The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Origin of Religious Creeds and Prayer Formulas

[ 1 ] Humanity began with an all-encompassing fundamental worldview, and depending on the character of the peoples and the climatic conditions in which they lived, this worldview took on different forms in their religious creeds. Just as in the Lord’s Prayer, the fundamental concepts of spiritual science appear to us in all other religious formulas and creeds. Though some may say they are merely imagined, they are in fact contained therein. But how did they come to be included? To answer this, we must realize that what is taught to us today was not presented in the same way in the most ancient views. The formulations of religious creeds varied greatly at different times. The older worldviews speak in images, not in concepts, as we do today. These images were preserved in a certain way, and we find them again and again. Thus, knowledge is always spoken of as a light, and wisdom is described as flowing water. But why was it that the ancient peoples were addressed in imagery? Let us try to understand how, before Hermes, before Buddha, Zoroaster, and Moses—and before the greatest religious founder, Christ—the religious teachers spoke to the peoples.

[ 2 ] We must distinguish between everyday consciousness and imaginative consciousness. We experience concrete, everyday consciousness from morning until night. In this state, we see things as they appear to our senses. The other states of consciousness are initially hidden from us. We have all heard of the state of dreamless sleep. For the initiate, this has a completely different meaning than it does for ordinary people. From the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the initiate remains in a conscious state. He perceives a world—albeit differently, in a completely different way than usual. The ordinary person knows nothing of this state. The consciousness of dream-filled sleep is more familiar to us. Thus, dream-filled sleep will now explain dreamless sleep to us.

[ 3 ] Dream-filled sleep reveals everything in symbols. It is similar to the state of consciousness of the initiate when he is in the spiritual world. The initiate also sees images, but not chaotic dream images, although his images, too, are constantly changing. On the physical plane, every object has only one form—for example, a table or a stone. But the higher we ascend, the more the form is in a state of transformation. Plants transform and move; animals do so even more; and human beings are the most mobile and capable of transformation. In Devachan, everything is constantly in a state of transformation. Through certain exercises, one can achieve a state in which, when looking at a plant, its color stands out from it and floats up and down in open space. Then one must learn to direct such freely floating colors—and also sounds—toward specific things and beings. Then color becomes an expression of inner life. This is also how the human aura manifests in color and form. Inner spiritual experience is expressed through it. It, too, is never still. It is an eternal movement; eternal movement is the very essence of the higher world. This is also what makes the spiritual world so confusing for those entering it for the first time. What manifests from moment to moment confuses the inexperienced. No spiritual being can conceal its inner life from those who see with spiritual eyes. The ordinary person must infer the inner from the outer. In the spiritual world, the inner life of every being lies freely and openly before us. There we are in the presence of the innermost essence of things. This can now be attained only by the initiate, who can bring the inner essence of things to the surface. And he does this consciously. Long ago, people were once able to do this unconsciously. The older people get, the less they are able to do what we can: they cannot calculate or count. They know nothing of logic. This was the case in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. But the Atlanteans were able to do something else. They could feel a very specific sensation welling up within them when, for example, they looked at a plant. In contrast, our feelings are pale and shadowy. The earliest Atlanteans did not yet have as clear a sense of color as we do. The Atlantean saw the color rising freely from the plant, like mist. Nor would he have seen the color of a crystal. He saw, for example, a halo of colors around a ruby, while the ruby itself appeared only as a cutout within it. Before this time, human beings could not even perceive the outlines of people, animals, and plants. But when they approached an enemy, they saw a form of brownish-reddish color rising up. A beautiful bluish-reddish color indicated a friend. In this way, they perceived inner life through individual colors.

[ 4 ] If we go back even further, to the Lemurian era, even all the impulses of the will were different. The will still acted in a “magical” way; it revealed its kinship with the forces of nature outside. If a person placed a hand on a plant back then and allowed their will to take effect, it grew visibly. As a result of humans enclosing themselves within a skin, their powers became separated from the forces of nature.

