The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Apart from the question put at the end of yesterday's lecture, it would be within the scope of this course of lectures to explain much more; but it is impossible to exhaust in ten lectures all there is to be said about our worlds. Therefore, I beg you to allow me to make yet a few observations before I touch on our question, especially as these observations are connected with it.

The first observation I have to make is difficult, perhaps even almost impossible of comprehension by the consciousness of the present day; but it is good to know that something of the sort exists. It is the question: in what way do these planetary formations really disappear again? It is clear to you how development spiritually proceeds: Beings arise to higher stages, and whilst they are rising they have to forsake the old place of habitation which afforded them for a time the possibility for developing certain capacities which they otherwise could not have achieved. When, in the course of evolution, that time approached which we call the Lemurian, man had reached so far in his general development that he had already repeated all that there was to be gained out of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. He now appeared on the dwelling-place destined for our earth-evolution, which had only just been formed. He developed through the Lemurian and Atlantean times on into our times, and he will continue to develop on into the future as we know — from one incarnation to the other. But after a certain time that human being will have to leave the earth, to forsake it, because it will not have anything more to give him, and will afford him no more possibilities of development. Now you might perhaps imagine that our earth would become a sort of deserted rubbish-heap when man had left it; you might compare it to a town which had been deserted by its entire population. You know what such a town looks like after a short time; it gradually turns into a mound of earth. We get an adequate idea of this in seeing towns which have been given over to nature. But it will not be so in the future of the earth. The following consideration will give you an idea of what that future will be like: what does such a genius, for instance, as Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael, signify for the earthly development of men? What importance for the earth's development, have those wonderful works of Michelangelo or Raphael which are still to-day enjoyed by thousands and thousands of people? Perhaps some of you have felt a certain sadness looking at the ‘Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci, when you have asked yourselves, standing in front of that wonderful work in Milan, how long it would still last? For one must not forget that Goethe, in his first journey to Italy, still saw that work of art in all its beauty and freshness as we cannot see it any more. But, from the time of Goethe's youth to our time, this work of art has so far perished as regards the external, material world, that it calls forth in us feelings of sadness.* For people who will live as late after us as we are now after Goethe, that picture will not exist any more. So it is with everything men create upon earth, with everything which is incarnated into physical matter upon earth. In reality it is so also with the earth itself, and with the creations of human thought. Put yourselves now in thought into that time when the spiritualised men will have risen into higher spheres. Thoughts in the sense of to-day — I do not mean scientific thoughts, for these will entirely lose their importance in three or four hundred years — but thoughts of men in general, as they come forth from a human mind, have naturally no importance for the higher worlds, but have it only for the earth. But when man shall have left the earth, what will have happened to all his past creations on earth, through all the hundreds and thousands of years that are past?

[ 2 ] The evolution of the individual is naturally the thing to be first spiritually considered. Leonardo da Vinci has risen higher through what he has achieved; that is his ascent. But we ask ourselves whether the great thoughts, the great impulses, which great men have imprinted on the substance of the earth, do not have any importance for the future of the Earth? Will the future break and grind the Earth into dust, and will all that man has made out of the earth disappear together with its existence? You admire the Cathedral of Cologne! † In a comparatively short time there will certainly not be one stone of it lying on the other; but the fact that man once expressed his thoughts in stone in this cathedral, will that have no significance for the whole earth? We are now disregarding that which man takes with him away from the earth, we are considering the earth itself. We see that, in fact, a planet grows always smaller in the course of its development. It contracts. That is the destiny of the substance of planets; but it is not all, that is only something which the physical eye and physical instruments can observe in the planets. There is a further development of the material substance — beyond that point.

[ 3 ] Let us now consider this further development of matter, and with this I am touching on what I said will perhaps be impossible for you to understand with the comprehension of the present day. It is a fact that the earth is continually contracting, hence matter tends towards the centre from all sides. And now I say — be it understood consciously, not only fully conscious of the law of the conservation of force, but also fully conscious of facts known to every occultist — I say: Matter draws together more and more towards a centre, and the strange thing is that in that centre matter disappears.

[ 4 ] Imagine that you have a piece of something which contracts more and more towards its centre. In its centre it disappears. It does not get pushed over to its other side, it absolutely disappears into nothing in its own central point! So that you can imagine to yourselves that, as the material parts contract towards the centre, the whole of the earth will some day disappear in that central point. But this is not all: in the same measure in which it disappears in the central point, it reappears again in the circumference. Out there in space it is coming back again. At one point in space matter disappears and emerges again at another. Out there it is coming forth anew. The substance disappears in one place and from outside it returns again. But it returns in such a way that it brings back with it all that the beings who have worked on the planets have imprinted on its substance; naturally not in its present form, but in a form which this transformation has given to it. In this way you see the Cathedral of Cologne returning from the other side, its material particles having disappeared in the centre. Nothing, absolutely nothing, of that which has been accomplished on a planet is ever lost, it all comes back again from the other side.

[ 5 ] That which happened in the beginnings of our evolution, before the Saturn development, we must place outside, beyond the Zodiac. Primeval wisdom called it the Crystal Heaven, and in that crystal heaven were deposed all the deeds of the Beings of a former evolution. They formed, so to speak, the foundation on which the new Beings began to create.

[ 6 ] As we said before, all this is extremely difficult for the modern mind to understand, because it is in the habit of considering matter only, and because it is not in the habit of conceiving that outside of three dimensional space matter can disappear and re-appear at another place after it has passed through other dimensions. You cannot grasp this so long as your ideas remain in the space of three dimensions; for this goes beyond the three dimensions. Therefore, it cannot be seen until it returns again from the other side into the space of three dimensions. In the meantime, it is in other dimensions.

It is a thing which we have to grasp; for the conditions of our world's origin have manifold connections, and something which is to be found in some one place may often have a complicated connection with something else which is in quite a different place outside three dimensional space.

[ 7 ] We have said that our planetary formation began with the ancient Saturn, and it really did begin then. It then advanced to Jupiter. When the whole creation of Jupiter began, all the Beings in the surrounding space also took part in it as you know. But just as all the Beings who are active within the whole expanse of our planetary system are developing further, so also are the Beings outside our system, those who are sending in their influence from surrounding spaces. As some of the surrounding Beings withdrew, so did also some of the Beings who were outside in universal spaces; some of these also withdrew; and as Jupiter contracted, something was also withdrawn by the Beings who retired, something which had nothing to do with our evolution at all, but which along with the withdrawing Beings formed first Uranus, and then Neptune during the Mars development. The names of Uranus and Neptune were, of course, not chosen to suit the subjects in the way the Ancients chose names; although in the name Uranus some meaning still is left; it was given when people still had some feeling for the meaning of names; therefore, all that lies outside our circle was generically called Uranus.

[ 8 ] Thus we see that the two planets which our astronomers of the present day consider as having the same significance as the other planets stand on a totally different footing, and fundamentally speaking have nothing to do with the creation of our world; they represent those worlds which have come into existence because Beings who, during the Saturn period, still had something to do with us, have withdrawn and have found their places of habitation outside our world. We shall gather other facts from this, for instance, that those planets have retrograding moons, and so on.

[ 9 ] Thus we have sketched the origin of our solar system and have asked ourselves: What position has man towards those Beings of the higher Hierarchies who, fundamentally speaking, were his human forefathers? We can begin with the highest, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, the Thrones, and in describing them, get a good idea of man. If we could rise beyond the Seraphim, we should get into the realm of the Divine Trinity. What is it then that the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones have in particular, that is different from all the other beings in the world? They have what is called ‘the direct sight of GOD.’ That which man has to seek for slowly and gradually, throughout his development, is theirs from the beginning of all time. We men say, that we must start from our modern standpoint to acquire ever greater powers of knowledge, of will, etc.; thus we shall rise ever nearer and nearer to the Godhead, Divinity will become ever more present to us. We say to ourselves: We are developing upwards, towards something which is still veiled from us, towards the Godhead. This is the difference between the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones and men, that since the beginning of our development these highest Beings have enjoyed the direct sight of the Godhead, have been in the near presence of the Divine Trinity. That whereunto men have to evolve has been theirs from the very beginning.

Thus it is immensely important for us to know that these Beings came into existence seeing God; that as they live, so also they are in the sight of God.

All they do, all they achieve, they do through the vision they have of God, God does it through them. They could not do otherwise, it would be impossible for them to act otherwise than they do; for the sight of God has such power, such an influence upon them, that with a direct certainty, with immediate impulse they put into action, all that they receive from the Godhead. Anything like deliberation, judgment, consideration, does not exist in the sphere of those Beings. For them, there only exists the sight of the commands of the Godhead, the reception of the immediate impulse to put into action that which they have seen. And they also behold the Godhead in its original true form, they see the Godhead as it is. But they only see themselves as those who fulfil the will and the wisdom of God. These are the conditions of the highest Hierarchies.

[ 10 ] When we descend to the next Hierarchy, to those Beings whom we call the Spirits of Wisdom, of Motion, and of Form, we have to say that they have not such direct vision of the Godhead, they do not see God in His immediate aspect as He is, but in His revelations in the way He — if I may express it so — reveals Himself through His countenance. Certainly it is unmistakable for them that it is the Godhead, they feel the immediate impulse to follow the revelations of the Godhead, just as with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The impulse is not so strong, but it still is a direct one. It would be impossible for the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones to say that they would not put into action that which they see prescribed for them, so to speak, by the Godhead; that would be unthinkable because of their nearness to the Godhead. But it would also be in a certain way quite impossible for those Spirits of Wisdom, of Motion, and of Form to undertake that which the Godhead Itself did not want them to undertake.

[ 11 ] Therefore, if development was to progress, something quite particular had to come into action. We now touch on a point which is always difficult for men to understand, even for those who have advanced to a certain degree of the Mystery-Wisdom. In the ancient Mysteries they tried to make it comprehensible in the following way: At a certain stage of initiation into the ancient Mysteries, the neophyte was led by hostile powers, who had a cruel and horrible appearance, and who also enacted cruel and horrible deeds in the sight of the neophyte. Those who performed these deeds were no other than masked priests, masked sages. To bring about the necessary temptations and ordeals, Priests had to disguise themselves in devilish shapes, as terrible beings who performed the most terrific and the most abominable deeds which the mind of man could ever imagine. What did this mean? To show to the neophyte how far development could err from the right path, the priest himself, under the guise of the evil-doer, had to represent that evil before his eyes. He had to have the illusion that evil itself stood before him, and only when the evil was unmasked did he see the truth; then the illusion was taken away, and he knew he had had to do with a trial. To make him strong, to arm him against evil, it was represented to him in its most terrific aspect, represented by the wise Priests themselves who certainly did not err in truth. It was only a reflection of that which had really taken place within the Cosmic development.

