The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] We have allowed vast stretches of human evolution—and, in connection with this, the evolution of the world—to pass before the eyes of our soul. We have seen how mysterious interrelationships in the evolution of the world were reflected in the actual development of human culture, in the so-called post-Atlantean era. We have seen how the first period of our Earth’s development was reflected in Indian culture; how the second, that of the separation of the Sun from the Earth, was reflected in Persian culture; and then, as time permitted, we attempted to describe and depict in particular detail how the most diverse occurrences and events of the Lemurian period—which constitutes the third epoch of Earth’s evolution and during which human beings first received the germ of the “I”—were reflected in Egyptian culture. We have seen how the initiatory wisdom of the ancient Egyptians is a kind of remembrance of this period that humanity has only just passed through in the course of Earth’s evolution. And then we saw how the fourth epoch—the time of the actual union between spirit and body, which is so beautifully portrayed in the works of Greek art—is a reflection of the experiences humanity had with the ancient gods, those beings we call angels. And we saw: nothing has remained that could be reflected in our time, in the fifth epoch, which is now unfolding before us. But there are mysterious connections between the individual cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era—connections to which we already alluded in the first lecture. You will recall that we pointed out how modern human beings’ fixation on their immediate sensory surroundings—how this, one might say, materialistic belief that only what occurs between birth and death, what is embodied in the flesh, is real—can be traced back to the fact that the ancient Egyptians took such special care in preserving their corpses. At that time, they sought to preserve the physical form of the human being. And this did not remain without effect on the soul after death. When the form is preserved in this way, the soul is, in fact, still connected in a certain sense after death to the human form it had during life. Thought-forms then take shape within the soul that cling to this physical form; and since human beings incarnate again and again—the soul appearing in ever-new bodies—these thought-forms persist. Everything the soul had to experience when it looked down from spiritual heights upon its corpse, preserved as a mummy, has become deeply ingrained in the human soul. Consequently, the soul has forgotten how to turn its gaze away from what is enshrined in the physical flesh, and this has led to the situation where numerous souls who were incarnated in ancient Egypt are now incarnated once more as a result of having beheld the physical body; they can only believe that this physical body is the reality. This was instilled in the soul at that time. For all such things that take place in one cultural epoch are by no means unrelated to other cultural epochs.

[ 2 ] If we consider the seven successive cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era, the fourth epoch—which is right in the middle—actually occupies a somewhat exceptional position. One need only view this period from an exoteric perspective to realize that, in exoteric life, the most marvelous external physical things are created, through which humanity, so to speak, conquers the physical world in a truly unique and harmonious way. Anyone who looks back at the Egyptian pyramids will say to themselves: In these pyramids we still see a kind of geometric form prevailing, which symbolically shows us how things have meaning. That deep union between the spirit—the formative human spirit—and the physical form has not yet taken place. We see this particularly clearly in the Sphinx, whose origin we have, after all, traced back to a memory of the Atlantean etheric human form. We see that this Sphinx, in its physical form, cannot possibly give us any immediate conviction, even though it represents a grand conception of humanity; we see embodied in it the idea that the human being is still animalistic in the lower regions and that the human being is formed only in the etheric head. But what we may encounter on the physical plane, we see refined in the Greek sculptural figures, and what we may encounter in moral life, in the destinies of human beings, we see in the tragic art of the Greeks. In a truly wondrous way, we see the inner spiritual life carried out onto the physical plane; we see the meaning of Earth’s evolution, insofar as the gods were connected to it.

[ 3 ] As long as the Earth was connected to the Sun, the high solar spirits were also connected to the human race. But little by little, as the Sun faded, the high gods also disappeared from human consciousness, gradually right up into the final Atlantean period. Even after death, human consciousness was no longer capable of ascending to the higher regions where a direct vision of the sun gods would have been possible. If we place ourselves—and this may be done, so to speak—in the perspective of the sun gods, we can say: I was connected to humanity, but I had to withdraw for a time. The divine world had to, so to speak, disappear from human consciousness in order to then rise again in a renewed, higher form through the Christ impulse. — A person living in the Greek world could not yet know what would come to the Earth through the Christ, but the initiate, who, as we have seen, already knew the Christ beforehand, could say to himself: This spiritual form, which was embodied as Osiris, had to vanish from human sight for a while; the horizon of the gods had to grow dark; but we have the certain awareness within us that it will reappear—the glory of God on Earth. - That was the cosmic consciousness people possessed, and this awareness of the descent of the glory of God and of its reemergence was reflected in Greek tragic art, where we see how human beings themselves are portrayed as images of the gods, how they live and strive and meet a tragic end, But this tragedy simultaneously implies that humanity can, after all, triumph through its spiritual power. Thus, drama—the contemplation of living and dying human beings—was, at its core, also meant to be a reflection of the great cosmic order. Everywhere in Greece, in all fields, we see this union between the spiritual and the sensual. This was a unique moment in the post-Atlantean era.

