The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Humanity in the Past, Present, and Future from the Perspective of the Development of Consciousness II

[ 1 ] Yesterday, I wanted to use the development of the Druidic culture—which is particularly relevant to our anthroposophical movement at this very moment—to illustrate, in a sense, the spiritual disposition of an earlier time in a certain region. If we go back three, four, or five millennia in the development of humanity—it varies for different regions of the Earth—we can always find ourselves immersed in such entirely different states of mind among people, which, as states of mind, naturally in turn determine that the entire spiritual and social guidance and direction of human life is oriented toward the conditions of such a state of mind characteristic of a particular epoch.

[ 2 ] The development implied here is linked to the gradual unfolding of human consciousness. In earlier times, human beings were quite different creatures than they are today, and in the future they will be different creatures once again. Conventional history records little of these things. Therefore, if one looks a few centuries beyond the present historical moment, what is presented as ordinary history is, for the most part, illusory from the perspective of a true human understanding. And as I indicated yesterday, we must observe, in essence, three stages of human consciousness—naturally, with the inevitable many nuances. What we today call our states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, sleeping—is, after all, the present; albeit a present that spans centuries, even millennia, but nonetheless the present in the historical sense. And when we go back to earlier periods of human development, we do not find the modern waking state described yesterday, with its thoughts unfolding in logical connections. The further back we go in human development, the less we find this kind of logical consciousness—which actually emerged in all its rigor only in the 14th and 15th centuries A.D., having taken its first steps in the later periods of Greek civilization; in earlier times, however, we find instead a much more vivid consciousness, filled with images rather than concepts, and indeed we find such a consciousness among all of humanity.

[ 3 ] What we call natural forces today was something that ancient humanity did not know in that form at all. The era I described to you yesterday did not speak of meteorological laws governing wind and weather; as I indicated, it spoke of pictorial, essential realities—of elemental spirits ruling at the boundaries of plants, of giants, of spiritual beings ruling over wind and weather, frost and hail, storms and thunder, and so on. Back then, everything in the perception of nature was alive. No logical conclusions were drawn. People looked upon the life, the weaving, the surging, and the undulating of spiritual beings within things and also within the elemental phenomena of nature. The basis of the inner states of mind of this earlier humanity was, in fact, quite different from what it is today. This state of mind was such that human beings were actually much more inwardly focused than they are today. But this inward focus was, in turn, different from what we know now. This inward focus was at the same time a consciousness weaving within living dream images, yet one that led out into the vastness of the worlds. People saw images, but they did not see these images in the same way that we have a thought today and things exist out there. No, what they perceived as giant beings—frost giants, storm giants, fire giants—and what they perceived as root spirits, leaf spirits, and flower spirits—in these they felt connected to the plant, to roots, leaves, and flowers, to lightning, and to thunder. People did not separate themselves from external nature because they experienced the spiritual, the pictorial-spiritual, within themselves, in their inner life.

[ 4 ] Not exactly in the very earliest times, which I have described in my Outline of Esoteric Science, but certainly in the times that followed, one can spiritually observe how this state of the soul evoked a very specific mood among the civilized peoples who were dominant at that time. There was indeed an epoch in which people still perceived much, inwardly and spiritually, of what human beinghood actually is. In these images I have just described, they did not merely see the present of their existence; they saw their pre-earthly life; they looked at it just as one now looks into a spatial perspective or a temporal perspective. It was not memory; it was vision. They looked beyond their birth into a spiritual world from which they had descended into earthly human life. It was natural for this earlier humanity to look toward this pre-earthly existence and to feel: As a human being, I am a spiritual being, for before I took on an earthly body, I rested in the bosom of the spiritual realm, spent my existence there, and experienced my human destiny not yet in a physical body, but in a—if I may put it this way, even though it is paradoxical—spiritual corporeality.

[ 5 ] The demand to believe in the spirit would have been completely absurd for that earlier humanity, just as it is absurd for people today to believe in mountains. For mountains can be seen. At that time, people could see their spiritual, prenatal life—albeit inwardly, through a vision of the soul—but they did see it inwardly. There came a time when people, while still spiritually perceiving this inner human aspect as the events of pre-earthly existence, found that nature itself—which was outside in their surroundings—became more and more of a mystery. I would say that, in the course of human development, pure sensory observation gradually came to the fore.

