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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz
Schmidt Number: S-2444
On-line since: 1st July, 2004
Neuchatel, 28th September 1911
My task today will be to tell you something about the work of
Christian Rosenkreutz. This work began in the thirteenth century, is
still going on today, and will continue right into eternity. The work
began, of course, with what I told you yesterday of the initiation of
Christian Rosenkreutz, and all that took place between the council of
the twelve and the thirteenth. When Christian Rosenkreutz was born
again in the fourteenth century, in an incarnation lasting more than a
hundred years, his main task was instructing the pupils of the twelve.
At that time hardly anyone else came to know Christian Rosenkreutz
apart from these twelve. This is not to be understood as if Christian
Rosenkreutz did not meet other people, but only that the other people
did not recognise him for what he was. Fundamentally this has remained
the same until today. However, the etheric body of Christian
Rosenkreutz has been constantly active in the circle of his pupils,
its forces working in ever growing circles, until today many people
are actually able to be influenced by the forces of his etheric body.
Christian Rosenkreutz selects those whom he wants to have as his
pupils in a remarkable way. The one chosen has to pay attention to a
certain kind of event, or several events in his life of the following
kind: Christian Rosenkreutz chooses people so that, for instance,
someone comes to a decisive turning-point, a karmic crisis in his
life. Let us assume that a man is about to commit an action that would
lead him to his death. These things can be very different one from the
other. The man goes along a path which, without noticing it, can lead
him into great danger. It leads to the edge of a precipice, perhaps.
Then the man, now only a step or two from the precipice perhaps, hears
a voice saying Stop! so that he has to stop without knowing
why. There could be a thousand similar situations. I should say, of
course, that this is only the external sign of being outwardly
qualified for a spiritual calling. To be inwardly qualified, the
chosen person has to have an interest in something spiritual,
theosophy or some other Spiritual Science. The external event I have
described is a fact of the physical world, though it does not come by
means of a human voice. The event always occurs in such a way that the
person concerned knows quite clearly that the voice comes from the
spiritual world. He may at first imagine that the voice has come from
a human being who is hidden somewhere, but when the pupil is mature
enough he discovers that it was not a physical person intervening in
his life. In short, this event convinces the pupil that there are
messages from the spiritual world. Such events can occur once or many
times in life. We have to understand what effect this has on the soul
of the pupil. The pupil tells himself: I have received another life
through grace; the first one was forfeited. This new life given him
through grace sheds light on the whole of the pupil's further life. He
has this definite feeling which can be described in this way: without
this rosicrucian experience of mine I should have died. My subsequent
life would not have had the same value but for this event.
It can happen, of course, that even though a man has already
experienced this once or even several times he does not come to
theosophy or Spiritual Science at once. Later on, however, the memory
of the event can come back. Many of you here can examine the past
course of your lives and you will find that similar occurrences have
happened to you. We give too little attention to such things today. We
ought altogether to realise how very important occurrences we pass by
without noticing them. This is an indication of the way the more
advanced pupils of rosicrucianism are called.
This kind of occurrence will either pass a person by without being
noticed at all, in which case the impression is blotted out and he
attaches no importance to it; or, assuming the person to be attentive,
he will appreciate its significance, and he will then perhaps rise to
the thought: you were actually facing a crisis then, a karmic crisis;
your life should actually have ended at that moment. You had forfeited
your life, and you were only saved by something resembling chance.
Since that hour a second life has been grafted onto the first, as it
were. You must look on this life as a gift and live it accordingly.
When such an event awakens in a person the inner disposition to look
at his life from that time onwards as a gift, nowadays this makes him
a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For that is his way of calling
these souls to him. And whoever can recall having had such an
experience can tell himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign
from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian
Rosenkreutz has added the possibility of such an experience to my
karma. That is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz makes his choice
of pupils. He chooses his community like this. Whoever experiences
this consciously, knows: a path has been shown me, and I must follow
it and see how far I can use my forces to serve rosicrucianism. Those
who have not understood the sign, however, will do so at a later time,
for whoever has received the sign will not be free of it again.
That a man can have an experience of the kind described is due to his
having met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world between his
last death and his last birth. Christian Rosenkreutz chose us then,
and he put an impulse of will into us that now leads us to such
experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are
brought about.
