The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] The last time we engaged in these reflections here, I was able to conclude by saying that Christianity is broader and more comprehensive than what is contained within the religious element, and that in those futures in which humanity will have outgrown what, over the course of time, has come to be called religion—in those futures, it was said, the essence of Christianity—freed from the religious element in the old sense—will have become a spiritual cultural factor for humanity. Christianity is thus capable of transcending even that form which, based on cultural developments to date, we are justified in regarding as the form of religious life.

[ 2 ] Since that last lecture, a wide variety of manifestations of cultural life have come to my attention. As you know, between that lecture and our discussion today lies a small body of work in the humanities carried out in the three northern countries: Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The week before last, I gave lectures in Stockholm, among other Swedish cities. You will understand when I tell you that in those northern countries—where, due to the small number of inhabitants, there is so much space for people that they live farther apart than in our Central European cultural countries —we need only recall that all of Sweden has as many inhabitants as London alone—that in those regions where there is so much space, there is also an opportunity for the old Norse gods and beings of the spiritual realm to still make their presence felt. One may well say: for those who know something of the spiritual realm, it is in a certain sense the case that the spiritual countenances of those ancient Norse deities—who stood before the spiritual gaze of the Norse initiates in the Norse mysteries during that time when the Christian idea had not yet flooded the world—peek out from every nook and cranny.

[ 3 ] Within these regions, steeped in legend not only in a poetic sense but also in a spiritual one, one could find another symptom right in the midst of it all. Between the days of the Stockholm lectures, I also had to give a lecture in Uppsala. In the Uppsala Library—right in the midst of all the manifestations of a spiritual nature dating back to the ancient pre-Christian times of the gods—lies quietly the first ancient Germanic translation of the Bible: the so-called Silver Codex, the four Gospels, translated in the 4th century by the Gothic bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila). It is curious: through a karmic chain of events, during the Thirty Years’ War, this document of Christianity was captured from Prague—where it had been kept until then—and is now preserved amidst those spiritual beings who—at least in their memories—permeate the spiritual atmosphere of those regions. And as if it were meant to be that this document should rest in this place, there is also the curious fact that eleven leaves of this Silver Codex were once stolen by a collector. After some time, his heir was overcome by such pangs of conscience that he had these eleven leaves sent back to Uppsala, so that they now lie once again alongside the others in the first Germanic translation of the Bible.

[ 4 ] Among the three public lectures in Stockholm, I was to give one on the central theme in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, and as we were walking down the street, I saw a notice posted on the columns of the opera house that read: “Wagner: Ragnarök—The Twilight of the Gods,” as the final evening of the performance of this Ring of the Nibelung. These are genuine symptoms that intertwine in a curious way: the Norse mythological world, which at its core is permeated everywhere by a profoundly tragic thread, pointing to the fact that one will come who will supplant this Norse world of gods and spirits. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that this mood of Norse mythology, as if in an echo, still emerges even in its medieval form through the fact that Siegfried is killed at the very spot where he was still vulnerable—and how this prophetically points to the very spot that will later be covered by the cross in the case of another, as it were, to suggest: here is a place where something is still missing. This is not merely a literary or poetic allusion, but something drawn deeply from the inspiration of the mythological world. For this tragic element lies both in the Norse saga and in the mystery underlying it—that the Christian principle would later take the place of the Norse pantheon. Throughout the Nordic mysteries, attention has been drawn everywhere to what this “twilight of the gods” actually signifies. It is also significant—and here again I mean something more than a mere poetic image—that, deep within the folk consciousness up there, memories of the old gods coexist with great serenity alongside what has been brought in and assimilated from Christianity. One perceives this resting Gothic Bible amidst the old memories as a symptom.

