The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Hermes

[ 1 ] If it is already of great significance for spiritual science itself to observe how the spiritual life of humanity progresses from epoch to epoch, slowly, so to speak, pushing its way up from dark depths to the surface, then the study of ancient Egyptian culture and spiritual life is, one might say, of even greater significance. This significance is felt in two ways when one attempts to immerse oneself in this ancient Egyptian spiritual life.

[ 2 ] At first, what echoes to us from time immemorial seems as mysterious as the face of the Sphinx itself, which we have as a monument to this ancient Egyptian culture. This air of mystery is further heightened by the fact that even modern scholarship has, in recent times, had to delve deeper and deeper into ever more ancient periods in order to explain the existence of later Egyptian culture, for which more significant documents are available. External research dates the forces at work in Egyptian cultural life back many millennia before our era, at least as far back as the seventh millennium—and even further still. If that is one reason why we take a special interest in this culture in particular, then we may say: the other reason is that—whether one likes it or not—this culture has something remarkable about it for people of the present, in that these people of the present—I mean our broader, more expansive present—have the feeling that this culture does indeed have something akin to, something mysteriously akin to, what these people of the present themselves desire and may set as their goal. That is why it also seems significant that such a great mind as Kepler, standing at the dawn of modern scientific development, could express his feelings about what science had to offer the world up to his time—and what he himself had to offer—in no other way than with words that go something like this: With all that I have sought to reveal about the motion of the planets around their sun, I have attempted to peer into the mysteries of the universe. It often seems to me as though, with the ideas derived from these mysteries, I have sought out the sacred vessels of the Egyptians in their mysterious temples and carried them over into modern times. And from this springs the feeling that future generations will be the first to understand the meaning of what I have to offer them. — One of the greatest minds of modern times felt such a kinship with ancient Egyptian culture that he could find no better way to describe the fundamental tone of what he wished to give to the world than by presenting it as a renewal of that which—albeit in different words and in a different manner — had flowed to the adherents and followers in the secret places of teaching and worship in ancient Egypt. Therefore, we must take a special interest in how these ancient Egyptians themselves perceived the essence and the entire nature of their culture.

[ 3 ] There is a meaningful phrase that has been preserved for us from ancient Greek tradition and that poignantly expresses how not only the Egyptians themselves, but also the ancient world as a whole, perceived Egyptian culture. It is handed down to us that an Egyptian sage said to Solon: “You Greeks will always remain children; what you know springs from your own human senses and perceptions. You have no ancient traditions. You remain children; you will not grow up, for you have no teaching seasoned by the wisdom of age!” — A “time-honored teaching”: we only come to understand what this means when spiritual science attempts to shed light on the entire nature of Egyptian thinking and feeling. Here we must recall what has often been said here before: that humanity, in the successive periods of its development, has undergone an unfolding of various forms of consciousness. The consciousness in which we now live—this entire way of apprehending the external world through the senses, of synthesizing it through the intellect and reason, this mode of everyday and even scientific thinking—has not always existed; rather, human consciousness is subject, more than anything else, to what is termed “evolution.” Not only the external world of forms is subject to this evolution, but also the human soul’s constitution and human consciousness itself. It has been pointed out that we can only understand the ancient cultural sites of humanity if we accept what spiritual science has to say based on its sources: that in ancient times, instead of today’s intellectual consciousness, there existed an ancient clairvoyant consciousness that was neither like our waking consciousness—which lasts from waking until falling asleep—nor like our unconsciousness during sleep, from falling asleep until waking. Rather, this ancient consciousness of pre-humanity consisted of an intermediate state that has been preserved, one might say, atavistically—like a withered heirloom—in the imagery of our dreams. But while our dreams are chaotic and, just as in ordinary life, have no meaning, that ancient consciousness—which operated through images yet possessed, in a certain sense, a dull, dreamlike character—was a clairvoyant consciousness whose images pointed not to our physical world but to what lies beyond it as a spiritual world. It can be said that, fundamentally, all clairvoyant consciousness—both the dreamlike consciousness of pre-humanity and that which human beings attain today through the training already mentioned here—operates in images, not in concepts and ideas as does external physical consciousness; and that these images must be correctly related by the bearer of consciousness to the spiritual realities that lie behind the physical-sensory phenomena.

[ 4 ] So, when we look back on all of ancient human development, we say to ourselves: What resonates with us there in such strange images is not merely—as a materialistic consciousness in the broadest sense believes today—a childlike elaboration of fantastical views of nature, but a collection of images that, while they appear before our soul in pictorial form, point in this very form to a genuine perception of a spiritual world. For those who delve into the ancient mythologies and legends not with a modern materialistic consciousness but with a sense for human creations and spiritual human works, the peculiar narratives of these mythologies take on a coherence that, in a wondrous way, harmonizes with those laws of the world that are higher than our physical, chemical, and biological laws. Thus, a tone of spiritual reality resonates through the ancient mythologies and religious systems. This is what gives them meaning.

