The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] If you continue reading the Gospel of Mark from the passages we tried to explain the last time we discussed this Gospel, you will come to a significant passage that, while similar to the accounts in the other Gospels, can best be understood in the context of the Gospel of Mark. This passage refers to the fact that Jesus Christ, after undergoing His baptism in the Jordan and His experiences in the wilderness, then, as it is said, went to the synagogue and taught.

[ 2 ] This passage is usually translated as follows: “And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught with authority and not like the scribes.” What does this sentence mean to a modern person today—no matter how devoutly they believe in the Bible—other than, one might say, a rather abstract statement: “for he taught with authority, and not like the scribes”? If we consider only the Greek text, we find that the word which in modern language is simply translated as “for he taught with authority” is:

For I teach them as one who has authority, and not as the scribes
(ēn gar didamaskōn autous hōs exusiān echōn, kai ouch hōs hoi grammateis) “and not like the scribes.”

[ 3 ] If we now wish to delve into the meaning of this significant passage, it will lead us once again a step further into what we might call the mysteries of the mission of Christ Jesus. For I have already pointed out that the Gospels, just like the other scriptures that truly originate from the realm of inspiration, are not so easy to understand; rather, in order to understand them, one must essentially bring together everything we have gathered over the course of many years—mental images and ideas about the spiritual worlds. And only such mental images can introduce us to what is meant when the Gospel says: “For he taught those who sat in the synagogues as an ‘Exusiai,’ as an authority, as a revelation, and not as those who are referred to here by the term γραμματῑç (grammateis).”

[ 4 ] If we want to understand a passage like this, we must recall everything we have absorbed over the course of time regarding the higher, supersensible worlds. We have taken to heart that human beings, as they live within our world, are, so to speak, the lowest link in a hierarchical order; that is, we must place human beings on the lowest rung of a hierarchical ladder. The supersensible world then follows on from human beings. In this world we first find what we call, according to Christian esotericism, the Angeloi or angels—the first supersensible beings standing above human beings who influence their lives; next come the Archangeloi or archangels, then the Archai or spirits of personality; these are followed by the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, and then we have the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. In this way, we can identify a hierarchical order of nine successive forms of being above humanity. And now let us clarify how these various spiritual, supersensible beings intervene in our lives.

[ 5 ] The Angeloi are those beings who, as messengers of the supersensible world, are closest to the individual human being as he lives on our Earth. They are the beings who, after all, have an influence on what we might call the destiny of a single individual human being on our physical plane. When we come to the Archangels, however, we are speaking of spiritual beings who, so to speak, already encompass a broader sphere of activity. Here we are speaking of beings whom we can also describe as national spirits, who thus organize and direct the affairs of entire national communities. When modern people today speak of a national spirit, they mean—as I have often pointed out—a certain number of thousands of people whom they list, purely in terms of numbers, as living within a given territory. But when we speak of a national spirit from the perspective of Spiritual Science, we mean the national individuality, and we are clear that we are not focusing on the number of people—be it this many or that many—but on a true individuality, just as we speak of an individuality in the case of a single human being. And when we speak of the spiritual guidance of an entire national individuality, we designate the archangels, the Archangeloi, as the spiritual guides of such a national individuality. So when we speak of these higher beings, we speak of them as real, supersensory creatures who have their own spheres of influence. When it comes to the Archai—or the spirits of personality, also known as the primordial principles—we are referring to spiritual beings that are, in turn, distinct from mere national spirits. When we speak, for example, of the French, English, or German national spirit, and so on, we are speaking, so to speak, of something that is distributed across different regions of the earth. But there is something that is common to all people—at least to all Western peoples today—and through which these peoples recognize one another. In contrast to the individual national spirits, we can call this the “zeitgeist,” and we must speak of a different zeitgeist for the Age of the Reformation and of another in our own time. Above the individual national spirits, therefore, stand those spiritual beings whom we call zeitgeists, and essentially, these leaders of successive epochs are the Archai. They are, at the same time, zeitgeists.