[ 5 ] One might further perceive it as a symptom, as a sign of things to come, when in the land where the gods of Götterdämmerung were as alive as could possibly be, these gods are reborn in Richard Wagner’s form, rising again outside the confines of religious life, which moves within narrow boundaries. For anyone who is even slightly able to interpret the signs of the times will see in Richard Wagner’s art the first shining star, as Christianity, in its deepest essence, steps out of the narrow confines of religious life into the broad sphere of modern intellectual culture. One can almost hear it within Richard Wagner’s very soul: how the religious idea of Christianity breaks free—how it shatters its religious bonds and becomes something more all-encompassing. When, on the shores of Lake Zurich from Villa Wesendonk, on Good Friday of the year 1857, he looks out upon the first spring flowers sprouting and the first seed of the soul of Parsifal dawns upon him amid this burgeoning life, this marks such a transformation of what initially lives in Christianity as a religious idea into a grander vision. And after he had first risen in his spirit to that prophetic foreshadowing of Christianity, which shone so powerfully in his Ring of the Nibelung poetry, this Christian idea later emerged fully in Parsifal and gained a broader horizon. It has thus become the starting point for that future in which Christianity will be not only religious life, but also a life of knowledge, a life of art, and a life of beauty in the fullest sense of the word.

[ 6 ] This should be presented to your soul today, following on from the conclusion of our previous reflection, as something that can stir a fundamental sense of what Christianity could once have become for humanity. Building on that, let us today take a brief look at the relationship between religion and Christianity from the depths of human evolution. The timing of this reflection is also well-suited to bringing just such a contemplation to mind.

[ 7 ] We are on the very threshold of that great symbolic festival which could be described as the festival that signifies the victory of the spirit over death; we are on the threshold of Easter, and we may recall that meditation in which we sought to understand Christmas from the depths of the mystery tradition. When we view, from a higher vantage point, Christmas on the one hand and Easter—with its outlook toward Pentecost—on the other, then, if we look at it correctly, that very relationship between religion and Christianity presents itself in a wondrous way before our spiritual eyes.

[ 8 ] We will now have to go back a bit further to lay the foundation for this discussion, but we will also see from this what is actually preserved in such festivals and what they can awaken in our souls. We will go far back in human evolution, though not as far as we did in our last lectures, neither in time nor in space. But the reflections we have made will be of help to us, because through them we have gained insight into the course of Earth’s evolution and its connection with the evolution of the beings of the celestial realms. Today we will go back only to approximately the middle of the Atlantean epoch. This is the epoch in which the ancestors of present-day humanity lived in the west of Europe, between Europe and America, on that continent which today forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. The Earth looked different back then. What is now the surface of the water was then land, and that is where the ancestors of the people who today constitute the European-Asian cultural humanity lived. If we now cast a spiritual glance at the inner life of this pre-Flood Atlantean people, it appears to us quite different from the inner life of post-Atlantean humanity. We know from earlier considerations how profoundly everything—including the human soul—has changed in the course of Earth’s evolution. Since that time, everything in human consciousness has changed, right down to that alternating state of waking by day and sleeping by night.

[ 9 ] Today, it is perfectly normal for a person, when he wakes up in the morning, to descend with his astral body and his “I” into his physical body and etheric body. And as he merges, he uses his eyes to see, his ears to hear, and his other sense organs to perceive the impressions from the sensory world around him. He merges into his brain and nervous system and processes the sensory impressions. This is his daily life. In the evening, he draws his astral body and his “I” out of the physical and etheric bodies again. And when a person falls asleep and his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, all the impressions of the sensory world and of daily life subside. Pleasure and suffering, joy and pain—everything that constitutes the inner life of the soul—subside, and life around the person at night is dark and gloomy.

