|
|
|
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
|
|
Man in the Past, Present, and Future; The Evolution of Consciousness
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
|
|
Man in the Past, Present, and Future; The Evolution of Consciousness
Schmidt Number: S-5430
On-line since: 19th April, 2004
THE SUN-INITIATION OF THE DRUID PRIEST AND HIS MOON-SCIENCE
Dornach, 10th September 1923
From the most varied points of view the point of view in
Occult Science
is only one of these I have indicated how
in a certain very early condition of our planet, Sun, Moon, Earth
(indeed the other planets too, only this will not concern us today)
were one whole, and how we must speak first of a departure of the Sun
from the one whole, Sun-Moon-Earth; and then at a much later epoch, of
a departure of the Moon.
All these matters have, of course, their external aspect, derived from
sense-conceptions. But they have also an inner aspect, which is this:
that Beings are bound up with such an existence, with Sun-existence,
with Moon-existence Beings who also on their part liberated
themselves from the one whole with the separation of the Sun and
entered into an entirely different kind of existence in the Cosmos. So
that as regards the further evolution of the Earth we cannot merely
speak of a detached Sun, exerting its physical and etheric influences
on the Earth, but, when it is a question of taking the spiritual
element of the cosmos into account, we must speak of a Sun population,
of Sun Beings, who although they were once united with the Earth now
lead an existence outside the Earth-evolution an existence that
extends far beyond this Earth-existence, and is much more sublime.
It is exactly the same in the case of what may be called the Moon
population. And when we were describing the spiritual side of such
cosmic processes, it was necessary to point to the fact that within
the Earth-evolution itself there once existed a primordial wisdom. But
this primordial wisdom did not, of course, consist of concepts which,
as it were, floated around in the air; it proceeded from Beings who do
not assume a physical body in the human sense, but who, as the result
of the instinctive clairvoyant forces possessed by man at that time,
did nevertheless live in man; it proceeded from the Beings who
continued their existence on the Moon, after the Moon as an external
cosmic body had separated from the Earth. We must therefore say that
within the Moon-being, not in the light that the Moon radiates back as
reflected sunlight, and not in all the rest of what the Moon radiates
back from the Cosmos, but in the inner being of this Moon-existence
there live Beings who were once the founders of the primordial wisdom
among Earth men. These are the Beings who passed over into the figures
of myths and sagas in picture form, who did not assume forms
perceptible to the ordinary consciousness; they are primordial Beings
who were once the founders of the primordial wisdom among Earth men.
These are the Beings who passed over into the figures of myths and
sagas in picture form, who did not assume forms perceptible to the
ordinary consciousness; they are primordial Beings to whom we look
back with wonder and awe, even if we only discover them externally as
the real foundations of the myths, sagas primordial Beings to
whom the intellectual forces of present humanity can attain only by
great exertion through the development once again of Imagination,
Inspiration, and so on. But there did remain, at all event within
humanity itself, something that was a kind of unconscious memory. And
then in the different evolutionary epochs of human civilization, by
which I mean, of course, the more ancient epochs of civilization,
these unconscious memories appeared in man's life of feeling and in
his whole constitution of soul, so that when we survey civilization we
can speak of a Sun civilization and a Moon civilization. These are, as
it were, consciousness-memories of something that in earlier times
worked in a far-reaching sense as Nature-forces in man; and what man
perceived of them is only an appendage, reminiscent of growth forces,
forces of inner organization.
On the basis of such conceptions we are able to penetrate in some
degree into the Druid culture. With the means accessible today to
external science man will ask in vain as to what was the real
soul-constitution of these Druid priests. (I might just as well call
them Druid sages, for both are expressions entirely suited to that
age, although of course they did not exist then.) What was it that
lived in the impulses by means of which these Druid priests guided
their people?
What is often narrated in history, and indeed often sounds terrible,
always signifies something that was active in the epochs of decadence
and degeneration. What I am going to describe here invariably refers
to what preceded this epoch of degeneration, and was active when the
civilization was in its prime. For these cromlechs, these Sun circles,
in what they truly represent, draw attention to what existed in the
epoch when the Druid Mysteries were in their prime. And with the means
given us by anthroposophical Spiritual Science, we can in a certain
way even today penetrate into the whole manner and mode of working of
these Druid priests. It may be said that they were everything to their
people, or rather their tribe. They were the authorities for the
religious requirements, so far as one can speak of religious
requirements at that time. They were the authorities for the social
impulses, and also, for instance, for the healing methods of that
time. They united in one all that later on was distributed over many
branches of human civilization.