[ 6 ] In very ancient times, in the era of primordial spirit, as I have described it in my Outline of Esoteric Science, human beings still perceived everything—including nature—in a spiritual way. But one sign of progress was that the perception of the spiritual remained within, while nature gradually began—if I may put it that way—to become de-spiritualized. Humanity then looked outward. While inwardly feeling that it was spirit born of spirit, humanity looked out upon the blossoming meadows, upon the cloud from which lightning bursts forth, upon wind and weather, upon the delicate or wondrously shaped crystals, upon mountains and valleys—upon all of this, humanity gazed. And then a certain mood arose—one that can be traced through long epochs of history from a spiritual-scientific perspective—precisely over what was then civilized humanity; a mood that can be expressed, for example, in the following way: We human beings are spirit born of spirit. In our pre-earthly existence, we were connected to the spiritual realm as human beings. Now we have been placed within the natural environment. We look at the beautiful flowers, the gigantic mountains; we look at the mighty forces of nature in wind and weather. But this is devoid of spirit. — And more and more, the idea of mere nature in our surroundings began to take hold.

[ 7 ] Now, however, human beings—and by this I mean, of course, the advanced human being, the kind of person who, in our language, might be called a “civilized” person at that time—began to sense and to see that their bodies were being formed from the substances, from the materials of this nature, which had been stripped of spirit and divinity. If something like this were to occur to modern man, to the man of the present, he would speculate about it, philosophize about it, and reflect on it. At first, this was not the case for the man of an earlier time. They did not reflect on it, but they sensed an immense disharmony between what they experienced within themselves: “I am a spirit from the realm of the spirit; my true human being originates from divine heights, yet I am clothed in something taken from nature, which appears to be devoid of spirit; my spiritual existence is interwoven with something that does not reveal the spirit to me.” My body is made of the same substance as the flowering plants in the fields, the same substance as the water from the clouds and downpours. But this substance is devoid of the divine. — And human beings perceived this as an expulsion from the spiritual world, as being cast out into a world to which they do not truly belong by their very nature.

[ 8 ] One could reject this mood—or let it pass one by—as is often the case with so many cultural moods today. But the alert people of that time sensed it, and humanity develops through moods and feelings, not through ideas and thoughts. For even the development of our thoughts in our own time is merely an episodic development—as we shall see in these very lectures—and the person who merely speaks in thoughts is, in fact, speaking in unreality. The very way people speak today is a way of speaking in unreality. Those who consider themselves the greatest practitioners and are positively bursting with pride over their practice—these people are, at heart, the strongest theorists. Today, the theorists sit in offices—and, of course, in university chairs as well; there, I might say, it goes without saying—but they also sit in offices and move about in the business world. Everything is framed theoretically; everything is captured in thought. This is an episode. It has no truth to begin with. It will only possess its truth when these people come to perceive and feel this life in their thoughts, just as humanity once felt when nature appeared to them as devoid of spirit: We are cast out, a cast-out race; we have been removed from the divine-spiritual heights, where we truly belong, and placed in a world to which our innermost human being does not belong.

[ 9 ] One result of this mood is precisely what then emerged as an expression, as a revelation of this mood: the sense of humanity’s Fall. This concept of the Fall arose from a transformation of consciousness. People told themselves: We have been cast out of the spiritual world; this must stem from an original sin. — And so, during a certain epoch, the notion of an original sin, of a Fall of humanity, dawned upon human consciousness. This notion of an original sin, of a prehistoric guilt, a prehistoric Fall, can also be understood when one comprehends the transformation of human consciousness from the past through the present into the future. And what humanity needed in that epoch, as this mood came over them, was not a dry theory; it was, above all, something that could be clothed in words in such a way that the words could be a balm for souls in need of comfort. What we have often referred to as the guidance of humanity in the ancient places of worship and religion, in the mysteries, we see emerging in a certain era that roughly coincides with the proto-Persian, proto-Chaldean, and Near Eastern cultures. We see this coinciding with what arose in the mystery priests as the great comforters of humanity. They became comforters. Comfort radiated from the mysteries. For the development of consciousness at that time needed comfort. The words had to be imbued with something soulful that spoke to the hearts just like balm—like comforting balm. It was an era that, in terms of religious and artistic creations—though in some respects different from later times—was nonetheless marked by a magnificent creative power. Many of the details in our art and in our religious concepts still stem from that very time. In particular, ritual symbols, ritual images, and ritual acts often originate from those ancient times.