[ 5 ] Now, however, we must realize that different peoples developed this world of images—in which they conceived of the higher, spiritual forces that lie behind the mere forces of nature—in diverse ways, depending on their disposition and temperament, race, and national character. We must also be aware that, in the course of gradual development, all manner of transitions occur from this ancient clairvoyant consciousness to our present-day object-oriented consciousness—our everyday intellectual consciousness. We must conceive of a fading away, a gradual retreat of the old clairvoyant consciousness; we must imagine, among the various peoples, how the powers of the old clairvoyance gradually diminished, how, so to speak, the images that appeared before the souls—who were still able to look into the spiritual world—contained ever fewer and fewer spiritual powers; how the higher worlds gradually closed their gates, until only the very lowest levels of spiritual activity remained perceptible in lower clairvoyance. We must also imagine that, for humanity as a whole, the old clairvoyance then ceased to exist altogether, and our vision remained limited to the physical world around us and to our concepts of physical things—which, through our combination of these physical things, led to our modern science. Thus, as the old clairvoyance gradually faded away, a sense of the present developed within us little by little, and in different ways among the various peoples. The mission of the Egyptian people was particularly unique in this regard.

[ 6 ] Everything we know, even from external sources, about earlier times, along with what has been added in our own time through recent research, shows us—if we understand it correctly—that what spiritual science asserts is true: that it was precisely the mission of the Egyptian people to look back to ancient times, when the leading individuals and personalities of this Egyptian people, through strong clairvoyant powers, still gazed deeply into the spiritual worlds. It was within the Egyptian people that a certain weaker clairvoyant power and a weaker power of the soul’s constitution—which was connected to this clairvoyance—persisted into later times. Therefore, we must say: The later Egyptians—right up to the last millennia before the Christian era—knew from their own experience that there is a different way of seeing than that of ordinary daily life, where one merely opens one’s eyes and relies on the intellect, and that this other way of seeing allows people to look into the spiritual world. But they were familiar only with the most rudimentary, pictorial conceptions of a realm that could be perceived there, and they recalled their ancient times, when their priest-sages—as in a golden age of Egyptian culture—were able to look deeply into the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] What had been perceived at that time as the mysteries of the spiritual worlds had been preserved—especially by the ancient Egyptians—with the greatest possible reverence, the deepest religiosity, and the utmost care throughout the millennia, so that those who lived in the later Egyptian era, even if they were still able to glimpse into the spiritual worlds, could say something like this: We still see a lower spiritual world; we know that such a perception of a spiritual world exists; to doubt this would be just as wise as doubting that there is external perception through the eyes. — That is what the Egyptian of later times could say to himself. Although he had only faint echoes of lower spiritual worlds left, he nevertheless felt and sensed that there had been an ancient time in which one could look more deeply into what lies beyond the physical and sensory realm. And an ancient teaching—of which the Egyptian sage had just spoken to Solon, preserved in wondrous temple inscriptions and column inscriptions—gave account of the clairvoyant powers of ancient times. But the one in whom the Egyptians saw, so to speak, all the original greatness of that ancient clairvoyant wisdom, they called their great sage, the ancient Hermes. When, in a later age, another renewer of ancient Egyptian wisdom appeared, he called himself—as, in fact, so many did according to an ancient custom of the Egyptian sages—Hermes once more. And his followers, because they claimed that the wisdom of Hermes, who had lived in the distant past, had been revived, now called this first Hermes the Thrice-Great: Hermes Trismegistus. Yet, strictly speaking, only the Greeks called him Hermes; among the Egyptians, he was known as Thoth. However, one can only understand this sage by grasping what the Egyptians—particularly under the influence of the traditions of Hermes or Thoth—regarded as the true mysteries of the world.

[ 8 ] It strikes us as quite strange what has been handed down, so to speak, as Egyptian beliefs. Individual gods—the most significant of whom are Osiris and Isis—do not even appear fully human in their pictorial depictions, but are often depicted with a human body and an animal head, or combined in the most varied ways from human and animal forms. Strange religious legends have been handed down to us from this pantheon. Furthermore, the Egyptians’ worship of animals—cats and others—is something highly distinctive; it went so far that they recognized sacred animals that were deeply revered, in which they saw something akin to higher beings. It is even said that this veneration of animals among the Egyptians went so far that lamentations were sung when, for example, a cat that had lived in a house for a long time died. Or if an Egyptian saw from a distance that a dead animal lay there, he would not go near it, for fear that others might say he had killed the animal—a crime punishable by severe penalties. Indeed, it has even been handed down to us that, during the time when Egypt was already under Roman rule, a Roman literally risked his life for killing a cat, because he had thereby provoked an uprising among the Egyptians. This veneration of animals appears as something particularly enigmatic within the broader context of Egyptian thought and sentiment. And furthermore: How strange the towering pyramid appears to modern people, with its square base and triangular sides! How strange the sphinxes appear, and everything that is being brought to the surface of our knowledge—with ever-greater clarity, even through modern research—from the depths of Egyptian culture! So we now ask ourselves: What place did the world of ideas surrounding all this occupy in the soul of the ancient Egyptian? What did the ancient Egyptian say that Hermes had taught him? How did he arrive at all these ideas?