[ 10 ] This was not yet the case around the middle of the Atlantean epoch. At that time, human consciousness presented a fundamentally different picture. When the human being of that time sank into his physical body and his etheric body in the morning, he was not met by those specific, sharply defined images of the physical external world; rather, the images were much more vague—much like how streetlights appear to us today, shrouded in dense fog and surrounded by auric, rainbow-colored formations. Here is a small comparison to help you form an idea of what the Atlantean saw in the middle of his era. However, these colors, which fringed the objects and did not yet allow for the sharp boundaries that people see today, and the sounds that emanated from the objects, were not yet the sober colors and tones we experience today. These colored borders—which also surrounded all living beings—expressed something of the beings’ inner soul life, so that when a person immersed themselves in their physical and etheric bodies, they still perceived, so to speak, something of the spiritual essence of the things around them—unlike today, when, upon immersing themselves in their physical and etheric bodies in the morning, perceives only physical things within their sharp boundaries and colored surfaces. And when, in the evening, a person left his physical and etheric bodies, silence and darkness did not spread around him. The images he perceived were, at most, slightly different, but hardly any fainter than during the day. The only difference was that during the day he perceived the external objects of the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms. At night, however, when a person emerged from his physical and etheric bodies, space was also filled for him with such images of color and sound, as well as with all manner of impressions of smell and taste—with everything that was all around him. But these colors and sounds, and these impressions of warmth and cold that he perceived there, were the garments and veils of spiritual beings who had not descended as far as to take on a physical form—beings whose names and images are preserved in legends and myths. For legends and myths are not “folk poetry,” but rather memories of those visions that people in ancient times experienced in such states; for these people perceived the spiritual both by day and by night. People truly lived at night surrounded by that Norse pantheon that has been preserved in legends and myths. Odin and Freya and all the other figures of Norse legend are not invented. They were experienced just as truly in the spiritual world by that pre-human race as people today experience their fellow human beings in their surroundings. And the legends and myths are the memories of what people experienced in everything they went through in their twilight, clairvoyant states.

[ 11 ] As this state of consciousness—which had developed from an even earlier state—became increasingly pronounced, the sun stood in the sign of Libra at the time of year we now call spring. And as we now move forward in time—into what is called the Atlantean era—we see how the state we have today is increasingly taking shape. The impressions that people had when their astral body and their “I” were outside the physical and etheric bodies at night became increasingly dull and insignificant. The images he received during the day, while he was within his physical and etheric bodies, became ever clearer; in short, more and more—as we might paradoxically say—night became night for him and day became day.

[ 12 ] Then came the Atlantean Flood, and the subsequent post-Atlantean cultures arose—those cultures I have often described to you, which we call the ancient Indian culture, within which the holy Rishis themselves taught the people; the ancient Persian, Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian culture; then the Greco-Latin culture; and finally, our own culture. If we wish to describe today the mood in which people lived during the post-Atlantean era—and to some extent even during the final stages of the Atlantean epoch—this mood presents itself to us as follows: Everywhere, the peoples—including those who had migrated eastward and settled there as descendants of the Atlantean peoples—still possessed the ancient memories, legends, and myths that reflected what people had experienced in an earlier time, in an earlier state of consciousness during the Atlantean era. The peoples had brought this treasure trove of legends with them from the Atlantean era, and they preserved and recounted it. This was what filled their lives, and the oldest inhabitants of the North still distinctly felt the power that spoke to them through the legends and myths, because their most ancient ancestors retained the memory that their forebears themselves had once lived through what was being recounted there. Something else was also preserved among these peoples—something they themselves had not experienced, but which had been experienced by those who were the initiates of those ancient times: the mystery priests and mystery sages. They had been permitted to look spiritually into the very same depths of world existence that are now once again being explored through spiritual research. They were permitted to look into these depths because the states of the souls of human ancestors within the initiated community were exactly the same as those of the national soul, which in ancient times still lived right in the midst of the spiritual world. Even if only in a dim and vague way, that clairvoyant state still existed in those ancient times. Thus, the peoples preserved their legends, fairy tales, and myths, which, in many refracted rays, revealed what had been experienced in the past; so too was preserved in the ancient wisdom that which was beheld in the Mysteries, that which had been cultivated in ancient times: a comprehensive worldview that could then be brought into the immediate individual consciousness of those who were initiated in the Mysteries. In the ancient Mysteries, it was only possible to artificially evoke those states that had been natural in ancient times.

