The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Contrast Between Cain and Abel

[ 1 ] Last time, I already pointed out that the story of Cain and Abel conceals a whole host of occult secrets. I would like to point out a few things today, but I must emphasize from the outset that the relationship between Cain and Abel—at least when understood in depth—is an allegory for extraordinarily profound mysteries, and we will only be able to recognize a few things based on the information we have.

[ 2 ] If we follow the five books of Moses, we will find many things that point directly to the development of humanity since the Lemurian epoch. The story of Adam and Eve and their descendants, for example, should not be taken at face value. Please bear in mind that we are dealing here, particularly in the five books of Moses, in Enoch, in the Psalms and in some other important chapters of the Gospel, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in some of Paul's epistles and in the Apocalypse, with writings by initiates, so that we must seek an occult core in these writings. This core was discussed everywhere in the occult schools. Anyone who does not read the Bible thoughtlessly — in the higher sense of the word — will notice many things. And I would like to draw your attention to something that is very easy to overlook, but which must be read literally in order to see that nothing here is superfluous and that it is easy to overlook something in the Bible.

[ 3 ] Take the first sentence in the fifth chapter of the first book of Moses: “This is the book of the generations of man. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God: male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them ‘man’ in the days when he created them. When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he begot in his likeness, after his image, and called the fruit 'Seth.'”

[ 4 ] One must read literally. Adam himself is called a human being par excellence. God created them male and female; not yet sexual, asexual. And how did he create them? In God's likeness.

[ 5 ] And furthermore, in the second sentence: “After so many years”—long periods of time are to be imagined here—“Adam begot a son, Seth, in his image.” At the beginning of the Adamic age, we have man in the image of God; at the end of the Adamic age, in the image of Adam, in the image of man. Formerly, man was created in the image of God. Later, he was in the image of Adam.

[ 6 ] So in the beginning we have human beings who are all equal to one another, and all are created in the image of the Godhead. They reproduced themselves in a sexless manner. We must be clear that they all still have the same form that they had from the beginning, so that the son resembles the father and the grandson resembles the son. What causes humans to change, to differentiate? How do they become different? It is because two individuals are involved in reproduction. The son or daughter resembles the father on the one hand and the mother on the other.

[ 7 ] Now imagine that you had an original godlike race that reproduced not through sexual reproduction but through asexual reproduction: the offspring always looks like the previous generation. There is no mixing. Diversity only appeared when the time of Seth came. But something else happened between the time of Adam and Seth. Namely, before the transition from Adam to Seth, two are born who are again important representatives: Cain and Abel. They stand in between, are transitional products. They were not yet born in the time when the character of sexual reproduction was distinctly present. We can deduce this from the meanings of “Abel” and “Cain.” “Abel” means ‘pneuma’ in Greek and ‘spirit’ in English, and if we take the sexual meaning, it has a decidedly feminine character. ‘Cain,’ on the other hand, means almost literally ‘the male,’ so that in Cain and Abel, the male and the female stand opposite each other. Not yet in the purely organic: on a higher, spiritual level, they tend toward differentiation.

[ 8 ] Now I ask you to note this carefully. Originally, humanity was male-female. Later, it was divided into the male and female sexes. We have the masculine, material in Cain, and the feminine, spiritual in Abel-Seth. The differentiation has taken place. This is symbolized in the words: Cain was a tiller of the ground and Abel was a shepherd (Genesis 4:2).

[ 9 ] In the most ancient languages, “ground” means the physical plane, and the three states of aggregation of the physical plane are: solid earth, water, and air. “Cain became a farmer” means in its most ancient meaning: he learned to live on the physical plane, he became a human being on the physical plane. That was the character of the masculine. It consisted in his being strong and powerful to work the soil of the physical plane and then return from the physical to the higher planes.

[ 10 ] “Abel was a shepherd.” As a shepherd, one takes life as it is offered by the Creator. One does not work the flocks, but merely tends them. Thus he is the representative of that race which does not attain the spirit through the independently working intellect, but receives the spirit as a revelation from the Deity itself, merely tending it. The guardian of the herd, the guardian of what is transplanted onto the earth, that is Abel. The one who works something out for himself is Cain. Cain lays the foundations for playing the zither and other arts (Genesis 4:21,22).

