The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] It gives me great satisfaction to be able to address our friends here in Norway at some length for the third time now, and I would like to respond very briefly to the kind words of our dear friend Eriksen by saying that the warm words of welcome he has just spoken are reciprocated by me with equal warmth and from the depths of my soul, just as they were spoken.

[ 2 ] I hope that this series of lectures, which I would now like to begin presenting to you, can also contribute in some way to an understanding of what we call the overall picture of our worldview. I would like to point out, particularly with regard to this lecture series, that as it progresses, it must necessarily include various elements that belong, so to speak, to the most fundamental truths of our worldview; it will have to include some of what is actually still quite distant from contemporary human thinking. Therefore, I ask above all those of my esteemed friends who have dealt less with the more advanced questions of the worldview of Spiritual Science to bear in mind that we would not make progress in our field if we did not, from time to time, take a vigorous leap into those realms of spiritual knowledge that are actually quite distant from present-day human thinking, feeling, and perception.

[ 3 ] From this perspective, a certain degree of goodwill toward these remarks will sometimes be necessary; for it would take much more time to present all the evidence and proof that would be required to support what will be discussed here in the coming days. We would make no progress unless, so to speak, a certain appeal were made to goodwill and to the openness of spiritual understanding regarding these very remarks. Indeed, the field we are now touching upon is one that, right up to our own time, has been largely shunned by occultists, mystics, and theosophists—and shunned precisely because a higher degree of open-mindedness is necessary to receive the things that must be said, so to speak, without the resistance that might sometimes arise.

[ 4 ] You may understand what this means most clearly if you recall that, at a certain stage of mystical or occult development, one is called a “homeless person.” “Homeless human” is, in fact, a technical term, and if we wish to characterize—without beating around the bush, since we are not speaking of the path of knowledge—what is meant by the term “homeless human,” we can briefly say that a “homeless person” is one whose knowledge and understanding of the great laws of humanity are, in truth, unaffected by everything else that arises in a person from the place where they live in accordance with their national heritage. We can also say that a rootless human being is one who is able to take in the great mission of all humanity without being influenced by the nuances of particular feelings and sensibilities that arise from this or that homeland. You can see from this that a certain degree of maturity in mystical or occult development requires a free perspective precisely toward that which we otherwise rightly regard as something great—that which, in relation to the individual human life, we describe as the mission of the individual national spirits, as that which, from the depths of a nation’s soil and from the spirit of the peoples, provides the individual concrete contributions to the entire mission of humanity.

[ 5 ] We wish, so to speak, to describe the vastness of that from which the homeless person must, in a certain sense, free himself. Now, the rootless people of all times, from prehistoric times to the present day, have always known that if they were to fully characterize, so to speak, what is referred to as the nature of rootlessness, they would find little—very little—understanding. First of all, these rootless people would face a prejudice expressed in the accusation: “You have lost all connection with the fertile soil of your people’s heritage; you have no understanding of what is otherwise most precious to people.” — But that is not the case. In a certain sense, rootlessness is—or at least can be—a detour, so that, once this sacred place, this rootlessness, has been reached, one may find the way back to the essence of the people and achieve harmony with the down-to-earth aspects of human development. If this must be pointed out from the outset, it is nevertheless not without foundation that, especially in our time, we should speak in the most open-minded way about what we call the mission of the individual Folk-souls of humanity. Just as it is justified that, up to now, this mission has been kept entirely silent—so to speak, to a certain degree—it is equally justified to begin speaking of this mission in our present time. This is of particular importance because the coming destinies of humanity will bring people together in a common human mission to a much greater extent than has been the case thus far. However, the individual members of each nation will only be able to make their corresponding free, concrete contribution to this common mission if, above all, they have an understanding of their national identity—an understanding of what might be called “self-knowledge of national identity.” Just as the phrase “Know thyself” played a major role in the Apollonian Mysteries of ancient Greece, so too will the following statement be addressed to the Folk-souls in the not-too-distant future: “Know yourselves as Folk-souls.” This saying will have a certain significance for humanity’s future endeavors.