[ 10 ] What were those teachers of the mysteries, who were tasked with offering this comfort, actually speaking about? Indeed, if—so to speak—general waking consciousness consisted of such a vivid, pictorial consciousness as I have described, there were nevertheless three levels of consciousness even in those days. Just as today there is sleeping, dreaming, and waking, so too in those days—in contrast to waking dreaming, which was, as I indicated yesterday, the general waking consciousness of humanity—there was a form of sleep that was not like the sleep experienced by ordinary consciousness today, in which sleep actually completely numbs consciousness. True, during sleep consciousness was very dull even among that earlier humanity, but upon awakening something remained. I described it yesterday by saying that, in a sense, when a person awoke, they had an inner aftertaste of sleep. Most people felt permeated inwardly—not merely on the tongue or the palate—but they felt permeated inwardly by a certain sweetness of experience as the aftertaste of sleep. The sweetness of the experience of sleep flowed over into daily life. People recognized in this sweetness the very healthy state of life, whereas when other tastes mingled with it, they perceived this as a sign of illness. It sounds paradoxical to people today when they are told that an earlier humanity felt the sweet aftereffect of sleep in their limbs, in their arms all the way to their fingertips, and in the other parts of the body. But that is precisely how it was; spiritual scientific research shows this. The linguistic genius has preserved much of this, though he has coarsened it with materialism. The sleep potion was once something spiritual—namely, sleep itself. Only later did it become something materialistic, something one drank as a liquid. Sleep itself was a potion from nature, a potion through which the ordinary memories of the day faded away. It was, at the same time, a potion of forgetfulness.

[ 11 ] Well, it was a vague aftereffect that the ordinary person experienced, but the initiation gave the teacher of the mysteries—the guide of humanity—a more precise awareness of what a person actually experienced during sleep. And just as we today, in modern initiation, ascend from ordinary imagination to spiritual vision, so, in a sense, humanity in those days descended from the waking-dream state into the state of sleep, but acquired consciousness of it, so that the ordinary person had that lingering sensation, while the mystery priest consciously felt his way into, sensed his way into sleep itself, and, so to speak, came to know that which then, in the lingering sensation, yielded what I have described. He came to know the waters beyond physical existence—the waters into which the human soul plunges during sleep, the waters into which the soul dived, the waters into which it is plunged every night: the waters of the astral world-fabric and world-essence. But compared to waking dreams, this was merely the second state.

[ 12 ] The third state was one of which humanity today knows absolutely nothing—a state deeper than the dreamless sleep of today. I said yesterday that one might call it “earth-envelopment.” Within it, every human being was in the midst of deep sleep during the night, but only the mystery priest, through his initiation, could attain an awareness of what was there and could communicate the findings of this awareness as the science of that time. Then the human being did not merely say: “I am embraced by the Earth.”—Yes, he said that too, but he added something else. He said to himself: “I am embraced by the Earth”—but he already experienced this as if, in the ordinary course of the day, he had entered a state that is actually very close to “death,” but a death from which there is still an awakening. In this third state of consciousness, the human being felt as if he had actually sunk into the earth, as if he had already entered a grave—but a grave that was not actually an earthly grave. I will be able to illustrate to you in the following way how this grave was not merely imagined, but had to be imagined.

[ 13 ] You see, the sun’s rays don’t just fall on the earth and shine off the flowers or the stars; the farmer knows this better than the city dweller, because he also makes use of the sun’s heat penetrating the earth even in winter. What has flowed into the earth during the summer is still there, deep within the soil. So it is not only warmth that flows in; other forces of the sun also flow into the earth. But from the perspective I am now discussing, that was actually the less important aspect. What was more important was that the moon’s influences could also penetrate the earth; the moon’s influences, so to speak, submerged beneath the earth’s surface. I would like to say that a beautiful conception from ancient times—one that was not merely poetic, but rather beyond the poetic—was this: people imagined, not through a logical conception as we do today, but through imagery, how the silvery sunlight streamed down to Earth in the light of the full moon, but then penetrates into the Earth—how this lunar silver penetrates a certain distance into the Earth—and then, in a sense, after being absorbed by the Earth, radiates back from the Earth’s interior—not from the surface. People perceived this silver surging and silver undulation of the Moon as a radiating in and out, a surging in and out. But this was not merely a beautiful image; as mystery priests, they knew something very specific about this undulating, wavering moonlight.