[ 5 ] The powers of thought are the least like nature. Even further back in time, there were beings who would have considered it absurd to say, “I have a concept of something external.”—For they saw the concept outside themselves, at work, as a reality. Concepts originally gave form to things. Today we look at a clock and form a concept of it. But we could not form the concept of “clock” if someone had not first formed this concept—before clocks even existed—and then constructed a clock based on it. It is exactly the same with the concepts of all things. The concepts we form about the things of the world existed as realities in the distant past. Back then, they were embedded within the things themselves. Everything comes into being according to such concepts, just as human beings do with their creations today. Those beings of that time, so to speak, observed the Master Craftsman of all things. They possessed a creative intellect. They were not yet embodied in a physical body. What dwells in the human body today still rested in the bosom of the Deity at that time. Down on Earth, there was already physical life and beings that stood between today’s animals and humans and were ready to receive the human soul. One can imagine this through an analogy. When many small sponges are immersed in water, each sponge will absorb droplets of water, and thus the water is divided into countless individual drops. The physical Earth, with its teeming multitude of beings, was at that time surrounded by a spiritual envelope, just as we are today surrounded by an envelope of air. It was only then, once each being had absorbed a spiritual droplet, that individual souls came into being. This also initiated the process through which human beings acquire a complete, concrete consciousness.

[ 6 ] Previously, the soul received everything from the World Soul as if from within, for the World Soul knew everything. That is the difference between knowledge today and knowledge back then. The inner world sinks into the darkness of dreamless sleep when bright daytime consciousness sets in. It is the astral body that perceives the external world: it sees colors, hears sounds, and feels pleasure and pain, but it cannot do so without the physical body. The astral body is also the same one that was once part of the collective soul substance. If all people were to fall asleep at the same time and their astral bodies were to intermingle—and also intermingle with that which, from the general world soul, did not descend into individual bodies—then dreamless sleep would cease; colors and sounds would rise up within the astral bodies, just as it was in the past when all souls still rested within the world soul. What is night today was once filled with light, filled with perceptions in the spiritual world. This is how all of humanity once perceived the astral world.

[ 7 ] What has humanity perceived since that time? What has humankind achieved since then? Its sense of self—the ability to say “I” to itself. All earlier consciousness was merely an intensified form of dream consciousness; people were not self-aware. Self-consciousness was bestowed upon human beings as they descended into the physical body. And it continues to grow more and more. It constitutes the essence of humanity’s current development. “I am who I am” has revealed itself to humankind. That is the true name of Yahweh: “I am who I am,” or, to put it more fully: “I am who was, who is, and who will be.” In that distant past, this consciousness was not present in human beings. Where was there an “I Am” consciousness? In the being in which souls were contained like drops in water. The Holy Spirit is the one who possessed the I-consciousness above before incarnation. The Spirit itself is that which gives rise to I-consciousness in human beings.

[ 8 ] In that distant past, teaching was a pouring out of wisdom: it came from within, not from without. From that time until the present, there was an intervening period: the Atlantean era. It was in the midst of this era that people began to perceive the outlines of things and beings. Yet everything was still shrouded in a mist of colors and resonated with sounds that had something to say—sounds that were wise. It was then that a teaching arose which later evolved into religious doctrine. Eons ago, there was a great school of adepts there. Everything we learn today originates from those Turanian adepts. It has been passed down by students to the present day. Back then, however, teaching was done quite differently than it is today. One had to take into account that humanity was in an intermediate state. Even the wisest men could not have counted beyond five. But by responding to their inner nature, one could enlighten them—teach them wisdom through imagery. One could not have conveyed the teachings of wisdom to them through words; they would not have been understood. The people of that time did not yet possess such a clear waking consciousness as we do today. However, they could easily be brought back into that state in which the Divine enlightened them from within. The teachers put the students into a state of hypnosis. This was not, however, the hypnotic state with which so much nonsense is practiced today, but something similar. The teachers used this sleep-like state to enlighten the students. Back then, they had occult script—what one might also call an occult language. There are still mantras that have more than just intellectual value. But these pale in comparison to the tonal compositions of that time. These tonal compositions were simple, but when a tone was struck, the lost capacity for enlightenment was restored. Then that world of inner enlightenment entered the person artificially; he saw the world spirits at work just as in days of old. The student then received formulas and specific drawings from the teachers. He then perceived the secrets of the worlds directly. For example, this sign told him how a new plant grows from a seed:

[ 9 ] Modern people cannot understand or feel anything about this without an interpretation. For the people of that time, this symbol had an immediate effect when they saw it or when it was tapped. The founders of religions then taught the formulas used at that time to later peoples.

[ 10 ] The further back we go, the more unified the world soul still was. In sleep, the astral bodies of all people are still quite similar to one another. Thus, back then in Atlantis, the astral bodies were all the same. It was possible to impart a primordial wisdom to all people. After the great flood had swept over the people of Atlantis, a unified wisdom was no longer possible. Now, in India, one had to teach in the way the Indian constitution demanded; differently in Persia; differently in Egypt; differently among the Greeks and Romans; and yet differently among the ancient Germanic peoples. But in all true forms of religion, that from which they arose lives on. In Atlantis, enlightenment was a communication of life, not of doctrine. The sign of the vortex, after all, directly aroused sensation. Today, feelings must first be kindled by concepts. Even the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer were once communicated like a musical scale of seven notes, associated with specific colors and scents.

[ 11 ] This is how the Atlantean disciple experienced the sevenfold nature of the human being. The greatest of the religious teachers, Christ, poured this into the Lord’s Prayer. Everyone who prays the Lord’s Prayer experiences its effect. It is not a mantra in the strict sense, although it can possess mantric powers. It is a thought mantra. Admittedly, it possessed the greatest power in its original language. But since it is, after all, a thought-mantra, it will not lose its power, even if it is translated into a thousand languages. Just as one can digest food without knowing the laws of digestion, so too does one reap the fruit of the Lord’s Prayer even without understanding it, although the spiritually advanced reap an entirely different fruit from it.

[ 12 ] This is the path that religious truths have taken. All our souls were once somnambulistic within the World Soul. It was divided and drawn down into many bodies. Spiritual perception was obscured, as was the possibility of restoring the original state. Religious teachings—and especially the formulas drawn from the spiritual world—are merely an echo in concepts and words. The wisdom of the Old Testament still speaks of primordial ideas and ideas. A faint reflection of the primordial ideas lives on in these ideas. But that primordial wisdom is not lost. It still rests in our slumbering souls. And bringing this up into clear, luminous consciousness is the work of spiritual science. When, after the last incarnation, a person has come to know the entire external world, then he will be received into the original clairvoyance and will bring with him new enlightenment—luminous consciousness. “Merging into universal consciousness is salvation,” they say in the East. It will not be so. In the past, before the first incarnation, there was no sense of self. But it will be present after the last incarnation. Every drop of the single soul-fluid takes on a very specific color; each one a different one. In the end, each brings its own color, and the once bright, clear water becomes iridescent with infinitely beautiful, luminous colors—each of which exists independently. Each brings its own specific color, its individual consciousness, which cannot be lost. The harmony of all consciousnesses is, ultimately, the Universal Consciousness. In freedom, the many will—because they so choose—become one! We must imagine this as it truly is. Every individual consciousness is wholly contained within the Universal Consciousness.

[ 13 ] This evolution of humanity is not in vain. Yes, life has a meaning, and the most beautiful meaning is that, in the end, human beings will lay upon the altar of the Divine that part of human existence which they themselves have earned. And from this is woven the garment that the Earth Spirit spins, as Goethe so beautifully and upliftingly says:

In the torrents of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Weaving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life,
Thus I create at the whirring loom of time,
And weave a living garment for the Deity.