We obtain a right perspective of this Druid culture and it is
quite correct to use this expression only when we realize that
its essence is to be found in an epoch preceding that which echoes to
us from those mythological conceptions of the North that are connected
with the name of Wotan or Odin. What is associated with the name of
Wotan really lies later in time than this epoch when the Druid culture
was in its prime. In the orbit of wisdom that points to the divine
name of Wotan or Odin we must recognize something that comes over from
the East, proceeding in the first place from Mysteries in the
proximity of the Black Sea. The spiritual content of these Mysteries
flowed from the East towards the West, in the certain
colonizing Mysteries, emanating from the Black Sea and
proceeding westwards, were founded in the most varying ways.
All this, however, streamed into a culture that must be called sublime
in a deeper sense, into a primordial wisdom, Druid wisdom. This Druid
wisdom was really an unconscious echo, a kind of unconscious memory of
the Sun and Moon elements existing in the Earth before the Sun and
Moon were separated from it. Initiation in the Druid Mysteries was
essentially a Sun-Initiation, bound up with what was then able to
become Moon wisdom through the Sun-Initiation. What was the purpose of
these cromlechs, these Druid circles? They were there essentially for
the purpose of a spiritual observation of the relation of the Earth to
the Sun. When we look at the single dolmens we find that they are
really instruments whereby the outer physical effects of the Sun were
shut off in order that the Initiate who was gifted with seership could
observe the effects of the Sun in the dark space. The inner qualities
of the Sun element, how these permeate the Earth, and how they are
again radiated back from the Earth into cosmic space this was
what the Druid priest was able to observe in the single cromlechs. The
physical nature of the light of the Sun was warded off, a dark space
was created by means of the stones, which were fitted into the soil
with a roof stone above them and in this dark space it was possible by
the power of seeing through the stones to observe the spiritual nature
and being of the Sun's light.
Thus the Druid priest standing before his altar was concerned with the
inner qualities of the Sun element so far as he needed the wisdom that
then streamed into him streamed in, however, in such a way that
the wisdom had still the character of a Nature-force for the
purpose of directing and guiding his people.
But we must always bear in mind that we are here speaking of an epoch
when men could not look at the calendar to see when it was right to
sow, when this or that grain of seed ought to be entrusted to the
soil. In those ages men did not look at a book in order to get
information about the time of the year. The only booking in existence
was the Cosmos itself. And the letters that formed themselves into
words arose from the observations as to how the Sun worked on one or
other contrivance that had been erected. Today, when you want to know
something, you read. The Druid priest looked at the action of the Sun
in his cromlech, and there he read the mysteries of the Cosmos. He
read there when corn, rye and so forth were to be sown. These are only
instances. The impulses for all that was done were read from the
Cosmos. The greater impulses, which were needed, one may say, to
complete the yearly calendar, were obtained from observation within
the shadow of the Druid circle. So that in this age, when there was
nothing that was derived from the human intellect, the Cosmos alone
was there. And instead of the printing-press man had the cromlech in
order to unravel from out of the Cosmos the mysteries it contained.
Reading the cosmic book in this way, men were therefore concerned with
the element of the Sun. And in contradistinction to the Sun element,
they perceived the Moon element. The forces which were then
concentrated in the Moon were once united with the Earth. These
forces, however, did not wholly withdraw; they left something behind
in the Earth. If there had been Sun-forces alone, rampant, growing
cells only would have arisen, life elements, always with the character
of small or large cells. The diversity, the formation, does not
emanate from the Sun-forces, but from the Moon-forces working together
with the Sun-forces.
When he exposed himself to all that his circles, his cromlechs could
reveal to him, the Druid priest did not receive the mere abstract
impression which we today receive, quite rightly, when in our way
that is to say in an intellectual way we enter into the
things of the spirit. For the forces of the Sun spoke to him directly.
In the shadow of the Sun the spiritual Sun-nature worked into him
directly, and it worked far more intensely than a sense-impression
does on us today, for it was related to far deeper forces. As the
priest stood before his place of ritual, observing this Sun-nature,
his breathing changed even as he observed. It became unloving, it was
blunted, it went in waves so that the one breath merged into the
other. He, with all that he was as a human being through his breath,
lived in what was given as a resulting influence of the Sun. And the
outcome was no abstract knowledge, but something that worked in him
like the circulation of the blood, pulsating inwardly through him,
kindling his human being even into the physical. Yet this working into
the physical was spiritual at the same time, and the inner
stimulations he experienced these were really his knowledge.