[ 6 ] It is particularly difficult for people of our time to acknowledge beings that, so to speak, do not exist at all for external sensory perception or for external material knowledge. Perhaps it will not be so difficult for people today to acknowledge that human beings, as they appear to us in the world, have certain members, certain parts of their being that are supersensible and invisible. Perhaps the current materialistic mindset of humanity can be led even more easily to the view that beings whom one can at least physically see on the outside—such as human beings—also have a supersensible, invisible aspect. But it is a great strain on our present-day mindset to speak of beings who, according to ordinary perception, do not actually exist at all. For what, in fact, is what people today call here and there the “Folk-soul” or “Folk-spirit”? It is, at most, what is accepted as a quality—a collective quality—of so many hundreds or millions of people crowded together on a certain piece of land. That there is anything living there besides the many millions of people crammed together on that territory—that there is anything real that would correspond to the concept of “national spirit” and underlie this concept—is difficult to make clear to the consciousness of our present age. If one were to ask—let’s say, just to have something completely neutral—: What does the modern person understand by the Swiss national spirit? — they would describe, in abstract terms, certain characteristics possessed by the people who inhabit the Swiss regions of the Alps and the Jura, and would be aware that this does not correspond to anything that could be perceived by external faculties of cognition, such as the eyes or other organs of perception. The first step must be to form, in an open and honest way, the idea that there are entities which do not, in and of themselves, manifest sensually and do not present themselves to ordinary material perception; that, so to speak, between beings that are sensually perceptible, there are other entities acting invisibly, which influence visible entities, just as the human being acts through human hands or fingers; that one can therefore speak of the Swiss national spirit just as one speaks of the spirit of a human being; and that one can distinguish this human spirit just as clearly from what one sees in the ten fingers before one as one can distinguish the Swiss national spirit from the millions of people living in the mountains of Switzerland. It is something else entirely, namely an entity, just as the human being itself is an entity. The only difference is that human beings present a sensory exterior to human perception. To the same extent that a human being presents himself to sensory perception—that is, as an external appearance, something that can be seen or perceived with the organs of sensation or the external senses—a national spirit does not present itself in this way; yet it is nonetheless a thoroughly real entity.

[ 7 ] Today, we will focus on forming, so to speak, a mental image of such a real entity. How do we even go about doing this in Spiritual Science when we want to form a mental image of a real entity? We gain a characteristic example of how we form a mental image of a real entity when we first turn our attention to the nature of the human being. When we describe the human being from a perspective of Spiritual Science, we distinguish within him the physical body, the etheric or Life-Body, the astral body or body of sensation, and what we regard as the highest member of the human being: the “I.” We know, then, that in what we call the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I,” we have, so to speak, the present human being before us. But you also know that we are looking toward the future development of humanity, and that the “I” is working on the three lower members of the human being, spiritualizing them and transforming them from their present lower form into their future higher form. The I will transform and reshape the astral body so that it becomes something different from what it is today. The astral body will then represent what you know as the Spirit-Self or Manas. Likewise, an even higher work of the I will be performed on the etheric body or Life-Body by transforming and reshaping it into what we call the Life-Spirit or Buddhi. And finally, the highest work of the human being—the highest we can conceive of for the time being—is that the human being will spiritualize, transform, and metamorphose the most resistant element of his being, the physical body, into the spiritual. It will be the highest aspect of human being when the “I” has transformed what is today the physical body—that which today appears to us as the coarsest and most material—into the Spirit-Man or Atma. Thus we look upon three aspects of human nature that have developed in the past, one in which we now find ourselves, and three others from which the “I” will create something new in the future.

