The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] In our most recent reflections, we have considered in detail a number of facts regarding the evolution of humanity. I have attempted to show how human beings developed during that period of Earth’s evolution which extends roughly from the moment the Sun emerged from the Earth until the time when the Moon, too, left the Earth. There is still more to be added regarding these facts, which we may call facts of occult anatomy and physiology. But in order to grasp everything correctly, we must shed some light today on a few other facts of spiritual life, for we must not forget that the aim here is actually to show the relationship between the Egyptian myths and mysteries—and indeed the entire Egyptian cultural period—and our own time. Therefore, it is necessary that we gain a completely clear understanding of how this further development proceeds through the various epochs.

[ 2 ] Let us once again consider what has been described as the effect of the spirits of the Sun and Moon—namely, the forces of Osiris and Isis—through whose actions the human body was first brought into being and formed. Let us bear in mind that this took place in the distant past, when our Earth had barely begun to take shape from the watery earth, and that a large part of what has been described actually took place within this watery earth. At that time, human beings existed in a state that should one day stand quite clearly before our souls, so that we may gain a clear understanding of what the human act of seeing itself looked like as humanity progressed through Earth’s evolution.

[ 3 ] I have described how the lower parts of the human being—the feet, lower legs, knees, and so on—came into being, so to speak, as a physical form, from the very moment the Sun made a move to withdraw from the Earth. However, we must remember that it has always been said that all of this would have been visible if there had been a human eye capable of seeing it. But no such eye existed. It did not develop until much later. While the human being was still in the water-earth stage, he perceived exclusively through the organ described as the pineal gland. Perception through the physical eye did not come about until the human hip region had developed. One can therefore say that the lower part of the human form was already present in the human being, but there was nothing in the human being that could have seen the human body. At that time, human beings could not see themselves. It was only at the moment when their body—forming from the bottom up—had passed the center of the hips that they acquired the ability to behold their own being. When the body had developed up to the sign of Libra, the human eye was first opened; then they began to see themselves as a hazy image. It was only then that the perception of objects developed. Thus, up until this development of the midpoint of the hips, all human perception, all seeing, was a clairvoyant, astral-etheric form of seeing. Human beings could not yet perceive the physical at that time, for human consciousness was still a dull, twilight-like state—yet a clairvoyant, dreamlike-clairvoyant one.

[ 4 ] And then human beings transitioned to a state of consciousness in which sleeping and waking alternated. While awake, they perceived the physical world dimly, as if shrouded in mist and surrounded by a halo of light. In sleep, however, human beings ascended to the spiritual worlds and to the divine-spiritual beings. Their state of consciousness alternated between a clairvoyant consciousness—which grew weaker and weaker—and daytime consciousness, the increasingly clear object-oriented consciousness that is the primary form of consciousness today. At that time, the ability for clairvoyant perception was gradually lost, as was, to an ever-greater extent, the ability to see the gods in sleep. And to the same degree, the clarity of waking consciousness set in, and with it, self-consciousness—the sense of “I,” the perception of the “I”—grew ever stronger.

[ 5 ] When we look back to the Lemurian era—the time before, during, and after the Moon’s separation from the Earth—we first encounter a clairvoyant state of human consciousness, in which human beings had no inkling of what we today call death. For when human beings stepped out of their physical bodies back then—whether through sleep or death—when they departed, their consciousness did not sink into oblivion; rather, they actually attained a higher, in a certain sense more spiritual, consciousness than when they were in their physical bodies. People back then never said to themselves: “I am dying now”—or “I am slipping into unconsciousness”—such concepts did not exist in those days. People did not yet rely on their own sense of self, but they felt immortal in the bosom of the Divine, and they knew all that we describe today as self-evident facts.

[ 6 ] Let's imagine the following. Let’s imagine we lie down to sleep, the astral body moves out of the physical body, and all of this happens during a full moon. So we have the physical body with the etheric body lying in bed, the astral body hovering above it, and all this in the light of the full moon. Now, the situation is not simply that an astral cloud becomes visible to the clairvoyant, but rather that he actually sees currents flowing from the astral body into the physical body, and these currents are the forces that dispel fatigue during the night; they restore the physical body from the wear and tear of the day, so that it feels revitalized and refreshed. At the same time, however, one would see spiritual currents emanating from the moon, and these currents are permeated by astral forces. One would see how spiritual influences do indeed emanate from the moon, permeating and strengthening the astral body and influencing its activity on the physical body.

