The Spiritual Hierarchies
LECTURE 1
Düsseldorf, 1909
This course of lectures will take us into the high spiritual regions
we shall be led from the earth, where we live, not only into the wide
physical spaces of our universe, but also be uplifted to those
spiritual worlds, from which this whole physical universe has derived
its origin.
Such a course will show us, that the fundamental object of all
knowledge and all wisdom is to solve the greatest problem of all —
the problem of humanity. In order to make the human being
understandable, explanatory facts have to be brought from far away.
Above all it is necessary that those who wish to follow this course
should be acquainted with the fundamental conceptions of
Anthroposophy; although it is true that all Anthroposophists are
acquainted with them in a general way. In these lectures we may rise
in spirit to very exalted spheres, but we shall always endeavour to
bring those facts which lie so far afield near to you and make them
as comprehensible as possible.
When we have to speak of what we call the Spiritual Hierarchies, it
means that our souls' gaze must rise to those beings who, in
the sphere of our earth, have a higher existence than man. In the
visible world we can only progress to beings that represent four
degrees of one hierarchy, i.e., the mineral world, the plant
world, the animal world and the human world. Above man begins a world
of invisible beings, through the knowledge of the super-sensible
world, and man is able (as far as it is possible for him) to rise a
certain distance towards those beings and powers, which are the
continuation in the invisible world of the four grades found within
the realm of the earth. The knowledge and investigation which lead us
into those regions has not, as you all know, come into existence only
at our present time in evolution. There is what we may call a
primeval world-wisdom; — all that man can fathom, all that he
can know and realise, all that he has
gained in ideas and conceptions, all that he has attained through
clairvoyant imagination, inspiration, and intuition, — all has
been lived before, and known before, by those Beings who are higher
than he. He only follows so to say, in their track. To make use of a
trivial example: the watchmaker has first the idea, then he makes the
watch according to the idea. A watch is made after the maker's
ideas which preceded the watch; afterwards everyone can study and
observe for himself from what ideas the watch was made, he can follow
up the thoughts of the watchmaker. At the present point of evolution
it is indeed only this kind of connection that man can have with
primeval world-wisdom and with the spiritual beings that stand above
him. Spiritual beings had first those imaginations, inspirations,
intuitions, those ideas and thoughts according to which the world, as
we see it, was formed. Man finds these thoughts and ideas in the
world again; when he rises to clairvoyant vision, he finds the
imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, by the help of which he
can penetrate into the world of those spiritual beings. We can,
therefore, say that before our world came into being there already
existed the wisdom of which we are going to speak: it is the PLAN OF
THE WORLD.
How far must we go back, while still remaining within the limits of
reality, if we want to come into touch with that primeval
world-wisdom? Must we go back to some time or other in the historical
past, when some great teacher was teaching? We can certainly learn a
great deal if we do; but to come into touch with true primeval
world-wisdom we must go back to the time when there was no outwardly
visible earth, when no world visible to the outer senses was as yet
in existence. It was from out [of] that wisdom itself that the world
came forth. But this wisdom, out of which spiritual beings formed our
world, was imparted to man later. Man with his thoughts could see
behind those thoughts, could realise the thoughts according to which
spiritual beings have built the world. After this primeval wisdom,
this wisdom of the creators of the world had worked through many
forms, it appeared in a form known to many of you: after the great
Atlantean period it appeared in those
ancient, holy Rishis, the great teachers of India, during our first
epoch of civilisation. With these sublime Rishis the primeval wisdom
expressed itself in a form which the man of the present day can but
little understand. The human capacities of feeling and thinking have
greatly changed since the times when the great teachers of India
taught man in the first epoch of civilisation after Atlantis; and if
the words which came from the Rishis were simply repeated as they
were said, there would be hardly one soul in the whole earth who
could hear anything more in them nowadays than just words and again
words. One has need of other capabilities of feeling than those at
present existing, in order to understand the wisdom which was given
to humanity in the first epoch after Atlantis. For all that is found
in the best books regarding primeval world-wisdom, is but a faint
echo of what this really is which in many ways is but a deceptive,