[ 8 ] We also know that there is something in between the work that has been accomplished and the work that will be accomplished in the future to form the three higher members. We know that we must conceive of the “I” itself as structured. It is working on a kind of intermediate existence. We therefore speak of the fact that between the astral body—as it has become part of the human being from the past—and the Spirit-Self, or Manas, which will become part of the human being from this astral body in the distant future, the three preparatory members lie in the middle; namely: the sensorial soul, the lowest member in which the “I” has worked; the intellectual or emotional soul; and the conscious soul. So that we can say: Of what we are working toward as the Spirit-Self or Manas, very little exists in human beings today—at most, the beginning. On the other hand, human beings have prepared themselves for this future work by learning to master their three lower members in a certain way and to a certain extent. They have prepared themselves by learning to master the sensory body or astral body, by penetrating it with their “I” and by developing the soul of sensation within the sensory body. Just as the soul of feeling stands in a certain relationship to the body of feeling, so the soul of understanding or emotion stands in a certain relationship to the etheric or Life-Body, so that the soul of understanding or emotion is a faint foreshadowing of what the Life-Spirit or buddhi will be—a faint foreshadowing, but a foreshadowing nonetheless. And what is contained within the conscious soul is, in a certain sense, worked into the physical body by the “I.” Therefore, it is a faint foreshadowing of what will one day become the Spirit-Man or Atma. We can also say: At present, apart from minor elements that the human being has already worked out of the astral body as the beginning of the Spirit-Self or Manas, we recognize four distinct members in the human being. Today we can distinguish:

1. the physical body,
2. the etheric body,
3. the astral body,
4. the “I” at work within it,

[ 9 ] and furthermore, as a prelude to the higher links:

the soul of sensation,
the soul of understanding,
the soul of consciousness.

[ 10 ] Here we have the human being before us as a being, as he presents himself to us today, and here we grasp, so to speak, this human being in the present moment of his becoming. We can literally see the “I” taking shape, having been prepared by the sensory, intellectual, and conscious souls—the higher members. We see this “I” working with the forces of the sensory, intellectual, and conscious souls on the astral body, on the beginnings of the Spirit-Self. We see the human being right now, in this very moment of his work.

[ 11 ] Those—and this will include most of you—who have studied what we call the research into the Akashic Records, the evolution of humankind in the distant past, and the outlook into the distant future, will know that human beings, as I have been able to sketch out for you, have evolved; that we can look back into the distant past; that human beings required long epochs of evolution to form the initial structure of their physical body, then the initial structure of the etheric body, and finally the astral body, and to further develop these three members. Humanity required long periods of time for this, and you may also know that humanity did not undergo the earlier development of its being—for example, the development of its astral body—in the same state of the Earth in which the Earth exists today, but rather that it developed its astral body in an earlier state of earthly existence: lunar existence. Just as we recognize our present life as the consequence of earlier Earth lives, of earlier incarnations, so too do we look back upon earlier incarnations of our Earth. What we call the feeling soul, the intellectual soul, or the emotional soul was first formed during the Earth’s present existence. During the Lunar stage, the astral body was implanted; during an even earlier stage of Earth’s existence—the Solar stage—the etheric body was implanted; and finally, during the Saturn stage, the physical body was implanted. Thus, we look back on three incarnations of the Earth, and in each of these incarnations we see one of the members that human beings carry within themselves today—first laid down as a predisposition and then further developed.

