LECTURE
VIII
Yesterday
we indicated that it was now necessary to answer the question: What
really happened to that Being whom we designate as Christ Jesus from
the Baptism by John in Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha? To answer
this question as far as possible, we must recall briefly what we know
from former lectures concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who in
his thirtieth year became the bearer of the Christ. The essential
points are given in my recently published book,
The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.
We know that in
Palestine, at the time which concerns us, not one but two
Jesus-children were born, one of them from the Solomon line of the
House of David. This is the Jesus child of whom the Matthew Gospel
speaks. The peculiar contradiction between the beginnings of the
Matthew and the Luke Gospels derives from the fact that the writer of
the Matthew Gospel was concerned with one of the Jesus-children, the
one born from the Solomon line. Then, at almost but not quite the
same time, another Jesus-child was born, from the Nathan line of the
House of David.
The important thing
is to understand clearly what kind of beings these two children were.
Occult investigation shows that the individuality who was in the
Solomon Jesus-child was none other than Zarathustra. After
Zarathustra's most important mission, of which we have spoken
in connection with the ancient Persian civilisation, he had been
incarnated again and again; lastly during the Babylonian-Chaldaic
civilisation, and now as the Solomon Jesus-child. This Zarathustra
individuality, with all the great and powerful inner forces which in
the nature of things he had brought over from earlier incarnations,
had to incarnate in a body descended from the Solomon side of the
House of David; a body adapted for working up and further developing
the great faculties of Zarathustra, in the way that human faculties,
when they are already at a very high level, can be brought further
on, in so far as they belong to the being who is going from
incarnation to incarnation. We are concerned therefore with a human
body which did not wait until later years to work on these faculties,
but could do so in a youthful, child-like and yet powerful organism.
Hence we see the Zarathustra-individuality growing up in such a way
that the faculties of the child developed comparatively early. The
child soon showed an extent of knowledge which would normally have
been impossible at his age.
One fact, however,
we must keep firmly in mind: the Solomon Jesus-child, although the
incarnation of so lofty an individuality, was only a highly developed
man. Hence he was encumbered — as even the most highly
developed man must be — with certain liabilities to error and
moral difficulties, though not exactly vices or sins. Then we know
that in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra, by an
occult process known to everyone who has made himself conversant with
such facts, forsook the body of the Solomon Jesus-child and went over
into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. Now the body of this Nathan
Jesus-child — or, better, his three-fold bodily organisation
physical body, etheric body, astral body — was formed in a
quite special manner. In fact, this body was such that the child
showed capacities exactly contrary to those of the Solomon
Jesus-child. Whereas the latter was remarkable because of his great
gifts in relation to things one can learn externally, it might almost
be said that in this respect the Nathan Jesus-child was untalented.
You will understand that saying this implies not the slightest
deprecation. The Nathan Jesus-child was not in a position to
familiarise himself with the products of human culture on earth. By
contrast, the remarkable fact is that he could speak as soon as he
was born. A faculty which belongs more to the physical body was thus
present in him from his birth. But — according to a good
tradition which can be occultly confirmed — the language he
spoke could be understood by his Mother only. The child's most
strongly marked characteristics were qualities of the heart. He had
an immense capacity for love and a disposition capable of immense
self-sacrifice. And the remarkable thing is that from the first days
of his life his mere presence, or his touch, had beneficent effects —
magnetic effects, one might perhaps call them nowadays. Thus all the
qualities of heart were manifest in this child, enhanced to such a
degree that they could have a beneficent magnetic influence on his
environment.
We know also that
active in the astral body of this child were the forces which had
once been acquired by that Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha. We
know indeed — and in this respect the oriental tradition is
absolutely correct, for it can be confirmed by occult science —
that the Bodhisattva, who on becoming Buddha five centuries before
our era no longer needed to incarnate further on earth, worked from
the spiritual world upon all those who devoted themselves to his
teachings. It is characteristic of such an individuality, who rises
to heights from which he need no longer incarnate in a body of flesh,
that he can then take part in the affairs and destiny of our earth
existence from out of the spiritual worlds. This can happen in the
most manifold ways. In fact, the Bodhisattva who went through his
last incarnation on the earth as Gautama Buddha has taken an
essential part in the further evolution of humanity. Our human
spiritual world stands continually in connection with all the rest of
the spiritual world. The human being not only eats and drinks and so
takes into himself the substance of the physical earth; he
continually receives soul-spiritual nourishment from the spiritual
world. In the most varied ways forces continually flow into physical
earthly-existence from out of the spiritual world. Such an in-flow of
the forces which Buddha had gained for himself came into the wider
stream of humanity through the fact that the Buddha forces permeated
the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child. We know, too, from earlier
lectures that the words we still have today as a Christmas message —
‘The Divine reveals itself from the heights, and on earth peace
will spread in the hearts of men of good will!’ —
originate in essence from the influence which flowed down into human
evolution through the immersion of the Buddha powers in the astral
body of the Nathan Jesus-child.
