The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism XIII

[ 1 ] Today and tomorrow, my task will be to show you the path to the higher worlds that is particularly suited to the present time—a path that has been cultivated, especially since the 14th and 15th centuries, within what is known as “esoteric training,” and which is most suitable for people today. We will better understand what this entails if we first take a look at the future development of humankind.

[ 2 ] We have spoken about human evolution through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth stages. Now, for those who think only in terms of the present, it is difficult to imagine how one can know anything about the future. But you must realize that certain great laws operate just as much in the future as they do in the present. Anyone familiar with these laws can glimpse into the future. In the realm of material reality, no one will doubt any longer that prophetic predictions can be made—for example, that solar and lunar eclipses and other celestial configurations can be calculated far into the future. In the realm of material reality, no one will doubt this anymore. Everyone also knows that if they are told that this or that substance will be mixed in a retort, the scientist can say what will happen when they are mixed. This is a prophecy that relates to external, sensory facts; one can make such a prophecy because one knows the laws according to which the substances act. In the same way, in spiritual science one learns the laws according to which human life unfolds, and one can therefore foreknow what will happen in the future.

[ 3 ] Of course, this raises an objection that has been raised by philosophers throughout the ages: If one can foresee what will happen in the future, then there can be no question of human freedom. — But people confuse looking into the future with predestination. That is why you find the strangest assertions about this in all philosophies; for all philosophers have failed to make this distinction. Actually, only Jakob Böhme did! To make this clear to you, I would like to give an example.

[ 4 ] I would like to compare time to space. Imagine you are standing here, and outside on the street there are two people. You can see from a distance what they are doing. Does that make you the one who determines what they do? No, you see it; but the other two act in complete freedom. Your observing them does not determine what they do. Now imagine that a clairvoyant sees what will happen in the future. But that is all he sees; this does not determine the events. If these events were determined by the future—that is, if they were already determined in the present, as it were—then that would not be “seeing into the future.” One only understands this distinction clearly after thinking long and hard about the difference between predestination and foresight.

[ 5 ] Today I do not wish to describe to you so much what the Earth will look like when the Age of Jupiter and Venus has arrived. I would like to tell you something else that will give you a picture of human development into the future; I would like to present to you something that originates from the oldest Christian mysteries, from the same Christian school of the genuine Dionysius, as a teaching that has always been presented in Christian esoteric schools. It was based on the following analogy: I am speaking to you here. You hear my words; you hear my thoughts, which are first within my soul—thoughts I could also keep hidden from you if I did not put them into words. I translate them into sounds; if the air were not spread out between you and me, you would not be able to hear the words. Whenever I utter a word here, the air in the room is set in motion at that very moment; each time, I set the entire airspace into a certain state of vibration with my words; the entire air mass vibrates in the manner in which my words are spoken. Let us now go a step further. Imagine you could make the air liquid and then solid. After all, even today we can make our air solid; you know that water can exist as vapor, that it can cool down and then become liquid, and that it can solidify into ice. Now imagine that I speak the word “God” through the air. If, at the very moment the sound waves reached you, you could solidify the air, then a shape—such as a shell, for example—would fall down. With the word “world,” a different wave would fall down. You could catch my words, and each word would correspond to a crystallized form of air.

[ 6 ] This example did in fact exist in Christian schools. First, something is a spoken word; then it becomes solid, taking on a fixed form; even earlier, before it had solidified, it was a thought hidden within. Now the Christian imagined: Just as creation is here in this space, so is creation in the greater world. Creation originated from the thought of things; then the Divine spoke that thought out into space. What you see out there in plants and minerals are such solidified words of God. You could conceive of everything as dissolved into the sound vibrations of the divine world-word. “Everything I see, I see as a solidified word of God,” the Christian told himself. And there he distinguished, in a certain sense, between the “Father in secret,” who has not yet expressed Himself; the “Word” or the “Son,” which resounds through space; and then the solidified Word, the “Revelation.” Thus you understand, in a deeper sense, the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was with God in the beginning. All things were made through it, and without it nothing was made that has come into being.” Everything that has come into being has come into being through the Word. We must take these things as literally as possible; then we will also easily recognize the creative power of the Word or Logos. In the Christian sense, what comes second is the Word, or the Logos. “Logos” must not be translated as anything other than “Word”; for it is meant that everything that exists in creation is based on the unspoken creative Word, that it resounded outward as the Word, and that therein lies the origin of all that exists. If we were to go back far enough in time, we would hear all the objects we know as animals, plants, minerals, and human beings resounding through space as the “Word,” just as you hear my words today, because the air had not yet cooled enough at that time for them to fall down as forms.

