life of the spirit and knows that death is only something apparent. Someone who does not know that everything dead is something apparent must say to himself, if death were anything real to the noble pair that gained freedom because it was expelled and driven out by the enslaved Dionysia that would perish which they both have taken along. For all those who remained in Dionysia are slaves of a dying human epoch. Apparently, nothing is left. If this semblance were reality, we could no longer believe anyhow in the fact that it has a significance if anybody has purchased a higher life with death. For then this drama would close with nothing. Solely the belief and knowledge that the spirit is real carries this drama, and that from the death of the freed couple a real spiritual blossom sprouts which later works and lives in humanity which has remained, which is planted in the whole spiritual human development. From the death of Kleonis and Phosphorus, a spiritual human flower grows which is there then.

That which the human being experiences by the light and what he recognises lives on. Schuré owes this certainty to the fact that the former Greek world had arisen in him due to Marguerita Albana. He owes to Christianity that he was not only an external artist, but also that he can have a deep look into the spiritual development of humanity. He has shown this sight in his book The Great Initiates. There he has spread out the historical tableau of humanity from Rama (seventh incarnation of Vishnu), Krishna, Hermes, Plato and other initiates up to Christ Jesus. He has shown this human tableau, this spiritual development.

With it, he has delivered a historical consideration which is theosophical in the most eminent sense and which has led countless people in Europe to the theosophical worldview. Out of the spirit of his consideration he created The Children of Lucifer, this little marvellous dramatic work in which in every line and in every scene theosophical spirit lives. Thus, the theosophical worldview becomes life; art becomes the expression of the theosophical spirit if the truth of the spirit is mirrored to us as beauty.

The human beings can create three things at first, Édouard Schuré says. At first, we are concerned with ontology. It leads us to the big principles of the world, but now we look at them—if we are deepened theosophically—not as anything dead, but as abstract divine thoughts. Then we are concerned with mysticism that leads us to the gods and higher beings whom we recognise as our older brothers. Then we are concerned with symbolism that shows us the god in the external sensuous picture and as a shadowy reflection in art. Thus, Édouard Schuré is a real theosophist and a real artist and shows more than all theosophical dogmatics what a theosophical world task consists in.

It is typical that under the title Lucifer the first theosophical journal appeared which we have renewed in our German magazine Lucifer-Gnosis where the whole way of thinking, the future task of the theosophical worldview has been expressed clearly, as it lives artistically in the drama with the title The Children of Lucifer. Only those who regard art as something external misjudge that in this piece of art something lives in the highest degree that has not missed the creative power because of its deepness. If this drama satisfies the artist completely, something of that impetus flows from this drama to the unknown god who works in us all and whose name theosophy just bears. Thus, this drama is the expression of that theosophical attitude which takes the true deepening and the human freedom seriously.

No one can be free in the highest sense of the word who does not find the divine in himself, who is not an associate, not a brother of the divine being. If the human being becomes this, he himself becomes a part of that force which is a bearer of the light that is Lucifer. Then he becomes a child of Lucifer. Those who understand something of the mysterious force working in the universe that one cannot see only with the eyes and perceived with instruments, of the forces that flow through the moral and religious life and work in our whole universe. Those who know a little bit about it speak of the forces that one calls the astral light.

The experts describe it in such a way that it flows through the space like other forces, like gravity, and works on the beings. The astral light flows through all beings; it lives in the higher animals and in the human being generally. If the human being does something and says, I act, or I am driven instinctively—it is in truth the astral light which works and lives in him. He can dedicate himself to this astral light, unconsciously, with dim consciousness. This always happens if passions and instincts press the human being. However, this does not happen if he becomes the bearer of own light if he connects himself with the force of Lucifer. Then he changes this astral light, this creative force in the world into a conscious, creative force in himself. Then he becomes a citizen in the higher spiritual worlds. If he leaves himself to the astral light with dim consciousness, he can say, indeed, the gods live, and they flow through me, but I am destined to emerge from unconsciousness, to let the light appear as something free, to illumine my actions independently with divine forces.

Everything that originates from the twilight of the consciousness, what the bearer of the light does not cause hampers our development. What leads to the aim and to the true human ideal is that which comes from the light, from the real knowledge. Therefore, the human being is only allowed to throw himself really into the stream of life if he has grasped the god in himself if the god is his leader. Theosophical attitude means waking the divine consciousness in oneself and becoming mortal with the aid of the forces which are in the own breast. Marguerita Albana whom Édouard Schuré calls his leader expresses that in a short saying which could be regarded as a motto of the theosophical attitude and which should also close our considerations today:

Trust in the god in your breast, and then leave everything that is in you to the stream of life
(Crois au Divin qui est en toi, et puis prête l'oreille au fleuve de la vie).

Many a time I have already pointed here to the fact that it is a prejudice if one declares the present theosophical movement in the strict sense of the word as a Buddhist or neo-Buddhist one. Theosophy or spiritual science does not want to implant a foreign worldview from without, but to show how also within our European culture deeper teachings of wisdom form the basis of the striving of humanity that express themselves most distinctly. Next time I venture to show how in a newer epoch of the German spiritual life theosophical feeling and thinking were expressed in a quite extraordinary measure, I would like to say, in its intellectual purity around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, however, I would like to show—as far as I can press it in a single talk—how within the Germanic-German folk culture an impact exists which goes back to views that we meet in theosophy.

