The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the years, in the various branches and in the various courses—and certainly also before a large number of the anthroposophical friends sitting here—reflections have been made on the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of Matthew, and in these reflections on the three Gospels, we have sought to bring before our inner eye—from three different perspectives, as it were, in three different ways—the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha. And perhaps these reflections have indeed served to foster an ever-growing appreciation of these unique events within our souls. We have, after all, already pointed out that the reason we have four Gospels is essentially to be found in the fact that the Gospel writers, as inspired occultists, wanted to portray the great event—each, so to speak, from a different angle—just as one depicts or photographs something external from a single vantage point. And when one takes photographs of an object from different angles, one can, by combining what the photographs reveal—as it were, by viewing them together—bring before the soul what is actual reality. Each of the Evangelists actually gives us occasion to view the great event in Palestine from a very special perspective.

[ 2 ] From a perspective that we might also call the unveiling of the highest human, occult, and other goals—and while also taking into account, alongside this highest human aspect, the highest cosmic principle—from this perspective, the Gospel of John offers us insight into the great events in Palestine.

[ 3 ] The Gospel of Luke offers us a glimpse into the mysteries that surround the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomonic and Nathanic Jesus—until the moment when the great inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth came through the Christ.

[ 4 ] The Gospel of Matthew is intended to show—for those who either heard the cycle when it was presented or who will read it later—how, so to speak, out of the folk traditions of ancient Hebrew culture, out of the folk mysteries of the Hebrew people, the physical, corporeal principle is prepared, so to speak, into which the Christ principle was to be incarnated for three years.

[ 5 ] In a certain sense, it is actually the Gospel of Mark that can lead us to the highest heights of a spiritual-scientific Christian perspective, and through the Gospel of Mark we are given the opportunity to gain insight into many things that are meant to be communicated to us specifically through the Gospels, but which are not conveyed to us in the same way by the other Gospels as they are by the Gospel of Mark. And since the opportunity still presents itself to speak to you today in connection with the Gospel of Mark, I have set myself the task of saying a few words on this subject this evening.

[ 6 ] However, when we speak of this, we must realize just how necessary it is to look into certain matters—matters that the superficial world of today has little inclination to examine. If one is to understand the Gospel of Mark and all its depths, one must familiarize oneself with the very different manner of expression used by people at the time when Jesus Christ still walked the earth. Please do not take it amiss if I try to convey to you, through clear shading—a distinct interplay of light and dark—what I actually wish to say with this.

[ 7 ] Through language, we express what we wish to say, and the words of language are meant to illustrate, in a certain way, what lives within our souls. The various epochs of human development differ greatly in the way they use language to express what lives within our souls. And if we were to go back to the epoch of ancient Hebrew development, to that marvelous mode of expression that was still possible in the ancient Hebrew temple language, we would find a completely different way of clothing the mysteries of our soul in words than people today can even begin to imagine. When a word was spoken in the ancient Hebrew language—since only the consonants were written, and the vowels were then added—what resounded within that word was not merely what resounds within it today—a rather abstract concept—but an entire world. And that is precisely why the vowels were not actually written out: because the speaker expressed his innermost being through the very manner of vocalization, whereas the consonants conveyed more of a description, a depiction of what lies outside. One might say, for example, that when an ancient Hebrew wrote a B—the letter corresponding to our modern B—he always felt something like a depiction of external conditions, of something that forms a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that, like a house, can enclose a being. One could not pronounce the “B” without this living within the soul. And when one vocalized an “A,” one could not do so without there being something alive within the “A”—something of strength, of power, indeed, of radiant power. Thus the soul lived on; the soul’s content floated out with the words and continued to float into space and toward other souls. So language was a much more vibrant thing. It delved much more deeply into the mysteries of existence than our language does.