[ 6 ] If we ascend even higher to the Exusiai, we are essentially dealing with supernatural powers of a completely different nature. To get a mental image of how the beings of higher hierarchies differ, at first glance, from the three just characterized—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—let us remember that a member of any given people is, in essence, very similar today to a member of any other people in terms of external physical constitution—that is, in terms of what they eat and drink. We cannot say that what lies beyond the soul-spiritual realm distinguishes one people from another. But even the successive epochs of time are such that we can say: The guiding spiritual beings relate only to what is soul-spiritual. However, human beings are not dependent solely on the spiritual-soul aspect. What is spiritual-soul in nature has a fundamental influence on the human astral body. But there are also denser aspects of the human being. These do not differ very significantly from one another in terms of what the Archai, Archangeloi, and Angeloi are concerned with. Yet these denser aspects of the human being are subject to a creative influence; the beings who are creatively active in relation to them are those that begin with the Exusiai and ascend from there. We owe language and concepts of time to the spirits of time, the national spirits, the Archai, and the Archangeloi. But what lives in light and air, in the climate of a particular region, also exerts an influence on the human being. One kind of humanity flourishes south of the equator, another in regions closer to the North Pole. However, we do not entirely agree with the statement made by a German philosophy professor in a widely read book: “The most significant cultures had to develop in the temperate zone; for all those beings who brought forth the most significant cultures would freeze to death at the North Pole and burn up at the South Pole!” — But we can certainly say this: In different climates, we see how differently diet and other factors affect human beings. The nature of external conditions—whether a person lives, for example, in mountain valleys or on the vast plains—is by no means irrelevant to national character. Here we see how the forces of nature influence the entire human constitution. And since we know through Spiritual Science that we must see in the forces of nature nothing other than the effects of those beings that are of a spiritual, supersensible nature, we must say: Spiritual, supersensible forces are at work in the forces of nature, and it is precisely through these forces of nature that they act upon human beings. Therefore, we can conceive of a distinction between the Archai and the Exusiai in such a way that we say: the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai act upon human beings in such a way that they do not yet make use of the forces of nature for their activity, but rather use only that which acts upon human beings on a spiritual-soul level—that is, language, concepts of time, and so on. Their influence does not extend to the lower members of the human organism, neither the etheric body nor the physical body. In contrast, moving upward from the Exusiai, we have those beings who act upon human beings but who also act within the natural forces outside the human organism; they are the leaders and guides of air and light, and of the various ways in which nutrients are processed in the realms of nature. It is they who preside over these realms of nature. What we see in lightning and thunder, in rain and sunshine, how this or that kind of nutrient grows in a particular region—in short, the entire distribution and order of earthly conditions—we attribute to spiritual beings whom we seek among the beings of the higher hierarchies. So when we look up to the Exusiai, we see their effects not merely in those invisible manifestations that are, for example, the revelations of the spirit of the age, but we see in the Exusiai that which acts upon us as light, and which also acts upon the plants as light.

[ 7 ] Let us now consider what is given to human beings as culture—that is, what they must learn in order to progress. Every human being in their own epoch is given what that epoch itself produces, but also, in a certain sense, everything that earlier epochs have helped to produce. Only that which originates from the lowest hierarchies—extending all the way up to the spirit of the age—can be historically preserved and become the subject of historical teaching and learning. What, on the other hand, flows forth from the realms of nature itself cannot be preserved in traditions and customs. Those, however, who are able to penetrate the supersensible worlds, through their supersensible faculty of knowledge also penetrate beyond the Zeitgeist to even higher revelations. Such revelations then present themselves as something that lies beyond the Zeitgeist, that carries more weight than what originates from the Zeitgeist, and that affects people in a very peculiar way. Every healthy person should truly take some time for serious introspection and ask themselves: What has a greater effect on my soul—what I can learn from the traditions of individual peoples and the spirit of the age, from the historical tradition dating back to ancient times—or a magnificent sunrise, that is, the manifestation of nature itself, of the supersensible worlds? — For a person can become aware that a sunrise, with all its grandeur and power, can stir the soul infinitely more than all science, all scholarship, and all art throughout the ages. What nature reveals in general can be felt most keenly by someone who has, for example, once taken a journey through the galleries of Italy, who has seen everything that has been preserved by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and so on, and has allowed it all to take hold of them with all its power—and who then climbs one of the Swiss mountains and beholds a natural spectacle. Then one asks oneself: Who is the greater painter: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci—or those forces that paint the sunrise one can observe from the Rigi?—And one must admit: No matter how much we admire what human beings have ever accomplished, what appears to us as the spiritual-divine revelation of the spiritual forces still seems to us to be the greater.

