The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture XXIX

[ 1 ] Now let us shed light on even more mysterious realms of karmic action and take a look at how karma operates within the context of nations and humanity. Anyone who takes seriously the principle of explaining the world not through material principles but through the spirit will understand this.

[ 2 ] History has shown that, in the course of human evolution, diseases have emerged that did not exist in the past. There are diseases of the times and diseases of the people. Today we will first hear something about the origin of such diseases of the times and diseases of the people. Let us understand this from a spiritual perspective. The doctor explains them by saying that this or that disease is caused by germs. But we must ask: Where do the germs themselves come from? — They are incarnated beings just like human beings. Even with such beings that act as destroyers of human life, we must ask: Where do they come from? What brought them into their present material existence? What were they before they incarnated?

[ 3 ] Let us assume, for example, that a certain people or race is perishing; it is heading toward its downfall. It resists this downfall. This resistance to downfall is a spiritual expression, something that lives within the astral body of the people in question. If such a perishing people were to die out on its own, the emotions being played out there would have no particular effect on others in the world. But let us suppose that it comes into conflict with another people and fills the other with fear and terror; this then produces an effect in the other people. Then we have two things: the perishing people and something that arises from the interplay between the people resisting their downfall and what arises from fear and terror in the other people. This is something lasting.

[ 4 ] Let us take a specific example: the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages, when the Mongols clashed with the European peoples and spread fear and terror among them. Such fear and terror were then present among the peoples. If one looks at these masses of people who were rushing in—of which the Mongol invasions were the last—and puts oneself in the mindset of the entire medieval population, one can see how spiritual formations took shape from the dying, desperate tribes of the fourth root race and the Europeans who were gripped by fear and terror. Suppose such an onslaught were met with courage and love; then the decaying substances would be dissolved. But fear, hatred, and terror preserve such decaying formations, and beings like bacilli therefore find a breeding ground. They later incarnate in those material forms that are suitable for their incarnation. Thus, the substances of decay have embedded themselves as seeds of decay within the fear and terror of the European peoples. And these are tiny living beings. This is how medieval leprosy, or “Miselsucht,” arose. These were the substances of decay from the declining Mongol peoples.

[ 5 ] Where, then, do these destroyers of human physical nature come from? They come from past spiritual elements, from sins. This is karma as it operates within the bodies of nations. From this you can discern how the moral life of a nation determines its future external existence. A nation has it in its power to ensure its physical future by leading a corresponding moral life in the present.

[ 6 ] In all the secret schools of Europe, it is said that all the bacterial diseases of modern times have a similar origin. Bacterial diseases are traced back to their spiritual origin. This is an esoteric tradition among the Rosicrucians and in other secret schools where these things are taught. There is a fundamental teaching in small circles of esoteric schools, which holds that in the 1970s, very specific battles took place within the astral world, and that something there has turned for the better, even if... (gap in the text.) These events are called the battle between the hosts of the Archangel Michael—taken from Christian esotericism—and the hosts of the god Mammon. Mammon is the god of obstacles, who places destructive, hindering forces in the path of progressive movement. On the other hand, this god Mammon is seen as the creator of very specific entities—entities that have a destructive effect on human life, particularly in the form of infectious diseases. The infectious diseases, unknown in earlier times, stem from the god Mammon.

[ 7 ] You will be able to appreciate that the esoteric schools must foster a progressive spirit in the deepest recesses of the human soul, for the true root cause of these modern ills is nothing other than the backwardness, the primordial conservatism of the so-called upper classes toward the impoverished lower classes, the oppressed masses who are striving for a new... (Gap in the text.) They are hindered, held back by the effects of the god Mammon. We find two opposing forces: the emotional world of the declining upper classes, who wish to preserve ancient times, and the feeling of hatred among the lower classes—an astral life hurled at the others by the great masses. In this contrast, esotericism again sees a source of decay and, in it, the cause of modern infectious diseases. Anyone who sees through these things will, of course, not turn against the efforts of modern medicine with its external remedies. But true healing will never come through these external means.

