The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I described to you how the great Initiate selected a group from among the Proto-Semites in the region of present-day Ireland, led them to the East, and settled them there. There, the Manu made his chosen ones the progenitors of the new cultures. He instructed them and gave them guidelines for a moral way of life that was prescribed down to the smallest details: how to organize their time and how to perform their work from morning until evening. But even more than through his teachings, he educated them through his direct influence and his thoughts. His influence was directly suggestive; when he sent his thoughts into the colony, his ideas and prescriptions took effect suggestively. Such an influence was what the people of that time needed for their transformation.

[ 2 ] The following scene, which took place in the mid-19th century, is characteristic of the difference in worldview between the Atlantic and the new root race. European colonists had persuaded the Native Americans—whom we must regard as descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who remained within the Atlantic culture—to cede tracts of land to them on the condition that new hunting grounds would be assigned to them. This promise had not been kept, and the chief could not understand why. This was the occasion for the following conversation. The Native American said: “You palefaces promised us that your chief would assign other land to our brothers after you had taken this from us. Your feet now stand on our land and tread upon the graves of our fathers. The white man has not kept his promise to the brown man.” You palefaces have black instruments with all sorts of little magical symbols—meaning books—and from these you learn to discern what your God wants. But that must be a bad God who does not teach people to keep their word. The brown man does not have such a God; the brown man hears the thunder and sees the lightning, and he understands this language; that is how his God speaks to him. He hears the rustling of the leaves and trees in the forest—there, too, his God speaks to him. He hears the waves splashing in the stream, and then the brown man understands this language. He senses when a storm is rising. Everywhere he hears his God speaking to him, and this God teaches something quite different from what your black magic symbols tell you.

[ 3 ] This is actually a rather significant speech, for it contains a kind of creed. The Atlantean did not rise to his God through rational concepts and ideas, but rather sensed, as it were, something sacred in all of nature as a fundamental chord of the divinity; he breathed in and out his God, as it were. And if one wanted to express what one heard in this way, one would summarize it in a sound similar to the Chinese Tao. For the Atlantean, this was the sound that flowed through all of nature. When he touched a leaf, when he saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that he had a part of the divinity before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the divinity. Just as one perceives a person’s soul in a handshake, so the Atlanteans, when they touched a natural formation, perceived the body of the divinity. They lived in an entirely different religious sensibility. Added to this was the fact that the Atlanteans were gifted with clairvoyance and thus were in communication with the spirit world.

[ 4 ] But then mathematical and logical thinking developed, and the more it advanced, the more clairvoyance diminished. People became much more preoccupied with what their senses perceived from the outside world, and as a result, nature was increasingly stripped of its divinity. People acquired a new gift at the expense of an old one. To the extent that they attained the gift of precise sensory perception, they ceased to understand that nature is the body of the Divine. Little by little, they saw before them only the body of the world, no longer the soul. This gave rise to a longing for the Divine in post-Atlantean humanity. For it was written in their hearts: “Behind nature there must be the Deity”—and they recognized that they must seek it with the spirit. The word “religion” means nothing other than seeking to reestablish a connection with the Deity; “religere” means to reconnect. Now there are various paths to finding the Deity. The first subrace of the post-Atlantean Aryan race, the Indians, followed this path. A few God-filled messengers of the Man, called the holy Rishis, became the teachers of the ancient Indian culture—a culture of which no poetry or tradition tells, and which is known only through the oral traditions of the secret schools. Marvelous works of literature, such as the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, arose much later. The ancient Indian told himself: What remains to us as external nature is not true nature; behind this nature lies the Divinity. — And what lies hidden behind nature, he called Brahman, the hidden God. For him, the entire external world was merely illusion, deception, Maya. And while the Atlanteans still sensed the deity in every leaf, the Indians said: “Nowhere in the outer world does the deity reveal itself. One must immerse oneself in the inner world. One must seek the deity within one’s own heart; one must pursue it in a higher, spiritual state.” — Every approach to the deity had retained something dreamlike. The Indians found no deity in nature; in grand and powerful mental images, in visions and imaginings, the world of Brahman revealed itself to him. Yoga was the training he underwent to reach beyond illusion to the Spirit, to the Primordial Being. The profound Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita—this hymn to human perfection—are but echoes of that ancient divine wisdom.

