The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Today, following on from various topics I have discussed with you recently, I would like to offer another reflection on the development of humanity in the post-Atlantean era and, in doing so, draw your attention to certain points that will emerge most clearly in the context of the preceding reflections.

[ 2 ] When we look back at the development of humanity, we must say that the epochs we identify in anthroposophical Spiritual Science—in order to gain an overview of human development—are entirely derived from the specific nature of the soul and of human beings in general within these epochs. This human nature does, after all, differ quite significantly across the individual epochs. However, people today are not very inclined to look beyond the current state of the soul and of humanity, and they construct a history of human development as if, for example, during the historical period documented in records—even though a development of civilization took place that is described based on external documents—the state of the soul had generally remained the same. In truth, this spiritual constitution has changed, and we know the points in time at which it underwent, so to speak, a transformation that was clearly discernible from the outside.

[ 3 ] The last of these dates has often been cited as the 15th century A.D. The one immediately preceding it was the 8th century B.C., and we could continue going back from there. It has also often been emphasized in our circles how true it is when an art historian like Herman Grimm points out that, in fact, the full understanding—the full historical understanding—of people today extends only as far back as Roman times. It was then that the same mental images—or at least roughly the same mental images—took root in people’s souls; these mental images are still prevalent today, sometimes even in a harmful way, having been passed down through the generations—such as Roman legal concepts, which no longer align with our social life at all, and so on. But still, through the very way in which people today immerse themselves in general social life, they still have an understanding of that which extends back to Roman times. If, on the other hand, we go back to the Greek world, it is indeed described historically from the outside according to the pattern of what came later, but this does not penetrate the actual inner nature of the Greeks at all. And Herman Grimm is right when he says: The human figures usually portrayed by history as the Greeks are actually shadowy, just as they are depicted. — With ordinary consciousness, one no longer sees into what lived within their souls, and therefore cannot understand the social fabric in the right way either. Even more different from our inner life is the inner life of people in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which lies beyond the 8th century B.C., and even more different still in the Proto-Persian epoch, as I have called it in my Secret Science, and quite different from what we feel today in our inner life from morning to night is the inner life of the Proto-Indian epoch, the first epoch that followed the great Atlantean catastrophe.

[ 4 ] But with the help of Spiritual Science, it is possible to determine what differences actually prevailed in these epochs with regard to the overall constitution of the human being. And here one must say that feeling about the human being in the way we do today—or something close to it—actually originated in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The way we speak today—as is customary—of body, soul, spirit, and the “I” within the human being, and the sense of an inner connection between the human being and the Earth, is something that modern humanity has inherited from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. But life has only come to be this way over the course of time. One might say that it has only become so earthbound that human beings feel themselves to be connected solely to the Earth, feel alienated from the cosmos, and regard the stars, the movements of the stars—one might even say the clouds—as something lying outside their earthly dwelling place and of only minor significance to them. The entire range of human feeling—and indeed the impulses of human will—prior to the Greco-Roman epoch were, if I may use the expression, elemental-cosmic. Human beings did not first need a philosophy to feel themselves as a part of the entire universe—above all, initially, the visible universe. It was natural for human beings, a matter of course, to feel themselves not only as inhabitants of the Earth but as a part of the entire cosmos.

[ 5 ] Especially in the first, the primordial Indian epoch—that is, if we go back to the seventh or eighth millennium B.C.—we find that human beings experienced something quite different from what we today call the “I”; perhaps I cannot say they “spoke” of it, but they certainly “felt” it. Certainly, people at that time did not express themselves in such terms at all, because human language did not extend to things in the same way it does today, but we must incorporate these concepts into our language. And so I would like to say that people of the primordial Indian epoch did not speak of the “I” as we do today—as, so to speak, a kind of point that summarizes the soul’s experiences—but when the “I” was spoken of in the primordial Indian era, it was taken for granted that the “I” had very little to do with the Earth and its events. In feeling himself as an “I,” the human being did not actually feel himself to belong to the Earth at all; he felt himself as an “I” connected first and foremost with the fixed starry sky. He had the feeling that the fixed starry sky gave him the stability of his “I,” gave him the feeling that he had an “I” at all. And this “I” was not felt as a human “I” at all. Human beings were human only insofar as they were clothed in a physical body on Earth. Through this physical body, which was regarded as a kind of shell for the “I,” human beings were citizens of the Earth. But within the earthly realm, the “I” was actually always regarded as something foreign. And if we were to coin a term today for the way the “I” was viewed back then, we would have to say: At that time, human beings did not feel a human “I” at all, but rather a divine “I.”

