The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] If one wishes to study the development of Germanic-Norse history and the spiritual impulses described therein, one must first consider the fundamental character of Germanic-Norse mythology; and it has already been pointed out on previous occasions that this Germanic-Norse mythology, despite certain similarities it shares with other mythologies and conceptions of the divine, is nonetheless something quite unique. It remains true, however, that a very extensive core of mythological belief extends across all Germanic peoples and tribes of Europe, so that even far to the south, a unified mythological perspective—essentially a similar understanding of those kinship relationships—is possible. Precisely because of the distinctive nature of Germanic-Norse mythology, there must once have been a shared understanding across all the regions where this mythology was widespread in one form or another; for what is common in the mythology of the Germanic-Norse peoples differs enormously even from the essential core of Greek mythology, not to mention Egyptian mythology, so that everything related in Germanic mythology is very closely connected to one another and far removed from what constitutes the essence of Greek and Roman mythology. However, it is not very easy to understand this essence today, not because of the prerequisites for understanding—which would take us too far afield to discuss here—but because a certain longing, a certain impulse prevails today to simply compare the religions of different peoples with one another. Comparative religious studies, comparative mythology—these are fields that inspire great enthusiasm today. This is a field in which it is possible to engage in the greatest nonsense. What usually happens when one compares the mythologies and religions of individual peoples? One compares the external features found in the stories of the gods, seeking to prove that a particular divine figure appears in one mythology and in a similar way in another, and so on. For anyone who truly understands the facts involved, this comparative study of religions is pretty much the most unsettling aspect of our current academic approach, precisely because, in reality, people compare nothing but superficial details everywhere. To someone familiar with the facts, such a comparative study of religions makes roughly the same impression as if someone were to say: “Thirty years ago, I met a man. He wore a uniform that was of such-and-such a design. The man had blue pants, a red jacket, and this or that head covering, and so on”—and then quickly continues: “Then, twenty years ago, I met a person who wore the same uniform, and ten years ago, another who wore the same uniform again.” Now, if the person in question were to believe that he could compare the people he met thirty years ago, twenty years ago, and ten years ago—simply because they wore the same uniform—in terms of their very nature, he would be very much mistaken; for a completely different person could be inside that uniform at different times, and what really matters is what kind of person is inside the uniform. The analogy may seem far-fetched, and yet when it comes to comparing religions, it amounts to the same thing if one takes Adonis and compares him to Christ. In that case, one is comparing only the outward uniform. The clothing and characteristics of the beings in the myths may be very similar or even identical, but what matters is what kind of spiritual-divine individualities are within them; and if the individualities within Adonis and Christ are entirely different, then this comparison has no more value than a comparison of uniforms. Nevertheless, this comparison is immensely popular today. What comparative religious studies can bring to light today in this field—using its entirely superficial methods—is therefore, in many respects, completely irrelevant. What matters far more is that one comes to understand—as it were, through the differentiation of national spirits—the way in which this or that people arrived at its mythology, its other doctrines concerning the gods, or even its philosophy.

[ 2 ] We can therefore hardly understand the fundamental character of Germanic-Norse mythology without taking another look at the five successive cultural periods of the post-Atlantean era. These five cultural periods were brought about by migrations from west to east, such that, so to speak, the most mature and advanced people, after completing these migrations, advanced into the Indian region and then established the sacred, ancient Indian culture. Further on, approaching our own time, the Persian culture was established, followed by the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture, then the Greco-Latin culture, and finally our own. These five cultures can be understood in their essential core only by recognizing that the people who participated in these cultures—as well as the angelic beings, the Folk-souls, the archangels, and the spirits of the age in times past—were themselves entirely distinct from one another. Today, let us give greater consideration to how different the people were who participated in these cultures.