[ 4 ] Now it is remarkable how certain phenomena of the third epoch are connected to our fifth period as if through subterranean channels; certain things that were planted like seeds during the Egyptian period are reappearing in our time; others, which were planted as seeds during the Persian period, will reappear in the sixth epoch, and things from the first epoch will return in the seventh period. Everything is connected by deep, lawful relationships, and the past points to the future. This connection becomes clearest to us when we consider the most extreme case—that which links the first period with the seventh. We look back on this first period, and we need not take into account what history reports, but rather what existed in the ancient, pre-Vedic times. Everything that later came to the fore was prepared; above all, what we know as the division of people into castes was prepared. Europeans may have many objections to these castes, but within the cultural context that existed at that time, these castes were justified, for they were connected in the deepest sense to the karma of humanity. The souls who migrated from Atlantis were indeed of very different worth, and in a certain sense it was fitting for these souls—some of whom were more advanced than others—to be divided into such castes according to the karma previously imprinted within them. And since in those ancient times humanity was not left to its own devices as it is in our present age, but was truly guided and directed in its development in a far higher sense than we can imagine today—since advanced individuals, whom we call the Rishis, had an understanding of what a soul is worth and of the differences between the various categories of souls— this caste system is based on a well-founded cosmic law. However harsh it may have appeared in later times, in those ancient times, when guidance was of a spiritual nature, this caste system was truly adapted to human nature. And just as it is true that, in the general course of normal human development, those who carried a certain karma into the new epoch also entered a specific caste, so it is true that one could transcend the limitations of that caste only by undergoing a process of initiation. Only when one reached the stages where one shed the circumstances into which karma had placed one, only when one lived a life of yoga, could these caste distinctions be overcome under certain circumstances. Let us be mindful of the spiritual-scientific principle that we must steer clear of any criticism of evolution and strive only to understand things. No matter how terrible this caste system may seem, it was justified in the fullest sense; we must simply view it in the context of a comprehensive, law-governed destiny pertaining to the human race.

[ 5 ] When people speak of races today, they are referring to something that is no longer entirely accurate; even in theosophical handbooks, major errors are made in this regard. It is said that our evolution proceeds in such a way that rounds, and within each round, globes, and within each globe, races develop one after another, so that we would have races in all epochs of Earth’s evolution. But this is not the case. For example, even with regard to present-day humanity, it no longer makes much sense to speak of mere racial evolution. We can speak of such racial development in the true sense of the word only during the Atlantean epoch. There, in the seven corresponding periods, human beings were indeed so different from one another in terms of outward physical appearance that one could speak of distinct forms. But while it is true that races emerged from this, it is no longer accurate to speak of races even for the earlier Lemurian period; and in our time, the concept of race will, in a certain sense, disappear, as all differences remaining from earlier times will gradually be blurred. Thus, everything that exists today with regard to human races are remnants of the differentiation that took shape during the Atlantean era. We can still speak of races, but only in the sense that the actual concept of race is losing its meaning. But what concept will then take the place of today’s concept of race?

