The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As we are together for the last time during this Christmas Meeting which should be a source of strength and of vital importance for the Anthroposophical Movement, you will allow me to give this lecture as a supplement to the many vistas opened for us by the series of lectures just finished, while also giving tentative indications concerning the future of anthroposophical strivings.

When we look at the world to-day—and it has been the same for years now—destructive elements on a colossal scale are everywhere in evidence. Forces that are actively at work enable us to have forebodings of the abysses into which Western civilisation will continue to steer. When we think of those individuals who are outwardly the spiritual leaders in various domains of life, we shall perceive that these men are in the throes of an ominous, universal sleep. They think, or at least most of them were still thinking only a short time ago, that until the nineteenth century mankind was childish and primitive in respect of understanding and conceptions of the world. Then modern science appeared in its many branches and now—so it is thought—there exists something that must through all eternity be cultivated as the truth.

The people who think this are really giving way to extreme arrogance, only they are not aware of it. On the other hand there sometimes arises, even in men to-day, a premonition that things are not, after all, as I have described.

Some little time ago it was still possible for me to give lectures in Germany organised by the Wolff Bureau. They attracted extraordinarily large audiences so that the existence of a desire for Anthroposophy became obvious to many people. Among the many nonsensical utterances of opponents there was one voice which to be sure was not much cleverer than the others in respect of content but which nevertheless indicated a remarkable premonition. It consisted in a newspaper report of one of the lectures I had given in Berlin. The notice was to this effect: When one listens to something of this kind, one becomes attentive to the fact that something is going on not only on the Earth—I am quoting the notice approximately—but in the whole Cosmos something is happening which summons men to adopt a spirituality different from what existed previously. Now, the forces of the Cosmos—not only earthly impulses—demand something from men. A kind of revolution is taking place in the Cosmos, the result of which must be the striving for a new spirituality.

Such utterances were constantly to be heard and were very worthy of note. The fact of the matter is this: the impulse that must be working in what is now to go out from Dornach must—as I emphasised from every possible point of view during the Meeting itself—be an impulse originating in the spiritual world, not on the Earth. Our striving here is to develop the strength to follow impulses from the spiritual world. That is why, in the evening lectures during this Christmas Meeting, I spoke of manifold impulses at work in the course of historical evolution in order that hearts could be opened for the reception of the spiritual impulses which have yet to stream into the earthly world, which are not derived from that world itself. Everything for which the earthly world hitherto has rightly been the vehicle, proceeded from the spiritual world. And if we are to achieve anything fruitful for the earthly world, the impulses for it must be brought from the spiritual world.

This prompts the assertion that the impulses we ought rightly to take with us from the Meeting for our further activity must be connected with great responsibility.

Let us think for a short time of the responsibility laid upon us by that Meeting. Anyone with a sense of the reality of the spiritual world could encounter many personalities during recent decades, and observing them spiritually experience bitter feelings regarding the future destiny of humanity on Earth. One could encounter one's fellow men on the Earth in the way that is possible spiritually and observe these human beings during their sleep while they are in the spiritual world with Ego and astral body, having left their physical and etheric bodies. During recent decades, explorations connected with the destinies of Egos and astral bodies during the sleep of human beings have resulted in knowledge calling for great responsibility on the part of those who possess it. One often saw souls, who had left their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, approaching the Guardian of the Threshold.

In the course of evolution the Guardian of the Threshold has been brought to men's consciousness in very many different ways. Many a legend, many a saga—for it is in this form, not in the form of historical tradition that things of the greatest importance are preserved—many a legend tells of how, in earlier times, this or that personality met the Guardian of the Threshold and was instructed by him how to enter the spiritual world and return again into the physical world. Every legitimate entry into the spiritual world must include the possibility of being able at any and every minute to return into the physical world and to live there as a practical, thoughtful human being, not as a visionary or as an ecstatic mystic.

Fundamentally speaking, it was this that was demanded by the Guardian of the Threshold through all the ages of human endeavours to enter the spiritual world. But notably in the last third of the nineteenth century hardly any human beings who succeeded in approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in waking consciousness were to be seen. In our present time, when it is historically incumbent upon the whole of mankind to encounter the Guardian of the Threshold in some form, one finds how souls during sleep approach the Guardian of the Threshold as Egos and astral bodies, and the pictures that are revealed are full of significance. The stern Guardian of the Threshold has around him groups of human souls in the state of sleep, souls who in waking consciousness lack the strength to approach this Guardian of the Threshold. They approach him while they sleep.

When one watches the scene presented there, a thought connected with what I have called the seed of great and essential responsibility comes to one. The souls approaching the Guardian of the Threshold during the state of sleep plead with the consciousness then prevailing—in the waking state everything remains unconscious or subconscious—plead to be admitted into the spiritual world, to be allowed to cross the threshold. And in numberless cases one then hears the voice of the stern Guardian of the Threshold saying: For your own well-being you may not cross the threshold. You may not be allowed to enter the spiritual world. You must go back!—For if the Guardian of the Threshold were to permit such souls to enter the spiritual world, they would cross the threshold and enter that world with the concepts imparted to them by the schools, education and civilisation of to-day, with the concepts and ideas with which the human being is obliged to grow up from about the age of six to basically the end of his life on Earth.

The intrinsic character of these concepts and ideas is such that what a man has become through them in modern civilisation and education means that he enters the spiritual world paralysed in soul. Moreover, he would return to the physical world empty-headed in respect of thoughts and ideas. If the Guardian of the Threshold were not to reject many human souls of the modern age but allow them to enter the spiritual world, they would feel on awakening: I am incapable of thinking, my thoughts do not connect with my brain, I am obliged to go through the world void of thoughts. For such is the effect of the abstract ideas which man applies to everything to-day. With these ideas he can enter the spiritual world but not come forth from it again. And when one witnesses this scene which is experienced during sleep by more souls than is usually imagined, one feels: Oh! if only it were possible to protect these souls from having also to experience at death what they experience during sleep. For if the condition that is experienced in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold were to be repeated for a sufficient length of time, if civilisation were to remain long enough under the sway of what current education provides, then the souls of men would pass through the gates of death into the spiritual world but would be unable to bring any mental vigour into the next earthly life. With the thoughts prevailing to-day it is possible for a man to enter the spiritual world but he can only come out of it again paralysed in soul.

You see, modern civilisation adopts the form of spiritual life that has for so long been cultivated, but real life does not allow this. Civilisation as it now is might continue to progress for a time. During waking life souls would have no inkling of the existence of the Guardian of the Threshold and during sleep would be rejected by him in order to avoid mental paralysis; and this would finally result in a race of men being born in the future with no understanding, no possibility of applying ideas in their future earthly life; and all thinking, all ideation would vanish from the Earth. A diseased, purely instinctive human race would people the Earth. Evil feelings and unbridled emotions without the guiding power of ideas would take hold of the evolution of humanity. It is not only through observation of the souls confronting the Guardian of the Threshold—souls which can gain no entrance to the spiritual world—it is not only through observing this that a sorrowful picture is presented to the seer, but in a different connection there is another factor as well.

If on the journey of which I have spoken, when the souls of sleeping human beings confronting the Guardian of the Threshold can be observed, one is accompanied by a human being belonging not to Western but to Oriental civilisation, a terrible reproach of the whole of Western civilisation may be heard from him, to this effect: If things continue as they now are, when the human beings living to-day appear on Earth in new incarnations, the Earth will become barbaric. Human beings will live devoid of ideas, in instincts only. You Westerners have brought things to this pass because you have abandoned the ancient spirituality of the East.

A glimpse into the spiritual world such as I have described may well give rise to a sense of great responsibility. And here in Dornach there must be a place where for those human beings who have ears to hear, direct and significant experiences in the spiritual world can be described. Here there must be a place where sufficient strength is generated not merely to indicate in terms of the dialectic-empirical mentality of to-day that here or there little traces of spiritual reality exist. If Dornach is to fulfil its task, actual happenings in the spiritual world must be spoken of openly. Men must be able to hear of the impulses in the spiritual world which then pour into and control the natural world and Nature itself. In Dornach men must be able to hear of actual experiences, actual forces, actual Beings of the spiritual world. Here there must be the High School of true Spiritual Science. Henceforth we must not draw back when confronted by the shallowness of the scientific thoughts of to-day which, as I have described, lead in the state of sleep to the stern Guardian of the Threshold. In Dornach the strength must be acquired to confront and experience the spiritual world in its reality.

There must be no dialectical tirades from here on the subject of the inadequacy of modern scientific theory. I was obliged, however, to call attention to the position in which human beings are placed when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold on account of these scientific theories and their offshoots in the orthodox schools of to-day. If what has been said at this Christmas Meeting is sincerely applied in the life of soul, the Meeting will be a forceful impulse which the soul can then apply in the activity that is needed in this age so that in their next incarnations men may be able to confront the Guardian of the Threshold in the right way. This will ensure that civilisation in its own right can enable men to face and hold their own when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold.

Just compare the civilisation of to-day with that of earlier times during all of which men's thoughts and concepts were directed primarily to the super-sensible world, to the Gods, to the world of productive, generative, creative forces. With concepts that were concerned primarily with the Gods, men were able to contemplate the earthly world and also to understand it in the light of these concepts and ideas. If with these concepts—worthy of the Gods as they were—a man came before the Guardian of the Threshold, the Guardian would say to him: You may pass, for you bring over the threshold into the super-sensible world thoughts that were already directed to the super-sensible world during your earthly life in a physical body. Thus when you return into the physical world of the senses you will have enough strength to protect you from being paralysed by the spectacle of the super-sensible world.

To-day man develops concepts and ideas which in accordance with the genius of the age he wants to apply only to the material world. These concepts and ideas are concerned with every possible aspect of weight, measure and the like, but they have nothing to do with the Gods and are not worthy of the Gods. Hence to souls who have completely succumbed to materialistic ideas that are unworthy of the Gods, the voice of the Guardian of the Threshold thunders when they pass before him in the state of sleep: Do not cross the threshold! You have squandered your ideas on the world of the senses. Hence you must remain with them in the world of the senses. If you do not wish to be paralysed in your life of soul you may not enter the world of the Gods as long as you hold such ideas.

These things must be said, not in order to be the subject of argument but because every individual should let his mind and soul be permeated by them and thus develop the attitude of mind that should have been generated in him by this solemn Christmas Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society. For more important than anything else we take with us is the recognition of the spiritual world which gives the certainty that in Dornach there will be created a living centre of spiritual knowledge.

Hence a really splendid note was struck this morning when Dr. Zeylmans spoke in connection with the sphere of medicine, saying that it is no longer possible to-day for bridges to be built from orthodox science to what it is our aim to found in Dornach. If we were to speak of what it is hoped to develop in the sphere of medicine here by boasting that our products can stand the test of all modern clinical requirements, then we should never reach any definite goal. For then other people would simply say: That is just a new remedy; and we too have produced plenty of new remedies!

It is of essential importance that a branch of practical life such as medicine should be taken in the real sense into anthroposophical life. That is what I certainly understood to be Dr. Zeylmans' wish when he said this morning that an individual who becomes a doctor to-day really longs for something that gives impulses from a new corner of the world. In the domain of medicine this is just what will be done from here in the future, together with many another branch of genuine anthroposophical activity. It will be worked out now, with Dr. Wegman as my helper, as a system of medicine based upon Anthroposophy. It is a dire need of humanity and will soon be available. It is also my intention to establish as soon as possible a close relationship between the Goetheanum and the Clinic in Arlesheim that is proving to be so beneficial. The work there will be orientated entirely towards Anthroposophy. That is also Dr. Wegman's intention.

In speaking as he did, Dr. Zeylmans also indicated what attitude the Vorstand in Dornach will adopt in all spheres of anthroposophical activity. In future we shall know exactly how matters stand. We shall not say: let us bring Eurythmy to this or that town, for if people first see Eurythmy without hearing anything about Anthroposophy, Eurythmy will please them. Then, later on perhaps, they will come to us, and because they have liked Eurythmy and have heard that Anthroposophy is behind it, Anthroposophy too may please them! Or again, it may be said: In the practice of medicine people must be shown that ours are the right remedies and then they will buy them; later on they may discover that Anthroposophy is behind them and then they will come to Anthroposophy!

We must have the courage to realise that such procedure is dishonest and must be abandoned. Anthroposophy will then find its way in the world. Our striving for truth here in Dornach will in the future be without fanaticism, will be advocated honestly and candidly. Perhaps in this way we can make reparation for principles that have been gravely sinned against in recent years.

We must leave this Meeting, which has led to the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society, not with trifling but with solemn thoughts. But I think that nobody need have experienced any pessimism as a result of what took place here at Christmas. We had, it is true, to pass the tragic ruins of the Goetheanum every day but I think that all those who climbed the hill and passed the ruins during the Meeting will have become aware of what our friends have understood in their hearts and that the following thought will have become a reality to them: Spiritual flames of fire will go forth from the new Goetheanum that will come into being in the future, for the blessing of mankind, will come into being through our activity and devotion. And the greater the courage with which to conduct the affairs of Anthroposophy that we take with us from this Meeting, the more effectively have we grasped the spiritual impulse of hope that has pervaded the Meeting.

The scene that I have described to you—the scene that is so often to be seen of modern man with the results of his civilisation and education facing the Guardian of the Threshold—this scene does not actually occur among perceptive Anthroposophists. But it does sometimes happen that this warning is necessary: You must develop the resolute courage to become aware of and avow your obedience to this voice from the spiritual world, for you have begun to wake. Courage will keep you wakeful; lack of courage—that and that alone could cause you to sleep.

The voice of exhortation to unfold courage and wakefulness—that is the other variant for Anthroposophists in the life of modern civilisation. Non-Anthroposophists hear the voice which says: Remain outside the spiritual world, for you have misused the ideas which are coined for purely earthly objects; you have amassed no ideas that are worthy of the Gods. Hence you would be paralysed on your return into the physical world of the senses. To the souls who are truly anthroposophical souls, however, it is said: You have now to be tested in respect only of your courage to avow adherence to the voice which because of the trend and inclination of your souls and hearts you can certainly hear and understand.

Yesterday, a year ago, we were watching the flames that were destroying the old Goetheanum, but just as we did not allow ourselves then to be interrupted in our continuation of the work, so to-day we are justified in hoping that when a physical Goetheanum will again be there, it will be merely the symbol of our spiritual Goetheanum which we will bear with us as idea when we now again go out into the world.

Over the Foundation Stone laid here will be erected the building in which the single stones will be the work achieved in every one of our Groups all over the world. We will now turn our thoughts to this work and become conscious of the responsibility of the men of to-day when they are standing before the Guardian of the Threshold who is obliged to forbid them entrance into the spiritual world.

Quite certainly it will never occur to us to feel anything except, the deepest pain and sorrow for what happened to us a year ago. But of one thing we may be sure—everything in the world that has achieved some measure of greatness is born from pain. May our own pain be applied in such a way that a vigorous, light-filled Anthroposophical Society will come into being as the result of your work, my dear friends.

To this end we will ponder deeply on the words with which I began the Christmas Meeting and with which I want to end it. May it become for us a festival of consecration not only of a year's beginning but of the beginning of a turning-point of worlds, to which we will dedicate ourselves in selfless cultivation of the spiritual life:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the Limbs
Which bear thee through the world of Space
Into the ocean-being of the Spirit.
Practise Spirit-Recollection
In the depths of soul.
Where in the wielding
World-Creator-Life
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within the I of God.
Then in the All-World-Being of Man
Thou wilt truly live.

For the Father-Spirit of the Heights holds sway
In Depths of Worlds begetting Life.
Spirits of Strength!
Let this ring out from the Heights
And in the Depths be echoed,
Speaking:
From God, Mankind has Being.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of Heart and Lung
Which leads thee through the rhythmic tides of Time
Into the feeling of thine own Soul-being.
Practise Spirit-Mindfulness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging
Deeds of the World's Becoming
Do thine own I
Unite
Unto the I of the World.
Then 'mid the weaving of the Soul of Man
Thou wilt truly feel.
For the Christ-Will in the encircling Round holds sway
the Rhythms of the Worlds, blessing the Soul.
Spirits of Light!
Let this be fired from the East
And through the West be formed,
Speaking:
In Christ, Death becomes Life.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting Head
Which from the ground of the Eternal
Opens to thee the Thoughts of Worlds.
Practise Spirit-Vision
In quietness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free Willing.
Then from the ground of the Spirit in Man
Thou wilt truly think.

For the Spirit's Universal Thoughts hold sway
the Beings of all Worlds, craving for Light.
Spirits of Soul!
Let this be prayed in the Depths
And from the Heights be answered,
Speaking:
the Spirit's Universal Thoughts, the Soul awakens.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

At the turning-point of Time
The Spirit-Light of the World
Entered the stream of Earthly Being.
Darkness of Night
Had held its sway;
Day-radiant Light
Poured into the souls of men;
Light that gives Warmth
To simple Shepherds' Hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise Heads of Kings.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads,
That good may become
What from our Hearts we would found
And from our Heads direct
With single purpose.

And so, my dear friends, carry out into the world your warm hearts in which you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, carry out into the world these warm hearts which promote strong, health-giving activity in the world. And help will be vouchsafed to you, enlightening your heads in what you would fain direct with single purpose. We will set about this with all possible strength. And if we prove to be worthy of this aim we shall see that a good star will hold sway over what is willed from here. Follow this good star, my dear friends! We shall see whither the Gods will lead us by the light of this star.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads.

Easter is felt by many people to be associated on the one hand with the deepest feelings and sensibilities of the human soul, but on the other, with cosmic mysteries and enigmas as well. Our attention is drawn to this connection with world riddles by the fact that Easter is a so-called moveable feast, fixed each year by computing the position of a constellation of which we will have more to say in the following lectures. Yet if we trace the festival customs and cult rites that have become associated with the Easter Festival through the centuries—rituals having a deep meaning for a large part of mankind—we cannot fail to observe the profound significance with which humanity has endowed this Easter Festival in the course of its historical development.

Easter became an important Christian festival—not coincident with the founding of Christianity, but during the first centuries; a Christian festival linked with the fundamental idea, the basic impulse, of Christianity: the impulse to be a Christian, provided by the Resurrection of Christ.