[ 3 ] The people who established the ancient -Indian culture—a culture that later found its literary expression in the Vedas and in subsequent Indian literature—were fundamentally different from, for example, the Greco-Latin peoples; different even from the Persians; different from the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples; and most different of all from the peoples in Europe who are now developing in preparation for the fifth cultural period of the post-Atlantean era. But in what way were they different? The entire human constitution of the ancient Indian peoples was absolutely different from that of the peoples of all regions lying further to the west. If we wish to form a mental image of the nature of this difference, we must realize: the peoples of ancient India had advanced very far in human development before they developed the “I.” They had made great—indeed, immense—progress in every other aspect of human development; they had a long, long history of human development behind them. But they had gone through this, so to speak, in a kind of dullness. Then the “I”—the consciousness of the I—made its appearance. This occurred relatively late among the Indian people; at a time when the Indian people were already, to a certain degree, very mature, having already gone through what the Germanic-Nordic peoples still had to go through, even while they already possessed their I. — Do bear this in mind! The Germanic-Nordic peoples, with their fully developed “I,” had to be present during what the inhabitants of ancient India had gone through in a state of certain dullness—that is, without their “I” being present.

[ 4 ] So what, then, did humanity go through during the post-Atlantean era in terms of its development? When people lived as human beings in the ancient Atlantean era, they were still endowed with a higher degree of ancient, dim clairvoyance. Through this ancient, dull clairvoyance, one could see into the divine-spiritual world; one could observe the processes taking place within that world. Now, for a moment, transport yourself back to the ancient Atlantean land, before the trains head east. The air was still permeated with water vapor and mist. But the souls of the people were different, too. People did not even distinguish the various external sensory perceptions from one another. At that time, the spiritual content of the world spread out around them like a spiritual aroma, like a spiritual aura. A certain form of clairvoyance was thus present, and people had to emerge from this state of clairvoyance. This occurred through the influence of the forces into whose sphere people entered during their migrations from west to east. During these migrations, the most diverse stages of soul development were once again experienced. There were peoples who, as they migrated eastward, initially emerged from the old state of clairvoyance as if in a daze and were already at a higher stage of development, even while their “I” was still shrouded in dullness. They passed through various stages of development, and their “I” was still a dull, dreamlike one. The Indians were the most highly developed, for their “I” awoke with full self-awareness. By then they had already reached a state where they possessed a very rich inner spiritual life that no longer particularly reflected those conditions which the peoples of Europe would continue to experience for a long time. They had already passed through those stages. They awoke to self-consciousness when they were already endowed with spiritual powers and abilities that enabled them to penetrate deeply into the spiritual worlds. Consequently, as the more advanced members of the Indian population worked their way out of their old, twilight-like clairvoyant states, all the activity and workings of the various angelic and archangelic beings in relation to human souls had, in essence, become highly indifferent to them. They no longer directly observed the work of the archangels and angels, nor that of those spiritual beings in general who worked particularly within the collective consciousness of the people. This had been accomplished in their souls, in their astral and etheric bodies, when they were, so to speak, not even present yet. They awoke when their souls were already endowed with an immense degree of maturity; they awoke in such a way that the most advanced among them could, through a slight effort of development, already read in the Akashic Records what had previously occurred in the course of human evolution, so that they looked out into their surroundings, into the world, and were thereby able to read in the Akashic Records what was taking place in the spiritual world—what they had gone through in a dull, twilight state of consciousness. They had been unconsciously guided into higher realms; before their sense of self had awakened, they had attained spiritual abilities far richer than the soul capacities of Western peoples. Thus, the spiritual world was a direct experience for these people. The most advanced among the Indian leaders had reached such a stage that, when their sense of self awoke, they were in fact no longer even dependent on observing, as it were, how human development welled up from the spirits of form or forces; rather, they were more familiar with what we call the spirits of movement, the powers, and that which stands above them—the spirits of wisdom. This interested them in a very special way. The spiritual beings that stand below these, on the other hand, were beings whose realm they had already inhabited earlier; therefore, they were no longer of such particular importance to them. Thus they looked up to what they later called the sum of all spirits of movement and all spirits of wisdom—to what was later designated by the Greek terms Dynameis and Kyriotetes. They looked up to these and said to them: “Mula-Prakriti”—that is, the sum of the Spirits of Movement—and “Maha-Purusha”—the total sum of the Spirits of Wisdom—which lives as a spiritual unity. They were able to arrive at such insights because the members of this people awakened to their “I” at such a late stage of development. They had already accomplished what later peoples still had to experience with their “I.”