[ 6 ] In the future, too—and even more so than in the past—humanity will, so to speak, differentiate itself, dividing into certain categories; but these will not be categories imposed from outside. Rather, people will come to realize, through their own inner spiritual capacity, that they must work together to form a single social body. There will be categories and classes, but even though the class struggle rages so fiercely today, those people who do not cultivate selfishness but embrace the spiritual life within themselves—those who develop toward the good—will voluntarily integrate themselves into humanity. They will say to themselves: one must do this, another that. A division of labor—a division extending even into the finest impulses—must take place; and it will turn out that the one who is the bearer of one thing or another will not need to impose his authority on others. All authority will be recognized more and more voluntarily, so that in the seventh epoch we will once again have a division among a small portion of humanity that repeats the caste system—but in such a way that no one feels forced into a caste, but rather that everyone says to themselves: I must take on one part of humanity’s work and leave another part to someone else—and both will be recognized as equal. Humanity will organize itself according to moral and intellectual distinctions, and on this basis a spiritually elevated system of castes will emerge once more. Thus, as if channeled through a mysterious conduit, what was prophetically revealed in the first epoch will be repeated in the seventh. And in this way, too, the third—the Egyptian—phase of cultural development is connected to our own. As little as it might appear to a superficial glance, all those things are coming to the fore in our present epoch that were, so to speak, laid the groundwork for during the Egyptian period. Just imagine that the souls living today were, for the most part, incarnated in Egyptian bodies, experienced the Egyptian environment, and—after other interim incarnations—have now been incarnated once more; and that, according to the laws indicated, they unconsciously recall everything they experienced during the Egyptian era. This is now reoccurring in a mysterious way, and if you wish to recognize such mysterious connections between the great laws of the world as they pass from one culture to another, then you must familiarize yourself with the truth—not with all the legendary and fantastical accounts that are presented to us regarding the facts of human development.

[ 7 ] For example, people tend to think rather superficially about humanity’s spiritual progress. They note that Copernicus appeared during a certain era. They say to themselves: Well, he appeared because observations at that time had led people to rethink the solar system. Anyone who holds such a view has not even studied—even on an exoteric level—how Copernicus arrived at his ideas about the connections in the heavens. Anyone who has studied this, and especially anyone who has followed Kepler’s great, momentous ideas, knows something different to say about it, and is further strengthened by what occultism has to say on the matter. Let us take this, to visualize it clearly, in a very concrete way. Let us put ourselves in the soul of Copernicus. This soul existed in ancient Egyptian times; it experienced the cult of Osiris in a particularly prominent context and saw how Osiris was regarded as a being comparable to the high solar being. The Sun stood, in a spiritual-spiritual sense, at the center of Egyptian thought and feeling—but not the external, sensory Sun, which was regarded merely as the physical expression of the spiritual. Just as the eye is the expression of the power of the spirit, so for the Egyptians the Sun was the eye of Osiris—the expression, the embodiment of what the spirit of the Sun was. The soul of Copernicus had once lived through all of this, and it was the unconscious memory of it that moved him to revive this idea—this ancient Osiris idea, which had once been spiritual—in the form that was possible in a materialistic age. It confronts us—where humanity has descended more deeply onto the physical plane—in its materialistic form as Copernicanism. The Egyptians held this concept in a spiritual sense; recalling this thought was Copernicus’s world karma, and this conjured forth the combination of directions that led to his solar system. And it was similar with Kepler, who—in an even more comprehensive sense—depicted the motion of the planets around the Sun in his three laws, which admittedly seem very abstract to us. But he derived it from a profound conception. What is striking, however, about this brilliant mind is the passage he himself wrote—one that fills us with shivers when we read it and where what has just been said confronts us in a tangible way. For Kepler wrote these words: “I have delved deeply into this solar system; it has revealed its secrets to me; I wish to bring the sacred ceremonial vessels of the Egyptians into the modern world.”