[ 13 ] Why was that state of spiritual perception natural in those ancient times? Because there was still a different connection between the physical body and the etheric body. The connection we have today only developed during the latter part of the Atlantean era. In Atlantean human beings, the upper part of the etheric head—and many other parts of the etheric body as well—protruded far beyond the physical head, and gradually, only toward the end of the Atlantean epoch, did the etheric head move completely into the physical head. At that point, the etheric body came to almost coincide with the physical body. This merging of the physical and etheric parts of the head gave rise to the state of consciousness that later became characteristic of human beings after the Atlantean era: the ability to perceive physical objects within sharp boundaries, as we understand it today. The fact that he can hear sounds, perceive smells, and see colors on the surface—where they no longer serve as witnesses to the spiritual inner nature of things—all of this was connected with that firmer fusion of the physical body and the etheric body, which gradually took place at that time.

[ 14 ] In even earlier times, when the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body, this part of the etheric body that was located outside could still receive impressions from the astral body, and these impressions were the perceptions of the ancient, twilight-like clairvoyance. It was only when the etheric body became completely immersed in the physical body that human beings were completely deprived of the old, twilight-like clairvoyance. In those ancient pre-Christian mysteries, the initiator therefore had to artificially induce in the initiate the very state that had been natural during the Atlantean era. Here we see that the students to be initiated in the mystery temples were treated in such a way that, after the astral body had received the corresponding impressions, the etheric body was partially lifted out by the initiating priest, thereby placing the physical body into a lethargic sleep—a kind of state of paralysis—for three and a half days. Then, while the etheric body was freed, the astral body could imprint upon it all the experiences that the ancient Atlantean human had undergone in a natural state. Thus the initiate could see what was no longer merely preserved in scripture—what was not merely tradition for him—but what now became an individual experience for him.

[ 15 ] Let us consider what the initiate went through at that moment. While the priest of the mysteries partially drew the etheric body out of the physical body and channeled the impressions of the astral body into this separated etheric body, the initiate experienced the spiritual worlds so intensely that he brought the memory of them back into the physical world. He had become a witness to what was taking place in the spiritual worlds. He could bear witness to it, and he was elevated above all that which was otherwise divided among peoples and nations, for he was initiated into that which unites all—all peoples—with one another: into primordial wisdom, into primordial truth. Such was the case in the ancient mysteries. Such was also the case in those moments of which I was permitted to speak to you in connection with the Christmas Mystery, when those things that actually constituted the defining characteristic of later consciousness vanished from the initiate’s gaze. Consider for a moment that the very essence of post-Atlantean consciousness lay in the fact that human beings were no longer able to look into the inner nature of things, that a boundary exists between them and the inner nature of things, and that they see only the surface of the things of the physical world. What had become inscrutable and opaque to the consciousness of human beings in the post-Atlantean era became transparent and comprehensible to the initiate. When the great moment came for him—what is called the Night of Initiation—he could see through the solid earth, and he could “see the sun at midnight,” see the spiritual essence of the sun “at midnight.”

[ 16 ] In essence, then, this pre-Christian initiation was something like a recalling of what had come naturally to people in ancient times—what people in those days experienced as their natural state of consciousness. Gradually, people grew out of this memory of ancient times. We have seen how, bit by bit, as the cultural cycles progressed, humanity outgrew those ancient memories and how it increasingly lost the ability to experience anything outside the physical body.

