The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Past and Future Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] On the eve of the day we call the “White Lotus Day,” we remember the great figure to whom we owe the impetus for the Theosophical Movement. Fifteen years ago, on May 8, Madame Blavatsky left the physical plane. We are not speaking of a death anniversary, but of a second, different kind of birthday, when we commemorate the day on which the individuality—who accomplished so much of significance for humanity in the physical body during the last third of the 19th century—was called to other spheres to continue her work from there. This day should stir within us the feelings and sensations that lift us up, enabling us to increasingly sense that kind of work to which a human being is called when he or she no longer dwells on the physical plane. This effect can be all the more significant the more suitable instruments he or she finds on the physical plane. The members of the Theosophical Movement are to become such instruments. What enables them to do so are the spiritual-scientific truths that you take in throughout the year.

[ 2 ] The individual who, with unparalleled selflessness, was the first to proclaim the great messages upon which the Theosophical Movement is based, should draw a little closer to us on this day each year. Admittedly, there are still not many among us who have any inkling of what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky actually meant—and will continue to mean—to the world. But what does that matter? In the first century A.D., Tacitus, a historian of incomparable importance, lived in Rome. A century after its emergence, he had nothing more to say about the spiritual movement upon which our entire Western culture was founded than that, far away at the borders of the Roman Empire, there was an insignificant sect said to have been founded by a certain Jesus, a Nazarene.

[ 3 ] Is it any wonder, then, that today scholars, professors, and broad circles of the educated know nothing about Madame Blavatsky’s mission—or at least harbor the most misleading notions and prejudices? That which is great and enters the world must, according to certain laws, provoke opposition and give rise to prejudice and misunderstanding. For it will happen again and again that the small and insignificant can be overcome by that which is great and assured of the future only very gradually and slowly. What Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has brought into the world is not an event that can be assessed after a short period of time. It is an event in the face of which our words today have become mere shadows. Not only our understanding of the world, not only our perception of things, but the entire range of human feeling and sensibility will enter a new stage when what was destined in Madame Blavatsky’s mission is realized. Let us for a moment envision the transformation of consciousness that will take place in some people today and in many others in the future.

[ 4 ] To help us understand one another, I’d like to paint a picture in your mind. Let us go far back to the times of ancient Greece. What remains from that era—the marvelous works of art, the creations of poetry, and the achievements of science—the divine verses of Homer, the profound thoughts of Plato, the spiritual teachings of Pythagoras—all of this comes together for us when we take a look at what we call the Greek mysteries. Such a mystery site was both a school and a temple. It was hidden from the gaze of those who were not worthy to receive the truth into their souls, and admitted only those who had prepared themselves to approach the truth with sacred feelings. When such individuals were admitted into the sanctuary from which all art, poetry, and the sciences had emerged, the observer who had not yet been initiated into clairvoyant power was permitted to see it in a symbolic image—but the one whose slumbering spiritual powers had already been awakened saw it in reality—how the God descended into matter, incarnated there, and now rests in the realms of nature until the Resurrection. It became clear to such a student of the mysteries that all the realms of nature—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—essentially contain the slumbering God within them, and that human beings are called to experience within themselves the Resurrection of this God, to perceive their soul as a part of the Divinity. Everywhere in the outer world, human beings can perceive something from which they are to awaken the slumbering divinity. But within their own souls, they themselves feel the divine spark, perceive themselves as the divinity, and attain the certainty of their immortality, of their activity and interweaving within the infinite cosmos. Nothing can compare to the sublimity that the initiate felt in such places. Everything was present there at once: religion, art, and knowledge. He felt religion in the objects of his devout worship; his sacred admiration was kindled by the works of art; and the mysteries of the world themselves revealed themselves to him in beautiful images that called for piety. Some of the greatest who had experienced this declared: Only through initiation does a human being rise above transience and the earthly realm to the eternal. A science and an art steeped in the sacred fire of religious feeling express something that could not be more beautifully described than by the word “enthusiasm”—that is, to be in God.