[ 8 ] The ideas that were instilled in souls in ancient Egypt confront us once again, and our modern truths are reborn Egyptian myths. We could trace this in great detail if we wanted to. We can trace it right down to the very nature of human beings. Let us recall once more the Sphinx, that wondrous, enigmatic figure who later became the Oedipus Sphinx in Greek culture, posing the well-known riddle to humanity. But we also already know that she is composed of a human form that, on the physical plane, was still analogous to the animal form, while her etheric body had already taken on a human form. In Egyptian times, a person was only able to truly see the Sphinx as an etheric form if they had undergone certain stages of initiation. Then, however, it stood before them. And now the important point is that, when one has a truly clairvoyant perception, one does not merely see it as a block of wood before oneself, but certain feelings are necessarily linked to this perception. A cold-hearted person may, under certain circumstances, pass by even the most significant artistic manifestation; a cold-hearted person may remain unmoved; clairvoyant consciousness is not in this position: when it is truly developed, the corresponding feeling is stirred within it. The Greek myth expresses the true feeling that the clairvoyant still had during the ancient Egyptian era and in the Greek mysteries when he had reached the point where the Sphinx appeared before his eyes. What was it, then, that appeared before his eyes? Something unfinished, something that was yet to come into being. He saw this figure, which in a certain sense still had animal forms; in the etheric head he saw what was to work into the physical form in order to make it more human-like. How this human being was to become, what task humanity had in its evolution—this question stood vividly before him as a question of anticipation, of longing, of the unfolding of what was to come, when he saw the Sphinx. That all human research and philosophy arise from longing is a Greek saying, but at the same time a clairvoyant one. One has before oneself a figure that is perceived only through astral consciousness, yet it torments one; it presents one with a riddle: the riddle of how one is to become. Now this ethereal figure, which existed in the Atlantean era and lived on in memory during the Egyptian era, has become increasingly incorporated into the human being, and it reappears on the other side in human nature; it appears in all the religious doubts, in the inability of our cultural epoch to answer the question: What is a human being? —In all the unanswered questions, in all the sayings revolving around “Ignorabimus,” the Sphinx reappears. In times that were still spiritual, human beings could rise to the level of truly facing the Sphinx; today it lives within them as the countless questions that remain unanswered. This is why it is so difficult for human beings to arrive at a conviction regarding the spiritual world: because the Sphinx, which used to be external, has—after the one who solved the riddle emerged during the Middle Period and cast it into the abyss, into the very depths of the human being—come to appear within the human being.

[ 9 ] Now that the Greco-Latin era—with its aftereffects extending into the 13th and 14th centuries—has run its course, we have been living in the fifth period ever since. Since then, new doubts have increasingly taken the place of the old certainties. We are increasingly confronted with such things, and if we are willing, we can rediscover the Egyptian concepts—translated solely into materialistic terms—in many, many details of more recent developments. We must simply ask ourselves what actually happened here; for this is no ordinary transmission; these things do not confront us directly, but rather in a modified form. Everything has taken on a more materialistic form; we even see the connection between human beings and the animal kingdom reemerging, translated into a materialistic perspective. The fact that human beings knew they could not yet shape their outer bodies in any way other than in an animal-like manner—and that they therefore, in Egyptian memory, even depicted their divine figures in animal forms—is reflected in worldviews that, in a materialistic manner, trace human beings back to animals. Darwinism, too, is nothing other than ancient Egyptian heritage in materialistic form.

[ 10 ] So we see: it is not merely a linear progression of development that we encounter here, but rather something like a bifurcation of development. One branch became more material, the other more spiritual. What used to follow a single line has split into two branches of human development. Go back to ancient times—to Egyptian, Persian, and ancient Indian cultures—and you will find that there was no science or faith that existed in isolation. What was understood about the spiritual foundations of the world extended in a straight line down to knowledge of the details, and one could ascend from knowledge of the material world to the highest summit; there was no contradiction between knowledge and faith. What we today call this opposition would not have been understood by an ancient Indian sage or a Chaldean priest; they were not yet aware of any distinction, nor did the Egyptians yet recognize a difference between what one is merely supposed to believe and what is supposed to be knowledge. This distinction only became apparent as humanity sank deeper into matter, as material culture was increasingly conquered by humankind. But for this to happen, another institution was necessary.

