The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary Remarks

[ 1 ] Through conventional history, humans can learn only a small part of what humanity experienced in ancient times. Historical records shed light on only a few millennia. And even what archaeology, paleontology, and geology can teach us is very limited. Added to this limitation is the unreliability of everything based on external evidence. One need only consider how the picture of this or that event—or of a people—that is not so long past has changed when new historical evidence has been discovered. One need only compare the accounts given by various historians of one and the same event; one will soon realize how uncertain the ground is on which one stands. Everything that belongs to the external sensory world is subject to the passage of time. And time also destroys what has come into being within it. External history, however, is dependent on what has been preserved over time. No one can say whether what has been preserved is also the essential aspect if they rely solely on external evidence. — Yet everything that comes into being in time has its origin in the eternal. It is just that the eternal is inaccessible to sensory perception. Yet the paths to perceiving the Eternal are open to human beings. They can develop the powers slumbering within them in such a way that they are able to recognize this Eternal. The essays on the question, “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?”, which appear in this journal, point to this development. As they unfold, these essays will also show that, at a certain high level of their cognitive capacity, human beings can also penetrate to the eternal origins of things that are transitory in time. If human beings expand their cognitive capacity in this way, they are no longer dependent on external evidence for knowledge of the past. Then they are able to look at what in events is not perceptible to the senses, what no amount of time can destroy. From transitory history, they penetrate to an imperishable one. This history, however, is written in different letters than the ordinary one. In Gnosis and Theosophy, it is called the “Akashic Records.” One can give only a faint idea of this chronicle in our language. For our language is tailored to the sensory world. And whatever is designated by it immediately takes on the character of that sensory world. One therefore easily gives the uninitiated—who cannot yet convince themselves of the reality of a particular spiritual world through their own experience—the impression of a fantasist, if not something even worse. — Those who have attained the ability to perceive in the spiritual world recognize past events there in their eternal character. They do not stand before them as the dead testimonies of history, but in full life. In a certain sense, what has happened unfolds before them. — Those initiated into the reading of such living scriptures can look back into a far more distant past than that depicted by external history; and they can also—through direct spiritual perception—describe the events reported by history in a far more reliable manner than history itself is capable of. To prevent any possible misunderstanding, let it be stated right away that spiritual perception, too, is not inherently infallible. This perception, too, can be mistaken; it can see things inaccurately, askew, or upside down. No one is free from error in this realm, no matter how exalted their standing. Therefore, one should not take offense if accounts derived from such spiritual sources do not always agree completely. Yet the reliability of observation here is far greater than in the external sensory world. And what various initiates can report about history and prehistory will, in essence, be in agreement. In fact, such history and prehistory exist in all secret schools. And here, for millennia, there has been such complete agreement that it cannot even be compared to the agreement that exists among external historians of even a single century. The initiates describe, in essence, the same thing at all times and in all places.

[ 2 ] Following these preliminary remarks, several chapters from the Akashic Records will be presented here. We will begin with descriptions of the events that took place when the so-called Atlantic continent still existed between America and Europe. This part of our Earth’s surface was once land. The soil of this land now forms the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean. Plato also tells of the last remnant of this land, the island of Poseidonis, which lay west of Europe and Africa. That the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean was once mainland, that for about a million years it was the setting for a civilization—albeit one very different from our own today: this, as well as the fact that the last remnants of this mainland sank in the tenth millennium B.C., can be read about in the booklet Atlantis, According to Occult Sources, by W. Scott-Elliot. Here, information will be provided about this ancient civilization, which serves as a supplement to what is stated in that book. While that book focuses more on the external aspects—the outward events—of our Atlantean ancestors, this text will record some details about their spiritual character and the inner nature of the conditions under which they lived. The reader must therefore transport his or her thoughts back to an age that lies nearly ten thousand years behind us and that lasted for many millennia. What is described here, however, did not take place solely on the mainland flooded by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, but also in the neighboring regions of present-day Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. And what later took place in these regions developed out of that earlier culture. — Regarding the sources of the information to be presented here, I today am still bound to maintain silence. Anyone who knows anything at all about such sources will understand why this must be so. But events may occur that will very soon make it possible to speak openly on this subject. The extent to which the insights hidden within the theosophical movement may gradually be revealed depends entirely on the conduct of our contemporaries. — And now the first of the documents that can be listed here shall follow.