[ 5 ] When we have brought this image to mind and now let our gaze wander to our own time, we see not only that we experience everything in isolation—beauty, wisdom, and piety—but our culture, which has become abstract and intellectual and has lost the living fire of those days, appears to us as something shadowy.

[ 6 ] That is why certain outstanding representatives of our spiritual life, who felt misunderstood and lonely, looked back to those great times of the infinite past, when humankind still cultivated a relationship with the spirits and gods themselves. They knew this, and in the silence of the night, many longed to return to the Mysteries of Eleusis. They were the last wondrous offshoot of the Greek Mysteries. A profound German thinker, one of those who had immersed themselves in the mysteries of existence, conveys to us the mood that came over him when his thoughts wandered back to the ancient sites of Greek wisdom—the mood of a spiritual wanderer. It was Flegel, that powerful master of thought, who sought to grasp, through contemplation, the images that the initiates of the mysteries had once beheld. The poem

is his work.

Eleusis
To Hölderlin

Peace dwells around me, within me. The restless people
Never tire of their worries. They give me freedom
And leisure. Thank you, O my
liberator, O Night! — With a veil of white mist
The moon traces the uncertain boundaries
Of the distant hills. A bright strip of the lake
Twinkles kindly across the water.
It banishes the memory of the day’s tedious clamor,
As if years lay between it and now.

[ 7 ] Thus speaks the contemplative thinker who looks deeply into the mysteries of the world, who can grasp all of this within his own heart through thought alone, and who now looks back upon the Mysteries of Eleusis. He continues:

Your image, my beloved, appears before me,
And the joy of days long past. But soon it gives way
To the sweeter hopes of our reunion.
Already I envision the scene of the long-awaited, fiery
Embrace; then the scene of questions, of the more secret,
of mutual scrutiny,
What here in my friend’s bearing, expression, and disposition
Has changed since that time;—the joy of certainty,
Of finding the loyalty of our old bond even firmer, more mature,
Of the bond that no oath sealed:
To live by free truth alone,
At peace with the code

That governs thought and feeling, never, never to yield!
Now the desire negotiates with sluggish reality,
That once carried me lightly over mountains and rivers to you.
But a sigh soon announces their discord, and with it
The sweet dream of fantasy flees.

My eye rises to the vault of the eternal sky,
To you, O shining star of the night!
And all desires, all hopes
Are forgotten as they flow down from your eternity.
The mind loses itself in this vision,
What I called “I” fades away.
I surrender myself to the immeasurable.
I am in it, I am everything, I am only it.
To the recurring thought, it is alien,
It shudders at the infinite, and, in wonder,
It cannot fathom the depth of this vision.
Imagination brings the eternal closer to the senses,
Marries it to form. — Welcome, you,
Sublime spirits, lofty shadows,
From whose brows perfection shines!
Do not be alarmed. I feel that it is also my home,
The radiance, the solemnity that surrounds you.

[ 8 ] Thus this thinker invokes the spirits who, in truth, appeared to the initiates of Eleusis. Then he invokes her himself—the goddess Ceres, who played a central role in the Mysteries. For Ceres is not only the goddess of earthly fertility, but also the source of spiritual life.

Ha! If only the gates of your sanctuary would burst open now,
O Ceres, who once reigned in Eleusis!
Drunk with inspiration, I would now feel
The thrills of your presence,
Understand your revelations,
I would interpret the lofty meaning of the images, and hear
The hymns at the gods’ feasts,
The lofty sayings of their council.

