The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we shall occupy ourselves with a general theme, and indeed with the question of the significance and the tasks of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the present, and then, on Tuesday, with a more individual theme concerning individual destiny and being.

We have indeed often emphasised that Anthroposophy has a special task and significance for mankind in the present age. Whoever occupies himself with anthroposophy as a thinking human being must put this question again and again to himself: What aims does this spiritual movement pursue, and how are they related to the other tasks of our age? These tasks can be illuminated from the most diverse points of view, as we have often done. Today we will try to grasp the evolutionary path of mankind at that point on which we ourselves stand, to look a little into the future, and then ask ourselves: What task has anthroposophy with especial reference to the evolutionary stage of mankind at which we stand at present?

We know that since the great Atlantean Catastrophe, which entirely transformed the earth as man's dwelling-place, up to our own time, five great epochs of civilisation are to be distinguished. We have often designated these five epochs of culture as the old Indian, old Persian, the Chaldaic-Egyptian, the Greco-Latin epoch, and then the epoch in which we ourselves stand, the fifth, which prepared itself in—let us say—the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, and in the middle of which we now are. We must be clear that such divisions are naturally not meant as if any one epoch of evolution sharply came to an end, and then a new one began, but that the one gradually and slowly passes over into the other, and long before one such epoch has run its course, the new one already prepares itself within it.

Thus we can say of our own epoch of culture, of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: there is already now being prepared, and indeed in a very significant way, that which will constitute the real characteristic of the sixth epoch of civilisation. And in general, human beings of our present age will separate themselves into two parts: those who today form no idea of all this, who know nothing of the preparation of the sixth epoch, who live as it were blindly, for the day, and those who form ideas for themselves that something new is preparing, and who also know that what is being prepared is fundamentally something which must be accomplished through human beings, must be prepared by mankind. We can in a certain connection place ourselves in the time as a human being and say we are doing what is generally the custom, what the others do, what our parents have educated us for, or, we can so place ourselves that we know consciously the following: “If you will consciously be a link in the chain of humanity, then you must do something—either in yourself or in your environment—which contributes to what must come, i.e., to prepare the sixth period of culture as much as in you lies.” The possibility of thus making preparations for the sixth period of culture can only be understood by entering a little into the character of our own epoch. For this, the comparative method offers itself as the best.

We know that these epochs of time are essentially different from each other, and in the course of years, in our anthroposophical movement, we have brought forward various characteristics whereby they are distinguished. We have pointed to the old Indian Period of civilisation, and have shown that the soul-qualities of man then were different from what they later were, how man then was still endowed to a high degree with clairvoyant consciousness. And we have shown that evolution through the following epochs consisted in man losing this clairvoyance ever more and more, and having to limit his power of perception and understanding more and more to the physical world. We have seen how the fourth epoch of civilisation was slowly prepared, in which man, as it were, appeared entirely in the physical world, so that that Being Whom we call Christ Jesus could incarnate in the physical world as a being, as a human being of the physical world. We have then seen how since that time, through a certain stream, the following appeared: how all human powers strengthened themselves still further in the physical world, how indeed the materialistic tendency of our age, the whole urge of man only to hold as valid what offers itself in the physical surrounding world, is connected with a further descent of man into the physical world. But by no means should things remain thus in evolution. Humanity must ascend again into the spiritual world, ascend with all the attainments men have acquired, with all the fruits of the physical world. And Anthroposophy should be just that which can bring to people the possibility of again ascending into the spiritual world.

Now we can say: “Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, there were numerous human beings who knew through their direct powers of perception: Around us is a spiritual world. We live in a spiritual world.” Fewer and fewer became the human beings who knew this; more and more were the powers of man limited to the perception of the senses. But if, on the one hand, today, the power of perception for the spiritual world is the least conceivable, yet, on the other hand, something is preparing in our age which is so significant that already for a great number of people, quite different faculties will exist in that incarnation which follows the present one. As the faculties of man have changed during the five epochs of culture, so they will also change into the sixth, and a great number of people today will clearly show already in their next incarnation through their whole mood of soul, that their faculties have essentially changed. Today, we will make clear to ourselves how different these souls of human beings will be in the future, with a great number already in the next incarnation, with others, in the incarnation following.

We could also look back in another way into past epochs of human evolution. Then we would see that the farther we go back to the ancient clairvoyance, at the same time, the more we have united with the human soul, what one can call the character of group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. It has often been pointed out to you that the consciousness of the group-soulness was existing in the ancient Hebrew people in an eminent degree. He who felt himself—really consciously felt himself as a member of the ancient Hebrew people—said to himself—especial attention has been drawn to this—” As an individual man I am a transitory phenomenon, but in me lives something that has an immediate connection with all the soul-being which has streamed down since the racial father Abraham.” A member of the old Hebrew people felt that. We can indeed esoterically admit as a spiritual phenomenon what was thus felt by the old Hebrew people. We understand better what then happened if we keep the following in mind.

Let us consider an old Hebrew initiate. Although initiation was not so frequent among the ancient Hebrews as among other peoples, we could not characterise such a real initiate otherwise—not merely one initiated into the theories and the Law, but an initiate really seeing in the spiritual worlds—than by taking into consideration the entire racial peculiarity. It is the custom today in external science, which busies itself with documents without any misgiving, to take everywhere what stands in the Old Testament, to test it by all kinds of external records, and then find it unsubstantiated. We shall have occasion to point out that the Old Testament gives the facts more faithfully than external historical records. In any case, spiritual science shows that a blood relationship of the Hebrew people can really be demonstrated back to the racial father Abraham, and that the assumption of Abraham as racial father is fully justified. This was something especially known in the old Hebrew secret schools: Such an individuality, such a soul-being as that of Abraham, was not merely incarnated as Abraham, but is an eternal being, who remained existing in the spiritual world. And in truth a real initiate was inspired by the same spirit, as he who inspired Abraham, and he could testify for him of himself, that he was permeated by the same soul-nature as Abraham. There was a real connection between every initiate and the racial father Abraham. We must hold that fast: that expressed itself in the feeling of membership of the old Hebrew people. That was a kind of group-soulness. One felt what expressed itself in Abraham as the group-soul of the people. One felt group-souls similarly in the rest of humanity. Mankind in general goes back to group-souls. The farther we go back in human evolution, the less do we find expressed the single individuality. That which we still find today in the animal kingdom: that a whole group belongs together—that was existing among mankind, and appears ever clearer and clearer, the farther we go back to ancient times. Groups of human beings then belonged together, and the group-soul was essentially stronger than what constituted the individual soul in the single human being.

We can now say: Today in our time, the group-soulness of people is still not yet overcome, and whoever believes that it is completely overcome does not keep in mind certain finer phenomena of life. Whoever keeps it in mind will very quickly see that certain human beings not only appear alike in their physiognomy, but that also the soul-qualities are similar in groups of human beings: that one can, as it were, divide human beings into categories. Each person can still today be reckoned into a certain category; with reference to this or the other quality, he will belong perhaps to different categories, but a certain group-soulness is not only valid because the races exist, but also in other connections. The boundaries drawn between the single nations fall away more and more; but other groupings are still perceptible. Certain basic characteristics stand so connected in some people, that he who will only look, can still today perceive the last relics of the group-soulness of man.

Now we, in our present age, are living in the most eminent sense, in a transition. All group-soulness has gradually to be stripped off. Just as the gaps between single nations gradually disappear, as the single parts of different nations understand each other better, so also will other group-soul qualities be shed, and the individual nature of each single person come to the foreground more and more.

We have therewith characterised something quite essential in evolution. If we want to grasp it from another side, we can say: That idea whereby the group-soulness chiefly expresses itself loses meaning ever more and more in the evolution of mankind, i.e., the idea of race. If we go back beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe, we see how the human races are prepared. In the old Atlantean age human beings were grouped according to external characteristics in their bodily structure, far more strongly than today. What we call races today are only the relics of those important distinctions between human beings as were customary in old Atlantis. The idea of race is only really applicable to old Atlantis. Since we deal with a real evolution of mankind, we have never employed the idea of race in the most eminent sense for the post-Atlantean age. We do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, etc., because that is no longer correct. We speak of an old-Indian period of civilisation, of an old-Persian period of civilisation, etc. And it would be utterly devoid of sense if we would speak of our time preparing a sixth race. If relics of the old Atlantean distinctions, of their group-soulness, are still existing in our time, so that one can still say the racial division continues to work on—that which is preparing for the sixth period of time consists just in the character of race being stripped off. That is the essential. Therefore it is necessary that that movement which is called the anthroposophical movement, which should prepare the sixth period of time, adopts in its basic character this stripping off of the character of race—that especially it seeks to unite people out of all “races,” out of all nations, and in this way bridges over these differences, these distinctions, these gaps, which are existing between various groups of human beings. For the old racial standpoint had in a certain connection a physical character, whereas what will fulfil itself in the future will have a much more spiritual character. Therefore it is so urgently necessary to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one, which looks to the spirit, and overcomes just that which arises from physical distinctions, through the force of a spiritual movement, It is, of course, thoroughly comprehensible that any movement has, as it were, its childish illnesses, and that in the beginning of the theosophical movement, matters were so represented as if the earth fell into seven periods of time—they were called Root-races—and each of these Root-races into seven sub-races, and that would always repeat itself, so that one could always speak of seven races, and seven sub-races, etc. But one must get beyond the illnesses of childhood, and be clear that the idea of race ceases to have any meaning, especially in our age.

Something else, in addition, is being prepared—something connected with the individuality of man in a quite special way—in man becoming ever more and more individual. It is only a question of this occurring in the right sense, and the anthroposophical movement should serve to this end, that human beings become individualities—or we could also say personalities—in the right sense. How can it do this?

Here we must look to the most striking new quality of man's soul, which is preparing. The question is often put: Well, if reincarnation exists, why does a person not remember the former incarnations? That is a question which I have often answered. Such a question appears as when one brings along a four-year-old child, and because it is a human being, and cannot reckon, one would say: Man cannot reckon. But let the child become ten years old, and then it will reckon. It is thus with the human soul. If today it cannot remember, yet, the time will come in which it can remember—the time when it has the same powers as he possesses who is initiated today. But just today that transition is happening. There exist today a number of souls who are so far on in our time, who stand close to the moment where they will remember their former incarnations, or at least the last one. A whole number of human beings today are, as it were, before the self-opening of the door to that embracing memory, which comprises not only the life between birth and death, but the previous incarnations, or at least, the last, in the first place. And when, after the present incarnation, a number of human beings are reborn, then they will remember this present incarnation. It is merely a question of how they remember. Anthroposophical development should give help and direction to remember in the right way.

In order to characterise this anthroposophical movement from this point of view, it must be said: Its character is that it leads man to realise in the right way what one calls the human “I,” the innermost member of the human being. I have often pointed out that Fichte rightly said, most human beings would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon, than as an “I.” And if you consider how many people there are in our time who make any idea at all of what is in the “I,” i.e., of what they themselves are, then in general, you would come to a very dismal result.

When this question arises, I have always to call to mind a friend I had more than thirty years ago, and who as a quite young student was completely inoculated at that time by the materialistic mood—today it is more modern to say “monistic” mood. He was already injected by it, in spite of his youth. He always laughed when he heard something was contained in man which could be designated as spiritual being; for he was of the view, that what lives as thought in us, was produced by mechanical or chemical processes in the brain. I often said to him: “Look, if you earnestly believe this as a content of life, why do you continually tell lies?” He really lied, continually, because he never said: “My brain feels, my brain thinks, but: I think, I feel, I know this or that.” Thus he built up a theory which he contradicted with every word—as every man does; for it is impossible to maintain what one imagines as a materialistic theory. One cannot remain truthful, if one thinks materialistically. If one would say: My brain loves you, then, one should not say “you,” but, my brain loves your brain. People do not make this consequence clear. But it is something which is not merely humoristic, but something which shows what a deep basis of unconscious untruthfulness lies at the basis of our present education.

Now, most people really would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon, i.e., as a piece of compact matter, than as that which can be called an “I” And today one naturally comes least of all to a grasp of the “I” through external science, which indeed, as such, must think materialistically, according to its methods. How can one attain this grasp of the “I”? How can one gradually get an idea, a concept of what he instinctively feels, when he says: I think? Solely and alone through this, that he knows by means of the anthroposophical view of the world, how this human being is constituted, how the physical body has Saturn character, the etheric body Sun character, the astral body Moon character, and the Ego, Earth character. When we keep in mind everything we thus get as ideas out of the entire cosmos, then we understand how the “I,” as the real Master-worker, labours at all the other members. And so we come gradually to an idea [Begriff] of what we profess with the word “I.” We gradually struggle up to the highest ideas of this “I,” if we learn to understand [verstehen] such a word. We not merely feel ourselves as a spiritual being if we feel ourselves within an “I,” but when we can say: In our individuality lives something which was there before father Abraham. When we cannot merely say: I and father Abraham are one, but: I and the FATHER, i.e., the Spiritual, weaving and living through the world. What lives in the “I,” is the same spiritual substance that weaves and lives through the world as Spirit. Thus we gradually work our way up to understand this “I,” i.e., the bearer of the human individuality, that which goes from incarnation to incarnation. In what way, however, do we grasp the “I”? Do we grasp the world at all through the anthroposophical view?

This anthroposophical view of the world arises in the most individual way, and is, at the same time, the most un-individual thing that can be conceived. It can only arise in the most individual way by the secrets of the cosmos revealing themselves in a human soul, into which stream the great spiritual beings of the world. And so the content of the world must be experienced in the human individuality in the most individual way, but at the same time, it must be experienced with a character of complete impersonality. Whoever will experience the true character of cosmic mysteries must stand entirely on the standpoint from which he says: Whoever still heeds his own opinion, cannot come to Truth. That is indeed the peculiar [eigenartige] nature of anthroposophical truth that the observer may have no opinion of his own, no preference for this or the other theory, that he may not love this or the other view more than any other because of his own especial individual qualities. As long as he stands on this standpoint, it is impossible for the true secrets of the world to reveal themselves to him. He must pursue knowledge quite individually, but his individuality must develop so far, that it no longer has anything personal, i.e., anything of his own peculiar sympathies and antipathies. This must be taken strictly and earnestly. Whoever still has any preference for these or the other ideas and views, whoever can incline to this or the other because of his education or temperament, will never recognise objective truth.

We have attempted here, this summer, to grasp Oriental wisdom from the standpoint of Western learning. We tried to be just towards Oriental wisdom, and truly presented it in such a way that it received its full rights. (The East in the Light of the West, cloth, crown 8vo, pp. 222. 7s. 6d) One must strongly emphasise that in our time it is impossible for independent spiritual knowledge to decide through any special preference for either the Oriental or the Occidental view of the world. Whoever says according to his different temperament he prefers the nature, the laws of the world as existing in the Oriental or correspondingly in the Occidental view, has not yet a full understanding for what is here essential. One should not decide, e.g., for the greater significance of, let us say, the Christ, as compared with what Oriental teaching recognises, because one inclines to the Christ through one's Occidental education or one's temperament. One is only fitted to answer the question “How is the Christ related to the Orient?” when from a personal standpoint the Christian is as indifferent to one as the Oriental. As long as one has preference for this or the other, so long is one unsuited to make a decision. One first begins to be objective when one lets the facts alone speak, when one heeds no reasons derived from personal opinion, but lets facts alone speak in this sphere.

Therefore something meets us in the anthroposophical world-view, if it meets us today in its true form, which is inwardly woven with the human individuality, because it must spring out of the “I”-force of the individuality, and on the other hand, must be independent, so that this individuality is again quite indifferent. That person in whom anthroposophical wisdom appears must be unconcerned by it, must be independent of it. This is essential, that he has brought himself so far, that he forces nothing of his own colouring into these matters. Then they will indeed be individual, because the spiritual cannot appear in the light of the moon, or the stars, but only in the individuality, in the human soul; but then, on the other hand, this individuality must be so far on that it can exclude itself in the production of what constitutes the wisdom of the world. Thus that which appears to mankind through the anthroposophical movement will be something which concerns each human being, no matter from what race, nation, etc., he is born, because it applies itself only to the new humanity, to man as such, not to an abstract, general man, but to each single human being. This is the essential. As it proceeds out of the individuality, out of the kernel of man's being, so it speaks to the deepest kernel of man's being, so it grasps this kernel of man. As we usually speak from man to man, fundamentally it is only surface speaking to surface, something which we have not united with the innermost kernel of our being. Understanding between man and man, full understanding, is hardly possible today in any other sphere, than in that where what is produced comes from the centre of man's being, and, when it is understood aright by another, speaks again to his centre. Hence in a certain connection, it is a new speech that is spoken by Anthroposophy. And if today we are still obliged to speak in the various national languages what has to be announced, the content is a new speech, which is spoken by anthroposophy.

What is spoken today outside in the world is a speech which is only really valid for a very limited sphere. In ancient times, when people still looked into the spiritual world through their old, dreamy clairvoyance, their word then meant something which existed in the spiritual world. The word signified something which existed in the spiritual world. Even in Greece, things were still different from what they are today. The word “idea” used by Plato signified something different from the word “Idea,” as used by our modern philosophers. These modern philosophers can no longer understand Plato, because they have no perception of what he called “Idea,” and they confuse it with abstract concepts. Plato still had something spiritual before him, even if already rarefied; it was still something quite real. Then also, one still had in the words the sap of the spiritual, if one may express it thus. You can trace that in the words. If anybody today uses the word “wind,” “air,” then he means something external, physical. The word wind here corresponds to something external, physical. If, e.g., in old Hebrew, the word wind, “Ruach,” was employed, one did not merely mean something external, physical, but a spiritual, which swept through space. When man breathes in today he is told by materialistic science that he simply inhales material air; in ancient times, one did not believe one inhaled material air, but then one was clear that one inspired something of spirit, or at least, of soul. Thus the words then were absolutely designations for spirit and soul. That has ceased today; today speech is limited to the external world, or at least, those who seek to stand at the peak of the age busy themselves seeing only a materialistic meaning, even behind those things where it is still obvious they are derived from soul and spirit. Physics speaks of an “impact” of bodies. It has forgotten that the word “impact” is derived from that which a living being performs out of its inner living nature, when it pushes another being. The original significance of words is forgotten in these simple things.

And so today, our speech—and this is most of all the case with scientific speech—has become a speech which is only able to express what is material. Because of this, what is in our soul while we speak is only comprehensible to those faculties of our soul which are bound to the physical brain as their instrument. And then the soul understands nothing more of all that is designated with these words, when it is disembodied. When the soul has gone through the gate of death, and no longer employs the brain, then all scientific considerations of today are forms quite incomprehensible to the disembodied soul. It does not even hear or perceive what one expresses in the speech of the time. This has no longer any meaning for a disembodied soul, because it only has meaning for what is the physical world. That again is something which is still more important to consider in what one can call the mode of thinking, the method of representation. It is even more important to consider it there than in theory, because it is a question of life, not of theory, and it is characteristic that one can see in the theosophical movement itself how materialism has crept in. Because it is the mode of the time, it has often crept into the theosophical view, so that real materialism prevails even in theosophy itself, e.g., when one describes the etheric or life-body. Whereas a person should exert himself to come to a grasp of the spirit, one mostly describes it as if it were a finer matter; and the astral body also. One starts as a rule from the physical body, goes further to the etheric or life-body, and says: that is built after the pattern of the physical body, only finer—thus one progresses to Nirvana. Here one finds descriptions which take their images from nothing else than the physical. I have already experienced that when one wanted to express the good feeling present in a room among those present, one did not do so directly, but one said: Fine vibrations are existing in this room. One did not heed that one materialises what exists spiritually in a mood if one thinks the space filled with a kind of thin cloud, permeated with vibrations. That is what I should like to call the most material way of thinking possible. Materialism has even got by the neck those who want to think spiritually. That is only a characteristic of our time, but it is important that we are conscious of it. And therefore we must pay especial heed to what has been said: that our speech, which is always a kind of tyrant for human thinking, has implanted in the soul a tendency to materialism. And many, who today would so willingly be thorough idealists, express themselves entirely in a materialistic sense, misled by the tyranny of speech. That is a speech which can no longer be understood by the soul as soon as it no longer feels itself bound to the physical brain.

There is, indeed, something else, you may believe it or not. For one who knows occult perception, real spiritual perception, the method of presentation often employed today in theosophical-scientific writings causes real pain—because it appears irrational to him, if he begins to think, no longer with the physical brain, but with the soul, which is no longer bound to the physical brain, i.e., which really lives in the spiritual world. As long as one thinks with the physical brain, so long can he go on characterising the world thus. As soon, however, as one begins to develop spiritual perception, then, to speak of things in this way ceases to have any meaning. Then indeed it even causes pain if one must hear the utterance: There are good vibrations in this room, instead of: A good feeling prevails here. That at once causes pain in anyone who can really see things spiritually, because thoughts are realities. Space then fills itself out with a dark cloud, if one forms the thought: Good vibrations are in this space, instead of: A good mood is prevailing.

It is now the task of the anthroposophical way of thinking—and the method of thought is more important than the theories—that we learn to speak a language, which is really not merely understood by the human soul so long as it is in a physical body, but understood also when this soul is no longer bound to the instrument of the physical brain; for instance, either by a soul still in the body, but able to perceive spiritually, or by a soul gone through the gate of death. And that is the essential! If we bring forward those ideas which explain the world, which explain the human being, then that is a speech which cannot merely be understood here in the physical world, but also by those who are no longer incarnated in physical bodies, but live between death and a new birth. Yes, what is spoken on our anthroposophical basis, is heard and understood by the so-called dead. There they are fully one with us on a basis where the same speech is spoken. There we speak to all human beings. Because in a certain connection, it is chance whether a human soul is in a body of flesh, or in the condition between death and a new birth. And we learn through anthroposophy a speech comprehensible to all human beings, whether they are in the one or other condition. Thus we speak a speech within the field of anthroposophy which is spoken also for the so-called dead. We really contact the innermost kernel of man, the innermost being of man, through what we cultivate in a real sense in anthroposophical considerations, even if they appear apparently abstract. We penetrate into the soul of man. And because we penetrate to the soul of man, we liberate man from all group-soulness, i.e., man becomes in this way more and more capable of really grasping himself in his ego, his “I.” And that is the characteristic, that those who come to anthroposophy today, who really take up anthroposophy, appear in comparison with others who remain far from it, as if through anthroposophical thoughts, their ego would crystallise as a spiritual being, which is then carried through the gate of death. With the others, in that place where the I-being is, which remains there—which is now there in the body, and which remains after death—there is a hollow space, a nothingness. Everything else which one can take up as ideas today, will become more and more worthless for the real kernel of man's soul-being. The central point of man's being is grasped through what we take up as anthroposophical thoughts. That crystallises a spiritual substance in man; he takes that with him after death, and with that he perceives in the spiritual world. He sees and hears with it in the spiritual world, with it he penetrates that darkness which otherwise exists for man in the spiritual world. And thereby it is brought about that when through these anthroposophical thoughts and way of thinking man develops this “I” in him today, which now stands in connection with all the world wisdom we can acquire—if he develops it—he carries it over also into his next incarnation. Then he is born with this now developed “I,” and he remembers himself in this developed “I.” That is the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement today, to send over to their next incarnation a number of human beings with an ego in which they remember themselves as an individual ego. They will be the human beings who form the kernel of the next period of civilisation. These people who have been well prepared through the anthroposophical spiritual movement, to remember their individual “I,” will be spread over the whole earth. For the essential in the next period of culture will be that these people will not be limited by single localities, but spread over the entire earth. These individual people will be scattered over the whole earth, and within the whole earth sphere will be the kernel of humanity, who will be essential for the sixth period of civilisation. And so it will be the case among these people, that they will know themselves as those who in their previous incarnation strove together for the individual “I.”

This is the right cultivation of that soul-faculty of which we have spoken. This soul-faculty so develops, that not only those just described will have this memory. More and more human beings will have this memory of their former incarnation—in spite of their not having developed the “I.” But they will not remember an individual “I,” because they have not developed it, but they will remember the group-ego, in which they have remained. Thus people will exist, who in this incarnation have cared for the development of their individual “I”—they will remember themselves as independent individualities, they will look back and say: You were this or the other. Those who have not developed the individuality will be unable to remember this individuality.

Do not think that through mere visionary clairvoyance one acquires the faculty of remembering the previous ego. Humanity was once clairvoyant. If mere clairvoyance sufficed, then all would remember, for all were clairvoyant. It is not merely a matter of being clairvoyant—humanity will already be clairvoyant in the future—it is a matter of having cultivated the ego in this incarnation, or not. If one has not cultivated it, it is not there as an inner human being; one looks back, and remembers as a group-ego, what one had in common. So that these people will say: Yes, I was there, but I have not freed myself. These people will then experience that as their FALL, as a new Fall of mankind, as a falling back into conscious connection with the group-soul. That will be something terrible for the sixth period of time; to be unable to look back to oneself as an individuality, to be hemmed in by not being able to transcend the group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. If one will express it strongly, one could say: The whole earth with all it produces (this holds at least as an image) will belong to those who now cultivate their individuality; those, however, who do not develop their individual “I,” will be obliged to join on to a certain group, from which they will be directed as to how they should think, feel, will, and act. That will be felt as a fall, a falling back, in the future humanity.

So we should regard the anthroposophical movement, the spiritual life, not as mere theory, but as something which is given us in the present, because it prepares what is necessary for the future of mankind.

If we grasp ourselves aright in that point where we are now, whence we have come from out the past, and then look a little into the future, then we must say: Now the time is come where man begins to develop the human faculty of remembering backwards. It is only a question of our developing it aright, i.e., that we train in us an individual “I;” for only what we have created in our own soul can we remember. If we have not created it, then there only remains to us a fettering memory of a group-ego, and we feel it as a kind of falling down into a group of higher animality. Even if the human group-souls are finer and higher than the animal, yet they are but group-souls. Humanity of an early age did not feel that as a fall, because they were intended to develop from group-soulness to the individual soul. If they are now held back, they fall consciously into it, and that will be the oppressive feeling in the future of those who do not take this step aright, either now or in a later incarnation. They will experience the fall into group-soulness.

The real task of anthroposophy, is to give the right impulse. We must thus grasp it within human life. If we keep in mind that the sixth period of time is that of the first, complete conquest of the racial idea, then we must be clear, that it would be fantastic to think that even the sixth “race” starts from one point on the earth, and develops like the earlier races. Progress is made by ever-new progressive methods of evolution appearing. By progress we do not mean that what was valid as ideas for earlier times should also hold for the future. If we do not see this, the idea of progress will not be quite clear to us. We will as it were fall again and again into the error of saying: So and so many rounds, globes, races, etc., and it all goes on revolving round again and again in the same manner.* (*This refers to the descriptions set forth in the books of the “Theosophical Society,” 1909.) One cannot see why this wheel of rounds, globes, races, etc., should always revolve again. It is a question of seeing that the word “race” is a term only having validity for a certain time. This idea no longer has any meaning for the sixth period. Races have only in themselves the elements which have remained from the Atlantean age.

In the future, that which speaks to the depths of man's soul will express itself more and more in the external nature of man; and that which man on the one side as a quite individual being has acquired, and yet, again experiences unindividually, will express itself by working out even to the human countenance; so that the individuality of man—not the group-soulness—will be inscribed for him on his countenance. That will constitute human manifoldness. Everything will be acquired individually, in spite of its being there through the overcoming of individuality. And we will not meet groups among those who are seized of the ego, but the individual will express itself externally. That will form the distinction between human beings. There will be such as have acquired their egoity; they will indeed be there over the whole earth with the most manifold countenances, but one will recognise through their variety how the individual ego expresses itself even into the gesture. Whereas among those who have not developed the individuality, the group-soulness will come to expression by their countenance receiving the imprint of the group-soulness, i.e., they will fall into categories similar to each other. That will be the external physiognomy of our earth: a possibility will be prepared for the individuality to carry in itself an external sign, and for the group-soulness to carry in itself its external sign.

This is the meaning of earthly evolution, that man acquires more and more the power of expressing externally his inner being. There exists an ancient script in which the greatest ideal for the evolution of the “I,” the Christ Jesus, is characterised by the saying: When the two become one, when the external becomes like the inner, then man has attained the Christ nature in himself. That is the meaning of a certain passage in the so-called Egyptian Gospel. One comprehends such passages out of anthroposophical wisdom.¹

After we have attempted today to grasp the task of anthroposophy out of the depths of our knowledge, we will consider something on Tuesday which as a spiritual problem—as a specially individual affair of man—can lead us to his destiny, to his being.

