The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us once again consider the soul and reflect on the significance of the fact that those truths and insights, which were enshrined in the Mysteries of Hybernia, had, in a certain sense, become dulled—that is, had failed to produce any further effect during their journey from the West to Central Europe—to the East, and that, even in matters of religion, the spiritual has been replaced by an external, sensory perception—or at least by the tradition and transmission of this sensory perception. Let us once again bring to mind the picture that emerged at the end of our last exposition. We have pointed to the Christ Being in the Mysteries of Hybernia; we have also pointed to it during the time when this Mystery of Golgotha took place. It was the initiators and their disciples in Hybernia who—without this Mystery of Golgotha having taken place in their midst for their sensory perception, and without any news having been able to reach them—celebrated this Mystery simultaneously as a universal festival, because they were clearly aware through their insight that this Mystery of Golgotha was unfolding externally at the same time.

[ 2 ] Thus, for the initiators and their students in Hybernia, the need had arisen to experience a sensually real event solely in a mental, spiritual way. And for the mindsets and perspectives on knowledge that were common in Hybernia, it was not necessary to have anything more than the spiritual in the physical world.

[ 3 ] This makes it clear, however, that in Hybernia the spiritual realm was regarded as paramount above all else. Indeed, through all manner of hidden currents of spiritual life, what was inaugurated in Hybernia spread across the British Isles, through Brittany, through what is now the Netherlands and Belgium, and even through what is now Alsace, reaching Central Europe. And even if not within general civilization, we do find in the first centuries of Christian development, throughout all the regions just mentioned, here and there individual people who were able to understand what had come over from the mysteries of Hybernia. But as I said, it did not become part of mainstream civilization. And one must approach these matters with a deep thirst for knowledge in order to find these individual personalities—who were still numerous in the early Christian centuries but became increasingly scarce in later centuries, particularly from the eighth and ninth through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries— personalities who, even if they gathered only a small number of disciples around them, quietly carried on—apart from the wider world and its civilization—what had been initiated on the Hybernian island in Western Europe.

[ 4 ] In general, what spread throughout Europe was that which did not require direct spiritual insight, but could be based on mere historical tradition, which simply recounted what had occurred as physical events in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. And it is precisely from this current that what gradually took shape—the tendency to accept only what took place in physical life—originated. People became less and less aware of the colossal contradiction inherent in presenting that which—like the Mystery of Golgotha—can only be comprehended through the deepest spiritual life, solely in an external form tied to the sensory realm. Yet this became the necessary course of cultural development in Europe.

[ 5 ] Essentially, all of this had been in the making for a long time, and it could only have come about because so much—so very much—of the ancient mystery traditions, even as they existed in Greece, had been forgotten. For these Greek mysteries were actually divided into two categories: those that were primarily concerned with directing the human mind toward the spiritual worlds—toward the actual guidance and orientation of the worlds in the spirit— and those that dealt with the mysteries of nature—with the forces and beings reigning in nature, particularly those residing in the earthly forces. Those who were to be fully initiated did, in fact, undergo both types of mysteries. And it was said of them that they had absorbed within themselves both the mysteries of the Father—the mysteries of Zeus—and the mysteries of the Mother—the mysteries of Demeter. And when we look back on those times, we find there—alongside a spiritual vision reaching into the highest realms, albeit with a certain degree of abstraction, but nevertheless reaching into the highest realms—a vision of nature that delves into the depths and, above all, what is particularly important, the connection between the two.

[ 6 ] This connection between the two—the fact that is little recognized today, namely that human beings contain certain external substances from nature within themselves but do not contain certain other substances from nature—was observed in the deepest sense precisely in the chthonic mysteries of Greece. As you know, human beings carry iron within them in an organized form. They also carry other metals within them; they carry calcium, sodium, magnesium, and so on—certain metals. But humans do not contain certain metals at all—if one considers only that these metals should be found by analyzing the human being’s physical composition using ordinary scientific methods. For example, according to this external examination, humans do not contain lead, copper, mercury, tin, silver, or gold.