[ 11 ] Let us imagine for a moment that this fall of humankind had not taken place—what would have happened then? We already considered a similar fall yesterday, though it was of a different nature; this is a renewed fall in another realm, one that occurs, so to speak, when science emerges as an independent discipline alongside the understanding of the spiritual. This was first the case in the Greek world; before that, there was no such opposition between science and religion; for the Egyptian priest, such a separation would have made no sense. Immerse yourselves in what Pythagoras learned from the Egyptians: the science of numbers. For him, it was not abstract mathematics; rather, it was what the musical mysteries of the world revealed to him through the harmony of numbers; mathematics—which today appears to people as something abstract—was for him a sacred wisdom imbued with a religious spirit. But humanity had to descend further and further with science into the material, physical world, and we can see how even what was the spiritual wisdom of the Egyptians confronts us—transformed in memory—as a myth of the materialistic worldview. In the future, all the theories of today’s people will be perceived as having only temporary value, just as the ancient theories are perceived by humanity today. Hopefully, people will then be wise enough not to fall into the same error as today’s people, who say: “Until the 19th century, people must have been utterly ignorant in science; only then did they become wise, for everything that was said earlier about the human body and anatomy is nonsense, and only what the last century has brought is true.”—But people in the future will be wiser; they will not repay like with like. They will not look down so dismissively on our myths of anatomy, philosophy, and Darwinism as people today look down on the old truths. But the fact remains that even what is regarded today as so firmly established are merely transitory forms of truth: the Copernican system of the world is only a temporary form. It will be replaced by something else. The forms of truth are constantly changing; this has been brought about by humanity’s immersion in materiality. However, to prevent humanity from losing all sense of connection, an even stronger spiritual impulse had to arise—an impulse toward spirituality. We characterized this powerful impulse yesterday as the Christ impulse. Humanity had to be left “scientifically” to its own devices for a while, so to speak, and religion had to be steered into a different current, saved from the encroaching influence of science. Thus we see how, for a time, science—which focuses on the external material world—and the spiritual—which continues along a distinct path—split apart. We see how the two currents—faith in the spiritual and knowledge of the outer material world—run side by side. Indeed, we even see that during a very specific period of medieval development, a period that immediately preceded our own, knowledge and faith consciously opposed one another, yet still sought a connection.

[ 12 ] Consider the Scholastics. They say: Through Christ, a body of faith has been given to humankind; we must not tamper with it, for it is given directly; but all the knowledge that time has produced since that schism occurred can only be used to prove this body of faith. — Thus we see how, in Scholasticism, the prevailing tendency is to apply all science to proving revealed truth. Where Scholasticism is at its height, it is said: One can, so to speak, look up from below into the body of faith, and to a certain extent human science can penetrate it. But then one must surrender to the revealed truth. — As time goes on, however, the connection between faith and science is lost; one no longer has any hope that they can go hand in hand; and we see the extreme case in Kant’s philosophy, where science and faith are driven completely apart—where, on the one hand, the categorical imperative with its postulates of practical reason is set forth, and on the other hand, purely theoretical reason, which has lost all connection and even admits: There is no possibility of finding a connection to spiritual truths on the basis of knowledge.

[ 13 ] But a powerful impulse has already returned, one that once again reflects the influence of ancient Egyptian thought. We see how minds are once again coming together—minds that now seek a convergence of faith and knowledge, that seek to recognize the divine through scientific inquiry, and that seek to grasp God so clearly and certainly that He becomes accessible once more to scientific thought. A prime example of this kind of thinking and perception is Goethe, in whom religion, art, and science truly converge; he approaches Greek works of art with the same reverence as he does when he studies the diversity of plant forms, seeking to find the great idea of the divine manifested once more in their outward expression.

[ 14 ] Here we see how Egyptian culture is reflected at its point of origin. We can examine modern culture as a whole: it appears to us as a remnant of ancient Egyptian culture. But this division within modern culture did not come about overnight; it developed gradually, and if we want to understand how this happened, we must take a brief look at how the post-Atlantean era laid the groundwork during the Atlantean period.

