The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Human History, the Present, and the Future in the Light of the Spiritual Sciences

[ 1 ] It is a striking characteristic of the human soul to feel the urge to seek orientation within the entire course of human development, in order thereby to gain a certain perspective on the place of one’s own personality within present-day life. What the past was like—from which everything that surrounds us in the present has developed; what we feel we have taken upon ourselves in the present as life’s debt and life’s work; how, in accordance with the course of human development and with what the soul experiences within itself in terms of impulses and longings, everything that lives within us as hopes and ideals can blossom for the future— —the human soul must, after all, ask itself these questions so often. And it is undoubtedly a healthy trait of the soul that it asks these questions. For what distinguishes human beings from other earthly beings is that they recognize, so to speak, the position they have been assigned within the course of evolution not only as such—arising from its conditions and causes—but also that they can influence it in a corresponding way out of an awareness of their task, their mission. And so we see that, in the spirit of modern times, the contemplation of world development—and of human development itself—is taking on a form that proceeds from perspectives reminiscent of what has just been stated.

[ 2 ] We see, for example, how Lessing, at the dawn of the newest intellectual movement, wrote his Education of the Human Race as the most mature expression of his own intellectual development, and how, in this Education of the Human Race, he strives to show that there is a certain consistent plan in the history of human development—that one can, so to speak, distinguish an earlier period in which humanity, for example with regard to its moral impulses, had to follow commandments imposed from outside, whereas the ongoing education brought about by the spiritual divine powers permeating the world leads humanity to increasingly grasp the good as an impulse inherent in its own being, so as to do good out of the mere concept itself—the good for the sake of the good. And we see—as has already become clear to us on several occasions in the lectures of this cycle—how Lessing, based on such a perspective, arrives at the necessity of accepting repeated earthly lives for the human soul, because, in a sense, the development of humanity is for him a reality, a truly progressive process. Thus the question inevitably arose for him: If a human soul lives during an earlier period of human development and absorbs certain impulses from it, how can it be reconciled with the meaning of human development that this soul would be forever lost to that development once it has died? — He could only ascribe meaning to this development by telling himself that the soul returns to earthly life again and again, and that in these recurring lives, the soul is guided by the forces leading humanity to the pinnacle of development. This is the fundamental idea, the fundamental impulse, that lay within Lessing’s soul when he was inspired to write his Education of the Human Race. Then we see once again how, drawing on a profound understanding of nature and humanity, Lessing’s successor, Herder, endeavored in his Philosophy of the History of Mankind to present humanity as a whole through a single idea, to show how different factors influenced human beings in certain eras compared to later times, so that Herder, too, perceived a meaningful plan in the development of humanity. And in fact, the deeper contemplation of humanity in the periods that followed never again strayed from the ideas inspired by Lessing, Herder, and others. It is just that the pervasive tendency of the nineteenth century to focus solely on the external has also taken hold of history, so that what had been thought and contemplated regarding the ongoing plan of human development remained, in a sense, more in the background for those individuals who directed the focus of their souls toward the spiritual, while official historical scholarship was not bold enough, not courageous enough, to investigate the active forces—the real, progressive factors—in human development.

[ 3 ] It is only natural, then, that spiritual science—which is to play an increasingly prominent role in the worldview that we have been attempting to characterize from this very place for years now—should once again seek to recognize the concrete, actual meaning of human history. It must be said, however, that in many areas we are addressing in these lectures—especially this winter—prejudices pile up again and again; these stem not from current research, but from current thinking about that research. Prejudices accumulate in particular when one seeks to explore the great laws of human history and that which is to emerge as a force for the present and as hope and ideals for the future. And all too readily today do people regard the nature of the human being, as it confronts us directly in the present, as something that, in a certain sense, cannot really have undergone any true inner development, but rather—insofar as it is the nature of the human being—has actually always been as it is today. At most, one admits that modern humans, in terms of the more natural, animalistic aspects of their development, have undergone an evolution that can actually be traced back to those primitive humans we excavate from prehistoric graves or other archaeological sites, and who reveal to us somewhat more imperfect forms of humanity than those of today’s civilized people—though this is evident only in terms of humanity’s external physical form. Or, as we saw in the lecture on “The Origin of Man,” one can hypothetically trace human ancestry even further back and believe that there exists some animal form from which humans may have evolved. The fact that, fundamentally speaking, even a truly meaningful consideration of ordinary history shows us how the inner life of human beings has changed greatly over the millennia is something to which people today pay far too little attention, and it would be difficult for them to admit that three, four, or five millennia before our era, the entire mental constitution and state of mind of human beings was quite different from what it is today. One would like to mention just one fact here, which should be particularly striking to those who study the development of the human soul from a scientific perspective, but which is by no means properly appreciated in its fundamental significance.

