The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Let me begin by saying that it fills me with deep satisfaction to be able to speak to you as part of a larger context—a series of lectures on topics related to spiritual knowledge. As important and necessary as it is for our time that spiritual science provide inspiration through individual lectures, it is no less necessary—especially for those who wish to delve more deeply into the life and endeavors of spiritual science—that such explanations and presentations be offered within a certain context. One can then express certain things more precisely; one can place them within a context where they first receive their proper light and nuance, whereas otherwise this or that might easily be subject to misunderstanding. For in the present age, even for the most prepared souls, many a word drawn from the spiritual realm still encounters a certain difficulty in being understood. To grasp how things are actually meant, one needs not only good will and intellect; rather, one must, in the true sense, bring to bear upon them something that one might call—even in the esoteric-occult sense—patience. And this patience is meant here in a deeper sense. We must first allow certain ideas and views to be illuminated by other considerations and wait patiently until, from the context, an understanding emerges for many things that at first were received merely as hints and were difficult for some to believe.

[ 2 ] In today’s lecture, our focus will be more on outlining the basic contours of our task as a kind of introduction. We do not yet want to delve into the task itself, but rather first come to a mutual understanding of what we intend to discuss over the next few days. For, fundamentally speaking, we have a broad and comprehensive topic before us: the world, the Earth, and humanity—that is, an outline of the scope of all knowledge we can acquire about the visible and invisible worlds. Our feelings are carried out to the farthest reaches of the cosmos when the term “world” is used in its serious and dignified sense. The word “Earth” points us to the stage upon which humanity is set, where we are to live and act, and which we are to understand in terms of its tasks and goals. And finally, the word “human being”—which we wish to grasp in its occult sense—points us to what the mystics of all ages have meant by the saying: “Know thyself, O human being.” And we have a subtitle for our “Theme.” Precisely because we have set ourselves such lofty and significant tasks, this subtitle is justified in a certain sense; for when we consider the connection between that wondrous pre-Christian culture—the Egyptian—and our own culture, we will see how mysterious forces permeate human life. Three periods of human striving and inquiry, of human development, morality, and way of life come to mind when we speak of Egyptian culture and the present day. When we speak of “Egyptian culture” in the occult sense, we mean the long culture, spanning millennia, that spread across northeastern Africa, along the banks of the Nile, and lasted until the 8th century B.C. We know that this Egyptian culture was succeeded by another, which we refer to as the Greco-Latin culture, centered on the one hand on the marvelous Greek people, sublime in their beauty, and on the other hand on the powerful Roman civilization. We also know that this cultural epoch encompasses that great event in the development of our Earth that we know as the appearance of Christ Jesus. And then comes our present time, the very epoch in which we ourselves live. Egyptian civilization with all that it entails—and it entails a great deal—the Greco-Roman era with its great achievements and the emergence of Christianity from it, and our present era: these are the three periods that present themselves to our spiritual eye when we consider the subtitle of our lectures. And the aim is to show that mysterious forces are at work between the first of the cultural epochs mentioned and our own. It is as if, during the Egyptian era, certain seeds were sown in the bosom of humanity as it gradually developed; seeds that remained hidden during the Greco-Latin cultural period and that are now sprouting in a most peculiar way in the present epoch. So much of what springs up in our souls today, what surrounds us today, what people speak of and dream about today, what our researchers think—much of it is like a sprout of ancient Egyptian culture, without people even realizing it. Most of you will be more or less familiar with the setup used in electrical operations for so-called telegraphic apparatus. You know that wires run from one place to another, connecting the devices to one another, and without having any deeper knowledge of these matters, you will understand that the force that sets the devices in motion has something to do with the force flowing through the wires. But you may also know that deep underground there is a connection—that the wire is buried in the earth at both ends. Yet this connection is not visible; it is established invisibly through the earth itself by forces that are more or less mysterious. Something similar exists as a profound mystery of human evolution. Historically, we see the threads being spun that lie in the realm of the manifest. We can trace what happened in ancient Egypt using the tools of history and the tools of occultism. We see how the threads of culture extend into Greek, Roman, and Christian times and right up to our own era. All of this is like a kind of above-ground conduit. But there is also an underground, hidden force—one that even acts more or less directly from ancient Egyptian times right up to our own. And many a strange mystery will be revealed to us as we trace and understand these connections.