[ 5 ] The peoples of the Persian culture were less highly developed. Due to their unique capacity for insight and the awakening of their sense of self, they were at such a lower level that they were able to engage with the entities of the forces or spirits of form. They became particularly familiar with these beings. In a certain sense, they perceived them clearly, and they took a special interest in them. The peoples of the Persian communities awoke at a level one step lower than that of the Indians, yet still at a level to which the peoples of the West would later have to work their way up. Thus, they became acquainted with the powers or spirits of form, which they grouped under the term “Amshaspands.” These are the “radiations” that we know as the spirits of form or powers, and which, from their perspective, the peoples of Persian culture were particularly well able to observe.

[ 6 ] Then we come to the Chaldean peoples. They already had an awareness of what we know as primal forces, as guiding spirits of the age. They had an awareness of the beings that are to be understood as primal forces, as spirits of the personality. In a different way, the peoples of the Greco-Latin era also had a certain awareness of precisely these primal forces or spirits of personality. But they possessed something else entirely as well, and that is what could lead us a step further in our understanding. The Greeks were even closer to the Germanic peoples. Yet the “I” awakened there at a higher level than among the Germanic-Nordic peoples. What the Nordic peoples still experienced as the work of angels and archangels was no longer experienced directly by the Greco-Latin peoples. However, they still had a clear memory of it. So imagine that the difference between the Germanic and the Greek-Latin peoples is that the Greek-Latin peoples still had a memory of how the angels and archangels had participated in the soul life they had developed within themselves. But they had not, strictly speaking, experienced this all too clearly. They were still in a dull state of consciousness at that time. Yet in their memory, it now came to the forefront of their souls in a very special way. The creation of this entire world, the way in which the angels and archangels—both the abnormal and the normal ones—work within the human soul—this is what the Greeks knew. What they had experienced was preserved in their souls as a powerful image of memory. Memory is what is more serene, with firmer contours than what one actually experiences. It is no longer so fresh and no longer so young, but what appears as memory has sharper outlines and contours. The influence or impulse of the world of angels and archangels on the human soul was evoked by the Greeks from memory in fixed, sharp contours. That is Greek mythology. Anyone who does not view it in this way, but merely compares the names with names that appear elsewhere—that is, who does not take the specific powers into account, who does not grasp the figures that appear as Apollo, Minerva, and so on—is engaging in a superficial comparison of religions, merely comparing the “uniforms.” What matters is the way in which things were viewed back then.

[ 7 ] Having seen this, we must admit: The Greeks shaped their mythology out of memory. — The Egyptian-Chaldean era had only a dim, vague memory of the workings of the world of angels and archangels, but a glimpse into the world of primordial forces. It is as if they were beginning to forget something. In Persian mythology, or the doctrine of the gods, we find a complete forgetting of the world of angels and archangels, but at the same time a glimpse into the world of the forces or spirits of form. What is found in Greek mythology has been forgotten by the Persian peoples and, even more so, by the Indians. They were already viewing all these events anew from the Akashic Records and creating images of past events based on their own insight—which, however, was already a deified insight achieved through highly developed spiritual powers. From this, you will also recognize that it is precisely these peoples of the East who find it exceedingly difficult to understand Western spiritual life. This is the source of the reserve shown by the peoples of the East toward Western spiritual life. They will certainly adopt Western material culture; but Western spiritual culture will remain more or less closed to them unless they approach it through the detour of Spiritual Science. They were already at a high level of human development at a time when Jesus Christ had not yet appeared on Earth. He did not appear until the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This was an event that could no longer be grasped by the forces that had developed out of the Indian national character. For this, forces were needed that were related to a less advanced stage of the “I,” to the “I” existing within subordinate soul forces.

[ 8 ] In the Germanic-Nordic regions, the influence of the angels and archangels on the human soul was not merely a memory, but such that people—even at the time when Jesus Christ walked the earth—could still see it, could still experience it, and could still participate in the activities of the angelic and archangelic beings as they were still at work within their souls. During these soul experiences, the Greek and Latin peoples recalled something they had once experienced in the past.