Easter is the Festival of the Resurrection; yet it points back to periods antedating Christianity, to festivals connected with the spring equinox that plays a part in determining the date of Easter, to festivals bearing on the re-awakening of Nature, on the life burgeoning from the earth. And this leads us directly to the heart of our subject.

As a Christian festival, Easter commemorates a resurrection. The corresponding pagan festival that occurred at about the same season was, in a sense, the celebration of the resurrection of Nature, of the re-awakening of what, as Nature, had been asleep throughout the winter time. But here we must emphasize the fact that with regard to its inner meaning and essence the Christian Easter in no sense corresponds to the pagan equinox festivals. On the contrary: comparing it with those of ancient pagan times, Easter, as a Christian festival, would correspond to old festivals that grew out of the Mysteries; and these were celebrated in the autumn. And the most interesting feature connected with determining the date of Easter, which is quite obviously related to certain old Mystery customs, is this: we are reminded precisely by this Easter Festival of the radical, far-reaching misapprehensions that have crept into the philosophic conceptions of the most vital problems during the course of human evolution. Nothing less occurred, in the early Christian centuries, than the confusion of the Easter Festival with quite a different one, with the result that it was changed from an autumn festival to a spring festival.

This points to something of enormous importance in human evolution. Let us examine the substance of the Easter Festival—what is its essence? It is this: the central figure in Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, experiences death, as commemorated by Good Friday. He remains in the grave for the period of three days, this representing His coalescence with earthly existence. This period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is celebrated in Christendom as a festival of mourning. Finally, Easter Sunday is the day on which the central being of Christianity arises from the grave. It is the memorial day of this event. That is the essential substance of Easter: the death, the interval in the grave, and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Now let us turn to the corresponding old pagan festival in one of its many forms; for only by so doing can we grasp the connection between the Easter Festival and the Mysteries. Among many people of diverse localities we find ancient pagan festivals whose outer form—the nature of the rites—strongly resembles the form of what is comprised in the Christian Easter.

From among the manifold ancient festivals let us choose that of Adonis for examination. This was celebrated by certain peoples of the Near East for a long period of time during pre-Christian Antiquity. An effigy constituted the center of interest. It portrayed Adonis, the spiritual representative of all that appears in the human being as vigorous youth and beauty.

Now, the ancients undoubtedly confused, in some respects, the substance of an effigy with what it represented, hence the old religions frequently bore the character of idolatry. Many took the effigy of Adonis for the actually present god of beauty, of man's youthful strength, of the germinating force becoming outwardly manifest and revealing in living splendor all the inner worth, the inner dignity, the inner grandeur of which man is or might be possessed.

To the accompaniment of songs and of rites representing the deepest human grief and sorrow, this effigy of the god was immersed in the sea where it remained for three days. When the locality was not near the sea, a lake served the purpose; and lacking this as well, an artificial pond was dug in the vicinity of the sanctuary. During the three days of immersion a deep and serious silence enveloped the whole community that confessed this cult, that called it its own. At the end of the three days the effigy was brought out of the water, and the previous laments were changed into paeans of joy, into hymns to the resurrected god, the god come to life again.

That was an external ceremony, one that stirred the souls of a great multitude of people: through an outer act, an outer rite, it suggested what was enacted in the sanctuaries of the Mysteries in the case of every man aspiring to initiation. In these olden times every such candidate was conducted into a special chamber. The walls were black and the whole room, which contained nothing but a coffin or, at least, a coffin-like case, was dark and somber. Beside this coffin laments and songs of death were sung: the neophite was treated as one about to die. It was made clear to him that by being laid in the coffin he was to go through what a man experiences in passing through the portal of death and in the three days following this event. The procedure was such that he became fully aware of this.

On the third day there appeared, at a certain point visible for him who lay in the coffin, a branch, denoting sprouting life. In place of the laments, hymns of rejoicing were sung. The initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language had been imparted to him, a new script: the language and script of the spirits. Now he might see, and he was able to see the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

Comparing this initiation that took place in the sanctuaries of the Mysteries with the rites performed publicly, we see that while the substance of the rites was symbolical, its whole form nevertheless resembled the procedure followed in the Mysteries. And in due time the cult—we may take that of Adonis as typical—was explained to those who had participated. It was celebrated in the autumn, and those who took part were instructed approximately as follows:

Behold, it is autumn. The Earth sheds its glory of flowers and leaves. All things wither. In place of the greening, burgeoning life that in the spring time began to cover the earth, snow will envelop it, or drought will bring desolation. But while everything around you dies, you shall experience that which in man partly resembles the dying in Nature. Man, too, dies: he has his autumn. When he reaches the end of his life it is fitting that the souls of his dear ones be filled with deep sorrow. But it is not enough that you should meet death only when it comes to you: its whole import must be grasped in its profound significance, and you must be able to recall it to your memory again and again. Therefore you are shown every year the death of that divine being who stands for beauty and youth and the grandeur of man: you are shown this divine being going the way of all Nature. But when Nature becomes barren and passes into death, that is the time you must remember something else. You must remember that man passes through the portal of death; that in this Earth existence he has known only what is transitory, like all that passes in the autumn, but that now he is drawn away from the Earth and finds his way into the vast cosmic ether. During three days he sees himself expand till his being contains the whole world. And then, while here the eye of the body is directed to the image of death, to the ephemeral, to what dies, yonder in the spirit there awakens after three days the immortal human soul. It arises in order to be born for the spirit land three days after death.

An intense inner transformation was brought about in the body of the candidate in the recesses of the Mysteries; and the profound impression, the terrific shock inflicted on the human life by this old method of initiation awakened inner soul forces, gave rise to vision.¹ That impression, that shock, brought the initiate to understand that henceforth he lived not merely in the sense world but in the spiritual world as well.

Other information imparted to the neophytes of the old Mysteries may be summed up thus: the Mystery ritual is an image of events in the spiritual world; what occurs in the cosmos is a likeness of what takes place in the Mysteries. No doubt was left in the mind of anyone admitted to the Mysteries that the procedure followed in these and enacted in man constituted images of what he experiences in forms of existence other than the Earth in the astral-spiritual cosmos.

Those who, owing to insufficient inner maturity, could not be deemed ready to have the spiritual world opened up to them directly were taught the corresponding truths in the cult; that is, in a semblance of the Mystery proceedings.

Thus the purpose of the Mystery festival corresponding to Easter—the one we have illustrated by the Adonis Festival—was as follows: during the autumnal withering and desolation in

Nature, the drastic autumnal representation of the transience of earthly things—autumn's picture of dying and death—the certainty was to be conveyed to the neophyte—or at least the idea—that death, which envelops all Nature in the fall, overtakes man as well; and it comes even to the representative of beauty, youth and the glory of the human soul, to the god Adonis. He also dies. He dissolves in the earthly counterpart of the cosmic ether, that is, in water. But just as he arises out of the water, as he can be lifted out of it, so the soul of man is brought back, after about three days, from the world-waters—that is, from the cosmic ether—after having passed through the portal of death here on Earth.

The mystery of death itself, that is what the autumn festivals were intended to present in these old Mysteries; and it was to be made readily intelligible by having the ritual coincide, on the one hand and in its first half, with dying, with the death of Nature; and on the other, with the opposite of this: with what represented the essence of man's being. It was intended that the initiate should contemplate the dying of Nature in order to become aware of how he, too, apparently dies, but how his inner being rises again, to take part in the spiritual world. To reveal the truth concerning death, that was the purpose of this old pagan festival deriving from the Mysteries.

Now, during the course of human evolution a most significant event took place: in the case of Christ Jesus, the transformation experienced at a certain level by the candidate for initiation in the Mysteries—the death and resurrection of the soul—embraced the physical body as well. In what light does one familiar with the Mysteries see the Mystery of Golgotha? He envisions the ancient Mysteries; he observes how the soul of the candidate was guided through death to resurrection, meaning the awakening of a higher form of consciousness in the soul. The soul died in order to awake on a higher plane of consciousness. What must here be kept in mind is that the body did not die, and that the soul died in order to be reawakened to an enlightened consciousness.

What every aspirant for initiation experienced in his soul only, Christ Jesus passed through in His bodily principle; in other words, on a different level. Because Christ was not an Earth-man but a Sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for all the human principles of this Being to undergo on Golgotha what the former initiate experienced only in his soul.

Those with intimate knowledge of the old Mystery initiation, whether living at that time or in our own day, have best understood what took place on Golgotha; for what they have known is that for thousands of years the secrets of the spiritual world have been revealed to men through the death and resurrection of their soul. During the process of initiation, body and soul had been kept apart, and the soul was led through death to eternal life. What was experienced in this manner by a number of the elect penetrated even into the physical body of a Being Who descended from the Sun at the time of the Baptism in the Jordan, and took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Initiation, enacted through many centuries, had become a historical fact.

The important part of that knowledge was this: because it was a Sun-being that took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, that which in the old neophyte had to do only with the soul and its experiences could now penetrate to the bodily life. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolution of His body in the mortal Earth, the resurrection of the Christ could be brought about because this Christ ascends higher than was possible for the soul of a neophyte. The neophyte could not sink the body into such profoundly sub-sensible regions as did Christ Jesus. For this reason the former could not rise to such heights in his resurrection as could Christ. But up to this point of difference, which is one of cosmic magnitude, the ancient enactment of initiation appeared as a historical fact on the hallowed hill of Golgotha.

In the first centuries of Christianity very few men knew that a Sun-being, a cosmic being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, and that the Earth had been fructified by the actual coming of a being that previously could be seen from the Earth only in the Sun—by means of initiation methods. And for those who accepted Christianity with genuine knowledge of the old Mysteries, its very essence consisted in their conviction that Christ, to Whom they had raised themselves through initiation—the Christ Who could be reached through the old Mysteries by ascending to the Sun—that He had descended into a mortal body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He had come down to Earth.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, a mood of rejoicing, of holy elation, filled the souls of those who understood something of it. What then was a living substance of consciousness gradually became a festival in memory of the historical event on Golgotha—through developments to be described later.

But while this memory was gradually taking shape, the awareness of the identity of Christ as a Sun-being disappeared more and more. Those familiar with the old Mysteries could not be in doubt: they knew that the genuine initiates, by being made independent of the physical body, experienced death in their soul, ascended to the Sun sphere and there found the Christ; that from Him, the Christ in the Sun, they received the impulse for the resurrection of the soul. They knew who Christ was because they had raised themselves up to Him. From what took place on Golgotha these initiates knew that the Being who had formerly to be sought in the Sun had descended to men on Earth.

Why? Because the old process of initiation, enacted to enable the neophyte to reach Christ in the Sun, could no longer be enacted: the nature of man simply had changed in the course of time. The ancient ritual of initiation had become impossible by reason of the manner in which the human being had evolved. Christ could no longer have been found in the Sun by the old methods, so He descended in order to enact on the Earth a deed to which men could look.

What is comprised in this secret is as supremely sacred as anything that can be revealed upon Earth.

How did the matter appear to those living in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha? A diagram would have to be drawn somewhat like this:

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In the old abodes of initiation the neophyte gazed up to the Sun existence, and through initiation he became aware of Christ. To find the Christ he looked out into space. In order to show the subsequent development I must represent time—that is, the Earth proceeding in time. Spatially the Earth is, of course, always there, but we will represent the course of time in this way. The Mystery of Golgotha has taken place. Now, a man, say of the 8th Century, instead of seeking Christ in the Sun from the Mystery temple, looks upon the turning point of time at the beginning of the Christian era, looks in time toward the Mystery of Golgotha (arrow in diagram), and can find Christ in an Earth deed, in an Earth event, within the Mystery of Golgotha. What had been spatial perception was henceforth, through the Mystery of Golgotha, to be temporal perception: that was the significant feature of what had occurred.

Eut if we reflect upon the Mystery ritual, remembering that it was a picture of man's death and resurrection; and if we consider in addition the form taken by the cult—the Festival of Adonis, for example—which in turn was a picture of the Mystery procedure, this threefold phenomenon appears to us raised to the ultimate degree, unified and concentrated in the historical deed on Golgotha.

What was enacted in a profoundly inner way in the sanctuary now appears openly in external history. All men now have access to what was previously available only for the initiates. There was no further need of an image immersed in the sea and symbolically resurrected. In its place was to come the thought, the memory, of what actually took place on Golgotha. The outer symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the inner thought, unaided by any sense image—the memory, experienced only in the soul, of the historical deed on Golgotha.

Then, in the following centuries, the evolution of humanity took a peculiar turn: men are less and less able to penetrate into spirituality; the spiritual substance of the Mystery of Golgotha can gain no foothold in the souls of men; evolution tends toward the development of a materialistic mentality. Lost is the heart's understanding of facts like the following: that precisely where Nature presents herself as ephemeral, as dying desolation, there the living spirit can best be envisioned. And lost as well is the feeling for the festival as such, the feeling that autumn is the time when the resurrection of all spirit contrasts most markedly with the death of Earth Nature.

And thus autumn can no longer be the time for the festival of resurrection; no longer can it emphasize the eternal permanence of the spirit by the impermanence of Nature. Man begins to depend upon matter, upon those elements of Nature that do not die—the force of the seed that is sunk in the ground in the fall and that germinates and sprouts in the spring resurrection. A material symbol for the spiritual is adopted because men are no longer able to respond through the material to the spiritual as such. Autumn no longer has the power to reveal, through the inner force of the human soul, the permanence of the spiritual by contrasting it with the impermanence of Nature. The imagination now needs the aid of outer Nature, outer resurrection. Men want to see the plants sprouting from the ground, the Sun gaining power, light and warmth increasing. Nature's resurrection is needed to celebrate the resurrection idea.

But this exigency also means the disappearance of the direct relationship that existed with the Festival of Adonis, and that can exist with the Mystery of Golgotha. A loss of intensity is suffered by that inner experience which can appear at physical death if the human soul knows that man passes physically through the portal of death and undergoes, for three days, what indeed can evoke a somber frame of mind; but then the soul must rejoice in a festive mood, knowing that precisely out of death—after three days—the human soul arises in spiritual immortality.

The force inherent in the Festival of Adonis was lost, and the next event ordained for mankind was the resurrection of this force in greater intensity. One beheld the death of the god, of all the beauty and grandeur and vigorous youth in mankind. On the Day of Mourning this god was immersed in the sea. A somber mood prevailed, because first a feeling for the ephemeral in Nature was to be aroused.

But the intention was to transform the mood induced by the impermanence of Nature into that evoked by the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. When the god—or his effigy—was raised up out of the water, the rightly instructed believer saw in this act the image of the human soul a few days after death: Behold! The spiritual experience of the deceased stands before thy soul in the image of the arisen god of beauty and youth.

Every year in the fall something that is indissolubly linked with human destiny was awakened within the spirit of men. At that time it would have been deemed impossible to connect all this in any way with outer Nature. All that could be experienced in the spirit was represented in the ritual, in symbolical enactment. But when the time was ripe for effacing the old-time image and having memory take its place—imageless, inner memory of the Mystery of Golgotha experienced in the soul—mankind at first lacked the power to achieve this, because the activity of the spirit lay deep down in the substrata of the human soul. So up to our own time there has remained the necessity for calling in the aid of outer Nature. But outer Nature provides no complete allegory of the destiny of man in death; and while the idea of death survived, the idea of resurrection has faded more and more. Even though resurrection figures as a tenet of faith, it is not a living fact for people of more recent times. But it must once more become so; and the awakening of men's feeling for the true idea of the resurrection must be brought about by anthroposophy.

If, therefore, as has been explained elsewhere, the anthroposophically imbued soul must sense the heralding thought of Michael, must intensify the idea of Christmas, so the idea of Easter must become especially festive; for to the idea of death anthroposophy must add the idea of resurrection. Anthroposophy itself must come to resemble an inner festival of the resurrection of the human soul. It must infuse into our philosophy a feeling for Easter, a frame of mind appropriate to Easter. This it can do if men will understand that the ancient Mysteries can live on in the true Easter Mystery, provided the body, the soul and the spirit of man—and the destiny of these in the realms of body, soul and spirit—are rightly understood.

• 1. We shall see presently why in our time initiation cannot be accomplished by this method, but must proceed quite differently.

It can be said that the original purpose of festivals was to induce men to look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things; and it is the Easter Festival in particular that can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries of civilization we have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has led man farther and farther away from a clear conception of his connection with cosmic forces and powers. He has become ever more reduced to contemplating only his relation to earthly forces and powers, and it is quite true that with the means recognized today as legitimate it could not be otherwise. If someone imbued with the old Mysteries in the pre-Christian or early Christian centuries could learn of our modern knowledge, and if he approached the matter in the frame of mind prevalent in those days, he would not be able to understand how man could live without an awareness of his extra-earthly, cosmic connection.

I shall now merely sketch various matters which you will find dealt with in detail in this or that cycle. As these lectures are intended especially to acquaint you with the Easter idea there is naturally no time to elaborate all the points that I shall merely indicate.

Harking back to the various older systems of religion, we may take as an example the one with which the closest contact still persists: the Hebrew-Jewish system. In certain religious systems of Antiquity, provided they are monotheistic, we find the veneration, the worship, of a single divinity. It is the divinity we speak of in our Christian conception as the First Person of all divinity, as the Father-God.

Now, in all religions embodying the idea of this Father-God there obtained to a greater or lesser degree the connection of this Father-God with the cosmic Moon forces streaming down to Earth; and the Mystery priests in particular were fully aware of it. Nowadays little remains of this old awareness of the connection between the human being and the Moon forces but the inspiration they impart to the poetic soul; and in the realm of medicine, the counting of the ten lunar months of man's embryonic life. But in the older cosmogonies is to be found a clear consciousness of the permeation, the empowering by impulses emanating from the Moon at the time man descends to his physical existence from the spiritual world, where he had lived his pre-earthly life as a being of soul and spirit. When a man seeks that which gives him life, which lives in him as forces of digestion, of breathing and so forth—in short, all forces of growth—he must not look for these among the Earth forces but among extra-terrestrial forces. By examining the Earth forces—well, he can perceive how these act upon him; but if our body were not held together by cosmic forces, if these did not give our body its form, what could Earth forces contribute to its cohesion? The moment the cosmic forces leave the body and the latter is exposed to the terrestrial forces only, it breaks up, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. The Earth forces can only make a man into a corpse; they cannot create his form. It is to the mighty influence of the Moon that we are indebted for the forces so active in man as to lift him out of his physical limitations, to give him a cohesive organization which during life does not succumb to those forces that seize and destroy him at death; forces that combat this destruction during his entire Earth life—and this they must do.

