The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Popular Occultism XIV

[ 1 ] Today I would like to speak further about Christian initiation and the Earth’s interior. It should be noted that Christian initiation was undergone by all those who were to teach Christianity from an occult depth—for example, the priests of the first Christian centuries. These initiations persisted for a long time but were gradually altered somewhat, and only in certain narrow circles were these rigorous exercises still undertaken. One should not assume that the rigors of these exercises can be expected of everyone; yet whoever submits to them will also attain a high level of knowledge along the Christian path. In this regard, Christ is, as it were, the primordial guru for all Christian disciples on this path. Angelus Silesius once said:

Will Christ be born a thousand times in Bethlehem
And not in you: you will remain lost forever.

[ 2 ] Something like this stems from inner experiences. Similarly, in the Gospel of John, it says: “But Jesus went out of the temple.”

[ 3 ] This is an astral experience and refers to the astral body stepping out of the physical body. In Christian initiation, the strict guru of the East is replaced by the requirement of Christian humility—submitting not to a single individual, but to Christ Jesus.

[ 4 ] The first stage is the washing of the feet. One reaches it by spending months trying to live according to the following ideas: The plant cannot live without the mineral kingdom beneath it. If it could speak, it would have to say: “You, mineral kingdom, you are indeed lower than I, but I owe my higher existence to you.” And when a person looks around at life, he must admit to himself: If I have advanced far in the spiritual realm, it is because others have worked on my behalf. We must therefore bow down in humility and gratitude to those who stand below us. “Whoever wants to be first will be last in the Kingdom of Heaven,” says a passage from the Gospel. This practice ultimately leads to the inner vision of the washing of the feet. Christ washes the apostles’ feet to offer them the tribute of His gratitude. Whoever lives in accordance with these ideas of humility will notice that the image of the washing of the feet appears to them in the form of an astral vision. Through this, what is described in the Gospel of John becomes a personal experience.

[ 5 ] Then one can move on to the second stage. The student must absolutely learn to endure all suffering and all obstacles in life with dignity and remain calm, even when everything is crashing down on him. And once again, an image of the flagellation appears in a dream on the astral plane. Not only does the student see the image, but he feels burning pain throughout his entire body, even in his fingernails and hair.

[ 6 ] Once this has been achieved, one moves on to the third stage. Here, the student must not only endure pain, but must also be able to calmly accept scorn and ridicule. In a dream experience, the crowning with thorns manifests as a peculiar, temporary headache.

[ 7 ] Reaching the fourth stage is very difficult. The initiate must develop a sense that his own body has exactly the same value to him as the things around him; he must learn to regard it as something foreign; he must come to feel: It is not I who go there, but I who carry my body there. The student then no longer lives within his body, but carries it like an object, like the wood of the cross. These exercises lead to the vision in which the student sees himself crucified. And outwardly, this stage of initiation even manifests itself through the appearance of the so-called stigmata. The student then receives, corresponding to the wounds of the crucifixion, actual stigmata at the relevant places on his body, which may appear temporarily. These inner and outer experiences arise after appropriate contemplation.

[ 8 ] The fifth stage is the mystical death. Now the student truly becomes clairvoyant on the astral plane. The previous experiences were merely initial symptoms. For a moment, the student experiences a sensation as if everything were disappearing, as if he were facing nothingness. This darkness is the antithesis of the general darkness that fell over the entire land at the time of Christ’s death. Then the darkness splits; this represents the tearing of the curtain in the temple and Christ’s descent into hell. This, too, is experienced at this stage. Whoever does not advance that far does not yet truly know what evil is. The student of the fifth stage descends into these depths of existence. This is the descent into hell.

[ 9 ] At the sixth stage, the burial, he perceives the entire Earth as his body, and his own body as a part of it. He becomes one with the entire Earth. The student is then as if placed within the entire Earth, covered and buried within it; he himself now becomes one with the planetary spirit.

[ 10 ] The seventh stage, the Resurrection, cannot be described in further detail, for no soul whose thinking is still bound to the brain can comprehend all that it signifies in terms of greatness and sublimity. When the secret student passes through these seven stages, Christianity comes alive within him. He experiences the Gospel of John as reality.

[ 11 ] In conclusion, we shall now discuss the structure of the Earth’s interior. This exploration of the Earth’s interior is, in fact, connected to the stages of Christian initiation. It is precisely through Christian initiation that one can gain a true understanding of the Earth’s inner conditions.

[ 12 ] From an occult perspective, there is a connection between human life, the Earth’s layers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on. Enormous changes in this regard are still to come. The scientific view that the Earth’s interior is molten is incorrect. The specific substance you are familiar with from external observation—because you walk on it—is the outermost, physically substantial layer of the Earth. It is called the mineral Earth. Science does not even reach the center of this layer. Each experience of Christian initiation now leads to a penetration into a specific layer of the Earth’s interior. The third degree of initiation, for example, allows penetration into the third layer; the seventh into the seventh layer, and so on.

[ 13 ] What is in the second layer cannot be compared to any chemical substance in the top layer; it is an entirely different substance. Physical heat increases only in the first layer. The substance of the second layer possesses properties such that, if anything living were brought into contact with it, that life would be instantly destroyed within it. Any plant would immediately turn to mineral form within it; life would be driven out of it. This layer is also called the life-destroying layer.

[ 14 ] The third layer is a substance that transforms emotional sensations into their opposites. It transforms joy into pain, and pain into pleasure. It reacts to the emotions of living beings; as a form of matter, it possesses this property and is called the layer of sensation.

[ 15 ] The fourth layer corresponds, in a certain sense, to the first region of Devachan, for there, too, physical objects appear as negatives. In Devachan, instead of the physical object, there is a kind of aura—a negative, a hollow light image—in which nothing can be seen inside, and which emits a certain sound from within. The fourth layer of the Earth’s interior, on the other hand, is essentially what gives form to earthly things. There are, as it were, the inverted forms; this can be compared to a seal and its impression. This fourth layer is therefore called the form layer.

