The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] How should we approach Theosophy if we wish to understand its deepest truths?

[ 2 ] To answer this question, let us take as our starting point a passage from the Gospel of Mark: “Behold, I send my angel before you, who will prepare your way before you. — It is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” — The original text reads: “It is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.”

[ 3 ] If an unbiased person were to read these words and try to explain them, he would not know what to make of them at first. He would regard them more or less as a cliché or, at most, as an allegory. For what is a preacher supposed to proclaim in a desert? After all, preachers don’t usually go into the desert, but rather to places where there are many people.

[ 4 ] If we now examine this passage in light of the findings of spiritual research, the full depth of the wisdom contained in every word of Holy Scripture becomes apparent to us. We will learn that every word in the original text is in its proper place and can only be understood in that context.

[ 5 ] What, then, is meant by the words: “I will send my angel before you, who will prepare your way before you”? — We know that here the Bible is referring to John the Baptist. However, in order to explain why the term “angel” is used here, we must go back once more to the earlier stages of our Earth’s development and see which beings played a part in them. We know, after all, that on our physical Earth there is also a hierarchical structure comprising various stages of development, the lowest of which is the mineral kingdom; next comes the plant kingdom, then the animal kingdom, and at the highest level, humanity. Higher still, above humanity, rises the hierarchy of the angels or Angeloi, the archangels or Archangeloi, the Archai or Spirits of Personality, the Exusiai or Spirits of Form or Powers; further up are the Powers or Dynamis, the Dominions; then the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim.

[ 6 ] All of these hierarchies, too, are in a state of constant evolution. Just as we are now going through our stage of human development on Earth, so the hierarchy of angels, which stands immediately above us, went through its stage of human development during the planetary state that preceded Earth’s—the lunar state—albeit in a different form than the one we are experiencing today. They are therefore one step ahead of us. And just as we are the guides and leaders of our children on Earth, so do the angels have the duty to guide and lead humanity. Since earthly forms now offer them no opportunity to incarnate within them, they must—in order to help us—infuse their wisdom into the bodies of the most highly developed, purest human beings, so that divine truths may be proclaimed to humanity through their mouths. In such a case, we can say: They cloak themselves in Maya.

[ 7 ] We can understand this even more clearly if we transport ourselves back to the distant past and create a mental image of the seven Indian rishis. If we were to look at their outward appearance, we would see nothing more than plain, simple men—perhaps even farmers—but within them lies the core of their inner being. With clairvoyant vision, however, we would see them enveloped in a great, radiant aura; from within them, flames of warmth would pour out into their surroundings. But for the greatest cosmic wisdom to penetrate the core of their being, all seven had to be together. Like the scale of seven notes on an instrument, they were touched by the Divine. And the language they spoke—to us, it would be incomprehensible sounds.

[ 8 ] What was language like in those ancient times? We can hardly imagine it today, for our modern language—unlike that of the past—is a philistine construct of concepts, permeated by logic. In the time of the Rishis, sound was that which, when it rang out, evoked images in the mind’s eye. Where, then, does language actually come from? From what primal source did it arise? The ancient sages had brought it down from the stars. For them, the zodiac was the hieroglyphic script in the sky, the writing of the deity. The zodiac represented the consonants, the planets the vowels, and depending on how they changed their orbits within the zodiac, the sages read the various meanings of heavenly wisdom.

[ 9 ] Thus, the bodies of the Rishis were also Maya, which veiled the inner divine essence.

[ 10 ] If we now apply this light, which Spiritual Science bestows upon us, to the words of the Bible, all the banality that materialists are so eager to ascribe to them vanishes. We now understand, in the truest sense of the word, what it means: “And God sent an angel ahead to prepare the way for him who was to come.” - The angel here truly refers to a highly evolved being from the first hierarchy of angels, or Angeloi, standing above us—a being who had lowered his spirit into the maya of the human body; in this case, into the body of John the Baptist, who was the incarnation of Elijah. One need only shed the proper light on the biblical passages and then take them literally if we wish to understand them correctly.

[ 11 ] And the Bible verses go on to say: “It is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” — “It is one who cries out in solitude.”

[ 12 ] Theologians don't know what to make of this either. Indeed, what does it mean to be a voice crying in the wilderness or to be in solitude?

[ 13 ] We know that John baptized with water. Specifically, baptism by water consisted of immersing the entire person in the Jordan River during the initiation ceremony.

[ 14 ] Why did this happen? It happened so that the etheric body of a spiritually developed person might detach itself from the physical body for a moment; for then the person experienced the same thing that a dying person experiences when his etheric body detaches. For he then sees his present incarnation in every detail, all the way back to his birth, unfolding before his eyes like a panorama, and he feels and knows that, outside his physical body, he is a spiritual being.

[ 15 ] When he returned to his physical body after this experience during his baptism, he had undergone an experience that set him apart from all other people: He felt, so to speak, isolated with this expanded knowledge, cut off from the rest of humanity, which no longer understood him. He felt lonely, as if in a desert, alone in solitude. And in his deepest inner seclusion, he heard the voice of one calling: his angel.

[ 16 ] This leading angel was to take on the form of John the Baptist here. That was the meaning of the voice in the wilderness in the Bible passage.

[ 17 ] We read further in the Gospel of Mark the passage where Christ proclaims the highest wisdom in the schools, and where it says: “And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught with authority and not like the scribes.”

[ 18 ] What does it mean to “speak powerfully”? Who spoke from their physical nature? Just as the angels and archangels are guides for individual human beings—and the archangels, in particular, are guides for the entire people—so, too, are other higher beings the directors and guides of the forces of nature, the natural powers. The geniuses of art also draw from these natural forces. We find them radiating within Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael: they drew from divine nature.

[ 19 ] And if we want to visualize where to find these forces of nature, let us transport ourselves in our minds for a moment to the mountain peaks—say, to one of the Swiss Alps. If we are then fortunate enough to witness a sunrise there, we will be overwhelmed by the magic and grandeur of this natural phenomenon; we will feel a shiver run through us from the mighty forces that radiate toward us and proclaim God’s omnipotence. When we see how, from the twilight gray of the dawning day, the first delicate hues of the rising sun emerge, how they bathe the peaks of the snow-capped mountains in a crimson glow, and our eyes are gradually dazzled by the spectacle that grows ever more brilliant, how the rays then conjure up ever more shades of color, which seem to stream in from all sides and grow ever more extensive, until the sun finally, in all its blazing splendor—awakening life and bestowing warmth—sends its rays down into the deepest valleys—then we perceive in this majestic natural phenomenon nothing other than spiritual forces converging here. And these forces are those beings we have come to know in the hierarchies as Exusiai, or Powers, or Spirits of Form. The original text states: “He taught like the Exusiai.” Christ had the Powers at his disposal; he spoke through them, in the form of the Powers. Through John spoke the angels who stand one level above humanity; through Christ spoke the powers of the forces that, as described, speak through natural phenomena. So it was these forces that set the body of Christ ablaze; they were the ones that enabled him to preach “with great power.”

[ 20 ] John the Baptist had received the highest initiation, which took place under the sign of Aquarius. When we look at the ancient signs of the zodiac, we see in the sign of Aquarius a figure bending down with a certain posture of the arms. This refers to the biblical words: “There is one coming after me, for whom I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the straps of his sandals.”