[ 7 ] This was the great mystery for those to be initiated into the Greek mysteries, which culminated in the question: How is it that human beings, for example, contain iron, calcium, and sodium within themselves, that they contain other substances found in the external natural world, yet do not contain, for example, lead or tin? People were deeply convinced that the human being was a small world, a microcosm. And yet, it seemed as if the human being did not contain these metals: lead, tin, mercury, silver, and gold.

[ 8 ] As for the older initiates in Greece, one can truly say that they believed: “It only seems that way.” For they were deeply imbued with the realization that human beings are true microcosms—that is, that they carry within themselves everything that manifests in the world.

[ 9 ] Let’s take a brief look into the mind of someone about to be initiated in Greece. For example, he was taught—I must summarize in a few sentences something that spanned many hours of instruction, but you will understand me—that he was told: “Look, just as the Earth today contains iron everywhere within itself—and iron is also present in human beings—so too, at a time when the Earth was not yet the Earth but existed in a previous planetary state, this Earth—which was then still the Moon or even the Sun—also contained within itself lead, tin, and so on, and all beings that participated in this earlier form of the Earth also participated in these metals and their powers, just as modern humans participate in the power of iron. But during the transformations that the Earth’s earlier form underwent, only iron remained as a substance present in such strength and density that human beings can be permeated by it. The other metals mentioned are indeed contained within the Earth, but they are no longer present in a form that would allow human beings to penetrate them directly. However, they are contained in an incredibly稀薄 state throughout the entire cosmic space that pertains to human beings.

[ 10 ] When I look at a small piece of lead, it is the familiar grayish-white metal. It has a certain density. You can touch it. But this same lead, which occurs in the lead ores of the Earth, is present in an infinitely fine dilution throughout the entire world space belonging to humankind and has its significance there. Its significance in the cosmos is that it radiates its forces everywhere—even where there appears to be no lead at all—and yet human beings come into contact with these forces of lead, though no longer through their physical body, but only through their etheric body. For outside of the Earth’s lead ores, lead is present in such a dilution that it can act only upon the human etheric body. And it does act upon the etheric body even in this state, in which it is spread throughout the entire world space in infinite dilution.

[ 11 ] And then the student of the Greek chthonic mysteries learned that just as the Earth—which is in fact infinitely rich in iron, a planet of which an inhabitant of another planet might say, “It is rich in iron”—has only Mars as its counterpart in this abundance of iron—just as the Earth is rich in iron, so Saturn is rich in lead. What iron is to the Earth, lead is to Saturn. And one must assume —as the initiate into the Chthonic Mysteries in Greece learned—that once, when that separation of Saturn from the general planetary form that the Earth once possessed took place, as described in my Occult Science, this particular distribution with regard to lead also occurred at the time when Saturn separated from that general form. Saturn, so to speak, took the lead with it and, through its own planetary life force and its own planetary heat, maintains it in such a state that it can permeate the entire planetary system—to which our Earth also belongs—with these finely distributed lead forces.

[ 12 ] So one must imagine the following: Earth, in the vast expanses of Saturn, which, however, fills the entire planetary system with fine lead, with the fine lead substance. This fine lead substance has an effect on human beings. And we can still find traces of this as well—that the initiate in Greece was made aware of it, that this student came to understand how this lead works. He knew: Our senses, especially the sense of sight, would completely absorb the whole human being, preventing him from achieving independence. The human being would merely see, unable to reflect on what is seen, unable to step back from what is seen and say, “I see.” He would be completely overwhelmed by the act of seeing were it not for this effect of lead. It is this effect of lead that makes the human being independent within himself, that sets him, as the “I,” in opposition to the receptivity to the external world that lives within him. And it is these lead forces that first enter the human etheric body, but then, from the etheric body, permeate the physical body in a certain way. Through this, the human being acquires the capacity for recollection, for memory.