obscured wisdom. However grand and sublime the Vedas appear to us,
however beautiful the songs of Zarathustra sound, and however
magnificent the language in which the ancient wisdom of Egypt speaks,
so that we can never sufficiently admire it; still, all that has been
written down gives us but a dim, dull reflection of the wisdom of
Hermes, of the grand teaching of Zarathustra, or of the sublime
knowledge which the Ancient Rishis proclaimed. This sublime wisdom
has been preserved and guarded for humanity; it was always to be
found in certain very limited circles of people who watched over what
is called the knowledge of the Mysteries. In the Mysteries of India,
Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and in the Christian Mysteries, all the
primeval wisdom of humanity has been safely preserved up to our
times. Up to a short time ago it was only in those narrow circles,
that not book-wisdom, but living wisdom, could be found. For certain
reasons which will be made clear in this course of lectures, our time
has been chosen for extending to larger masses of people that which
has been kept alive by those little groups. The original wisdom of
the Rishis, for instance, has never lost life. It permeated, like the
fountain of youth, the age which we regard as the beginning of our
era. The very holy wisdom which the Rishis gave to man was continued
through Zarathustra and his pupils, through the Chaldean and Egyptian
teachers. It also flowed in the words of Moses, and it came forth
again with. an altogether new impulse, as from the fountain of life,
with the appearance of the Christ upon earth. It then became so deep,
so intrinsically internal, that it could only gradually flow again
into humanity. Thus we see that since the outward declaration of
Christianity, the primeval world wisdom has penetrated but slowly and
gradually into humanity from most elementary beginnings. Its messages
are there, they are to be found in the Gospels and in other Christian
writings which include the wisdom of the holy Rishis, in a new form;
like a new birth out of a new fountain. But how could these messages
be understood at the beginning of the era for whose purification
Christianity had been created? Through the Gospels it was least of
all understood; they only attained very gradually to further
comprehension and in many ways to a still further obscuration, and
to-day the Gospels are, in truth, the most sealed of all books for
the larger part of humanity — books which will only be first
understood by a future age which will have refreshed itself at the
source of the original world-wisdom. But the treasures hidden in the
Christian revelation have been preserved, treasures no other than
those of the Eastern wisdom, but renewed by means of fresh forces
They have been guarded in narrow circles which were the continuation
of Mystery Societies, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, and
finally in the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. These treasures of
truth have been kept well hidden and have been accessible only to
those who through severe trials had prepared themselves for the
living wisdom. Thus the treasures of the Eastern and Western wisdom,
through all the centuries of evolution from the beginning of our era,
were made almost inaccessible to the larger mass of humanity.
Only a little trickled through here and there to the outer world: the
most part remained a secret of the new Mysteries. Then came a time
when some of the contents of primeval wisdom, treasured in narrow
circles, was allowed to be given out to larger masses of humanity in
a language comprehensible to them. Since the last third of the
nineteenth century or thereabouts one can speak of this world wisdom
in a more or less unveiled form. It is only because certain things
have taken place in the spiritual worlds that the Guardians of the
Mysteries received permission to allow some of the ancient wisdom to
penetrate to the outer world. All of you, my dear friends, know the
course of development of the Anthroposophical Society. You know how
the ice in which its development was bound was, so to say, broken by
those words of wisdom, revealed in a way which I am not going to
enter into now — the stanzas of Dzyan. Those stanzas of Dzyan,
of the secret teaching, contain in truth some of the deepest and most
important wisdom; they have in them much of that which coming from
the teaching of the holy Rishis has flowed through the sanctuaries of
the East. They contain also much of what has streamed into Western
Europe since the Christian rejuvenation. For the stanzas of Dzyan do
not include only the wisdom which had to be kept exclusively for the
East, but also a great deal of that which streamed as a clear light
through the centuries of our time, through the Middle Ages into the
Mystery Schools of the West. Much that is to be found in the stanzas
of Dzyan will only be gradually understood in all its depth. It may
well be said here that the wisdom of the stanzas of Dzyan is of such
a kind that it cannot yet be understood in the widest
anthroposophical circles, or fathomed with the exoteric capabilities
of the present day.
