The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Contrast Between Cain and Abel

[ 1 ] I already hinted last time that the story of Cain and Abel conceals a whole host of occult mysteries. I would like to point out a few of these today, but I want to emphasize from the outset that the relationship between Cain and Abel—when understood in its full depth—is an allegory for extraordinarily profound mysteries, and we will only be able to discern a few of them based on the information we have.

[ 2 ] If we examine the Five Books of Moses, we will find much in them that directly points to the evolution of humanity since the Lemurian era. The story, for example, of Adam and Eve and their descendants should not be accepted at face value. I ask you to bear in mind that, particularly in the Five Books of Moses, in the Book of Enoch, in the Psalms, and in several other important chapters of the Gospel, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in some of Paul’s epistles, and in the Book of Revelation, we are dealing with writings by initiates, so that we must seek an occult core within these texts. This core was discussed everywhere in the occult schools. Anyone who does not read the Bible thoughtlessly—in the higher sense, thoughtlessly—will notice many things. And I would like to draw your attention to something that can very easily be overlooked, but must simply be read literally in order to see that nothing here is written in vain, and that it is easy to overlook certain passages in the Bible.

[ 3 ] Take the first sentence of the fifth chapter of the first book of Moses: “This is the book of the genealogy of man. When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God; male and female He created them, blessed them, and called their name ‘man,’ in those days when He had created them. When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he begot a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and named the child ‘Seth.’”

[ 4 ] One must read the text literally. Adam himself is called “man” in the absolute sense. God created them male and female; not yet sexually differentiated, but asexual. And how did He create them? In God’s image.

[ 5 ] And furthermore, in the second sentence: “After so many years”—one must imagine long periods of time here—“Adam begot a son, Seth, in his own image.” At the beginning of the Adamic era, we have man created in the image of God; at the end of the Adamic era, in the image of Adam—in the image of man. Earlier, 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 they are all created in the image of the Deity. They reproduced asexually. We must be clear that they all still have the same form they had from the beginning, so that the son resembles the father and the grandson, in turn, resembles the son. What, then, causes people to change and become different? How do they become different? Because two individuals are involved in procreation. The son or daughter resembles the father on one side and the mother on the other.

[ 7 ] Now imagine that you had an original, god-like race that reproduced not sexually but asexually: The offspring always resemble the preceding generation. There is no intermingling. Diversity did not arise until the time of Seth. But something else occurs between the time of Adam and Seth. Namely, before the transition from Adam to Seth takes place, two are born who are, in turn, important representatives: Cain and Abel. They stand in between; they are transitional figures. They were not yet born in the era when the character of sexual reproduction was distinctly present. We can infer this from the meanings of the names “Abel” and “Cain.” “Abel” means “pneuma” in Greek and “spirit” in German, and if we consider the sexual connotation, this has a decidedly feminine character. “Cain,” on the other hand, means almost literally “the masculine,” so that in Cain and Abel, the masculine and the feminine stand in opposition to one another. Not yet in a purely organic sense: on a higher, spiritual level, they tend toward differentiation.

[ 8 ] Now I ask you to take careful note of this. Originally, humanity was both male and female. Later, it was divided into the male and female sexes. We see the masculine, material aspect in Cain, and the feminine, spiritual aspect 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, “Boden” means “physical plane,” and the three states of matter on the physical plane are: solid earth, water, and air. “Cain became a farmer” means, in its most ancient sense: he learned to live on the physical plane; he became human on the physical plane. That was the nature of the masculine. It consisted in his being strong and vigorous so that he could work the soil of the physical plane and then return from the physical plane to the higher planes.

[ 10 ] “Abel was a shepherd.” As a shepherd, one accepts life as the Creator presents it. One does not exploit the flocks, but merely tends them. In this way, he is the representative of that lineage which does not attain the Spirit through the independently working intellect, but receives the Spirit as a revelation from the Divine itself, and merely guards it. The guardian of the flock, the guardian of that which is planted on the earth—that is Abel. The one who works to achieve something on his own—that is Cain. Cain lays the foundations for playing the lyre and other arts (Genesis 4:21, 22).