[ 9 ] The Germanic peoples lived in this world as if it were their own, immediate realm. Their sense of self had awakened at that stage of existence where the folk spirits—and those spiritual beings that themselves still stand beneath the folk spirits—were still working their way into the soul. Therefore, these peoples stood closest to what we know as the events that took place in ancient Atlantis.

[ 10 ] In ancient Atlantis, people looked up to the spiritual powers and spoke of a kind of unified deity, because they were looking up—through direct perception—into ancient, primeval stages of human development. At that time, people still perceived, as it were, the workings of the spirits of wisdom and the spirits of movement—which the later Indians would later observe again through the Akashic Records. These Western peoples had risen one step beyond this stage of perception, so that they experienced in the immediate present the transition from the old worldview into the new one. They beheld the weaving and life of real spiritual powers at a time when the “I” had not yet awakened. But at the same time, they saw how the “I” gradually awoke, and how angelic and archangelic beings intervened in the soul. They perceived this immediate transition. They had a memory of an earlier weaving and life, when the perception was still such that one saw everything, as it were, as if in a sea of mist, and they watched as what we have come to know as the divine-spiritual beings who stand immediately above humankind emerged from this sea of mist for them. But the ancient gods who were active before the gods—whom people now saw and with whom they felt connected—began to intervene in human soul life; these divine beings, who were active in the distant, distant past, in the time of ancient Atlantis, were called the Vanir. Emerging from the ancient Atlantean era, human beings then beheld the weaving of the angels and archangels; these were called the Aesir. These were the beings who, as angels and archangels, cared for the human “I,” which was now awakening at the lowest level. They were placed in charge of those peoples. What the other peoples of the East had overlooked—namely, observing how the soul works its way upward through the various forces bestowed by the normal and abnormal angelic and archangelic beings—the peoples of Europe had to experience from the very beginning; they had to be fully engaged in this process so that these soul forces could develop gradually.

[ 11 ] Thus, the divine figures that stood, so to speak, before the soul of the Germanic-Norse person—the divine figures that worked directly upon his soul—and what he himself observed as the human-soul’s struggle to emerge from the cosmic were direct perceptions; that was something they experienced directly. They did not look back in memory at the way in which souls had formed themselves within bodies; rather, they saw what was happening right before their eyes. It is his own development, and his “I” is present in it. He has an understanding of this all the way back to the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries A.D. He has retained an understanding of how the soul forces gradually form and crystallize into the body. First, he looks at the archangelic beings who worked within his soul by giving him what his soul forces were to become, and there he finds Wotan or Odin to be the most outstanding of these archangels; he sees him working on his soul, sees how he works his way into his soul. What does he see there? How does he perceive Wotan or Odin? As what does he recognize him, and as what does he learn to love him and, above all, to understand him? He learns to recognize him as one of those archangels who had once chosen to renounce their ascent to higher realms. He comes to know Odin as one of the exceptional archangels, as one of the great renunciants of antiquity who had assumed the office of archangel when they undertook the vital mission of working into the human soul. The Germanic-Nordic people still experience Odin at work during the time when he sets out to instill language into the soul. In a wondrous way, the account of how Odin himself works among his peoples to make language possible for them has been preserved. This is described as a divine initiation. How Odin came to acquire the power to bestow language upon the souls of the Germanic-Nordic peoples is depicted by the fact that, before he attained this ability, Odin underwent what is presented to us as the initiation through the drink of the gods—the drink of the gods that once existed among the giants in the distant past. This mead contained not merely abstract wisdom, but represents for us the wisdom that manifests itself directly in sound. Through this wisdom manifested in sound, Odin attains power during his initiation; he learns to wield it as he undergoes a long initiation—a nine-day initiation—from which he is then delivered by Mimir, the ancient bearer of wisdom. Thus Odin becomes the master of the power of speech. Hence, later legend traces the language of the poets, the language of the skalds, back to Odin. The study of the runes is also traced back to Odin; in ancient times, it was thought to be much more closely related to language than to later literature. How, then, the soul acquires language—by taking a detour through the etheric body and, as it lives within the physical body, through the corresponding archangel—is expressed in the wondrous stories told about Odin.