[ 8 ] That is the light I would like to paint for you. And I would like to set this in contrast with the shadow: that in our time, we have become philistines to a great degree in this regard. Our language now expresses only abstractions and generalities. People no longer feel this at all. In essence, it really expresses nothing but philistine ideas. How could it be otherwise in an age when people are beginning to use language—even in literary writing—long before they have any intellectual substance; in an age when so much is churned out as mass-produced material for the general public, when everyone believes they must write something, when everything is taken as a subject for writing. I have had to witness how, when our society was founded, writers turned up out of curiosity, intending perhaps only to squeeze a novel out of the whole affair. Why shouldn’t there be characters that one can cobble together in public writing? So we must be clear that, in contrast to the way language used to be thought of as something sacred—toward which one bears the responsibility that God should speak through it—we now have a language that has become abstract, empty, and philistine. That is why it is so incredibly difficult to squeeze those great, powerful truths—which are communicated to us and resonate, for example, in the Gospels—into today’s words. Why shouldn’t people today believe that everything can be expressed in our language! They cannot understand that our language conveys something that is empty compared to what even the Greek language meant with a single word. And when we read the Bible today, we read something that, compared to the original content, has been sifted once, twice, three times—but sifted in such a way that not the best, but always the worst remains. Therefore, it is, of course, easy to invoke the Bible’s modern wording in a certain way. But we fare the worst when, in the case of the Gospel of Mark, we invoke the Bible as it stands before us today. We must not do that under any circumstances.

[ 9 ] Now you know that the Gospel of Mark, in its opening words, is based on the translation by Weizsäcker—which is considered excellent but, as one might expect given that it is regarded as so excellent today, is not actually all that excellent—as follows: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: ‘Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way. Listen, a voice cries out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.”’

[ 10 ] If the Gospel of Mark begins this way in Weizsäcker’s translation, honest people would really have to say to themselves: I don’t understand a word of any of this, for anyone who wants to understand it must be deluding themselves. Anyone who approaches this honestly cannot understand a thing when it is said: “Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you, who shall prepare the way for you; hear, as it is proclaimed in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For either a triviality is being stated, or something is being said that cannot be understood. Now, however, one must first gather the concepts that make it possible to understand a statement such as Isaiah’s here. For Isaiah pointed to the great and momentous event that was to be the most significant event in human development. What exactly was he pointing to? Well, based on what we have already described, we can very well point to what Isaiah foretold; we can point to it by saying:

[ 11 ] In ancient times, human beings possessed a kind of clairvoyance. They had the ability to grow into the spiritual-divine world through their soul forces. What actually happened to a person when they grew into the spiritual-divine world? What happened when they entered the divine-spiritual world was that they ceased to use their “I”—to the extent that it had already developed at that time; instead, they used their astral body, which contained the powers of vision and perception, while all the powers residing in the “I” were gradually awakened, at first, to the perception of the physical world. It is the “I” that makes use of the sensory organs. But the old human being, when seeking to gain insight into the world, used his astral body. Thus, the old human being saw and perceived through the astral body. And the further development consists in this: you find the transition from the astral body to the use of the “I.” And with regard to this “I,” the Christ impulse should be the most intense impulse. If Christ were to be received into the “I” in such a way that Paul’s words are true—“Not I, but Christ in me”—then the “I” has the power to grow into the spiritual world through itself. Previously, only the astral body could do this.

[ 12 ] Thus we have before us a development of humanity such that we can say: Human beings used their astral body as an organ of cognition, and increasingly they lost the ability to develop any organ of cognition within the astral body at all. Precisely as people drew closer to the Christ event, there came a stage in their development when they had to admit: “My astral body has less and less ability to look into the spiritual world.” His connection to the spiritual world had come to nothing, and the “I” was not yet powerful enough to gain any insight from the world on its own. That was the age when Christ, so to speak, was approaching.

[ 13 ] In the actual evolution of humanity, the process involves certain major advances being gradually prepared and then simply coming to pass. This was also the case with the Christ impulse. However, there had to be a transition. Things could not have unfolded in such a way that a person would have seen his astral body gradually becoming numb to the spiritual world, so that he would have felt complete desolation and barrenness within himself until the “I” was kindled by the Christ impulse. It was not to come to that. Rather, for some, it happened that, through a special influence from the spiritual world, they already saw something in their astral body similar to what one would later recognize and perceive through the “I.” The “I-ness” was, so to speak, prepared in the astral body. This was a foreshadowing of the “I-ness” in the astral body. After all, it was only through the ego and its development that human beings became earthly human beings. The astral body actually belonged to the old Moon. At that time, the Angelos, the angelic human, was at the human stage. The angel was human on the old Moon; on Earth, the human being is human. We know this. For human beings, it was appropriate to use their astral body on the Moon. Everything else was merely preparation for the development of the “I.” The beginning of our earthly evolution was a repetition of the lunar evolution. For in the astral body, human beings could never fully become human; rather, only the angel on the Moon could become human in the astral body. Just as Christ lived within the Earth human to inspire the “I,” so too, in preparation for this “I”-hood, there had to be the possibility that among the angels of the Moon—that is, the Moon humans, the Angeloi—there were prophets who inspired the human astral body so that the “I”-hood could already begin to develop. So what a prophet might have described as follows had to come to pass: There will come a point in human evolution when humanity will be ripe for the development of the “I.” In the astral body, only the Angeloi of the Moon have risen to the highest level. But in order for human beings to be prepared for this sense of self, certain people—who, by grace, experience this in exceptional states—must be inspired on Earth in such a way that they act like angels, even though they are human beings; that is, they are angels in human form.