[ 7 ] If you keep this in mind, you can tell yourself: The word was once creative. Today, humankind is a beginner in what its ancestors—the gods who stood above it—once did. Once upon a time, the gods spoke the world into being, and then this act of creation transformed into the created world that surrounds us. What we are able to bring forth today in the plant, animal, and human realms—in the realm of reproduction—is merely a transformed form of that original divine creative word. Human beings also carry within themselves a higher and a lower nature. The most fully developed aspect is that which lies within the reproductive system; and the beginning of a new form of production lies in the human larynx. When a person utters a word, this is the beginning of what they will one day achieve. What the gods once accomplished is where humanity stands today at the very beginning. — A new form of creation will take the place of the old. And just as human beings today produce words with their larynx, so their larynx will later become an organ of creation; it will bring forth ever higher and higher, ever denser and denser creations. What is merely air today will be substance in the future. When the Earth has transformed into Jupiter, the word will be creative in the mineral kingdom; in the Venusian state, the larynx will produce plants; and so it will continue until it is able to produce its own kind. It only came into being in the form it has today when it was able to send air outward through the lungs as sound. What we can only say to one another today, we will be able to produce in future stages of the Earth’s development in such a way that it endures. And ultimately, the larynx will be the organ through which human beings will bring forth their own kind in purity, without sexual distinction. Its larynx will be transformed into a reproductive organ.

[ 8 ] Here we gain insight into what the human being of the future will be like, and what the larynx is predisposed to. A mysterious phenomenon can point out to you how the life of the larynx is actually connected to certain stages of development: in males, sexual maturity triggers a change in voice; the young man “mutes.” The larynx is at its beginning; sexuality is at its end. That is how delicately things are interconnected in nature. What we have in our sexual life is something that is dying out; what we have in the larynx, in speech, will in the future be an organ through which we express ourselves.

[ 9 ] We could cite many examples of how human beings will gradually develop those organs that are currently present only in embryonic form—organs that they have adapted as part of their respiratory system on Earth, but which actually belong to the cardiac system.

[ 10 ] Now we will see how, through the training that has been practiced in Europe since the 14th century, one can actually anticipate future states of humanity, and how one can also accelerate one’s inner development more quickly than if one were to simply leave oneself to the course of the world. The training known as Rosicrucian training is the most suitable for people today. Rosicrucianism is something that actually has a bad reputation among those who have only heard of it once. And if what the books say about it and what the scholars know were true, then Rosicrucianism would be nothing more than the fraud for which it is currently regarded. But the truth is that those who judge Rosicrucianism in this way know only the fraud. We, however, want to consider today the true Rosicrucianism, which arose through the individuality hidden under the name Christian Rosenkrentz, and which, in the year 1459, gave rise to the Rosicrucian movement.

[ 11 ] I would like to expressly note that what I am saying is taken as an example, just as what I told you yesterday during the Christian training. I will therefore now outline for you the seven main points of Rosicrucian training—which, of course, not everyone goes through in the same order—but we will first outline these stages, which are relevant for everyone in the spirit of Rosicrucianism.

[ 12 ] The first is what is called “study.” “Acquisition of imaginative knowledge” is the second. The third is “acquisition of the occult or secret script.” The fourth is “the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone.” The fifth is what is called “the correspondence between the small world—the microcosm—and the great world—the macrocosm.” The sixth is “living within the macrocosm,” and the seventh is what is called “godliness.”

[ 13 ] The Rosicrucian Path is the path that leads most surely and most deeply to an understanding of Christianity; however, the Christian path is better suited to those who can persevere in the faith and are able to stir within themselves the feelings I described to you yesterday. The Rosicrucian Path, however, is intended for those who can connect Christian truths with the truths of the outer world. It is precisely then that Christianity will be able to defend itself against any external attack. Christianity is such a worldview that one can never be wise enough to understand it fully. There is no level high enough to fully comprehend how Christianity is meant for the wisest of the wise. Yet the Rosicrucian Path is the most suitable path for people of today.