[ 4 ] Today, people say that human beings must think logically, that they must link their concepts and ideas together in a logical manner, and indeed, that they can only arrive at judgments in a logical way. This demonstrates the view that human beings are subject to certain inner logical laws in the imaginative processes of their souls, and that, in a sense, they can arrive at the truth only through logic. However, we also know from historical development that logic as a science was first established only a few centuries before our era by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. And one can say: If one truly understands the spiritual development of humanity, one must also realize that human beings did not actually become aware of the laws of logic until after the Greek philosopher Aristotle had given these laws a specific form. Would it not be natural and appropriate, then, to reflect on such a fact and ask: How is it that thinking about logical laws only entered the course of human development at a specific point in history? — If one were to reflect appropriately on this fact, one would indeed arrive at the conclusion—which is entirely true—that human beings did indeed develop their consciousness relatively late, such that they were able to become aware of the logical processes in their souls, or rather, of the laws of logic in their souls, and that logic therefore arose only at a certain time because, prior to that, the entire mood, the entire constitution of the human soul, was such that it could not be aware of the laws of logic. Humanity developed the capacity for logical thinking only gradually, evolving toward that era which we can call the Greco-Roman era, named after the most significant peoples who lived during that time. Toward this Greco-Roman era, humanity developed in such a way that it only became conscious of itself during this period of thinking characterized as logical, meaning that prior to this, the inner constitution of the human soul was different.

[ 5 ] However, if modern human beings are unwilling to engage with the deeper findings of spiritual research, they have only one way to gain an understanding of what consciousness actually is—consciousness that is not permeated, interwoven, and interwoven with logical laws. If people today wish to form a conception of a pre-logical consciousness purely through external, materialistic observation of nature, they can do so only by turning to the instincts of animals. What can they learn from these animal instincts? It has been pointed out repeatedly here that it would be entirely impossible to speak of animal instincts in such a way as to suggest that there is not, in fact, logic and inner rationality present in the life and activities of the animal world. Everything that fundamentally takes place in the life of the animal world points to this inner rationality. We see how insects with fully developed instincts live under certain conditions that make it completely impossible for them to know the circumstances under which their offspring must develop during the early stages of their existence. Even though the adult insect lives under natural conditions that are entirely different from those required by the caterpillar, we still see how the insect—even though it has not at all become acquainted with these other conditions in its present state—lays its eggs with great natural wisdom in a place where the hatching caterpillar will then encounter the natural conditions that are right for it. Here we see how, in fact, a governing reason is at work within what takes place. Everywhere we see reason and logic at work in the animal kingdom; yet, unless we wish to indulge in unwarranted mysticism, we cannot say that animals possess any awareness of this logic and reason. And when we consider the beaver’s marvelous architecture and other feats of animals, when we examine the entire instinctual life of animals and draw attention to how animals, for example, relate to a change in the weather—which they foresee long in advance and behave accordingly—when we can point out how, according to well-documented reports, animals foresee earthquakes, volcanic eruptions—though this is merely a metaphor, for it occurs through the reason that reigns within animals, in that they “foresee” such things—then we must say: There is something in the instinctual life of animals that shows us how animals, too, are entwined in logic and reason, just as there is an externally operating lawfulness in the world, just as the environment everywhere is interwoven with objective rationality and objective lawfulness. — Thus, by observing animal instincts—that is, what operates in animals as a result of a law or through the stimulation of a law that is not reflected in consciousness—human beings can form a conception of how what happens through them can also occur in a different way. It need not happen merely by a person saying to himself, when he wants to do this or that: “This is my goal; this is how it must look, and this is how the tool must look”—but rather, without engaging in these conscious deliberations, something similar can develop within the context of the world from other forms of consciousness—from forms that are subconscious to human consciousness—just as human conscious rationality develops within human beings.

[ 6 ] Now, spiritual science points out to us that this kind of rationality, as it currently exists in humanity, —a rationality based on inner, conscious logic, on inner, rational goal-setting—has developed only gradually; that human beings were by no means, prior to this, animal beings with merely animal instincts, but rather beings who possessed a form of consciousness entirely different from our present logical consciousness, yet also a consciousness distinct from that represented by animal instinct. If you consider what has already been said here in the lectures of this cycle regarding the possibility of developing the dormant powers of the human soul and, as it were, opening up what we have called the “spiritual eyes,” “spiritual ears”—what we have called, in a real and not a fanciful sense, a kind of clairvoyant consciousness—then we will be able to turn our attention to the possibility of developing other forms of consciousness beyond today’s purely logical consciousness, which sets only rational goals for itself, and, as it were, of training ourselves in other forms of consciousness. Attention has been drawn to how, through inner, intimate soul processes of meditation and concentration, the person who wishes to become a spiritual researcher and to look into the deeper recesses of the soul must attain a different kind of consciousness, so that spiritual research envisions a different kind of consciousness that is developed through education from the present form of consciousness. Just as such a form of consciousness—through which a person not only perceives what they can perceive through their eyes, ears, and other sense organs, through which they do not merely perceive what they can perceive through their physical instruments, but rather looks into a spiritual world independently of their physical instruments— — just as such clairvoyant consciousness must develop in the present as the goal of spiritual research, so too, when we trace humanity back into the past, it becomes evident that in earlier times a different form of consciousness existed than that which is currently characteristic of humanity as logical, thinking consciousness. What we know today as consciousness has only developed since the Greco-Roman era. Human beings first had to be educated to attain it. Now we have moved beyond the Greco-Roman period, and in our present age, spiritual scientific research shows us humanity’s place in the course of evolution in such a way that attention is once again drawn to how the form of consciousness that has developed since the Greco-Roman era can be further developed and cultivated into higher forms of consciousness. From this, at least hypothetically at first, the following thought may arise: It therefore makes sense to assume that the consciousness which Aristotle, in a sense, codified into laws in his logic—and which entered the course of human development during the Greco-Roman era—itself evolved from other forms of consciousness, so that when we look back through human history, we must seek out other forms of consciousness—above all, other forms of the life of the soul—among humankind.