Thus we see the
Buddha forces working further in the stream of earth-existence which
took its start from the Events of Palestine. And it is interesting
that precisely the researches made by western occultism in quite
recent years have led to the recognition of a very important
connection between European civilisation and the Buddha forces. For a
long time these Buddha forces have been working from the spiritual
worlds, particularly upon everything in Western civilisation which is
unthinkable without the specific influence of Christianity. All those
philosophical streams which have developed during recent centuries up
to the nineteenth century, in so far as they are Western spiritual
currents, are permeated by the Christ-Impulse, but the Buddha has
always been working into them from out of the spiritual worlds. Hence
the most important thing that European humanity can receive from
Buddha today does not depend on the handing down of the teaching that
Buddha gave to men about 500 years before the Christian era, but on
what he has become since that time. For he has not remained at a
standstill; he has progressed; and it is through this progress, as a
spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, that he has in the highest
sense been able to take part in the further evolution of Western
civilisation. The outcome of our own occult investigation harmonises
in a wonderful way with much that had been known previously, before
this important influence could be investigated again. For we know
that the same individuality who appeared as Gautama Buddha in the
East had previously worked in the West, and that certain legends and
traditions connected with the name of Buddha or Wotan have to do with
this same individuality, just as Buddhism has with Gautama Buddha in
the East; hence the same field of action in human evolution which had
been prepared earlier by the same individuality has again been
occupied in a certain sense. Thus are interlaced the ways taken by
the spiritual currents within the evolution of humanity.
Today the most
important thing for us is to establish that in the astral body of the
Jesus-child described by Luke we have the Buddha forces at work. And
when this Nathan Jesus-child was twelve years old, the Zarathustra
individuality passed over into his three-fold being.
Why is it, then,
that this Jesus-child had the remarkable qualities we have just
characterised? It was because he was not a human individuality like
every other, but in a certain respect quite different, and in order
to understand him we must go back to the ancient Lemurian time in
which, strictly speaking, the Earth-evolution of man took its start.
We must clearly understand that everything before the Lemurian time
was really only a repetition of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods.
Only in the Lemurian time was the first germ-condition laid down in
man as a potentiality, so that during the Earth-evolution he could
receive the fourth member of his being, the Ego. We can say the
extension of mankind over the Earth — a subject dealt with
more precisely in the Outline of Occult Science — is to be
traced to certain human ancestors in the Lemurian period, the period
with which our present Earth took its start.
It is only after a
certain point of time in this Lemurian period that we can speak
correctly, in a modern sense, of the human race. Before this, those
Egos who have since continued to incarnate were not present in men on
Earth. They were not yet separate from the substance of that
Hierarchy which had first brought the human Ego into being: the
Hierarchy of the Spirits of Form. We can now picture to ourselves —
occult research shows this — that part of the substance of the
Spirits of Form entered into the incarnations of men for the building
up of the human Ego. But when in due time man was given over to his
physical incarnations on the Earth, something was held back. A
certain Ego substance was not brought into the stream of physical
incarnations. If we were to represent the stream of physical human
incarnations, beginning with him whom the Bible calls ‘Adam’,
the progenitor of the human race, we should have to draw a
genealogical tree with wide-spreading branches. Instead, let us
simply imagine that the substance poured down from the Spirits of
Form now flows onward, but that something was held back: an Ego that
was now protected from entering into physical incarnations. Instead,
this Ego preserved the form, the substantiality, which man had had
before proceeding to his first earthly incarnation. This Ego lived on
collaterally with the rest of humanity, and at the time of which we
are now speaking, when the Event of Palestine was to take place, it
was still in the same condition, if we wish to speak according to the
Bible, as was the Ego of Adam before his first embodiment in flesh.