To go further, let us discuss the difference between Christian
Rosenkreutz's teaching in earlier times and in later times. This
teaching used to be more in the nature of natural science, whereas
today it is more like Spiritual Science. In earlier times, for
instance, they considered natural processes and called this science
alchemy, and when the processes took place beyond the earth they
called it astrology. Today we consider things from a more spiritual
aspect. If we consider, for instance, the successive post-Atlantean
cultural epochs, the culture of ancient India, ancient Persia, the
Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian culture and the Greco-Roman
culture, we learn about the nature of the development of the human
soul. The rosicrucians of the Middle Ages studied natural processes,
regarding them as the earth processes of nature. They distinguished,
for instance, three different natural processes which they regarded as
the three great processes of nature.
The first important process is the salt process. Everything in nature
that can form a deposit of hard substance out of a solution was called
salt by the rosicrucian of the Middle Ages. When the medieval
rosicrucian saw this salt formation, however, his conception of it was
entirely different from that of modern man. For if he wanted to feel he
had understood it, the witnessing of such a process had to work like a
prayer in his soul. Therefore the medieval rosicrucian tried to make
clear to himself what would have to happen in his own soul if the
formation of salt were to take place there too. He arrived at the
thought: human nature is perpetually destroying itself through
instincts and passions. Our life would be nothing but a decomposition,
a process of putrefaction, if we only followed our instincts and
passions. And if man really wants to protect himself against this
process of putrefaction, then he must constantly devote himself to
noble thoughts that turn him towards the spirit. It was a matter of
bringing his thoughts to a higher level of development. The medieval
rosicrucian knew that if he did not combat his passions in one
incarnation he would be born with a predisposition for illness in the
next one, but that if he purified his passions he would enter life in
the next incarnation with a predisposition for health. The process of
overcoming through spirituality the forces that lead to decay is
microcosmic salt formation. So we can understand how a natural process
like this occasioned the most reverent prayer. When observing salt
formation the medieval rosicrucians told themselves, with a feeling of
deepest piety: divine spiritual powers have been working in this for
thousands of years in the same way as noble thoughts work in me. I am
praying to the thoughts of the gods, the thoughts of divine spiritual
beings that are behind the maya of nature. The medieval rosicrucian
knew this, and he said to himself: when I let nature stimulate me to
develop feelings like this, I make myself like the macrocosm. If I
observe this process in an external way only, I cut myself off from
the gods, I fall away from the macrocosm. These were the feelings of
the medieval theosophist or rosicrucian.
The process of dissolution gave a different experience: it was a
different natural process that could also lead the medieval
rosicrucian to prayer. Everything that can dissolve something else was
called by the medieval rosicrucian quicksilver or mercury. Now he
asked again: what is the corresponding quality in the human soul? What
quality works in the soul in the same way in which quicksilver or
mercury works outside in nature? The medieval rosicrucian knew that
all the forms of love in the soul are what correspond to mercury. He
distinguished between lower and higher processes of dissolution, just
as there are lower and higher forms of love. And thus the witnessing
of the dissolution process again became a pious prayer, and the
medieval theosophist said to himself: God's love has been at work out
there for thousands of years in the same way as love works in me.
The third important natural process for the medieval theosophist was
combustion, that takes place when material substance is consumed by
flames. And again the medieval rosicrucian sought the inner process
corresponding to this combustion. This inner soul process he saw to be
ardent devotion to the deity. And everything that can go up in flames
he called sulphur. In the stages of development of the earth he beheld
a gradual process of purification similar to a combustion or sulphur
process. Just as he knew that the earth will at some time be purified
by fire, he also saw a combustion process in fervent devotion to the
deity. In the earth processes he beheld the work of those gods who
look up to mightier gods above them. And permeated with great piety
and deeply religious feelings at the spectacle of the process of
combustion, he told himself: gods are now making a sacrifice to the
gods above them. And then when the medieval theosophist produced the
combustion process in the laboratory himself, he felt: I am doing the
same as the gods do when they sacrifice themselves to higher gods. He
only considered himself worthy to carry out such a process of
combustion in his laboratory when he felt himself filled with the mood
of sacrifice, when he himself was filled with the desire to devote
himself in sacrifice to the gods. The power of the flame filled the
medieval theosophist with lofty and deeply religious feelings, and he
told himself: when I see flames outside in the macrocosm I am seeing
the thoughts and the love of the gods, and the gods' willingness to
sacrifice.