[ 12 ] There is something else that needs to be emphasized when we speak of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon states. Just as we, as human beings on Earth, go through the state that we might call the self-conscious human state. Thus, during earlier stages of Earth’s evolution—during the ancient Lunar, Solar, and Saturnian states—other beings passed through the stage that we are currently undergoing on Earth. It makes little difference whether one refers to these beings using the terminology common in the East or that which is more customary in the West. Those beings who, during the Lunar stage of our Earth, were at the level where human beings are today—and who are the next higher beings standing above us—we call, in the terminology of Christian esotericism, “angeloi” or angels. They stand one level higher than human beings because they completed their human stage one epoch earlier, so that these beings were, during the ancient Lunar phase, what we are today. However, they were not walking around on the Moon at that time as human beings do today on Earth. They were beings at the human stage, but they did not live in the flesh as human beings do today. Thus, only their stage of development corresponded to the human existence that humans undergo today. Likewise, we find beings of an even higher order who underwent human development during the ancient Solar stage. These are the Archangeloi, or Archangels. They are beings who stand two stages higher than human beings, having passed through their human stage two epochs earlier. If we go back even further to the first incarnation of our earthly existence, to the Saturn state, we find that the beings who passed through their human stage there are those we refer to as spirits of personality, Archai, Primordial Beings; so that when we begin with these beings—who were therefore human beings in the distant past, during the old Saturn state—and then trace the incarnations on Earth down to our present time, we have before us the stages of development of beings all the way down to our own being. We can therefore say: the Primordial Beings, the Archai, were human beings on the old Saturn; archangels, Archangeloi, were human beings on the ancient Sun; angels, or Angeloi, were human beings on the ancient Moon; and human beings are human beings on our Earth. Since we now know that in the future we will continue our evolution, further developing what are our lower members—that is, what today is our astral body, our etheric or Life-Body, and our physical body—we must surely ask: Is it not just as natural that the beings who previously passed through the human stage are already at the stage where they are transforming their astral body into the Spirit-Self, or Manas? Just as we will complete the transformation of our astral body into the Spirit-Self or Manas during the next incarnation of our Earth—during the Jupiter era—so too have those beings who were human beings during the Lunar epoch, the Angeloi, completed the transformation of their astral bodies into the Spirit-Self or Manas, or they will complete it during our earthly existence. They are undergoing during our Earth incarnation what we will only have to undergo during the Earth’s next incarnation. If we look even further back at the beings who were human during the ancient Sun period, we can say: They already had to undergo during the Lunar period what we will only have to undergo in the next Earth incarnation. They are engaged in the work that human beings will carry out when, through their I, they transform their etheric or life-body into Life-Spirit or buddhi. Thus, in these Archangeloi, in these archangels, we have beings who stand two stages above us, who stand on the stage that we will one day reach when, through our I, we transform the life-body into Life-Spirit or buddhi. When we look up to these beings, we do so in such a way that we say: We see in them beings who stand two levels above us, beings in whom we see, as it were, a foreshadowing of what we ourselves will experience in the future; we look up to them as beings who are working today on their etheric or Life-Body and transforming it into Life-Spirit or buddhi. In the same way, we look up to even higher beings, the spirits of personality. They stand on a level even higher than that of the archangels, a level that human beings will reach in the even more distant future, when they will be able to transform the physical body into Atma, or the Spirit-Man.

[ 13 ] Just as human beings exist at their present stage of existence, so do these corresponding entities exist at the stages of existence just described; just as they stand above us, so are they realities. Now, their reality is by no means distant from earthly existence; rather, it intervenes in it and exerts an influence on our human existence. We need only ask ourselves now: How do these beings, who stand above humankind, influence our human existence? If we wish to understand this influence, we must take into account that such beings, so to speak, present a different spiritual aspect in their work than those beings we today call human beings. There is, in fact, a considerable difference between these beings that stand above human beings and those beings that are currently only at the human stage. As strange as this may sound now, it will become completely clear to you over the next few days. This is, after all, spoken from genuine spiritual research: human beings, as they are today, are, so to speak, in an intermediate stage of their existence. The way the ego works on its lower members today will not remain so forever. The entire human being is, as it were, internally coherent today, and it forms, as it were, a being undivided by anything. This may change in the future of human development, and it will change significantly. Once human beings have progressed to the point where they can work on their astral body with full consciousness and, through their “I,” transform this astral body into the Spirit-Self or Manas, then a state similar to the one that now exists in the unconscious or subconscious during sleep will be present in full consciousness. Imagine, for a moment, the state of human sleep. During sleep, a person withdraws—in relation to their astral body and their “I”—from their physical body and their etheric body; they leave them lying in bed and then, as it were, float outside the physical and etheric bodies. Now imagine the human being in this state, such that consciousness awakens: “I am an ‘I’”—that it awakens in this spiritual body just as it is present in the waking state of consciousness. What a strange sight the human being would present to themselves at that moment! He would feel in one place: “There I am,” and perhaps down below, far away from that first place: “There is my physical body and my etheric body; they are in that place and they belong to me, but I, with my other limbs, am floating outside, up there.” When a person today becomes conscious in his astral body, outside his physical and etheric bodies, then he can indeed—no matter how highly developed he may be on Earth today, so to speak—do nothing other than move freely here or there in his astral body and act independently of his physical body in various places in the world; but he cannot yet do this with his physical and etheric bodies. In the distant future, however, it will be possible to guide them from a location in northern Europe, for example, to another location from the outside, commanding them: “Go on!” and then steering their movement from the outside. That is not yet possible today. But human beings will be able to do this once they have progressed beyond the stage of Earth’s evolution to the Jupiter stage—the next stage of our Earth’s development. That will also be the next stage of human development. We will then feel that, in a sense, we will be our own external conductor. That is the essential point. And this leads to a division of what we have today called the human being. Materialistic consciousness, however, cannot make much of this. It cannot grasp what is already, in a certain sense, actively at work in the external world today in a manner similar to how it will one day be present in the human being. Such phenomena already exist today. People could perceive them if they paid attention. They would then see that there are certain beings who, for example, have developed in this way too early. Just as the human being, by waiting for the right moment, will reach the Jupiter state at the right time—so that he can direct his physical and etheric bodies—so, too, there are beings who, in a certain sense, have developed prematurely without having waited for the right moment. We find such prematurely developed beings in the bird world—specifically among those birds that undertake the great migrations across the Earth every year. Here it is the so-called group soul that is connected to the etheric body of each bird. Just as the group soul directs the regular migrations of the birds across the Earth, so too will the human being, after having developed his Spirit-Self or Manas, command what we call the physical and etheric bodies, give them orders, and set them in motion. In an even higher sense, human beings will be able to direct these bodies and set them in motion from the outside once they have developed to the point where they can also act to transform the etheric or Life-Body. Such beings, who are already capable of this, exist today. These are the Archangeloi, or Archangels. They are beings who can already do what human beings will one day be able to do—beings who can accomplish what might be called “directing their etheric and physical bodies from the outside,” but who, in addition, can also work on their own etheric bodies.