After the first ice had been broken in this way, the time came when
one could speak more openly from the sources of Western occultism,
which is no other than the occultism of the East transplanted and
continued in a way that has adapted itself to new circumstances and
conditions of physical and spiritual life.
The time has come when one can speak from those ever living sources
of occultism which have been faithfully treasured in the Mysteries of
the Rosy Cross. There is no wisdom of the East which has not streamed
into Western occultism and into the teaching and investigations of
the Rosy Cross; in them is to be found absolutely all that the great
teachers of the East ever had in their keeping. Nothing, nothing
whatever of that which is to be found in the Eastern wisdom is
lacking in the wisdom of the West. The only difference — if it
can be called a difference — is that Western occultism has to
include the whole of the Eastern wisdom and teaching and, without
losing anything, to blend it with the light which has been kindled in
humanity through the Christ Impulse. When one speaks of Western
occultism, of that which has its derivation from the hidden Western
Rishis (whom certainly no eye hath seen) it is impossible to say that
in it is wanting one single iota, one single shred of the Eastern
wisdom. Only it had all to be brought forth again fresh and new from
the fountain-head of the Christ Impulse. All the great treasures of
wisdom which were first revealed by the holy Rishis regarding
superhuman worlds and super-sensible existence, resound in the
description we have to give of the spiritual hierarchies and their
reflection in the physical world. Just as the geometry of Euclid has
not become something different from what it used to be, because one
teaches and learns it with new human capabilities, just as little has
the wisdom of the holy Rishis changed because we learn and teach it
with the new capabilities which have been kindled in us by the Christ
Impulse. Therefore much of what we have to say about the spiritual
worlds can be called Eastern wisdom. There must not be any
misunderstanding in these things — and misunderstandings happen
so easily. Those who will not free themselves of a misconception, in
order to come to understanding, can very easily misinterpret what,
for instance, was said yesterday at the Easter lecture. They might
assert about the so-called truths of Buddha, that I had said that the
Buddha had taught and revealed the truths about life and life's pain
as follows: ‘birth is pain, illness is pain, old age is pain,
death is pain; to be separated from those one loves is pain, not to
be united with what one loves is pain, not to have what one desires
is pain’ and that I said: ‘Let us look at those who, in
the times after Christ, really understood the Christ Impulse; for all
the holy truths of the Buddha about the pain of life have no more
their full importance; something has been created by the Christ
Impulse that is like a cure for the pain of life.’ The Buddha
taught: ‘Birth is pain’; but those who understood the
Christ would answer that through birth we enter into a life shared
with the Christ, and through the Christ's share in it the pain
of life will be extinguished. Illness will also be extinguished
through the healing power of the Christ Impulse, and there is no more
pain in illness for one who understands Christ, and death also has no
more pain for him who understands Christ. Yet someone might reply to
this ‘Yes, but I could point to the Gospels to show that also
there you will find it said that illness is pain, life is pain’:
and one might superficially come to the conclusion: ‘We have
those modern religious documents, but what they contain can also be
found in Buddhism, therefore religions are not making progress, there
is no evolution in them. All religions say the same things, but you
have spoken of a progress, you expounded to us how, with the help of
Christianity, the old truths of Buddhism would not be true any more.’
If anyone were to say this he would be guilty of a very serious
misunderstanding. For that was not said: everything indeed was said
with the exception of the last sentence. It is very important that
this very subtle question should be rightly understood. A fanatic can
never understand with precision, but a man who is objective can. No
one who speaks with knowledge of Rosicrucian wisdom will ever expound
anything that would be against any of the writings of the great
Buddha, or say that anything in them is untrue. Every man who speaks
from the sources of Rosicrucian wisdom shares the conviction of
Buddha, no one denies it. ‘Yes,’ such a man says, ‘what
thou, great Buddha, through thy inner illumination, hast seen of the
great truths about pain and life is exactly true, it is true to its
last iota.’ Nothing, absolutely nothing will be taken away from
it. All of it remains as it was. And it is just because all of it
remains as it was, because all is true of what the Buddha said about
the pain of life, of illness, of old age and of death, just because
of this, the Christ Impulse is such a powerful and important saving
help to us, for it is just this which lifts the pain, because it is
true that pain would be there, if the world could not be lifted
beyond and above it through that great Impulse. Why could the Christ
work effectively? Because the Buddha had spoken the truth. Humanity
had to be brought down out of the spiritual heights where the
primeval world wisdom is active in its purest form; man had to be led
to independence, through physical existence with which life's
pain and illness are bound up, and the great healing help had to
oppose those unavoidable facts in the course of further evolution.