A careful comparison between the basis of the European religious and worldview with that which has been expressed over there in the East in such a peculiar, spiritual way will show us how little the misunderstanding is justified that the theosophical spiritual current wanted to force something completely strange on the European life. We have to characterise—if we want to carry out this comparison really—the basic view of the so-called theosophical worldview with a few words at least. If only just, let us once visualise the often-discussed basic view of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview.

The human being is, according to this theosophical worldview, at first a being who has a double nature as basis, namely a transient so-called cover part, an external member of his nature, and an imperishable everlasting essence. The external cover is as it were the sheath or the tool of the human being with which his immortal essence works and is active in this world. This cover is clearly divided into four members. The first member is the so-called physical body, the body that one can see with the eyes and perceive with the other senses. The second member is the so-called etheric body. Life lives in this body. It has the same figure approximately as the physical body, but it forms the basis of the physical body as the bearer of the life principle. The third member is the bearer of the feelings, of joy and sorrow, of the instincts and passions. We call it the astral body, because the forces, which are effective in it, prove to be to someone who can deeper look into the world the forces that live outdoors in the starry heaven, in the astral, and are essential. We call the fourth member the real human ego. We call it in such a way because the human being has the three other members, physical body, etheric body, and astral body in common with the remaining beings, which are round him.

Every mineral has a physical body. The plant has a physical body and etheric body, the animal has a physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The human being besides has a fourth member to live within this world that enables him to say to himself “I.” This ego is the final member, the final point of the development of the three above-mentioned bodies that they have striven for since primeval times. It lives in the three covers, which surround it not like onionskins, but they interact regularly, penetrate each other powerfully, and take shape. At the same time, the ego is the bearer of a higher tripartite nature we call spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man best of all. These members are today included only as gifts in the majority of the human beings. The Eastern mysticism calls the spirit self “manas,” the life spirit “buddhi,” and the highest, innermost member “atman.” It is the real spirit of the human being, the innermost core, the immortal within the human nature. With it, we have seven members of the human nature as we have seven tones of the musical scale or seven colours in the rainbow.

The lower members are a confluence, an essence of the three realms, which surround us: the mineral, plant and animal realms. The higher members, manas, buddhi, and atman are not to be perceived by the senses, they are of divine nature. The human being has these members also in common with higher realms of existence, as he has his lower members, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body in common with the realms of nature surrounding us on earth. As he extends with these three lower bodies into the earthly existence, he strives with the higher spiritual members of his nature up into the realms of the divine that is tripartite like the external nature. Thus, the human being is rooted in the earthly and he extends with his branches into the spiritual-divine world. As he developed out of the earthly world from lower beginnings, he develops spiritually upwards, becoming more and more similar to the higher spiritual beings. Therefore, we can also say, the human being is divided in three parts.

While we connect the lower members and the upper ones, we have the ego in the middle. It has a share of both, of the earthly and the divine. It penetrates the etheric body and the astral body. We call this ego soul. We call the real immortal inside of the human being, atman, buddhi, and manas, mind or spirit. By these three members of his nature, the human being is a citizen of three worlds at the same time. He is a citizen of the usual physical world here. When he has left the physical world here, when he has left his physical body, also the etheric body, he enters another world, a kind of intermediate world, an astral world, as we say, the soul world. At first immediately after death, he has to purify himself for a number of years from that, which still adheres to him from the connection with the earthly-physical world. We call this state kamaloka or stay in the astral world. This is no place, but a state. The disembodied human being, as long as he still has certain effects of his physical nature in himself, stays in the soul world and ascends then to a still higher world that we call devachan or the world of spirit.

You know now that the spiritual-scientific worldview assumes not only a one-time stay of the human being in this physical world, but that it knows that the human being has to go through repeated earth-lives. His immortal essence can deify itself more and more only thereby, can ascend to spiritual regions going through experiences, through lessons in the earth-life repeatedly. Thus, the human being returns to the physical world when he has gone through the worlds of soul and spirit, then he returns again to the spiritual world and so on. These repeated incarnations are held together according to the so-called principle of karma, according to the law of cause and effect. If a human being, after he has gone through repeated earth-lives, appears again, he is born with dispositions and abilities, which he has appropriated in the former lives by experience, and with the guilt, which he has burdened himself in former lives. Thus, the one appears happy, the other unhappy and miserable because he himself has prepared this. What we have compiled here appears in the future earth-life again. The human being thereby ascends and descends, goes to and returns from the three worlds: physical world, astral world and devachan world.

The human being is not only a being, which belongs to these three worlds, but he also has companions in these three worlds. Someone, who searches spiritual-scientifically in the other worlds, not only in the physical world, which the human being perceives with his senses and can seize with hands, knows that there are not only such beings which have the three members of the human nature: body, soul and mind. However, there are also beings, which are lower than the human being is, and beings, outranking the human being. How we have to imagine the beings, which are lower than the human being is? We have to imagine them in such a way that they have not a spiritual core as the highest like the human being, but they have a mental one only. As well as the human being has mind, soul and body, the lower beings only have soul, body and something that is lower than the body. If you like, we call this unknown third world the underworld and we can say, such beings have a tripartite nature, too, whose lowest member is the underworld whose middle member is the physical world and whose uppermost member is the soul world.

However, there are also beings who have two members in the spiritual and a third member beyond the sphere of devachan, beyond the sphere of the spiritual. Thus, you see that you can construct a whole number of beings to yourselves. Such beings really exist as experience shows. The human being belongs to the three worlds. Such beings also belong to the three worlds and as well as the human being is developing from a level on which his soul was his uppermost being in which the spiritual core was implanted, these other beings are also developing perpetually. You see that those who have experience of such things must say to themselves that the human being—after he has left this physical body and ascends to the worlds of soul and spirit—is just the companion of other beings, of beings whose lowest member is the mental nature.

