The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twelfth Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the past few weeks, I have spoken here about various forms of the Mysteries. In particular, we have sought to gain insights into those Mysteries which, as the last great Mysteries, so to speak, directly linked the human inner being to existence in nature, to the spirit of existence in nature. These were the Mysteries of Hybernia. And we have seen how, through insights into the human being itself—insights that were, however, of a thoroughly intimate spiritual nature, indeed of an individually personal nature—the Greek Mysteries penetrated into the innermost being of the human being. One might well say: just as in the external natural world the most diverse regions of the earth bear this or that vegetation, so too, in the course of human development, the most diverse influences from the spiritual world upon human beings manifest themselves in the most varied regions of the earth.

[ 2 ] If we were to travel to the Orient—which, historically speaking, is set to happen in the coming days—we would discover many other aspects of mystery drama. But today—since not all of the visitors are present yet—I would rather build upon what has already been discussed than begin something new.

[ 3 ] One might say: When we look back at the development of humanity, a threefold development emerges with complete clarity before our imaginative consciousness. I say “with complete clarity before the imaginative consciousness” because, if one extends the epochs I am about to discuss further back in time, one naturally arrives at a number greater than three; and the same is true if one looks further into the future. But today let us consider these middle stages of human development—which do not arise only through inspiration but already appear with complete clarity before the imagination—from a certain perspective.

[ 4 ] Even well into the Egyptian era, the reality for humanity was that, from the perspective of the consciousness of both the African-European and Asian peoples at that time, what we today call “matter” did not exist at all. Not even the coarse, external substances existed in human consciousness, let alone those abstractions we now refer to as carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, and so on. These things did not exist; rather, everything that extended out in nature was directly regarded as the bodies of the divine-spiritual beings who reveal themselves throughout all of nature. Today we go into the mountains, step on a stone, perhaps even pick it up, and see in it an indifferent substance. Nothing even remotely similar comes to our consciousness as it did to the ancient Egyptians or the people of the ancient Orient.

[ 5 ] Isn't it true that today, when we stand face to face with a person and, say, touch their fingers, we do not regard what we are touching on that person's finger as something indifferent? We regard it as something that belongs to their entire human organism. And when we look, for example, at the tip of a person’s index finger, we cannot help but say to ourselves: this is part of a whole organism.

[ 6 ] This was the case with the ancient Egyptians; this was the case with the ancient peoples of the Orient in their consciousness. When they stepped on a stone or picked up a stone, it was not merely an indifferent stone to them as it is to us today; to them, it was not at all an ordinary earthly substance; to them, it was a part of the divine body, as the earth appeared to them. And just as we relate in our consciousness today to the skin of a human being, so did the ancients relate to the outer surface of the earth. When we approach a person today and, due to particular circumstances, become aware that he or she reminds us of another person we already know—who may not be present at the moment—and when the circumstances reveal that this person we are meeting is the sister or brother of that other person, then it immediately occurs to us: there is a shared bond of flesh and blood between these two people; in a certain sense, they belong together physically. And when the ancient Greeks or the ancient Orientals raised their gaze to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and then looked at the Earth, they saw in this Earth, first and foremost, the divine body of the Earth god, but at the same time they saw in this Earth the sister or brother—in short, the sibling relationship—to the planets circling around the Earth: Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn.

[ 7 ] And so there was something thoroughly spiritual in the ancient people’s perception of the entire cosmos and of the Earth as a part of that cosmos. You need only look deep within yourselves to imagine how this meant something entirely different for the soul than what people feel today. It is indeed significant to behold the divine body in the Earth, to see in the Earth a sisterly member in relation to all the other planets of the solar system! For the ancients conceived of the entire universe as filled with gods. And for them, not only was the entire Earth filled with gods, but—apart from the great planetary bodies—every single part of these planetary entities was also filled with gods. In stone and tree, in river and rock, in clouds and lightning, various spiritual-divine beings revealed themselves. This awareness was awakened among broad segments of the population across the Earth, and this awareness was deepened through the manifold forms of mystery rituals that were found here and there on Earth.

