The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It must be strictly remembered that there is no connection of kinship or other such relationship between Jesus, the son of Pandira, Jeschu ben Pandira, and the central figure in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, or any other Gospel. A hundred years before our era, that is to say a hundred years before the coming of Christ, Jeschu ben Pandira was stoned and then hanged on a tree, and he must not be confused with any figure in the Gospels. I want to emphasize, however, that to speak about the personality or existence of Jeschu ben Pandira requires no occult knowledge or clairvoyant faculty, because information about him can be obtained, if so desired, from Hebrew and Talmudist records. Confusion with the real Jesus has constantly occurred, for the first time actually as early as the second century A.D. Although Jesus, the son of Pandira, is not to be identified with Jesus of the Gospels there is a historical connection between the two personalities. This connection can be established to-day only through spiritual-scientific research and to understand it in all its depth we must again speak briefly of the evolution of humanity.

Looking up to those Beings who are the great Leaders of evolution, we come finally to lofty Individualities generally known by the name of Bodhisattvas—because it is in the East that the theory of their existence has been most firmly established. There are a number of Bodhisattvas. Their task as the great Teachers of humanity is to allow wisdom from, the spiritual worlds to flow through the Mystery Schools according to the maturity attained by men in a given epoch. The two Bodhisattvas—to whom reference has often been made when 'we have been speaking of the evolution of humanity—of primary interest for our own times arc the son of King Suddhodana who became Buddha, and he who as Gautama Buddha's successor in the office of Bodhisattva still holds this office to-day and—as Oriental wisdom and clairvoyant investigation agree—will do so for the next 2,500 years. This Bodhisattva will then become Maitreya Buddha, attaining the saint: rank as did his predecessor, Gautama Buddha.

The Bodhisattvas succeed one another in the evolution of humanity as great Teachers and must not be confused with the One who is the very source of their teachings, from whom they receive what it is their mission to impart to the several epochs. We must picture a 'college' of Bodhisattvas and at its centre the living source of the teachings. This living source is none other than He whom we are accustomed to call ‘Christ’. It is from Christ that all the Bodhisattvas receive what they have to impart to men in the course of the ages.

As long as a Bodhisattva holds this office he devotes himself first and foremost to the task of teaching; for, as we have heard, when he attains the rank of Buddhahood he does not again descend to incarnation in a physical body. Once more in agreement with all Oriental philosophy it can be said that Gautama Buddha, who as the son of King Suddhodana passed through his final incarnation in a physical body, has since assumed embodiment only as far as the etheric body. In the lectures on St. Luke's Gospel we heard of the next task of this Bodhisattva after becoming Buddha. When the so-called Nathan Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was born (he is not the same as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel), the Buddha who was embodied at that time as far as the etheric body, penetrated into the astral body of this child. Hence we can say that since his incarnation as Gautama Buddha the function of that Being was no longer to give teaching but to work as a living power from the spiritual world into the physical world. To work through teaching and to work as a living, growth-promoting power arc entirely different matters. A Bodhisattva is a Teacher until he becomes Buddha; from then onwards he is a power, an organising, life-bestowing power. And the Buddha worked as such in the constitution of the Nathan Jesus.

Since the sixth century B.C., the successor of the Bodhisattva who then became Buddha has taken the latter's place in the series of great Teachers. This is the Bodhisattva who later on will become the Maitreya Buddha. Hence we have to look for teachings needed by mankind since the time of Gautama Buddha wheresoever the Bodhisattva who succeeded him has poured down his inspiration, inculcating into his disciples what it is their mission to communicate to the world.—I said in the lecture yesterday that the activities centred in the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were chosen to be an instrument for the work of this Bodhisattva, and that one of the very noblest, purest personalities in the Essene communities was Jesus, the son of Pandira. Thus it was through the Essenes that the teaching of the Bodhisattva sent its radiance into mankind on the Earth.

As hearers of the deeper teachings, the Essene communities disappeared comparatively soon after the Christ Event—this is evident from external history. It will therefore certainly not seem incredible when I say that fundamentally and essentially the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were instituted in order that they might be instrumental in bringing down from the spiritual realms, from the spheres of the Bodhisattvas, what was needed to enable men to comprehend the momentous event of the appearance of Christ. The most important teachings given to mankind with the object of promoting understanding of the Christ Event stemmed from the communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes. Thus Jesus, the son of Pandira, inspired as it were by the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha and whose influence was at work in these communities, was chosen to give teachings whereby the Mystery of Palestine, the Mystery of Christ, could be brought within reach of man's understanding. More detailed information about the Therapeutae and Essenes can be discovered only by means of spiritual-scientific investigation. Very little is known about them in external history. And as we are among anthroposophists, we shall not hesitate to draw from the secrets possessed by the Therapeutae and Essenes what is necessary for a deeper understanding of St. Matthew's Gospel, as well as of the other Gospels. We shall speak of the secrets in a way that tallies with the picture a spiritual scientist must have of these communities which flourished a century before the Christ Event in order to prepare for it through special teachings.

The essential feature in these communities was the Initiation undergone by members of the sects. This Initiation was specially adapted to promote understanding, through clairvoyant vision, of the significance of the part played by the Hebrews and by Abraham in preparation for the coming of Christ. That was the mystery with which the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were specially concerned. The very purpose of the Initiation undergone by their disciples was to promote deeper and more exact clairvoyant insight into the connection just mentioned. In the first place, therefore, it was necessary that an Essene should learn to assess the full significance of what had come about for the Hebrew people through Abraham, and so be able to see in him the progenitor of that people. Through his own vision an Essene was to realise that there had been implanted into Abraham the faculty of which I have spoken in the preceding lectures, which had then to be filtered through many generations, flowing down through the blood.

To understand how something of importance for the whole evolution of humanity can be brought about through a personality such as Abraham, you must keep this very significant truth clearly in mind: that always, whenever a personality is chosen to be a special instrument in the great process of evolution, a divine-spiritual Being must have a direct hold in that personality.

(Those of you who were present at the performance in Munich of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, or have read it, will know that one of the most important dramatic moments¹ is when the Hierophant indicates to Maria that she can fulfil her mission only when the influence of higher Beings has actually taken effect in her, when, in her case, this has caused what may be called a separation of the higher members of her nature from the lower, making it possible for the latter to be 'possessed' by an inferior spirit.—Everything in the Mystery Play, if you let it work upon your souls and do not take it superficially, can make you alive to great secrets of the evolution of humanity.)

As such a momentous role in evolution had been assigned to Abraham, it was necessary that the Spirit once perceptible to men in Atlantean times weaving through the external world should penetrate into his inner, organic constitution. Abraham was the first in whom this came to pass and therewith a fundamental change in man's faculty of spiritual perception was made possible. This could be brought about only through the influence of a divine-spiritual Being and such a Being did, in fact, lay into the organic constitution of Abraham the seed for the bodies that were to descend from him in the line of generations.

Thus an Essene would have said: The power that could actually bring the Hebrew people into existence, the power that enabled this people to become the bearers of the mission which prepares for Christ's coming, was established, in rudiment to begin with, by the mysterious Being who is only to be discovered when the soul ascends through the entire sequence of generations to Abraham, to the point where this Being entered into Abraham's bodily constitution, thereafter to work through the blood as a kind of Folk-Spirit in the Hebrew people. If, therefore, this secret of the evolution of humanity is to be understood, a man must rise in soul to the Spirit who implanted that power and seek for him in the realm where he was to be found before he had penetrated into Abraham.—The Essenes said: If a man desires to ascend in soul to the Spirit inspiring the Hebrew people and to know him in all purity, such a man, if he is an Essene or a Therapeut, must undergo a certain development whereby he purifies himself from everything that since the time of Abraham has approached the human soul from the physical world. The spiritual Being within man, and all the spiritual Beings who work together to bring about the evolution of humanity are to be experienced in their purity only in the spiritual world; in the state in which they exist within man they have been defiled by the forces of the physical world of sense.

According to the view held by the Essenes--and in a certain province of knowledge it is of course absolutely correct—every human being had within him whatever impurities had made their way into the soul in the past, clouding vision of the spiritual Being who had established in Abraham the power of which we have spoken. Accordingly it was essential that the soul of every Essene should be cleansed of everything that had penetrated into this power as a disturbing factor, dimming the vision of the Being indwelling the blood of the generations. The aim of all the methods of inner purification, all the exercises practised by the Essenes, was to liberate the soul from those inherited traits and influences which might obscure vision of the Being who was the Inspirer of Abraham. It was realised that the soul and spirit within man, this inmost core of his nature, had been clouded and sullied through the inherited traits.

There is a spiritual law which through their studies and clairvoyant perception the Essenes were well able to grasp, namely that the influence of heredity ceases only after 42 stages in the line of generations. Only after 42 stages have all traces of heredity been eliminated from a man's soul. He inherits something from his father and his mother, something from his grandfather and grandmother and so on, but the earlier the stages in the sequence of generations, the less are inherited impurities within him, and after 42 generations there are none; the influence of heredity no longer exists. Hence the aim of the methods of purification practised by the Essenes was to eliminate, through exercises and strict training of the inner life, whatever impurities had sullied the soul in the course of 42 generations. Every Essene was obliged to submit to severe discipline and to undergo difficult mystical experiences leading through 42 stages. There were 42 distinct stages on this mystical path to purification; when he had passed through them in actual experience an Essene knew that he was free from all influences of the world of the senses, from all the impurities in his inner nature resulting from heredity.

Thus an Essene rose in soul through 42 stages to the high level where he felt the inmost core of his own being to be related to the Divine-Spiritual. He said: By passing through these 42 stages I reach the God for whom I aspire !—The Essenes had clear perception of how a man could rise in soul to a Divine Being who had not yet descended into matter, for the path of ascent was known to them from their own experience. Among all who were living on the Earth at that time, the Therapeutae and the Essenes alone were cognizant of the truth about what had come to pass through Abraham. They knew the truth concerning heredity through the generations and they knew too that to ascend to a Being who has entered the stream of heredity and reach the stage where that Being had not yet descended into matter, a man must rise in soul through 42 stages, corresponding to the 42 generations; then the Being would be found. But they knew some-thing else as well, namely this.—Just as a man must ascend in soul through the 42 stages to reach this Divine Being, so must the Divine Being himself take the path in the opposite direction, descending through 42 stages if he is to penetrate into the blood of a man. Just as there are 42 stages on the path of ascent to the Divine Being, so must the Divine Being descend through 42 stages in order to become a man among men.

Such were the teachings given among the Essenes, above all by Jeschu ben Pandira, under the influence of the inspiring Bodhisattva. Thus it was a doctrine of the Essenes that the Being who had inspired Abraham to receive the Divine Seed into his own organism, needed 42 generations to descend to manhood.

When we know this we also know the source of the know-ledge that enabled the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew to enumerate precisely these 42 generations. And it was Jesus, the son of Pandira, who drew the attention of the Essenes to one point in particular.—The 42 generations would not be completed until a further hundred years had elapsed after the century in which he was living. He therefore taught the Essenes that they could rise in soul through the 42 stages only so far as a link with historical events was still possible, and that from that point onwards any further advance could only be through grace from above. But, so he taught them, the time will come when, as a natural happening, a man will be born for whom it will be possible to rise through his own blood to such a lofty height that there can descend into him the Divine Power enabling him to bring to manifestation the Spirit of the Hebrew people, the Jahve-Spirit, in the blood of that people. Jeschu ben Pandira taught: If Zarathustra, the herald of Ahura Mazdao, is to incarnate in a human body, this body must have been prepared in such a way that the divine-spiritual Being indwelling it has descended through 42 generations.

The Essene communities, therefore, were the source of the teaching concerning the generations with which St. Matthew's Gospel begins. But to understand these facts thoroughly, reference must be made to an even deeper aspect of the subject.

Because man is a twofold being, everything connected with his development presents itself to us from two sides. During waking consciousness the four members of man's being are united and his twofold nature is not immediately apparent. But during sleep he is quite clearly twofold: his physical and etheric bodies remain in the physical world and his astral body and Ego have emerged from the other two members. As long as we are concerned with that which makes man part of the physical world, we can speak only of physical body and etheric body. In truth, all man-made institutions and affairs in the physical world concern the physical body and etheric body, although during waking life the activity of the other members is also involved. During the hours of waking consciousness man works from his Ego and astral body into the other two members; during sleep he leaves the latter to themselves. But in reality, the moment he goes to sleep, forces and beings begin to work from the Cosmos and to permeate the members he has temporarily abandoned; it is a fact, therefore, that a constant influence from the Cosmos is exercised upon his physical and etheric bodies. These bodies that re-main in the bed during sleep constitute the outer side of man's structure and their attributes are comprised within 42 generations, during which span these attributes are transmitted by heredity. If we take everything that belongs to the physical nature in the first generation and then pass on through 42 generations, when these have been completed, no trace at all will be found of the rudimental qualities that were the most fundamental in the first generation. In other words, the active characteristics and forces in the physical and etheric bodies of a human being arc comprised within 6 times 7 generations. Whatever the inherited traits in these two bodies may be, they must be sought among the ancestors, but only within the course of 42 generations. Beyond that, nothing is to be found; everything belonging to an earlier generation has vanished. The forces inherent in the outer constitution of a human being are therefore essentially connected with 42 generations.

In this sense the evolution or development of man in Time is based upon a principle of number. This must be studied more closely, for it has an important bearing upon the genealogy given in St. Matthew's Gospel.

Everything relating to the physical body is connected with 42 generations, because everything that has to do with development or evolution in Time is governed by the number 7. Evolution through the period during which physical attributes are inherited was known by the Essenes to be connected with this number. An Essene said to himself: You have to pass through 6 times 7 stages=42 stages; then you come to the next 7 stages which complete the multiples of 7 : 7 times 7 =49 stages. It is however the case that whatever lies beyond the 42 stages can no longer be attributed to the forces and beings working as active factors in the physical and etheric bodies. In accordance with the law governing the number 7, the whole evolution of the physical and etheric bodies is actually achieved only after 7 times 7 generations; but in the final 7 generations complete transformation has already taken place and nothing of the earlier generations is any longer present. The Essenes knew that what primarily concerned them was comprised within the 6 times 7 generations; but that when the multiples of 7 were complete, something new was there. In the sphere entered after the 42 generations, they realised that they no longer had to do with human but with superhuman existence. They said: 6 times 7 generations are connected with the Earth, and what lies beyond them to make 7 times 7 already leads beyond the Earth: this is the fruit for the spiritual world. After the 6 times 7 generations the fruit is produced which then, with the completion of the 7 times 7, emerges for the spiritual world.

Hence the thoughts of those among whom the Gospel of St. Matthew originated were somewhat to the following effect.—The physical body used by Zarathustra must be of such maturity that after the 42 generations it is already at the point of spiritualisation, therefore of deification. It is in existence at the beginning of the 43rd generation, but instead of passing into the further stages this body allows itself to be permeated by another Being—by the spirit of Zarathustra who incarnated on the Earth as Jesus of Nazareth.—Thus through the fulfillment of the mystery of numbers the most fitting body and the most fitting blood had been provided for the Zarathustra-soul in Jesus of Nazareth.—Such is the preparation of whatever relates to physical and etheric body in human evolution.

But now there are in man—hence also in him who was to be the bearer of the Christ Being—not only physical body and etheric body but astral body and Ego as well. Therefore the astral body and Ego too, not only the physical and etheric bodies, had to be adequately prepared. For an event of such stupendous importance this could not be accomplished in one personality, and two were necessary. The physical body and the etheric body were prepared in the personality with whom the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily concerned; the astral body and Ego-principle were prepared in the personality of whom the Gospel of St. Luke tells and whom we know as the Nathan Jesus. During the early years this was a different personality. Whereas Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel received the suitable physical and etheric bodies, Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was to receive the suitable astral body and Ego-principle. How could this come to pass?

As I said before, it is a fallacy due to the assertions of an inferior kind of clairvoyance that the whole astral being and the Ego of a man are contained in the cloudlike formation hovering near the physical and etheric bodies of one who is asleep. The truth is that when, during sleep, man passes out of the physical and etheric bodies, his being expands into the whole Cosmos, into everything pertaining to the Cosmos. The mystery of our sleep is that We draw from the world of t he stars—hence we speak of ‘astral’ body—the purest cosmic forces We then bring these forces with us when, on waking, we descend into the physical and etheric bodies. We emerge from sleep strengthened and vitalized by everything we have been able to draw into ourselves from the Cosmos.

When a man develops clairvoyance in its higher form to-day—and this applies also to the time of Christ Jesus—what experiences must he undergo? In the conditions normal at the present time, man becomes unconscious when with his astral body and Ego he passes out of the physical and etheric bodies. Clairvoyant consciousness must, however, be brought to the stage where there can be vision through the astral body and Ego alone, to the entire exclusion of physical and etheric bodies. This clairvoyant consciousness then participates in and perceives the happenings of the world of the stars—not only gazes into that world but actually penetrates it. Just as the consciousness unfolded by the Essenes rose upwards through the chronological sequence of generations governed by the number 7, so must a man pass through the stages that make it possible for him to have clairvoyant vision of the Cosmos.

I have often spoken of where the danger lies for development either in the one direction or in the other. Among the Essenes it was fundamentally a matter of descent into the physical and etheric bodies in order that after traversing the 42 generations they might find the Divine. With them it was as if, on waking, instead of seeing the world around him, a man were to plunge into his physical and etheric bodies in order to observe their forces—in other words, to perceive his external nature from within. Normally, man does not descend consciously into these bodies on waking; lie is protected from doing so because at the moment of waking his consciousness is diverted to the environment and is not directed to the forces of the physical and etheric bodies. What was essential for the Essenes was to learn to perceive all the forces and capabilities originating from the 42 generations, to learn to disregard entirely what the eyes observe in the outer world and to plunge straightaway into their own physical and etheric bodies where they then beheld the living produce of the secret of 6 times 7=42 generations.

Man must raise his consciousness in a similar sense if his aim is to ascend into the Cosmos in order to learn of the mysteries underlying cosmic existence. This is a mightier task. When descending into his own inner nature the only danger facing him is that of being laid hold of by its forces, by desires, passions and other tendencies in the soul to which lie generally pays no heed or even has no inkling that they exist, because in ordinary circumstances his external interests keep him from direct knowledge of them. In normal circumstances there is no possibility that he will be overpowered by these forces, because at the very moment of waking his attention is diverted by the appearance of the outer world. Whereas, therefore, when descending into his inner nature the danger is that a man will be overwhelmed by his own lowest and most egotistical urges, a different danger confronts one who is living through the experience. of expanding over the Cosmos. This danger cannot be more exactly characterized than by saying: One who at the moment of going to sleep does not become unconscious but retains so much consciousness that in his astral body and Ego he has an instrument for perception of the spiritual world—for such a one the danger may be that he is utterly dazzled, as if he were facing the blinding rays of the sun. He is dazzled and bewildered by the stupendous grandeur of the impressions.

While it was necessary for the Essenes to recognize that all inherited attributes in the physical and etheric bodies were connected with the secret of the number 6 times 7, a certain secret of number was also connected with the attainment of knowledge of the mysteries of the Cosmos, of the Great World. Again, the best approach to this secret was to turn to movements and constellations in the Cosmos, to the manifestations of the stars themselves. As we have heard, 6 times 7 stages lead to the secrets of man's inner nature; the secrets of cosmic space are reached after 12 times 7=84 stages. A man who has passed 12 times 7 stages arrives at the point where the labyrinth of the spiritual forces of the Cosmos is no longer bewildering; he attains the state of calm in which he can find his bearings in this labyrinth and see through its intricacies. In a certain sense that too was a teaching given by the Essenes.

When a man who possesses the clairvoyant faculties here described goes to sleep, his being flows out into conditions expressed in the secret of the number 12 times 7. But at the last of these stages he is already in the super-sensible; for when he has completed the it times 7 stages he has reached the boundary of the conditions to which the numerical secrets apply. Just as the 7 times 7 stages have already led into the Spiritual, so too have the 12 times 7. To reach the Spiritual along this path a man must have passed through t times 7 stages in the astral body and Ego. This is indicated in the stellar script itself, 7 being the number of the planets and I 2 that of the constellations of the Zodiac which the soul must traverse in cosmic space. As the seven planets group them-selves within the twelve zodiacal constellations and pass in front of them, when a man is ascending in soul into the Cosmos he must pass through 7 times 12, or rather 7 times it stages to reach the Spiritual.

You can, if you like, picture the 12 constellations of the Zodiac as the spiritual periphery, with man himself in the centre. If he is to reach the Spiritual, he cannot begin by spreading as it were from the centre, but he must expand in spirals, gyrating in 7 spirals and passing all the 12 constellations in each complete circuit—therefore 7 times 12 stages. Man expands in spirals gradually into the Cosmos—all this is of course only a figurative description—and if, circling in this way, he were to have passed through the 12 constellations for the seventh time, he would have reached the Divine-Spiritual. Then, instead of looking into the Cosmos from the centre, he looks inwards from the spiritual periphery, from the twelve stations, and from these vantage-points he can behold the external world and all that is in it. There must be twelve such vantage-points; one alone does not suffice. Thus a man who aspired to reach the Divine-Spiritual must sublimate astral body and Ego through 11 times 7 stages; when 12 times 7 stages had been scaled, he was within the Spiritual.

Astral body and Ego had in this way to pass through 1 2 times 7, or rather t times 7 stages to reach the Divine. But if the Divine is to descend and a human Ego be made fit to be its vehicle, the descent must equally be through times 7 stages.

Therefore in setting out to describe these spiritual forces whereby astral body and Ego were rendered fit to be bearers of the Christ, it was natural that the Gospel of St. Luke should indicate how the Divine-Spiritual Power descended through 11 times 7 stages. And this the Gospel does. Because the Gospel of St. Luke is describing that other Personality for whom astral body and Ego-bearer were prepared, it does not—as the Gospel of St. Matthew—describe 6 times 7 generations, but a sequence of it times 7 stages through which the Power indwelling the Individuality of the Jesus of whom this Gospel is speaking, came down from God himself. This is expressly stated. Count the stages enumerated in St. Luke's Gospel as those through which the Divine Power descends, and you will find that there are 77.

Because the Gospel of St. Matthew is describing the secret of what is taking effect during the descent of the Divine Power working formatively in physical body and etheric body, the ruling number is 7 times 7. And in the Gospel of St. Luke the number 11 times 7 must necessarily appear, because this Gospel is describing the descent of the Divine Power by which the astral body and Ego are transformed. From this we can realise what deep foundations underlie these presentations and how in very truth the secrets of Initiation, the stages in the descent of the Divine-Spiritual into a human individuality and in the expansion into the Cosmos arc indicated in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke.

We will speak again tomorrow of the reasons why the Gospel of St. Luke enumerates a line of generations and why, in an age when the mystery of Christ Jesus was imparted to only a very few human beings, it was made known that from God and from Adam down to the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel there had been 77 generations.

• 1. Scene 3, pp. 1o7-8, in the translation by Adam Bittleston. The whole scene should be read.