[ 11 ] Now comes the contrast in how they relate to the Deity. Abel receives the spiritual and offers as a sacrifice the very best, the highest fruit of the Spirit. God, of course—since this is what He Himself has planted on earth—looks upon the offering with pleasure. Cain lays claim to something else. He wants to turn to the Deity with the products of his intellect. This is something entirely foreign to the Deity, something that human beings have attained through their own free will.

[ 12 ] Cain is the human being who strives toward the arts and sciences. At first, this has no connection to the Divine. A profound truth is expressed here. Anyone with experience in the occult knows that the arts and sciences, even though they have set humanity free, were not what led humanity to the spiritual; rather, they were precisely what led humanity away from what is truly spiritual. The arts are something that has grown on humanity’s own soil, on the physical plane. This cannot be pleasing to the Divine at first. From this arises the contrast: the “smoke”—the spirit that God Himself planted in the earth—rises from Abel toward the Divine, while the other “smoke,” that of Cain, remains on earth. That which is self-willed remains on earth, like the smoke of Cain.

[ 13 ] This is also the contrast between the feminine and the masculine. The feminine is that which is inspired by what is received directly from the Divine. Pneuma is attained through conception. What Cain has to offer is human labor on the physical plane itself. This is the contrast between the feminine and masculine spirits. These two are originally opposed to one another here.

[ 14 ] Every human being is both male and female, not only physically but also spiritually; each is at once a receptive spirit open to inspiration and an intellectual mind that processes and synthesizes what has been inspired. Now this was separated—we need only continue to see a symbol in the feminine and masculine—and now the principle of inspiration passed on to those who stood on Abel’s side, to those who remained shepherds and priests. The principle of inspiration did not pass on to the others; they became scientists and artists turned toward the worldly and confined themselves purely to the physical plane.

[ 15 ] This could not have happened without a corresponding change having taken place within human beings. When human beings were still of a single gender, it would not have been possible for them to effect a separation between spiritual wisdom and intellectual science. Only when humankind was definitively divided into two sexes, only when humanity was divided by gender, was the brain brought to the point where it could function. The brain became masculine; the deeper essence became feminine. Human beings can only produce within their physical nature. There they bring something into being, namely offspring. But a spirit, insofar as it resides in the brain, is male and limited in its productivity to the physical plane.^{1See under Notes.} We have a representative depiction of this in Cain and Abel.

[ 16 ] Now, because this division has occurred, it has come to pass that in the reproduction of the human race, descendants no longer merely resemble their ancestors as such, but have become differentiated. I ask you to bear the following in mind: The greater the significance of the sexual aspect, the more differentiation occurs. If we were dealing with purely asexual reproduction, the subsequent generations would resemble the preceding ones. There would be no difference over time. The difference arises solely because mixing takes place. And what made this mixing possible? The fact that the masculine principle dedicated itself to the physical plane. Cain became the one who tilled and transformed the soil. This outward difference between generations would not have entered humanity had not a portion of humankind descended to the physical plane. It was no longer as it had been before, when production descended from the higher planes. Now something has become interwoven within human beings because they have drawn something from the physical realm. Now they become a reflection of what they have acquired on the physical plane, and human beings carry this upward to the higher planes. The physical is the mark of Cain. The physical plane, in its effect on human beings, is imprinted upon them as the mark of Cain.

[ 17 ] Now humanity is completely connected to 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, with the sons of Abel-Seth representing the Sons of God and the sons of Cain representing the Sons of the physical plane.

[ 18 ] You will now understand that the story of Cain and Abel fits in between Adam and Seth. A new principle has entered into humankind: the principle of heredity, of original sin, and of being unlike the preceding generation.

[ 19 ] But the sons of God are still here. Not all the Abels have been wiped out of the world. And now we see what has come upon the earth as a result of Cain’s answer to the question, “Where is your brother Abel?”: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — No human would ever have said that before. Only a mind that reacts, as it were, acoustically[?] to the spiritual would say that. Now the principle of struggle, the principle of opposition, is intermingling with the principle of love; now egoism is born: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

[ 20 ] The Abels who remained were the Sons of the Gods; they remained connected to the Divine. But they now had to be careful not to become entangled in the earthly realm. And thus began the principle that becomes the principle of asceticism for those who have consecrated themselves to the Divine. It becomes a sin when he associates with those who have consecrated themselves to the earth. It is a sin when “the sons of the gods take pleasure in the daughters of men from the lineage of Cain.”