[ 7 ] Today’s “worldview-oriented” person, who believes he stands on the firm ground of natural science but in fact stands only on his own prejudices, is still prevented from seeking out such other forms of spiritual life in the course of human evolution. For he cannot imagine that, if he were to trace human development back to its starting point—to the so-called “primitive humans”—he might encounter a form of consciousness other than the instinctive consciousness that resembles today’s animal consciousness. But if, as we characterized in the last lecture, we were not to trace the development of humanity back to a point where human beings were animals and had evolved from animal ancestral forms only in terms of their physical forms, but rather, as spiritual science does, trace human beings back to the point where they already existed as spiritual beings, before he possessed a physical body—that is, if we trace humanity back to the spiritual proto-human and then accept the idea that this spiritual proto-human only assumed external bodily forms over the course of time, as we have described, then, in a retrospective view, we can no longer seek out forms of consciousness that would merely resemble animal instinct; rather, we arrive at forms of consciousness that would correspond to an ancient human form, which we must conceive of as increasingly spiritual-soul-like the further back we go. Thus, proceeding even into the Greco-Roman era, we must imagine that human development has proceeded in such a way that even the inner life of the soul has become increasingly entangled in the material world. We would therefore have to ascend, in the historical development of humanity, to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more spiritual inner life of the soul.

[ 8 ] Now, not only do the facts of spiritual research show us this—they show it clearly—but also the external facts of human development show that, the further back we go, even into historical and prehistoric times that can be investigated historically, we arrive, as it were, at a different kind of life of the human soul, at a completely different way of relating to the external world. Concepts such as those we currently develop—and which children already learn intellectually in school—through which we reflect the external world, soon cease to exist as we go back beyond the Greco-Roman era. And it is not without good reason that Western philosophers of history have always begun their history of philosophy by tracing the origins of philosophy—that is, the intellectual reflection on the world— began in the Greek world with Thales five to six centuries before the Christian era, because they recognized that it was only there that the possibility of speaking of an intellectual, logical reflection of the world first arose. Only our present age has managed to break with the sentiment of those historians who trace the origins of philosophy back to Thales. Today, when everything is lumped together, there is a tendency to trace the history of philosophy far, far back to Eastern thought—to the Indians or Persians—without giving any consideration to the fact that the ways in which human souls experienced and perceived things within pre-Greek cultures were entirely different from what later emerged from Greek culture. It is precisely this superficiality of the “profound” contemplation of the Orient—as exemplified by the Germans, for instance, whom our age is capable of producing—that leads to extending the history of philosophy beyond Thales. This can only happen when one has no idea of how human consciousness developed in its fundamental forms, and that Oriental spiritual life has an entirely different content from what began in the inner life of human history starting with the Greco-Roman era. And when we examine what we encounter in earlier times, we must say: People everywhere felt, to a greater or lesser extent, compelled not to live within the forms of reason—the intellectual forms in which we, even as children today, begin to reflect the world—but rather to experience the thought-forms that confront us as myths as a soulful, pictorial way of thinking about the world. What people take into their souls in order to gain some understanding of the world comes to us as imaginations. It is images that have been preserved for us in the myths. And what is remarkable is that, if we go back to pre-Greek times, we very soon find images at the very foundation of all peoples’ cultures; and the further back we go, the more evident it becomes that human beings are deeply and inwardly satisfied and fulfilled by living within these images—within what might be called a kind of imaginative conception of the world.