[ 17 ] In the early days of the post-Atlantean epoch—in ancient India, in Persian and Chaldean culture, and even in Egyptian culture—there were still many people whose etheric bodies were not yet so firmly bound to their physical bodies that they could not still receive impressions from the spiritual worlds, like atavistic remnants from an earlier time. But then, during the Greco-Latin period, all these vestiges from an earlier time faded away, so to speak, and the possibility of conducting the ancient initiation in the same way as before became increasingly rare. The possibility of preserving the memories of the ancient primordial wisdom for humanity also became increasingly rare. We are drawing ever closer to our own fifth epoch, which, viewed from within, holds a very special significance within human evolution.

[ 18 ] In the fourth period—that is, the Greco-Roman era—the situation was still such that one could say, the possibility still existed to recall what humanity had once perceived through the ancient, twilight-like clairvoyance, just as, on the other hand, some people were completely at home in the physical body and thus completely cut off from the spiritual worlds. Our entire life shows us that human beings of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch have sunk even deeper into the physical body. The outward sign of this is the emergence of materialistic ideas. They first appear in the fourth epoch, among the ancient Hellenic atomists. Then they disappear and reappear time and again, until they have grown ever more powerful over the last four centuries, so that human beings have lost not only the positive, ancient content of their memory of the spiritual worlds, but also their belief in the spiritual worlds altogether. That is the reality of the situation. Human beings have become so deeply immersed in the physical body during this fifth epoch that they have even lost their faith. In many people, this belief in the existence of the spiritual worlds has been completely lost.

[ 19 ] Let us now ask ourselves from a different perspective: What, then, was the course of human development? We look back to that ancient Atlantean era, which we have tried to visualize, and we can say that human beings still lived with their gods at that time. They believed not only in themselves and in the three realms of nature, but also in the higher realms of the spiritual worlds, for they were, after all, witnesses to them during the Atlantean era. There was no great difference between their nocturnal and diurnal consciousness. The two were still in balance, and human beings would have been fools if they had denied what was actually perceptible around them, for they saw the gods. Religion as we understand it today could not yet exist at that time, for religion was not yet needed. What constitutes the essence of religion was a fact of life for the people of the Atlantean era. Just as you do not need a religion to believe in roses, lilies, rocks, and trees, so too did the Atlanteans not need a religion to believe in gods, for to them, the gods were a reality.

[ 20 ] But these facts gradually faded from memory. The content of the spiritual worlds increasingly became a memory—partly preserved in traditions of what was recounted from ancient times as having been seen by the forefathers, and partly preserved in legends and myths and in what individual, specially gifted clairvoyant people still saw for themselves. Above all, however, this content of the spiritual worlds was preserved in what the mystery priests guarded within the mysteries. Everything that the Hermes priests in Egypt, the priests of Zarathustra in Persia, the Chaldean sages, and the Indian successors of the holy Rishis preserved was nothing other than the art of making people, through initiation, witnesses once again to what pre-humanity had naturally seen in its surroundings. And depending on the nature of a people—with their particular abilities and sensibilities—and depending on the climate in which they lived, what was preserved in the Mysteries was embodied in the religion of that people, here in this religion and there in that one. But primordial wisdom underlay all these religions as their great unity. This primordial wisdom was the same, a unified whole, whether Pythagoras cultivated it in his school, whether the Hermetic disciples in Egypt, the Chaldean sages in the Near East, Zarathustra in Persia, or the Brahmins in India taught it: everywhere the same primordial wisdom, graded only according to the needs and specific circumstances of the folk religions as they appear to us in the various regions. There we see the development of religious culture.

[ 21 ] So what is this religious culture? Religious culture is the manner of conveying the spiritual worlds—as just described—to those people who no longer have the ability to experience this spiritual world through their own faculties of perception. Religion became the message from the spiritual world for all those who could no longer experience the spiritual world as a reality. Thus, spiritual life spread across the globe as culture in religious form. It lived on in this way through the various cultural periods, from the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, and Greek-Latin eras right up to our own time.

