IX
Imaginative Knowledge and
Artistic Imagination
Among the various
instructions which the teacher gives the pupil, Imagination was the
second named. This consists in man's not passing through life as
happens everyday, but in the sense of Goethe's saying: “All
that is transitory is but a likeness;” behind every animal and
every plant something that lies behind should arise for him. In the
meadow saffron, for example, he will discover a picture of the
melancholy soul, in the violet a picture of calm piety, in the
sunflower a picture of strong, vigorous life, of self-reliance,
of ambition. When a man lives in this sense, he raises himself to
imaginative knowledge. He then sees something like a cold flame
ascend out of a plant, a color picture, which leads him into the
astral plane. Thus the pupil is guided to see things which present to
him spiritual beings from other worlds. It has already been said,
however, that the pupil must strictly follow the occult teacher, for
this alone can tell him what is subjective and what objective. And
the occult teacher can give the pupil the necessary steadiness which
is given of itself by the sense-world, as it continuously corrects
errors. It is different, however, in the astral world; there one is
easily subject to deceptions; there one must be supported by one who
has experience. The teacher gives a series of instructions to a pupil
who wishes to follow the Rosicrucian path. In the first place, he
gives him precise instruction when he has begun to reach the stage of
imaginative development. He tells him: strive first of all to love
not merely a single animal, nor form a particular relationship with a
single animal, or to experience this or that with one or another
animal. Seek rather to have a living feeling for whole animal groups.
Then you will receive through this an idea of what the group-soul is.
The individual soul which with men is on the physical plane is with
the animals on the astral plane. The animal cannot say
“I” to itself here on the physical plane.
The question is often
asked: “Has the animal no such soul as man?” It has such
a soul, but the animal-soul is above on the astral plane. The single
animal is to the animal-soul as the single organs are to the human
soul. If a finger is painful, it is the soul that experiences it. All
the sensations of the single organs pass to the soul. This is also
the case with a group of animals. Everything that the single animal
experiences is experienced in it by the group-soul. Let us take, for
instance, all the various lions: the experiences of the lion all lead
to a common soul. All lions have a common group-soul on the astral
plane, and so have all animals their group-soul on the astral plane.
If one inflicts a pain on a single lion or if it experiences
enjoyment, this continues up to the astral plane, as the pain of a
finger continues to the human soul. Man can raise himself to a
comprehension of the group-soul if he is able to fashion a form that
contains all individual lions, just as a general concept contains the
individual images belonging to it.
The plants have their soul
in the Rupa region of the Devachanic plane. By learning to survey a
group of plants and gaining a definite relationship to their
group-soul, a man learns to penetrate to plant group-souls on the
Rupa plane. When the single lily, the single tulip is no longer
something special for him, but when the individuals grow together for
him into living, densified imaginations, which become pictures, then
the pupil experiences something quite new. What matters is that this
is a quite concrete picture individually formed in the imagination.
Then man experiences that the plant-covering of the earth, that some
meadow strewn with flowers, becomes something completely new to him,
that the flowers become for him an actual manifestation of the spirit
of the earth. That is the manifestation of these different plant
group-souls. Just as the human tears become the expression of the
inner sadness of the soul, as a man's physiognomy becomes an
expression of the human soul, so the occultist learns to look on the
green of the plant covering as the expression of inner processes, of
the actual spiritual life of the earth. Thus certain plants become
for him like the earth's tears, out of which wells forth the earth's
inner grief. There pours a new imaginative content into the soul of
the pupil just as someone may tremble and feel moved at the tears of
a companion.
A person must go through
these moods. If he endures such a mood vis-à-vis the animal
world then he raises himself to the astral plane. When he immerses
himself in the mood of the plant world he raises himself to the lower
region of the Devachanic plane. Then he observes the flame-forms that
ascend from the plants; the plant-covering of the earth is then
veiled by a sum of images, the incarnations of the rays of light
which set upon the plants.
One can also approach- the
dead stone in this way. There is a fundamental experience in the
mineral world. Let us take the mountain crystal, glittering with
light. When one looks at this, one will say to oneself: In a certain
way this represents physical material, so too is the stone physical
material. But there is a future perspective to which the occult
teacher leads the pupil. The man of today is still penetrated
by instincts and desires, by passions. This saturates the physical
nature, but an ideal stands before the occultist. He says to himself:
Man's animal nature will gradually be refilled and purified to a
stage where the human body can stand before us just as inwardly
chaste and free of desire as the mineral that craves nothing, in
which no wish is stirred by what comes near it. Chaste and pure is
the inner material nature of the mineral. This chastity and purity is
the experience that must permeate the pupil on gazing at the
mineral world. These feelings vary as the mineral world shows itself
in different forms and colors, but the fundamental experience
which permeates the mineral kingdom is chastity.
Our earth today has a quite
particular configuration and form. Let us go back in the evolution of
the earth. It once had a completely different form. Let us immerse
ourselves in Atlantis and still further back: we come there to ever
higher temperatures, in which metals were able to flow all around as
water runs along today. All the metals have become these veins in the
earth because they first flowed along in streams. Just as lead is
hard today and quicksilver is fluid, so lead was at one time fluid
and quicksilver will one day become a solid metal. Thus the earth is
changeable, but man has always participated in these various
evolutions. In the ages of which we have spoken, physical man as yet
was not in existence. But the etheric body and astral body were
there; they could live in the higher temperatures of that time. The
sheaths gradually began to form with the cooling process, enveloping
man.
While something new was
always being formed in man during the earth's evolution, something
correspondingly new had also been formed outside in nature. The
rudiments of the human eye had first arisen in the Sun evolution.