In examining what
occult science knows about this Ego — which naturally for
modern man is something extremely foolish — we see that this
Ego, which was, as it were, held back ‘in reserve’, was
given into the care of the Holy Mysteries through Atlantean and
post-Atlantean times. It was preserved in an important Mystery
centre, as in a tabernacle, and because of this it had quite special
characteristics; it was untouched by everything that a human Ego
could have learnt on Earth. It was therefore untouched by any
Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it was indeed something we can
think of, in contrast to other human Egos, as an empty sphere, still
completely virginal with regard to all earth experiences — a
nothing, a negative, in this respect. Hence it seemed as though the
Nathan-child, described in the Luke Gospel, really had no Ego; as
though he consisted only of physical, etheric and astral body. And it
is quite adequate if at first we say that an Ego, developed as Egos
had developed in Atlantean and post-Atlantean times, was not there at
all in the Luke Jesus-child.
We speak in the true
sense of the words when we say that in the Matthew Jesus-child we
have to do with a completely human being; whereas in the Nathan
Jesus-child of the Luke Gospel we have to do with a physical, an
etheric and an astral body which are interrelated in the harmonious
unity that belonged to man when he emerged from the Saturn, Sun and
Moon evolutions. Hence this Jesus-child, as the Akashic Record tells
us, was untalented for all that human culture had developed. He could
not receive it because he had never been among it. External abilities
and adaptations to existence are the outcome of certain experiences
in earlier incarnations. Anyone who had never shared in such
experiences would show himself without talent for all that men have
accomplished during the earth-evolution. If the Nathan Jesus-child
had been born in our time, he would have been totally ungifted for
learning to write, since in Adamic times writing was unknown. By
contrast, the Luke Jesus-child revealed in a high degree the
qualities he had brought with him — qualities that had not
fallen into decadence through the Luciferic influence. Even more
interesting is the remarkable language he spoke.
Here we must bring
to mind something I mentioned in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind:
that the languages which are now spread over the earth took their
rise comparatively late in evolution: they were preceded by what can
truly be called a primal human language. It is the disuniting spirits
of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic world who have made many languages out
of the primal language. The primal language is lost, and can be
spoken today by nobody with an Ego which in the course of
earth-evolution has passed from incarnation to incarnation. This
Jesus-child, who had not gone through human incarnations, acquired
from the starting-point of human evolution the faculty of speaking,
not this or that language, but a language of which we can rightly say
that it was not comprehensible to those around him. But, because of
the inner qualities of heart that lived in it, it was understood by
his Mother's heart. This points to a phenomenon of immense
significance in the case of the Luke Jesus-child.
We have seen that
when this Luke Jesus-child was born, he was provided with everything
that had not been influenced by the Lucifer-Ahrimanic forces. He did
not possess an Ego that had been through a series of incarnations;
therefore nothing had to be discarded when, in his twelfth year, the
individuality of Zarathustra passed over from the Solomon Jesus-child
into the Nathan Jesus-child. I have already said that the human
element which had remained behind, and up to this time had developed
in the Mysteries by the side of the rest of humanity, was born for
the first time in the Palestine period as the Nathan Jesus-child.
There was a transference from a Mystery centre in Western Asia, where
this human kernel had been preserved, into the body of the Nathan
Jesus-child. This child grew on, and in his twelfth year the
individuality of Zarathustra passed into him. We know also that this
passing over is intimated in the scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus
in the Temple. It was quite natural that the parents of the Nathan
Jesus-child, who were accustomed to regard him in the light we have
described, should find a remarkable change when they discovered him
in the Temple after he had been lost. For that was the moment when
Zarathustra passed over into this twelve-year-old child. From the
twelfth to the thirtieth year, therefore, we have to do with the
individuality of Zarathustra in the Luke Jesus-child.
Now in the Luke
Gospel we have a remarkable expression which indicates something that
can be made clear only by occult investigation. You know that in the
Luke Gospel, after the description of the scene with the
twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, there is a passage: ‘And
Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and
man’. (Luke II:52). In truth this passage stands as follows
when we restore the text of the Gospels from the Akashic record: The
twelve-year-old child increased in everything wherein an astral body
can increase, i.e., in wisdom; in everything wherein an etheric body
can increase, i.e. in all the qualities of kindliness, goodness, etc;
and in everything wherein a physical body can increase, i.e., in all
that pours itself into external beauty of form. In this passage,
therefore, a special indication is given that the Jesus-child, not
having gone from incarnation to incarnation, had up to his twelfth
year remained untouched, and could not be touched in his
individuality, by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. The Luke Gospel
intimates this again by tracing the sequence of generations back
through Adam to God, thus indicating that the substance in question
was uninfluenced by all that had taken place in human evolution.