• 1. f. Dr. Steiner's Gospel of St. Matthew, lecture 6, published by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

Out of the whole spirit of our anthroposophical work, you will have seen, in the course of years, that its aim is not to work on, as it were, something directly sensational, but to follow tranquilly those facts connected with spiritual happenings, the knowledge and cognition of which can be important for our life. One does not merely serve the day, spiritually, by always speaking on what concerns the day, but one also serves it by assimilating a knowledge of the great connections of life. Our own individual life is fundamentally connected with the great events of existence, and we can only rightly judge our own life, when we estimate it by the greatest phenomena of life. Hence it arises, that within our seven-yearly cycle in the German Section of the Theosophical Society, for four years we have occupied ourselves with the foundation of our views, of our knowledge, and in the last three years we have tried to deepen these basic views with reference to world-embracing questions. And you will have seen from what has come to you in the explanations given in various lecture-cycles, that considerations concerning the Gospels belonged to the latter. Not merely because the material and content of the Gospels should be brought close to us, but because through their study, many things touching human nature can be learnt. And so today, something can be said about the Gospels, with various applications to the personal life of man.

These Gospels are regarded less and less by external science as a historical document for the knowledge of the greatest Individuality, of the greatest Impulse, which has entered the evolution of humanity—of Christ Jesus. The attitude to the Gospels in the first Christian centuries, and for a long time through the middle ages, was quite different from what it has become in recent times. The Gospels are first felt today as four mutually contradictory documents, and nothing appears more natural today than to say: How can four documents be historical, when they contradict each other, as the four Gospels do, each of which professes to give us an account of what happened at the beginning of our era in Palestine.

Yet one thing could strike human thinking, unless it tries today to avoid seeing the most important matters. For example, it might be said: It does not really need very much today to realise that if the four Gospels are read consecutively they do indeed contradict themselves in that sense as one understands it today. Any child could see that, one might retort! But it might be added: Now the Gospels are in all hands, now everybody occupies himself with them. But there was a time before the invention of printing, before the modern spread of books, when these Gospels were by no means in all hands, when they were really read only by very few, and these few, they were just the people who stood at the peak of the spiritual life. Fundamentally, in the first centuries, only those had the Gospels in their hands who stood at the summit of the spiritual life. The content was imparted to the others, brought near so that they could grasp it. One might ask: Were then these few, who stood at the summit of the spiritual life, really such terrible fools, such mightily stupid people, that they could not see what any child can see today: that they do contradict each other, in the ordinary sense? Were then all those people, who endeavoured to grasp the gigantic Christ Event in the sense of the four Gospels, really such fools, such terribly stupid men, that they did not see what the critic sees, working in the modern sense with these contradictions? This is a question for oneself.

If we pursue such a question, we soon notice something else: i.e., that the whole world of man's feeling towards the Gospels stood differently to them than it does today. Today it is the critical intellect, which has learnt its whole training, its whole manner of thought, at the hand of external sense-reality, it is this which attacks the Gospels, and for this it is truly not difficult to find these intellectual contradictions; for they are childishly easy to find.

How, then, did those who stood at the summit of the spiritual life and centuries ago took the Gospels in hand get on with what one today calls contradictions? You see, these men of old had an infinite reverence, unthinkable today, for the great Christ Event through the four Gospels, and they felt extraordinarily that because they had four Gospels, they had all the more to revere and value this event. How is that possible? That was because these old judges of the Gospels kept in mind something quite different from what is kept in mind today. The modern critics do not proceed more cleverly than one who, perhaps, photographs a nosegay from one side—he thus gets a certain photograph of the nosegay. He now goes through the world with this photograph. People notice what the photograph looks like, and say: Now I have an exact idea of the nosegay. But then someone comes who photographs it from another side. The picture is quite different. He shows the picture of the same nosegay to people, but they say: That can't be a picture of the nosegay. The pictures contradict each other. And if the nosegay is photographed from four sides, then the four pictures do not appear similar, yet they are four views of the same thing. This was how the old judges of the four Gospels felt. They said: the four Gospels are representations of one event, from four different points of view, and because this is the case, they give us thereby a complete picture, because they are not alike—and first when we are in a position to form a complete representation from the four sides, do we then get a complete idea of the events of Palestine. And so these people said: We must look up with all the greater humility, when we see the events of Palestine presented from four sides. For this event is so great, that one cannot understand it, if it is only described from one side. We must be thankful that we have four Gospels, which describe this great event from four sides. We must only understand how these four different points of view have come together, and then, when we have convinced ourselves of this, can we form a perception of what the individual person can have from the four Gospels.

That which we call the Christ Event is a mighty happening in the spiritual evolution of mankind. How can we insert what took place then in Palestine in the whole of human evolution? We can regard it in such a way that we say: Everything, all that mankind previously experienced spiritually, which humanity had gone through spiritually, all that flowed together streamed together into the event of Palestine, in order from then to flow on farther in one common stream.

There we have—just to mention but one thing—let us say, the old Hebrew teaching, as is laid down in the Old Testament, if we understand it aright. That is one contribution. It flowed in, as the event of Palestine took place.

There was then another stream which proceeded from Zarathustra. This flowed into that which from then streamed on through the world as Christianity as a main stream.

There is that which we can call the Oriental spiritual stream, which found its most significant expression in Gautama Buddha. That also flowed into the one great main stream, and still others, in order then to flow on together. All of these single streams are today within Christianity.

You are not shown what Buddhism is today by one who warms up again the teachings which Buddha gave out 600 years before our era. These teachings have flowed into Christianity. You are not shown what Zarathustrianism really is by one who takes the old Persian documents, and from thence will show the nature of Zarathustrianism today; for he who taught in ancient Persia what exists in the ancient Persian documents has evolved further, and has let his contribution flow into the spiritual life of mankind, and we must seek Zarathustrianism also within Christianity, as well as Buddhism, and the old Hebrew stream.

And now we must ask ourselves, in order to have, in a slight degree, a picture of the real relationship: How have these three streams of Buddhism, Zarathustrianism, and ancient Hebrewism, flowed into Christianity.

If we will understand how Zarathustrianism flowed in, then we should call to mind something which has often been mentioned here: that that individuality whom we mention as Zarathustra, was the great teacher of the second post-Atlantean epoch, and first taught in the so-called ancient Persian people, and then incarnated again and again. After he ascended higher and higher through each incarnation, he appeared about 600 years before our era as a contemporary of the great Buddha. He appeared in the secret schools of the old Chaldean-Babylonian sphere of culture. This Zarathustra was incarnated there, he was the teacher there of Pythagoras, who went to Chaldea, in order to perfect himself in the right manner. Then this Zarathustra, who at that time 600 years before our era appeared under the name of Zarathas or Nazarathos, was born again at the beginning of our era, reborn so that he appeared in a body which sprang from the parental pair called Joseph and Mary, mentioned and described in the Matthew Gospel. We designate this child of Joseph and Mary, of the so-called Bethlehem parents, as one of the two Jesus children who were then born at the beginning of our era. Zarathustra incarnated in him. Therewith we have implanted in that old Palestine the individuality who was the bearer of Zarathustrianism, the one significant spiritual stream.

But not only this spiritual stream has to live again, in order to be able to stream into Christianity in a new form, but other spiritual streams also. Many different things had to come together and combine for this. For instance, it had to happen also that Zarathustra was born in a body, which as a body, through its physical organisation, made it possible for Zarathustra in that incarnation at the beginning of our era, to develop those faculties which he possessed, through having ascended so high from incarnation to incarnation. For we must permit ourselves to say: If such a high individuality descended and found an unsuitable body (which could happen through his being unable to find a suitable body), then he would not be able to express the faculties which he possessed in soul and spirit, because the instruments were not there, in order to express on earth the corresponding powers. One must have a definitely formed brain, if one will express such powers as Zarathustra possessed. That means, one must be born in a body, which, as a body inherited from forefathers, has those qualities which render it a suitable instrument for the faculties which come over from an earlier incarnation. And so, in the case of that Jesus child described in the Matthew Gospel, care had to be taken, that he did not merely have inwardly, in that which reincarnated such a high psychic-spiritual organisation, that he could exercise that mighty effect which had to be exercised, but that also, this soul could be born in a perfect physical organisation, which was inherited. Zarathustra had to find forthcoming this suitable physical brain.

What was thus worked out as a perfectly adapted physical organisation was now the contribution which the ancient Hebrew people had to make to Christianity. A suitable physical body had to be created out of it with the utmost conceivable perfect physical instruments. A suitable body had to be created through purely physical heredity for him who incarnated here. Preparation had to be made for this throughout all the generations lying far back, so that the right qualities could be passed on to that body which was born at the beginning of our era. To transmit the right body was again the mission of the ancient Hebrew life.

Now we will form for ourselves an idea of how this life flowed into the great main stream of our present spiritual life. That means, just as we have seen the mission of Zarathustra within Christianity, so we will now seek the mission of the ancient Hebrew people for the entire civilisation of our earth.

Here it must be said that the more spiritual science progresses, the more it sees in the Bible, compared with what we have today as external history. What is unearthed in the latter really appears childish compared with what stands in the Bible, only one must read it rightly to understand it. This is really the more correct, to the eyes of true spiritual investigation. And so, among other things, it is correct that in a certain connection, that which was the later Judaism, arose from a tribal father, from the father Abraham or Abram. Something absolutely correct lies behind that if we go back along the generations, we come to a tribal father, to whom quite special powers are imparted from out of the spiritual world itself. And in the sense of spiritual science, we can speak of a tribal father of the Jewish people, of Abraham or Abram. Quite special powers were imparted to him from out of the spiritual world. What were these? If we want to understand what special faculties were imparted to him, then we must call to mind a little the various things we have already said here.

We have said: If we go back to earlier times, we find that human beings had other powers of soul, which we can designate as a kind of dim clairvoyance compared with those of today. They could not look out into the world in such a self-conscious intellectual way as modern human beings, but they still had the faculty to see the spirit which exists in the outer world, spiritual phenomena, facts and beings; even if this seeing, because it occurred in a dimmed consciousness, was more like a living dream, yet it had a living connection with reality. This old clairvoyance had to become weaker and weaker, so that man could educate himself to our present modern perception and intellectual culture.

The whole evolution of mankind is a kind of education of humanity. The various faculties are gradually acquired. Our present way of seeing, without our perceiving, for instance the astral body winding round a flower, when we behold it in ordinary consciousness—whereas the ancient observer saw the flower and the astral body round it—this modern perception, which beholds objects with the sharp contours of the intellect, had to be trained in man, through the disappearance of the old clairvoyance. But one definite law prevails in spiritual evolution. Everything which man acquires must take its starting point from one individuality. Faculties which are to become common to a large number of people must, as it were, first begin in one. Those faculties which relate especially to a combination turned away from clairvoyance, to the judging of the world according to measure, number, and weight, these faculties which tend especially not to see into the spiritual world, but to combine sensible phenomena, were first implanted from out of the spiritual world in that individuality who is designated as Abraham or Abram. He was chosen first to develop especially those powers which are bound in the most eminent degree to the instrument of the physical brain. Abraham or Abram is not for nothing called the discoverer of arithmetic, that means, that faculty which judges and combines the world according to measure and number. He was, as it were, the first of those, in whose soul-powers the old dreamy clairvoyance was extinguished, and whose brain was so prepared as a perfect instrument, that just that faculty which makes use of the brain, comes most to the fore.

And so in Abraham or Abram, there was a man, in whom the physical brain was so developed, that it was applied most of all to external perception on the physical plane, whereas all human beings earlier made less use of the physical brain, while they saw clairvoyantly in the outer world the spiritual world, without always using the physical brain. That was a significant, mighty mission which was especially allocated to Abraham.

And now this faculty, which was laid as a seed from out the spiritual world in Abraham, like any other seed, had to develop more and more. You can easily conceive that whatever appears in the world must develop. Similarly this power of considering the world through the physical brain had gradually to develop from the seed. The evolution of this faculty now occurred through the succeeding generations, while that which was given to Abraham was carried over to the succeeding generations through the times which followed. But something else had to happen than formerly when the mission of older people was carried over to the younger. For the other missions were not yet bound to a physical body; the greatest missions especially were not bound to a physical brain. Let us take Zarathustra. What he gave to his disciples was a higher clairvoyant vision than other people had. That was not bound to a physical instrument; that was carried over from teacher to pupil, the pupil again became teacher, carried it over to his pupils, and so on. Now it was not a question of a teaching, of a method of clairvoyant perception, but of something bound to the instrument of the physical brain. Something of this nature can only be implanted into later times by being inherited physically. Therefore, what was given to Abraham as mission was bound up with its being inherited physically from one generation to the other. That means, this perfect organisation of the physical brain must be inherited from Abraham by his descendants from generation to generation. Because his mission consisted in the physical brain becoming more and more perfect, this had to happen from generation to generation.

Thus the mission of Abraham was something bound up with procreation, in order to become ever more perfect in the course of physical evolution. But now something else was united with this contribution which the old Hebraic people had to perform. This we will understand if we consider the following.

If we take the other people in other civilisations, with their old dim clairvoyance, then we must say: How did they receive that which was most important, which they venerated most of all in the world? They received it in such a way that it shone as Inspiration in their inner being, shone entirely inwardly. One did not have to investigate so far afield as today. Today man acquires his science by investigation outwardly, by experimenting, he derives his laws by combining external facts. The ancients did not experience what they sought to know in this way, for it shone in them as inspiration. They received it in the inward being. The soul had to give birth to it inwardly. They had to turn the gaze away from the outer world if they let the highest truths arise as inspirations. This had now become different in that people who derived their mission from Abraham or Abram. Abraham had to bring to men just that which can be won through observation outwardly, and through combination. If then a member of other civilisations, which were built on the old clairvoyance, looked up to the highest, then he said to himself: I am thankful to the God Who reveals Himself to me within. I turn my gaze away from outside, and the God becomes present to me in the spirit, if, without looking outwards, I let the inspirations of the Divinity shine within. That people which arose from Abraham, however, had to say: I will renounce the inspirations which merely come from within. I will prepare myself to turn my gaze into the world around. I will observe what reveals itself in the air, and water, in mountain and plain, in the starry world, there will I send my gaze, and then I will be able to ponder how one thing stands by another. I will combine the things outside with each other, and will see how I can win an all-embracing thought. And when I comprise what I see in the outer world with an all-embracing thought, bringing it into one single thought, then I will name that which the outer world says to me Jahve, or Jehova. I will receive the highest through a revelation from outside, through a revelation which speaks through the outer world. That was the mission of the Abrahamitic people: to give mankind that which came as revelation from outside, in contrast to that which the other peoples had to give. Therefore this instrument of the spiritual life had to be inherited so that it corresponded in its formations to the revelations from outside, just as earlier the inner soul-powers had to correspond to the revelations from within.

Now let us ask ourselves: What happened there, when the old clairvoyants gave themselves to the revelations from within? Then they turned their gaze from outside, for what revealed itself in the external world could say nothing to them about the spiritual world. They even turned their gaze from sun and stars, for they listened solely to what was within, and then the great inspirations about the secrets of the world revealed themselves. Then the perceptions appeared concerning the structure of the world. And that which they knew about the stars and their movements, about the laws of the starry world, about the spiritual worlds, was not acquired by them through external observation, these members of the ancient civilisations. They knew something of Mars, Saturn, etc., because the nature of these stars revealed itself in their inner being. Thus it was the laws of the entire cosmos, which as it were, were inscribed in the stars, were at the same time inscribed in the souls of these people. They revealed themselves there through inspiration. As the laws of the world which dominate the hosts of the stars revealed themselves in the soul, so now the external laws which rule the world should reveal themselves through external combination to the Abrahamitic people, which now should be won through external observation. For this, heredity had to be so guided that thereby the brain got those qualities through which it could see the right combinations there outside. That wonderful conformity to law was implanted in the seeds which were transmitted to Abraham, which could so develop through i.e. generations, that their development corresponded with the great world-laws. The brain had to be inherited so that its inner powers, its configuration, developed like the laws of number of the stars, out there in the cosmos. Therefore, it was said by Jahve to Abraham: Thou wilt see generations arise from thee, which in their ordering are arranged as the number of stars in the heavens. As the stars in the sky are arranged in harmonious relationships of number, so should the generations also be arranged in harmonious relationships of number. That means these generations should carry laws in themselves, like the starry laws in the heavens, There we have twelve constellations. An image of this had to appear in the twelve tribes, as they arose from Abraham, so that the corresponding faculties, which were implanted as seed in Abraham, could be led down through the generations. And so, in the whole organic structure of this people developing from age to age, an image was created of the number and measure in the heavens. A translation of the Bible has rendered this by saying: Thy descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in heaven.... Whereas in truth, the passage should run: Thy descendants shall be arranged regularly in the blood relationship, so that their arrangement is an image of the laws of the stars in the heavens. O, the Bible is deep! But what is today offered as Bible is coloured by the modern view of the world. There it runs, “Thy descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in the sky,” whereas in truth it is said: Everything shall be so regular in thy descendants that, for example, twelve tribes result, which correspond to the number twelve in the constellations of heaven.

And so the individual characteristics had to appear that all the time there came to expression the mission of the Abrahamitic people: I get as a gift from outside—not as something which shines in my innermost—that which forms my mission. There is given to me from outside that which I have to bring to the world. That is wonderfully expressed in the Bible, that the mission of Abraham is something given to him from outside, in contrast to the old revelations which were given from within. What had the mission of Abraham to be? The mission of Abraham had to be this: to provide the blood, and what flows through the blood, to Christ Jesus. That is the mission of Abraham. The entire spirituality of a certain stream had to be permuted in this. That had to work as if it came from outside, a gift from outside. Abraham had to give to the world the old Hebrew people. That is his mission. If that is to correspond to the whole nature of his mission, then this people itself, which is his mission, this people itself must be a gift from outside, must be given by him as a gift. Abraham had a son—Isaac—whom he had to sacrifice, as related in the Bible. And as he came to sacrifice him, this son was given anew to him by Jahve. What is thus given him? From Isaac originate the entire people. If Isaac had been sacrificed, there would have been no Hebrew people. The whole people were thus given him as a gift. In the sacrifice of Isaac is this character of gift wonderfully expressed. The people itself is the mission of Abraham; and with Isaac, he receives the entire Hebrew people from Jahve as a gift.

The presentations in the Bible are thus deep, and all correspond in detail to the inner character in the progressive evolution of humanity. This old Hebrew people had to give up bit by bit the old clairvoyance, which the other civilisations comprised within themselves. This old clairvoyance was bound to faculties which came out of the spiritual world. One designated these clairvoyant faculties, according to their nature, by expressions derived from the starry constellations. The last faculty which was given up, for the old Hebrew people to be bestowed on Abraham, was the one connected with the starry sign of the Ram. Therefore a ram is sacrificed in place of Isaac. That is the external expression for the sacrifice of the last clairvoyant power so that the old Hebrew people could be bestowed on Abraham. Thus this people was chosen to develop just those powers which depend on the observation of the outer world. But atavistic relics of the earlier appear in all, and so it came about that again and again the old Hebrew people was forced to exclude what did not lie purely in the blood. The carrying over of these faculties directed externally that which still remained of the old clairvoyance. That which came as an inheritance from other peoples had always to be excluded.

We here touch a chapter which is only described with difficulty today, because it contains a truth which lies as far as possible from modern thinking. But it is nevertheless a truth, and one may make the demand, that those who have worked a longer time in anthroposophical groups, can bear such truths, withdrawn somewhat from modern habits of thought.

We must be clear that for certain human classes in ancient times, they retained older faculties into later ages, especially with reference to knowledge; the old clairvoyant powers were once with them in the soul. Man was more united with spiritual beings; they revealed themselves in him. That expressed itself in certain people, who represented as it were decadent products of this older humanity, that they maintained a lower form of this connection with the spiritual outer world. Whereas the really clairvoyant people were more bound up with the entire universe through spiritual intuition and inspiration, the human beings who were in decadence, were lower human types, who in their decadence developed their ancient connection with the surrounding world. They were not independent; the I-ness or Ego-hood, Ego-nature, did not come out in them, but also, the old clairvoyant faculties were no longer at their corresponding height. Such human beings constantly appeared, and in them was shown the connection between certain physical human organs, and the so-called ancient clairvoyant organs. And now comes that truth which must sound so strange. What one calls the old clairvoyance, this shining of world secrets in the innermost, must come by some path or other into the soul. What shone in man must stream in; that means, we have to conceive that “streamings-in” (influxes) occur in people. The ancient human being did not perceive these streams, but when they took place and shone in him, he perceived them as his ancient inspirations. Certain streams thus flowed into man from out his environment. These were later transformed in him. These streams in ancient times were purely spiritual streams, were, for instance, perceptible to a clairvoyant as pure astral-etheric streams. But later, these pure spirit streams dried up, as it were, condensed to etheric-physical streams. And what arose thus? The hair arose in this way. The hair is a result of the ancient streams. The hair today on a human body was formerly spiritual stream in man, coming from outside into his inner being. Our hair is a dried-up astral-etheric stream. And such things are only preserved where—one might say—the old truths have remained, purely externally, in writing, through tradition. Therefore, in Hebrew, the word HAIR and the word LIGHT are designated by approximately the same signs, because one had a consciousness of the relationship between the astral in-streaming light, and the hair; as, in general, in old Hebraic writings, originally, purely in the words themselves, the greatest truths are contained.

Thus one can say: there is a progressive evolution of mankind. With those human beings, however, who retained the old faculties in decadent form, these streamings-in indeed transformed themselves, dried up, as it were, but no new faculties appeared instead. They were in an old way bound with the new, and yet again, not bound, because these streams were dried up. Such people were very hairy, while those who developed further were less hairy, because new powers appeared instead of those which later condensed to hair.

Science will only come again to these significant truths after a long time. In the Bible they stand. The Bible is far more learned than our modern science, still standing at the childish stage guarding its A.B.C. Just read the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob is he who has progressed a stage, who has developed the faculty of the later age, Esau has remained at an earlier stage. It is he who is the simpleton, as it were, compared with Jacob. As the sons are presented to Isaac, the mother has covered Jacob with false hair, so that Isaac confuses the younger son with Esau. We should thereby be shown that the old Hebrew people still had something in them as an inheritance from other civilisations which had to be stripped off. Esau is thrust out; through Jacob is implanted what should live on as external combination.

And just as that which had been retained in a form remaining behind was thrust out in Esau, so were the old clairvoyant powers, which came to expression as an atavistic remnant in what Joseph represents, thrust out by his brothers, towards Egypt. He had dreams, and could interpret the world through them; that is the faculty which should not develop in the mission of the Abrahamitic people. Therefore he is thrust out, and must go to Egypt.

So we thus see how a stream is worked out in the old Hebrew people, which is built on blood relationship through the generations, and out of which by stages that which remains over as relics is expelled. The old Hebrew has this as its own peculiar tendency, to make that which is inherited down through the generations into an ever more and more perfect instrument, so that when the whole generations have run their course, that body can be evolved from it which can furnish the instrument for him who is to be incarnated again. If the old Hebrew people could not receive revelations from within, they must receive them from outside. Even that which the other peoples received through direct inspiration, had to be received by the old Hebrew people through an external revelation. That means, the Jews had to go over to another people—led by Joseph—who had the old inspirations. And while Joseph was initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries, they attained through external means what they needed to know about the characteristics of the spiritual worlds. They even received the moral law from outside, not as something which shone to them from within. That was the mission of the old Hebrew people. Then, after they had assimilated what they had to absorb from outside, they withdrew with an externally acquired revelation—they returned back again to their Palestine.

And now, after this old Hebrew people had undergone all this, there should be shown how it gradually developed from generation to generation, so that finally the body which became the body of Jesus could be born from this people, whereby the old Hebrew stream flowed into Christianity.

Remember how we have discussed the development of tendencies in the case of single human beings. The life of the individual falls into periods of seven years. The first period extends from birth until the change of teeth, at the age of seven, and in this the physical body simply builds its forms. Then we have the second seven-yearly period to the age of puberty, in which the etheric body is active in the growth of form, in enlarging the forms. The forms are made definite till the age of seven, then the already definite forms merely enlarge, letting those tendencies prevail down in them. From 14 to 21, the astral body is especially predominant. And so we see in the twenty-first year the real “I” of man is first born, and becomes independent. Thus the life of the individual runs its course in certain periods, till the birth of the human “I” or Ego. Similarly, those germs or aptitudes must gradually develop in that people which as people had to provide a body for a most perfect Ego or “I.” In this case, what appears in man in the course of years, so develops here that it appears in the course of generations. A following generation must have developed other tendencies than a previous generation. Everything cannot develop all at once merely in one generation. To explain why this is so from occult bases would lead too far, but one can call to mind a quite ordinary phenomenon. Just remember that in heredity, certain qualities are not immediately inherited, but leap over one generation and it is the grandson who appears similar to the grandfather in inherited qualities. Thus it is in the inheritance of qualities in the successive generations of the Hebrew people. One generation had always to be leaped over. And so what corresponds in the single individual to one period of age, corresponds in the successive generations to two. We can therefore say: This people, like a great individual, must so develop from generation to generation, that what occurs in the case of the individual from birth to change of teeth, here requires 2 x 7 = 14 generations. Then a second period comes, again comprising 2 x 7 generations. This corresponds to the period between the change of teeth and puberty. Then a third period, again comprising 2 x 7 generations, corresponding to the age between 14 and 21, where the astral body is especially prominent. Then the “I” or Ego can be born. The “I” or Ego could be born in the Hebrew people after 3 (2 x 7) = 3 x 14 generations had elapsed. He who wanted to describe to us the body which was given as instrument to Zarathustra, had to show how, through 3 (2 x 7) generations, the seed which was given to Abraham developed, so that after 3 x 14 generations, the “I” could be born, just as in the individual, the “I” could be born in its threefold corporality after 3 x 7 years. The writer of the Matthew Gospel does this. He describes 3 X 14 generations, the generations from Abraham to David, those from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and those from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus.

Thus from the depths of knowledge, out of the Matthew Gospel, we have pointed to the mission of the old Hebrew people, how gradually the forces were developed which made it possible for the most perfect Ego or “I” which Zarathustra had attained to be born in a body from this people.

And if we now see what the destinies were of this old Hebrew people, we find that the Captivity appeared to the entire people where, in the individual after the fourteenth year, preparation takes place for individual life, where that springs up which can be accomplished in life, and what man absorbs between the ages 14 and 21; the hopes of youth; that the Captivity was the time when, as it were, the astral body of the old Hebrew people came into consideration, where that was implanted through the last fourteen generations, which gives it its impulse. Therefore the old Hebrew people are led into the Babylonian Captivity—there, where, 600 years before our era, Zarathas or Nazarathos was then in his incarnation, at that time the teacher in the secret schools of the Babylonians. Those who were the most prominent leaders of the old Hebrew people then came into contact with the great teacher of ancient times, with Zarathas. He there became their teacher, united himself with them, they took up there the great impulse which so worked that in the last fourteen generations this people were prepared for the birth of Jesus.

Events then went on further, as you know. And then we see something noteworthy. We see a law observed in the spiritual sphere by the writer of the Matthew Gospel, which will be recognised more and more as a law significant for all life. This is the law, that whatever has happened earlier is repeated at a higher stage. Modern science has it already in a somewhat distorted form when it declares that what has been undergone at a lower stage throughout long epochs is repeated shortly in each single being. The writer of the Matthew Gospel shows us this in a magnificent way. He shows it by saying: The Ego of Zarathustra had to incarnate in a body which was gradually developed within the Abrahamitic people. Abraham proceeded from Ur in Chaldea, from the place where Babylonian civilisation started, and took his path through Asia Minor towards Palestine. His descendants were led farther south through the dreams of Joseph, towards Egypt, and after they had here received the Egyptian Impulse, returned to Canaan. That is the fate of the entire people. First, the whole people are led through Canaan, towards Egypt, and then back again to Canaan. What thus transpired as the fate of a people, had now shortly to be repeated. There, where the Ego is born for whom the vehicle had been thus prepared, after all had been developed that was laid down in Abraham, there this Ego again takes its starting point from Chaldea. In Chaldea, Zarathustra was the secret teacher in his last incarnation, his spirit was united with Chaldea. What path does the soul of Zarathustra take, when it will incarnate in Bethlehem? Zarathustra had remained united with those who had been initiated in the Chaldean secret schools, with the Magi. They called well to mind how they had heard from their teacher that he would reappear, that this soul who from the beginning was designated as Zarathustra—the golden star—would take his path at a definite point of time towards Bethlehem. And as the time came, they followed the path which this soul took, repeating the path of the old Hebrew people. As Abraham followed the path to Canaan, so that star took this path to Canaan: that means, the soul of Zarathustra; and the three Magi followed the star Zarathustra, and he led them to that place where he was born in that body destined for him from out the Abrahamitic people. Thus Zarathustra, the Ego of Zarathustra, was led along that path—repeating in spirit—which Abraham had traversed to Palestine. Then the old Hebrew people had had to seek the path to Egypt. It had been led over through the dreams of the elder Joseph. And now, that Ego which was born in the Bethlehemitic Jesus, was led through the dreams—again of a Joseph—led to Egypt, the same path which the Abrahamitic people had pursued through the dreams of the elder Joseph. This Ego of Zarathustra, repeating in Spirit, undergoes the whole destiny of the old Hebrew people in the body of Jesus. He goes to Egypt, and then again back to Palestine. Here we have the repetition in spirit which is undergone by the soul of the Ego of Zarathustra. And that is an image of the fate of the old Hebrew people.

