The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the preceding lectures, it has been shown to what extent the external world appears as an illusion and conceals the spiritual world behind it. So when the observing consciousness penetrates the veil of illusion, it enters the spiritual world. And the person who has this experience can then say that, for them, the outer veil of the senses has become transparent, and they see through it into the spiritual world. One might say that this is one path to the spiritual world. However, it has also been shown how, within one’s own inner soul life—everything we call thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and indeed even the more complex phenomena of this soul life, such as conscience and so on—constitutes a kind of veil that conceals a spiritual world. And when the contemplative consciousness penetrates through this veil, it enters once again into a spiritual world. These two different paths into the spiritual world have been known throughout the ages. Those who sought initiation were aware of the fact that one encounters the spiritual world by penetrating, on the one hand, the outer veil and, on the other hand, the inner veil. That is why we find among the ancient peoples of the earth the distinction between higher gods and lower gods; and in the mysteries of all ages it was said that at a certain stage of initiation one stands before the lower and higher gods; but the world of the higher gods and the world of the lower gods were also always treated in quite different ways. One can understand that this notion of two paths into the spiritual worlds is justified when one considers the following: In the way the external world presents itself to human beings—in the colorful tapestry of color impressions, warmth impressions, and so on, that is, in the colorful tapestry of the elements of fire, air, water, and earth—human beings initially have no influence. In the morning the sun rises; it sends its rays of light over the various things on earth, and according to the various conditions that take shape there, the outer sensory world presents itself; and when a person penetrates these conditions, he enters the spiritual world. Human beings are therefore unable—because they have no influence over the outer sensory world—to corrupt this sensory world that surrounds them through their own inner nature; it is, as it were, set before them by the spiritual beings who reveal themselves within it, and they cannot degrade it through their own power. Thus, when a person is initiated, the task at hand may be to penetrate the veil of the sensory world, but they must leave the veil of the sensory world just as the spiritual beings have fashioned it.

[ 2 ] A person is in a different position when it comes to their own inner world. How a person perceives and feels, how they will, how they think, and how they develop their moral sensibilities depends on whether they are more or less perfect, and whether they have worked more or less on their inner life. A person cannot, so to speak, produce a “good” and a “bad” red or green in the dawn or in a plant; but by corrupting his own inner life, he can generate senseless perceptions and evil moral judgments within himself; a person can yield more or less to the voice of their conscience; with regard to their perceptions, they can yield to the beautiful and the ugly, to true and false mental constructs. Thus, the veil that our soul spreads over the spiritual world in its inner life is altered by a person’s own behavior. And since, ultimately, what we see behind the veil of our own inner life depends on whether this veil itself is sound or corrupted, it is easy to see that with a corrupted, imperfect, underdeveloped inner life, distorted images can be created even when ascending into the spiritual world or descending to the lower spiritual beings— false, absurd, and unnatural ideas and forces.

[ 3 ] Thus, throughout the ages, a distinction was made between the ascent to the higher gods and the descent to the lower gods, and the descent was regarded as far more dangerous than the ascent to the higher gods; for this reason, particularly high demands were placed on the initiates of the mysteries, the secret science, when they embarked on this path into the spiritual world.

[ 4 ] This had to be mentioned because these two paths into the spiritual world do indeed play a major role in human evolution, and because one can only truly understand the contrast between the East and the West—and grasp the relationship between the “Children of Lucifer” and the “Brothers of Christ”—by keeping these two paths in mind. In the outer world, which to the human eye very often appears as a colorful jumble of the most diverse facts, there is nothing that is not wisely guided, nothing in which spiritual beings, spiritual forces, and spiritual realities are not at work; and one can understand everything that happens there only by learning to see how spiritual events have grouped themselves under the guidance of those powers that have been characterized from a wide variety of perspectives. If one wishes to understand why a particular form of wisdom flourished specifically in the East, and why, in turn, the future of Christianity depends specifically on the development of Western forces, one must turn one’s gaze to the origins and the historical course of the two worlds.