[ 9 ] Whoever, starting from the present intellectual, rational, and logical understanding of the world, through that self-education as described in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? , transforms their soul into an instrument for spiritual research, attains a kind of imaginative knowledge as the first stage of true clairvoyant knowledge; and whoever allows this imaginative knowledge—which now presents itself once again in the form of images—to take effect upon their soul will say to themselves: When I compare this imaginative insight of the spiritual researcher with what is still preserved in the wondrous imaginations of the myths and worldviews of the Greeks and also of the pre-Greek peoples, I encounter something that is, on the one hand, the same or similar, but on the other hand, fundamentally different. — When today’s spiritual researcher rises to his imaginations—which reflect the spiritual processes underlying the sensory phenomena of existence—he retains his logical thinking; he retains it and strives precisely for what we must call logical thinking. That is to say, he brings all rational connections, the entire character of his present consciousness, into that realm; and any imaginative insight that could not shed light on the way in which the images are connected—on how everything within the imaginative world weaves itself into a whole—would not be a true one. It was precisely in this regard that I recently experienced a most remarkable fact. In my Outline of Esoteric Science, you will find an attempt to present, on a broader scale, not only the development of humanity on Earth in the sense of imaginative insight, but also the earlier incarnations of our Earth in other, preceding celestial bodies. Everything that constitutes fact in this regard—though such facts reveal themselves only to spiritual consciousness—is presented there in a way that corresponds to logical consciousness and the facts of sensory perception. Now, a theologian who had read this book once said to me: “What I read there struck me as being so thoroughly structured by logic and reason that one might be tempted to think the author of this book arrived at it purely from today’s spiritual life, through logical conclusions alone.” — That gave me pause, and I said to myself: Then perhaps the entire presentation came about not through clairvoyance at all, but through mere logic. — And he said this even though he claimed that he could not, through his own logic, arrive at what is presented as the content of knowledge in this book. This is, after all, a common occurrence in the present day, especially when one is confronted in a hostile manner with the claim that such accounts are constructed through mere logic—even if these results are only later pieced together into a logical thread to make them comprehensible. Yet everything contained in Occult Science has not been arrived at through logical deductions. It would also be difficult to arrive at these things through logic. But now that they have been discovered, they are clothed in and interwoven with logic. They were, of course, not discovered by disregarding logic, but certainly not through the process of logical deduction; nevertheless, everything corresponds entirely to what one might call imaginative knowledge.

[ 10 ] This is intended to serve as an example of what can be sought through the self-education of our present consciousness—a kind of new imaginative insight that can lead us into the depths of things. When we compare such insight with myths, legends, and other constructs that gleam up to us from ancient times in human development, we have found the following: it is important to recognize these glimmers of insight that people must have cast into the depths of natural existence. However, in order for them to express what they had thus explored through such powerful images as those preserved for us in myths and legends, it was necessary that those people be wiser than the people of a logical age. For in comparison to many a nature myth and many a creation myth, what our modern science is often amounts to nothing more than bungling and dilettantism; for with its original unfolding and interweaving of the world’s forces, an Egyptian or Babylonian myth concerning the workings of good and evil in the world stands higher than the modern monistic interpretation of the world. From what those people were capable of thinking, one senses an inner coexistence and interweaving with the forces that people today laboriously bring to mind in mental images; one senses an inner permeation by the deep forces of natural existence that reign within natural existence itself. But then one also senses it in the myths: just as they present themselves in all their richness and grandeur—and, in a certain sense, uniformly among all peoples across the globe—they were not woven by the intellect, nor even by fantasy in the modern sense, but by imagination. Not, however, the imagination referred to today in the context of spiritual science, but an imagination that was still free from the intellectual and rational elements. Nor was it the workings of mere fantasy, but rather the workings of a primal imagination—a clairvoyant, as yet unrefined imagination—not one akin to the animal realm, even if it operated and shaped as imagination in a dreamlike darkness and twilight, acting as imagination, but not yet an imagination permeated by the elements of logic and thought. Thus we see that, before Greco-Roman culture intervened in human history, the peoples were intimately connected with what reigns in the depths of being, and—without the application of logic—expressed, through the direct interweaving with eternal existence in the great, powerful images of the myths, something that is not scientific in today’s sense, but rather what science was in earlier times.

[ 11 ] In this sense, we come to the origins of our present-day intellectual human behavior in Greco-Roman culture, and we see, preceding this culture, a completely different kind of spiritual life and culture—a spiritual life that, because it was not yet logical, because it was still dreamlike, was nevertheless more deeply connected to the fundamental spiritual realities of all weaving and working, and was thus able to express this weaving and working in pictorial form. Therefore, one can perhaps find no other word that better characterizes the essence of the culture immediately preceding the Greco-Roman era—as it was prevalent among the Egyptians or Chaldeans—than the term: culture of revelation. Greco-Roman culture was preceded by a culture of revelation, in which—when the human soul sought to know—what lives and weaves within things surged into it as a revelation through mighty images and imaginings, seeking to well up from within things, just as a spring wells up from rocks and mountains. Greco-Roman culture, on the other hand, is characterized everywhere by the fact that it gradually experienced a kind of twilight of the old culture of revelation; although in the earlier period of the Greeks the revelations still welled up fully alive from things, we then see—especially with Socrates—the strong emergence of a permeation of the soul’s life with intellectual culture, with the intellectual element, and how the things that sprang from the ancient culture of revelation gradually fade ever more and more, so that human beings increasingly make the content of their inner life what presents itself to them when they look at the things around them and allow their senses to perceive them. Previously, it was the case that human beings looked at things, that they saw the gurgling spring, that they saw what was happening in the forest and meadow. Everywhere he turned his gaze toward things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke to him spiritually like a revelation; from every little stream, from every murmuring spring, what lived within them as a fundamental spiritual force came to meet him. He then incorporated this into images such as those of water spirits, nymphs, and so on. What reigned in the depths of things—what had opened up to the ancient clairvoyant consciousness like dreams from a spiritual world—gradually faded away, and in its place came a full, unreserved recognition of what human beings perceived with their senses in general. The culture of perception emerged, in which human beings placed themselves in the world as they were and as they perceived it; in which they saw the world through their physical organs, through their entire physical organization, and grew so fond of it that the entire Greek world is, in fact, permeated in its mindset by the saying handed down to us from a great Greek, who said: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows! — In the ancient culture of revelation, one could not have spoken this way; it became possible only when the world had advanced to the culture of perception—to what the senses see and what the intellect develops as intellectual intuition on the basis of the senses—since people knew only that a spiritual world lay beyond the sensory world. It was only possible to say this once the spiritual world that lies behind the sensory world had become uncertain to direct perception.