This is the outline of the worldview that is not only spread about any part of the world civilisation, but forms the basis of all deeper religions and should be only renewed by the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview. However, at the same time this also is a worldview which is in perpetual development, not a worldview which one has to consider as something that was once determined in the abstract, but a worldview, which develops through the various states of human development most differently.

The human being becomes more and more mature in the course of development, which is also arranged variously. Now, however, the human being takes not only share in this development, but the basic teaching of all world cultures shows that certain single human individuals can go through a faster development that they can ascend quicker to higher levels of perfection that they are able to rush ahead of their fellow men, so to speak. Then they have already attained, while they are still in the sensuous body, an insight into those worlds, which the human being enters when he has passed, otherwise, the gate of death. All religious cultures preserve this as a secret that the human being is capable to behold into the worlds, which are closed to him while he lives in the sensuous body. However, the human being can already cross the gate of death in this life and get a sight of those worlds which he has later to enter developing upwards. As well as the human being rushes ahead of the animal, such persons rush ahead of the remaining humanity. All deeper teachings of the world culture call these persons initiates. You see, there we get really the sequence about which I was speaking already last time in the talk on Lucifer. We get a whole sequence of beings, which puts the human being wonderfully, however, comprehensibly in the quite natural spiritual world. Thus, the principle forms the basis of every religion and every bigger worldview that there are divine natures beside and above the human beings that, however, these divine natures have gone through the stages in bygone times, which the human beings go through today. They have gone through them under other conditions and in another way; for nothing recurs in the universe.

So we can say, those who today are gods were once human beings, and the human being develops up to divine nature in future. He is becoming a god, and the gods are nothing else than perfected human beings. This is the basis of any secret doctrine as one calls it. Understanding this sentence in its entirety means just to be an “initiate.” However, one must not understand this only in the abstract with the intellect, but in the experience. The ray of spirit accessible to the human being now is necessary to it. Then only one knows which big, infinite significance this sentence of any secret doctrine has, this sentence, which, so to speak, penetrates all worldviews as a leitmotif.

Allow me now to look at the different images of the Germanic and German prehistoric time, partly until the present time. Perhaps, I am allowed to go back to the fact that science has only taken a little into consideration, unfortunately, how these things are. At the end of the eighties, a book by my dear friend Ludwig Laistner (1845-1896, novelist and literary historian) appeared—its title is The Riddle of the Sphinx (1889)—, a nice, two-volume work. It does not deal with some exceptionally high teachings, but starts from the very simple. It starts from a quite simple fact that takes place within our present folklore still in numerous forms. There still exists, for example, the folk legend of the Lady Midday with the Wends (Slavic people in Germany). It runs as follows: if certain people who work in the field outdoors do not break off for lunch, but remain on the field between twelve and two o'clock, the Lady Midday comes and puts questions to them. She asks, for example, the flax farmer about the linen weaving or something else. The people must answer these questions. If they stall with a question, it is all up with them. Until two o'clock, they must come through with the answer. If they cannot properly give an answer, the Lady Midday strangles them or cuts off their heads with her sickle. The farmers use different means against her. The person concerned must be able to pray the Lord's Prayer inversely. If he is able to do this, the Lady leaves him; otherwise, she offends or kills him.

You see a legend researcher, Ludwig Laistner, starting from simple legends. Then he investigates similar legends. Still today, they are to be found in our folklore. He visits them in the manifold regions and thinks at the same time that this is a simple example of the so-called interrogative torment, of the dilemma in which the human being is placed by the fact that spiritual beings ask questions he has to answer. He shows how in another legend forms the same thing becomes more and more complex, until one ascends to the riddle which the sphinx puts to the human beings, and which Oedipus solved. Laistner explains this nicely where he shows how the legend of the Lady Midday relates to the complex question of the human riddle, put by the sphinx.

Laistner then shows something else. I must tell this because you learn from it how exceptionally important it is for theosophy. He started, like most legend researchers, from the different concepts of god, and he got around to seeing symbols in them. You know that some gods are understood as symbolic representations of the clouds, the sun, the moon et cetera. This is a widely ramified view you can find everywhere. But it is put up by such people—Laistner has exactly got to know in his own personality—who do not know in reality, how the imagination of the people works, who do not know that it is far from the imagination of the people to make up gods from wind and weather, from flash, thunder, sunshine, and rain. Laistner also already realised this when he was still dependent on the academic life that there can be no talk of it. Now in the book of the sphinx he asked, what is there, actually, if the Lady Midday comes and torments everybody with questions?—There is—and Ludwig Laistner proved it almost exactly—that these things have arisen from another state of consciousness, the dream state. He proved that the Lady Midday is nothing else than the product of a dream experience which those have had who slept during noon on the field. Not the day consciousness fantasised, but the dream has become symbolic. Laistner distinguishes sleeping in a room and sleeping on free field. As well as the human being can dream with the blanket in the hand of a frog which he holds in the hand, the outside world symbolises itself in the Lady Midday. This has arisen from a dream experience. Laistner tried to develop this thought. He did not yet know spiritual science. Hence, he had to point to the fact that important components of our legend poetry have arisen from real dream experiences.