[ 5 ] From various lectures you have heard me give, you know that our entire present spiritual life originates from that region we call ancient Atlantis; that an ancient spiritual life developed in a region in the West between present-day Europe and America; and that the Asian, African, and American cultures we encounter are ultimately descendants of the ancient Atlantean culture. It is there that we must seek the fertile soil from which all our cultural life springs. Before that immense catastrophe—which so transformed the face of the Earth that it took on its present form—there existed within ancient Atlantis human races quite different from those of today, guided by high initiates, by leaders of humanity. There, a culture developed that was essentially under the influence of an ancient form of clairvoyance, so that the people of that time possessed an instinctive ability both to see through the outer veil of the sensory world into the higher spiritual world and to look through their own soul life down to the lower gods. That was natural back then. Just as it is natural for people today to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and so on, so it was natural for the people of that time not only to see colors, hear sounds, and so on out in the world, but also to see spiritual beings behind the colors and sounds and so on. Likewise, it was natural for them not only to hear the voice of conscience but also, for example, what the Greeks called the Erinyes. They perceived these as spiritual beings. Thus, the ancient Atlanteans were instinctively familiar with a spiritual world.

[ 6 ] The purpose of human evolution is for people to gradually, so to speak, emerge from this old, instinct-like yet spiritually perceptive consciousness and advance toward what is characteristic of our present age. Human beings had to pass through this stage of life on the physical plane. Now, it would not have been possible to guide the entire development of humanity from the spiritual world simply by sending a stream of people from ancient Atlantis across the regions of Europe and Africa into Asia, and for everything to have developed, so to speak, in a straight line. —- Development never consists merely in something taking shape from a seed and then proceeding in a straight line; rather, wherever there is development, something else must also come into play. You can first illustrate this with a very ordinary example: development is never a straight-line progression in which one thing simply drives the next, but rather something else is part of the development. Consider a plant! You plant the seed in the ground and watch as the plant’s organs sprout from it—the leaves, and later the sepals, stamens, pistil, and so on. Now, in the normal life of plants today, if development is to move forward, something else is necessary—something that, so to speak, does not lie along the straight line of progress. Fertilization is necessary for fruit formation. The fertilizing substances must flow from one plant to another so that the flower can develop into fruit; the fruit could not develop in a straight line from the flower alone, but a stream of influences from the outside must be added so that, through this influence coming from the side, development can proceed. What you can see in the plant is a metaphor for all life on Earth, and it also gives you a clue as to how things are in spiritual life. It is entirely wrong to believe that one can reach one’s goal in spiritual life by assuming that a cultural current emerges somewhere and that it constantly drives forth something new and ever-new from within itself. This may continue for a while, but it would not be enough; it would be just as incapable of bringing about what is to happen as a flower without fertilization could be of producing fruit. At a certain point in development, a lateral influence must always come into play—a kind of spiritual fertilization, so to speak, in the development of humanity. When a cultural current has been propagating in a straight line for a while, some influence must come from the side. Just as the female and male elements develop separately from one another in plant life, so too, in the progressive development of humanity since Atlantis, it was not a single current that formed, flowing from the West to the East; rather, essentially two main currents had to move eastward from ancient Atlantis, developing separately from one another for a time and then, after a certain period, converging and mutually fertilizing one another so that the right outcome could come to pass. And we can trace these two currents of human development if we examine the records of spiritual vision in the proper way. There we have a current of human development that arises as certain peoples migrate from the ancient Atlantean land more toward the north, so that they reach the regions that today comprise England and northern France, then move on to present-day Scandinavia, Russia, and into Asia, all the way down to India. Here a stream of peoples of the most diverse kinds is moving, carrying a specific spiritual life within it. Another stream of human development follows a different path; it heads more to the south, so that today we would have to trace its route roughly from the Atlantic Ocean through southern Spain, through Africa, across to Egypt, and then on to Arabia. Two currents—great migrations of peoples, as it were—flow eastward from ancient Atlantis. Each of these cultural currents initially follows its own path until they mutually enrich one another at a later stage.