[ 14 ] It was known that when a person stands on Earth, they have weight. Gravity, or weight, holds them to the ground; the Earth, so to speak, draws its beings toward itself through gravity. People knew that the forces of the Moon counteract gravity. They are generally weaker than the coarse, robust Earth’s gravity, but they are what counteracts the Earth’s gravitational forces. This was known. It was known that a human being is not merely a lump held fast by Earth’s gravity, but that he or she is in a kind of state of equilibrium, drawn toward the Earth and pulled away by the Moon, except that Earth’s gravity retains the upper hand for the human being on Earth. But for that which is active in the human head, this—I would say—negative gravity, this pulling-away force, makes itself felt. Even if one could not yet fly through it, one could still lift the spirit up into the starry realms. And through this initiation—that is, by way of the moon’s influence—the people of that time, through their mystery priests, came to understand the effects of the stellar environment on human beings on Earth.

[ 15 ] This was the astrological initiation that is so often misused today, and which was particularly pronounced among the Chaldean people. Through this indirect means, they knew certain things—not only about the effects of the moon, but also about the effects of the sun, Mars, Saturn, and so on. Human beings today—forgive me if I express this in a metaphor, but such things are difficult to characterize logically—human beings today have become earthworms in terms of their knowledge; no, not even earthworms—something worse: they have become earthworms for whom it never rains, who never emerge from the earth. Earthworms, after all, come out of the earth at certain times when it rains, and there they enjoy what is happening above the earth’s surface, and that is for the earthworms’ own good. But in spiritual and soul terms, modern man is an earthworm for whom it never rains. He is completely encapsulated in relation to the earthly realm. He thinks, for example: What I have in my physical body simply grows on the earth, much like stones form. — That, for example, the hair on one’s head is the result of the sun’s influence—modern human beings, of course, do not know this, and so on, because they are, after all, earthworms for whom it never rains; that is, beings who, though they carry the sun’s effects within themselves, do not come to the surface to explore such things. Yes, human beings—as those ancient mystery priests knew—did not simply grow out of the earth like a head of cabbage, but came into being through the interplay of the entire cosmic stellar environment. And so you can see how the human beings of the past stood before their initiated mystery guides, who had been initiated in the manner I have just described, so that they knew what the cosmic environment surrounding the Earth means for human beings.

[ 16 ] This, however, enabled these mystery priests to convey something to people—which I will try to express in somewhat simple terms, since we today are not yet able to speak in the same way as those ancient mystery priests, who at the time clothed their words in wonderful poetry. That was made possible by the genius of the language of that time; we cannot speak that way today because the language does not allow it. Today, what those mystery priests said to those who sought comfort from them regarding the de-spiritualized nature into which human beings felt cast out could be expressed as follows: Yes, as long as you remain in the states of ordinary waking consciousness in life, your surroundings will appear de-spiritualized to you. — But if one consciously immerses oneself in the region surrounding the Earth, where, in the silvery moonlight that ripples and surges through the Earth, one beholds the reign of the star gods—if one is able to do this, then one learns to recognize—though not spontaneously, as was the case in earlier times, but through human effort — that this outer nature, too, is permeated everywhere by spiritual beings, that it bears within itself the gifts of the gods as spiritual beings, as elemental spirits. And so the comfort that the mystery priests gave to people in those ancient times consisted in drawing their attention to the fact that: Plants are not only beautiful; they are also truly permeated by spiritual weaving and being; the clouds do not merely drift majestically through the air—divine-spiritual elemental beings reign within them, and so on. — Through their initiation, these initiates led precisely the humanity they were charged to guide to the spirit of nature.