[ 12 ] People also sensed the dawn of a completely new era. Oh, during the epoch we might characterize as Greco-Roman, people sensed the dawn of that which human beings were now to develop from within themselves—their reason, their intellectual culture. People sensed that they had previously been, as it were, sheltered within a realm of revelation with which they felt a spiritual kinship. Now, however, they felt that they were entering a new phase, one in which they were placed more firmly at the center of their own “I.” For those who observe the course of history in its finer nuances, this trend stands out with great clarity. And it stands out to us all the more when we recall that such immersion in a culture of revelation does indeed show human beings how, as spiritual beings, they are sheltered within the spiritual world—which they perceive clairvoyantly, albeit in a dreamlike manner— perceives, yet such clairvoyant perception is at the same time associated with only a limited focus on one’s own “I,” with only a limited awareness of one’s own “I.” Placing oneself at the pinnacle of one’s own personality is something that can only be granted to a people through a culture of perception. Thus, in the Greco-Roman era, with the ability to process perceptions internally through this intellectual element, human reflection on the “I” also emerges—an “I” that can initially be experienced only in the intellect, as a concept, an idea, or something invisible within ordinary reality. This is why, in ancient times, the concept of the human “I” is given little emphasis. Anyone who delves into the depths of the ancient cultures will always say: The ancient myths and legends speak of gods, and when a person goes about their work, they are aware that in one step this god is at work, in another that god, spurring them on. — In their striving toward things, people felt as if they were imbued with the divine, as if they were permeated by spirit, but not yet imbued with the “I.” Human beings attain self-knowledge and self-awareness only through intellectual culture. Therefore, this nourishment had to be provided to them during the Greco-Roman period so that they could attain full consciousness of themselves. Even in the development of language, we can demonstrate how this gradually emerged, how it was absent in the revelatory cultures, but how there humanity regarded itself as a vessel into which the gods poured their spring water. The Greeks first had to endure the great tragedy of having their vision clouded at the expense of their spiritual environment, forcing them to say to themselves: This is the tragedy. Better to be a beggar in the world I have come to love than a king in the other world, which is uncertain to me! — A world that had only become uncertain to him during the Greco-Roman era. But since the ancient mysteries still played a role in this remarkable age in a wondrous way, it was still possible to think of this transition of the soul itself in mythical, imagery-filled terms, even as a wholly new consciousness emerged.

[ 13 ] What would a person—who even back then had already thought entirely intellectually and had been thoroughly imbued with intellectual culture—have said to himself if he had turned his gaze to this crucial point in human history, where the soul is torn away from the old culture of revelation in order to ascend to the culture of perception, and is thereby educated toward ego-consciousness? He would have said to himself: In ancient times, human beings were such in their physical bodies that, when they looked out into the world, they saw the spiritual-soul aspect reigning everywhere. — He saw no “I” in this spiritual-soul realm, but he saw what he described as the spiritual beings standing above him: They live in my actions, they live in my perception, in my life, and everywhere else. — Wherever he directed his gaze, the “I” did not yet present itself to him. Now the human being turned his gaze out toward the world, and during this time of transition one thing struck him in particular: “What am I myself?” And the answer to this question filled him with a kind of shudder, so that he had to say to himself: No longer, when I ask myself about myself, do I arrive at the answer that gods are entering into me, but rather I feel permeated by a solitary “I”! — That is what a person imbued with intellectual consciousness would have said. But one who had carried something over from earlier times—one who would have spoken in such a way as to frame the emergence of self-consciousness within the old image, imagining it from the standpoint of the old consciousness—would have said: Once upon a time, the river god—that is, a divine being—Cephissus and a nymph had a son, Narcissus. This enters the human soul itself as an image. Narcissus sees the spring on Mount Helicon. It is foretold to him that he must perish the moment he sees himself. This means: the human “I” loses its connection to the divine when the human being perceives its connection to the divine. There, Narcissus sees himself and has taken the seed of death into himself. So it is with the human soul as it learns to recognize itself within the culture of perception. Here, the transition from the ancient culture of revelation to the culture of perception is described, only in a different way.