[ 22 ] Human beings have incarnated into their physical bodies for the purpose of experiencing the external world through the physical senses, so that they may take what they experience outwardly with their physical senses into their spirituality and carry it forward toward future stages of evolution. Now, however, since we have descended into the physical body—having passed the midpoint of our post-Atlantean cultures—we find ourselves in a very special situation. Not everyone yet, but numerous people are already in this situation. All development within humanity proceeds in a remarkable way. It advances, so to speak, up to a certain point, and from there it then moves in the opposite direction. After development has descended to a certain point, it ascends again and reaches the same stages once more, only in a higher form, so that humanity today actually faces a remarkable future: a future—as everyone who is familiar with this profoundly significant fact of human development knows—in which their etheric body will gradually loosen again after having been submerged in the physical body, within which it perceived, within sharp boundaries and forms, everything that can be perceived in the physical world today. The etheric body must loosen up again, must emerge once more, so that human beings can ascend to spiritualization and perceive in the spiritual world. In fact, humanity is already once again at the point where, for a large portion of human individuals, the etheric bodies are loosening up again.

[ 23 ] Now we encounter something most remarkable. It is, in fact, the very mystery of our cultural era that we are now touching upon as we consider this fact. We must imagine that the etheric body has descended deep into the physical body and must now begin its return journey. It must take with it from the physical body everything it was able to perceive with its physical senses. But as the etheric body loosens again, everything that was once physical reality will gradually have to become spiritual once more. Human beings must now carry into the future the awareness, the certainty, that there is a spiritual aspect even within the physical. For what else would happen to him? Otherwise, his etheric body would emerge from the physical body, but the human being would retain only a belief in the physical world and lack the awareness that the spiritual has a reality within the physical—a reality that emerges with the etheric body itself as the fruit of what was experienced in the physical body. Thus it could happen that human beings would, so to speak, fail to connect with this emergence of their etheric body.

[ 24 ] Let us pinpoint precisely and definitively the moment when the human etheric body is completely immersed within the physical body and begins to emerge from it once more. Let us now suppose that a person sheds his etheric body in such a way that, while living in the physical body, he has lost his faith in and awareness of a spiritual world—that is, he has severed his connection with the spiritual world while in the physical body. Let us assume that they have descended so firmly and thoroughly into the physical body that they have been able to preserve nothing but the belief that physical life alone is reality. And now they enter the next phase. The etheric body steps out, inevitably leaving him, and the human being is unable to carry into this state the awareness that a spiritual world exists. He then fails to recognize this spiritual world. This is what might lie ahead for humanity in the coming era: that it will fail to recognize the spiritual world—which it ought to experience through the loosening of the etheric body—and will regard it as a figment of the imagination, fantasy, or illusion. And those who, in the most subtle way—perhaps we should say, so as not to be suggestive: in the most subtle way—have descended into the physical body, who have become the materialistic scholars, that is, who have adopted the most rigid concepts of matter; these are the ones who face the greatest danger of having no inkling, upon the loosening of their etheric body, that a spiritual world exists. They then regard everything they experience of a spiritual world as illusion, fantasy, or daydreaming.

[ 25 ] Let me give you just one example: a book on psychology was recently published by a German professor. It sets out to demonstrate that the soul is, in fact, entirely identical to the brain and merely reveals its functions from different perspectives—sometimes from the outside, sometimes from the inside. The inner aspect is said to consist of feeling, imagination, and will, while the outer aspect is the brain, examined from an anatomical and physiological perspective. In this book, you will find a curious statement: it points out that if there were an independent soul, one would have to assume that this independent soul would increase or decrease its powers through all the impressions a person receives. But now there is the law of energy, which states that all the forces a person absorbs from the outside must also flow out from them again, and it is pointed out how, in a human being, all the thermal energy they absorb is also given off again. Since this is subject to the general law of energy, and since we see that what goes in must also come out again, one must conclude that no independent soul is at work here, but rather that purely material processes are taking place within the body, which are then radiated outward.