[ 8 ] And when we trace the Greek essence back to that time when Greece’s external political greatness declined into a kind of popular chaos and the Macedonian essence emerged, then we find that, indeed, something flooded into human knowledge and human understanding at that time—something we last encountered here in the form of Aristotelianism, something we came to know as the spiritual mission Alexander the Great had set for himself in relation to his people. When we arrive, on the one hand, at this culminating point of Hellenism and, on the other hand, at the downfall of Hellenism and the Macedonian essence, we see, in contrast to what external history—which is in reality a historical legend—presents, an impulse emerging from the very depths of consciousness, particularly among the deeper spirits, an impulse that sprang from those mysteries to which Aristotle was quite close, even though he never spoke of them outwardly. It was these mysteries that, in the deepest sense and with full vitality, awakened in their listeners the awareness that the entire world is a theogony, a becoming of gods; that one views the world in a thoroughly illusory way if one believes that anything other than gods comes into being in the world. It is the gods who embody the essences of the world; it is the gods who have experiences in this world; it is the gods who perform deeds. And what one sees as clouds, what one hears as thunder, what one perceives as lightning, what one perceives on earth as rivers and mountains, what one perceives on earth in the mineral realms—these are the revelations, the manifestations of the unfolding of the destinies of the gods who lie hidden behind them. And what manifests outwardly in the cloud, in lightning and thunder, in the tree and the forest, in the river and the mountain—this is nothing other than what the divine presence, which is everywhere, reveals, just as a person’s skin reveals the inner soul of that person. And if gods are everywhere, then one must distinguish—as the students of the mysteries in northern Greece were taught—between the lesser gods, who are present in individual natural beings and processes, and the greater gods, who manifest as the essential beings of the Sun, Mars, Mercury, and a fourth who cannot be made visible externally through an image or a form. These were the great gods, the great planetary gods—those great planetary gods who were treated in such a way that the human gaze was directed upward toward outer space, so that not only the eye but also the whole heart might behold that which dwells in the Sun, Mars, and Mercury—but which does not live only out there in this small circle of outer space, which lives everywhere in outer space, and which, above all, draws near to human beings.

[ 9 ] And after a—I would say—majestic impulse had first been awakened in the student of the Northern Greek Mysteries by his gaze being directed upward toward the planetary spheres themselves, this gaze was then deepened in a human sense to such an extent that, as it were, the eye was seized by the heart in order to see spiritually. Then the initiate understood why three symbolically shaped jugs had been placed on the altar before him.

[ 10 ] We once used a replica of these jugs here in a eurythmic performance of Faust, and these jugs looked exactly as they did back then—just as they appeared in the Samothracian and Northern Greek mysteries. But the essential point was that, in their entire symbolic form, these jugs were used in a consecration ritual, a sacrificial rite. A kind of incense was placed in these jugs, set alight; the smoke streamed out, and three words—which we will discuss tomorrow—were spoken with mantric power by the officiating priest into the smoke rising from these jugs, and the figures of the three Cabiri appeared. They appeared because the human breath—the exhalation through the mantric word—took shape and imparted its form to the rising, vaporizing substance that had been incorporated into the symbolic jugs. And as the student learned in this way to read his own breaths—as he learned to read what these very breaths inscribed into the smoke—he simultaneously learned to read what the mysterious planets spoke to him from the vast cosmos. For now he knew: just as one of the Kabirs was shaped by the mantric word and its power, so in reality was Mercury; just as the second Kabir was shaped, so in reality was Mars; just as the third Kabir was shaped, so in reality was Apollo, the Sun.