[ 12 ] We find similar archangelic beings among Odin’s companions: in Hönir, who bestows the power of mental images, and in Lodur, who bestows what is closest to the race itself—namely, skin color and blood character. In these two beings, then, we must see archangelic beings who, so to speak, lean more toward the normal side. We recognize the abnormal ones in the beings that appear as the Wili and the We. These are entities that work even more deeply within, in the innermost recesses of the soul, as I explained in the previous lecture. But such an “I,” which itself stands at an abnormal stage of development—where it is already involved in the formation of the subordinate soul forces—feels a deep kinship precisely with an abnormal archangel. Such an “I” feels a kinship with an abnormally developed archangelic being. For this reason, Odin is not perceived as an abnormal archangel, but rather as one who, in his backwardness, is akin to the backwardness of Western souls, who experience more consciously within their “I” what was left behind during their passage through those realms—realms that Eastern souls passed by at certain stages of their soul life until they resolved to awaken. Therefore, above all else, the soul of the Germanic-Nordic people is imbued with everything connected to these Archangelic forces of Odin, which delve and work in the elemental depths of the soul’s life.

[ 13 ] When we have said that it is the angels who convey to individual human beings what the archangels bring about, then an “I” that awakens at such an early, elemental stage of soul life has, above all, an interest in having the affairs of the archangels, as it were, carried into that “I.” That is why the Germanic-Nordic person is drawn to an angelic figure who possesses special power but is at the same time intimately connected to the individual human being and his or her individuality. That is Thor. Thor is recognized only by knowing that he must be seen as a being who, although he might have advanced very far had he developed normally, chose to remain at the level of the angels relatively early on so that, at the time when the “I” awoke in the soul’s development, he could serve as a guide in the soul world of the Germanic-Nordic regions. The fact that what was to be carried from the spiritual world into each individual “I”—and could indeed be carried there—is what is felt so directly in Thor as being related to the individual human “I.” If we keep this in mind, we will also better understand the details that have been handed down. Our task, after all, is to be able to understand these divine individualities in an appropriate way. Now, however, the Germanic-Nordic people sensed and witnessed this imprinting of the soul into physicality. They were present as the “I” integrated itself into physicality and took possession of every single human being.

[ 14 ] Now we know that the “I” pulsates in the blood of the physical body, and that every inner aspect corresponds to an outer one, every microcosmic aspect to a macrocosmic one. The work of Odin, the giver of linguistic and runic wisdom, who acted through breathing via a long detour, corresponds in the outer macrocosm to the movement of the wind. The regular influx of air through our respiratory organs—which brings about the transformation of air into the word, into language—corresponds, out there in the macrocosm, to the movements and currents in the wind. Just as truly as we perceive Odin’s reign in the transformation of air into words within ourselves, so too must we see him reigning and working out there in the wind. But this is what those who still possessed the ancient Germanic-Norse abilities—which included, in particular, a certain degree of clairvoyance—truly saw. They saw Odin reigning everywhere in the world wind; they saw him shaping language through his breath. The Norse people perceived this as a unity. Just as that which lives within us and organizes language—that is, just as language was organized in the Nordic tradition—penetrates into the “I” and causes the pulsation of the blood, so too do lightning and thunder in the macrocosm correspond to that which organizes itself as language within us. Language exists even before the “I” is born. Therefore, the “I” is perceived everywhere as the son of that being which gives language. Thor, in particular, is involved in imprinting this upon the individual “I,” and what corresponds to this process in the macrocosm is, in the microcosm, the pulsation of the blood. What, then, corresponds in the macrocosm to the pulsation of blood within the human being is that which passes through the blowing winds and weaving clouds as lightning and thunder. The Germanic-Nordic person, however, perceives this in his clairvoyance as a single unity; he sees the blowing of the wind and the flashing of lightning outside as intimately connected with the weaving of the air he breathes in. He sees how it passes into the blood and causes the “I” to pulsate there. Today this is regarded as a material process, but for the Germanic-Nordic people it was still an astral process. They saw the intimate kinship between fire and lightning and what flows through the blood. They felt the pulse in their blood and knew: “This is the beat of the ‘I’; I know: what beats there, I feel, and after some time I feel it again.” But he paid no attention to the external, material process. All of this was clothed in clairvoyant perception. He perceived what causes the pulse to beat and causes it to return again and again to the same place as the deed of Thor. As he perceived the ever-returning motion of Thor’s hammer back into Thor’s hand, he felt within his “I” the power of Thor—the power of one of the mightiest angels ever worshiped—because he was a mighty being regarded as having remained at the level of angelhood.

