The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to supplement the reflections we have made here over the past few days with a few additional thoughts that may serve to give concrete meaning to certain concepts upon which present-day action is based—thoughts, I would say, that may help us find concepts that are less abstract than almost all the concepts by which humanity allows itself to be governed today. We have a great need for such concepts, for only such concepts enter into the world of human feeling and thereby into real life; only such concepts can also inspire human will and action.

[ 2 ] Looking at the world today, we should actually be able to see, as the most distinctive feature of social life across the civilized world, that larger human communities have replaced the smaller ones of the past. We need not go far back in human history to find that social communities were spread over only a small territory. We find that urban communities formed a relative unity, and, strictly speaking, it is only in the most recent times that the great imperialist communities have emerged, out of which has arisen what has already been described to you on numerous occasions: the empire of the English-speaking population. No one, especially in Central Europe today, should harbor any illusions about the consequences of these events. But clear, reality-based concepts of these matters can only be obtained if one is willing to adopt perspectives from the humanities. These perspectives from the humanities take us back to earlier stages of human development and show us how certain relationships also manifested themselves among people—relationships which, as I have mentioned on several occasions, should not be called “states,” because doing so causes immense confusion, but rather should be described with some other, more neutral term: let us say, “empires” arose. And such empires were ruled by individual people, by individual human communities. From them emerged something that, as things progressed, led to the formation of states, which are regarded today as so self-evident that people do not want to challenge them—at least in certain areas they do not want to challenge them—and, what is even worse, because they are regarded as self-evident, people do not even want to think about them.

[ 3 ] Underlying all of this, however, is something that connects human beings—connecting them inwardly, in their inner life, with the spiritual-divine, as he has called it at various stages of Earth’s evolution.

[ 4 ] If one goes back to semi-prehistoric times—times that only just extend into historical life—one finds that in these prehistoric times the concept of a ruler of a kingdom—let us say, for all our words are, after all, inadequate for these older concepts—was shaped quite differently from how we tend to understand it today. The concept of a ruler of an earthly kingdom, whether large or small, was brought very close to what human beings recognized as their concept of God. This leads us to things that must seem extraordinarily paradoxical to people today. But this is only because modern people are so unwilling to truly engage with what once existed in human development and which does not correspond to the concepts of the West—or its offshoot, America—that have become familiar over the past three to four centuries.

[ 5 ] However, in those earlier times, which are semi-prehistoric, the ruler of the empire was also installed in office in a different manner—at least in many empires—than was the case in later times. We need only go back to ancient Egypt—but to its earlier, semi-prehistoric times—or to ancient Chaldea, and we find everywhere that it was regarded as a matter of course that the predecessors of today’s priesthood prepared the rulers for their office. People had very concrete ideas about this process of preparing a ruler through the priesthood and its institutions. They believed that through this preparation, the one called to rule would truly become something special—a notion that has survived as a final hint in the Chinese designation “Son of Heaven.” There was an awareness that one had to mold the person called—or appointed—to rule any given region into a kind of “Son of Heaven.” But regarding these matters, people did not hold the same conception that we today almost exclusively bring to mind when speaking of human education or the preparation of a person for any particular purpose. Even though great effort is made to emphasize that people should not be educated merely for one office or another in the world—by grafting intellectual concepts onto their being or soul—but rather that the whole person should be developed, almost all of our current concepts of development, education, and the like remain highly abstract. The prevailing notion is that, in education and in preparation for a role, only something within the human being itself should be changed or transformed in the sense of progress. There is no notion that, through such development, a person should become something entirely different from what they were before. Above all, there is no notion that something objective—which was not previously present in the person—should be instilled into them. One does not have the idea that I might characterize in the following way: I am speaking with a person who has, after all, emerged from today’s natural and social life. He says this or that to me; I say this or that to him. He speaks to me as the bearer of a name that originates from the ordinary state-civil contexts from which people today simply grow up. I speak to him in the same way. — This is, after all, almost the only way we relate to one another as human beings today and how we view every person among us.