[ 14 ] Imagine, as a concept, beings that are active, so to speak, in the vicinity of our Earth, that are contained within the spiritual atmosphere of our Earth along with their “I,” and who, from this “I” of theirs, have already transformed their astral body, so that they possess a fully developed Spirit-Self or Manas, but who now continue to work on our Earth with this fully developed Spirit-Self or Manas and work into human beings by transforming our etheric or Life-Body; beings who stand at the stage at which they transform the etheric or Life-Body into Buddhi or Life-Spirit. If you imagine such beings—who thus stand at the level of the spiritual hierarchies that we call archangels—you will have a concept of what are called “national spirits,” what are called the guiding national spirits of the Earth. The national spirits belong to the level of the Archangeloi, or Archangels. We shall see how they, in turn, direct the etheric or Life-Body, and how, through this, they in turn influence humanity and draw it into their own activity. When we consider the various peoples of our Earth and single out individual ones, we will find in the unique fabric and life of these peoples—in what we call their special, characteristic qualities—a reflection of what we can regard as the mission of the national spirits.

[ 15 ] When we recognize the mission of these beings—who serve as the inspirers of peoples—we can define what a people is. A people is a cohesive group of human beings led by one of the Archangeloi, one of the archangels. The individual members of a people receive inspiration from this source for what they do and accomplish as members of that people. Through a mental image of these national spirits as individually distinct as the people on our Earth, we will come to understand that the various groups of peoples represent the individual missions of these Archangels. If we mentally visualize how, in world history, one nation after another—and also one nation alongside another—exerts its influence, we can now, at least in abstract form—the form will become increasingly concrete in the coming lectures—form a mental image of everything taking place there being inspired by these spiritual beings. But one thing will likely come to mind quite easily: that alongside this interplay of one people with another, something else is taking place in human evolution. If you survey the period of time we count from the great Atlantean catastrophe—which altered the face of the Earth so drastically that the continent that once existed between present-day Africa, America, and Europe sank at that time—you can distinguish the periods in which the great peoples were active, from which the post-Atlantean cultures emerged: the ancient Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greek-Latin, and our present culture, which will eventually transition into the sixth cultural epoch. We also observe that various peoples’ spiritual guides have successively been active within these cultures. We know that the Egyptian-Chaldean culture continued to exert its influence long after the Greek culture had already begun, and that the Greek culture continued to prevail even after the Roman culture had already begun. Thus, we can view the peoples both side by side and one after another. But in everything that develops within and alongside the peoples, something else is also developing. It is progress in human development. It does not matter whether we regard one as higher or lower than another. For example, someone might say: “I like Indian culture best.” That may be a personal judgment. But anyone who does not swear by personal judgments will say: It does not matter how we evaluate things; the necessary course of events leads humanity forward, even if one might later call it decline. Necessity drives humanity forward. If we compare the various historical periods—5000 B.C., 3000 B.C., and 1000 A.D.—there is still something that transcends the national spirits, something in which the various national spirits share. You need only consider this in our own time. How is it that so many people from the most diverse national regions can sit together in this hall, understand one another, and strive to understand one another with regard to the most important thing that has brought them together here? These different people come from the realm of the most diverse national spirits, and yet there is something in which they find common ground. In a similar way, the various peoples of that time understood one another and were able to find common ground, because in every era there is something that transcends the national soul, that can bring the various folk-souls together—something that is understood to a greater or lesser extent everywhere. This is what is referred to by the rather poor but common German term “Zeitgeist,” or “spirit of the age.” The spirit of the epoch, the Zeitgeist, is different in Greek times than it is in our own. Those who grasp the spirit of our time are drawn toward theosophy. This is what transcends the individual national spirits from the spirit of the epoch. In the time when Jesus Christ appeared on Earth, his forerunner, John the Baptist, described the spirit—which one might call the Zeitgeist—with the words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