A study of the genealogy of Jesus as it is given in the Gospel of St. Luke will show that what the writer wished to convey is in accordance with the statements made in the previous lecture. We saw that in the same way as a Divine Power (Kraftwesenheit) was to permeate the etheric and physical bodies of the Solomon Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, so also was a Divine Power to permeate the astral body and Ego (or the vehicle of the Ego) of the personality we know as the Nathan Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel. It is clearly indicated in the latter Gospel that this Divine Power flows down through all the successive generations, in an unbroken line, from that stage in the existence of the Earth when man had not as yet descended for the first time into a physical incarnation. The ancestry of Jesus is traced back through the generations to God. Adam is named as the Son of God. 'This means that in order to find the Divine Principle within the astral body and the Ego of the Nathan Jesus we must look to that pristine state of existence experienced by man before he descended into physical incarnation on the Earth, while he still lived in the divine-spiritual realms and can truly be called a Godlike being. To this period, when man's divine nature was as yet unaffected by Luciferic influences, the Gospel of St. Luke traces back the lineage of the Jesus of whom it tells. All anthroposophical investigation indicates that this period was in the Lemurian Age.

In those Mystery schools where the pupils were trained for the Initiation characterized yesterday as the attainment of knowledge of the great secrets of the Cosmos, the aim was to lead man out of and beyond everything earthly and beyond what he had himself come to be as the result of earthly influences. He was to be taught what vista of the Universe can be revealed to him when he deliberately refrains from using the instruments of cognition he has possessed since the time of the Luciferic influence. The first great question for the pupils of these Mysteries was this: What vista of the Universe lies before clairvoyant vision when a man frees himself from perceptions given through the physical anti etheric bodies and from all the surrounding earthly influences? Such freedom had been man's natural state before he first entered earthly incarnation and became the ‘earthly Adam’—speaking now in the Biblical sense and particularly that of the Gospel of St. Luke. Thus we can see that there are two conditions only in which man can rightly be regarded as a divine-spiritual being: one is that conferred through the lofty Initiation attained in the Great Mysteries; the other is that which was present at an elementary stage of human existence and cannot be fulfilled at any optional Earth-period. It obtained before the descent of the Divine Man in the Lemurian epoch into the 'man of the Earth', as the Bible describes him; for ‘Adam’ signifies ‘earth-man’, that is to say, a being whose nature is no longer purely spiritual but is now clothed in the elements of the earth, of the ‘dust’.¹

It may cause surprise that only 77 generations or stages of hereditary are enumerated in the Gospel of St. Luke. In the Gospel of St. Matthew too it may well cause even more surprise that only 42 generations are mentioned from Abraham to Christ, when a simple calculation will show that the number of years usually reckoned to one generation, multiplied by 42, would not reach back to Abraham. To be accurate, such calculation would have to take account of the fact that in the Patriarchal Age before Solomon and David, longer periods Were reckoned to a generation—and rightly so—than was the case later on. To get the historical dates even approximately correct WC must not reckon to three generations—for example, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—what would now be an average number of years; about 215 years would have to be allowed for the three generations. This is also confirmed by occult investigation. The fact that the period of a generation in those early times was longer than it is to-day holds good even more emphatically for the generations from Adam to Abraham. In respect of the lineage from Abraham onwards it will be obvious to everyone that a single generation was once of longer duration, for it is at an advanced age that heirs are born to the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Just as it is usual now to reckon 33 years to a generation, so those who compiled the Gospel of St. Matthew were right in assigning 75 to 8o years, and even more, to one generation. It must be emphasized that back to Abraham, this Gospel is referring to individuals. The names of Abraham's predecessors given in the Gospel of St. Luke, however, do not refer to single individuals. In this case it is essential to remember something that is a fact, although it may seem incredible to materialistic minds.

What we to-day call our memory, our recollective consciousness of the unchanging identity of our inmost being, goes back in the normal way only into the early years of our childhood. If a man of the present time follows his life back into the past, he will find that memories cease at some point. One person will remember more of childhood, another less; but in any case memory to-day is limited to the one personal life, and indeed does not even embrace the whole of that life back to the day of birth. If we realise what the soul-faculties and characteristics of man's consciousness were in ancient times, recalling that in past epochs of evolution a certain clairvoyant state of consciousness was normal, it will not surprise us to find that in periods not far distant, consciousness was connected with memory to an altogether different extent than was the case later on.

Before the epoch of Abraham, man's whole constitution of soul was different from what it subsequently came to be, and this applies above all to the power of memory. During the still earlier epoch of Atlantis, the difference in this power was far greater still. A man did not, as he does to-day, remember the experiences of his own personal life only, but his memory extended through his own birth and beyond that to what his father, grandfather and other ancestors had experienced. Memory was something that flowed in the blood through a series of generations and only later came to be limited to a single period and to the single life.

Now the connotations of a name in ancient times were not such as arc associated with a name to-day. Indeed, the giving of names in ancient times is a subject that would now require very special study, for what modern philology has to say about it is often sheer nonsense. In the past it would have been impossible to conceive that names could be attached to beings or things in the purely external way that is customary nowadays. A name was once a reality connected essentially with the being who received it, and it was intended to express in sound or tone the inner nature of that being. The name was meant to be an echo of the being in the tone. (Our modern age has no inkling whatever of what this implies; if it had, books such as Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache could never have been written. This book contains a masterly review of modern research, of all scholarly treatises recently written on the subject of language, but makes no mention of its intrinsic character in antiquity.) In those times when the faculty of memory was different, a name did not apply merely to an individual human being in his personal lifetime but extended to all that was strung together through the memory; therefore the same name was in use as long as this retrospective experience endured. The name ‘Noah’, for example, did not signify a single individual; it signified what, in the first place, an individual remembered of his own life and then, beyond his birth, of the life of his father, of his grandfather and so on, as long as the thread of memory continued. The same name was used for the succession of individuals whom the thread of memory connected. Therefore names such as ‘Adam’, ‘Seth’, ‘Enoch’, comprised as many personalities as were united through memory. Thus when it is said that the name of some individual belonging to times of antiquity was ‘Enoch’, we may understand it to mean that a new thread of memory has come into existence in an individual who was the son of someone bearing a different name; the memory of the former individual did not carry back into that of his predecessors. The new thread of memory is not severed, however, with the death of the first individual to bear the name of 'Enoch' but continues through the generations until again a new thread of memory appears, and, with it, a new name which will be•;used until the new thread is broken. Thus when ‘Adam’ is referred to, the one name designates several successive personalities in the sequence of generations.

It is in this sense that names are used in the genealogical table in St. Luke's Gospel. The intention of the writer is to convey to us that the divine-spiritual Power that entered into the Ego (Ego-bearer) and into the astral body of the Nathan Jesus must be traced back to the stage when man first descended into earthly incarnation. In St. Luke's Gospel, there-fore, we find, firstly, the names of single individualities and then, after we reach the name of Abraham, we come to the epoch when memory embraces the longer period and several individualities are included under one name, combined as it were into one Ego by the memory.

It will now be easier for you to realise that the 77 names enumerated in St. Luke's Gospel extend over very long periods, actually reaching back to the time when the Being we may denote as the divine-spiritual entity in man was incarnated for the first time in a human physical body. The other aspect presented in the Gospel is this.—One who in passing through the 77 stages in the Great Mysteries had succeeded in purifying his soul from everything absorbed by humanity in Earth-existence, attained the state that is possible to-day only when a man is free of his physical body and can live entirely in the astral body and Ego. He is able, then, to pour his being over the whole surrounding Cosmos from which the Earth itself arose. Such was the aim of the Initiation in these Mysteries. A man had then reached the level of the Divine-Spiritual Power which drew into the astral body and Ego-bearer of the Nathan Jesus.

The Nathan Jesus was to exemplify that which man receives, not from earthly but from heavenly conditions of existence. Hence the Gospel of St. Luke describes the Divine-Spiritual Power by which the astral body and Ego of the Nathan Jesus had been permeated. The Gospel of St. Matthew describes the Divine-Spiritual Power through which the inner organ for the Jahve-consciousness had been brought into existence in Abraham; and this same Power was working in the physical body and etheric body through 42 generations, constituting a line of heredity.

These were the teachings—especially those in St. Matthew's Gospel concerning the derivation of the blood of Jesus of Nazareth—which were cultivated and studied in the communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, among whom Jeschu ben Pandira worked to prepare for the coming of Christ Jesus. It was his mission to prepare at least a few, by imparting to them the knowledge that at the end of a definite period of time, namely 42 generations after Abraham, the development achieved by the Hebrew people would make it possible for the Zarathustra-Individuality to incarnate in a branch of the lineage of Abraham in the Solomon line of the House of David. This was a teaching given in advance. Not only was it taught at that time in the Schools of the Essenes but there were pupils in those Schools who had lived through the 42 stages in actual experience and were therefore themselves able to behold in clairvoyant vision the nature of the Being who was descending through the 42 stages. Knowledge of this was to be given to the world through appropriate teachings and it was the task of the Essenes to ensure that among a few human beings at least, there would be understanding of what the coming of Christ would be for the Earth.

We have already heard of events connected with the history of that human Individuality who incarnated in the specially prepared blood of which the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks. The wisdom which in very early times this great Teacher—known by the name of Zarathustra or Zoroaster—had imparted in the East, fitted him for the later incarnation. He was, as we know, the inaugurator of the Hermetic culture of Egypt, inasmuch as to this end he had given up his astral body, then to be borne by Hermes. He had also given up his etheric body, which was preserved for Moses. As the creator of the Mosaic civilization, Moses bore within him the etheric body of Zarathustra. Zarathustra himself incarnated later on in other astral and etheric bodies. Of particular interest to us is his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos in ancient Chaldea in the sixth century B.C., where the Chaldean sages were his pupils and where the wisest among the pupils of the occult schools of the Hebrews at the time of the Babylonian captivity came into contact with him. The pupils of the Chaldean occult schools were then occupied throughout the following six centuries with the traditions, rites and cults originating with Zarathustra in the personality of Zarathas or Nazarathos. All the generations of pupils—Chaldean, Babylonian, Assyrian and so on—who were living in those regions of Asia, deeply revered the name of this great Master. They waited with longing for his next incarnation, for they knew that after six hundred years he would come again. The secret of his coming was known to them and was like a beacon light shining in from the future.

And as the time approached when the blood would be suitably prepared for the new incarnation of Zarathustra, the three envoys, the three wise Magi, set out from the East; they knew that the revered name of Zarathustra himself would lead them as a Star to the place where his new incarnation was to take place. It was the Being of the great Teacher himself who as the ‘Star’ led the three Magi to the birthplace of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel.—Ordinary philology itself will confirm that the word ‘Star’ was used in ancient times to denote human individuality. It is not only spiritual research which from its own sources tells us more clearly than anything else that the three Magi at that time were led by Zoroaster, the ‘Golden Star’, to the place where he was to reincarnate, but it follows from the very use of the word ‘Star’ for human Individualities of lofty development that the Star by which the Wise Men were guided was Zarathustra himself.

Thus six hundred years before the Christian era the Magi of the East had come into contact with the Individuality who subsequently incarnated as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel. Now Zarathustra himself led them to Palestine and they followed in his track. For it was the Star of Zarathustra moving towards Palestine that guided the Magi along their way from the Chaldean Mysteries in the East, to Palestine, where Zarathustra was about to incarnate.

This secret of the coming incarnation of Zarathustra, of Zarathas or Nazarathos, was known in the Mysteries of Chaldea. But the secret of the blood of the Hebrew people which was that when the time was ripe it would be suitable for the new bodily constitution of Zarathustra—this was a teaching of the Essenes, who in their Mysteries were trans-ported in soul through the 42 Stages.

Thus there were, to begin with, two groups who knew something about the secret of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel: the Chaldean Initiates, who possessed knowledge relating to the Individuality of Zarathustra and his coming incarnation in Hebrew blood, and the sect of the Essenes, which was concerned with another aspect of the physical constitution, of the blood of the coming Being. In the Schools of the Essenes, teaching had been given for rather more than a hundred years on the approaching advent of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, in whose being would be found, wholly fulfilled, not only those conditions of which I have already spoken, but others too which can be characterized as follows.—

In these Schools a pupil underwent a lengthy period of training for the purpose of achieving, by exercises and other methods, the purification of soul necessary to him before he was led through the 42 stages in order to behold the secrets of the etheric body and the physical body. But it was known in these communities that the Being for whom they were preparing would descend from the heights already possessing those qualities which were a prerequisite for development of the faculties capable of perceiving these secrets.

The system employed by the Essenes for the purification of the soul was, in effect, a continuation of the ancient Nazarite discipline.² This form of occult training had existed in Judaism from times immemorial. Long before the advent of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, certain Hebrews had dedicated themselves to it, adopting very special methods for the furtherance of development in soul and body. First and foremost, the Nazarites subjected themselves to a diet that in a certain respect is still useful to-day if anyone desires to make more rapid progress in soul-development than is otherwise possible. They abstained altogether from eating flesh and drinking wine. This made conditions easier for them because the eating of flesh may actually retard development in one who is seeking for the spirit. It is the case—though this is not intended as propaganda for vegetarianism—that abstinence from meat-eating makes everything easier; it is possible to develop greater inner resistance to obstacles, greater strength for the overcoming of hindrances arising from the physical and etheric bodies, and a greater power of endurance. Naturally, this is not due entirely to abstinence from meat-eating but first and foremost to the fact that such a man is strengthening his soul. The avoidance of meat as food merely brings about a change in the physical body; but if the element from the side of the soul is absent and does not permeate the body as it should, there is no particular purpose in abstaining from the eating of flesh.

These practices of the Nazarites were continued, but in a much stricter form, by the Essenes who also resorted to quite other usages of which I spoke to you yesterday and the day before. Above all, however, they practised the very strictest abstinence from meat-eating, with the result that they learnt, comparatively speaking more quickly, to expand their memory beyond 42 generations and to gaze into the secrets of the Akashic Chronicle. They became what may be called a ‘sprout’ or a ‘shoot’ on a branch, on a tree, or on a plant—a sprout that endured through many generations. They were not detached from the tree of humanity but were conscious of the branches uniting them with it. In a certain respect they were different from men who severed themselves from the tribal stock and whose memory was limited to the life of the single personality. The name given to the former individuals in the communities of the Essenes too, was a word meaning ‘a living branch’, in contrast to a severed branch. They were men who felt themselves integrated in the line of generations, in no way severed from the tree of humanity. The pupils who cultivated particularly this trend in Essenism and who had passed through the 42 stages in their own experience were called ‘Netzers’.

Jeschu ben Pandira, of whom I spoke yesterday as the great Teacher in the communities of the Essenes—he is a figure fairly well known to occultists—had a faithful and particularly close disciple from this class of Netzers. Jeschu ben Pandira had five pupils or disciples, each of whom took over a special branch of his general teaching and continued to develop it. The names of these five pupils were: Mathai, Nakai, the third was given the name Netzer because he came especially from that class, then Boni and Thona. These five pupils of Jeschu ben Pandira who himself suffered martyrdom on account of alleged blasphemy and heresy, a hundred years B.C., propagated his teachings in five different sections. Spiritual-scientific investigation finds that after the death of Jeschu ben Pandira the teaching relating to the preparation of the blood for him who was to be the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel was propagated especially by Mathai. The teaching concerning the inner qualities and nature of the soul—a teaching connected with the old Nazarite but also with Netzerism in its later form—was continued by Netzer, the other great pupil of Jeschu ben Pandira. Netzer was specially chosen to be the founder of a little colony. There were many such colonies in Palestine, a particular branch of Essenism being cultivated in each of them. The cultivation of Netzerism, the special concern of the pupil Netzer, was to be the primary aim in the colony which led a secluded existence and which then, in the Bible, received the name ‘Nazareth’. There, in Nazareth—Netzereth—an Essene colony was established by Netzer, the pupil of Jeschu ben Pandira. Those whose lives were dedicated to the ancient Nazarite order lived there in fairly strict seclusion. Hence after the happenings of which I have still to speak, after the flight to Egypt and the return, nothing was more natural than that the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel should be brought into the atmosphere of Netzerism. This is indicated in St. Matthew's Gospel where it is said that after the return from Egypt, Jesus was taken to the little city of Nazareth, ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene’. There have been many different interpretations of these words because none of the translators knew what was really meant—namely that here there was a colony of Essenes where the early years of Jesus' life were to be spent.

Before going into other details and into the relationship with the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel, we will now speak in broad outline of certain matters connected with the life of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel.

Everything presented in the early chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel derives from the secrets taught by Jeschu ben Pandira among the Essenes and subsequently propagated by his pupil Mathai. All the processes with which these teachings were concerned had to do with the preparation of the physical body and etheric body of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, although needless to say it was also a matter of influences being exercised upon the astral body too through the 42 generations. But if we say that during the first 14 generations it was the physical body that comes into consideration, during the second 14 generations the etheric body and during the third 14 generations—since the Babylonian captivity—the astral body, it must nevertheless be held firmly in mind that what was rightly prepared in this way for Zarathustra could be fully used by this great Individuality only in so far as it belonged to physical body and etheric body.

And now remind yourselves of the development of an individual human being: from birth until about the seventh year it is paramountly the physical body that is in process of development, during the next seven years, from the second dentition until puberty, the etheric body; and only then does the free development of the astral body begin. In the case of the physical and etheric bodies prepared for Zarathustra through the generations beginning with Abraham, this process of development was to reach culmination and into these bodies Zarathustra was to descend in the new incarnation. But when the development of the etheric body had reached its conclusion, what had been prepared for him was no longer adequate and he had now to proceed to the development of the astral body.

To this end there now took place a wonderful, awe-inspiring happening, without some understanding of which it is impossible to grasp the depths of the great Mystery of Christ Jesus. During boyhood the Zarathustra-Individuality evolved in the physical body and etheric body of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel until the twelfth year. In the case of this Individuality and also on account of the climate, the point of development occurring in our regions at the age of 14 to 15 fell somewhat earlier. By the twelfth year everything that could possibly be attained in the suitably prepared physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon lineage had actually been attained. And then the Zarathustra-Individuality forsook the bodies to which the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily referring and passed over into the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke. From the Lecture-Course on the latter Gospel we know the explanation of the story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple. When the parents of Jesus were suddenly unable to understand him because he had so completely changed, what had happened was that there had passed into him the Zarathustra-Individuality who had lived until then in the physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon Jesus.—Such things do occur in life, difficult though it is for materialistic thought to give credence to them. The fact that an Individuality passes out of one body into another does actually occur, and this was the case when the Zarathustra-Individuality left the original body and passed into the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel in whom the astral body and Ego-vehicle had been specially prepared.

From the twelfth year onwards, therefore, Zarathustra was able to continue his development in the astral body and Ego-vehicle of the Nathan Jesus. This is magnificently presented to us in the Gospel of St. Luke, in the passage referring to the astounding scene where the 12-year-old Jesus is sitting among the learned Rabbis and saying things that sound utterly strange. How could Jesus of the Nathan line be capable of this? The explanation is that at that moment the Zarathustra-Individuality had passed into him. Until the twelfth year Zarathustra had not spoken out of the boy who had been brought to Jerusalem at that time and the change of character was therefore so great that the parents did not recognize the boy when they found him sitting among the learned scribes.

Thus we have to do with two sets of parents, both named ‘Joseph' and Mary’—common names at that time—and with two boys, each named Jesus. But to infer anything from the names ‘Joseph' and 'Mary’ as names are understood to-day would be at variance with the findings of all genuine investigation. The genealogy given in St. Matthew's Gospel is that of the one child—Jesus of the Solomon line of the House of David. And St. Luke's Gospel tells of the other child—Jesus of the Nathan line—who is the son of different parents altogether. The two boys grew up in close proximity to each other until they were twelve; years old. This can be read in the Gospels; what they relate is everywhere correct. But as long as it was desired that people should not learn the truth or the people themselves did not want to hear it, the Gospels were withheld from them. It is only a matter of understanding what the Gospels say—for they speak truly.

Jesus of the Nathan line grew up with a deeply inward nature. He had little aptitude for acquiring external wisdom and assimilating facts of ordinary knowledge. But the depths of his soul were fathomless and he had a boundless capacity for love, because in his etheric body was contained the power that streamed down from the time when man had not yet entered into earthly incarnation, when he was still leading a Divine existence. This Divine existence manifested in this boy in the form of an infinite capacity for love. It was therefore natural that he should have been ill-adapted for everything acquired by men in the coursh of incarnations through the instrumentality of the physical body, while on the other hand an untold warmth of love pervaded his inner life. To those who knew of it, one episode in particular was a sign of the boy's inner faculties. A faculty that otherwise can be awakened in the human being only by outer stimuli, functioned from the beginning in the case of the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel; directly after his birth he spoke certain words that were intelligible to those around him.³ In respect of all inward qualities he was infinitely great; unskilled, however, in respect of whatever can be acquired through the generations of mankind on the Earth.

What wonder that the parents were amazed in the Temple when suddenly there was before them a boy who, having grown up in this body, was now filled with a wisdom otherwise attainable by external means only. This sudden, radical change was possible because at that moment the Zarathustra-Individuality passed over from the Solomon Jesus into the Jesus of the Nathan line. It was Zarathustra (or Zarathas) who was now speaking out of the boy at the time described to us, when his parents were searching for him in the Temple.

Zarathustra had naturally acquired all the faculties it is possible to acquire by using the instruments of the physical body and the etheric body. He had necessarily to choose the lineage from Solomon, for in the bodily constitution produced by this blood there were strong, highly developed forces. From this bodily constitution he drew whatever he could make part of his own being and now united it with the deep inwardness made manifest in the nature of the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel and deriving from an age before man's earthly incarnations began.

Thus two streams became one. There was now one Being. In the Gospel our attention is specially called to the following.—Not only did the parents notice a startling change, detecting something they could not possibly have expected, but this change also showed itself outwardly. When the boy Jesus had been found by his parents among the scribes in the Temple, it is specifically said: ‘And he went with them and came to Nazareth... And Jesus increased in physical stature, in the noblest habits, and in wisdom.’ Why are these particular attributes mentioned? It was because they could be part of his nature in a very special sense now that the Zarathustra-Individuality was in him.—I must call particular attention here to the fact that the words referring to the three attributes in certain translations of the Bible are sometimes as follows: And Jesus increased in wisdom and age and in favour with God and man.' Do we really need a Gospel to tell us that age increases in a boy of twelve? Weizsäcker's translation is: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man.’ But this does not convey the real meaning. The real meaning is that in the Nathan Jesus-boy there was now a different Individuality—one whose nature was not, as had previously been the case, purely inward, but who, having developed hitherto in a perfected physical body, was able to make himself manifest in the external physical stature as well. Furthermore, habits that are acquired from life and develop in the etheric body as their special province, had previously been absent from the nature of the Nathan Jesus. His capacity for love was so great that it could be the foundation on which to build; but this capacity was a spontaneous reality and could not imprint itself into habits acquired from life. Now, however, the other Individuality was present, having in his own nature the powers resulting from mature development of the physical and etheric bodies, and in these conditions it was possible for habits to come to visible expression and be impressed into the etheric body. That was the second attribute. The third increase ‘in wisdom’ 'in the ordinary sense of the word is easier to understand. Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was not ‘wise’; he was capable of infinite, supreme love. The increase in wisdom was due to the presence in him of the Zarathustra-Individuality.

In speaking about the Gospel of St. Luke I referred to the fact that it is quite possible for a human being from whom the Individuality has departed and who has then only the three sheaths—physical, etheric and astral—to go on living for a time, But he of whom the early chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel speaks—Jesus of the Solomon line—wasted away and died, comparatively soon after his twelfth year. At first, then, there were two boys; then the two became one.