[ 6 ] This was, in essence, something completely foreign to the times I have been describing here. Above all, it was foreign to the people who were called to hold important offices and to provide leadership within humanity itself. External natural connections—lineage, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and the like—were of no further consideration if the individuals in question had been properly prepared for their office. Nor, however, was what we today seek and find in a contemporary human being—even one elevated to the highest spheres—the determining factor; rather, people were aware that: When one speaks with a person who has been properly educated in this regard, it is not the ordinary “I”—born here or there, stamped by this or that social context—that speaks through this person, but rather something that, through preparation and education within the culture of the Mysteries, has been prompted to descend from spiritual heights and take up residence within the person in question. Of course, speaking of such things expresses something that is immensely paradoxical to people today. But today it is necessary to approach such matters no longer with confused notions, but with concepts grounded in truth.

[ 7 ] The idea was that education—not just any education, but the education of those called to important offices—should be such that, from then on, beings of the higher hierarchies would speak through these people, using them merely as instruments. This instrument must be prepared through education; only then can it be made suitable for beings of the higher hierarchies to speak through it. And what was thus practiced entered the general consciousness and made itself felt there in particular when the general public consciousness judged who was the ruler, the one in power. Only remnants such as the designation of the ruler of China as the “Son of Heaven” have survived from these times; yet a human consciousness existed then, as can be discovered through spiritual scientific research in the most ancient Egyptian and Chaldean periods. In the general popular consciousness of those times, the ruler was the god. And, in essence, there was no other concept of the divine. The ruler was prepared in such a way that his outward human form was of no consequence; it merely provided the opportunity for a god to move among human beings. It was entirely natural for the earliest inhabitants of what would later become the Egyptian Empire to acknowledge in their consciousness that they were ruled by gods who walked the earth in human form. In this sense, the earliest social consciousness of humankind was, on the one hand, thoroughly realistic. People did not believe in any particular afterlife or a separate spiritual world. The spiritual world was right there where the world in which earthly human beings lived also existed; but in this world, in which earthly human beings lived, not only ordinary human beings but also the gods walked in fleshly form. The divine world was right in the midst of it all, yet absolutely visible under the conditions that people were accustomed to creating through the culture of the mysteries. If this Ruler decreed something, if he willed something, then it was a god who willed it. And in the consciousness of the earliest humanity of this semi-prehistoric epoch, it would have been nonsense to discuss whether or not what the Ruler willed should happen; for it was, after all, a “god” who willed it.

[ 8 ] Thus, the earliest human consciousness linked the spiritual hierarchical order with what took place on Earth. It was present right there among human beings. It was not something one had to ascend to through some spiritual or inner means. No, it was present in the Mysteries as a structured form of education for those bodies deemed suitable for preparation, so that the beings of the higher hierarchies might take up residence within them and walk among and rule over humanity.

[ 9 ] As paradoxical as this may seem to people today, they must finally break free from their narrow-minded concepts—which are only three to four centuries old, as they are understood today—and broaden these concepts. For one can no longer develop by looking toward the future unless one broadens what has today become narrow-mindedness in almost all areas of life—by expanding the temporal horizon over which humanity looks, and by surveying longer periods of development than people are accustomed to surveying historically today.

[ 10 ] What once existed in the most ancient times—in historical and prehistoric development—is, of course, replaced by other things as history progresses, but it persists in certain areas. It often persists in such a way that it becomes externalized, continuing in an external form while losing its inner meaning. That which is characteristic of the earliest imperialism—the belief that the ruler is God—still persists here and there in the present, only it no longer makes sense, because humanity is evolving rather than remaining static.

[ 11 ] Not long ago, a pastoral letter from a Catholic bishop was published in a certain place. It asserted nothing more and nothing less than that the Catholic priest is more powerful than Christ Jesus in his liturgical acts. For when the priest celebrates the sacred rite on the altar, he compels Christ Jesus, the God of Christianity, to enter the earthly world when the priest performs transubstantiation. Whether God wills it or not, through transubstantiation He must take the path prescribed for Him by the priest. A recent pastoral letter has also explicitly pointed to this supremacy of the earthly “priest-god” over the “subordinate god” who descends from cosmic heights and walks the earth in the flesh of Jesus. Such things stem from older times and have become meaningless in our own era. Certain representatives of certain denominations know full well why they, in turn, are reintroducing such ideas into human society. They have become just as meaningless as when rulers of more recent times inscribed in family registers: “The king’s will is the supreme law.” — We have experienced these things as well. Slumbering humanity has remained silent in the face of all these things, just as it remains silent now in the face of events that are leading to humanity’s ruin—events to which people have grown accustomed, which they do not want to see—just as today people hardly want to see anything at all of the more important processes within human development.