[ 6 ] A person could have looked out at all kinds of rocks, at the mountains, at the cliffs; he could have looked at everything else on Earth when he said of all of this, “it is, it exists,” he would at the same time have sensed in those ancient times that if there were only this “being”—which exists on Earth in stones, in plants, in rivers, in mountains, in cliffs—then we humans could have no “I.” For everything that guarantees the existence of these earthly things and entities could not guarantee the existence of the “I.” - Human beings did not feel a human “I” within themselves, but rather a divine “I.” The divine “I” was to them a “drop from the sea of the divine.” But when they wanted to speak of the “I”—and I say this with the caveats I just mentioned—they initially perceived the “I” as a creature of the fixed-starry sky. He perceived the fixed-starry sky as the only thing that possesses such a mode of being. Because the “I” has a mode of being similar to that of the fixed-starry sky, the “I” can say of itself, “I am.” If the “I” could say “I am” only in accordance with the mode of being of a stone, or the plant world, or the mountains and rocks, then the “I” would have no right to say “I am.” Only because the “I” is star-like can it say, “I am.” Because the existence that the stars possess lives within the “I,” the “I” can say, “I am.” The people of this ancient epoch of humanity saw the rivers flowing out there and the trees swaying in the wind. But when we speak of the human “I” that inhabits the physical human body and possesses the impulse to go there, “I’m going there,” “I’m moving on Earth”—if one could speak of this “I” as the active agent in the movement only in this way—that it moves the body, just as one might say that the wind moves the trees, or as one might say of anything on Earth that is capable of movement, “it moves”—then one would have no right to attribute an impulse of movement to the “I.”

[ 7 ] This is roughly how the teacher of the Mysteries would have spoken to his students in those ancient times: You can see how the trees move, how the waters flow in the rivers, how the sea moves. But neither from the trees that move, nor from the water that moves in the rivers, nor from the waves the sea stirs up, could the “I” ever learn to develop those impulses of movement that a human being develops when he carries his body in motion across the earth. The “I” can never learn this from a moving earthly entity. The “I” can learn this only because it belongs to the movement of the planets, to the movement of the stars. Only from Mars, from Jupiter, from Venus can the “I” learn to move. And when the “I” moves arbitrarily on Earth, it is carrying out something that it does precisely because it belongs to the moving, planetary world of the stars. — Furthermore, it would have seemed utterly incomprehensible to a person of that ancient epoch of humanity if someone had said: “Look, thoughts are emerging from your brain.” — If one transports oneself back today to the state of mind one once had—for we have passed through lives in the ancient Indian epoch— and then contrast it with today’s state of mind, in which one believes that thoughts come out of the brain, what the new human being believes would seem utterly nonsensical—absolutely nonsensical—to the ancient human being that one once was; for the ancient human being knew that thoughts could never come out of a mass of brain matter. He knew that the sun is what stirs the thoughts, and that the moon is what, in turn, calms them. He attributed the life of his own thoughts to the interplay of the sun and the moon. Thus, in the first post-Atlantean epoch—the primordial Indian period—the divine “I” was regarded as something belonging to the fixed starry heavens, to the planetary movements, and to the interaction of the sun and the moon. In fact, what the “I” derives from the Earth was regarded much like events passing by the cosmic-divine “I,” whereas the essence of the “I” was, in those ancient times, entirely of a cosmic-divine nature.