[ 8 ] But when those spiritual guides of humanity appear to us—whom we call the Initiates and who speak not from tradition but in an original way—then their revelation is something like the revelation of nature itself. But what can have the effect of a sunrise can never have that effect if others merely parrot it. What we have received in the traditions of Moses and Zarathustra—if it is tradition, if it has been transmitted as preserved by external culture, the spirit of the age, and the national spirit, and is now being conveyed—then nature, by contrast, appears as the greater force. For in the revelations of Moses and Zarathustra, they had an impact as great as that of nature only when they sprang directly from the experience of the supersensible worlds themselves. This is the power of the original revelations to humanity: that they come to us like what nature itself has to reveal. But this begins only when we sense the Exusiai as the lowest hierarchy within the forces of nature.

[ 9 ] What, then, did those gathered in the synagogues experience when Christ Jesus stepped among them? Up to that point, they had been accustomed to being taught by the “grammarians”—those who knew what the spirits of the age, the spirits of the people, and so on had communicated. That was what they were used to. Now there came one who did not teach like them, but in such a way that his words were a revelation of the realm of the supersensible powers in nature itself, or of thunder or lightning. So if we know how the hierarchies ascend, then we understand such a word from the Gospel and grasp it in all its depth. This is what we must feel in response to such a word from the Gospel of Mark.

[ 10 ] However, in the case of works by artists such as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, those who have a sense of the supernatural that lies behind them can still perceive, even in the artist’s latest works, what was originally revealed. That is why, in fact, the great works of art and the great works of the spirit can seem like an echo of the earliest works. And if we succeed in seeing what Raphael, for example, knew how to imbue his works with—if we succeed in reviving Zarathustra’s work—then we can hear something of what reaches us from the Exusiai.

[ 11 ] But from what the scribes—that is, those who had absorbed ideas derived from the spirit of the people and the spirit of the times—taught in the synagogues, one could hear nothing that in any way echoed the revelations of nature itself. Therefore, we may say: Such a statement is meant to suggest to us that people in those days began to feel and sense that something entirely new was speaking to them; that through this man who came to them, something was revealed that was like a force of nature itself, like one of the supersensory forces that lie behind natural phenomena. People gradually began to sense what had actually entered into Jesus of Nazareth—what is symbolized by the baptism of John. In essence, those who could say in the synagogues, “He speaks in such a way that one feels as if the Exusiai were speaking, not merely the Archai, the spirits of the age, or the spirits of the people,” were not even particularly far along.

[ 12 ] Only when we succeed in restoring the richness and substance to what has today become so diluted in abstractions—so thin in modern translations of the Gospels—through what we have absorbed within ourselves through Spiritual Science, only then will we understand how much is required to truly penetrate the meaning of what is written in the Gospels. It will take generations to even begin to explore all the depths that our present age can already sense. Much of what the Gospels contain will only be able to be explored in the future.

[ 13 ] What the writer of the Gospel of Mark, in particular, sought to present was essentially a further elaboration of what the one who—as one of the very first—had himself grasped the nature and essence of Christ through direct supersensible perception was permitted to teach—namely, what Paul was able to teach. Now one must understand exactly what Paul learned, what he absorbed through the revelation at Damascus. Although this event is described in the Bible as a sudden enlightenment, anyone who knows the true reality of such an enlightenment understands how it can occur at any time for those who wish to ascend into the realms of the spiritual world—and how, through everything they experience, such a person becomes a completely different human being. In the case of Paul, it is indeed amply described how he became a completely different person through the Damascus Road experience.

[ 14 ] Now, even from a very superficial reading of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, you already know that Paul sees the Christ event—the event of Golgotha—as the focal point of the entire development of humanity, and that he links this event directly to the event described in the Bible as the first incarnation of humanity with Adam, so that Paul is essentially saying: What we must call the spiritual human being—the true, real human being, of whom only a Maya exists in Maya—once descended, as we say, in the ancient Lemurian era, and thus became a human being as he manifested himself through the Lemurian, Atlantean, and post-Atlantean periods up to the Christ event. Then came the event at Golgotha.

[ 15 ] This was the state of affairs for Paul after his vision near Damascus. In the event at Golgotha, there was something that, at first, is entirely equivalent to man’s descent into the flesh. For this provided the impetus to gradually overcome those forms of earthly existence that humanity had entered into at that time through Adam. That is why Paul calls the human being who appeared in Christ the “new Adam,” whom every person can take on through union with Christ.