[ 12 ] In the time between the Jupiter and the Mars development — if I dare express myself in trivial words — a number of Beings from the sphere of the Mights or Spirits of Motion were detached; they were placed in such a manner within the course of evolution that, instead of helping it onwards, they had to put hindrance in its way. Thus the deeds of — if I may coin the word — ‘adversely-commanded’ Mights were thrown athwart the course of evolution. For the ruling world-powers of the Hierarchies said to themselves: ‘Never could that arise which has to arise if the way were always smooth. Greater things must take place.’ [ 13 ] Imagine that you have a car to push. You develop your strength by pushing it. If heavy ballast is put into the car it will be heavier to push, but you would develop greater strength. Suppose the Godhead had let the world's evolution remain as it was, up to the time just after the Jupiter evolution, men could have certainly developed very well; but humanity could have become still stronger if hindrance had been in its way. For the good of humanity, certain Mights or Spirits of Motion had to receive adverse commands. These were not evil at first, one need not consider them as evil Powers, one might even say they sacrificed themselves by putting obstacles into the way of development. Therefore, these Mights may be called the gods of hindrance, of impediment, in the widest sense of the word. They are the gods of the impediments and hindrances placed in the way, on the high-road of development. And from that moment, the possibility was given for all that was achieved in the future. These ‘adversely-commanded’ Mights were not yet evil in themselves; on the contrary, they were the great promoters of development, promoting it through the storms they produced, but they were the breeders of evil; for, out of the storms they produced, evil gradually arose.

Naturally, the path of development of these ‘adversely-commanded’ Mights shaped itself quite differently from that of their brothers; their action was quite different, and the result was that, during the Moon-development, they became the tempters, the seducers, of those beings we call Angels. The Angels were passing through their human stage during the Moon development. There were Angel-men on the Moon who, so to speak, looked at the way the hindrances acted on development, and who said to themselves: ‘We can now put ourselves in the way of conquering the hindrances, we can plunge into the whole stream of the Moon's evolution; but we prefer to pass it by, we do not want to plunge into it, we want to remain above with the good Gods.’ These Angels tore themselves away, at a certain moment of the Moon's development, from the Mights who were throwing hindering influence down into the Moon-evolution. But there were other Angels who said to themselves: ‘We will not follow our brothers, for if we follow them, development would turn back, nothing new would be embodied in it.’ Just because of the existence of these hindering influences, something new was infused into evolution, from the time of the Moon onwards. Those Beings who said to themselves: ‘I shall have nothing to do with that which is going on down there, I shall stay with the Mights who do not wish to be tainted by anything low,’ these withdrew from the mass of the Moon and became part of the followers of all that is connected with the Sun. They would not have anything to do with what was proceeding on the forsaken Moon, when all the hindering powers held sway. But the other Beings who plunged down into it, had now to take into their bodily nature; (which they received on the Moon) all the hindering influences that existed there. They had to harden themselves more, as it were, than would otherwise have been the case. Their bodily sheaths became denser than they would otherwise have been. In their bodies were implanted the consequences of the deeds of the Mights, but these deeds were well rooted in the divine plan of the world — we must keep that well in mind. A further result of this was, that as the Moon development passed on into that of the Earth, the whole process was repeated, and those Beings who had plunged into the full tide of the Moon's development, remained behind those who would have nothing to do with it, and others remained still further back, and were attracted by the retrograding development. The result of all this was, that during the earth evolution Angel-men existed, who were advanced, and others who were retrograde.

The advanced Angel-men approached the men of the earth during the time, when, in Lemuria, they were ripe to receive the germ of the human ‘I,’ and gave them the choice, as it were, to rise into the spiritual worlds, then, and not to have anything further to do with that which since the time of the Moon, had mingled with the course of the world's development. The Beings who had stayed behind, whom we call the Luciferic beings, came into touch with the human astral body — they could not approach the ‘I’ — and grafted into that astral body all the results of the fight in heaven. While to the Mights was assigned the fight in heaven, for they were created Gods of Hindrance; the consequences of their deeds now slipped into the human astral body, and there signified something else; they signified the possibility of error and the possibility of evil. Man had now been given the possibility of error and of evil with the object that he should also have the possibility of rising above evil and error, through his own strength.

[ 14 ] Now consider that such Beings as the Mights, belonging to the second threefold Hierarchy, could not have had the power to become evil of their own free will; they had to be ‘adversely-commanded;’ and it was the Beings of the third threefold Hierarchy, and only those who stand nearest to man, the Angels, who first had it in their power to follow, or not to follow, the hindering Powers. Those who did not follow we always find represented in the pictures which illustrate the victories fought out in heaven. They express what happened during the Moon development, when Man had progressed as far as the organisation of his astral body, that is to the human-animal stage. Then those Angel beings who, so to speak, remained good, tore themselves away from the course of the Moon development, they escaped from what was going on down there, on the Moon. And this picture is represented to the Soul of man in different ways. It was originally represented in the fight of Michael with the dragon. You see it also in the symbol of the Bull of Mithra, where it is specially clearly expressed. It is, of course, not meant that in doing this these Angel Beings avoided their duty, but they were put forth as an ideal for the future. ‘These beings’ — it was said — ‘preferred to rise into the spiritual worlds, whereas you have descended. Other beings came down with you, those who followed the Powers of Hindrance. You must now work upon that which you have absorbed in this descent, and carry it up again into the spiritual world; when you rise again you must become a Michael, a conqueror of the Bull.’ For every symbol of this kind is used in a twofold sense.

[ 15 ] Thus we see that, because those ‘Mights’ were given certain orders, men first received the possibility of reaching their goal by their own strength, a thing which even the highest Seraphim cannot do of themselves. This is very essential. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones cannot do otherwise than follow the immediate impulses given them by the Godhead. The Dominions of the second threefold hierarchy, too, cannot do otherwise. A certain number of the Mights were ordered to oppose, so that those Mights also, who, as it were, threw themselves into the way of development, could not do otherwise than follow the orders of the Godhead. In what is called the ‘origin of evil’ they could but perform the will of the Godhead who, by means of evil, wishes to develop more powerful good. Now let us descend to those Beings we call the Powers or Spirits of Form. They also could not have come to this of themselves. They could not have grown wicked of themselves, nor could the Spirits of Personality, nor could the Spirits of Fire. For, when these were men on the Sun, the Mights had not yet been ordered to oppose, there was as yet no possibility of becoming wicked. The first who had the possibility of becoming evil were the Angels, for this could only happen after the development of the Moon. There, from the Sun to the Moon, the Fight in Heaven took place. A part of the Angels avoided this possibility, they would not be seduced by the forces which had to introduce hindrances, they held to the way of the old Nature. Thus, as far down as the Angels, or part of them, we have Beings who are absolutely unable to do otherwise than follow the divine Will. It is essential to remember this.

[ 16 ] We now come to two categories of Beings. First those Angels who fling themselves into that which the Mights produced during the Fight in Heaven; these are Beings who on account of their later deeds we call Luciferic. These Beings became united to the human astral bodies during the Earth-evolution and gave to men the possibility of evil, and also the possibility of developing through their own free power; so that in the whole sequence of Hierarchies we have only men; and some of the Angels, who have the possibility of freedom. In the midst of the ranks of the Angels the possibility of freedom begins, but it is first fully developed in men. When man entered the earth, he had at the beginning to be assailed by the power of the Luciferic Spirits; they penetrated the human astral body with their force. The ‘I’ was therefore attracted towards those forces, so that during the Lemurian and Atlantean evolutions, and even later we have the ‘I’ as in a cloud, as sheathed in a cloud, which was produced by the assaults of Lucifer. Man was saved from being overpowered by these forces which penetrated him, only because he was overshadowed by earlier Beings, because Angels who had remained above, and also Archangels, came down from the spirit world, incarnated into special individuals and guided men. And this continued up to the time when something quite particular took place; when a Being, whose existence up to then had always been united to the existence of the Sun, when a Being had progressed so far as to be able to penetrate, not only the physical, etheric and astral bodies of men, as former exalted Beings had done, but to penetrate into man even as far as his Ego.

[ 17 ] You remember how I described that in former times higher Beings descended and ensouled the human physical, etheric and astral bodies. Now at a special time, an individual arose who was chosen to receive into him the highest Being — a Being who was at first united to our Sun existence, but who now entered into, and worked inspiringly in all the powers of this individuals Ego.

[ 18 ] The ‘I’ expresses itself through the blood. Just as the material substance of blood is the expression of the ‘I’, so the warmth or fire of the blood, which is the remnant of the Saturn fire, is the expression of the Ego in the elements. This Being had to find expression physically in a twofold way; first through fire. It proclaimed itself to Moses through fire in the burning bush and in the thunder and lightning on Sinai. For it is the same Being who later was able to penetrate into the human ‘I’, who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and in the thunder and lightning on Sinai. This Being prepared its advent, and appeared in a body in which blood flowed — in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through this, a Sun-Being entered into an earthly individuality. Because the human ‘Ego’ will be filled ever more and more by the force which then entered into it, it will become ever more and more capable of overcoming by its own power the influences which can pull it down. For the Being who could penetrate into the Ego of man, is of a different nature from those other Beings who formerly descended to earth and ensouled physical, etheric and astral bodies. [ 19 ] Let us take the ancient holy Rishis. In their etheric body there was, as we have seen, the spirit of a high Being; they had inherited that etheric body from great Atlantean forefathers in whom that exalted Being had lived. It was passed over to them. They could not follow at all with their Ego and their astral body, the things which their etheric body expressed in the moments of inspiration. And so it happened from epoch to epoch. Men were inspired; it was always as if a power was in them, something that took strong possession of them. From what man was capable of in himself — he was withdrawn, in order to become better. He was inspired by a better Being. This was the case with all founders of religions. They were ensouled by a Being who was still high above the Fight in Heaven, so that they were not left completely to themselves. In the Christ there appeared a Being of a quite different nature, who did nothing, nothing at all, to force people to come to Him. And this is essential! [ 20 ] If you take the whole manner in which Christianity was propagated, you will find a living proof that the Christ during His life did nothing of what was done later for the propagation of Christianity. Look at the founders of religion of the ancient times! They are the great Teachers of humanity, they taught from a certain period in our development, and their teaching acted on men in an overwhelming way. Look at the Christ! Does He, fundamentally speaking, work through His teaching? The man who thinks that His teaching is the most important part, does not understand the Christ. The Christ did not in the first place act at all through His teaching, but through that which He did. And the greatest deed of the Christ was that which ended with death, was His Death. This is the essential point, that the Christ acted though a deed, and when this deed spread through the world, He was not any more physically present. This is the great difference between the Christ and the other great founders of religions. This difference is not at all understood as yet, but is essential. You can follow all the teachings of Christianity, all that is preached as Christianity, and you can find it all in other religious systems. This cannot be denied. You can say: ‘All the essential part of Christian teaching is included in other teachings.’ But has Christianity been operative in the contents of its teaching? He who at first did what was most essential towards spreading the essence of Christianity, did he rely on its teaching? Look at the Apostle Paul! Was he transformed from a Saul to a Paul by what is written in the Gospels? He persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus. He persecuted them until He who died on the Cross appeared to him from the clouds, until he, Paul, had his own personal occult experience of the fact that Christ lived. It was the effect of that death, the result of that deed, which gave the impulse to Paul, this was the cause of it all. Other religious systems act through their teachings, and their teachings are the same as in Christianity, but the essential thing in Christianity is not the teaching, but what happened, the deed. And this deed is such that it does not act upon man except when man makes up his mind to let it act upon him, that is, when it can be joined to the absolutely free character of his ‘Ego.’ For it is not sufficient that the Christ should be present in the man's astral body, He must be present in his ‘EGO,’ if He is to be really understood. And the Ego must decide in complete freedom, voluntarily, to receive the Christ. This it is with which we are concerned, this is the point. Just because of this, the human Ego, when it unites with the Christ, receives into itself a reality, a divine force which is not a mere teaching. Therefore it can be asserted a hundred times that the teachings of Christianity are to be found in other religions, but this is not the question; the fact is that the essential thing in Christianity is the deed which can become one's own possession only through free will, through a voluntary ascent into the higher worlds. Man takes the Christ-force into himself, because he voluntarily receives it, and no one can receive it who does not do so voluntarily. This has only been made possible for man because he has become human upon earth, because he was called to grow into man on earth.