We must conceive this knowledge in a far more living way, as far more
intense we must conceive it as living experience. Moreover, the
Druid priest received it at certain times only. With a lesser
intensity of life it could be kindled in him every day at noon; but if
the great secrets were to be revealed, the priest had to expose
himself to these influences at the time which we now call the season
of St. John. Then there arose what I may call the great wave of his
knowledge as against the lesser daily waves. And while, through the
Sun-influences which he thus caught up on Earth in a peculiar and
artificial way, he experienced what he felt as his Initiation
his Sun-Initiation he became able also to understand the forces
which had remained behind as Moon-forces in the Earth when the Moon
had left it. Such was the Nature-lore he gained under the influence of
Sun-Initiation. What was revealed on the surface of things was
unimportant to him, but what welled forth from below as the
Moon-forces in the Earth, this was important. Through the principle of
Initiation, whose relics, as we have seen, are preserved in these
strange monuments today, he placed himself in a condition to gain
knowledge. And the knowledge he gained was of all that works in
Nature, especially when in the sky at night-time the stars stood over
the Earth, and the Moon traveled across the heavens.
The Sun-Initiation gave the Druid priest the spiritual impulse, and as
a result he had his science of Nature. Our science of Nature is an
earthly science. His was a Moon-science. The underlying Moon-forces,
as they ray forth in the plants from the depths of the Earth, as they
work in wind and weather and so forth these he felt. He felt
them, not in the abstract way, as we today having an earthly
science feel the forces of Nature. He felt them in all their
livingness.
And what was thus livingly revealed to him, this he felt as the
elemental beings living in the plants, in the stones, in all things.
These elemental beings, having their dwelling place in trees and
plants and so forth, were enclosed in certain bounds. But they were
not those narrow bounds that are set to man today. They were far
wider. His science of Nature being a Moon-science, the Druid priest
perceived how the elemental beings can grow and expand into gigantic
size.
From this resulted his knowledge of the Jötuns, the giant-beings. When
he looked into the root-nature of a plant beneath the soil, where the
Moon-forces were living, there he found the elemental being in its
true bounds. But the beings were ever striving to go forth and grow
outward gigantically. When the kind of elemental beings who lived
beneficially in the root-nature, expanded into giants, they became the
giants of the frost, whose outward physical symbol is in the frost,
who live in all that sweeps over the Earth as the destructive hoar
frost and other destructive forces of the frost-nature. These were the
loosened root-forces of the plants which lived within the frost, as it
swept with its giant forces over the Earth, working destructively;
whereas in the root-nature the same forces worked bounteously and
beneficially. And what worked in the growth of the leaves, this too
could grow to giant size. Then it lived as a giant elemental being in
the misty storms that swept over the Earth, with all that they
contained in certain seasons with the pollen of the plants, and
so forth.
And what lives gently, modestly, as it were, in the flower-forces of
the plants, when this grows to giant size, it becomes the
all-destroying fire.
Thus in the weather-processes the Druid priests beheld the forces of
being expanded into giants the same forces that lived within
their right limits in the kingdoms of Nature. The chosen places where
we find these old heathen centers of ritual show that what they
received on the one hand through the Sun-circles and the cromlechs,
was developed into the Earth-knowledge which was thus made possible.
They developed it so as to be able properly to observe the mysterious
working and weaving of wind and weather as they sweep over the Earth
the working together of the water and the airy nature, the
hoar-frost oozing forth from the earth, the melting dew. It was
through the Sun-Initiation and the knowledge of the Moon-beings that
there arose this most ancient conception which we find at the very
foundations of European culture.
Thus the Druid priest read and deciphered the cosmic secrets which his
institutions of the Sun-Initiation enabled him to gain from the
Cosmos. Thus, stimulated by the Sun-Initiation, he gained his
knowledge from his science of Moon-nature. But with all this the whole
social and religious life stood in close connection. Whatever the
priest could say to the people arose on the spiritual foundations of
this element in which the people lived. We see it best of all in what
the Druid priests possessed as a science of healing. They saw on the
one hand the elemental beings contained within their bounds in the
various growths and products of the mineral and especially of the
plant kingdom. Then they observed what happened to the plants when
these were exposed to frost, exposed to the influences which the
giants of the storm and wind carry through the airy spaces, or again,
exposed to the seething of the fire-giants. They studied what the
giants of frost and hoar-frosts, the giants of the storm, the
fire-giants, if loosed and set free, would do to the plants. At length
they came to the point of taking the plants themselves, and imitating
within certain limits all that was indicated in outer Nature as the
influence of the giants. They subjected the plants to a certain
process, to the freezing cold process, the process of burning, the
process of binding and solution.
