The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] It was part of the so-called Mysterium magnum that we had to address yesterday, and some of you may have found it somewhat difficult to view it precisely from the perspective we had to adopt in order to fully grasp all the details. But the world is complicated, after all, and if one aspires to attain certain higher insights, there is really no other way than to be willing to make the effort and accept a few minor difficulties along the way.

[ 2 ] If we once again bring to mind, clearly and concisely, what we are to understand by this great mystery, it has been, on the one hand, the threefold nature of the human being—or, to put it more accurately, the composition of the human being from three human beings, each consisting of seven parts—so that we can distinguish an upper human being, a middle human being, and a lower human being. These three human beings appear to us, as we wander through the world and have our experiences, to be intimately connected with one another. Ordinary consciousness does not distinguish these three human beings from one another. That was one side. The other side of the great mystery is that at the very moment when the human being rises from his ordinary earthly consciousness to a higher kind of consciousness, he is immediately confronted with the fact—which was also explained in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*— that they must then expect a tearing of their consciousness into three parts, a tearing apart of their entire being, namely into a thinking human being, a feeling human being, and a willing human being. Divided into these three inner soul beings, the human being feels, as it were, when they wish to ascend to a higher consciousness. On the one hand, we have the threefold sevenfold human being; on the other hand, when we transcend ordinary consciousness, we immediately experience a tripartition of our consciousness, so that the person who, as an occult aspirant, becomes a clairvoyant—as you know from the book mentioned—must exert every effort to hold together the three members of his consciousness, so that he does not fall apart inwardly and spiritually. It would be an inner catastrophe if he were to fall apart. So while in ordinary life we are constantly tempted to merge that which is threefold—human nature—into a unity, into a single human form, the situation regarding our inner being, regarding our soul life, is such that the moment we transcend our consciousness in any way, we are immediately reminded that we are a threefold being, reminded that we are in danger of being torn apart into three people in the innermost life of the soul.

[ 3 ] The best way to understand how things actually are is to start, quite simply, from the very basics of what everyday life presents to us and what is made clear to the occult aspirant—things that people in this ordinary, external life do not, in fact, realize at all. Even in ordinary life, the three soul forces of the human being—which are also distinguished in ordinary life—or, rather, the individual qualities of consciousness themselves, clearly point throughout the course of life to what we learned about yesterday as the threefold human being.

[ 4 ] Take a look at the person standing before you in everyday life. What must actually take place for everyday consciousness to arise? For everyday consciousness to arise—the consciousness that you, as thinking human beings on Earth, carry with you for the most part—it is necessary for external impressions to be able to act upon your senses. The senses are primarily, insofar as they inform us about earthly life, fixed in the head, and the content of consciousness—that which is within consciousness—originates primarily from these senses.

[ 5 ] If you take the “upper human” from among the three people we met yesterday, you will say to yourself: The impressions of the day, of ordinary consciousness, affect primarily the upper human, the “head human.” They assert themselves through the fact that the human being is capable of countering these impressions of external consciousness—when they act upon him—with the instrument of his brain, indeed his entire head.

[ 6 ] A simple reflection will show you that human beings, as earthly beings, cannot by any means be merely intellectual beings. From an occult perspective, we saw yesterday how the human being is divided into three parts. But as the human being stands before us as an earthly being, the head, in order to be viable, must be sustained by the substances and forces that are continually sent from the second, the middle human being, into the head. Nutrients must flow from the middle human being into the head through the blood circulation; they must sustain the brain; then the brain can function as an instrument to confront external sensory impressions, and then, in particular, thoughts and mental images can arise in the human being as a result of external sensory impressions.

[ 7 ] What arises through the instrument of the brain is experienced by the human being in their ordinary consciousness; and you also know that this ordinary consciousness ceases when the human being sleeps, that external sensory impressions are then no longer present, that they no longer affect the human being. When a person sleeps and external sensory impressions no longer affect the brain maintained by the middle human being, then, of course, effects still occur from this middle human being on the upper one, from the second human being on the first, that is, on this brain. In this middle human being, respiration is also maintained during sleep; furthermore, the other activities of the middle human being are maintained; the blood is likewise directed to the brain when a person sleeps, just as when they are awake. This essentially occurs with only a slight difference.