[ 7 ] What, then, is the difference between these two cultural currents? It lies in the fact that the current that moved more toward the north included people who were better suited to using their external senses and external perception, who were more inclined to focus their gaze on the tapestry or veil of the external world. Among these people, who moved further north, there were initiates who showed them the way to those spiritual worlds known as the higher gods—those gods one encounters when one penetrates the veil of the outer sensory world. The beings venerated as Germanic-Nordic gods are of this nature. Odin, Thor, and so on are names for such divine-spiritual beings that one finds when one penetrates the outer veil of the sensory world. The people of the other ethnic stream had a different constitution. These people, who migrated from ancient Atlantis into Asia via a southern route, were more inclined to immerse themselves in their soul life, in their inner world. One might say—please do not take this term with a derogatory connotation—that the Nordic peoples had a greater talent for looking out into the world, while the southern peoples had a greater talent for brooding over their own inner life and seeking the spiritual world through the veil of their own inner life. Therefore, it will not surprise you that the descendants of the southern peoples had gods who, so to speak, belonged to the underworld—gods who rule more over the life of the soul. You need only consider the example of the Egyptian Osiris. Osiris is the deity whom a person encounters after passing through the gate of death. He is the god who cannot live in the outer sensory world. He lived there only in ancient times; and as the new ages dawned, he was immediately overcome by the powers of the sensory world, by the evil Seth; and ever since then he has lived in the world that human beings enter after death—that is, in a world that can only be found by immersing oneself in that which is immortal and enduring within the human being, that which passes from incarnation to incarnation; in what constitutes the human inner life. That is why people felt this inner life to be particularly connected to Osiris.

[ 8 ] That was the difference in the character traits of the northern and southern peoples. There was only one ethnic group that, in a certain sense, united both traits within itself during the first epoch of the post-Atlantean era following the great Atlantean catastrophe. This people was specially chosen to walk both paths leading into the spiritual world and to find on both paths something fruitful and appropriate for that time. For while the Nordic peoples gazed out into the world of the outer sensory realm and the Southern peoples brooded inward into the inner life of their souls, there existed a community of people who possessed both the ability to penetrate the outer sensory world and ascend into the spiritual worlds beyond it, as well as to live their way into their own innermost being, into the deepest depths of mystical contemplation, and to find the spiritual worlds through the veil of their own soul life. This was an ability that, admittedly, was present in all human beings during the ancient Atlantean era, at least in its early epochs. But this ability to find both outward and inward is connected to another experience—one that stands quite uniquely in human life. Anyone who has only the ability to penetrate the outer veil of the sensory world and find there the spiritual world—the higher gods—and then hears that there are other deities somewhere else on Earth, does not truly understand the latter. But whoever combines these two abilities—who can penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world just as easily as the veil of their own soul life—will ultimately make an eminently important discovery, namely, that what we find when we penetrate the veil of our inner life is, in its essence, the same as what we find when we penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world. For a unified spiritual world reveals itself to us—in one case from the outside, in the other from the inside. If one comes to know the spiritual world through both paths, one recognizes its unity. Whoever advances toward the spiritual worlds through the path of inner contemplation finds them behind the veil of the life of the soul; and if he also has the ability, through the development of supersensory powers, to penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world, then he knows that what he has found within is the same as what he has beheld by looking outward. The ancient Indian community was in this position, having that great experience of the unity of spiritual life. When the supersensible gaze of the ancient Indian turned outward, he beheld there the outer spiritual beings that hold together and shape the phenomena of the world. When he immersed himself in his inner being, through this mystical contemplation he found his Brahman within himself; and he knew that what he found behind the veil of soul life was the very same force that, with the great, mighty beat of its wings sweeping through the cosmos, had also created and ordered the outer world.