In the Matthew Gospel, out of the knowledge of the law, we have that faithfully described, that what appears at a higher stage, is a repetition in short of what was there earlier. Oh, how deeply these gospels describe the event that stands at the beginning of our era, that is so mighty, that four writers have said: Each one of us can only describe from his standpoint this great event. Each of these four has described the one event according to his own limited power. As when we picture a being from four sides, we retain but one picture, and through the combination of mutually contradictory pictures know the total being, so has the writer of the Matthew Gospel described what he knew about the law of 3 (2 x 7), about the preparation of the body for the great Ego of Jesus through the mission of the old Hebrew people, according to these secrets, of which he was conscious just through his initiation. The writer of the Luke Gospel has described according to the initiation of which he was conscious, whereby he presented how in another way the Buddha stream flowed into Christianity, in order to flow on farther into it. And the other gospel writers have described from out of the presuppositions of other initiations. The event they describe is so great, that we must be thankful when we find it described from four sides, from the aspects of four initiations.

Today we have only been able to indicate the inflow of the Zarathustra stream, and the contribution of the old Hebrew people. Next time we will discuss something else, which has been transmitted as a contribution in order to stream further into Christianity at a newly-arisen stage. Only some details were mentioned today from the spirit of the origin of Christianity, to show how our knowledge of the world grows, our knowledge of man grows, if we follow the greatest event in humanity. An idea should be awakened of how deeply this event is to be taken, and how deep the gospels are, when we really understand how to read them.

In the course of years, considerations have been brought forward in the various groups in different lecture-cycles, for a great number of the anthroposophical friends sitting here, on the John Gospel, the Luke Gospel, the Matthew Gospel, and we have attempted in these considerations, on the three gospels, to let appear before our spiritual eye the great event of Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different sides, as it were, in three varying ways. And perhaps these considerations have proved adapted to lay in our souls the foundations for an ever-increasing valuation of this unique event. We have already pointed out how the reason why we have four gospels is to be sought essentially in the fact that the writers of the gospels, as inspired occultists, wanted to represent this great event each from his own side, just as one copies or photographs something external from one standpoint. And if one takes photographs of a thing from different sides, so through a combination of what results, through bringing them together before the soul, one can come to the true reality. Each of the evangelists really gives us opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one special side. From a side which we can call at the same time the opening of the highest human, occult and other aims, and beside this highest human principle, also taking into account the highest world principle—from this side it is the John Gospel which gives us an insight into the great event of Palestine.

The Luke Gospel opens for us an insight into the secrets, which hover round the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, of the Solomon and Nathan Jesus, up to the moment where the great inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth is replaced by the Christ.

The Matthew Gospel, for those who have heard the lecture-cycle on it, or have read it later, has to show how from the people of ancient Hebraism, from the folk-secrets of the Hebrew people, the physical principle of life (as it were) was prepared, in which the Christ-Principle should incarnate for three years.

In a certain connection it is again the Mark Gospel which can lead us into the highest summits of the anthroposophical, Christian method of observation, and through the Mark Gospel opportunity is given us to look into many things which should be imparted to us through the gospels, but are not brought near to us in such a way by the other evangelists. And I have laid on myself the task of saying a few words because opportunity offers itself today to speak of the Mark Gospel.

If we speak of this, we must be quite clear how necessary it is to look into many things for which the superficial world of the present has no real inclination. If one is to understand the Mark Gospel and all its depths, one must become acquainted with the quite different method of expression among men at the time when Christ Jesus walked on earth. Do not take it amiss, if I attempt to say to you what I really intend, through a distinct shading, a distinct twilight.

We express through speech what we want to say. And what lives in our soul should in a certain way be made obvious in the words of speech. In this method of expressing through speech what lives in our soul, the various epochs of human development are very different from each other. If we went back to the epoch of the old Hebrew evolution, to that wonderful method of expression which was still possible in the old Hebraic temple-speech, we should find quite another method of clothing the secrets of our soul in words, than people today have any idea of. When a word sounded in the old Hebraic speech—only the consonants were written, the vowels were then added—then there did not merely sound in this word what sounds in it today; a more or less abstract idea... but a whole world. Because of this, the vowels were not really written, because he who spoke gave out his most inner being just through his way of vocalising, whereas in the consonants, there lay more the description, the portraying of what is outside. One can say that when, e.g., an ancient Hebrew drew a “B”—what corresponds today with our “B”—he always felt something like a portraying of external relationships, of something which formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter “B” always evoked the picture of something which, house-like, could surround a being. One could not utter the “B” without that living in the soul. And if one vocalised an “A,” one could not do it without something of strength, of force, even of radiating power, living within it. Thus the soul lived further. The soul-content worked outwards with the words, soared into space and into other souls. Thus speech was then a far more living affair. It entered far more into the secrets of existence than our speech.

That is the light which I wanted to place before you. And the shadows I must represent in contrast; that we in our time have become to a high degree in this connection pedants. Our languages only express abstractions, generalities. One does not even feel that any more. Speech only expresses now pedantry, fundamentally. How should this be different in an age when people even begin to manipulate it in literary fashion long before they have a spiritual content; in an age when such an infinite amount goes into the broad masses as print, when each one thinks he must write something, when everything becomes an object for writing. I have had to experience that even in the founding of our society, authors turned up from curiosity, who had the intention of being able to extract perhaps a novel out of the matter: why should not forms exist there which one can have on tap and retail in a public writing shop? Thus we must be quite clear that we have a speech which has become abstract, empty, pedantic—in contrast to the way in which one formerly conceived it as something holy, to which one felt the responsibility that GOD should speak from out of it. Hence it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze into modern words those great, tremendous facts, which are imparted to us and which sound to us, for instance, in the gospels. Why should the man of today not also believe that one can give everything in our speech? He cannot understand that our speech says something empty with what even the Greek speech still meant with a word. And if we read the Bible today, we read something which, compared with its original content, has been sifted once, twice, three times, but so sifted, that there remains not the best but always the worst. Therefore it is naturally cheap in a certain way to appeal to the modern words of the Bible. But we go astray most of all if we appeal to the Bible in the case of the Mark Gospel, as it lies before us today. In any case we must not do that.

Now you know that the Mark Gospel had in its first lines as its basis the words which the translation by Weizsacker, regarded as exceptionally good (but it is conceivable that what is regarded today as so excellent, need not be so really), renders as follows: “As stands written in the prophet Isaiah; Behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness; prepare the way of the Lord; make straight his paths.”

Honest people must really say to themselves, if the Mark Gospel begins thus in this Weizsacker: I do not understand a single word of it all. Whoever will understand it must really resolve to do something. Whoever goes sincerely to work, cannot understand anything when it is said: “Behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness; prepare the way of the lord; make straight his paths.” For either a triviality is uttered, or something is said which one cannot understand. One must first bring together those ideas which make it possible to understand such an utterance as that of Isaiah's here. For Isaiah points to that great, mighty event, which should be the most significant event in human evolution. What is he really pointing to? Now from what we have already described, we can well indicate what Isaiah predicted. We can indicate it by saying: In ancient times, man had a kind of clairvoyance; he had the possibility of growing with his soul-forces into the divine spiritual world. What really happened with man when he grew thus into the divine spiritual world? Then it was the case that when he grew into the divine spiritual world he ceased to employ his Ego, so far as it was developed at that time. He used his astral body, in which were those forces which were the forces of vision, of seership, whereas all the forces rooted in the Ego were gradually awakened through the perception of the physical world. It is the Ego which employs the instruments of the senses. The ancient human being, however, when he sought illumination about the world, employed his astral body. The ancient human being saw, perceived in the astral body. Further evolution consisted in this, that the transition was found from the astral body to the use of the Ego. With reference to this Ego, the Christ-Impulse had to be the most intense impulse. If, now, the Christ is taken up into the Ego so that the phrase of Paul is true, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then the Ego has the power of growing into the spiritual world through itself. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus we have an evolution of humanity before us of which we can say: Man employed his astral body as organ of knowledge, but he lost more and more the possibility of developing an organ of knowledge in his astral body. And the more one approached the Christ Event, that stage of evolution arose of which man must say: My astral body has less and less the possibility of looking into the spiritual world. Nothing arose through its union with the spiritual world, and the Ego was not yet forceful enough to get, from its side, any illumination from the world. That was the age when the Christ drew near.

Now in the real evolution of mankind, it is a question of certain great strides being gradually prepared, which then occur. This was the case with the Christ-Impulse. But a transition had to exist. Things could not so run their course that man saw how his astral body gradually became dull towards the spiritual world, so that he would have felt utter barrenness and desolation in himself, until the Ego was kindled through the Christ-Impulse. Things could not take this course. But in the case of a few it happened through an especial influence from the spiritual world, they saw something already in the astral body similar to the way one should later see and know through the Ego: The egoity (Ego-hood) was, as it were, prepared in the astral body. That was an anticipation of the egoity in the astral body. Man indeed first became earthly man through the Ego and its development. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon. At that time, the angel, the angel-man, was at the human stage. The angel was man on the old moon. Man is man on the earth. We know that. On the old moon, it was man's task to use his astral body. Everything else was only preparation for the Ego-evolution. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of the moon evolution. For man could never become fully man in the astral body; but on the moon, only the angel could become man in the astral body. Therefore—just as in the earth-man the Christ lived in order to inspire the Ego—so for the preparation of this Ego-hood the possibility had to be given, that from the angels of the moon—from the moon-men, the angels—prophets were so inspired in their human astral body, that the Ego could be prepared. There had thus to occur what a prophet could have characterised in the following way: There will come in human evolution a time when man will be ripe for the ego-evolution. In the astral body only the angels of the moon have raised themselves to the highest. But in order that man can be prepared for this egoity, certain human beings must be so inspired on earth, through grace, in exceptional conditions, that they work as angels, in spite of their being human; that they are angels in human form.

Here we come to an important occult idea, without which you cannot understand at all the evolution of humanity in the sense of occultism. Externally uttered, it is naturally easy if one simply says that all is Maya. Well, all right. But that is an abstraction. One must really take it earnestly. Therefore one must be able to say: There stands a man before me... that, however, is Maya! Who knows... is that, anyhow, a man? Perhaps the human existence is but the external veil, employed by quite another being than man is, just to bring about something which cannot yet be effected by man. I have indicated something of this in my Portal of Initiation.

In ancient times, such an event was actualised for humanity, when that individuality who lived in Elias was reborn in John the Baptist, and when, in the soul of John the Baptist, an angel entered for that incarnation, and employed the corporality, and also the soul-nature of John the Baptist, in order to effect what no human being would have been able to bring about. In John lived an angel, an angel who had to go before, and announce before, that which should live in Jesus of Nazareth, in the widest sense, as true Ego-hood [Ichheit]. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is a Maya (illusion), and in him there lives an angel, a messenger. This stands also in the Greek: “Behold, I send my messenger = Angel.” The German alone thinks no more of this, that in the Greek “Angel” stands in this place. “Behold I send my angel before him.” And so there is indicated a deep world-mystery which, preceded with the Baptist, was prophesied by Isaiah. He characterises John the Baptist as a Maya, as an illusion, he who in truth comprises the angel, who, as angel, has to announce what man really should become through the reception of the Christ-Impulse—because the angel has to announce beforehand—what man only later has to become. And so, at this place, there should be said: “Behold, that which gives the egoity to the world, sends the angel before thee, to whom the egoity should be given.”

Now we pass to the third sentence. What does it signify? Here one must call to mind the whole historic world-situation. How had things become in the human breast, since the astral body had gradually lost the power of stretching out its forces like tentacles, to look clairvoyantly into the divine spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body was put in activity, it could see in the divine spiritual world. This possibility disappeared more and more, and it became dark in man. Man could formerly spread out his astral body over all the beings of the divine spiritual world. Now he was alone in himself—alone is the same as eremos [Greek ernmos] That which the soul was now, lived in the solitude. That also stands there in the Greek text: Behold, how it appears, how it there speaks in the solitude of the soul (or you could say “in the wilderness of the soul “)—when the astral body could no more spread itself out to the divine spiritual world. Give heed how it calls in thy soul-wilderness, in thy soul-loneliness.

What is it that announces itself beforehand? Here we must be clear as to the meaning of one quite definite word, when one uses it of soul-phenomena, or of spiritual phenomena in general, above all in the Hebrew, but also in the Greek: the word Kyrios. If one translates it by “the lord,” as generally happens, then one is translating truly absolute nonsense. What is meant by it? Everybody in ancient times, who had such an utterance on his tongue, knew that something was meant thereby which was connected with the soul-progress of the human race. He knew, therefore, that the word “Kyrios” pointed, indeed, to secrets of soul. We have in the soul, when we look to the astral body, various forces. We usually call them thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. Those are the three forces that work in the soul. But they are the serving forces of the soul. As man progressed in evolution, these forces which formerly were the lords, to whom man was given over—(man had to wait whether his thinking, feeling, willing was called)—these single soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the “I.” Nothing else was understood by this word, when it referred to the soul, than the “I,” though it no longer held in the old sense: the divine spiritual thinks, feels, wills in me, but I think, I feel, I will: The Lord makes itself valid in the soul forces. Prepare yourselves, ye human souls, to go such soul paths, that ye let the strong “I” awaken in your souls: Kyrios, the Lord in your souls. “Listen, how it calls in the solitude of soul. Prepare the force or the direction of the soul—Lord, of the I. Make open his forces!” Thus one must translate it, approximately. “Make its forces open, so that it can come in, so that it is not the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing.” And if you translate these words: “Behold, that which is the ego, sends its angel before thee, who should give thee the possibility to understand how it calls in the solitude of the astral soul: prepare the directions of the I, make the forces open for it, for the I,” then you have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; then you have an indication of the greatest event in human evolution; thus you understand from this how Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, how he points out thereby that man's soul-solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, of the “I.” Then the words get force and weight. Thus, we must grasp such words.

Why could John the Baptist be the bearer of the angel? He could be this, because he had had a quite special initiation, The various initiations are specialised. These initiations are not something general; they are specialised. With those individualities who have a quite special task, an initiation had to occur according to a quite special kind of secret. Now for everything which happens at all in the spiritual world, it is so provided that there is revealed in the heavens, in the starry script what spiritual facts there are. One can receive the sun-initiation, that means, enter the secrets of the spiritual world, which is the world of Ahura Mazdao, for which the sun is the external expression. But one can be initiated into the sun secrets in a twelve-fold way, and each initiation is in a certain connection a Sun-Initiation, but yet is differently constituted with reference to the other eleven. According as man has this or the other task for the whole of mankind, he receives a sun-initiation of which one can say: This is a sun-initiation but such that one must express by saying: The forces flow in so that the sun stands in the sign of Cancer. That is different from the initiation one receives which one must express by saying: The forces flow in as if the sun stands in the sign of the Balance or Scales. They are the expressions for different specialised initiations. And those individualities who have such a high task, a high mission, as characterised here for John the Baptist, they must be initiated in a quite special manner in a special initiation, because only from this can they get the strong force necessary to bring about this mission in the world, also, under conditions in a quite one-sided way. And so, John the Baptist, in order that he could become the bearer of the Angelos, had that sun-initiation, which one can call the initiation from the sign of the Waterman. As the sun stands in the sign of the Waterman, that is a symbol for that kind of initiation which John the Baptist received, in order to become the bearer of the angel, while he received the force of the sun, as it flows down when it stands in the sign of the Waterman, when it stands in such a relation to the other stars, that one designates it with the expression: It stands in the sign of the Waterman. That was the symbol that John had the Waterman-initiation. The sign indeed received this name Waterman, because he who had the Waterman-initiation received especially the power as a spiritual initiate, of effecting in human beings what John effected as the Waterman, as the Baptist: namely, to bring human beings to this, that with the immersion in water, they got their etheric bodies so free, that they came to such a self-knowledge, which made possible what was the most important thing at the time. Human beings were immersed, and the etheric body became free for a moment. Through the baptism in the Jordan, man could feel the quite especial importance of the world-historic epoch. Therefore John was initiated just in the Baptism Initiation. And because one must express that symbolically, with the flowing-down of the sunrays out of the sign in which the sun stands, so one called this sign also—the Waterman. Thus the name of the human power is carried over.

Today a whole number of learned ignoramuses make the attempt to interpret spiritual events by bringing down the heaven, as it were, to the earth. They say: Now, that signifies the prominence of the sun. All these learned people, who really do not know much, interpret human events from out of the heavens. The reverse was the case. What lives in man spiritually was carried over to the heavens, while one made use of the heavens as a means of expression. So that John the Baptist could say: I am he who baptises you with water. And that was the same as if he had said: I am endowed with the initiation of the Waterman. I baptise you with water, I am endowed with the initiation of the Waterman. That was the word which John would have been able to say to his intimate disciples. And just as the sun progresses in opposition to its sense-path: if you proceed in opposition to Waterman, there arises—Virgin; then it passes to Balance. If we have initiation in mind, we must consider the opposite path, on the other side: from Waterman to Fishes. Thus John could say: Something will come that no longer has to work as corresponds to the sun from out of the Waterman, but as corresponds to the working of the sun from out of the Fishes. One will come who will bring a higher baptism. When the spiritual sun mounts higher, then there arises from the Waterman-baptism, the baptism from spiritual water. The sun ascends in spirit from Waterman to the Fishes: hence the well-known fish-symbol for the bearer of the Christ, which is an ancient symbol. For just as in John through quite special spiritual influences a Waterman initiation took place, so the initiation, of which I have spoken here and there to you, which arose through all mysteries in a secret way which transpired around Jesus, a Fish-initiation—a progression of the sun by one constellation. That was what placed Jesus of Nazareth in his age, that he was first subject to a Fish-initiation.

This is, one might say, sufficiently indicated to us in the gospel of Mark. Yet such things can only be indicated in image form. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are seeking fish. Therefore all his first apostles are fishermen. And we can find obvious what I have said—the progress to the Fishes, when we are told: I have baptised you with water. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit. And as he drew to the sea of Galilee—that means, when the sun was so far advanced, that one could see its counterpart from the Fishes—those are inspired who were called Simon, and Simon's brother, James, and James' brother, fishers—they are inspired in the corresponding way. How can we understand all that? We cannot understand it, unless we enter a little more closely into the means of expression of that time.

Our modern means of expression is pedantic. If a man stands before us, we say: there is a man. If a second stands before us, we say again: there is a man. A third—another one, etc. But we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs, and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expression we have but the one word: there is a man. But what is a man for occultism? Nothing but Maya! Really, as he stands there before us, man is—nothing. He is about as much as the rainbow which stands in the sky. How long is this anything? Only so long as the necessary conditions are given between rain and sunshine. If the sun and rain alter their relationship, it is gone. It is just the same with man. He is only a streaming together of forces of the macrocosm. We must seek the forces in heaven, here or there in the macrocosm. There, where one assumes perhaps a man somewhere on the earth, there is nothing for the occultist. But forces are streaming from above down, from below up, and they intersect. And as the peculiar constellation of rain and sunshine results in the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in a phenomenon, and this appears as man. That is the man. Man is nothing as he stands before us. In truth, he is a schema, a Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces which are real, which intersect there where our eyes think they see a man. Just try and take this expression earnestly: Man is nothing as he stands before us. He is but the shadow of many forces. The being, however, who reveals itself in man, can quite well be elsewhere, than at that point where this man is walking on two legs. There are three men: The one is an ancient Persian, who works at the plough in the old Persian agriculture. He looks like a man—in truth he is one of the souls, who are nourishing their forces out of this or that world from below or above. The second is perhaps an old Persian official. He is built through forces from another world which intersect in him. If we will know him, we must mount to these forces. All of you, as you are sitting here, are in your reality quite somewhere else. Only the forces from your own real being ray here.... Then stood a third Persian there, of whom one had to say: He is really utter deception—he is utterly a schema, which stands there. What was there in reality? One must go up to the sun, there are the forces which nourished this model. There above, among the secrets of the sun, one finds that which one can call the Gold Star—Zarathustra; that sends the rays down, and here below stands a model, which one calls Zarathustra. In truth, his being is not there at all. That is the third.

Now it is important that in ancient times one was aware of what was meant by such designations. One did not give names as one does today, but one named people according to what lived in them, not according to their external illusory appearance. We must be quite clear of this. So that one should have been able to say: An ancient human being at the time of Christ should have well understood when one pointed to John the Baptist, and said: Here is the angel of God. One would only have heeded that which had taken up the place. One spoke of the chief matter, not of the subsidiary ones. Now let us assume the same mode of expression was applied to Christ Jesus Himself. How must one have spoken of Christ Jesus if one understood such things? No man at that time would even have dreamt of naming that which then wandered over the earth, this wandering body in flesh, the Christ Jesus; but that was the sign, that what streamed down spiritually from out of the sun, was caught up in this point in a quite special manner. If this body, which was the body of Jesus, went from one place to another, that was the rendering visible of the sun-force which went from one place to another. This sun-force could also go alone. At times the expression was so used, that Christ Jesus was in his home in the flesh, but what was in him moved further, even without his body. Especially in the John Gospel the expression is so used, that under conditions, when this being moved purely spiritually, the writer of the gospel speaks quite exactly as if this sun-force dwelt in a fleshly body. Hence it is so important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always brought into connection with the physical sun, which is the external expression for the spiritual world, which has been collected, been caught up, at that point where the fleshly body wanders. If thus the Christ Jesus heals, for instance, then it is the sun-force which heals there. This must stand, however, at the right place in the heavens. “When evening was come, as the sun went down, they brought to him all who were sick, diseased, etc.” It is important that one indicates that this healing power can flow down when the external sun has set, when the sun only still works spiritually. And as He needs a definite force in order to work, he had to take this out of the spiritual sun, not out of the physical visible sun. “And early in the morning, while it was still dark, he arose and went out.” The path of the sun, and the sun-force is expressly indicated to us: that this sun-force works, and that fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign: that this path of the sun-force could also be visible to the weak external eyes. And everywhere in the Mark Gospel where we have mention of the Christ, the sun-force is meant, which for that epoch of our earthly evolution was quite especially active on that part of the earth called Palestine. And one could see the sun-force. “At this or that time, Christ went from this place to that place.” One could just as well say: “At this time, the spiritual force of the sun, as if gathered into a focus, went from this to that place,” And the body of Jesus was the external sign which made visible to the eyes how the sun-force moved. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the sun-force come down to earth. And if you draw the steps of Jesus as on a special map, then you have a cosmic event; the working of the sun-force out of the macrocosm in the land of Palestine. It is a question of this macrocosmic event. It is especially the writer of the Mark Gospel who points this to us; the writer of the Mark Gospel, who well knew that a body, which was the vehicle of such a principle as the Christ-Principle, must be subdued in a quite special way by his principle. It was the pointing to that world which Zarathustra had so powerfully announced behind the world of sense, the pointing to that world as it works into the human world. And so now there was indicated through Christ Jesus how the forces work on into the earth. Therefore a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra-events must occur in that body which, as we have seen, even if it was the body of the Nathan Jesus, was in a certain way influenced by the Zarathustra Individuality.

Now let us hear the great, beautiful legends of Zarathustra. As his mother gave him birth, the first wonder of Zarathustra showed itself as the famous Zarathustra smile. The second wonder was when the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, Durasrav, resolved to murder Zarathustra, of whom the decadent magicians had said special things. As the king appeared to stab the child, his arm was paralysed. That was the second miracle after the birth of Zarathustra. And then, the king who could not use his dagger against Zarathustra, had the child taken among the wild beasts of the desert. That is the expression for the fact that in earliest childhood, Zarathustra had to see what man sees when he appears impure. Instead of the noble group-souls, and the noble, higher spiritual beings, he sees the outflow of his wild fantasy. That is the exposure in the desert to the wild animals, among which Zarathustra remains unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth was again a miracle among the wild animals, etc. Always it was the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra.

We find these wonders again in the Mark Gospel repeated: “And then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness—(really it means solitude)—for forty days... and the angels ministered unto him.” Here we are shown that the body was prepared to take up, as it were, in a focus, that which transpired in the macrocosm. What happened with Zarathustra must happen again; being led to the wild beasts.... This body took up what came in from out of the macrocosm.

The Mark Gospel already in its first lines places us within the greatest cosmic connections. And I wanted to show you how basically, if one but first understands the words in the right sense—not as in our modern pedantic speech, but as in the ancient speech, where each word had living worlds behind it—when one understands it in the sense of this ancient speech, how then the Mark Gospel gets new life, new force. But one must say: Our modern speech can only find what was already laid in the words in these ancient speeches, after much paraphrase. What we utter when we say: “Man lives on the earth and develops his ego. Man formerly lived on the moon, then it was the angels who went through their human stage.” All of that lies behind, when it runs: “Behold, I send my angel before man.” And the words are not to be understood, without the presupposition of what is offered in spiritual science. And people in the present should be sincere, and say of the words at the beginning of the Mark Gospel: That is incomprehensible. Instead of doing this, they stand there in petty pride and explain spiritual science as fantasy, which puts all kinds of things into what they know in a simple way. But these people of today do not know it at all. And today one no longer has the principle that one had, for instance, in ancient Persia, where from epoch to epoch, the ancient holy documents were rewritten, in order to be clothed anew for each epoch. Thus the divine spiritual word as Zend-Avesta was transformed, and again transformed, and what exists today is the last form. Seven times the Persian Bible was written anew. And anthroposophy should teach men how necessary it is that books in which the holy secrets are written must be transformed from age to age. For especially when one will preserve the mighty style of old, one may not as it were attempt to remain as much as possible with the old words. One cannot do it, one understands them no more, but one must attempt to transform the ancient words into a direct understanding of the present. We have tried this summer to do that with Genesis.¹ You saw, then, how many of the words must be transformed. You have perhaps today got a little idea of how the words must also be transformed in the Gospel of Mark.

• 1. Secrets of Creation. A series of lectures on the Book of Genesis delivered by the author at Munich, August, 1910, now out of print, but to be reprinted shortly in a second and revised edition.

Today we will consider a general theme: the question of the meaning and tasks of anthroposophical spiritual science. Tomorrow we will take up a more specific theme: the destiny and nature of the individual human being. We have often emphasized that anthroposophy has a special task and meaning for human beings in the present age. People who think will not be able to avoid the question what the aims of this spiritual movement are and how they relate to other tasks of our time. Such tasks may be explained from diverse points of view, as we have often done. Today we will try to describe the evolutionary stage of contemporary humanity and attempt to look a little into the future. Then we will consider the task of anthroposophy in reference to our present evolutionary stage.

We know that since the great Atlantean catastrophe, which entirely transformed the earth, there have been five great epochs of civilization. We designate these as the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin, and the epoch we presently live in. The latter was prepared in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries after Christ; we are now actually in the middle of this epoch. Of course, such divisions are not to be understood as indicating that each evolutionary epoch abruptly came to an end and then a new one began. Rather, one epoch gradually and slowly merged into another. Long before one epoch has run its course, the next one is already being prepared.

In our own cultural epoch, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the characteristics of the sixth epoch are already being prepared. Roughly speaking, people in our time can be divided into two groups: those who live blindly for the day, have no idea of, and know nothing about the preparation of the sixth epoch, and those who understand that something new is being prepared. The latter also know that this preparation must basically be accomplished by human beings. We find our place in our time either by passively following the customs of our society and doing what our parents have taught us to do, or by being aware that to be a conscious link in the chain of humanity we must work on ourselves and our environment to contribute, as best we can, to the preparation of what must come, namely, the sixth cultural period.

How it is possible to prepare for the sixth epoch can only be understood when we consider the character of our own period. The best way to do this is to compare it with others. We know these cultural epochs are different from each other, and over the years we have presented their various distinguishing characteristics. We have shown that in the ancient Indian period people had different soul qualities than they did later. At that time, human beings were still endowed with a high degree of clairvoyant consciousness. In later epochs, this clairvoyance was gradually lost, and perception and understanding became limited to the physical world. We have seen that the fourth epoch was slowly prepared; it was in that period that humanity came to live entirely in the physical world. This made it possible for the being whom we call Christ Jesus to incarnate in human form, as a human being on the physical plane. Next we have seen that since that time a certain stream further strengthened human capacities in the physical world. Indeed, the materialistic tendency of our age and the insistence to accept only the physical world as real are connected with humanity's further descent into the physical. However, things must not remain like this. We must ascend again into the spiritual world, bearing with us the attainments and fruits we have acquired in the physical world. It is the task of anthroposophy to offer people the possibility of ascending once again into the spiritual world.

Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, there were many human beings who knew through direct perception that they were surrounded by, and lived in, a spiritual world. Gradually, however, the number of those who knew this decreased as human perception became more limited to the physical senses. In our time, the capacity to perceive the spiritual world has almost disappeared; yet something so significant is being prepared in our time that a great many people will have quite different faculties in their next incarnation. Human faculties have changed during the past five cultural epochs, and they will change again in the sixth. The capacities of a great number of people living today will change considerably in their next incarnation, as will be clear from the whole nature of their soul. Today we will talk about how different many of these human souls will be already in their next incarnation; of course, for other people, this change will not happen until two incarnations from now.

Looking at past epochs of human evolution, we can also see that the closer we come to the ancient clairvoyance, the more the human soul has the character of what we can call “group-soulness.” I have often pointed out that consciousness of this group-soulness existed preeminently among the ancient Hebrews. A person who consciously felt himself to be a member of this people understood, “As an individual human being, I am a transitory phenomenon, but there lives in me something that has an immediate connection with all the soul essence that has streamed down since the days of our progenitor, Abraham.” In esoteric terms, we can describe these feelings of the Hebrew people as a spiritual phenomenon. We will better understand what happened there if we look at the following.

Let us consider a Hebrew initiate of that time. Although initiation was not so frequent among the ancient Hebrews as among other peoples, we can characterize such a real initiate—that is, one initiated not just into theories and the law, but one who really saw into the spiritual worlds—only by taking into consideration the peculiarity of the Hebrew people as a whole. Nowadays, historians, who are concerned only with documents, check the Old Testament against all kinds of external records and find it unsubstantiated. We will have occasion to point out that the Old Testament gives us facts more faithfully than external historical records. In any case, spiritual science shows that the blood relationship of the Hebrews to Abraham can really be proven, and that their claim on Abraham as their original progenitor is fully justified. It was known particularly in the ancient Hebrew Mystery schools that the individuality or psychic essence of Abraham did not incarnate only in him, but is an eternal being existing in the spiritual world.

In fact, all true initiates among the Hebrews were inspired by the same spirit that inspired Abraham; they could call upon that spirit and were permeated by the same soul nature as Abraham. There was a real connection between every initiate and the tribal ancestor Abraham. This connection was expressed also in the feelings of the individuals belonging to the Hebrew people. They felt that what came to expression in Abraham was the group-soul of the people.

Group-souls were also experienced in the same way by other peoples of that time. Humanity in general goes back to group-souls. The farther back we go in human evolution, the less developed we find the individuality. Instead, a whole group belonged together as a unit, as is the case in the animal kingdom. This “groupness” is more and more pronounced the farther back we go into ancient times. Groups of human beings then belonged together, and the group-soul was considerably stronger than the individual soul.

Even today human group-soulness is still not overcome. Those who claim the opposite merely fail to take into account certain subtler phenomena of life, such as the resemblance of certain people not only in their physiognomies but also in their soul qualities. In a sense, people can be divided into categories, and everyone will fit into one of them. Individuals may differ as to this or that quality but a certain group-soulness still makes itself felt and not only because there are still different peoples. The boundaries between the nations continue to disintegrate, but other groupings are still perceptible. Thus certain basic characteristics are combined in individuals in such a way that the last vestiges of group-soulness can still be perceived today.

We are now living in a period of transition. All group-soulness must gradually be stripped off. Just as the differences between nations are gradually disappearing, and the factions within them come to understand each other better, so also will other group-soul qualities have to be shed. Instead, the individual nature of each person will be pushed to the fore. We have here characterized something essential in evolution. From another point of view, we can also say that in the course of evolution the concept of race, by which group-soulness is chiefly expressed, gradually loses its significance.

If we go back beyond the Atlantean catastrophe, we see how human races were prepared. In the ancient Atlantean age, human beings were grouped according to external bodily characteristics even more so than in our time. The races we distinguish today are merely vestiges of these significant differences between human beings in ancient Atlantis. The concept of race is only fully applicable to Atlantis. Because we are dealing with the real evolution of humanity, we have therefore never used this concept of race in its original meaning. Thus, we do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, and so on, because it is no longer true or proper to do so. Instead, we speak of an Indian, a Persian, and other periods of civilization. And it would make no sense at all to say that in our time a sixth “race” is being prepared. Though remnants of ancient Atlantean differences, of ancient Atlantean group-soulness, still exist and the division into races is still in effect, what is being prepared for the sixth epoch is precisely the stripping away of race. That is essentially what is happening.

Therefore, in its fundamental nature, the anthroposophical movement, which is to prepare the sixth period, must cast aside the division into races. It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the divisions and differences between various groups of people. The old point of view of race has a physical character, but what will prevail in the future will have a more spiritual character.

That is why it is absolutely essential to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one. It looks to the spirit and overcomes the effects of physical differences through the force of being a spiritual movement. Of course, any movement has its childhood illnesses, so to speak. Consequently, in the beginning of the theosophical movement the earth was divided into seven periods of time, one for each of the seven root races, and each of these root races was divided into seven sub-races. These seven periods were said to repeat in a cycle so that one could always speak of seven races and seven sub-races. However, we must get beyond the illnesses of childhood and understand clearly that the concept of race has ceased to have any meaning in our time.

Humanity is becoming evermore individual, and this has further implications for human individuality. It is important that this individuality develop in the right way. The anthroposophical movement is to help people become individualities, or personalities, in the right sense. How can it accomplish this? Here we must look to the most striking new quality of the human soul that is being prepared. People often ask why we do not remember our former incarnations. I have often answered this question, which is like saying that because a four-year-old child cannot do arithmetic, human beings cannot do arithmetic. When the child reaches ten, he or she will be able to multiply with ease. It is the same with the soul. If it cannot remember our former incarnations today, the time will come when it will be able to do so. Then it will possess the same capacity initiates have.

This new development is happening today. There are numerous souls nowadays who are so far advanced that they are close to the moment of remembering their former incarnations, or at least the last one. A number of people are at the threshold of comprehensive memory, embracing life between birth and death as well as previous incarnations. Many people will remember their present incarnation when they are reborn in their next life. It is simply a question of how they remember. The anthroposophical movement is to help and guide people to remember in the right way.

In light of this, we can describe this anthroposophical movement as leading a person to grasp correctly what is called the I, the innermost member of the human being. I have often pointed out that Fichte rightly said most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon than as an I.¹ To think how many people in our time have any idea at all of the I—that is, of what they are—leads to a dismal conclusion.

In this connection I am always reminded of a friend I had more than thirty years ago and who, as a young student, was completely steeped in the materialistic outlook. Today it is more modern to call it the “monistic” outlook. He always laughed when he heard someone say that within each human being there was something that could be called a spiritual being. My friend thought that what lives as thought in us is produced by mechanical or chemical processes in the brain. I often said to him, “Look, if you seriously believe this, why are you lying all the time?” For, in fact, he really was lying continually because he never said, “My brain feels, my brain thinks,” but, “I think, I feel, I know this or that.” Thus, he contradicted his own theory with his every word—as everyone does, for it is impossible to adhere fully to a materialistic theory one has imagined. It is impossible to remain truthful if one thinks materialistically. If one wanted to say, “My brain loves you,” then one should not say “you,” but “My brain loves your brain.” People are not aware of the consequences of their theories. This may be humorous, but it also shows the deep foundation of unconscious untruthfulness that underlies our present spiritual condition.

Now, most people really would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon, that is as a piece of matter, than as an I. The I can be understood least of all through science with its materialistic methods and way of thinking. How can we understand the I? How can we arrive at an idea or concept of what we feel instinctively when we say, “I think”? We can do so only through knowing on the basis of the anthroposophical world view how the human being is constituted and structured—that the physical body is related to Saturn, the etheric body to the sun, the astral body to the moon, and the I to the earth. When we keep in mind the ideas we can gather from the cosmos, we understand that the I, as the real master, works on the other members. Then we gradually come to understand what we mean by the word “I.”

As we learn to understand this word, we slowly approach the highest concept of this I. We begin to feel ourselves as spiritual beings not only when we feel ourselves to be within an I, but also when we can say that something lives in our individuality that was already there before Abraham. Then we can say not only, “I and father Abraham are one,” but also “I and the Father, that is, the spiritual element weaving through and living in the world, are one.” What lives in the I is the same spiritual substance that lives and weaves in the world as spirit. Thus we gradually come to understand the I, the bearer of human individuality that goes from incarnation to incarnation.

How do we understand the I and the world in general through the anthroposophical world view? The anthroposophical view of the world develops in the most individual way, but at the same time it is the most un-individual thing you can imagine. It arises in the most individual way when the secrets of the cosmos are revealed in a human soul, when the great spiritual beings of the world stream into this soul. The content of the world must be experienced in the human individuality in the most individual way, but at the same time it must also be experienced completely impersonally. Concerning the true character of cosmic mysteries, we have to say that as long as we still value our personal opinion, we cannot arrive at the truth.

Indeed, it is the peculiar nature of anthroposophical truth that the observer must not hold any opinion of his or her own about it and must not have any preference for this or that theory. The observer must not like this or that view more than any other because of his or her individual peculiarities. As long as we have our own opinions, it is impossible for the true secrets of the world to be revealed to us. We must pursue knowledge quite individually, but our individuality must be so developed that it no longer retains anything personal; it must be free of sympathies and antipathies. This must be taken very seriously. Those who still prefer personal ideas and views and are inclined to this or that because of their education and temperament will never know objective truth.

This summer, we have tried to understand eastern wisdom from the standpoint of western teaching.² We have tried to do justice to eastern wisdom and to present it truly. It must be emphasized that if we have independent spiritual knowledge in our time, it is impossible to decide for either the oriental or the occidental views of the world on the basis of personal preference. Those who say that because of their temperament they prefer the oriental or the occidental world view and its laws do not understand what is essential here. We should not decide that Christ, let us say, is more significant than what is to be found in eastern teaching because we happen to incline toward him through our western education or temperament. We cannot answer the question how Christ is related to the orient until, from a personal standpoint, we can accept Christian and oriental teachings equally. As long as we have a preference, we are unable to make a decision. We begin to be objective only when we let the facts speak for themselves and disregard our personal opinions.

The anthroposophical world view in its true form is closely interwoven with human individuality, for this world view must spring from the I-force of the individuality and yet be independent of it. The individuality as such does not matter. The person in whom anthroposophical wisdom appears must be completely unimportant compared to this wisdom; the person as such does not matter at all. It is only essential that this person has developed so far that his or her personal likes, dislikes, and opinions do not taint the anthroposophical wisdom. Then this wisdom will indeed be individual, because the spiritual cannot appear in the light of the moon or the stars but only in the individuality, in the human soul. This individuality, however, must be developed to the point of being able to disengage from the development of the wisdom of the world.

What is entering humanity through the anthroposophical movement concerns every human being regardless of race or nationality. This movement speaks only to the new humanity, the new human being—not to an abstract concept “human being,” but to every individual. This is the essential point. Anthroposophy proceeds from the individuality, the innermost core of the human being, and it speaks to and touches this core of a person's being. We usually speak to each other only as one surface to another and mostly about things not connected to our innermost being. Full understanding between individuals is hardly possible today, except when what is to be communicated comes from the center of one individual's being and speaks to and is understood rightly by the center of another. Thus, in a certain way, anthroposophy speaks a new language. Even if we are still obliged to speak in the various national languages, the content of what is said forms a new language.

What is said in the outer world is really only valid for a very limited sphere. In the past, when people still looked into the spiritual world through ancient, dreamy clairvoyance, words indicated something that existed in the spiritual world. Even in ancient Greece such things were different from what they are today. The word “idea” as used by Plato signified something different from “idea” as used by our modern philosophers, who no longer understand Plato. They have no perception of what he called “Idea,” mistaking it for an abstract concept. Plato still meant something spiritual that he could perceive. Even if already rarefied, it was nevertheless something quite real. Words still contained, if I may say so, the juice of the spiritual.

The spiritual can still be traced in words. When people today use the word “wind” or “air,” they mean something external, physical. However, the ancient Hebrew word for this, “Ruach,” did not only refer to something physical but also to something spiritual permeating the universe. Modern materialistic science tells us that when we inhale, we simply breathe in physical air. In ancient times, however, people did not believe they inhaled only physical air; they were aware that they inhaled something spiritual, or at least something psychic.

In fact, in ancient times, words designated something spiritual and psychic. That is no longer true today; language has become limited to the external world at least people who want to be fully up to date culturally are busy finding materialistic meanings behind terms that are obviously derived from the realm of soul and spirit. Physicists, for example, speak of an “impact” of bodies. They have forgotten that “impact” is derived from what a living being performs in its inner nature when it pushes another being. The original meaning of words is forgotten in these simple things. Thus, our language, particularly our scientific language, can no longer express anything but the material. What is in our soul while we speak can therefore be understood only by those soul faculties that are bound to the physical brain as their instrument. As a result, when the soul is disembodied, it understands nothing of all that has been said with these words. When the soul has gone through the gate of death and can no longer use the brain, all scientific discussions are quite incomprehensible to it. It does not hear or perceive what one expresses in contemporary language, which has no meaning for a disembodied soul. Our language has meaning only in the physical world.

We must consider this in relation to our way of thinking and outlook on the world because this fact is much more important than a theory. After all, what matters is life, not theory. Characteristically, one can see in the theosophical movement how materialism has crept in. Materialism sneaked even into theosophy and prevails even there, for example, in the descriptions of the etheric or life body. Rather than making an effort to understand the spiritual, people often describe the etheric body as if it were a kind of finer matter, and they do the same with the astral body. They usually begin with the physical body, proceed to the etheric or life body and say it is constructed on the same pattern as the physical body, only finer. And they continue this way until they reach nirvana. Such descriptions take their images only from the physical world.

I have even heard people say that there are fine vibrations in a room when they wanted to describe the good feeling present in the room. They do not notice that they are reducing something spiritual to matter when they think of a room as filled with vibrations as with a thin fog.

This is the most materialistic thinking possible. Materialism has taken hold even of those who want to think spiritually. This is typical of our times, and it is important that we are conscious of it. We must be especially aware that language is always a kind of tyrant over our thinking and has implanted in our souls a tendency to materialism. Many people today who claim to be idealists express themselves in an entirely materialistic way because they have been seduced, as it were, by the tyranny of language. This materialistic language cannot be understood by the soul when it is no longer bound to the brain.

There is yet more to it than this. The method of presentation often employed in scientific-theosophical writings causes real pain to those who know occult contemplation, true spiritual perception. For this way of presentation does not make sense to people who have begun to think not with their brain but with their soul, now freed from the brain—people who really live in the spiritual world. It is all well and good to describe the world materialistically as long as we still think with the physical brain, but as soon as we begin to develop spiritual perception, speaking in this way ceases to have any meaning. Indeed, then it even causes pain to hear people say that “there are good vibrations in this room,” rather than “a good feeling prevails.” Because thoughts are realities, such utterances cause pain in those who can really see things spiritually. For them the room becomes filled with a dark fog when somebody expresses the thought “there are good vibrations in this room.”

It is the task of our anthroposophical way of thinking, which is decidedly more important than all theories, to learn to speak a language that is understood by the soul not only while it is still in a physical body but also when it is no longer bound to the physical brain. In other words, this language must be understood by a soul still in the body and able to perceive spiritually as well as by a soul that has gone through the gate of death. That is what is important. When we use anthroposophical concepts that explain the world and the human being, we are speaking a language that can be understood here in the physical world and also by those who are no longer incarnated in physical bodies but are living between death and a new birth. Yes, what is spoken in anthroposophy is heard and understood by the so-called dead. They are fully at one with us when we speak the same language. With this language we speak to all human beings. After all, in a sense, it is mere chance whether a soul is in a body or in the condition between death and a new birth. Through anthroposophy we learn a language that is comprehensible to all human beings, living or dead. Thus, in anthroposophy we speak a language that is also spoken for the dead.

We really touch the innermost core of a person through what we cultivate in anthroposophical discussions, even if what we say appears to be abstract. We penetrate right into the human soul, and because of that, we can free people from group-soulness. Because we penetrate into their souls, they become increasingly able to really understand themselves as an I.

Interestingly, the difference between those who come to anthroposophy and really embrace it and those who do not is that the I of the former is as if crystallized into a spiritual being through anthroposophical thinking, a spiritual being that is then carried along through the gate of death. The others, who do not practice anthroposophical thinking, have a hollow space, a nothingness in the place where the I is now in physical life and after death. Any other concepts we can take in nowadays will gradually become more and more immaterial for the true core of the human soul. The central essence of the human being will be touched and understood only by the anthroposophical thoughts we take in. These crystallize a spiritual substance in us that we can take with us after death and that enables us to perceive in the spiritual world, to see and hear, and to penetrate the darkness that would otherwise exist there for us. Thus, it becomes possible that we can take the I we have developed through the anthroposophical outlook and concepts—the I that is connected to all the wisdom in the world we can receive—with us into the next incarnation. Then we will be reborn in the next incarnation with this developed I, and we will be able to remember it.

It is the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement to enable a number of human beings to enter their next incarnation with an I each remembers as his or her own, individual I. These people will then form the nucleus of the next period of civilization. Then these individuals who have been well prepared through the anthroposophical spiritual movement to remember their individual I will be spread over the earth. For the essential characteristic of the next period of civilization is that it will not be limited to particular localities, but will be spread over the whole earth. These individuals will be scattered over the earth, and thus everywhere on earth there will be a core group of people who will be crucial for the sixth epoch of civilization. These people will recognize each other as those who in their previous incarnation strove together to develop the individual I. That is the proper cultivation of that soul faculty we have spoken of

This soul faculty will be so developed that more and more people who have not developed their I will also be able to remember their former incarnations. However, they will not remember an individual I, but only the group-I in which they had remained. In summary, people who are working in this incarnation to develop their individual I will be able to remember themselves as this or that independent individuality; they will be able to look back at the individuality they were. People who have not developed their individuality will be unable to remember any individuality.

Do not think that mere visionary clairvoyance will enable you to remember your previous I. Humanity was once clairvoyant, and if that in itself sufficed, then everyone would have remembered because all were clairvoyant. Thus, what matters is not clairvoyance; people will indeed be clairvoyant in the future. Rather, what matters is whether we have cultivated our I in this incarnation or not. If we have not cultivated it, the I will not be there as the innermost human essence, and we will remember only a group-I, only what we had in common with others. In that case we will have to look back and admit that we did not free ourselves from the group-I in this incarnation. People to whom this happens will experience it as though it were a new Fall, a second Fall of humanity, a falling back into a conscious connection with the group-soul. Not to remember oneself as an individuality and to be hemmed in by one's inability to transcend group-soulness will be something terrible in the sixth epoch. To put it bluntly, we can say that the earth and all it can yield will belong to those who now cultivate their individualities. Those, however, who do not develop their individual I will be dependent on joining a group that will instruct them in what they should think, feel, will, and do. In the future development of humanity this will be felt as a regression, a second Fall. Therefore, we should not regard the anthroposophical movement and spiritual life as mere theory but rather as something that is given to us now to prepare what is necessary for the future of humanity.

When we understand our present condition correctly—understand where we have come from and where we are going—then we must realize that humanity is now beginning to develop the ability to remember beyond the limits of the present incarnation. What matters now is that we develop it in the right way, that is, by developing our individual I. For we can remember only what we have created in our soul. If we have not created it, we are left only with the fettering memory of a group I, and we will feel this as a falling back into a group-soul of higher animality, as it were. Even if human group-souls are more refined than those of the animals, they are still group-souls. People of an earlier age would not have considered this a regression because they were just in the process of developing from group-soulness to the individual soul. However, if group-soulness is retained today, people will consciously experience this falling back into group-soulness. In the future, this will create an oppressive feeling in those who cannot catch up with the development of the individual I either in the present incarnation or a later one; they will feel their falling back into group-soulness.

Anthroposophy must help people keep pace with this development of the I; that is how we have to see anthroposophy and its place in human life. When we keep in mind that the sixth period is that of the first complete overcoming of the concept of race, we have to realize that it would be sheer fantasy to think that a sixth “race” will also start in a particular place on earth and develop like the earlier races. After all, that is what progress is all about: ever new ways of evolution appear, and concepts that were valid for earlier times will no longer apply in the future. If we do not realize this, the idea of progress will remain unclear for us. And we will again and again fall back into the error of speaking about so and so many cycles, worlds, races of evolution, and so on. It is unclear why this wheel of cycles, worlds, and races should keep turning. We must realize that the word “race” is a term that was valid only for a particular time. As we approach the sixth epoch, this term loses its meaning.

In future, what speaks to the depths of the human soul will be expressed increasingly in people's outer appearance. What people have acquired as individuals and yet experienced non-individually will be expressed in their countenance. Thus, the individuality of a person—not the group-soulness—will be inscribed on his or her countenance, and that is what will account for human diversity. Everything will be acquired individually, although it will only be gained through overcoming the individuality. Those who are in the process of developing the I will not form groups, but their individuality will be expressed in their external appearance. That is what will create differences between human beings.

There will be people who have acquired I-hood; they will be scattered over the earth, and their countenances will be very diverse. Yet, in this diversity the individual I is expressing itself even in the person's gestures. However, those who have not developed their individuality will bear the imprint of group-soulness in their countenances; that is, they can be grouped in categories that will resemble each other. That will be the outer physiognomy of our earth: the possibility will be prepared to bear one's individuality as an outer sign or to bear the outer sign of group-soulness. It is the meaning of earthly evolution for human beings to develop more and more the ability to express their inner being in their outer appearance. That is why the highest ideal of the evolution of the I, Christ Jesus, is described as follows in an ancient document: “When two become one, when the outer becomes like the inner, then human beings have attained Christ nature in themselves.” That is the meaning of a certain passage in the so-called Egyptian Gospel.³ One can understand such passages on the basis of anthroposophical wisdom.

Today we have attempted to understand the task of anthroposophy out of the depth of our insight. Next time we will consider a spiritual problem that is of special concern to the individual and that can lead us to understand our destiny and our true nature.

• 1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814, German philosopher. The statement Steiner refers to here can be found in Fichte's Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaft (“Foundation of Science”), 1794, note to Paragraph 4.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The East in the Light of the West, vol. 113 in the Collected Works, and Edouard Schuré, Children of Lucifer, both in one volume, (Blauvelt, NY: Spiritual Science Library, 1986).
• 3. The so-called Egyptian Gospel is an apocryphal gospel of which only fragments have survived.

As you know from the spirit of our anthroposophical work over the years, our work is not based on a striving for sensations. Instead, we want to calmly examine the facts of spiritual life that are important in our lives. It is not by speaking of what lies on the surface of daily life that we serve our age spiritually, but by gaining knowledge of life's larger connections. Our individual lives are closely connected with the great events of existence, and only when we judge our own life on the basis of the greatest phenomena of life can we assess it rightly. That is why we have tried in the last three years to deepen our fundamental views in relation to universal questions. We spent the first four years in this first seven-year cycle in the existence of the German Section of the Theosophical Society establishing our views and insights. From what you heard in the various lecture cycles, you will have realized that the lectures on the Gospels are part of the work of these last three years. Those lectures not only helped us understand the contents of the Gospels, but also showed what we can learn from them about human nature. Today, we will talk more about how the Gospels can be applied to our personal lives.

Conventional science is less and less willing to consider the Gospels historical documents about the greatest individuality ever to intervene in human evolution, Christ Jesus. The attitude toward the Gospels in the first Christian centuries and even in the Middle Ages was quite different from what it has become in modern times. These days, the Gospels are indeed seen as four mutually contradictory documents, and nothing seems more natural than to ask how they can be considered historical records when they contradict each other as much as they do in giving an account of what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era.

Now, if people did not love to overlook the most important things, their thinking would inevitably have to lead them to the following realization. They would have to admit that it does not really take much to see that the Gospels contradict each other in our modern sense of the word. One could say that even a child can see the contradictions. But we could also add that nowadays the Gospels are available to everybody, and everybody can read them. However, before the invention of printing, they were not available to all people but were read only by a few people. These few were spiritual leaders. The content of the gospels was then taught to other people in a way they could understand. Now we have to ask if those few people who read the gospels, the spiritual leaders, were really such tremendous fools that they did not realize what every child can see these days, namely, that the gospels contradict each other.

When we investigate this matter, we soon notice that people's whole world of feeling toward the Gospels was different in the past. Today it is the critical intellect, trained in outer sensory reality, that has a field day with the Gospels. It has no problem at all finding the intellectual contradictions there; this is, after all, child's play.

How, then, did those leaders of spiritual life, who were reading the Gospels, come to terms with these contradictions? On account of the Gospels, people in ancient times had a tremendous reverence we can't even imagine today for the great Christ event. Indeed they felt that precisely because they had four Gospels they should revere and appreciate the Christ event all the more. This is because these early readers of the Gospels thought quite differently than we do today. Modern readers are no cleverer than somebody who photographs a bouquet of flowers from one angle. Then he has a picture of the bouquet and shows it around. People look at it and remember the picture, thinking they now have a clear idea of what the bouquet looked like. But then someone takes a picture of the same bouquet from another angle and gets quite a different picture. He also shows it to everyone but now people say it cannot possibly be the same bouquet because the two photographs contradict each other. And if the bouquet is photographed from all four sides, the four pictures will not be at all similar; yet they will be four pictures of the same thing.

This was how the early readers of the four Gospels felt. They believed the four Gospels are four different representations of one event, each taken from another point of view. They provide a complete picture of the event precisely because they are not alike. It is only when all four sides are combined that a complete idea of the event in Palestine emerges. People back then felt they had to look up to the Christ event with even more humility precisely because it was presented from four perspectives, for clearly this event is so great that it cannot be understood if it is presented from only one point of view. They felt they had to be grateful to have four Gospels describing this event from four points of view. However, they saw they had to understand how these four different points of view originated. Then they could develop an idea of what the individual can derive from the four Gospels.

What we call the Christ event is a tremendous, mighty event in the spiritual evolution of humanity. What place does that event in Palestine have in this evolution? We can say that everything humanity had previously experienced spiritually merged in this event in Palestine and from then on continued in one common stream. For example, the ancient Hebrew teaching, as it is recorded in the Old Testament, is one part of this common stream. It flowed in as the event in Palestine took place. Another stream proceeded from Zarathustra. This, too, entered into Christianity, which then flowed through the world as a kind of mainstream. Likewise, what we might call the oriental spiritual stream, which found its most significant expression in Gautama Buddha, also joined the one great mainstream. All these various streams are now contained in Christianity. You do not learn what Buddhism is nowadays from people who warm over the teachings of Buddha from 600 B.C. Those teachings have flowed into Christianity. Likewise, you do not learn what Zarathustrianism really is from people who want to explain its nature on the basis of ancient Persian documents. For the one who taught in ancient Persia what was recorded in these ancient documents has evolved further. He has let his contribution to the spiritual life of humanity flow into Christianity, and we will have to look for it there.

To get a clear picture of the facts, let us consider how these three streams, Buddhism, Zarathustrianism, and the ancient Judaic stream, flowed into Christianity. To understand how Zarathustrianism flowed in, we should remember that the individuality we call Zarathustra was the great teacher of the second post-Atlantean epoch who first taught among the ancient Persians and was then incarnated again and again. Through each incarnation he ascended higher and higher, and finally he appeared around 600 B.C. as a contemporary of Buddha. He appeared in the secret schools of the ancient Chaldean-Babylonian culture and was the teacher of Pythagoras, who had gone to Chaldea to perfect himself. Then this Zarathustra, who in 600 B.C. was known as Zarathas or Nazarathos, was reborn at the beginning of our era to parents called Joseph and Mary, as described in Saint Matthew's Gospel. This child of Joseph and Mary, the so-called Bethlehem parents, was one of the two Jesus children born at the beginning of our era. Thus, we see the individuality who was the bearer of Zarathustrianism—one of the significant streams mentioned above—transplanted to ancient Palestine.

This was not the only spiritual stream that was to revive and in a new form flow on in Christianity. Many different things had to come together to bring this about. For instance, Zarathustra had to be born in a body so organized that it was possible for him to develop further the faculties he had acquired through ascending from incarnation to incarnation. We must keep in mind that no matter how highly developed an individuality is, if it descends into an unsuitable body because it cannot find a suitable one, this individuality cannot express his or her soul-spiritual faculties because it lacks the necessary physical instruments. It takes a certain kind of brain to express such faculties as Zarathustra possessed. That is, he had to be born into a body that had inherited the qualities making it an appropriate instrument for such faculties. Thus, the Jesus child described in Saint Matthew's Gospel had to have a high soul-spiritual organization in his reincarnating I, which would allow him to have the powerful effect that was necessary, and he also had to have a perfect physical organization, which was inherited, for his soul to be born into. Zarathustra had to find a suitable physical brain.

This perfectly adapted physical organization was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews to Christianity. A suitable physical body for Zarathustra, a body with the most perfect imaginable physical instruments, had to be created in the Hebrew people through purely physical heredity. This had to be prepared far back in the past through many generations so that the right qualities were passed on and then inherited by the body that was born at the beginning of our era.