[ 8 ] There is indeed a difference in the way the instrument of everyday consciousness is maintained by the average person while awake, and how it is maintained while asleep. This difference is expressed, for example, in the fact that during sleep the number of our breaths is reduced from about twenty to fifteen, that the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled is also about a quarter less, and that the entire nature of our metabolism changes during sleep. So if, under certain circumstances, a person’s usual diet and its effects continue during sleep, this can actually be very harmful. People know this from the fact that one sleeps poorly after a heavy meal, so that the brain’s rest is indeed disturbed by a heavy meal consumed immediately before falling asleep. There is thus a difference between the state of sleep and the state of wakefulness, even in the way the average human being influences the higher human being.

[ 9 ] Now let us ask ourselves: What, then, are the immediate consequences for the average person on Earth when this distinction arises?

[ 10 ] The fact that a person withdraws from the external world and acts solely within their physical inner being—in what we have described as the human form—means that the middle human acts toward the upper human through the forces present in the middle human, has the consequence that ordinary everyday consciousness is extinguished; that although the human being has a brain during sleep, they do not perceive the effects that occur from the middle human being upon this brain; that these effects do not manifest and actually exist only in what we usually call dream consciousness.

[ 11 ] This dream consciousness is indeed very complex, but if one thinks about it for a moment, it is quite easy to realize that a certain class of dreams is definitely connected to what is going on within the average person, and that this stems from the fact that the brain is not only capable of perceiving the external world when sensory impressions act upon it, but is also, in a certain sense, capable of perceiving what arises from the inner human being in the form of dream images that take on all manner of symbols. If something is amiss in the heart, this can very easily be dreamed of under the symbol of a boiling stove. If something is wrong with the intestines, one often dreams of snakes. The inner self is very often characterized in such a way that the dream points to what is happening within the middle man. And anyone who examines this remarkable connection through ordinary external science will be able to say that irregularities in the middle man are symbolically perceived in dream images.

[ 12 ] As you are well aware, there are also people who have even more profound experiences with dreams of this kind; people who can perceive the onset of certain illnesses in very specific symbolic ‘dream images,’ so that one can often find a clear connection between regularly recurring ‘dream images’ of a symbolic nature and a subsequent lung, heart, or stomach disease, and the like.

[ 13 ] Just as it is possible, by paying close attention upon waking, to notice that if one has dreamed of a burning stove, the heart sometimes beats faster—which is precisely what the burning stove represents—so too can lung diseases, internal irregularities of the stomach, and indeed all illnesses that have not yet manifested as such, announce themselves symbolically in dream images. We can therefore say: The human brain, or rather the human soul, is not only receptive to external impressions conveyed through the senses, but also to the physical inner life of the human being, with the sole difference that it does not take in true mental images, but forms fantastical-symbolic mental images of what is taking place within the human being.

[ 14 ] When we consider this fact, it becomes quite clear that a person perceives themselves while dreaming, that they can say of themselves: In my dreams, I look at myself. — But in the act of perception during the dream, they do not know this; they perceive their heart in the dream, but they do not know that it is their heart they are perceiving. They perceive a burning stove, an object outside themselves—that is, what is within them is projected outward and stands outside the person. So you can see quite clearly here that in dream consciousness, a person can only be concerned with their physical interior, and that through this dream consciousness they are torn apart, ripped apart.

[ 15 ] Ordinary life, after all, proceeds in such a way that we are generally concerned only with waking and sleeping. But you also know from your own dreams that it is not only the states of the middle human being, but also the states of the upper human being—the head human being—that are perceived in dreams. You need only pay attention to those dreams that are caused by irregularities in the head itself. Through what is perceived as an irregularity in the head itself, the brain—or rather, the soul using the brain as its instrument—perceives itself in the dream. The higher human being perceives itself. These dreams always have something extraordinarily characteristic about them. If you have a dream and wake up with some kind of pain in your head, it is the case that the dream is a symbolic, fantastical, pictorial representation of your headache. As a rule, such dreams will always relate to irregularities in the brain itself, to irregularities in the higher self, and they will always take the form of leading you out into the vastness, of placing you inside a large vault or a cave. Specifically, the vault above the person is the typical, characteristic feature of headache dreams. Something will be crawling around in there, or there will be spider webs, or there will be dirt on the ceiling of the cave. It may also be a palace that you perceive above you.