[ 16 ] Thus, one can find the spirit of the age for every epoch, and this is something that is woven into the weaving of the national spirits, which we have simultaneously characterized as the weaving of the Archangels. For today’s materialistic human being, the spirit of the age is something entirely abstract and devoid of reality, and one should certainly not suggest to such a person that the spirit of the age is a true being. Nevertheless, behind the term “spirit of the age” lies a real entity—none other than one that stands three levels above the human level. Hidden behind it are those beings who already passed through their human stage on ancient Saturn—the Earth’s most distant epoch of development—and who today, from the spiritual sphere surrounding the Earth, are working on the Earth’s transformation, thereby undergoing, so to speak, the final phase of the transformation of their physical body into a Spirit-Man, or Atma. We are dealing here with high beings, beings whose qualities might make a human feel dizzy. These are the beings we might again describe as the true inspirers—or, to use technical terms from the occult, the “intuitors” of the spirit of the age or the spirits of the age. They work in such a way that they take turns, passing the baton, as it were, from one to the next. From epoch to epoch, they pass their task on to one another. The spirit of the epoch that was active during the Greek period passes the mission on to the one who acts later, and so on. They thus take turns. As we have seen, there are a number of such spirits of the age, such spirits of personality, who act as the spirit of the age. These spirits of personality, these intuitors of the spirit of the age, occupy a higher rank than the national spirits. In every age, one in particular is active and gives that age its overall character, assigning tasks to the national spirits, so that what constitutes the collective spirit of the epoch becomes specialized and individualized through the national spirits. Then, in the coming epoch, it is succeeded by another spirit of the age, another spirit of personality, another arche.