The Druid priests said to themselves: Looking out into this
world of Nature we behold the destructive working of the giants, of
frost and storm and fire. But we can take from these giants, from the
Jötuns, what they spread so awkwardly and clumsily over the world; we
can wrest it from them; we can harness once more within narrow limits
these loosened forces of the Moon.
This they did. They studied what takes place in the thawing earth, in
storm and wind, in the fierce, seething heat of the Sun. All this they
applied to the Sun-nature which lived in the plants and which they
themselves received in their Initiation. And in so doing they created
their remedies, their healing herbs and the like, all of which were
based upon the fact that the giants were reconciled with the Gods. In
those times each single remedy bore witness to the reconciliation of
the foes of the Gods with the Gods themselves.
What man received immediately under the influences of Sun and Moon,
just as it was offered by Nature herself, this would be a food-stuff.
A medicine, on the other hand, would be something that man himself
created, in that he continued Nature beyond herself, harnessing the
giant-force to place it in the service of the Sun.
We must imagine the Druid civilization spread out over a great portion
of Northern and Central Europe about 3,000 or 3,500 years ago. Men had
nothing at all similar to writing. They had only this cosmic writing.
Then into all this there spread from the East, to begin with from a
Mystery in the region of the Black Sea, what is now contained as an
insoluble riddle for the ordinary consciousness in the Norse
Mythology, associated with the name of Wotan.
For what is Wotan? The Mystery from which this Wotan culture proceeded
was a Mercury Mystery, a Mystery that added to the impulses of Sun and
Moon the impulse of Mercury. One might say that that old civilization
was there in a sun-and Moon-radiant innocence and simplicity,
untouched by what could be told to mankind through the Jupiter
impulses. Only away in the East these Jupiter impulses were already
present. From thence they now spread, colonizing, towards the West.
Wotan-Mercury carried his influence westward.
Here at the same time we have thrown light upon the fact that Wotan is
described as the bringer of the Runes, the Runic art of writing. He
was the bringer of what man drew forth from himself in the first
primitive way of intellectuality as an art of deciphering the
universe. This is the very first entry of intellectualism, the Wotan
impulse. Thus one might say that the Mercury, the Wotan-nature, was
now added to the Sun-and Moon-natures.
Wherever this Wotan impulse worked itself out fully, everything that
was present from earlier experiences was influenced by it. It all
received a certain impulse from this Wotan element. For there was one
thing, a special secret of the Druid culture. We know that at all
places things arise that do not belong there. Weeds grow on the tilled
land. We might say that the Druid culture recognized as the good
plants of civilization only the Sun and Moon qualities, and if,
hastening forward as it were to a later time, the intellectual element
already then arose, they treated it as a weed. Among the many remedies
the Druids had, there was one against the Mercury quality of deep
thought and introspection. Strange as it may seem to us today, they
had a remedy against this habit of sinking into one's inner being, or
as we should say, of pondering on one's own salvation. The Druids
wanted man to live with Nature and not to sink into himself, and they
regarded as sick and ill anyone who even attempted to express anything
in signs or the like, unless it were merely to imitate the things of
Nature in a primitive form of art. Anyone who made signs was diseased
and must be healed. Indeed he was then considered as black human
being, he was not white. Yes, my dear friends, if we with all our
present knowledge were transposed into the Druid culture, we should
all be sent to a hospital and cured.
And now from the East the Wotan civilization brought this very
illness. The Wotan civilization indeed was felt as an illness. But it
also brought, with a power grown truly great and gigantic, what had
formerly appeared as an abnormality, an unhealthy introspection. Into
the midst of what had formerly been taken only from the cosmic
writing, it brought the Rune. So that man now transferred his
intellectual element into the signs he made. It brought in all that
was felt as a Mercury culture. Thus it was no wonder that what
proceeded from the Wotan culture, distilled from the best forces that
were in it, viz., the Baldur-Being, the Sun-Being, was felt and
thought of as one united not with life, but with death. Baldur had to
go to Hel, into the dark forces of Death, the dwelling-place of Death.
Moreover, to begin with, men pondered most, as we can see from the
traditions of the Edda, not on the question of how this Baldur, son of
the Wotan forces, should be freed from Hel for this is really a
later conception but on the question of how he should be
healed. And at length they said: We have many means of healing, but
Baldur, the intelligence proceeding from the Runes of Wotan for
this there are no remedies, and it can only lead to death.