[ 12 ] This is an early stage in the development of earthly empires: the ruler is God. This view persists with considerable vitality even into Roman times. No matter how one might portray Nero—whether as a fool or a bloodthirsty tyrant—for large segments of the Roman people, Nero’s terrible tyranny meant nothing other than their amazement that a god could walk the earth in such a form. For many inhabitants of the Roman Empire, there was no doubt that Nero was a god.

[ 13 ] A second stage in the development of empires is the transition from the ruler’s divine nature to the ruler’s divine inspiration. The ruler was the god in the early days of human development on civilized Earth. The ruler represents God; he is not imbued with the essence of God, but he is inspired and endowed by God. What he does prospers because the divine power—which is no longer within him but resides in a realm adjacent to the earthly realm—flows into him, inspires him, permeates him, and directs his actions.

[ 14 ] If we are to find a term for that which is, so to speak, the ruler of the second stage of earthly empires, we must say: the ruler is a symbolum. On the first level, the ruler was a divine being who walked the earth. On the second level, he is that which the being signifies; he is the sign, the image through which the being expresses itself. The ruler is the image of God.

[ 15 ] What manifests itself in external social conditions is then also reflected in the structures and institutions. While in the earliest times, empires were structured such that a number of people were led by a divine being who outwardly resembled them but was inwardly very different from them—that is, their god—we see in the second stage of empires how the leader or leaders represent the god or gods whose symbols they are.

[ 16 ] Just as, at the first stage of human empires, discussions about whether what the ruler—the god—does is justified or unjustified are nonsense, so at the second stage the possibility arises of reflecting on whether anything he does is right or wrong. At the first stage of empires, whatever the ruler does, thinks, or says is always right, for he is God. Only at the second stage is there a supposition that, alongside the earthly realm—which contains God within itself and contains those endowed by God—there exists something spiritual that stands apart from this earthly realm and from which flows into the earthly realm the power that directs and guides it. And the institutions and human beings of this earthly realm reflect that which flows in from the realm of the higher hierarchies.

[ 17 ] It is interesting to observe how, for example, in the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, and in Dionysius the Areopagite—who is far more genuine than modern science could ever imagine—the correct theory emerges regarding this manner in which human empires are governed by divine empires, such that what reigns and is established among human beings is a metaphor, a symbol, of what exists in the divine realm. We see how Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the existence of heavenly hierarchies, as it were, behind that which walks here on earth as the human hierarchy. Dionysius the Areopagite expressly points this out: What is arranged here in the priestly hierarchy—from deacons and archdeacons all the way up to bishops—must take such a form in the social structure that it expresses the following: Just as the deacon relates to the archdeacon, so does the angel relate to the archangel in the order of the angels, and so on. The earthly hierarchy is a faithful reflection of the heavenly hierarchy. Here we see a reference to the second stage of the Empire. It was there that what subsequently dominated human consciousness—even into times not so long ago—was able to develop. Just consider for a moment that until the year 1806, there existed in Central Europe something that expressed this “fusion,” as I would call it, of the heavenly and the earthly in its very name: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The very fact that this name came into being—“the Holy Roman Empire,” that is, the one that carries within itself the power of heaven, and “of the German Nation,” that is, the one that emerged from the earthly realm—shows how an entire empire was formed in such a way that it was intended to be the imprint of a heavenly order.

[ 18 ] It was from such ideas that something like St. Augustine’s “City of God” emerged, and from which Dante’s book “On Monarchy” also emerged. If only people today were not as short-sighted as they are, they would take a closer look at something like Dante’s description of the monarchy, and they would then see that Dante—whom one must, of course, regard as a great mind—even in the 13th and 14th centuries held concepts that are radically different from those held by people today. And if one were to take such things seriously in the context of historical development, one would abandon those narrow-minded concepts—which do not even date back to Dante but are only a few centuries old—with which people today fill their heads with illusions and, going back only as far as ancient Greece, attempt to understand the course of history. For example, when it comes to the earlier periods of Egyptian civilization, one can only grasp the entire structure if one knows: For the ancient people, the gods walked the earth; in the periods that followed, although the gods no longer walked the earth, what had to be formed on earth was a symbol, an image of the divine world order.