[ 21 ] The fallen Angels who have spread over the earth as Lucifer, are in a different position. These ought really to have become men on the Moon; they have remained behind in their development, hence they can enter the astral body but not the Ego. They are in a peculiar position, a position which we can only describe graphically, even if it appears somewhat pedantic. Let us suppose, leaving aside the physical and etheric body, that the astral body of man during the Lemurian development was represented by the circle A-B-C, and the Ego was the circle enclosed (a) in that astral body. [ 22 ] The Ego gradually entered the astral body. What happens now? During the Lemurian development the Luciferic forces slip on all sides into the man's astral body and penetrate him with their activities, which find expression in his lower passions. That through which he succumbs to error and evil is rooted in his astral body; the Luciferic spirits have implanted this into him. (If they had not done this he would never have had the possibility of error and evil, he would have been lifted up to the place from whence he receives his ‘Ego’, untouched by all hindering influences.) So it goes on, but the great leaders protect humanity as far as it is necessary so that it should not sink too low.

[ 23 ] Now comes the Advent of the Christ. Let us take a man who has voluntarily received the Christ. Christianity is only at its beginning. But let us take the Ideal; the man's ‘Ego’ has voluntarily, with complete free will, allowed the Christ's force to flow into him. When the Ego has progressed so far that it has filled itself with the Christ, then this Christ force irradiates the astral body also. In that same astral body, into which the Luciferic powers had formerly implanted their deeds, the Christ power is now radiating from within outwards. What happens in the future? Because we have overcome with the help of Christ, and only with His help, all those human qualities which come from Lucifer, we also, as men, gradually release the Luciferic powers; and a time will come, when the Luciferic powers who, during the Moon development, had to sink downwards into a certain lower evolution for the sake of human freedom, and who had not themselves the opportunity of experiencing the Christ force upon earth, these Luciferic powers will experience the Christ force through man, and through Him they will be released. Man will save Lucifer, when he takes the Christ force into himself in the necessary way. And because of this, man will again grow stronger than he otherwise would have been. For imagine: if man had not received the Luciferic powers, then the Christ force irradiating him, would not have encountered the hindrances of the Luciferic forces, and it would have been impossible for man to progress so far in wisdom, goodness and in truth as he may do, when he has to overcome these opposing forces.

[ 24 ] Thus in Man, we have a member of the Hierarchies who, as we see, is very distinct from the other members. We see that man's position is different from that of the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, of Motion and of Form, and different too from the Spirits of Personality, from the Fire Spirits the Archangels and from some of the Angels. He can say to himself, looking into the future: ‘I am called on to search in my own inmost depths, for that which gives me the impulse for my actions — I do not receive it from gazing on the Godhead like the Seraphim, but from the innermost depth of my own being.’

The Christ is a God whose action is such that one is not absolutely forced to follow His Impulse, one follows it only when one understands it, and in freedom. He is, therefore, the God who never seeks to hinder the free development of the Ego in this or that direction. The Christ says in the very highest sense: ‘You will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free.’

And those beings of the next Hierarchy who had the possibility of doing evil, the Luciferic beings, these will again be released, liberated by the power of man.

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[ 25 ] We therefore see, my dear friends, how in fact the World development does not simply repeat itself, but that new things enter. For a human stage such as is lived by men at present was never met with before, not with the Angels, nor the Archangels, nor the Spirit of Personality. Man had a completely new mission to fulfil in the world, the mission we have just characterised. For the sake of this mission he has descended into the world of the earth. And the Christ came into the world as a free Helper for him, not as a God acting from above, but as a first-born among many.

[ 26 ] Thus at last, we understand all the dignity and all the importance of Man as a member of our Hierarchies, and when we glance upwards to all the nobility and the glory of the higher Hierarchies we say to ourselves: Be they ever so great, so wise, so good that they never err from the right path, yet the great mission of man is to bring Freedom into the world, and with Freedom firstly that which one calls Love in the true sense of the word. For Love without Freedom is impossible. A Being who blindly follows an impulse, just follows it; but for a Being who can also act otherwise, there exists but one force which he could follow, and that is Love. Freedom and Love are two poles which belong to each other. If Love is to enter into our Cosmos, it can happen only through Freedom, that means, only through Lucifer and those who conquer him; and at the same time through the Saviour of men, through the Christ. Therefore, the earth is the Cosmos of Freedom and Love, and therefore, the essential thing is, that we, without tempting man away from humility, must learn to reckon the Hierarchies as they ever have been reckoned in Western esotericism: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; these follow the direct impulse of the Godhead, having the sight of God. The Spirits of Wisdom, of Motion, and of Form, (Dominions, Mights, and Powers), these are as yet so bound to the higher powers that they have to be given ‘adverse-commands’ in order that evolution should have the possibility of proceeding further. The Archangels and the Spirits of Personality also cannot fail, cannot, through their own free will, sink into evil. Therefore, the spirits of the Hierarchies next above man were called Messengers and Arch-Messengers to show that they did not fulfil their own tasks but the tasks of those who stand immediately above them. But in men a Hierarchy is maturing which will fulfil its own tasks.

Through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan developments man will be always maturing towards accomplishment from out his own Impulses. Even if to-day he is not yet so far advanced he will attain to it in time.

[ 27 ] Which are the Hierarchies? We begin: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; the Spirits of Wisdom, who exercise their dominion only so far as they act in the direction of the impulses they receive from the gods; then the Mights or Spirits of Motion, who have their power only because they receive it from above; it is the same with Spirits of Form. Were they to become evil, they could. become so only according to the decision of Divinity. We come then to the Spirits of Personality, to the Arch-messengers and messengers and have now descended almost as far as to men. And what can be said of Man if we place him in the ranks of the Hierarchies? After the Archangels and Angels, the Arch-messengers and messengers, we will have to rank the Spirits of Freedom or Spirits of Love; for this, beginning from above, is the tenth of the Hierarchies, which although in process of development, yet belongs to the Hierarchies.

[ 28 ] In the universe we have not to do with repetitions, each time that a cycle is passed, something new is added to the world's evolution. And to introduce the new element, is always the mission of that Hierarchy, which is at its human stage of development.

[ 29 ] In these lectures we have endeavoured to prove the significance of Man through the significance of our Cosmos; we have, to a certain degree at least, questioned ourselves to-day as to the spiritual significance of man, and we have endeavoured to explain man — this point in the centre of the universe — in accordance with the teaching of the Mysteries, by explaining him — the point, from the circumference!

In doing this our knowledge gains reality; for it is most essential that all true spiritual knowledge should be a concrete true knowledge. This means that the knowledge gained through spiritual science should itself give a direct presentation of the Cosmos and of the Spiritual Hierarchies.

[ 30 ] We stand at the central point of the world. Everything around us loses significance for us, because we have to say: The external world of sense cannot solve the riddle for us. It is, as if everything were to draw together to a centre, and when this is done — then from the circumference, the solution of this world problem comes back to us in actual reality, just as is the case with matter itself which is a reflection and symbol of the spiritual. It draws together in the centre, disappears there, and then emerges again out of the circumference. This is a reality. And our knowledge is real when it thus stands before our eyes like the construction and the process of the whole cosmos. Then it is no speculation, no fancy, it is born out of the Cosmos itself. And we must develop the feeling within us: Wisdom must be an ideal for us, which is born out of the circumference of the Cosmos, and which fills us with the strongest force, with force to carry out our own intentions, our own great world-Ideal, and with this, force also for our ideal for future humanity.

[ 1 ] Do we have to imagine the spiritual hierarchies with the concept of spatiality, since they are spoken of as domains?

[ 2 ] We can say of man that the being of this man lives out within space. But space itself, in occult terms, must also be imagined as something created. This creation lies before the works and effects of the highest hierarchies; we may therefore assume the existence of space. But we may not imagine the highest Trinity spatially, for Space is its product. We must imagine the spiritual entities without Space; Space is something created. But the effects of the hierarchies in our world are spatially limited, like those of man. The other hierarchies are what moves within Space.

[ 3 ] Is time applicable to spiritual processes?

[ 4 ] Certainly; but the highest spiritual processes in man lead to the concept that they take place timelessly. The activities of the hierarchies are timeless. It is difficult to speak of the arising of time: the word “arise” already contains the concept of time; one would have to say rather: the essence of time, and that is not so easy to speak about. There would be no time if all beings were at the same stage of development. Time comes into being through the interaction of a sum of lower and a sum of higher beings. Different degrees of development are possible in the timeless; through their interaction, time becomes possible.

[ 5 ] On the concept of development.

[ 6 ] The concept of evolution extends to all worlds; but for the Godhead it is another.

[ 7 ] What is the difference between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelian entities?

[ 8 ] The latter have a stronger, more powerful will to evil. The two types of entities come from different hierarchies. At the beginning of evolution, beings were more on the same level; then we have remaining beings. The stages of development overlap. The Ahrimanic entities are lower in the region of evil and are recruited from the most diverse hierarchies; for example, some remained behind on the sun, others on the moon; those left behind on the sun can catch up on their development on the moon, those left behind on the moon on the earth, and so on. Mephistophelian or Ahrimanic entities are those that stand higher or lower in the hierarchy of evil than the luciferic ones; they recruit themselves from the archangels to the powers.

[ 9 ] Can elemental beings become human?

[ 10 ] There are entities that came into being because higher entities did not develop their limbs; these became detached and became elemental beings. There are whole armies, whole hosts of them. The lifespan of such entities varies greatly. As a rule, they undergo a downward development and disappear completely from existence; for example, there can be no question of the elemental spirits developing to the level of humanity.

[ 11 ] The Indian teaching is so little emphasized in your discussion of the etheric body; why?