[ 26 ] No harmful criticism should be leveled against such a book or against such a doctrine as is taught from the official pulpits of our official science, for people are not to blame for devising such doctrines; they live under the most terrible influences. In truth, it is just as foolish to measure how much heat enters and leaves a person and conclude from this that they have no soul, as it would be for someone to stand in front of a bank’s office, count how much money goes in and comes out, and then conclude—after all that energy, that is, all that money, has come out again—that there are no bank employees inside! You will find such thought forms almost everywhere today in what is regarded as official psychology. And how suggestively they affect humanity today! This is the age in which precisely those who wish to be the leaders of humanity—and who believe they are operating with an unbiased science—have sunk deepest into the physical body. During the immersion of the etheric body into the physical body, they have completely lost the awareness that a spiritual world exists, and it must be said that it is precisely these scholars who will fall most deeply prey to the fate I must now describe to you. What, then, can the future hold for these people?

[ 27 ] If human beings are to live their lives properly in the future, once the etheric body has been freed again, they must be aware of what is offered to this etheric body and what is appropriate for humanity at that time. And in order for humanity to have an awareness of what is offered as knowledge of the spiritual world, it is necessary that, even beyond the point where human beings are completely immersed in the physical-sensory realm, they preserve the knowledge that a spiritual world exists. The connection between religious life and a life of knowledge must never be lost. Human beings originated from a life among the gods; they will ascend once more to a life with the gods. But they will have to recognize them! They will truly have to know that the gods are real. Human beings will no longer be able to remember the ancient times when their etheric body is loosened again. If, in the intervening ages, they have lost consciousness of the spiritual world and have adopted solely the belief that life in the physical body and what is visible in the physical body are the only realities, then they will float in the air for all eternity. Then they will be lost in the spiritual worlds; they will have lost the ground beneath their feet. Then they face the danger of what is called “spiritual death”; for what surrounds them will then be unreality, an illusion—a reality of which they have no awareness, in which they have no faith—and they will wither away. This is true spiritual death; it is something that threatens human beings if they do not bring with them, upon entering the spiritual worlds, an awareness of this spiritual world. But where is the point in human evolution where awareness of the spiritual world can be fully attained? That is the point where, through a descent into a physical body and the overcoming of that body, the great example has been set before humanity—that great example found in the Christ. Through a complete understanding of the Christ, one can attain that which offers humanity the possibility of connecting with all the memories of the past and all the prophecies of the future. For all the founders of religions before Christ—what did they point to? They pointed to the earlier incarnations and to the later incarnations of the human being. Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth when Jesus of Nazareth was thirty years old. Christ was the Being who lived in a physical body only once. And through this once-in-a-lifetime victory over death—if it is correctly understood—humanity is shown how to live in order to bring into all future times the awareness that a spiritual world exists. This is union with Christ.

[ 28 ] And how will the Christ idea live on in the human beings of the future? The human beings of the future will look back on our epoch—when human beings lived in physical bodies—just as the human beings of the post-Atlantean era look back on the Atlantean era, when human beings still lived alongside the gods. He will feel himself to be the victor over that which is experienced in the physical body. When he then ascends again to the spiritual plane, he will look down upon the physical as that which has been overcome. This is what we should feel in a great prophetic act when we contemplate the Easter miracle.

[ 29 ] The human being of the future has two possibilities before him. One possibility is that he recalls the time when he had experiences in the physical body and says to himself: Only what was back then was real. We are now in the world of illusions; reality was life in the physical body. —This person looks upon the abandoned physical body as upon a grave, and what he sees in that grave is a corpse; but the corpse, as the physical body, represents true reality for him. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that the person looks back on what was experienced in the physical world, again as if upon a tomb, but in such a way that he says to those who believe that the physical alone was the true and real, and deeply feels the truth of these words: “The one you seek is no longer here!” The tomb is empty, and the One in question has risen! The empty tomb and the risen Christ—that is the mystery of prophecy; and so, in the Easter mystery, we have the mystery of prophecy.