[ 8 ] In my book The Secret Science, I referred to the second epoch as the “primordial Persian” one. By then, the vitality of the perception of the cosmic “I” was no longer what it had been in the primordial Indian epoch. In a sense, this perception had already been somewhat dampened. But during this period, people experienced the cycle of the year—which I have spoken of here frequently in recent times—in an intense way. Today, human beings have actually become earthworms—well, it’s a metaphor, of course—they have become earthworms because that is how they go about their lives—not even earthworms, since earthworms actually emerge from their underground dwellings when it rains, but isn’t it true that human beings live like that today? Nothing special arises for them from it, at most just such abstract differences: We feel inconvenienced when it rains and we don’t have an umbrella; we adjust to snow in winter and sunshine in summer; we go to the countryside and do similar things. — So we do experience the cycle of the year, but in a terribly shadow-like way. We no longer experience it with our whole humanity. We experienced the cycle of the year with our whole humanity in the primordial Persian epoch. Back then, when the Christmas season arrived, people felt: Yes, now the soul of the Earth is united with the Earth; now the Earth is cloaked in a blanket of snow, which today is nothing more to people than frozen water. But back then, it was the garment with which the Earth clothed itself in order to shut itself off from the cosmos, to develop an individual, independent life within the cosmos, because the soul of the Earth had become intimately united with the Earth during the autumn months right up to the time we now call the Christmas season. People also felt: “Yes, now the Earth soul is united with the Earth.” - Human beings had to turn their own soulful nature toward that which lives within the Earth. In a sense, they sensed the Earth’s soul—united with the Earth—beneath the blanket of snow. The blanket of snow became spiritually transparent to them. They sensed the elemental spirits beneath the snow, who carry the power of the plant seeds through the winter until the next spring. When spring then arrived, he felt how the Earth, as it were, exhaled its soul, how the Earth strove to open its soul to the cosmos, and he himself, in his feelings and perceptions, joined in this opening of the Earth toward the cosmos. He began to lift up to the cosmos that which he had developed during the winter—his attachment, his soul’s attachment—to the earth.

[ 9 ] Of course, during this period, human beings could no longer simply look up at the cosmos as they had in the immediately preceding epoch, when it was clear to them that when I look up at the cosmos, I see that which gives my “I” existence, movement, and thought. But then he looked up at the cosmos with a sense of foreboding and said to himself: That which connects me to the earth in winter calls upon me now to rise up into the cosmos with a sense of foreboding. - He no longer felt his connection to the cosmos as intensely as in earlier times, but he sensed it in a certain intuitive way. Just as the “I” experienced itself as cosmic in the ancient, primordial Indian times, so too did the astral aspect within the human being in the primordial Persian era experience itself as that which moved with the course of the year. Human beings lived in harmony with the course of the year. People became, so to speak, serious when, in winter, they saw the blanket of snow below in their souls; they were put in a serious mood; they turned inward. At that time, they engaged in what we would today call soul-searching. They opened themselves to the cosmos with a certain joy when spring approached. They merged—I would say—with a certain rapture into the cosmic, no longer in the clear manner of the primordial Indian era, but with a certain rapture, feeling joyful, torn away from their human physicality right in the middle of summer, during the time we would today call the St. John’s season. Just as he felt connected in winter to the wise spirits of the earth, so during the height of summer he felt connected to the ever-present spirits in the cosmos—I would say dancing and jubilant, joyful spirits—that swirled around the earth. I am merely describing how it was felt.

[ 10 ] Then, as we approached our present-day months of August and September, the human soul began to feel once more that it must return to the earth, yet that it had gained powers—drawn from the cosmos during its detachment in the summer months—that make it possible to live more deeply as a human being during the winter months. It was indeed the case that in those ancient times, people experienced the cycle of the year with their whole being, so that they perceived the spiritual aspect of the annual cycle as their own human concern. And it was back then that people felt it was important to learn, at certain points in the annual cycle, to empathize deeply with this cycle. It was during this time that the impulses for the actual festivals arose. Later on, people came to experience the festive aspects of the year more or less only as a matter of tradition. Some traditions remained, such as the solstice festivals, which now show only traces of that shared experience of the annual cycle. In those earlier times, this shared experience of the annual cycle was a powerful and intense one.