[ 9 ] We must now accustom ourselves to recognizing, so to speak, a deeper wisdom in all legends—especially the more significant ones. We must assume that these legends seek to convey, through imagery, certain laws of spiritual life—that is, laws that are higher than the external laws of nature. For example, the Egyptian legend speaks of the divine couple Osiris and Isis, and the Egyptian legend names Hermes as Osiris’s wise counselor. The legend sees Osiris as a being who lived in ancient times in the region where human beings now live. This Osiris, portrayed by the legend as the benefactor of humanity, under whose wise influence Hermes or Thoth bestowed upon the Egyptians their ancient culture—down to the very material essence of that culture—had an enemy. The Greeks called this enemy Typhon. This enemy pursued Osiris, killed him, dismembered his body, hid it in a coffin, and cast it into the sea. His sister and wife, Isis, searched for Osiris; she searched long and hard for the husband who had been snatched from her by Typhon or Seth, and when she finally found him, she gathered the pieces into which Typhon or Seth had dismembered him, buried him in various places throughout the land—where temples were subsequently erected—and gave birth, as a higher being born after death, to Horus, who thus came into being only after Osiris’s death—solely through a spiritual influence that had passed from Osiris, who had meanwhile departed for another world, to Isis. And Horus is now called upon to defeat Typhon and, in a certain sense, to reestablish the dominion of that life which—originating with Osiris—was to flow into humanity.

[ 10 ] One must not merely interpret such a legend allegorically and symbolically, but must also be able to immerse oneself somewhat in the entire emotional and sensory world of the ancient Egyptians; for it is from this—which is more important than any abstract concepts—that the feelings and sensibilities toward figures such as Osiris and Isis first come to life. It is not good to interpret figures such as Osiris and Isis in such a way that one sees in Osiris, from the outset, the sun, and in Isis, from the outset, the moon, and so on—thus offering an “astronomical” interpretation, as the term is used today in the external sciences—while believing that such a legend merely symbolizes certain celestial phenomena. That is not the case. Rather, we must go back to the ancient feelings of the Egyptians and, based on these feelings, imagine the very peculiar nature of looking up to supersensible, invisible powers—to those supersensible, invisible powers that underlie the sensory world and whose mutual relationships are initially characterized in Osiris and Isis. When hearing these two names, the ancient Egyptians felt something like the following:

[ 11 ] Humanity, he told himself, is founded on a higher, spiritual reality. This did not originate from the material existence in which it now lives, but rather humanity has, so to speak, first condensed itself into its present physical human existence, gradually evolving into it. Humanity’s actual development originated from another form of human existence of a more spiritual nature. When I now look into my own soul, I become aware that there is something within me that signifies a longing for the spiritual—and at the same time, a longing for the source from which I myself descended from this spiritual world. The forces from which I originated still live within me. What I carry within me as my finest supersensible, invisible forces is intimately related to these original supersensible forces. That is why I feel an Osiris force within me. It represents to me a supersensible human being who once lived in other, supersensible regions. Even if it lived there in a dull, instinctive manner, even if it first had to be clothed in a physical body and its instruments in order to perceive the physical world, it nevertheless once lived a spiritual life in contrast to this physical-sensory existence.

[ 12 ] According to ancient Egyptian belief, the forces that originally underlie human development must be understood as a duality—a duality such that one element is named Osiris and the other Isis: Osiris-Isis. If we look within ourselves and draw upon the sensations and feelings of the ancient Egyptians, we can say to ourselves: We have, first and foremost, active thinking within us. One need only recall how thinking must proceed when a thought finally arises—for example, when we have the thought of a triangle within us. Active, dynamic thinking must precede this in order to form the thought of a triangle. After we have been active in our soul, we can turn passively to the result of our thinking—to our thoughts and ideas. We ultimately see within our soul the forms created by our active thinking. Just as thinking relates to thoughts, as imagining relates to mental images, and as the active relates to what arises from the active and ultimately stands before us—so does Osiris relate to Isis. One might also say: The active appears to us as a fatherly, masculine principle—the Osiris principle—like a fighting force that then fills our soul, filling it with thoughts and feelings. And just as human beings stand here, the ancient Egyptians told themselves, just as the substances that live in their blood or form their bones were not always in their blood and bones but were scattered throughout the cosmos, just as this entire physical body is a combination of physically traceable substances that migrate into the human form, whereas before they were spread out in the universe—so it is with our power of thought: within us, it is the power of imagination. Just as the substances in our blood are sometimes contained within the human form and at other times spread out in the universe, so too is the Osiris force active within us as the power of thought and spread throughout the spiritual universe as Osiris—the Osiris force that permeates and interweaves the entire universe, flowing into the human being just as the substances do that then compose the blood and bones in the human body. And the Isis forces, weaving and living throughout the universe, flow into our thoughts, images, and concepts. Thus, we must first imagine the ancient Egyptians’ spiritual gaze toward Osiris and Isis.