In very ancient records there are often remarkable utterances which cannot be understood unless the relevant facts are known. Later on we will go into the more intimate aspect of the union of the two boys; at the moment I will refer only to the following .—

In the so-called ‘Gospel of the Egyptians’ there is a passage which already in the early centuries of our era was regarded as extremely heretical, because Christian circles either did not want to hear the truth or did not want the truth to come to light. Something was nevertheless preserved in an apocryphal writing where it is said in effect that salvation (the Kingdom) will come to the world when the Two become One and the Outer becomes as the Inner. This sentence exactly expresses the occult reality of which I have told you. Salvation depends upon the Two becoming One. And the Two became One in very truth when in the twelfth year of his life the Zarathustra-Individuality passed over into the Nathan Jesus and qualities that at first had been entirely inward became outward. The inwardness of soul in the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was profound beyond all telling. But this quality manifested outwardly too whwn the Zarathustra-Individuality, whose development had proceeded in the physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon Jesus, permeated that inwardness with the forces engendered by his contact with those bodies. An impulse of such power then pervaded the physical and etheric bodies of the Nathan Jesus from within that the outer could become an expression of the inner—of the inner nature as it had been before the Zarathustra-Individuality had passed into the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel.—The Two had become One.⁴

We have now followed Zarathustra from his birth as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel to his twelfth year, when he left his original body and passed into the bodily constitution of the Nathan Jesus; this he now developed to such a lofty stage that he was able, later on, to offer it as his own three sheaths into which the Being we call Christ might be received.

• 1. I Cor. XV, 47. ‘The first man is of the earth, earthy...’
• 2. The ‘law of the Nazarite’ is found in Numbers VI, 1-21. A recent study of this subject from exoteric sources will be found in Matthew Black, The Scrolls and Christian Origins (Nelson, 1961).
• 3. See The first Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ, Chapter I, 1-3. (From the Apocryphal New Testament, published in London. 1820, editied by William Hone.) See also the Koran. Chapter XIX.
• 4. The passage concerning the Two becoming One occurs in the Gospel of the Egyptians and also in the Second Epistle of Clement where it is followed by the reference to the outer becoming as the inner.

If we are to realise to some extent what the Christ Event signified for the evolution of humanity, reference must again be made to a fact already known to those of you who heard the lectures given last year in Basle on the Gospel of St. Luke. It is the more necessary to speak of this, because to-day we shall be studying the Christ Event in broad outline and proceed in the next lectures to fill in details. But to draw this broad outline We must remind ourselves of a fundamental truth of human evolution, namely, that in the course of it men are constantly acquiring new faculties and reaching stages of greater perfection. In its external aspect, this fact becomes obvious simply by looking back over the comparatively short period covered by ordinary history and perceiving how in the course of time new faculties unfolded, finally giving birth to modern civilization and culture. If, however, a particular faculty is to awaken in human nature and eventually be attain-able by everyone, this faculty must appear somewhere for the first time in a specially significant form.

In the lectures on St. Luke's Gospel I spoke of the ‘Eight-fold Path’ which men can tread if they adhere to what flowed into the evolution of humanity through Gautama Buddha. This Eightfold Path is usually said to consist of the following: right view, right understanding, right speech, right action, right vocation, right application, right memory or recollectedness, right contemplation.¹ These are attributes of the life of soul. It can be said that since the time of Gautama Buddha, human nature has reached a stage where it is possible for man gradually to unfold in himself, as intrinsic faculties of his own, the attributes of this Eightfold Path. Before Gautama Buddha had lived on Earth in the incarnation in which he attained Buddhahood, this would have been beyond the power of human nature. Let us therefore be quite clear about the following.—In order that in the course of hundreds of thousands of years these faculties should be able to gradually to develop in individual men, it was essential for the initial impetus to he given through the presence in physical human nature of a Being as lofty as Gautama Buddha. As have said, these faculties will, in fact, unfold in a considerable number of human beings and when the number is sufficient, the Earth will be ready to receive the next Buddha—Maitreya Buddha—who is now a Bodhisattva.

Between these two events, therefore, lies the phase of evolution during which it should he within the power of a sufficiently large number of human beings to acquire the higher intellectual and moral qualities comprised in the Eightfold Path. In the personality of Gautama Buddha all these qualities of the Eightfold Path were present.

It is a law of the evolution of humanity that such qualities must be present in their fullness at some one time in a single personality: then, although time process may take thousands of years, they flow into humanity in general, enabling all men to receive this impulse and to develop the corresponding faculties.

Now, that which is to stream into humanity through the Christ Event will not need some use thousand years to achieve its effect as in the case of the impulse given by Gautama Buddha. What has already streamed into humanity through the Christ Being will live and continue to work as a faculty in men for the whole remaining period of Earth-evolution. What, then, is it that has come to humanity through the Christ Event, as an impulse infinitely more powerful than that of the Buddha?

It may be characterized in the following way.—The powers to which man could attain in pre-Christian times only through the Mysteries, have, since the Christ Event, become accessible—and will become increasingly so—as a universal attribute of human nature. To understand what this means it is first of all necessary to have a clear idea of the nature of the ancient Mysteries and of the process of Initiation in the pre-Christian era.

In ancient times Initiation always varied in form among the different peoples of the Earth, and it has continued to do so—in the post-Atlantean epoch also. Part of the process of Initiation was experienced by particular peoples and part by others. Those who believe in the principle of reincarnation will be able to answer the question why it was not possible for the whole process of Initiation to be experienced by every ancient people. This was not necessary, for the simple reason that a soul who had been born into one people and had there experienced a particular part of Initiation had further incarnations among different peoples and could experience the other part.

Initiation is the power to see into the spiritual world in a way which is impossible to sense-perception or to the intellect that is dependent upon the physical body.

In normal earthly life, twice. within twenty-four hours, man has to be in the sphere where the Initiate also is, but the Initiate is conscious of his surroundings, whereas ordinary man is not. Within a period of twenty-four hours man's life alternates between waking and sleeping. As anthroposophists you are all aware of the fact that when a man goes to sleep he emerges in his astral body and Ego from his physical and etheric bodies. His Ego and astral body expand into the Cosmos, whence he draws the forces he needs during waking life. From the time of going to sleep until waking, his being is in very truth spread over the Cosmos to which indeed he is always related, though he knows nothing about it. His physical consciousness is extinguished at the moment of going to sleep, when his astral body and Ego pass out of his physical and etheric bodies. During sleep man is in the Great World, the Macrocosm, but in normal earthly existence he is entirely unaware of it. Initiation means that lie is no longer unconscious when his being expands into the Cosmos, and thereby he becomes able to participate consciously in the existence of the other celestial bodies that arc connected with our Earth. Such is the nature of Initiation into the Great World.

If, without proper preparation, a man were able to become aware of the world into which he passes during sleep, the overwhelming power and splendour of the impressions made upon him would give rise to an experience comparable only to unprotected eyes being dazzled and blinded by the rays of the Sun. He would he overcome by blindness inflicted by the Cosmos, and be killed in soul. The aim of all Initiation is that man shall not pass into the Macrocosm unprepared, but with organs strengthened to such an extent that he is able to endure the impact. That is one aspect of Initiation: penetration into the Universe, enlightened perception of the world into which man actually passes during sleep at night, but of which he knows nothing.

The reason why this sojourn in the Great World dazzles and bewilders is that in the material world of the senses man is accustomed to altogether different conditions. In the world of the senses he is accustomed to consider everything from a single viewpoint; and if he comes across something that does not tally exactly with the opinions he has formed from this one viewpoint, lie regards it as false. This is quite suitable for life on the physical plane but if he were to attempt to pass out into the Macrocosm through Initiation still holding the opinion that there should he conformity in this sense, he would never find his bearings. His mode of life in the world of the senses is such that he places himself at a particular point and front this point—as though it were his snail-house—he judges everything. But when he undergoes Initiation his consciousness passes out into the Great World.—Let us suppose a man were to pass outwards in one particular direction only; he would experience only what lies in this direction, and everything else, being unnoticed, would remain unknown to him. In point of fact, however, man cannot pass out into the Macrocosm in one direction only; he must necessarily pass out in all directions, for the process is one of expansion, of spreading into the Macrocosm and the possibility of haying one single standpoint ceases altogether. He must be able to contemplate the world not only from the one point but to contemplate it as well from a second and a third standpoint. This means that he must above all develop a certain mobility and universality of vision.

There is, of course, no need to fear that an infinite number of viewpoints must be attained as is theoretically possible. Twelve are enough—in the star-language of the Mystery Schools they were symbolized by the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. A man must not, for example, pass out into the Cosmos in the direction of the constellation of Cancer only, but in such at way that he actually beholds the world from twelve different viewpoints. It does not help here to look for what is called ‘conformity’ in abstract, intellectual parlance. Conformity can be sought afterwards, in the different modes of perception that are adopted. The primary necessity is to contemplate the world from different sides.

Let me say here in passing that the great difficulty to be faced in all movements based upon occult truths is that people are so prone to import the habits of ordinary life into these movements. When truths discovered by supersensible investigation have to be communicated, it is necessary, even in the case of purely exoteric descriptions, to adhere to the principle of describing than from different points of view. Those who for years have followed the development of our movement attentively will have noticed that it has been our endeavour never to describe things from one aspect only but always from many different angles. This, of course, is also the reason why people who insist upon judging everything according to the usages of the physical plane, find contradictions here or there. Every object has a different appearance when seen from one side or from another, and in such circumstances it is easy to find contradictions. The principle in a spiritual-scientific movement should be to remember that when one statement appears to differ from an earlier one, each was being made from a particular standpoint. To avoid undue emphasis being laid upon the apparent existence of contradictions, it must be repeated that the principle of giving descriptions from many angles is always obeyed among us. For example, in the lecture-course given in Munich last year—The East in the Light of the West—great world-mysteries were described from the standpoint of Oriental philosophy. It is essential therefore for anyone who desires to attain consciousness of the Cosmos by the path outlined, to acquire mobility of vision. If he is not willing to do this he will find himself lost in a labyrinth. It is true that man can adapt himself to the Cosmos, but it is also true that the Cosmos does not adapt itself to man. Suppose someone full of preconceptions expands into the Cosmos in one direction only and insists upon adhering to this particular viewpoint; what happens is that conditions in the Cosmos have changed while and he is therefore left behind. Suppose—to use imagery deriving from the stars—he goes out in the direction Aries and believes his viewpoint to be of that constellation. But the Cosmos, having moved onwards, is actually presenting to hint what lies in the constellation of Pisces, and then—symbolically expressed—he sees what is coining from Pisces as an experience arising in Aries. Confusion is the result, and he finds himself in a labyrinth. The essential thing to remember is that man needs twelve standpoints, twelve viewpoints, to be able to find his bearings in the labyrinth of the Macrocosm.

So far we have spoken of one aspect of Initiation, namely the process of passing outwards into the Cosmos. But there is yet another way in which man is in the divine-spiritual world without knowing it; and this happens during the other period of the twenty-for hours of the day. On waking from sleep he sinks down again into the physical and etheric bodies, but quite unconsciously, for at the moment of waking his faculty of perception is immediately diverted to the outer world. Were he to descend consciously into his physical and etheric bodies he would experience something altogether different.

Man is protected by the sleeping state from penetrating consciously into the Macrocosm without due preparation. He is protected from entering consciously into the physical and etheric bodies by the fact that his faculty of perception is diverted to the outer world at the moment of waking. The danger that would arise for a man who was to descend consciously, but without proper preparation, into his physical and etheric bodies, is somewhat different from the blindness and confusion already described as the danger threatening one who attempts to expand his consciousness into the Macrocosm before being fit to do so.

If a man comes into contact with the inmost nature of his physical and etheric bodies and identities himself with it, there is an intensification of what constitutes the very purpose of these bodies, namely to enable him to unfold Ego-consciousness. Unless there has been proper preparation, the Ego descends into the sphere of the physical and etheric bodies unpurified and a man is so overpowered that the resulting mystical experiences preclude inner truth, inasmuch as deceptive pictures arise before him. If a man obtains insight into his own inner nature, he will be united with whatever egoistic , wishes, impulses, vices are in him. In ordinary circumstances no such union takes place, for during day-consciousness his attention is diverted to experiences of the outer world and they preclude comparison with what may arise out of perception of his own inner nature.

I have spoken on other occasions of the experiences described by Christian martyrs and saints when for the first time they penetrated to the depths of their own inner nature. These experiences illustrate the situation I have been describing. These Christian saints describe the temptations and deceptions that came to them when, having shut out all outer perception, they sank into their own inmost nature. Their descriptions are entirely in keeping with the truth, and it is therefore highly instructive to study the biographies of saints from this point of view and to see how man is normally diverted from awareness of the forces operating in his passions, emotions, impulses, urges and the like, because in ordinary life he immediately directs his attention to the external world.—We can therefore say: When a man descends into his own inner nature, he is as it were compressed into his Egohood, entrapped in his Egohood, concentrated with all intensity in that point at which his only desire is to he an Ego, to satisfy his own wishes and cravings; the evil that is in him then endeavours to lay hold of his Ego, Such are the conditions prevailing during this experience.

On the one hand, therefore, when a man attempts to expand into the Cosmos without due preparation, the danger confronting him is that of being blinded, dazzled; and on the other hand he is compressed, confined entirely within his Ego when he penetrates, without the right preparation, into his own physical and etherize bodies.

But yet another form of Initiation was cultivated among certain peoples. While on the one side the expansion into the Macrocosm was practised especially among the Aryan and Northern peoples, the other form was practised above all among the Egyptians, namely, the form of Initiation in which man draws near to the Divine through directing his gaze inwards and through deepened contemplation, through sinking into himself, comes to know his own nature as the work of the Divine.

In the days of the ancient Mysteries the evolution of humanity as a whole had not yet reached the stage where Initiation—whether leading outwards into the Macrocosm or inwards into man's own being, into the Microcosm—could be carried out in such a way that man was left entirely to himself. When, for example, in the process of an Egyptian Initiation a candidate was being inducted into the field of the forces operating in his physical and etheric bodies, experiencing them in full consciousness, from all sides there burst from his astral nature the most terrible passions and emotions; demonic, diabolic beings and influences issued from him. Hence the officiating Hierophant in the Egyptian Mysteries had helpers—twelve in number—who by receiving these demons into themselves turned them aside from the course they would otherwise have pursued. In this sense, therefore, man was never completely free in the old process of Initiation. For what would inevitably be evoked as a result of the penetration into the physical and etheric bodies could only be endured when a man had around him the twelve helpers who received the demons into themselves and subdued them.

Something similar took place in the Northern Mysteries, where expansion into the Macrocosm was made possible by the presence again of twelve helpers of the Initiator who surrendered their own forces to the candidate for Initiation, thus endowing him with the power to unfold the thinking and feeling necessary for finding his way through the labyrinth of the Macrocosm.²

This kind of Initiation—where man was not left to himself but was obliged to depend entirely for safety from demonic forces upon the helpers of the officiating Hierophant—was gradually to he superseded by another, one that can be achieved by a man himself, where the Initiator merely gives indications about what ought to to done and the man then gradually learns to find his own war onwards. No considerable progress has yet been made along this path, but little by little there will unfold in humanity a faculty making it possible for a man both to ascend into the Macrocosm and to descend into the Microcosm without assistance and to pass through both forms of Initiation as a free being.

The Christ Event itself took place for this very purpose: It was the starting-point from which it became possible for matt to penetrate in complete independence into the physical and etheric bodies, as well as to pass outwards into the Macrocosm, into the Great World. It was, however, necessary that both the descent and the ascent (or expansion) should he accomplished in freedom once, in the fullest possible sense, by a Being as sublime as Christ Jesus. The fundamental significance. of the Christ Event is that Christ, the all-embracing Being, accomplished in advance what it would become possible for a sufficiently large number of people to achieve in the course of Earth-evolution.—What was it that actually came to pass as a result of the Christ Event?

It was necessary on the one side that the Christ Himself should descend into a physical body and an etheric body. And because in one human being these bodies had become so sanctified that it was possible fur the Christ so to descend, once and once only, the impulse was given in the evolution of mankind whereby every human being who seeks for it is able to experience in freedom and independence the descent into his physical and etheric bodies. This had never before been accomplished, had never before taken place. For in the ancient Mysteries something quite different was brought about through the instrumentality, of the Hierophant and his helpers. In the Mysteries a candidate for Initiation could descend into the secrets of the physical and etheric bodies and rise to those of the Macrocosm only when he was not living consciously in his physical body; he had to be entirely free from the body. When he returned from this body-free state he could remember his experiences in the spiritual worlds, but he could not bring them to physical experience. It was a matter of remembrance only.

This state of things was radically changed through the Christ Event. Before Christ's coming, no Ego had ever consciously penetrated through the whole of the inner nature of man, right into the physical and etheric bodies. This had now come to pass for the first time through the Christ Event.

The other impulse was also given, in that a Being of a rank infinitely more exalted than that of man, was nevertheless united with human nature and, so united, poured His Being into the Macrocosm through the power of his own Ego, without external aid. Christ alone could make it possible for man gradually to acquire the power to penetrate into the Macrocosm in freedom. These are the two basic facts presented to us in the two Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke.—In what sense is this meant?

We have learnt that the Zarathustra-Individuality who in very early post-Atlantean times was the great Teacher of Asia, incarnated in the 6th/7th century B.C. as Zarathas or Nazarathos; and again later he incarnated as the Jesus-child of the Solomon line of the House of David, as described in St. Matthew's Gospel. In his first twelve years this Individuality in the Solomon Jesus-child developed all the faculties and qualities it was possible to unfold in the instrument of the physical and etheric bodies of an offspring of the House of Solomon. He was able to do so only because he lived for twelve years in this particular physical and etheric body. Human faculties become one's own in the real sense only when they are made into serviceable instruments. At the age of twelve the Zarathustra-Individuality passed out of the Solomon Jesus and entered into the other Jesus, described in the Gospel of St. Luke, who had descended from the Nathan line of the House of David.

The two boys were brought up in Nazareth. The Zarathustra-Individuality passed into the child of the Nathan line on the occasion described in the Gospel of St. Luke, when, after having been lost during the Feast, he was found again in the Temple at Jerusalem. The child of the Solomon line died soon afterwards, but the Zarathustra-Individuality who had dwelt within him lived on in the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel until his thirtieth year, developing to further stages all the faculties it had been possible to acquire through the instruments prepared for the Solomon Jesus in the way described. These faculties were now enriched and supplemented by what could be acquired through the very special astral body and Ego-bearer which were present in the Jesus child of St. Luke's Gospel.

Thus it was Zarathustra himself who evolved in the body of the Jesus described by St. Luke, from his twelfth until his thirtieth year, developing all the qualities contained in that body to the stage where he was able to make his third great offering—the offering of the physical body which then, for three years, became the physical body of the Christ. In a very much earlier epoch the Zarathustra-Individuality had bequeathed his astral body to Hermes and his etheric body to Moses. He now offered up his physical organism, that is to say, he relinquished Ins physical sheath, with the whole of its etheric and astral content, to the Christ. And the sheaths which until then had been indwelt by the Zarathustra-Individuality, were now indwelt by a Being of an absolutely unique nature—by the Christ who is the fount of all the wisdom of the great World-Teachers. .

This is the event portrayed in the Baptism by John in the river Jordan. It is an event whose infinite, all-embracing significance is indicated in one Gospel in the words: ‘Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I behold my very Self, in whom my own Self confronts me!’—a better rendering than the comparatively trivial words...‘in whom I am well pleased’. Elsewhere in the New Testament the rendering is: ‘Thou art my beloved Son: this day I have begotten thee’. (Acts XIII, 33; also Hebrews, V, 5.) Here there is a clear indication of a birth—namely, the birth of Christ into the sheaths prepared by Zarathustra and then offered up by him. At the moment of the Baptism by John, the Christ Being entered the human sheaths made ready by Zarathustra; and there was now a rebirth of the three sheaths themselves, in that they were permeated by the spirit-substantiality of Christ. Christ was now in human sheaths—in bodies, uniquely prepared it is true, but for all that such are possessed in a less perfect state by other men.

Christ, the highest Individuality who can be united with the Earth, was now living in human sheaths, in a human body. But if He was to be a pattern for all mankind of full and complete Initiation, He would have to experience both the descent into the physical and etheric bodies, and the ascent into the Macrocosm. This He did. But from the very nature of the Christ Event it will be obvious that in His descent into the bodily sheaths, Christ was proof against all the temptations—with which He was indeed confronted but which rebounded from Him. It must also be obvious that the dangers accompanying expansion into the Macrocosm could have no effect on Him.

The Gospel of St. Matthew describes how after the Baptism the Christ Being actually descended in full consciousness into the physical and etheric bodies. The account of this is given in the story of the Temptation. We can see how in every detail this scene of the Temptation portrays the experiences undergone by man when he descends into the bodily sheaths. Christ's descent into a human physical body and etheric body was a contraction into human Egohood, lived through as an example, so that it is possible for us to say: ‘All this can happen to us, but if we are mindful of Christ, if we strive to follow His example, we have the power to confront and to overcome everything that may issue from the physical and etheric bodies’.

The first outstanding Initiation-event described in the Gospel of St. Matthew is the Temptation. It portrays one side of Initiation, the descent into the bodily sheaths. The other side of Initiation is also described, in that it is shown how Christ, having assumed the physical nature of man, underwent the experience of expansion into the Macrocosm.

I must here speak of an objection that is very naturally made. It will be fully met in the course of the following lectures but the main point at least shall be considered to-day. The objection is this. If Christ was a Being of such sublimity, why had He to undergo all these trials, why had He to descend into physical and etheric bodies, why—as every man has to do had He to emerge from these bodies and expand into the Macrocosm? He did this, not for His own sake, but for the sake of man! In higher spheres a like deed would have been within the power of Beings akin in nature to Christ, but it had never yet taken place in a human physical body and etheric body. No human body had yet been permeated by the Christ Being. Divine substantiality had before this passed out into space; but what lives in man had never yet been borne out into space. The incarnate Christ alone was capable of such a deed. It was a deed that had to be accomplished for the first time by a Divine Being clothed in human nature.

This second basic event is recounted in the Gospel of St. Matthew where it is shown that the other side of Initiation, expansion into the Macrocosm, into the world of the Sun and Stars, was actually accomplished by Christ. First He was anointed—as others were—so that He should be cleansed and be proof against whatever might approach Him, above all from the physical world. The anointing—an act that played a part in the ancient Mysteries—is presented here at a higher level, in the arena of actual history, whereas formerly it took place only in the seclusion of the temples. We see how at the Passover, Christ gives expression not only t0 the state of inner self-possession, but also to the expansion into the Macrocosm, when in the words, ‘I am the Bread’, He declares to those around Him that feels Himself living in whatever exists on the Earth in the form of material substance. In the scene of the Passover there is indicated the conscious expansion into the Macrocosm, as distinct from the unconscious expansion that takes place during ordinary sleep. And the inevitable experience of being dazzled and blinded is voiced in the monumental words: ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death’. Christ Jesus experiences in full reality what men experience as the pains of death, paralysis, blindness. The scene at Gethsemane depicts the agony of the soul in parting from the body. What follows in the Gospel narrative is intended to describe the process of passing out into the Macrocosm: the Crucifixion and the Entombment are processes that had formerly been enacted in the Mysteries only.