The medieval rosicrucian produced these processes himself in his
laboratory and then he entered into contemplation of these salt
formations, solutions and processes of combustion, letting himself at
the same time be filled with deeply religious feelings in which he
became aware of his connection with all the forces of the macrocosm.
These soul processes called forth in him divine thoughts, divine love
and divine sacrifice. And then the medieval rosicrucian discovered
that when he produced a salt process, noble, purifying thoughts arose
in him. With a solution process love was stimulated in him, he was
inspired by divine love, and with a combustion process the desire to
make a sacrifice was kindled in him, it urged him to sacrifice himself
on the altar of the world.
These were the experiences of one who did these experiments. And if
you had attended these experiments yourself in clairvoyant vision, you
would have perceived a change in the aura of the person carrying them
out. The aura that was a mixture of colours before the experiment
began, being full of instincts and desires to which the person in
question had perhaps succumbed, became single-hued as a result of the
experiment. First of all, during the experiment with salt formation,
it became the colour of copper pure, divine thoughts
then, in the experiment with a solution, the colour of silver
divine love and finally, with combustion, the colour of gold
divine sacrifice. And then the alchemists said they had made
subjective copper, subjective silver and subjective gold out of the
aura. And the outcome was that the person who had undergone this, and
had really experienced such an experiment inwardly, was completely
permeated by divine love. Such was the way these medieval theosophists
became permeated with purity, love and the will to sacrifice, and by
means of this sacrificial service they prepared themselves for a
certain clairvoyance. This is how the medieval theosophist could see
behind maya into the way spiritual beings helped things to come into
being and pass away again. And this enabled him to realise which
forces of aspiration in men's souls are helpful and which are not. He
became acquainted with our own forces of growth and decay. The
medieval theosophist Heinrich Khunrath,
( 35 )
in a moment of enlightenment, called this process the law of growth and decay.
Through observing nature the medieval theosophist learnt the law of
ascending and descending evolution. The science he acquired from this
he expressed in certain signs, imaginative pictures and figures. It
was a kind of imaginative knowledge. One of the outcomes of this was
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians which was
described yesterday.
This is the way the best alchemists worked from the fourteenth to the
eighteenth and until the beginning of the nineteenth century. About
this truly moral, ethical, intellectual work nothing has been printed.
What has been printed about alchemy concerns purely external
experiments only, and was only written by those men who performed
alchemy as an end in itself. The false alchemist wanted to create
substance. When he experimented with the burning of substances he saw
the material results as the only thing gained, whereas the genuine
alchemist attached no importance to these material results. For him it
all depended on the inner soul experiences he had whilst the substance
was forming, the thoughts and experiences within him. Therefore there
was a strict rule that the medieval theosophist who produced gold and
silver from his experiments was never allowed to profit from it
himself. He was only allowed to give away the metals thus produced.
Modern man no longer has the correct conception of these experiments.
He has no idea what the experimenter could experience. The medieval
theosophist was able to experience whole dramas of the soul in his
laboratory when, for example, antimony was extracted; the
experimenters saw significant moral forces at work in these processes.
If these things had not taken place at that time, we would not be able
to practise rosicrucianism in the Spiritual Scientific way today. What
the medieval rosicrucian experienced when he beheld the processes of
nature is a holy natural science. The mood of spiritual sacrifice, the
tremendous joys, the great natural events, including pain and sadness,
as well as the events that uplifted him and made him happy, all these
experiences that he had during the experiment he performed, worked on
him in a liberating and redeeming way. All that was planted into him
then, however, is now hidden in the innermost depths of man.
How shall we rediscover these hidden forces that used to lead to
clairvoyance? We shall find them by studying Spiritual Science and by
devoting ourselves deeply to the inner life of the soul in serious
meditation and concentration. By means of inner development of this
kind, work with nature will gradually become a sacrificial rite again.