[ 16 ] So, as a higher being, a person perceives themselves, but they project what they have perceived back outwards. It is, as it were, as if the human being steps out of themselves and projects what is within them, what is in their mind, outward. Thus, once again, a kind of division of the human being, a kind of tearing apart, of losing oneself, of self-annihilation.

[ 17 ] The states I have just described to you are precisely ‘spatial states’. They are states that clearly show you how the human being already falls apart in dream consciousness, how the unity of his consciousness, how his sense of self, is not maintained, and how, fundamentally speaking, what appears as a dream is always a mirror, a symbolic reflection of what is taking place within the human being’s own physicality.

[ 18 ] The point, however, is that the occult aspirant does not merely transition from ordinary waking consciousness to a dream state—which would be nothing special—but rather that he transitions to an entirely different state of consciousness; that through the exercises described in earlier lessons—by suppressing the intellect, the will, and memory—he detaches himself from his own self and attains a completely different consciousness.

[ 19 ] To understand this other form of consciousness—which is not dream consciousness—dream consciousness can nevertheless be helpful to those who are completely unfamiliar with clairvoyant consciousness. This understanding arises in the following way. If we ask ourselves: What is it, primarily, that a person perceives from their physical interior during dream states? We must answer: It is the painful, the disorderly; it is that which occurs as an irregularity within the physical interior. A moment’s reflection will show you that the ordinary, normal states of the interior are not perceived by the dream consciousness. When a person is completely healthy as an upper and middle human being, when everything in the head and in the middle human being is in order, then people also sleep properly; then, under ordinary circumstances—please note this word carefully—one cannot say that anything compels a person to interrupt their peaceful sleep with dreams.

[ 20 ] Now, however, the path that the higher, clairvoyant consciousness must take is also one that passes through conditions similar to those of the dream state. The difference is that this passage through similar conditions is achieved precisely through occult training; and it is no different than that in clairvoyance, a person first brings themselves to recognize not merely the external, ordinary painful states of their physical interior, but that they are first led to perceive the normal states of their physical interior, which thus elude the ordinary person during peaceful sleep. A person first becomes acquainted with these states as a clairvoyant aspirant. In other words: he will come to know his brain, his head-self, and he will come to know the middle self by learning to perceive it inwardly. In a manner similar to how the sleeping person perceives his middle and head-self in certain dreams, so too must the aspirant to clairvoyance come to know his middle and upper self.

[ 21 ] Let us take the average person as our starting point. If you consider the average person, you will have to admit that there is actually nothing in this average person that directly points to the outside world in any particular way. In the head, it is the eyes and the other sense organs that point directly to the external world. The average person does, of course, have the ability to relate to the external world because the sense of touch extends over the entire skin; but this perception of the external world by the average person is truly insignificant compared to the knowledge of the external world we gain through the head-oriented person. This perception is of little significance, and even the warmth that affects the middle human being, while actually having the greatest significance as a perception, is of importance only for the human being’s inner experience, for his inner state of being. Thus, we have the middle human being as a self-contained being who has inner processes that are of the utmost importance to him, but which have little significance for the human being’s relationship to the outside world.

[ 22 ] But if you ask yourself whether this inner human being might not have a connection with the outer world that eludes the perception of ordinary consciousness, you will immediately realize that this inner, middle human being also has a very significant connection with the outer world. It all depends on this middle human being being adapted to earthly conditions. He must breathe the earth’s air; he must have the substances that thrive on earth for his sustenance. In this way, the middle human being and the Earth belong together. If the substances necessary to sustain the life of the middle human being were not present within the sphere of earthly existence, this middle human being could not be as he is. If the air he breathes were not available to him, this middle human being could not be as he is. We must therefore say: This average human being is something we must necessarily count as part of our earthly existence, must count as entirely part of what the Earth can give to humanity.