Does that man deny the reality of facts who, while declaring that
these realities exist, holds at the same time that remedy has been
given us by which the facts, about which those truths have been said,
can be brought to a salutary development; does he who says this deny
any existing reality? Oh! in those heights of existence where we must
look for the spheres of the spiritual hierarchies — there
Buddhism is not opposed to Christianity, nor Christianity to
Buddhism; there the Buddha gives his hand to the Christ, and the
Christ to the Buddha. But every misconception regarding human
evolution, every misconception as to its ascending development, is a
misconception also of that spiritual act in our earthly evolution
which is the Act of Christ.
Thus nothing is denied. of the wisdom of the East, the wisdom which
has brought down to us the teaching of the holy Rishis, and with it
the primeval world-wisdom, which through such long epochs of time has
ever been streaming into humanity. But, all through those very long
epochs, large masses of humanity could not penetrate to the sources
of that wisdom, could only understand it with great difficulty; it
was precisely the understanding of it which came with such
difficulty. In ancient Atlantean times, before the great catastrophe,
when the masses of humanity were still clairvoyant with the thin
ancient clairvoyance, they beheld something quite different when they
looked upwards to the spaces of heaven, to the spiritual hierarchies,
from what they saw in the times after Atlantis when the larger part
of humanity had lost its clairvoyance and so could gaze only with its
physical eyes into the physical distances of the heavens. Therefore,
in the times before the Atlantean catastrophe, it would have been
quite senseless to speak to them of the heavenly bodies spread out in
space as they are to-day. The clairvoyant human eye gazed into
heavenly distance and saw the spiritual worlds. In those times there
would have been no sense in speaking of Mercury or of Neptune or of
Saturn, etc., as our astronomy speaks. The way astronomy speaks of
the spaces of the world and what they contain is merely a reflection
of what is seen by our own physical sight when it looks into depths
of the sky. This did not exist for the ancient clairvoyant humanity
of Atlantis; when they looked upwards, they did not see
physically-limited stars, what the physical eye sees to-day is but
the outer physical expression of the spiritual realities which people
then beheld. When looking to-day with one's physical eye
through a telescope at the place where Jupiter is, one perceives a
physical globe surrounded by moons. What was seen by the man of
Atlantis when he lifted his clairvoyant gaze to that same point which
we look at to-day with our physical eyes? The Atlantean's eyes
would have seen as little of what our sight sees to-day, as we should
if we looked at a light through a thick autumn fog. The eye of the
Atlantean would not have seen the physical star Jupiter, but he would
have seen that which is also united with Jupiter to-day, which the
man of the present day does not see: the aura of Jupiter, a totality
of spiritual beings, of which the physical Jupiter is only the
external expression. Thus did the gaze of man, before the Atlantean
catastrophe, sweep round the spaces of the world seeing everywhere
its spiritual content. He could speak only of the spiritual, for it
would have had no meaning to speak of physical stars, when the
physical eye was not yet opened as it is to-day. Looking into the
spaces of the universe man saw spiritual beings — the spiritual
hierarchies. He actually saw beings. We can compare the changes that
took place with further evolution in this way: let us suppose that we
are going out into a thick fog; we do not see separate lights,
everything is surrounded by aura or fog. The fog lifts and disperses,
the separate lights are visible, but their aura becomes invisible ...
This is only a physical process which must serve for an example. But
the ancient eye saw the aura of Jupiter, it saw spiritual beings in
that aura which at certain points of their evolution were united to
Jupiter. Humanity then developed further, to the attainment of
physical sight. The aura remained: men could no longer see it, but
the physical body in the centre became ever clearer and clearer,
spiritually it was lost to sight as its corporeal part became
visible. But the knowledge of the spiritual, the knowledge of the
beings surrounding the star was kept and guarded in the holy
Mysteries.