If we know theoretically, on the one hand, that the Moon forces contain the potential human body, we must observe, on the other hand, how the old religions reverenced these forces that introduced man, so to speak, into physical existence through his birth—revered them as the Father forces, the forces of the divine Father. And the ancient Hebrew initiates were clearly aware that from the Moon emanated the forces which lead man into his Earth life, maintaining him there, and from which he severs himself, as physical man, when he passes through the portal of death.

To look up with loving soul to these divine Father forces and to relive them in the ritual and in prayer, that was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these old monotheistic religions were more consistent than you might think: such matters are utterly misrepresented in history, because history is dependent upon material documents and has no access to what can be observed in spiritual vision.

The religions that focused on the Moon and the spiritual beings abiding there are really later religions: the primordial ones embraced in addition a clear idea of the Sun forces and even—as we must add here—of the Saturn forces; but particularly of the Sun forces.

You see, this leads to a study of history for which no material documents exist, a period antedating the foundation of Christianity by many millennia; it takes us back to the epoch which, in my Occult Science, I called the Ancient Indian—in order to give it a name and because it evolved in the locality that later became India. The civilization following this was the Ancient Persian. During these civilizations the manner in which man developed was very different from what it became later; and upon this development depended his creed. We human beings have been developing, during the last two thousand years or more, in such a way that we really do not notice any break in the continuity of our earthly development, and indeed, the break is scarcely noticeable. Something that takes place in us around our thirtieth year remains largely in the subconscious, unconscious mind of present-day man. This was by no means the case among those who lived eight or nine millennia before the beginning of our era. At that time a man's development was continuous up to about the thirtieth year, but then a mighty metamorphosis set in. I must express this rather drastically, for thus the facts in the case will best be made clear.

Here is something that could happen in those ancient times: before his thirtieth year, someone had become acquainted with another who was three or four years younger, and who thus passed through the metamorphosis at a later time. Now, if these two people had not seen each other for a certain time and then met again—I am using the language of today that shows the matter in a still more radical way—it could happen that the one who had experienced the metamorphosis would fail to recognize the other when addressed by him. So great was the change that had come over his memory.

In these very old times it was the custom in the small communities such as then existed to register events in the lives of young people, because they themselves forgot it all after passing through the mighty revulsion in their thirtieth year, and had to be informed of what they had experienced previously. And then, when these people realized that in their thirtieth year they had become different beings, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their previous experiences—this was actually so—then, through the instruction they received, they became aware at the same time that before their thirtieth year it was exclusively the Moon forces that had acted upon them, and that now the Sun forces entered into the development of their earthly life.

The influence of the Sun forces on man is entirely different from that of the Moon forces; but what does present-day man know of the Sun forces? Only their external physical effect. He knows that they warm him, make him perspire; and he knows a bit about their therapeutic value—sun-baths and the like—but only in quite an external way. He cannot remotely conceive of the effect of the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun.

Julian the Apostate, last of the pagan Caesars, still knew something of these Sun forces from reminiscences of the Mysteries; and because he tried to revive this knowledge he was murdered on his expedition to Persia. That shows us how strong were the powers that were out to exterminate the knowledge of such matters in the early Christian centuries. It is therefore not surprising that today it is impossible to learn about these things.—While the Moon forces determine man, permeate him with an inner necessity so that he must act according to his instincts, his temperament, his emotions—in fact, according to his whole physico-etheric body, the Sun forces liberate him from this necessity. They melt, so to speak, these forces of necessity, and it is really through their agency that he becomes a free being.

In ancient times these two influences were sharply divided. In his thirtieth year a man simply became a Sun-man, a free man, whereas up to that time he had been a Moon-man, un-free. Nowadays these conditions overlap: even in childhood the Sun forces are active along with the Moon forces, and the latter continue to influence later life, with the result that today compulsion and freedom interact. But as has been said, this was not always the case, and in the prehistoric times with which we are dealing the effects of the Moon and of the Sun were sharply separated in life's course. It was considered pathological, abnormal, when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the turning point in his life; therefore it was said of normal people that they were born not once, but twice. And when humanity began to develop in such a way that this second or Sun-birth (the first was called the Moon-birth) became less noticeable, certain exercises, certain cult rituals—in short, certain methods were applied to those who were to be initiated in the Mysteries. These experienced what no longer existed for mankind in general, and they were then the twice-born.

The term “twice-born” which we find nowadays in oriental writings is one of mere tradition. I should really like to ask every orientalist, every Sanscrit scholar, whether our knowledge of the Orient discloses the substance of the term in a clearly definable way. I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst: you can ask him whether or not his studies in this field confirm my doubts. Quantities of formal explanations of the term are available, but the meaning of the substance is not known. Only those can understand it who know that it goes back to a reality such as I have just set forth. In such matters spiritual research alone can speak; and when it has spoken I should like to ask any unprejudiced exponent of external science whether all available documents do not bear out at every step the results of spiritual research. This will prove to be the case, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain matters antedating the science based on documents must be pointed out, for the latter cannot unlock the knowledge of human life.

So we look back to an epoch of Antiquity in which people spoke of the Moon-birth of the human being as the creation of man by the Father; and they understood that in the Sun-birth the rays of the Sun were permeated with the Christ force, the force of the Son, the liberating force. Consider: what does this Sun force effect? It enables us human beings upon Earth to make something of ourselves. Without the liberating Sun forces, without the impulses that break down compulsion, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable natural necessity—not of the necessity imposed by destiny but by Nature.

When a man imbued with the old cosmogonies looked up to the Sun he knew that this world-eye, from which the power of the Christ streamed forth, released him from bondage in that inexorable necessity into which he had been born through the Moon forces, and subject to which he would otherwise have had to develop throughout life. He knew that these Sun forces, these Christ forces raying down upon him through the cosmic eye of the Sun, enabled him to make something of himself through his inner freedom, something he had not been through the agency of the Moon forces when he entered life.—What the Sun forces gave to man was this consciousness of his ability to transform himself, to make something of himself.

For completeness' sake and parenthetically I should add that the third source to which men looked were the Saturn forces. In these they saw all that sustained the human being after passing through the portal of death; that is, when he experienced the third earthly metamorphosis.

Physical birth—Moon-birth
Second birth—Sun-birth
Third birth (physical death)—Saturn-birth

After death the human being was sustained by the forces of Saturn, which at that time was considered to lie at the extreme periphery of the Earth's planetary system. These were the forces that bore him up and out into the spiritual world, that maintained the cohesion of his being when the third metamorphosis occurred. There is no doubt that this was part of the ancient cosmogonies.

But humanity changed as a result of evolution, and the time came when only the effects of the Sun forces were known in the Mysteries. The knowledge of these survived longest in the therapeutic sections of the Mysteries, because the same forces that give man his freedom, the ability to make something of himself—namely, the Sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and other beings and things of the Earth, and in this form contain healing properties.

For the most part, however, mankind lost just this contact with the Sun. For a long time people were still aware of their dependence upon the Moon forces, the Father forces; but the consciousness of being dependent upon the Sun forces for their liberation disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of Nature—about the only ones mentioned in our philosophies—are really nothing but the Moon forces reduced to complete abstractions. But One Who still knew the Sun forces and was able to be guided by them was the Christ Bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them because it was His mission to receive them in His own body as they streamed down to Earth, whereas in the old Mysteries they could be reached only by ascending in vision to the Sun.

I explained that yesterday; but the essential point is that in the thirtieth year of His life a transmutation occurred in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; the same transformation that took place in everyone in primeval times, except that then the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual Sun entered into all men, whereas here it was the primal Being of the Sun, the Christ Himself, Who descended to enter human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what underlies the Mystery of Golgotha as the primal fruit of the whole life of the Earth.

You will now be able to understand the whole context of these matters by considering the manner in which Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, as I might put it, existed as a quite human institution in those days, for it meant initiation. Primarily this comprised three stages; but the first requirement for attaining to true enlightenment, to initiation, was that everything offered the candidate by the Mysteries should engender in him a degree of inner humility such as nowadays hardly anybody can even dimly imagine. Today people consider themselves enormously modest in respect of their achievements, even in cases where one who can see through them knows that they are veritably possessed by vanity. At the inception of an initiation, the most important realization that had to come to the neophyte was that he could not think of himself as a human being at all: that it still remained for him to become one. Today it would be asking too much of anyone to admit that at any given period of his life he was not a human being. But that was the very first requirement, and the neophyte had to meditate as follows: Before descending into an earthly body I was indeed a human being; in pre-earthly existence I was a human being of soul and spirit. In this form I then descended into the physical body, received from my mother, from my parents. I was then—not clothed in a physical body—that would be a wrong term: I was permeated by this physical body.

Of the manner in which, over a long period of time, the spirit and the soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—of all this men are completely unaware. They know nothing of it. They are conscious of perceiving with their senses, of seeing their physical surroundings with their eyes. But when soul and spirit have so far permeated a man's physical body that he considers himself a fully developed adult, where has he actually arrived? He can only see out of his eyes, listen out of his ears, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness, through his skin: he can only perceive outward, not inward. He cannot look into himself with his eyes: the most he can do is to dissect the human corpse and then imagine he is looking into himself. But in reality he is not. Supposing here is a house. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I procure some tools, and if I am strong enough I demolish the house. Then I have all the separate bricks before me; but is it not childish to imagine I am looking into the house when I am only looking at this pile of rubbish? Yet that is the way people go to work nowadays. They dissect the human being and cut him up in order to learn to know him; but in that way they do not learn to know him, for that is not at all the human being. If we would learn to know the human being we must be able to look back inward through the eyes, to listen back inward through the ears, just as today we perceive outward through the senses.

All that taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the Door to Man, the Gate to Man. The point of departure in the initiations was the candidate's realization that he could know nothing of the human being; and having no human self-consciousness, he could not even be a human being. He must first learn to look inward through his senses as previously he had only looked outward. That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment the neophyte learned this looking inward he experienced himself also in his pre-earthly existence, for then he knew that he was in his spirit-soul element.

So the neophyte learned to look inward instead of outward, and in so doing he became aware of what had entered him through eyes, ears, skin, and so forth, as prenatal existence. At this point he was told that only now could he come to understand what today we would call natural science. How do we of today go about studying natural science? We are taught to observe the phenomena of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is the same as though I had known someone very well, and I were told to forget, when

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I meet him again, everything we had ever had in common. Fancy, if you can, a married couple meeting again after a separation and being obliged to forget everything in the way of their common experiences! Well, I can imagine that occasionally it might be pleasant to do so; but life could not be maintained under such conditions.

Yet those are exactly the conditions imposed upon men of our time by our system of civilization, for they did learn to know the kingdoms of Nature from their spiritual aspect before descending to Earth. And while today men are encouraged to forget all they had learned about the minerals, plants and animals before descending to Earth, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, was instructed somewhat as follows: he was shown, for example, a block of quartz; and then everything possible was done to recall to his memory what he had known, before descending to Earth, about quartz—or about the lily, or the rose, as the case may have been. Recognizing was the factor taught as natural science; and when the candidate had learned to study Nature in the light of what he had seen in his prenatal life, he was admitted to the second stage.

In the second stage he learned music and what was then architecture, geometry, surveying, etc.; for this second stage comprised everything the neophyte could perceive when he not only looked inward through his eyes and listened inward through his ears, but actually entered into himself. Then he was told that he was about to enter the human Temple Grotto, and this he came to know. It meant that which was physically permeated by the psycho-spiritual forces that constitute man before he descends to life on Earth. There he penetrated into himself. This Temple Grotto, he was told, was made up of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought, where one learned everything connected with thinking. Seen from without, the head is small; but if one enters into it and looks at it from within, it is as comprehensive as the world, and there one's spiritual activity becomes manifest. That was the first chamber. In the second chamber one learned to know feeling; and in the third, willing.

In this way the initiate learned how man is organized in respect of his organs of thinking, feeling and willing; he learned about the factors concerned in the Earth life. Knowledge of Nature has significance not only in connection with the Earth: it is acquired before one descends to Earth. Here we must remember that yonder in the spiritual world houses are not built with tellurian architecture. There is music there, but it is spiritual melos. What we know as music is projected down into our air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as we experience it, it is of this Earth It is the same when we survey: we measure the Earth; and surveying, geometry and the like are earthly sciences. It was important for the candidate for the second stage to have his attention drawn to the fact that all thought of gaining enlightenment or knowledge by earthly means alone is delusive, except in the case of geometry, architecture or surveying; that a genuine science of Nature must consist in recalling prenatal knowledge. That is what he was taught; and he came to understand that geometry, architecture, music and surveying were the sciences that can be learned here on Earth.

Thus the mystic entered into himself and came to know the human being as consisting of three chambers, as opposed to the human being of one particular incarnation, which is all one encounters by knowing him only from the outside.—And in the third stage the neophyte learned the nature of man as it was when he not only entered into himself, comprehending his spiritual self, but when his spiritual self learned about the body as well. In all the old Mysteries this was therefore the stage inevitably called the Portal of Death. There the initiate learned what he was like after laying aside the earthly body. But there was a difference between this actual death and the death of initiation. Why this had to be so I shall explain in the following lectures; at the moment I am merely emphasizing the facts.

When we actually die we discard the physical body and are no longer bound to it. It ceases to respond to Earth forces, and we are free of these. But one who is still bound to the physical body, as was the case in the initiations of old, must obtain by his own strength and efforts what comes to him automatically through death, namely, this freedom from the body; and he must sustain this condition for a certain length of time. Initiation demanded the attainment of these strong inner forces of the soul by which the latter could remain independent of the physical body; and these forces at the same time provided higher cognition of matters not to be perceived by the senses or thought by the intellect. They transported the initiate as a human being into the spiritual world, just as man is placed by his physical body into the physical world.

But at that point the candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a psycho-spiritual human being, as an initiate, while still in his Earth existence. From that time onward he saw the Earth as a star existing detached from man; and in the older Mysteries it was with the Sun in particular that he had to live, instead of with the Earth. He knew what came to him from the Sun and how the Sun forces worked in him.

The stage that followed the one I have just described, the fourth, may be explained in this way: When a man eats on this Earth he knows, this is cabbage, that is game—he drinks various things, and he knows that now these things are outside him, now inside. He breathes the air which is alternately outside and inside. He is connected with the Earth forces in such a way as to carry within him the forces and substances of the Earth that are otherwise outside him. It was made clear to the candidate that before being initiated he was an Earth-carrier, a carrier of cabbage, game, pork, and so forth. But if you have completed the third stage of initiation, so he was told, and if you receive what you are now able to receive by having freed yourself from the body, you will no longer be a carrier of cabbage, pork and veal, but you will be a bearer of what the Sun forces give you.—And this spiritual gift of the Sun forces was called in all the Mysteries christos. Hence the neophyte who had passed beyond the third stage and could now feel himself as a bearer of the Sun forces—just as on Earth he could feel himself to be a cabbage carrier—was called a christophor, a Christ bearer. In the majority of the old Mysteries that was the appellation of a neophyte of the fourth stage.

In the third stage certain things had to be thoroughly understood, in particular, that the craving for the physical body must cease if enlightenment was to enter; and the neophyte had clearly to realize that while he belonged to the Earth as far as his physical body was concerned, yet the function of the Earth was really to destroy that physical body, not to build it up. Now he came to know the constructive forces that derive from the cosmos.

And he learned something else when he became a christophor, namely, that even in the Earth's matter there are spiritual forces at work, only they are not perceptible to earthly senses. Another language was current in those times, but in modern words—and I can use only these—the sense of what was made clear to the candidate was this: if you would know the science of matter, know how different elements combine or separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter out of the cosmos. That is impossible if you are not initiated: it is necessary to have passed through the fourth stage. You must be able to see by means of the forces of the Sun existence—then you can study chemistry.

Imagine nowadays confronting a candidate for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry with the requirement that he must first be able to feel himself in the same relation to the forces of the Sun as he does to the cabbage of the Earth! It would seem quite mad.—But in the old days realities were dealt with, and people came to understand that by means of all the forces active in the body—forces employed for ordinary learning—only geometry, surveying, music and architecture can be studied. Not chemistry. Today chemistry is studied from the outside, and so it has been since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine enlightenment must despair at the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon data, not upon inner penetration of the subject. And if people were open-minded they would realize that something more is necessary, that other things must be understood if chemistry is to be studied. What stifles such impulses in man is the cowardice of modern cognition in which he has been reared.

Now the neophyte had attained to the still higher stage of astronomus. The external study of the stars, by computation and the like, was considered wholly futile: spiritual beings inhabit the stars, and these can be known only after physical observation has been surmounted—after even geometry has been overcome—so that one can live in the universe and get to know the spiritual nature of the stars. Then the neophyte became a resurrected one; then he could really see the Moon and Sun forces at work upon earthly man.

Today I have described to you from two aspects how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries—not at a given season but at a certain degree of human maturity: Easter was the arising of the psycho-spiritual man out of the physical body in the spiritual universe; and those who still knew something of Mystery wisdom saw the Mystery of Golgotha in this light when it took place. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not intervened? In olden times it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in still older times it was a matter of course for a man to experience his second birth in his thirtieth year or thereabouts. And later on there were at least memories, as well as the science of the Mystery schools, that kept alive in tradition what in earlier epochs had been actually experienced. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, all that had been lost or forgotten; and humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not that power, to which the initiate attained in becoming a christophor, descended into a Jesus of Nazareth and henceforth remained on Earth, so that man could be united with this power through Christ Jesus.

Undoubtedly, then, the Easter Festival as we know it is linked with a phase of the Mysteries, and we can really become conscious of the substance of our Easter only by reviving this aspect of them. You will readily understand that in this way we can at least approximate a realization of what the ancient neophyte experienced at his initiation. This will be the subject of further consideration. The neophyte could say to himself: Initiation has disclosed to me how Sun and Moon act within me in their mutual celestial relationship. For now I know that as a physical being I am constituted in a certain way. The circumstance that my eyes, my nose—my whole bodily form within and without—are shaped thus and so, that this bodily form could grow and is still growing through being nourished, all this depends upon the Moon forces, as does everything in the way of necessity. But that I can be active within my bodily nature as a free inner being, can transmute and master myself, this is due to the Sun forces, the Christ forces. These I must activate if I would, by conscious effort, build within me what otherwise they would have to bring about by compulsion.