[ 14 ] This brings us to an important occult concept, without which you cannot possibly understand the evolution of humanity from the perspective of occultism. On the surface, it is, of course, easy to simply say that everything is Maya. But that is an abstraction. One must take this very seriously. Therefore, one must be able to say: Well, there is a human being standing before me, but that person is Maya—who knows if that person is even a human being at all? Perhaps humanity is merely the outer shell, and a being entirely different from a human being is using this outer shell to bring about precisely something that cannot yet be brought about by a human being. —I have alluded to this in my Gateway to Initiation.

[ 15 ] In ancient times, such an event became relevant to humanity when the individuality that had lived in the ancient Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist, and when an angel entered the soul of John the Baptist for his incarnation at that time and made use of John the Baptist’s physicality and also his soul nature to accomplish what no human being could have accomplished. An angel lives within John, who is to go before and proclaim in advance what was to live as true selfhood in the most comprehensive sense in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extraordinarily important to know that John the Baptist is a maya and that an angelos, a messenger, lives within him. The Greek text also states: “Behold, I send my messenger, angelos, angel.”—Only Germans no longer think of the fact that the Greek text reads “angelos” at this point: “Behold, I send my angel before him.” - This thus points to a profound cosmic mystery that took place with the Baptist, one that Isaiah had foretold. He characterizes John the Baptist as a Maya, as an illusion—he who, in truth, encompasses the angel, the Angelos, who, as an angel, must proclaim what the human being is actually meant to become through the reception of the Christ impulse, because angels must first proclaim what the human being is to become only later. So one might say at this point: “Behold, that which gives the world its I-ness sends the Angelos before you, to whom the I-ness is to be given.”

[ 16 ] Now let us turn to the third sentence. What does it mean? To understand this, one must first consider the entire situation of world history. What had come to pass within the human breast, since the astral body had gradually lost the ability to extend its powers like tentacles and to gaze luminously into the divine-spiritual world? In the past, when the astral body was activated, it could gaze into the divine-spiritual world. Now this possibility gradually disappeared more and more, and darkness fell within the human being. In the past, the human being could spread his astral body over all the beings of the divine-spiritual world. Now he was lonely within himself—loneliness is equivalent to &onuog. What was the human soul now lived in this loneliness. This is also still there in the Greek text: Behold how it appears, how it speaks there within the solitude of the soul—if you will, in the desolation of the soul—when the astral body could no longer extend itself toward the divine-spiritual world. Listen to how it calls out in the desert of your soul, in the solitude of your soul.

[ 17 ] But what is being proclaimed in advance? Here we must now clarify what a very specific word meant when it was used in reference to spiritual phenomena—and to spiritual phenomena in general—especially in Hebrew, but also in Greek: the word Kyrios. If one translates this as “the Lord,” as is usually done, one is translating utter nonsense. What is meant by this? Anyone in ancient times who uttered such a phrase knew that it referred to something connected with the spiritual progress of the human race. Therefore, they knew that the word Kyrios also alluded to the mysteries of the soul. When we look at the astral body, we see various forces within the soul. We usually call them thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces at work in the soul. But they are the serving forces of the soul. As humanity progressed in its development, these forces—which had formerly been the masters to whom humanity was subject (for humanity had to wait to see if its thinking, feeling, and willing would be called upon)—these individual soul forces were placed under the authority of the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the “I.” And when the word was applied to the soul, nothing else was meant by it other than the “I,” which no longer held fast to the old notion—that the Divine-Spiritual thinks, feels, and wills within me—but rather: I think, I feel, I will—the Lord asserts Himself in the soul’s powers. Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to walk such paths of the soul that you may awaken within your soul the strong “I,” Kyrios, the Lord in your soul. Hear how it calls out in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the power or the direction of the Lord of the soul, the “I.” Unlock its powers!—This is roughly how one must translate it: unlock it so that it may enter, so that it is not the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing; unlock its powers! And when you translate these words: “Behold, that which is the I sends its angel before you; he shall give you the ability to understand how it calls out in the solitude of the astral soul; prepare the directions of the I, open up its powers for it, for the I!”—then you will find meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; then you have the reference to the greatest event in human evolution; then you understand from them how Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, how he points out that the loneliness of the human soul yearns for the coming of the Lord into the soul—the “I.” And only now do the words become flesh and blood, and this is how we must understand such words.