[ 17 ] When a certain number of epochs have passed, a spirit of the age has undergone further development. We must have in our mental image that our personality passes on the results of this earthly life to the next earthly life when we die in our own time and have completed our development here. The same is true of the spirits of the epoch. In every epoch, we have such a spirit of the epoch; at the end of the epoch, it hands over its office to its successor, who in turn hands it over to the next successor, and so on. Meanwhile, the previous ones undergo their own evolution; then it is the turn again of the one who has been absent the longest, so that in a later epoch—while the others are then undergoing their own evolution—he returns as the Spirit of the Epoch and, intuitively, instills into humanity what he himself has acquired for his higher mission. We look up to these spirits of personality, to these beings who can be named with the otherwise rather meaningless term “zeitgeist,” so that we can say: We humans go from incarnation to incarnation; but we know quite precisely that, as we ourselves move from epoch to epoch, as we look into the future, ever-changing zeitgeists govern the events of our Earth. But our present-day Zeitgeist, too, will return; we will encounter it again. Because of this characteristic of these spirits of personality—that they, as it were, describe circles and return to their point of departure, that they describe cycles—because of this characteristic, they are also called “spirits of the cycles.” — We will have to justify this term in even greater detail. — So these higher spiritual beings, who issue their commands to the national spirits, are also called “spirits of the cycles.” This refers to those cycles that human beings themselves must undergo, in which, from epoch to epoch, they return in a certain sense to earlier states and repeat them in a higher form. Now, you see, this repetition of the characteristics of earlier forms is something you may notice. If you carefully trace the development of humanity’s stages on Earth from a perspective of Spiritual Science, you will find these repeated events in a wide variety of ways. For example, one such repetition is that, so to speak, seven epochs follow one another after the Atlantean catastrophe—what we call the post-Atlantean cultural stages. The Greco-Latin stage, or cultural epoch, forms, so to speak, the turning point in our cycle and therefore does not undergo a repetition. This is followed by a repetition of the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, specifically in our own time. This will be followed by another epoch, which will be a repetition of the Persian period, albeit in a somewhat different form, and then the seventh epoch will come, which will be a repetition of the ancient Indian culture, the epoch of the holy Rishis, so that in this epoch certain things that were laid the foundation for back then will emerge in a different form. The guidance of these events rests with the spirits of the age.

[ 18 ] That what progresses from epoch to epoch is now lived out across the Earth among various peoples; that the most diverse forms are shaped from this or that soil, grow out of this or that linguistic community, from this or that formal language, from architecture, art, and science—and that all of these can undergo metamorphoses and are capable of absorbing everything that the spirit of the epoch can instill in humanity—for this we need the national spirits, who belong to the archangels in the hierarchy of higher beings. Now we still need a mediating force between the higher mission of the national spirits and those beings here on Earth who are to be inspired by them. You will readily recognize—at first in abstract form—that the mediators between these two kinds of spirits are the hierarchy of angels. They form the mediating link between the national spirit and the individual human being. So that the individual may take into himself what the national spirit is to instill in the entire nation, so that the individual may become an instrument in the nation’s mission—this requires such mediation between the individual and the archangel of the nation.

[ 19 ] Thus we have looked up to the beings who became human three stages before the earthly human reached the human stage, and have seen how they position themselves within humanity in their consciousness and intervene in our earthly evolution. Tomorrow we will show to what extent the work of the archangels—working down from above, from their I, which has already developed into Manas or the Spirit-Self and works on the etheric body or Life-Body of the human being—manifests itself precisely in the creative output, the qualities, and the character of a people. In this work of the higher beings, the human being is directly surrounded by them, in that, as a member of a people, he is placed within it. Although the human being is first and foremost a human individuality—an embodiment of an “I”—he is not merely an individuality but also a member of a people, and thus something for which, as a human individuality, he bears no responsibility. What can a human being, by belonging to a particular people, do about the fact that he speaks precisely the language of that people? This is not an individual achievement, nor does it belong to what we call individual progress; it is the current into which he is drawn. What we call human progress is something entirely different. As we observe the Folk-souls being woven and lived, we will recall what human progress consists of and what a human being needs in order to move through it. We will see what belongs, so to speak, not only to his development but also to the development of entirely different entities.

[ 20 ] Thus we see how human beings are integrated into the series of hierarchies, and how, in their development from time to time, from epoch to epoch, beings whom we know from the other side play an active role. And we have seen how arrangements are made to ensure that these beings can express themselves in the most diverse individual ways, and we have seen that what they have to offer can become part of human beings.

[ 21 ] The overarching principles of each epoch are shaped by the spirit of the times. The spread of the spirit of the times across the entire Earth is made possible by the individual national characters. While the spirits of the age empower the national spirits, the angels ensure that these can flow into individual human beings, so that they may fulfill their mission. The fact that individual human beings become instruments in this mission of the national spirits is brought about by the beings who stand between human beings and the national spirits—the angels, or Angeloi.

[ 22 ] How this marvelous network will reveal to us the workings of the manifold national individualities of the past and the present will be one of the topics of these lectures. In the next lecture, we will begin to shed light on the concrete details of how this fabric—which we have only sketched out today—is woven, the spiritual fabric that is our next existence in the world.