[ 9 ] This is the powerful and mighty force that influences us from those ancient times: that something has been preserved here that existed as an ancient culture in the old Atlantean era and has survived as a remnant into the post-Atlantean era. But evolution does not advance through the transformation or preservation of the old, but rather through the emergence of new currents of development that then mutually enrich one another. If we trace the northern current of development that extended from ancient Atlantis through Europe to Asia, we find in the ancient Indian people the most advanced outpost, which, after its union with other elements, gave rise to ancient Indian culture. But if we go a little further north, to the region of the Persians, we find the primordial Persian culture—the one that appears to us in later historical times as the Zoroastrian culture. This Zoroastrian culture already reveals to us, when we examine it through the means of supersensible perception, the characteristic that people looked more toward the external world and sought to penetrate the veil of the external world in order to advance into the higher spiritual world. From this characteristic of the Persian national character, you will understand that Zoroaster, the leader of this primordial Persian culture, initially placed less emphasis on inner mystical contemplation—indeed, he even stood in a certain contrast to it—but rather directed his gaze more toward the outer sensory world; initially upward toward the sensory sun, to draw people’s attention to the fact that behind the sensory sun there stands something like a spiritual solar being—that behind it stands Ahura Mazdao. Here you already have, in its fully developed form, the path taken by the initiates of the northern peoples. And it was precisely in ancient Persian culture, under the leadership of the earliest Zarathustra, that the highest form of this view of the spiritual world took shape outwardly. This form of external perception became all the more imperfect the further the peoples had, so to speak, lagged behind the ancient Persians,^{2This does not refer to the historical Persians, but to ancient prehistoric peoples in the region that later became Persia.} who had advanced as far as the Near East. Other peoples in Asia and Europe had remained behind the primordial Persians. All these peoples, however, shared the characteristic that their gaze was directed more outward. All the initiates of these peoples chose the path of guiding their people toward the spiritual world that lies beyond the veil of the sensory world. Within Europe, if we examine it through the means of spiritual research, we still find, in that wondrous culture—which, so to speak, lay at the foundation of all other European cultures—the Celtic culture, the remnants of everything that arose through the interplay of the national spirit and the research of the initiates; that which is largely lost today and can only be unravelled to some extent from the external sensory world by those who know the paths to seek through spiritual vision. All that which we may call the ancient Celtic element—wherever it shines forth to us as the bedrock of the other European cultures—is the echo of even older European cultures, which in a certain sense had lagged behind the great, sublime Zoroastrian culture, yet which, in essence, followed the same path, each according to the character of its people. In a certain sense, the peoples had been distributed in such a way that, depending on their geographical spread, they could follow the path to the spiritual in different ways. Depending on the various places where these peoples lived, they followed this path to a greater or lesser degree of perfection.

[ 10 ] Now you must realize that the interaction a person has with the outside world—whether it be the spiritual or the sensory world—has an effect on the person himself; that these experiences are not something that simply exists, so to speak, like a mirror of the world, merely for the sake of the human being gaining knowledge; rather, what happens in this way serves to advance the human being in a very specific manner in his or her development. What, then, is the human being of a given time? He or she is that which the world forces living in his or her environment have organized him or her to be. We are the result of what the world forces have shaped us into. We are shaped according to how these world forces penetrate us. Just as one who breathes in fresh air develops his or her organs accordingly, so too does one who absorbs this or that kind of spiritual life shape his or her spiritual organism—and, because the physical organism is merely the effect of the spiritual one, the physical organism is also shaped accordingly. Human beings are constantly evolving. You will therefore find it understandable that among all the peoples of this Nordic current—because the forces of the external world flowed into them preferentially—it was primarily the external physical characteristics that came to the fore: everything that can shape a human being from the outside. What could be seen externally in a human being and felt as an active force was developed by these external forces. You will therefore find not only warlike qualities developed in these peoples, but also an ever more perfect instrument for penetrating the external world; the brain itself becomes ever more perfect under the influence of external forces. Therefore, the seeds for understanding the external world are present in the people of this ethnic current. It was only from this stream of peoples that what ultimately led to the mastery of the external forces and powers of nature could emerge in spiritual life. One might say that these masses of peoples placed the greatest value on making the human being’s external instrument—that which can be seen outwardly—ever more perfect, not only physically, but also intellectually, morally, and aesthetically. More and more, the spirit was poured into the outer physical body. The physical body was made more and more perfect, so that the individual soul, as it lived from one incarnation to the next, could generally find a better physical form in the next incarnation—above all, not only in the physical sense but also in the moral sense. Thus, that which spiritualizes human beings outwardly—that which spiritualizes their physical body—was able to develop particularly under such influences.

[ 11 ] If we now ask ourselves what developments were bound to take place, particularly among those peoples who took the other path, you will say to yourselves: Among them, the refinement of the inner life was bound to unfold. Therefore, try to trace the concept of conscience in ancient times among those peoples I have just described—those who, so to speak, spiritualized their outward physicality. You will not find the concept of conscience among them. It emerges among the peoples who took the southern path. Among them, the finer experiences of the soul emerge; there, the inner life of the soul is enriched with concepts and ideas, so that it could finally develop into that wealth which is still so marveled at today—the ancient, mysterious Hermetic science of the ancient Egyptians. The wisdom of the Egyptians, so highly revered by all connoisseurs of these matters, could only develop because the inner life of the soul came to fruition within this stream of human development. All the arts, all the wisdom that had to be developed within human beings from within—all of these came to the fore in this current of human evolution. Thus we see that within this stream of humanity, less emphasis is placed on spiritualizing the outer physical body, whereas all the greater emphasis is placed on spiritualizing the inner powers of the soul, developing them ever more finely and subtly.