[ 13 ] And it was always a momentous occasion when such a student—like the Greek student of the chthonic mysteries—after having come to understand such things, was led to the following. The substance of lead was shown to him with the utmost solemnity. Then his mind was directed upward toward Saturn. Then the connection between Saturn and earthly lead was brought before his soul. Then he was told: Just as you see this lead, so does the earth contain it. But the earth, in its present state, is not capable of directly giving the lead a form such that it could act within the human being. But Saturn, with its entirely different thermal state and its inner life forces, radiates the lead into planetary space; and through this, you are an independent human being, a human being capable of memory. Remember that you are a human being only because you still know today what you knew ten or twenty years ago. Just think of how your humanity suffers if you do not carry within you what you carried ten or twenty years ago. Your sense of self would be fragmented if the power of memory were not fully present. You owe this to what radiates toward you from distant Saturn. It is the force that has come to rest in the Earth’s lead and, in this state of rest, can no longer act upon human beings. Thus, Saturn’s lead force ensures that thoughts take root within you, that they resurface from the depths of the soul after a certain time, and that you can live in a lasting, rather than merely temporary, relationship with the outer world. It is thanks to this lead-Saturn force that you do not merely see the objects around you today and forget them tomorrow, but that you can retain them; that you can allow what you experienced years ago to come alive again in your soul; you can shape your inner soul life in accordance with what you experienced in your surroundings during your earthly life.

[ 14 ] At first, this made a tremendous impression on the student, because such a concept had been presented to him with great solemnity—but with a serious, unsentimental solemnity. But then he also came to understand: Yes, if only this lead-Saturn force were at work, if only this lead-Saturn force were to give human beings the capacity for an “I” and the capacity for memory, then human beings would indeed become completely alienated from the cosmos. If only this Saturn force were present, human beings would indeed be able to take in what they have seen with their physical eyes into their memory and make it permanent for earthly life; yet they would become estranged from the cosmos. They would, in a sense, become hermits in their earthly existence, inspired by Saturn to have the capacity for memory.

[ 15 ] There the student came to realize that this Saturn force must have an opposite: the force of the Moon. Let us assume that the two are positioned such that the power of Saturn and the power of the Moon, coming from opposite directions but flowing into one another, reach the Earth—and thus also humanity. What Saturn takes from human beings, the Moon gives; what Saturn gives to human beings, the Moon takes. And just as the Earth possesses a force in iron that human beings can process internally—a force that Saturn possesses in lead—so the Moon possesses this same force in silver.

[ 16 ] Silver, too, as it exists in the earth, has already reached a state in which it cannot enter the human body. But the entire sphere occupied by the Moon is in fact permeated by finely dispersed silver. The Moon exerts an influence—especially when its light comes from the direction of Leo—such that, through this silvery power of the Moon, the human being experiences the opposite effect of Saturn’s leaden power; that is, he is not alienated from the macrocosm, even though he is graciously inspired from the universe with the power of memory. And it was a particularly solemn moment when the Greek student was led there, when Saturn and the Moon stood opposite one another in this way and could be seen, and then, in the solemnity of the night, it was made clear to the student: Look up at Saturn, encircled by its rings. To it you owe what you are as a self-contained human being. And look toward the other side, at the silver-radiant Moon. It is thanks to the Moon that you can endure the power of Saturn without detaching yourself from the cosmos.

