The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] I had to tell you various things about the nature of the Hybernian Mysteries, and as you saw yesterday, this unique course of development that people were able to undergo on the island of Ireland led these people to gain insight, first and foremost, into what the human mind is capable of experiencing through its own inner activity. You need only consider that, through all the preparations made for those to be initiated, it was possible—as if by magic—for landscapes, such as those that otherwise unfold only before the human senses, to be conjured up before those very senses; not that religious, fantastical, hallucinatory impressions were presented, but rather that what one was already accustomed to seeing stood like a veil before the soul—for one knew very well that there was something behind it. And it was the same with looking into one’s own inner self through the enchanting vision of the dreamlike summer landscape. So the student was prepared to have imaginations—imaginations that initially tied in with what the student otherwise saw with the external senses. But he already knew, as he held these imaginations before him, that through them he would penetrate further into something entirely different.

[ 2 ] I have shown you how the student was able to look back to the time before earthly existence and to the time after earthly existence—to the time after death up to the midpoint between death and a new birth—and, looking forward, to the time immediately preceding the descent, again up to the midpoint between death and a new birth. But something else also came to light. As the student was guided further to truly immerse himself in what he had experienced—his soul having been strengthened by the vision of pre-earthly and post-earthly life, and his soul having gained insight into the nature of dying and being reborn— and then, with even greater inner strength and energy, he was able to delve deeper into the nature of the moment of stillness, of being absorbed by the vastness of the worlds—in a sense, of floating out into the blue distances of the ether— and again, what it was like when one felt oneself to be nothing but a personality within the senses, when, so to speak, one perceived nothing of the rest of the human being, but perceived only the existence within the eye, the existence within the entire realm of hearing, feeling, and so on—when, in other words, one was entirely a sensory organ.

[ 3 ] The student had learned to rekindle these states within himself through strong inner energy, and then, from these states, to allow that which now continued to come to him. When he was then instructed—entirely at will, from within—after having gone through everything I have described, to re-establish the state of inner rigidity, so that he felt his own organism, as it were, like a kind of mineral—that is, essentially as something quite foreign; if he felt his outer self, his physical body, as something foreign, and his soul, as it were, merely hovering around and enveloping this mineral substance, then in the state of consciousness that resulted from this, he gained a clear insight into the lunar existence that preceded that of the Earth.

[ 4 ] And you remember, my dear friends, at this very moment, how I described this lunar existence in my Occult Science and in various lectures. What is described there came alive in the student’s consciousness; it was simply there for him. To him, this ancient lunar existence appeared as a planetary existence that, at first, actually existed only in a watery, liquid state—but not like the water we know today, rather, I would say, more gelatinous, like something coagulated, one might say. And he felt himself within it. But he felt organized within this semi-soft mass. And he felt the organization of the entire planet radiating from his own organization.

[ 5 ] You just need to understand the difference between what it was like to experience things back then and what it’s like today. Today, in a certain sense, we feel limited by our skin, and we say nothing other than that, as human beings, we are what is inside our skin. This is, of course, a tremendous error, for as soon as we come to what is air-like within the human being, the absurdity of feeling confined within one’s skin immediately becomes apparent. As I have often said: the mass of air that I now have within me was not within me just a short time ago, and the mass of air that will be within me in a short time is outside. So even today, we feel ourselves to be human in the right way only when, with regard to our airy nature, we do not think of ourselves as closed off from the outer world. We are everywhere where the external air is. Essentially, there is no difference between having a piece of sugar in your mouth right now—which will be in your stomach the next moment after having traveled a certain path—and having a mass of air out there at this very moment that will be in your lungs the next moment. The piece of sugar travels this path (it is illustrated); the air travels precisely this other path through the respiratory organs. And anyone who does not count this as part of themselves should not count their mouth as part of themselves either, but should let their body begin only at the stomach. So, for modern human beings, it is actually nonsense to think of oneself as enclosed within the human skin.

[ 6 ] But in the lunar existence, there was absolutely no way to feel enclosed within one’s skin. Furniture like the kind found there today—the kind you walk up to and touch—did not exist back then; rather, everything that existed was simply a product of nature. And when you extended the limb you had back then—which, incidentally, was such that one could speak of it in terms similar to how we speak of fingers today—you could retract it so that it disappeared entirely, and you could retract your arm; you could make yourself very thin, and so on. Now, today, when you reach for the blackboard, you do not feel that this blackboard belongs to you. Back then, when one reached for something, one simply felt that it belonged to oneself, just as the air mass still belongs to us today. So that one’s own organism was indeed felt to be merely a part of the entire planetary-lunar organism.