[ 14 ] Someone who had already imagined the transition to the new consciousness within the framework of the old consciousness would have said to himself: When people used to look out into the world around them, they saw spiritual-divine forces everywhere—albeit through their old imagery. This old imaginative consciousness has receded; it has gradually experienced something like twilight, and what ultimately remained were actually the worst forces of spiritual beings acting from without. To a person who imagined the new in the manner of the old, these forces came to consciousness as the Gorgons, in whom people, in their vision, saw only the most terrible beings and therefore depicted them as such—as the very worst beings that arose in their consciousness. Then the new human being, Perseus, rises up and beheads the Gorgons—Medusa, that is, the consciousness that still existed as a final remnant, represented by Medusa’s serpentine head. The story then goes on to describe how two beings emerge from the beheaded Medusa: Chrysaor and Pegasus. I am no fan of allegorical-symbolic interpretations of myths. I mean—even not in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation—that the one who, under the conditions of the old consciousness, experienced the rise of the New, was still able to clairvoyantly perceive, entirely within the conditions of that old consciousness, what humanity was to develop into as the emergence of Chrysaor and Pegasus from Medusa. What did he see? Chrysaor, the image that humanity received as a down payment for what it had lost in the form of the old clairvoyant mode. Pegasus, the personification of fantasy. For fantasy arises from the fact that the old imagination is entering a kind of twilight, and human beings no longer have the strength to enter the new epoch with the power of the old consciousness. And in place of the old imagination, which entered into spiritual reality, they substitute that which does not enter into spiritual reality, but into the eternal shaping of the human soul—and which seeks to represent the new shaping of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing other than what is known as “ego culture” in human life. This continues to take shape. That is why we hear how that which led to ego culture—Chrysaor—unites with Callirrhoe. From this arises Geryoneus as what we must call modern intellectual culture—the culture of the intellect—which the Greeks felt led humanity away from the ancient clairvoyant culture, but which had to lead humanity away precisely because, otherwise, humanity could never have attained an awareness of the “I.” In turn, the figure of Chrysaor has something strangely tragic about it; it characterizes us, just as human intellectual culture itself does. And as one of those who felt this most deeply—a poet, Robert Hamerling—said of this intellectual culture: In the course of human development, we see the conscious culture of the intellect emerging from the ancient, unconscious culture of myth. But this culture has the purpose of every development: to lead to its own death! — If the culture of the intellect alone were to continue progressing in its own way—this is clear to Hamerling, and it must be clear to anyone who can truly fathom the unique nature of the culture of the intellect in its innermost essence—it would lead to a goal that would be a withering away, an extinction of all vitality, all originality, and all dynamism in culture.

[ 15 ] This is what has evolved from ancient culture into contemporary culture: the culture of the intellect. And by pointing out that intellectual culture need not remain merely intellectual culture, spiritual science shows that while humanity necessarily had to arrive at intellectual culture in order to develop self-consciousness, it can once again arrive at something that can be more than intellectual culture. What does intellectual culture give to human beings? It gives them what they call a worldview. What, then, is humanity striving for in particular today? Let us take, for example, what those who today seek to construct a worldview out of intellectual culture hold up as their highest ideal: that concepts must not deviate in the slightest from what exists in external reality. And they deem impossible anything that does not correspond directly with sensory-material reality. But spiritual research will recognize—beyond intellectual culture—that the latter provides us not only with something that can represent reality to us, but also with something that can educate the soul, that brings forth the soul’s powers, that still possesses an educational value, and how, through what is born in the human soul through intellectual culture, the humanity of the future will once again arrive at an imaginative culture through which it will connect with the spiritual backgrounds of things.

[ 16 ] Thus we see in intellectual culture the necessary element for the human “I” to crystallize over the course of human history; we see that, through intellectual culture, the ancient clairvoyance had to be dulled so that the “I” could shine forth and live itself into those incarnations that the soul experienced in Greco-Roman culture, and which it continues to experience even today and for some time to come. And then we see how, in the future, a new culture of imagination will be kindled, through which humanity will once again be drawn into the spirit and into spiritual life. Thus the present follows on from the past, and thus the present teaches us, through its roots, what must develop for the future. In a most magnificent way, so to speak, the awareness of this transformation of consciousness confronts us at a certain point in human history. But first, let us note that with the ancient culture of revelation—which we have characterized as having preceded the Greco-Roman culture of perception and our intellectual culture—a certain epoch of humanity had also been reached. The culture of revelation was completely immersed in a spiritual life of humanity that we can describe as the ancient imaginative life. If we were to go back even further, we would encounter an ancient culture that, throughout the Near East, points not to the culture described in history as the Persian one, but to a much older one from which the Persian culture later emerged. And this older culture, in turn, succeeded the ancient Indian culture. Thus, we find the ancient Persian and ancient Indian cultures to be the precursors of the culture of revelation.