However, dream experiences are only rudiments of another state of consciousness. Someone can attain this other state of consciousness that goes through a certain inner development about which we still speak in the talk of 19 April. Who has visited these talks knows that if he goes through certain exercises, trains himself spiritually, he can transform the usual chaotic dream world into a quite regular world which does not show him only parts of the usual reality as memories, but introduces him also in the higher spiritual world which he can then take along in reality. This is the higher state of consciousness; this is the astral or imaginative consciousness. It begins with the fact that the dream experience becomes regular and that the person concerned realises one day that he experiences a new reality. Then he can rise to a still higher spiritual reality.

That the human being rushes ahead of his fellow men, that he can already reach what the future gives all human beings that he can look into the worlds of soul and spirit, this was there in a certain way in past times. Because the human development consists of the fact that he develops from one level of consciousness to the next higher one. The present human consciousness where he perceives with external senses and works on the sensory impressions with his reason only originated from a consciousness, which was not the same, but was similar to the dream consciousness. This dreamlike consciousness was somewhat darker. However, the human being did not perceive immediate impressions but symbols. What took place in life expressed itself as pictures in the human being. He lost this consciousness and bought the clear day consciousness for it. At that time, he did not have the present clear consciousness. He could not perceive with the senses, could also not see the daylight. He had to see this consciousness sinking in darkness to attain the present consciousness of the bright day. In future, he attains a consciousness where he has both, the imaginative consciousness, which leads him into the astral world, and furthermore the bright, clear day consciousness. These are the contents of all secret doctrines, which form the basis of any culture.

Thus, the human being can look at a time in which he can say to himself, at that time I saw the world around myself as a soul world. It caused a pictorial consciousness in me. This was internally bright and clear. No external sun appeared to the external eye, but an internal light illumined the mental all around. This inner light descended into the darkness, and the external light ascended which the human being perceives with the external senses. As rests, as rudiments of all things remain, rests exist with those classes of the population, which have lagged behind, which have not sharpened their intellect so much, which have forced back not so much what the picture consciousness answered to them, which deduced less, which are less prudent. Thus, their dream consciousness is much brighter. There they experience not only chaotic dreams, but they also experience higher truth for which perhaps they cannot account to themselves properly. They experience just like the clairvoyant, and they experience another astral world if the inner consciousness has awoken. They get to know beings that do not exist here and have a certain relationship to the human inner nature. It is more or less clear to the usual people, and they only experience the picture of the Lady Midday.

However, others have a more developed imaginative consciousness. They experience still more. In present primitive legends, rests of an ancient astral consciousness are preserved. We look back at a human past, in particular here in Central Europe and in Western Europe, at a past, in which—the further we go back—more and more of that consciousness exists which was substituted by the present bright day consciousness. Only that remained to the people as recollection of bigger or lower clearness, the disappearance of the astral consciousness in a dark past, in darkness. Of course, I do not say, the thoughts of the people, but I say, something that lives in the people and that I want to grasp in thoughts only.—That is which the human being of the people says to himself without realising that: I have to move the consciousness away from the day view; I must sleep, then I get entrance in that world again which my forefathers experienced, in a world which disappeared to the human beings. I do not experience it as a clear image, but as an obscurely assembled recollection.

Such a thing lives in the people, and, hence, people know that the astral experiences were richer and richer; the further one goes back in the past. What did the people experience whose scanty rests they have today like the questions of the Lady Midday? This is the recollection of beings that inhabit the astral world; this is the recollection of the old gods. The images of the gods are taken from them. Now you remember that I have emphasised as especially noteworthy that one should pray the Lord's Prayer inversely. Those who have heard me occasionally here know that one must read everything inversely in the astral. One must read the number 341 in the imaginative world as 143. This applies to our passions, too. The passions that go out from us appear—if the astral world has opened to us—as beings which hurry towards us. This is very painful for those who did not prepare themselves before. Everything that flows from us flows apparently to us. Hence, they see animals and all possible beings rushing towards themselves. With pathological conditions, for example, with insanity, you notice that there suddenly beings appear in the form of animals. These are beings living in the person concerned flow out of him and appear reflected in the form of animals.

Something that moves in the sensuous world from behind forwards moves in the astral world inversely. One has to pray the Lord's Prayer from behind forwards to satisfy the Lady Midday in the world in which she is. You can see how the legend adheres this. Now we could go through the entire Germanic world of gods and we would find that that is reflected in it, which I have shown at the beginning of the talk as the secret doctrine of all cultures. What I have shown in great thoughts and outlines as the worlds which apparently pile on top of each other—in truth, they are in each other—all that is reflected popularly in the Germanic world of gods. When the human being lived once in a world in which he still had a picture consciousness in which he had not yet advanced to the present deducing intellect, his ego was not yet as powerful as today. Indeed, he did not think and act as an animal, but the lower members: physical body, etheric body, and astral body prevailed in him. The ego did not yet have senses. It still lived an inner life; thereby he still controlled the external. It was another form of human beings, they could not yet think with that consciousness we have today.

The human beings were much more imperfect than the present ones, but they were more perfect concerning the lower members. They had developed them more powerful and more varied. Hence, they did not yet belong to the spiritual world. They were soul beings in certain respect whose highest member belonged to the astral world whose middle member was also mental, and the third member was still lower. The imaginative consciousness meets such beings on the astral plane; there it discovers their highest essence. These beings, in certain respect ancestors of the human beings, are reflected in the Germanic folk consciousness as the giants. They are nothing else than predecessors of the human beings. Then the world developed. The human beings developed up to higher spheres. They received their thinking and became companions of spiritual beings that are finer organised in certain respect than the giants are because they took part in the higher spiritual worlds. These beings are reflected in the Germanic folk consciousness as the Æsir. The original Germanic mythology did not see anything miraculous in all that, but it saw in it an expression of the sentence, which I have stated: the human being is a becoming god, and the gods are those whom one can call perfect human beings, deified human beings. Gods are beings who have gone through their human level in bygone times. Thus, you see that the sequence of the beings of the Germanic mythology also expresses itself in the difference between the giants and the Æsir.