[ 7 ] Let’s suppose we were people living in the ancient Lemurian era; then our astral bodies would have perceived this influx of spiritual forces, would have looked up, and would have said: “That is Osiris, strengthening me, working on me; I can see his influence flowing through me.” — And we would have felt safe in Osiris during the night; we would have lived, so to speak, with our “I” in Osiris. “I and Osiris are one,” we would have felt. If we had been able to put what we felt into words back then, we would have described it something like this upon returning to the physical body: Now I must go back down into the physical body that is waiting for me down there; this is a time when I immerse myself in my lower nature—and we would have looked forward to the time when we could leave the physical body again and ascend and rest in the bosom of Osiris or in the bosom of Isis, where we would reunite our “I” with Osiris.

[ 8 ] The more the physical body developed, the more it took root from below, and the more—following the development of the upper limbs—human beings were able to see physically, the more a person could perceive the objects in the physical world around them, the longer they had to remain when they immersed themselves in their physical body, the more interest they gained in the physical world, the darker their consciousness became regarding the spiritual world, the clearer their consciousness in the physical body became, the more they weaned themselves away from the spiritual world. Thus, human life in the physical world developed more and more, and in the states that occur between death and a new birth, consciousness became darker and darker. During the Atlantean era, human beings increasingly lost that sense of belonging among the gods, and by the time the great catastrophe had passed, a large portion of humanity had already completely lost the natural ability to glimpse into the spiritual world at night; in its place, however, they had gained the ability to perceive the external world with ever-greater sharpness during the day, so that the objects around them gradually appeared in clearer outlines. It has already been pointed out that among those who had been left behind, the gift of clairvoyance had still been preserved while the post-Atlantean cultures were developing. Right up until the time when Christianity was founded, there were still stragglers of this clairvoyance, and even today there are—albeit very rarely—people who have retained this clairvoyance as a natural gift; however, it is a completely different kind of clairvoyance than that acquired through esoteric training.

[ 9 ] In Atlantis, then, night gradually grew dark for humankind, while daytime consciousness began to brighten. The night became unconscious for the people of the first post-Atlantean culture, which we have sought to characterize in all its grandeur, in the spirituality that entered through the holy Rishis whom we have brought before our souls in the previous lectures, and which we must now characterize from yet another perspective.

[ 10 ] Let us put ourselves in the minds of the disciples of the holy Rishis, in the minds of the people of Indian culture in general—let us say, at the time immediately after the last traces of the great Atlantean floods had vanished. It still lived there in the soul as a kind of memory—a memory of the old world, of that world where human beings experienced the gods working upon their bodies and had seen how Osiris and Isis were at work within them. Now they had emerged from that world, from the bosom of the gods. In the past, all of this had been present for him, just as the physical world is present for him today. Like a memory, it passed through the mind of the Indian human being who belonged to the first post-Atlantean culture—through the mind of the Indian human being to whom the Rishis could still tell how things really were, for he knew that the Rishis and their disciples could see into the spiritual world. But he also knew that for the ordinary person—for those belonging to Indian culture—the times when he could look into the spiritual world were over.

[ 11 ] Like a memory—like a painful memory of the old, true homeland—it stirred within the soul of the old Indian as he found himself transported into the physical world, which is, after all, only the outer shell of the spiritual world, and he longed to escape from this outer world. And he felt: The mountains and valleys are illusory, the masses of clouds in the air are illusory, even the starry sky is illusory; everything is merely a covering, a physiognomy of being. And the truth that lies behind it—the gods and the true form of humanity—we cannot see. What we see is Maya, is false; the true is veiled. — And this feeling grew ever more vivid: that human beings, sprung from truth, have their home in the spiritual realm; that the sensory realm is false, is Maya; that the physical world of the senses has clouded their minds.

[ 12 ] For those who feel so strongly the contrast between the spiritual and the false physical, the religious disposition will lead them to take little interest in the physical world and to direct their spirit more and more toward what the initiates behold and what the holy rishis can reveal. The Indian longed to escape this reality—this harsh reality, which for him was nothing but an illusion. For the true is not what the senses perceive; he sensed the true only beyond that. And the first post-Atlantean cultural period paid little attention to what was happening outwardly on the physical plane.