From all this we can understand why even today we look to Sun and Moon and their relative position to determine the date of Easter. Nothing remains of all this but our calculation, When is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the spring equinox? We place Easter on the Sunday following this first full Moon, thus indicating that in the nature and form of Easter we see something that must be determined from above, from the cosmos. I shall elaborate that tomorrow. But what must be grasped anew is the idea of Easter. This can only be done by contemplating the old Mysteries, which first of all drew attention to what was experienced by introspection—the portal of man; by the achievement of freedom—the portal of death; by moving freely in the spiritual world—becoming a christophor.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear when the time came for the development of human freedom to assert itself; but now the time has come to rediscover them. We must find and make them our own again; and we must fully realize that today efforts are necessary to this end.

With this in mind the Christmas Conference was held, for there is urgent need of a sanctuary on Earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society must lead the way in its further development to the modern Mysteries. It will be one of your tasks, my dear friends, to collaborate in this way with the right understanding. But in order to succeed you will have to reflect on human life in its three stages: that of introspection, that of self-penetration, and that of a consciousness such as results in outer reality only through death.

And to remind us of what has been said in this hour, let us carry away with us and meditate upon these words:

Stand at the portal of man's existence,
Read above its arch stones cosmic scripture.

Dwell in the deep of man's inner soul-life,
Feel within its orbit the world's beginning.

Ponder the end of man's earth-chapters,
Find thou there the turning-point of spirit.¹

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

• 1. Translation by Barbara Betteridge.

In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival; and in order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring to the so-called secret of the Moon.

During all epochs in which people knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.

The manner in which astronomy is studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism, remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.

In the human being a unified psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself, not in a unified psycho-spiritual entity, but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.

Inner man is related to this spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.

External observation of the Moon shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter—and there is also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.

All this is nowadays explained as though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space, illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon—that is, something that presents a physical aspect—this aspect embodies something totally different from what is inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present—now wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of its physical and spiritual expression.

And now, in order to understand the crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.

Naturally, in the time when man existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower

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part of man was formed and held fast by the other forces—no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces, but by the former only. On the other hand, the influences that emanated from within the Earth at the time it still contained the Moon now act upon man from without, from the Moon.

We can put it this way: formerly the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs—the feet and legs—and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the surrounding cosmos.

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This process has radically changed since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces—that is, to something cosmic—if he would build his etheric body.

This etheric body must be formed in such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose: it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body. This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon—in fact, all the light shining from the Moon into the cosmos—contains the forces that enable man to form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.

And on the other hand, the forces man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.

But all this that the Moon forces achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth, it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

Now, the entire life of this spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon. Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.

Certain of the Mysteries knew this. It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is reflected in the names of the days of the week:

Thus we see how everything pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was something as follows: Remember, oh man, that before descending to Earth you needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so forth.

So on the one hand we have the rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the capacity for movement is concentrated there.

If we wish to employ these secrets of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the matter cosmically.

The current engendering in man the capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of Saturn.

There remains that which must be kept away—pushed back, as it were—to prevent its interfering with the formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that which comes from the Sun. From the Sun—or from the observation of the Sun—derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete in himself through the integration of the etheric body—that is, through protective forces.

It can be said that in this way we learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.

By means of initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx, but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth—really an unwisdom in the materialistic age—but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.

This sort of initiation really meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon—not in a symbolical sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.

The initiate knew that for the time being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body; and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast realm.

And what was that? Well, among other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve, destroy the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most of all his ego he must look to the Sun.

This initiation was really of such a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.

And now he reflected as follows: the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and out of this the etheric body is formed.—That was the secret known to him who was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer—that is, a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.

Now imagine this actual experience through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men no longer knew that such things could happen; that man is really able to withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in the Easter Festival.

The ability to experience all this did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic; instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and said, I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon, and said, It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins, when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.

The old Mysteries employed this image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of the full Moon.

All this, then, became a memory, but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon. ... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a human experience, people imagined that something or other—not man himself—streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so now the Moon beholds the Sun—that is, its symbolization in Sunday.

We have the beginning of spring, March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe. We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.

March 21st—full Moon—Sunday.

What does the Moon observe? The Sun; and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former times frequently occurred for many men.

That is actually what our present spring Easter Festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.

The process I described today is a different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations—those of the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned, men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.

Thus the confusion manifesting itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it is driven by the spirit.

But this was intended to remind men—not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection. There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos intensified his soul life enormously.

But this varied according to the locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret, which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself, I come to a place where the Adonis Festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the secret of the Moon.—Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to the whole meaning of the year.

You see, our Easter Festival has really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that follow upon death.

In passing, then, from Earth secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has disappeared.

Today I wanted to present this subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.

We have seen that out of the Mysteries grew something that made man aware of being related to the world in a way that can be expressed in the annual festivals; and in particular we have learned that Easter is an outgrowth of the principle of initiation. From all that has been set forth it will have become evident what a significant role the Mysteries played in the entire evolution of humanity. Really everything of a spiritual nature that has permeated the world and developed through mankind originated in the old Mysteries. In modern terms we could say that the Mysteries were all-powerful in guiding the spiritual life.

Now, it was intended from the beginning that mankind should develop freedom; and to this end it was necessary for the old Mystery system to recede and for humanity to be less closely linked, for a time, with the powerful guidance that proceeded from the Mysteries, to be cast more upon its own resources, as it were. We certainly cannot assert today that the time has arrived in which men have achieved their true inner freedom and are ready to pass over into the next phase of evolution that is to follow upon that of freedom. This is not the case. Still, many have already passed through a number of incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less strongly felt than formerly; and though the seeds of these incarnations have not yet sprouted, they are nevertheless potentially present in the souls of men. And with the coming of a more spiritual age they will develop what they have not developed in their present dimness of vision. Above all things, however, it will be necessary that the wisdom, the vision, the experience of the spiritual such as can be attained by modern initiation, be met with esteem, with reverence; and this must be offered out of man's freedom. Without esteem and reverence, true enlightenment and a spiritual life of humanity is really not possible.

Surely we make the right use of festivals if with their help we try to implant in our souls this esteem, this reverence for things spiritual as they have evolved during the course of human history; if we try to learn how to observe in the most intimate way possible the spiritual significance of outer events, to understand how these carry spiritual meaning from one age over into another. For the time being men keep returning to Earth in repeating incarnations, thus carrying over their experiences of earlier epochs into later ones. Human beings are the most important factor in the further development of all that takes place within the history of mankind. But men of all periods live in a definite environment, and clearly, one of the most significant environments was that of the Mysteries. A most important factor in the progress of humanity is the carrying over of what has been experienced in the Mysteries and re-experienced, be it again through the medium of Mysteries, whence it acts upon mankind, or by other means of enlightenment. Today it must be the latter, for the true Mystery system has withdrawn from the present outer world and is to reappear only in the future.

If the impulse that went forth from here, from the Goetheanum, at the time of the Christmas Meeting, really takes root in the Anthroposophical Society, it is certain that by leading to ever deeper insight the Anthroposophical Society will be the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. These new Mysteries must be consciously nurtured by the Anthroposophical Society. We recall an event that can be utilized in our development as once a similar one was used: the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Both were the result of a grave wrong; yet on different planes things have different meanings, and it is possible for a frightful iniquity, as it appears on one plane, to be employed on another for the advancement of human freedom—in the sense that precisely such horrible events can bring about a real advance in human progress.

But as I have already said, such matters must be grasped through their inner meaning if they are to be approached understandingly. One must enter into the particular manner in which the spiritual element of the world pervaded the Mysteries. Yesterday I pointed out how the establishment of the annual Easter Festival grew out of a spiritual conception of the constellation of Sun and Moon, and that from the Moon viewpoint the other planets were observed. And I said further that according to what is learned by observing the other planets, the human being, in descending from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence, is guided in forming his light-ether body.

If we would observe and rightly understand how this light-ether body, these ether forces, are transmitted to us by the Moon forces, Moon observations—by what I might call the spiritual Moon observatory, this can be done as we have just endeavored to do it: by turning to the cosmos where it is all inscribed and exists as a fact. But it is important to ponder in our souls the human element as well, the part it plays in the different epochs as a factor of these truths.

As a matter of fact, never did the souls of men take part so intimately, so fervently, in this last phase of the descent to Earth—the enveloping in an etheric body—as in the Mysteries of Ephesus. There the whole service of the Goddess of Ephesus, exoterically called Artemis, was directed toward co-experiencing the spiritual weaving life within the cosmic ether. When members of the Ephesian Mystery approached the image of the Goddess, the feeling this gave them may be said to have become intensified to hearing; and what they heard, as though the goddess were speaking, was something as follows: I rejoice in all that bears fruit in the wide expanse of cosmic ether.—A deep impression was created by this expression of intense joy on the part of the Goddess of the Temple, her joy in all that grows, sprouts and burgeons in the world-ether; and an ardent feeling of close relationship with blossoming and flowering was in particular something that permeated the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as with a magic breath.

Nowhere else was the growth of the plant life, the drive of the Earth forces into the plants, co-experienced so intensely as in the Mystery of Ephesus, for the entire training here tended to that end. And this led to the next step: it was here that instruction was given, if I may so call it, specially intended to induce in the minds of members a feeling for the Moon secret, of which I spoke yesterday. It was everyone's own experience to feel himself as a light-being, because the act of receiving his light-form from the Moon was made so alive for the neophytes and initiates.

A part of the ritual ran something as follows—and one who could take part in it was actually transported into that act of forming himself out of the sunlight that circles around the Moon: as though proceeding from the Sun, there came to him the sound J O A.¹

He knew that this J O A activated his ego, his astral body. J O (ego, astral body) and A (the approach of the light-ether body), joining in J O A. Then, with the J O A vibrating in him, he felt himself to be composed of ego, astral body and etheric body.

And then it seemed as though he heard sounding up to him from the Earth—for he had been transported into the cosmos—something that saturated the J O A: eh v. JehOvA What rose up to him in the eh v were the Earth forces.

Now he realized that in this JehOvA he felt the complete human being. The premonition of the physical body, which he acquired only on Earth, he felt intimated in the consonants complementing the vowels that in the J O A indicate the ego, the astral and the etheric body.—This becoming one with the JehOvA was what enabled the disciple of Ephesus to sense in their full significance the last steps of the descent from the spiritual world.

But in feeling the import of this J O A the neophyte at the same time felt himself to be the sound J O A in the light. Then he was a human being: resonant ego, resonant astral body, in a shimmering light-ether body. He was sound in light. That is the nature of cosmic man; and in this state the initiate was able to grasp what he saw in the cosmos, just as on Earth he could perceive through his eyes what occurs in the physical environment of the Earth. When the neophyte of Ephesus bore this J O A within him he really felt transported into the Moon sphere, and he took part in all that could be observed from the point of view of the Moon.

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In this condition the human being was man in general, in the sense that the differentiation between man and woman did not enter until the descent to Earth occurred. Man felt himself transported into this pre-earthly existence, the region immediately preceding his approach to the terrestrial. The Ephesian disciples were able to achieve this ascent to the Moon sphere in a particularly intimate way; and henceforth they carried in their heart, in their soul, what they had experienced there. It sounded for them something as follows:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.²

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

That expresses what permeated every Ephesian, and he counted it the most important of all that pulsed through his being. When a participant in the Ephesian Mysteries heard these words ringing in his ears, as it were, there was something about them that made him feel himself completely as a human being; for through them he became aware of the relation between the forces of his etheric body and the planetary system. This came to forceful expression. The cosmos speaks to the etheric body:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might.

Now the human being feels himself to be in the power of the moonlight.

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing.

The chiming, endowed with creative force, sounds across from Mars. And what gave strength to man's limbs, endowing him with the power of movement:

And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging.

From Jupiter there rays across:

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming.

And from Venus:

And Venus' love-bearing beauty ...

In order that then Saturn may gather up all that rounds off the human being within and without, prepare him to descend to Earth and there to clothe himself in a physical garb; and then further enable this physically garbed being, who bears the god within him, to live on the Earth:

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being
And to ages now aborning
Consecrate thee.

From what I have described you can readily see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was colorful and aglow with inner light. Epitomized in the thought of Easter, it comprised really everything that had ever been known about man's true dignity in the cosmos, in the whole universe. And many of the wanderers I mentioned yesterday—those who went from one Mystery to another in order to benefit by the totality of the Mysteries—many of these have repeatedly assured us that nowhere else as in Ephesus—at least, not so joyously—did they perceive so intimately and brightly the harmony of the spheres through that Moon point of view, where the radiant astral light of the world shone on them, where they sensed it in the spiritual sunlight flooding the Moon: in other Mysteries the saturation of man's soul and spirit with astral light was not felt with such an intense, inner artistic grasp.

All this was associated with the temple that went up in flames by the hand of a criminal or a lunatic. But as I mentioned during the Christmas Conference, initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were re-embodied in Aristotle and Alexander; and these personalities came close to what was still capable of being sensed, in their time, of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now, what appears to be an outwardly fortuitous event can be of great spiritual significance in world evolution. Among ourselves it has frequently been mentioned for years that the Temple of Ephesus was burned at the hour in which Alexander the Great was born. But as this temple burned, something significant occurred.

What untold experiences had come to the dwellers in that temple through the centuries! What a wealth of spiritual light and wisdom had suffused its halls! And while the flames lept up from the Temple of Ephesus, all that wisdom was imparted to the cosmic ether, so that we may say: the perpetually recurring Easter Festival of Ephesus that had been locked in the temple halls was henceforth inscribed in the dome of the universe, in so far as this is etheric, though in less legible letters.

That is often the way things work out: much human wisdom that in olden times had been enclosed within temple walls was released, was inscribed in the world-ether, and there at once becomes visible to one who ascends to real imagination. And this imagination is the interpreter, as it were, of the secret of the stars: what once was secret within the temples has been inscribed in the world-ether, and there it can be read by means of imagination.

We can put it another way, but it means the same. I go out into the starlit night, contemplate the firmament and throw myself open to it. Then, if I have the right capacity, the forms of the constellations and the movements of the planets are transmuted as into vast cosmic script. And if I read this script, something emerges like that which I explained yesterday in referring to the Moon secret. When the stars no longer remain merely something to be mathematically and mechanically computed, but become the alphabet of cosmic script, these things can indeed be read there.

But I should like to develop the matter further. When Alexander and Aristotle approached the Kabirian secrets in Samothrace at a time when the old Mysteries were already on the decline,² something occurred to them at that moment through the influence of the Kabirian Mysteries like a memory of the old Ephesian time, which both had passed through in a certain century. And once more there resounded the J O A, and again they heard intoned:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.

But in this memory, this historical recollection of something ancient, there resided a certain power, the power to create something new. And from that moment there streamed forth this power to create something new—but it was something strange and little observed by mankind. For you must really first understand the nature of this creative power that went forth from the collaboration of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any notable poem or other work of art—it can be a most beautiful one, such as the Bhagavad Gita or Goethe's Faust or his Iphigenia—anything you value very highly—and reflect on its rich and mighty content—let us say, on the content of Goethe's Faust. Now, by what means, my dear friends, is this rich content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted in the ordinary way, as it is to most people. At some time during your life you read Faust. What did you encounter on the physical plane—on the paper? Nothing but combinations of a b c, and so forth. The means by which the mighty content of Faust is disclosed to us consists only of combinations of the letters of the alphabet. If you know the alphabet, the paper contains nothing that does not correspond with one of the twenty-odd letters. Something is conjured up out of these twenty-odd letters—if you know how to read—that evokes for you the whole glorious substance of Faust. You may find it excessively tiresome to recite the alphabet, and you may consider it as abstract as anything could well be; yet rightly combined, this superlative abstraction gives us the whole of Faust.

Now, when there was heard again the cosmic resounding from the Moon that disclosed to Aristotle and Alexander what the blaze of Ephesus signified, how that fire had carried the secret of Ephesus out into the world-ether, there came to Aristotle the inspiration to found the cosmic script. This, however, is not achieved by means of the alphabet, but rather through thoughts, as book writing is made up of letters. And so the letters of the cosmic script came into being.—When I write them down for you they are just as abstract as the alphabet:

There you have a number of concepts. They originated when Aristotle laid them before Alexander. Learn to accomplish with these concepts what you do with the alphabet, and you will have learned to read in the cosmos by means of Being, Quantity, Quality, Relationship, Space, Time, Position, Having, Doing, Suffering.

In our age of abstractions something peculiar happened to logic, as it is taught in the schools. Imagine a custom existing in some school to teach—not reading, but, for instance, to provide books from which the pupils had to keep learning the letters in all conceivable combinations, but never arriving at using them for envisioning the wealth of the contents: that would be the same as what the world has done to Aristotle's Logic. In the books on logic are listed his categories—that's what people call them. People memorize them, but have no idea what to do with them. It is exactly like memorizing the alphabet without knowing how to apply it.

Reading the cosmic records bases on something just as simple as extracting the content of Faust by means of the alphabet—it must merely be learned. And fundamentally, all that anthroposophy has ever brought forth or ever will has been experienced by means of these concepts, just as what is read in Faust is experienced through the letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are comprised in these simple concepts that are the cosmic alphabet.

Something intervened in Earth evolution at the time of Alexander that stands in contrast with the direct perception so characteristic of Ephesus. It did not develop till later, especially during the Middle Ages; and it is deeply hidden, profoundly esoteric. Profoundly esoteric is the meaning that dwells in those ten simple concepts; and actually we are learning more and more to live in them. But we must keep striving to experience them as livingly in our soul as we do the alphabet when a wealth of spiritual substance is in question.

Thus you see how something that for thousands of years had been a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom flowed into ten concepts, whose inner power and light, however, remain to be re-disclosed. And when man will have learned again to read in the cosmos, when he will experience the resurrection of what has lain buried as though in a grave during this interlude in human evolution between the two spiritual ages, then it will come about at some future time that the world wisdom, the light of the world, will be found again. It is our task, my dear friends, to bring to light again what is hidden. We must make of Easter an experience for all humanity. And just as it could be said on other occasions that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, so it is in its whole manifestation an Easter experience, a resurrection experience coupled with an experience of the grave. And it is especially important during this Easter gathering that we should feel, if I may so express it, the solemnity of anthroposophic striving by realizing that today we can turn to a spiritual Being Who may be close to us, directly beyond the threshold, and appeal to Him thus: Oh, how blessed was mankind at one time with divine-spiritual revelation that still shone so very bright in Ephesus! But now all that is buried. How can I uncover what is so deeply buried?—for one would like to believe that what once existed might in some historical way be found again in the grave where it lies.