[ 17 ] You see, in this way—in direct connection with humanity’s relationship to the cosmos—what was practiced in Greece came to be called “astrology” in later caricatures. It was true wisdom, for people did not merely see the star as a point of light or a speck of light up above; rather, they saw in the star a spiritually living being and the human being on Earth in connection with this spiritually living being. They had a natural science that reached up into the heavenly realms and extended out into the vastness of the universe. And then, once the student had gained such glimpses of light, such insights into the light, once this had been deeply inscribed in his soul, he was led—for example, in the true Mysteries of Eleusis, as was customary—before two statues, as you have seen in my descriptions of other Mysteries, including the Hybernian Mysteries. And one of these statues represented to him a fatherly deity, that fatherly deity who was surrounded by the signs of the planetary and solar realms; that fatherly statue, which represented to him, for example, the radiant Saturn, but so radiant that the student was reminded: “Yes, that is the leaden radiance of the cosmos”; just as he was reminded by the moon: Yes, that is the silver radiance of the Moon, and so on with each individual planet. Thus, in the statue representing the Fatherly, he perceived what mysteries radiated from the Earth’s planetary surroundings—mysteries related to the individual metals of the Earth, which, however, had already become useless to the human inner being within the Earth.

[ 18 ] Behold, the disciple was told, there stands the Father of the World before you. The Father of the World bears lead in Saturn, tin in Jupiter, iron—which is akin to the earthly being, though in a completely different state—in Mars, radiant gold in the Sun, radiant, flowing copper in Venus, radiant mercury in Mercury, and radiant silver in the Moon. You carry within you only that part of the metallic element which you were able to assimilate from the planetary states that the Earth once possessed. From the present state, you can assimilate only iron. But as an earthly human being, you are not a whole. What the Father standing before you shows you in the metals—which cannot exist within you today as a result of your earthly existence, but which you must now draw from the cosmos—in the Father you have your other half, if you consider yourself a human being who has passed through the Earth’s planetary transformations. Only then are you a whole human being. Here on Earth, you stand as a part of the human being. The Father carries the other part before you, around his head and in his arms. What stands here before you, together with what he carries—that is what you truly are. You stand on Earth. But this Earth was not always as it is today. If it had always been this way, you could not exist on it as a human being. For it carries within itself—albeit in a dead state—the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars—in a different state, that is—the gold of the Sun, the silver of the Moon, the copper of Venus, and the mercury of Mercury; it carries all of this within itself. But just as it contains them, these metals are merely memories of the way in which silver once lived within the Earth during the Moon’s existence, gold during the Sun’s existence, and lead during Saturn’s existence. And what appears to you today in the dense metallic masses of lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, mercury, and silver—with the exception of the iron you actually know, which is not the iron found deep within the Earth, for that is Martian in nature—what appears to you today in these compact, dense metals once poured forth from the cosmos into the Earth in an entirely different state. These metals, as you know them today from the Earth, are the corpses of the former metal beings. Lead is the corpse of that metal being which played out its role on Earth in its ancient form during the Saturn era and later, to a different degree, during the Moon era. Tin, together with gold, played a role on Earth during the Sun Age in a completely different state—if you behold it in spirit, then this statue, in what it presents to you today, becomes a truly fatherly statue. And in the spirit, as in a real vision, the statue of the true Mysteries at Eleusis came to life and handed to the female figure standing beside it that which the metals once were. And the female figure received this former form of the metals in the disciple’s vision and clothed it with that which the Earth, of its own accord, could give when it became Earth.

[ 19 ] This is how the student saw this wondrous process, this wondrous event: There, just as now once again symbolically, the metallic mass radiated from the father’s statue hand, and that which was earth—let us say, for example, its limestone or other rock—came into contact with what was radiating in, and surrounded the metallic inflow with earthly substance, just as the hand lovingly reaching upward from the one maternal statue received that which was bestowed upon the maternal statue by the paternal statue in the form of metallic power. This was a profound and powerful impression, for one could see within it the cosmic and the earthly interacting over the course of the eons. And one learned to perceive what the Earth offers in its true nature.