[ 12 ] What Dr. Steiner said is the property of all secret teachings. The Secret Doctrine is not an Indian doctrine, just as there is no such thing as an “Indian Theosophy”. Dr. Steiner used the common terminology of all secret teachings in his remarks.

[ 13 ] Are the Elohim still above the nine Hierarchies?

[ 14 ] The Elohim are those beings who remained connected to the sun when the sun separated from the moon and earth; they belong to the hierarchy called the powers, spirits of form, and from there upwards to the hierarchies. They are still within our evolution. Elohim is the collective name for the sun beings; at that time they had chosen the sun as their dwelling place - not as their sphere of activity. Christ, the highest of the Elohim, is their ruler. However, he does not belong to the hierarchies, but to the Trinity. In Christ we have an entity before us that is so powerful that it has influence over all the members of our solar system.

[ 15 ] The Second Coming of Christ.

[ 16 ] The return of Christ will be very real, and it will take place when a large part of humanity has reached the point that they will be able to recognize Christ in the form in which he will appear, and this experience can then be something for people. Because what matters is that as many people as possible will also be able to recognize him.

[ 17 ] Concerning the Asuras.

[ 18 ] The asuras – the evil ones – are entities that are one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic entities and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones.

[ 19 ] What protection is there from black magicians?

[ 20 ] The best defense is to try to maintain your freedom, to use your sound judgment and to employ your reason. If you are always mindful of this, you will not expose yourself to any danger, and you will not have to deal with anything from this side. Of course, where the belief in authority plays such a large role today and the addiction to recognize all kinds of things in a hazy state of consciousness is so great, it is easily possible for black magic forces to flow in. Protection against them is only necessary when one enters a certain level of occult development. In a properly conducted occult training course, which aims at harmonizing the soul forces, one already acquires protective powers against such attacks. There are no general rules.

[ 21 ] Is there a difference between the group souls of bees, ants and corals?

[ 22 ] Certainly; there are many degrees of difference. The group soul of the beehive is a very high entity, higher than that of the ants; it is so high that one could say: it is cosmically precocious. It has reached a state of development that man will only reach on Venus. We must look at it like a precocious child; it stands out from the normal development. It is similar with the group soul of ants, only it is lower. The coral group soul is an even higher being, but also a precocious being; it is higher than, for example, the group soul of cattle. However, the level does not always fit into the time; some later degree of development is anticipated. This exposes the beings to various dangers that they are not yet able to cope with. Occult zoology is very complicated and the level of development of group souls varies greatly.

[ 23 ] What hierarchies are the Greek and Germanic gods related to?

[ 24 ] With the Angels. Here we are dealing with beings who developed their activity in the Atlantean period. At first, man lived together with these beings; he lived together with gods, for these beings only withdrew later and only became “gods” in the late Atlantean period. In Atlantis itself, men and gods still lived side by side. The human line of development went downward, that of the gods upward. Every hierarchy has innumerable degrees and gradations.

[ 25 ] What will become of the animal world in the future? Is it destined for a higher development?

[ 26 ] The group soul of the animals develops upward; it will be a different being on Jupiter. They will not, of course, become human in the modern sense, but on Jupiter these group souls will achieve a kind of humanity. There is no upward development for the individual animal, because the individual animal relates to the group soul as the bark of a tree relates to the sprouting shoot: it falls away, just as the bark of a tree falls away; but the group soul rises up.

[ 27 ] How high is the value of so-called prenatal education?

[ 28 ] The mother has a lot to consider during the pregnancy. In today's world, where the mother knows nothing of all this, very important measures are being neglected. The first ten (lunar) months of life on earth can be the time when something very good is snatched away from man. Today the task of preventing this falls to the gods; later, when people have matured, it will fall to people. The gods, in their supreme wisdom, have withdrawn the first ten (lunar) months of human development from human influence. Men should be glad that they cannot interfere with prenatal development. If the life of the mother is so ordered that it corresponds to a certain ideal in thinking, feeling, sensing and willing, then that is certainly also best for the child.

[ 29 ] On Vulcan Evolution.

[ 30 ] What can be mentioned about this is that this development is not a conclusion; but we want to be satisfied if we know what is happening there, once it is the time for us. In the course of development, even the concept of development develops.

[ 31 ] On the relation of spiritual science to modern science.

[ 32 ] In the facts of modern science you will find evidence for spiritual science; only the theories nowhere lead into the field of spiritual science, but lead away from it. Today's science is not attacked, but what has been achieved is recognized; but we must clearly and sharply show the boundary as to how one enters spiritual science or is led away from it.

[ 33 ] Is there a connection between blood relationship and Karma?

[ 34 ] It is karmically conditioned that a person is born into a particular family; it may be the fulfillment of past karma. But a person can also create new karmic connections for himself. We create them for ourselves through what we do today. People who are truly connected to each other meet again and again. The fact that we were born into a certain environment is an expression of previous karma. But one does not always have to remain connected to those with whom one is related by blood. Spiritual ties, formed out of family ties, lead to each other again. But such things change with the different cycles of humanity; consanguinity is beginning to have less significance than before, and it will lose this significance more and more. In the development of humanity,

[ 35 ] the binding force of blood ties becomes weaker and weaker.

[ 36 ] Concerning the quarrel in heaven.

[ 37 ] In the conflict in heaven, not the worst and most incompetent powers were singled out and “detailed”. In the mystery play, initiates were also put in masks of the opposing forces to make this clear to the disciple. A person of wisdom should be rubbed off on a person of wisdom who is on the path of error.

[ 38 ] On the Negative and the Positive.

[ 39 ] Humanity will increasingly come to the realization that pettiness, folly, and so on, are only significant for the physical world and will die with the people; however, the good, as the positive, will remain forever. In his knowledge, the occultist is guided by great world laws, for example, by the one - that sounds trivial - by which herrings reproduce in the sea. The herring eggs perish en masse: the negative is a necessary part of becoming. This should not prevent us from doing positive things again and again. No matter how many opposing forces there may be, what needs to be done must be done.

[ 40 ] On the meaning of suffering.

[ 41 ] Suffering is a concomitant of higher development. It is indispensable to knowledge. Man will say to himself one day: “What the world gives me in the way of joy, I am grateful for. But if I am given the choice between keeping my joys or my sufferings, I will want to keep the sufferings; I cannot do without them for the sake of knowledge. After a certain time, every suffering presents itself in such a way that one cannot do without it, for we have to understand it as something contained in development. There is no development without suffering, just as there is no triangle without an angle. When the harmony of the Christ is attained, we shall recognize that all preceding suffering was a necessary condition for this harmony. For the harmony of the Christ to be there, suffering must be there; it is an absolute factor in evolution.

[ 42 ] By overcoming egotism, man rises above the feeling of being oppressed and paralyzed. In this phenomenon one can see something good: strength from inadequacy. Thank God that I am encouraged to continue acting through an inadequate act, that is, its failure! The human striving is not an uncertain lottery. Only he remains unredeemed whose free will turns away from the destiny of the human being. In the synthesis of the world process, suffering is a factor.

[ 43 ] What will the theosophical movement mean in the future?

[ 44 ] Something very useful, and it will be shown that those who use it as a battering ram for development are mistaken.

[ 1 ] On reincarnation.

[ 2 ] In reality, the doctrine of reincarnation is an ancient teaching in the secret schools. It has only relatively recently been included in the scriptures. It is one of the most elementary teachings in the world. The processes of reincarnation themselves are not so simple. (See Rudolf Steiner's explanations about the etheric bodies of the rishis and so on).

[3] The reappearance of the /ch was carefully guarded among the secrets. In the infancy of the theosophical movement, one could hear strange things about reincarnation; it happened that at the coffee house at one table, there were re-embodiments of Emperor Joseph, Seneca and so on! These things are very confusing. One should cultivate the feeling in relation to them: “I receive many ideas, but I cannot dig deep enough to understand them. I actually understand nothing at all!” It is the best impulse to be shy about forming a final judgment.

[ 4 ] On the expressions: death and dying.

[ 5 ] In the Book of Job, Job's wife advises him not to remain good. One expression occurs: “Deny God and die.” These words encapsulate a whole world. We can only understand them if we know what was understood by “union with God.” It is the possibility of a life that cannot be extinguished by death, once union has been attained.

[ 6 ] By dying, the material process is not meant; one must approach this word with other feelings. Paul once said, “Then came the law, and I died.” We must realize what the concept of the law means. By death is meant the separation of that which is unkillable.

[ 7 ] In certain ages, it was understood to mean the submerging of the soul's consciousness into a lower state: when the soul enters embodiment, it enters into obscuration of consciousness.

[ 8 ] The soul can lead such a life that she never has to enter darkness again. Darkness is death, which occurs at the birth of the body. Souls that do nothing for themselves enter this re-death, that is, re-embodiment.

[ 9 ] It is the will of the masters to show clearly how modern thinking is deficient and inflexible and so infinitely far removed from the true facts.

[ 10 ] Not only is that Christian love, which helps those who have fallen into error, but there is an active Christian love that protects others from misunderstandings. In oriental wisdom there is a theory of knowledge so profound that we cannot even begin to understand it with our Kantian materialism. When we penetrate to pure knowledge, we have to say: without the eye, there is no light – so the world is our imagination. But without light, there is no eye either! It perceives light not by chance, because light is the creator of the eye: the eye is born of light. The objectification of light is the sun. Occultly, the sun corresponds to the eye in the microcosm. Likewise, voice (microcosmic) and fire (macrocosmic) correspond. The formation of formed matter can be correctly compared with the formation of sound or tone figures. These are reproductions of the original processes. Form is sound that has become rigid in matter. The clay had to first break through the primal fire. The mineral and animal world, in short, everything is clay (that has broken through the fire). Microcosmically, the fire pulses in the warmth of the blood. As the fire finds expression in the blood, the sound of the microcosm resonates from within (the voice) and corresponds to the matter forming out of the Logos.

[ 11 ] The wisdom of the primeval world is wiser than the thinking that has arisen in the course of the world. The wisdom that is in the things around us was imprinted on them on the moon. The task of the earth is the development of love. On Jupiter, love will reach us from everything. Evolution on earth is necessary to find love from within on Jupiter. On the moon, we have as poles: wisdom - error; on earth: love - selfishness.

[ 12 ] Saturn – Fire Sun – Air (gas) Moon – Water Earth – Earth (solid).

[ 13 ] Water and air developed independently of each other during the formation of the earth. Everything is condensed from the four elements. Evaporated water is intimately related to plants. Today we can only use inorganic forces (e.g. coal and so on), while the Atlanteans worked with plant forces. He knew how to draw the forces out of the seed and used them to move his vehicles. The forces of the plant seed are born of air and water. But how a person uses these forces depends on his or her morality. Wind and weather were closely related to this. If the forces were used well, then wind and weather were also good. When the Atlanteans became evil, they themselves brought about the catastrophe of the flood.