[ 12 ] Just take a look at Greek sculpture! When it sought to depict the spiritualized, ennobled physical body, it portrayed the members of the northern peoples. All the figures of Zeus, Aphrodite, and Pallas Athena reflect, in their outward form, the racial type of the northern peoples. Where the aim was to point to the inner development of the soul life, there was a need to show that the forces developing within the soul do so invisibly; there, a figure such as Hermes, or Mercury, was depicted. He is shaped differently from the other gods; he is shaped in the same way as the African peoples are shaped. Completely different ears, a different hair type, slanted eyes instead of the Nordic eyes. Yet it was known that this human type is the bearer of scientific knowledge, wisdom, and everything that affects the human soul. This was associated with the concept of the messenger to the lower world of the gods, with Hermes or Mercury.

[ 13 ] The difference between the two streams of humanity can be characterized as follows: the northern stream of humanity works toward presenting an external human being who, in his external physicality, embodies the spirit as if in an image; the other cultural current, on the other hand, was concerned with giving form to the soul that reveals itself invisibly—that is, to that which can only be sensed when one turns one’s gaze inward. Thus, the northern cultural current created the image of the deity in the human being, as it appears outwardly; the southern cultural current created the soul image of the deity—the soul image of the deity that works and weaves invisibly within. Initially separate, like the male and female reproductive substances of a plant, these two cultural currents developed; one cultural current, as far as it could go toward internalization, the other, as far as it could go toward the expression of the spiritual in the external world. And then, when the right time had come, these two cultural currents had to fertilize one another. Whether we consider one or the other of these national currents, we will find confirmation of what has just been said everywhere, even in what confronts us externally and historically.

[ 14 ] Thus, the gods of the southern peoples remained more or less invisible deities with whom one connected within oneself—gods whom one might, in a certain sense, fear and dread, but before whom, in another sense, one could stand in such a way as to look up to them with a certain human confidence. It has, after all, been suggested that one sees these gods of the inner world as one is oneself. If one is morally developed and brings moral qualities of the soul to bear upon the inner world of the gods, then these gods reveal themselves in their true form; their essence flows into the human being; he feels inwardly enlightened and transfigured by them. If one is immoral oneself, if one is endowed with evil, untrue, and ugly ideas, then the image of this world of gods becomes distorted; it appears in terrible, demonic forms, just as even the most beautiful face can become distorted and look like a caricature when viewed in a mirror shaped like a garden globe. When facing the gods they beheld within themselves, people could have the feeling: Oh, these are our good friends, our closest spiritual companions; these are the ones we look up to, and who pour their powers into the innermost depths of our spiritual life; this is something that belongs to us in our very core. — And through these divine beings, a person could feel enlightened, strengthened, and transfigured. But they could also, when they perceived them as distorted images through their own qualities, look upon them with shudder and dread; these beings could torment them, pursue them, and drive them into the wildest excesses of life, precisely because they appeared as distorted images of their lower passions. From this you can gauge how it was understood that no human being faced these very gods in an unprepared state; rather, wherever access to the spiritual world was granted to a person, the requirement—in the strictest sense—was for prior spiritual and moral perfection, an exceptionally thorough preparation; and warnings were never ceasingly given against approaching the gods in a state of spiritual weakness.

[ 15 ] If we now survey this spiritual world, which we have thus far found among the peoples of the southern ethnic stream, and if we wish to characterize it in its entirety—so to speak, according to its rulers—then we call it the divine spiritual world that inwardly enlightens human beings with that light which cannot become visible outwardly—the light that they must strive to attain through their own self-perfection—we call it the world of Lucifer, the world of the Light-Bearer. This southern stream of peoples discovered the world of Lucifer in this way.