[ 11 ] And when one looks at those figures from fashion magazines—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—which, unfortunately, are most often seen in galleries alongside late Greek sculpture, and whom one greatly admires because one has no idea of their origins—if one looks at those fashion-magazine-style figures of Apollo, Mars, and Mercury, but views them with that Goethean gaze, the gaze that Goethe applied during his Italian journey, in order to gain, through these fashion-magazine-style figures, an inkling of what Greek art actually was in those creations that perished along with so much else that, in the first centuries after the founding of Christianity, was cast into the terrible devastation that took hold at that time—if one looks, so to speak, through these late Greek sculptural figures, which, I would say, on the one hand rightly, because they were pioneering, and on the other hand wrongly, because they are merely afterimages of what came before, are held in high regard when one looks back at that from which they arose, then one sees how, in the earlier Greek period, the sacrificial revelations were reenacted—revelations that had come about in earlier times in an even more majestic, magnificent way than later at Samothrace during the Cabirian Mysteries. One looks back to those times when the mantric word was spoken into the sacrificial smoke, and the true forms of Apollo, Mars, and Mercury appeared.

[ 12 ] Those were the times when people did not say, in the abstract: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”—those were the times when people could say something entirely different, when they could say: “The exhalation takes shape within me, and as the exhalation takes shape in a regular manner, it reveals itself to be an afterimage of cosmic creation, for it creates for me, out of the sacrificial smoke, forms that are for me the living inscriptions which convey to me what the planetary worlds wish to tell me.”

[ 13 ] And when the initiate of the Cabirian Mysteries on Samothrace approached the gates of these places of initiation, his training had given him the feeling: Yes, now I am entering that which encompasses the magical acts of the sacrificing Father. For “Father” was the name given to the officiating initiators of these mysteries. “And what revealed to the initiate the magical power of these officiating Fathers? Through what the gods have placed within human beings—through the power of language—the priestly magician and sage inscribed into the sacrificial smoke those characters that articulated the secrets of the universe.

[ 14 ] That is why, as he approached the gate, the disciple said in his heart: “I am entering that which encompasses a mighty spirit, that which encompasses the great gods—those great gods who, through the sacrificial rites of humankind, reveal the mysteries of the universe on Earth.”

[ 15 ] That was a language that was spoken there, and a script that was written there, which truly engaged not merely the human mind, but the whole person. And in the Samothracian mysteries, there was still something of a knowledge that has, of course, been completely lost today. Today, people are certainly capable of speaking truthfully about how a quartz crystal feels, how a piece of iron feels to me, how a piece of antimony feels, how a strand of hair feels, how human skin feels, how an animal’s fur feels, how silk and velvet feel; that is what people today are quite capable of bringing to mind through their sense of touch. In the Samothracian Mysteries, there was still something present that enabled people to say truthfully how the gods could be felt. For the sense of touch was still capable of what it was fully capable of in ancient times: sensing the spiritual, feeling the gods. And the truly marvelous thing is this: indeed, one must go back to earlier times if one is to speak in all sincerity of how people could say with truth, “I know through my fingertips how the gods feel.” But in the Samothracian Mysteries there was another art of sensing the gods; it consisted of the following.

[ 16 ] As the priestly magician spoke the words into the sacrificial smoke—that is, as he let the words resound in his exhalation—he felt in his outgoing breath what a person otherwise feels when he reaches out a groping hand. And just as one knows that one feels with one’s fingertips in ever-changing ways, running them over fabric—whether feeling velvet, silk, cat fur, or human skin—so too did the Samothracian priest-magician perceive with the air he exhaled, and he perceived the breath he sent radiating toward the sacrificial smoke as an outstretching of something that came from within himself: he perceived the breath as a tactile organ reaching out toward the smoke. He felt the smoke. And in the smoke he sensed the great gods coming toward him—the Kabirs; he sensed, in the way the smoke took shape and in the way the forms that were taking shape there approached the exhalation from the outside, so that the exhalation felt: there is roundness, there is angularity, something is reaching out to meet me. The entire divine form of the Kabir was perceived by touch through the breath clothed in the word. With the language that came from the heart, the Samothracian sage perceived the Kabirs—that is, the great gods—descending toward him through the sacrificial smoke. And there was a living interaction between the Logos within the human being and the Logos out there in the vastness of the worlds.