[ 23 ] But it is not merely a question of what the Earth can give to humankind. For the Earth could exist for a long time, and yet the average human being could not survive. If the Sun did not come to the Earth’s aid and enable what the average human being needs to ripen and flourish on Earth, then the average human being could not survive. Just consider for a moment that this average human being derives his nourishment from the Earth, and that this nourishment, along with the air, is the essential substance that sustains him; yet everything that actually exists as nourishment depends on the Sun’s influence on the Earth. Thus, what enters into the human being is brought about by the Sun within the Earth’s orbit. In short, when we consider the average human being, we are not dealing merely with a direct influence of the Earth on the human being, but indirectly with an influence of the Sun on the human being. Without the physical sunlight illuminating the Earth, the average human being could not exist. What is within this average human being has entered him through the work of sunlight on the Earth.

[ 24 ] You see, this significant fact—that this average human being is actually an effect of sunlight—is expressed when the occult aspirant becomes clairvoyant, that is, develops not merely a dream consciousness but a clairvoyant consciousness, so that while images arise in dreaming that express inner irregularities, the images the clairvoyant aspirant receives express what the sun does in the average human being; initially, the entirely orderly, regular aspects of what the sun does in the average human being. When the occult aspirant becomes clairvoyant and the perception of his own regular inner being comes alive within him, then he stands before the flooding light; then he is surrounded by the flooding light. Just as the images of inner irregularities surround the dreamer, so do flooding light phenomena surround the occult aspirant; it is first and foremost the perception of the sun’s effect within his own inner being that arises in him.

[ 25 ] Now compare ordinary external consciousness with this peculiar consciousness that arises within the clairvoyant. When the human being, as a higher human being, looks at the objects of the earth, he looks at these objects—for essentially, visual perception is predominant in life—through the sunlight reflected by the objects and flowing back to him. In outer consciousness, the human being looks at the outer sunlight as it is reflected back to him from the outer earth. What the outer sunlight does externally to the things of the earth is perceived by the outer, everyday consciousness of the earthly human being. What the sunlight does to him personally, what it does by enabling his middle self, what it does by penetrating the middle self with its power—this appears as a flood of light before the human being when he becomes an occult aspirant. He sees the sun within himself in exactly the same way as he sees the sun externally when the day begins and as long as the day lasts. And just as he sees the objects around him through the sunlight being reflected back from the external objects, so the occult aspirant sees the solar aspect as it is reflected back to him from his own inner being once he has reached a certain stage of clairvoyance. It is, as it were, the form of his middle man revealing itself in its luminous transparency. That is one aspect.

[ 26 ] If you were to go back to ancient times and study in the various ancient mystery schools what occult aspirants initially went through, you would learn that what has just been described was an essential part of those ancient mystery schools. You would learn that the occult aspirant learned to perceive the Sun indirectly through his own inner being, learned to perceive that which persists from the Sun’s effects even when the person is asleep, but which eludes him during waking consciousness because his attention is entirely absorbed by external consciousness. What the human being is as a solar being was made clear to the occult aspirant through a specific stage of mystery initiation. Thus, through his own selfhood, he came to know the solar being, came to know how the sun acts not merely externally in the light reflected by objects, but how it acts within the human physical form itself.

[ 27 ] But the occult aspirant, the budding clairvoyant, must also learn to find the other; namely that which can be compared to brain dreams, to the dreams that reflect irregular, disordered states of the brain, where the human being, as I have told you, characteristically, typically always perceives symbols, such as if he were in a cave or in a palace—in short, as if something were arching over him into which he can look. When the occult aspirant is guided not only to perceive the states of his middle man, but also the states of his upper man, insofar as he is formed, the states within the head man, then what occurs is never the same as in the perceptions of the middle man. Rather, what occurs there—I am simply telling you a fact here—is what appears as a regular expansion, as a perfectly genuine expansion of the brain-stimulated dream, only that it is experienced with full consciousness. What a person perceives when they have closed all their sense organs, when they perceive nothing external and direct their clairvoyant consciousness inwardly toward themselves, toward the higher, the brain-human—that is in fact the starry sky, some vision of the starry vault of heaven.