[ 5 ] This was the first stage at which humanity sought to return to the divine; it is a stage that did not lead to particularly great achievements in external culture. For the Indian turned away from all that is external; he sought the higher life only through a spiritual absorption detached from the world.

[ 6 ] The second subrace, the Proto-Persians, had a different mission; their culture, too, originated from Manu in a well-calculated manner. Even before the time of Zoroaster, the ancient Persians had an ancient culture that has been preserved solely through oral tradition. It now occurred to humankind that external reality was a reflection of the deity, and that one must not turn away from it but rather transform it. The Persian wanted to transform nature; he wanted to work on it; he became a farmer. He stepped out of the silence of the otherworldly realm of thought and realized, from the resistance he encountered, that not everything was Maya after all—that alongside the world of the spirit, there also existed a very real world of reality. Alongside the world of the spirit, he found a world in which one had to work. Gradually, the conviction grew within him that there are two worlds: a world of the good spirit, into which one can immerse oneself, and the other world, which one must work on. And then he said to himself: In the world of the spirit, I will find the ideas and concepts through which I will transform external reality, so that it itself becomes a reflection of the eternal spirit.

[ 7 ] Thus, the Persian saw himself caught in a struggle between two worlds, and this later took on the form of the two powers of Ormuzd—the world of the good spirit—and Ahriman—the world that must be transformed. But one thing was still missing for the Persians: the external world stood before them as an entity they did not understand; they could find no laws within it. They did not realize that the spiritual is to be found in nature; they felt only resistance in their work.

[ 8 ] These universal laws were discovered by the third subrace—the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian peoples—and later by the Semites, who emerged from them as a branch. They looked up at the starry sky, observed the course of the celestial bodies and their influence on human life, and subsequently devised a science through which they could understand the movement and influence of the celestial bodies. They connected heaven and earth. We can examine the character of this third subrace through an example. The Egyptians observed: The Nile floods the land at a specific time and makes it fertile. This always occurs at the rising of a certain constellation, Sirius. — And so the Egyptians observed the timing of the floods. They associated the constellation visible in the sky at that time with the activity of the Nile. They also observed the position of the sun in connection with the arrival and departure of certain birds, the rising and setting of the stars, and their relationships to one another and to humanity, thereby developing a science. It became clear to them that great wisdom prevailed in all natural processes, that everything occurred according to great laws, which they sought to fathom. Above all, it was the ancient Chaldean priests who were the bearers of profound wisdom. Yet the laws of nature were not abstract laws to them. They did not see the stars as mere physical celestial spheres; they saw each planet as animated by a being whose body was the planet itself. Very concretely, they imagined the life-giving deity behind every constellation. Thus, the Egyptian and the Chaldean sensed that they were enclosed in the bosom of the world of spirits as spirits among spirits; they saw matter filled with wisdom.

[ 9 ] As you can see, humanity had gradually come to recognize wisdom in the external natural world once again through science, thereby renewing what had been a natural, clairvoyant knowledge inherent in the ancient Atlanteans.

[ 10 ] The fourth subrace, the Greco-Roman culture, was not directly influenced by Manu, but was influenced by the other cultures. It, in turn, had a different mission: art. Little by little, humankind had found the path to the spiritualization of nature. The Greeks went further than the Egyptians; they did not take ready-made images of nature, but rather took unformed matter—marble—and imprinted their own mark upon it. They fashioned Zeus and the other gods themselves. The third subrace sought the spirit in the external world; the fourth subrace imprinted the spirit upon it themselves. Art—the enchantment of the spirit into matter—was the exclusive domain of the Greco-Latin race.

[ 11 ] The Egyptians studied the movements of the stars and used them to shape the structure of their states for centuries to come. The Greeks imbued the external human community—the cities of Sparta, Colchis, and so on—with what they drew from within themselves. The Romans went even further; they reshaped not only stone and metal, but also the entire great human community according to their spirit.

[ 12 ] The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, the fifth subrace, go even further in shaping the external world. This subrace, to which we ourselves belong, not only imprints upon matter what lives within human beings, but also imprints upon matter the very laws of nature. It discovers the divine laws of the universe—the laws of gravity, light, heat, steam, and electricity—and, with their help, reshapes the entire sensory world. Its mission is to study not only the laws slumbering within human beings, but also the laws that permeate the entire world, and to imprint them upon the external world. As a result, all of humanity has become more materialistic; no Zeus could emerge, but rather—the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, and so on.