Thus we see once more what I have pointed out to you from so many
points of view in the study of human evolution. In olden times the
instinctive knowledge of mankind knew nothing of the significance of
death, for men remembered the pre-earthly life and knew that death is
only a transformation. They did not feel death as any deeper incision
than this. Above all there was no such thing as the tragedy of death.
This only entered in when the Mystery of Golgotha approached, which
became indeed a redemption from the fear of death. In the Baldur
legend you see the most visible description of how, with the entry of
intellectualism, there comes that mood of soul which reckons with
deaths, and you see what thus entered into human evolution.
Thus what had been seen in the death of Baldur, who could not rise
again, was only healed once more in the way of soul and spirit, when
the Christ-figure who could rise from death was placed over against
him.
It is wonderful how in the North, through the influence of the
Mercury-forces on the Sun-and Moon-forces, the perception of the
Christ-impulse was prepared. In Baldur, the God who falls into death
and cannot rise again, we see the forerunner, in the North, of Christ,
who also falls a victim to death, but who can rise, because He comes
directly from the Sun. Baldur, on the other hand, the Sun-force coming
from Wotan, is the Sun-force reflected back by Mercury, radiating
forth from the signs which man makes out of his intellect.
Thus we see how evidently all these things evolve in the Northern
regions, where man still appears to us living and reading in the
Cosmos, seeking for his religious, social and medical conceptions from
the Cosmos, until at a later stage he passes over to dwell with the
Earth-forces. From his sacrificial stone the Druid priest gazes at the
configuration of the shadow of the Sun, and reads what appears in the
shadow, representing the spiritual aspects of the Sun. Then we
approach the time when the Sun-Being, the Sun-nature that had been
caught up, as it were, in the cromlechs is drawn in abstract lines,
called rays. We approach the time when the relationship of what lives
in root and leaf and blossom with what lives in frost and wind and
fire is recognized at most in a chemical sense. Giants and elemental
beings alike are transformed into forces of Nature. And
yet in our forces of Nature no more is contained than the giants of
ancient time. We are only unaware of the fact and feel immensely
superior. It is a straight line of development from the giants to the
forces of Nature. These are the latter-day children of them. Man who
lives today in a highly derived, i.e., an unoriginal, civilization,
cannot but be deeply moved when he looks at these scant relics of the
Druid age. It is as though he were to behold the hoary ancestors of
what is living in this present time.
To go more into detail, we too today speak of medicine and remedies in
a strangely abstract way, very intellectually, describing abstractly
their mode of preparation. All this we must imagine transformed into
something altogether living if we would look back on the way the Druid
priest regarded his remedies. For he felt the Sun-forces which he knew
so well and which in plants and other products of Nature he treated
with the forces of the giants. All this was altogether living for him.
From the giants he wrested the forces of preparation to transform the
plants into medicaments. He knew that in so doing he did something for
the whole Cosmos. Then he gazed on man himself. Through his peculiar
knowledge of man, the most intimate parts of the natural man, e.g. in
the dream-recognized the symptoms coming forth, as it were, from the
imaginations that arose, the vague, unconscious flickering-upward of
the deeper human nature into consciousness under the influence of
these remedies in which the giant-forces were subdued and held in
check, he recognized how these things worked in the human being into
whom they were instilled. Thus he had on the one hand his Loki in the
wild influences of the outer fire, and on the other hand what he had
taken away from Loki in order to transform this or that plant by a
combustion process into a medicament. From the way this worked within
the human being, he then beheld the Loki-force in man. For here it was
disarmed. And the Druid said: That which out there in the world of the
giants is working with threatening danger and destruction works
healingly when brought in the right manner into the inner man.
Poisonous forces as it were on a large scale become healing forces
when brought to the right place.
Thus the Druid in his way perceived the varied forces and workings of
Nature. Thus he was within the spiritual whereby he sent forth the
religious, social, medicinal and other impulses into his community.
Thus in that time the ancient primeval wisdom which the Moon Beings,
so long as they were here, had cultivated on the Earth, and which was
now no longer here directly, since they themselves had gone with the
Moon this primeval wisdom was preserved through Beings that
were found and known by a kind of Sun-Initiation in the way I have
described to you today.
|
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
|
The Rudolf Steiner e.Lib is maintained by:
The e.Librarian:
elibrarian@elib.com
|
|
|
|
|