Still more expresses itself in it. It expresses itself in the fact that the development of such beings definitely takes place in the same sense as the human development. The present human beings—the Germanic mythology understands it that way—learnt from Wotan what they learnt. Who was Wotan originally? We hear that our ancestors learnt the runes, the art of poetry, and still other things from Wotan. However, one always attributed this to the great initiates. Thus, an individuality expressed itself in Wotan whom we had to call a great initiate just now in the sense of the secret doctrine, a being who rushed ahead of humanity and who had already gone through the stages which humanity has to go through only now.

How did Wotan become the great teacher of the prehistoric times? Like other initiates in the other secret doctrines. There are initiates in all secret doctrines. Today these experience the same as at that time, while they outgrow their lower ego, develop the spiritual essence in themselves, and become citizens of a higher world already in this life. At the same time, however, it is made clear to us that at a certain hour the lower nature faces them. In every human being is a sum of passions, desires and wishes, which cling to his lower nature. From all that the human being has to come out first. Then it appears like a being before him. If the human being rises up to his higher nature, his lower nature is like something that is outside of him, while he is, otherwise, embedded in the desires and passions. Just as little anybody can lay his brain on a plate and look at it, just as little you can see your inner life, your inner lower nature. One calls this detached being the guardian of the threshold.

His lower nature stands as a being beside the human being, and he must say to himself once, that are you! You must detach this!—In all initiations, one calls this the descent into hell. One has to become a companion of the infernal powers, to descend into the depths of the world because the human being is simply embedded in them and his higher nature lives only halfway in him. One calls this being the guardian of the threshold because the human beings who do not appropriate courage and presence of mind do not overcome that. Those are called initiates who have crossed this threshold. Gradually the human being goes through development. He overcomes a stage at first where the human being becomes aware of his lower nature. Whereas he identifies himself with it, is embedded in it, it faces him like something else, as well as the table stands before me now. In all initiations, one calls this stage crucifixion. The human being is crucified to his own body because it is to him as irrelevant as an external cross to which he is nailed. If he has overcome this stage, he ascends higher. Then he became wise. One calls him with a symbolic expression “serpent” for the same reason, because generally the serpent is the symbol of wisdom. There he drinks from the springs of wisdom in the world. Then he still goes through a third stage.

One has to go through this stage in the different religions most variously. Look at Wotan. What is shown to us by him? These three stages of initiation are shown to us. One tells us first that Wotan would have had to hang once on the holy wood. During nine days, he suffered there and shouldered the sufferings of the world. There the giant Mimir came to him and gave him a drink from the cup of wisdom. He was released from the holy wood. This was the first initiation of Wotan. After he had gone through this, he was longing for the cup from which the potion can flow, which his uncle Mimir had given him at the gallows. Then, however, one further says that this cup of wisdom is protected in the abysses of the mountains and that Wotan crept in the figure of a serpent through the abysses to Gunnlod in order to seize the cup of wisdom. This was the second initiation.

The third stage is that where one tells us—and this is something very significant—that Wotan himself went to the spring of that wisdom which is the wisdom of the present and is to be found with that spring which is in the root of the world ash Yggdrasil. There lived the giant Mimir. Wotan here attained the initiation that enabled him to be the teacher of the prehistoric time, namely the present wisdom. Once he had attained wisdom from the abysses of the mountains, from the higher worlds. However, he should become a teacher of our wisdom, of that wisdom which is obtained by the senses and by the mind. He obtains the strength to this here. This was expressed in a nice symbol. One says that he lost an eye. What is the eye that he must leave behind to find the present wisdom? This is the astral eye. Now, because he should take up the wisdom of the runes, the wisdom of the present, he loses the astral eye, so that he can be a leader on the sensuous plane to which humanity has developed. These things show in no uncertain manner how in these three successive pictures the secret doctrine, which forms the basis of all religions, is also expressed in the Germanic mythology.

In another way, deep truth is expressed if we look, for example, at the legend of Baldr who is killed by the blind Hodur with the mistletoe at Loki's instigation. Loki is the adversary of Baldr. If we consider this legend, we realise that many people say that Baldr symbolises the sun, the setting sun. They say this without having an idea of the fact that no people write that way. The people experienced in the primeval times on the astral plan in pictures what we have got to know as the basis of the secret doctrine at the beginning of this talk. What did the folk experience in this respect? I have already pointed to the images that appear like obscure recollections, but not in the clear consciousness, I have pointed to the astral light disappearing in darkness, so that the present sensory life originated. The former astral consciousness, Baldr, is killed by the present darkness, mental darkness, by the present sensuous looking which Hodur symbolises, namely at the instigation of Loki. Who is Loki?