[ 14 ] Similarly, fire and earth were in connection for a certain time (Lemuria). These elements can intertwine in many different ways.

[ 15 ] You can have an idea of three-dimensional space. In the Platonic school, an important tenet is: God geometrizes. Basic geometric concepts awaken clairvoyant abilities. In the geometry of the situation, it is proved that the same point is everywhere in the vicinity: the infinitely distant point on the right is the same as the starting point on the left. That means, ultimately, the world is a sphere, you come back to the starting point. When I take geometric theorems, they turn into borderline concepts. Three-dimensional space reaches its point again. That is why point a in the astral world acts on point b without any connection.

[ 16 ] One introduces materialism into theosophy when, in order to arrive at the spiritual, one assumes that matter becomes thinner and thinner. This does not lead to the spiritual. But through such ideas as point a = point b, one arrives at ideas of the fourth dimension.

[ 17 ] As an example, we can think of the gall wasp with the thin waist 0-0, if the connection in the middle were not there and the two parts moved together, connected only by effect. Expand the concept: many fields of action goJo in multidimensional space.

[ 18 ] About the Number 40. “One in the egg” — what does that mean? It is written like this: 10. The exoteric reads it as ten, the esoteric: “One in the egg”.

[ 19 ] Imagine we have completed some cycle of development, for instance Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we are at the point where the evolution of the Earth begins. What man has gained from Saturn has become egg O0, from the sun as well: 0 0, from the moon as well: 0 0 0. After three completed cycles, a new one begins: 1000. This one undergoes sub-cycles.

[ 20 ] Cycle 6.5.4.3.2.1.

[ 21 ] We can also write in occult writing: 4321000. When we speak of 1000 years in occult writing, we mean that 3 cycles have emerged from the egg.

[ 22 ] This is an occult arithmetic that reflects cosmic facts. Everything from the cosmos is reflected in the physical and spiritual life of the earth. In our present cycle, man is moving towards the contemplation of the external world, towards a reversal of all contemplation. Where Maja occurs for consciousness, is the 4th cycle. Therefore, the 4 is the number of Maja and the cosmos.

[ 23 ] In all instances where 4 occurs in the Bible, this or that is overcome by Maja: 40 days of fasting, 40 days of wandering mean a certain overcoming. 40 = 4 from the egg. Whoever fasts for 40 days must have gone through an occult cycle. The more primitive the states of consciousness are, the less one can speak of boredom. This fades the more we go back in states of consciousness.

[ 24 ] Evolution does not presuppose a beginning or an end. Development proceeds in cycles without repetition, with something new being added in cyclic progression. A finite beginning or end is a last-ditch attempt to explain away sensual processes.

[ 25 ] The development of the part __creature, the evolvement of the whole God, is a false premise. Example: Father - son.

[ 26 ] The planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars remained behind before the separation of the sun. Mercury and Venus separated from the sun after the separation of the earth, to create dwelling places for higher beings.

[ 27 ] We can explain the canals of Mars through Germanic mythology: Germanic mythology reflects earlier conditions of the earth. In the earlier thinness of matter, regular processes took place that have now become irregular: for example, the twelve streams, the fire sparks and so on; these were developmental processes on earth. The same is true on Mars: the formation of canals is a still preserved, retained state that our earth also went through.

[ 28 ] Man has the task of attaining freedom; he can develop forces from all hierarchies, for example, from the angels Manas, from the archangels Budhi, and so on. Through his development, it becomes possible for higher hierarchies to take effect; it is precisely through this that he develops further. Man contains all hierarchies within himself as a microcosm.

[ 29 ] In the evolution on earth, everything repeats itself. Where Mars is today, the earth was in the state of the moon. Repeated on earth: the passage of Mars.

Secret knowledge has been applied since ancient times. Through it, one can fathom the essence of man and those conditions without which one could not gain an actual insight into the development of the worlds. Through [secret knowledge] we learn about life and death, karma, fate and all deeper questions into the future and from the past. It provides information about our dwelling place, the earth, and the world body system.

Thus, “theosophy” or “secret science” provides the means to gain insight into all these states. To this end, a person must follow the path of initiation. Two paths lead there: the Christian and the Rosicrucian path. The path of the Rosicrucians has been adapted to the Christian path through modifications. The best way for a person to acquire clairvoyance is to trust the seers and let them tell their stories. The Rosicrucians had the right way of understanding the truth. The truth is always the same, but the way people understand it changes as they develop. Thus, it had to be proclaimed to the Romans, Germans and so on in ever-changing ways. We must all feel great respect for the way the Egyptian priests taught about the deepest questions of existence. Copernicus' system based the consideration of the worlds on the physical plane, and people believe that they can recognize more and more of the things through refined instruments, while the Ptolemaic system used the astral plane for help. We cannot easily imagine how man's soul thought at that time. Without the spiritual influences, the language of the materialistic world view would have led to a quagmire in the nineteenth century. It would soon have become impossible to communicate in it.

The spiritual currents that strengthened good and curbed evil always emerged from the secret schools. A symbolic language is used there that is understood by the initiates of all secret schools. The ancient sages did not regard the heavenly bodies as dead bodies; as current science assumes, the stars were not material globes for them, but beings endowed with soul and spirit, and so it is in reality. Our sun is not a soulless fireball; it is the body of Christ, and He is its spirit. Beings endowed with power rush through the spaces; they are forces of will, not empty abstract forces of attraction. The gaze of these heavenly beings really penetrated the worlds. In the past, spiritual science shed its light over all the worlds; as a result, there were brilliant cultures on our earth, but buildings like the pyramids, which still amaze us, were built with primitive means.

Despite the eclipse caused by materialism, the secret schools have not ceased to exist. Humanity urgently needs them. The spiritual leadership emanates from the secret schools. In the fifteenth century, a small circle formed under the leadership of a great man, Christian Rosenkreutz; the effect extends into the nineteenth century.

If it is part of today's attitude that people cannot communicate quickly enough what they believe to be true, the occultist only communicates what he considers necessary to proclaim. There is a deep necessity for the presentation of occult science as a countercurrent to materialism.

Theosophy is Rosicrucian science. Occult attitudes are no more debatable than mathematics. It does not help to discuss a remedy, it must help. Theosophy is inner experience; man experiences inwardly what is outward, and the outer comes from the inner. An age in which people know that everything is ensouled will act differently than one of materialism. Nervousness is proof that the spiritual does not form the center of man; if it were not for spiritual influences, nervous epidemics might break out in thirty years, like other plagues, because people can never completely withdraw from their surroundings.

It is life-giving to relate the truth in every age in relation to the immediate life; it is hostile to life not to want to know about the spiritual forces.

A great deal of patience and perseverance is required to achieve clairvoyance; first you have to listen and absorb before you receive the means. A person's cognitive processes are not limited. No one has the right to decide about something they do not know. Those who have not studied mathematics should not presume to judge the correctness of a proof. Within the human being himself are the sources for looking into higher worlds.

Occultists fall into three categories: initiates, clairvoyants, and adepts. The initiate need not be clairvoyant, and the clairvoyant is not always an initiate, and neither needs to possess the adept. The paths are different. It is necessary to understand the laws up to the highest realms of existence – the secret of numbers and forms – in order to be an initiate. People are only told things when they are morally and spiritually ready for them, because otherwise it could have the most dire consequences for them. Humanity would then immediately be split in two, into good and evil.

A clairvoyant is a person who has highly developed spiritual senses, his spiritual eyes and ears are open, without his needing to understand the spiritual laws. One cannot imagine the trust and love that existed among the Rosicrucians. They complemented each other in a magnificent way, with one explaining what the other saw; thus, they gained insight and understanding of what they saw.

To be an adept, one needs goodwill and patient understanding, but it also requires that one be able to make sacrifices and keep quiet about things that are not beneficial to other people. The adept must know how to apply the powers, for which he acquires the ability in many incarnations. The adept works in secret. Our time demands that the initiate become a seer.

The undeveloped person follows his instincts, the average person chooses between them, he refines and purifies them. This work is done by all of humanity. The I does this work on the astral body, which integrates itself into it as a higher one. The astral body consists of two parts: one that the human being had before humanity moved into him; the other he has transformed into the spiritual self. A man in whose soul nothing stirs any more that incites him to passions and desires has transformed his astral body into a spiritual self. From the middle of the Atlantean period until a distant future, man has to accomplish this work through his I.

The work of the I is the shaping of the spirit of the mind at the astral body,
the shaping of the spirit of life at the etheric body,
and the shaping of the spirit of the human being at the physical body, and this work is carried out systematically by the students of occultism.

The ennoblement of the astral body through the acquisition of intellectual abilities resembles the minute hand of the clock, the transformation of the etheric body through the ennoblement of the temperaments and moral abilities resembles the hour hand of the clock. The most powerful impulses for changing morals come from religions, they emanate from the great founders of religions, and also through genuine art, an art in which the divine passes through the sensual forms.

The etheric body also consists of two parts: one that the human being has inherited and one that he transforms into the spirit of life. This happens through conscious, systematic work in a spiritual way, which then takes firmer hold than the inherited part. The effect of such work can then be applied to the physical body. This task is not the lowest, but the highest; it requires the strongest forces.

The physical body is a structure full of wisdom, which is less understood by man than the astral body. We know more about our instincts, passions and desires than about how blood corpuscles move. What do we know about the functions of the spleen, liver, gall bladder, pineal gland? The latter was once used for clairvoyance and will be made capable of it again.

Man will not get to know his own body through anatomy, by cutting up corpses, but through inner observation, through mastery of the body. The first step in this direction will be the transformation of the breathing process. The breath is the breath that, as it were, breathes into itself, which is why “Atma” means “spiritual man”. This I with its bodies is at the same time an imprint of the universe. With each step that man takes, his penetration into the universe deepens.

It is dangerous and misleading to speak of theosophy as if the soul were absorbed in the universe. This absorption can only be achieved in stages through the deification of the human being.

The three fundamental aspects of the self:
the astral body, transformed into manas or spirit self;
the etheric body, transformed into budhi or life spirit;
the physical self, transformed into atma or spiritual man.

The I is not easy to understand, it arises through work on the lower limbs; for this it must be trained.

After the Atlantean time, people began to work on the Manas. In the Lemurian time, it entered the physical body. Before that, only the physical body, etheric body and astral body existed. There was an intermediate stage until the middle of the Atlantean period before work on the Manas could begin. Three stages were prepared for the ability to work out the I: the sentient soul, the mind soul and the consciousness soul. As far as the I is conscious, it works on the astral body in the mind soul. As the sword is in its sheath, so is the sentient soul in the soul body. The I first fertilizes the sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul in the astral body and works on the spirit self, life spirit and spiritual man in the etheric body.

In the Nordic Druid schools, there were nine members of the human being, in Egypt seven. The Nordic students distinguished between the astral body or Kama-Rupa, the sentient soul in the soul body and, in the higher Manas, the consciousness soul and spirit self.