[ 13 ] The situation was already different in the second cultural period, among the Persians, from whom Zoroaster—the great disciple of Manu—later emerged. If we wish to characterize in a few strokes what the transition from Indian to Persian culture consisted of, we can say: The adherent of Persian culture did not merely perceive the physical realm as a fate; he perceived it as a task. Although he, too, still looked up toward the regions of light—he looked up toward the spiritual worlds—he turned his gaze back to the physical world, and before his soul lay the sight of how everything was divided into the forces of light and the dark forces. The physical world became a field of work for them. The Persians told themselves: There is the good abundance of light, the deity Ahura Mazda or Ormuzd, and there are the dark powers, led by Angramainyush or Ahriman. From Ahura Mazda comes the salvation of humankind; from Ahriman comes the physical world. We must transform what comes from Ahriman; we must unite with the good gods and defeat Ahriman, the evil god in matter, by working the earth, by becoming beings capable of cultivating the earth. By defeating Ahriman in this way, we make the earth a means for the good. — The first step toward redeeming the earth was taken by the people of Persian culture, and they held the hope that the earth, too, would one day become a good planet, that it would be redeemed, and that Ahura Mazdao, the supreme being, would be glorified.

[ 14 ] That was how the person felt who did not gaze upon the sublime heights as the Indian did, but who stood firmly grounded in this physical world. That, however, was not how the member of Indian culture thought, who had lost the firm ground beneath his feet.

[ 15 ] And the conquest of the physical plane continued into the third cultural stage, the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean culture. By then, hardly anything remained of the ancient aversion with which the physical world had been perceived as Maya. The Chaldeans looked up at the starry sky, and the radiance of the stars was not merely Maya to them, but rather the characters that the gods had inscribed upon the physical plane. And along the paths of the stars, the Chaldean priest-sage traced the way back to the spiritual worlds; and when he was initiated, when he came to know all the beings that inhabited the planets and the heavenly bodies, he raised his eyes and said to himself: What I see with my eyes when I lift my gaze to the starry sky is the outer expression of what occult vision—initiation—bestows upon me. When the initiating priest grants me the grace to behold the God, then I see the God. But everything external that I see is not merely an illusion; in it I see the script of the gods.

[ 16 ] This is how such an initiate felt—just as we feel when we are face to face with a friend, then are separated from one another for a long time, and then receive a letter from him and see the characters written by our distant friend before us. We see that it was his hand that formed these characters; we perceive the feelings of the heart expressed within them. This is roughly how the Chaldean and also the Egyptian initiate felt—one who had been initiated into the sacred mysteries, who, while in the temple of the mysteries, saw with his spiritual eye the spiritual beings connected to our Earth. And when he saw all this and then went outside, and when he then looked upon the world of the stars, it seemed to him like a letter from the spiritual beings. He perceived a message from the gods when the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled; in the stormy wind he perceived a revelation from the gods. The gods had manifested themselves to him in everything he saw externally. Just as we feel when faced with a letter from a friend, so did he feel toward the external world; so did he feel when he saw the world of the elements, the world of plants, animals, and mountains, the world of clouds, and the world of the stars. All of this was deciphered as a divine script.

[ 17 ] And because the Egyptians trusted in the laws that humans could discover in the physical world—laws through which humans can master matter—geometry and mathematics arose. With their help, man was able to master the elements because he trusted in what his mind could discover, because he believed that one could imprint the mind upon matter. Thus, he was able to create the pyramids, the temples, and the sphinxes. This was a tremendous step toward the conquest of the physical plane, taken during this third cultural period. And with that, humankind had finally reached the point where it could truly respect the physical plane; only now had the physical world become a reality for them. But what kind of teachers had they needed before?

[ 18 ] In the past, people needed teachers; even the initiates needed teachers, let’s say in ancient India. What kind of teachers did the initiates need? It was necessary for the initiate to be artificially guided to see again, in the states of initiation, what human beings had once been able to see in their dim clairvoyant consciousness. The initiate had to be led back. He had to be led back up into the spiritual world, into his former spiritual homeland, so that he could convey to others what he had experienced through his own inner journey. For this, he needed teachers. Thus, the disciples of the Rishis needed teachers who would show them what happened in ancient Lemuria, what happened in ancient Atlantis, when human beings were still capable of clairvoyance. And it was still the same among the Persians.