[ 18 ] And why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angelos? He was able to do so because he had undergone a very specific initiation. Initiations, you see, are specialized. They are not something general; they are specialized. For those individuals who have a very special task, an initiation must take place in a very specific way. Now, provision has been made for everything that takes place in the spiritual world, so that what are in fact spiritual realities are truly revealed in the heavens in the language of the stars. One can receive the Solar Initiation—that is, enter into the mysteries of the spiritual world, which is the world of Ahura Mazdao, of which the sun is the outward expression. But one can be initiated into the mysteries of the Sun in twelve different ways, and every initiation is, in a certain sense, a solar initiation; yet it is structured differently in relation to the other eleven. Depending on whether a person has this or that task for all of humanity, they receive an initiation of which one can say: “This is a solar initiation, but one that must be described in such a way that one says: the forces flow into it as if the sun were in the sign of Cancer.” This is different from receiving a solar initiation that must be described by saying: “The forces flow into it as if the sun were in the sign of Libra.” These are the terms used for various specialized initiations. And precisely those individuals who have such a lofty task, such a lofty mission as the one characterized here for John the Baptist, must be initiated in a very special way into a specific initiation, because only through this can they possess the strong power to carry out this mission in the world, even under circumstances that may be quite one-sided. And so, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angelos, he underwent the solar initiation that can be called the initiation arising from the sign of Aquarius. Just as the Sun stands in the sign of Aquarius, so this is a symbol of the kind of initiation that John the Baptist had received in order to become the bearer of the Angel, by absorbing the power of the Sun as it flows when it is positioned in such a way relative to the other stars that one describes it with the expression: “It stands in the sign of Aquarius.” That was the symbol. John had the Aquarius initiation. The constellation even came to be called Aquarius because the one who had received the Aquarius initiation, as a spiritual initiation, possessed the very special ability to do with human beings what John, as the “Aquarius,” as the Baptist, did: namely, to truly lead people to the point where, by being immersed in water, their etheric body became sufficiently liberated so that they attained a self-knowledge enabling them to discern what was most important at that particular time. People were immersed, and for a moment their etheric body was liberated. Through baptism in the Jordan, people could sense the very special significance of this epoch in world history. That is why John was initiated specifically into the baptismal initiation. And because this must be symbolically expressed by the flow of the sun’s rays from the constellation in which the sun stands, this constellation was also called Aquarius. Thus, the name is derived from this human capacity.

[ 19 ] Today, a whole host of learned ignoramuses are attempting, so to speak, to interpret spiritual events by bringing heaven down to earth, as it were. They say: Well, this signifies the advance of the sun. — All these learned gentlemen, who basically know nothing, interpret human events by looking down from heaven. It was the other way around: what lives spiritually within human beings was transferred to heaven by using heaven as a means of expression. So that John the Baptist could say: I am the one who baptizes you with water. — And that was the same as if he had said: “I baptize you with water; I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius.” — That would have been the words John the Baptist could have spoken to his innermost disciples. And just as the sun moves in the opposite direction to its sensory course—when it moves away from Aquarius—so Virgo stands opposite, and then it moves toward Libra. But if we consider initiation, we must take a reverse course on the other side: from Aquarius to Pisces. Thus John could say: Something will come that will no longer have to act in the way that corresponds to the Sun’s action from within Aquarius, but rather in the way that corresponds to the Sun’s action from within Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism. As the spiritual Sun rises higher, the baptism of Aquarius becomes a baptism from the spiritual waters. The Sun rises from Aquarius in the spiritual realm to Pisces. Hence the well-known sign of Pisces for the bearer of Christ, which is an ancient symbol. For just as there was an Aquarius initiation in John through very special spiritual influences, so too was the initiation—of which I have already spoken to you here and there—that came about in a mysterious way through all the mysteries that unfolded around Jesus, a Pisces initiation. A shift of the Sun by one constellation—that was what placed Jesus of Nazareth within his time: that he was initially subjected to a Pisces initiation.