[ 7 ] And all of this came to the consciousness of the Hybernian student. And he then also gained the impression that the gelatinous-liquid state is merely a phase in the lunar organization of time; that there were certain epochs in that ancient lunar organization when, within this gelatinous substance, something appeared that was physically much harder than the hard substances we have today. Nevertheless, it was not mineral in the sense that today’s emerald, corundum, or diamond are, but rather it was simply something hard, horn-like. There were no minerals in the modern sense of crystallized substances and the like, but rather what existed in the way of mineral-like, hard, horn-like substances certainly had forms from which one could see that they were separate from organic activity—just as today we do not speak of the crystalline form of a cow’s horn, but rather know that the cow’s horn exists only because it has been driven out of an organism, or the deer antler, or the like. Incidentally, it is no different with bone; but bone is mineral in nature. So such mineral-like substances, which were built up from within the organic, existed back then.

[ 8 ] And those beings who had already partially lived through their human existence at that time—who had only a few aspects of that human existence left to complete during their earthly lives—are precisely those individualities of whom I spoke as the great, wise primordial teachers of humanity on Earth, who are now residing in the lunar colony.

[ 9 ] All of this dawned on the Hybernian student during this state of stupor. And when he had gone through all of this in the proper manner—that is, in the way that seemed plausible to his initiators—he was then instructed to advance once more, to advance repeatedly, so as to allow his frozen state to flow out, to stream forth to the distant reaches of the ether, to the point where he could feel: the paths of the heights carry me out into the distances of the blue ether, to the very limits of spatial existence.

[ 10 ] And then, as he repeatedly went through this, he felt everything there was to feel, moving out from the Earth, as it were, toward the distant realms of the ether. But as he moved toward the distant realms of the ether—after the heights had taken him in and carried him to the blue expanses of the ether—he felt out there, how, as it were, at the very edge of the world of space, that which once again permeated him—what we would today call the astral—something that was experienced inwardly and that connected much more significantly, much more powerfully with the human being of that time, though it could not, of course, be perceived as strongly as similar phenomena are perceived today, but which connected with the human soul in a more energetic, more powerful, and more vivid way—much as feeling would connect with the human inner being today if a person were to expose themselves to the inflowing, refreshing sunlight to the extent that it penetrates them inwardly with a vitalizing element that makes the details of their physical organization truly tangible to them. For if you pay just a little attention, you will be able to feel: when you expose yourself to the sun freely, when you allow the sun to flow through you—but not in such a way that the sun becomes unpleasant to you, unpleasant in your inner feeling—when you expose yourself to the sun in such a way that you allow its light and warmth to flow into your body, into your organism, with a certain sense of comfort, then you will feel: it will be as if you were now gently sensing each individual organ differently than before. You literally enter a state in which you can describe yourself from within.

[ 11 ] The fact that such things are so little known is simply a shortcoming in the capacity for attention of people today. If this lack of attention did not exist today, people would in fact be able to offer at least dreamlike glimpses of what has revealed itself to them through inner feeling in the streaming sunlight. And in reality, students used to be taught about the inner workings of the human organism in a different way than they are today. Today, one dissects a cadaver and compiles anatomical atlases. This does not require much attention, although it must be admitted that some students do not even muster this much attention; but it does not require much attention. But students were once taught in such a way that they were placed in the sun and guided to sense their inner being in response to the pleasantly streaming sunlight; and afterward, they were already able to sketch the liver, the stomach, and so on. This inner connection between the human being and the macrocosm exists, provided the conditions for it are established. Of course, you can be blind and still perceive the shape of any object through touch. In the same way, when one organ in your body is made sensitive to another through attention to the light, you can describe the internal organs so that you can at least take their silhouettes into your consciousness. But to a high degree, this was instilled in the initiate of the Hybernian Mysteries, so that as he flowed out into the blue etheric distance, as the astral light flowed in, he no longer felt himself above all else; rather, he sensed in his consciousness a mighty world, a world about which he now said to himself: I live entirely within an element alongside other beings. This element is, in essence, pure natural goodness. For from all directions I feel how it flows into me from this element, in which—forgive me for using a phrase that will only become possible later—in which I swim like a fish in water, though I myself consist only of very fleeting, light elements; within the entire planetary element, I feel how this comforting influx approaches from all sides. The student actually felt the astral light flowing into him from everywhere, shaping him, forming him. This element is pure natural goodness, he could have said, for it gives me something everywhere. I am actually surrounded by nothing but goodness. Goodness, goodness is everywhere, but natural goodness that surrounds me. But this natural goodness is not merely goodness; it is creative goodness, for it is this goodness that, through its powers, simultaneously brings me into being and gives me the form that sustains me, insofar as I swim, float, and weave within this element. And so, fundamentally, it was natural-moral impressions that arose there.