[ 28 ] That was the great moment in the lives of occult aspirants, particularly in the ancient mysteries—to what extent this changed for the new mystery tradition, we shall yet learn—when he perceived his own inner self, insofar as this inner self is expressed in human form, in the higher human being as the sky with shining stars; that he thus looked out into the vast world, even though he had no sense organ open, and yet the image of the starry sky was there. And the greatest moment of all was this: when the occult aspirant observed, not what is, so to speak, on the upper surface of his head, but when he looked down from the upper human being, from the head human being, toward the middle human being; when he simultaneously perceived, without opening any of his senses, that which is the lower surface of the brain, and saw it radiating through the middle human being. There, in complete darkness—because his senses were closed, for he was, in relation to the outside world, like a sleeping person, looking inwardly downward, as it were—the human being perceived the sun in the night, in the midst of the dark expanse of the sky. This is what was called in the ancient mysteries: to behold the sun at midnight—that is, the flooding sunlight within the stars, which appear much smaller in their effect relative to the sun. These were significant milestones in the life of the occult aspirant.

[ 29 ] Once the occult aspirant had reached this point, he could tell himself something very specific. He could say to himself: Yes, just as I perceive the flooding sunlight—that is, the sun—through myself when I look at my middle human being, so too, because it is the real effect of the stars, can I see the heavens with their stars through the upper human being. The fact that I see the stars and there is not, say, complete darkness, stems from the fact that the brain is attuned to the stars, just as my middle human being is attuned to the sun. — Thus the aspirant came to realize that just as the middle man is sustained by the sun, and his entire middle being is connected to the sun—that is, belongs to the sun—so the upper man, the brain man, is connected to the whole world and its stars.

[ 30 ] Once the occult aspirant had experienced this within himself, he could go out to those who possessed only ordinary consciousness, but who nevertheless, out of their inner needs and the longing of their souls, felt the urge to establish a connection with something that transcends the earthly human being. In other words: The occult aspirant could go out to the religiously inclined person, who could somehow sense such connections with the world, and say to them: Human beings, as they stand on Earth, are not merely beings that belong to this Earth, but beings that, through the chest and abdomen, are partly connected to the Sun, and who, as head-beings, are connected to the entire cosmos. — And then what the occult aspirant could proclaim to the religiously inclined person was transformed in the latter into devotion, into prayer.

[ 31 ] Depending on the position of the various groups of people to whom the occult aspirants came as founders of religions, they were able to speak more about one aspect or more about another. To those people who were more inclined to perceive their well-being—which concerns the inner human being—as a certain earthly happiness, that is, to those people who, so to speak, made their earthly disposition dependent primarily on the physical well-being of the middle human being, the occult aspirants, as founders of religions, could say: That which constitutes your well-being depends on the solar being. — Through the influence of the occult aspirants, these people then became followers of a sun religion. You can see for yourself: everywhere across the earth where people of the type just described were present—for whom it was primarily important that their attention be drawn to what determined their inner well-being—sun religions arose.

[ 32 ] It is nothing but the empty fantasy of a disastrous, fantastical-materialistic science to believe that humans would have simply come up with the idea of worshipping the sun on their own. The way in which conventional, external materialistic science speaks of this or that group of people having become sun-worshippers is precisely one of the fantasies of materialistic science. It is entirely unjust for today’s materialistically minded people to accuse the Theosophists of a certain tendency toward fantasy while attributing only realism to themselves. On the whole, we can say that materialism is by no means lacking in a tendency toward fantasy when, for example, it seeks to explain that certain people once became sun-worshippers. In doing so, it conjures up some fantasy and imagines the matter in such a way that people, through this or that circumstance—and one does not know from what impulse—came to worship the sun. The truth is that the initiated, the occult aspirants, have known among certain populations: We are dealing here with people who primarily cultivate the virtues of fortitude, courage, bravery—in short, everything connected with the middle human being; we must teach them that one can indeed perceive the supersensible, that this middle human being is a result of the sun’s influence. — And these occult initiates then diverted people in whom the middle human being predominated from mere well-being, from merely living within themselves, and directed them toward devotion that looks upward, religiously, to the original being of this middle human being. They directed these people toward sun worship.