[ 3 ] Today we will need to sketch out a sort of outline of our task. First, let us briefly mention the peculiarity referred to in the subtitle of our topic, which we have just characterized.

[ 4 ] If we turn our gaze back to ancient Egypt and consider just a few of the—one might say—highly significant artifacts of that civilization, we are struck, for example, by the pyramids, and also by the Sphinx, that wondrous, enigmatic figure. Then let us let our gaze wander up to ancient Greece. There, the Greek temple greets us with its distinctive architecture. And we consider what we know of Greek civilization from its external history, and admire the sculptural works of art—those grand, ideal, perfected human figures who are addressed as gods: Zeus, Demeter, Pallas Athena, Apollo. And further still, we turn our gaze toward ancient Rome. Something remarkable presents itself to us as we let our gaze wander from the ancient Greek peninsula across to the Italian peninsula. Before our eyes appear the figures of ancient Rome that have left the deepest impression on us—figures clad in the toga, which is more than merely an outer garment. What do we feel toward those Roman figures? Oh, one might say that one feels toward certain figures from the early Roman monarchy and the Roman Republic as if the ideal figures of the Greeks had stepped down from their pedestals, as if they were appearing before our souls in the flesh and blood of these Roman figures in togas. For what makes them appear this way to us is the inner strength they possess; and we sense what lies within this inner strength when we compare the feelings, thoughts, and mindset of a member of a Greek state—for example, a Spartan or an Athenian—with what developed in ancient Rome as a Roman. We sense what is at stake here. The citizen of Sparta or Athens felt himself first and foremost to be a Spartan or an Athenian. Endowed, in a certain sense and to a certain degree, with a shared soul, the Spartan and the Athenian felt what we call the Greek polis more deeply than their own individual humanity; they felt themselves more as Spartans or Athenians than as individual human beings; he felt more strongly the powerful force at work within him—arising from the shared spirit of the polis—than his own personal strength. The Roman, on the other hand, appears to us to be entirely centered on his own personality. Hence, one very specific aspect stands out above all others in Roman culture: the concept of civil law. For everything that legal scholars dream of regarding the earlier origins of the concept of law is something entirely different from what, in better times of scholarship, was rightly called Roman law. In ancient Rome, a person learns to feel like an individual; he stands on his own two feet no longer as a member of a city, but as a Roman citizen—that is, he feels placed at the very center of his own humanity. Thus the time had come when the spiritual—which had previously been perceived, so to speak, as hovering in higher realms—had descended down to our earth. There is something peculiar about Roman law and its culture. Take the case of the Greek who felt himself to be a Theban or a Spartan—what, then, is the spirit of Thebes or of Sparta? For us anthroposophists, it is not an abstraction, but something like a spiritual cloud, which in turn is the physical expression of a spiritual being in which the city of Sparta or Thebes is embedded; but not an entity that would be visible on the earthly, physical plane. The Greek does not look at himself at first; he looks up to something above him; the Roman looks first to himself. It is he who first recognizes the Highest—that which can take form in the flesh on the physical plane—as a human being. The spiritual has descended completely into humanity: this is the time when even the highest spiritual, when the Divine itself, could descend to the point of incarnation, to the becoming human in the flesh, in Christ Jesus.

[ 5 ] It is a marvelous process to see how the first of the cultures we have mentioned extends into this Greco-Roman era. Let us recall how Moses, when he was in Egypt—as Scripture describes it—received the mission from higher realms to lead his people to the “One God,” and how he asked God: “What shall I say to my people when they ask me, ‘Who sent you? Who gave you this mission?’” — Then God answers—and we shall see what profound

[ 6 ] The truth lies hidden in the saying: “Tell those to whom I send you that the ‘I Am’ has sent you.” — “I Am” thus becomes the designation for a single God who still reigns and works in the spiritual realms, who has not yet descended to the physical plane. To whom does this voice belong, which calls down to Moses: “Tell your people, I am the ‘I Am’”? To whom does this voice belong, which can make itself audible to the initiate Moses, which speaks to him, so to speak, from spiritual worlds? It is none other than He—and this is the secret of the ancient Egyptian mysteries—it is the very same One who later appears as Christ in the flesh; only that afterward He stands visibly before those around Him, whereas before He could speak only to the initiates from spiritual heights. Thus we see the Divinity, the Spiritual, descending more and more as humanity is prepared, having experienced in the Roman era how significant the incarnation in the flesh and the appearance on the physical plane are.