[ 20 ] And in the Gospel of Mark, this is—one might say—sufficiently hinted at; it’s just that such things can only be hinted at figuratively. Christ Jesus draws to Himself all those who seek the fish. That is why His first apostles were all fishermen. And we can clearly see what I have said—the advance toward the fish—when we are told: “I have baptized you with water; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

[ 21 ] And as he passed by the Sea of Galilee—that is, as the sun had risen so high that one could see its reflection rising from the fish—those called Simon and Simon’s brother, James and James’s brother, the fishermen, found themselves inspired in the appropriate way. And how can we understand all this? We cannot understand it unless we examine the language of that time a little more closely.

[ 22 ] “Philistine” is how we express ourselves today. When a person stands before us, we say, “That is a person.” When a second person stands before us, we say again, “That is a person.” A third—yet another, and so on. But what we have before us is merely Maya. If a being has two legs and a human face, in our philistine way of speaking we have only one word for it: “That is a human being.” But what is a human being in occultism? Nothing but Maya; at first glance, as he stands there before us, the human being is truly nothing. He is about as much as the rainbow that appears in the sky. How long does the rainbow exist? Only as long as the relevant conditions—between rain and sunshine—are present. When the sun and the rain change their relationship, it is gone. It is exactly the same with the human being. He is merely a convergence of forces from the macrocosm. We must seek these forces in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where one might suppose a human being to be somewhere on Earth, there is nothing for the occultist. But forces flow down from above and up from below, and there they intersect. And just as the peculiar constellation of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces converging from above and below out of the macrocosm produce a phenomenon that looks like a human being—that is the human being. The human being is not at all what he appears to be before us. In truth, he is a phantom, a maya, an illusion. For what truly exists are the cosmic forces that intersect where our eye believes it sees a human being. Try to take this statement seriously: The human being is nothing as he stands before us. He is the shadow of many forces. But the essence that reveals itself in the human being may be located entirely elsewhere than at the point where that particular human being is walking around on two legs. There are three human beings here: one is an ancient Persian laborer, working with a plow in the agriculture of ancient Persia. He looks like a human being. In truth, he is one of the souls whose powers are nourished from this or that world, from below or above. The second is perhaps a primordial Persian official. He is shaped from another world by forces that intersect within him. If we wish to know him, we must ascend to these forces. All of you, as you sit here, are in reality somewhere entirely else. Only the forces of your true essence radiate into this space. Then there stood a third Persian, of whom one had to say: He is all the more a true illusion, he is all the more a phantom standing there. What was that in truth? One must ascend all the way to the sun; there lie the forces that nourished this specter. Up there, among the mysteries of the sun, one finds what might be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It sends down its rays, and down here stands a specter called Zarathustra. In truth, his being is not there at all. That is the third one.

[ 23 ] Now, the important thing is that in ancient times people were aware of what such designations meant; that they did not give names as we do today, but rather named people according to what lived within them, not according to their outward appearance. We must be very clear about this. So one could have said: An ancient person at the time of Christ would have understood perfectly well if someone had pointed to John the Baptist and said, “Here is the Angelos of God.” One would have taken into account only what had taken its place there; one spoke of the main thing, not the secondary thing. And let us now suppose that the same way of speaking was applied to Christ Jesus himself. How, then, when one understood such things, was one to speak of Christ Jesus? Indeed, to call that body walking on Earth “Christ Jesus”—that would never have occurred to a person of that time, not even in a dream; rather, it was the sign that what flowed down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at that point. When this body—which was the body of Jesus—moved from one place to another, it was the manifestation of the solar force moving from one place to another. This solar force could also move on its own. At times, the expression was used to mean that Christ Jesus was “at home,” in the flesh, but what was within him continued to move even without his body. In the Gospel of John in particular, the expression is used in such a way that, under certain circumstances, when the same being moves in a purely spiritual manner, the Gospel writer speaks in exactly the same way as when this solar power dwells in the physical body.