[ 12 ] If we wanted to draw a comparison with something from today, we could only say: If it were possible for a person to have a rose before them, to smell it, and—out of inner truthfulness and honesty—to say: “Divine goodness, which spreads throughout the entire Earth, also flows into the rose, and as the rose imparts its essence to my sense of smell, I smell the divine goodness living within the planet,” — if a person today could say something like that with inner honesty while smelling the rose’s fragrance, then they would experience something like a faint shadow of what was once inwardly experienced as the entire life-element of the individual human being. And that, my dear friends, was the experience of the solar existence that preceded our Earth. Thus, the student could experience the solar existence and the lunar existence as they preceded our Earth.

[ 13 ] And furthermore, once the student had been guided to feel only within his senses—having experienced something like shedding his entire organism, so that he actually lived only in his eye, in his auditory tract, and in his entire sense of feeling—he then perceived what I have described in my Occult Science as the Saturn existence—the state in which one floated and wove within the element of warmth, within the warmth that was differentiated within itself. One was in such a state that one felt oneself not as flesh and blood, not as bones and nerves, but merely as an organism of warmth—yet this warmth was within another warmth: the planetary warmth of Saturn. One perceived warmth when the external warmth was at a different level than the internal warmth. A weaving in warmth, a life through warmth, a sensation of warmth against warmth—that was, after all, the Saturn existence.

[ 14 ] And this is what the student went through when he had withdrawn into his senses. And these senses themselves were not yet as differentiated as they are today. This perception of warmth through warmth, life through warmth, life in warmth—that was the most essential thing. But there were moments when, by approaching another thermal process or another quantum of heat—one’s self, so to speak, as a thermal organism—one felt something within oneself through the contact, like a flare of flames, and one was now in an element—not merely heat that flows, weaves, and undulates, but at a certain moment one was something like a blazing flame, or even something that was like a weaving sensation of taste—taste not only on the tongue, which of course did not exist back then, but taste as something one felt within oneself, which, however, was ignited by another, which also imparted something of itself to another, and so on. The Saturn existence was stirred to life within the student.

[ 15 ] So you see, in these Hybernian mysteries, the student was indeed initiated into what lies beyond one’s own earthly existence. He came to know the Saturn, Sun, and Moon existences as the successive metamorphoses of earthly existence.

[ 16 ] And then he was repeatedly prompted once again to experience what was now leading him into his inner self; first to experience once more what I have described to you as the sensation of inner pressure, as if one were being pressed by the sensation of one’s own center, as if the air within were being compressed, so that, if one were to compare this state to something in the present-day earthly human being, one could only compare it to the feeling of being unable to exhale, of having one’s breath pressed and squeezed in all directions. That was, of course, the first state, and the student was now to evoke it again in his soul through an act of external will. And when he did so—when he actually experienced this state of drifting into a dreamlike state, through which he had indeed already become capable of dreaming of nature as a summer landscape while awake—when he had entered this state, then at some point he suddenly had a very peculiar experience. I would like to say that, in order to characterize this experience at all, I must characterize it from the opposite direction; I must characterize it in the following way. Just imagine: Today, as an earthly human being, you enter a warm room; you feel the warmth; you go outside when it is 5 or 10 degrees below zero and feel the cold there; you feel the difference between warmth and cold, but you experience this as something physical. It does not merge with your soul. And as an earthly human being, it is not the case that when you enter a warm room, you always have the feeling: here in this room, something is spreading out like a great spirit that enfolds you with love. You perceive this warmth as physically comforting, but you do not perceive it as something spiritual. The same is true of the cold. You shiver; you shiver physically, but you do not have the feeling that, out there, due to the particular climatic conditions, demons are approaching you from all sides, whispering something so icy that you grow cold even in your soul. Physical warmth is not, at the same time, a spiritual experience for you, because as an earthly human being with ordinary consciousness, you do not perceive the natural spiritual aspect in all its intensity. As an earthly human being, one can be warmed by another person, by their friendship, by their love; one can be chilled by their coldness, perhaps even by their philistinism, but one means something spiritual by this. But just consider how little the physical earthly human being today is inclined, when stepping out into the warm, muggy air in summer, to say: “The gods love me very much right now!” Or how little is the modern person inclined, when stepping out into the winter cold, to say: “But now only those sylphs are flying through the air who are frosty philistines in the world of the sylphs.” These are expressions one hardly ever hears today.