So this Jesus-child
lived on, increasing in all that was possible for a three-fold
organism not touched by the contamination which has affected the
three-fold bodies of other men. And this enabled the individuality of
Zarathustra, from the twelfth to the thirtieth year of life, to pour
into this three-fold human being all that could come from the heights
to which he himself had previously attained. Hence we form a correct
idea of Jesus of Nazareth, up to the thirtieth year of his life, when
we think of him as a lofty human individuality, for whose coming into
existence the greatest possible preparations had been made.
But we must now be
clear about one thing if we want to understand how the fruits of a
development we go through in our bodies are of benefit to the
individuality. Our bodies enable our individuality to absorb the
fruits of our life for its future evolution. When in death we forsake
our bodies, we do not usually leave in them what we have achieved and
gained for ourselves as individuals. Later on we shall see under what
special conditions something may remain in the bodies; but it is not
the rule that the individuality should leave behind in his bodies
whatever he has won for himself. When Zarathustra forsook the
threefold bodily being of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year, he
left behind the three bodies, physical, etheric, and astral. But all
that he had been able to gain through these instruments went into the
individuality of Zarathustra and lived on further with him, to his
benefit. Something however, was gained by the three-fold bodily
organism of Jesus of Nazareth. His human nature, still free, as it
always had been, from Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, was
conjoined for a period with the individuality who had unequalled
insight into the spirituality of the cosmos.
Think what this
Zarathustra had experienced! While he was founding the ancient
Persian civilisation and looking up to the great Sun Spirit, he was
even then gazing out into the cosmic realms of the spiritual. Through
successive incarnations his development went on. When the innermost
part of human nature, together with the most intensive powers of
sympathy and love, had become manifest through the unsullied human
substance which had been preserved until the birth of the Nathan
Jesus, and when the astral body had permeated itself with the forces
of Gautama Buddha, there was present in this child what we may call
the most intimate inwardness of man. And then into this bodily nature
there entered the individuality who above all others had seen most
clearly and deeply into the spirituality of the Macrocosm. By this
means the bodily instrument, the entire organism, of the Nathan Jesus
was so transformed that it could be the vehicle capable of receiving
into itself the Christ-extract of the Macrocosm. If this bodily
nature had not been permeated by the Zarathustra-individuality up to
the thirtieth year, the eyes would not have been able to endure the
substance of the Christ from the thirtieth year up to the Mystery of
Golgotha; the hands would not have been capable of being permeated
with the substance of the Christ in the thirtieth year. To be able to
receive the Christ, this bodily nature had to be prepared, expanded,
through the individuality of Zarathustra. Thus in Jesus of Nazareth,
as he was at the moment when Zarathustra took leave of him and the
Christ-Individuality entered into him, we have to do neither with an
adept, nor with anything like a higher human being. For an adept is
an adept because he has a highly developed individuality, and it was
just this that had passed out of the threefold bodily nature of Jesus
of Nazareth. We have simply the bodily nature so prepared through the
indwelling of Zarathustra that it could take into itself the
Christ-Individuality. But now, through the union of the
Christ-Individuality with this bodily nature, by necessity the
following consequence came about.
During these three
years, from the Baptism by John in Jordan onwards to the Mystery of
Golgotha, the development of the physical body, the etheric body, and
the astral body was quite different from the bodily development of
other human beings. Since the Nathan Jesus had received no influence
from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, the possibility was given
that, from the Baptism in Jordan onwards — now that there was
in Jesus of Nazareth no human Ego, but solely the Christ
Individuality — everything which is normally at work in a human
organism was not developed.
We said yesterday
that the human Phantom, the primal form which draws into itself the
material elements that fill out the physical body and are laid aside
at death, had degenerated in the course of time up to the Mystery of
Golgotha. At the beginning of human evolution it was intended that
the Phantom should remain untouched by the material elements that man
takes for his nutrition from the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms.
But it did not remain untouched. For the Luciferic influence brought
about a close connection between the Phantom and the forces which man
absorbs through his earthly evolution; a connection particularly with
the ashy constituents. The result was that the Phantom, while
continuing to accompany man during his further evolution, was
strongly drawn to these ashy constituents, and instead of adhering to
the etheric body, it attached itself to these products of
disintegration. But where the Luciferic influences had been kept
away, as they were from the Nathan Jesus, no force of attraction
arose between the Phantom and the material elements that had been
taken into the bodily organism. Throughout the three years from the
Baptism up to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Phantom remained untouched
by these elements.