[ 13 ] The ancient consciousness could find no expression for such ideas within the world that surrounds us here on Earth through our senses. For everything that initially surrounds us here was regarded precisely as the sensory world, which could offer no external symbols for the supersensory world. In order to gain something like a language, a written expression for such ideas—which powerfully moved the soul when it said to itself, “The power of Osiris and Isis is at work within me”—people turned to the script written by the celestial bodies in the cosmos. It was said: What one perceives as the supersensible power of Osiris can be conceived in a sensed way in what emanates from the sun as sunlight and weaves through and permeates space as the active power of light. And in what one perceives as Isis, one can see what comes to us as reflected, cast-back sunlight from the moon, which is dark in itself—like the soul when active thinking does not enter it—and waits for the light of the sun to cast it back, just as the soul waits for the Osiris force to cast it back as the Isis force. If the ancient Egyptian felt this way—that outside, the sun and the moon tell me how best to think symbolically about what my soul feels—then he also knew: There is, after all, no coincidental connection between what appears mysteriously in space—the light-spreading sun and the moon that reflects the sunlight—but what I see there as illuminating space, spreading light, and reflecting light must have something to do with the forces that I perceive within myself as supersensory. — Just as we do not see in a clock something driven by little demons moving its hands, but rather something mechanical, so we also know that the entire construction of the clock is based on the thought of the clockmaker—a thought that came from the human soul—so that a spiritual force has shaped the mechanism of the clock. Just as the hands of a clock relate to one another—interdependent, of course—and when we look out into space, governed by mechanical laws, yet ultimately dependent on the laws that a human being perceives in his soul when he speaks of the forces of Osiris and Isis—so the sun and moon appeared as the means of expression for a mighty cosmic clock. And the Egyptian did not merely say to himself: “The sun and moon embody for me the relationship between Osiris and Isis”; rather, he sensed: “What lives within me is, at its root, the same mysterious balance of forces that carries the light to the sun and moon.”

[ 14 ] Just as it was with Osiris and Isis in relation to the sun and moon, so it was with the other gods in relation to other celestial bodies and planets. The Egyptians initially saw in the positions of the celestial bodies symbols of what they experienced as the supersensible or what had been handed down to them as the experiences of the earliest clairvoyants. But they also saw in this expression of a cosmic clock the manifestations of the very same forces that they ultimately perceived within the human soul. Thus, the great cosmic clock—with the movement of its stars and the relationship of the moving stars to the stationary ones—became a revelation of the spiritual, supernatural forces that lay behind them, that had brought about these positions, and that had found in a universal script—one that must be understood—a means of expression for their supernatural powers and forces.

[ 15 ] These are the feelings and sensations toward this higher world that the ancient Egyptians received through clairvoyants regarding that spiritual world, which they knew existed because they themselves still possessed the last echoes of ancient clairvoyance. But now they said to themselves: We humans originate from this spiritual world. But we have been placed in a world of sensuality, which is given to us in sensory-physical things and in sensory-physical events. We originate from the world of Osiris and Isis. That which strives within us as the best part—and which can attain higher levels of perfection than those we now possess—has flowed forth from Osiris and Isis. They live invisibly within us as a force. What constitutes the physical human being originates from external circumstances, is drawn from the external world; within it, the Osiris-Isis part is merely clothed.

[ 16 ] Such a conception of ancient wisdom, however, became in the soul of the ancient Egyptian a sentiment that completely dominated that soul—an all-encompassing feeling of Egyptian spiritual life. One can take in abstract concepts without touching upon the moral and ethical aspects of the soul’s life, or even the fateful and fortuitous aspects of it; indeed, one can take in particularly mathematical and abstract concepts from the natural sciences in this way—one can debate electricity and similar forces without the soul having to ask the question of human destiny. But one cannot grasp the feelings and sensations just described—those arising from looking into the spiritual worlds and identifying the deepest qualities of the soul with Osiris and Isis—as mere thoughts and ideas without stirring up thoughts of happiness and destiny, the moral impulses of the human being; indeed, they are stirred up! For then a person says to themselves: I carry a better self within me, but because of what I am in the physical body, this better self initially recedes into the background and does not become fully apparent at first. An Osiris- and Isis-nature underlies me, but it belongs to the worlds of origin, to the ancient golden, sacred times. For modern human beings, it has been overcome by the forces that have condensed the outer physical into the human body and imprisoned the Osiris and Isis forces within the body, which is perishable and subject to destruction just like the outer forces of nature.