[ 11 ] This, however, was also accompanied by a complete transformation in the innermost consciousness of human beings. In the Proto-Indian era, it would have seemed quite impossible to people if someone had spoken to them about the “people.” This seems paradoxical to people today because they do not have a mental image of how a sense of belonging to the people also only emerged later. Certainly, the conditions on Earth made it necessary even in the ancient Indian era for people living together in a given territory to have closer ties than those living farther away, but the concept of a “people”—the feeling of belonging to a people—did not exist in the ancient Indian era. Something else existed instead. There was a very vivid sense of the succession of generations. The son saw himself as the son of his father, the grandson of his grandfather, and the great-grandson of his great-grandfather. Things were not, of course, organized exactly as we must describe them today using our current terminology, but we can describe them this way because it captures the essence of the matter. If one were to look into the mindset of those ancient times, one would find that within the family, great care was taken to ensure that one could state how far back one could trace one’s lineage—who the grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather were—and how one could trace the line all the way back to a very, very distant ancestor. People felt themselves to be part of the succession of generations. As a result, they felt much less connected to the present than people did later on. They felt intimately connected to the succession of generations. What has been reduced to a caricature in the aristocratic principle—the sense of generational continuity, the ancestral principle—was, in ancient Indian times, something that every person took for granted; there was no need for family chronicles to document it. That is why things were quite different in those ancient times, for human consciousness itself, through instinctive clairvoyance, established a connection with the ancestral line, in that one recalled—in a certain way—not only one’s own personal experiences but also, almost as vividly as one remembered one’s own experiences, the experiences of one’s father and grandfather from that time. These memories grew increasingly faint, but human consciousness maintained a connection within the bloodline of the generations. Thus, it was specifically this sense of connection across the generations that played a significant role back then. The concept of the people—the sense of belonging to the people—emerged in parallel with this, though also slowly. In the proto-Persian era, it was not yet strongly pronounced; it only gradually emerged over time. When people no longer had the living awareness of living within the generations, their consciousness filled with a sense of national connection—in a sense, with the contemporary national connection—whereas in that most ancient time, the blood connection was, over the course of time, the essential focus of attention.

[ 12 ] You see, the concept of “people” did not become fully significant until the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch. But in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, this awareness of the course of the year had already become somewhat dulled. On the other hand, however, a vivid awareness existed in this epoch—extending into the last millennium of the pre-Christian era—that the world is governed by thoughts, that thoughts live everywhere in the world. I have already hinted at this in another context: the view we hold today—that thoughts arise within us and extend out to the things in the external world—would have struck a person of that time much like someone today drinking a glass of water and saying, “My tongue produces the water.” One might indeed imagine that one’s tongue produces the water, but in truth one draws the water from the entire body of water on Earth, which is a unified whole. But someone—if they were particularly simple-minded, if, for example, they failed to see the connection between the amount of water in their glass and the total amount of water on Earth—might believe that the water arises on their tongue. The people of the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch would have made the same objection if anyone had told them that thoughts arise in the head. They knew that thoughts live everywhere in the world. What a human being draws from the world’s sea of thought into this vessel of his head is drawn from the world’s sea of thought. In this epoch, people no longer experienced the visible aspects of the cosmos in the divine “I,” or the cycle of the year in the astral human being, but they did experience the world-thoughts, the Logos, in the etheric body. A person from the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, had he used our terms, would not have spoken of the human physical body at all in the way we do. We speak of this physical body as if it were the most important aspect of the human being. A person of the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch perceived the body in such a way that he saw in it only the result of what lives as thought in the etheric body. For a person of that epoch, the human physical body was an image of human thought. He did not attach to it the importance that we attach to it today. During this time, the concept of “the people” gradually took on a more defined form. And so we can say: Human beings became more and more citizens of the Earth. By the third post-Atlantean cultural period, their connection to the world of the stars and to their “I” had already largely been lost. This connection was still calculated in astrology, but it was no longer perceived in elementary consciousness. The course of the year, which is important for the astral body, was no longer perceived in its immediacy. Yet, at least, the cosmic thought was still felt. Human beings had, so to speak, already come to perceive earthly heaviness as their very nature. However, they perceived thought as something so alive that they did not yet believe this nature to be exhausted in earthly heaviness.