[ 17 ] And as the initiating father led the disciple before the sacrificial altar and gradually taught him how to feel through language, and as the disciple progressed further and further and became immersed in this feeling through language, the disciple finally reached that stage of inner experience in which he first had a clear awareness of the form of Mercury, Hermes, what Apollo is like, and what Ares—Mars—is like. It was as if the person’s entire consciousness had been lifted out of his body, as if what the student had previously known as the contents of his head were now above his head, as if the heart were located in a new place, having risen from the chest into the head. And then, within this human being who had truly transcended himself, arose that which took inner form in the words: “Thus do the Cabiri, the great gods, will you to be.” From that moment on, the student knew how Mercury lived within him in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, and Mars in his speech.

[ 18 ] You see, it was by no means only natural processes and entities in the external world that were presented to the students in ancient times. What was presented to them was neither a one-sidedly naturalistic view nor a one-sidedly moral one, but rather something in which morality and nature merged into one. And that was precisely the secret of the Samothracian world: the student was imbued with the awareness that nature is spirit, and spirit is nature.

[ 19 ] From those times, whose final echoes can be found in the Samothracian Kabiri rites, comes the insight that unites earthly substances with the entire heavens. In ancient times, when people saw that reddish-brownish mineral with a coppery luster—when they saw what we now call copper—they simply could not say, as we do today: “That is copper; it is a component of the Earth”—for they could not conceive of such a thing. For the ancients, this was not a component of the earth, but rather the work of Venus within the earth, which manifested itself everywhere as copper. The earth produced only rocks such as sandstone and limestone in order to receive within its bosom what the heavens had planted in the earth. And just as we cannot say today—when we have the soil here (it is drawn) and we sow a plant seed into the soil: “This seed has grown out of the soil”—so too, when one had the Earth’s surface here and a copper ore within the Earth, one could not say back then: “This copper ore is a component of the Earth.” What one had to say was: The earth here, with its sandstone or other rock, is the soil, and whatever metallic substance is contained within it was planted into the earth by some planet. That is a seed, planted into the earth by a planet. Everything that existed on earth in this way was regarded as having been impulsed into the earth from heaven.

[ 20 ] When we study the Earth today and learn about its substances, we describe everything in such a way—just look at any book on mineralogy or geology—that we are describing the Earth itself. That is not how it was described in ancient science. Back then, one’s gaze wandered over the Earth; but upon seeing the substances, one had to look up toward the heavens, and there, in the heavens, one saw the essential nature of the substances. Copper, tin, and lead appear to lie merely in the Earth. Yet they are the seeds that were planted here during the ancient Sun and Moon eras, from the heavens into earthly existence.

[ 21 ] But such was also the teaching of the Cabiri in the Samothracian Mysteries. After all, that was what, at the very least, had an impact on Aristotle and Alexander the Great as an “atmosphere of knowledge.” And then the foundation was laid for something entirely different.

[ 22 ] Humanity did not immediately descend from heaven to earth with its insight, but first passed through an intermediate stage in ancient times. And even in the echoes of those ancient times—the Samothracian Mysteries—when people sought to describe the metals of the earth or other earthly substances, such as sulfur or phosphorus, they were actually describing the heavens, just as one describes a plant when seeking to understand the essence of the seed. After all, when you have a seed in front of you, you cannot recognize the nature of that seed unless you recognize the plant. What good is such a seed that looks like this if you don’t know what anise looks like? What, the ancients would have said, would you do with the copper that appears in the earth if you don’t know what Venus looks like—spiritually, soulfully, and physically—up there in the heavens?

[ 23 ] And astronomy gradually—one might say—became the study of orbits and the study of the atmosphere, in that when one looked at earthly things, one no longer described what the stars were in their essence, but rather, when one saw an earthly being, one said to oneself: First of all, what we see in the solid earth lives within it; but then there also lives within it what we see in the liquid, which tends toward a drop-like form; and then there lives within it that which seeks to expand in all directions, that which is air-like, that which, for example, lives in the human organism as breath and speech. And then there lives within it the fiery element, which dissolves the individual being within itself, so that something new can arise from the fragmented, dissolved components. Thus the elements live within every earthly form.

[ 24 ] And just as people in the ancient mysteries looked upon the salty element—which was indeed cosmic but had taken on an earthly form—and saw it in what Mother Earth had contributed to the metallic realm, they perceived the Mercurial in everything that was to become metal from the cosmos.