[ 7 ] And we see how, in an immensely deepened form, a series of cultural phenomena now emerges from what humanity has thus received as a new gift. We see how temple architecture and pyramid construction give way to the Romanesque church—yet another testament to inner human creativity!—and we see how, beginning in the 6th century, the cross bearing the dead Jesus appears. And little by little, a remarkable form emerges from this current of Christianity, whose mysteries are deeply, deeply hidden. We need only bring this figure from the world of painting before our eyes once, in the marvelous form it has taken in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. You all know this wondrous virginal woman at the center of the painting. You know this child, held by the Madonna, and you have certainly all experienced the corresponding shivers of emotion in the presence of this image. But let me mention one thing regarding this painting, which is such a wonderful expression of humanity’s spiritual striving at the stage that concerns us in the three cultures mentioned: It is no coincidence that the artist has surrounded this Madonna with a cloud formation from which a great number of similar little children, angelic figures, emerge.

[ 8 ] And now let us immerse ourselves completely, with all our feelings, in this image of the Madonna. Anyone who has enough inner sensitivity to immerse themselves in it will sense and feel that there is something here quite different from what an ordinary, mundane mind can perceive in this image. Don’t these angelic figures in the clouds surrounding the Madonna tell us something? — Yes, they tell us something of the utmost significance, if only we look at them deeply enough. It whispers into our souls when we immerse ourselves intimately in this image: Here before us is a miracle in the best sense of the word. — And we do not believe that this child, whom the Madonna holds in her arms—as this figure appears to us—was born in the ordinary way from a woman. No, these angelic figures in the clouds tell us so: they appear wondrous and fleeting, as if still taking shape, and the child in her arms appears to us only as a condensed expression, as something more crystallized than these fleeting angelic figures. As if brought down from the clouds and cradled in her arms, this child appears to us not as one born of a woman. And we are drawn to a mysterious connection between the child and the virgin mother. And when we paint this image in our minds, another virgin mother appears before our eyes: the ancient Egyptian Isis with the child Horus. And one can surmise a mysterious connection between the Christian Madonna and the Egyptian figure who stands before us as Isis, upon whose temple were inscribed the words: “I am what was, what is, and what will be; no mortal can lift my veil.” What we have just hinted at in a subtle way—like a miracle—in the image of the Madonna is also suggested to us by the Egyptian myth, in that it does not have Horus born through conception, but rather through a ray of light from Osiris falling upon Isis—a kind of immaculate conception: the child Horus appears. Here we see how the threads are woven together; what we are exploring here is, so to speak, without earthly connection.

[ 9 ] And once again, we let our gaze wander further, to the point where our time begins. We immerse ourselves in the Gothic cathedral with its marvelous pointed-arch architecture; we call to mind what took place there in the Middle Ages during the gatherings, where the true believers stood before true priests. We recall the effect of this Gothic cathedral with its multicolored stained-glass windows through which sunlight streamed; we recall how some of those who could speak of the deeper mysteries of the world’s creation were able to produce sounds that found their outward reflection in the marvelous, color-divided light. And time and again the priests pointed out that the collective power of divine existence communicates itself to humanity in individual rays of power, just like this light that streams in through the stained-glass windows. The senses perceived the refraction of the light, and within the soul was stirred what lay spiritually at the foundation of this image. Thus the power of the soul and of feeling permeated such a Gothic cathedral. Now let us delve a little deeper into what is thus painted before our soul. Let us look at the Egyptian pyramids—a peculiar architectural structure! We must strain our minds to unravel what they are trying to tell us. Little by little, we will see how the mystery of the world, the earth, and humanity is expressed in the pyramid; we will see that it embodies what the Egyptian priest felt according to his religious tradition. We will delve deeply into all these things; today, let us merely draw attention to what such a priest felt and communicated to his people through images. This Egyptian wisdom, which found its full expression in the religious tradition, was profound; it was a direct result of ancient traditions; this Egyptian wisdom was like a memory, and the Egyptian sage who met Solon could rightly say: “Oh, you Greeks, you remain children your whole lives long; in your childlike souls, nothing of the ancient sacred truth lives on.” —- He wanted to point to the antiquity of Egyptian wisdom. Where did it come from?