[ 21 ] From this arose a race that is usually not even mentioned in the public books of the Old Testament, but is only alluded to: a race that is imperceptible to the physical eye. In occult terminology, it is called “Rakshasas” and is similar to the “Asuras” of the Indians. These are the diabolical beings who truly existed and exerted a seductive influence on humankind, causing the human race itself to fall. This “Poussade”—the union of the sons of the gods with the daughters of men—produced a race that became particularly seductive to the fourth subrace of the Atlanteans, the Turanians, and led to the downfall of the human race. Some were saved and carried over into the new world. The Flood is the deluge that destroyed Atlantis. The people who had been seduced by the Rakshasas gradually disappeared.

[ 22 ] Now I must say something that will certainly seem very strange to you, but which is infinitely important to know, which is of very special significance, and which has been an occult secret to the outside world for many centuries—something that will seem unbelievable to most people’s minds, yet is nonetheless true. I can assure you that every occultist frequently verifies in what we call the Akashic Records whether this is so. But it is so.

[ 23 ] These Rakshasas exist; they have truly existed—active, at work—as tempters of humankind. They have influenced human passions up to the point when the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth and the Budhi principle itself became present on Earth in a human body. Now, whether you believe it or not: this has cosmic significance; it has 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 Rakshasa beings were thereby brought into a state of paralysis and lethargy. They were, as it were, held in check, so that they became immobile. This was only possible because they were counteracted from two sides. This would not have been possible had two natures not been united in Jesus of Nazareth: on the one hand, the old chela, who was fully connected to the physical plane, who could also work on the physical plane and maintain its balance through his powers; and on the other hand, Christ himself, a pure spiritual being. This is the cosmic problem that underlies Christianity. Something happened in the occult realm at that time; it was the banishment of the enemies of humanity, echoed in the legend of the Antichrist, who was bound but will reappear unless the Christian principle in its original form once again stands against him.

[ 24 ] The entire occult tradition of the Middle Ages sought to prevent the influence of the Rakshasas from emerging. Those who can see on higher planes had long since foreseen that the time when this could happen would come 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 provided aid 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 various details concerning Marie-Antoinette as prophecies that have already been fulfilled. The following is also found in Nostradamus’s Centuries (Century 10,75): When the 19th century comes to an end, one of the Brothers of Hermes will appear from Asia and will reunite humanity. - The Theosophical Society is nothing other than a fulfillment of this prophecy by Nostradamus. Countering the Rakshasas and restoring the original mysteries is one of the aims of the Theosophical Society.

[ 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 far deeper than Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. Jesus has incarnated time and time again. His task is to revive the principle of the mysteries. Behind this lies not a fact of cultural history or a physical reality, but the fact that I have explained to you—as an occultist, you are well aware of it—the struggle against the Rakshasas. You see, a great and important occult mystery is hidden here.

[ 26 ] You might now ask me: Why is this expressed in allegorical form rather than 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 early Christian teachers—held to the principle of reincarnation. And this allegorical manner of communication serves a good purpose. When, for example, the Druid priests spoke of “Nebelheim,” of the “giant Ymir,” and so on, this was of course not folk poetry. Rather, the Druid priest knew this: the human spirit, into which I am instilling these tales today, will—when it incarnates again—be prepared to grasp the truth in a more perfect form. All these tales are based on the premise that the spirit will incarnate again, so that it may grasp the truth all the more easily later on. These fairy tales are based not on belief, but on the knowledge and experience of reincarnation. Even the denial of reincarnation—beginning in the third century of Christianity—occurred on the premise of reincarnation, because the intention was to pull people down into Kama-Manas, so to speak, until everything spiritual had passed through the process of incarnation. That is why Christianity had no knowledge of reincarnation for 1,500 years. If we were to continue withholding the doctrine of reincarnation, we would be depriving people of this knowledge a second time. But that would be a great sin, a transgression against humanity. The initial withholding, however, was necessary, for the single life between birth and death also had to be made valuable to people.