[ 33 ] This example illustrates how materialism is prone to fantasy. But this can also be clearly seen in other examples. For example, we have read various descriptions of our Munich building that found their way into the newspaper through an indiscretion, and the materialistic person of today has now formed mental images about what all this might be and what its purpose might be. There one could truly be convinced that imagination is indeed a characteristic of modern man: when it comes to talking about certain things about which one knows nothing, the materialistic person is not at a loss to conjure up all manner of fantasies as explanations. This is the case in everyday life, but it is also the case in science. The majority of explanations offered by materialistic science are empty fantasies; but it is particularly a matter of imagination when materialistic science attempts to say or explain something about sun worship.

[ 34 ] But when there were people on Earth who were less inclined to develop the middle human being—that is, who were more inclined toward thinking, creating mental images, and living as the higher human being—then something else came into play. What came into play was that the occultists, who went out into the world as founders of religions, drew people’s attention to the origin of that which is their instrument for nurturing thoughts, for living in thoughts and mental images. And they said to them: If you wish to have a mental image of this, since you cannot look into the supersensible heavenly worlds yourselves—this was not said in those exact words, of course, but I am adding it here—then you have the outer reflection of it when you stay awake at night and gaze upward in devotion at the star-studded sky.

[ 35 ] The actual worship of the stars—or, as one might say, the worship of the night, since the concept was often framed in such a way that the night was substituted for the starry sky—became prevalent among those peoples who were of a contemplative nature. For the thinking, for the pondering peoples of antiquity, such religions were established, through which they were shown where the origin lies of the instrument of their thinking, the higher human being. And many of the names borne by the most ancient gods of certain peoples must simply be translated into modern languages with the word: the night. The night, as it mysteriously appears as the mother of the stars, as it brings forth the stars from within itself—the night was worshipped because the occult initiates knew in fact that the instrument of the brain is truly and genuinely a product of the star-studded night.

[ 36 ] Thus, in the case of those peoples who became sun worshippers, attention was often drawn not only to the sun itself, but just as one has pointed to Mother Night through the stars—and many ancient words for ancient gods must be translated as “night”—so too, with regard to the sun, attention was primarily drawn to the fact that it brought about the day, that it made the day. And the consequence of this is that many words among those peoples who essentially worship the highest divine power in the sun must be translated as “day” in the context of sun worship.

[ 37 ] We can therefore say with some justification: Depending on whether people saw themselves as strong-willed, courageous, warlike peoples, we find them primarily as sun-worshippers or day-worshippers, because their initiates directed them toward the sun, the being of the day, for the purpose of devotion. The thinking, the pondering peoples, on the other hand, we find as worshippers of the night and the stars, because their initiates directed them there.

[ 38 ] But there are also other peoples. There are peoples who did not possess the characteristic that their daytime consciousness and nighttime consciousness—or, one might also say, consciousness and unconsciousness—were so completely separate. If we go back to ancient times, we find many peoples—as you know from the other theosophical lectures—who had preserved intermediate or transitional states of consciousness, that is, an ancient form of clairvoyance; peoples who not only alternated between day and night in consciousness and unconsciousness, but who possessed the consciousness of “day” and the unconsciousness of “night” together in a kind of semi-consciousness as an ancient clairvoyant consciousness.

[ 39 ] These peoples possessed a third state of consciousness. As a result, they also had a sense that there is indeed a connection between human beings and something beyond the earthly realm. What was the reason for this predisposition in these peoples? These peoples also possessed a very specific characteristic in their form, in their outer human appearance, in their physical nature. These people, who were endowed with the ancient gift of clairvoyance—in ancient times and in the very ancient past, this was true of almost all people across the entire Earth—had the peculiarity that, in certain states of consciousness, they could perceive their symmetrical counterpart, but not as a symmetrical human being in themselves, but rather in such a way that this middle human being appeared in its activity upon the upper, upon the cerebral human being.