Let us look at how this life flowed into the mainstream of our present spiritual life. Just as we have seen the mission of Zarathustra in relation to Christianity, so we will now find out about the mission of the ancient Hebrews. Here I must tell you that the more spiritual-scientific research progresses, the more it has to admit that the Bible, not outer cultural history, is right. What cultural history digs up appears childish in comparison with what is written in the Bible and what only needs to be read properly to be understood. For spiritual science the Bible is more correct than historical research. For example, it is true that Judaism descended, in a sense, from a common forefather called Abraham or Abram. It is indeed absolutely correct that as we trace the generations back into the past, we come to a forefather who was endowed with very special powers by the spiritual world. What were these powers? To understand what special capabilities were given to Abraham, we must recall various things we have already spoken about here.

As we have said, when we look at ancient times, we find that people had other faculties of soul than we have today; these can be called a kind of dim clairvoyance. Back then, people could not look at the world in the self-confident, intellectual way we do, but they were able to perceive the spiritual around them, spiritual phenomena, facts, and beings. Since this seeing took place in a state of dimmed consciousness, it was like a living dream, but a dream that had a vital connection to reality. This ancient clairvoyance had to become weaker so people could develop our modern way of thinking and our intellectual culture.

Human evolution is a kind of education through which the various faculties are gradually developed. For example, in our present way of seeing, we perceive, let's say, a flower without seeing its astral body winding all around it. The ancients, however, still saw the flower and its astral body. We had to be trained in our modern perception that sees objects with the sharp contours of the intellect; this training required that the ancient clairvoyance vanish. Now, there is a certain law that prevails in spiritual evolution. According to this law, every capacity humanity acquires must have its beginning in one individuality. Faculties that are to become common to a large number of people must first appear in one person. Thus, the faculties having to do with reasoning not related to clairvoyance, with evaluating the world by measure, number, and weight—faculties that aim not at seeing into the spiritual world but at understanding sensory phenomena—were first implanted by the spiritual world in the individuality known as Abraham or Abram. He was chosen to be the first to develop the powers that are especially bound to the physical brain. It is not for nothing that Abraham is called the discoverer of arithmetic, that is, of the capability to quantify the world and calculate it according to measure and number. In a sense, he was the first of those in whose soul the ancient dreamy clairvoyance was extinguished and whose brain was prepared so that the faculty using the brain as instrument could become effective. Thus, the mission given to Abraham was a significant and profound one.

Now this faculty that had been given to Abraham in rudimentary form was to become more and more perfect. As you can imagine, everything in the world must develop, and the ability to perceive the world through the physical brain was no exception. This faculty was developed through being transmitted from Abraham to the succeeding generations. However, something different had to happen in this case than is usual when a mission is passed on from the older generation to the younger. After all, other missions, especially the greatest ones, were not connected to a physical instrument, the physical brain.

For example, let us look at Zarathustra. He gave his disciples a higher, more advanced clairvoyant vision than other people had. It was not bound to a physical instrument but was transmitted from teacher to pupil. The pupil then in turn became a teacher and gave this higher clairvoyant vision to his pupils, and so on. Abraham's mission, however, was not a teaching or method of clairvoyant perception but something bound to the brain. Thus, it could be transmitted to later generations only through physical inheritance. The mission given to Abraham depended on being transmitted physically from one generation to the next, that is, the perfected organization of Abraham's brain had to be inherited by his descendants generation after generation. Because Abraham's mission consisted in perfecting the physical brain, the latter became more and more perfect from generation to generation. In other words, the mission of Abraham depended on procreation for its gradual perfection in the course of physical evolution.

There was yet something else connected with this contribution of the ancient Hebrew people, and we will understand what it was when we consider people in other civilizations who had dim clairvoyance. We can ask how they received what was most important to them, what they revered most in all the world. They received it as inspirations that lit up within them. They did not have to do research as we do. Nowadays, we establish sciences by investigating the world outside us, by experimenting and deducing laws from the external facts. The ancients did not gain their knowledge in this way; rather, it lit up within them as an inspiration like a flash of lightning. They received their knowledge in their inner being; their souls had to give birth to it within them. They had to turn their gaze away from the outer world in order to allow the highest truths to blossom forth within them as inspirations.

This was to become different for those who derived their mission from Abraham. Abraham had to bring to humanity precisely the results of observation and reasoning. When people in those civilizations that were built on ancient clairvoyance looked up to the highest, they felt, “I am grateful to the God who reveals himself to me within me. I turn my gaze away from the outer world, and the Godhead is most present to me when, without looking at the outside world, I let his inspirations light up within me.”

However, the descendants of Abraham were to renounce inspirations coming from within themselves and prepare themselves to turn their gaze to the world around them. They were to observe what is revealed in air and water, in mountain and plain, and in the starry world, and to ponder how all things exist side by side. They were to connect external things with one another and to gain an all-embracing thought from this. When they condensed what they saw in the outer world into one single thought, they called what the outer world told them Yahweh or Jehovah. They were to receive the highest through a revelation that speaks through the outer world.

In contrast to what other peoples were to contribute, the mission of the Abrahamic people was to give humanity what came as revelation from outside. Therefore, the instrument of spiritual life had to be inherited so that its organization was appropriate for the revelations from outside, just as earlier the inner powers of soul had to be adapted to the revelations from within.

Let us look at what happened when the clairvoyants of ancient times yielded to revelations from within themselves. They turned their gaze away from the outer world because what was revealed there could tell them nothing about the spiritual world. They even turned their gaze away from the sun and stars and listened only to what was within. There, a great inspiration about the secrets of the world was revealed, and they had a picture of the structure of the cosmos. What these ancient clairvoyants knew about the stars and their movements, about the laws of the starry world, and about the spiritual worlds was not acquired through external observation. Rather, the ancients knew something about Mars, Saturn, and so on because they had revealed themselves within these people. The laws of the universe, which are inscribed in the stars, were also inscribed within the human soul and revealed themselves there in inspirations. Just as the laws of the universe, which rule the stars, were revealed in the soul, so the laws that rule the world were now to be revealed to the Abrahamic people through outer reasoning and deduction—that is, those laws had to be grasped through outer revelation.

For this purpose, heredity had to be guided in such a way that the brain could acquire the qualities enabling it to perceive the right relationships between things. This wonderful lawfulness was implanted into the predispositions transmitted to Abraham, predispositions that developed through the generations in such a way that their organization corresponds to the great cosmic laws. The brain had to be transmitted so that its inner capabilities and its structure developed like the laws of numbers in the stars in the universe. This is why Jehovah said to Abraham, “You will see generations descend from you that will be ordered and arranged in accordance with the numbers of the stars in the heavens.” The generations following Abraham were to be arranged in harmonious numerical relationships just as the stars in the sky are ordered in harmonious relations. In other words, these generations were to bear within them laws that are like the laws of the stars in the heavens.

In the heavens, there are twelve constellations. An image of this was to appear in the twelve tribes of descendants of Abraham so that the faculties that were implanted in rudimentary form in Abraham could be carried down through the generations. In the organic structure of this people, developing further from age to age, an image was to be created of number and measure in the heavens. In one Bible translation this is rendered as, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore.” In truth, however, the passage should read, “Your descendants shall be grouped regularly in their blood relationships so that their arrangement is an image of the laws of the stars in the heavens.” The Bible is profound, but the way it is presented these days is colored by the modern view of the world. Thus, we read, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore,” while a true translation would be, “Your descendants shall be so regularly grouped that, for example, twelve tribes will arise that correspond to the twelve constellations.”

Thus, the individual characteristics had to express that the Abrahamic people was to realize that their mission was a gift from outside, not something that came to life within them. They had to know that what they have to bring to the world is given to them from the outside. The Bible wonderfully expresses that Abraham's mission comes to him from outside in contrast to the old revelations that were given from within. What was this mission? Abraham's mission was to provide what flows through the blood up to the time of Christ Jesus. The entire spirituality of a certain stream had to be placed into this. It was to work as if it came as a gift from outside. Abraham had to give to the world the ancient Hebrew people. That was his mission.

If this people was to be in keeping with this mission, it had to be given to Abraham as a gift from outside. Abraham had a son, Isaac, and he was asked to sacrifice this son, as the Bible tells us. As Abraham was about to carry out the sacrifice, his son was given back to him by Jehovah. What was Abraham given there? The entire Hebrew people descended from Isaac. If Isaac had been sacrificed, it would not have come into being. Thus, the whole Hebrew people was given to Abraham as a gift. The sparing of Isaac wonderfully expresses the nature of this gift. It was Abraham's mission to father the Hebrew people, and with Isaac he received it as a gift from Jehovah.

This is how profound the stories in the Bible are; all of them correspond in their impressive details to the inner character of the progressive development of humanity. The Old Testament Hebrews gradually had to relinquish the ancient clairvoyance that continued within the other civilizations. This clairvoyance was connected to faculties coming from the spiritual world, which were designated according to their nature by expressions taken from the names for the constellations. The last faculty to be given up in exchange for the gift of the Hebrew people was connected with the sign of the Ram. Therefore, a ram was sacrificed in place of Isaac. This is the external expression of the sacrifice of the last clairvoyant power, making it possible for Abraham to receive the Hebrew people as a gift. The Hebrews were chosen to develop the faculties for observation of the outer world. Nevertheless, every new development contains also atavistic remnants of earlier things. That is why everything that was not purely in the blood and still recalled ancient clairvoyance had to be excluded for the sake of the transmission of the new outer-directed faculties. Thus, the Hebrews always had to exclude what came as an inheritance from other peoples.

We come now to a subject that is difficult to discuss because it contains a truth far removed from modern thinking. Nevertheless, it is a truth, and those who have worked for a while in anthroposophical groups may be able to accept a truth that is foreign to the conventional modern thinking. We must be aware that certain classes of people in ancient times retained their earlier faculties into later ages, especially faculties related to knowing. Clairvoyant powers lived in human souls, and people were closely connected with spiritual beings who revealed themselves in their souls. In certain people, who were the products of the decline of these ancient times, there developed ultimately a lower form of this connection to the spiritual world around them. While the actual clairvoyants were connected with the whole universe through spiritual intuition and inspiration, those who were part of the process of decline and who developed this connection to the spiritual in a phase of decadence were actually lower types of people. They were not independent because their I was undeveloped, and at the same time their clairvoyant faculties were already declining. Such individuals appeared throughout history, and in them we can see the relationship between certain physical organs and the clairvoyant organs.

Now we arrive at the truth that will sound strange to you. What we call ancient clairvoyance, this lighting up of the cosmic secrets within human souls, had to enter the soul somehow. We have to picture this as streams flowing into human beings. The ancients did not perceive them, but when these streams had occurred and lit up within them, people perceived them as their inspirations. In other words, certain streams flowed into people from their environment; in later periods these streams were transformed. In the distant past, these streams were purely spiritual, and clairvoyants could perceive them as purely astral-etheric streams. But later these purely spiritual streams dried up, as it were, and condensed to etheric-physical streams. What became of them? They developed into hair. Our hair is the result of these ancient streams. The hair on our body was formerly spiritual streams that flowed from outside into human beings. Our hair is nothing else but dried up astral-etheric streams.

Such facts are preserved only where the old truths have been retained externally in writing or through tradition. In Hebrew the characters for the words “hair” and “light” are approximately the same because people were conscious of the kinship between the light streaming in astrally and hair. In general, the greatest truths are contained in ancient Hebrew literature in the words themselves.

So, we can say human evolution is progressive. However, in those people whose ancient faculties were declining the incoming streams changed and dried up, but no new faculties appeared to take their place. Those people were connected with the new in an old way, yet unconnected because the streams were dried up. Such people were very hairy, while those who developed further were less hairy because new powers replaced those that later condensed into hair.

It will take a long time for science to arrive at these significant truths. Nevertheless, they can be found in the Bible. The Bible is far wiser than our science, which is still at the stage of a child beginning to learn his ABC's. Read the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob was the one who progressed a step further and developed the new faculty; Esau, on the other hand, remained at an earlier stage, and compared to Jacob he was a simpleton. When they were presented to their father Isaac, their mother had covered Jacob with false hair to make Isaac confuse his younger son with Esau. This shows us that the Old Testament Hebrews still had retained something that was inherited from other cultures and that had to be discarded. Esau is cast out, and what was to live on as sense-based reasoning is transmitted through Jacob. Here, what had remained in a retarded form was expelled in Esau. Similarly, the ancient clairvoyant faculties, an atavistic inheritance, appeared in Joseph, who was consequently expelled by his brothers to Egypt. Joseph had dreams through which he could interpret the world—this faculty was not to be developed in the mission of the Abrahamic people. Therefore, Joseph was cast out and had to go to Egypt.

There we see how a stream evolved in the Hebrew people that is built on the blood relationships of generations and from which the remnants of the old inheritance are gradually expelled. It was the special faculty of the ancient Hebrews to turn what is inherited down through the generations into a more and more perfect instrument so that finally a body could be produced that could be the instrument for Christ who would incarnate in it. If the Hebrews could no longer receive revelations from within, they had to receive them from without. They had to receive through external revelation even those things other peoples received through direct inspiration. That is, the Jews, led by Joseph, had to go to a people that still possessed the old inspiration. There, Joseph was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, and the Jews attained through external means the knowledge they needed about the spiritual worlds. They even received their moral laws from the outside rather than as something lighting up within them. After they had assimilated what they had to take in from outside, they returned to Palestine.

We must now show how the Hebrews gradually developed from generation to generation so that finally the body of Jesus could be produced, and the ancient Hebrew stream flow into Christianity. Remember our discussion of the development of rudimentary characteristics in individuals. The life of an individual can be divided into periods of seven years. The first period, in which the physical body simply builds its forms, extends from birth to the change of teeth at the age of seven. The second period, in which the etheric body is active in growth and forming, continues until puberty. The forms are defined until the age of seven and the already-defined forms are then enlarged. From fourteen to twenty-one the astral body is especially predominant, and at twenty-one the true I is born and becomes independent. The life of the individual runs its course in certain periods until the birth of the human I.

In the same way the gifts of the people that was to provide a body for the most perfect I had to develop gradually. What takes place over years in an individual, however, develops in a people over generations. Each successive generation must further develop the characteristics of the preceding one. To explain the occult reasons for this would lead us too far afield, but you might recall a quite ordinary phenomenon. Just remember that certain qualities are inherited not directly, but skip a generation. For example, it is the grandson who resembles the grandfather in those characteristics. It was the same in the inheritance of qualities in successive generations of the Hebrews; every other generation was skipped.

What is one period of seven years in an individual's life corresponds in the successive generations of a people to two periods or fourteen generations. We can therefore say the Hebrews developed in twice seven or fourteen generations, which corresponds to the period from birth to the change of teeth in the individual. The following period corresponds to that between the change of teeth and puberty and again comprises twice seven generations. A third period of twice seven generations corresponds to the years between fourteen and twenty-one, when the astral body is especially prominent. It was then possible for the I to be born in the Hebrew people after three times twice seven or three times fourteen, that is, forty-two generations.

To describe the body that became Zarathustra's instrument, I had to show how the seed given to Abraham developed through thrice fourteen generations so that the I could be born, just as in the individual the I is born into the threefold corporeality after thrice seven years. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this. He describes thrice fourteen generations—the generations from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus. Here, from the profundity of knowledge Saint Matthew's Gospel points to the mission of the Hebrews, showing how the forces were gradually developed that made it possible for the perfect I attained by Zarathustra to be born in a body produced by this people.

Looking at the destiny of the Hebrews, we find that the Babylonian Captivity occurred at the period when the individual, after the age of fourteen, prepares for life, when the hopes of youth to be realized later take root. The Babylonian Captivity was the time when the astral body of the Hebrews developed, and what gives this astral body its impulse in the final fourteen generations of the forty-two was implanted into it then. That is why the Hebrews were led into the Babylonian Captivity where, six hundred years before our era, Zarathas or Nazarathos was incarnated as the teacher in the Mystery schools of the Babylonians. There, the most prominent Hebrew leaders came in contact with Zarathas, the great teacher of that era. Zarathas joined them and became their teacher. From him the Hebrew leaders received the impulse that, in their last fourteen generations, prepared them for the birth of Jesus.

History as we know it then unfolded, and we see the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel take into account a law in the spiritual sphere that will be recognized more and more as significant for all life. This is the law that whatever has happened earlier is repeated at a higher stage. This is expressed in science in a somewhat distorted form in the axiom that what occurs at a lower stage of the species throughout long epochs is repeated in brief in each individual. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this in a magnificent way by saying that the I of Zarathustra was to incarnate in a body that was gradually developed within the Abrahamic people.

Abraham proceeded from Ur in Chaldea, the place where Babylonian civilization originated, through Asia Minor to Palestine. Through the dreams of Joseph, his descendants were led farther south to Egypt, and after they had received the Egyptian impulse, they returned to Canaan. This was the fate of the whole people. First, they were led through Canaan to Egypt, and then back again to Canaan. This fate of the whole people was to be repeated in brief. After all that had originated in Abraham had been developed, after the sheaths had been prepared, Zarathustra's I again took Chaldea as its point of departure. His spirit was connected with Chaldea, and in his last incarnation he was the Mystery teacher there.

What path does Zarathustra's soul take when it incarnates in Bethlehem? He had remained connected with the Magi, who had been initiated in the Chaldean Mystery schools. They remembered that they had heard him say he would reappear and that his soul, which had always been called “the golden star,” would proceed at a particular time to Bethlehem. When the time came, they followed the path his soul took, thus repeating the path of the Old Testament Hebrews. As Abraham traveled the road to Canaan, so this star, the soul of Zarathustra, also followed it. The three Magi followed the star of Zarathustra, and he led them to the place where he was born into the body from the Abrahamic people that was destined for him. Thus, the I of Zarathustra repeated in spirit the path Abraham had taken to Palestine.

The Old Testament Hebrews then had to seek the way to Egypt. They were led there by Joseph's dreams. Now the I that was born in the Jesus-child of Bethlehem was led through the dreams of another Joseph to Egypt along the same path the Abrahamic people had followed earlier. Zarathustra's I repeated in Jesus' body the ancient Hebrews' destiny, going first to Egypt and then returning to Palestine. Here, we have a recapitulation in spirit through the I of Zarathustra, reflecting the earlier fate of the Hebrews.

Based on his knowledge of the spiritual law that what appears at a higher stage is a brief repetition of what has occurred earlier, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel faithfully describes all this. How profoundly these Gospels record the event that inaugurated our era! That event is so great that the four evangelists found that each of them could only describe it from his own standpoint. Each of them has described this event according to his own limited powers. When we see someone from one of four sides, we get only one picture, and only by combining mutually contradictory pictures do we get an overall idea of the person. Similarly, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel described what he knew through initiation about the law of thrice twice seven, the law of forty-two, and about the preparation of the body for the great I of Jesus of Nazareth. Through his initiation, the writer of this gospel knew the Mysteries according to which Jesus’ body was prepared as the mission of the Hebrews. The writer of Saint Luke's Gospel described, on the basis of his initiation, how the stream of the Buddha flowed into Christianity. The other evangelists have described the event on the basis of their initiations. The event they recorded is so profound that we must be grateful to find it described from the point of view of four initiates.

Today I just wanted to mention a few details of the spiritual origin of Christianity to show how our knowledge of the world and of humanity grows when we study this greatest of human events. I wanted to give you an idea of how deeply this event should be taken and how the Gospels really are when we know how to read them.

Many of the lectures I have given over the years in anthroposophical groups to friends—some of whom are sitting here today—have dealt with the gospels of John, Luke, and Matthew.¹ In those lectures, we have tried to recreate in our minds the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different angles—in three different ways, so to speak. We hope these lectures could establish an ever-increasing appreciation of this unique event in our souls. I have already pointed out that we have four gospels because their authors were inspired occultists and each wanted to represent this great event from one perspective only, just as we take pictures or photograph external objects from only one point of view. When we then take the pictures from various angles and combine them, looking at all of them together, we can have the actual reality before our souls. Thus, each of the evangelists gives us the opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one particular standpoint.

The Gospel of Saint John gives us an insight into these events from a perspective we may call a revelation of the highest human and occult aims, as well as of the highest world principle. In Saint Luke's Gospel, on the other hand, we are given an insight into the secrets surrounding the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomon and Nathan Jesuses—up to the moment when his inspiration through the Christ took place. As you know from my lecture cycle on the Gospel of Saint Matthew—if you missed the lectures you can read them later—this gospel shows how the physical body in which Christ was to be incarnated for three years was prepared in the Hebrew people.

In a certain way, the Gospel of Saint Mark leads us to the highest summits of the spiritual-scientific, Christian world view. It gives us the opportunity to look into many things that are imparted to us through the gospels but are not touched upon in the same way by the other evangelists. Today, therefore, I have set myself the task to speak about this gospel.

We must be aware that it is necessary to consider many things that the superficial world of our time does not really want to look at. If we want to understand Saint Mark's Gospel in all its depth, we must familiarize ourselves with the different way of expressing things that prevailed at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth. Do not take it amiss, then, if in order to convey what I have to tell you, I paint it in strong colors.

We express what we want to say in language, which is to bring out what lives in our souls. The expression of soul content in language differs from one epoch of human development to another. In the Hebraic epoch, the ancient Hebrew sacred language provided a wonderful way of expressing things. It was very different from our way of clothing the secrets of the soul into words. When a word was spoken in old Hebrew, it contained not merely an abstract idea, as it does today, but a whole world. The vowels were not written because the speaker expressed his innermost being through his way of vocalizing, whereas the consonants contained the description—the picture, so to speak—of what was outside. We can say that when the Hebrews wrote, for example, what corresponds to our B, they always felt something like a picture of outer conditions, something that formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that can enclose a being like a house; the letter could not be pronounced without this image living in the speaker's soul. When A was vocalized, there was always something of strength and force, even of radiating power, living within it. That is how the soul lived on; the spiritual-psychological content flowed out with the words, soared into space, and touched other souls. Obviously, language was then a far more living affair and entered more fully into the secrets of existence than our contemporary language.

That is the light in the picture I mentioned. The shadows are in our having become, to a great extent, philistines. Our language expresses only abstractions and generalities, and we no longer even notice this—so our language at bottom expresses only the philistine. It could not be otherwise in an age when people begin to write literature long before they have any spiritual content to express, when an infinite amount of printed material goes to the general public, when everyone thinks he must write something, and when everything can be a subject to write about. I have even seen authors turning up at the founding of our society out of curiosity, hoping to find material for a novel in it and looking for protagonists that can be dished up in the popular style.

We must be aware, then, that our language has become abstract, empty, and philistine, in contrast to the way it was when people still thought of language as something holy, something that must be handled responsibly, and through which God would speak. That is why it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze the tremendous facts imparted to us by, and resounding in, the gospels into modern words. Why shouldn't people these days believe that everything can be expressed in contemporary language? They cannot understand that this language is empty of what even the Greeks expressed with one word. Furthermore, reading the Bible today, we find something that, compared to its original content, has been sifted once, twice, even thrice, but in such a way that not the best but only the worst remains. It is therefore rather cheap to refer to the modern wording of the Bible. We go most astray, however, when we turn to the Gospel of Mark as we have it in the Bible today.

In the translation by Weizsäcker, which is generally considered excellent—and because it is considered so excellent nowadays, we can assume that it is not all that good—the first lines of the Gospel of St. Mark are rendered as follows:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

Honest people must really admit that if Weizsäcker begins the Gospel of Saint Mark like this, they do not understand a single word of it; those who claim to understand this are fooling themselves. People who work honestly will not be able to understand the lines, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For they express either a triviality or something that cannot be understood. The concepts that make it possible to understand what Isaiah says here must first be acquired. For Isaiah pointed to the great, tremendous event that was to be the most significant event in human evolution. What was he really referring to?

Based upon what we already know, we can say what Isaiah prophesied. We can say that in ancient times humanity had a kind of clairvoyance that allowed people to grow into the divine-spiritual world with their soul forces. But what really happened when people grew thus into the spiritual world? They ceased to make use of the I, insofar as they had developed it at that time. Instead, they used their astral body, with its forces of vision and seership—whereas the forces rooted in the I were gradually awakened in the process of perceiving the physical world. It is the I that uses the senses as instruments. When the ancients sought enlightenment about the world, they employed their astral bodies. They saw and perceived in their astral bodies. Further evolution consisted in the transition from the use of the astral body to the use of the I. In regard to the I, the Christ impulse was the most intense impulse. If Christ is taken into the I in the sense of St. Paul's words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” then the I will have the power to grow into the spiritual world through its own efforts. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus, we can say of human evolution that human beings formerly used their astral body as an organ of perception, but gradually lost the ability to develop organs of perception in the astral body. As humanity approached the time of the Christ event, it entered an evolutionary stage in which people had to realize that their astral body was less and less able to see into the spiritual world. The astral body's connection to the spiritual world came to nothing, and the I was not yet forceful enough to get any enlightenment from the outer world. That was the time when Christ drew near.

Now in the evolution of humanity, certain great steps forward are gradually prepared before they actually take place. This was the case with the Christ impulse, but there had to be a transition. The development I just described could not have gone so far that human beings would have seen their astral body gradually becoming dulled toward the spiritual world and would have felt an utter desolation and dreariness in themselves until the I would have been kindled later through the Christ impulse. Things were not to turn out that way. Rather, a few individuals developed so far that through a particular influence from the spiritual world they saw with the astral body something similar to what people were to see and know later through the I. In other words, the I was prepared in the astral body.

Indeed, it is through the I and its development that human beings have become earthly beings. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon when the angels, the Angeloi, were at the human stage. The angels were human on the old moon; we are human beings on the earth. On the old moon, human beings appropriately used their astral body, and everything else was just preparation for the evolution of the I. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of our moon evolution on a higher level. After all, had we remained limited to the astral body, we could never have become fully human. Only angels on the moon could become human in the astral body. Therefore, just as Christ lived in earthly human beings in order to inspire the I in them, so for the preparation of the I there had to be prophets from the angels of the moon, the moon-humans, to inspire the astral body so that the I-hood of human beings could be prepared. A prophet could have characterized it in the following way. “There will come a time in human evolution when humanity will be ripe for the development of the I. Only the angels of the moon were raised to the highest in their astral bodies, but for human beings to be prepared for this I-hood, certain people on earth had to be so inspired through grace and under exceptional conditions that they could work as angels even though they were humans. They were angels in human form.”

Here we arrive at an important occult concept that is indispensable to the occult understanding of human evolution. It is naturally easy to say that all is Maya, but that is an abstraction. We must really take it seriously and be able to say, “A human being stands before me, but he or she is Maya. Who knows, he or she may not really be human. Perhaps the humanness is only an outer veil employed by quite another being, not a human one, to bring about something that cannot yet be effected by humanity.” I have indicated something of this in my The Portal of Initiation.²

Such an event occurred when the individuality who lived in Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist. An angel entered his soul and used his body and soul to do what would have been impossible for a human being to accomplish. An angel lived in John who had to announce the true I that was to live in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is only Maya and that an angelic messenger lived in him. This is found also in the Greek version of the Bible: “Behold, I send my messenger [i.e., Angeloi or angel].” Thus, a profound cosmic mystery connected with John the Baptist was prophesied by Isaiah. As we have seen, Isaiah characterized John as Maya or illusion, but in truth John encompassed the angel who had to announce what humanity really was to become through receiving the Christ impulse. Angels proclaim beforehand what humanity is to become later. So, this passage in the Bible should really read, “Behold, what gives I-hood to the world sends the angel before thee to whom I-hood will be given.”

Now we go on to the third sentence. What does it mean? Here we must call to mind the whole historical world situation. What happened after the astral body gradually lost the ability to extend its forces like tentacles to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body became active, it could see into the spiritual world. This possibility gradually disappeared, and it became dark within human beings. While they could spread their astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world in former times, now they were alone in themselves. Their souls now lived in solitude. That also is in the Greek text. “Behold, what speaks in the solitude—or, if you like, wilderness—of the soul when the astral body could no longer extend out to the divine spiritual world. Listen to what calls in the wilderness and loneliness of the soul.”

What is it that announces itself? Here, we must be clear about the meaning of one particular word when it is used in reference to spiritual or soul phenomena. This was true, above all, in Hebrew, but also in Greek. The word is Kyrios. To translate it as “the Lord,” as is usually done, produces absolute nonsense. What does this word mean? In ancient times everyone who spoke this word knew it meant something that was connected with the progress of the human soul. People knew that the word Kyrios referred to secrets of the soul.