According to the sevenfold division, five members are developed, two - Budhi and Atma - are still in the core.

When a person falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed; the astral body and the ego withdraw, along with everything that develops through the ego. The dream is an intermediate state when the astral body is still connected to the etheric body in a certain way. Actually, the astral body should also be out; but one must not imagine this out-of-being in a tangible way. The astral body is drawn out with its powers; this is to be understood dynamically, not spatially. As long as the astral body is in the body, the person thinks and feels; all consciousness takes place through the eye, ear and so on. All this sinks when the astral body withdraws, fatigue sets in, but in the morning it gives way to refreshment.

Where do the forces that strengthen and heal people come from? When people sleep, they lie in their physical and etheric bodies, which are in a plant-like state. Meanwhile, the soul returns to its radiant, better home in the astral plane. For those who have not yet been trained, all experiences sink into a higher world. More highly developed beings then find themselves in a surging world of flowing sound formations. At first there is silence, but spiritual ears hear a new world of sounds. It is possible to hear the connection between the planets and our sun. Those who look at the starry sky in terms of the Ptolemaic system see the stars moving. Divided into 360 degrees, each star moves one degree in relation to each other in one hundred years. Saturn moves one thousand two hundred times as fast, Jupiter two and a half times as fast; Jupiter moves five times as fast in relation to Mars, and Mars moves twice as fast as the Sun, Venus and Mercury - when viewed occultly. Mercury to Moon is like twelve to one.

According to the speed of movement, each world body has a different tone; the harmony is the music of the spheres or spherical harmony. These tones move and swim in astral substances and forces. Just as we do not see the stars during the day, the soul moves away from its home; at night, it returns to a blissful, comforting element. The soul plunges into the cosmic worlds that belong to the sun, and in its vibrations the soul renews its strength.

Paracelsus had the right concept for this state, he says: “A calm sleep must always bring health; insomnia, insufficient sleep shorten the physical life.

After death, only the physical body remains and [this is] left to the dissolution of its substances and forces. The etheric body no longer works against the dissolution. The state that the etheric body is united with the deceased without the physical body can last for two to three days; it can last about as long as a person could endure without sleep. During this time, everything he has experienced from birth until he loses consciousness in death passes in his memory. No pain or pleasure is associated with these memories, the images are objective, they pass by like in a panorama. This is because the etheric body has the ability to form memories through the ego; it is the carrier of memory. It is an experience that the etheric body is separated from the physical body after death.

In a finger, there are muscles and nerve ganglia. These ganglia are immersed in the substance of the etheric body as if in a hollow sphere. When a limb falls asleep, we feel a tingling sensation. This comes from a partial separation from the etheric body. Hypnotizing is therefore dangerous because a permanent tendency to push out the etheric body can arise. For a short time, the etheric body can leave the physical body through shock, falling and the like; if the person remains conscious, life appears as an image. This is proof that the etheric body conveys memory.

When a person is free from the physical body through death and in the etheric body, he takes an extract of life with him, which joins the others as a new leaf, like a link in a chain. In this way, the ego enriches itself, the carrier of all further wanderings.

Just like plant seeds, human beings take a multitude of seeds with them to Devachan, in order to develop them there anew. All the powers that rebuild the body are contained there; the archetypes of the human being are also found there.

Long ago, the physical eyes were formed by the light. The light drew out the eyes, they are products of the light. Before that, man was still blind; the food juices, which otherwise provided the strength to feel, grasp, scratch and so on, were transformed to form organs for seeing. In this way, the ear was formed for sound, the nose for aroma.

The archetype of the etheric body arises out of the watery region of Devachan. The archetype of the astral body arises out of the aerial region of Devachan. Out of these regions man creates the foundations for his physical shell. The time between death and birth teaches the reasons why he must come again and again. Man must always gain different experiences, otherwise it would be useless for him to come to the same earth. This is constantly changing. A million years ago, people could not live here in Germany because of the tropical heat. In our present homeland, there were the animals and plants of the equator.

About twenty thousand years ago, there was an ice age in the North German lowlands that extended down to Bavaria. After the birth of Christ until the fourth century, Germany was still a land without culture. From a chronicle of an archbishop of Bremen, one can read that the people in the east, in the Mark, drink blood and have other barbaric customs. The children of the Greeks and Romans were educated differently than those of the Germans. Man does not enter the scene of the earth again until it has changed and he experiences a completely new situation. There is always something new to experience, and the earth always shows a new face. Peoples who had their spiritual life through the secret schools of high teachers retained certain feelings for the transformation of the earth; they knew that these transformations were connected with events in the starry sky.

The point in the spring sky where the sun rises keeps moving. We are in the constellation of Pisces. At the time of Jesus' birth, the sun had been rising in the constellation of Aries for eight hundred years; two thousand one hundred and sixty years before that, it had been rising in the constellation of Taurus, and before that in the constellation of Gemini and Cancer. Thus, in about two thousand one hundred and sixty years, the sun passes through one constellation after another until it completes its cycle.

After the Atlantean world, the Indian epoch emerged, under the sign of Cancer, which is a spiral-shaped vortex and represents the Indian cult. The Persian epoch was ruled by Gemini, the Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian epochs by Taurus. Each new solar sign brought a savior. Eight hundred years before Christ, the nations hoped for the Lamb, hence the words of John the Baptist about Christ: “This is the Lamb of God.” The saga of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, which Jason brought, also belongs here.

It is often said that nature does not make leaps. But it does make huge leaps. A newborn child is a huge leap, and a plant's root, stem, leaf and flower are huge leaps! It meant a huge leap from the old Atlantic culture to the Indian one. In nature, everything is formed in a whirling manner, so Indian culture curled up into the Atlantic one. When the sun has passed from one constellation to another, the earth has always received a new face.

The Indians under the sign of Cancer always longed back to the deity, their ancient home; the Persians had to distinguish light and darkness in the sign of Gemini, the Egyptians worshiped the sacred bull. The time between two incarnations varies greatly because people's intimate circumstances differ. On average, there are two incarnations in a solar sign, one male and one female, in the same individual. In the overall process of development, there are as many male as female incarnations. Only in exceptional cases do up to seven incarnations of the male sex follow one another, when special tasks need to be fulfilled.

From the natural basis of motherly love an ethical bond develops. The networks that are woven from soul to soul on earth are much more intimate and lasting in the spirit world because the body as an obstacle no longer exists. The reunion there has its deepest satisfaction, the souls do not live next to each other, but in each other; time and space have ceased to exist.

What work does a person do in devachan? He would be a poor world citizen, and it would be sad if he only wanted to rebuild himself as well as possible for the next incarnation. He has something important to do there, to work on shaping the world. It is wrong to imagine the stay in the spirit world as idleness.

The hereafter is all around us, we can already be blissfully happy here; disincarnated, man works there on the transformation of the earth; what he then encounters again, he himself [helped to transform], he prepares his own bed. The forces of nature are only the outer, visible tone, which cannot be without spiritual impact.

Consider the flowers in a meadow bathed in sunshine. With an open [spiritual] eye, you can see the radiance of the etheric body around the flowers, and in the sunlight that falls on them, you can see the departed working on the flowers. It is our cosmic, divine duty to help with planetary evolution in joyful devotion. If we were to shirk this duty, we would be like a brick in a building that does not want to be integrated and causes the house to collapse.

If we were to indulge in a world-hostile asceticism, we would destroy the divine building. Every incarnation is important as a link in the being. There is nothing arbitrary about the personality. The limbs and the ego are nothing more than what man has acquired piece by piece.

Everything around us is valuable, we are called upon to ennoble even the smallest thing to the greatest. Every life is the pearl of a string that we must consider to be of infinite value.

When the human archetype has been formed, the astral body envelops it. Just as iron filings are drawn by the force of a magnet, so the astral substance forms around the I.

New souls are always pushing to be embodied. Bell-like figures rush through the astral plane with extraordinary speed, which is an expression of their power. This is followed by the selection of parents; this often drives them from one end of the earth to the other, hence their haste. At the moment when the nascent human being reaches the place where he fits best, higher beings attach the etheric body to the astral body. As soon as these bodies are reconnected, the person experiences the opposite of their retrospective account of their death, they see their new life in front of them. The soul can be horrified by what is about to happen. Some people are so frightened that they prevent higher beings from integrating. Then the etheric body hangs down partially from the head, and people become idiots.

It is delicate to talk about this, but the future child is already with its parents before conception and is incorporated into the small germ until about the seventeenth day after conception. The etheric body is then already active, and the higher members have a determining effect on the future person from there.

From his last stay in the realm of purification, man took with him the desire to make up for the pain he caused others and felt as an inhibition. That is the brand that puts man in a position to make amends for what he has done. Attractions, sympathy and antipathy, proceed from Kamaloka and form the causes of destinies. Through the causes of the laws we are led to the strict laws of karma. The occultist can investigate how destinies are interwoven. Example: Five femal judges killed a person. In a previous life, this person was an Indian chief and killed the five others.

In order to understand everything else better, it is useful to follow the development of the world on a large scale. First, our planetary development comes into consideration. Our Earth is our dwelling place and has already undergone many changes. When man has reached his goal, the Earth will also change into another planet. Our Earth has to go through seven embodiments as a planet: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. The planet that was Earth as Saturn is not in the sky today. Today's Saturn was in its childhood then and is now in its manhood. Our Earth has nothing to do with the present Saturn. The names are therefore to be understood as generic terms and not as earthly conditions.

By studying man himself, the planetary conditions become clear to us best. Man is the oldest being on earth. When the earth was Saturn, something of him was already present. The mineral, plant and animal kingdoms developed later. Occultism shows us the development quite differently than the Darwinian method.

The fact that the most perfect part of the human being is the physical body cannot be grasped with the mind alone, but with the soul. For example, consider a thigh bone. With the application of the least material: what a magnificent bridge framework and network of beams! The art of engineering has not yet been able to imitate such a structure with the simplest means to achieve the greatest strength in the distance.

What tremendous work the heart does! The astral body, with its passions, assails it, supplying it with a multitude of heart poisons; it can only survive because it is so strongly built.

On Jupiter the etheric body will be perfect.
On Venus the astral body will be perfect.
On Vulcan the I will be perfect.

The physical body is the oldest, on the sun the ether body was added, on the moon the astral body, and in the present state of the earth the I moved into the human being. In the sun, a core of the ether body moved into the human being. On the moon, the astral body called the physical body to its perfection. The gods worked on the physical body the longest.

No body can replace glands if it is not permeated by an etheric body. On Saturn, we see the first rudiments of eyes, ears, larynx, liver, spleen, and bone system. The chemical processes on the Sun are found in living form on Saturn. The physical apparatus was formed. What is the eye if not a photographic apparatus! In the ear, tiny hairs are tuned to sounds, only through this can it pick up sounds. The larynx is a trumpet. The whole sphere of Saturn was covered with small reflective dots - eyes, ears and so on.