[ 17 ] Well, you see, this sensation I am trying to describe—which is why I said I have to explain the matter from the opposite direction—was something that presented itself as self-evident to the student precisely when he was experiencing this inner sense of pressure. Everything he felt as warmth, he felt at the same time as something spiritual, but also, in turn, as physical warmth; and he was able to feel this because his consciousness was immersed in the Jupiter existence that will arise from the Earth. For we will become Jupiter beings only by uniting physical warmth with soulful warmth, so that as Jupiter beings, when we caress a person or a child out of love, we will at the same time be a true source of warmth for the child. Love and the radiating of warmth will not be separate at all. One will indeed come to radiate the warmth one experiences, soulfully, into one’s surroundings as well.

[ 18 ] To experience this—though not in the earthly world, but transported to another world—was the goal to which the initiate of the Hybernian Mysteries was led, and through this, the existence of Jupiter was revealed to him in a symbolic form, though of course not in the physical reality of the earth.

[ 19 ] And the next step was this: the student was to truly feel that inner distress I spoke to you about yesterday, as the student came to actually sense the necessity of overcoming his own ego, because otherwise it can become the source of evil. When the student truly brought this inner state of the soul to life within himself, something occurred for him such that he not only felt soul warmth and physical warmth as one, but what he felt as one—this soul-physical warmth—began to shine, revealing itself as it began to glow. The mystery of the radiance of light—the spiritual radiance of light—was revealed to the student. Through this, he was transported into that future in which the Earth will be transformed into the planet Venus, into the future planet Venus.

[ 20 ] And then, when the student felt everything he had experienced in the past surging together within his heart, just as I described to you yesterday, it became clear to him that everything he experienced in his soul was simultaneously manifesting as an experience of the planet. One has a thought; the thought does not remain merely within the person’s skin—the thought begins to resound; the thought becomes a word. That which the person lives takes shape as a word. The word spreads throughout the volcanic planet. Everything on the volcanic planet is a speaking, living being. Word resonates with word, word clarifies itself through word, word speaks to word, word learns to understand word. Humanity itself feels itself to be the word that understands the world, the word that understands the world of words. As this was presented in image form before the Hybernian initiate, he knew himself to be in volcanic existence, in the latest metamorphic state of the Earth planet.

[ 21 ] As you can see, the Hybernian Mysteries truly belonged to what is rightly called the Great Mysteries in spiritual science. For what the students were initiated into gave them an overview, a comprehensive view of human life before and after Earth. At the same time, it gave them an overview of cosmic life, into which the human being is woven and from which he is born in the course of time. Human beings thus came to know the microcosm—that is, themselves as spiritual-soul-physical beings—in connection with the macrocosm. But they also came to know the becoming, the weaving, the arising and passing away, and the metamorphosing transformation of the macrocosm. These Hybernian Mysteries were indeed great mysteries.

[ 22 ] And they reached their true zenith in the age that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha. But it was precisely the distinctive feature of the great mysteries that in these great mysteries Christ was spoken of as the One to come, just as people later spoke of Christ as the One who had passed through past events. And in fact, after the first initiation, the intention was to show the student—by presenting him with the image of Christ as he departed—that the entire course of the Earth’s history tends toward the event of Golgotha. At that time, this was still portrayed as something yet to come.