[ 17 ] In a certain earlier epoch of human development, the very purpose of the mysteries was to tell people: The lack of spirit in nature is merely an illusion of ordinary waking dreams. In truth, spirit can be found everywhere in nature.

[ 18 ] There was once a time in human history when people actually lived within the spirituality of existence in this way and, through the structure of the mysteries, came to know the spirituality of existence even in those areas that initially seemed devoid of spirit to them. Everything that approached human beings in this way—whether through instinct, such as the vision of the inner spiritual being, or through the teaching of the Mysteries, such as the spiritualization of natural existence—all of this made human beings dependent, dependent on spirituality. Had human development remained in this state, what we must today recognize as one of humanity’s greatest assets—perhaps even its central asset—could never have entered consciousness: the sense of free will, the sense of freedom.

[ 19 ] This state of the soul, characterized by an instinctively felt spirituality, was bound to fade away. Humanity had to be led to three other states of consciousness. The sense of being at one with the Earth—from which the ancient initiates drew their stellar wisdom and thus the spirituality of nature—fell completely into decay. In the human state of mind, there remain only dreamless sleep, dreaming, and waking. It took its place, so to speak, on the other side of that region of consciousness in which freedom can just begin to dawn. What we today call our waking consciousness—with which we conduct our ordinary lives and pursue science—is something that an earlier humanity did not know at all. But it was within this that the possibility of pure thought arose—a possibility whose existence may cause us to despair, yet from which we can draw, and from which alone we can draw, the impulses of freedom. For if we, as humanity, had never arrived at this pure thought—which does not simultaneously guarantee existence but is pure thought nonetheless—then we, as human beings, would never have arrived at the consciousness of freedom either.

[ 20 ] One might say: Following humanity’s evolution, what was once humanity’s connection to the spiritual realm was shrouded in darkness. In exchange, humanity was given these three states of consciousness, which actually led it from spiritual heights into the depths of the earth. But it was precisely from these depths of the earth that humanity was to find the innate power to unfold freedom. And the dawn of this state of soul—of waking, dreaming, and sleeping—had, in essence, already been present for a millennium. Humanity had already ventured very far into a certain darkness—that darkness in which the impulse toward freedom does exist, but in which the light of spirituality does not shine. Just try to truly grasp what this was actually like in the course of human development. If one looks back to ancient times, people would gaze up at the starry sky, and from what they knew of that sky, they could say to themselves: What lives within me are the forces of this starry sky; I belong to this cosmos. — As a spirit, the human being had been forced down onto the earth. It grew dark, so to speak, in the heavens, for the light—even if it was sunlight or starlight shining down in a physical sense—was something human beings could not see through. It is like a curtain drawn across the view, behind which human beings can find no support for their existence. They can no longer see what lies beyond this curtain.

[ 21 ] Tomorrow we will see how this veil has in fact been there for a millennium, how it has become ever thicker and thicker, and how this thickness of the veil was in turn reflected in the entire mood of humanity. Then a light shone through this veil; the veil, so to speak, fell apart. And this light is the light that shone forth on Golgotha. Thus the event of Golgotha enters into the development of humanity. In this event—which was now an event on Earth—humanity was to rediscover what it had once seen in the vastness of the cosmos as the spirituality of the world. Through his passage through the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ was to bring into earthly life what had formerly been seen in the heavens. The divine-spiritual being Christ was to descend and dwell in a human body in order to bring this light to humanity—which was now unable to rise above the Earth—in a different, new way.

[ 22 ] As humanity, we are today only at the beginning of understanding this Mystery of Golgotha, and the future of Earth’s evolution will consist in humanity’s understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha becoming ever more mature, so that the radiance emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha may increasingly transform from an inner radiance into a cosmic radiance and begin to illuminate everything within the scope of human perception. But it will only be possible to discuss this in more detail once we have contributed a few more building blocks to it today.