[ 17 ] Thus we see the legend of Osiris and Isis translated into feelings. Osiris, the higher power of humanity that is spread throughout the cosmos, is overcome by those forces that are subject to destruction within human nature. What lives within the human being as the Osiris force is imprisoned by Typhon. Typhon is even linguistically linked to the word “to dissolve, to decay.” It is imprisoned within what takes the form of a coffin for the spiritual part of the human being, into which—invisible to the outer world—the Osiris part of the human being disappears. But the nature of the soul within it—which for human beings is the mysterious Isis nature—remains a mystery to the imagination of the ancient Egyptians. It remains so that in the future—and indeed through the penetration of intellectual power—it may once again attain that from which the human being emerged. Thus, something hidden within the human being strives to revive Osiris. The Isis force is present in the human soul to gradually lead the human being back to Osiris from what he or she currently is. And this Isis force enables human beings—though not as long as they remain physical human beings—to separate themselves from physical-sensual nature; yet it ensures that, even while they remain outward, physical human beings and stand fully within the outer, physical world, he nevertheless constantly looks inward toward a higher Self, which, according to the view of all the greatest minds of humanity, lies deeply hidden at the foundation of all human powers. This human being—who is not the outer, physical human being, but rather the human being who is constantly spurred on to strive toward spiritual light, always driven by the hidden forces of Isis—is the one who appears like the earthly son of Osiris, who did not ascend into the earthly world but remained hidden in the spiritual worlds. This invisible human being—the human being who strives toward the higher self—was perceived by the Egyptian soul as Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris.

[ 18 ] Thus, the ancient Egyptian looked with a certain wistfulness toward the Osiris origin that humanity possesses, yet at the same time looked into the soul and said: The soul has retained something of the power of Isis, who herself gives birth to Horus, who is always driven to strive upward toward the spiritual heights. And in these spiritual heights, humanity finds Osiris once more. — But for modern humanity, Osiris can be reached again in two ways. The Egyptian said to himself: I came forth from Osiris, and to Osiris I shall return. In terms of my spiritual origin, Osiris is within me, and Horus guides me to return to Osiris, to his father. But Osiris can be reached only in the spiritual world. He could not enter into physical human nature. There he was overcome by the forces of Typhon, which are subject to destruction because they are external forces of nature.

[ 19 ] Therefore, Osiris can be reached only in two ways. One way is through the gate of death. The other is the path that passes through the gate of that death which does not lead to physical death, but rather to initiation. Therefore, the Egyptians imagined—as is further elaborated in my work *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*—that when a person passes through the gate of death, he reaches Osiris after undergoing the necessary preparatory stages. Once freed from the earthly physical body and standing in the spiritual world, the awareness of his kinship with Osiris awakens within him. The deceased himself feels in such a way that, in the spiritual world after death, he can be addressed as “Osiris.” Everyone, so to speak, is addressed as Osiris after death. The other path back to Osiris—that is, the other path into the spiritual world—is the path of initiation. The ancient Egyptians conceived of this path as one through which a person comes to know what is initially invisible and supersensory within human nature. This is Isis, or the power of Isis. In our everyday perception, in the knowledge we possess in daily life, we do not penetrate to the depths of our soul, to the Isis force. But there is a path to penetrate to the Isis force, to descend to one’s own “I,” to see how this “I” is enveloped by physical matter. If you follow this path, you will descend to where the “I” resides in its true spiritual home. That is why the ancient Egyptians said to themselves: You must therefore descend into your own inner being. There you will first find physical human nature, insofar as it is the expression of the true human being itself—the “I.” You must penetrate through this physical human nature. You perceive the outer world—insofar as it is the creation of the spiritual, supersensible powers—in the three kingdoms of nature: when you look at the stones and their mathematical forms; when you look at the plants and their wondrous forms, which are animated by an inner life in which divine-spiritual forces are at work; and finally, in the third realm, the animal kingdom. With human beings, however, you must not stop at the outer form, but must delve into that where their soul forces live as Isis forces. — That is why initiation into the Isis Mysteries was connected to what was first meant to reveal itself to the human being: where to look, how one is clothed in matter. What happened when the human being thus delved into their own nature was essentially the same as what happens in death, only in a different way. The human being had to pass through the gate of death while still alive; had to experience that transition from physical perception to supersensible perception, from the physical world into the spiritual world—that transition which the human being undergoes when passing through actual death. The person to be initiated had to undergo this path by descending into his own inner being, had to experience what can only be experienced by descending into one’s own inner being. There he first entered the physical interior, into the way in which nature forms that which serves as the physical instrument of the “I”: the blood.

[ 20 ] We have mentioned this often: while the nervous system provides the tools for feeling, willing, and thinking, we must regard the blood as the tool of the “I.” If a person wishes to descend into his tools, then—as the ancient Egyptians conceived it—he must descend into his physical-etheric sheath, into the etheric-soul aspect; he must learn to become independent of the force on which human beings are otherwise dependent in their blood; and—after separating himself from it—he must enter into the wondrous pathways of the blood itself. Human beings must first come to know their higher nature physically. They can do this only if they can come to know themselves in such a way that they view themselves as an object. Human beings can recognize an object only when they are outside of it. Thus, they must be outside themselves in order to know themselves. Therefore, initiation leads to powers through which the soul forces can experience things without using the physical instruments, so that the human being has the physical instruments before him as objects—in much the same way as, after death, the spiritual part of the human being looks down upon the physical body. Thus, in the Isis Mysteries, the human being was first to become acquainted with his own blood.