[ 10 ] As you know, our present humanity was preceded by another humanity that lived on the continent now covered by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. When the great Atlantic flood came, the knowledge of the Atlanteans was carried eastward through what is now Europe. What remained here are the Nordic myths, like memories of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. We know that the ancient Indian and Persian cultures were carried to Asia by the descendants of the Atlanteans, that Egyptian wisdom was in part inspired by Asia, but that it also flowed directly from the West to the East, from Atlantis to Africa. And what kind of wisdom was it that the Egyptian sage spoke of as an ancient tradition? This becomes clear to us if we consider, even for just a moment, the difference between life in ancient Atlantis and our life today. Back then, human beings were endowed with a dim clairvoyant power. They saw beings all around them—beings that are still around us today, but which modern humans can no longer perceive. The Earth is not limited to plants, minerals, and animals. Around us are spiritual beings, but they are visible only to the clairvoyant eye. Back then, in Atlantis, human beings possessed clairvoyance as a normal faculty; not only plants, minerals, and animals were their companions—divine-spiritual beings were their companions as well, and they lived with them just as you live together with human beings today. Back then, there was not yet that strict separation between day and night as there is today. Today, when a person descends into their physical body in the morning with their astral body and ego, physical objects surround them. And when they emerge in the evening with their ego and astral body from their physical and etheric bodies, it becomes dark and gloomy around them. Such is the state of the average person today. In Atlantis it was not so, especially in ancient times. When a person stepped out of their physical body in the evening, darkness did not spread around them, but rather they entered a world of spiritual beings: they saw those divine-spiritual forms just as they see physical forms today. Wotan, Baldur, Zeus, Apollo—none of them are invented, fantastical figures; they are expressions of real beings who, back in the Atlantean era, had not yet taken on a physical body but possessed, as their densest body, the transparent etheric body. And when a person stepped out of his physical body at night, these beings were around him as ethereal figures; and when he reentered his physical body in the morning, he was in this world of reality, which is the only one for him today; he left, so to speak, the world of the gods for a time and plunged into the world of physical, flesh-and-blood beings, and there was no strict boundary between the perceptions of night and day. And when, in those days, the initiate spoke to ordinary people of such divine figures, he was not speaking of something unknown to them. It was as if we were speaking of people today and calling them by name. Thus they spoke of beings such as Wotan and Baldur, for they knew them as divine etheric beings.

[ 11 ] The memory of that ancient wisdom and experience was carried over by the emigrants who journeyed eastward; and from these memories, combined with a very specific character of the Egyptian people—which we will come to know in detail—the conviction emerged within ancient Egypt that a spiritual and thus eternal being lives within the human being, and that when the body lies as a corpse, it has been forsaken by a divine-spiritual being. This was expressed in the most varied images and messages that the Egyptian priests conveyed to the people. But this was not merely an abstract truth for the ancient Egyptians; for them, it was a truth they experienced directly. Let us describe what the Egyptians felt. They said to themselves: I see the corpse lying here, the dust of the human being who was the bearer of an “I”; I know—for I know it from ancient tradition, I know it from the experiences of my ancestors—that something remains which passes into other worlds. That would not fulfill its purpose, the ancient Egyptians said, if it lived solely in that spiritual world; a bond of attraction must be forged between the spiritual world and the earthly, physical world. We must, so to speak, have a magnetic bond for the soul that ascends to higher regions in death, in order to awaken in it a lasting feeling, so that it may return and appear again on this earth.

[ 12 ] We know today from spiritual science that humanity itself ensures that the soul returns again and again to ever new incarnations; we know that when a person passes into other spheres at death, during the time spent in Kamaloka—the time when they are weaning themselves from earthly matters—they remain bound to the physical world by certain forces. We know that it is these forces that prevent them from ascending immediately to the regions of Devachan, and that it is also these forces that draw them back down into a new incarnation. But today we are people who live in abstractions, who present such things as “theory.” In ancient Egypt, this lived on as a tradition; the Egyptian was the opposite of a theorist, of a mere thinker—he wanted to see with his own senses how the soul makes its way from the dead body up into the higher regions. They wanted to see this constructed before them, and they embodied this idea in the pyramid: the path by which the soul ascends, how it emerges from the body, how it remains partially bound, and how it is led upward into higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramid, we can see the soul’s bondage to the earthly; like an image of Kamaloka, it confronts us with its mysterious forms. We can say that, in its outward appearance, it is for us an image of the soul that has left the body and is moving toward higher regions.