[ 25 ] Oh, it’s so incredibly childish when people today start giving descriptions of what people in the Middle Ages imagined Mercury to be! There’s always this underlying assumption that “Mercury” in the Middle Ages might have referred to something similar to quicksilver—or indeed any single metal at all. But that’s not the case at all. Mercury is every metal, insofar as that metal is under the influence of the entire cosmos. For how would copper behave if only the cosmos were to act upon its periphery, as it does on every metal? Copper would become fluid like quicksilver. What would happen to lead if only the cosmos were to act upon it? Lead would become liquid, like mercury. What would happen to tin if only the cosmos were to act upon it? Tin would become liquid. Every metal, if only the cosmos were to act upon it, would become like mercury. All metals are “Mercury” insofar as the cosmos acts upon them. And what, then, is the actual mercury of today, which still takes on a liquid form on Earth?

[ 26 ] Well, you see: the other metals—let’s say lead, copper, tin, and iron—have moved beyond the drop-like form. When the entire Earth was still under the influence of the spherical cosmos, all metals were mercury. They have moved beyond the mercurial form; today they crystallize in other forms. Only true mercury—in the modern sense of the word—has remained at that stage.

[ 27 ] What would the ancients—and indeed, the medieval alchemists—have said about modern mercury? They said: Copper, tin, iron, and lead are the good metals that have progressed with Providence; mercury is the Lucifer among metals, for it has remained at an earlier stage of formation. And so it was in ancient times that, by speaking in this way of the earthly, one was in truth speaking of the heavenly.

[ 28 ] From there, the discussion turned to what lies between the outer sphere and the Earth. Between the celestial sphere and the Earth lie, from the bottom up, the Earth itself, then the watery element, the airy element, and the fiery element. And so the ancients viewed everything on Earth from the perspective of the heavens; likewise, a subsequent era—which only came to an end in the first third of the fourteenth century—viewed everything from the perspective of the celestial sphere, the atmospheric realm. And then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the great turning point came. Then human beings, with their worldview, descended entirely to the Earth. Then, in their consciousness as well, the elements of water, air, and fire fragmented; they fragmented into sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen. Human beings saw everything from an earthly perspective.

[ 29 ] And with that begins the era I have already alluded to when discussing the Hybernian Mysteries: the era in which humanity embraces the Earth with its knowledge, and the heavens become mathematics to it. It calculates the size of the stars, their motion, their distance, and so on. The heavens become abstraction to him.

[ 30 ] But it was not merely heaven that became an abstraction. For the image of heaven in the living human being is his head. And what human beings can perceive of heaven lives in their head. And since human beings came to know of heaven only mathematics—that is, the logical and abstract—from then on, only the logical-abstract, the conceptual-ideal, lived in their head. And so, from then on, there was no possibility for human beings to bring the spiritual-mental into the conceptual-ideal. And where the Spirit was sought, that great struggle began between what man could attain through the ideal contents of his mind and brain, and what the gods wished to reveal to him from heaven. This struggle was waged on the grandest, most colossal scale in the true forms of what is known as the Rosicrucian mysteries of the Middle Ages. There, the powerlessness of modern humanity was perceived as a preparation for true knowledge. For it was indeed something that could be felt as something mighty, especially within the circles of true Rosicrucian initiation. The power lay in the fact that it became clear to the student—not abstractly, but as a living inner reality—that as a modern human being, one can only enter the world of concepts. But in doing so, one loses the living essence of one’s own humanity.

[ 31 ] And as the student sensed that what modern times were offering him could not lead him to his true essence, it was then that the student felt: You must either despair of knowledge, or you must undergo a kind of mortification of the pride of abstraction. And already the Rosicrucian student—the true Rosicrucian student—felt something akin to the Master having struck him on the back of the neck to indicate that the abstract nature of the modern mind is not suited to entering the spiritual worlds, and that the student must renounce mere abstraction in order to enter the spiritual world.

[ 32 ] That was actually a major preparatory moment for what might be called the Rosicrucian initiation.