[ 19 ] And what could then emerge—the possibility, for example, of reflecting on something like the concept of right, of considering that human reason can arrive at a judgment regarding what is right and wrong—only became possible in the second phase of the empire’s development. In the earliest phase, it was nonsense to think about what might be right or wrong. One had to look to what the ruler said, for God lived within him—that is to say, he was God. Now, in the second phase, the point was that one could determine through human judgment: In the adjacent spiritual realm there is something that cannot be attained through one’s physical self, but rather through one’s soul-spiritual self. People no longer believed, as they had in earlier times, that the divine could unite with the entire physical human being, or that the human being himself could become a god; at most—to express in mystical terms what lived within the public institutions—they believed that the soul of the human being could unite with God.

[ 20 ] Basically, no one today understands the language of the writings that were composed and published in the 13th and 14th centuries unless they realize that people’s consciousness functioned in a completely different way back then than it does today: In certain people who are called to and trained for a ministry, there truly lives something of divine inspiration. — It is, after all, a peculiarity that things which often stem from something very serious later become objects of ridicule, once human development has progressed and taken on other forms. If, for example, someone says today, “To whom God gives an office, He also gives understanding,” they are essentially saying it with a somewhat humorous tone. But what is imbued with a humorous tone today was, in the times of the second stage of imperial development, certainly something true, something right—it was something that filled people’s consciousness. And what was true of human beings was also true of what was done within certain limits. Ritual acts were structured in such a way that what took place through them represented images of what occurred in the spiritual realms. Ritual acts that were performed were spiritual events that extended into physical, earthly events. People certainly believed that the spiritual realm existed alongside the earthly one, but they also believed that it extended into the earthly realm, and that within the earthly realm one could find the symbol, the sign, of the spiritual realm.

[ 21 ] Only gradually did people cease to regard this as something valid in their consciousness. And we see an age dawning in which this awareness of the connection between the earthly and the spiritual is fading away. In the times of Wycliffe and Hus, people began to argue about something that would previously have been unthinkable: the meaning of transubstantiation—that is, the connection between this ritual act and something that takes place in spiritual worlds. In eras when people begin to argue about such things, the old contents of consciousness cease to exist; people no longer know how to interpret the things they had known how to interpret for centuries or millennia. Certain things that were considered normal in a particular age always continue to exert an influence into later ages. There they become out of place; there they become anachronistic, Luciferic. And so the great, far-reaching symbols have remained—symbols that point to a certain era, to the connection between earthly ritual practices or similar things and the divine-spiritual events of the world. These symbols have been transplanted into later times and preserved in a Luciferic manner by certain secret societies. Western secret societies, in particular, have preserved such ancient symbols. These symbols are there by tradition, but they have lost their meaning. And so, on the one hand, we see that certain secret societies—whose offshoots include, for example, the Masonic lodges, the Jesuit orders, and the confessional communities—have, in a certain sense, preserved the symbols; but these are things that had meaning only for a bygone age. But we also see that, in essence, only what had meaning for earlier ages is preserved in a Luciferic way through words. Even in the words used in public life, the old substantive content is lost, as is the awareness that these words are signs pointing to the spiritual. For the spiritual is gradually disappearing; the word becomes an empty symbol, an empty sign.

[ 22 ] In the third age, at the third stage of empire-building, the awareness of a person’s divine endowment—of the interpenetration of earthly events and earthly speech with the divine—also came to an end. The spiritual realm is completely relegated to the afterlife. The opposite of what existed on the first stage of empire-building now emerges: On the first stage, God lived on Earth and walked among people in human form; on the third stage, God can only be conceived of in the invisible, supersensible world. And everything that people once had to express their relationship to the divine-spiritual loses its meaning. People continue to use the word “God.” When the word “God” was spoken in times past, people sought something that outwardly took human form, something that walked among physical human beings. Not that the earliest humans were materialists. Materialists could only emerge after the spiritual world had been relegated to the supersensible realm. In the earliest period of human development, the spiritual world was right in the midst of humanity. For an inhabitant of ancient Egypt, it would not have been necessary to say, “The realm of the divine is in our midst”—for that was a matter of course to them. In the age when Christ Jesus appeared among humanity, it was first necessary to tell people: “The realm of the gods does not come with outward signs; it is in our midst.”