[ 20 ] Take a look at some of the metallic substances found in the earth. They have crystallized them. They have surrounded them with a kind of crust, with that which comes from the earth. The metallic element comes from the cosmos; that which is of the earth lovingly receives what comes from the cosmos. You see this everywhere out there, where people walk around the sites where metals are found and tend to the metals. And that which met the metal there was called the Mother. And the most important of these earthly substances, which stood opposite the heavenly-metallic to receive it, were called the Mothers.

[ 21 ] This is also a aspect for those “mothers” to whom Faust descends. At the same time, he descends into the Earth’s pre-earthly times to witness there how the maternal Earth absorbs within itself that which is given to her from the cosmos in a fatherly manner.

[ 22 ] Through all of this, a sense of empathy with the cosmos was stirred within the initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries—an inner, heartfelt understanding of what the products and processes of nature on Earth truly are.

[ 23 ] My dear friends, when people today look at these natural processes, look at these products of nature—it’s all dead, it’s all just a corpse. And when we tinker with physics or chemistry, what are we doing other than doing to nature the very same thing that the anatomist ultimately does when he cuts open a corpse in the dissection room, where he has the dead body of that which is destined for life. In this way, with our chemistry and our physics, we cut into living nature. But the Greek student was given a different natural science: the natural science of the living, which made him view today’s lead as the corpse of lead. One must go back to the times when lead was alive. There, the mysterious relationship of the human being to the universe, the mysterious relationship of the human being to what surrounds him in the earthly realm, became clear to him.

[ 24 ] And then, once the student had gone through all this, once it had been deeply imprinted upon his soul before the statues of the father and the mother—which represented the two opposing forces, the forces of the cosmos and the forces of the earthly realm—within his soul, he was led, so to speak, into the Holy of Holies, even in Greece. There he saw the image before him: the female figure nursing the child at her breast. Then he was introduced to the meaning of the words: “And this is the god Jakchos, who will come one day.” In this way, the Greek student learned to understand the mystery of Christ in advance.

[ 25 ] Once again, Christ had been presented in a spiritual sense to those who were to be initiated at Eleusis. But at that time, people were initially only allowed to come to know this Christ as the One to come—as the One who was still a child, a child of the worlds, who was yet to come of age in the cosmos. Those to be initiated were called “telestoi”: those who were to look toward the end, toward the goal of Earth’s evolution.

[ 26 ] And now came the great turning point. It was the turning point that, in historical terms, is most clearly expressed in the transition from Plato to Aristotle.

[ 27 ] You see, it is a peculiar thing, my dear friends. As the fourth century approached in the development of Greek culture, the first shift toward abstraction took place. And it took place in such a way that between Plato and Aristotle—when Plato was already very old, when Plato was actually nearing the end of his career—the following scene took place between Plato and Aristotle. Plato said—I must put this into words, though of course it unfolded in a much more complicated way—something like the following to Aristotle:

[ 28 ] Some things did not seem quite right to you as I presented them to you and the other students. But what I presented to you and the other students is, after all, the essence of ancient sacred mystery wisdom. But in the course of their evolution, human beings will take on a form, a shape, an inner organization that will gradually lead them to something indeed higher than what we now have in human beings—but which makes it impossible for human beings to accept what natural science, in the manner I have described today, was among the Greeks. — Plato made this clear to Aristotle. — “And that is why I intend to withdraw for a while,” said Plato, “and leave you to your own devices. Try, in the world of thought—for which you have a special aptitude, and which is to become the world of human thought over many centuries—try to develop in your mind what you have absorbed here in my school.”

[ 29 ] Aristotle and Plato remained apart, and Plato thus carried out a lofty intellectual mission precisely through Aristotle.

[ 30 ] You see, my dear friends, I must describe this scene to you just as I have described it a moment ago. But if you look in the history books, you will find this scene described there as well, and I will now tell it to you as it is described in the history books from which people learn. There it is described as follows: Aristotle was actually always a somewhat wayward student of Plato, so much so that Plato is said to have remarked once that Aristotle was indeed a gifted student, but that he was like a horse being trained by someone who then kicks his trainer with his hoof. And whatever transpired between Aristotle and Plato led more and more to Plato distancing himself from Aristotle, becoming angry, and no longer going to the Academy to teach at all. That’s what the history books say.