[ 19 ] Things were different among the Chaldeans, and especially among the Egyptians. Oh, there, too, there were teachers who guided students to develop their powers to such an extent that, through clairvoyant vision, they could look into the spiritual world, beyond the physical world. These were the initiators who revealed what lies beyond the physical. But a new teaching, an entirely new method, became necessary in Egypt. In ancient India, little attention had been paid to how what takes place in the spiritual world is inscribed in the physical plane, or to the correspondence between gods and humans; little attention had been paid to that. In Egypt, however, something else was needed: not only that the initiate, through initiation, see the gods, but also how “they moved their hands to inscribe the stellar script,” and how all physical forms had come into being. The ancient Egyptians had schools, modeled entirely on those of the Indians, but they also learned how the spiritual forces correspond with the physical world. Now they had a new subject of study. In India, the student would have been introduced to the spiritual forces through clairvoyance; in Egypt, in addition, they showed what physically corresponds to spiritual acts. They demonstrated, for each part of the physical body, which spiritual work it corresponded to; for example, how the heart corresponds to a spiritual work—that was taught. And the founder of the school—through which not only the spiritual was revealed, but also its work on the physical—the founder of this school was the great initiator Hermes Trismegistus. Thus, in him—the thrice-great Thoth—we see the first to reveal to humanity the entire physical world as a scripture of the gods. Thus, we see our post-Atlantean cultures gradually incorporating the impulses of human evolution. Hermes appeared to the Egyptians as a divine messenger. He gave them what had to be deciphered as the deeds of the gods in the physical world.

[ 20 ] We have thus briefly characterized the three cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean era. People had come to appreciate the physical plane.

[ 21 ] The fourth cultural period, the Greco-Latin period, is the era in which human beings come into even closer contact with the physical plane. During this time, human beings reach the point where they not only perceive the writing of the gods in the physical world, but also project their own selves—their spiritual individuality—into the objective world. Artistic creations such as those found in Greece had never existed before. The fact that human beings projected themselves outward from within themselves in sculpture and other works of art—that they created in them something like their physical selves—was achieved in the fourth cultural period.

[ 22 ] During this period, we see the inner, spiritual aspect of the human being rising out of the person onto the physical plane and flowing into matter. We see this union between the spiritual and the material in its purest form in the Greek temple. For anyone who can look at it with hindsight, this temple is a marvelous work of art. Greek architecture is primordial architecture. Every art form reaches its pinnacle somewhere. Here, architecture reached its pinnacle. Sculpture and painting, too, each reached their pinnacle at some point. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most marvelous achievement in architecture was created in the Greek temple. For what has been achieved within it?

[ 23 ] Those with a sense of artistic space—that is, those who perceive how a horizontal line relates to a vertical one—may sense a faint echo of this. And a whole host of cosmic truths comes to life in the soul that is simply able to sense how the column supports what lies above it. One must be able to sense that all these lines already exist invisibly in space. The Greek artist saw the column, as it were, clairvoyantly, and merely added matter to what he saw. He saw space as pure life; he saw it permeated by living forces. How could people today even begin to grasp the vitality of this sense of space?

[ 24 ] We can see a faint echo of this in the works of the old painters. One can still find depictions where, for example, angels are shown floating in space, and we get the feeling that the angels are supporting one another. Little of this sense of space remains today. I have no objection to Böcklin’s use of color, but he lacks any occult sense of space. A figure such as the one above his *Pietà*—one does not know whether it is meant to be an angel or some other being—must inevitably evoke in the viewer the feeling that it is about to fall at any moment onto the group below it. This must be emphasized if one wishes to point to something that is almost impossible to conceive of today: the Greek sense of space, which must be explicitly described as being of an occult nature. A Greek temple was something as if space had been born of its own lines. The consequence of this was that divine beings—whom the Greeks, as clairvoyants, knew and for whom the temple was built—truly descended into the temple and truly felt at home there. And it is true: Pallas Athena, Zeus, and so on were truly present within the temples; they had their bodies—their material bodies—in these temples. For since such beings could incarnate only into an etheric body, they found in these temples a true dwelling place in the physical world. Their physical body could become such a temple in which their etheric body felt at home.

[ 25 ] Anyone who understands the Greek temple knows that it differs significantly from a Gothic cathedral. This is not meant as a criticism of Gothic architecture, for the Gothic cathedral is also a sublime work of art. But anyone who looks deeply into the nature of a Greek temple can well imagine that, even when it stands in solitude—when there is not a soul to be seen far and wide, when it is completely alone, with only the temple there—it stands as a whole. A Greek temple is, after all, complete, even if no one is praying inside it. It is not soulless; it is not empty, for the god is within it; it is inhabited by the god.