All the holy Rishis speak of that knowledge. In the times when men
already saw only in a physical way, the Rishis spoke to them of the
spiritual atmospheres, of the spiritual inhabitants of those spheres
which are spread out in the spaces of the world.
Consider what the situation then was. In the centres of knowledge,
spiritual beings were spoken of which surround the spheres of the
universe. Outside where the physical eye was growing always sharper,
physical matter was spoken of more and more. When the Ancient Rishis
said the word Mercury (they did not use that word, but we take it as
an example), did they mean by it the physical orb of that name? No! —
even the ancient Greeks did not use it in that sense; what they meant
was the totality of spiritual beings belonging to that planet.
Spiritual world and spiritual beings were spoken of when, in the
centres of secret knowledge for instance, the word Mercury was
pronounced. When the disciples of that sacred knowledge spoke of the
Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn pronouncing these
words in their different languages, they expressed the gradations of
spiritual beings. When those names are used to-day, only the coarsest
part is meant of that which was originally understood by Moon,
Mercury, Venus. The principal part is just what is omitted to-day;
the ancient teacher of wisdom said the word Moon and with that word
he evoked the idea of a great spiritual world. When he, pronouncing
the word ‘Moon’, pointed to the place in heaven where the
moon was, he felt in his consciousness that it was the lowest stage
of the spiritual hierarchies, but the man to whom he was showing it,
who was getting ever further from that spiritual sight because
humanity was growing more and more physical, saw only the physical
moon, and called it ‘Moon.’
One single word for two things which, though they certainly belong to
each other, call forth quite different ideas in man. It was the same
when the sages of the sacred knowledge pointed to Mercury, Sun, or
Mars. Thus we see that the two currents grew always further apart in
humanity, the spiritual one describing something quite different from
the material current. In the sacred Mysteries these words —
which later became the mere names of physical planets — were
always understood as descriptions of spiritual worlds and gradations
of spiritual realms. The outer world always understood it materially
up to the time of modern Mythology — I use the word purposely —
which is called Astronomy. And as Anthroposophy has recognised the
full worth of all the other Mythologies, it has also, as you will
understand, given full value to that Mythology which is called modern
Astronomy, which sees only space and in it, the physical
world-spheres as physical orbs. But to him who knows, modern
Mythology is only a special phase of all Mythologies. What the
ancient inhabitants of Europe said in their myths about gods and
stars, what the Romans gave in their Mythologies, and what appeared
as the obscured Mythology of the Middle Ages, lead up in a straight
line to the wonderful and admirable discoveries of Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galileo. A future will come when modern Mythology will be
spoken of somewhat in this way: ‘There was a time when people
found it right to place a material sun as the middle point of an
ellipse and let the planets rotate within it, and spin round
themselves on their own axes in different ways; they arranged a world
system in that way, as people of earlier times also did. To-day’
— so will that future age think — ‘all that is only
legend and fairy tale.’ Yes, that future age will come,
although the man of the present who laughs at former Mythologies
thinks it impossible that one could ever speak of Copernican
Mythology. But this consideration will make clear to us how through
the same words something ever more different may be meant. In spite
of this the true primeval wisdom has always been cultivated and has
always continued; it has however always been less understood
exoterically and its spiritual side less seen, the more it has been
materially explained.
In the beginning of our era, when there was a rejuvenescence of
primeval wisdom, (in order that humanity should not lose all touch
with that ancient wisdom), it was said. in sharp, clear words, that
when man looks at the outer space of the world and his physical eye
sees only what is physical, the space is filled with spirit. It was
the most intimate pupil of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, who
said in clear-cut words: ‘There is not only matter out there in
space; there is, for the soul which rises consciously into the spaces
of universal existence, the spiritual part which stands above man in
the evolution of existence.’ And he used words which sounded
different from the old ones, for if he had used the old words
everybody would have understood them in the material sense. The
Rishis spoke of the spiritual hierarchies, they expressed in their
language what the Greek and Roman wisdom still described when
speaking of the ascending scale of worlds: of the Moon, of Mercury,
Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Dionysius, the pupil of the
Apostle Paul had the same worlds in his mind as the Rishis, he
repeated in clear cut words that here one had to do with spiritual
realms, and he used words which he could be certain would be
understood in their spiritual sense: he spoke of Angels, Archangels,
Archai, Powers, Mights, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim.