[ 31 ] One account is found in the history books; the other—what I have told you—is the truth and holds within it the impetus for something very significant. For you see, there were two kinds of Aristotle’s writings. One contained significant natural science—the very natural science that was Bleusis’s natural science, which reached Aristotle indirectly through Plato; and the other type of writings contains the ideas—the abstract ideas—that Aristotle was charged with presenting, on Plato’s behalf, indeed on behalf of the task that Plato himself had been given by the Eleusinian Mysteries.

[ 32 ] And what Aristotle actually had to offer also took a twofold path. One was the so-called logical writings—those logical treatises that drew out the most enduring ideas from the ancient Eleusinian wisdom. Aristotle entrusted these writings, which contained less natural science, to his student Theophrastus. And via Theophrastus—and through other detours as well—they made their way through Greece and Rome, forming, throughout the Middle Ages, the body of teaching wisdom for those active in civilization, for the teachers of worldviews in Central Europe.

[ 33 ] And what had come about in the way I told you last time—what had come about because one had to reject the mystery wisdom of Hybernia and could only build upon what was, in turn, the tradition of what unfolded sensually at the beginning of the calendar—this was connected with what had been separated from the wisdom of Plato, which is still found in Aristotle, or rather, the wisdom of the Eleusinian Mysteries. But for what was truly natural science—which still bore within itself the spirit of the chthonic mysteries, which had subsequently flowed only into the Eleusinian mysteries; a natural science that reached out toward the heavens, that roamed the vastness of the cosmos to explain the earthly—for this natural science, the time had passed in Greece. And whatever was to be saved of this natural science could only be saved insofar as Aristotle became Alexander’s teacher, who led his campaigns into Asia, and who introduced as much of Aristotelian natural science as was possible to the East—a science that then passed into the Jewish and Arab schools, from there crossed over to Spain via Africa, and, in a filtered form, exerted a partial influence on what was unfolding in Central Europe, as I have shown you, emerging from the Iberian Mysteries among individual, solitary people. Theophrastus bequeathed his Aristotle to the Church Fathers of the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great carried the other Aristotle over to Asia: that Eleusinian wisdom, which had then reached Spain via Africa in a vastly diluted form and shone forth in the Middle Ages, having been cultivated—despite the prevailing civilization—even in individual monasteries—for example, by Basilius Valentinus, who, I might say, has come down to posterity in mythical form. That lives there within; that lives, I would say, beneath the surface, while on the surface lives precisely that culture of which I spoke to you last time. For in all that which constituted general civilization, in all of that, what could still be taught even in Aristotle’s time does not live: Christ must truly be recognized.

[ 34 ] The third image—the female figure carrying the child at her breast, the child of Jakcho—must also be understood. But what is needed to understand this third figure must first come about in the course of human development—this is precisely what Aristotle himself had often said to his student, Alexander the Great, through circumstances such as those I have just described to you, even though he was unable to put it into writing.

[ 35 ] And so we see how the call lies within the bosom of the ages to understand, in its original reality, what was then so beautifully depicted by Christian painters: the mother with the child at her breast—yet this has not been fully understood, neither in Raphael’s Madonna nor in the Eastern icon, and it still awaits comprehension.

[ 36 ] Some of what is necessary to arrive at such an understanding will be discussed here in these lectures over the coming period. Tomorrow I will trace the path that carried certain profound occult mysteries from Arabia to Europe, in order to establish a certain historical phenomenon in your minds. And in the lectures—which are intended to present the occult foundation of humanity’s historical development and which will be given to the delegates at Christmas—I will, of course, also have to explain, at the appropriate point, the full significance of Alexander’s campaigns in connection with Aristotelianism.