This, then, is the other main theme of the Gospel of St. Matthew—the expansion into the Macrocosm. Our attention is drawn to the fact that Christ Jesus had been living hitherto in the physical body which afterwards hung on the Cross. He had been concentrated in one point of space and now expanded into the Cosmos. Those who would seek for Him now could not find Him in this physical body but would have to seek Him with clairvoyant vision in the spirit which pervades space.

Christ had accomplished alone what had formerly been enacted in the Mysteries during the three-and-a-half days with extraneous help. He had accomplished that which was at His trial held against Him—namely, His statement that if this Temple were destroyed He would build it again in three days—a clear indication, this, of the initiation into the Macrocosm accomplished in the Mysteries during the three-and-a-half days. He then indicates that hereafter He must no longer be sought in the physical sheath in which He had been confined, but outside, in the spirit pervading cosmic. space. Even in feeble modern translations the majesty of this passage reveals itself to us: ‘Hereafter ye shall see at the right hand of Divine Power the Being who is now born as the prototype of the evolution of humanity and He will appear to you out of the clouds’. It is there, in the Cosmos, that the Christ must be sought, as the prototype of the great Initiation to be undergone by man when he forsakes the body and expands into the Macrocosm.

Herein we have the beginning and the end of the earthly life of Christ. It begins with the birth that took place at the Baptism by John into the body of which we have spoken. It begins with the one side of Initiation as presented in the story of the Temptation: the descent into the physical and etheric bodies. And it ends with the presentation of the other side of Initiation: the expansion into the Macrocosm. Here there is first the scene of the Last Supper, followed by the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Between these two points lie the events recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew; and in the following lectures we will insert the details into the sketch that has now been drawn in mere outline.

• 1. Renderings of the original terms vary greatly in literature on Buddhism. Those used here are taken from The Way of Zen, by A. W. Watts (Thames & Hudson), where it is pointed out that each name was originally preceded by the word samyak, meaning ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’. Thus ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’ view, and so on.
• 2. See also the Cycle: Macrocosm and Microcosm. Lecture Six.

It was said yesterday that through the Christ Event the two forms of Initiation became processes of world-historic significance, and when this is fully comprehended it epitomises an essential aspect of that Event.

One form of Initiation consisted in passing through the daily experience of waking from sleep in such a way that on penetrating into his physical and etheric bodies a man's faculties of perception were diverted from the physical environment and directed instead to the processes operating in those bodies. It was above all in the Mysteries and Mystery-centres of ancient Egypt that Initiation took this form. The aspirants were directed and guided in a way that enabled them to avoid the accompanying dangers; in a certain respect they became changed men, able during the process of Initiation to look into the spiritual world—to begin with into the sphere of spiritual forces and beings working in the htiman phsical and etheric bodies.

The Essene Initiation may be described as follows.—When, having lived through the 42 stages, an Essene had gained more intimate knowledge of his inner nature, of his true Eg0-nature, and of what made spiritual vision possible when using the special organs transmitted by heredity, his consciousness was led beyond the 42 stages to awareness of the divine-spiritual Being who as Jahve, or Jehovah, had brought about the formation of the organ first possessed by Abraham; in the spirit the Essene became aware of the essential importance of this organ at that time. He was therefore looking back upon the structure of man's inner nature—itself a product of the same divine-spiritual Being. Knowledge of man's inner nature was the aim of this Initiation.

In the lecture yesterday I spoke in a general sense of what is in store for one who penetrates into his own inner nature. In the first place, egoism in every shape and form is aroused, inducing a man to say to himself: I will marshal all the passions and emotions that are connected with my Ego and are averse from knowing anything of the spiritual world—I will marshal all these forces so that I can identify myself with them, acting and feeling only out of my own Ego-centric nature!—The danger is that a man who penetrates into his own inner nature may become supremely egoistic, and this also as a partisular form of illusion to those who are endeavouring through esotcric development to achieve the same goal. In the latter case egoism takesmany forms which the person in question usually does not recognize; in fact he believes his impulses to be the reverse of egoistic.

Again and again it has been said that the path into the higher worlds demands inner conquests. But there are many who would like to tread this path without any such efforts, who would like to have vision of the higher worlds but are unwilling to undergo the experiences that make this possible; such people dislike having to overcome all kinds of impulscs inherent in human nature and want to reach the higher worlds while at the same time avoiding all such impulses. They are quite unaware that to allow entirely regular and normal occurrences on this path to be the cause of disaffection is often a sign of extreme egoism. Every individual ought really to ask himself: Is it not inevitable that as a human being I should stir up powers of this kind?—But although it has been emphasized over and over again that at, a certain stage something of the sort will happen, these people are still taken aback. In saying this I merely want to indicate the illusions and misconceptions to which everyone is apt to succumb. It must also be remembered that men in our time have become very ease-loving and would prefer to tread the path into the higher worlds with the comforts available to them in everyday life. But comforts much sought after in certain domains of life simply cannot be available along the path leading into the spiritual world.

In former times, a man who found this path through the process of Initiation which led into his inner nature, came into the realm of its own—divine-spiritual Powers at work in his physical and etheric bodies. Such a man was able to testify of the secrets of the spiritual world and to recount to his fellow-men the experiences undergone in the Mysteries while he was being led into his own inner nature and therewith into the spiritual world. But something was connected with this process. When the Initiate came habk from the spiritual worlds he could say I have gazed into the realm of spirtual existence; but I was helped! The helpers of the Initiator made it possible for me to live through the time when the demonic beings from my own nature would have got the better of me.—-But because he owed his vision of the spiritual world to helpers from outside, he remained dependent for the whole of his life upon this ‘Initiation-collegiate’, upon those who had been his helpers. He carried with him into the world the forces of the beings who had helped in his Initiation.

This was all to be changed and such dependence brought to an end. Aspirants for Initiation were to become less and less dependent upon those who were their teachers and initiators. For this help involved a factor of fundamental importance. In our everyday consciousness a clear and distinct feeling of ‘I’ wakens in us at a certain moment of our existence. This has often been spoken of, and my book Theosophy too refers to the point of time when the human being begins to be aware of himself as an ‘I’, an Ego—an experience that is not possible for an animal. If an animal were to look into its inner nature in the way a human being does, it would not find an individual Ego, but a group-Ego; it would feel itself belonging to a whole group. This feeling of of egohood, was suppressed in the ancient Initiations while a man was rising into the spiritual worlds and from everything I have said you will realise that this was a beneficial measure. For all the individualistic impulses, passions and so forth which tend to separate man from the external world are bound up with the feeling of egohood. If passions and emotions were to be prevented from reaching a certain strength, it was necessary for the feeling of egohood to be dimmed. Consciousness during Initiations in the ancient Mysteries was not like that of dreams, but the feeling of egohood was suppressed. The goal now, since the Mystery of Golgotha, was that a man should undergo Initiation while maintaining full awareness of the Ego functioning in him during the hours of waking life. The clouding of the Ego that was always part of the process of ancient Initiation, was to cease. This, of course, can only come about gradually in the course of time, but in fact it has already been achieved to-day to a considerable extent in all rightly constituted Initiations; the feeling of egohood is not extinguished when a man rises into the higher worlds.

We will now study in greater detail an Initiation of pre-Christian times, for example, that of the Essenes. Suppression of the feeling of egohood was, in a certain sense, associated with this Initiation too. That which gives man the feelng,of ‘I’, of egohood, in earthly existence, enabling him to have external perceptions—this had to be suppressed. You need think only of a very elementary aspect of everyday life to realise that in the different state of existence during sleep, when man is in the spiritual world, he has no consciousness of ‘I’. It is only in waking life that he has has consciousness, when he has withdrawn from the spiritual world and his gaze is directed to the physical world of the senses. So it is in men to-day and so too it was in those among whom Christ worked on the Earth. In a man belonging to the present era of Earth-existence the ‘I’ is not, in normal conditions, awake in the spiritual world. The essence of Christian Initiation, however, is that the ’I’ remains fully awake in the higher worlds as in the external, physical world.

Think of the moment of waking. Man emerges from a higher world and descends into his physical and etheric bodies. At this moment, however, he does not become aware of the inner processes in these bodies because his faculty of perception is diverted to the environment. Now everything upon which man's gaze falls at the moment of waking, everything that comes within his purview—whether by physical perception through eyes or ears, or grasped with the intellect bound up with the physical organ of the brain—everything, in fact, that he perceives in the physical environment, was designated in the Hebraic secret doctine as Malkhut,¹ the ‘Kingdom’. This was the expression used for everything in which the 'I' of man could participate consciously. The most accurate rendering of what was conveyed in Hebraic antiquity by the expression the ‘Kingdom’, is this: That in which the human ‘I’ can be consciously present, Primarily, the Kingdom denoted the world of the senses, the world in which man lives in the waking condition with full Ego-consciousness.

Let us now follow the stages of ancient Initiation while a man was penetrating into his own inner nature. The first stage, before he could penetrate into his etheric body and become aware of its secrets, is not difficult to picture. As we know, the external sheaths of a human being consist of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. An aspirant for this kind of Initiation must be able consciously to see through his astral body as it were from within. He must first experierice his astral body from within if he is to penetrate into the inner nature of his physical and etheric bodies. That is the portal through which he must pass. New, ever new, experiences await him—experiences as objective as those confronting him in the external world.

If we were to designate as the ‘Kingdom’ the objects which our present constitution enables us to perceive in our physical environment, we should distinguish three kingdoms: mineral, plant and animal. In the terminology of the ancient Hebrews no such definite distinction was made; the three kingdoms were comprised in one. Just as we perceive the animals, plants and minerals through the Ego when we gaze into the world of the senses, so does the gaze of one in process of penetrating into his own inner nature fall upon everything that can be perceived in the astral body. Now, however, he does not perceive directly through his Ego; the Ego is using the instrument of the astral body. And what a man sees when using a different faculty of perception—that is, when his Ego is functioning in the world with which his astral organs connect him—was always designated in the language of the ancient Hebrews by three expressions. just as we have an animal kingdom, a plant kingdom and a mineral kingdom, the trinity perceived when a man's consciousness was functioning in his astral body was designated by three words: Netzah, Yesod and Hod. To translate these expressions into our language with any degree of accuracy it would be necessary to probe deeply into the feeling for words that existed in ancient Hebraic culture, for the renderings usually given in dictionaries do not help at all. For example, Hod as a combination of sounds would have conveyed the meaning of ‘spirit revealing itself outwardly.’ The word would have signified spirituality manifesting itself outwardly, striving to express itself outwardly, but spirituality that must he conceived of as astral. The word Netzah would have been the term denoting this urge for outward expression in a much denser form. The word ‘impermeable’ may perhaps convey some indication of the meaning.

In modern textbooks of Physics you will find a statement that should really count as a definition only, but logic has not been taken into consideration. It is said that physical bodies are ‘impermeable’; but the definition of a physical body ought in reality to be that at the place where it is, no other body can be at the same time. This should count as a definition, but instead of that a dogma is created, and it is said: bodies of the physical world have the quality of impermeability—whereas the correct phraseology would be that two bodies cannot be at the same place simultaneously. That, however, is a matter belonging to philosophy. Self-manifestation in space so that everything else is excluded was expressed by the word Netzah—this would be a much denser nuance of Hod. What lies between the two was indicated by the word Yesod.

Thus there are three different nuances. First, an astral reality revealing itself outwardly—Hod; when densification or coarsening has occurred to such a degree that things become physically impermeable, the Hebraic term would have been Netzah; Yesod indicated the intermediate degrees. It may therefore be said that these three words designated the three different qualities or attributes of the beings of the astral world.

We can now follow the experiences of the aspirant for Initiation through the further stages leading into his inner nature. Having first passed through the necessary stages in his astral body, he penetrated into his etheric body, where he became aware of realities higher than those designated by these three words. Why higher?—you may ask. There is a particular reason for this—one of which account must be taken if you want to understand the inner structure of the world and of man. You must remember that it is the very highest spiritual forces that have worked on what appear to us as the lowest manifestations of the external world. Your attention has often been drawn to this, especially in connection with the nature and constitution of man.

We describe man as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. The Ego or ‘I’ of man is in a certain sense the highest of his members; but at the stage at which it is to-day, it is the ‘baby’ among the four. At present the ‘I’ is actually at the lowest stage, yet it contains the rudiments of the highest perfection attainable by man. On the other hand, the physical body is, in its way, the most perfect member—although this is due, not to man himself but to the work performed by divine-spiritual Beings through the evolutionary epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, The astral body too has already reached a stage of greater perfection than that of the Ego. The Ego is the member of our being with which we identify ourselves. Anyone who does not deliberately close his eyes to reality need only look within himself to find his Ego. On the other hand, just think how far man is from understanding the mysteries of his physical body! Divine-spiritual Beings have been working at the human physical body not for millions of years only but for millions upon millions to perfect its present structure. Between physical body and Ego are the astral body and the etheric body. Compared with the physical body, the astral body is an imperfect member, having within it desires, passions, emotions and so forth. Owing to the forces and nature of the astral body man enjoys many things that are directly injurious to the constitution of the physical body, although the etheric body, lying between them, acts as a check. Man enjoys many things that are poison for the heart; if he depended on the astral body alone his health would very soon be undermined. He owes his health entirely to the fact that the human heart is so perfectly constructed that it is able for many decades to withstand the attacks of the astral body. The more deeply we penetrate into man's constitution, the higher are the spiritual forces that have worked at its members. It could he said that our ‘I’ has been bestowed upon its by the youngest gods, the youngest divine-spiritual Powers; and much older gods have produced in our lower members that perfection which man today hardly even begins to comprehend; still less is he capalslc of producing with the instruments at his disposal the marvellous structure created by the divine-spiritual Beings.

This perfection was perceived and experienced in a very special sense by those who through an Essene Initiation, for example, penetrated into the inner regions of man's being. An Essene Initiate said to himself: When I have completed the first fourteen stages I pass into my astral. body; there I am confronted by all the passions and emotions associated with it, by whatever harm I have done to my astral body during my incarnation. But I have not yet been able to do as much injury to my etheric body as to my astral body. My etheric body is still much more godlike, much purer; it reveals itself to me when I am passing through the. second fourteen stages.—And he had the feeling that having resisted the attacks of his astral body, he had overcome the greatest stumbling-block connected with the first fourteen stages and had now passed into the light-filled spheres of his etheric body, the forces of which he had not vet been able to injure to a like extent.

What a man beheld at this second stage was indicated in the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews by three expressions, all of which arc extremely difficult to render in our modern language. The three expressions were Gedulah (or Hesed), Tipheret, Geburah. Let us try to picture the three realms of experience designated by these words.

When a man became aware of the realities revealed to him in his etheric body, the effect expressed by the first word, Gedulah was a picture, a conception, of majesty and grandeur in the spiritual world, of everything that gives the impression of overwhelming power On the other hand, the word Geburah, although related to Gedulah, expressed a quite different nuance of greatness—greatness deprived of a certain quality through activity. Geburah expressed that nuance of greatness, of power, which manifests outwardly in order to project itself, to assert itself in the outer world as an independent force. Whereas the expression ‘Gedulah’ implied that the effect produced was due to intrinsic excellence, Geburah conveyed the impression of a kind of aggressiveness, of something asserting itself outwardly through aggressive behaviour. Tipheret was the word used to designate greatness at rest within itself, inner richness which manifests outwardly but without any clement of aggressiveness, giving expression to spiritual greatness through its own nature. To convey what was implied by this word would only be possible by combining our two concepts of Goodness and Beauty. A being bringing its inner richness to expression in its outer form appears beautiful to us; and a being bringing its own intrinsic excellence to expression outwardly, appears good to us. But in the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews these two concepts belong together—as Tipheret.—Thus it was by penetrating into his etheric body that a man came into contact with beings expressing themselves through these three qualities.

The nex stage was the penetration into the physicl body. Here a man came to know the most ancient among the divine-spiritual Beings who have worked at his creation. Remind yourselves that in the articles contained in the book From the Akashic Chronical² and in Occult Science—an Outline, it was said that the very first rudiment of the human physical body came into existence on Old Saturn. Very sublime spiritual Beings, the Thrones, sacrificed their own will-substance in order that the first rudiment of man's physical body might arise; and sublime spiritual Beings worked on this rudiment during the further course of evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. In the lectures on Genesis, given in Munich, I described how these lofty spiritual Beings continued their work through these earlier periods, organising and elaborating this rudiment of the human physical body to higher and higher stages, culminating in the marvellous physical organism in which the human being, consisting of etheric body, astral body and Ego can incarnate to-day.

When a man was able to penetrate into his inmost nature he became aware of what was described in the Hebraic secret teachings as the embodiment of qualities only to be conceived of by reflecting on the very highest wisdom attainable by the human soul. Man regards wisdom as an ideal; he feels lifted to a higher level when be can imbue any part of himself with wisdom. Those (among the Esscnes) whose consciousness penetrated into the physical body knew that they were now approaching Beings whose very nature and substance consisted of what can be acquired by man in a very small measure only, when he strives for wisdom not attained through acts of ordinary cognition but through hard and heavy experiences of the soul, gained wonly in the course of many incarnations. Even then only a certain amount of wisdom is acquired; for not until it has been sought in every possible form could anyone be said to possess it fully. At this stage of Initiation an Essene became aware of Beings revealing themselves as Beings of Wisdom, Beings whose intrinsic quality manifested itself as pure, awe-inspiring wisdom.. This
quality was expressed in the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews by the word Hokhmah,, rendered to-day as ‘Wisdom’.

A particular nuance of this attribute or quality of wisdom is again a certain densification. This is present in man but in his individuality he acquires it to a small extent only. On penetrating into the physical body from within, however, a man again encounters Beings who possess this quality—it is a densification of wisdom—in such a marked degree that it seems literally to radiate from them. It is the quality expressed by the word Binah in the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews, and is akin to what can be evoked in man his reason is called into play. Man acquires the power of reason to a certain limited degree only. But when the word Binah is used we must think of Beings entirely permeated by what can he born of reason. Binah is a denser nuance of Hokhmah. Hence when reference was made in the Hebraic secret doctrine to the original creative Wisdom out of which worlds were born, Hokhmah was compared to a spring of water, and Binah to a sea—indicating a certain degree of densification.

And the very loftiest experience attainable through penetration into the physical body was designated by the word Keter. It is almost impossible to find an adequate translation for this word. The quality which conveyed an inkling of the attributes of divine-spiritual Beings of the greatest sublimity could only be indicated by a symbol expressing the fact that a man was raised above his own level, invested with a significance greater than was normally his. The expression designating the lofty nature of this quality was Keter, ‘Crown’.

The following, then, are the qualities or attributes of the Beings whose realm a man reaches when he penetrates within himself into his own inner nature.³

You can picture to yourselves that in an Essene Initiation entirely new experiences were undergone by a man, when the qualities and attributes referred to became realities to him.

How did an Essene Initiation contrast with the character and form of Initiation enacted among the neighbouring peoples? All ancient Initiations were adapted to cause the suppression of the feeling of ‘I’ that a man has when he is gazing at Malkhut, the Kingdom. The feeling of ‘I’ was to be eliminated. Hence in Initiation a man could not be as he was in the physical world. True, he was led upwards into the spiritual world, but as an Initiate he could not be man in the sense that he was man in the Kingdom, in Malkhut. In connection with ancient Initiations, therefore, a sharp distinction was made between what a man experienced as an Initiate on the one hand and within his Ego on the other.

If one wanted to give a brief indication of the conditions attaching to Initiation in the secret schools of ancient times compared with those obtaining in public life, one would have to say the following.—Let nobody believe that he can retain the same feeling of egohood that he has in the Kingdom, in Malkhut, if he aspires to become an Initiate. Wonderful and glorious experiences of I lie three times three attributes in their reality come to him as he reaches higher and higher stages; but he must entirely discard the feeling of egohood that is his in the external world. Experiences designated by the words Netzah, Yesod, Hod, and so forth, cannot be carried. down into Malkliut, cannot remain associated with man's ordinary feeling of egohood. That was the conviction held universally. And anyone who might have dared to contradict this principle in ancient times would have been regarded as a fool, a madman and a liar.

The Essenes were the first to teach that the time would come when everything that is above would be carried down, so that man would be able to experience it while maintaining his feeling of egohood intact. The Greeks spoke of Βασιλεια τωυ ομραυωυ (the Kingdoms of Heaven). It was the Essenes who first taught of the coming of One who would bring down for the ‘I’, for the Ego living in Malkhut, what is above in the ‘Kingdoms of Heaven.’ And this too was taught in words of awe-inspiring power by Jeschu ben Pandira to the Essenes and to a few of those around him. The gist of his teaching as transmitted in the immediate future through his pupil Mathai (Matthew) may be indicated briefly in the following way.—

Inspired as he was by the successor of Gautama Buddha, by the Bodhisattva who will eventually become the Maitreya Buddha, Jeschu ben Pandira taught to this effect.—Hitherto the Kingdoms of Heaven could not be brought down into Malkhut, into the realm to which the Ego of man belongs. But when the three times fourteen generations have taken their course and the time is thus fulfilled, there will be born from the progeny of Abraham, from the stem of David, the stem of Jesse (Jessians=Essenes), One who will bring the nine attributes of the Kingdoms of Heaven into the realm in which the ‘I’ of man is actively present.—This teaching led to Jeschu ben Pandira being stoned as a blasphemer, for it was held to be the grossesst violation of the principles of Initiation by those who refused to admit or to recognise that because humanity progresses, something that is right for one period is not necessarily right for another.

Then came the time when prophecy was fulfilled, when the three times fourteen generations had run their course and when there could arise from the blood of the people a bodily constitution in which Zarathustra was able to incarnate, and subsequently, having achieved. further development by the means available in the body of the Nathan Jesus, to offer up that body to the Christ.⁴ The time had come of which Christ's forerunner had declared that the Kingdoms of Heaven would draw near to the Ego which lives in the external world, in Malkhut.

We shall now realise the nature of the task facing Christ after the Temptation. He had withstood the Temptation through the power of His own being, through the principle which in a man to-day, we call the ‘I’, the Ego. He had been victorious over all the attacks and temptations confronting one who penetrates into his own astral, etheric and physical bodies. This is clearly shown in the story. Egoism in all forms is present in such a way as to reveal it in its greatest possible intensity.

A stubborn factor arising in one who is striving for esoteric development is the tendency to occupy himself solely with ins own personality. It is precisely in those who want to find their way into the spiritual world that the habit is so often found of loving to talk about their own cherished personality, concerning themselves with it every moment of the day. Whereas in other circumstances people may deliberately refrain from adopting this attitude when they make efforts to develop or perhaps when they first become anthroposophists, they now begin to pay great attention to their own Ego; and then illusions arise on all hands, illusions from which they were formerly diverted by the ordinary demands of life. Why does this happen? It is because such people are incapable of coping with what rises up from their own inner nature. They are utterly at a loss to know how to deal with what is happening in themselves. Formerly they were alert and readily attracted by the external world; now they are diverted to their own inner world and all sorts of feelings and emotions that were within them begin to rise up. Why is this? What such a person really wants is to be an an Ego, entirely independent of the external world. But then he often falls into the error of wanting to be treated like a child who is told clearly what he must do. He wants to be anything rather than a man who sets his own direction and aim in accordance with what esoteric life teaches him. He has not yet begun to reflect about it, but he has the feeling that dependence upon the external world is a disturbing factor, especially when he wants to be absolutely untrammelled and give all his attention to the dictates of his own egoism. But there is one fact, trivial though it may seem, that prevents him from detaching his bodily life at least from the surrounding world; this fact is that human beings are obliged to eat! It is a trivial fact but it is fatally true. We can learn from it how powerless we are without the world around us. It is a trenchant example of our dependence upon the surrounding world without which we could not live; we are really like a finger on our hand: if we cut it off it withers. A quite trivial consideration can therefore show us the extent to which we are dependent upon the surrounding world.