[ 16 ] The other stream of peoples led to the goal of enabling the outer human being—the human being who lives between birth and death in a physical body—to become as faithful a reflection of the deity as possible in terms of outward form. What could the ideal of human development be in this realm? This ideal could only be to create the very highest of its kind; it could only be to do everything that would, at least once on Earth, bring forth an outer body so perfect and so imbued with spirit that it was capable not only of becoming a likeness of the Deity, but also of receiving the Deity itself. In other words: The ideal in this other stream of peoples had to be “to cause a human individuality to perfect, spiritualize, and ennoble itself to such an extent—with regard to everything a human being possesses between birth and death—that this physical body might become a noble vessel capable of receiving the highest spiritual reality.” And to the one who, in the most perfect way, pointed toward the spiritual world that lies behind the veil of the sensory realm—Zarathustra,^{3By “Zarathustra” here, of course, we do not mean the well-known historical figure, but rather an ancient, prehistoric ancestor. This is based on the idea that the descendants of a great individual would adopt that person’s name over the course of long ages. For such was the custom in ancient times.} It was to him, too, that the great thought first dawned: An outer physicality must be created through such moral, intellectual, and spiritual power that this physicality is as spiritualized as it can possibly be. Because this thought first occurred to Zarathustra, he ensured that he perfected himself from incarnation to incarnation so that with each incarnation he dwelt in a nobler, more moral, more aesthetic, and more intellectual body. Thus we see the individuality that first appeared as Zarathustra in ancient Persia working upon itself in such a way that it appears in ever nobler physical forms, until it has reached the point where it has brought about such a refinement of the physical form that the body became the noble vessel—not merely a reflection of the divine spiritual world, but into which the divinity—which one had otherwise seen only behind the veil of the external sensory world—descended. That which the ancient Zarathustra pointed to as the world of the sun spirits standing behind the physical sun—that which he referred to as the hidden spirit of goodness, Ahura Mazdao—was to find a place by drawing ever closer to the Earth, where it could dwell as in a perfect, spiritualized physical form. Thus Zarathustra appeared in one of his incarnations in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; and the body of Jesus of Nazareth was so thoroughly spiritualized, so thoroughly ennobled, that it could take into its outer physicality that very spirituality which was otherwise found behind the veil of the sensory world. This spirituality was able to pour itself into this body.^{4One can see from this how foolish a distortion it is to say that the speaker of the above lecture ever identified Christ with Zarathustra. He did this no more than he declared Christ and Buddha to be one and the same.} The human body—which, particularly within the northern cultural current, has always been cultivated through the direction of the gaze outward into the spiritual world—had been prepared to become the very vehicle of that spirituality hidden behind the outer sensory world. Thus had the great, momentous event been prepared: to have the spiritual world—which lies hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, which cannot be seen anywhere with the ordinary eye, but only with the spiritual eye—to have this spirituality present in a body, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, for three years on Earth. Thus, over the course of three years, that spirituality took shape as the Christ principle within the prepared body of Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 17 ] Thus, in the northern stream of peoples, attention had not been focused solely on what lay beyond the outer sensory world; rather, the groundwork had been laid for allowing this spiritual reality to flow into the earthly world, so that what had previously been seen only behind the sun could also walk among humanity on Earth for three years. Thus, Lucifer had, so to speak, entered humanity through the southern stream of peoples, just as Christ had entered through the northern stream of peoples, both in accordance with the character of these streams. And we live in a time when these two streams of peoples must unite, just as the male and female fertilizing substances must interpenetrate one another. We live in an age in which Christ—who entered from without as an objective being into the ennobled body of Jesus of Nazareth—must be understood through the soul’s ever-deepening immersion within itself and its union with the spiritual world that can be found within, with the world that originates in Lucifer’s realm. Thus will the fertilization of these two national currents gradually take place. It has already begun; it began at the very moment indicated to us by the account of how the sacrificial blood of Christ, which flowed from the cross, was collected in the sacred Grail; how this holy Grail was brought over to the West from the East, where people had prepared themselves to understand the Christ event by cultivating the light of Lucifer in a very specific way. And so the union of these two currents, which exist within humanity itself, will proceed more and more progressively. Whatever people of the present may choose to do, it will come to pass in the future for the salvation of humanity that, within the culture where these two currents converge, the great Christ Being—who guides the development of the world and humanity—will be understood through the light that the soul receives from within, from the realm of Lucifer,^{5Based on past experience, it can be said that people will draw the following erroneous conclusion from the passage above: I see in the human soul a union of Christ with Lucifer. If one projects onto this what one personally imagines Lucifer to be, this erroneous conclusion will amount to a falsehood. Only by referring to the Luciferic force—which, in the context of these lectures, is what I myself mean—will one arrive at the correct understanding, and thus have no cause for suspicion.} Christ will provide the substance; Lucifer will provide the form. And from what the two of them become together will come the influences that will sink into the spiritual development of humanity and bring about everything that the future will hold for the salvation and blessing of humanity.