Looking at the astral body, we see that our soul has three distinct forces we call thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul. They are the serving forces in the soul. Formerly, they had been the lords of humanity, and human beings had been subject to them and had to wait for their thinking, feeling, or willing to be called into action. As human beings evolved, however, these soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the I. When the term Kyrios referred to the soul, nothing else was understood by it than the I. This I no longer believed that the divine spiritual thinks, feels, and wills in it, but “I think, I feel, I will.” The Lord makes himself felt in the forces of the soul. “Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to follow paths that lead you to let the strong I—Kyrios, the Lord—awaken in your souls. Listen to the call in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the force or direction of the Lord of the soul—the I. Make open his forces!” That is roughly how this passage should be translated. “Open up, so that the I can enter and does not become the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing. Open up its forces!” When you translate these words, “Behold, the I sends its angel before you that is to give you the possibility of understanding the calls in the solitude of the astral soul: Prepare the directions of the I, and open the forces for it,” you then have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah and a reference to the greatest event in human evolution. You then understand that Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, that he points out that our soul solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, the approach of the I. The words have force and weight only when we understand them this way.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angeloi? He could do this because he had had a certain initiation. Each initiation is specialized. Initiations are not just general, but specialized. Individuals who have a very special task need a particular kind of initiation. Now for everything that occurs in the spiritual world precautions have been taken so that the starry script in the heavens reveals spiritual facts. For example, people could have a sun-initiation and enter into the secrets of the spiritual world that is the realm of Ahura Mazdao, the world for which the sun is the external expression. There are, however, twelve different ways to be initiated into the secrets of the sun; each of these initiations was a “solar initiation,” yet different from the other eleven. Depending upon what a person has to accomplish for humanity, he or she receives an initiation that can be described as a solar initiation but, for example, one where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Cancer. This differs from the initiation where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Libra. This is how different specialized initiations were designated.

Individuals who have as important a mission as John the Baptist must be initiated in a very special way. Only then will they have the necessary strength to accomplish their mission in the world even in a rather single-minded way if circumstances require that. So, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angeloi, he had to undergo the sun-initiation that can be called the initiation in the sign of Aquarius. The sun in Aquarius is a symbol for the initiation John the Baptist received to become the bearer of the angel. He received the force of the sun as it streams down when its relation to the other stars is characterized with the words, “The sun stands in the constellation of Aquarius.” That was the symbol. John had undergone the Aquarius initiation.

The constellation was given the name Aquarius because those who underwent this initiation had the power to do with human beings what John did as the Aquarian, the Baptist. Through immersion in water, he brought people to the point where their etheric bodies were freed sufficiently for them to gain the self-knowledge that allowed them to realize what was most important in their time. People were immersed and their etheric bodies were freed for a moment. Through baptism in the Jordan, people could feel the special importance of this epoch in the history of the world. Therefore, John underwent the baptism initiation. To express symbolically the flowing in of the rays from the constellation in which the sun stood, this sign was called Aquarius. In this way the name of the human capacity is carried over to the heavens.

Today many learned ignoramuses try to interpret spiritual events by bringing the heavens down to earth. They say, “Now, that indicates a forward movement of the sun.” These learned people, who really do not know anything, interpret human events from the heavens. However, it was the other way around. What lives in humanity spiritually was transferred to the heavens; the heavens were used as a means of expression. Thus, John the Baptist could say, “I have baptized you with water,” which was the same as saying, “I baptize you with water: I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius.” That is what John could have said to his closest disciples. With our senses we see the constellation of Virgo opposite Aquarius, and from there the sun moves to Libra. However, in terms of initiation, the sun proceeds in the opposite direction, not as it appears to our senses. Thus, we have to look at the sun's path from Aquarius to Pisces. John could say, “Something will come that will no longer work in the way that corresponds to the sun's influence in Aquarius; instead, it will work in a way corresponding to the sun's effect in Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism.”

When the spiritual sun rises higher, then the Aquarian baptism becomes a baptism with spiritual water. The sun ascends in the spiritual realm from Aquarius to Pisces, hence the well-known ancient fish symbol for the bearer of Christ. Through special spiritual influences, John had an Aquarian initiation. But the initiation that came about mysteriously through the Mysteries around Jesus, of which I have spoken several times, was a Pisces initiation. It resulted from the sun advancing to the next constellation, and Jesus of Nazareth was integrated into his time through being subjected first to a Pisces initiation.

This is sufficiently indicated in the Gospel of Saint Mark, but such things can only be shown in images. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are fishing, so his first apostles are all fishermen. The advancing of the sun from Aquarius to Pisces is obvious when John tells us, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” When Christ walked along the Sea of Galilee—which means, when the sun was so far advanced that one could see its counterpart coming up from Pisces—the fishermen Simon, Simon's brother, James, and James's brother, were inspired. This can be understood only when we look more closely at the way people expressed things at that time.

Our modern way of expressing ourselves is pedantic. If a person stands before us, we say there is a human being. If a second person stands before us, we again say there is a human being. A third, another, and so on, but we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expressing ourselves we have only one term, “human being.” However, what is a human being to occultism? Nothing but Maya! He or she is about the same as a rainbow, which lasts only so long as the necessary relationships between rain and sunshine exist. When these relationships change, the rainbow disappears.

It is the same with human beings. A human being is only the streaming together of forces of the macrocosm, forces we find in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where we usually assume a human being somewhere on earth, there is nothing for the occultist. In fact, forces stream down from above and up from below and intersect. Then, just as the peculiar relationship of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in the phenomenon that looks like a human being. People are nothing as they stand before us. In truth, they are a phantom, Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces, intersecting where our eyes think they see a human being, that are real. Try to take the statement seriously that a human being is nothing as he or she stands before us. A human being is but the shadow of many forces. The being who reveals himself in a person can easily be elsewhere than at that point where the individual in question is walking around on two legs.

For example, consider three men, first, an ancient Persian whose work was plowing. He looked like an ordinary man but actually was one of the souls whose forces were nourished from this or that world, above or below. The second man was an ancient Persian official. He was formed by forces from another world that intersected in him. To know him, we must look at these forces. All of you sitting here are in your reality somewhere else, and only the forces of your real being radiate into this room. Our third example is a Persian of whom we have to say he was really a complete illusion, a phantom. What was there in reality? We must go all the way up to the sun to find the forces that nourished this phantom. There, among the mysteries of the sun, we find what can be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It radiates down, and here below stands a figure called Zarathustra. In truth, however, his being is not there at all. This is our third example.

Now, it is important to realize that in ancient times people were aware of the meaning of such designations. Names were not given as they are today. People were named according to what lived in them rather than on the basis of their external, illusory appearance. We must be quite clear about this. We can say that at the time of Christ people would have easily understood what was meant when John the Baptist was referred to as the angel of God. Such a statement would have taken account of what really happened there; it would have focused on the main thing and disregarded secondary considerations.

Let us assume people had spoken about Christ Jesus in the same way. How would they have had to speak of him if they had understood such things? They would not have dreamt of naming the physical body walking around among them Christ Jesus. Rather, the name was the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at the point where this physical body was. As this body of Jesus wandered from one place to another, it made visible the sun force as it moves from place to place. This force could also move around alone, and at times it was said that Christ Jesus was in his “home,” that is, in his physical body, but what was in him moved on without his body. Particularly in Saint John's Gospel this expression is used in such a way that, at times, the writer speaks of this being moving purely spiritually exactly as though he were describing this sun force dwelling in a physical body.

It is therefore important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always seen in relation to the physical sun, which is the external expression of the spiritual world that is received at the point where Christ's physical body is walking around. When Christ Jesus heals, for instance, it is the sun force that heals. However, the sun must be at the right place in the heavens: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.” It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down only when the external sun has set but still works spiritually. And when Christ again needed a certain force for his work, he had to take it from the spiritual rather than from the physical, visible sun. “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.” Here, the path of the sun and the solar force is expressly indicated. It is this solar force that is at work here, and fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign, making the path of the sun forces visible to the physical eye.

Whenever Christ is mentioned in Saint Mark's Gospel, the sun force is meant, which, in that epoch of human evolution, was especially active in Palestine. The sun force could be seen as Christ went from one place to another. We could just as well say that at that time, the spiritual force of the sun, as though focused in one point, went from one place to another. The body of Jesus was the external sign that made the movements of the sun force visible. The paths Jesus took in Palestine were those of the sun force come down to earth. If you trace his steps on a map, you have a diagram of a cosmic event: the influence of the sun force from the macrocosm on the land of Palestine. That macrocosmic aspect is what matters here. The writer of Saint Mark's Gospel points out this macrocosmic connection. He knew that the body serving as the vehicle of a principle such as that of Christ had to be overcome by its principle in a special way. Thus, this gospel points to the world whose existence behind the world of the senses Zarathustra had so powerfully announced; it points to that world as it works on our human world. Through Christ Jesus it was indicated how these forces now work on the earth. Therefore, a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra events had to occur in the body of the Nathan Jesus because it was in a certain way influenced by the individuality of Zarathustra.

Let us recall the beautiful legend about Zarathustra. At his birth, Zarathustra accomplished his first miracle when he showed his famous smile. Later, Duransarun, the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, resolved to murder him because of what some retrograde Magi had told him about the child. However, when the king attempted to stab the child, his arm was paralyzed. That was a second miracle. Then, because the king could not stab him, Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts of the desert. Thus, in earliest childhood Zarathustra experienced what we see when we look out into the world through our impurities. Instead of noble group-soul and higher spiritual beings, we see emanations of our wild fantasy. That is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth occurred also among the wild animals, and so on. It was always the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra and ministered to him.

We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Saint Mark. “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness [Actually the word is solitude]. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.” This shows us that the body was prepared that was to be the focal point to receive what transpired in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated, among other things, the time he spent among the wild beasts. This body took in what came from the macrocosm.

Even the first lines of Saint Mark's Gospel take us into the greatest cosmic context. I wanted to show you that if we understand the words in the right sense—not in the sense of our modern philistine language but in that of the ancient languages where living worlds were behind each word—then the Gospel of Saint Mark comes alive again and receives new force. With our modern language, however, it takes many circumlocutions to find again what was simply present in the words in ancient languages. When we say that human beings live on the earth and develop their I, and that they formerly lived on the moon where the angels went through the human stage, we are expressing what lies behind the words, “Behold, I send my angel before human beings.” These words cannot be understood without prior knowledge of what spiritual science offers. People in our time should be honest and admit that the words at the beginning of Saint Mark's Gospel are incomprehensible. Instead, in petty pride they declare spiritual science a fantasy that reads all kinds of things into what they supposedly just know. However, they do not really know it.

Today the principle of rewriting sacred documents for each epoch, as was done in ancient Persia, is no longer practiced. Thus, the divine spiritual word, as presented in the Zend-Avesta, was transformed again and again. The Persian bible was rewritten seven times and what exists today is the last form. Anthroposophy has to teach people how necessary it is to rewrite the books containing the holy secrets in each epoch. For especially if we want to preserve the grand old style, we should not try to stay as close as possible to the ancient wording. That can't be done; the old words are no longer understood. Instead, we must try to translate the ancient wording into the immediate understanding of our time. That is what we have tried to do this summer with the Book of Genesis. You saw that many of the words had to be changed. Perhaps today you have got an idea of how the words must also be changed in the Gospel of Saint Mark.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of St. John, vol. 103 in the Collected Works, repr. (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988), The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, vol. 112 in the Collected Works (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982), The Gospel of St. Luke, vol. 114 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), and The Gospel of St. Matthew, vol. 123 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation: A Rosicrucian Mystery Drama (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1981).

For anyone who has a background of Spiritual Science, and has absorbed something of its teaching about the evolution of the world, then goes on to study those tremendous opening words of our Bible, an entirely new world should dawn upon him.

There is probably no account of human evolution so open to misinterpretation as this record known as Genesis, the description of the creation of the world in six or seven days. When the man of today calls to life in his soul, in any language familiar to him, the words In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, they convey to him scarcely a faint reflection of what lived in the soul of an ancient Hebrew who allowed the words to work upon him. It is not in the least a question of being able to replace the old words by modern ones; it is much more important that we should have been prepared by Anthroposophy to feel at least something of the mood which lived in the heart and mind of the Hebrew pupil of old when he brought to life within himself the words: B'reschit bara elohim et haschamayim v'et ha'aretz.¹ A whole world lived while such words were vibrating through his soul.

What was it like—this inner world which lived in the soul of the pupil? We can only compare it with what can take place in the soul of a man to whom a seer has described the pictures he experienced on looking into the spiritual world. For what in the last resort is Spiritual Science but the outcome of seership, of the living intuitions which the seer receives when, having freed himself from the conditions of sense-perception and of the intellect bound up with the physical body, he looks with spiritual organs into the spiritual worlds? If he wishes to translate what he sees there into the language of the physical world, he can only do so in pictures, but if his descriptive powers suffice, he will do it in pictures which are able to awaken in his hearers a mental image corresponding with what he himself sees in the spiritual worlds. Thereby something comes into existence which must not be mistaken for a description of things and events in the physical sense-world; something comes into existence which we must never forget belongs to an entirely different world—a world which does indeed underlie and maintain the ordinary sense-world of our ideas, impressions and perceptions, yet in no way coincides with that world.

If we want to portray the origin of this our sense-world, including the origin of man himself, our ideas cannot be confined to that world itself. No science equipped only with ideas borrowed from the world of the senses can reach the origin of sense-existence. For sense-existence is rooted in the supersensible, and although we can go a long way back historically, or geologically, we must realise that, if we are to reach to actual origins, there is a certain point in the far distant past at which we must leave the field of the sense-perceptible and penetrate into regions that can only be grasped super-sensibly. What we call Genesis does not begin with the description of anything perceptible by the senses, anything which the eye could see in the physical world. In the course of these lectures we shall become thoroughly convinced that it would be quite wrong to take the opening words of Genesis as referring to events which can be seen with the outward eye. So long as one connects the words “heaven and earth” with any residue of the sensuously visible one has not reached the stage to which the first part of the Genesis account points us back. Today there is practically no way of obtaining light upon the world it describes except through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science we may indeed hope to approach the mystery of the archetypal words with which the Bible opens, and to get some inkling of their content.

Wherein lies their peculiar secret? It lies in the fact that they are written in the Hebrew tongue, a language which works upon the soul quite differently from any modern language. Although the Hebrew of these early chapters may not perhaps have the same effect today, at one time it did work in such a way that when a letter was sounded it called up in the soul a picture. Pictures arose in the soul of anyone who entered with lively sympathy into the words, and allowed them to work upon him—pictures harmoniously arranged, organic pictures, pictures which may be compared with what the seer can still see today when he rises from the sensible to the supersensible. The Hebrew language, or, better said, the language of the first chapters of the Bible, enabled the soul to call up imaginal pictures which were not wholly unlike those that are presented to the seer when, freed from his body, he is able to look into supersensible regions of existence.

In order to realise in some measure the power of these archetypal words we must disregard the pale and shadowy impressions which any modern language makes upon the soul, and try to get some idea of the creative power inherent in sound-sequences in this ancient tongue. It is of immense importance that in the course of these lectures we too should seek to place before our souls the very pictures which arose in the Hebrew pupil of old when these sounds worked creatively in him. In fact we must find a method of penetrating the primeval record entirely different from those used by modern research.

I have now given you an indication of our line of approach. We shall only slowly and gradually learn to comprehend what lived in the ancient Hebrew sage when he allowed those most powerful words to work upon him, words which we do at least still possess. So our next task will be to free ourselves as far as possible from the familiar, and from the ideas and images of “heaven and earth,” of “Gods,” of “creation,” of “in the beginning,” which we have hitherto held. The more thoroughly we can do this the better we shall be able to penetrate into the spirit of a document which arose out of psychic conditions quite different from those of today.

First of all we must be quite clear as to the point of time in evolution we are speaking of, when we deal with the opening words of the Bible. You know of course that contemporary clairvoyant investigation makes it possible to describe to some extent the origin and development of our earth and of human existence. In my book Occult Science I tried to describe the gradual growth of our earth as the planetary scene of human existence, through the three preliminary stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon.² Today you will have in mind, at least in broad outline, what I described there. At what point then in the spiritual scientific account should we place what draws near to our souls in the mighty word B'reschit? Where does it belong?

If we look back for a moment to ancient Saturn, we picture it as a cosmic body having as yet nothing of the material existence to which we are accustomed. Of all that we find in our own environment it has nothing but heat. No air or water or solid earth is as yet to be found upon ancient Saturn; even where it is densest, there is only fire—living, weaving warmth. Then, to this living, weaving warmth, a kind of air or gaseous element is added; and we have a true picture of the Sun existence if we think of it as an interweaving, an interpenetration, of a gaseous, airy element and a warmth element. Then comes the third condition, which we call the Moon evolution. There the watery element is added to the warmth and the air. There is as yet nothing of what in our present earth we call solid. But the old Moon evolution has a peculiar characteristic. It divides into two parts. If we look back upon old Saturn, we see it as a single whole of weaving warmth; and the old Sun we still see as a mingling of gaseous and warmth elements. During the Moon existence there takes place this separation into a part which is Sun and a part which retains the Moon nature. It is only when we come to the fourth stage of our planetary evolution that the earth element is added to the earlier warmth, gaseous and watery elements. In order that this solid element could come into existence, the division which had taken place previously during the Moon evolution had first to repeat itself. Once again the sun had to withdraw. Thus there is a certain moment in the evolution of our planet when, out of the universal complication of fire and air and water, the denser, more earthy element separates from the finer, gaseous element of the sun; and it is only in this earthy element that what we today call solid is able to form.

Let us concentrate on this moment, when the sun withdraws from its former state of union with the rest of the planet and begins to send its forces to the earth from without. Let us bear in mind that this was what made it possible, within the earth, for the solid element—what we today call matter—to begin to condense. If we fix this moment firmly in our minds we have the point of time at which Genesis, the creation story, begins. This is what it is describing. We should not associate with the opening words of Genesis the abstract, shadowy idea we get when we say “In the beginning,” which is something unspeakably poverty-stricken compared with what the ancient Hebrew sage felt. If we would bring the sound B'reschit before our souls in the right way, there must arise before us—in the only way it can do so, in mental images—all that happened through the severance of sun and earth, all that was to be found at the actual moment when the separation into two had just taken place. Furthermore we must be aware that throughout the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, spiritual Beings were its leaders and its bearers; and that warmth, air, water are only the outer expressions, the outer garments of spiritual Beings who are the reality. Thus when we contemplate the condition which obtained at the moment of separation of sun and earth, and picture it to ourselves in thoughts full of material images, we must also be conscious that the elementary “water,” “air,” “fire,” which we have in our mind's eye, is still only the means of expression for moving, weaving spirit which, during the course of the preceding Saturn, Sun and Moon stages has advanced, has progressed, and at the time now being described has reached a certain stage in its evolution.

Let us place before us the picture of an immense cosmic globe, composed of weaving elements of water, air or gas and fire, a globe which splits apart into a solar and a telluric element; but let us conceive too that this elementary substance is only the expression of a spiritual. Let us imagine that from this substantial habitation, woven of the elements of water, air and heat, the countenances of spiritual Beings, weaving within it, look out upon us, spiritual Beings who reveal themselves in this element which we have had to represent to ourselves through material images. Let us imagine that we have before us spiritual Beings, turning their countenances towards us, as it were, using their own soul-spiritual forces to organise cosmic bodies with the help of warmth, air and water. Let us try to imagine this!

There we have a picture of an elementary sheath, which, to give a very rough sensuous image of it, we may perhaps liken to a snail-shell, but a shell woven not of solid matter, like the snail's, but from the forest elements of water, air and fire. Let us think of spirit, in the form of countenances, within this sheath, gazing upon us, using this sheath as a means of manifestation, a force of very revelation which, as it were, pricks outward into manifestation from what lies hidden in the supersensible.

Call up before your souls this picture which I have just tried to paint for you, this image of the living weaving of spirit in a kind of matter; imagine too the inner soul-force which causes it to happen; concentrate for a moment on this to the exclusion of all else, and you will then have something approximating to what lived in an ancient Hebrew sage when the sounds B'reschit penetrated his soul. Bet the first letter, called forth the weaving of the habitation in substance; Resch the second sound, summoned up the countenances of the spiritual Beings who wove within this dwelling, and Schin the third sound, the prickly, stinging force which worked its way out from within to manifestation.

Now the underlying principle behind such a description is dawning upon us. And when we have grasped that, we are able to appreciate something of the spirit of this language; it had a creativeness of which the modern man with his abstract speech has no inkling.

Now let us place ourselves at the moment immediately preceding the physical coagulation, the physical densification of our earth. Let us imagine it as vividly as possible. We shall have to admit that in describing what was taking place at that moment we cannot make use of any of the ideas which we use today to describe processes in the external sense-world. Hence you will see that it is utterly inadequate to associate any external deed with the second word we meet in Genesis—bara—however closely that deed might resemble what we understand today as creation. We do not thus get near to the meaning of that word. Where can we turn for help? The word implies something which lies very near the boundary where the sensible passes over directly into the supersensible, into pure spirit. And anyone who wishes to grasp the meaning of the word bara, which is usually translated “created” (In the beginning God created ...), must in no wise associate it with any productive activity which can be seen with physical eyes.

Take a look into your own inner being! Imagine yourselves as having been asleep for a while, then waking up, and, without opening your eyes to things around you, calling up in your souls by inner activity certain images. Bring home vividly to yourselves this inner activity, this productive meditation, this cogitation, which calls forth a soul-content from the depths of the soul as if by magic. If you like you can use the word “excogitate” for this conjuring up of a soul-content out of the depths into the field of consciousness; think of this activity, which man can only perform with his mental images, but think of it now as a real, cosmic, creative activity. Instead of your own meditation, your own inward experience in thinking, try to imagine cosmic thinking-then you have the content of the second word of Genesis, bara. However spiritually you may think it, you can only liken it to the thought-life you are able to bring before yourselves in your own musing, you cannot get nearer to it than that!

And now imagine that during your musing two kinds of images come before your souls. Suppose there is a man to whom on awakening two different kinds of thought occur, a man who muses about two different kinds of thing. Suppose that one kind of thought is the picture either of some activity, or of some external thing or of some being; it does not come about through external sight, through perception, but through reflection, through the creative activity of his soul in the field of his consciousness. Suppose that the second complex of ideas which arises in this awakening man is a desire, something which the man's whole disposition and constitution of soul can prompt him to will. We have elements both of thought and of desire coming up in our souls through inner reflection. Now imagine, instead of the human soul, the Beings called in Genesis the Elohim, reflecting within themselves. Instead of one human soul, think of a multiplicity of reflecting spiritual Beings, who, however, in a similar way—save that their musing is cosmic—call forth by reflection from within themselves two complexes which might be compared with what I have just been describing—a pure thought-element and an element of desire. Thus instead of thinking of the musing' human soul, we think of a group of cosmic Beings who awaken in themselves two complexes; one of the nature of thought or ideation, that is, one which manifests something, expresses itself outwardly, phenomenally; and another of the nature of desire, which lives in inner movement, inner stimulation, which is permeated with inner activity. Let us think of these cosmic Beings, who are called in Genesis the Elohim, musing in this way. The word bara, “created,” brings their musing home to us. Then let us think that through this creative musing two complexes arise, one tending towards external revelation, external manifestation, and another consisting of an inward stimulus, an inward life; then we have the two complexes which arose in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when the words haschamayim and ha'aretz—represented for the modern man by “heaven” and “earth”—sounded through his soul. Let us try to forget the modern man's conception of “heaven and earth.” Let us try to bring the two complexes before the soul, the one which tends more to disclose itself, tends to outward manifestation, is disposed to call forth some outside effect; and the other complex, the complex of inner stimulation, of something which would experience itself inwardly, something which quickens itself inwardly; then we have what expresses the meaning of the two words haschamayim and ha'aretz.

As for the Elohim themselves, what kind of Beings are they?

In the course of these lectures we shall learn to know them better, and to describe them in terms of Spiritual Science; but for the present let us try to reach in some measure the meaning of this archetypal word “Elohim.” Whoever wishes to get an idea of what lived in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he used this word should clearly understand that in those days there was a lively comprehension of the fact that our earth evolution had a definite meaning and a definite goal. What was this meaning and this goal?

Our earth evolution can only have a meaning, if during its course something arises which was not there before. A perpetual repetition of what was already there would be a meaningless existence, and unless the Hebrew sage of old had known that our earth, after having passed through its preliminary stages, had to bring something new into existence, he would have regarded its genesis as meaningless. Through the coming into existence of the earth something new became possible, it became possible for man to become man as we know him. In none of the earlier stages of evolution was man present as the being he is today, the being that he will more and more become in the future; that was not possible in earlier stages. And those spiritual Beings who directed the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions were of a different nature from man—for the moment we will not enter into the question whether they were higher or lower. Those Beings who wove in the fiery, gaseous and watery stages of elementary existence, who wove a Saturn, Sun and Moon existence, who at the beginning of earth existence were weaving its fabric—how best do we come to know them? ... How can we draw near to them?

We should have to go into very many things to get anywhere near an understanding of these Beings. To begin with, however, we can come to know one aspect of them, and that will suffice to bring us at least one step nearer to the potent meaning of the ancient Bible words. Let us consider those Beings for a moment—the Beings who stood nearest to man at the time when he was created from what had developed out of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us ask those Beings what they really wanted. Let us ask them what was their will, their purpose. Then we shall be able to get at least some idea of their nature. They had great ability; in the course of their evolution they had acquired capacities in various directions. One of them could do this, another that. But we understand the nature of these Beings best if we realise that at the time we are now considering they were working as a group towards a common goal; they were moved by a common aim. Although at a higher level, it is as if a group of men, each with his own special skill, were to co-operate today. Each of them can do something, and now they say to each other: “You can do this, I can do that, the third among us can do something else. We will unite our activities to produce a work in common in which each of our capacities can be used.” Let us then imagine such p. group of men, a group each of whom practises a different craft, but which is united by a common aim. What they intend to bring into existence is not yet there. The unit at which they are working lives to begin with only as an aim. What is there is a multiplicity. The unit lives, to begin with, only as an ideal. Now think of a group of spiritual Beings who have passed through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, each one of whom has a specific ability, and who all at the moment I have indicated make the decision: “We will combine our activities for a common end, we will all work in the same direction.” And the picture of this goal arose before each of them. What was this goal? It was man, earthly man!

Thus earthly man lived as the ultimate goal in a group of spiritual Beings who had resolved to combine their several skills in order to arrive at something which they themselves did not possess at all, something which did not belong to them, but which they were able to achieve by combined effort. If you accept all that I have described to you—the elementary sheath, the cosmic, meditative spiritual Beings working within it, the two complexes, one of desire quickening inwardly, and another manifesting outwardly—and then ascribe the common purpose I have just mentioned to those spiritual Beings whose countenances gaze out of the elementary sheath, then you have what lived in the heart of the Hebrew sage of old in the word Elohim.

Now we have brought before us in picture form what lives in these all-powerful archetypal words. Then let us forget all that a man of today can think and feel when he utters the words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Bearing in mind all that I have told you today, try to put this picture before you. There is the sphere in which fiery, gaseous and watery elements weave. Within this active, weaving elementary sphere a group of pondering spiritual Beings live. They are engaged in productive pondering, their pondering is penetrated through and through by their intention to direct their whole operation towards the form of man. And the first-fruits of their musing is the idea of something manifesting itself outwardly, announcing itself, and something else inwardly active, inwardly animated.

“In the elementary sheath the primeval Spirits pondered the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly mobile.” Try to bring before yourselves in these terms what is said in the first lines of the Bible, then you will have a foundation for all that is to come before our souls in the next few days as the true meaning of those all-powerful archetypal words which contain such a sublime revelation for mankind—the revelation of its own origin.

• 1. See Figure 1, below.
• 2. To avoid any ambiguity, capital letters will be used throughout this book for the words Sun and Moon, when they refer to the planetary evolutions preceding that of our earth.

In a good many places in this course of lectures—as well as elsewhere in our Anthroposophical discussions—it may well sound as if I rather enjoyed having to set myself up in opposition, or apparent opposition, to “modern science.” I am thinking more of people in the outside world unacquainted with the kind of feeling that prevails in our circles, but it is a point on which I am particularly anxious to avoid any misunderstanding. You may take it as definite that it is a very real effort for me to do anything of the sort; and that I only do it precisely at those points where I myself am able to develop or carry further what science has to say. My sense of responsibility is such that it will not permit me to bring forward anything that conflicts with the opinions of modern science, unless I have first placed myself in a position to understand, and if necessary reproduce, its findings on the subject in hand. No one having such an attitude could possibly approach the all-important matters which are to occupy us in the next few days without the deepest sense of awe and of the responsibility that goes with it.

Unfortunately, it just has to be said that, as regards the questions now to come before us, modern science breaks down altogether. The scientists are not even in a position to know why this should be so, or to perceive why their science must necessarily prove so hopelessly amateurish in face of the real and the great problems of existence. So, although in a short course of lectures it is naturally not possible to engage in controversy about every detail, please take it for granted that behind all I say I am fully aware of the modern scientific outlook on these subjects. Only, as far as possible, I must confine myself to what is positive, and trust that in a circle of Anthroposophists this will always be understood.