[ 23 ] Whatever was once alive in the earthly evolution of humanity returns, in a certain sense. And so, as I have just described to you, this insight into the effects of the moon was alive within the mystery priests. The effects of the moon carried them upward to their astrological initiation. They learned how one could be initiated into the stellar mysteries of the cosmos through the effects of the Moon. An essential aspect of this initiation was that the one being initiated—the one who was to be initiated in this way—would experience something as if he suddenly felt within himself that gravity had less significance for him than usual. He felt his weight less. And they were in turn instructed by the elder teachers not to give in to this, but rather, when they felt as if they were becoming lighter, so to speak, to impose heaviness upon themselves through a strong effort of will. This was, in a sense, part of the art of the ancient initiations: to allow what was lost in natural heaviness due to the influence of the lunar forces to flow into oneself through the will. Through this, that very stellar wisdom shone forth. And so every predisposition in the people of that time was used to overcome this heaviness, to develop within them the will to hold fast to the Earth in a soulful way. But because this soulful holding fast had the effect of kindling an inner soul light, it shone out into the cosmic expanses, and humanity gained knowledge of these cosmic expanses.

[ 24 ] When spiritual science sheds light on these matters, it is possible to describe precisely how this ancient consciousness came into being. But what was present in such people always returns. There is an atavism, an inheritance of the ancient. It reappears because human beings, too, return. And precisely because the connection to the lunar forces reemerges in later generations—who live in an age when it should no longer be present, since that deep sleep has vanished—it manifests as somnambulism, particularly as ordinary lunacy. And these people, when this state comes over them, do not combat the lightening of the soul; rather, they wander around on the rooftops, or at least get out of bed. They do with their human being what actually belongs only to the astral body. What is, in a sense, an abnormality in such later times was, in earlier times, an advantage that could be used to gain insights. And the fact that such people were popularly called “moonstruck” makes perfect sense, for this state of the human constitution is connected to the atavistic kinship with the lunar forces that has remained from ancient times.

[ 25 ] Just as human beings are connected to the forces of the moon in the way I have described to you, so too are they connected to the forces of the sun. It is just that this connection with the forces of the Sun operates in a more hidden part of the human being, so that one only comes upon it very indirectly. It was certainly from this connection with the forces of the Sun that the Druid priests of the golden age—not the age of decline—sought their solar initiation. This solar initiation brings about a state in which one no longer merely looks upward—as it were, stimulated by the lunar forces—to gain some knowledge of the mysteries of the cosmos through astrological initiation; rather, this solar initiation offers something akin to a dialogue with the divine-spiritual beings of the universe, providing a kind of inspiration, whereas the lunar initiation offers only a kind of imagination. The solar initiation is a kind of listening to the counsel of the spiritual beings of the cosmos, or at any rate, a glimpse into much deeper mysteries of cosmic existence than those revealed by the lunar initiation.

[ 26 ] This, too, can resurface later in an atavistic way. After all, it is present in every human being. The effects of the sun are present in every human being. But given the state of the human soul today—since we are no longer the people of the past—we are such that, above all, our eyes are constituted to receive the physical rays of the sun. I hinted at this yesterday: There is a spiritual-soul aspect to these physical sunbeams. It’s just that modern people don’t see it. And so, in fact, modern people behave toward the sun exactly as someone would behave if they encountered another person who claimed to possess an inner soul aspect, and that person told them: “There is nothing to this soul aspect.” When you move your arm, that is a lever mechanism; there are cords—the muscles—and when they are pulled, the lever is activated. That is a mechanism. — This is precisely how modern humanity behaves toward the effects of the sun. It sees only the outer physical aspect, which in this case is merely the physical light. But while the physical light of the sun’s influence penetrates us, the spirituality of the solar being simultaneously penetrates the human being. Through a certain kind of inner concentration—which the human being cannot yet achieve in the way I described in the book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? but which they possess through atavism like an elemental force—through a certain kind of inner concentration, human beings today can, through an inner concentration of their organism—by “today” I mean the historical period, which can of course extend over several millennia—cease to be strongly receptive to the physical effects of the sun, but instead become receptive to the spiritual-solar aspect. Then a person sees differently. Where this atavistic quality arises, one sees differently than one does in ordinary life today. When you look into a mirror, what stands before the mirror is reflected back to you. Precisely because the mirror is opaque on the back side, what is in front of the mirror is reflected back. Now, if a person has a soul constitution such that, even though they are in full possession of their senses, instead of looking into the sun, they do not see the physical sunlight but see darkness, then this darkness becomes a mirror, and their immediate surroundings—nature—appear reflected to them. And then he does not say: “Here I have a plant that has a root, from which it sprouts leaves, a flower, a fruit, and a seed”—but rather he says: “I look there, in the lower part of the plant, and I see what is the elemental spirit of wisdom, which has a conserving quality, which has a solidifying quality.” And then, as I look further up the plant, I see how this solidifying, this preserving force is overcome, and how the plant strives not to solidify, but rather to alternate between solidifying and dissolving in the formation of leaves; and finally, like boiling under the influence of fire, I see the plant striving upward. And then the life of the plant is reflected in the darkness, which is, however, spiritual brightness—much as Jakob Böhme, in an atavistic sense, viewed the plant, perceiving the salty element at the bottom, the mercurial element in the middle, and the phosphoric element at the top. And so we see reflected in a spirit such as Jakob Böhme’s—who was a natural, sun-initiated being—that which in ancient times belonged to human civilization, to the primordial civilization in which people could not yet read or write. And when one takes up a work by Jakob Böhme—the Mysterium magnum, De Signatura rerum, Aurora, or Dawn at Daybreak, and so on—and, in a sense, fail to read it in such a way that one actually discerns from Jakob Böhme’s stammering account something very similar to what I have described to you about the Druid priests, then one is simply misreading Jakob Böhme. He was not initiated externally, but rather in such a way that this solar initiation wells up within his inner being, as if it were a repetition of an earlier earthly existence. This can be traced right back into Jakob Böhme’s biography.