[ 15 ] We have seen that a small group of people in the region of present-day Ireland was the most advanced, as they possessed the abilities that gradually emerged in successive cultural epochs. The ego faculty, as we know, has been developing since the Lemurian period, but that stage of egohood present in this small group of people—who, so to speak, directed the cultural current from west to east—consisted of the capacity for logical reasoning and judgment. Before that, nothing of the sort existed; if a thought arose, it was already proven. This small group of people possessed a predisposition for judgmental thinking, and they carried this seed from the West to the East; and during those waves of colonization—one of which moved southward to India—the first seeds of conceptual thinking were sown. Then combinatory thought was instilled into Persian culture, and in the third—the Chaldean—this combinatory thought became even more intense; the Greeks, however, took it so far that they left behind the magnificent legacy of Aristotelian philosophy. And so it continues: combinatory thinking develops more and more, yet it always returns to a central point, and new impulses are constantly emerging. We must imagine it this way: When culture moved from that point to a point in Asia, a stream turned toward India, one that was still the least imbued with pure logical thinking. The second stream, which went to Persia, was already more permeated by it; the Egyptian stream even more so; and within this stream, the people of the Old Testament separated themselves—they possessed precisely the aptitude for combination that had to be developed in order to take another step forward in this pure logical form of human knowledge. But this is also linked to the other aspect we have considered: the descent onto the physical plane. The further we descend, the more thought becomes purely logical and dependent on external judgment. For logical thinking—pure, mere human logic that moves from concept to concept—requires the brain as its instrument; the developed brain merely mediates logical thinking. Therefore, this external thinking—even when it reaches astonishing heights—can never, for example, grasp reincarnation on its own, because this logical thinking is initially applicable only to the external, sensory world around us.

[ 16 ] Although logic is applicable to all worlds, it can only be directly applied in relation to the physical world. Thus, when it appears as human logic, it is absolutely bound to its instrument, the physical brain; purely conceptual thinking could never have come into being without the further descent into the sensory world. You see, the development of logical thinking is linked to the loss of the old clairvoyant perception; indeed, humanity has had to pay for logical thinking with this loss. It must regain the clairvoyant perception alongside logical thinking. In later times, human beings will regain the power of imagination, but logical thinking will remain with them. First, the human brain had to be created; human beings had to step out into the physical world. The head first had to be fully formed, like the etheric head, so that this brain might exist within the human being. Only then was it possible for human beings to descend into the physical world. To save the spiritual, however, the moment had to be chosen when the final impulse toward purely mechanical, purely external thinking had not yet been given. If Christ had appeared a few centuries later, He would have come too late, so to speak; humanity would have descended too far, become too entangled in thinking, and would no longer have been able to understand Christ. Christ had to appear before the final impulse, for only then could the religious-spiritual current still be saved as a current of faith. And then the final impulse could be given, which drove human thinking down to its lowest point, so that thoughts became completely bound and captivated by physical life. This was brought about by the Arabs and the Muslims. Islam is nothing other than a particular episode in this Arab culture, for as it spread into Europe, it exerted its final influence on purely logical thinking, which is unable to rise to higher, spiritual realms.

[ 17 ] Humanity is guided by what might be called a spiritual guidance of the world, a providence: First, spiritual life is saved through Christianity; then Arabism makes its way around the South toward Europe, which is to become the stage for external culture. Arabism is capable only of grasping the external. Do we not see how the arabesque itself cannot rise to the level of the living, how it remains stuck at the level of form? We can see this in the mosque, where the spirit has, so to speak, been sucked out. Humanity first had to be brought down into matter. And through the detour via the Arabs—through the Arab invasion, through what might be called the clash of Arabism with European culture, which had already absorbed Christianity within itself—we see how modern science first begins to take shape.

[ 18 ] Thus we see that, on the one hand, the memory of ancient Egypt is being revived. But what makes it materialistic? What makes it the thought-form of the dead? We can demonstrate this clearly. If the path had continued smoothly, then the memory of the past would have emerged in our own time. But as it is, we see how the spiritual finds refuge in faith, and how one wing of European development is seized by materialism; how, for the person who recalls the ancient Egyptian era, this memory is transformed along the path through Arabism in such a way that it appears to him in a materialistic form. The fact that Copernicus conceived of the modern heliocentric system at all was an Egyptian memory. The fact that he interpreted it in a materialistic way—that he turned it into a mechanical, lifeless rotation—stems from the fact that, from the other side, Arabism pulled this memory down into the realm of materialism.

[ 19 ] Thus we see how mysterious channels run from the third to the fifth age. We see this even in the principle of initiation. For when modern life was to receive a principle of initiation within Rosicrucianism, what was it? We have seen in modern science the union between Egyptian memory and Arabism, which is directed toward the dead. On the other hand, we see another union taking place—a connection between what the Egyptian initiates instilled in their disciples and the spiritual realm. We see a union between wisdom and what has been preserved of religious truth. That harmonious blend of Egyptian memory within wisdom and the Christian impulse of power—we see it in Rosicrucianism. Thus we see the ancient seed, sown in Egyptian times, returning—but not as a mere repetition, rather in a differentiated form, having reached a higher level.