Then the Being will reply to us, as did once before a like being in a similar case: What you seek is no longer here. It is in your heart, if only you will unlock your heart in the right way.

Anthroposophy is indeed latent in the hearts of men, but it is for these human hearts to open in the right way. That is what we must deeply feel. Then we will be led back—not instinctively, as of old, but in full awareness—to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

All this I would like to implant in your hearts, my dear friends, at this Easter time; for to permeate yourself with something that can enkindle a feeling of solemnity in every heart dedicated to anthroposophy, that is something which carries up into the spiritual world and which must be correlated with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach. For this impulse must not remain a thought-out, intellectualistic one, but must spring from the heart; it must not be formal or matter-of-fact, nor must it be sentimental: it must issue from the cause itself and bear the mark of solemnity. When the conflagration at Ephesus blazed up, first in the outer ether and then in the heart of Aristotle, it revealed anew to Aristotle the secrets that could then be epitomized in the simplest terms; and we may say in all modesty that, just as he was able to use the fire of Ephesus to this end, so it is our task—and we shall fulfill it—to use what the flames of the Goetheanum carried into the ether: the aims and purpose of anthroposophy.

What do we gather from all this, my dear friends? That at the memorial service in the Christmas-New Year time, the time in which the disaster struck us a year before, it was vouchsafed us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. How could this be? Because we are right in feeling that what had previously been a cause pertaining to this Earth, worked for and established as such, was carried by the flames out into cosmic space. Because this misfortune has come to us we are, recognizing its consequences, justified in saying, Now we understand that we may no longer represent a mere Earth cause, but must know it as one of wide etheric space in which the spirit lives: the cause represented by the Goetheanum is a cause of the cosmic ether in which lives the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried out into the ether; and it is granted us to permeate ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses flowing in from the cosmos.

Take this in any sense—as an image, if you like: even as an image it signifies a profound truth, a truth that can be simply expressed: the Christmas impulse calls for the permeation of anthroposophical activity with an esoteric element. This is present because what had been earthly now reacts on the impulses of the anthroposophical movement through the astral light in the physical fire that rayed forth into cosmic space; but we must be able to receive these impulses.

Then, if we are able to receive them, we feel a certain important link in the chain of all that lives in anthroposophy: it is the anthroposophical Easter spirit, which can never in the world believe that the spirit perishes, but rather that it arises ever and again after dying through the world; and anthroposophy must hold fast to the spirit resurrected again and again out of eternal depths.

That is what we will take into our hearts as the Easter thought, the Easter feeling; and from this gathering we shall carry away feelings, my dear friends, that will fill us with courage and strength for work when we return to our allotted spheres.

• 1. Translator's Note:—For readers not familiar with German it must be explained that j is pronounced like our y in “yet”—in other words, like an excessively short German i. For this reason it is not too strange that one often encounters J for I (but only in capitals), and the above is a case in point. Indeed, there is no choice here but to use it, as the same letter must serve as a pure vowel in J O A and later as a modified vowel in Jehova.—The letters J O A must be pronounced Ee Oh Ah, and Jehova that appears later, Yay-hoh-vah.
• 2. Translation by Henry B. Monges.
• 2. Samothrace still existed as a memorial and also as a sanctuary for work, but in the main the Mystery schools had declined in the time of Alexander.

Easter is felt by many to be associated on the one hand with the deepest feelings and sensibilities of the human soul, and on the other, with cosmic mysteries and enigmas. The connection with cosmic mysteries becomes clear when we consider that Easter is a so-called movable feast, the date of which is fixed each year with reference to a specific constellation in the heavens. We will have more to say about this in the lectures to come. As for Easter's connection with the human soul, if we examine the customs and rites that have become associated with it through the centuries, we cannot fail to observe the great significance with which a large part of mankind has come to invest this festival.

For Christianity, Easter was not important initially, but it became so during the first few centuries. It is linked to Christianity's basic tenet, the Resurrection of Christ, and to the fundamental impulse to become a Christian provided by that fact. Easter is therefore a celebration of the Resurrection, but as such it points back to times and festivals predating Christianity.

These earlier festivals centered around the spring equinox, an event which, though not identical with Easter, enters into the calculation of its date, and celebrated nature's reawakening in the new life burgeoning forth from the earth. And this leads us directly to the heart of our subject, which is the Easter festival as a stage in the evolution of the Mysteries.

For Christians Easter commemorates the Resurrection. The corresponding pagan festival in a sense celebrated the resurrection of nature, the reawakening of what, as nature, had been asleep throughout the winter. However, there the similarity ends. It must be emphasized that with regard to its inner meaning, the Christian Easter festival in no sense corresponds to the pagan equinox celebrations. Rather, a serious examination of ancient pagan times reveals that Easter, in the Christian sense, is related to festivals that grew out of the Mysteries and that were celebrated in the fall.

This most curious fact demonstrates what serious misunderstandings regarding matters of the highest importance have occurred in the course of humanity's development. In the early Christian centuries, nothing less happened than the confusion of Easter with a completely different festival, with the result that Easter was moved from fall to the spring.

With this we touch upon something of enormous importance in the development of humanity. Consider for a moment the essential content of Easter. First, the figure central to Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, experiences death, as commemorated by Good Friday. He then remains in the grave for three days, symbolizing his union with earthly existence. Christians observe this interval, the one between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as a period of mourning. Finally, on Easter Sunday, the central being of Christianity arises from the grave. In essence, then, Easter involves Christ's death, lying in the grave, and resurrection.

Let us now turn to one of the many forms of the corresponding pagan festival, for only in doing so can we grasp the relation of Easter to the Mysteries.

Among many ancient peoples we find celebrations whose rituals enact a content strongly resembling that of the Christian Easter festival. One of these was the festival of Adonis, which was observed by certain Near Eastern peoples over long spans of pre-Christian antiquity. At the center of this festival stood a likeness of the god Adonis, who represented all that manifests itself in human beings as vigorous youth and beauty.

The ancients in many respects undoubtedly confused the god's image with what is represented; hence their religions frequently bordered on fetishism. Many indeed took the image of Adonis to be the actually present god, the god of beauty and youthful strength, of an unfolding seminal power that reveals in splendorous outer existence all the inner nobility and grandeur of which humanity is capable.

To the accompaniment of songs and rites portraying humanity's deepest grief and sorrow, the god's likeness was immersed for a period of three days in the sea if the Mystery site was near the sea, in a lake if it was near a lake, or otherwise in an artificial pond that was dug nearby. For three days a profound and solemn silence took hold of the entire community. When after that time the idol was lifted from the water, the laments gave way to songs of joy and hymns to the resurrected god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an external ceremony, one that profoundly stirred the souls of a great number of people. Even as it did so, however, it hinted at what happened within the sacred Mysteries to every person aspiring to initiation.

In those times every candidate for initiation was led into a special chamber. It was dark and gloomy and its walls were black. The chamber contained nothing but a coffin or at least something like it. Laments and dirges were sung around this coffin by those who had led the neophyte into the chamber. The latter was treated as if he were about to die. His teachers made it clear to him that by being laid in the coffin he was to undergo the experience of death and of the three days following. The candidate was to achieve total inner clarity regarding those experiences.

On the third day, in a spot visible to the occupant of the coffin, a branch appeared, signifying life's renewal. The earlier laments gave way to hymns of joy, and the initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language, a new script were revealed to him, the language and script of the spiritual world. He was permitted to see, and did see, the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

Compared with these procedures enacted deep within the Mysteries, the external, public rites were symbolic, resembling in their form the initiation ceremonies of the select few. At the proper time these rites, of which the Adonis festival may be taken as typical, were explained to their participants. The rites took place in the fall, and participants were instructed in somewhat the following way:

“Behold, autumn is now upon us; the earth loses its mantle of plants and leaves. All is withering. In place of the greening, burgeoning life that began to cover the earth in spring, snow will now come, or at least a desolating drought. Nature is dying. And as it dies all around you, you shall experience that part of yourself that is similar to nature. Human beings die as well. Each of us has his autumn. And although when life comes to an end it is fitting that the souls of those remaining should be filled with deep sorrow, it is not enough to meet death only when it actually happens. In order that you be confronted with death's full solemnity, that you be able to remind yourselves of death again and again, you are shown each fall the death of that divine being who stands for beauty, youth, and human grandeur. You see that he too goes the way of all nature. Yet, precisely when nature becomes barren and begins to die, you must remember something else. You must remember that although human beings pass through the portal of death, although in this earthly existence they experience only things that are like those that die in autumn, at death they are drawn away from the earth and live their way out into the vast cosmic ether, where for three days they feel their being expand until it encompasses the whole world. Then, while the eyes of those on earth are focused only on death's outer aspect, on what is transitory, in the spirit world the immortal human soul awakens after three days. Three days after death it arises, born anew for the spirit land.”

In a process of intense inner transformation, the candidate for initiation into the Mysteries actually experienced this dying and reawakening within his own soul. The profound shock inflicted upon people by this old method of initiation—we shall see that in our day completely different methods are necessary—awakened within them latent powers of spiritual vision. They knew henceforth that they stood not merely in the world of the senses, but in the spiritual world as well.

What the students of the Mysteries received as timely instruction might be summed up in the following words: “The Mystery ritual is an image of events in the spiritual world, of what occurs in the cosmos; the public rituals in turn are a likeness of the Mysteries.” No doubt was left in the students' minds that the Mysteries encompassed procedures representing what human beings experience in forms of existence other than the earthly, that is, in the vastness of the astral and spiritual cosmos.

Those who could not be admitted to the Mysteries because they were deemed not mature enough to receive directly the gift of spiritual vision were taught appropriate truths in the cultic rituals, which symbolized what occurred in the Mysteries. These rituals, such as the Adonis cult, that took place amid autumn's withering, when all of nature seemed to speak only of the transience of earthly things, of the inexorability of death and decay, served to instill in people the certainty, or at least the idea, that death as experienced by nature in the fall must also overtake human beings, overtake even the god Adonis, representative of all the beauty, youthfulness, and grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis also dies. He disappears into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether, into water. But just as he is lifted out of it, so too is the human soul raised from the waters of the world, the cosmic ether, about three days after it has passed through the portal of death.

The secret of death itself was thus portrayed in the ancient Mysteries through the corresponding autumnal festivals. These festivals coincided in their first half with the withering and decay of nature, and in their second half with the opposite, namely, with the eternal essence of the human being. Humanity was to contemplate the dying of nature in order to recognize that human beings die as well, but that in accordance with their inner nature they arise anew in the spiritual world. The purpose of these ancient pagan Mystery festivals was thus to reveal the true meaning of death.

As humanity developed, the time came when a particular being, Christ Jesus, carried down into bodily nature the process of death and resurrection that the candidate for initiation had achieved in the Mysteries only on the level of the soul. People familiar with the ancient Mysteries can peer into them and perceive that neophytes were led through death to resurrection within their souls, that is, they awakened to a higher consciousness. It is important to note that their souls, not their bodies, died and that they did so in order to rise again on a higher level of consciousness.

What aspirants to initiation experienced only in their souls, Christ Jesus passed through in the body, that is, on a different level. Because Christ was not of the Earth, but rather a sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could undergo on Golgotha in the entirety of his human nature what initiates had formerly experienced only their souls.

Those who still possessed intimate knowledge of the old Mystery initiation, from that time on to our own, understood the event at Golgotha most profoundly of all. They knew that for thousands of years people had gained knowledge of the spiritual world's secrets through the death and resurrection of their souls. During the process of initiation body and soul had been kept apart, the soul being led then through death to eternal life.

What a number of select people had thus undergone in their souls was experienced all the way into the body by the being who descended from the sun into Jesus of Nazareth at the time of his baptism in the Jordan. An initiation process repeated over many, many centuries became in this way a historical fact.

That was the essence of what people familiar with the Mysteries knew. They knew that because a sun-being had taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth what had formerly occurred for the neophyte only at the level of the soul and its experiences could now take place on the plane of the body as well. In spite of Christ's bodily death, in spite of his dissolution into the mortal earth, the Resurrection could be brought about because Christ ascended higher in soul and spirit than was possible for a candidate for initiation. The neophyte was incapable of bringing the body into such profoundly subsensible regions as Christ did, so that he could not rise as high in resurrection. Except for this difference in cosmic magnitude, however, it was the ancient initiation process that appeared in the historic deed on sacred Golgotha.

In the first Christian centuries very few people knew that a sun-being, a cosmic being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, or that the earth had actually been made fruitful by the coming of a being previously visible only in the sun for students of initiation. And for those who accepted it with genuine knowledge of the old Mysteries, Christianity consisted essentially in the fact that Christ, who could be reached in the old Mysteries by ascending through initiation to the sun, had descended into a mortal body. He had come down to earth, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

A mood of rejoicing, even of holy elation, filled the souls of those who understood something of this Mystery when it occurred. Living awareness then gradually gave way, through developments we shall discuss presently, to a festival in memory of this historical event on Golgotha.

While this memory was taking shape, awareness of Christ's identity as a sun-being grew dimmer and dimmer. Those familiar with the ancient Mysteries could not be mistaken about that identity. They knew that genuine initiates, by being made independent of the physical body and experiencing death in their souls, had ascended to the sphere of the sun and there found the Christ. From the Christ they received the impulse to resurrection. Having raised themselves up to him, they were cognizant of his true nature. From the events on Golgotha they knew that the being formerly accessible only in the sun had descended to mankind on earth.

Why? Because the old rite of initiation, through which neophytes had risen to Christ in the sun, could no longer be performed. Over time human nature had changed. Evolution had progressed in such a way as to make initiation by means of the old ritual impossible. Human beings on earth could no longer find Christ in the sun. For this reason he came down to enact a deed to which earthly humanity could now turn its gaze. This secret is among the holiest things of which we may speak here on earth.

What was the situation then for those living in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha? If I were to draw it, I would have to sketch something like this:

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In the old initiation center (red, at right), neophytes gazed up to the sun and through initiation became aware of the Christ. To find him they looked out into space, so to speak. In order to show later developments, I must here represent time in terms of the earth proceeding along a line from right to left—its subsequent positions from year to year represented by arcs beneath the line—even though the earth does not actually move this way through space. At the left, let us say, is the eighth century; the Mystery of Golgotha (cross, at center) had already taken place. Human beings, instead of seeking Christ in the sun from a Mystery temple, now look back toward the turning point of time, to the beginning of the Christian era. They look back in time (yellow arrow in figure) toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and there find Christ performing an earthly deed.

The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was that it changed a previously spatial perception into perception through time. Furthermore, if we reflect upon what transpired in the Mysteries during initiation, remembering that initiation was an image of human death and resurrection, and then consider the form taken by the cult—the festival of Adonis, for example—which was itself a picture of the Mysteries, then these three things appear raised to the ultimate degree, unified and concentrated, in the historical deed on Golgotha.

The profoundly intimate rites of the Mystery sanctuaries now stood forth as an external, historical event. All humankind now had access to what was previously available only to initiates. No longer was it necessary to immerse an image in the sea and symbolically resurrect it. Instead human beings were to think of, to remember, what actually took place on Golgotha. The physical symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the internal, immaterial thought, by the memory of the historical deed on Golgotha experienced within the soul.

A remarkable development began to take place during the centuries that followed. Human beings were less and less cognizant of spiritual realities, so that the substance of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer gain a foothold in their souls. Evolution tended toward the development of a sense for material reality. Human beings could no longer grasp in their hearts that precisely where nature presents itself as ephemeral, as dying and desolate, the spirit's vitality can best be witnessed. The autumnal festival thus lost its meaning. It was no longer understood that the best time to appreciate the resurrection of the human spirit was when outer nature was dying, that is, during the fall.

Autumn simply became an unsuitable time for the festival of resurrection, for it could no longer turn people's minds to spiritual immortality by underscoring nature's transience. People began to depend upon material symbols, upon enduring elements of nature, for their understanding of immortal things. They focused upon the seed's germinating force, which, though buried in the fall, sprouts forth again in spring. People adopted material symbols for spiritual things because matter could no longer stimulate them to perceive the spirit in its reality. Human souls lacked the strength to receive autumn's revelation of the spirit's permanence in contrast to the impermanence of nature. Help from nature, in the form of an outwardly visible resurrection, was now necessary. People needed to see plants sprouting from the ground, the sun gaining strength, light and warmth increasing, in other words, a resurrection of nature, in order to celebrate the idea of resurrection itself.

But this meant that the immediate connection to the spirit present in the festival of Adonis, and potentially present in the Mystery of Golgotha, disappeared. An intense inner experience that was possible in ancient times at every human death gradually faded out. In those times people had known that although a departed soul's first experiences beyond the gate of death were indeed a matter for solemn reflection, after three days the living could rejoice, for they knew that then the departed soul arose out of earthly death into spiritual immortality.

Thus the power inherent in the festival of Adonis disappeared. It lay in humanity's nature that this power should at first arise with great intensity. Ancient peoples beheld the death of the god, the death of human beauty, grandeur, and youthful vigor. This god was immersed in the sea on a day of mourning. The mood was somber, for people were at first to develop a feeling for the ephemeral. This mood, however, was to yield in turn to a different one, to that evoked by the human soul's super-sensible resurrection after three days. When the god—or rather his likeness—was raised out of the water, rightly instructed believers saw in it an image of the human soul as it exists a few days after death. The fate of departed souls in the spiritual world was placed before them in the image of the risen god of beauty and youth.

Thus each year in the fall human minds were awakened to a direct contemplation of something deeply connected with human destiny. At that time it would have been deemed inappropriate to convey this by means of outer nature. Truths that could be experienced spiritually were represented in the cult's symbolic rituals. However, when the time came for the ancient, physical idol to be replaced with the inner experience of the unseen Mystery of Golgotha, a Mystery that embodied the same truth, humanity at first lacked the strength, for the spirit had retreated into deeply hidden regions of the human soul.