[ 16 ] Thus we truly see the gradual descent of humankind into matter—whether one calls it Adam or something else —- from the Lemurian human to the pre-Christian human, and then again the strength and impulse upward, so that the human being, with all earthly experiences, with everything that can happen to him on Earth, can return to the original spiritual state in which he found himself before he descended. Now, if one does not wish to misunderstand the true meaning of evolution, one must not ask: Couldn’t humanity have been spared this descent? Why did humanity have to incarnate and go through the various incarnations, only to ascend again and have the same thing it had before? - Such a question could only stem from a complete misunderstanding of the true spirit of evolution. For human beings take with them all the fruits and experiences of earthly evolution and are enriched by the content of their incarnations. This is content that they did not possess before.

[ 17 ] Hypothetically, imagine a person descending through the first incarnation: there he learns; he learns through the second incarnation, and so on through all incarnations. These incarnations proceed in such a way that they are initially descending: the human being becomes more and more entangled in the physical world. Then he begins to ascend again and can rise as far as he is able to receive the Christ impulse. He will one day return to the spiritual world, but by then he will have taken with him whatever he was able to gain on Earth.

[ 18 ] Thus, Paul truly sees in Christ the center of all human development on Earth, which gives human beings the impetus to ascend into the supersensible world, enriched by all their earthly experiences.

[ 19 ] How, then, does Paul view the sacrifice on Golgotha—the actual crucifixion—from this perspective? —It is somewhat difficult to accurately convey this fact of the sacrifice on Golgotha, this most essential fact of human development, in terms of modern concepts as Paul understood it. For this understanding is also that of the writer of the Gospel of Mark. We must first familiarize ourselves with the idea that within the human being—as he stands before us today—there exists a microcosm, a small world, and we must begin by studying everything that comes into play here.

[ 20 ] The way human beings appear to us today, the way they develop between birth and death in a single incarnation, reveals two stages of development that are very different from one another. People usually do not distinguish between them, but they are very, very distinct from one another. I have—because, in fact, our entire endeavor in Spiritual Science is systematically structured to a greater extent than is generally thought—already drawn attention on various occasions to these two fundamentally different aspects of the human being. One can be observed in the period of human development that lies between birth and the point up to which modern human beings can recall in their individual lives. If you trace your memories back, you reach a certain point; beyond that, you have no recollection. Although you were there before that and may have heard from your parents or siblings what you were doing before then—and therefore know some of it—you still cannot recall anything beyond a certain point. Normal memory breaks off at a certain point in time. In the best-case scenario, this is around the age of three. Before that, human beings are incredibly active and receptive to impressions. Just think of all that one learns during this time—in the first, second, and third years of life! But modern humans have absolutely no recollection of the impressions these things made on them. — Then begins the period through which the thread of “I”-memory runs smoothly and uninterrupted.

[ 21 ] One should certainly take these two stages of development into account, for they are extraordinarily important if one wishes to consider the human being as a whole. One must now trace human development precisely and without the prejudices of modern science. The facts of science do indeed corroborate and prove what I have to say; but one must not let the prejudices of science influence one’s judgment, lest one stray far from the truth. Thus, if one traces human development precisely, one will be able to say: Just as human beings live as social beings, as social individuals, so they can only live according to the condition determined by what they absorb into that thread of memory that flows, in the best-case scenario, from about the age of three onward. In this lies everything of which one can say: It is the direction of human conscious life; all the things we consciously take in—as laws by which we govern ourselves, as impulses worth emulating, and so on—all of that lies within it. What lies before that, we take in, in a certain sense, unconsciously for the “I”-consciousness. This does not fit into the thread of what truly belongs to our full, ego-conscious life. There are, therefore, certain years preceding our ego-conscious life in which the environment affects us in a completely different way than it does later on.

[ 22 ] The difference is a truly radical one. If we could observe the child before this time, it would immediately become apparent that, prior to the point in time that the human being later recalls, the child feels much more at home within the general macrocosmic spiritual life. It has not yet separated itself, has not yet isolated itself; rather, it considers itself part of its entire surroundings and even addresses itself in the same way others address it. For it does not say “I want,” but rather “Little Karl wants,” and only later does it learn to refer to itself as “I”—a point that modern child psychologists take issue with, though this does not contradict the truth, but only the understanding of the psychologists in question. In the early years, the child still feels part of its surroundings, perceiving itself as a member of the whole environment. It is only at the point that the person later recalls that they begin to isolate themselves from their surroundings as an independent being.