[ 40 ] If you want to get an idea of what actually takes place during such a clairvoyant experience, imagine it as a mental image of the human being in the brain. In ordinary, normal earthly life, external sensory impressions act upon the brain, and the brain reflects these images back—that is, it sets its own essence against the external images. Thus, the mental image of the external world arises as a reflected image of the brain. For these are, in fact, the mental images of the external world: they are images reflected back by the brain. When you see the external world, the external impressions travel through the eye to a specific part of the brain and are received there. The fact that they are received there—or at least not allowed to pass through in their entirety, but are reflected back—is what causes a mental image to arise. Now, if a person becomes clairvoyant at all, impressions are made on the brain not only by external objects, but also by the middle human being, which can then be reflected back by the brain.

[ 41 ] What I have just stated—that the average person makes impressions on the brain and that these impressions are reflected back by the brain—is in no way what I have described as existing in the case of the true occult aspirant. The true occult aspirant perceives his middle man directly, not through the brain. He sees the solar aspect within himself directly; he also sees the stellar aspect within himself, directly in his brain. But what we are now discussing—this clairvoyant state in which the inner processes, the solar aspect within the middle man, are reflected back by the brain, just as the external impressions that come through the senses are reflected back by the brain—this was the very foundation upon which the ancient clairvoyance of the people of antiquity was based. They perceived indirectly through their middle man. They did not initially perceive anything external. They perceived only that which was present within themselves in a solar manner and which was reflected back to them through the fact that what was received by the brain was perceived as a mental image of the solar within themselves.

[ 42 ] There were once peoples who were so predisposed that, in certain natural clairvoyant states, they would, as it were, capture with their brains and transform into a mental image the sun-like light within themselves. And how did that appear? It was projected outward and was not perceived like ordinary mental images caused by the external world, but rather as if it were inner sunlight, yet coming from outside. And when investigations were made into the origin of such a phenomenon, when occult aspirants sought to understand why they found themselves in such states, then what became clear to them was that which is within the average human being—that which constitutes their inner sun-like essence.

[ 43 ] Human beings possess this solar quality because they are solar beings. What appears in the instrument of the brain is connected to the fact that human beings are star beings, that they are in fact formed out of the entire universe. But what they now perceive depends on the fact that the Earth, with a powerful effect on the human being, is orbited by the Moon.

[ 44 ] In those ancient times, human beings were organized in such a way that the moon essentially influenced their brains; the moon exerted a powerful effect on their brains. That is why this ancient clairvoyance often depended on the phases of the moon and usually occurred in contexts that found their outward expression in the phases of the moon. Ancient clairvoyance was such that it increased over a period of fourteen days and then decreased over another fourteen days. In the middle of such a monthly period, the effect was particularly strong. This ancient clairvoyance thus unfolded in such a way that these people indeed experienced times when they knew: We are solar beings. — They knew this because they could perceive the sun through the inner mental image of the brain. But this occurred through the influence of the moon. Indeed, ancient clairvoyance often manifested in such a way that human beings, as it were, submitted to the twenty-eight-day ebb and flow of the lunar influence, and that in ancient times there were days when the lunar influence was particularly strong, when therefore clairvoyance was present in all people, when, so to speak, an inner clairvoyant consciousness asserted itself in all people. When the occult initiates went out to such people and had to put them in a religious frame of mind, they made them into moon worshippers for the same reasons that other people had been made into sun or day worshippers, or star or night worshippers. Hence the worship of the moon among many ancient peoples.

[ 45 ] Moses came to know this lunar cult in its true origin among the Egyptian initiates; and he himself was one of the greatest and most significant among them, who, in a particularly spiritualized form, made the lunar cult the religion of a people, namely the ancient Hebrew people. The worship of Yahweh by the ancient Hebrew people is thus a spiritualized lunar cult. Through it, the awareness could be sustained among the ancient Hebrew people well into later times that human beings are connected to the extraterrestrial, that their being is not confined to the earthly realm.