[ 21 ] At that point, the individual first underwent an experience that can best be described as: reaching the threshold of death. This was the first stage of initiation into the Isis Mysteries: the individual had to look upon his own blood, upon himself as an object, and had to immerse himself in the shell that serves as the instrument for his Isis nature. There, in the initiation sites, he was led to two gates, where, through images he experienced firsthand, he was shown: This is what it looks like when you picture in your soul what is happening within you. — Two gates appeared before him there, a closed gate and an open gate. And we must say: How remarkable these teachings are, echoing to us from millennia past, how they once again resonate with what people believe today—only that today they interpret it in materialistic terms. I was already able to allude to this on the occasion of the Zarathustra lecture. “Man encounters two gates,” said the ancient Egyptian clairvoyant, “when he is in the underworld.” Through two gates you enter your blood and your inner being. The anatomist might say: through the two openings located in the valves on either side of the heart. If he were to penetrate through his own body, he would enter through the “open gate.” The “closed gate” prevents the blood flow from taking an incorrect path. What we encounter anatomically contains the symbols of what—albeit in clairvoyant forms and images—the ancient sages experienced; though they did not have the anatomical structures before them as directly as the modern anatomist does, they did perceive what the clairvoyant consciousness sees when it looks inward from the outside.

[ 22 ] The next stage of the Isis initiation consisted of what is expressed by the saying: “Man is guided through the trials of fire, air, and water.” That is to say, the human being comes to fully understand the physical nature of his Isis being; he comes to understand fire as it flows through the body as a tool in his blood and how it becomes a fluid; he further comes to understand how air penetrates as oxygen. Fire, air, and water: the human being comes to understand the warmth of the breath and the fluidity of the blood. And human beings are purified as they come to know the nature of their physical bodies through the elements of fire, air, and water; and once they have seen through their physical bodies in this way, they have arrived at their Isis nature. This is expressed technically by saying: Only now does the human being feel that they have truly come into their own, that they now know themselves to be a spiritual being and no longer feel limited to the humanity of the outer world, but rather look into the spiritual world. For it is a law that we see the physical sun only during the day, because at night it is veiled from us by matter. In the spiritual world, however, there is no such covering. There, one sees the spiritual powers precisely when the physical eyes are inactive. The Isis initiation symbolically expresses this by saying: When a person is purified, they come to see the spiritual beings face to face—to see the sun at midnight. This means that even when it is dark and gloomy, what underlies the sun as spiritual life and as a spiritual primal force is nevertheless visible to those initiated into the Isis Mysteries.

[ 23 ] This is how the path to the Isis forces of the soul is described to us—the path that could be taken by those who, while still alive, sought out the deepest forces of the soul. Then there were even higher mysteries, which were the actual Osiris Mysteries. There, it actually became clear to the individual how, through the power of Isis, one could find oneself in that primal force of a spiritual, supersensory nature from which humanity emerged: in Osiris—just as Osiris rises within the human soul.

[ 24 ] When the ancient Egyptians wished to express, in a particular text, or to depict in their own way the relationship between Isis and Osiris, they did so by describing the movements of the sun and moon across the sky, and the other spiritual powers through the positions of the other stars. Above all, they took into account the zodiac with its relative stillness and the planets moving across the zodiacal constellations. In everything revealed therein, the ancient Egyptian saw the best way to express in a spiritual text what moved his soul. They knew: “I can take nothing from what is on Earth to express what a human being is called to do when he follows the power of Isis to Osiris; if this is to be described, it must be drawn from the constellations of the stars.” — This led to the fact that the great sage—who must be conceived as having existed in time immemorial—possessed, according to the Egyptians’ view, above all else the deepest clairvoyant insight into this relationship between humanity and the universe, which had been depicted only in outline form, and that he expressed to the highest degree what the constellations of the stars represented in relation to these spiritual forces, their workings, and the interplay of events between them. He expressed what was happening in the language of the stars. If, for example, one were to describe the relationship between Osiris and Isis, it could be conveyed to the people in the form of a legend—exoterically. For those who were then led into initiation, the more precise relationship was expressed through the relationship of the light emanating from the Sun, reflected by the Moon, and proceeding in remarkable phases from the new moon through the quarters to the full moon. In this, one rightly saw something similar to the relationship of the Isis force of the human soul to Osiris. And then, from these celestial relationships and their forms, one derived what can truly be regarded as the archetypes of writing. For just as little as people still recognize this in writing, so much must it be said: In the consonants, one must perceive representations of the signs of the zodiac, which are relatively static. And in the relationship of the vowels to the consonants, one must see representations of the relationship of the planets and their moving forces to the zodiac. The written characters, one must say, were brought down from the heavens.