[ 24 ] That is why it is so important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always related to the physical sun, which is the outward expression of the spiritual world, captured at the point where the physical body moves about. So when Christ Jesus heals, for example, it is the power of the sun that heals. But it must be in the right place in the heavens: “When evening came, as the sun was setting, they brought to him all who were suffering,” illnesses and so on. — It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down once the outer sun has set, when the sun acts only spiritually. And when he again needed a certain power to act, he had to draw it from the spiritual sun as well, not from the physical, visible sun. “And early in the morning, while it was still dark, he rose and went out.” — The path of the sun and the power of the sun is explicitly indicated to us: that this solar power is at work, and that, in essence, Jesus is merely the outward sign that this path of the sun’s power could also become visible to the mere physical eye. And wherever we find mention of the Christ in the Gospel of Mark, what is meant is the power of the sun, which became particularly active during that epoch of our Earth’s development in this part of the world called Palestine. And one could see the power of the sun: at one time or another, the Christ went from one place to another. One might just as well say: At that time, the spiritual power of the sun, as if concentrated at a focal point, moved from one place to another. And the body of Jesus was the outward sign that made visible to the eyes how the power of the sun moved. Jesus’ journeys in Palestine were the paths of the solar power that had descended to Earth. And if you chart Jesus’ footsteps as a special map, you have a cosmic event: the influence of the solar power from the macrocosm into the land of Palestine. And this macrocosmic reality is what matters. The writer of the Gospel of Mark points this out in particular; he was well aware that a body which was the bearer of such a principle as the Christ-principle had to be overcome by its own principle in a very special way. It was, therefore, the pointing beyond—precisely to that world which Zarathustra so magnificently heralded as lying beyond the sensory world—the pointing to this world as it once again exerts its influence upon the human world. Thus, through Christ Jesus, it was now indicated how the forces once again work their way back into the Earth. Therefore, in the body—which, as we have seen, was in a certain sense influenced by the Zarathustra individuality, even though it was already the body of the Nathanic Jesus—a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra processes had to take place.

[ 25 ] Now let us hear the great and beautiful legend of Zarathustra. When his mother gave birth to him, Zarathustra performed his first miracle: the famous Zarathustra smile. The second of these miracles was that the king at that time of the district where Zarathustra was born, Duransarun, resolved to murder Zarathustra—about whom the reactionary magicians had told him extraordinary things—but when the king appeared to stab the child, his arm became paralyzed. That was the second of the miracles following Zarathustra’s birth. And so this king, who could not use his dagger against Zarathustra, had the child led out to the wild animals of the desert. This is an expression of the fact that even in his earliest childhood, Zarathustra had to see what a human being must see when he looks out with an impure gaze. Instead of the noble group soul and the noble, higher spiritual beings, he sees the outpouring of his wild imagination. This is the leading out into the desert to the wild beasts, from which Zarathustra remains unharmed. This is the third of the miracles. The fourth was yet another miracle among the wild beasts, and so on. It was always the good spirits of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra.

[ 26 ] We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Mark: “And immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness”—the text actually says “solitude”—“for forty days, and he was tempted by Satan, and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.” Here we are shown that the body was prepared, as it were, to absorb—as if at a focal point—what was taking place in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to happen again: the leading out to the wild beasts. The body absorbed what came in from the macrocosm.

[ 27 ] The Gospel of Mark places us within the broader context right from the very first lines. And I wanted to show you how, fundamentally, this Gospel of Mark—if one only understands the words in their true sense—not as in today’s philistine language, but in that of the ancient languages, where every word has living worlds behind it—if one understands it in the spirit of these ancient languages, then the Gospel of Mark takes on new life, new power. But it must be said: Our modern language can only rediscover, through many circumlocutions, what was already inherent in the words of the ancient languages. What we mean when we say: “Human beings live on Earth and develop their ‘I’; human beings once lived on the Moon, where it was the angels who went through their human stage”—all of this underlies the statement: “Behold, I send my angel before the human being.” These words cannot be understood without the foundation provided by Spiritual Science. And people today should be honest and should say, upon reading the words at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark: “This is incomprehensible.” — Instead, they stand there in their petty arrogance and declare that Spiritual Science is a flight of fancy that reads all sorts of things into what they know in a simple way. The people of today simply do not know it at all. And today we no longer have the principle that existed, for example, in ancient Persia, where from one epoch to the next the ancient sacred text was rewritten to be clothed anew for each epoch. Thus, the divine-spiritual Word was transformed and transformed again as the Zend Avesta. And what exists today is its final form. The Persian Bible was rewritten seven times. And anthroposophy is meant to teach people how necessary it is that the books in which the sacred mysteries are written must be rewritten from epoch to epoch. For precisely if one wishes to preserve the great ancient style, one must not try, so to speak, to cling as much as possible to the old words. That is impossible; we no longer understand them. Instead, we must strive to translate the ancient words into a form that is immediately comprehensible in the present. We attempted this with regard to Genesis this past summer. There you saw how some of the words must be adapted. Perhaps today you have gained a small sense of how the words in the Gospel of Mark, too, must be adapted.