The need to look to nature for symbols of the spirit has continued into our own time. Nature, however, provides no complete image of our destiny in death; and while the idea of death has survived, that of resurrection has increasingly disappeared. Even though resurrection is spoken of as a tenet of faith, the fact of resurrection is not a living one for people of more recent times. It must, however, once more become so through anthroposophical insight that awakens a feeling for the true concept of resurrection.

If, therefore, as has been said on appropriate occasions, we as anthroposophists must cherish the Michael idea as a heralding thought, and must deepen our understanding of the Christmas idea, so too must our experience of the Easter idea be particularly festive. For it is anthroposophy's task to add to the thought of death that of resurrection, to become an inner celebration of the resurrection of the human soul, imbuing our philosophy with an Easter mood. Anthroposophy will be able to achieve this when people understand how the ancient Mystery concepts can live on in the true concept of Easter, and when once again a proper view prevails of the body, soul, and spirit of the human being and of the fates of these in the physical, soul, and divine-spiritual worlds.

We can say that the original purpose of festivals is to make human beings look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things. The Easter festival in particular can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries we in the civilized world have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has made us focus less and less upon our connection with cosmic forces and powers. We have gradually been reduced to contemplating only our relation to earthly forces and powers. Of course, given the means for acquiring knowledge recognized as legitimate today this could scarcely be otherwise. However, if in pre-Christian times or even in the early centuries of Christianity someone who was connected with a Mystery center could have experienced what we moderns call knowledge, and if he were to approach the matter with the state of mind characteristic of those earlier times, he would not at all understand how human beings can live without an awareness of their connection to extra-earthly, cosmic things.

I would now like to sketch various matters that you will find dealt with more thoroughly in this or that lecture cycle. As the present lectures are intended to acquaint us specifically with the Easter idea, I naturally cannot elaborate on every detail, but only touch upon the most important points.

If we go back to certain ancient monotheistic religious systems—for example, to the Hebrew-Judaic system, with which we are most familiar—we naturally find the veneration and worship of one deity. That deity is the one of whom we speak in our Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead, as God the Father.

Now all the religions in which the concept of the Father-God played a part had a greater or lesser awareness of his connection to the cosmic moon forces, forces that stream down to the earth from the moon; the Mystery priests were particularly aware of this connection. In our time this consciousness of our relationship to the moon has all but disappeared. Perhaps the only place it lives on is in the inspiration of poetic imagination by the forces of the moon, or in medicine in the counting of human embryonic life in ten lunar months. But older world views were clearly aware that the human being, who exists in the spiritual world as a being of spirit and soul, is permeated and strengthened by forces emanating from the moon as he descends into earthly existence.

If we want to know what shapes our living form, to know what lives in us as nutritive and respiratory processes, as overall forces of growth, we must look not to earth forces but rather to cosmic forces. For a consideration of earth forces readily reveals their relation to us. If we did not hold our bodies together with extra-earthly forces, if our bodies did not receive their form from cosmic forces, how could the earth forces alone hold them together? The moment the human body is forsaken by cosmic forces and exposed to merely terrestrial forces, it falls apart, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. Earth forces can only make us into corpses; they cannot shape us. It is to the influence of the moon that we owe the uplifting forces within us, the forces that give us a cohesive, organized form, a form that during life does not succumb to forces that seize and destroy us at our death. It is due to this that throughout our earthly lives we can resist destruction, as indeed it must be resisted.

Although in this way we may say theoretically how the form of our body is dependent upon the forces of the moon, we must also see that these forces, which guide us, so to speak, through birth into a physical existence, were revered by ancient religions as the forces of the divine Father. The ancient Hebrew initiates knew that the moon radiates those forces that lead us into our earthly life and maintain us there. Our physical being is severed from these forces only when we pass through the gate of death.

To look up lovingly to these divine Father forces, to express devotion to them in ritual and prayer, this was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these religions were more consistent than you might think. For history completely misrepresents them, basing itself, as it must, merely upon external evidence, not upon what can be observed in spiritual vision.

Religions that focused on the moon and the spiritual beings living in it were really of relatively late origin. The truly primordial religions had in addition to this a clear perception of the sun forces and even, it must be added, of the forces of Saturn. However, with this we are entering into a period of history of which no physical documents survive, one that antedates the foundation of Christianity by many thousands of years. In my Outline of Occult Science I called this period the ancient Indian—partly to have a name for it, but also because it took place in the area we now call India. The civilization following this was the ancient Persian. During these civilizations human beings still developed very differently than they did later, and this is reflected in their religious beliefs.

During the last two thousand years or more, human beings have been developing in such a way that they no longer notice a certain discontinuity in their earthly development, and indeed, the break is really hardly noticeable. Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today remains largely in the subconscious or the unconscious. However, this was not the case among people who lived eight or nine thousand years before Christ. At that time a person's development was continuous up until about the thirtieth year, when a profound metamorphosis set in, which I shall be quite direct in describing. Although what I have to say might sound somewhat strange, it nevertheless fits the relevant facts.

In those ancient times the following could happen. Let us say that before turning thirty, a man had made the acquaintance of someone much younger, say three or four years younger, who would therefore experience the thirtieth-year metamorphosis much later than the former. Suppose now that the two men had not seen each other for some time and were then reunited. It could happen, and in today's words this sounds indeed strange, that if the younger person were to address the older one, the latter might not recognize him. The metamorphosis would have completely transformed his memory.

Because in these very ancient times people around the age of thirty tended to forget all they had experienced previously, it was the custom in the small communities of the time to record events in young peoples' lives in order to inform them of their earlier experiences after they had passed through the profound transformation. And then, when such people realized they had become different persons in their thirtieth year, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their earlier experiences—yes, it really happened this way—then at the same time they were also taught that before their thirtieth year only moon forces had acted upon them, whereas now sun forces were entering into their development.

The sun forces' influence on the human being is entirely different from that of the moon forces. Of course, people today know little of sun forces, for they know only their external, physical effects. They know, for example, that because of sun forces—pardon my bluntness—they sweat, feel hot; they are also no doubt aware of sunbathing and its therapeutic uses, but this is all superficial. The average person nowadays cannot even begin to conceive of the effect that the forces spiritually connected with the sun have upon him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, acquired some knowledge of the sun forces in the dwindling Mysteries, and was murdered on his expedition to Persia because he wanted to make it official again. [Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus), A.D. 331–363. Roman emperor 361–363. ] That is how strong the powers that wanted to exterminate such knowledge in the early Christian centuries were. It is therefore not surprising that no knowledge of such matters has survived.

While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

In ancient times the influence of the moon and that of the sun were sharply divided. Around the age of thirty people simply became sun people, that is, free, whereas up until then they had been moon people, or unfree. Nowadays these two overlap; even in childhood the sun forces act along with the moon forces, and the moon forces continue to work on us in later years. Thus in our time necessity and freedom intermingle.

As has been said, however, this was not always the case. In the prehistoric times of which we have been speaking, the effects of the moon and the sun upon human life were sharply separated, it was considered pathological when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the new beginning in his thirtieth year. By the same token, people spoke of having been born not once, but twice. As humanity began to develop in such a way that the second or solar birth (the first was called the lunar birth) became less noticeable, certain facts, including exercises and cult rituals, began to be applied to initiates in the Mysteries. In this way the initiates experienced something that the rest of mankind no longer did. They were now the twice-born.

The term twice-born that may be found in ancient oriental writings even today no longer carries its original meaning. It would be interesting to ask every orientalist and Sanskrit scholar—I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst, you can ask him how things stand according to his professional studies—whether they think modern scholarship can explain the meaning of this expression clearly and in no uncertain terms. [Professor Hermann Beckh, 1875–1937, orientalist. From 1922 on priest in the Christian Community. ] In fact, any number of formal analyses are available, but the essential meaning remains a mystery. Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it has spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Thus we look back to an ancient time when people spoke of their lunar birth as of a creation by the Father. Regarding their solar birth people understood that in the sun's spiritual rays Christ's power, the power of the Son, is active, and that it sets human beings free. Consider what it does for us. Only through its action can we make something of ourselves in earthly life. Without the liberating forces and impulses of the sun, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable determinism, and not even the determinism of fate, but merely that of nature.

People in ancient times knew this. To them, the sun was a celestial eye from which the power of Christ streamed forth. They knew that this power released them from the bondage of iron necessity into which the moon forces had placed them at birth and which would otherwise govern their entire lives. The sun forces, the Christ forces looking down upon them through the cosmic eye of the sun, enabled them to make something of themselves in inner freedom, something they could not have become merely by virtue of the moon forces. Thus in the sun forces people saw the possibility of transforming or making something of themselves here on earth.

For completeness' sake I should briefly mention that ancient people also looked to the forces of Saturn, in which they saw all that sustains us when we pass through the portal of death, that is, when we experience the third earthly metamorphosis.

After death the human being is maintained by the Saturn forces that reign at what was in ancient times considered to be the outer limit of our planetary system. These forces support us and carry us out into the spiritual world; they maintain our being's integrity when the third metamorphosis occurs. This was unquestionably the world view of ancient times.

But humanity changes, and the time came when the sun forces' effects were known only in the Mysteries. This knowledge survived longest in the Mysteries' therapeutic sections, because the same forces that give us our freedom, our ability to make something of ourselves—namely, the sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and in other earthly beings and substances, which as a result possess healing properties.

For the most part, however, human beings lost this knowledge of the sun. Although knowledge of our dependence on the moon or Father forces remained with people for a long time, consciousness of our dependence on the sun forces, or we must really say, of our emancipation through those forces, disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of nature, which seem to be the sole topic in modern philosophy, are really nothing but a completely abstract version of the moon forces.

One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will be able to understand these things in their full significance if you consider the way Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, one might say, was as yet a human affair, for it was initiation.

Basic initiation consisted of three stages. The very first requirement for initiation was to develop, through exposure to what the Mysteries had to offer, a degree of inner humility we cannot fathom today. Although today people do indeed consider themselves enormously modest with respect to knowledge, anyone who can see through them knows they are truly possessed by arrogance.

Above all, at the outset of initiation the candidate had to believe that he was not yet really human, that this was a goal yet to be achieved. Today it would be asking too much of people at any stage of life that they should not consider themselves human beings. But for initiation this was the very first requirement. The candidate had to know that it was only before descending into an earthly body that he had been a human being, that in pre-earthly existence he had been a human being of soul and spirit, which then entered a physical body provided by a natural mother, by the natural parents. It did not “clothe itself” with the body—for that is an inaccurate expression—rather it permeated itself with a physical body.

Now just how, over a long period of time, the spirit and soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—is something most people are not aware of. What everyone is aware of, what everyone perceives through the senses, is the physical world around us. When spirit and soul have completed their permeation of our physical bodies at adulthood, we can only look to the outside with our eyes, listen with our ears to what is outside us, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness outside us through our skin; in other words, we perceive only what is outside not what is inside us. We cannot look into ourselves with our eyes: the most we can do is to dissect a human corpse and imagine we are looking into ourselves. But in reality we are not.

Suppose I have a house here before me. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I take some tools and, if I am strong enough, I can demolish the house. The individual bricks then lie before me in a heap; they are all that is left of the house. This is the way things are done today; people dissect the human being, cut him up, in order to get to know him. But in this way they do not get to know him; what they get to know this way is not at all a human being. To really know ourselves we must be able, just as today we look out of our eyes, to look in through them, to listen in with our ears, and so on.

All this taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the door to the human being. Initiation started from the candidate's realization that he knew nothing about the human being, and that, having no consciousness of himself as human, he could not really claim to be one. He would first have to learn to look in through his senses, in the same way he otherwise looks out.

That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

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The initiate thus learned to look in (red) instead of out (yellow), and in so doing became aware of what had entered him as pre-earthly existence through his eyes, ears, skin, and so forth (green—see diagram). Aware now that he had had such an existence, he was told that now he could begin to acquaint himself with what today we would call natural science.

When we learn about natural science today, we are taught to observe the phenomena of nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is analogous to being told upon meeting someone we have known for a long time to forget everything we have ever had in common with that person. Fancy, if you will, a married couple being told upon seeing one another after a long separation to forget everything they had ever been through together. Well, yes, I can imagine that once in a while such a thing might actually be preferable, but life could not be carried on in that way.

Such, however, are exactly the circumstances imposed upon us by our modern system of civilization. We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned then about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz—or about lilies, or roses—before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

After a candidate had mastered the method of recollecting things viewed in pre-earthly existence, he was admitted to the second stage, which consisted of learning the music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc., of the time. This was because the second stage comprised everything a person could learn not only by looking inside with his eyes and listening to what is inside him with his ears, but by actually entering into himself. Here the candidate for initiation was told he was entering the Temple Grotto of Man, which was the part of himself physically permeated by the soul-spiritual forces of which he had consisted before descending to life on earth. Into this he penetrated.

The Temple Grotto, he was told, consisted of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought. There he became acquainted with everything—well, yes, when looked at externally, it is the human head, which is small, but when entered into and viewed from within, it is as big as the world. The candidate came to know himself there as spirit. That was the first chamber. In the second he acquainted himself with feeling; and in the third with willing.

In this way initiates learned how the human being is organized with respect to the organs of thinking, feeling, and willing; they acquainted themselves, that is, with what matters on earth. Knowledge of nature, on the other hand, transcends such merely earthly matters. One acquires it before one even descends to earth. After that, it is simply a question of recalling it. By contrast, no houses are built in the spiritual world with earthly architecture. Similarly, the music that exists in the spiritual world is entirely spiritual; earthly music is merely its projection into the terrestrial air. Surveying is concerned with the dimensions of the earth; both it and geometry are earthly sciences.

It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The candidate thus entered into himself and came to know the cosmic human being. This consisted of three chambers, unlike the single earthly organization we encounter by approaching the human being only from the outside.

In the third stage the candidate not only delved down into himself, coming to know himself spiritually, but as spirit he came to know the body as well. Initiates in all the old Mysteries called this level of knowledge “the Portal of Death.” Here one learned what it is like to lay aside the earthly body. There was, however, a difference between actual death and the death experienced in initiation. I will explain in the following lectures why this had to be so; at the moment I only want to point out the facts.

When we die, we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. We cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely, freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

These same forces also provided higher knowledge of matters that could neither be perceived with the senses nor thought with the intellect. They brought human beings into relation with the spiritual world, just as our physical bodies bring us into relation with the physical world. At this point a candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a human being of spirit and soul, as an initiate, while still living on earth. From that time on he experienced the earth as outside himself and could live with the sun rather than with the earth, particularly in the older Mysteries. He knew what he had from the sun, how the sun forces were active in him.

After this third stage followed then the fourth. The fourth stage had an effect that may be explained as follows: When a human being on earth eats, he recognizes, for example, that he is eating cabbage or venison. He can drink various things, and know that first these things are outside, then inside him. He breathes the air; first it is outside, then inside, then outside again. In short, he carries within him earthly forces and substances that also exist outside him. What the Mysteries made clear to the student was that before initiation he had been an earth-bearer, a bearer of cabbage, venison, pork, and so on, but that upon completing the third stage of initiation and experiencing what it is possible to experience when one frees oneself from the body he would no longer be a bearer of cabbage, pork, and veal, but rather of what the sun forces gave him.

In all the Mysteries this spiritual gift of the sun forces was called Christos. Hence the candidate who had gone through the three stages and now felt himself to be a bearer of the sun forces, just as he had been a cabbage-bearer on earth, was called a christophor, a Christ-bearer. This was the term applied to a neophyte of the fourth stage in most of the ancient Mysteries.

In the third stage the candidate had to understand certain things thoroughly, most importantly that his craving for the physical body had to cease during moments of knowledge. He had to understand that the human being, as far as the physical body is concerned, belongs to the earth, but that the earth actually only destroys the physical body and does not build it up. It was at this point that the initiate came to know the upbuilding forces that originate in the cosmos.

He also learned something else. Precisely when he became a christophor, the initiate realized that spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of the earth, albeit in a way imperceptible to earthly senses. Had our modern way of speaking, which is the only one I can use, been comprehensible to people of ancient times, the sense of what the neophyte was told might be expressed as follows: “If you wish to know and understand substance, to see how the different elements combine and separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter from the cosmos. You can only do this, however, once you have been initiated into the fourth stage. For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.”

Now in our time it would be thought quite absurd, wouldn't it, to require of candidates for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry that they experience sun forces in the same way that they do earthly cabbage. In the old days, however, such demands were made. Furthermore, initiates realized that all the forces of ordinary cognition alive in the body can be used only to study geometry, surveying, music, and architecture. They are useless for the study of chemistry.

Chemistry as we know it today deals only with superficial realities, and has done so ever since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine knowledge must despair at having to learn the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon descriptions, not upon an inner penetration of the subject. If people were open-minded, they would realize that something more is necessary, that a different method of cognition is required, for a true study of chemistry. That this is not realized is simply the result of the cowardice so prevalent today.

When a candidate had passed the fourth stage, he was ready to become an adept in astronomy, which was an even higher stage of initiation. The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

Today I have described for you from two sides how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries, not in a particular season but at a certain stage of human development. Easter, we have seen, was the inner human being's resurrection out of the physical body into the spiritual universe. Those still cognizant of ancient Mystery wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha saw that Mystery in this light. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?

In ancient times it had been possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for even earlier than that it had been a matter of course for people to experience a second birth around their thirtieth year. Memories of this had been preserved, as had the knowledge of the Mystery schools, and thus what had been experienced directly in earlier epochs was kept alive as tradition. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, this had all been lost or forgotten. Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.

Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution. In the lectures to come you will be able to get at least an idea of what the ancients experienced in initiation. A new initiate could say to himself: “Initiation has revealed to me how sun and moon, as celestial opposites, work within me. I know now that my physical form—the particular shape of my eyes, nose, indeed of my entire body, inside and out—as well as the fact that this form could grow, and continues to grow through nourishment, is a result of the moon forces. Upon them all necessity depends. But that I can come to life within my physical body as a free human being, that I can alter my character and master myself, this is due to the sun forces, to the Christ forces. These I must awaken within me if I am to achieve through my own efforts a conscious freedom over and above that given me by the sun forces through another kind of necessity.”

From all this one can understand why even today human beings calculate the date of Easter from a particular constellation of sun and moon. All that remains of the old consciousness is an interest in finding the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. That Easter is set on that Sunday indicates, as I shall elaborate tomorrow, that people see in Easter's nature and form something that must be determined from above, that is, from the cosmos.