For now humanity had completely forgot what it once knew. Had it
still been able to understand the connection between what Dionysius
and the Rishis had seen, it would have grasped, while hearing on the
one side of the Moon, and on the other side of the Mysteries of the
Angels, that these were one and the same thing. It would have heard
the word Mercury on the one hand and Archangel on the other, and
would have known they were the same. The word ‘Archai’
spoken by the one, and ‘Venus’ by the other, were the
same. And men. would have understood that with the words ‘Sun’
and ‘Powers’ the same worlds were meant. With the name
‘Mars’ they would have felt that they had to rise to the
Mights (Dynamis). When they heard Jupiter mentioned, they would have
known that it was the same as when in the school of Dionysius,
Dominions were described. Saturn corresponds to ‘Thrones’;
but in wider circles this was not known any more, it could not be
known. Thus there was on the one side a science of matter, which
became ever more material, and the old names which once signified
spiritual forces, were now used in a material sense. And on the other
side, there was a spiritual life which spoke of Angels and
Archangels, etc. which had lost its connection with the physical
designations of these spiritual beings.
Thus we see how the primeval wisdom enters through Dionysius into the
school which Paul had inaugurated, and how this new inauguration had
to be penetrated by the ancient spirit. It is the task of modern
Spiritual Science, or anthroposophy to form once more the bond which
must unite the physical to the spiritual, the bond between the earth
and the spiritual hierarchies. It is impossible for those who do not
know where their ideas about the outer world of the senses come from,
to realise the other, the spiritual side of knowledge. This will be
particularly noticeable when we have to deal with those writings
which, although they are but a faint echo of the primeval cosmic
wisdom, can still be understood in the light of that wisdom.
Let me show you an example of the difficulty there is in
understanding writings which come down to us from that primeval
wisdom. It is an example out of the Song Celestial, the Bhagavad
Gita, where a sentence throws a very significant light on the
connection between human life and the hierarchies. It is the
following: (8th Chap. beginning with 23rd verse) ‘I will
explain unto thee, oh man seeking for truth’ (it is thus
generally translated) ‘under what circumstances those who know
the Eternal leave the earth through the gate of death, to be later
reborn or not. I will tell thee: Behold the fire, behold the day,
behold the time of the waning moon, behold the half year when the sun
is high — those who die at that time, who die in fire, in the
day, in the time of the waxing moon, those enter through the gates of
death into Brahma, but those who die in the sign of the smoke, in the
night, when the moon is waning, in the half year when the sun stands
low, these when they leave the world and pass through the gates of
death enter only into the light of the moon, and return again to the
world.’ Here you have, my dear anthroposophical friends, a
sentence from the Bhagavad Gita, in which it says that the condition
of man's progress and of his reincarnation depends on whether
he dies in the sign of the light, by day, with the waxing moon,
during the half year when the sun stands high, or whether he dies in
the sign of the smoke, by night, when the moon wanes and when the sun
is low. It is said that this refers to the material sun. Of those who
die in the sign of the fire by day, with the moon waxing, and during
that half of the year when the sun is high, it is said that they do
not need to return. Those who die in the sign of the smoke, by night,
with the moon waning, and when the sun is low, must return into the
world. This sentence out of the divine song of the East presents the
greatest difficulty to all those who want to explain it within the
limits of exoteric life. It can be explained only when it is
illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge, by the light in
which it was received and written, the light which streams out of the
Mystery schools, which can be increased. which has known its
rejuvenescence through Christianity and which shows us how to find
the link which binds the names Moon to Angels, Mercury to Archangels,
Venus to the Archai and so on. With its help we shall find the key to
such sentences as the one we gave as an example. Our course of
studies will start from the explanation of this sentence in the
Bhagavad Gita, a thing which is impossible in exoteric life; and
after we have found the key to it, we shall pass on to further
explanations of the spiritual hierarchies.
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