Egoism at its highest pitch may take the form of the wish: If only I could become independent of the surrounding world; if only I were myself capable of conjuring into existence by magic that which as an ordinary human being I need in physical life but which causes me to be so strongly aware of my dependence upon the world around! Such a wish may actually arise in those who are seeking to attain Initiation. Even hatred may be aroused by the realisation that one is dependent on the environment and incapable of conjuring the means of nourishment into existence by magic. It seems strange to say this, but although wishes that soon arise on a small scale when a person is striving to develop, appear paradoxical, in their extreme form they become downright absurdity. A man is usually quite unaware that he has such wishes. In point of fact no human being has them so strongly that he is deluded into claiming the power to create food by magic, to sustain life by something not derived from the external world, from Malkhut. But in an extrernesase someone might believe: If only I were able to live so entirely in my astral body and Ego that I could rely for my needs entirely on my own wishes, I should no longer be dependent on the surrounding world!

This form of temptation does arise. And in the case of the One who was to undergo it in its greatest intensity, it is characterized by the saying that the Tempter .confronting Christ Jesus bade Him turn stones into bread. This is temptation in its extreme form. The descent into a man's own inner being is described most wonderfully in St. Matthew's story of the Temptation.

The second stage comes after the aspirant for Initiation has penetrated into his astral body and is confronted by all the emotions and passions that could have made him into an utter egoist. Perceiving all this, instead of resisting and overcoming it, a man would like to cast himself down into the etheric body and physical body. This is a situation that may well he described as hurling oneself into the abyss. And this is how it is actually described in St. Matthew's Gospel: man casts himself down into what he has not hitherto been able to spoil to any considerable extent—namely, the etheric and physical bodies. But the passions and emotions must first have been overcome. The Christ Being knows this and facing the Tempter, having overcome the forces by His own power, declares: Thou shalt not tempt the Being to whom thou shoulds't surrender thyself !

Then comes the tthird stage—the penetration into the physical body. When this descent into the physical and etheric bodies takes the form of temptation, it is an experience that may come to every human being during the process of Initiation at the stage when he sees himself from within. He then perceives everything that is contained in the three highest attributes. This is like a world to him but, to begin with, a world of illusion only, a world he cannot see as intrinsic truth unless he penetrates through the sheath of the physical body and rises to those spiritual Beings who are not themselves actually within the physical body but only work in it. If we do not rid ourselves of egoism it is always the tempter of the physical world, Lucifer or Diabolus, who wishes to deceive us about our own being. He promises us everything that confronts us—although it is merely the product of our own maya, our own illusion. If this spirit of egoism does not leave us, we behold a whole world, but a world of deception and lies. Lucifer promises us this world. Let us not believe it to be a world of truth I We enter this world but remain in maya if we do not eventually free ourselves from it.

The Christ Being lived through these three stages of temptation before the eyes of mankind as a model and an example to be followed. Inasmuch as the Temptation was once undergone outside the sanctuaries of the Mysteries, resisted through the power of a Being indwelling the three human sheaths, the impulse was given whereby it was made possible for man in the future course of evolution to rise into the spiritual world with the ‘I’-consciousness belonging to the external realm of Malkhut. The two worlds were no longer to be separate and man was to be capable of rising into the spiritual worlds with the ‘I’ that lives in Malkhut. This was achieved for humanity through the victory over the Temptation as related in the Gospel of St. Matthew. A Being living on the Earth had now provided the model for the ascent of the human ‘I’ from the kingdom of Malkhut into the higher worlds and realms of existence.

What was the result of the Christ Being having lived through as an historical event, an experience hitherto undergone only in the secrecy of the Mysteries? The natural result was the preaching of the Kingdom. The Gospel of St. Matthew therefore relates the Temptation first and then proceeds to describe the stages of the ascent of the Ego, the ‘I’, that henceforth will be able in itself consciously to experience the spiritual world. The secret of the ‘I’ that in accordance with the mode of consciousness prevailing in the external world rises into the spiritual word—this secret, as the Gospel of St. Matthew relates, was now to be unveiled through the Christ Being during the time following the Temptation. Then come the chapters beginning with the Sermon on the Mount and therewith presenting the conception given by Christ of the Kingdom, of Malkhut.

Such are the profundities to be fathomed in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The sources and basic elements of this Gospel must be sought in the secret teachings not only of the Essenes but in those existing in the whole world of ancient Hebraic and Greek culture. We then feel for such a text the profound reverence which, as was said in the Munich lectures,⁵ arises when, enriched with the findings of spiritual-scientific investigation, we turn to the records bequeathed to us by the seers of olden time. We feel that such records speak to us across the ages. It is as though a spirit-language in which great Individualities converse with one another through the centuries were becoming audible—audible, of course, only to those who understand the words of the Gospel: ‘He who hath ears to hear, let him hear!’ But just as in the remote past many things had to happen in order that physical ears might become part of our organism, so it is in the case of the spiritual ears through which we comprehend what is said in those great spiritual records.

The purpose of modern Spiritual Science is to enable us to read and decipher these spiritual records. Not until we have acquired insight into the true nature of the in the Kingdom, in Malkhut, shall we able to understand the chapter in St. Matthew's Gospel beginning: Blessed are they who are beggars for the Spirit; for through themselves, through their own Ego, they shall find the Kingdoms of Heaven!

An Initiate of ancient times would have said to a man: In your own Ego you search in vain for the Kingdoms of Heaven. But Christ Jesus said: The time has come when in their own Egos men will find the Spirit when they seek the Kingdoms of Heaven.

The historic Christ Event consists in the carrying of profound Mystery-secrets into the external world. In this sense we shall be studying that Event still more closely, and then you will understand how to interpret the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.

Note on the ten Sephirot.

In a lecture on the subject given by Rudulf Steiner in Doruach, 10th May, 1924, to the workmen engaged on building the second Goetheanum, he answered the question put by one of them as to what the Jews meant by the ‘Sephirot-Tree.’ He said that the ten Sephirot were expressions designating ‘the forces by which man is connected with the spiritual world’, adding that these ten forces of the universe were pictured by the ancient Hebrews as working in upon the human being from all sides and directions. The lecture dealt in detail with the qualities connected with each of the ten forces.

In kabbalistic literature, various synonyms are used fur the ten Sephirot, e.g. potencies, emanations, attributes, principles. There are also many variations in the actual names and in their spelling. The Sephirot are often depicted in the form of a tree and its branches (a picture of organic life) and are charted at definite points on a figure representing Adam Kadmon (‘Primeval Man’). This figure was also used to illustrate the lecture to the workmen referred to above.

A useful article on the Sephirot will be found, for example, in the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, and for students of Jewish mysticism who are able to read German, the following book written by a learned kabbalist and anthroposophist is strongly to be recommended: Der Sohar and seine Lehre, by Ernst Muller, with a Preface by Professor A. Bergman (Origo Verlag, Zurich, 1951).

• 1. One of the ten Sephirot. See note on p. 148.
• 2. Published in 1959 (American edition) with the title Cosmic Memory.
• 3. The ten Sephirot of kabbalistic literature, See note at end of lecture, p. 148.
• 4. See lecture 12, p. 209; also The Gospel of Luke, notably Lectures Four to Seven, Rudolf Steiner gives a condensed account of these happenings in The Spiritual Guidance of Man, Lecture Three.
• 5. See Genesis: Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation, notably the beginning of Lecture VI (p. 73) and the end of Lecture VIII (pp. 99-100)

We are celebrating today the fifth anniversary of the Bern Branch. It is also the first occasion on which we have gathered in this room. Let us hope it will offer a worthy frame for our spiritual work and striving in this city. The fact that we are able to hold our more intimate meetings surrounded by such architectural forms as these is of significance for our spiritual endeavors. We know that in a number of different places such rooms are striven for and already exist. In view of the twofold festive nature of this event, it is appropriate to say a few introductory words about the significance of such forms.

In our strivings we repeatedly come to a threefoldness in one or the other direction that may be termed the sacred triad. We discover it expressed in the human soul as thinking, feeling and willing. If we consider thinking we shall find that in our thinking activity we have to direct ourselves according to objective necessities. If we fail to do so, whether in thinking about the things of the physical plan or about spiritual things, we shall commit the error of not reaching the truth. In relation of our will, also, we must orient ourselves according to certain external moral precepts. Here, too, we have to act according to necessities. In fact, with regard to both our thinking and our willing the necessities of higher realms play into the physical world.

Man feels truly free only in the realm of his feelings. It is quite different from thinking and willing. We feel most at home in the sphere of feeling and sensation when we are compelled neither by thinking nor by willing, but can surrender to what is purely felt. Why is this so? We sense that our thinking is connected with something, is dependent. We likewise feel a dependency in our willing. In our feelings, however, we are completely ourselves and there we live completely within our own soul, as it were. Why is this so? It is because ultimately our feelings are a mirror picture of a power that lies far beyond our consciousness. Thoughts must be considered as images of what they represent. We must so develop our will that it expresses our duties and responsibilities. In the sphere of feeling we can freely experience what speaks to our soul because, occultly considered, feelings are a mirror image of a realm that does not enter our consciousness. It lies beyond our consciousness and is of a divine spiritual nature.

We might say that the gods seek to educate mankind through thinking and willing. Through feeling the gods allow us to participate in their own creative working, though in a mysterious way. In feeling we have something immediately present in our own souls in which the gods themselves delight.

Now by means of forms as they have been created here, our studies can be accompanied by feelings that draw us closer to the spiritual worlds. This intimacy with the spiritual world must be the result of all our considerations. That is why we can attach a certain importance to such surrounding forms and seek to penetrate what they can mean for us. We look in all directions and feel the power of light and color, which for us can become a revelation of what lives in the spiritual world. What we have to say certainly also can be understood in the barren, dreadful halls unfortunately so prevalent everywhere today. But a real warmth of soul can only come about in spiritual studies when we are surrounded by forms such as these. That this can be so after the first five years of our work here in Bern may be looked upon as the good karma that blesses and accompanies our activities. Therefore, we shall devote this occasion that is festive in a twofold way to considering the significance of spiritual science, of a spiritual knowledge, for modern man.

Much that will be considered today has been spoken about previously but we shall discuss it from new aspects. The spiritual worlds can only become fully intelligible if we consider them from the more varied viewpoints. Life between death and a new birth has been described in many different ways. Today our considerations will deal with much that has concerned me recently in the sphere of spiritual investigation.

We remember that as soon as we have gone through the gate of death we experience the kamaloca period during which we are still intimately connected with our feelings and emotions, with all the aspects of our soul life in the last earthly embodiment. We gradually free ourselves from this connection. Indeed, we no longer have a physical body after death. Yet, when the physical and etheric bodies have been laid aside, our astral body still possesses all the peculiarities it had on earth, and these peculiarities of the astral body, which is acquired because it lived in a physical body, also have to be laid aside. This requires a certain time and that marks the period of kamaloca. The kamaloca period is followed by experiences in the spiritual world or devachan. In our writings it has been characterized more from the aspect of what man experiences through the different elements spread out around him. We shall now consider the period between death and a new birth from another side. Let us begin with a general survey.

When man has gone through the gate of death he has the following experience. During life on earth he is enclosed within his skin, and outside is space with things and beings. This is not so after death. Our whole being expands and we feel that we are becoming ever larger. The feeling of being here in my skin with space and surrounding things out there is an experience that we do not have after death. After death we are inside objects and beings. We expand within a definite spatial area. During the kamaloca period we are continually expanding, and when this expansion reaches its end, we are as large as the space within the orbit of the moon. The fact of dwelling within space, of being concentrated in one point, has quite a different meaning after death than during physical existence. All the souls who dwell simultaneously in kamaloca fill out the same space circumscribed by the orbit of the moon. They interpenetrate one another. Yet this interpenetration does not mean togetherness. The feeling of being together is determined by quite other factors than filling a common spatial area. It is possible for two souls who are within the same space after death to be quite distant from one another. Their experience may be such that they need not know of one another's existence. Other souls, on the other hand, might have close, intimate connections and sense each other's presence. This depends entirely on inner relationships and has nothing to do with external spatial connections.

In later phases when kamaloca has come to an end, we penetrate into still vaster realms. We expand ever more. When the kamaloca phase draws to a close, man leaves behind him as if removed everything that during his physical existence was the expression of his propensities, longings and desires for earthly life. Man must experience all this but he must also relinquish it in the Moon sphere or kamaloca. As man lives on after death, and later recalls the experiences in the Moon sphere, he will find all his earthly emotions and passions inscribed there, that is, everything that developed in his soul life as a result of his positive attraction to the bodily nature. This is left behind in the Moon sphere and there it remains. It cannot be erased so easily. We carry it with us as an impulse but it remains inscribed in the Moon sphere. The account of the debts, as it were, owing by every person is recorded in the Moon sphere.

As we expand farther we enter a second realm that is called the Mercury sphere in occultism. We shall not represent it diagrammatically, but the Mercury sphere is larger than the Moon sphere. We enter this sphere after death in the most varied ways. It can be accurately investigated by means of spiritual science. A person who in life had an immoral or limited moral disposition lives into the Mercury sphere in a completely different way from one who was morally inclined. In the Mercury sphere the former is unable to find those people who die[d] at the same time, shortly before or after he did, and who are in the spiritual world. He so enters into the spiritual world that he is unable to find the loved ones with whom he longs to be together. People who lack a moral disposition of soul on earth become hermits in the Mercury sphere. The morally inclined person, however, becomes what one might call a sociable being. There he will find above all the people with whom he had a close inner connection on earth. This determines whether one is together with someone. It depends not on spatial relations, for we all fill the same space, but on our soul inclinations. We become hermits when we bring an unmoral disposition with us, and sociable beings, if we possess a moral inclination.

We encounter other difficulties in connection with sociability in the Moon sphere during kamaloca but by and large whether a man becomes a hermit or a sociable being there also depends on the disposition of his soul. A thorough-going egoist on earth, one who only indulged his urges and passions, will not easily find in the Moon sphere the people with whom he was connected on earth. A man who has loved passionately, however, even if it were only physically, will nevertheless not find himself completely alone, but will find other individuals with whom he was connected. In both these spheres it is generally not possible to find human beings apart from those with whom one has been connected on earth. Others remain unknown to us. The condition for meeting other people is that we must have been with them on earth. Whether or not we find ourselves with them depends on the moral factor. Although they lead to a connection with those we have known on earth, even moral strivings will not carry us much farther beyond this realm. Relationships to the people we meet after death are characterized by the fact that they cannot be altered.

We should picture it as follows. During life on earth we always have the possibility of changing a relationship with a fellow man. Let us suppose that over a period of time we have not loved someone as he deserved. The moment we become aware of this we can love him rightly, if we have the strength. We lack this possibility after death. Then when we encounter a person we perceive far more clearly than on earth whether we have loved him too little or unfairly, but we can do nothing to change it. It has to remain as it is. Life connections bear the peculiar quality of a certain constancy. Because they are of a lasting nature, an impulse is formed in the soul by means of which order is brought into karma. If we have loved a person insufficiently over a period of fifteen years, we shall become aware of it after death. It is during our experience of this that we bring about the impulse to act differently in our next incarnation on earth. We thereby create the impulse and the will for karmic compensation. That is the technique of karma.

Above all, we should be clear about one thing. During the early phases of life after death, namely during the Moon and Mercury periods (and also during subsequent periods that will shortly be described), we dwell in the spiritual world in such a way that our spiritual life depends on how we lived on earth in the physical world. It not only is a question of our earthly consciousness. Our unconscious impulses also play a part. In our normal waking state on earth we live in our ego. Below the ego-consciousness lies the astral consciousness, the subconscious sphere. The workings of this sphere are sometimes different from our normal ego-consciousness without our being aware of it.

Let us take an actual example that occurs quite frequently. Two people are on the friendliest of terms with each other. One develops an appreciation for spiritual science while the other, who previously appeared quite complacent towards it, comes to hate spiritual science. This animosity need not pervade the whole soul. It may only be lodged in the person's ego-consciousness, not in his astral consciousness. As far as his astral consciousness is concerned, the person who feeds his animosity still further might in fact have a longing and a love for the spirit of which he is unaware. This is quite possible. There are contradictions of this kind in human nature. If a person investigates his astral consciousness, his subconscious, he might well find a concealed sympathy for what in his waking consciousness he professes to hate. This is of particular importance after death because then, in this respect, man becomes truly himself. A person may have brought himself to hate spiritual science during a lifetime, to reject it and everything connected with it, and yet he may have a love for it in his subconscious. He may have a burning desire for spiritual science. The fact of not knowing and being unable to form thoughts of his memories can result in acute suffering during the period of kamaloca because during the first phase after death man lives mainly in his recollections. His existence is then not only determined by the sorrow and also the joy of what lives in his ego-consciousness. What has developed in the subconscious also plays a part. Thus man becomes truly as he really is.

Here we can see that spiritual science rightly understood is destined to work fruitfully in all spheres of life. A person who has gone through the gate of death is unable to bring about any change in his relation to those around him, and the same is true of the others in relation to him. An immutability in the connections has set in. But a sphere of change does remain that is in the relationship of the dead to the living. Inasmuch as they have had a relationship on earth with those who have died, the living are the only ones who can soothe the pain and alleviate the anguish of those who have gone through the gate of death. In many cases such as these, reading to the dead has proved fruitful.

A person has died. During his lifetime for [one] reason or another he did not concern himself with spiritual science. The one who remains behind on earth can know by means of spiritual science that the deceased has a burning thirst for spiritual science. Now if the one who remains behind concerns himself with thoughts of a spiritual nature as if the dead were there with him, he performs a great service to him. We can actually read to the dead. That enables the gulf that exists between the living and the dead to be bridged. The two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, are severed by materialism. Consider how their union will take hold of life itself! When spiritual science does not remain mere theory but becomes a life impulse as it should, there will not be separation but immediate communication. By reading to the dead we can enter in immediate connection with them and help them. The one who has avoided spiritual science will continue to feel the anguish of longing for it unless we help him. We can assist him from the earth if such a longing is at all present. By this means the living can help the dead.

It also is possible for the dead to be perceived by the living, although in our time the living do little to bring about such connections. Also in this respect spiritual science will take hold of life, will become a true life elixir. To understand in which way the dead can influence the living let us take the following as our starting point. What does man know about the world? Remarkably little if we only consider the things of the physical plane with mere waking consciousness. Man is aware of what happens out there in front of his senses and what he can construe by means of his intellect in relation to these happenings. Of all else he is ignorant. In general he believes that he cannot know anything apart from what he observes by means of sense perception. But there is much else that does not happen and yet is of considerable importance. What does this mean?

Let us assume that we are in the habit of going to work at eight o'clock every morning. On one occasion, however, we are delayed by five minutes. Apart from the fact that we arrive five minutes late nothing unusual has happened apparently. Yet, upon closer consideration of all the elements involved, we might become aware that precisely on that day, if we had left at the correct time we would have been run over. That means that had we left at the right time we would no longer be alive.

Or what is also possible and might have occurred is that a person might have been prevented by a friend from sailing on the Titanic. He might feel that had he sailed he surely would have been drowned! That this was karmically planned is another matter. But do think, when you consider life in this way, of how little you are in fact aware. If nothing of what might have taken place has happened, then you are simply unaware of it. People do not pay attention to the countless possibilities that exist in the world of actual events.

You might say that surely this is of no importance. For the outer events it matters little, yet it is of importance that you were not killed. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we might have known that there was a high probability of being killed. If, for instance, we had not missed the train that was involved in a major accident. One cannot mention all possible cases and yet they happen constantly on a small scale. Certainly, for the external course of events we only need know what can be observed.

Let us assume that we definitely know that something would have happened had we not missed the train. Such a knowledge makes an inner impression on us, and we might say that we have been saved in a remarkable way by good fortune. Consider the many possibilities that confront people. How much richer would our soul lives be if we could know all the things that play into life and yet do not happen! Today people only consider the poverty-stricken sequence of what has actually occurred.

It is as if one were to consider a field with its many ears of wheat and reflect that from it a relatively small number of seeds will be sown. Countless others will not sprout and will go in another direction. What might happen to us is related to what actually occurs as the many grains of wheat that do not sprout are related to those that sprout and carry ears. This is literally so, for the possibilities in life are infinite. Moments in which especially important things for us in the world of probability are taking place are also particularly favorable moments for the dead to draw near. Let us suppose that a person left five minutes early, and as a result his life was preserved. At a particular moment he was saved from an accident, or it might also happen that in such a manner a joyful event escaped him. A dream picture that imparts a message from the dead can enter life at such moments. But people live crudely. As a rule, the finer influences that constantly play into life go unheeded. In this respect, spiritual science refines the feelings and sensations. As a result, man will sense the influence of the dead and will experiences a connection with him. The gulf between the living and the dead is bridged by spiritual science that becomes a true life elixir.

The next sphere after death is the so-called Venus sphere. In this sphere we become hermits if on earth we have had an irreligious disposition. We become sociable spirits if we bring a religious inclination with us. Inasmuch as in the physical world we are able to feel our devotion to the Holy Spirit, so in the Venus sphere shall we find all those of a like inclination towards the divine spiritual. Men are grouped according to religious and philosophic trends in the Venus sphere. On earth it is so that both religious striving and religious experience still play a dominant part. In the Venus sphere the grouping is purely according to religious confession and philosophic outlook. Those who share the same world-conception are together in large, powerful communities in the Venus sphere. They are not hermits. Only those are hermits who have not been able to develop any religious feeling and experience.

For instance, the monists, the materialists of our age, will not be sociable, but lonely beings. Each one will be as if encaged in the Venus sphere. There can be no question of a Monistic Union because by virtue of the monistic conception each member is condemned to loneliness. The fact that each is locked in his cage has not been thought out. It is mentioned so that souls may be brought to an awareness of reality as compared to the fanciful theories of monism that have been elaborated on earth. In general we can say that we come together with those of the same world-conception, of the same faith as ourselves. Other confessions are hard to understand in the Venus sphere.

This is followed by the Sun sphere. Only what bridges the differences between the various religious confessions can help us in the Sun sphere. People do not find it easy to throw bridges from one confession to another because they are so entrenched in their own views. A real understanding for one who thinks and feels differently is particularly difficult. In theory such an understanding is often claimed, but matters are quite different when it is a question of putting theory into practice.

One finds, for instance, that many who belong to the Hindu religion speak of a common kernel in all religions. They in fact, however, only refer to the common kernel of the Hindu and Buddhist religions. The adherents of the Hindu and Buddhist religions speak in terms of a particular egoism. They are caught in a group egoism.