[ 25 ] This is how the ancient Egyptians viewed Hermes, whose teachers, in turn, were the forces that spoke down from heaven and revealed what unfolds within human souls. Indeed, even more than that: what unfolds in human actions, even in all the everyday activities of life, what unfolds in tasks such as land surveying—for which the mathematical sciences were necessary— geometry—which Pythagoras later learned from the Egyptians—was traced back by the ancient Egyptians to the wisdom of Hermes, who, so to speak, saw in all earthly, spatial relationships something like reflections of the celestial relationships and depicted the celestial relationships in the language of the stars. Hermes brought this celestial script down into mathematics and geometry, teaching the Egyptians to find in the stars what was taking place on Earth. We know that the entire Egyptian way of life was connected to the flooding of the Nile, to what the Nile deposited from the mountainous regions lying south of Egypt. But we can also gauge from this how necessary it was to know in advance, to a certain extent, when these floods of the Nile might occur, and when the changes in natural conditions over the course of a year might unfold correctly. The Egyptians also derived their calendar from the celestial script in the sky. When Sirius, the Dog Star, became visible in the constellation of Cancer, they knew: the Sun would soon enter that constellation, and as its rays descended from there, they would, so to speak, conjure forth what the Nile, with its floods, would bring to the earth. Thus they knew: Sirius is the Watchful One; he heralds what we have to expect. This was part of their celestial world clock. In order to cultivate the land properly and master what was necessary for daily life, they looked up gratefully toward the Dog Star. And they looked even higher, to where, in times long past, they had been taught that the movement of the stars is the expression of the world clock.

[ 26 ] For such and similar circumstances, the Egyptians sought guidance in the celestial script. In Thoth or Hermes, they saw the spirit who, according to ancient traditions, compiled the most ancient records of the world’s wisdom, and who, based on the inspiration he received from the celestial script, formed the physical letters, taught humanity agriculture, and gave them geometry and the art of surveying—in short, taught everything that people need for physical life. But all physical life is nothing other than the body of a spiritual life. Spiritual life, however, is connected to the entire universe, and it was from this that Hermes drew his inspiration. Thus, the entire culture soon came to be associated with Hermes. Indeed, the Egyptians felt an even deeper connection to him. Let us suppose, for example, that an Egyptian in the year 1322 B.C. looked up at the sky; he would have seen a very special constellation. For the ancient Egyptians had a calendar system that was, at first glance, convenient for human purposes—especially for human mathematical thinking: twelve months of thirty days each, which—with five supplementary days—totals 365 days for the year. This is how they had calculated throughout the centuries, for it was, so to speak, mathematically and arithmetically convenient: a year had elapsed when 365 days had passed. As we know from modern astronomy, this left a quarter of a day unaccounted for each time; that is, when the Egyptian year was calculated to an end, it was a quarter of a day too early. If you do the math, you’ll see that each time the year began earlier: the year would advance month by month and then return to the beginning. This was the case after four times 365 years. Thus, after 1,460 years, the celestial conditions had once again aligned with the earthly reckoning, as the entire year had shifted backward over the course of those 1,460 years. If you count back three times from the year 1322 B.C., you arrive at the period to which the Egyptians traced their ancient sacred wisdom, so that they said: In ancient times, the clearest clairvoyance still existed. With each such great solar year, which brought about a correction of the earthly calendar, the ancient clairvoyant power had diminished by one stage. We are now living into the fourth stage. Our culture is already entering a phase where we can have only traditions of an ancient teaching. But we look back through three world ages to a great antiquity in which our greatest sage taught his disciples and successors what we have today—in many cases transformed—in scripture, in mathematics, geometry, surveying, in all other practical aspects of our lives, and also in astronomy. As it were, the ancient Egyptian said to himself: Our human calculations, which adhere to the convenient numbers of twelve times thirty plus five supplementary days, show us how the divine-spiritual world must correct us. For through what we hold in our minds, we ourselves have become estranged from Osiris and Isis. We cannot calculate the year exactly. But as we look up into a hidden world, the powers that guide the stars correct us.

[ 27 ] Thus, even when it came to his chronology, the ancient Egyptian looked up—from his own weak human power, which is bound to the intellect—to the spiritual forces and beings that live in the hidden realm and, according to deeper laws, correct, protect, and guard what human beings must experience on Earth. And the ancient Egyptians revered their Thoth, their Hermes, as the one inspired by these watchful celestial forces. Therefore, for the soul of the ancient Egyptian, this individual was not merely a great teacher, but a being to whom they looked up with the deepest gratitude and reverence, saying to themselves: Everything I have, I have from you. You stand above in a time as ancient as time itself, and through those who were the bearers of your traditions, you sent down what flows into outer human culture and becomes the greatest blessing for humanity. As a result, the soul of the ancient Egyptian—whether in regard to the actual source of these forces or their guardian, whether toward Osiris, Hermes, or Thoth—felt imbued not merely with knowledge rooted in wisdom, but with a feeling that was, in the deepest sense, a moral one—a feeling enveloped in the deepest reverence and gratitude. Hence, the ancient accounts show us that all the wisdom possessed by the Egyptians—especially in ancient times, and later on less and less—was imbued with a religious character. Indeed, in the view of the ancient Egyptians, all human knowledge was linked to a sacred feeling, all wisdom was always linked to piety, and all science was linked to religion. In later times, all of this was, to a greater or lesser extent, no longer evident in its pure form. For just as it is true that individual peoples in successive epochs have the mission of giving shape to the universal spiritual in specific forms, so it is true that individual cultures, once they have reached their zenith, head toward decadence. And most of what has been preserved from ancient Egyptian culture actually dates from the period of decline, and we can only guess at what lies behind it: what, for example, strikes us as strange about the pyramids, or what is meant by the seemingly grotesque animal cult. For the Egyptians said to themselves: The era in which wisdom was active—not the era in which they had inherited it—is preceded by another, in which all beings, not just human beings, have descended from divine-spiritual heights. If we wish to come to know the innermost being of the human being, we must not look at their outer form, but rather we must penetrate into their inner being. What we encounter on the outside are like frozen stages of primordial revelation. This is revealed, as it were, in condensed form through powerful images of ancient laws in the three kingdoms of nature; first of all, in the world of rocks. What is revealed to us there are proportional relationships that we express once again in the pyramid. What we see in plants as inner forces is something we see expressed once again in the lotus flower. And finally, on the path toward the human being, we see how divine forces—which have not yet ascended to the human level—are cast into outer forms, scattered throughout the individual animal forms.