For this to come about human beings must go through what we now call
Spiritual Science. Human beings in their thousands must devote
themselves to Spiritual Science; they must cultivate an inner life, so
that in the future the spiritual reality behind nature will be
perceptible again, and we learn to understand again the spirit behind
maya. Then, in the future, although it will only happen to a small
number of people to begin with, they will be able to experience Paul's
vision on the road to Damascus and to perceive the etheric Christ, Who
will come among men in super-sensible form. But before this happens man
will have to return to a spiritual view of nature.
If we did not know the whole significance of rosicrucianism we could
believe that humanity was still at the same stage as it was two
thousand years ago. Until man has gone through this process, which is
only possible by means of Spiritual Science, he will not come to
spiritual vision. There are many good and pious people who are
theosophists at heart, although they are not followers of Spiritual
Science.
Through the event of the baptism in Jordan, when the Christ descended
into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and through the Mystery of
Golgotha, mankind has become capable of beholding and recognising the
Christ later in the etheric body since 1930 onwards. Christ has
only walked the earth once in a physical body, and we should be able
to understand this. The second coming of Christ means seeing Christ
supersensibly in the etheric. Therefore everyone who wants to tread
the right path of development must work to acquire the capacity to see
with spiritual eyes. It would not signify human progress for Christ to
appear again in a physical body. His next appearance will be a
revelation in the etheric body.
What was given in the different religious creeds has been gathered
into one whole by Christian Rosenkreutz and the council of the twelve.
This means that everything that the separate religions had to give and
all that their followers strove and longed for will be found in the
Christ Impulse. Development during the next three thousand years will
consist in this: the establishing and furthering of an understanding
of the Christ Impulse. From the twentieth century onwards all the
religions will be reconciled in the mystery of rosicrucianism. And in
the course of the next three thousand years this will become possible
because it will no longer be necessary to teach from documents, for
through the beholding of Christ human beings will themselves learn to
understand the experience Paul had on the way to Damascus. Mankind
itself will pass through the experience of Paul.
The Maitreya Buddha will appear five thousand years after Buddha was
enlightened under the bodhi tree, that is, about three thousand years
from now. He will be the successor of Gautama Buddha. Among true
occultists this is no longer in doubt. Occultists of both the West and
the East are in agreement about it. So two things are beyond question:
Firstly, that the Christ could appear only once in a physical body;
secondly that He will appear in the twentieth century in etheric form.
Great individualities will certainly appear in the twentieth century,
like the Bodhisattva, the successor of Gautama Buddha, who will become
the Maitreya Buddha in about three thousand years. But no true
occultist will give to any human being physically incarnated in the
twentieth century the name of Christ, and no real occultist will
expect the Christ in the physical body in the twentieth century. Every
genuine occultist would find such a statement erroneous. The
Bodhisattva, however, will especially point to the Christ.
Secondly, it will be three thousand years before the Bodhisattva who
appeared in Jeshu ben Pandira appears as the Maitreya Buddha. The real
occultists of India, in particular, would be horrified if we were to
maintain that the Maitreya Buddha could appear before then. There
could well be the kind of occultists in India, of course, who are not
real occultists and who, for reasons of their own, speak of a Maitreya
Buddha already in incarnation. Proper devotion to rosicrucian
theosophy and to Christian Rosenkreutz can protect anyone from falling
into these errors.
All these things are stated in rosicrucianism in such a way that they
can be tested by reason. Healthy human understanding can test all
these things. Do not believe anything on my authority, but just take
what I say as an indication and then test it for yourselves. I am not
perturbed, for the more you examine theosophy or Spiritual Science the
more sensible you will find it. The less you take on authority, the
more understanding you will have for Christian Rosenkreutz. We know
Christian Rosenkreutz best when we enter properly into his
individuality and become conscious that the spirit of Christian
Rosenkreutz lives on and on. And the nearer we approach his great
spirit the stronger we shall become. We can hope for a great deal of
strength and help from the etheric body of this great leader, who will
always be there, if we ask him to help us.
We will also be able to understand the strange event of Christian
Rosenkreutz falling ill if we absorb ourselves properly in the work of
Spiritual Science. In the thirteenth century this individuality lived
in a physical body that grew weak to the point of transparency, so
that for several days he lay as though dead, and during this time he
received from the twelve their wisdom and he also experienced the
event of Damascus.
May the spirit of true rosicrucianism be with you and inspire you in
this group, then the mighty etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz will
be all the more active here.
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