One might insert here a beautiful Estonian legend about group egoism that tells of the origin of languages. God wished to bestow the gift of language on humanity by means of fire. A great fire was to be kindled and the different languages were to come about by having men listen to the peculiarities of the sounds of the fire. So the Godhead called all the peoples of the earth to assemble so that each might learn its language. Prior to the gathering, however, God gave preference to the Estonians and taught them the divine-spiritual language, a loftier mode of speech. Then the others drew near and were allowed to listen to how the fire was burning, and as they heard it they learned to understand the various sounds. Certain peoples preferred by the Estonians came first when the fire was still burning quite strongly. When the fire was reaching its end the Germans had their turn, for the Estonians are not particularly fond of the Germans. In the feebly crackling fire one heard, “Deitsch, peitsch; deitsch, peitsch” (German, whip). Then followed the Lapps of whom the Estonians are even less fond. One only heard, “Lappen latchen” (Lapp, lash). By that time the fire was reduced to mere ashes, and the Lapps, brought forth the worst language of all because the Estonians and the Lapps are deadly enemies. Such is the extent of the Estonians' group egoism.

A similar group egoism is true of most peoples when they speak of penetrating to the essential core common to all religious creeds. In this respect, Christianity is absolutely not the same as all the other creeds. If, for example, the attitude in the West was comparable to that toward the Hindu religion, then old Wotan still would reign as a national god. The West has not acknowledged a ruling divinity to be found within its own area, but one outside it. That is an important difference between it and the Hinduism and Buddhism. In many respects, Western Christianity is not permeated by religious egoism. Religiously it is more selfless than the Eastern religions. This is also the reason why a true knowledge and experience of the Christ impulse can bring man to a right connection with his fellow men, irrespective of the confessions they acknowledge.

In the Sun sphere between death and rebirth it is really a matter of an understanding that enables us not only to come together with those of a like confession, but also to form a relationship with mankind as a whole. If sufficiently broadly understood in its connection with the Old Testament religion, Christianity is not one-sided. Attention has been drawn previously to something of considerable importance that should be recognized. You will recall that one of the most beautiful sayings of Christ, “Ye are Gods,” is reminiscent of the Old Testament. Christ points to the fact that a divine spark, a god dwells in every human being. You are all Gods; you will be on a par with the Gods.

It is a lofty teaching of Christ that points man to his divine nature, that he can become like God. You can become God-like, a wonderful and deeply moving teaching of Christ! Another being has used the same words, and it is indicative of the Christian faith that another being has done so. At the opening of the Old Testament Lucifer approaches man. He takes his starting point—and therein lies the temptation—with the words, “You shall be as Gods.” Lucifer at the beginning of the temptation in Paradise and later Christ Jesus use the same words! We touch here upon one of the deepest and most important aspects of Christianity because this indicates that it is not merely a matter of the content of the words, but of which being in the cosmic context utters them. In the last Mystery Drama it had to be shown that the same words have a totally different meaning according to whether spoke by Lucifer, Ahriman or the Christ. We touch here upon a deep cosmic mystery, and it is important that we should develop an understanding for the words, “Ye are Gods” and “Ye shall be as Gods,” uttered on one occasion by the Christ, on the other by Lucifer.

We must consider that between death and rebirth we also dwell in the Sun sphere where a thorough understanding of the Christ impulse is essential. We must bring this understanding along with us from the earth, for Christ once did dwell in the Sun but, as we know, He descended from the Sun and united Himself with the earth. We have to carry Him up to the Sun period, and then we can become sociable beings through the Christ impulse and learn to understand Him in the sphere of the Sun.

We must learn to discriminate between Christ and Lucifer, and in our time this is only possible by means of anthroposophy. The understanding of Christ that we bring with us from the earth leads us as far as the Sun sphere. There it acts as a guide, so to speak, from man to man, irrespective of creed or confession. But we encounter another being in the Sun sphere who utters words that have virtually the same content. That being is Lucifer. We must have acquired on earth an understanding of the difference between Christ and Lucifer, for Lucifer is now to accompany us through the further spheres between death and rebirth.

So you see, we go through the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Sun spheres. In each sphere we meet, to begin with, what corresponds to the inner forces that we bring with us. Our emotions, urges, passions, sensual love, unite us to the Moon sphere. In the Mercury sphere we meet everything that is due to our moral imperfections; in the Venus sphere all our religious shortcomings; in the Sun sphere, everything that severs us from the purely human.

Now we proceed to other spheres that the occultists terms the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Here Lucifer is our guide and we enter into a realm that bestows new forces upon us. Just as here we have the earth below us, so there in the cosmos we have the Sun below us. We grow into the divine-spiritual world, and as we do so we must hold fast in memory what we have brought with us of the Christ impulse. We can only acquire this on earth and the more deeply we have done so, the farther we can carry it into the cosmos. Now Lucifer draws near to us. He leads us out into a realm we must cross in order to be prepared for a new incarnation. There is one thing we cannot dispense with unless Lucifer is to become a threat to us, and that is the understanding of the Christ impulse, of what we have heard about Christ during our life on earth. Lucifer approaches us out of his own accord during the period between birth and death, but Christ must be received during earthly life.

We then grow into the other spheres beyond the Sun. We become ever larger, so to speak. Below us we have the Sun and above, the mighty, vast expanse of the Starry heavens. We grow into the great cosmic realm up to a certain boundary, and as we grow outward cosmic forces work upon us from all directions. We receive forces from the mighty world of the stars into our widespread being.

We reach a boundary, then we begin to contract and enter again into the realms through which we have traveled previously. We go through the Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon spheres until we come again into the neighborhood of the earth and everything that has been carried out in the cosmic expanse has concentrated itself again in an embryo borne by an earthly mother.

This is the mystery of man's nature between death and a new birth. After he has gone through the gate of death he expands ever more from the small space of the earth to the realms of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. We have then grown into cosmic space, like giant spheres. After we as souls have received the forces of the universe, of the stars, we contract again and carry the forces of the starry world within us. This explains out of spiritual science how in the concentrated brain structure an imprint of the total starry heavens may be found. In fact, our brain does contain an important secret.

We have yet another mystery. Man has gathered himself together, incarnated in a physical body to which he comes by way of his parents. He has journeyed so far during his expansion in cosmic space that he has recorded his particular characteristics there. As we gaze from the earth upward to the heavens, there are not only stars but also our characteristics from previous incarnations. If, for instance, we were ambitious in previous earth lives, then this ambition is recorded in the starry world. It is recorded in the Akasha Chronicle, and when you are here on the earth at a particular spot, this ambition comes to you with the corresponding planet in a certain position and makes its influence felt.

That accounts for the fact that astrologers do not merely consider the stars and their motions but will tell you that here is your vanity, there is your ambition, your moral failing, your indolence; something you have inscribed into the stars is now working out of the starry worlds onto the earth and determines your destiny. What lives in our souls is recorded in the vastness of space and it works back from space during our life on earth as we journey here between birth and death. If we truly understand them, these matters touch us closely, and they enable us to explain many things.

I have concerned myself a great deal with Homer. Last summer during my investigations into the conditions between death and rebirth I came upon the immutability of the connections after death. Here, in a particular passage, I had to say to myself that the Greeks called Homer the blind poet because he was such a great seer. Homer mentions that life after death takes place in a land where there is no change. A wonderfully apt description! One only learns to understand this through the occult mysteries. The more one strives in this direction, the more one realizes that the ancient poets were the greatest seers and that much that is secretly interwoven in their works requires a considerable amount of understanding.

I would like to mention something that happened to me last autumn and which is quite characteristic. At first, I resisted it because it was so astonishing, but it is one of those cases where objectivity wins. In Florence we find the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici by Michelangelo. The two brothers are portrayed together with four allegorical figures. These figures are well known, but at a first visit it occurred to me that something was not quite right with this group. It was clear to me that the one described as Giuliano is Lorenzo, and vice versa. The figures, which can be removed, had obviously been interchanged on some occasion and it has gone unheeded. That is why the statue of Giuliano is said to be that of Lorenzo, and vice versa. But I am really concerned here with the four allegorical figures.

Let us first deal with this wonderful statue, “Night.” It cannot be understood simply in terms of an allegory. If, however, knowing about the etheric body and imagining it in its full activity, one were to ask, “What is the most characteristic gesture corresponding to the etheric body when it is free from the astral body and ego?” the answer would be the gesture as given by Michelangelo in “Night.” In fact, “Night” is so molded that it gives a perfect representation of the free, independent etheric body, expressed by means of the forms of the physical body when the astral body and ego are outside it. This figure is not an allegory, but represents the combination of the physical and etheric bodies when the astral body and ego are outside them. Then one understands the position of the figure. It is historically the truest expression of the vitality of the etheric body.

One comes to see the figure of “Day” as the expression of the ego when it is most active and least influenced by the astral, etheric and physical bodies. This is portrayed in the strange gesture and position of Michelangelo's “Day.” We obtain the gesture of the figure “Dawn” when the astral body is active, independent from the physical and etheric bodies and the ego, and of “Dusk” when the physical body is active without the other three members.

I struggled long against this piece of knowledge and to begin with thought it quite absurd; yet the more one gets into it, the more it compels one to recognize the truth of the script contained in these sculptures. It is not that Michelangelo was conscious of it. It sprang from his intuitive creative power. One also understands the meaning of the legend that tells that when Michelangelo was alone in his studio, the figure “Night” became endowed with life, and would move around freely. It is a special illustration of the fact that one is dealing with the etheric body. The spirit works into everything in art as in the evolution of humanity. One learns to understand the world of the senses only if one grasps how the spirit works into sensible reality.

There is a beautiful saying by Kant. He says, “There are two things that have made a specially deep impression on me, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” It is particularly impressive when we realize that both are really one and the same. Between death and rebirth we are spread out over the starry realms and receive their forces into ourselves, and during our life in a physical body the forces we have gathered are active within us as moral impulses. Looking up to the starry heavens we may say that we dwell among the forces that are active out there during the period between death and rebirth. This now becomes the guiding principle of our moral life. The starry heavens outside the moral law within are one and the same reality. They constitute two sides of that reality. We experience the starry realms between death and rebirth, the moral law between birth and death.

When we grasp this, spiritual science grows into a mighty prayer. For what is a prayer but that which links our soul with the divine-spiritual permeating the world. We must make it our own as we go through the experiences of the world of the senses. Inasmuch as we strive consciously towards this goal, what we learn becomes a prayer of its own accord. Here spiritual knowledge is transformed immediately into feeling and experience, and that is how it should be. However much spiritual science might work with concepts and ideas, they will nevertheless be transformed into pure sensations and prayer-like feelings. That is what our present time requires. Our time needs to experience the cosmos by living into a consideration of the spirit in which the study itself takes on the nature of a prayer. Whereas the study of the external physical world becomes ever more dry, scholarly and abstract, the study of spiritual life will become more heartfelt and deeper. It will take on the quality of prayer, not in a one-sided sentimental sense but by virtue of its own nature. Then man will not know merely as a result of abstract ideas and the divine that permeates the universe is also in him. He will realize as he advances in knowledge that he truly has experienced it during life between the last death and a new birth. He will know that what he experienced then is now in him as the inner riches of his life.

Such considerations, related as they are to recent research, help us to gain an understanding of our own development. Then spiritual science will be abler to transform itself into a true spiritual life blood. We shall often speak further about these matters in the future.

For his present life on Earth man is beholden partly to the external world, including in the wider sense not only the several kingdoms of Nature immediately around him but also the influences coming from the stars and the cosmic expanse. But this is only one part of the world to which he is beholden for his present earthly life. He is beholden above all to his previous lives on Earth, the results and effects of which he brings with him inwardly. As you know from anthroposophical literature, man is a fourfold being. Every time he goes to sleep his astral body and ‘I’ separate from his physical and etheric bodies. Of these members only the physical and etheric bodies owe their character and composition to the external world lying visibly—or also, as etheric world, invisibly—around man. On the other hand, everything that he bears within him in his astral body and Ego in his present earthly existence, he owes entirely to what he experienced in the past, in earlier lives on Earth.

In the outer physical world there are two portals, two gates, through which the life of man, taken in its entirety, reaches out beyond this world. We will begin to-day by considering this cosmic aspect and conclude with a study very directly concerned with human life. For inhabitants of the Earth, these two gates are the Moon and the Sun.

The fact is that modern science knows very little indeed about the heavenly bodies—actually only what can be determined by calculation or observed by means of instruments. Just think what an inhabitant of Mars would know about the Earth if, from Mars or from some other star, he were to acquire his knowledge by employing the same methods as those employed by the inhabitants of the Earth! He would know no more than that the Earth is a luminous body radiating into cosmic space the light it reflects from the Sun. He might form all kinds of hypotheses, just as men do about Mars—as to whether beings do or do not exist on the Earth. But an inhabitant of the Earth knows that beings of his own rank and beings of other kingdoms share his dwelling-place; and those whose knowledge is derived from the inner, spiritual destinies of earthly humanity, will be able to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of the other heavenly bodies, for example, of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us think about what may be said of this physical, psychic and spiritual aspect of Moon existence. I must here remind you of many things to be found in the book Occult Science—an Outline, and in several of the printed lecture-courses. From this literature you know that the Moon was once united with the Earth. It is accepted by orthodox modern science, at any rate by its most important representatives, that the physical Moon once separated from the Earth and, if I may put it so, chose its own position in cosmic space.

But Spiritual Science discloses that not only did the physical Moon separate from the Earth but that certain Beings went with it, Beings who had once inhabited the Earth together with men. They were of a much higher spiritual rank than man in his physical embodiment; but they were in close intercourse with men, although this intercourse was altogether different from the relationships between human beings to-day.

Anyone who devotes even cursory study to the early history of the Earth and its spiritual achievements will feel deep reverence for the different civilisations. Certainly, our forefathers—that is to say, we ourselves in earlier incarnations—were not as ‘clever’ in the modern sense as we imagine ourselves to be to-day, but in point of fact they knew a great deal more. Knowledge, after all, is not acquired through cleverness only. Cleverness comes from intellect, and intellect is only one of the human faculties, although nowadays it is prized, especially by science, more highly than all the others. Yet when we see how the world has developed in a moral and social respect in this enlightened twentieth century, there is really no cause to be so very proud of our intellectual culture—which has come into being only in the course of time. Even if with no other aid than external history we go back and consider, for example, what originates from the ancient East, we cannot but feel great reverence. The same may apply even to certain achievements of so-called ‘uncivilised’ peoples, but we will think now only of ancient India and Persia, of the wonderful wisdom contained in the Vedas, in Vedanta or Yoga philosophy. If we let these things work upon us, not superficially but with all their deep intensity we shall feel an ever-increasing reverence for what past ages created—not through cleverness as we know it, but in a quite different way.

Spiritual Science makes it clear that what has been preserved in documentary records is only the residue of a wonderful, primeval wisdom of mankind. It was expressed in a much more poetic, artistic language than is used for our modern knowledge, but it was nevertheless wonderful wisdom, imparted to men by Beings at a stage of evolution far higher than that of humanity on Earth. Intellectual thinking takes place, after all, through the instrumentality of the physical body, and these Beings had no physical body. This accounts for the fact that they conveyed their primordial wisdom to mankind in an essentially poetic, artistic form.

These Beings did not remain with the Earth; the majority of them to-day actually inhabit the Moon in the heavens. What modern science can discover has to do only with the external properties of the Moon. The Moon is in truth the home of lofty spiritual Beings whose task once was to inspire earthly humanity with the primeval wisdom. They then withdrew to establish this Moon colony in the Cosmos. It is clear from what I have said about these Beings who now inhabit the Moon that our own human past is connected with them. In earlier lives we were their terrestrial companions. And our connection with them is immediately evident if we look beyond what external knowledge and external life can give to man. When we contemplate all the factors by which our existence is determined, which are not, however, dependent upon our intellect but transcend the intellect and are related to our deeper nature, we realise that these Moon Beings, although they no longer have their habitation on the Earth, are still deeply and inwardly connected with our very existence. For before descending to the Earth and receiving a physical body from our forefathers, we were in the spiritual world, in pre-earthly life; and there, even to-day, we are in close contact with these Beings who were our companions in Earth existence long ages ago. When we come down from the spiritual worlds into earthly existence, we pass through the Moon sphere, through the Moon existence. Once upon a time, when these Moon Beings were on the Earth, they had a profound effect upon mankind, and it is still so to-day, inasmuch as they impress into the descending Ego and astral body what is then carried over into the physical body on Earth.

Nobody can himself decide to be a man of talent, or a genius, or even a good man. Yet there are men of talent and genius and some who are innately good. These are qualities which the intellect cannot produce; they are connected with man's inmost nature, a great part of which comes with him when he passes from pre-earthly existence through birth into earthly life. To impress into his Ego and astral body what then makes its way into his nerves and blood as genius or talent or the will to do good or evil—this is the task of the Moon Beings during the time when in a man's pre-earthly existence he is passing through the Moon sphere. It is not only when, in poetic mood, lovers go walking in the moonlight that the Moon has an effect upon what is living and weaving in the deeper part of man's nature below the level of consciousness; this Moon influence is active in everything that rises from a level below that of the conscious intellect and makes man what he really is in earthly life. And so to-day these Moon Beings are still connected with our past, inasmuch as it is they who after our earlier incarnations give us in pre-earthly existence the stamp of individuality.

If we look back over our life to the point where it runs out beyond the earthly realm into the spiritual, whence our particular faculties, our temperament, our inmost, essential character, are derived, we find in the Moon the one gate which leads from the physical into the spiritual world. It is the gate through which the past makes its way into our life and gives us individuality.

The other gate is the Sun. We do not owe our individuality to the Sun. The Sun shines alike on the good and on the evil, on men of genius and on fools. As far as earthly life is concerned the Sun has no direct connection with our individuality. In one instance only has the Sun established connection with earthly individuality and this was possible because at a certain point of time in the Earth's evolution, a sublime Sun Being, the Christ, did not remain on the Sun but came down from the Sun to the Earth and became a Being of the Earth in the body of a man, thus uniting His own cosmic destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity. The other Sun Beings who remained in the Sun sphere have no access to the single human individuality but only to what is common to all mankind. Something of this remained in the Christ and is an infinite blessing for earthly humanity: what had remained in Him was and is that His power knows no differentiation among men. Christ is not the Christ of this or that nation, of this or that rank or class. He is the Christ for all men, without distinction of class, race or nation. Nor is He the Christ of particular individualities, inasmuch as His help is available alike to the genius and the fool. The Christ Impulse has access to the individuality of man, but to become effective it must take effect in the inmost depths of human nature. It is not the forces of the intellect but the deepest forces of the heart and soul which can receive the Christ Impulse; but once received this Impulse works not for the benefit of the individual-human but of the universal-human. This is because Christ is a Sun Being.

Looking back into the past we feel ourselves connected with the Moon existence and realise that we bear within us something not derived from the present but from the cosmic past—not merely from the earthly past. In our present Earth existence we unite this fragment of the past with the present. We do not, in the ordinary way, pay much attention to what is contained in this fragment of the past; but in point of fact we should not be of much account as human beings if it were not there within us. What we acquire at the time of descending from pre-earthly into earthly existence has something automatic about it—the automatic element in our physical and etheric bodies. What makes us into particular human individuals is inwardly connected with our past and thus with the Moon existence. But just as we are connected with the past through our Moon existence, so are we connected with our future through the Sun existence. We were ready for the Moon forces, especially in relation to the Beings who have withdrawn to the Moon, even in earlier times; for the Sun which works to-day as an impulse in the sphere of the universal-human only, we shall not be ready until a very distant future, when evolution has reached a much more advanced stage. The Sun to-day can reach only to our external being; not until distant future ages will it be able to reach our individuality, the inmost core of our being. When the Earth is no longer Earth, when it has passed into quite another metamorphosis, then and then only shall we be ready for the Sun existence. Man is so proud of his intellect—but the intellect in present humanity is purely a product of the Earth, since it is tied to the brain, and the brain—despite current belief—is the most physical structure in the human organism.

The Sun is perpetually wresting us away from this bondage to the earthly, for the Sun does not in reality work upon our brain ... if it did, we should produce much cleverer thoughts! From the physical aspect the Sun's influence is exerted on the heart, and what streams out from the heart is Sun-activity. Through the brain men are essentially egotistic, through the heart they become free from egoism and rise to the level of the universal-human. Thus through the Sun we are more than we should be if we were left to our own resources in our present Earth existence. Let me put it like this: if we can really find our way to the Christ, He enables us, because He is a Sun Being, to be more than we could otherwise be.

The Sun stands in the heavens personifying the future, whereas the Moon personifies the past. The Sun is the other gate into the spiritual world, the gate leading to the future. Just as we are impelled into earthly existence by the Moon Beings and Moon forces, so, through death, we are impelled out of it by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are connected with that part of our nature of which we are not yet master, which the gods have given us so that we may not wilt in earthly life but reach out beyond our own limitations. And so Moon and Sun are in truth the two gates in the universe into the spiritual life. The Moon is inhabited by Beings with whom we were once connected in the way I have indicated. The Sun is inhabited by Beings with whom—with the exception of the Christ—we shall be united only in our future cosmic existence. The Christ will lead us to those who were once His companions on the Sun. But this, as far as man is concerned, belongs to the future.

We have said that the influences of the Moon work upon us from the spiritual world; the same is true of the influences working from the Sun upon our physical and etheric bodies. Think, for example, of the temperaments. There are forces in the temperaments which play into the physical body, but more particularly into the etheric body. This is regulated by the interplay of Sun and Moon. A man with a strong vein of melancholy in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Moon. Similarly, a man with a markedly sanguine vein in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Sun. A man in whom the quality of Sun and Moon are in balance and neutralised, will be a phlegmatic type. When the physical element as such plays into a man and comes to expression in the life of soul, as in the temperaments, the Sun and Moon forces are in play in the whole of his being. But to begin with, man is aware of these forces only when they confront him in their external, physical manifestation, when the Moon—and similarly the Sun—announces its presence through the orb that is outwardly visible. Yet forces far transcending the physical are taking effect; we must always speak of the Sun and Moon as spiritual realities. And that is easy enough to realise.

Think of a human body. This body to-day no longer has within it the same substances as it had ten years ago. You are perpetually casting off these physical substances and replacing them by new. What endures is the spiritual form of man, the configuration of inner forces. Suppose you had been sitting in this room ten years ago; you do not bring with you now the flesh and blood that were within you then as material substance. The physical is involved in a perpetual stream from within outwards; it is being cast off all the time. Although this is a known fact it is not always remembered. It is a fact in the Cosmos too. People think that the Moon which shines down upon the Earth to-day is the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or Buddha. Spiritually, yes, it is the same Moon, but not in respect of physical substance. As for the Sun, the physicists and astrophysicists calculate how long it will be before it disintegrates in cosmic space. They know that it will disintegrate but they reckon in terms of millions of years. The same kind of results would be obtained if such calculations were applied to the human being. The calculations are absolutely correct and cannot be faulted—only they are not true! They are dead correct, but just think of this—if you examined a human heart today, then five days later and then again after a further five days, you could calculate from the minute changes what it was like three hundred years ago and what it will be like three hundred years hence. In the same way geology can calculate what the Earth looked like twenty million years ago and what it will look like twenty million years hence. The calculations may be perfectly correct, but the Earth was not in existence twenty million years ago and will not be in existence twenty million years from now. The calculations themselves are correct but they are not true! Not even for the shortest periods does the Cosmos differ from man in this respect. Although mineral substances last essentially longer in that form than the configuration of substance in living bodies, yet even the purely physical part of mineral substances is transient. As I have said, the Moon in the sky to-day is in its physical composition no longer the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or the Emperor Augustus, for its substance has changed, just as the substance of a man's physical body has changed. What endures out there in the Cosmos is the spiritual element, just as in the case of a human being what endures from birth to death is the spiritual entity, not the physical substance.