[ 30 ] Christ wanted to present to humanity the great synthesis of the Christmas Mystery—as a repetition of the ancient mysteries—and the Easter Mystery—as the mystery of the future, the mystery of the risen Christ. That is the mystery of Easter. This will be the future of Christianity: that the Christian idea is not merely something like a message from higher worlds, not merely something like religion, but that the Christian idea is a confession and an impulse of life: a confession, because in the risen Christ, the human being sees what he himself must experience in all the future; an act of life, because Christ is not merely the one to whom he looks up, who merely “grants him grace,” but is the great model whom he emulates by overcoming death. To act and live in the spirit of Christianity, seeing in Christ not merely the Comforter, but regarding Christ as the One who goes before us and who, in the deepest sense, is akin to our deepest being—the One whom we strive to emulate: this is the Christ-idea of the future, which is capable of permeating all knowledge, all art, and all life. And if we wish to recall all that the idea of Easter encompasses, we will find in it a symbol of Christianity in true action and true life.

[ 31 ] When people will no longer need the religious teachings that tell them of the gods of ancient times—because they will once again be living among the gods—then Christ will be the one who will make them strong and powerful so that they may find the right perspective in the midst of the gods. Religion will then no longer be necessary to believe in the gods whom people will see again, just as it was not necessary in the past when they lived among the gods. Back then, they did not need to believe, and they will not need to believe in the gods whom they will see again when, strengthened and empowered by what can be gained from Christianity, they step among these gods. Then they themselves will be spiritualized among spiritual beings and will be able to carry out their work among the spiritual beings. Thus, in a not-too-distant future, human beings will once again see how the physical world loses its significance for them and how, so to speak, physical things fade away. Their reality will fade, even though human beings will remain on Earth for a long time to come. But when physical things lose their significance and importance and begin to fade, humanity will either witness the essence of the physical world vanishing and be unable to believe in the spirituality that rises before them, or they will be able to believe and carry their consciousness over into the spirituality of the future—and they will then not experience spiritual death.

[ 32 ] To be confronted with a reality that one does not recognize as such is to be spiritually disoriented. People would live in a state of spiritual disorientation if the spiritual worlds were to appear before them as their etheric body loosens and they did not recognize them as such. Today, many people might already be conscious of the spiritual worlds, but they are not, and so these worlds rebound upon them; this manifests itself in their nervousness, neurasthenia, and a pathological fear of illness. This is nothing other than the backlash caused by a lack of awareness of the spiritual world. Whoever feels this also feels the necessity for a spiritual movement that, transcending mere religion, preserves faith in the human being—in the whole human being, that is, also in the spiritual human being—and brings full knowledge of the spiritual human being. And to recognize Christ means also to recognize the spiritual human being.

[ 33 ] To live into the future of humanity with the idea of Christ means to transcend Christianity itself as a religion and to extend the Christian ideal as a form of knowledge to the broadest horizons. Christianity will permeate art, expand it, and enliven it, imparting artistic creative power in the richest measure. Richard Wagner’s Parsifal is a foreshadowing of this. Christianity will permeate all life and activity on Earth, and when religions have long since ceased to be necessary for humanity, humanity will be strong and vigorous precisely under the influence of the Christian impulses that had to be given to humanity back when it was in the middle of the fourth cultural epoch. During the Greco-Latin cultural epoch, Christ came among humanity. Just as humanity had to descend into the deepest depths of material life, so must it be brought back up to the knowledge of the Spirit. And the appearance of Christ provided this impulse.

[ 34 ] These feelings are meant to bring us joy during the days when we are symbolically surrounded by the mysteries of Easter, during the Easter season. For the Easter mystery is not merely a mystery of remembrance, but also a mystery of the future, a prophecy for humankind, which is gradually freeing itself more and more from the bonds, entanglements, and snares of a purely physical and sensual life.