Loki's name is already connected with the fire. What, however, is the fire in the secret doctrine? It is not the physical fire. The physical fire is only the external expression of an internal one, of that which the secret doctrine knows as the soul of the fire. This also lives in the human being in certain ways as his desires and passions. Only that separated itself during the further development that lives in the human being as desires and passions. It is no longer connected with the external fire, but the secret doctrine points to that. You get to know this more and more if you get involved with the occult side of theosophy or spiritual science. It shows how passions and desires are connected similarly with the fire as the positive and the negative poles of a magnet: the passions are one pole and the physical fire the other, however, they belong together. With the iron, you have both poles unseparated. This seems absurd to the materialistic worldview, I know this well. However, everything seems to be absurd to that who does not want to get involved with the depths of occult science. The look goes back to those times when one speaks of figures, as Loki is one. This being had an original existence and an immense strength when passion and fire were not yet separated when the passion still flowed through the seething fire. Such a fire being was Loki. Then the world developed further in such a way that from Loki, the fire, the lower nature formed and from the Æsir the higher nature. Both have arisen from Loki's nature.

This forms the basis of the Germanic legend. This is the secret of the Germanic mythology, that the world of the gods originated, while the beings developed further in the passionate primordial bases as well as in the spiritual. One tells us of three children of Loki. The first child is the Fenriswolf, the second is the Midgard Serpent, and the third is the goddess of the dead, Hel, who is bright on one side and has a black body on the other side. What does she show? She shows the lower human nature, which causes birth and death. Hence, Hel appears black and white. The Midgard Serpent that entwines the continents of the present world represents the etheric body that is tied to the present lower human nature. The third member represents what has arisen from the lower passions. Loki has remained from a former development. He had to deliver his children, so that the present world could originate which is thereby provoked to opposition and falls a victim to that which was the view of the former world.

Baldr has to descend to Hel, into the depth. The depth symbolises the usual physical human nature. What is Baldr? Baldr exists as sub-consciousness if, for example, in trance the usual surface consciousness is extinguished and the old consciousness is roused again. Baldr is killed for us now. However, with Hel he still exists as the strength, as the strength of passion connected with the nature of fire.

Thus, we could call every member of the Germanic world of gods an external expression of this secret doctrine. You would see if we had fifty talks instead of one that all that is wonderfully right in the minute details, that we are concerned with a secret doctrine, which forms the basis of the pictorial ideas of the Germanic mythology. We also here find initiates, sages, who knew what I have told at the beginning of the talk. However, the people got to know beings of other worlds by means of various rests of their consciousness. They ranked these folk spirits in the world of the old gods. That is why the Germanic mythology appears as born out of the folk consciousness. How Siegfried, who is overcome, finds his higher self, this presents itself to us as an expression of deep secret teachings. This is not contrived, but it becomes completely certain that it is so to someone who is able to go back in such way in the spiritual depths of the prehistoric time. If we go through the Germanic mythology, we get a pictorial impression.

If we look at the East, we see the same secret doctrine as I have explained it at the beginning of the talk. However, we see it differently formed. With few sentences, we can characterise it. Not with Buddhism and not with Hinduism we want to get involved. We only need to know that they revere the brahma as a spiritual original being that forms the basis of all. The main ability of brahma is the creative knowledge, called vidya. Imagine a person standing beside a machine and studying it. He has a receptive knowledge. Imagine, however, the inventor who made the machine originally, he composed it from single parts. He had creative knowledge first. Such a creative knowledge, spread about the world surrounding us, is vidya, and the receptive knowledge is avidya. Thus, there are different gradations of vidya and avidya. However, brahma is the owner of all that is subsumed in vidya and avidya. Everything is born out of the thought and the human being himself is born out of it. But he has to develop again back to vidya, to the creative knowledge. This is the sense of human development.

The human being is led again through three places that the Indian doctrine calls loka. When the human being has died, he must stay in Bhurloka for a while, it is the same as kamaloka. The highest world is the spiritual world, Svargaloka. It is the devachan. From there he goes back again to the Bhurloka and back to the physical world. Thus, one sees how he takes up the most various forces and materials in the physical world. These came into being from Vidya of the enclosing Brahman. There we have the finest material world on top, the world of the Akasha. Akasha is only a material expression of Indra, which is the soul of this world. Then we come to the world of fire, to Agni. This is the material expression of the god Agni and the same as the god Loki in the Germanic mythology, only in another shade. Then we come down to the air, Vayu, then to the water and, finally, to the solid. Thus, the Indian doctrine imagines the construction of the external world. The Indian cult is the external symbolic expression of this secret truth.

If we ask ourselves which characteristic the Indian secret doctrine has that it developed other pictures, we can say that it bears a less symbolic character, but a more conceptual one. This is generally the difference between the Indian and the Germanic secret doctrines. Internally they are the same, an external difference exists, however, because the external religions in Europe have taken on a pictorial character that corresponds more to the beings of the astral plan, while the Indian people advanced a further step and gave them characters reminding of external impressions. We must indicate this as a difference of the Germanic and Indian doctrines that the Germanic doctrine is closer to the astral, the Indian one, however, to the thinking. Hence, it is also clear that the Indian doctrine is closer to that which the human being regards today as his innermost possession that one understands it easier than the world of the Germanic gods that has faded away into the unknown.