[ 17 ] When we survey these cultures, we find that what has developed within humanity—which has indeed emerged from the spiritual realm but has not yet emerged from the conscious spiritual realm permeated by reason and logic—is language. Just as, according to a frequently repeated saying, a child learns to speak before it learns to think, so too did humanity learn to speak before it learned to think. Before the ability to grasp the contents of the soul through those great, powerful images existed, a language developed from the deep foundations of pictorial consciousness—not from animal instincts—out of a clairvoyant consciousness that was even higher than the revelatory consciousness of ancient Egyptian culture. The element of language developed even before ancient Indian culture. Language is a creation of the human spirit, but a preconscious creation of the human spirit. This takes us back to even earlier periods of human development, in which the spiritual process of humanity unfolded in such a way that language gradually developed out of a still subconscious spiritual activity.

[ 18 ] And then we see that ancient Indian culture coming into its own—a culture we admire precisely because we can call it, in the best sense of the word, a unified culture. This is not the culture of the Vedas. As they have come down to us, the Vedas are merely an echo of the true ancient Indian culture and did not arise much earlier in our Christian era than the time we now live in relative to its beginning. This ancient Indian culture could be characterized today by saying: The ancient Indian did not yet perceive any distinction between the material and the spiritual at all when he looked at plants, stones, mountains, meadows, and clouds. In everything around him, he did not yet see the spiritual as separate from the material; he did not perceive colors and forms at all as we do today, but rather the spiritual and the material were in immediate contact for him. He perceived the spiritual just as directly and as real as he perceived the external material colors: a culture of unity, in which the spiritual was still regarded as equal to the material. Therefore, he sensed the all-pervading Spirit everywhere in things—a perception that was later described as the all-pervading Spirit Brahman, the Universal Soul that is felt to be present everywhere. But this culture, which we encounter in primeval times as the starting point of human history, did not yet, so to speak, enable human beings to engage with the material world or to truly exert their powers within it. Consequently, in the north—in the region where the Persian Empire would later expand—it was confronted by another culture, one almost diametrically opposed to it, which is entirely imbued with the conviction that, although human beings belong to the spiritual world, they are tasked with working with the material world here on Earth.

[ 19 ] Compared to the ancient Indian people, the Proto-Persian people are the hardworking, laboring people who seek to connect with the spiritual powers in order to imprint the spiritual into the material configuration of the Earth through their own strength and labor. Therefore, the Persians felt connected to their God of Light and said: “He permeates me”—just as humanity in general first lost its connection with the divine during the age of perceptual culture, the Greco-Roman era. The spirit of light, Ahura Mazdao, lived within the ancient Persians. In contrast, he regarded what he had to overcome as “resistant matter” as permeated by the forces of resistance, of Ahriman, of the dark spirit. Thus, for the Persians, the expression of the revealing Spirit in the human soul prior to the culture of revelation is linked to what we might call the culture of Mithraic enthusiasm. We can illustrate what the ancient Persians conceived of as Ahura Mazdao—whom we can symbolically think of as the sun—in the following way. While later humanity still knew: “You are permeated by the spirit; the spirit reigns within you”—and still later felt only that it was permeated by the “I”—these primordial Persian times were characterized by an enthusiasm in the spirit, truly a state of standing within God and allowing God to work through oneself. The ancient Ahura Mazdao culture, which preceded the culture of revelation, was an enthusiastic culture.

[ 20 ] Thus we see that it is precisely through spiritual science that we can observe something as beautiful as what the poet in particular feels—for example, when Robert Hamerling envisions something similar at the end of his “Atomistik des Willens.” He does not yet arrive at this in a spiritual-scientific way, but through elementary intuitions, that humanity has developed from an elementary interconnectedness with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity formed myth and language at this elementary stage, but that intellectual culture is called upon to lead human beings to a point where they become fully attentive to and fully conscious of their “I,” of the central spiritual-soul core of their being. —

[ 21 ] Another culture in the course of human development pointed this out in a magnificent way. At that time, this was pointed out when people knew, through a prophetic intuition: A time will come when what lives through and permeates the world as the highest spiritual-divine will live fully and consciously within the human being—though this will manifest only in the innermost core of the human being. But this time must be awaited; it is a time yet to come. Then something will take hold within human beings that will enable them to conceive of their innermost being as fully permeated by the Divine. The spiritual powers are, as it were, drawing near to prepare for this ascent of the human “I.” But for now, we must not yet speak of what is present within human beings as though the highest Divine-Spiritual were already permeating them. The Divine is still ineffable. This is how ancient Hebrew culture perceived it; this is how it sensed the culture of the “I,” the intellectual culture, drawing near, saying to itself, as it were: What will one day be able to designate as the name of the God who lives in the human soul can only be characterized by an ineffable name. — Hence their conception of the ineffable name Yahweh. Yahweh or Jehovah is, after all, merely a substitute for the ineffable name of the Divine, for what has been composed of these letters cannot in fact be vocalized, cannot be uttered, for as soon as it is uttered, it becomes something other than what is meant as the divine-spiritual being, which will only develop into the spiritual being of humankind in the time to come. — Thus, in the course of evolution, humankind had to descend into the sensory-material world, while in future times it will rise again to the spiritual.