[ 20 ] These, however, are thoughts that are not meant to be mere thoughts designed to teach us about the world, the Earth, and humanity, but rather are meant to penetrate our feelings and even our impulses of will—impulses that can inspire us, for they show us the paths we must follow. They show us the paths to the spiritual, but they also show us how we can carry forward into the future what we have gained in a positive and dignified manner in the purely material realm. We see how the paths diverge and come together again; and the time will come again when not only will the memory of Egypt unite with the spiritual truths of faith—so that we will have a Rosicrucian science that is at the same time a religion, alongside a science rooted in the material—but these two will also unite: science with Rosicrucianism. This, too, will be illustrated for us by a myth of the third cultural epoch.

[ 21 ] We look for them in the Babylonian period. There we are directed to the god Marduk, who confronts the evil principle—the materialistic one, the Old Testament serpent—and splits its head, so that, in a certain sense, what was once an adversary is divided into two parts. We do indeed see what happened back then: the separation of what existed in the ancient primeval waters, symbolized by the serpent; we see the higher aspect in the truths of faith, and the lower aspect in the purely material worldview. Science and the spiritual must be united, and they will be united again in the future. And this will happen precisely when, through Rosicrucian wisdom, spiritualism has been deepened and has become a science, when it itself will once again meet with what has been researched on scientific grounds. And then a great harmonious unity will arise once more; the various cultural currents will flow together through the channels of humanity. Do we not see how this union has been sought in recent times?

[ 22 ] If we could look back at the ancient Egyptian mysteries, we would see how religion, science, and art were still one. There, the evolution of the world is depicted in the descent of the god into matter through a grand, powerful, and dramatic external symbol. And whoever appreciates this symbol has science before them, for they experience there, in a living representation, how it all unfolded—how humanity sank into it, how it gradually flowed down into the world. But they have something else before them as well; they also have art before them, for in the image they see a symbolic representation of what science is. Yet both science and art do not merely stand before them; they simultaneously become religion for them, for what is revealed to them visually is imbued with religious feeling. And then, later, this splits apart; religion, science, and art go their separate ways. But even in our own time, people are once again sensing that they must converge. What, after all, was Richard Wagner’s profound striving other than what we have described as spiritual striving—transformed into a cultural impulse through a grand, powerful intuition? Among the Egyptians, it took the form of vivid imagery, because the physical eye required it. In our time, this is repeating itself; a whole is to be assembled once more from the individual cultural currents, but in a work of art whose primary element is the flow of sound. Everywhere we can find the connection between Egyptian culture and the modern era; everywhere we can observe this reflection.

[ 23 ] But then it will become all the more evident to us that every era is not merely a repetition, but rather a process of ascent, a continuous evolution of humanity. And then humanity’s deepest aspiration—the aspiration toward initiation—must also continue to evolve. What was the principle of initiation in the first epoch cannot be the principle of initiation for the transformed humanity of today. It is not a matter of being reminded that the Egyptians had already discovered the eternal truth and wisdom in ancient times, that we can already find primordial wisdom in the ancient Eastern religious traditions and philosophies, and that all others who came later were, in essence, merely there to relive the same experience over and over again if the highest initiation is to be attained. No! That can never be the case. Every age needs its own very special power that reaches into the depths of the human soul.

[ 24 ] When some claim—as indeed happens—that there are some among the Theosophists who say: “There is a Western initiation for our cultural level, but it is a later development; true initiation can only be obtained in the East”—then the response must be that one cannot simply pass judgment on this matter. One must delve deeper into these matters than is usually done. There may be people who say that Buddha ascended to the highest realms and that Christ brought nothing new compared to Buddha; but it is only in what presents itself to us concretely that we can recognize what is at stake. If we ask those who stand on the ground of Western initiation whether they negate or reject anything about Eastern initiation, or whether they speak of the Buddha differently than those who stand in the Eastern tradition, the answer is no; all of that is valid to them, and they say “yes” to it all. But they understand the process of further development and differ from those who reject the Western principle of initiation in that they know how to affirm what is offered by Orientalism, while also recognizing the advanced forms that have become necessary over the course of time. They say “yes,” and they say “no” to nothing in the realm of Eastern initiation. Take a description of the Buddha from the perspective of Western esotericism. It will differ in no way from what is said by one who stands on the ground of Eastern esotericism. But the one who stands from the Western perspective knows—he knows how to show that there is something else in Christ that goes beyond this. The one who stands from the Eastern perspective does not do this. It is not decided by claiming that the Buddha is greater than Christ, but rather by what one says that is positive; that is what matters. And here, the one who stands on the Western standpoint speaks of Buddha in exactly the same way as the Eastern one. The Westerner does not say “no” to what the Eastern one says, but “yes”; yet he also says “yes” to something else as well,