[ 27 ] Even deeper forces that can then take effect within human beings are the forces of what was originally the outermost planet in our solar system. For modern astronomy, it is no longer the outermost planet, since two others have been added—planets that even pose some challenges for modern physical astronomy, because the laws governing the moons’ motions do not quite add up, and so on. But since the main focus is on the spatial arrangement, and since Uranus and Neptune have now joined the solar system, they are included in the count. But as I said, they cause some headaches because their moons have “gone haywire” compared to what other well-behaved moons of Jupiter and so on do. In reality, one can indeed say: Saturn is, for the living, concrete grasp of the planetary world system, the outermost of the planets. And just as a human being can be under the influence of the lunar effects described to you in more detail, or under the influence of the solar effects outlined briefly, so too can they be under the influence of these Saturnian effects. Saturn acts through what it radiates spiritually into the planetary system and thereby into human beings—like a cosmic-historical memory. Saturn is like memory, like the recollection of our planetary system, and if one wants to know anything about the events of the planetary system, one cannot actually discover this through astronomical speculation.

[ 28 ] These things are already beginning to throw external science into disarray today, because nothing really adds up anymore. But people are approaching everything the wrong way. You see, we have often spoken in our circles about the so-called theory of relativity—that in the physical world one can never really speak of absolute motion, but must always speak only of relative motion. Just as one can say, “The sun moves, the Earth stands still,” so later people said, “The Earth moves, the sun stands still.” All of this is actually only relative; one can say one thing or the other. As was once discussed here in Stuttgart at a conference of the anthroposophical movement regarding the theory of relativity, a proponent of this theory of relativity explained to the audience in very simple terms how it makes no difference whether one takes a match and strikes it against a box by holding the box still and moving the match past it, or whether one holds the match still and moves the box: in either case, the match begins to burn. This is meant in a very serious scientific sense and was, of course, presented with the utmost seriousness at the time, and there’s not even anything to be said against it. One could have found a naive soul to nail down the little matchbox; then a bit of absoluteness would have crept in. Under certain circumstances, one could have pushed the entire house—it was located at Landhausstraße 70 at the time—backward; then relativity would have been present again. It would just have been a bit difficult. But if one extends this to the entire physical universe, then one can say with Einstein: Within the physical world, nothing absolute can be found; everything there is already relative. — Yet we stop at relativity. It is precisely the relativity of the physical world that must lead us not to seek the absolute in the physical world, but in the spiritual world. Today, science already offers access to the spiritual world everywhere, provided it is understood correctly. One need not be an amateur today; rather, one can be a precise, genuine scientist, and then one will be led into the spiritual realm by genuine science—which is simply not thought through to its conclusion, not even by its leading authorities. And so, within the realm of physical research, one cannot say anything at all about something like what Saturn is to our universe. It is, in a sense, the memory of our planetary system. Everything that has ever happened in the planetary system is preserved within it. It tells those who have undergone the Saturn initiation what has happened in this planetary system.