[ 14 ] We engage in study in the Rosicrucian sense when we have thoughts that no longer have anything to do with our sensory world. In fact, the Western world knows what is called “thinking in free thoughts” only in geometry; that is why the Christian-Gnostic schools also used the term “mathesis” for that which pertained to higher truths, to God, and to the higher worlds, because one must comprehend this independently of all sensuality, just as one must comprehend mathematics independently of all sensuality. A circle drawn with chalk is highly imperfect; you can only conceive of the only true circle, and everything you can learn about the circle can only exist in thought. It is precisely in mathematics that one learns to think with sensory independence—through the circle one constructs in thought, through the triangle one constructs in the mind, whose angles together total one hundred eighty degrees. It is somewhat inconvenient to learn to think without external sensory objects, and for most people there is no other field of study for this purpose than theosophy. I told you right in the first lesson: Logically, its body of knowledge is absolutely comprehensible. But if someone wants to discover the truths for themselves, then they need clairvoyance to do so. Logic is sufficient for understanding.

[ 15 ] Only our materialistic age could have conceived of calculating machines, which teach us to think in a way that is not free from sensuality. It is precisely the child who must learn to grasp things free from sensuality. This is why the way in which education is influenced by spiritual knowledge will be immensely valuable, particularly for the art of education. Spiritual science is also good training in thinking free from the senses. For everything I have told you about Saturn, the Sun, and the essential members of the human being—you cannot see these things; you must grasp them through thinking free from the senses, and no one should believe that they can train themselves well without first grasping these things theoretically. That is precisely the benefit: these things do not exist for the senses; it is precisely through this that one acquires a way of thinking that transcends the senses. Therefore, for some, it is enough to simply open themselves up at first to what theosophy teaches about the things that cannot be grasped by the senses. These were, in essence, the ideas that were always presented to people in the Rosicrucian schools, and they were made to commit these ideas to memory thoroughly.

[ 16 ] If you wish to go further, you will find a good means of training in pure thinking in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom. These books are simply an exercise in thinking that is free from the senses. With other books, you generally cannot change much by moving a thought to a different place. With these books, the thoughts cannot be moved to a different place. These books came into being in such a way that my personality merely provided the opportunity for these structures of thought to enter the realm of the senses. One simply had to surrender oneself so that these thoughts could generate themselves and unfold on their own. Anyone who wishes to delve deeper and devotes half a year to it—it is not easy, but this effort is the very best one can achieve in this process—and anyone who can read it to the end will have drawn forth from within themselves a power that lay hidden within them.

[ 17 ] The second is imagination—visual perception—which is entirely shaped by Goethe’s beautiful words: “Everything transitory is but a parable.” In fact, only those who have attained certainty in their thinking should engage with it. Those who have not could easily fall into fantasy. The prerequisite, therefore, is that one first achieve clarity of mind; nothing prevents one from straying from the right path more than clear thinking. And nothing leads one astray more than unclear thinking, than illogicality.

[ 18 ] In the broadest sense, imagination could be described as looking at everything around you the way you look at a person. Consider a person’s face: you see wrinkles form and fade away; you do not merely describe them—you call them a smile or sadness. A person’s smile reveals to you a cheerful state of mind within. You do not merely infer the inner state from the outer appearance; rather, it is a direct sign of an inner state to you. Or you see a tear roll down: you are not merely a physicist who judges a tear solely by the law of gravity, but you know that the rolling tear is an expression of the soul’s inner sadness. And so everything external is an expression of the soul’s inner mood to you. And the Rosicrucian initiate comes to perceive that everything he sees outside becomes for him an expression, so to speak, of the spirit of the earth: a certain plant, the autumn crocus, will in reality become for him an expression of the earth’s mournful existence, while other plants will be expressions of the earth’s cheerful existence. Just as a smiling face is an expression of the soul’s cheerful mood, so too do the flowers become an expression of the Earth’s cheerful or sorrowful mood. And Goethe did not mean this merely as an external image when he spoke of the Earth Spirit in Faust:

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, at the whirring loom of time,
I weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 19 ] The Earth Spirit gradually becomes to him something that lives within the Earth, and he develops a spiritual and emotional connection to all of nature surrounding him. There is one particular mood within this nature that I would like to make especially clear to you.