These doctrines were differently developed. As we see two configurations in Europe and India, we see one more, in the middle, so to speak, in Greece. We can see that two quite different forces in nature cause the Indian and the Germanic characteristics. The Indian characteristic approaches more the present ego. Hence, the Indian looked for his higher consciousness in the contemplation in his inside. He attempted to advance from Avidya to Vidya, from the receptive knowledge to the creative knowledge. A science of knowledge, a higher doctrine than a doctrine based on astral pictures is the Indian doctrine, and a doctrine based on astral pictures is expressed in the Germanic mythology. Why is this the case? The Germanic mythology gives us a great and fine answer. The higher consciousness that the human being should attain is represented in all secret doctrines as the female principle, as the soul. What is taken up from the outside what fertilises the soul is shown as the male principle. We have there the female soul that is fertilised by wisdom, by the spirit of the outside world. Thus, the human being moves up if he develops spiritually, figuratively spoken, to the higher female principle in his nature. Goethe means that saying: “The eternally-female pulls us upwards.” You must not understand this pedantically, because you read it in the “Chorus Mysticus” (Faust II). If we understand this that way, we understand what the Teuton means if he says, if the warrior is killed on the battlefield, the Valkyrie meets him, there he reaches the higher mental.—The mentality of a warlike people, the passage through the gate of death and the attainment of a higher consciousness is symbolised by the approaching Valkyrie, taking up the soul in Valhalla, the connection with the higher consciousness, with the Valkyrie. The highest god is in the original Germanic the god Ziu (Týr) from whom Tuesday has its name. This is the same god as Mars in the Roman and as Ares in the Greek mythologies. Mardi (French) is the day, which is consecrated to the god of war, Mars. It was a warrior religion and it differs from the internal religion of the Indian.

Who lives in the inner world develops the passions less that live in the astral world and are expressed in it. Thus, the consciousness, the warlike nature of the Teutons is reflected in the world of their gods. The Valkyrie is the higher consciousness naturally. Because the passion of war was here the creator of the mythology, the world of the gods was expressed in astral pictures; because over there in Asia, in India the creator was the introversive sense, therefore, a more spiritual religion was expressed. Both worldviews found their higher unity, their harmony when the Germanic one got the inside from Christianity.

Thus, you see that a deep internal sense forms the basis of the human development, and that one must look for this deep internal sense. Then one comes to the profundities of the world development, and then one does not stop at abstractions, as if one single figure of humanity formed the basis, but one understands that it is a variform wisdom. The secret doctrine had to be different in India, different in Europe, different with a warlike people, and different in Greece, with the people endowed with art. Humanity develops through the most various forms of cultural existence—the course of this world development always forward and always upward at the same time.

To the branch:

Most honored Sir!

By the deed of foundation of July 22, 1902, President H.S. Olcott has approved the founding of a German section of the “Theosophical Society”. He also instructed me by a special letter (dated July 22) to take the initiative in founding this section.

It is understandable that I myself, at this moment of foundation, feel compelled to address a few words to the brothers in the branches. This is all the more understandable as I have every reason to say how aware I am that the prospect of the post of Secretary General has given me a very special trust. I am also aware of the great responsibility that this office places on me.

I had to do some serious soul-searching when I was asked to take up the post. Above all, I had to ask myself whether I was allowed to accept such an office, given my short affiliation with the Theosophical Society.

My reasons cannot be misunderstood by the Theosophists to whom I speak. The time when I joined the “Theosophical Society” was for me the end point of many years of inner development. I joined no earlier than when I knew that the spiritual forces I had to serve were present in the “Theosophical Society”. And from that moment on, it was completely clear to me that I should belong to the Theosophical Society. I did not need to say that if the members of the German branches of the “Theosophical Society” consider me worthy, I not only may, but must follow their call. To the Theosophists I say that my personality is no more decisive for my decision in this direction than it will ever be in the future in the conduct of my office. I want to “serve” in the sense that one of our best German Theosophists will express in a forthcoming writing.

For those who have only recently joined the “Theosophical Society”, especially for those who are still doubtful in themselves whether it is the right thing to join our Society, which H. $. Olcott founded in association with H. P. Blavatsky, and at the head of which the former still stands; or whether it is not better, or just as good, to join another so-called “Theosophical Society”; for them I remark the following. The proof that we as the German section of the “Theosophical Society” will achieve what every true Theosophist wants to achieve - more or less consciously - can only be provided by our future work. In this respect, joining us is certainly a matter of trust for many at present. I myself know that there are forces within the “Theosophical Society” to achieve what we are striving for. I have known this since I joined, and my presence at the last annual meeting (July 1902) in London, where I was able to approach the leading personalities, was a new affirmation for me.

Whether we will achieve what we are called to do within the German-speaking population will depend on the trust that will be placed in us, and no less on how our work is received. We ourselves will serve no one other than the spiritual powers that guide us. What we have to give in our “service” cannot be revealed by the day, but only by time.

Just one more word. If the German section of the “Theosophical Society” is to accomplish what it is called upon to do in view of the present spiritual conditions and the “signs of the times” in German-speaking regions, then it needs a Theosophical monthly. It will be my task to establish such a publication. I can only give the assurance here that I see the necessity of such a journal, and ask you all to accept this journal as the organ of the German section of the “Theosophical Society”.

With the highest esteem and fraternal greetings
Dr. Rudolf Steiner
Friedenau-Berlin, Kaiserallee 95

Dear Sir and dear Brother!

President Olcott requests that I send him a detailed statistical report on the situation of the German section immediately. I therefore ask you to report to me as soon as possible on the following:

1. What are the names of the members of your branch?
2. What writings have been published by these members since October 1, 1901?
3. Who are the functionaries of your branch?

In faith
Your most humble
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Marie Steiner for the twenty-seventh Anniversary and Convention of the Theosophical Society

To the President-Founder, TS: received with much pleasure the Charter of 22nd July, 1902, and made all necessary preparations for the formation of the German Section of the TS. At the general meeting of the 19th and 20th of October this Section was formally constituted, and the Executive Committee chosen. The ten lodges forming our section are: Berlin, Charlottenburg, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Hannover, Lugano (Switzerland), Munich, Cassel and Leipzig.