But your halls have fallen silent, O Goddess!
The circle of gods has fled to Olympus
Back from the desecrated altars,
Fleeing from the desecrated tomb of humanity
The genius of innocence that conjured them here.
The wisdom of your priests is silent.
Not a single sound of the sacred consecrations
Has reached us, and in vain does
The researcher’s curiosity seeks more than love
For wisdom. They possess the seekers and despise you.
To master them, they dig for words,
In which your lofty spirit would be imprinted.
In vain! They catch only dust and ashes,
In which your life will never, ever return to them.
Yet even amid decay and lifelessness, they found pleasure
The eternally dead, the contented ones! — In vain, there remained
No sign of your feasts, no trace of an image.
To the son of consecration, the abundance of lofty teachings,
The depth of ineffable feeling was far too sacred,
To deign to acknowledge their dry symbols.
Even the thought itself cannot be grasped by the soul,
Which, beyond time and space, immersed in a foreshadowing of infinity
Forgets itself and now awakens once more to consciousness.
Whoever might even wish to speak of this to others,
Even if he spoke with the tongues of angels, would feel the poverty of words.
He shudders at having conceived the sacred as so small,
At having diminished it through them, so that speech seems like a sin to him,
And so that, trembling, he seals his lips.
What the consecrated one thus forbade himself, a wise
Law forbade the poorer spirits from revealing,
What they had seen, heard, and felt on that holy night,
Lest even the better ones be disturbed in their devotion by the clamor of their own folly
And their hollow verbiage
Provoke them to anger against the Holy One Himself, so that it might not
Be trampled into the mire, and so that it might not
memory, lest it
become a plaything and a commodity for the sophist,
whom he sold for a pittance,
for the cloak of the eloquent hypocrite, or even
for the rod of the joyful boy, and thus become so empty
in the end that it would find the roots of its life only in the echo
From foreign tongues would it have the roots of its life.
Your sons, Goddess, carried it sparingly,
Not your honor in the streets and markets; they kept it
In the inner sanctuary of the breast.
Therefore you did not live on their lips.
Their lives honored you. In their deeds you still live.

This night, too, O holy Deity, I heard you.
The lives of your children often reveal you to me as well,
I often sense you as the soul of their deeds!
You are the lofty spirit, the faithful belief,
That, as a deity, does not waver even when all else perishes.

[ 9 ] In more recent times, it has been necessary for the power of thought to find expression, on the one hand, in an idealistic manner and, on the other, in a more materialistic way. Hegel, too, was no longer understood, and he ranks among the lost spirits of humanity as a whole. Everything was permeated by the spirit of materialism in the second half of the 19th century, and even today this spirit prevails in the widest circles. Should it gain the upper hand, it would lead humanity to complete stagnation in its cultural manifestations.

[ 10 ] A peculiar mindset came to dominate in the second half of the 19th century. As late as the 18th century, Lessing had said that a belief need not be nonsensical simply because it arose during the pure, innocent childhood of humanity. Yet the materialist dismisses this belief—which is found among all peoples as the foundation of culture—as childish, fanciful notions, and sees only in what scientific thought has produced something that corresponds to the mature, adult mind. Practical life has become a frantic rush for material goods to satisfy purely physical needs, and things that are far worse still threaten to arise as a consequence. Science, with its motto, “How wonderfully far we have come,” at the same time considers itself immensely superior to everything that humanity has previously produced in order to gain a connection with the world: the wisdom of the Chaldean and Babylonian priests, the teachings of Pythagoras and others. It is said of the great Plato that no one can make sense of the confused material he left behind. The *Timaeus* is called incomprehensible, but no one seeks the reason why it is not understood. Here we might recall Lichtenberg’s words: When a head and a book collide and it sounds hollow, it need not be the book’s fault. — In practice, materialism has also given rise to hypocrisy, which above all refuses to admit that purely material pursuits alone dominate life. Rarely has there been so much talk of ideals and so little understanding of them as in this era.