[ 28 ] This is roughly how we can imagine the feelings of the ancient Egyptian when he saw in animals the enduring forms of ancient divine powers. For the ancient Egyptian looked back to primeval times, when everything sprang forth from divine, supersensory powers, and he surmised that divine powers had remained within the beings of the three kingdoms of nature, powers that had then evolved within him into humanity. We must always look to the feeling, the sensation, and that necessity which shows us that such wisdom, as existed among the ancient Egyptians, was indeed a wisdom that morally gripped the souls, one that could not leave them without morality at all. And through the way in which the entire world was brought together with supersensible forces, a moral relationship to the animal world had to arise, one that found grotesque and strange expression only during the Egyptian period of decline. For when one looks at later Egyptian culture, it becomes clear that imperfection does not mark the starting point, but rather that the starting point of Egyptian culture was marked by spiritual revelations and the heights of civilization. We must not—as is so often done today when considering the starting point of cultures—attribute primitive, simple states to primordial conditions, but rather, on the contrary, to periods of decline in which the great spiritual heritage had already sunk and decayed. When we find cultures of barbarism anywhere, these are not primordial cultures, but cultures in decline that have descended from spiritual heights.

[ 29 ] This, however, is yet another point that may serve as a thorn in the side of that branch of science which seeks to describe all cultures as if they had originated from the most primitive states—states of primitiveness such as are still observed today among “savages.” But in today’s most primitive cultures, we find cultures in decline, whereas at the dawn of humanity, we find primordial cultures that are inspired directly from the spiritual world by the leading spiritual beings who stand behind external history. This is what spiritual science concludes from what it can know. Once again, we may ask: Does spiritual science, which stands at the height of our time, come into conflict with modern science when it asserts that, as we go back in time, we do not arrive at cultures in decline but rather at high cultures that have since fallen? In the lecture “What Does Geology Have to Say About the Origin of the World?” we showed that this is not the case with regard to geology. The same can be said of what has been stated today. It took a long time for people to move beyond the belief that, looking back from our time, we would see childlike, primitive conditions—such as those still found among primitive peoples today—rather than sublime theories. But when we look at empirical research that approaches the facts clearly and without prejudice, what do we find there? I would like to quote verbatim from a recent work *The Influence of Babylonia on the Understanding of the Old Testament* by Alfred Jeremias, which will show us how even external research is gradually returning to an original culture that was spiritually advanced and permeated by far-sighted theories, and how what are called “barbaric cultures” must be regarded as cultures in decline. This should be particularly emphasized here in connection with this recent work.

“The oldest documents, as well as the entire cultural life of the Euphrates region, presuppose a scientific and at the same time religious theory that does not merely eke out an existence in the secret teachings of the temples, but rather governs state organizations, serves as the basis for administering justice, and guides the management and protection of property. The further back in antiquity we look, the more exclusively this theory prevails; it is only with the decline of the ancient Euphrates culture that other forces come to the fore.”

[ 30 ] This is the very beginning of external science, which here as well—as we were able to demonstrate last time with regard to geology—is taking paths that can converge with what spiritual science has to contribute to contemporary culture. If we continue to proceed along these paths, we will increasingly move away from that lifeless construct that some would place at the starting point of human cultures as something primitive, childlike, and will arrive at the great individualities who appear all the more towering to us because, from a culture still imbued with clairvoyance, they had to pass on from their inspirations that which we find within all cultural activity as the greatest blessings of which we are partakers. Thus we look precisely to those spirits of humanity who—like Zarathustra, and likewise Hermes—appear so great to us precisely because they were the first to provide humanity with its greatest impulses in that time of ancient yore of which the sage spoke to Solon. We look up to Hermes or Thoth and say to ourselves: Just as Zarathustra, so too does Hermes stand as one of those leading individualities of humanity, in whose presence we feel a surge of strength within ourselves, knowing that the spirit is not merely in the world, but constantly flows into worldly deeds, into the development of humanity! We feel so truly strengthened in our existence, validated in our work, assured in our hope, and fortified in our destiny as human beings through our connection with such spirits, of whom we will always say: Future generations look to them and seek their own existence in the gifts of their soul’s powers, recognizing their own work in the eternal spiritual works of the spiritual guides who act through humanity with a mighty impulse!