Saturn was not a dense mass; there was also no water or air, it was a state of warmth, still dark, no fire breaking out. When I look into a human eye, I see my image; so Saturn sent its rays out into the world and reflected itself in it. The echo is a reflected sound. Saturn reflected everything like a great echo. We actually have seven senses, two of which are hidden: a sense of time and a sense of space. We actually have to describe the sense of touch or feeling as a sense of warmth. The sense of space is now quite hidden; it is a small channel in the inner ear; rods that stand in three directions. In the past, these were large organs. The ability to acquire mathematical knowledge is based on the complete development of these organs. The geometer draws his logical conclusions and judgments not through the brain, but through the sense of space; through it we know the three dimensions of space.

The sense of time is located in the eye. It is the small black point in the eye and has the ability to contract and expand the ring-shaped muscles of the pupil.

A person who does not have this sense easily suffers from madness, which is why the psychiatrist sees the condition of pupillary rigidity. Morphine makes the point smaller and smaller. Today this sense is difficult to find.

Then Saturn darkened, entered its [pralaya] state and became the Sun.

What is now called the zodiac was reflected in Saturn and formed the ring. How things are reflected depends on the surface. A concave mirror reflects things in a circle. Saturn reflects the other stars, which unite in it as if at a focal point.

The sun forms beings with an etheric body. There were those who remained who had no etheric body; they remained Saturn beings; only with a physical body, they formed the second realm.

On the Sun, man was a plant) as he still is in sleep. And just as plants are still sleeping today, humans in the solar state were in a perpetual sleep.

On Saturn, man was in the mineral state, but we must not imagine it to be as condensed as our present-day minerals.

Unlike Saturn, the Sun did not reflect heat back, but first absorbed it and then radiated it. If we had wanted to enter its surface, we would have felt as if we were in steam; it is similar to the present state of the Sun.

While Saturn was permeable and reflected everything, there were spots on the sun, the retarded, the other was a luminous mass of gas. This is the spiritual explanation of sunspots. The occultist does not have to deny what the physical explainer says, he just sees more. As one sees a mirage, so did man see the luminous gas masses with their fine apparatus. The end of the air-shaped sun was approaching.

The state of the moon resembles that of water, it was only denser and more jelly-like, similar to the protein substance. Here man received the etheric body in addition to the astral body. The glandular masses - concerning digestion, reproduction and so on - were caused by the etheric body, the nervous system came through the astral body. The sense organs were developed to a higher degree on the moon.

The beings that had remained on the sun formed the third kingdom on the moon, so that we have mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. The latter, however, are different from the higher animals. They were animal-men, the regularly developed first kingdom; the other kingdoms have remained at the various levels. The highest kingdom actually consisted of animal-men and the second kingdom of plant-animals, the third kingdom of mineral-plants, the kingdoms have descended half a level.

The human animals, however, were half a step higher than our present-day apes. The moon mass itself was a plant-mineral kingdom, it was like a peat bog, a mass of plants, half alive. The moon as a sphere consisted of the firmest mass of these wood and bark masses.

A separation occurred in the moon's development. A sun drew its forces from the moon and kept the finest masses for itself. The bodies merged again, and a darkening occurred. An old moon with dense masses then orbited the sun. We now have the sun and the moon; the human animal lived on the moon.

The Earth revolves around itself in twenty-four hours; around the sun, once a year. The old moon revolved around itself in the same amount of time, but always turned the same side towards the sun. The consequence was: there was a warm and a cold half. Therefore, it happened that the creatures went to the warm side during the mating season and to the cold side at other times, they orbited the moon constantly. The migratory behavior of [today's] migratory birds can still be traced back to a moon habit. Likewise, the mating seasons of animals and the like are still connected to moon habits.

In those days, when the earth and moon were still together, in the time of fiery gases, all water was still dissolved in steam, it was a smoke of all substances.

Those physical bodies into which the souls had moved were not like today's humans and animals. They would appear grotesque to us; the physical bodies were formed by the soul entering them. It is of great importance that the lungs form when the soul enters. Until then, the beings moved by floating and swimming in the air. During the cooling period, the swim bladder transforms into lungs; they formed when the soul entered.

This transformation enabled blood to be formed. The I was able to couple with the human being. These conditions do not occur quickly; millions of years are necessary for this. The ability to breathe through the lungs and the descent of the souls into the bodies is wonderfully expressed in the Bible: God breathed the breath of life into man, and he became a living soul.

Thus, through theosophy, the profound truths in the religions emerge, compelling people to respect the tremendous facts in the development of mankind. This worship of the supernatural remained until about the fourteenth century, until Christianity became materialistic. It is not at all Christian to understand the spiritual essence of Christianity in its spiritual form in an abstract, dry way through the research of theology, geology and so on. It is genuinely Christian to express the great events in cosmology as Moses did in the past: “Adam fell into a deep sleep!” This means: Adam saw clearly the development on the astral plane. It is presented as a symbol that he clairvoyantly perceived on the astral plane how the [gill-breathing] being was transformed into a lung-breathing being through the self.

The migratory instinct on the moon was related to the mating and rutting season. Reproduction took place on its sunny side, and the interim period was spent on the other side.

The animal-men, who were the highest lunar beings, had not yet attained a degree of love; love, which descends from the highest level to the plant world, had not yet gained any strength on the moon. Everything was strictly regulated by cosmic forces; wisdom was the guiding principle. With the advent of the astral body, humans descended to a lower level, and with that, love began. The moon is the planet of wisdom, the earth the planet of love.

The wisdom-filled structure of the body developed mainly on the moon; at the end of the earth, love will be the motto. When we see the wonderful plant formations and the wisdom-filled structure of the human being, we find everything permeated by love. In the human being, it first reveals itself in the blood relationship of the ancient Atlanteans, and then develops into the compassion of brotherly love. From the coarsest forms of sexuality to the finest soul bonds, all beings are entwined in the bond of love. The transition from wisdom to love is a great step forward.

Mankind owes the gradual infusion of love to the high solar beings, who already possessed all parts of the spirit and whose progress had reached its peak. Yahweh lowers the ego; he is the bringer and giver of love, through whom a unified bond is created; it is a mutual giving and taking that furthers the soul in love.

There were also beings between gods and humans, only a part reached the Atma level. Many remained at the Budha level, while humans developed the beginning of Manas.

The Atma gods, the sun beings, wanted to imprint love on people, while the moon gods wanted to imprint wisdom on them. The important role that blood love played at the beginning of the Lemurian period approached people. Because the Hebrews felt that they were related by blood, they were able to base their legislation on it.

Love brings people together. They form larger and more comprehensive communities. The moon gods create an important counteraction. Freedom, individuality would have disappeared, people would have merged into a general love mess, that is why the moon gods directed their strongest attack against the union, their leader was Lucifer. So there were two currents, that of Yahweh and that of Lucifer, that of love and freedom.

The Atlanteans already had their secret schools. In the post-Atlantean period, the most developed people moved under the great leader Manu to the Gobi Desert, from where colonizers went out to all cultures. Wisdom was spread by people, by initiates, not by books.

The Indian culture consisted of descendants of the Lemurians and Atlanteans. The Indians received the Vedanta wisdom from the emissaries from Gobi, who were the holy rishis, seven in number.

The first post-Atlantean culture, the Indian culture, preserved the memory of the clairvoyance of the Atlanteans, hence the deep longing of the Indians for this time when man still felt connected to the divine; they valued clairvoyance more than the vision of external objects. They said to themselves: What we see outside are mere shadows, illusions! That is why they aspired to transcend this world. Through the yoga training, they sought to achieve the extinction of physical reality in order to exchange it for clairvoyance.

The Indians have retained their appreciation of the supernatural, but also their underestimation of the sensual world. It is a great mistake if this culture must pass away irretrievably, that it should be brought back into the present.

Persian culture is a step forward in that it regards the earth as reality, as a field of labor. The Persians were aware that one must plant the spiritual in the sensual world. [The Persian] wanted to redeem the sensual world with the help of the spirit. The great Zarathustra saw the god of light in the solar aura, and opposite him stands Ahriman, the god of darkness.

This was followed by the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian culture. It had powerful leaders who married spirit and science. The Egyptians tried to impress the spirit of reality. Their interpretation of the stars was based on astrology and was imbued with spiritual wisdom, as were their architectures and famous monuments.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin period, something new was added. While the Indians longed for a dream world, the Persians progressed by thinking of the sensual world as a field of work, and the Egyptians were able to align their earthly existence with the orbits of the stars, it was left to the Greeks to see themselves as a form of spiritualization. Form and material became the means of a living immortalization of the spirit. The Greeks brought art down into earthly reality. Its social effectiveness was a real, social state structure.

Great states are founded on causes other than physical facts. The Romans were the first to develop the concept of the “citizen”. In Greece, people were like members of a state; with the Romans, the individual figure came into its own. They imbued their own being with spiritual concepts, which is why jurisprudence flourished among them. They were conquerors of the external reality of man.

Then came an event of fateful significance. From the Atlantean era until the Romans, the God of Love, Yahweh, and the God of Wisdom, Lucifer, fought within man. It was a matter of uniting and individualizing the two extremes. The close blood ties also diverged among the Hebrews. The time came when these associations were no longer sufficient. The peoples were thrown into confusion by the campaigns of Alexander the Great; the campaigns of the Romans formed a center of spiritual selfishness.

It was a tremendous advance when Christ Jesus transformed the bond of love from a natural into a spiritual bond. His words are to be understood in this way: “Whoever does not leave brother and sister, son and daughter, and so on, cannot be my disciple.

The beginning of love was sexuality. The soul relationships between people must become ever more refined until, at the end of the earth, brotherhood embraces all people.

The preliminary stage of brotherhood came through Yahweh; the Christ brought spiritual love into the world; only then can man completely abandon it when love is spiritualized. This love must increase more and more in the relationships between people; it must become so great that it will triumph over all resistance.

The Christ Jesus appeared at a time when people were drifting apart, to unite them in a great brotherhood. Therefore, the Christ Jesus is the true spirit of the sun and the earth, the ruler of the earth, who puts love at the center.

Through Christ's atonement and sacrificial death, the astral plan is transformed from love of blood relationship into universal brotherly love. The first act takes place in Palestine, where a great brotherly bond is formed around humanity, the bond to love correctly where no blood ties exist. Christ Jesus provided the impetus for a transforming love that overcomes all. Christ Jesus is the greatest marriage between God and Man.

The fifth epoch signifies a deep descent into matter; the spirit is held captive by it, it becomes its slave. Even religion has become materialistic, Christianity must be renewed through theosophy.

It is a descent of the spirit into matter, this is not meant to be a criticism [of our age], but it must also be understood as a necessity. It is through this that concepts and logic are developed; natural science becomes the ruler of natural forces. However, it is still an enslavement of the spirit when the gigantic achievements are used only to serve the basest needs that were previously satisfied in the simplest way, while the spirit was cultivated. It is a waste of spiritual strength when animal instincts are satisfied with it.