[ 11 ] Now comes the contrast between their attitudes toward the deity. Abel receives the spiritual and offers the best, the highest fruit of the spirit, as a sacrifice. God naturally looks with pleasure upon the sacrifice, because it is what he himself has planted on earth. Cain claims something else. He wants to turn to the deity with the products of his intellect. This is something completely foreign to the deity, something that man has achieved in his freedom.

[ 12 ] Cain is the man who strives for the arts and sciences. At first glance, this has no connection with the deity. A profound truth is expressed here. Those who have experience in the occult know that, although the arts and sciences have made human beings free, they were not what led human beings to the spiritual; they were precisely what led human beings away from the truly spiritual. The arts are something that has grown on the physical plane, on the ground that belongs to human beings themselves. This cannot initially be pleasing to the deity. From this arises the contrast that the “smoke,” the spirit that God Himself planted in the earth, rises up to the deity from Abel, and that the other, the “smoke” of Cain, remains on the earth. The independent remains on the earth, like the smoke of Cain.

[ 13 ] This is also the contrast between the feminine and the masculine. Feminine is that which is inspired by what is received directly from the deity. Pneuma is attained through conception. What Cain has to give is human work on the physical plane itself. This is the contrast between the feminine and masculine spirit. These two are originally opposed to each other here.

[ 14 ] Every human being is not only physically but also spiritually male and female at the same time; they are both a receptive spirit that allows itself to be inspired and an intellectual being that processes and combines what has been inspired. Now this separated—we need only see the feminine and masculine as symbols—now the principle of inspiration passed to those who were on Abel's side, to those who remained shepherds and priests. The principle of inspiration did not pass to the others; they became scientists and artists turned toward the world and limited themselves purely to the physical plane.

[ 15 ] This could not have happened without a change taking place within human beings. When humans were still male-female, it would not have been possible for them to separate spiritual wisdom and intellectual science. It was only when humans were finally divided into two sexes, only when humanity was divided by gender, that the brain was brought to a point where it could function. The brain became masculine, the deeper essence became feminine. Man can only produce within his physical nature. There he brings forth something, namely offspring. But a spirit, insofar as it is in the brain, is masculine and productive, limited to the physical plane. ^{1See under References.} We have a representative illustration of this in Cain and Abel.

[ 16 ] Now, because this division has occurred, it has come about that in the reproduction of the human race, the offspring no longer merely resemble their ancestors as such, but that they have differentiated. I ask you to bear the following in mind. The greater the significance of sexuality, the greater the differentiation. If we had pure asexual reproduction, the next generations would look similar to the previous ones. There would be no difference in the sequence of time. Difference arises only through mixing. And what made this mixing possible? Through the male devoting itself to the physical plane. Cain became the one who tilled and changed the soil. This external difference between the generations would not have entered humanity if a part of humanity had not descended to the physical plane. It was no longer as it had been before, when production descended from the higher planes. Now something was woven into human beings through their taking something from the physical realm. Now they become an image of what they have acquired on the physical plane, and human beings carry this up to the higher planes. The physical is the mark of Cain. The physical plane, in its effect on human beings, is imprinted on them as the mark of Cain.

[ 17 ] Now man is completely connected with the earth, so that there is a contrast between Cain and Abel, a contrast between the son of God and the son of the physical plane, whereby the sons of Abel-Seth represent the sons of God, and the sons of Cain represent the sons of the physical plane.

[ 18 ] You will now understand that the event of Cain and Abel falls between Adam and Seth. A new principle has entered into human beings, the principle of heredity, of original sin, of dissimilarity to the previous generation.

[ 19 ] But the sons of God still remained. Not all of the Abels were eliminated from the world. And now we see what came upon the earth when Cain answered the question, “Where is your brother Abel?” with, “Am I my brother's keeper?” No human being would ever have said that before. Only a mind that reacts to the spiritual as if acoustically would say that. Now the principle of struggle, the principle of opposition, mixes with the principle of love; now egoism is born: “Am I my brother's keeper?”

[ 20 ] The Abels who remained were the sons of God; they remained related to the divine. But now they had to be careful not to enter into the earthly realm. And thus began the principle that becomes the principle of asceticism for those who have dedicated themselves to the divine. It becomes a sin when they unite with those who have dedicated themselves to the earth. It is a sin when “the sons of the gods find favor with the daughters of men from the line of Cain.”