[ 13 ] And further! We are trying to understand these ancient traditions. In the ancient Atlantean era, people could still perceive many things around them that are completely hidden from people today. We recall from earlier lectures that, in that era, the human etheric body was not yet as closely connected to the physical body as it is today; the etheric head still extended far beyond the physical head. In animals, this form has remained in a more primitive state even today. If you observe a horse clairvoyantly, you will see the etheric head rising like a luminous form above the horse’s muzzle; and if only you could see that remarkable structure that rises above the elephant’s trunk! Not as pronounced, but similar in nature, was the etheric head present in the ancient Atlantean; later, it moved further and further into the physical head, so that today it is roughly the same in size and shape. But on the other hand, the physical head—which was only partially dominated by the etheric head and still possessed many forces on the outside that are now located within—was not yet human-like to that high degree; it was only just taking shape; one could still see, so to speak, something of a lower, animal-like head form. What was it like when the ancient Atlantean looked at one of his companions during the day? He saw a receding forehead, protruding teeth—something that still resembled an animal. Then, when the human fell asleep in the evening, when Atlantean clairvoyance began, the gaze was directed not only at the animal-like form, but the ethereal human head form—a far more beautiful form than it is today—was already emerging from the physical head. To the nightly gaze, the animal-like features had become indistinct, and the beautiful human form emerged. And the Atlantean clairvoyant could look back to even more distant times, to eras when human beings were still more animal-like, yet connected to an etheric body that was entirely human in form; this etheric body was far more beautiful than today’s physical human body, which has adapted to the strong, dense forces. Now imagine this memory of the ancient Atlantean consciousness symbolically presented to people in Egyptian times! Imagine that an Egyptian priest had wanted to tell his people: “Your own souls in Atlantean times, when they were awake, beheld the human form in animal shape, but at night a beautiful human head emerged.” — This memory, vividly rendered: that is the Sphinx. Only then can one understand these forms; one must learn to understand that they are not figments of the imagination, but realities.

[ 14 ] And once again we proceed with our examination. We move from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. Only those who sense that forces are at work in space can truly understand such a temple. The Greeks possessed this sense of space. The person who studies space from the standpoint of spiritual science knows that this space is not that abstract void of which our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream, but rather that it is highly differentiated. It is something that is in itself filled with lines—lines of force here and there, from top to bottom, from right to left, straight and curved lines in all directions. One can feel space, penetrate it intuitively. Anyone who possesses such a sense of space understands why certain old painters depicted the freely floating angelic figures in Madonna paintings with such marvelous naturalism; they know that these angels hold one another, just as the celestial bodies in space are held together by their gravitational pull. It is quite different, for example, when you look at Böcklin’s painting “Pieta.” This is not to detract from the otherwise outstanding quality of this painting, but anyone who has retained a vivid sense of space will have the feeling that those strange angelic figures are about to fall at any moment. The old painters still possessed a sense of space derived from the clairvoyance of earlier times; in more recent times, this has been lost.

[ 15 ] When art still drew on occult traditions, people were aware of such mutually sustaining forces that exist within space, flowing back and forth. Those in whose minds the concept of the Greek temple arose sensed these forces. They did not conceive it intellectually, but rather perceived the forces flowing through space and incorporated the stone material into it: they filled with matter what was already there in the occult realm. Thus, the Greek temple is a material embodiment of forces at work in space; a Greek temple is a crystallized concept of space, in the purest sense of the word. The consequence of this is something very important. Because the Greeks gave material form to the spatial forces, they provided the divine-spiritual beings with the opportunity to use this material form. It is not a figure of speech, but a reality, that in those days the God descended into the Greek temple to be among human beings on the physical plane. Just as today a pair of parents provides the physical form—the bodily aspect—of a child so that the spiritual can manifest itself on the physical plane, so something similar occurred with the Greek temple. There, an opportunity was provided for divine-spiritual beings to descend and incarnate within the architectural structure of the temple. That is the mystery of the Greek temple: the god was present there in the temple. Anyone who truly sensed the form of the Greek temple also sensed that there need not be a single human being far and wide—not even within the temple itself—and yet that the temple was not empty, for the god was truly present within it. The Greek temple is a whole in and of itself because it contains the forms that enshrine the god within it.