[ 22 ] Then Christian culture emerged, entering—as a matter of necessity—precisely the era that had given rise to the culture of the “I.” It sees in the Christ impulse that which, when properly understood, can work inwardly within the human being, thereby giving the human “I” the impetus to live its way back into the spiritual realm in the future, just as humanity once descended from the spiritual realm. Anyone who can understand why Plato, Socrates, and others were only possible in Greece, and why ego-consciousness reached a decisive point at that time, will also grasp why the Mystery of Golgotha had to unfold precisely within Greco-Roman culture for the sake of human development—and thus also why this became the focal point of the entire course of human development. Only those who do not reflect on these connections and do not know what human consciousness is and how it changes can fail to see how the Christ impulse—characterized from a different perspective in the previous lecture—fits into the course of human development from the past through the present into the future. Thus, the essence of what arises in the human “I” is revealed precisely in ancient Hebrew culture. And now, when one surveys history in this way, one can delve into all the details. Philosophers have often cited the claim that the Greeks said: all philosophy, all contemplation of the world, begins with wonder.

[ 23 ] Yes, it must begin with wonder, just as it did in Greece. We can demonstrate this if we view human history and the present state of humanity in the proper light. Something of the ancient clairvoyant consciousness has remained, which now, having remained, no longer works as it once did. That is the dream. The dream is a final, decadent remnant of the old clairvoyance, because the conditions of ego-consciousness are already at work within it. What is missing from the dream? If you follow the dream images as they ebb and flow, you will see that one of them is missing. As they come and go in normal dreaming, the most incredible things happen. One moment this image is there; the next, another follows it in a way we would never accept in waking consciousness. Why? Because in a dream, a person cannot be astonished, and because astonishment first arises with ego-consciousness in the culture of perception, and because something of the pre-ego-conscious worldview finds its way into the dream. And the Greeks provided a wonderful characterization of what emerges as the ego-worldview when they said that it begins with astonishment. But there is yet another element missing from dreams. In dreams, we can, under certain circumstances, do the most incredible things, and our conscience never torments us. Conscience belongs to ego-consciousness. It only emerges as ego-consciousness develops. This can be demonstrated, for example, by comparing the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. In Aeschylus, there is never any mention of a conscience, whereas in Euripides, the concept of conscience already plays a role. Thus, conscience enters human development alongside self-consciousness, and the dream—which is merely a relic of the old clairvoyant consciousness—lacks this conscience as well.

[ 24 ] Thus, as human history transitions into the present, we see how intellectual consciousness gradually develops out of other ancient forms of consciousness—specifically, clairvoyant states of consciousness from which language and myth arose—and how this intellectual consciousness has now reached a pinnacle of its development. Therefore, as a foreshadowing of the forces necessary for the future of development, what may be called spiritual research is emerging in our time; this is intended to indicate that humanity need not perish—no matter how frightening, according to Robert Hamerling’s account, the destructive power of a culture based solely on intellect may be—but rather that this culture of intellect will give rise to a new way of finding one’s way back into the spirit. And thus spiritual science is aware of what a modern poet-philosopher so beautifully expresses at the end of his work, as he gives voice to his pain over intellectual culture, which has brought all ancient, elemental communion with the depths of the world to a twilight, while in its place allowing the ego to rise. There the poet says: “The kingdom of God, placed at the end of the world by the legends—the Golden Age to which we must aspire—means nothing other than the withdrawal of all life into the spirit, a process that can also take place individually and personally.” Thus concludes a work by Robert Hamerling, in the hope for the future that all life will develop back into the spirit, just as all human life originates from the spirit. Past, present, and future converge in such a way that at the center—in the present—lies the culture of the “I,” which brings humanity to a self-awareness it did not previously possess. But humanity will retain this self-awareness as a lasting legacy of our age and carry it upward into spiritual heights, so that we may once again speak of a spiritual age of humanity. And there would be no ideal for the future that could be in any way oppressive if we understand human history from the perspective of spiritual science. How are we placed within life, which can often be so full of suffering and pain; how can we relate to the world’s goals in our ideas? We may answer this great cosmic riddle, this great question of humanity—especially from the perspective of spiritual science, with a certainty that simultaneously provides life force and confidence for all of humanity’s future—just as the poet, of whom we have just spoken, answers it intuitively and imaginatively. In 1856, he inserted beautiful words into his “Venus in Exile” that touch upon humanity’s past, present, and future—words he had not yet spoken from the perspective of spiritual science. But what is thus foreknown in the human soul in an intuitive form and later renewed in another form—what we now know intellectually—meets us so wonderfully in the ancient myths and legends! What spiritual science can state on a strictly scientific basis has already been expressed in an intuitive way by the poetic mind, and here, too, we may summarize what can be said about human history, the present, and the future in the poet’s words:

Why have I been cast into the abyss of earthly existence
Threatened by suffering and the grim face of death,
Why do I drift in a sea of colorful illusions,
Swimming through waves of pain toward my destination?
I do not know. Only one thing is certain to me:
Deep within me, a voice resounds,
Which joyfully accepts the lot of life
And approves of this earthly fate!