In occult terms we
can say: The human Phantom, according to its intended development
through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, should not have been
attracted to the ashy constituents but only to the dissolving salt
constituents, so that it would have taken the path of volatilisation
in so far as the salt constituents dissolved. In an occult sense one
can say that it would have dissolved and passed over, not into the
earth but into the volatile constituents. The remarkable fact is that
with the Baptism in Jordan and the entry of the Christ Individuality
into the body of the Nathan Jesus, all connection of the Phantom with
the ashy constituents was wiped out; only the connection with the
salt constituents remained.
This is alluded to
in the passage where Christ Jesus wishes to explain to his
first-chosen disciples: ‘Through the way in which you feel
yourselves united with the Christ Being, a certain possibility for
the future evolution of humanity will come about. It will be possible
for the one body risen from the grave — the spiritual body —
to pass over into men’. That is what Christ wished to say when
he used the phrase, ‘You are the salt of the earth’. All
these words we find in the Gospels, reminding us of the terminology
and craft language of the later alchemists, the later occultism, have
the deepest imaginable significance. And in fact this significance
was well known to the mediaeval and later alchemists — not to
the charlatans mentioned in the history books — and not one of
them spoke of these connections without feeling in his heart a
connection with Christ.
Thus it followed
that when Christ Jesus was crucified, when his body was nailed to the
Cross — you will notice that here I use the exact words of the
Gospel, for they are con-firmed by true occult research — when
this body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the Cross, the Phantom
was perfectly intact; it existed in a spiritual bodily form, visible
only to super-sensible sight, and was much more loosely connected with
the body's material content of earth-elements than has ever
happened with any other human being. In every other human being a
connection of the Phantom with these elements has occurred, and it is
this that holds them together. In the case of Christ Jesus it was
quite different. The ordinary law of inertia sees to it that certain
material portions of a human body hold together after death in the
form man has given them, until after some time they crumble away, so
that hardly anything of them is visible. So it was with the material
portions of the body of Christ Jesus. When the body was taken down
from the Cross, the parts were still coherent, but they had no
connection with the Phantom; the Phantom was completely free of them.
When the body became permeated with certain substances, which in this
case worked quite differently from the way in which they affect any
other body that is embalmed, it came to pass that after the burial
the material parts quickly volatilised and passed over into the
elements. Hence the disciples who looked into the grave found the
linen cloths in which the body had been wrapped, but the Phantom, on
which the evolution of the Ego depends, had risen from the grave. It
is not surprising that Mary of Magdala, who had known only the
earlier Phantom when it was permeated by earthly elements, did not
recognise the same form in the Phantom, now freed from terrestrial
gravity, when she saw it clairvoyantly. It seemed to her different.
Moreover we must
clearly understand that it was only through the power of the
companionship of the disciples with the Christ that all the
disciples, and all those persons of whom the same is told, could see
the Risen One, for He appeared to them in the spiritual body, the
body of which Paul says that it increases as a grain of seed and
passes over into all people. Paul himself is convinced that it was
not a body permeated by the earthly elements which had appeared to
the other apostles, but that the same which had appeared to him had
also appeared to them, as he says in the following passage:
For I have delivered
unto you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ
died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was
buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then
he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of
whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He
appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one
untimely born, he appeared also to me. (I Corinthians XV:3–8.)
But what was it that
convinced Paul? In a certain sense Paul was an Initiate before the
Event of Damascus. His Initiation had combined the ancient Hebrew
principle and the Greek principle. He knew that an Initiate became,
in his etheric body, independent of the physical body, and could
appear in the purest form of his etheric body to those who were
capable of seeing it. If Paul had had the vision of a pure etheric
body, independent of a physical body, he would have spoken
differently. He would have said that he had seen someone who had been
initiated and would be living on further in the course of
earth-evolution, independently of the physical body. He would not
have found this particularly surprising. What Paul experienced on the
road to Damascus could not have been that. He had experienced
something which he knew could be experienced only when the Scriptures
were fulfilled; when a perfect human Phantom, a human body risen from
the grave in a super-sensible form, would appear in the spiritual
atmosphere of the earth. And that is what he saw! That is what
appeared to him on the road to Damascus and left him with the
conviction: ‘He was there — He is risen! For what is
there could come only from Him: it is the Phantom which can be seen
by all human individualities who seek to relate themselves to the
Christ.’ This is what convinced him that Christ was already
there; that he would not come first in the future, but was actually
present there in a physical body, and that this physical body had
rescued the primal form of the human physical body for the salvation
of all men.
That this deed could
be accomplished only through the greatest unfolding of divine love,
and in what sense it was an act of love, and then in what sense the
word ‘salvation’ is to be understood in the further
evolution of humanity — this will be our subject tomorrow.
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