[ 20 ] The Rosicrucian initiate walks through the fields and sees the tiny dewdrops hanging from all the plants. This reminds him of the ancient Land of Mist, where the air was filled with misty dew, and where people were connected to nature in a completely different way. When the Rosicrucian student walks through the fields and sees the dewdrops, he says to himself: this is what was dissolved in the atmospheric air of the ancient Land of Mist. — And a deep memory of the Atlantean era wells up within him.

[ 21 ] The imagination was particularly well-developed among the students of the medieval Rosicrucian schools, as well as among those who were disciples of the Holy Grail. I would like to incorporate something that was a teaching—because I cannot put it any other way—into a dialogue.

[ 22 ] The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant—how it sprouts from the ground, how it opens its calyx upward to reveal its reproductive organs, and how the sun’s rays shine down, causing the flower to bloom and the fruit to ripen.” — The Rosicrucian student, as well as the disciple of the Holy Grail, had to bring this image, this vision, to mind. Now, even in materialistic science there is something deeply significant: the plant is compared to the human being. But then you would have to compare the root to the head and the flower to what in humans are the reproductive organs—and what they modestly conceal; for in the plant, the root is the head. Man is the inverted plant; the animal is only the half-inverted plant. That is why the Rosicrucians said: Look at the plant—the root in the ground, the reproductive organs modestly stretched toward the sun’s rays. Look at the animal: the spine horizontal; and then at man: completely transformed. Plant, animal, and human in their development, symbolized by the cross! The cross is plant, animal, and human. — And now we will understand Plato’s words: “The World Soul is stretched across the World Cross.” — The World Soul, which permeates everything, is stretched across plant, animal, and human.

[ 23 ] Now the Rosicrucian initiate was instructed: Look at the plant. In its nature, it is lower than you; it does not yet possess consciousness or thought; but its matter is pure and chaste; it stretches its calyx toward the sun, and without desire or lust, it extends its reproductive organ toward the sunbeam, the sacred lance of love. But now matter is permeated by what desire is. And imagine the ideal for the future: that matter will be purified once more, that it will produce in pure chastity.—And they pointed to the larynx, where humanity, in purity, will have regained the chastity of the plant’s calyx. Imagine the plant’s calyx, which is still free of desire. It develops through desire, but it will become pure again and bear fruit in chastity once more by allowing itself to be fertilized by the sunbeam transformed into the spiritual, by the holy lance of love. — And a foreshadowing of this holy lance of love is the lance with which the heart of Christ Jesus was pierced on the cross.

[ 24 ] Yesterday we saw how this blood from the Savior’s wound banished selfishness from the earth. Thus, this lance is a foreshadowing of the higher lance, which is the sunbeam transformed into the spiritual realm. And the Holy Grail points to the chalice of humanity, which develops from the larynx—which will be precisely the purified reproductive organ of the future, just as it is today in the case of plants.

[ 25 ] This is the deeper concept of the Holy Grail, and this is how it was made clear to the Rosicrucian student and the disciple of the Holy Grail on the imaginative level. Compare what you now perceive in these images—the calyx of a plant, the sexual principle steeped in desire, the Holy Grail, the desire-free chalice—compare this with the dry, sober intellectual concept that modern science offers you, and you will have grasped the difference between imagination and mere intellectual thinking, which captures the entire course of world events in an image! This is important because mere intellectual concepts, as people hold them today, are not creative; but for those who combine these concepts into a mental image, these images are truly creative. This was sensed in ancient times, and it must even be taken into account in the education of children. I would like to discuss a current issue here.