[ 13 ] Another race will follow us, one that will in turn find its way back. In our race, humanity has reached the pinnacle of the transformation of the physical world. We have descended the farthest onto the physical plane; we have gone to the very limits in our conquest of the physical plane.

[ 14 ] That was the task of post-Atlantean humanity. The Indian had turned away from the physical. The Persian recognized it as a mass that offered him resistance. The Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Egyptians recognized the wisdom of nature. The Greeks and Romans continued to conquer the physical plane from within, and only our human civilization has advanced far enough to incorporate the laws of nature into the physical plane. And now humanity will become more spiritual once again.

[ 15 ] The course of human development is immense and meaningful. Every group of people has its task. What still lives on in myths and legends in the third and fourth subraces—the memory of primeval times, of the world of the gods—our humanity no longer has any part in it; it has only the physical world. With its emergence onto the physical plane, humanity lost its connection to the world of the gods; only the physical world remains for it.

[ 16 ] The Theosophist is not a reactionary; he knows that the material era was a necessity. Just as animals, after taking up residence in dark caves, developed other organs to a great extent but saw their organs of sight atrophy, so it happens everywhere in the spiritual and sensory world: Where one ability develops, another must recede. The gift of clairvoyance and the power of memory had to recede so that physical sight could develop. When humans learned to master the external world through the laws of nature, they had to forfeit their spiritual vision.

[ 17 ] How differently people used to see things! Copernicus, for example, freed humanity from the old misconception that the Earth stands still. He taught that it was a mistake to assume that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Kepler and Galileo further developed this theory. And yet both Copernicus and Ptolemy are correct; it all depends on the vantage point from which one observes the Sun and the Earth. If one views our solar system not from the physical plane but from the astral plane, then the Ptolemaic system is the correct one. There, the Earth stands at the center, and things are as the ancient world described them. One need only remember that on the astral plane everything appears reversed. The Ptolemaic system thus applies to the astral plane, while the Copernican system applies to the physical plane. In the future, an entirely different worldview will emerge. Usually, it is merely emphasized that Copernicus taught two things: that the Earth rotates on its axis and that the Earth revolves around the Sun. No attention is paid to the fact that he taught yet another movement—namely, that the entire system moves in a spiral. This remains overlooked until humanity returns to it in the future. Copernicus stood at the threshold and still retained strong ties to the old world.

[ 18 ] There is no absolute truth; every truth has its purpose at a specific time. And when we speak of Theosophy today, we know that when we are reborn, we will hear something different and relate to one another in a completely different way.

[ 19 ] Let us look back to times when we may have been together before in some part of northern Europe, where people gathered around the Druid priest who told them the truth in the form of myths and legends. Had we not listened, and had he not shaped our souls, we would not understand what Theosophy now brings back to us as truth in a different form. And when we return, it will be spoken in a different form—a higher form. Truth evolves like everything else in the world. It is the form of the divine Spirit, but the divine Spirit has many forms. If we imbue ourselves with this nature of truth, we will gain an entirely different relationship to it. We will say to ourselves: Although we live in truth, it can take the most diverse forms. — We will then also view present-day humanity in an entirely different way. We will not say that we possess the absolute truth; rather, we will say: These fellow human beings now stand at a point of view where we, too, once stood. — We have a duty to engage with what the other person says; we need only make it clear to them that we value them at the level of truth on which they stand. Everyone has something to learn, and thus we become tolerant toward every form of truth. In this way, we learn to understand everything; we do not fight against people, but seek to live with them. Modern humanity has developed the freedom of the individual. Theosophy will cultivate an inner tolerance of the soul based on this fundamental view of truth.

[ 20 ] Love is higher than opinion. The most diverse opinions can coexist when people love one another. That is why it is deeply meaningful that, in the Theosophical worldview, no religion is attacked and none is singled out; rather, all are understood, and a brotherhood can develop because members of the most diverse religions understand one another.

[ 21 ] But this is one of humanity’s most important tasks today and in the future: this living together with others, this mutual understanding. And as long as this sense of human community does not develop, there can be no question of occult development.