[ 25 ] One cannot think in such a way as to say: “Oh, these Orientalists have a very poor understanding of the Buddha’s life if they believe they must take it literally that the Buddha perished from eating too much pork.” From the standpoint of Christian esotericism, one is right to object that those who interpret this in a trivial way understand nothing at all; it is merely a metaphor for how the Buddha related to his contemporaries. He had revealed too much of the sacred Brahmanic mysteries to the outside world. He perished because of an excess of the occultism he had given to the world. He perished as anyone who reveals the hidden perishes. This is what that peculiar image conveys. One may emphasize this with the utmost clarity: there is no contradiction in Orientalism, but rather one must simply learn to understand the esoteric nature of such matters. But if one were to say that one should regard it merely as something inferior—for, for example, no one would ever have thought twice about it if we were told that the Apocalypse was received by its author amid thunder and lightning—and if one were determined to use this as a pretext to mock the Apocalypse, then one could reply: It is a pity that the person who says such a thing does not know what it means for the Apocalypse to have been revealed to the earth amid thunder and lightning.

[ 26 ] We must note here that no negation ever passes the lips of the Western esotericist, and that much of what appears enigmatic at the beginning of the Theosophical Movement finds its explanation in Western esotericism. Anyone grounded in Western esotericism knows that they will never encounter the slightest conflict with the great, powerful truths about the world that were communicated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. If, for example, we recall that in the case of the Buddha we must distinguish between the Dhyani Buddha, the Adi Buddha, and the human Buddha, this is only fully explained by the Western esotericist. For we know, of course, that what is regarded as the Dhyani Buddha is nothing other than the etheric body of the historical, real Buddha, gripped by the divine; that the etheric body was gripped by what we referred to yesterday as the individuality of Wotan. This is, of course, already contained within it; it merely needs to be grasped in the proper way through Western esotericism. The anthroposophical movement will have to take particular care to ensure that what has come before our souls as a feeling impulse from such a contemplation serves to inspire us to strive for development, so that we must not stand still for a single moment. The spiritual science movement gains its value not by preserving old dogmas—even if they are only fifteen years old—but by grasping the true meaning of such a movement, which can consist of nothing other than the uncovering of ever-new seeds, ever-new spiritual sources. Then it will become a living current within humanity, and then it will bring about that future which has now appeared before our souls—albeit only as a sketchy hint—from what we have been able to observe of the past. That is the best thing we can take with us as such an impulse of feeling.

[ 27 ] The point is not to convey theoretical truths, but to ensure that our feelings and sensibilities become powerful and strong enough to take action. We have considered the development of the universe, the Earth, and humanity; we wish to understand what we have gleaned from this in such a way that we ourselves are always ready to become part of that development. What we call the future must, of course, be rooted in the past. Our will for the future must correspond to our understanding of the past; but this understanding has no value unless it is transformed into driving forces for the future. What we have seen has given us a picture of such significant driving forces that not only our will and our enthusiasm, but also our joy of life and sense of security are stirred. When we see such a convergence of the various currents, we say: Many seeds lie in the womb of time; they are all meant to ripen. But through his ever-deepening insight, the human being is to acquire the ability to become an ever-better nurturer of all these seeds lying in the womb of time. Insight for the sake of action, for the sake of security in life—that is what must permeate all spiritual scientific contemplation as an emotional impulse. In closing, I would like to point out only this: all so-called spiritual scientific theories attain the ultimate truth only when they are transformed into life, into emotional impulses, and into a sense of security in life—so that we do not merely observe theoretically, but truly participate in the process of evolution.