We shall therefore only be viewing the world rightly when we say of man that what endures between birth and death is his soul; what endures out yonder in the celestial bodies is a multiplicity of Beings. And when speaking of Moon and Sun we ought to be conscious that if we are to speak truly we must speak of Beings of the Moon and Beings of the Sun. The Beings of the Moon are connected with our past; the Beings of the Sun will be connected with our future, but even now they work into our present existence.

A sound basis for the study of human karma and destiny can be established only when man is given his real place within the Cosmos.

Try as we will, we can never alter the past. For this reason, in the Moon forces as they work into and lay hold of our human nature there is an element of immutable necessity. Everything that comes to us from the Moon has this character. In whatever comes from the Sun and points to the future, there is something in which our will, our freedom, can be a factor. So that we can say: when man again apprehends the Divine in the Cosmos, and instead of vague, sentimental generalisations is able to speak with precision and definition about the Divine as revealed in the several heavenly bodies, a special kind of language will take shape within him when he contemplates the heavenly bodies with heart-knowledge and true human understanding.

Now suppose a human being were standing in front of us and looking at his hands or his arms, his head, his chest, his legs, his feet, we were to ask in each case, ‘what is that?,’ and were told in reply, ‘that is something human.’ When no distinctions are made but everything is labelled with the generalisation ‘human,’ we are without bearings or direction. The same is true if we gaze out into the Cosmos, contemplate the Sun and Moon and the stars and speak of the Divine as a generalisation. We must acquire a definite, concretely real view of the Divine. And this we do when we recognise, for example, the deep connection of the Moon with our own past, indeed with the past of the whole Earth. Then, when we look at the Moon in the heavens, we can say: “Thou cosmic offspring of Necessity, when I contemplate that within me over which my will has no sway, I feel inwardly united with thee.” Our knowledge of the Moon then becomes feeling, for we realise that every experience arising perceptibly out of inner necessity is connected with the Moon.

If in the same way we contemplate the inmost nature of the Sun, not merely making calculations or observing it through instruments, we shall feel its kinship with everything that lives in us as freedom, with everything that we ourselves can achieve for the benefit of the future.

Such experiences would enable us to find a link with the instinctive wisdom of primeval humanity. For we cannot rightly understand what radiates with such poetic beauty from ancient civilisations unless we can still feel, when we gaze at the Moon, that there we are glimpsing the past with its element of necessity and when we gaze at the Sun that there we are glimpsing the freedom belonging to the future.

Necessity and freedom interweave in our destiny. In terms of the terrestrial and human we speak of Necessity and Freedom; in terms of the heavenly and cosmic we speak of Moon existence and Sun existence.

Now let us try to discover how the forces of the Sun and Moon work in the web of our destiny. We meet some human being. As a rule the fact that we have met him is enough in itself; we accept life as it comes without being very observant or giving it much thought. But deeper scrutiny of individual human life reveals that when two persons meet, their paths have been guided in a remarkable way. Think of two individuals, one aged twenty-five and the other aged twenty, who meet; they can look back over the course of their lives hitherto and it will be evident to each of them that every single happening in the life of the one, say the twenty-year-old, had impelled him from quite a different part of the world to this meeting, at this particular place, with the other. The same will be true of the twenty-five-year-old. In the forming of destiny very much depends upon the fact that human beings, starting from different parts of the world, meet as though guided by an iron necessity directly to the meeting-point. No thought is given to the wonders that can be revealed by studies of this kind but human life is infinitely enriched by insight into such situations and impoverished without it. If we begin to think about our relationship to some human being whom we seem to have met quite by accident, we shall have to say to ourselves that we had been looking for him, seeking for him, ever since we were born into this earthly existence ... and as a matter of fact, even before then. But I do not want to go into that at the moment. We need only remind ourselves that we should not have come across this individual if at some earlier point in earthly life we had taken only a slightly different direction to the left or to the right and had not gone the way we did. As I said, people do not give any thought to these matters. But it is sheer arrogance to believe that something to which one pays no attention is non-existent. It is a fact and will eventually reveal itself to observation. There is, however, a significant difference between what takes place before the actual meeting of two individuals and what takes place from that moment onwards. Before they met in earthly life, they had influenced each other without having any knowledge of the other's existence. After the meeting the mutual influence continues, but now they know each other. And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant.

Naturally, we also meet many individuals in life for whom we have not been seeking. I will not say that we meet a great many people of whom we might think that it would have been better not to have done so! I am not suggesting any such thing ... but at all events we do meet many individuals of whom we cannot say that we have deliberately set out to find them.

If what I have now been saying is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, it becomes clear that what has been in operation between two human beings before they actually meet in earthly life is determined by the Moon, whereas everything that takes place between them after their meeting is determined by the Sun. Hence what occurs between two human beings before they become acquainted can only be regarded as the outcome of iron necessity and what happens afterwards as the expression of freedom, of mutually free relationship and behaviour. It is indeed true that when we get to know a human being our soul subconsciously looks back and forward: back to the spiritual Moon, forward to the spiritual Sun. And with this is connected the weaving of our karma, our destiny.

Very few people today have faculties for perceiving these things. But it is precisely because these faculties are beginning to develop that so much in our age is in a state of ferment. The faculties are already present in numbers of human beings, only they are unaware of it and ascribe the effects to all kinds of other causes. In reality these faculties of perception are striving to function so that when human beings become acquainted with one another they may realise how much is due to iron necessity, to the forces of the Moon, and how their relationship will go forward in the light of the Sun, in the light of freedom. To experience destiny in this way is itself part of the cosmic destiny of humanity today and on into the future. When we meet a human being in the world we can distinguish quite clearly between two kinds of relationship. In the case of one individual the relationship proceeds from the will, in the case of another, it proceeds more or less from the intellect, or even from the aesthetic sense.

Think of the subtle differences in the relationships between human beings even in childhood or youth. We may love an individual or perhaps we hate him. If our feelings do not reach this intensity, we shall feel sympathy or antipathy; our feelings in this case do not go very deep—we just pass him by or let him pass us by. It cannot be denied that this was how we felt about most of our teachers at school; and we should count ourselves fortunate if it was not so.

But a quite different kind of relationship is possible, even in childhood. It is when we are so inwardly affected by what we see a person do, that we say: we must do it too! The relationship between us makes us choose him as a hero, as one we must follow on the path to Olympus. In short, some human beings have an effect upon our intellect, or at best upon our aesthetic sympathy or antipathy; and others have a direct effect upon our will.

Or think of the other side of life. External circumstances may bring us into very close contact with certain individuals—yet we simply cannot dream about them. We may meet others only once, yet we never seem to be free of them, we are always dreaming about them. If a more intimate association is not vouchsafed to us in this present earthly life, this will have to be reserved for other incarnations. However that may be, our relationship to a human being is deeper if, as soon as we meet him, we begin to dream about him.

There is also a sort of waking dreaming, which in the case of most people to-day lacks clear definition. But as you know, there are also initiated human beings who experience life very differently. If we meet an individual who makes an impression upon our will, he will also have an effect upon our ‘inner speech:’ he will not only speak when he is face to face with us; he will also speak out of us. If we are initiated into the secret of cosmic existence we shall know that there is a double relationship between individuals when they meet: we may meet one person to whom we shall listen, and then go on our way; we need never listen to him any more. Others we may meet to whom we shall listen, but when we go away from them they still seem to be speaking—but out of our own inner being: they are there and they really do seem to speak in this way.

What happens in the case of an Initiate is as I have just described: he actually carries within him, in the very quality of his voice, those who have made this impression on him. In those who are not initiated this also takes place, but only in the realm of feeling; it is there all the same, but subconsciously. Let us suppose that we meet an individual and then come across other people who know him as well and will remark what a splendid fellow he is. This means that they have thought about the man and have formed a judgement based on the intellect. But we do not call everyone we meet a splendid fellow or a cad, as the case may be; there are individuals who have an effect upon our will—which as I have said, leads a kind of sleeping existence within us during our waking life. The effect is that we feel we simply must follow or oppose them. In one who is not initiated, these individuals, even if they do not speak within him, live in his will. What then exactly is the difference between these two kinds of relationship?

When we meet other human beings who have no effect upon our will, but of whom we do no more than form a judgement, then there is no strong karmic connection between us; we have had little to do with them in earlier earthly lives. Individuals who affect our very will, so that they seem to be always with us, whose form is so strongly impressed upon us that they are always in our thoughts, so that we dream of them even in our waking life—these are the individuals with whom we have had a great deal to do in our past earthly lives, with whom we are as it were cosmically connected through the gate of the Moon; whereas in our present life we are connected through the Sun with everything that lives in us without any element of the necessity belonging to Moon existence.

Thus is destiny woven. On the one side man has his isolated ‘head-existence’ which has considerable independence. Even physically this head-existence raises itself all the time above the general conditions of man's cosmic existence, and in the following way—the brain weighs on average 1,500 grammes, and with this weight it would crush all the underlying blood vessels. Just think of it—a weight of 1,500 grammes pressing on those delicate blood vessels! But this does not happen. Why not? Simply because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. If you have learnt any physics, you will know that a body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water it displaces—this is the so-called principle of Archimedes. The actual weight of the brain is therefore about 20 grammes, because the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. Hence the brain in the body presses with a weight of only 20 grammes—certainly not with its actual weight of 1,500 grammes. The brain is isolated and has its own existence.

As we go about the world, the brain is like a man sitting in his motor-car. The man himself does not move; the car moves and he sits still. And our brain as the bearer of intellect has an isolated existence. That is why the intellect is so independent of our individuality. If each of us had our own separate and distinct intellect this would augur badly for any mutual understanding! We are able to understand one another only because we all possess the same principle of intellect, although naturally there are differences of degree. But intellect is a universal principle. Human beings can understand one another through the intellect which is independent of their individual qualities. Whatever appears in human destiny as something belonging to the immediate Present—such as the meeting of two people—works upon the intellect and impulses of feeling associated with the intellect. In these cases we speak of someone as a ‘splendid fellow’ in whom we have no further interest than that he has had an effect upon our intellect. Everything that is not part of our karma has an effect upon the intellect; everything that is part of our karma and links us with other human beings as a result of experiences once shared with the individuals we now meet—all this works through those depths of human nature which lie in the will. And so it is true that the will is working even before we actually meet a human being with whom we are karmically connected. The will is not always illumined by the intellect. Just think how much in the working of the will is shrouded in darkness! The karma which leads two human beings together is shrouded in the deepest obscurity of all; they become dimly aware that karma is working from the way in which their wills are involved. The moment they come face to face the intellect begins to work; and what is then woven by the intellect can become the basis for future karma. But in essentials—not wholly, but in essentials—it would be true to say that for two human beings who are karmically connected, their karma has worked itself out when the meeting has taken place. Only what they may do after that as a continuation of what lives in the unconscious—that and that alone becomes part of the stream of future karma. But a great deal is then woven into their destiny which has an effect only on the intellect and its sympathies and antipathies. Past and Future, Moon existence and Sun existence are here intermingled. The thread of karma that reaches into the past is interwoven with the thread that reaches into the future.

We can actually gaze into cosmic existence. For if we watch the Sun rising in the morning and look at the Moon at night, we can glimpse in their mutual relationships a picture of how Necessity and Freedom are interwoven in our own destiny. And if, with a concrete idea of the mingling of Necessity and Freedom in human destiny, we again contemplate the Sun and the Moon, they will begin to unveil their spirituality to us. Then we shall not speak like the unwitting physicists who when they look at the Moon merely say that it reflects the light of the Sun ... but when we see this light of the Moon which is the same as the light of the Sun, we shall rather speak of the weaving of cosmic destiny.

Thus contemplation of our own human destiny leads to a conception of cosmic destiny. Then and only then are we able in the real sense to knit our human existence with cosmic existence. Man must learn to feel himself a living member of the Cosmos. Just as a finger is a finger only while it is actually part of a human body—if it is amputated it is no longer really a finger—so man himself has real being only inasmuch as he is part of the Cosmos. But man is arrogant, and the finger would probably be humbler if it had the same kind of consciousness. ... Yet perhaps it would no longer be humble if it could at any moment tear itself free and move around the body... although it would have to remain in the sphere of a human being in order to remain a finger at all! And man, as earthly man, must remain in the Earth-sphere if he is to be man. He is a quite different being, he is a being of eternity when he is outside the Earth-sphere, either in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence. But again, we can gain knowledge of these spheres of existence only when we recognise that we ourselves are members of the Universe. This recognition will never be achieved by fanciful speculation about our connection with the Universe, but only when, as we have tried to do to-day, we learn gradually to feel its concrete reality. Then we feel that our destiny is in very truth an image of the world of stars, of the Sun-nature and the Moon-nature. We learn to look out into the Universe and read the scroll of our human life from the life of the great Universe. Again, we learn to look into our own soul and to understand the world through it. For nobody understands the Moon who does not understand the element of Necessity in human destiny; nobody understands the Sun who does not understand the element of Freedom in human nature. Such are the interconnections of Necessity and Freedom.

At the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum we tried to give the impulses which would help us to make these facts of true esoteric perception still more effective in the years to come. And I hope that our Members will become more and more conscious of what took place at Christmas. I would like particularly to draw your attention to the fact that every Member can now receive the News Sheet. Through this News Sheet and many other developments in the Anthroposophical Society, the whole Society should in future be able to share in that quickening life which can flow from Anthroposophy. The isolation which has hitherto existed between the Groups must as far as possible come to an end. The Anthroposophical Society can become a real whole only when those who are members of a Group in New Zealand know what is going on in a Group in Berne, and members of a Berne Group know what is going on in New Zealand or New York or Vienna. This should now be possible. And one of the many things we are doing, or at least that we want to do in connection with the Christmas Meeting is to make this News Sheet a medium for all anthroposophical work in the world. It will be necessary to pay some attention to the News Sheet, and then everyone will realise what he can do to promote its aims.

While I am speaking here the third number of the News Sheet is being issued in Dornach; in it I have shown how every Member can co-operate in making it a genuine reflection of anthroposophical achievements. Only because I believe that to this end it is necessary for Anthroposophy to be cultivated more intensively within the Society—I do not mean in the sense of more content, but with greater intensity, greater enthusiasm, greater love—only for these reasons, although in the ordinary way I should have every right at my age, to retire, I have decided, after having given up the personal leadership of the Society in 1912, to begin again and to imagine that I have regained my youth and am capable of the work. I want this to be understood as a desire to stimulate interest for a more active life in the Anthroposophical Society. My hope—and anyone who was not at Dornach can read about it in the Goetheanum Weekly and the News Sheet—is that whatever of spiritual value was achieved at the Christmas Meeting shall in some way reach every individual Member. Thereby the aim of bringing true esoteric life into the Society will be achieved. The High School for Spiritual Science was founded at Christmas with the aim that esoteric life shall again flow into the Anthroposophical Society.

I hope that the words I have spoken to you to-day will have expressed the desire that this esoteric life may again unfold among us in the way that will be made clearer and clearer to you. This aim can become reality through what can go out in future from Dornach as the centre where the General Anthroposophical Society was founded at Christmas. May the Members of this Berne Group be able to contribute effectively to what we should like to achieve in Dornach for the whole Movement, to the extent that our forces permit.

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.

Lecture 1 of 11 from the volume The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

My Dear Friends,

We will consider a certain theme today which may serve as an elaboration of the public lecture given yesterday.¹ I want to speak in greater detail of how the human being is placed within the sphere of the World Order that is connected with his destiny, with what we are accustomed to call Karma. How does the shaping of destiny proceed? In order to answer this question, not theoretically, but concretely in a vital and practical manner, it is necessary to study the being of man a little more closely.

Human life is often said to be divided into two different states of consciousness: waking life and sleep. The conception of sleep in most people's minds amounts to nothing more than this, that the human being rests during sleep. The scientific view indeed assumes that the activity of consciousness ceases when a man falls asleep and begins again when he wakes; in other words, so far as the organism is concerned, sleep is nothing but repose, a state in which human activity is at rest. But sleep is by no means merely rest; we must realise that from the time of falling asleep to the moment of waking, both the astral body and the Ego are present outside the physical and etheric bodies as active realities.

At the present stage of evolution reached by man in earthly life, it is not possible for him to have direct consciousness of what the Ego and astral body are doing during sleep; none the less their activities are, to say the least, as significant as those of waking life. The reason why the Ego and astral body cannot unfold consciousness of all the complicated circumstances in which they are immersed during sleep is that, at the present stage of the Earth's evolution, Ego and astral body have no organs wherewith to become aware of the happenings in which they are involved. Nevertheless these experiences are undergone by the Ego and astral body during sleep and they work on into the life of day, into man's conscious life.

We can most easily form an accurate conception of the way in which the experiences of Ego and astral body work into the life of day, by thinking of the beginning of man's life. During the very earliest period, as a tiny child, the human being as it were sleeps his way into the earthly life. You must not think here only of the times when a child is actually and obviously asleep, but of the whole period which cannot, in later life, be remembered by ordinary consciousness. To external observation the child may give the impression of being awake during this period, but what is going on in the child's consciousness does not take a form which can be remembered in later life. When we speak of all that is experienced by the child without his having subsequent memory of it, we are referring to this period during which the human being is ‘sleeping’ his way into earthly life.

But now, what develops out of this sleeping state at the beginning of man's life on Earth? Three things must be considered if we are to understand the workings of all that the human being brings from his pre-earthly life and proceeds to weave, in the dim consciousness of sleep, into his physical existence. There are three faculties which the human being has to acquire, differently from the animals. Animals either do not have them at all, or already possess them—in greater or lesser degree of development—when they come into the world.

Of the development of these three faculties people have usually quite a one-sided and inadequate conception. Very little of the whole process receives consideration. The first faculty is learning to walk. Man enters the world, the earthly world, as a being who cannot walk, who has to acquire this faculty. The second is speaking, and the third, thinking. One faculty may take precedence in a particular child, but in general it can be said that the human being learns to walk, to speak and to think. The faculty of thinking follows that of speaking; the faculty to grasp also in thought what is expressed in words develops, gradually, out of speaking. It is some considerable time before one can truly say that a child thinks.

The ordinary conception of walking is extremely inadequate. Walking does not merely consist in the child's learning to stand upright and propel his legs, it involves acquiring equilibrium, gaining complete mastery of the balance man has in the world. This means the child can move freely in any direction without falling over. Thus he learns to place his body into the world; he learns to control his muscles and limbs in such a way that the centre of gravity in the body, whether standing or walking, lies at the correct point. Current ideas about this faculty are, as I said, totally inadequate, for in reality something else of tremendous significance comes to pass with the learning to walk, namely differentiation of the functions of legs and arms. As a rule—and where modifications occur there is a sound explanation for them—animals make uniform use of their four limbs, whereas in the human being there is differentiation. For the purposes of equilibrium and of walking, man uses his legs, whereas his arms and hands are wonderful instruments for the expression of his life of soul, vehicles of the work he is to accomplish in the world. This differentiation between feet and hands, arms and legs, is one of the features that are ignored in the usual one-sided conception of the faculty of learning to walk. The differentiation testifies, in the physical world, to the fact that the human being has to acquire certain faculties during his physical life on Earth.

The second faculty, that of speaking, is also acquired by imitation; the little child tries to imitate—just as he does with walking, standing, equilibration, differentiation between hands and feet. It can be said with truth, that speaking is not unconnected with walking,—above all, with the use of the hand in its differentiation. It is well known that speaking is connected with the specific development of an organ situated at the left side of the brain. This however only applies to people who use their right hand for the most important activities of life; in left-handed people the organ of speech lies at the right side of the brain. These facts indicate that what comes to expression in speech is connected with the search for equilibrium. Then, out of speaking, thinking develops. A person who is born dumb can only be brought to think by artificial means; in all those who are not born dumb, thinking is a faculty that develops out of speech.

Now, the characteristic development I have just described is not really to be understood until we can follow how, in later life, the human being passes over from the waking to the sleeping state. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie resting in the physical sense; the Ego and astral body have separated, in essentials, from the physical and etheric bodies. But if, with the methods of spiritual Science, we examine the astral body of man which has separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, we find that this astral body contains within it the forces that are connected with learning to speak. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the human being falling asleep and waking, during the time when, as a child, he is learning to speak; and it is also very interesting, in the case of some grown-up person who is learning to speak for the first time, to observe the intensity with which the astral body participates in the process. For when the human being is learning to speak, and even later on, too, when he is using speech in everyday life, the astral body carries with it, out of the physical and etheric bodies, the element of soul and spirit that is inherent in words and in speech.

If you can perceive how a human being speaks, how he forms his words, how he imparts to the words his own characteristic tone of voice, how he pours into words the force of his inner convictions, the experiences of his own soul—then you can also perceive how, when he falls asleep, the astral body carries this element of soul and spirit out of the physical and etheric bodies and during the period of sleep holds within itself, in the world of soul and spirit, as a kind of echoing wave, the after-workings of the psycho-spiritual qualities of speech. The forming of the words, the nuances of tone, the force of conviction which a man is able to bring into his words—all this can be perceived in the astral body during the sleeping state. There is, of course, no force of vibration such as is communicated to the physical air, and thus naturally no physical tone of voice is produced. The element of spirit and soul however, that proceeds from the human mouth on the waves of the words and is heard by the human ear, what the soul communicates in the flow of speech—all this is carried forth into the spiritual world by the astral body while the human being sleeps. It can be perceived more clearly when a child, or even a grown-up, is exerting himself to learn to speak a language. But through the whole of life, the element of spirit and soul inherent in speech during the day is taken out into the spiritual world by the astral body during the night. Thus we can say: the nuances of feeling in the spoken word—these it is above all that are carried out of the human being by the astral body during the night. This is a characteristic function of the astral body.

And now let us consider the Ego during the hours of sleep. The Ego is related, as it were, by nature to the limb-system. Just as the astral body is connected with the breast from which speech proceeds, so is the Ego involved in what the human being performs with his limbs, what he does between waking and falling asleep as he walks about or uses his arms and hands. The astral body flows into every word, carries forth the soul-quality of the word during sleep; the Ego is bound up with every movement we make as we go about the world in waking consciousness. The Ego is involved in every movement of the hands, in every act of grasping an object. Whereas, in connection with the astral body, too little attention is paid to the specific soul-element that pours into speech (speech being in itself so obviously a matter of the life of soul), when we come to the connection between the Ego and the limbs, we find an inclination to ignore altogether the working of the soul and spirit. Walking, grasping with the hands, are regarded as processes which happen entirely within a kind of physical mechanism,—for such the human organism is thought to be. But it is by no means so.