More than this, however, is necessary. The very content of Easter must be grasped anew, and this can happen only if we examine the old Mysteries. These showed first of all what people could experience if they looked inside themselves, the portal of Man, then when they descended into themselves and came to know the remotest inner recesses of their being, the three-chambered, cosmic human being; when they liberated themselves from the body—the portal of Death; and when they moved freely in the spiritual world, they became christophors.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparations to that end must now be made.

It was with this in mind that the Christmas Conference was held. An earthly sanctuary for the re-founding of the Mysteries is urgently needed. The Anthroposophical Society, as it continues in its development, must lead the way to that re-founding. It will be partly your task, my dear friends, to help this along in the right spirit. But for that you will need to examine the three stages of human life: introspection, self-penetration, and a consciousness one has in outer reality only in death.

As a reminder of what has been said in this hour, I would like us now to carry away and meditate upon the following words:

As an extension of my comments of the last few days, I would like today to take a closer look at the astronomical aspect of Easter. To do this, however, I will first have to touch upon certain facts relating to the so-called mystery of the moon.

For as long as there was Mystery knowledge people spoke of a secret of the moon. Inasmuch as human beings participate in the cosmos as a whole, this secret was related to human nature. It must be understood that with respect to our whole nature we are connected with the cosmos, just as through our physical bodies we are connected with the earth. Our materialistic times, however, have deprived us of the ancient awareness of the spirituality pervading the universe, spirituality that lives in the forms of constellations and in the motions of heavenly bodies. Our perception of heavenly bodies is now purely external; all we can do with them is calculate their movements, as we do with the planets.

Such an approach to astronomy, however, is like studying the human organism while ignoring that it is animated by a being of soul and spirit. Attending only to measurable quantities and to mechanical laws of motion, we overlook the spirit and soul that express themselves through these phenomena.

This spirit and soul, as they manifest themselves in the human being, are unified by the ego into a single entity, whereas in the cosmos as a whole we have to do in spiritual observation not with one but with a multitude, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings. Some of these express themselves in the forms of the constellations, others in the wanderings of the planets, still others in the radiant light of the stars, and so on.

This many-faceted heavenly spirituality is related to humanity's inner nature in the same way that earthly foodstuffs are related to our physical nature. The secret of the moon represents the most basic of these inner relations between us and the cosmos.

To the earthly eye the moon appears engaged in a constant metamorphosis. From a round, luminous disk such as we see now, it diminishes to half, then to a quarter, until finally it vanishes from sight in a phenomenon we call the new moon. This is followed by a gradual growth in size back to the full moon.

The usual explanation for this is, of course, that the moon is just a body that moves about in space and is illuminated from different angles by the sun, so that its shape apparently changes. Such an explanation, however, does not encompass everything the moon means to earth and to earthly humanity. Instead it must be realized that when we look at something as physically conspicuous as the full moon, something that presents us with a physical aspect, we are dealing with a completely different thing than when the same object presents itself to us as the new moon, which obviously cannot manifest itself in a visible, physical way due to the celestial configuration connected with it. However, we must not conclude from this that the new moon is completely without effect. When the state of the heavens is such that we know the moon to be new, it is simply a matter of the moon being present in an invisible and therefore more spiritual manner than when it appears in the physical light as full moon. The moon is therefore present at one time in a completely physical way, at another in a completely spiritual way, always rhythmically alternating between these two forms of expression.

In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to recall certain facts with which you may be familiar from the account I give of them in my Outline of Occult Science. [Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1972). ] We must particularly call to mind that the moon was once inside the earth. It was part of it. Then it split away, becoming a satellite, as they say, and since then has orbited around it. But during the time when it was still joined with the earth, it acted upon human beings from within it.

Humanity, of course, lived and developed completely differently on the earth when it still had the moon within it. Earth was impoverished when the moon split off, because the forces by which humanity was shaped and held fast from then on were entirely earthly rather than both earthly and lunar. Lunar forces that once acted upon human beings from within the earth now exert their influence from without.

At one time the lunar forces radiated into the human being from below upwards, affecting first the feet and legs and coursing upwards from there into the entire body. Since the moon split off, however, these forces have acted in the opposite direction, from the head downwards, and in doing so have acquired a completely different role in the life of humanity from the one they had previously.

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Where do we see this different function of the moon? In descending from pre-earthly existence to a new life on earth the human being has very definite experiences. When he has undergone everything necessary in the period between death and a new birth, the human being prepares to come down to earth, to unite himself with a physical body provided by an earthly father and mother. But before his ego and astral body can unite themselves with a physical body, he must clothe himself in an etheric body, which he gathers form the surrounding cosmos. It is here that the new role of the lunar forces comes to expression, for this process has changed fundamentally since the moon separated from the earth. Prior to that time, human beings who had completed the life between death and a new birth and again approached earth needed forces to gather the ether, which is scattered throughout the cosmos, around their ego and astral bodies, in order to fashion from it the shape of their etheric bodies. Such forces were provided by the moon from within the earth. Since the moon split off, human beings have obtained the necessary forces from outside the earth, that is, from the moon. Immediately before they enter earthly existence, then, human beings must call upon what lies in the moon forces, that is, upon something cosmic, in order to fashion their etheric bodies.

This etheric body must be shaped in such a way that it has, so to speak, an outside and an inside. This may be depicted as follows:

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In fashioning the outer side of the etheric body human beings need forces of light, for in addition to other substances the etheric body is composed primarily of the streaming light of the cosmos. Sunlight, however, is of no use for this. Sunlight cannot bestow the forces that enable human beings to shape their etheric bodies. To obtain these we need the light that shines from the sun to the moon and is then reflected back, for in this process the light is essentially changed. All the light we receive from the moon, the light that the moon sends out into the cosmos, contains the forces we need to form the outside of our etheric bodies. Conversely, the spiritual forces that radiate from the new moon are the ones we need to shape the inside of our etheric bodies.

Thus our ability to form the outside and inside of our etheric bodies is related to the moon's rhythmic alternation between light and darkness. And this is possible only because the moon, contrary to the idle chatter of modern science, is really more than just a body in space; in reality it is permeated with spirit; it bears a multiplicity of spiritual beings within it.

On various occasions I have explained that when the moon separated from the earth not only did physical matter stream out into space but also a class of spiritual beings who had lived on earth in spiritual rather than physical form and who were mankind's original teachers. These beings went with the moon into space and founded a sort of lunar colony. We must therefore distinguish between the moon's physical-etheric and its soul-spirit aspects, keeping in mind that the latter is a multiplicity rather than a unity.

The activity of the moon's spiritual beings is entirely determined by how they view the surrounding world from their standpoint. To express myself pictorially, these beings first direct their gaze to what is most important to them, namely, to the planets. All occurrences on the moon, including those that assure human beings of the forces they need to fashion their etheric bodies, depend upon the results of observations that the beings living in the moon make of our solar system's planets—Mercury, sun, moon, and so on.

This was known in certain of the old Mysteries. Initiates of such Mysteries were aware that the moon-beings acted according to observations of the planets' positions and motions. This was expressed by bringing the moon, by which celestial configurations important to the fashioning of the human etheric body were determined, into human awareness and in connection with the other planetary forces. This was done by means of the names given to the days of the week:

In this way the moon's viewpoint was incorporated into a structuring of time that reminded human beings of the entire planetary context. In this way the ancient Mysteries attempted to awaken people's memories of pre-earthly existence, of a time when they had needed forces created on the moon by the moon-beings' observation of the planets. People were to be reminded that they owed the particular form of their etheric bodies to what the moon had been able to glean from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on.

Thus we have on the one hand the moon's rhythmic oscillation between light and darkness as it orbits around the earth, and on the other the entire planetary system, inscribed into human consciousness by the names of days of the week. And to this the Mysteries could add even more. They taught, for example, that because the moon-beings can look toward Mars, we receive etheric bodies endowed with the capacity for speech. Likewise, because the moon-beings can observe Mercury, our etheric bodies are infused with the capacity for movement. In fact, if we consider these same teachings from an altogether different point of view, we can discover how eurythmy arises from human speech. Eurythmy develops out of speech when we explore the mysteries of speech by asking the moon-beings about their observations of Mars, and then watch how these observations change when they shift their gaze to Mercury. If we transform the Mars experiences of the moon-beings into their Mercury experiences, then we see the capacity for eurythmy develop out of our capacity for speech. This is the cosmic perspective on how speech is metamorphosed into eurythmy.

The capacity for wisdom that lives within us is made possible by the moon-beings' experiences of Jupiter. Our ability to love and to appreciate beauty derives from their experiences of Venus. Inner warmth of soul is planted into our etheric bodies by what the moon-beings learn from observing Saturn. And in order that our etheric body's formation not be disturbed during the period immediately preceding our descent to earth, everything that derives from the sun is kept at a distance; one could almost say, it is pushed away. It is from the sun or rather from the sight of the sun that protective forces must shield us if we are to become self-contained beings through the formation of an etheric body.

In this way we come to know what takes place on the moon, as well as how the etheric body is fashioned as the human being descends from pre-earthly into earthly existence. These are the facts I mentioned relating to the secret of the moon.

Such things may be spoken of today. In certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely spoken of, but actually lived through. What I wrote on the blackboard was not just known, but inwardly experienced:

The Mysteries of which I spoke to you yesterday enabled initiates to transcend the merely external use of their bodily senses, to free or distance themselves from their physical bodies, and to live exclusively in their etheric bodies. When they did so, however, they lived with all the realities of which I have just spoken. Rather than the speech that is formed in the larynx, they experienced the cosmic language that resonates from Mars. Their movements, too, were in harmony with the guidance Mercury exerts over the cosmos. They moved, that is, not with feet and legs, but in their essential being in accordance with Mercury's direction. And instead of having the wisdom we normally acquire with such difficulty as we progress through childhood and youth—nowadays it is really a lack of wisdom—the initiates lived entirely within the wisdom of Jupiter, not directly, but by uniting themselves with the moon-beings who observed it.

Through this form of initiation one could live entirely in the moon's radiant light. One actually left the earth.

No longer a being of earthly flesh and blood, one lived within the moonlight, but in the moonlight structured and modified by what lived in the other planets of the solar system. Through this kind of spiritual observation one actually became a light-being of the moon.

This must not be taken symbolically or abstractly. Just as today when we take a walk into Basel and back, we are fully conscious that what we are experiencing is real, so at that time people could be conscious of actually paying the moon-beings a visit through initiation. Initiates were conscious of taking leave for a while of their physical bodies and of moving into the moon's luminous realm as beings of spirit and soul. Clothed in bodies of light and united with the moon-beings, they could gaze out into the solar system and observe what revealed itself there.

Primary among the things they observed was that sun-beings exerted forces that could not be permitted to play any part in the fashioning of the human etheric body. They perceived, that is, that the sun tends to disintegrate or destroy the etheric body. And for that reason they knew that the forces emanating from the sun-beings must be received by the higher human members, the ego and the astral body, but not by the etheric body. Only upon the higher members could the sun-forces be allowed to work. For the etheric body, on the other hand, one turned not to the sun but to the planets. For the astral body and even more so for the ego's full inner power one had to turn to the sun.

This was the second thing revealed by the Mysteries that had access to the secret of the moon. Initiates knew that through their etheric bodies they belonged to the system of the planets, but that their ego forces in particular and also those of their astral bodies derived from the sun. In other words, through this form of initiation they became one with the moonlight, but looked at the same time toward the sun.

Initiates grasped that the sun shines its light upon the moon because it may not directly transmit that light to human beings. We then have moonlight in conjunction with the influences of the planets, out of which, as we have seen, the human etheric body is fashioned. That was the knowledge conveyed by this particular form of initiation, which thus also revealed the extent to which an initiate carried within himself the power of the spiritual sun. The initiate observed this directly, achieving thereby the level of a Christ-bearer. He became the bearer of a sun-being, not a vessel, but a bearer. Just as the moon itself, when it is full, is a sunlight-bearer, the initiate became a Christ-bearer, a christophor. His initiation into this was a thoroughly real experience. He escaped form the earth and ascended to become a being of light.

Now try to imagine this real experience, this earlier, inner Easter experience, transformed into a cosmic festival. In later times people no longer knew that they could rise above the earthly, unite themselves spiritually with the moon, and from there observe the sun. However, a reminder of all this had to be preserved, and it was preserved in the Easter festival.

Although in later times people with a more materialistic outlook could not recognize the possibility of such experiences, they did retain an abstract recollection of them. Rather than looking within themselves and knowing that they could unite themselves with the moonlight, they looked up to the full moon, imagining that not they but rather the entire earth was striving up towards it.

At no time could this be experienced more strongly than at the beginning of spring, when forces rise upward from the earth's surface out of the seeds buried in it.

Even after developing into plants these forces continue to stream upward into the cosmos. In the ancient Mysteries it was known that human beings could most readily achieve the lunar and solar initiation and become christophors when the earth's inner forces streamed up in this way into the cosmos through the stems and leaves of plants. The Mysteries represented this in the image of a human being floating upward on these forces toward the moon. This could only happen, however, when the moon was full.

Something of this knowledge survived into later times, but it became abstract. “The moon must be full.” Dimly, no longer realizing it could be an actual human experience, people subconsciously imagined something other than themselves streaming upward in the spring toward the first full moon. The moon itself, they thought, then looked toward the sun, that is, toward the first following Sunday. In other words, instead of a christophor looking at the sun from his newly-gained vantage point in the moon, people imagined that the moon looked at the sun, that is, at its symbolization in Sunday. Thus we have the following sequence:

March 21: Full moon: Sunday.

March 21 is the beginning of spring; the earth's forces burgeon forth into the cosmos. One must then wait until the proper observer, the full moon, is there. The moon then observes the sun, making the following Sunday Easter. Our method for fixing Easter's date is thus an abstract vestige of what was once a thoroughly real Mystery procedure, one that in ancient times many people experienced.

This procedure, however, is different from the one I described the day before yesterday. The latter, as you will recall, led to an understanding of the nature of death. I said that the process of resurrection, which was symbolized by the rituals of the Adonis cult and of others like it, demanded that one first undergo a kind of death experience in order to rise in the spiritual world after three days. For reasons I have already set forth, this resurrection process took place in the fall. By contrast, the procedure I have described today was celebrated or enacted in a different set of Mysteries, those conferring the solar and lunar initiation. It carried the initiates back before the beginning of earthly life.

Thus we look back to a time when certain Mysteries recognized our descent from pre-earthly into earthly life, while others, the autumnal Mysteries, recognized our ascent into the spiritual. In later times, however, when people no longer sensed this living relationship between themselves and the cosmos, the autumnal Mystery of ascent was mistakenly combined with the spring Mystery of descent.

Here materialism began to show its effects. For materialism not only gave rise to false opinions, it cast people into total confusion concerning things that had previously lent a kind of sacred order to human existence.

Part of that sacred order was that when fall came, a cosmic festival was observed that pointed toward a Mystery procedure, the spirit of which might be captured by the following words: “Nature is falling into decay, withering away. In this it resembles the decay of our own physical being. However, even as we look at nature, perceiving only transient things, the eternal lives within us. This must be viewed with spiritual eyes and is not affected by what happens in nature. After death it rises again in the spiritual world.”

Through the spring Mysteries, on the other hand, humanity realized that nature is overcome by the spirit.

Spirit works in from the cosmos, causing physical life to burgeon and sprout forth from the earth. People were thus reminded, not of how we proceed into the spiritual world at death, but rather of how we emerge from it and descend to earth. In other words, precisely when nature was on the rise, human beings were reminded of their descent into the physical, while when nature fell into decay, they were to reflect upon their rise, their resurrection, into the spiritual.

You can imagine the extent to which inner life was deepened by this experience of humanity's relation to the cosmos.

Different regions stressed different festivals. In ancient times there really were peoples who were more autumnal, while others were more vernal. The autumnal peoples celebrated Mysteries like those of Adonis; the others had Mysteries based upon such realities as I have described today. Only people of whom it is reported, and correctly so, that they traveled like Pythagoras from place to place, from Mystery center to Mystery center seeking knowledge, were able to have the entire range of human experience. Traveling from one place to another, they might at one time behold the autumnal Mystery, which is actually the Mystery of the sun, and at another the spring Mystery, which is the Mystery of the moon. This is why the ancient universal initiates are always portrayed as traveling from one Mystery center to another. And it may truly be said that they thereby inwardly experienced the year through the various festivals. Coming to a place where an Adonis festival was celebrated, they might say: “I behold the cosmic autumn and the radiance of the spiritual sun at the onset of winter's night.” Where a spring Mystery was celebrated they might say: “I behold the Mystery of the moon.” In this way they came to know the year's full inner meaning.

Thus, as you can see, Easter as we know it today is encumbered with things that do not really belong to it. It should actually be a ceremony of burial, one that goads us into working, just as the spring festivals did for ancient peoples. Such festivals gave them the spiritual incentives they needed for work in the summer; in other words, Easter was an admonishment to prepare for the summer's work. By contrast, the fall festival of resurrection was celebrated at a time when human beings left work behind. In leaving it behind, however, they experienced within themselves something of supreme importance to beings of spirit and soul, namely, an awakening to the eternal in them. This they experienced by contemplating the soul's resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

By proceeding from earthly Mysteries to cosmic Mysteries, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we thus begin to recognize the year's inner structure as revealed through the festivals, even though much of the festivals' hidden meaning has been lost. Tomorrow, as time permits, I will try to go more deeply into matters that have been described today in more general, cosmic terms, by focusing on particular Mystery centers.

We have seen how the Mysteries provided human beings with a conscious connection to the world in such a way that this connection could be portrayed in the yearly cycle of festivals. In particular we have seen how Easter developed out of the principle of initiation. It should be obvious from all that has been said that the Mysteries played a highly significant role in humanity's development. Indeed, in ancient times essentially all of humanity's spiritual life and development originated within the Mysteries. To put it in modern terms, the Mysteries wielded great power in the overall guidance of spiritual life.