In the last lecture I tried to show how those tremendous, archetypal words with which the Bible opens—words which are put before us in a language different in its very nature from modern tongues—can only be rightly interpreted if we try to forget the attitude of mind and feeling we have acquired as a result of the usual modern renderings. For the language in which these powerful words of creation were originally given to us has actually the peculiarity that the very character of its sounds directs the heart and mind towards those pictures which arise before the eye of the seer when he contemplates the moment of the welling-forth of the sense-perceptible part of our world out of the supersensible. Every single sound in which the immemorial origin of our earth existence is placed before us is full of active power. In the course of these lectures we shall often have to refer to the character of this language; today, however, let us confine ourselves to one of the first essentials.

You know that in the Bible, after the words which yesterday I at least tried to put before your souls in picture form, there comes a description of one of the complexes which arose out of the divine meditation, out of the divine productive musing. I told you that we have to conceive that, as if out of a cosmic memory, two complexes arose. One was a complex which may be compared with the thoughts which can arise in us; the other is of the nature of desire or will. The one complex contains all that tends towards outer manifestation, tends to proclaim itself, tends, as it were, to force its way out—haschamayim. The other complex—ha'aretz—consists of an inner activity, a permeation with inward craving; it is something which inwardly vivifies, animates. Then we are told of certain qualities of this inner, vivifying, self-stimulating element, and these are indicated in the Bible by appropriate sounds. We are told that this self-stimulating element was in a state which is designated as tohu wabohu¹—without form and void. To understand what is meant by tohu wabohu we must try to recapture a picture of what it expresses; and we only succeed in doing that if out of our spiritual scientific knowledge we call to mind what it was that, after its passage through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, emerged again and surged through space as our planetary earth existence.

I pointed out yesterday that what we call solidity, the state which offers a certain resistance to our senses, did not exist during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; only the elements of fire or warmth, gas or air, and water were to be found there. It was only with the emergence of the earth that the solid element was added. Thus at the moment when there happened what we were describing yesterday, when the tendency began for the sun to split off from the earth, there is a mutual interpenetration of the elements warmth, air and water—they surged through one another. That preliminary surging interpenetration which we have tried to picture to ourselves is thr meaning of the phrase inadequately translated as without form and void, but eloquently and effectively rendered by the succession of sounds tohu wabohu. What then does tohu wabohu signify?

If we try to picture what can be aroused in our souls by these sounds it is something like this. The sound which resembles our own T calls up a picture of forces diverging from a central point in every direction. Thus the moment one utters the T sound one gets the picture of forces diverging from a centre in every direction to illimitable distances. So that we have to imagine the elements warmth, air and water permeating, interpenetrating each other, and within them a tendency to diverge, as from a centre in all directions. The sound tohu alone would suffice to express this tendency to push outwards, to separate. What then does the second part of the phrase signify? It expresses the very opposite of what I have just described. The character of the sound resembling our B, called forth by the letter Bet, expresses what you would get if you imagined an enormous sphere, a hollow sphere, with yourself inside it, and rays proceeding from every point inside this sphere towards its centre. Thus you imagine a point within space whence forces stream out in all directions—that is tohu; these forces are arrested at the extremities of the spherical enclosure, and turned back again on themselves from every direction of space—that is bohu. And if you have formed this idea, and think of all these streams of force as filled with the three elementary substances of warmth, air and water, then you know the character of this inner animation. The combination of these sounds indicates the way in which elementary existence is guided by the Elohim.

How far has this brought us? We shall not understand the sublime process of the seven days of creation unless we bear these details in mind. If we do so, then the whole will seem a wonderful cosmic drama. Let us recall once more that in the word bara—“in the beginning the Gods created”—we are concerned with a soul-spiritual activity. I have likened it to the thoughts which are called up in our own souls. Thus we may think of the Elohim as arrayed in space, and bara as a cosmic soul-activity, a pondering. What the Elohim ponder is expressed by haschamayim and ha'aretz—the outward radiation and the inner, mobile energy.

To make the comparison as close as possible picture yourselves in the moment of awakening; groups of ideas arise in your souls. This is how haschamayim and ha'aretz arise in the souls of the Elohim. Now you know that these Elohim came over to earth evolution at the stage to which they had evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. So that they are in a somewhat similar situation to your own when on awakening you call up thoughts in your souls. You can contemplate those thoughts, you can say what they are. You can say: “When I awake in the morning and recall what has previously been left in my mind, I can describe it.” It was something the same with the Elohim, when they said to themselves: “Let us now reflect upon what arises in our souls when we recall what took place during the ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us see how it looks in recollection.” What it looked like is expressed in the phrase tohu wabohu; it could be expressed by a picture such as I have given you, as streams radiating from a centre outwards into space and back again, in such a way that the elements are interwoven in this streaming of forces. Thus the Elohim could say to themselves: “At the stage to which you have so far brought things this is what they look like. This is how they are resumed.”

Now in order to understand what comes next, usually rendered “darkness was above the fluid substances” or “above the waters”(above the abyss)—or darkness was upon the face of the waters (English A.V.)—we must take into consideration something else. We must once more turn our attention to the course of evolution before the earth came into existence.

First we have the Saturn existence, inweaving in the fiery element. Then comes the Sun existence, with its addition of the airy element. But in my Occult Science you can read how with the addition of the air something else is associated. The fine warmth element of Saturn condenses to a gaseous element. But every such densification is accompanied by a counter-process of refinement. Condensation to the gaseous element is a descending process, but on the other side there is an ascent to the light element. Thus, speaking of the transition from Saturn to Sun, we must say that Saturn still weaves solely in the element of warmth, whereas during the Sun evolution something denser, the gaseous element, is added, but so also is light. The light element makes it possible for the warmth and the air to manifest themselves in outward radiance.

Now let us take one of the two complexes—the one expressed as ha'aretz, usually translated as “earth”—and ask ourselves how the Elohim, turning their attention to this complex after their act of recollection, would have described it. They could not have said that what had already existed in the Sun evolution had now come to life again. For it was without light; light had separated from it. Ha'aretz had thus become one-sided. It had not brought with it the light, but only the coarser elements, the gaseous and the warmth elements. True, there was no lack of light in what is expressed by haschamayim, but haschamayim is the sunlike, issuing from the other complex. In ha'aretz there was no rarefaction, there was no light. We may then say that in one of the complexes warmth, air and water surged through one another in the way which is indicated by tohu wabohu. These elements were denuded, they lacked the light which had entered into evolution on the Sun. They remained dark, had nothing sunlike about them; for that had withdrawn with haschamayim. Thus the progress of earth evolution means that the light, which it still had so long as the sun remained united with it, had now withdrawn; and a dark fabric woven of the elements of warmth, air and water was left.

We now have the content of the meditation of the Elohim before our souls in more detail. But we shall never be able to think of it in the right way unless we are conscious all the time that air, water and even warmth are external expressions of spiritual Beings. It would not be quite correct to call this elemental existence their “garment”; it should rather be regarded as making known their presence externally. Thus what we call air, water, warmth, are maya, illusion; they are only there for the outward aspect, and this is so even for the mind's eye. In reality this elemental existence is something psycho-spiritual, it is the external manifestation of the soul-spiritual of the Elohim. But we must not think of the Elohim as at all like man, for man is actually their goal. To fashion man, to call man, with his own peculiar organisation, into existence, that is the very matter of their cogitation. So we must not think of them as human, but we must certainly envisage that there is already in their nature a certain cleavage. When we speak of man today, we do not understand him at all unless we distinguish between body, soul and spirit. You know what great efforts we Anthroposophists have made to get a closer understanding of the activity and nature of this human trinity. To recognise this unity in trinity first becomes necessary in the case of man; and it would be a great mistake to think of Beings who existed before man, the Beings whom the Bible calls Elohim, as if they resembled man. Nevertheless in their case too we can rightly distinguish between a kind of body and a kind of spirit.

Now when you distinguish between body and spirit in man, you are well aware that even his outer form bears testimony to the fact that his being lives in it in a variety of ways. For instance, we do not try to locate man's mind in his hand or his legs, but we say that his bodily functions are in his trunk and his limbs, and that the organ of his mind is the head, the brain; the brain is the instrument of mind. Thus we distinguish in the external human form certain parts as the expression of the physical, and certain other parts as the expression of the spiritual.

We have to look upon the Elohim in somewhat the same way. All this surging elementary web of which I have spoken can only be correctly understood if it is looked upon as the bodily vehicle of the Elohim's psycho-spiritual. These elements of air, warmth and water are the external embodiment of the Elohim. But we have to make a further distinction; we have to look upon the watery and gaseous elements as more connected with the bodily, denser functions of the Elohim, and what permeates this tohu wabohu as warmth as being the element in which their spiritual part is at work. Just as in the case of man we say that the more bodily part functions in the trunk and the limbs, and the more spiritual part in the head, so if we look upon the entire cosmos as an embodiment of the Elohim, we can say that their more specifically bodily part lived in the air and the water, and their spiritual part moved in the warmth

Now the Bible makes use of a remarkable phrase to express the relationship of this spiritual part of the Elohim to the elements: Ruach Elohim m'rachephet [See Figure 4, below.]—a phrase which we must go into more closely if we would understand how the spirit of the Elohim permeated the other elements. We can only understand the verb racheph by praying in aid, so to speak, all the associations which it would have carried with it in those days. If one simply says “And the spirit of the Gods moved upon the outspread substances—upon the waters” one has said almost nothing. We can only understand the word if we think of a hen sitting upon her eggs, and of her brooding warmth radiating out over the eggs beneath her. (I know it is a crude illustration, but it does help to bring out the meaning.) And if you think of the energy of this brooding warmth which streams from the hen into the eggs in order to bring the eggs to maturity, then you can have a notion of the meaning of the verb used here to convey what the spirit does in the element of warmth. It would of course be quite inaccurate to say that the spirit of the Elohim broods, because what the physical activity of brooding conveys today is not what is meant. What is meant to be conveyed is the activity of the outraying warmth. As warmth radiates from the hen, so the spirit of the Elohim radiates by means of the warmth element into the other elementary states. When you think of this, you have a picture of what is meant by the words: And the spirit of God (the Elohim) moved upon the face of the waters.

Now, up to a point, we have reconstructed the picture which hovered before the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he thought about this primeval condition. We have constructed a complex of spherically interwoven warmth, air, water, such as I have described the tohu wabohu to be, from which all the light had withdrawn with the haschamayim, and this interweaving of the three elementary states was inwardly permeated with darkness. In the one element, the warmth, there weaves or surges the spirituality of the Elohim, which itself expands with the expanding warmth, and brings to maturity what is at first immature in the darker elements.

Thus when we come to the sentence And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, we are dwelling on one characteristic of what in the first verse of the Bible is called ha'aretz—earth. We are expressing what is left after haschamayim has been withdrawn.

Now let us recall once more the earlier conditions. From the earth we can look back to the Moon, Sun and Saturn conditions. Let us go back to the Sun. We know that at that time there was no separation of what we today call earth from the sun. Therefore the earthly part was not illumined by light from without. That its light comes from without is the essential characteristic of life on earth. At that time, however, you have to think of the earth-sphere as enclosed within the Sun, forming part of the Sun, not receiving light, but itself forming part of the Being that is radiating light into space. This condition can be summed up by saying simply that in it the earth element does not receive light, but is itself a source of light.

Mark the difference! In the Sun evolution the earth itself participated in the radiation of light. In the earth evolution that is no longer the case. The earth has surrendered the radiant element, it has to receive light from without; light has to stream into it. That is the essential difference between the earth, as it has become in the course of evolution, and the Sun condition; with the separation of the sun, of the haschamayim, the light went out too. All that is now outside the earth. The elementary existence which surges in ha'aretz as tohu wabohu has no light of its own. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, but that did not make the earth light; it left it in darkness.

Let us take another look at this elementary existence as a whole. You know of course from earlier lectures that we are accustomed to enumerate what we call the elementary states within our earth existence, beginning with the solid, then coming to the watery, next to the gaseous or aeriform and then to the warmth. These four constitute the denser conditions of matter. But we have not yet finished. If we go further upwards we meet with finer conditions, of which we do not get a much better idea by calling them finer substances. The main thing is to recognise them as finer relatively to the denser ones, the gaseous, the warmth and so on. They are usually called etheric states, and we have always distinguished light as the first of these finer states. Thus, when we descend from warmth into the denser, we come to the gaseous condition; if we ascend, we come to light. Ascending still further, beyond the light we come to a yet finer etheric condition, we come to something which is not really recognisable in the ordinary sense-world. We only get a kind of external reflection of it. From the occult point of view one can say that the forces in this finer ether are those which govern the chemical affinities of matter, the chemical combinations, the organisation of substances such as we can observe if, for instance, we place a fine powder on a metal plate, and then draw the bow of a violin across the plate, getting as a result the “Chladni” sound-figures. What the coarse physical tone brings about in the powder also occurs throughout space. Space is differentiated, is permeated, by forces which are more rarefied than the forces of light, by forces which represent in the spiritual what tone is in the sense-world. So that when we ascend from warmth to light, and from light to this finer element, we can speak of a chemical of sound-ether, which has the power to decompose and to combine substances, but is in reality of the nature of sound, sound of which the sense-perceptible tone which the ear hears is only the outward expression, the expression made by its passage through air. That brings us somewhat nearer to this finer element which is above light. Thus when we say that what has the quality of manifesting itself externally withdrew from the ha'aretz with the haschamayim we must not think only of the light, but also of the finer etheric element of sound which permeates light.

Just as we go downward from warmth to air, and thence to water, so we can go upward from warmth to light, and from light to what is of the nature of sound, of chemical combination. And from water we can descend lower to earth. When we mount from the sound-ether we come to a still higher etheric condition, which also withdrew with the haschamayim. We come to the finest etheric state of all, which weaves within the chemical or sound-ether we have just been describing. If you turn your spiritual ear in this direction, you do not of course hear a noise in the external air, but you hear the tone which vibrates through space, the tone which permeates space and organises matter just as the tone produced by the bow of a violin organises the Chladni sound-figures. But into this condition brought about by the sound-ether is poured a still higher etheric mode. And this higher ether permeates the sound-ether just as the meaning of our thought permeates the sound which our mouth utters, thereby transforming tone into word. Try to comprehend what it is that transforms tone into a word full of meaning; then you will have some idea of this finer etheric element permeating the organising sound-ether and giving meaning to it—the Word which vibrates through space. And this Word, which thrills through space and pours itself out into the sound-ether, is at the same time the source of life, it is really vibrant, weaving life! Thus what has withdrawn out of the ha'aretz with the haschamayim, what has gone into the sun, as distinct from the other, the lower, the earth part—as distinct from the tohu wabohu—announces itself externally as light. But behind the light is spiritual tone, and behind that is cosmic speech. Thus we may say that in the brooding warmth lives the lower spiritual part of the Elohim, somewhat as our own desire lives in the lower part of our soul. The higher spirituality of the Elohim, which went out with the haschamayim, lives in the light, in the spiritual sound, in the spiritual word, the cosmic Word. These can only stream into the tohu wabohu again from without.

Let us now try to bring before us in a picture what hovered before the soul of the Hebrew sage as ha'aretz, as haschamayim. When what withdrew as spiritual light, as sound, as the uttering and formative Word-element, streams back again, how does it act? It works from the sun as articulate light, as light giving utterance to cosmic speech. Let us think of what we have called tohu wabohu in its darkness, in its surging interweaving of warmth, air and water; let us think of it in its light-forsaken darkness. And then let us think that out of the activity of the Elohim, through the creative Word, which as the highest etheric entity lies behind their activity, there rays in with the light all that streams out from the Word. How is one to describe what is taking place? One cannot more fittingly express it than by saying that the Beings who had withdrawn their highest into the etheric with haschamayim radiated answering light out of cosmic space into the tohu wabohu. There you have the substance of the memorable verse: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. There you have the picture which hovered before the Hebrew sage.

So we must think of the Beings of the Elohim as spread over the whole cosmos, we must think of this whole cosmos as their body, and the elementary existence in the tohu wabohu as the lowest form of this body; of the warmth as a somewhat higher form; and we must think of the haschamayim, the part which has withdrawn, as the highest spirituality, which now works creatively into the whole structure of the tohu wabohu.

Now you see what I am leading up to—that it was the cosmic Word expressing radiant light which organised the surging of the elementary part, the tohu wabohu, and made it what it later became. Whence comes the power which organises the human form? There can be no human form such as we have, standing upright on two legs, making use of hands, unless it be organised by forces emanating from the brain. Our own form is organised by the highest spiritual forces streaming out from our own spiritual part. The lower is always organised by the higher. In the same way the ha'aretz, the body of the Elohim, their lower part, was organised by their higher bodily part, the haschamayim, and by the spiritual essence of the Elohim working within it. Thus the highest spirituality of the Elohim takes possession of what has been cast out, and organises it, and we can express this by saying that the light manifesting itself through the cosmic Word streams into the darkness. That is how the tohu wabohu was organised, raised out of the disorder of the elements. Thus, if you think of the haschamayim as the head of the Elohim, and the elementary part which is left behind as the trunk and limbs, organised through the power of the head, then you have the actual process. Then you have man expanded to cover the whole cosmos. And out of the spiritual organs in haschamayim he organises himself. When we think of all the streams of energy which pour out from the haschamayim to the ha'aretz we may venture to picture it as a macrocosmic man organising himself.

Now in order to paint the picture more accurately, let us turn our attention to man as he is today. Let us ask ourselves how man has become what he is—I mean, what he is to the spiritual scientist, not to ordinary science. What is it that has given him the special structure which distinguishes him from all the rest of the living creatures around him? What is it which weaves throughout this human form? If one does not blind oneself it is very easy to say what makes him man; it is something he possesses which none of the beings around him has—speech, which expresses itself in its own proper sounds. That is what makes him man. Think of the form of the animal and ask yourselves how it could be raised to the level of the human form. What would have to permeate it for it to become human? Let us put the question in this way. Let us think of an animal form, and imagine that we have to make a breath enter into it—what would this breath have to contain, in order to make this form begin to speak? It would have to feel itself inwardly organised in such a way that it uttered the sounds of speech. It is the sounds of speech which make the animal structure human!

How then can one picture the cosmos? Out of all that I have put before your souls, all that I have built up gradually out of this elementary existence, picture by picture, how can one come to feel the cosmos inwardly, how can one come inwardly to feel the structure of macrocosmic man? By beginning to feel how the sounds of speech flash into form.

When the sound of A soughs through the air, learn to feel not merely its tone, learn to feel the form it makes, just as the tone of the violin bow, passed over the edge of a plate, makes a form in the powder. Learn to feel the A and the B in their transience through space; learn to experience them not merely as sound, but as form-making; then you will feel as the Hebrew sage felt when the sounds of speech stimulated in him the pictures which I have put before your mind's eye. That was the effect of the sounds of speech. That is why I had to say that Bet (B) aroused the idea of something enclosing, like a shell shutting something off and enclosing an inner content. Resch (R) stimulated a feeling such as one has when one feels one's head: and Schin (S) suggested what I might describe as a pricking or penetrating. That is a thoroughly objective language, a language which, if the soul is receptive, crystallises into pictures as the sounds are uttered. In the sounds themselves lies the lofty discipline which led the sage to the pictures which crowd upon the soul of the seer when he enters into the supersensible world. Sound is in this way transmuted into spiritual form, and conjures before the soul pictures which form a connected whole in the way I have described. What is so remarkable about this ancient record is that it has been preserved in a language the sounds of which create form, the sounds of which crystallise in the soul into form. And these forms are the very pictures which one gets when one penetrates to the supersensible out of which our material physical has evolved. When one comes to understand this, one feels a deep awe and reverence for the way in which the world has evolved; and one comes to realise that truly it is by no mere chance that this great document of human existence has been transmitted in this script—a script which by means of its very characters is capable of arousing pictures in the soul, and of guiding us to what in our own time the seer is to discover anew. That is the feeling which the Anthroposophist ought to cultivate when he approaches this ancient document.

• 1. See Figure below.

In a good many places in this course of lectures—as well as elsewhere in our Anthroposophical discussions—it may well sound as if I rather enjoyed having to set myself up in opposition, or apparent opposition, to “modern science.” I am thinking more of people in the outside world unacquainted with the kind of feeling that prevails in our circles, but it is a point on which I am particularly anxious to avoid any misunderstanding. You may take it as definite that it is a very real effort for me to do anything of the sort; and that I only do it precisely at those points where I myself am able to develop or carry further what science has to say. My sense of responsibility is such that it will not permit me to bring forward anything that conflicts with the opinions of modern science, unless I have first placed myself in a position to understand, and if necessary reproduce, its findings on the subject in hand. No one having such an attitude could possibly approach the all-important matters which are to occupy us in the next few days without the deepest sense of awe and of the responsibility that goes with it.

Unfortunately, it just has to be said that, as regards the questions now to come before us, modern science breaks down altogether. The scientists are not even in a position to know why this should be so, or to perceive why their science must necessarily prove so hopelessly amateurish in face of the real and the great problems of existence. So, although in a short course of lectures it is naturally not possible to engage in controversy about every detail, please take it for granted that behind all I say I am fully aware of the modern scientific outlook on these subjects. Only, as far as possible, I must confine myself to what is positive, and trust that in a circle of Anthroposophists this will always be understood.

In the last lecture I tried to show how those tremendous, archetypal words with which the Bible opens—words which are put before us in a language different in its very nature from modern tongues—can only be rightly interpreted if we try to forget the attitude of mind and feeling we have acquired as a result of the usual modern renderings. For the language in which these powerful words of creation were originally given to us has actually the peculiarity that the very character of its sounds directs the heart and mind towards those pictures which arise before the eye of the seer when he contemplates the moment of the welling-forth of the sense-perceptible part of our world out of the super-sensible. Every single sound in which the immemorial origin of our earth existence is placed before us is full of active power. In the course of these lectures we shall often have to refer to the character of this language; today, however, let us confine ourselves to one of the first essentials.

You know that in the Bible, after the words which yesterday I at least tried to put before your souls in picture form, there comes a description of one of the complexes which arose out of the divine meditation, out of the divine productive musing. I told you that we have to conceive that, as if out of a cosmic memory, two complexes arose. One was a complex which may be compared with the thoughts which can arise in us; the other is of the nature of desire or will. The one complex contains all that tends towards outer manifestation, tends to proclaim itself, tends, as it were, to force its way out—haschamayim. The other complex—ha'aretz—consists of an inner activity, a permeation with inward craving; it is something which inwardly vivifies, animates. Then we are told of certain qualities of this inner, vivifying, self-stimulating element, and these are indicated in the Bible by appropriate sounds. We are told that this self-stimulating element was in a state which is designated as tohu wabohu—without form and void. To understand what is meant by tohu wabohu we must try to recapture a picture of what it expresses; and we only succeed in doing that if out of our spiritual scientific knowledge we call to mind what it was that, after its passage through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, emerged again and surged through space as our planetary earth existence.

I pointed out yesterday that what we call solidity, the state which offers a certain resistance to our senses, did not exist during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; only the elements of fire or warmth, gas or air, and water were to be found there. It was only with the emergence of the earth that the solid element was added. Thus at the moment when there happened what we were describing yesterday, when the tendency began for the sun to split off from the earth, there is a mutual interpenetration of the elements warmth, air and water—they surged through one another. That preliminary surging interpenetration which we have tried to picture to ourselves is the meaning of the phrase inadequately translated as without form and void, but eloquently and effectively rendered by the succession of sounds tohu wabohu. What then does tohu wabohu signify?

If we try to picture what can be aroused in our souls by these sounds it is something like this. The sound which resembles our own T calls up a picture of forces diverging from a central point in every direction. Thus the moment one utters the T sound one gets the picture of forces diverging from a centre in every direction to illimitable distances. So that we have to imagine the elements warmth, air and water permeating, interpenetrating each other, and within them a tendency to diverge, as from a centre in all directions. The sound tohu alone would suffice to express this tendency to push outwards, to separate. What then does the second part of the phrase signify? It expresses the very opposite of what I have just described. The character of the sound resembling our B, called forth by the letter Bet, expresses what you would get if you imagined an enormous sphere, a hollow sphere, with yourself inside it, and rays proceeding from every point inside this sphere towards its centre. Thus you imagine a point within space whence forces stream out in all directions—that is tohu; these forces are arrested at the extremities of the spherical enclosure, and turned back again on themselves from every direction of space—that is bohu. And if you have formed this idea, and think of all these streams of force as filled with the three elementary substances of warmth, air and water, then you know the character of this inner animation. The combination of these sounds indicates the way in which elementary existence is guided by the Elohim.

How far has this brought us? We shall not understand the sublime process of the seven days of creation unless we bear these details in mind. If we do so, then the whole will seem a wonderful cosmic drama. Let us recall once more that in the word bara—“in the beginning the Gods created”—we are concerned with a soul-spiritual activity. I have likened it to the thoughts which are called up in our own souls. Thus we may think of the Elohim as arrayed in space, and bara as a cosmic soul-activity, a pondering. What the Elohim ponder is expressed by haschamayim and ha'aretz—the outward radiation and the inner, mobile energy.

To make the comparison as close as possible picture yourselves in the moment of awakening; groups of ideas arise in your souls. This is how haschamayim and ha'aretz arise in the souls of the Elohim. Now you know that these Elohim came over to earth evolution at the stage to which they had evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. So that they are in a somewhat similar situation to your own when on awakening you call up thoughts in your souls. You can contemplate those thoughts, you can say what they are. You can say: “When I awake in the morning and recall what has previously been left in my mind, I can describe it.” It was something the same with the Elohim, when they said to themselves: “Let us now reflect upon what arises in our souls when we recall what took place during the ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us see how it looks in recollection.” What it looked like is expressed in the phrase tohu wabohu; it could be expressed by a picture such as I have given you, as streams radiating from a centre outwards into space and back again, in such a way that the elements are interwoven in this streaming of forces. Thus the Elohim could say to themselves: “At the stage to which you have so far brought things this is what they look like. This is how they are resumed.”

Now in order to understand what comes next, usually rendered “darkness was above the fluid substances” or “above the waters”(above the abyss)—or darkness was upon the face of the waters (English A.V.)—we must take into consideration something else. We must once more turn our attention to the course of evolution before the earth came into existence.

First we have the Saturn existence, inweaving in the fiery element. Then comes the Sun existence, with its addition of the airy element. But in my Occult Science you can read how with the addition of the air something else is associated. The fine warmth element of Saturn condenses to a gaseous element. But every such densification is accompanied by a counter-process of refinement. Condensation to the gaseous element is a descending process, but on the other side there is an ascent to the light element. Thus, speaking of the transition from Saturn to Sun, we must say that Saturn still weaves solely in the element of warmth, whereas during the Sun evolution something denser, the gaseous element, is added, but so also is light. The light element makes it possible for the warmth and the air to manifest themselves in outward radiance.

Now let us take one of the two complexes—the one expressed as ha'aretz, usually translated as “earth”—and ask ourselves how the Elohim, turning their attention to this complex after their act of recollection, would have described it. They could not have said that what had already existed in the Sun evolution had now come to life again. For it was without light; light had separated from it. ha'aretz had thus become one-sided. It had not brought with it the light, but only the coarser elements, the gaseous and the warmth elements. True, there was no lack of light in what is expressed by haschamayim, but haschamayim is the sunlike, issuing from the other complex. In ha'aretz there was no rarefaction, there was no light. We may then say that in one of the complexes warmth, air and water surged through one another in the way which is indicated by tohu wabohu. These elements were denuded, they lacked the light which had entered into evolution on the Sun. They remained dark, had nothing sunlike about them; for that had withdrawn with haschamayim. Thus the progress of earth evolution means that the light, which it still had so long as the sun remained united with it, had now withdrawn; and a dark fabric woven of the elements of warmth, air and water was left.

We now have the content of the meditation of the Elohim before our souls in more detail. But we shall never be able to think of it in the right way unless we are conscious all the time that air, water and even warmth are external expressions of spiritual Beings. It would not be quite correct to call this elemental existence their “garment”; it should rather be regarded as making known their presence externally. Thus what we call air, water, warmth, are maya, illusion; they are only there for the outward aspect, and this is so even for the mind's eye. In reality this elemental existence is something psycho-spiritual, it is the external manifestation of the soul-spiritual of the Elohim. But we must not think of the Elohim as at all like man, for man is actually their goal. To fashion man, to call man, with his own peculiar organisation, into existence, that is the very matter of their cogitation. So we must not think of them as human, but we must certainly envisage that there is already in their nature a certain cleavage. When we speak of man today, we do not understand him at all unless we distinguish between body, soul and spirit. You know what great efforts we Anthroposophists have made to get a closer understanding of the activity and nature of this human trinity. To recognise this unity in trinity first becomes necessary in the case of man; and it would be a great mistake to think of Beings who existed before man, the Beings whom the Bible calls Elohim, as if they resembled man. Nevertheless in their case too we can rightly distinguish between a kind of body and a kind of spirit.