[ 13 ] This first came to the fore during the Greco-Roman cultural epoch and developed more and more throughout that epoch. It was only then that the physical body became important to human beings. Of course, everything has its deep justification in its own time, and we see this full, fresh immersion into the physical body in all the individual achievements of Greek culture. I would say that this immersion into the physical body is particularly evident in Greek art. Indeed, for the Greeks of earlier times in particular, the physical body was something they experienced much like a child who delights in new clothes, because their immersion in the physical body was as fresh as youth—they truly lived within it. As the Greco-Roman era then progressed, and especially once Roman civilization had taken shape, people no longer felt the freshness of immersing themselves in the physical body; they felt the physical body more—well, how shall I put it—like someone who wears a state uniform and knows that through that uniform they signify something. That was roughly the feeling—which, of course, was not expressed in such words, but which lay in the whole of one’s feelings and sensibilities. The Roman perceived his physical body as the ceremonial robe intended for him by the world order. The Greek experienced the immense joy that now, having been born, he could clothe himself in something that had been bestowed upon him—such a physical body. This also gave Greek art, tragedy, and the works of Homer that distinctive verve in the depiction and portrayal of the human, insofar as this humanity is connected to the outer physical appearance of the human being. One must seek out the inner reasons for all psychological phenomena. Just try for a moment to put yourself in the mindset of the kind of joy that radiates from Homer’s depictions of Hector, Achilles, and so on—how the outward appearance is described, how great importance is placed on the depiction of the outward form. This became established in Roman culture. Roman culture is, in general, a realm where everything is, so to speak, fixed—where that which we can still comprehend with our ordinary consciousness begins. For it is in this fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch that human beings truly become citizens of the Earth. And that which was formerly the conception of the “I,” the astral body, and the etheric body recedes into the indeterminate. The Greeks still have a vivid sense that thought lives within things. I have described this in my Riddles of Philosophy. Then this is gradually overcome. People come to believe that thought arises only within human beings. And in this way, human beings grow more and more into their physical bodies.

[ 14 ] At present, we still do not have a clear sense of how this has actually changed in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, which has only existed since the 15th century. We are growing out of our physical bodies once again, but we do not yet realize it. We are still fantasizing, one might say, about what a Greek felt when contemplating the human form. But our sense of it is very vague. When we perceive the swift-footed Achilles as a shadow-like figure, this perception is vague. That this was, for the Greeks, something that gave them an immediate—I would say, striking—vision of Achilles, that Achilles stood before them in his very essence—we perceive this far too vaguely. And with regard to all art, we have outgrown the interpenetration of the physical body with the human soul. Whereas the Greeks in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era felt how the cosmic idea was slipping away from them—how the idea could only be grasped by reflecting back on the human being—today there is complete uncertainty regarding the idea among people. You see, a Greek from, say, the 6th century B.C. would have found it terribly absurd if he had been expected to solve the scientific question of how thought is related to the brain. He would not have even conceived that such a question could exist, for what this statement actually implies would have seemed to him entirely self-evident. He would have spoken much as we would if we were to say: “I take the watch in my hand.” And now I’m supposed to start philosophically speculating about the relationship between the watch and my hand. I examine the flesh in my hand; I examine the glass and the metal in my watch. Then I examine the relationships between the flesh in my hand and the glass and the metal in my watch, in order to gain a philosophical insight into why my hand has grasped the watch and is holding it. — Yes, if I were to do that, wouldn’t it be absurd to today’s consciousness? It would have seemed just as absurd to ancient Greek consciousness to try to explain—by appealing to the nature of thoughts or the nature of the brain—the self-evident fact that the human being grasps thoughts through the brain, for one perceives this directly, just as one perceives that the hand takes the watch, and yet one does not consider it necessary to establish some kind of scientific relationship between the metal of the watch and the muscle tissue. Problems arise over time depending on the way one views things. For the Greeks, what we today call the connection between thinking and the organism was self-evident—as self-evident as the connection between the watch and the hand when I pick up the watch. They did not speculate about it; it was self-evident to them. They knew how to bring thoughts into harmony with the human being. They knew this; they knew it instinctively.