[ 21 ] From this arose a race that is not even mentioned in the public books of the Old Testament, but only hinted at: a race that is not perceptible to the physical eye. In occult language it is called “Rakshasas” and is similar to the “Asuras” of the Indians. These are the devilish beings that really existed and had a seductive effect on humans, so that the human race itself declined. This “poussade” of the sons of God with the daughters of men gave rise to a race that became particularly seductive for the fourth subrace of the Atlanteans, the Turanians, and led to the downfall of the human race. Some things were saved and carried over into the new world. The Flood is the flood that destroyed Atlantis. The people who had been seduced by the Rakshasas gradually disappeared.

[ 22 ] Now I must tell you something that will certainly seem very strange to you, but which is infinitely important to know, which is of very special significance and has been an occult secret for many centuries to the outside world, and which will seem incredible to most people, but is nevertheless true. I can assure you that every occultist is often convinced in what we call the Akashic Records that this is so. But it is so.

[ 23 ] These Rakshasas exist, they really existed—active, working—as seducers of human beings. They worked on human passions until the time when Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha principle itself became present on earth in a human body. Now, whether you believe it or not, this has a cosmic significance, a significance that extends beyond the earthly plane. It is not for nothing that the Bible expresses it this way: Christ descended into limbo. There were no longer any human beings there; he was dealing with spiritual beings. The beings of the Rakshasas were thereby brought into a state of paralysis and lethargy. They were, as it were, held in check so that they became immobile. They could only become this way because they were counteracted from two sides. This would not have been possible if two natures had not been united in Jesus of Nazareth: on the one hand, the old chela, who was completely connected to the physical plane, who could also work on the physical plane and keep it in balance through his powers, and on the other hand, Christ himself, a pure spirit being. This is the cosmic problem that lies at the heart of Christianity. Something happened in the occult realm at that time; it was the banishment of the enemies of humanity, echoing in the legend of the Antichrist, who was bound but will reappear unless the Christian principle in its original form confronts him again.

[ 24 ] All the occultism of the Middle Ages strove to prevent the influence of the Rakshasas from coming to the fore. Those who can see on higher planes foresaw long ago that the time when this could happen would be at the end of the 19th century, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Nostradamus, who worked in a tower that was open at the top and who also brought help during the plague, was able to predict the future. He wrote a number of prophetic verses in which you can read about the war of 1870 and many things about Marie Antoinette as prophecies that have already been fulfilled. The following is also written in Nostradamus' Centuries (Century 10,75): When the 19th century comes to an end, one of the Hermes brothers from Asia will appear and reunite humanity. The Theosophical Society is nothing other than the fulfillment of this prophecy of Nostradamus. The Theosophical Society strives to counteract the Rakshasas and reestablish the original mysteries.

[ 25 ] You know that Jesus Christ remained on earth for ten years after his death. The “Pistis Sophia” contains the deepest theosophical teachings; it is much deeper than Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism.” Jesus was incarnated again and again. It is his task to revive the mystery principle. Behind this lies not a cultural-historical or physical fact, but the fact that I have explained to you, as you, as an occultist, are well aware: the struggle against the Rakshasas. You see, here lies a great and important occult secret.

[ 26 ] You may now ask me: Why is this said in allegorical form and not in plain language? I must point out here that those who were great teachers of humanity, such as Moses, the Indian rishis, Hermes, Christ, and the first Christian teachers, stood on the standpoint of the principle of reincarnation. And this allegorical mode of communication has a good meaning. When, for example, the Druid priests of Nebelheim told of the giant Ymir and so on, this was of course not folk poetry. The Druid priest knew that the human spirit, which I am imprinting with fairy tales today, will be prepared to grasp the truth in a more perfect form when it incarnates again. All these fairy tales are based on the premise that the spirit will reincarnate, so that it will be easier to grasp the truth later on. These fairy tales are not based on belief, but on knowledge, on the experience of reincarnation. Even the denial of reincarnation – from the third century of Christianity onwards – took place on the assumption of reincarnation, because people wanted to drag humanity down into Kama-Manas, more or less until everything spiritual had passed through incarnation. That is why Christianity had no knowledge of reincarnation for 1,500 years. If we wanted to continue to withhold the teaching of reincarnation, we would be withholding this knowledge from people a second time. But that would be a great sin, a transgression against humanity. However, the one-time withholding was necessary because the one life between birth and death had to be made valuable to people.