[ 23 ] And now we live in an age in which it has become absurd to look for anything in a human being other than the linear development—based on cause and effect—of his childhood nature. We live in an age in which it is madness for a person to consider themselves anything other than the straightforward development of that which also encompasses their childhood. What was taken for granted, say, eight thousand years ago—what existed back then as a general consciousness—is today claimed to be a symptom that the person making such a claim is insane. And only by reinterpreting what was real in earlier times—according to the patterns of contemporary thought—into this conventional fable we call “history,” only in this way do we cast a veil over this radical metamorphosis that can be discerned when one truly observes human development in accordance with the truth. Much of what we say today, much of what we display in our outward lives, has come about because it once referred to something that was regarded as reality. We still use words today such as “by the grace of God”—in recent years, people have tried to wean themselves off this to a greater or lesser extent, but they have not succeeded very well—yet we do not know, or we do not take into account, that this once represented a full reality, a matter of course, for the consciousness of humanity.

[ 24 ] By this I am pointing out to you the facts that give our public life its character of being full of empty phrases and conventions. For what we assert in public life through our language, our customs, and even our judgments—all of this points back to times when these words, even if they first arose in a later language—they were modeled after the original language—were formed and used in a completely different sense. Today, the words we use in public life have been drained of their meaning. With some words and symbols, this is evident; with others, it has long gone unnoticed. That what was once—through magical acts—transformed into an important magical part of the God walking upon the earth, a symbol hung upon the human body, has become the futility of the modern order—this is a history that humanity pays little heed to. Not only can that which is expressed in words become a cliché—just as our most important words relating to public life are clichés—but also that which is attached to people in the form of objects can take on a similar character with regard to its relationship to reality, just like the word that is empty today but once had a sacred, substantial meaning.

[ 25 ] But until we recognize that our development has, for the time being, been such that an older form of consciousness has lost its substance and become mere rhetoric and convention, a genuine reconstruction of our public social life—which has now been destroyed—cannot take place. We must look for new sources that will once again bring substance to our public life. In our consciousness, the gods do not walk about in human form. Therefore, we must acquire the ability to recognize that which does not have a human form, but rather that which has a form that can only be beheld when one rises to spiritual vision. Since, to our consciousness, the gods no longer descend to the physical thrones, we must acquire the spiritual abilities to ascend, gazing toward those thrones where the gods—who can live for us only in the spiritual realm—are present. We must become capable of imbuing our clichéd abstractions with a lived spiritual content. We must become capable of looking these truths—which are shattering to those who grasp them correctly—straight in the face. We must become capable of seeing things as they are. Sometimes we fail to do this even over a period of decades. We believe we live within European civilization because we are Central Europeans. We should ask ourselves: What has actually made our inner spiritual life so ambivalent over the last fifty years—or even a little longer?

[ 26 ] Well, I would just like to point out one thing: If you look to the West, the first thing you see—let’s not talk about the rest—is a people in decline, the French people. But one thing is significant within this French people. When a member of the French people said, “I am a Frenchman”—a statement he had been making for centuries—he was expressing something that corresponded to external reality and was a legitimate, truthful affirmation of his relationship to the external world. Those among us who have still spoken with people who spent their youth in the first half of the 19th century as Germans could confirm the following to me: Herman Grimm, for example, repeatedly described what it actually meant for the people who were also still young within Germany during his youth—that at that time, anyone who would have wanted to profess in public life: “I am a German; I profess this—not as a mere phrase, but as a reality”—was a state criminal. One could be Bavarian, Württemberger, or Prussian, but one was a criminal if one said, “I am a German.” —In the West, saying “I am French” had substance—for one was permitted to be so in public life. It had real significance—one that could land you in prison or otherwise make life impossible—if you had dared to say that you were a German, and thus belonged to a united nation. People today have forgotten this; but these things are, after all, realities. And it is essential that we look these things squarely in the face. But one will not muster the necessary enthusiasm for such things unless one nourishes one’s inner life with the great, correctly understood phenomena of world history—not that “fable convenue” found in our current textbooks and taught in our schools, but that real world history which can be gained through spiritual contemplation.