[ 11 ] Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s mission took place during this period. It is fair to say—without in any way diminishing the significance of her personality—that her soul was entrusted with a task that was actually too great for it. If one seeks to unravel the mystery of why this particular woman was called upon to bring the message of Theosophy to the world, one arrives at the conclusion that she offered the only means by which the leading spirits could make themselves understood to the people of the West. Those who held official positions lacked even the slightest understanding of what spiritual truths were necessary for humanity. Even the concept of the spirit had been lost, and when people spoke of the spirit, it was nothing more than an empty word. This remarkable woman, who from her youth possessed extraordinary psychic and spiritual gifts, was called upon to bring a message to the world that no scholar was capable of conveying. From the earliest days, she viewed the world as something different from what nineteenth-century education prescribed. In everything that surrounds us, she could perceive spiritual beings that were just as real to her as anything tangible. And from her early youth, one thing was characteristic of her: a profound reverence for a sublime spirit. Without this profound reverence, no human being can ever attain true knowledge. No matter how sharp one’s intellect or how penetrating one’s reason may be, or even if one has developed dim clairvoyant powers—one cannot advance to genuine, true knowledge without what is called profound reverence. For true knowledge can be given to us only by those beings who, in their development, have far outstripped humanity. Everyone admits that individual human beings are at different stages of development. In our materialistic age, people may be reluctant to admit this, yet certain differences cannot be denied. Yet most people seem to believe that their own understanding is already the highest. They are not quick to admit that there are even higher beings, beyond Goethe and Francis of Assisi. Nevertheless, this is the fundamental prerequisite for true knowledge. No one attains it who lacks this great reverence, which has been entirely lost in the leveling outlook of our time.

[ 12 ] This profound reverence implies an important truth for human beings. We all come from spiritual worlds, from an original life in the spirit. The truly divine part of our soul originates from a divine source. There was a time for each of us when the ability to look out from the spiritual world into the sensory world was first awakened within us. In ancient times, all people possessed a dim but clairvoyant consciousness. Images arose from their souls that pointed to a reality surrounding them. It was only later that sensory consciousness, as we know it today, began to take shape. At a certain moment in each of our developments—as symbolically depicted for Eve in the story of the Garden of Eden—the serpent of knowledge approached each of us and, in a past incarnation long ago, spoke these words: “Your eyes will be opened; you will recognize good and evil in the visible outer world.” — The serpent has always been the symbol of the great spiritual teachers. Everyone had such an advanced teacher; at one time, each was with one who spoke these words to them: “You will one day recognize the sensory world.”

[ 13 ] A person who possesses great reverence will encounter such a teacher once more in their lifetime, when their spiritual senses are opened. In occultism, this is called the “rediscovery of the Guru,” the great teacher whom everyone must seek and whom one can find only if one possesses great reverence and, at the same time, knows that there is something that transcends the average human condition.

[ 14 ] This deep reverence and awareness of the existence of the great Teachers lived within Madame Blavatsky, and that is why she was called upon to pass on something of these great Teachers to humanity. The Guru reigns in secret, and only those who have found the path to him themselves are able to recognize him. Thus, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky possessed the right intuition to give present-day humanity something entirely new.

[ 15 ] Anyone who has gained even a little insight into the places where truth is upheld can appreciate that the pursuit of such a new truth involves many difficulties. Then, for the person who understands something of the search for truth, the time comes when he learns to refrain from criticizing great personalities. He no longer focuses on their mundane aspects. Only those who have no idea of the position great figures hold in the world cling to these mundane aspects. But whoever sees through the bigger picture is grateful for what these figures have contributed. This is also the only possible stance toward a figure such as Madame Blavatsky. “Much admired and much reviled,” this Helena, too, walked among humanity, and it is doubtful whether such nonsense and folly has ever been said or written about anyone as it has been about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—and, of course, about all those who were of equal stature to her. Scholars have made the strange claim that she wrote a major work—*The Secret Doctrine*—which contains the Dzyan stanzas. These stanzas are said to represent ancient traditions. Her opponents, however, claim that Madame Blavatsky invented these stanzas and led the world to believe they were ancient traditions. Only scholarship really stoops to such folly. For let us assume just for a moment that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had indeed invented these stanzas, and let us immerse ourselves in them. If we devote ourselves to them for just a while—perhaps two or three years—we will find that, while all scholarship and all discoveries still interest us, but compared to the great revelations contained in these Dzyan stanzas, everything that modern science has achieved to date actually seems utterly trivial. Do you not think that our reverence for Helena Petrovna Blavatsky might then grow even more? However, to anyone who devotes a short period of two to three years to penetrating the deep meaning of these stanzas, it will be irrelevant whether these stanzas were written thousands of years ago or composed by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the last third of the 19th century. Upon reflection, one must even admit that the miracle would be all the greater in the latter case. This makes the critics’ objections seem all the more foolish, as they merely demonstrate that they have not understood a single word of the whole matter. Here you have a glimpse of the great obstacles that stood in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s way. Then people go on to say that she had this or that flaw. Such people are unlikely to have any sense of her true significance.