[ 23 ] We can therefore say: Whatever a human being is capable of assimilating as laws and whatever can constitute the content of his consciousness belongs to the second stage of his development, beginning at this defining point in time. The first stage of development involves an entirely different relationship to the environment, such that one is much more immersed in and connected to the environment—maintaining a direct correspondence with it. You can only fully grasp what is actually being said if you hypothetically create a mental image of yourself as if the consciousness which, in early childhood, provides this direct connection to the environment were to remain with the human being into later years. Human life would unfold quite differently then. People would not feel so isolated; rather, in later years they would feel themselves to be a part of the entire macrocosm—they would feel at home within the greater world. This sense is lost to them. Later in life, they have no connection to the greater world and believe themselves to be standing there in isolation. If they lead an ordinary life, this isolation comes to their consciousness only in an abstract sense. It comes to their awareness in a concrete way, however, as they increasingly cultivate selfishness, as they increasingly seek, so to speak, to shut themselves off within their own skin. Those with little education believe—which is actually complete nonsense—that as human beings we live only within our own skin. For the moment we exhale, all the air we have inhaled is already outside us, so that simply by breathing in and out, we are constantly in communication with our entire environment. It is an absolute Maya, the mental image we have of ourselves as beings. But human consciousness is such that one must live within this Maya. One simply cannot do otherwise. For in our time, people are neither particularly inclined nor especially ready to experience karma. If, for example, someone’s windows are smashed today, they perceive it—because they feel themselves to be an isolated being—as a personal injury inflicted upon them, and they become angry. But if he were to believe in karma, he would feel a sense of belonging to the entire macrocosm and would know that it is indeed true that we are actually the ones who smashed the windows. For in truth, we are interwoven with the entire cosmos. It is utterly absurd to believe that we are confined within our own skin. But this sense of connectedness with the macrocosm is something only a child possesses in the early years. A person loses it from the moment onward, until such time as they later recall it.

[ 24 ] This was not always the case. In earlier times—which are not so far behind us—human beings did, in fact, carry that awareness from their earliest childhood into their later years to a certain degree. That was in the days of ancient clairvoyance. Associated with this, however, was an entirely different way of thinking—and even of expressing facts. This is an aspect of human development that Spiritual Science would do well to fully grasp one day.

[ 25 ] When a person is born into the world today—that is, when he comes into our midst—what is he? — For people today, he is essentially the son of his father and, first and foremost, the son of his mother. And if, in civil life, he does not have a birth certificate or baptismal certificate listing his father and mother—on which a person can be identified—then nothing at all is known about that person, and under certain circumstances, his very existence may be denied. Thus, for the modern consciousness of humanity, a person is the physical son of his father, the physical son of his mother.

[ 26 ] People in a not-too-distant past did not think that way. But because today’s scientists and researchers do not know that people used to think differently and meant something entirely different by their words and terms, they arrive at entirely different interpretations of the ancient accounts. For example, we are told of a Greek singer named Orpheus. I mention him because, in a certain sense, he belongs to the era that immediately preceded the Christian era. Orpheus was the one who established the Greek mysteries. The Greek period is the fourth within our post-Atlantean culture, so that, as it were, the culture of Orpheus prepared the way for what was later given to humanity through the Christ event. For Greece, then, Orpheus is this great forerunner. What would a modern person say if he were to encounter someone like Orpheus? He would say: He is the son of this father and the son of that mother—indeed, modern science might even investigate his inherited characteristics. There is already a thick book today that lists all the inherited characteristics from Goethe’s family and thus attempts to summarize Goethe based on these inherited traits. People did not think this way in Orpheus’s time; they did not regard the outer, physical human being and his characteristics as the essential thing, but rather saw as essential in Orpheus that which enabled him to become the inaugurator, the true leader, of pre-Christian Greek culture, and it was clear to them that what lived within him as a physical brain or nervous system was not the essential. Rather, what was regarded as essential was that he carried within himself—in what he experienced—an element that originated directly from the supersensible worlds and that then, through him, on the stage provided by his personality, encountered a sensory-physical element. The Greeks did not see in the personality of Orpheus the physical aspect derived from his father and mother, or perhaps even from his grandfather and grandmother; that was quite unimportant to them—it was merely the outer expression, the shell. What was essential to him was that which originated in the supersensible and converged with the sensible on the physical plane. Therefore, the Greek said to himself: When I have Orpheus before me, it hardly matters that he is descended from a father and a mother; but what does matter is that the soul-element within him—through which he has come into being—derives from a supersensible realm that has never had anything to do with the physical plane, and that a sensory-physical element, through what human beings already were at that time, could act upon this supersensible aspect of his personality and unite with it. And because the Greeks saw in Orpheus, as his essential nature, a purely supersensible element, they said of him: he is descended from a Muse. He was the son of a Muse, Calliope; he was not merely the son of a physical mother, but of a supersensible element that had never had any connection with the physical world.