[ 27 ] For a typical Protestant today, it is completely unthinkable that it could ever have made sense for people to say, “God walked upon the earth and God was the ruler,” and “there is no sensory realm where gods still exist, for the processes through which one becomes a god are in the realm where the supersensible dwells, within the mystery” . Even in the earliest periods of semi-prehistoric Egyptian history, the mystery was truly a supernatural reality, and it was only when the mysteries were transformed into churches that the church became a symbol of the supernatural.

[ 28 ] A humanity like today’s, which refuses to look back at the starting points of its historical development, lives its life just like a person who has reached the age of forty-five and has forgotten what he or she experienced in childhood, or like a person who has reached the age of forty-five and can remember back only as far as the age of twenty-five. Just imagine what the consequences would be for a person’s inner spiritual life if, at the age of forty-five, they knew nothing of everything that had preceded the age of twenty-five. Yet this is the state of mind of humanity today, and it is from this state of mind that those who wish to be leaders of humanity emerge today. It is from this state of mind that attempts are being made today to establish what is to be incorporated into a social structure as a guiding force. What is necessary above all else is for each person to come to know humanity as a living organism possessing a memory that must not be trampled underfoot—a memory that looks back on events still influencing the present, yet which, through the very nature of their influence, virtually demand that something new flow into them.

[ 29 ] If one were to strike just a few such notes, one would see that what is needed in the present is something in comparison to which all the empty rhetoric flaring up from many quarters today is nothing but triviality. And one does wish that a sufficiently large number of people would recognize the gravity of the present time and find the strength to truly emerge from this gravity into something new. That is, after all, the truly sad thing: that the people of today face great tasks and would prefer to sleep through them. Essentially, this has been the task for decades that the anthroposophical movement was meant to undertake: to rouse slumbering humanity, to point out that humanity today must be given something that truly transforms the state of the soul—as opposed to the one that currently exists—just as the dreaming state of the soul transforms into that of fully awake daily life upon waking in the morning.

[ 30 ] This is what I wanted to conclude today with regarding the two historical reflections on the spiritual sciences that I have presented to you during my current visit. If only what the anthroposophical movement is could be the source of what truly ignites, warms, and energizes our social initiatives! The fact that humanity needs social impulses at the present time is so evident from an observation of current phenomena that it really ought not to be overlooked again. That these social impulses can only be met if a new spirit is infused into human development—this is something that should be recognized precisely by those who, from whatever perspective, identify with the anthroposophical movement. But for this to happen, truthfulness and vigilance—true vigilance—are necessary on the foundation of this anthroposophical movement. Modern civilized humanity has grown accustomed to slumbering in public life. And today this slumber is so profound that one might sometimes—if one were not immersed in spiritual life and able to see the course of spiritual affairs behind the physical—be thrown into considerable doubt by the outward course of action to which people devote themselves in the pursuit of their affairs. This outward course to which people devote themselves in the pursuit of their affairs literally reveals that people shy away from participating in any way in the grasping of the truth within phenomena. People are so glad when they do not have to look at the events that are taking place! One sees today how people allow themselves to be told: “This and that is happening here and there!”—They stand there on their own two feet, without letting on in any way that they have heard of things that have profound significance for the further course of events. People today hear about the most significant events that are bound to lead to destruction and decline, and they cannot even feel indignant about them. Now, once again, things are happening throughout the world, and plans are being hatched in parts of Germany that should horrify people—and yet they are not! But anyone who cannot be horrified by these things also lacks the strength to develop a sense of truth.

[ 31 ] This is what must be emphasized today: that a healthy indignation at what is unhealthy must be the source of enthusiasm for the new, necessary truths. Today, it is even less necessary to impart truths to people than it is to infuse these lethargic nervous systems with fiery energy. For what people need today is fiery energy, not mystical slumber. Not a longing for mystical tranquility, but service to the spiritual—that is what matters today. Today, the connection with the Divine must be sought in activity, not in mystical idleness and complacency.

[ 32 ] These are the things that must be pointed out. For today we must seek ways to bring into our consciousness the possibility of reconnecting the Divine with the external reality. And we can do this only if we look without prejudice at how, in the empires of the first kind, people found gods walking on earth. We must find the way for human souls to walk spiritually in spiritual worlds, so that we may find gods once again!