[ 23 ] On this island, which was later subjected to so many trials, there was indeed a place of great mysteries—a place of Christian mysteries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha—where human beings living before the Mystery of Golgotha were legitimately guided, through their spiritual vision, toward the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 24 ] And when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, while the remarkable events we have just described—as we portray the experience of Christ Jesus on Golgotha and its surroundings—were taking place over in Palestine, great festivals were celebrated within the Hybernian Mysteries and their community, that is, among the people who belonged to the Hybernian Mysteries. And what actually took place in Palestine occurred in a hundredfold, pictorial way on the Hyberian Island—without the image being a mere remembrance of the past. On the Hyberian Island, the Mystery of Golgotha was experienced in images simultaneously, while the Mystery of Golgotha was historically taking place in Palestine. When later, in temples and churches, the Mystery of Golgotha was experienced in images—shown to the people in images—these were images that evoked a memory of something that had passed on Earth, something that had thus been drawn from ordinary consciousness as a historical memory. On the Hybernian Island, these images existed at a time when they could not yet be drawn from the past through historical memory, but could only be drawn from the spirit itself. On the Hybernian Island, what unfolded before the physical eye in Palestine at the beginning of our era was spiritually beheld. And so, on the Hybernian Island, humanity actually experienced the Mystery of Golgotha spiritually. And this signifies the greatness of all that later emanated from this Hybernian Island for the rest of civilization—though it has since disappeared in later times.

[ 25 ] And now I ask you to pay attention to one thing. Anyone who studies only external history can find much that is magnificent, beautiful, heart-lifting, and enlightening when looking back historically at the ancient Eastern world, at ancient Greece, and at ancient Rome; and they can experience many things again when moving forward, say, to the time of Charlemagne and through the Middle Ages. “But just take a look at how sparse the external historical records become during the period that begins a few centuries after the emergence of Christianity and ends around the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. Take a look at the historical works; in all the older, more honest historical works, you’ll actually find only very brief accounts—very little—for these centuries. Only then do things begin to become more detailed again.

[ 26 ] However, more recent historians—who, in a somewhat professorial manner, are ashamed to present the material so poorly by failing to describe what they do not know—invent all sorts of fantastical constructs that are now inserted into these centuries. But that is all nonsense. If one presents the facts objectively and historically honestly, the historical record for the period when ancient Rome was collapsing—followed by the devastating waves of the Migration Period, which, incidentally, were not even as terribly conspicuous as people today imagine, but were only striking in contrast to the relative calm that preceded and followed them—becomes rather sparse. But if you were to simply calculate today—or, for that matter, had calculated during the prewar period—how many people, say, migrate from Russia to Switzerland each year, you would find that more people have traveled that same route in Europe than did during the entire period of the Migration Period. All these things are relative. So that, if one were to continue speaking in the same vein used to describe the Migration Period, one would actually have to say: Right up until the pre-war period, everything in Europe was in a state of constant migration, including the movement to America. And the waves of emigration to America were more numerous than the great migrations of the Migration Period. People just don’t really realize this.

[ 27 ] Nevertheless, as this period—described as the Migration Period and the post-Migration Period—unfolds, historical records become sparse. Not much is known about it. Little will be written about what took place, for example, here in this region, or in France, in Germany, and so on; little will be written about it. But it was precisely there that the echoes of what had been beheld in the Hybernian Mysteries were still flowing across Europe—albeit only as a faint echo—and where the effects and impulses of the great Mysteries of Hybernia were already permeating civilization everywhere. “But now two great currents met. You see, everything I am saying now is really only in terms of terminology, not to cast even a shadow of sympathy or antipathy on anything, but to describe the historical necessity. Two currents met. One, which came from the East via Greece and Rome, relied on the increasingly pervasive influence over humanity of a mindset focused solely on the intellect and the senses, working with what existed as historical memory of outwardly visible, outwardly experienced events. From Palestine, through Greece and Rome, the message spread—a message that was then taken up by people in their religious lives—the message about something that had taken place in the physical, sensory world through the God Christ in Palestine. This was tailored to people’s understanding, which relied solely on what we today call ordinary consciousness—that which depends on the intellect and the senses. And indeed, it spread in the most magnificent way. But this eventually supplanted what came from the West, from Hybernia, and which, as a final echo of ancient instinctive earthly wisdom, reckoned with the old spiritual wisdom of humanity that was only now beginning to shine into the new consciousness. Something spread from Hybernia across Europe that, with regard to enlightenment, did not rely on wisdom based on sensory perception, nor on proof of something by demonstrating that it had historically taken place. Instead, cults and teachings of wisdom spread from Hybernia—as Hybernian cults and Hybernian teachings of wisdom—which relied on something that enlightens human beings from the spiritual world, even when, like the Mystery of Golgotha, it is simultaneously unfolding in physical reality at another spot on Earth. In Hybernia, the physical reality of Palestine was viewed in a spiritual way.