[ 27 ] Had he been merely the son of the muse Calliope, he would have been able to bring to light only that which was a manifestation of the supersensible world. But by virtue of his era, he was also called upon to express that which was meant to serve the physical age. Therefore, he was not merely a mouthpiece for the Muse, for Calliope—just as in earlier times the Rishis were merely mouthpieces for the supersensible powers—but he lived out the supersensible in such a way that his lived experience exerted an influence on the physical world. Hence, he is descended from his father, Öagros, who was a Thracian river god. What Orpheus proclaimed was thus connected on the other side and adapted to the climate of Greece, to what external nature in Greece provided, and to the Thracian river god Öagros.

[ 28 ] This shows us, then, how what was essential in Orpheus was seen in what lived within his soul. That is how people used to be described. They were not described as they were later, when people would say: “He is the son of this or that person,” or “He is descended from this or that city”—but rather, people were described according to their spiritual worth. In the case of Orpheus, it is now extraordinarily interesting to see how intimately the entire destiny of such a person was perceived—one who, on the one hand, was descended from a Muse and, on the other, from a Thracian river god. Such a person had not merely absorbed the supernatural, as the ancient prophets had, but had already taken in the sensory as well. He was already exposed to all the influences that the physical, sensory world exerts upon us.

[ 29 ] Now we know that human beings consist of various constitutional elements: the lowest, the physical body; then the etheric body—which, as we have said, contains the opposite sex within itself—and then the astral body and the “I.” A person like Orpheus, on the one hand, can still see into the spiritual world because he is descended from a Muse—you now know what that means. But on the other hand, his ability to live in the spiritual world is undermined precisely by his life on the physical plane, by his descent from his father, the Thracian river god. This undermines his purely spiritual life. For all the earlier leaders of humanity in the second and third post-Atlantean cultural periods—who merely served as channels through which the supersensible worlds spoke—it was the case that they could, in a sense, perceive their own etheric body as something separate from the physical body. In the cultures of ancient clairvoyance—even among the Celts—when a person was to perceive something that he was to reveal to his fellow human beings, it was revealed to him through his own etheric body stepping out of him. This etheric body then served as the vehicle for the forces that descended upon him. Now, if the messengers were men and their etheric bodies were therefore feminine, they perceived what was conveyed to them from the spiritual worlds in a feminine form.

[ 30 ] It should now be shown that Orpheus, insofar as he was in direct contact with the spiritual powers—because he was already the son of the Thracian river god—was susceptible to the possibility of being unable to hold onto what was revealed to him through his own etheric body. And the more he immersed himself in the physical world and expressed who he was as a son of the land, the more his clairvoyant powers slipped away from him. This is depicted by the fact that Eurydice—his revealer, his soul-bride—is snatched from him by the bite of a viper—that is, by what comes from him as human—and carried off to the underworld. He could only regain her through an initiation that he then had to undergo. Whenever a descent into the underworld is spoken of, an initiation is meant. Thus, he was to win back his wife through an initiation. But he was already too deeply entangled with the physical world. Although he did indeed acquire the ability to descend into the underworld, when he came back up, when he once again saw the sun, Eurydice slipped away from him. Why? Because when he saw the sun, he did something he was not allowed to do: look around, look back. In other words, he violated a commandment that had been strictly imposed on him by the god of the underworld. What is this commandment? That the physical human being, as he lives today on the physical plane, must not look back beyond that specific point in time where the macrocosmic childhood experiences lie—experiences which, if they were to penetrate into later consciousness, would restore the ancient clairvoyance. “You must not,” says the god of the underworld, “harbor a desire to truly fathom the mysteries of childhood or to remember where the threshold stands.”—Because he does so, he loses the ability to see into the spiritual realm.