[ 46 ] But just as the ancient moon-worshippers, and likewise the sun- and star-worshippers among the outer peoples, understood little of the fact that stars, the sun, and the moon appear spiritual to the clairvoyant—that they do not appear as objects seen through the external senses—so too would the ancient peoples have understood little if they had been told: “Yes, worship that which is the origin of your middle man, but do not form a mental image of it in the image of the sun as perceived by the external senses, but as something supersensory that underlies the sun”—it would have been understood just as little if it had been said to the star-worshippers that the organ of their contemplation and thought has its origin in the vast expanse of the universe, but that they should not imagine this origin in the image of the starry sky perceptible to the outer eye, but in the invisible that lies behind it, in the many spiritual beings that are in the stars. Just as one could not tell the sun- and star-worshippers what was known to the initiates, so too could one not tell the moon-worshipping peoples: Imagine an invisible being that has, as it were, its outer body in the moon. But one could say something else, and Moses did indeed say it to the ancient Hebrew people. It could not yet be said to the earlier moon-worshippers, but only to the ancient Hebrew people. Therefore, Moses did not point his people to the visible moon, but to that being in whom lay the origin of the ancient clairvoyance of all peoples; that clairvoyance which was given to human beings, as it were, as a down payment when they were placed in the condition of having to alternate with their consciousness between day-consciousness and night-consciousness, and which brought a knowledge of the world similar to what the sunbeams reflected by the moon express. For this, which could therefore offer only the external, which an earthly consciousness, a day and night consciousness, could offer at most in the outwardly visible world of the stars, it was given to the people of ancient times, through the ability to alternate between this day and night consciousness, something like a down payment, an ancient clairvoyance connected to the spiritual essence of the Moon and which, externally and locally, stands in a relationship to the Moon once again.

[ 47 ] And as this clairvoyant consciousness was also to gradually fade away and disappear in the course of human development, a more spiritual substitute was created for the ancient Hebrew people in the invisible lunar being, in Yahweh or Jehovah, whom Moses taught to the ancient Hebrew people; and in contrast to this, he expressly pointed out that he must not be confused with anything seen externally or with an image made of him, as seen from the outside. Therefore, he expressly forbade regarding any image in the external world as an image of Yahweh or Jehovah. He forbade making an image of God that could still have given the eye something not made from our external world, and he also forbade making an image of the invisible, supersensible God that is taken from the external world.

[ 48 ] Thus we see a curious connection between the religion of Yahweh and a lunar religion, which was bestowed upon humanity in its earliest days through ancient clairvoyance. For those who are particularly interested in such matters, it should be noted that it was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky herself who, drawing on the most reliable sources, pointed out that the religion of Yahweh was, in a certain sense, a kind of renewal of the ancient lunar religion. However, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had not yet progressed in her research as far as we can today, so that this connection, as it has been presented here, would have been completely clear to her. The correct insight that the religion of Yahweh is a lunar religion gave rise in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s soul to a slight feeling as if there were something inferior in this ancient religion of Yahweh. But that is not the case. If one knows that the Yahweh religion of the ancient Hebrew people has its roots in ancient clairvoyance and, as it were, preserves only the memory of this ancient clairvoyance, then one will be able to fully comprehend the sacred seriousness of this Yahweh religion.

[ 49 ] Thus you can see the connection between the significant experiences of occult aspirants who, in a higher state of consciousness, experienced humanity’s connection to the entire world and humanity’s belonging to the entire world by recognizing that the middle human is a solar human and the higher human is a stellar human. In this way, you can also see the connection between what occultism recognizes in the external religions, which in many respects were, as ancient religions given to humanity, also ancient theosophies. For at the moment when the ancient people became devout, something of the ancient clairvoyance stirred within them to a greater or lesser extent, and thus they did not merely have to believe, but could grasp and understand what the ancient initiates told them, even if they could not see it. Thus, the ancient religions are in many ways ‘theosophies.’ They are theosophical teachings that the occultists gave to humanity, depending on how people in the respective part of the world were predisposed.

[ 50 ] As you have seen, in our discussion we have had to temporarily omit the lower man, as the third of the sevenfold man. We will return to this and will then see how remarkably the great Mystery was presented, and how the occult aspirant also develops further through initiation, through which alone the true nature of the human being can be understood.