Human beings, however, were destined to achieve freedom, which meant that the Mysteries' powerful influence had to diminish and for a time leave human beings more or less to their own devices. Although today it can hardly be said that we have already achieved true inner freedom and are ready to proceed with the next evolutionary step, still a significant number of people have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries has been less palpable than it was in earlier times. The fruit of these incarnations, although not yet ripe, is alive in peoples' souls. And when an age finally dawns that is once again more spiritual, the current ignorance will be overcome. People will then freely greet with esteem and reverence the spiritual knowledge and experience that can be achieved through modern initiation. For without esteem and reverence, neither knowledge nor humanity's spiritual life would be possible.

One of the purposes of the festivals is to try to cultivate this reverence in ourselves by understanding how the spiritual has developed throughout human history. Through the festivals we can learn to look very intimately at how historical events pass spiritual contents on from one age to another. For even though human beings are the most fundamental link in the chain of historical development, in that they reincarnate and thereby carry experiences of earlier epochs into later ones, nevertheless each life is lived in a particular milieu, of which the Mysteries are of course a highly significant part. A most important factor for the progress of humanity is the carrying of the contents of Mystery experiences into later incarnations, where they are encountered again, either in new Mysteries, which in turn have their effect upon humanity as a whole, or in some other form of knowledge.

It is in some other form of knowledge that past Mystery wisdom must be experienced in our time, for the actual Mysteries have all but disappeared from outer life, and must rise again. I might say that if the impulse originating from the Christmas Conference that was held here at the Goetheanum truly takes hold within the Anthroposophical Society, then the Society, inasmuch as it leads to the Classes, which have already begun to be established, will become the basis for a renewal of the Mysteries. [The School for Spiritual Science, which was founded at the Christmas Conference in 1923, was divided into subject sections. In addition, the esoteric training was to progress through three classes, only the first of which had been established before Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. ] The Anthroposophical Society must consciously cultivate this renewal. The Society was, after all, witness to an event that, like the burning of the Temple at Ephesus, can be turned to good historical account. In both cases a grievous wrong was perpetrated. However, what is a terrible wrong on one level can turn out to be useful for human freedom on another level. Such harrowing events can indeed call forth a true step forward in human evolution.

To understand such matters we must examine them, as I mentioned before, on as intimate a level as possible. We must look at the particular way in which the world's spirituality lived within the Mysteries.

As I indicated yesterday, the fixing of Easter's date grew out of a spiritual appreciation of the constellation of the sun and the moon. I also indicated that moon-beings observe the planets, and that these observations guide human beings in their descent from pre-earthly into earthly life, guide them in the formation of their etheric bodies. Now in order to understand how the lunar forces or, one might say, the spiritual observatory on the moon makes etheric forces available to human beings, we can look to the cosmos; for, as we have had occasion to see, it is inscribed there, it exists there as a fact. However, it is also important to appreciate the interest human beings have taken in these matters throughout history. And that interest was nowhere more sincere than in the Mysteries at Ephesus.

Every aspect of the service to the goddess of Ephesus, known exoterically as Artemis, was designed to give an experience of the creative spiritual forces pervading the cosmic ether. When the participants in the Mysteries approached the statue of the goddess, they had the sensation of hearing her speak, in words such as this: “I delight in all that bears fruit within the vast cosmic ether.”

To hear the goddess thus express her heartfelt delight in everything that grows, buds, and sprouts within the cosmic ether was a truly profound experience. Indeed, the spiritual atmosphere of Ephesus was aglow with heartfelt sympathy for all budding and sprouting things. The Mysteries there were instituted in such a way that nowhere else could one find such sympathy with vegetative growth, with the budding and sprouting of the earth into the plant world.

One consequence of this was that the lessons, if I may call them that, that dealt with the mystery of the moon, of which I spoke yesterday, could be given at Ephesus with particular force and clarity. As a result of such instruction, each student was able to experience himself as a figure of light formed by the moon. One exercise in particular directly placed a person capable of performing it into a process of building himself up out of sunlight transformed by the moon. In the midst of this the sounds I, O, A * rang forth, as if emanating from the sun.

[*Translator's note: Pronounced as in English “eagle,” “boat,” “father.”]

These sounds, the Mystery student knew, enlivened his ego and astral body. I, O: ego, astral body, and with A, the approach of the luminous etheric body: I, O, A. As these sounds vibrated within him, he experienced himself as ego, as astral body, and as etheric body. Then, as if resounding from the earth, for the student was now outside the earth, came the sounds eh-v, which mingled with the I, O, A.

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In this word, IehOvA, the Mystery student experienced himself as a complete human being. Through the consonants, he felt a premonition of his earthly physical body. These consonants are bound up with the vowels, I O A, which express the ego, astral body, and etheric body.

It was through such immersion in the word IehOvA that the Ephesian apprentice was able to experience the final stages of his descent out of the spiritual world. As he did so, however, he felt himself living within the light. Now truly human, he was a sounding ego and sounding astral body within a light-filled etheric body. Sound within light—such is the cosmic human being.

In this way it was possible to take in what is visible in the cosmos, just as what happens in the earth's physical surroundings can be taken in through the eyes.

While carrying I O A within himself, the Ephesian student felt himself transported to the sphere of the moon, where he shared in the observations that could be made from there. In this condition he was still a human being in general, undifferentiated; only upon descending to earth did he become man or woman.

It was a pre-earthly state into which the student was transported, a state preparatory to the descent to Earth. In the Ephesian Mysteries this self-elevation into the sphere of the moon was an especially vivid experience, which the initiates inwardly cherished, and whose content might be expressed in the following words:

Every Ephesian bore this reality within himself, counting it among the most important things that permeated his being. Indeed, he felt himself to be truly human when these verses sounded in his ears, to use a somewhat trivial expression. For he associated them with a newly-awakened consciousness of his connection with all the planets through his etheric body's forces. The verses, pregnant with meaning, were addressed by the cosmos to the etheric body:

The human being is experiencing himself here within the power of the shining moon.

Creative tones resonate forth from Mars. Then comes the force that animates our limbs, makes us into beings of movement:

Jupiter sends forth its rays:

As does Venus:

So that Saturn may gather all together and complete our inner and outer development, preparing us to descend to Earth and to clothe ourselves in a physical body, so that we might live on Earth as physical beings who carry the god within us:

From these descriptions you may gather that a brilliant inner light permeated the spiritual life of Ephesus. In fact, all that had ever been known about humanity's true stature within the cosmos was gathered and preserved there in the concept of Easter.

Yesterday I mentioned that certain people wandered from place to place in order to experience the totality of Mystery wisdom. Of these, many expressed wonder at the richness of the spiritual life at Ephesus. They assure us repeatedly that nowhere but there could they perceive so clearly and richly the harmony of the spheres as heard from the standpoint of the moon. The most brilliant astral light of the cosmos appeared to them there: they sensed it in the sunlight glimmering around the moon, pervading that light with spirit in the same way that the human soul pervades the physical body. Nowhere else than in Ephesus could they experience this, at least not with the same sense of joy or artistic vision.

Such was the Mystery center that went up in flames through the deed of a criminal or a madman. Ephesian initiates later reincarnated in Aristotle and Alexander, as I mentioned at the Christmas Conference. [Alexander the Great, 356–323 B.C., king of Macedonia 336–323, conqueror of Greek city-states and of the Persian empire. Pupil of Aristotle.
Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Greek philosopher, pupil of Plato. Tutor of Alexander the Great.] These individualities then came into contact with what remained of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

As an example of how a seemingly meaningless outer coincidence can actually be of great significance in the world's spiritual evolution, I may mention, as I have before, indeed for many years now, that the temple at Ephesus was burning at the very moment as Alexander the Great was born. As it burned, however, something else happened as well.

Consider for a moment how much the devotees of the temple had experienced throughout the centuries, how much spiritual light and wisdom had passed through its halls. All that was passed on to the cosmic ether by the flames. One might indeed say that the temple's continuous, concealed celebration of Easter was henceforth inscribed, although in somewhat less legible characters, into the vault of the heavens, to the extent that that vault is etheric. This is also true of much other human wisdom as well. Surrounded in ancient times by temple walls, it later escaped and was written into the cosmic ether, where those who have risen to true Imagination may perceive it directly. Because of this, Imagination may be said to be an interpreter of the secrets of the stars. It is the key to former temple secrets now inscribed into the cosmic ether.

The same thought may be expressed in another way. Imagine that you are looking at a crystal clear night sky, allowing your perceptions to sink deep into your soul. Provided you are properly prepared, the forms of the constellations, the movements of the planets will all begin to transform themselves into something like a cosmic script. And by reading this script you will grasp the outlines of the mystery of the moon, which I set forth yesterday. Such things can be read in the cosmic script, provided the stars are no longer seen merely as objects of mathematical and mechanical calculation, but as letters of a cosmic alphabet.

To continue with the Ephesian Mysteries: as I mentioned, Aristotle and Alexander came into contact with the Cabeirian Mysteries in Samothrace at a time when all the ancient Mysteries were in decline. At Samothrace, however, these Mysteries were remembered and preserved, even practiced. Under their influence, Alexander and Aristotle experienced something akin to a memory of Ephesus, in whose spiritual life both had of course participated in an earlier incarnation. Once more the I O A sounded forth for them, as well as the verses:

Cosmic-born being, thou clothed in light,
Strengthened by sun in the realm of moon's might,

Blessed art thou by Mars' creative ringing
And Mercury's swiftness, mobility bringing,

Illumined by wisdom from Jupiter raying
And by Venus's beauty, love portraying—

So that Saturn's venerable spirit-ways
Might consecrate thee to the world of space and time.

But this was more than just a memory of times past. Rather, it gave them the strength to create something new, something unusual and hence little regarded by humankind. Before I reveal it, you must understand just what kind of creation it was.

Take any significant work of literature, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, or Goethe's Faust, or Iphigenia, in short, any work that you admire, and think about its richness and powerful content. Now, how is that content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it was transmitted in the usual way, that is, that at some point in your life, you read it. Physically speaking, what precisely did you have before you? Nothing but combinations of letters of the alphabet on paper. The entire magnificent content comes to you through mere combinations of the twenty odd letters of the alphabet. But provided you can read, something comes to life through these twenty odd letters that enables you to experience the entire rich content of Goethe's Faust.

On the other hand, you may decide that the alphabet is a frightfully boring thing, that such a concatenation of letters is the most abstract thing imaginable. And yet these little abstract letters, properly combined, can give you all of Goethe's Faust!

When Aristotle and Alexander heard the celestial harmonies once again at Samothrace, they realized what the burning of the temple at Ephesus had meant. They perceived that the Ephesian Mysteries had been carried out by the flames into the vast cosmic ether. At that moment they became inspired to found the cosmic script, which is composed not of letters of the alphabet, but of thoughts.

Thus the letters of the cosmic script were discovered, which in their own way are as abstract as the alphabet:

What we have here is a collection of concepts, first introduced by Aristotle to his pupil Alexander. One can learn to use them in much the same way that one learns to use the letters of the alphabet and read the cosmic script with them.

In later times, particularly in the abstract phase of scholastic logic, a very unusual thing occurred. Imagine a school in which the students are taught not to read, but rather only to learn the various letters of the alphabet in every imaginable combination—ac, ab, ae, and so on. In essence, this is what happened to Aristotelian logic. Works on logic would enumerate the above concepts, called categories. Students would learn them by heart, but not know what else to do with them next. It was as if they learned the alphabet but never learned to spell.

In a way, the concepts of quantity, quality, relation, and so on, are as simple as the letters of the alphabet, but knowledge of them is required in order to read in the cosmic script, just as to read Faust one must know the alphabet. And in essence, all past and future achievements of anthroposophy are experienced in terms of these concepts. For all the secrets of the physical and spiritual worlds are contained in them. These simple concepts, in other words, constitute the alphabet of the cosmos.

Starting in the time of Alexander, the earlier, direct perceptions characteristic of practices at Ephesus were replaced by something deeply hidden, something esoteric, that really began to develop only during the Middle Ages and that is embodied in the above-mentioned eight concepts (they may actually be expanded to ten). We are learning to live more and more with these, but we must strive to keep them as alive in our souls as the letters of the alphabet are when we read any rich and spiritual work of literature.

And so you see how ten concepts, whose illuminating and effective power has yet to be rediscovered, came to embody an enormous wisdom known instinctively for thousands of years. And although this light-filled wisdom lies, as it were, in the grave, someday it will rise again. People will then be able to read once again in the cosmic script, and to experience the resurrection of what has been hidden in the time between the two spiritual epochs.

It is of course our mission, my dear friends, to bring to light what has been hidden. We are here, after all, to find the human meaning of Easter. On another occasion I said that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, but in all its endeavors it is also an Easter experience, a resurrection experience, bound up with the experience of the grave. It is essential, particularly at an Easter gathering such as this, to experience something of the solemnity, if I may put it that way, of our anthroposophical striving. We should sense the presence of a spiritual being just beyond the threshold to whom we can go and say: “How blessed mankind once was by divine-spiritual revelation! How glorious that revelation was in the temple at Ephesus! Now all that is buried; where must I dig for it?” To which the being beyond the threshold will reply, just as another did on a similar occasion, “What you seek is no longer here; it is in your hearts, if only you know how to open them.”

Anthroposophy is indeed in people's hearts, and these hearts need only be opened in the right way. That should be our conviction, and if it is, we shall be led back, not instinctively as in ancient times but in full awareness, to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

I offer you these Easter words in the hope that they might reach your hearts, for by devotedly cultivating the solemn mood that anthroposophy can enkindle within our souls, we reach up into the spiritual world. At the same time, this solemn mood is connected with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach, which must not be allowed to remain abstract or intellectual, but must issue from the heart. Avoiding both joylessness and sentimentality, it must be a natural expression of the solemn facts.

Just as the fire of Ephesus flared anew within the hearts of Aristotle and Alexander, after scorching the cosmic ether and revealing to them the secrets that they compressed into the simplest of forms, just as they used the burning of Ephesus, so too must we—and this may be said in all modesty—be able to make use of what the flames of the Goetheanum carried out into the ether as the substance of our anthroposophical aims, both past and to come.

It was in keeping with this, my dear friends, that at Christmas time, at the beginning of the new year, the very time of year in which our misfortune occurred, we were permitted to let issue forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. Why? Because we could feel that a previously earthly concern had been carried out by the flames into the vastness of the cosmos, and that because of this misfortune, what we represent is no longer a merely earthly concern, but rather of significance for the whole cosmic-etheric world. This world, filled with spiritual wisdom, has adopted the Goetheanum's cause, which was carried out by the flames. The Goetheanum impulses with which we imbue ourselves now stream in from the cosmos.

Take this any way you like; take it as a picture. But as a picture it points to a profound reality. To put it simply, since the impulse at Christmas all anthroposophical endeavor must be infused with esotericism. This is because impulses are now working their way in from the cosmos as a result of the astral light that streamed up from the burning Goetheanum. These impulses can strengthen the anthroposophical movement, provided we are in a position to receive them. If we are, then everything anthroposophical, including the Easter mood, will be sensed as an essential part of the whole that is anthroposophy.

The anthroposophical Easter mood convinces us that the spirit never dies, that though it may die to the world, it always rises again. Anthroposophy must base itself upon this spirit that rises ever anew from its eternal foundations.

Such is the feeling and concept of Easter that we may take into our hearts. And from this gathering, my dear friends, we shall carry away courage and strength for our work in other places.

In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from our own.

In these days we speak of chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen, for instance, is something that is present only under certain well-defined conditions—conditions of warmth, e.g., and other circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable person to unite a conception of reality with something that, when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to arrive at true existence.

I have marked a transition as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., because before this time man's perceptions were still altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality—purely in respect of reality—of the physical men he saw with his eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called Intelligences of the Cosmos, as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings, the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness; and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the Elements of the Cosmos, the earthy, the fluid or watery, the airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water, air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word, they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would, however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—even in a sense, the scholars of the eighteenth century—had ideas of warmth, air, water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water—these have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his pupils.

When I wrote my Outline of Occult Science I was obliged to make the account of the evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would have been able to give the account quite differently. The following might then have been found in a certain chapter, e.g., of Outline of Occult Science. An idea would have been called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things—but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say, with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the people were so filled with enthusiasm—forgive me, but it really was so—that present-day man would say they had all gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern Europe—it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns directly into light, illuminating everything—such an idea did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim. And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.

There you have one such sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of their being.

And then one would have gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel; the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space. [Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]

All the drawing I have made is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do, think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the whole—if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel warmth in varying differentiations—here greater warmth, there less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.

Such a united building-up by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there. The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.

A picture will perhaps make clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent; the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.” Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now in the time of which I speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones—and that is the Saturn existence.

The description went further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—these alone have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner. Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

What is it that is able now to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air. And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

You must clearly understand that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness, dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air. And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know: Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.

And what follows after this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the Sons of the Second Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air—not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn, the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of Light the Third Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels—add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to pass.

Let us suppose an Archai or Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light, encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness—or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness, darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light and darkness.

Here we may find a connection with something that is historical, with something that is to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony, Beings of the Third Hierarchy—this spiritual element in man's thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.

One must indeed have lost all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.

But now we must go further. We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when colour is present and works as a reality—and it can do so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element—when this is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure, counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the creation of Colour in the Cosmos.

You will say: No, that I cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in its true meaning. Red—surely you do not think that red is, in its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being? Red is something that makes an attack upon you.—I have often spoken of this.—You want to run away from red; it thrusts you back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper. Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with soul-experience, must follow with movement.

People gaze open-eyed at the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On the other side they come out again. To one who views it with imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance, in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage and bravery of heart.

Now picture to yourselves: There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and disappearing into it—here anxiety and fear, there courage ... And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.

There is no doubt about it: if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things. Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses himself, how he uses his words.

Thus we have, as a reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were—the second Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.

And now we come to the Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth, even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves use but guarded and kept—with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life. Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints and suggestions, came Life.

You will say: Then did nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving, glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness, laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life, in its iridescence streamed-through with Life—that is what appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms. Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into Earth existence.

Such things as I have been describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished—though history tells us little of them—from the ninth and tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the beginning of the nineteenth century—always however in these later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man. Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements. It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth Hierarchy, Man.—The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes.—That is all!

There you have the first Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself” of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the “thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes, they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”

Yes, my friends, that is the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract, shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms, and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of Spiritual Science must try to do.

I wanted to indicate to you today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings, although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures. That is what he gives—a fragment of embryology. According to the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort—unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's Faust.

It is time that these things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history during the last few centuries.