[ 28 ] But that which could only be linked to physical reality overshadowed that other aspect, which was based on the spiritual elevation of the human being, on the spiritual internalization of the human being, on the spiritual permeation of the human being. And gradually, out of a necessity that has often been discussed in relation to other perspectives, that which was connected to sensory-physical existence gradually gained the upper hand over that which was connected to spiritual vision. And the news of the Savior dwelling in a physical body on Earth gained the upper hand over the wondrous imaginative images that came from Hybernia ' and could be depicted in cults—over the magnificent imaginative images that proclaimed the Savior as a spiritual being and, in the portrayal of their cult and in their descriptions, took no account of the fact that this was also a historical event. It was least possible to take this into account at a time when it was not yet a historical event, for the cults had already been established before the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 29 ] And the time dawned when people became more and more receptive only to what could be physically perceived, when they, one might say, came to no longer accept as truth anything that was not connected to what could be physically perceived. And so the wisdom that came from Hybernia was no longer perceived in its substantiality. And so the art that came from Hybernia was no longer perceived in its cosmic truth. Thus, more and more, what emerged was not a Hybernian science, but a science that was based solely on the external and sensory; and not Hybernian art, but an art — even Raffaclian art is no different — that used the sensually perceptible as its model, whereas Hybernian art sought to realize the mental and the spiritual directly through the means of art.

[ 30 ] Thus came a time when, in a certain sense, a darkness had descended upon spiritual life, a time when people relied solely on the intellect and the senses, and formulated philosophies intended to show how the intellect and the senses might somehow arrive at Being or attain the truth.

[ 31 ] And then that very strange thing happened: people were no longer receptive to spiritual influences. And where, I would say, could one see more clearly that people, with their consciousness, were no longer receptive to spiritual influences than in what was given to them—I have described this in the journal Das Reich—such as The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, which was given to them. At the time, I drew attention to just how strange the circumstances surrounding this “Alchemical Wedding” were. Valentin Andreä was the physical author of this “Alchemical Wedding”; it was written by Valentin Andreä in the year immediately preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. But no one familiar with Valentin Andreä’s biography will be in any doubt that Valentin Andreä—who later became a philistine pastor and wrote other unctuous books—did not write the Chemical Wedding. It is sheer nonsense to believe that Valentin Andreä wrote the Chemical Wedding. For just compare the “Chemical Wedding” or the “Reformation of the Whole World” or the other writings of Valentinus Andreä—in essence, it was the same person—with the saccharine, unctuous, greasy, and oily style that Pastor Valentin Andreä, who merely shares the same name, wrote in his later life. That is indeed a most curious phenomenon! Here we have a young man who has barely finished school, yet he writes down works such as the Reformation of the Whole World and the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, and we have to strain to fathom the inner meaning of these writings. He himself understands nothing of it, as he later demonstrates: he becomes a smarmy, oily pastor. That is the same person! And one need only consider this fact to find plausible what I argued at the time: that the “Chemical Wedding” was not written by a human being, or was written by a human being only in the same sense that Napoleon’s ever-anxious private secretary wrote his letters. But Napoleon was, after all, a human being who stood firmly with his feet and legs on the ground—he was, in short, a physical personality. The one who wrote The Chemical Wedding was not a physical personality, and he made use of this “secretary,” who later became the slick pastor Valentin Andreä.

[ 32 ] Just imagine this marvelous event that preceded the Thirty Years’ War: a young person—a very young person—extends his hand to a spiritual being who writes down something like The Chemical Wedding! And what in this case comes to light only as a special example actually happened quite often in those days. It’s just that these things were not properly recognized or preserved. Whatever was given to humanity as important during that time was presented to people in such a way that they were unable to comprehend it with their intellect. This was the ever-flowing spirituality that continued to reveal itself to them—a spirituality that people could still portray, but could no longer experience within themselves.