In every movement of the fingers that we make during the day, in every step we take as we go about, spirit and soul are contained, just as truly as they are contained in words. What is connected with our limbs and our movements is taken by the Ego out of our physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world when we fall asleep; and in the process inheres a psycho-spiritual element of a very special nature. At every moment during the period of sleep, the Ego is unconsciously satisfied or dissatisfied. (You will understand this better presently, when I have explained it more fully). Although the words sound trivial, the Ego is satisfied with the legs having moved towards some place or other, or with something that has been accomplished by the arms. Not only is an aftermath of leg and arm movements carried out into sleep, but satisfaction or dissatisfaction as well. Part of the experience of the Ego during the hours of sleep is as follows: You should really not have gone to such and such a place! Or: It was very good to go there! It was good, too, that some particular thing was done with the arms! Or again: Such and such an action was not good! This is an expression of the element of soul and spirit that is added by the Ego to what it bears outwards from the limbs of man into sleep.

What underlies this? In accordance with the World Order the astral body of man is destined to come into inner contact between sleeping and waking with the Beings described in the book Occult Science as belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi—the Archangels. The Archangel Beings feel an affinity with what is carried out into sleep as an echo sounding on from human speech. It is something they need, something they long to experience.

I will put it like this.—Just as human beings in their physical life on Earth have to breathe, have to be surrounded with oxygen, and consequently feel oxygen to be something beneficial, so do the Archangeloi, who are connected with the inner nature of the Earth, experience a need that the souls of men who are asleep shall bring to them the echo of what is contained in their speech.

Human speech is in this way connected, inherently and fundamentally, via the sleeping state, with the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. You will remember what I have said in earlier lecture courses, namely, that the Archangeloi are the Leaders, the Guiding Spirits, of the folk-languages. This is connected with what has now been given. The Archangeloi are the Guiding Spirits of folk-languages because they breathe in what the human being, as he sleeps, brings to them from his speech. And a certain human failing is revealed—it is one that is particularly observable in modern cultural life—when, with his speech, a man does not carry out into sleep the right quality.

There is in the culture of the present day very little of what we call idealism. Our words relate entirely to things of the outer, material world. The voicing of ideals—which presupposes belief in the spiritual, for the ideal is a spiritual thing—is becoming rarer and rarer. Since in their waking life men do not unfold inner enthusiasm for ideals, they speak, in reality, of nothing but what is actually present in the physical world. More and more do their words apply and refer only to things of the physical world.

In our days it is often so that people who claim to believe fanatically in the Spirit are the very ones who refute the Spirit. I refer to such as engage in spiritualistic experiments with the object of producing manifestations of the Spirit. This is because, fundamentally, they are only willing to believe in a Spirit which can manifest in the material world. But it is no Spirit that reveals itself in glimmering material light and other such phenomena! Spiritualism is veritably the most extreme form of materialism. It is really an attempt to deny the Spirit, inasmuch as these people will only acknowledge as Spirit that which enters into the world of matter. We are living in an age when words, as they emerge from the soul, lack the wings of idealism. But if this quality is absent, if, in other words, man is unable in waking life to speak of his ideals as well as of physical things, unable to turn to the ideal which imparts real aim to life and transcends physical existence, if in his daily speech he produces no words to express ideals, so that language itself lacks idealism, then it is exceedingly difficult, during sleep, for the connection—which is so necessary for the human being—to be made with the Archangeloi; in such circumstances no order prevails during sleep in the intercourse which should be established between the human soul and the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. Yes, it is indeed the case that every night man loses the opportunity, if I may so express it, of union with the Archangel Beings. And it is difficult for him, then, to have the inner connection with the spiritual world which enables his life between death and a new birth to be full of strong and vital experiences. The life of a man between death and a new birth is weakened when no idealism is expressed in his speech.

To understand these things constitutes an integral part of the knowledge of life. Those who realise what lack of idealism in speech signifies will ultimately develop the power to make it once again an integral quality of human speech. Even during earthly life it can be observed that a man who, during sleep, fails to draw the right power from the Archangel, does not unfold the strength he should really possess. With regard to what speech should accomplish during sleep for the human being, we can therefore say: In order that speech may produce something that is beneficial to life, we must make a real effort to develop idealism of such a kind that our words do not merely voice an understanding of everyday affairs, but are also imbued with the Spiritual, in the form of idealism.

We are confronted with something even more striking when we observe the Ego in the sleeping state. The Ego carries out into sleep satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the activities of the limbs. Just as the astral body, as a result of the after-working of speech, is carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, so is the Ego carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archai—the Powers of the Primal Beginnings—by virtue of what it takes out into the sleeping state as an echo of what has been performed by arms and legs in the daily round of life. From these Archai, the power flows to us, firstly, so to permeate the physical body that we do not only desire the Good, but are also able to exercise upon the urges and instincts of the physical body the measure of control which ensures that the physical body shall present no insuperable obstacle to the fulfilment of the duty or aim we have set ourselves in freedom of thought. In our thoughts we are free beings; but the power to use the freedom in actual life arises only when we carry out into sleep the basis for a true connection with the Archai. How can this be done? Idealism brings the astral body into right connection with the Archangeloi. And what enables the Ego to be united with the Archai? Although we ourselves, to begin with, are unconscious during sleep, the Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai is fully conscious, receives what is unconscious in us and elaborates it into a definite thought of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what we have done during the day. But what is it that enables us to be connected rightly with these Archai, in the same way as idealism in speech leads us into right connection with Archangeloi?

One quality alone brings the Ego, during sleep, into right connection with the Archai, namely true human love, universal and unselfish love for human beings, sincere interest in every fellow man with whom life brings us into contact. I do not mean sympathy or antipathy, which are merely the outcome of something we are not willing to overcome. True and genuine love for human beings during the waking state leads us, during sleep, to the bosom of the Archai. And there, while the Ego is resting in the bosom of these Beings, karma or destiny is shaped. A verdict is passed: ‘I am satisfied with what I have performed with my arms and legs.’ And out of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction is born a power that not only plays a part in the period immediately following death, but continues on to the next earthly life—the power to shape destiny aright, so that true balance and adjustment are brought about in all those things which in one earthly life we have experienced in the Ego during sleep, in communion with the Archai.

Reflection on these things will develop insight into the mysterious connection between the Ego and the karma, or destiny. Just as the astral body of a man who is an idealist can hand over his speech to the Archangeloi as an offering that then enables the Archangeloi to guide him aright between death and a new birth, so does the Ego weave and work at the texture of destiny. Karma is elaborated in conjunction with the Archai. It is moreover in the power of the Archai to bestow upon us what we need in order that we may not only live through the period between death and a new birth, but, at our next descent to the earthly world, possess already a power which in earliest childhood, enables us, each in his own way, to learn to walk, to find equilibrium, to differentiate the functions of feet and hands, arms and legs.

It is wonderful to be able to perceive how the efforts made by a child when it stops crawling and begins to walk, when it first learns to achieve equilibrium—how these efforts represent the after-effects of the way in which, during the previous earth-life, the Ego was able, because of a universal love for human beings, to make a connection, during sleep, with the Archai. This fact manifests now in the process of learning to walk and can be observed in the very details of the process.

Suppose, for instance, a little child continually stumbles and falls. This means that in a previous life feelings of strong antipathy or even hatred were harboured. No more than an approach was made to the Archai and the effect of the absence of any real connection is expressed in the constant falls during the process of learning to walk. One who develops insight into such matters and sets himself the aim, let us say, of fitting himself to be an educator in the true sense by making close and careful observations of the way in which little children learn to walk, can indeed come to realise what a great and far-reaching task lies before him in the karmic adjustment of something brought over into the present life through the fact that in the previous life there was too little human love, or perhaps enough, but of a misdirected kind.

We have here an example of how the materialistic outlook remains altogether within the realm of the physical. It describes how the human organism raises itself like a machine to the upright position, how it learns to walk, and so on: but behind every physical phenomenon is something spiritual and those who can survey the whole process learn to recognise that the previous earthly life works over into learning to walk. For learning to walk is one expression of how the human being, at the beginning of a new earthly life, learns to control his physical body. Those who understand it fully, know that there is a great deal more in the process of learning to walk than the capacity to lift the legs and raise the body upright; they know that, in truth, this phenomenon is connected also with deeply inward processes, it has to do with the whole manner in which the human being is becoming master of his glandular activity and the like. For when a child is learning to walk, and even before, it is not a matter only of walking, but of gaining—or failing to gain—control of the glandular activities, a factor in the process being whether the child's temperament is phlegmatic or choleric, or whether certain emotions in him are too intense. This, again, is connected with the relationship established with the Archai during sleep in a previous earthly life, as the outcome of universal human love, or lack of it. Materialistic thought says that the human being rests during sleep. But he is not merely resting. When the right kind of idealism is present in a man's waking life, then the astral body will be enabled, while he sleeps, to rise to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, that is to say, to be connected with the spiritual world during sleep in such a way that the period leading over from death to a new birth can be lived through in the right manner. If this period is not rightly spent, it means that weaknesses are carried over into another earthly life. How the next life is framed and built, depends upon the nature of the connection established with the Archai. Universal human love carries with it creative power. To have strength to place the body wholly in the service of the soul, to have mastery and control of the physical body—upon what does this depend? It depends upon whether the human being, in the previous life, unfolded love for his fellow men—a faculty that belongs entirely to the soul.

You will remember what I have said in previous lectures: The soul-element of one earthly incarnation manifests in the physical in the next; the spiritual of one incarnation in the soul of the next. These connections are as I have just described them.

It will not do to generalise, saying merely that destiny and karma exist. What can be said, and with truth, is that we behold how the human being works at the formation of his own karma. He weaves it during sleep; but it is during waking life that he gathers what he needs for its texture. He weaves the threads that are formed out of universal human love—or he weaves threads which perpetually tear asunder and make bad karma for the next life, threads that are woven out of feelings of hatred for our fellowmen. Love and hatred—these are creative forces in the forming and shaping of karma.

Such truths must be viewed in their true light. It is but a slip-shod and easy-going conception of karma which prompts us to say: ‘I am ill—it is my karma!’ ‘A misfortune has befallen me—it is my karma.’ To make karma responsible for everything in this fatalistic way does not, it is true, afford any real peace of mind, it is merely a convenient theoretical conception; it is, however, quite incorrect.

Imagine you are considering, not this present life, but the third subsequent life, then in that life you will be able to look back to the present one, and when you say: ‘It is my karma,’ your karma, as it will be then, is to be traced back to this present earthly life where it was actually born. In other words, karma is all the time coming into being.

It is not right to throw everything back to the past. The right attitude to karma leads us to say: An illness which befalls me now, need not necessarily be the consequence of earlier weaknesses of soul; it is possible that an illness may constitute a first beginning. Karma holds good, nevertheless. If an illness, a misfortune befalls me in this present earthly life, the compensation will quite surely come,—or again the illness, the misfortune, may itself be the compensation.

In other words: the future, too, must be reckoned with, when we are speaking about karma. The right attitude towards karma is to have an unshakable conviction of justice reigning through all the worlds, a knowledge that for everything there is compensation. But the present earthly life must not be considered as breaking the on-flowing sequence of incarnations so that we relegate everything to the past. The healthy and positive attitude to the karmic flow of life's happenings rests on the sure knowledge that there is justice. What really matters most of all is the mood of soul that is born from this understanding of karma.

The whole feeling and attitude of soul that must emerge from a true understanding of karma, is one which makes us realise when, perhaps some misfortune befalls us as consequence of an earlier weakness in the life of soul—that if this misfortune had not come about, the weakness would have persisted. Looking into the depths of our soul, we must realise: It is good and right that this misfortune has come upon me, because it has enabled a weakness to be eliminated.

A man who bewails a misfortune which is really the consequence of a preceding weakness or failing, is not adopting the standpoint of true manhood, for the inference is that it matters not to him whether he remains weak or achieves some measure of strength. That man alone faces misfortune aright who says to himself: ‘If it has occurred because of an earlier weakness, it is to be welcomed, for it will make me conscious of the weakness (which expressed itself perhaps in some definite failing); I will now eradicate the weakness, I will be strong again.’

In a case, on the other hand, where a misfortune befalls one as the first step in karma, the right attitude is to say to oneself: If we were always only to encounter what we wish for ourselves, such a life would make us out and out weaklings! One or two earthly lives might continue to be comfortable and easy through the fact that only that would befall us that we desired for ourselves—but in the third or fourth life a kind of paralysis of soul and spirit would supervene, and no effort to overcome obstacles would arise in us. For, after all, obstacles would not be there for us to overcome unless the unhoped-for, the undesired came upon us. But if the right kind of strength is developed vis-à-vis the obstacles, if enough human love is carried over into sleep, then the karma that is woven by the Ego in communion with the Archai is such that the true compensation takes place in the next earthly life.

The truths of Anthroposophy need not remain in the realm of cognition; their very nature is such that they affect a man's attitude and temper of mind and heart. A man who is not thus affected has not grasped them fully; for him indeed they remain abstract and theoretical. The effect which a true understanding of karma has upon a man is to make him more sensitive to happiness and misfortune than he would otherwise be; happiness and misfortune are experienced with great intensity; but he is also able to induce in his soul an attitude to the spiritual world which arises, not out of any belief or creed but out of a perception of what the Ego and astral body are doing while they are withdrawn from the bodily life of day. Recognition of this promotes an unshakable conviction of world-justice. Understanding of karma means that a man has a true perception of world-justice. It does not mean that he becomes phlegmatic towards happiness or unhappiness, joy or pain; it means that joy and pain, happiness and misfortune are for him allotted to their proper place in life.

Observing the human being during the life of day, we can see how the Ego and astral body are working in the physical body. This means that we know something of their activity in the physical body. But we know nothing about the workings of the soul and spirit within the Ego and astral body. If, as a materialist, I am speaking to a human being, listening to his words, I say to myself: Lungs, larynx are at work as he speaks; vibrations are set up in the air and they strike on my ear. But if I see the process truly, I perceive in the words and speech the man's astral body in which his kinship with the Divine-Spiritual world is expressed. I say to myself: When, during the life of day, the astral body is within the physical body, it conceals itself in the man's speech and similar activities; during the night, however, the astral body participates in the life of the higher Hierarchies. And it is the same with the Ego.

When the human being sleeps he is not merely resting from the fatigues of his daily life. Here in the physical world, man sleeps, works and speaks with his physical body; but he is active too in the spiritual world, while he is asleep. Since materialism denies that Ego and astral body exist and operate in full reality of being during sleep, materialism cannot possibly understand the world in its entirety. What is the ‘moral world’ to materialism? To materialism the ‘moral world’ is something the human being formulates in thought—something that has nothing to do with the actively creative powers of the world. But those who have true and penetrating perception of human life know that man lives within the moral world-order during sleep just as truly as during waking life he lives in air and light. This again leads us to something more that it is essential we should understand.

The workings of speech (and the same holds good for karma, too) accompany us when we die. Through the course of our life we have been connected—rightly, or perhaps inadequately—with the world of the Archangeloi. This relationship has repeated itself in every period of sleep, and we bear with us through the Gate of Death into the spiritual world what has been given us by the Archangeloi during sleep. We can then find the way rightly into the spiritual world which is, indeed, the Logos, the world consisting of cosmic principles which have their images in the words of speech; we can find our way into the spiritual world to live out there our life between death and a new birth.

But the matter is not so simple. After death we have no physical body; we are able to turn to good account what the Archangeloi have conferred upon us from our periods of sleep. But when as physical human beings on the Earth, we wake from sleep, we have again to descend into a physical body. The Archangeloi cannot bestow upon us the power to do this. Still higher Hierarchies must add their work, namely, the Beings designated in Occult Science the Exusiai and the Kyriotetes. Into the urges, instincts and desires of the physical body—which offer resistance to us—these higher Beings must introduce the fruits of what we have achieved in communion with the Archangeloi through the spirituality of speech; and this now flames up within us, as the voice of conscience. When that which we bring out of sleep into the body lights up as the voice of conscience, there is working, in this voice, all that has been bestowed by the Hierarchy of the Exusiai and Kyriotetes—a Hierarchy more sublime than that of the Archangeloi.

Thus when we discover in the physical world a man whose conscience is so strong that instincts of a higher order arise in his physical body, we realise that as a result of idealism in his speech, Kyriotetes and Exusiai have worked upon him.

Again, when through universal human love a man forms a real link with the Archai, the results of the work that he himself does on his karma appear in the body of the next earth-life when, in early childhood, while he is sleeping his way into life, he learns to walk, acquires balance, skill in the use of his arms, control of the glandular system, and so on. All this is possible because he has been able, between death and a new birth, to work in communion with the Archai. But in order that in his life on Earth a man may develop delicate sensitivity, a quick and clear consciousness in regard to his own deeds, it is necessary for the still higher Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Dynamis to work together with the Archai.

When a man lacks wide-hearted love for his fellowmen, lacks interest in his human environment, he does not find a true link with the Archai. The result is that he prevents himself from weaving his karma rightly for the next earth-life, and the compensation has to wait for later incarnations. In the present earth-life such a man suffers from increasing lack of power to carry into the physical body the judgments that he forms—satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the actions performed by legs and hands. This cannot be achieved by ourselves alone; through intensified human love we need to have entered into a true relationship with the Dynamis. These Beings then bear into our physical body the requisite power; otherwise we come to grief, although we may perceive quite clearly what is right.

In thought we can be free. But in order to use this freedom aright in the physical body, the proper equilibrium must be established in waking and sleeping life because we must be united not only with the Archai but also with the Dynamis.

The highest Hierarchy of all—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—bear our deeds out into the universe. From out of sleep, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes bear as moral power into our bodily nature what we grasp in thoughts: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones bear this out into the universe, so that our own moral forces become world-creative forces.

When the time comes for the Earth to pass over to the Jupiter condition and for our moral forces to perform their true functions in this great process of transformation, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones can only play their part if we are able to offer them the necessary foundations. If, because of feebleness, we have only forces of destruction to offer them, then we are working for the destruction of the Earth, not for the upbuilding of Jupiter.

When Anthroposophy speaks of the manifoldness of the spiritual world, this is by no means a mere naming of particular stages, but we are enabled gradually to behold the whole warp and woof of the world and to perceive the connection of the human being with the spiritual world as clearly as we perceive his connections with the physical world. The power to promote and upbuild life arises in men who acquire in this way a true insight into their connection with the spiritual world, who realise that the purpose of sleep is not merely repose but that the after-workings of the physical body may bring the human being into a right connection with the spiritual world.

It is quite possible for a man to deny the spiritual and moral world because, to begin with, at his present stage of Earth evolution, he is not aware of its reality. He is asleep in this respect. A true science must evoke into the realm of consciousness, realisation of the heavenly existence which reaches into earthly life. Sleep comes over man for this very purpose—that he may, himself, draw out of the spiritual world the power he needs for his physical life.

And now, from this point of view, study the connection of what I have sketched today in outline with my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As I have stated with emphasis there, it is not a matter of establishing the theory that the will must be free, but that the thought must be free. The thought must control the will if man is to be a free being. But a man's life must be suitably directed and ordered if the will is not to present insuperable hindrance to the thought that is free. As men in the physical world we can make our thought free. Feeling² becomes free only when we have established a true relationship with the Archangeloi; will becomes free when we have established a true relationship with the Archai.

The living content of speech, as well as all that lives in our limbs, passes out, during sleep, together with the soul and spirit. Astral body and Ego go forth, but the ether-body remains with the physical body. The thinking that is bound up with the ether body continues within the ether-body; but we know nothing in ordinary consciousness of how this ether body thinks from the time of falling asleep to that of waking, because we are outside it. It is not true that thinking ceases during sleep; we think from the moment of falling asleep until we wake. Man's thoughts are in perpetual flow in his ether-body, only he is unaware of it. Not until the moment when he returns to the body do the thoughts light up in his consciousness. Man can become free in his life of thought because his thoughts are bound, through the ether-body, with the physical life of Earth; for he has been placed upon the Earth in order that he may become free. From the spiritual world alone can he draw the power of freedom—the power that leads to freedom in feeling and in will.

It will be clear that throughout the whole of his life on Earth the human being retains the real foundation for his thinking—the ether-body. Astral body and Ego pass out into a cosmic world during earthly life; not so, the ether-body. The ether-body emerges only at death. Then comes the backward review, lasting one, two, three days, of the life that has just ended; the human being sees his whole life as a panorama. Always, without exception, the human being looks back, after death, upon his earthly life which has now run its course. The whole ocean of the thoughts that have arisen in him between birth and death, both in sleeping and waking life—a great sea of inter-weaving thoughts—is present before him during these three days after death, but immediately thereafter the thoughts are claimed by the Cosmos; the thoughts dissolve, and after two or three days the whole panorama has passed away—into the Cosmos. We are accustomed to say that the ether-body has been detached and has dispersed, but in actual fact the Cosmos has absorbed it into itself. The ether-body has continued to expand, until finally it is completely absorbed into the Cosmos. Then, as Ego and astral body, the human being is received into the bosom of the Higher Hierarchies. Only when an ether-body is again bestowed upon him, can he descend to a new earthly life and continue the work which will make him a free human being. For it is the goal of earthly life that man shall become free. The foundation for freedom lies in the activity of pure thinking—a faculty that is bestowed upon man on Earth. Therefore is the ether-body bound to the physical body for the whole course of earthly life, releasing itself only at death in worlds where freedom is not to be acquired. Freedom is acquired during life on Earth, and moreover, as you know, during certain epochs only of Earth life.

We can thus understand that there is a true relationship between freedom and karma, for freedom is connected with those members of man's being (physical body and ether-body) which remain behind during sleep. Karma is woven by the Ego during the period of sleep,—that is to say, in a realm beyond and apart from those members wherein freedom has its foundations. Karma does not weave the texture of free or unfree thoughts; karma weaves at feeling and will. Karma emerges from the depths of human nature, out of the ‘dreaming’ feeling and the ‘sleeping’ will. Into this we can pour, or rather over against this we can place, the power that lives in the free activity of thoughts, in pure thinking, in the ethical and moral impulses as I described them in the book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for these impulses must have their root in pure thinking.

Everything, you see, fits into a whole. It is essential to realise that the further we progress in Anthroposophy, the more completely do we find the details uniting and forming one whole. Contradictions may well be found in what is said concerning one particular domain or another; this is inevitable, because before arriving at any real insight in one domain we need, in reality, to study this domain in connection with the whole. Otherwise our conclusions are like that of a man who makes statements about a planet and is unable to understand the causes of its specific movements. In such a case it is of course necessary to reckon with the whole planetary system. Thus, if we wish really to know something about the world and about life, we must try to fathom all the connections, all the details of actual realities, both in the physical world and in the worlds of soul and spirit.

This was what I wanted to say to you today, my dear friends, when it has been possible for us to be together again in a Group Meeting. My desire has been to help you to develop that attitude to karma—that is, to universal justice—which arises in a man when he finds his true bearings in Anthroposophy. More important than the mere comprehension of theories is the feeling, the attitude of soul which we carry over into life itself. May you succeed, in ever greater and greater measure, in making the gifts of Anthroposophy the very substance of your soul, receiving them verily not into your thoughts alone, but into your heart and soul. The more Anthroposophy becomes the heart-substance of those who desire to understand it truly, the more will it be possible to introduce Anthroposophy into cultural spiritual life in the wide sense. This is a deep and urgent need, for with antiquated traditions mankind will be incapable of progress. Try to tread the path of Anthroposophy which leads from the head to the heart, for in your hearts Anthroposophy will be secure.

• 1. The Aim of the Goetheanum and the Task of Anthroposophy, Berne, 5th April, 1923
• 2. The German word here is ‘Gemut’—a word that means more than “feeling,” for it includes also the perception and understanding that belong to the heart.