Now when you distinguish between body and spirit in man, you are well aware that even his outer form bears testimony to the fact that his being lives in it in a variety of ways. For instance, we do not try to locate man's mind in his hand or his legs, but we say that his bodily functions are in his trunk and his limbs, and that the organ of his mind is the head, the brain; the brain is the instrument of mind. Thus we distinguish in the external human form certain parts as the expression of the physical, and certain other parts as the expression of the spiritual.

We have to look upon the Elohim in somewhat the same way. All this surging elementary web of which I have spoken can only be correctly understood if it is looked upon as the bodily vehicle of the Elohim's psycho-spiritual. These elements of air, warmth and water are the external embodiment of the Elohim. But we have to make a further distinction; we have to look upon the watery and gaseous elements as more connected with the bodily, denser functions of the Elohim, and what permeates this tohu wabohu as warmth as being the element in which their spiritual part is at work. Just as in the case of man we say that the more bodily part functions in the trunk and the limbs, and the more spiritual part in the head, so if we look upon the entire cosmos as an embodiment of the Elohim, we can say that their more specifically bodily part lived in the air and the water, and their spiritual part moved in the warmth

Now the Bible makes use of a remarkable phrase to express the relationship of this spiritual part of the Elohim to the elements: Ruach Elohim m'rachephet—a phrase which we must go into more closely if we would understand how the spirit of the Elohim permeated the other elements. We can only understand the verb racheph by praying in aid, so to speak, all the associations which it would have carried with it in those days. If one simply says “And the spirit of the Gods moved upon the outspread substances—upon the waters” one has said almost nothing. We can only understand the word if we think of a hen sitting upon her eggs, and of her brooding warmth radiating out over the eggs beneath her. (I know it is a crude illustration, but it does help to bring out the meaning.) And if you think of the energy of this brooding warmth which streams from the hen into the eggs in order to bring the eggs to maturity, then you can have a notion of the meaning of the verb used here to convey what the spirit does in the element of warmth. It would of course be quite inaccurate to say that the spirit of the Elohim broods, because what the physical activity of brooding conveys today is not what is meant. What is meant to be conveyed is the activity of the outraying warmth. As warmth radiates from the hen, so the spirit of the Elohim radiates by means of the warmth element into the other elementary states. When you think of this, you have a picture of what is meant by the words: And the spirit of God (the Elohim) moved upon the face of the waters.

Now, up to a point, we have reconstructed the picture which hovered before the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he thought about this primeval condition. We have constructed a complex of spherically interwoven warmth, air, water, such as I have described the tohu wabohu to be, from which all the light had withdrawn with the haschamayim, and this interweaving of the three elementary states was inwardly permeated with darkness. In the one element, the warmth, there weaves or surges the spirituality of the Elohim, which itself expands with the expanding warmth, and brings to maturity what is at first immature in the darker elements.

Thus when we come to the sentence And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, we are dwelling on one characteristic of what in the first verse of the Bible is called ha'aretz—earth. We are expressing what is left after haschamayim has been withdrawn.

Now let us recall once more the earlier conditions. From the earth we can look back to the Moon, Sun and Saturn conditions. Let us go back to the Sun. We know that at that time there was no separation of what we today call earth from the sun. Therefore the earthly part was not illumined by light from without. That its light comes from without is the essential characteristic of life on earth. At that time, however, you have to think of the earth-sphere as enclosed within the Sun, forming part of the Sun, not receiving light, but itself forming part of the Being that is radiating light into space. This condition can be summed up by saying simply that in it the earth element does not receive light, but is itself a source of light.

Mark the difference! In the Sun evolution the earth itself participated in the radiation of light. In the earth evolution that is no longer the case. The earth has surrendered the radiant element, it has to receive light from without; light has to stream into it. That is the essential difference between the earth, as it has become in the course of evolution, and the Sun condition; with the separation of the sun, of the haschamayim, the light went out too. All that is now outside the earth. The elementary existence which surges in ha'aretz as tohu wabohu has no light of its own. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, but that did not make the earth light; it left it in darkness.

Let us take another look at this elementary existence as a whole. You know of course from earlier lectures that we are accustomed to enumerate what we call the elementary states within our earth existence, beginning with the solid, then coming to the watery, next to the gaseous or aeriform and then to the warmth. These four constitute the denser conditions of matter. But we have not yet finished. If we go further upwards we meet with finer conditions, of which we do not get a much better idea by calling them finer substances. The main thing is to recognise them as finer relatively to the denser ones, the gaseous, the warmth and so on. They are usually called etheric states, and we have always distinguished light as the first of these finer states. Thus, when we descend from warmth into the denser, we come to the gaseous condition; if we ascend, we come to light. Ascending still further, beyond the light we come to a yet finer etheric condition, we come to something which is not really recognisable in the ordinary sense-world. We only get a kind of external reflection of it. From the occult point of view one can say that the forces in this finer ether are those which govern the chemical affinities of matter, the chemical combinations, the organisation of substances such as we can observe if, for instance, we place a fine powder on a metal plate, and then draw the bow of a violin across the plate, getting as a result the “Chladni” sound-figures. What the coarse physical tone brings about in the powder also occurs throughout space. Space is differentiated, is permeated, by forces which are more rarefied than the forces of light, by forces which represent in the spiritual what tone is in the sense-world. So that when we ascend from warmth to light, and from light to this finer element, we can speak of a chemical of sound-ether, which has the power to decompose and to combine substances, but is in reality of the nature of sound, sound of which the sense-perceptible tone which the ear hears is only the outward expression, the expression made by its passage through air. That brings us somewhat nearer to this finer element which is above light. Thus when we say that what has the quality of manifesting itself externally withdrew from the ha'aretz with the haschamayim we must not think only of the light, but also of the finer etheric element of sound which permeates light.

Just as we go downward from warmth to air, and thence to water, so we can go upward from warmth to light, and from light to what is of the nature of sound, of chemical combination. And from water we can descend lower to earth. When we mount from the sound-ether we come to a still higher etheric condition, which also withdrew with the haschamayim. We come to the finest etheric state of all, which weaves within the chemical or sound-ether we have just been describing. If you turn your spiritual ear in this direction, you do not of course hear a noise in the external air, but you hear the tone which vibrates through space, the tone which permeates space and organises matter just as the tone produced by the bow of a violin organises the Chladni sound-figures. But into this condition brought about by the sound-ether is poured a still higher etheric mode. And this higher ether permeates the sound-ether just as the meaning of our thought permeates the sound which our mouth utters, thereby transforming tone into word. Try to comprehend what it is that transforms tone into a word full of meaning; then you will have some idea of this finer etheric element permeating the organising sound-ether and giving meaning to it—the Word which vibrates through space. And this Word, which thrills through space and pours itself out into the sound-ether, is at the same time the source of life, it is really vibrant, weaving life! Thus what has withdrawn out of the ha'aretz with the haschamayim, what has gone into the sun, as distinct from the other, the lower, the earth part—as distinct from the tohu wabohu—announces itself externally as light. But behind the light is spiritual tone, and behind that is cosmic speech. Thus we may say that in the brooding warmth lives the lower spiritual part of the Elohim, somewhat as our own desire lives in the lower part of our soul. The higher spirituality of the Elohim, which went out with the haschamayim, lives in the light, in the spiritual sound, in the spiritual word, the cosmic Word. These can only stream into the tohu wabohu again from without.

Let us now try to bring before us in a picture what hovered before the soul of the Hebrew sage as ha'aretz, as haschamayim. When what withdrew as spiritual light, as sound, as the uttering and formative Word-element, streams back again, how does it act? It works from the sun as articulate light, as light giving utterance to cosmic speech. Let us think of what we have called tohu wabohu in its darkness, in its surging interweaving of warmth, air and water; let us think of it in its light-forsaken darkness. And then let us think that out of the activity of the Elohim, through the creative Word, which as the highest etheric entity lies behind their activity, there rays in with the light all that streams out from the Word. How is one to describe what is taking place? One cannot more fittingly express it than by saying that the Beings who had withdrawn their highest into the etheric with haschamayim radiated answering light out of cosmic space into the tohu wabohu. There you have the substance of the memorable verse: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. There you have the picture which hovered before the Hebrew sage.

So we must think of the Beings of the Elohim as spread over the whole cosmos, we must think of this whole cosmos as their body, and the elementary existence in the tohu wabohu as the lowest form of this body; of the warmth as a somewhat higher form; and we must think of the haschamayim, the part which has withdrawn, as the highest spirituality, which now works creatively into the whole structure of the tohu wabohu.

Now you see what I am leading up to—that it was the cosmic Word expressing radiant light which organised the surging of the elementary part, the tohu wabohu, and made it what it later became. Whence comes the power which organises the human form? There can be no human form such as we have, standing upright on two legs, making use of hands, unless it be organised by forces emanating from the brain. Our own form is organised by the highest spiritual forces streaming out from our own spiritual part. The lower is always organised by the higher. In the same way the ha'aretz, the body of the Elohim, their lower part, was organised by their higher bodily part, the haschamayim, and by the spiritual essence of the Elohim working within it. Thus the highest spirituality of the Elohim takes possession of what has been cast out, and organises it, and we can express this by saying that the light manifesting itself through the cosmic Word streams into the darkness. That is how the tohu wabohu was organised, raised out of the disorder of the elements. Thus, if you think of the haschamayim as the head of the Elohim, and the elementary part which is left behind as the trunk and limbs, organised through the power of the head, then you have the actual process. Then you have man expanded to cover the whole cosmos. And out of the spiritual organs in haschamayim he organises himself. When we think of all the streams of energy which pour out from the haschamayim to the ha'aretz we may venture to picture it as a macrocosmic man organising himself.

Now in order to paint the picture more accurately, let us turn our attention to man as he is today. Let us ask ourselves how man has become what he is—I mean, what he is to the spiritual scientist, not to ordinary science. What is it that has given him the special structure which distinguishes him from all the rest of the living creatures around him? What is it which weaves throughout this human form? If one does not blind oneself it is very easy to say what makes him man; it is something he possesses which none of the beings around him has—speech, which expresses itself in its own proper sounds. That is what makes him man. Think of the form of the animal and ask yourselves how it could be raised to the level of the human form. What would have to permeate it for it to become human? Let us put the question in this way. Let us think of an animal form, and imagine that we have to make a breath enter into it—what would this breath have to contain, in order to make this form begin to speak? It would have to feel itself inwardly organised in such a way that it uttered the sounds of speech. It is the sounds of speech which make the animal structure human!

How then can one picture the cosmos? Out of all that I have put before your souls, all that I have built up gradually out of this elementary existence, picture by picture, how can one come to feel the cosmos inwardly, how can one come inwardly to feel the structure of macrocosmic man? By beginning to feel how the sounds of speech flash into form.

When the sound of A soughs through the air, learn to feel not merely its tone, learn to feel the form it makes, just as the tone of the violin bow, passed over the edge of a plate, makes a form in the powder. Learn to feel the A and the B in their transience through space; learn to experience them not merely as sound, but as form-making; then you will feel as the Hebrew sage felt when the sounds of speech stimulated in him the pictures which I have put before your mind's eye. That was the effect of the sounds of speech. That is why I had to say that Bet (B) aroused the idea of something enclosing, like a shell shutting something off and enclosing an inner content. Resch (R) stimulated a feeling such as one has when one feels one's head: and Schin (S) suggested what I might describe as a pricking or penetrating. That is a thoroughly objective language, a language which, if the soul is receptive, crystallises into pictures as the sounds are uttered. In the sounds themselves lies the lofty discipline which led the sage to the pictures which crowd upon the soul of the seer when he enters into the super-sensible world. Sound is in this way transmuted into spiritual form, and conjures before the soul pictures which form a connected whole in the way I have described. What is so remarkable about this ancient record is that it has been preserved in a language the sounds of which create form, the sounds of which crystallise in the soul into form. And these forms are the very pictures which one gets when one penetrates to the super-sensible out of which our material physical has evolved. When one comes to understand this, one feels a deep awe and reverence for the way in which the world has evolved; and one comes to realise that truly it is by no mere chance that this great document of human existence has been transmitted in this script—a script which by means of its very characters is capable of arousing pictures in the soul, and of guiding us to what in our own time the seer is to discover anew. That is the feeling which the Anthroposophist ought to cultivate when he approaches this ancient document.

If anyone who has a background of Spiritual Science, and has absorbed something of its teaching about the evolution of the world, then goes on to study those tremendous opening words of our Bible, an entirely new world should dawn upon him.

There is probably no account of human evolution so open to misinterpretation as this record known as Genesis, the description of the creation of the world in six or seven days. When the man of today calls to life in his soul, in any language familiar to him, the words In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, they convey to him scarcely a faint reflection of what lived in the soul of an ancient Hebrew who allowed the words to work upon him. It is not in the least a question of being able to replace the old words by modern ones; it is much more important that we should have been prepared by Anthroposophy to feel at least something of the mood which lived in the heart and mind of the Hebrew pupil of old when he brought to life within himself the words: B'reschit bara elohim et haschamayim v'et ha'aretz. A whole world lived while such words were vibrating through his soul.

What was it like—this inner world which lived in the soul of the pupil? We can only compare it with what can take place in the soul of a man to whom a seer has described the pictures he experienced on looking into the spiritual world. For what in the last resort is Spiritual Science but the outcome of seership, of the living intuitions which the seer receives when, having freed himself from the conditions of sense-perception and of the intellect bound up with the physical body, he looks with spiritual organs into the spiritual worlds? If he wishes to translate what he sees there into the language of the physical world, he can only do so in pictures, but if his descriptive powers suffice, he will do it in pictures which are able to awaken in his hearers a mental image corresponding with what he himself sees in the spiritual worlds. Thereby something comes into existence which must not be mistaken for a description of things and events in the physical sense-world; something comes into existence which we must never forget belongs to an entirely different world—a world which does indeed underlie and maintain the ordinary sense-world of our ideas, impressions and perceptions, yet in no way coincides with that world.

If we want to portray the origin of this our sense-world, including the origin of man himself, our ideas cannot be confined to that world itself. No science equipped only with ideas borrowed from the world of the senses can reach the origin of sense-existence. For sense-existence is rooted in the super-sensible, and although we can go a long way back historically, or geologically, we must realise that, if we are to reach to actual origins, there is a certain point in the far distant past at which we must leave the field of the sense-perceptible and penetrate into regions that can only be grasped super-sensibly. What we call Genesis does not begin with the description of anything perceptible by the senses, anything which the eye could see in the physical world. In the course of these lectures we shall become thoroughly convinced that it would be quite wrong to take the opening words of Genesis as referring to events which can be seen with the outward eye. So long as one connects the words “heaven and earth” with any residue of the sensuously visible one has not reached the stage to which the first part of the Genesis account points us back. Today there is practically no way of obtaining light upon the world it describes except through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science we may indeed hope to approach the mystery of the archetypal words with which the Bible opens, and to get some inkling of their content.

Wherein lies their peculiar secret? It lies in the fact that they are written in the Hebrew tongue, a language which works upon the soul quite differently from any modern language. Although the Hebrew of these early chapters may not perhaps have the same effect today, at one time it did work in such a way that when a letter was sounded it called up in the soul a picture. Pictures arose in the soul of anyone who entered with lively sympathy into the words, and allowed them to work upon him—pictures harmoniously arranged, organic pictures, pictures which may be compared with what the seer can still see today when he rises from the sensible to the super-sensible. The Hebrew language, or, better said, the language of the first chapters of the Bible, enabled the soul to call up imaginal pictures which were not wholly unlike those that are presented to the seer when, freed from his body, he is able to look into super-sensible regions of existence.

In order to realise in some measure the power of these archetypal words we must disregard the pale and shadowy impressions which any modern language makes upon the soul, and try to get some idea of the creative power inherent in sound-sequences in this ancient tongue. It is of immense importance that in the course of these lectures we too should seek to place before our souls the very pictures which arose in the Hebrew pupil of old when these sounds worked creatively in him. In fact we must find a method of penetrating the primeval record entirely different from those used by modern research.

I have now given you an indication of our line of approach. We shall only slowly and gradually learn to comprehend what lived in the ancient Hebrew sage when he allowed those most powerful words to work upon him, words which we do at least still possess. So our next task will be to free ourselves as far as possible from the familiar, and from the ideas and images of “heaven and earth,” of “Gods,” of “creation,” of “in the beginning,” which we have hitherto held. The more thoroughly we can do this the better we shall be able to penetrate into the spirit of a document which arose out of psychic conditions quite different from those of today.

First of all we must be quite clear as to the point of time in evolution we are speaking of, when we deal with the opening words of the Bible. You know of course that contemporary clairvoyant investigation makes it possible to describe to some extent the origin and development of our earth and of human existence. In my book Occult Science, I tried to describe the gradual growth of our earth as the planetary scene of human existence, through the three preliminary stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon.¹ Today you will have in mind, at least in broad outline, what I described there. At what point then in the spiritual scientific account should we place what draws near to our souls in the mighty word B'reschit? Where does it belong?

If we look back for a moment to ancient Saturn, we picture it as a cosmic body having as yet nothing of the material existence to which we are accustomed. Of all that we find in our own environment it has nothing but heat. No air or water or solid earth is as yet to be found upon ancient Saturn; even where it is densest, there is only fire—living, weaving warmth. Then, to this living, weaving warmth, a kind of air or gaseous element is added; and we have a true picture of the Sun existence if we think of it as an interweaving, an interpenetration, of a gaseous, airy element and a warmth element. Then comes the third condition, which we call the Moon evolution. There the watery element is added to the warmth and the air. There is as yet nothing of what in our present earth we call solid. But the old Moon evolution has a peculiar characteristic. It divides into two parts. If we look back upon old Saturn, we see it as a single whole of weaving warmth; and the old Sun we still see as a mingling of gaseous and warmth elements. During the Moon existence there takes place this separation into a part which is Sun and a part which retains the Moon nature. It is only when we come to the fourth stage of our planetary evolution that the earth element is added to the earlier warmth, gaseous and watery elements. In order that this solid element could come into existence, the division which had taken place previously during the Moon evolution had first to repeat itself. Once again the sun had to withdraw. Thus there is a certain moment in the evolution of our planet when, out of the universal complication of fire and air and water, the denser, more earthy element separates from the finer, gaseous element of the sun; and it is only in this earthy element that what we today call solid is able to form.

Let us concentrate on this moment, when the sun withdraws from its former state of union with the rest of the planet and begins to send its forces to the earth from without. Let us bear in mind that this was what made it possible, within the earth, for the solid element—what we today call matter—to begin to condense. If we fix this moment firmly in our minds we have the point of time at which Genesis, the creation story, begins. This is what it is describing. We should not associate with the opening words of Genesis the abstract, shadowy idea we get when we say “In the beginning,” which is something unspeakably poverty-stricken compared with what the ancient Hebrew sage felt. If we would bring the sound B'reschit before our souls in the right way, there must arise before us—in the only way it can do so, in mental images—all that happened through the severance of sun and earth, all that was to be found at the actual moment when the separation into two had just taken place. Furthermore we must be aware that throughout the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, spiritual Beings were its leaders and its bearers; and that warmth, air, water are only the outer expressions, the outer garments of spiritual Beings who are the reality. Thus when we contemplate the condition which obtained at the moment of separation of sun and earth, and picture it to ourselves in thoughts full of material images, we must also be conscious that the elementary “water,” “air,” “fire,” which we have in our mind's eye, is still only the means of expression for moving, weaving spirit which, during the course of the preceding Saturn, Sun and Moon stages has advanced, has progressed, and at the time now being described has reached a certain stage in its evolution.

Let us place before us the picture of an immense cosmic globe, composed of weaving elements of water, air or gas and fire, a globe which splits apart into a solar and a telluric element; but let us conceive too that this elementary substance is only the expression of a spiritual. Let us imagine that from this substantial habitation, woven of the elements of water, air and heat, the countenances of spiritual Beings, weaving within it, look out upon us, spiritual Beings who reveal themselves in this element which we have had to represent to ourselves through material images. Let us imagine that we have before us spiritual Beings, turning their countenances towards us, as it were, using their own soul-spiritual forces to organise cosmic bodies with the help of warmth, air and water. Let us try to imagine this!

There we have a picture of an elementary sheath, which, to give a very rough sensuous image of it, we may perhaps liken to a snail-shell, but a shell woven not of solid matter, like the snail's, but from the forest elements of water, air and fire. Let us think of spirit, in the form of countenances, within this sheath, gazing upon us, using this sheath as a means of manifestation, a force of very revelation which, as it were, pricks outward into manifestation from what lies hidden in the super-sensible.

Call up before your souls this picture which I have just tried to paint for you, this image of the living weaving of spirit in a kind of matter; imagine too the inner soul-force which causes it to happen; concentrate for a moment on this to the exclusion of all else, and you will then have something approximating to what lived in an ancient Hebrew sage when the sounds B'reschit penetrated his soul. Bet^*, the first letter, called forth the weaving of the habitation in substance; Resch^†, the second sound, summoned up the countenances of the spiritual Beings who wove within this dwelling, and Schin^‡, the third sound, the prickly, stinging force which worked its way out from within to manifestation.

Now the underlying principle behind such a description is dawning upon us. And when we have grasped that, we are able to appreciate something of the spirit of this language; it had a creativeness of which the modern man with his abstract speech has no inkling.

Now let us place ourselves at the moment immediately preceding the physical coagulation, the physical densification of our earth. Let us imagine it as vividly as possible. We shall have to admit that in describing what was taking place at that moment we cannot make use of any of the ideas which we use today to describe processes in the external sense-world. Hence you will see that it is utterly inadequate to associate any external deed with the second word we meet in Genesis—bara—however closely that deed might resemble what we understand today as creation. We do not thus get near to the meaning of that word. Where can we turn for help? The word implies something which lies very near the boundary where the sensible passes over directly into the super-sensible, into pure spirit. And anyone who wishes to grasp the meaning of the word bara, which is usually translated “created” (In the beginning God created ...), must in no wise associate it with any productive activity which can be seen with physical eyes.

Take a look into your own inner being! Imagine yourselves as having been asleep for a while, then waking up, and, without opening your eyes to things around you, calling up in your souls by inner activity certain images. Bring home vividly to yourselves this inner activity, this productive meditation, this cogitation, which calls forth a soul-content from the depths of the soul as if by magic. If you like you can use the word “excogitate” for this conjuring up of a soul-content out of the depths into the field of consciousness; think of this activity, which man can only perform with his mental images, but think of it now as a real, cosmic, creative activity. Instead of your own meditation, your own inward experience in thinking, try to imagine cosmic thinking-then you have the content of the second word of Genesis, bara. However spiritually you may think it, you can only liken it to the thought-life you are able to bring before yourselves in your own musing, you cannot get nearer to it than that!

And now imagine that during your musing two kinds of images come before your souls. Suppose there is a man to whom on awakening two different kinds of thought occur, a man who muses about two different kinds of thing. Suppose that one kind of thought is the picture either of some activity, or of some external thing or of some being; it does not come about through external sight, through perception, but through reflection, through the creative activity of his soul in the field of his consciousness. Suppose that the second complex of ideas which arises in this awakening man is a desire, something which the man's whole disposition and constitution of soul can prompt him to will. We have elements both of thought and of desire coming up in our souls through inner reflection. Now imagine, instead of the human soul, the Beings called in Genesis the Elohim, reflecting within themselves. Instead of one human soul, think of a multiplicity of reflecting spiritual Beings, who, however, in a similar way—save that their musing is cosmic—call forth by reflection from within themselves two complexes which might be compared with what I have just been describing—a pure thought-element and an element of desire. Thus instead of thinking of the musing' human soul, we think of a group of cosmic Beings who awaken in themselves two complexes; one of the nature of thought or ideation, that is, one which manifests something, expresses itself outwardly, phenomenally; and another of the nature of desire, which lives in inner movement, inner stimulation, which is permeated with inner activity. Let us think of these cosmic Beings, who are called in Genesis the Elohim, musing in this way. The word bara, “created,” brings their musing home to us. Then let us think that through this creative musing two complexes arise, one tending towards external revelation, external manifestation, and another consisting of an inward stimulus, an inward life; then we have the two complexes which arose in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when the words haschamayim and ha'aretz—represented for the modern man by “heaven” and “earth”—sounded through his soul. Let us try to forget the modern man's conception of “heaven and earth.” Let us try to bring the two complexes before the soul, the one which tends more to disclose itself, tends to outward manifestation, is disposed to call forth some outside effect; and the other complex, the complex of inner stimulation, of something which would experience itself inwardly, something which quickens itself inwardly; then we have what expresses the meaning of the two words haschamayim and ha'aretz.

As for the Elohim themselves, what kind of Beings are they? In the course of these lectures we shall learn to know them better, and to describe them in terms of Spiritual Science; but for the present let us try to reach in some measure the meaning of this archetypal word “Elohim.” Whoever wishes to get an idea of what lived in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he used this word should clearly understand that in those days there was a lively comprehension of the fact that our earth evolution had a definite meaning and a definite goal. What was this meaning and this goal?

Our earth evolution can only have a meaning, if during its course something arises which was not there before. A perpetual repetition of what was already there would be a meaningless existence, and unless the Hebrew sage of old had known that our earth, after having passed through its preliminary stages, had to bring something new into existence, he would have regarded its genesis as meaningless. Through the coming into existence of the earth something new became possible, it became possible for man to become man as we know him. In none of the earlier stages of evolution was man present as the being he is today, the being that he will more and more become in the future; that was not possible in earlier stages. And those spiritual Beings who directed the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions were of a different nature from man—for the moment we will not enter into the question whether they were higher or lower. Those Beings who wove in the fiery, gaseous and watery stages of elementary existence, who wove a Saturn, Sun and Moon existence, who at the beginning of earth existence were weaving its fabric—how best do we come to know them? ... How can we draw near to them?

We should have to go into very many things to get anywhere near an understanding of these Beings. To begin with, however, we can come to know one aspect of them, and that will suffice to bring us at least one step nearer to the potent meaning of the ancient Bible words. Let us consider those Beings for a moment—the Beings who stood nearest to man at the time when he was created from what had developed out of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us ask those Beings what they really wanted. Let us ask them what was their will, their purpose. Then we shall be able to get at least some idea of their nature. They had great ability; in the course of their evolution they had acquired capacities in various directions. One of them could do this, another that. But we understand the nature of these Beings best if we realise that at the time we are now considering they were working as a group towards a common goal; they were moved by a common aim. Although at a higher level, it is as if a group of men, each with his own special skill, were to co-operate today. Each of them can do something, and now they say to each other: “You can do this, I can do that, the third among us can do something else. We will unite our activities to produce a work in common in which each of our capacities can be used.” Let us then imagine such a group of men, a group each of whom practises a different craft, but which is united by a common aim. What they intend to bring into existence is not yet there. The unit at which they are working lives to begin with only as an aim. What is there is a multiplicity. The unit lives, to begin with, only as an ideal. Now think of a group of spiritual Beings who have passed through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, each one of whom has a specific ability, and who all at the moment I have indicated make the decision: “We will combine our activities for a common end, we will all work in the same direction.” And the picture of this goal arose before each of them. What was this goal? It was man, earthly man!

Thus earthly man lived as the ultimate goal in a group of spiritual Beings who had resolved to combine their several skills in order to arrive at something which they themselves did not possess at all, something which did not belong to them, but which they were able to achieve by combined effort. If you accept all that I have described to you—the elementary sheath, the cosmic, meditative spiritual Beings working within it, the two complexes, one of desire quickening inwardly, and another manifesting outwardly—and then ascribe the common purpose I have just mentioned to those spiritual Beings whose countenances gaze out of the elementary sheath, then you have what lived in the heart of the Hebrew sage of old in the word Elohim.

Now we have brought before us in picture form what lives in these all-powerful archetypal words. Then let us forget all that a man of today can think and feel when he utters the words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Bearing in mind all that I have told you today, try to put this picture before you. There is the sphere in which fiery, gaseous and watery elements weave. Within this active, weaving elementary sphere a group of pondering spiritual Beings live. They are engaged in productive pondering, their pondering is penetrated through and through by their intention to direct their whole operation towards the form of man. And the first-fruits of their musing is the idea of something manifesting itself outwardly, announcing itself, and something else inwardly active, inwardly animated.

“In the elementary sheath the primeval Spirits pondered the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly mobile.” Try to bring before yourselves in these terms what is said in the first lines of the Bible, then you will have a foundation for all that is to come before our souls in the next few days as the true meaning of those all-powerful archetypal words which contain such a sublime revelation for mankind—the revelation of its own origin.

• 1. To avoid any ambiguity, capital letters will be used throughout this book for the words Sun and Moon, when they refer to the planetary evolutions preceding that of our earth.