[ 26 ] People are so quick to say these days: What a load of nonsense our ancestors taught us children with that fairy tale about the stork! We must tell children the truth today. — If our descendants treat us the way we treat our ancestors, they will laugh at us too, and they will say: Our ancestors thought that human beings come into being through material interactions! — And they will look back on that time when people explained this process to children in a way they could understand. Back in the days when the stork fairy tale first emerged, the elders themselves believed in it, because they knew full well that when a human is born, the soul descends from the spiritual world; they always associated this with something winged. And you can still find this in children’s songs, for example in the little song:

Fly, beetle, fly!
Your father is at war!
Your mother is in Pomerania.
Pomerania has been burned to the ground!
Fly, beetle, fly!

[ 27 ] This “fly” is meant as a metaphor for the human soul, because people had a sense of the astral realm and of the bodies flying there that enter the physical world from there. And what is “Pommerland”? “Pommer,” or, which is the same thing: “Pummerle”—is nothing other than the name for a small child; and Pommerland, Pummerleland, is the land of children, from which the mother brings the little child. One must explain this entirely from the perspective of the spiritual world. If you then recall that this image of the stork bringing children is, in fact, a metaphor for a spiritual process—reincarnation— then you will realize how infinitely important it is that the child first takes in the image, because their state of mind is quite different when the child is first taught the image representing the spiritual process, so that they can also hear about the physical process with holy reverence.

[ 28 ] Now you, too, will be able to believe in the stork if you know this: this stork is the image of the soul descending to you! Your instruction will inspire the child’s imagination, and when you grasp the truth, a mysterious aura will emanate from it and be transmitted to the child. This is true of all imaginative concepts. You can teach children anything.

[ 29 ] If you are faced with the question: What about life after death? — then show the child a butterfly chrysalis: just as the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, so the soul flies out of the body, only that we cannot see it. But only those who believe in this themselves—and for whom the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis on a lower level is the same as what happens to the soul on a higher level—will be able to teach it to the child with conviction. When spiritual science once again immerses people in an understanding of the spiritual world, so that images come alive in their hearts, then people will also be able to educate in a completely different way—and not feed the child dry intellectual truths that harden the heart. One must simply avoid turning these truths into something grotesque or comical, but rather realize what important aspects of life lie behind them.

[ 30 ] The third thing a person must acquire—which paves the way for them—is the “mastery of occult writing.” This does not mean learning a script in the ordinary sense. Although our written characters often trace their origins back to occult images, they are by no means the same as the occult script. Here we are dealing with a process of immersing oneself in the true, great world forces at work out there in the world. And everything we record there must be such that one developmental process passes over into the next. Take a plant: it bears seeds; in the seed you have the starting point for a new plant. But if you could truly examine the process, you would see that nothing from the old plant passes over into the new one. In truth, the entire old plant perishes in terms of matter; the new plant builds itself up entirely anew—only a kind of dynamic process is transferred into the new plant. Here you have sealing wax, and there a seal; you press the seal into the sealing wax, and yet nothing of the seal has been transferred into the sealing wax; only the form is transferred. — This is the case with every developmental process. The old matter, as it dies away, merely provides the opportunity for the new form to arise again in the spirit of the old. This is represented by two spirals intertwined with one another, which never actually come together. Such a transition occurred after the Atlantean culture; it faded as a cultural stage, and a new one emerged in the Indian culture—so that this, too, must be represented by two spirals. I have told you that around the year 800, the sun rose in the constellation of Aries, previously in Taurus, before that in Gemini, and even further back in Cancer. The Greco-Latin culture—which encompassed our own in its early stages—coincides with the time when the sun rose in Aries; the preceding culture—the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian one—corresponded to the time when the sun was in the constellation of Taurus; before that, there was Persian culture, which corresponds to the time when the sun rose in Gemini, and ancient Indian culture developed when the sun was in Cancer: and it was then that the symbol for Cancer—the two intertwined spirals—was first drawn.

[ 31 ] In this way, I could explain to you the true meaning of each sign of the zodiac. These symbols are drawn from nature itself; they are an expression of the forces and laws that govern the natural world. When one becomes familiar with the occult symbols, one begins to step outside of oneself; one then penetrates the secret depths of nature.

[ 32 ] This gives you a brief glimpse of the first three stages of the Rosicrucian path: the “Study,” “Imaginative Knowledge,” and the third: the “Mastery of Occult Scripture.”

[ 33 ] Tomorrow we will discuss the other stages, beginning with the “preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone.”