[ 16 ] Now, Madame Blavatsky has shared with humanity revelations from the occult worlds. Anyone familiar with this journey into the occult worlds—as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky undertook it—also knows the dangers associated with it. When one considers how easily the passions can be aroused by the sensory world, and what abysses are experienced by one who had to peer into the occult worlds as deeply as was necessary to write a book like *The Secret Doctrine*, one no longer questions the external circumstances associated with this significant figure and her surroundings. Even this strong character was nearly shattered by the world’s resistance. Precisely because she faced so much incomprehension and false authority, and given the receptivity and sensitivity of her occult powers, we can understand that she reached the twilight of her life as a personality who was, in a certain sense, broken. But what she has given to the world shall live on in humanity and have a future.

[ 17 ] The mood I sought to paint before your souls through the words of one of the greatest sons of modern times—this mood of longing—must spread ever more widely. It will find fulfillment in what Madame Blavatsky was to bring to the world and what is to be developed more and more fully. It is precisely when we regard her as an inspirer that we honor this figure most. She sought only to serve as a faithful disciple of the great spiritual forces that stood behind her, and only those who act in accordance with these spiritual forces are truly working in the spirit of the Theosophical movement. Spiritual life, which has become shadow-like, will regain its vitality as people come to understand more and more what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky sought to bring into the world with such courage, energy, and boldness. And it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of what such a Lotus Day can be if we look beyond all the historical gossip and strive to focus on the essential.

[ 18 ] This is the correct understanding of the Theosophical Movement when we realize that the living spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is to continue to work through us for the benefit and progress of humanity. Then we will not merely say, out of idle sentimentality, that this spirit is immortal and is celebrating a new birthday; rather, we ourselves will contribute to ensuring that it lives and works where it is meant to work. For that was surely the founder’s sole personal wish: that the members of the Theosophical Movement become the living instruments of expression for the spirit that she, in a selfless manner, placed entirely at the service of this spiritual movement; and the more the members understand this spirit of selflessness, and the more they come to realize that there is a duty to seek knowledge, the more they embody the spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One always hears people say, “The main thing is love and compassion.” Certainly, love and compassion are the main thing, but only knowledge can make love and compassion fruitful. There is a certain complacency—and it is by no means rare, even among those who believe they are striving for the Spirit. To say “love”—that can be learned in a second. —But to acquire knowledge for the salvation and blessing of humanity—that takes an eternity. And to internalize this awareness within ourselves—that knowledge is the foundation of all true spiritual work—this must increasingly become the purpose of the Theosophical Movement. That is why it is essential to follow in the footsteps of the founder of our movement with tireless pursuit of knowledge—step by step, without being led astray by a complacency that refuses to learn but instead wishes to grasp everything in a single day. This can be studied precisely through the works and the life’s work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and therefore all talk that arises from idle complacency is futile. But what we are to learn—by pursuing it as a continuation of what she herself began on the physical plane—is the pursuit of spiritual-scientific knowledge.