[ 8 ] What occurs later is always foreshadowed by esoteric insight. This insight consists in the correct understanding that the morality of the present can bring about better health in the future. From this, one can in turn gauge how deeply those who introduced the Theosophical Movement to the world were able to see. It arose from an understanding of such connections. It was foreseen that the drive toward a struggle of all against all would take on ever more intense forms. The events that are bound to come unfold with an inner necessity, just as things in the East develop like a fire where particularly flammable material is present. It would be senseless to try to hold back such events. The Theosophical Movement has already sought appropriate and effective means to eliminate the struggle of all against all through the dissemination of the principle of brotherhood. For brotherhood dissolves the putrid elements and the hatred that flow into the world. And as far as races are concerned, we are in a state of decline. If this decline is perpetuated by the belief that it can be halted—and by hatred—rather than being dissolved by love, then naturally the very worst consequences will follow. The Theosophical Movement seeks to dissolve it through love. Its founders know that the Theosophical Society is not merely a remedy but the very source of humanity’s future development.

[ 9 ] Thus we see how the physical is a consequence of the preceding spiritual, and how, under certain circumstances, people have the power to connect the physical with its spiritual origin through an understanding of these relationships. For example, anyone who knows how a particular illness is connected to certain sensations and emotions knows that by evoking these emotions, they can also bring about the illness. The black magician can use this knowledge to the detriment of the masses. That is why the deeper occult truths cannot simply be taught to everyone, since they would immediately lead to a sharp division between good and evil. This is the danger in spreading occult teachings. For one cannot teach anyone how to heal without simultaneously teaching them how to cause illness. Where occult teachings have become more widespread among the people, such things have occurred. In certain regions of the Orient, one can hear true accounts of sects whose purpose is to induce specific diseases. — Thus, we are delving ever deeper into explaining the material in terms of the spiritual.

[ 10 ] Let us now try to look at things over somewhat longer periods of time. We know that today there is a beautiful balance between all animal life and the plant world. Plants use carbon for themselves and exhale oxygen, thereby continuously creating the source for the animal life that breathes all around them. This source springs from the plant world. Everything that breathes today exists through the workings of this mysterious workshop of the plant world. From this, one can gain an understanding of how worlds come to an end—how the world that preceded our Earth came to an end. Breathing on the Moon did not exist in the same way as it does today among animals and humans. A completely different process existed on the Moon in place of the breathing process; it gradually gave way to breathing. We can form a picture of this earlier process by looking at a remnant of that time: the poikilothermic animals, which have the same temperature as their surroundings. On the Moon, there was fire- or heat-breathing. The absorption and release of fire or heat at that time corresponded to the present-day absorption and release of air. In the middle of the Lemurian period, the process of respiration began to take on the form it has today.

[ 11 ] Breathing is a physical manifestation of the spiritual process of the monad’s embodiment in the lower human being. Breathing means: the drawing in of the monad. In Hatha Yoga, the student therefore also undergoes a breathing process. The student rhythmically regulates what is a natural process for human beings in order to bring breathing—which is today a natural process—under his control. Just as, before human beings transitioned to this breathing process, they similarly absorbed and released heat from the outside—a process that transformed into the circulation of warm blood—so too does the Hatha Yoga student seek to transform the breathing process into an internal one, bringing it under his or her inner control. The rules of Hatha Yoga involve transforming breathing into a process that does not proceed from the inside out, but rather into an internally regulated process, just as blood circulation is now a regulated internal process. In the case of cold- and warm-blooded animals, the process of blood circulation relates to that of humans in the same way that the breathing process of the average person relates to that of the Hatha Yoga student. Behind all these things lie very profound evolutionary ideas that are intended to form the basis of real processes.