[ 33 ] And so it is that in this age—in which, if the books were thick enough, the history books would consist entirely of blank pages—humanity lives as if in two currents: in the current that flows down in the physical world, where people believe more and more only in what their intellect tells them and what their senses perceive; but above that, a spiritual revelation is constantly taking place—one brought about by human beings but not understood by them. And among the most characteristic examples of this spiritual revelation are works such as The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz.

[ 34 ] But everything that was revealed there still passed through people’s minds, even if those minds did not understand it; it passed through people’s minds, grew weaker, and became distorted. Such murmuring and babbling—as the verses in The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz sometimes are—became something magnificently poetic, something powerfully poetic. And yet they are revelations of something magnificent: powerful macrocosmic images, powerful experiences between the human being and the macrocosm, which appear majestic. When one reads the Chymical Wedding with today’s perspective, one learns to understand these images of the Chymical Wedding; they dissolve, for they are, after all, colored by the minds through which they passed, and behind them the grandeur appears.

[ 35 ] Such things are proof that what humanity once experienced has actually lived on in the subconscious. And it was then that it completely faded away during the early days of the devastating Thirty Years’ War. In the first half of the seventeenth century, what was once a great, majestic spiritual truth began to ebb away. And only the mystics retained a sense of it. But the actual substance—the spiritual substance—was completely lost. Reason prevailed at first, paving the way for the age of freedom.

[ 36 ] And today, as we look back on these things—and look back specifically on the Hybernian Mysteries—I would say with a rather profound inner spiritual life, for they are, in essence, the last great mysteries, those last great mysteries through which the human and cosmic secrets were able to express themselves. And when one explores these mysteries again today, only then do the Hybernian Mysteries appear truly great. But one cannot truly fathom them unless one has first explored these matters independently. And even if one has explored them independently, something special still occurs.

[ 37 ] When one approaches the images of these Hybernian mysteries in Akashic evolution, one senses something that has a repulsive effect. It is as if one were being held back by a force, as if one could not draw near with one’s soul. And the closer one comes, the more that which one seeks to reach with one’s soul becomes obscured, and one experiences something like a spiritual numbness. One must work one’s way through this spiritual numbness. One can do so only by allowing everything one already knows—whether similar experiences, self-discovered insights, or independently perceived truths—to come alive within oneself. And one then realizes why this is so. One then realizes that these Hyberian Mysteries were indeed the final echo of an ancient era from the divine-spiritual powers of humanity, but that at the time when the Hyberian Mysteries receded into the shadow realm, they were simultaneously surrounded spiritually by a dense wall, so that human beings cannot fathom them passively, or perceive them, and that he cannot approach them except by awakening his spiritual activity within himself—that is, by becoming a true human being of the modern age. I would like to say: access to the Hybernian Mysteries has been closed off at the same time so that people cannot approach the Mysteries in the old way, but are instead led to experience what must be found inwardly by human beings in the epoch of freedom is truly experienced as an activity of consciousness—not through a historical, nor even a Hellesian-historical, contemplation of ancient, wondrous, great mysteries before one has set out on the path to arrive at these mysteries through one’s own inner activity.

[ 38 ] Thus, the great mysteries of Hybernia most intensely foreshadow how a new age begins in the era in which the Hybernian mysteries sink into the realm of shadows. “But even today, they can once again be beheld in all their glory and majesty by the soul being sustained by inner freedom, for through genuine inner activity one can draw near to them, one can overcome that which strikes back at one, that which seeks to numb, that which stands before the soul as a barrier to what was still revealed here—even into the latest times—to those being initiated: the great ancient mysteries of the former, albeit instinctive, but no less exalted spiritual wisdom that once poured forth over the humanity of the Earth as a primal force of the soul. The most beautiful and significant monuments of later times to the primordial wisdom of humankind, to the primordial grace of the divine-spiritual beings as it was revealed in the primordial state of humanity—the most beautiful spiritual and soulful monuments of this era—are those images that can reveal themselves to us as we turn our gaze toward the Mysteries of Hybernia.