[ 31 ] Thus, something extraordinarily subtle and intimate about Orpheus is portrayed through this loss of Eurydice. This is simply a consequence of the human being becoming a victim of the physical world. He has entered, together with a being that was still essentially rooted in the supersensible, into what he was destined to become on the physical plane. As a result, all the forces of the physical plane assail him, and he loses Eurydice, his own innocent soul—which modern human beings are bound to lose; he loses her. And the forces into which he is then cast tear him apart. This is a kind of sacrifice of Orpheus.

[ 32 ] So what is it that Orpheus experiences first as he ascends from the third to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch? He first experiences what the first stage of childhood consciousness sheds: the connection with the macrocosm. It is not there; it does not carry over into conscious life. And just as the human being is in his true essence, he is consumed, killed by the life of the physical plane, which actually begins only with the aforementioned epoch. — Now picture this human being, who is, so to speak, the human being of the physical plane, who, in today’s normal consciousness, recalls events back to a certain point in time; preceding this are three years of childhood. This human being, with the thread of memory, is so entangled with the physical plane that Orpheus—in his true essence—cannot endure it within him, but is torn apart. This is the true human spirit of our time, the human spirit that shows us how deeply a human being can be entangled with matter. This is the spirit that, in the sense of Pauline Christianity, is called the Son of Man. You must take this concept to heart: the Son of Man, who is found within the human being from the point in time back to which the human being can recall today, along with everything the human being can assimilate from culture. Take this human being into your mind’s eye, and now imagine everything that a human being could be through their connection to the macrocosm, if added to this were what enters from the macrocosm during the early years of childhood. In the early years of childhood, this can be nothing other than a foundation, because the developed human “I” is not yet present. But if it were to flow into the developed human “I,” then what happened at the very moment when the Spirit descended from above upon Jesus of Nazareth through his baptism in the Jordan would occur again: the three innocent stages of childhood development would blend together with the rest of humanity. That is the next step. And what was the consequence of this? The consequence was that this innocent childhood life, as it sought to develop on the physical earth, could develop for only three years—just as it develops everywhere for only three years—and then came to an end at Golgotha; that is, it could not blend with what a human being becomes by the point up to which he or she can normally recall.

[ 33 ] If you think this through: what it would mean if all that connection to the macrocosm—which emerges dimly and vaguely in the early years of childhood but, because the child does not yet have a sense of self, cannot yet truly shine—were to mingle within a human being; and if you think further about how, when it dawns in later consciousness, something would take shape, something would fall into us that does not originate from the human being within us, but from the very depths of the world from which we are born—then you have the interpretation of the words that were spoken in reference to what is depicted in the descent of the dove: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him!” That is to say, it is Christ who has been incarnated here in Jesus of Nazareth, “begotten”—the Christ who was in fact born into Jesus of Nazareth at the moment of John’s baptism and who stood at the height of that level of consciousness which people otherwise possess only in the early years of childhood, but with all the sense of cosmic oneness that a child would have if it knew what it feels during the first three years. Then, of course, those words would also take on a completely different meaning: “I and the Father”—the cosmic Father—“are one.”

[ 34 ] If you let this sink into your soul, you will begin to sense a little of what, so to speak, was the first fundamental element of the Damascus Road experience for Paul, and what is expressed in these beautiful words: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven!” These words have many meanings, but this is one of them. Paul said, “Not I, but Christ in me!” That is, the essence that possesses a macrocosmic consciousness such as a child would have if it could permeate the consciousness of its first three years with the consciousness of later years. In today’s ordinary human being, these two aspects are separate—and must be separate—for otherwise they could not coexist. Nor did they coexist in Christ Jesus. For after those three years, death was inevitable, and it occurred under the circumstances that unfolded in Palestine. They did not unfold in this way by chance, but through the interplay of these two factors: the Son of God, who is the human being from the moment of birth until the development of ego-consciousness, and the Son of Man, who is the human being after the moment of attaining ego-consciousness. The coexistence of the Son of Man and the Son of God gave rise to the events that subsequently led to the events in Palestine.