[ 12 ] What is generally no longer understood today is that there is something in the air that is spiritual. When people were still aware of this, they called the spirit: air, wind = pneuma. “Pneuma” means a breeze and also the soul-spiritual. The term dates back to times when people were still aware of the true connections. Let us now consider the fact that on the Earth’s predecessor (the Moon), certain beings had evolved beyond the level of humanity at that time. These were the Luciferic beings. When we consider them, however, we must realize: they did not live in an environment like that of the Earth today. They could not breathe air, so they could not take in the spirit either. For the reception of spirit corresponds to breathing air. Thus, they were compelled to carry out within the principle of warmth what takes place in the air today. On Earth, we distinguish seven states of the physical: first, the life ether; second, the chemical ether; third, the light ether; fourth, thermal ether; fifth, air; sixth, water; seventh, solid matter. The Luciferic beings therefore had to carry out within heat the same processes that human beings carry out in air today. Now you can imagine that for this reason these beings, who have given human beings free consciousness and independence, are in a certain sense linked to fire. For this reason, when they appear, they are bound with a certain greed to everything in the human being that manifests as warmth or fire. This greed clings to the human being’s own warmth. Thus, the givers of knowledge and freedom are linked to something that seeks to incarnate itself in the human being’s warmth, in the same way that it once did on the Moon. This is the connection between knowledge and between birth and death, illness, and so on in the world. With knowledge, birth, death, and illness entered the world; humanity has thus paid for knowledge with them. Hence we also see the connection between certain manifestations of warmth and illness, namely fever. This is the origin of fever. Traditions regarding this persisted well into the 19th century.

[ 13 ] On the earlier planet—the predecessor of our Earth—there were not yet humans, animals, plants, and minerals as we know them today. At that time, there were three kingdoms that lay between our own. In the highest kingdom were beings who had not yet sunk as low as today’s animals, nor risen as high as today’s human beings. At that time, plants did not yet exhale oxygen. Oxygen—this life-giving air—did not yet exist. It was only with the emergence of our plant kingdom that oxygen was mixed into the nitrogen. The Moon was surrounded by a nitrogen atmosphere. In the second half of the previous planet, the beings were indeed already striving toward forms capable of breathing—forms endowed with lungs and so on—but it was not until the cycle of our Earth that the present plant kingdom took shape. The animal beings then developed the organs for breathing. They pushed the plant kingdom down a level so that it would provide them with oxygen to breathe.

[ 14 ] These events on our Earth’s predecessor planet inevitably led to a state in which life in its previous form was no longer possible. Life had evolved into something else and required a new planet. The previous realm had to perish. It suffocated the entire world of living beings on the previous planet. This is how planets, along with their life, come to an end, and in what is being prepared—within the body of the mother planet—a new life develops. This is how the decline and rise of planets are to be understood.

[ 15 ] Today, human beings live in such a way that, just as they once contained the other kingdoms within themselves, they still carry evil within their karma. They are now working this out of themselves. In the future, good and evil will exist in external forms: a race of the good and a kingdom of the evil, side by side. In the future, the human face will emerge in a transfigured form from the separate, cast-down evil of the animal realm. Let us imagine the transfigured human face, which today slumbers like a riddle within animal matter, separated from the animal-evil and symbolically represented—you cannot conceive of it better than in the great intuition of the Egyptian Sphinx. It is not something that points only to the past, but it also points to the future. The riddle of the Sphinx—transposed into Greek mythology—is the riddle of humanity. It is no coincidence that the ancient Egyptians placed the Sphinx before the temples of initiation. Initiation is the planting of the mystery of the future within the soul. At the entrance to the temples, the Sphinx had already created the atmosphere for initiation.

[ 16 ] What has oxygen as its physical body on the outside is the monad on the inside. As soon as oxygen appears on Earth, the monad has the ability to incarnate. It is the desire to acquire the monad for oneself that drives the student to inhale large amounts of oxygen and try to hold it within. Oxygen is not merely something material and external. One must examine oxygen in terms of its spirit. Thus, we have oxygen externally and the monad internally. The process of respiration therefore formed the body for the descending Sons of Manas during the Lemurian period.