The names of the Executive Committee are:

Dr. Rudolf Steiner, General Secretary (ex-officio), and the Mesdames and Messrs. Henriette von Holten, Julius Engel, Bernard Hubo, Richard Bresch, Dr. HübbeSchleiden, Günther Wagner, Ludwig Deinhard, Bruno Berg, Adolf Kolbe, Gustav Rüdiger, Adolf Oppel, Marie von Sivers and Dr. Noll.

The President of the Leipzig Lodge is issuing the Vâhan. A review, which is to be edited by Dr. Rudolf Steiner under the name of Luzifer, is to appear either on the Ist January or the 1st April.

The books printed in the course of last year were: «The Mystic in the awakening of spiritual life in the new times,» Dr. Rudolf Steiner; «Christianity as a mystical fact,» Dr. Rudolf Steiner; «Goethe’s Faust: a picture of his Esoteric Philosophy,» Dr. Rudolf Steiner; «Occult Psychology,» by Ludwig Deinhard; «Is Death an End?» by B. Hubo, and translations of «Thought Power» and «Evolution of Life and Form,» by Mrs. Besant, and «Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,» by G.R.S. Mead.

Our task for the coming year will be the recruiting of members and an increased activity by writings and lectures in the service of Theosophy, as well as an attempt to introduce Theosophy into the various branches of German spiritual life.

The German Section began its activity with the visit of Mrs. Besant, who gave on 20th October a lecture to the members of the T.S., and on the 21st, another to a large public gathering, upon «Theosophy, its meaning and objects.»

The Rules of the German Section were discussed in the General Meeting and adopted.

The head-quarters of the German Section is in Berlin.

Accept my assurance that I shall work in the service of the Theosophical Society in every way to the utmost of my strength.

Rudolf Steiner,
General Secretary.

Dear Friends and Brothers!

I hereby take the liberty of informing you that the first statutory General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society will take place on October 18 and 19 of this year. I take the liberty of suggesting the program on the attached sheet.

Hoping to be able to greet you on this occasion,

with theosophical greetings,
yours,
Dr. Rudolf Steiner
General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society
currently Schlachtensee near Berlin, Seestraße 40.

Annual General Meeting of the German Section of the Theosophical Society.

Location: Berlin Wilmersdorf, Motzstraße 17. Garden house, 2 flights of stairs.

Sunday, 11 a.m.: preliminary discussion of the board.

In the evening at 7 p.m.: objective conference of the members present on pending theosophical questions (in this part, nothing business-related is to be discussed, but topics from the fields of theosophy and occultism are to be dealt with in a congress-like form. Everyone who wants to speak should be given the floor).

Monday, October 19, 10 a.m.: Annual General Meeting, business reports, proposals and communications.

At 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, before the conference begins, Dr. Rudolf Steiner will give a lecture on “Occult Historical Research with Special Regard to the Present.” Please send announcements of further lectures to the Secretary General, who will then communicate the relevant information in a further circular letter.

Dear friends and brothers!

I hereby take the liberty of extending to you the fraternal greetings of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. The General Assembly of the German Section, which met in Berlin on October 18 and 19, has authorized me to convey these greetings to you.

In brotherly faith, the General Secretary of the German Section, Berlin Wilmersdorf, Motzstraße 17.

Translated by Marie Steiner for the twenty-eighth Anniversary and Convention of the Theosophical Society

To the President-Founder, TS: - With my fraternal and most cordial greetings I have pleasure in submitting to you the Annual Report of the German Section of the Theosophical Society.

A new branch has been formed at Weimar, under the title of the Weimar Branch of the TS.

The total number of branches in Germany and German-Switzerland is now 11; 47 new members have joined during the year and two resigned. Miss Marie [v.] Sivers (Motzstrasse, 17, Berlin Wilmersdorf) has been elected Assistant to the General Secretary.

In the month of June last there appeared the first number of anew monthly magazine, Luzifer, under my editorship. It is published at Motzstrasse 17, and is dedicated to theosophical propaganda in German-speaking countries. Our old organ, The Vâhan, edited by Herr Richard Bresch, at Leipzig, has continued to appear as usual.

A new work entitled «Christendom as a Mystical Fact», by myself, has been published, and another, «Theosophy, a Picture of the World and the Destiny of Man,» is in preparation by me and will shortly appear. The following translations have been published: Mrs. Besant’s «Esoteric Christianity,» Mr. Leadbeater’s «Astral Plane» and «Outline of Theosophy.»

On the whole I venture to say that we are authorized to entertain the best hopes for the future. I myself am doing my best to aid in propagating Theosophy in Germany, lecturing in Berlin and in other towns. We hope to form within the next few weeks branches at Köln and Nürnberg.

Our work is difficult as so many of our old members are reluctant to enter upon the work of propaganda in the present state of German thought, but I am fully persuaded, after considering all sides of the question, that positive work must overcome all obstacles: at the beginning success will be slow, but the movement will become stronger as it acquires momentum. With my whole soul I promise to do everything in my power to forward it.

Rudolf Steiner,
General Secretary.

Dear friends,

We hereby invite you to attend an extraordinary general assembly of the Besant branch of the Theosophical Society at 7 p.m. on Friday the 30th of this month.

This will be a preliminary meeting for the General Assembly of the German Section and for the election of four delegates to the same. For the latter, we propose Messrs. Kiem and Selling, and Mesdames von Sivers and Mücke. We ask those friends who cannot attend to please indicate to us by postcard whether they agree with the above names.