[ 15 ] The way in which spiritual power holds the physical body together is expressed in Germanic-Norse mythology by the idea that the “I” is what holds the soul-body being together as it is woven into existence. From within, the Germanic-Nordic person perceives the weaving of the physical-psychic human being, and even in later times he still understood how his inner self becomes integrated from the astral realm, how, so to speak, the inner responds to the outer. He still understood when initiates told him how the world takes shape for the human being. He was able to understand how to go back to earlier stages—to what had been told to him about the events that represent the relationship between angels and archangels—to the earlier stages when human beings were born from the macrocosm in a physical-spiritual sense. He was able to see how the individual human being is formed from the macrocosm and how he or she rests within the macrocosm. He sought out in the macrocosm those processes that unfold microcosmically in such a way that human thoughts are woven from the human north—from the cool realm of the spirit—and that from there the human physical body is supplied with the twelve cranial nerves of the head. He sees this process, which microcosmically has become the twelve cranial nerves. He sees the weaving spirit in what he calls “Nebelheim” or “Niflheim”; he sees the twelve streams that converge and become material in the twelve cranial nerves of the human being; he sees how, in counteraction to what comes down from above, there is that which comes from the heart, from the human south; he seeks it in the macrocosm outside and understands it when it is called “Muspelheim.” Thus, even in the Christian centuries, he retains an understanding of how to grasp the microcosm from within the entire macrocosm, and one can go back even further for him by gradually allowing the human being to emerge from the macrocosm as an extract of the whole world. He is able to look back on this time and can understand that these processes have a past, which he himself still perceives as the work of the angels and archangels within his soul. He can see that these processes have a past, and the mental images he gains there are what confront us—what is recognized as the Old Germanic-Norse Genesis, as the emergence of humanity from the entire macrocosm.

[ 16 ] Starting with the Germanic-Norse chaos, the Ginnungagap, we find ourselves roughly at the point where the Earth is forming anew after having passed through the three earlier states, the Saturn, Sun, and Moon states, where the Earth is thus rising again out of Pralaya, where the realms of nature have not yet differentiated, where human beings are still entirely spiritual beings. It is then that the Nordic person understands how the later states come into being.

[ 17 ] And now it is interesting to see how Nordic-Germanic mythology uses imaginative imagery to depict the events that took place in those times—events for which we, in the teachings of the Spiritual Science, use more mature expressions and concepts in place of the earlier images. It describes the events that took place when the sun and moon were still united. It describes the moon’s departure and how the development then transitions into what later became the “Land of the Giants.” It describes to us everything that took place during the Atlantean epoch as a continuation of what had happened earlier and which constituted matters specific to the Germanic-Nordic people.

[ 18 ] Today I simply wanted to give you a sense of how the Nordic “I” awoke when it was still at a lower stage of development, how the Nordic human being looked into the Folk-soul, into the soul of Thor, and so on. I wanted to evoke a sense of how the “I” was present in this process, how it was able to take a direct interest in the weaving in of higher beings as well—beings who, however, came from an entirely different direction than the beings we find among the Eastern peoples.

[ 19 ] Tomorrow we will try to gain access to the more remote aspects of Germanic mythology. We will recognize how these remote aspects foreshadow what lives in the folk-souls, and we will see what the nature of these very folk-souls of our Western peoples is.