[ 16 ] And when we now consider Roman church architecture—particularly that with a crypt—we can already see a kind of further development. In the pyramid, we see depicted the path the soul takes after death—the outer architectural form representing the departing soul. For the divine soul that delights in dwelling on the physical plane, the Greek temple is the expression. The Roman building with the crypt corresponds to the cross on which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity has advanced to a heightened consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bondage to the earthly, the Kamaloka period, is represented in the pyramid; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death, is expressed in the cross on which the dead body of Jesus hangs, which is meant to remind us of the spiritual victory over death—of Christ.

[ 17 ] And a little further on, we come to the Gothic building. It is not complete unless the faithful congregation is inside. If we want to feel everything as a whole, then the pointed arches must unite with the clasped hands and the emotions expressed within them, which surge upward. But not emotions like those in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death was celebrated, but rather triumphant emotions, such as those felt by the soul that already feels itself to be victorious over death within the body. The soul that is victorious within the body belongs in the Gothic edifice; it is not complete unless such emotions flow through it. The Greek temple is the body of the god; it stands alone. The Gothic church presents itself as something that calls the congregation; it is not a temple, but a cathedral. “Cathedral” is the same word expressed in the suffix “tum,” as, for example, in the words “humanity” or “national character.” The Russian word “duma” is also based on the word “tum.” A cathedral, a “Tum,” is the place where individual members are called together to form a congregation.

[ 18 ] This is how you can see how human thoughts and human attitudes evolve over time, and this is how we gradually arrive at our own era. And we will see how these forces do not merely continue to operate, as it were, in the world above: beneath the surface, mysterious occult currents flow, so that what is emerging in our culture today appears to us as a reincarnation of much of what was implanted in humanity in ancient Egyptian times. And let us conclude with a thought that will point you, as a first inkling, toward such mysterious connections.

[ 19 ] What is it that defines the materialism of our culture today? Let us characterize this materialism. For many people today who have lost the harmony and reconciliation between faith and knowledge, what is particularly characteristic of them when they try to look at something spiritual? They see nothing! They look at the coarse, the material and physical; they know that this is real, that it truly exists, and they even go so far as to deny the spiritual realm. They believe that human existence is fulfilled when the human body lies in the dust; they see nothing rising up into the spiritual worlds. Can such a view arise as a consequence of something that was sown as a seed in a time when a firm belief in the survival of the soul prevailed, as was the case in ancient Egypt? Yes; for in culture, it is not as in the plant kingdom, where only similar things spring from the seed time and again. In culture, one value must alternate with another that is seemingly dissimilar—and yet deeper, intimate similarities exist.

[ 20 ] Today, a person’s gaze is bound to the physical body; they regard this physical body as reality and are unable to rise to the spiritual realm. These souls, who today look out through their eyes upon physical human bodies and cannot rise to the spiritual realm, were incarnated in earlier tribes as Greeks, Romans, and ancient Egyptians. And everything that lives in our souls today is the result of what we have absorbed in earlier incarnations.

[ 21 ] Imagine your soul transported back into the ancient Egyptian body. Imagine your soul, after death, being guided through the passageway of the pyramid into higher spheres, while your body remains preserved as a mummy. This had an occult consequence. The soul was compelled to look down whenever the mummified body lay below. There, thoughts became solidified, ossified, and hardened; there, thoughts were bound into the physical world. Because, from the regions of the spirit, the ancient Egyptian soul had to look down after death upon its preserved physical body, the thought took root within it that this physical body is a higher reality than it actually is. Imagine yourself in the state of your soul back then; you were looking down at the mummy. The thought of the physical form has hardened; it has carried over through the incarnations: today, this thought manifests in such a way that people cannot tear themselves away from the physical body form. Materialism as a thought is in many ways a fruit that has sprung from the embalming of corpses.

[ 22 ] This shows you how thoughts and feelings continue to exert their influence from one incarnation to the next. This is meant only to give you a glimpse of how cultures live on through incarnations, how they reappear in entirely different forms; it is meant to give you only a faint inkling of the numerous occult threads that run hidden beneath the surface.

[ 23 ] Today we wanted to lay the groundwork a bit and hint at the questions that will occupy us. We will now let our gaze wander upward to the highest realms of the world as envisioned by the Egyptian priest; we will have to direct our attention to the nature, purpose, and destiny of the human being; and we will understand how such mysteries are solved when we see that the fruits of one cultural epoch reappear in a wonderfully mysterious way in another, later one.