First the etheric body formed itself and this again formed the human
physical eye. As a piece of ice freezes out of water, so are the
physical organs formed out of the finer etheric body. The physical
organs were formed within man while outside the earth became solid.
In every age the formation of a human organ took place parallel with
the formation of a particular configuration outside in nature.
While in the human being the eye was called for, in the mineral
kingdom the chrysolite was formed. One can therefore think that the
same forces which outside articulated the nature of the chrysolite in
man formed the eye.
We cannot be satisfied in
the particular case with the general saying that man is the microcosm
and the world is the macrocosm; occultism has demonstrated the actual
relationship between man and the world. When the physical organ
for the reasoning faculties was formed in the Atlantean age,
outside lead solidified; it passed from the fluid to the solid state.
It is the same forces which hold sway in the solidifying of lead and
in the organ of intelligence. One only understands man when one can
recognize the connections between the human being and the forces of
nature. There is a particular group within the socialist movement, a
group that has distinguished itself by its moderation from the
socialists. It is the temperate ones who have always retained a good
deal of the reasoning faculties. This special group in the socialist
movement consists of the printers, and this is so because printers
have to do with lead. The tariff-union between workers and
employer was first worked out among the printers. Lead brings about
this frame of mind if it is taken in small quantities.
Another case can be cited
from the experience where, in a similar way, one could observe the
influence of the nature of a metal upon a man. It had become
noticeable to a man how easily he discovered analogies in every
possible thing. One could conclude that he had much to do with
copper, and that was the case. He blew the bugle in an orchestra and
therefore had to with an instrument that contains much copper.
When someday the
relationship of the external lifeless world to the human organism is
studied, it will be found that a relationship exists between man and
the surrounding world in the most varied ways: for instance, the
relationship of the senses to the precious stones. There exist
certain relationships of the senses to precious stones based on
the evolution of the senses. We have already found a
relationship between the eye and the chrysolite. There is also
a relationship between the onyx and the organ of hearing. The
onyx stands in a remarkable relation to the oscillations of man's
ego-life, and occultists have always recognized this. It represents,
for instance, the life that goes forth from death. Thus in Goethe's
“Fairy-tale,” the dead dog is changed into onyx through
the old man's lamp. In this intuition of Goethe's lies the outcome of
an occult knowledge. Therein lies the relationship of the onyx to the
organ of hearing. An occult relationship exists further between the
organ of taste and the topaz, the sense of smell and jasper, the
skin-sense as man's sense of warmth and the cornelian, the productive
power of imagination and the carbuncle. This was used as the symbol
for a productive power of imagination, which arose in man at the same
time as the carbuncle in nature.
Occult symbols are drawn
deep out of real wisdom and if one only penetrates into occult
symbolism one finds genuine knowledge there. He who knows the
significance of a mineral finds entry to the upper region of
the Devachanic plane. When one sees a precious stone and is permeated
by the feeling of what the precious stone has to say to us, then one
finds entry to the Arupa regions of Devachan. Thus the gaze of the
student widens and more and more worlds dawn for him. He must not be
satisfied with the general indication, but little by little he
must find entry into the whole world.
One finds also in German
literature how an instinctive intuition regarding the mineral forces
is shown by poets who were miners, for example by Novalis, who had
studied mining engineering. Kerning has chosen many miners as
types for his occult personalities. There is also the poet, Ernst
Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, that remarkable spirit who from time to time
immersed himself artistically in the secrets of nature, particularly
in his tale, “The Mines of Falun.” One will feel many
echoes here of the occult relationships between the mineral
kingdom and man, and much too that indicates how occult powers take
hold in a remarkable way of artistic imagination.
The mystery-center is the
essential birthplace of art. In the astral realm the mysteries were
actual and living. There one had a synthesis of truth, beauty, and
goodness. This was so to a high degree in the Egyptian mysteries and
those in Asia, as well as in the Greek mysteries, especially the
Eleusinian. The pupils there actually beheld how the spiritual
powers submerged themselves in the various forms of existence. At
that time there was no other science than what one thus beheld. There
was no other goodness than that which arose in the soul as one gazed
into the mysteries. Nor was there any other beauty than that which
one beheld as the gods descended.
We live in a barbaric age,
in a chaotic age, in an age devoid of style. All great epochs of art
were working out of the deepest life of spirit. If one observes the
images of the Greek gods one plainly sees three distinct types: first
there is the Zeus type, to which Pallas Athena and Apollo also
belong. In this type the Greeks characterized their own race. There
was a definite modeling of the oval of the eye, the nose, the mouth.
Secondly, one can observe the circle that may be called the Mercury
type. There the ears are completely different, the nose is completely
different, the hair is woolly and curly. And thirdly there is the
Satyr type, in which we find a completely different form of the
mouth, a different nose, eyes, and so on. These three types are
clearly formed in the Greek sculpture. The Satyr type is to represent
an ancient race, the Mercury type the race following, and the
Zeus type the fifth race.
In the earlier times, the
spiritual world view permeated and saturated everything. In the
Middle Ages it was still a time when this came to expression in
handicraft, when every door-lock was a kind of work of art. In
external culture we were still met by what the soul had
created. The modern age is entirely different; it has brought forward
only one style, namely, the warehouse. The warehouse will be as
characteristic for our time as the Gothic buildings — for
instance, Cologne Cathedral — were for the Middle Ages of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The cultural history of the
future will have to reckon with the warehouse as we have to with the
Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages. New life comes to its expression
in these forms. The world will be filled again with a spiritual
content through the diffusion of the teachings of spiritual science.
Then later, when spiritual life comes to expression in external
forms, we shall have a style which expresses this spiritual life.
What lives in spiritual science must stamp itself later in external
forms. Thus we must look on the mission of spiritual science as a
cultural mission.
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