To understand the development of humanity as a whole, it is necessary to look at it from different perspectives. Apparent contradictions dissolve when you think about them more deeply.

We saw how the body approached its present state through the Lemurian and Atlantean periods, when the Earth was still covered by vast masses of fog. We saw how a group of the advanced migrated to Ireland, not to the present one, but to a neighboring one. These people developed logical thinking. A mighty change had taken place with these people. Previously, the etheric body of man towered mightily above the head. The etheric body is the architect of the body, it builds the organs. It could work quite differently when it was inside instead of outside; this is how the brain became an instrument of thought. Thus, through this change, the brain became the organ of thought, and everything else had to adapt to it. The etheric body first had to remodel the head, then itself, in order to work back again. It is necessary to understand the development of man according to the method of the Rosicrucians or the Druids; they divided man into nine parts.

Firstly, the “physical body”; secondly, the “etheric body”; thirdly, the “sentient body”, in which the “sentient soul” is the fourth link; fifthly, the “mind soul” or “lower Manas“, sixthly

It was the most important event in the Atlantean era for the physical body that man learned to think in it. The task of our time until the farthest future is to align the other parts accordingly, except for the ninth link, which will be further developed in other cycles.

We have now arrived at the fifth, the [Germanic-Anglo-American] epoch. After the seventh epoch, an event will take place, like the old Atlantic flood. The spiritual man will then move into the human being, like the etheric body into the physical body in the Atlantic period. In India, the influence of the etheric body became apparent. This is the reason for their longing to merge into Brahman, to lose themselves in the heights of the music of the spheres. They lived with constant awareness in the etheric body and had a great understanding for everything that rises above the earthly. They fulfilled the task of adapting the etheric body to culture.

The Persians trained the sentient soul to perceive the outer world and to overcome it through work. They cultivated agriculture and viticulture. The body no longer indulges in inner feelings, it applies muscle power. Perfecting the sentient soul was reserved for the Egyptians. Their mystery schools were in full bloom. The disciples of Hermes regarded the heavens as an ocean of stars; the stars were entities to them, animated by sympathy and antipathy. Intellect, sentiment, and imagination expanded among the Greeks; the Romans founded jurisprudence.

The nations became aware that reason celebrates its victory in the individual human being. In the past, the connection between states was always guided by priestly wisdom, so hierarchies and castes formed. The spiritual life of ancient peoples was different from ours; it was a prophetic one. The Sibylline books, in which events were predicted a thousand years in advance, came from such a source. The initiates foresaw the course of events. Thus we see Egyptian history guided by divine inspiration. The leaders drew up a plan, saying: “If we are to achieve salvation, we must direct our destiny according to heaven.” They followed the laws of planetary orbits and divine numbers. True disciples of the great masters thus wisely guided the Egyptians through seven ages. There was a priest cult until Greek times. By personally turning to himself, man breaks away from divine revelations. Turning to oneself was symbolized in the snake as a sign of wisdom. The snakes of Laocoon show the struggle of priests with the snake, the struggle of the fourth with the third epoch. For another part of the ancient world, the horse was the sign of wisdom. The horse is a retarded human being. It was the last of the equine natures to evolve. Those who observe the world with a more refined sensibility will understand how some peoples love their horses. The Arab and his horse are one. People instinctively feel a certain gratitude for this animal. The meaning of the centaur is an ancient secret. The Indians revered the horse, as do our Nordic peoples, and it is [in the coat of arms of Lower Saxony]. In the Apocalypse, reference is made to the horse. Odysseus made the wooden horse to bring about the fall of Troy, where priestly wisdom was preserved the longest. The Romans felt their descent from the priestly caste and depicted it ingeniously. Aeneas, son of Anchises, founded “Alba Longa”, that is,

Ancus Marcius: mind soul. He built canals and built a wall around the city.

Tarquinius Priskus: spirit self. He waged wars and promoted the arts.

Servius Tullus: Spirit of life, he gives laws. Tarquinius Superbus: Man of spirit. He is of an ambiguous nature, he strives for the most sublime, which he cannot obtain. The modern mind knows only the profane, it cannot see how such a line-up as that of the Roman kings is possible. What a hassle the historians went to explaining Livy.

Christ, the God who leads people upwards, is not a particular member of a people, he belongs to all peoples. He is the man who speaks to man.

Our era, the Germanic-Anglo-American era, follows. Christianity was too high for the young tribes to understand. It is only now beginning to seep in. Our time is partly lost to the outside world. Those with occult eyes would see the transition that separates the last third of the previous century from the past as the dawn of a new era. Before, students were plagued with dry facts. There is a change taking place in physics, geology, biology and natural science. Ten years ago, at the meeting of natural scientists in Vienna, the chemist Ostwald put energetics, power, in the place of atomism. The spirit will take its place. [...]

In the sixth period, the manas or spirit self will infuse into the consciousness soul. Since the fourteenth century, initiates have said that they have to reckon with science, and the spiritual researcher knows all the facts of it. The consciousness soul has the consciousness of the Atma truths that have become real. The spiritual researcher knows, for example, that light is not created by objective vibrations. What is necessary for our time is the inflow of the spirit self. This is what the Rosicrucian training aims at; it helped to prepare the time. Christ Jesus came in the fourth epoch, he gave the world direction. He will return when people will have the ability to recognize him. The human culture will look into higher worlds through the spirit self.

The system of Copernicus, the theory of Darwin were great because they trained thinking, as did the physics of Galilei and so on, but they are only the presentation of objective facts. Thinking can put oneself in the place of spiritual science.

In the sixth period, a great change will take place in Europe, the peoples of the East will merge with those of the West. The coincidence of the consciousness soul with the manas or spirit self is what is referred to in the New Testament as the Holy Spirit. This is the program for the future. It will happen in any case, despite any opposition. Like leaves falling from a tree, the countercurrents will be repelled. Those who have learned to walk with the true laws can work together.

Not only the soul life is changing, but also the human body. We have organs that are in decline, others are developing. Those for reproduction have the shortest life, they came last and will be the first to fall away. They formed in the Lemurian period and were blackmailed by the astral body. Before that, humans and animals had reproductive organs that were permeated by the etheric body; they were of a plant-like nature. The change occurred when the etheric body was seized by the astral body, so later the lowest acts became of a carnal nature. In the Vatican collections, in a corner, you can see a man with a plant-like structure growing out of his back, so faithfully did art preserve the secret of early reproduction. The “fig leaf” has a completely different meaning than is usually assumed; it is a reference to the descent of man through the plant leaf.

In the ascent, the larynx will be the organ that serves reproduction. The inner soul is reproduced outwards through images and inferences that express themselves in words. The word is a condensed form. This is the process of creation; the [solar beings] created through the spoken creative word. Everything created is the condensed word of God.

Goethe had a sense of this when he wrote: “The sun sounds.” The angels are creative sun gods. Man is called to become creative through the word. In the beginning was the word, the word became flesh. This is the Christ Jesus, as John testifies in the Gospel.

Among other things, the body with its organs, for example the heart, must become more and more perfect. Today, man can still have little effect on his soul. When he can move his heart organ at will through ether currents, he will become the independent conqueror of the organism. Thus humanity changes from form to form. Each time a person returns, his dwelling is improved.

The Indians worked on the etheric body, the Persians on the sentient body, the Egyptians on the sentient soul, the Romans and Greeks on the mind soul. Today's humanity has brought it to the consciousness soul. We notice a crossover of individualities through the cultures. The Indians developed memory, but it was more of a mental memory than that of the Atlanteans. The Persians came to an intimate relationship with nature. The Egyptians were mystically inclined. The Greeks and Romans developed intellect and wisdom. Now man must really experience the outer world, where he belongs, through experience, otherwise it remains a dream to him. We are now in a stage in which man is trying to control the forces of nature.

There is a karma that connects entire nations. For example, throughout the Middle Ages, the peoples of Europe were often threatened by the Huns just as they had barely begun to rise through Christianity. These Mongols had astral bodies that went into decay, but this is a spiritual process. They were remnants of the ancient Atlanteans under their leader Attila or Etzel. If the peoples had not been afraid, the Huns could not have harmed them. Thus the corrosive influence was transmitted to the fresh astral bodies of the peoples. This caused leprosy or misery. The saga of this is in “Poor Henry” by Hartmann von der Aue. The picture “The Battle of the Huns” shows the event on the astral plane.

We collect good karma when we bring our lives together into a harmonious unity. We always experience something; life brings it to us, we have to add the fruits.

To get certainty about facts of karma, we must not speculate or philosophize, we must let the facts speak for themselves as they unfold. The occultist investigates real facts. It is difficult to trace past lives backwards. The occultist does not make hypotheses, otherwise he would soon be discredited. Observational thinking is better for the occultist than subjective thinking. It is important to experience world-ending thinking.

From the karmic point of view, experiences are of two kinds: those for which we are not responsible and those we have earned. Not everything is a karmic effect. We are confronted with facts, misfortunes; those for which we are not responsible find their compensation later. A thought that becomes a habit in our life expresses itself in the etheric body in the next life; the tendency to rejoice becomes the tendency of the etheric body. Sensations and perceptions depend on the experiences of the previous life; we cannot help how they now arise in us. Let us consider the astral body itself. Feelings, passions, sensations and perceptions are properties of the astral body. Stormy lust indicates an undeveloped astral body, while high moral concepts indicate a purified one. Depending on whether we educate it with careful moral concepts, sublime ideas or by indulging every desire, the astral body takes shape in the next life - and consequently even more so the etheric body - in inclinations and temperaments. A libertine who gave in to sensual lust in his previous life will experience this as a temperament in his etheric body in his present life. Those who work intellectually acquire talents and abilities for the future.

The occultist must acquire the ability to effortlessly return to the same fact and to love it; this will have a great influence on his etheric body, giving him an excellent memory in the next life. In the Buddha-doctrines there are always repetitions, these have the purpose of making the etheric body, which is dependent on the astral body, capable of expanding the memory. The qualities of the astral body become those of the etheric body and are expressed in the physical body in the next life. Through patience and perseverance, we can already expand our memory somewhat in this life.

Dispositions for disease come from outside and from within the person. Dispositions for this come from sensual habits and express themselves in diseases in the next life. We should not only increase healthy dispositions, but also acquire good ones. A person of good health takes care of good habits. This is how abilities and temperaments develop. Those who are bitter and do not get rid of this fault will develop a tendency towards typhoid, feverish diseases. Those who are always criticizing, who can't do anything right for anyone, who can't truly love, will age prematurely and easily develop wrinkles and be ugly. Those who can develop sympathy and love stay young for a long time. Those who focus on an unhealthy, heightened sense of achievement and want to own a lot are consequently prone to infectious diseases.

Experiences affect people; what they do and what constantly takes place on the physical plane all shape their future destiny. Their deeds, good or evil, in turn shape the future body. Thus we have a cycle of facts and their consequences.