[ 29 ] Just as the connection to the moon can manifest one-sidedly in human beings—as a legacy of earlier human development, as a legacy of the human being of the past—and the human being thereby becomes a sleepwalker, so too can the spiritual effects of the sun emerge, and the human being then, instead of looking into the light with open eyes as usual, actually looks into the darkness in which nature is reflected, seeing it as Jacob Böhme did—just as one can also experience the connection with the effects of Saturn, which act particularly on the human head and actually implant temporary memory in the human being during earthly life. These effects of Saturn can occur in a special way.

[ 30 ] So one can speak of “moon people”—the ordinary somnambulists—and of “sun people,” such as Jakob Böhme and even Paracelsus, albeit to a lesser degree. One can also speak of “Saturn people.” And Swedenborg was precisely such a “Saturn person.” Swedenborg, after all, is also someone who—to put it mildly—gives conventional scholarship a headache; indeed, one might even say he should give it a headache. For this Swedenborg was at the cutting edge of his time in conventional science; he was truly an authority. Until his forties, he was also reasonably acceptable to our science, saying nothing that external science could not accept. Only then—then—did he gradually become clouded. We must say that the Saturn forces became particularly active within him. People who stand on materialistic ground say he went mad. But it is still something that should give us pause to reflect: that there are so many posthumous works by Swedenborg, which are now even being published by a Swedish society and are recognized as scholarly works. The most eminent scholars in Sweden are now engaged in publishing Swedenborg’s works. But these are the works he composed—let us say—before his spiritual vision. It is unpleasant to speak of a man who was, so to speak, the most intelligent person of his age up until his forties, and to whom one must actually say in later years: “He is a fool, to put it mildly.”—But Swedenborg did not become any less intelligent; rather, at a certain moment, just after he had climbed to the pinnacle of the conventional science of his time, he began to look into the spiritual world. And since, so to speak, this looking into the spiritual world took hold of his head—the very organ that he — he had, in fact, developed quite specially — was now seized by spirituality, by Saturnian spirituality, he was able to look into it in his own way—not like Jakob Böhme, who saw the inner mysteries of nature reflected in darkness—but into the immediate ether, where the images of higher spirituality appear in the ether. And he described this spiritual world just as Swedenborg has described it. What he beheld was not what he had imagined. The spiritual beings to which he alludes are different. But he also did not merely see an earthly reflection of these spirits; rather, he saw the effects of the spirits in the ether and perceived etheric formations. These were the deeds of the spirits—which, admittedly, were not seen themselves—in the earthly ether. While Jakob Böhme saw reflections of nature, he saw what was brought about in the earthly ether by these spirits, whose effects he alone perceived. So when Swedenborg describes angels, these are not angels, but etheric forms. But what appeared to him as angels—as etheric forms—is brought about by angels; it is a reflection of what the angel does. And so one must always look to the reality of such things. It is, of course, a mistake to say that Swedenborg saw the spiritual world as such, for that was not his own experience. But he did perceive a reality.

[ 31 ] The ordinary somnambulist, the sleepwalker, acts as if it were reality. He acts with his physical body in a way that he should only act with his astral body. Jakob Böhme, however, saw with his physical body—above all through the structure of his eyes—in such a way that he excluded the physical, looked into the darkness, yet saw the light within that darkness: the reflection of the spirits of nature. Swedenborg did not see reflections, but rather the etheric images of the higher spiritual existence. This is a progression: from the unobserved, automatic spiritual permeation of the somnambulist, through what I might call the natural “second sight” of Jakob Böhme, who saw not the outer side of nature but the reflection of its inner side, all the way up to Swedenborg, who saw not the mirror images but the reality in the ether—not mirror images but images of action—of what is taking place above in the higher spiritual regions.

[ 32 ] And so we see how we can speak of people’s past and present, but how the past still stands clearly within the present, how there is a legacy present in so-called abnormal states that must be understood. And it is precisely when one can look in this way at the past and at that which still extends from the past into the present that one will be able, with the help of a profound understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, to point intuitively toward humanity’s future as well. This will be the subject of tomorrow’s lecture.