[ 15 ] If I were to ask, “Well, there’s only one hand, and the clock should actually fall down—so why does this clock stay in place?”—that would have been the same question for the Greeks as when we ask today: “What generates thoughts in the brain?” This has become a question for us because we no longer even know how we came to separate thought from the body in the first place. We are on the path to separating thought from the human being once again, and we do not know what to do with thought because we no longer have the physical body; we are already on the path to outgrowing it. I would like to use another comparison. We don’t just have clothes, but also pockets in them—we can put things inside. Yes, that’s how it was with the Greeks. The human body was something that could, so to speak, hold thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will within itself. Today we don’t know what to do with the thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will in human beings. It’s as if we had pockets in our clothes and everything kept falling out, or as if we were anxious about what to do with them and wanted, so to speak, to carry them around in our hands all the time, because we aren’t aware that we have pockets. In the same way, we are not aware of the nature of our organism; we do not know what to make of the life of the soul in relation to the organism, and we come up with the strangest ideas regarding psychophysical parallelism and so on. But for a Greek consciousness, this would be like a person who does not see that he has pockets and therefore does not even occur to him to put anything in them—that they are there for that purpose. But I say all this only to suggest how we gradually become estranged from our physical body once again.

[ 16 ] This is also rooted in the course of human development. If we look back once more to the ancient Indian era, when people looked up through the line of generations to a distant ancestor—indeed, they felt no need to seek the gods anywhere other than in this line of generations. Because human beings themselves were divine to him, he remained entirely within human evolution, seeking the divine in his ancestry. It was the evolution of humanity that served as the field in which he sought the divine.

[ 17 ] Then came the era that reached its zenith in Egyptian-Chaldean culture, where the concept of “people” had attained a particularly high status. There, people saw the divine in the individual folk gods—in those who lived side by side in accordance with blood kinship.

[ 18 ] Then came the Greek era, when human beings felt, as it were, deified, when they had become citizens of the earth. It was only then that the need arose to seek the gods above the earth, to look up to the gods. Ancient people knew of the gods by looking up at the stars. The Greeks, however, needed something of their own in addition to the stars in order to look up to the gods. But this need is now growing ever greater within humanity. Humanity must increasingly develop the ability to look beyond the physical, beyond the physical starry sky, beyond the physical course of the year, and beyond what a person perceives when facing objects—today, when they can no longer perceive the thoughts within the objects. Humanity must first acquire the ability to discover the divine-spiritual as something distinct, above and beyond the sensory-physical, so that it may then find it again within the sensory-physical.

[ 19 ] It is precisely the task of anthroposophical Spiritual Science to assert this forcefully. And in this way, anthroposophical Spiritual Science grows out of the entire development of humanity on Earth. We must always bear in mind that anthroposophy is not something that is arbitrarily conjured up and inserted into human evolution as a program, but rather something that arises from the inner necessities of human evolution for our present epoch. It is, in essence, merely a sign of backwardness that materialism is able to assert itself in our time. It corresponds to the true needs of our time—precisely because human beings have not only become citizens of the Earth, as they were in Greek times, but have even become estranged from this earthly citizenship once again, and thus no longer know what to do with their soul-spiritual nature in relation to the body—that the necessity arises for human beings to look within themselves at the spiritual-soul aspect apart from the physical. Since materialism exists alongside this need that truly lives in the depths of the soul today, it represents an Ahrimanic stagnation at that which, in Greek and even Roman times, was still natural for human beings. Back then, one could look at the physical, for one still saw the spiritual within the physical. Because we have remained stagnant, we no longer see the spiritual in the physical today, but accept the physical merely as such. This gives rise to materialism. A trend has entered human development that, if I may say so, is hostile to further development. Humanity is still reluctant today to coin new concepts; it wishes only to further develop the old ones. We must move beyond this resistance to further development. When we become open to further development, we will also gain a completely natural relationship to something like anthroposophical spiritual development, which moves precisely from an antiquated need to the truly present need of humanity today—namely, to rise to the spiritual.

[ 20 ] So today, once again, I wanted to offer a perspective from which you can see how anthroposophy truly emerges as a necessity in the development of humanity for our present time.