[ 16 ] The fifth layer is teeming with life. Here, life is not confined to any particular form.

[ 17 ] The sixth layer, the water layer, is highly malleable and consists entirely of will and sensation. It responds to impulses of the will; it cries out, as it were, when pressed. Because this inner life can be compared to fire, this layer is called the fire earth.

[ 18 ] The seventh layer of the Earth is then reached in the seventh stage of initiation. Just as the eye produces counter-effects within itself in response to certain influences, so it is in the seventh layer. Its substance transforms all qualities into their opposites by reversing them. That is why this layer is called “the Earth’s reflector.”

[ 19 ] The eighth layer, which also becomes perceptible at the seventh level of initiation, possesses not only physical characteristics but also moral ones; it transforms all the moral qualities that humans develop into their opposites. Everything that is united on Earth is separated and scattered there. All moral feelings, such as love and compassion, are transformed there into their opposites—hardness, brutality, and so on. This layer is called the Shatterer.

[ 20 ] The ninth layer is the Earth's brain. Evil works its magic there. Black magic is connected to it. The white path turns black there.

[ 21 ] It is much more difficult to explore the Earth’s interior than the astral and devachan planes. This exploration is truly among the most difficult of all. What Sinnett says about the Earth’s interior in his book Esoteric Buddhism is not correct. Instead of conducting his own research as a clairvoyant, he used a medium. Only within the true Rosicrucian School is one able to speak of the Earth’s interior. And during the golden age of Christianity, the Earth’s interior was viewed in a similar way. The Nordic mysteries, the Trotten mysteries, and the Druidic mysteries also spoke of this in considerable detail. Dante, too, speaks poetically in his Divine Comedy of the nine-part interior of the Earth. The eighth layer is referred to there as the “Layer of Cain,” because through Cain, evil—that which causes fragmentation—entered the world.

[ 22 ] In general, occult phenomena are described in great works of poetry such as the Odyssey, Parzival, and so on. In the tale of Poor Henry, for example, reference is made to the influences of the decaying astral substances of the peoples of the early Middle Ages who had fallen into decadence. The Esoteric Doctrine has always influenced the great poets, both consciously and unconsciously. In the light of theosophy, not only does the entire world take on immense depth for us, but so do the great works of literature of humanity. There, one can truly seek out and recognize the Divine.

[ 23 ] A characteristic of the Lemurian era was that, at that time, the upper layers of the Earth were developed only sporadically—as it were, only as islands—so that much of the fire layer penetrated outward. The layer of fire is the foundation of the other layers. The will of the Lemurian human, which was still strongly active at that time, was still able to exert a magical influence on this layer of fire. The undulating movements of the Earth were still connected to human will. That is why the Lemurian continent was destroyed from within the layer of fire. Humanity had sunk too deeply, especially in Late Lemuria. Terrible deviations had taken hold. And so these pernicious impulses of the will affected the layer of fire: Lemuria, like Sodom and Gomorrah, perished in a catastrophic fire, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The will does indeed act upon the layer of fire. Thus, there is a connection between the inner being of the human being and the inner being of the Earth. The Earth-Shatterer, the Cain layer, undergoes a transformation through humanity’s ongoing moral development. What humanity does on Earth gradually reshapes the entire Earth. And once white magic has advanced to a high degree, the Earth’s core will also change. The black magicians will be banished to a kind of moon when our planet eventually perishes.

[ 24 ] When very specific evil impulses of will interact today, they affect the layer of fire, and it may then be that the disturbance in the layer of fire continues into the layer of water and through the other layers, all the way to the uppermost one. This leads to the occurrence of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, seaquakes, and so on. If humanity works to improve moral conditions on Earth, the situation regarding natural disasters will also gradually improve. The progress of the Earth is linked to the progress of humanity; what the Earth’s interior reveals to us is merely one example of this. Research has been conducted into the relationship between the karma of the individual and the karma of the collective; investigations have been made into how a person’s future destiny might unfold, and it has been found that such people [who perish in an earthquake] usually appear in their next incarnation as particularly spiritual personalities, or at least possess the predisposition for a spiritual life. They have experienced the futility of the material world vividly and swiftly; it was the final jolt they needed to turn toward the spirit. Similarly, the martyr’s death by fire results in a special idealism in the next incarnation. The connections between births and earthquakes are also interesting. In most cases, it is found that people born immediately after an earthquake turn out to be particularly materialistic in their outlook. The force through which a person descends again from Devachan has something to do with the fire layer. The person sets the fire layer in motion to the extent that the will leading him to incarnation is of a particularly low, sensual nature at the time of his birth. At the beginning of its development, the Earth was a being capable of transformation, and humanity is likewise. Humanity has bound the Earth’s destiny to its own. You can imagine how, in light of this, the occultist’s sense of responsibility grows with regard to the spiritual currents that are brought into humanity. The Theosophical Movement is connected to a very specific goal of Earth’s evolution. It is to bring about the universal brotherhood of humankind. Its goal should therefore be to improve the Earth’s fragmentation—the eighth layer—and to save from the Earth’s center whatever can be saved. Here, the saying holds true: “Constant dripping wears away the stone.” Even the smallest effect is not lost. The person who strives to transform their soul so that the power emanating from occultism becomes effective participates in this work and will then also view everyday life in an entirely different way. The true study of occultism consists in the spiritual student penetrating ordinary, natural life with insight. Occultism can bear fruit and have a beneficial effect in all areas of life. Every soul must and will ultimately arrive at the truth. And so occultism trusts in the echo it will find within souls.