[ 26 ] But a Gothic cathedral is only half a cathedral—it is not complete—if there are no believers, no worshippers within it. Anyone who understands this cannot conceive of the Gothic cathedral as standing there lonely and alone, without the faithful congregation whose thoughts flow into it. And all the Gothic forms and ornamentation are part of what emanates from it. No God, no spiritual being is present in the Gothic cathedral unless the prayers of the faithful are within it. Only when the praying congregation is gathered is it filled with the divine. This is expressed even in the word “Dom,” for it is related to the “tum” in “Deutschtum” (German spirit), “Volkstum” (national character), and so on—terms that always imply a sense of gathering—and the word “Duma” is even related to it. The Greek temple is not a house of the faithful. It is designed as a house inhabited by the god himself; it can stand alone. In the Gothic cathedral, however, one felt at home only when the faithful filled it, when the devout congregation was gathered, when the sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows and the colors were refracted by the fine dust particles, and then, as happened time and again, the preacher in the cathedral’s pulpit said: Just as light is refracted into many colors, so too does the one spiritual light—the divine power—divide itself among the multitude of souls and into the many forces of the physical plane. — The preacher often said things like this. When visual perception and spiritual experience flowed together in this way, the cathedral became something complete.

[ 27 ] Just as it was with the great temple structures, so it was with all artistic expression among the Greeks. The marble of their sculptures took on the appearance of life; the Greeks expressed in the physical realm what lived in their spiritual realm; a union of the spiritual and the physical existed among the Greeks.

[ 28 ] The Romans, however, had gone one step further in overcoming the physical plane. The Greeks had the ability to infuse their works of art with the soul-spiritual, but they still felt themselves to be part of a whole—the polis, the city-state; they did not yet feel themselves to be individuals. The same was true of earlier cultures: the Egyptian did not see himself as an individual human being; he saw himself as an Egyptian, as a member of a people. In Greece, too, we find that people did not place value on seeing themselves as human beings, but rather took the greatest pride in being a Spartan or an Athenian. To be a person, to be something in the world in one’s own right—this was first experienced through Roman civilization.

[ 29 ] The idea that a person is an individual in their own right only became a reality for the Romans. The Romans invented the concept of the “citizen,” and thus laid the foundation for jurisprudence—the law—which has rightly been called a Roman invention. Only modern jurists, who have no idea about these facts, have had the poor taste to claim that law in this sense already existed beforehand. People who speak of Eastern lawgivers, such as Hammurabi, are talking nonsense. There were no legal precepts before; there were only divine commandments. One would have to use harsh words if one wanted to speak objectively about this science; one would have to, if one wanted to be fair, use terribly harsh words, and any criticism is merely a sympathetic one. The concept of the citizen was first truly felt in ancient Rome. There, human beings had brought the spiritual into the physical world, right down to their own individuality. It was in ancient Rome that the will was first invented; there, the will of the individual personality became so strong that it could even determine, beyond death, what should happen to their possessions and property. Now the individual, personal human being was to be the determining factor. With this, humanity had brought the spiritual down to the physical plane through its own individuality. That was the lowest point of development.

[ 30 ] Humanity stood at its highest point in Indian culture. The Indian still soared to spiritual heights, at the very pinnacle. In the second culture, the Proto-Persian, humanity had already begun to descend. In the third culture, the Egyptian, the descent was even greater. In the fourth culture, humankind descended all the way to the physical plane, into matter. There came a point where humankind stood at a crossroads; either it could descend deeper and deeper, or it had to, at the lowest point, gain the ability to work its way back up, to return once more to the spiritual world. For this to happen, however, a spiritual impulse had to come onto the physical plane itself—a powerful jolt that could lead humanity back into the spiritual world. This powerful jolt was provided by the appearance of Christ Jesus on Earth. The divine-spiritual Christ had to come to humanity in a physical human body; He had to undergo physical existence in the physical world. Now that humanity was entirely within the physical world, God had to descend to them so that they might find their way back to the spiritual world. This would not have been possible before. Today we have traced the development of the cultures of the post-Atlantean era down to their lowest point; we have seen, in outline, how the spiritual impulse through Christ occurred at that lowest point. Now humanity is to ascend again, spiritualized and permeated by the Christ principle. We will thus see how, for example, Egyptian culture reemerges in our era, but permeated by the Christ principle.