LECTURE
XIV.
HUMAN
SOUL-STRIVINGS DURING THE MIDDLE AGES THE ROSICRUCIAN MYSTERIES
Dornach,
23rd December, 1923.
WE
will utilize the last lecture of this course by bringing together, to
some extent, the Mysteries as I have outlined them as belonging to
this or the other region of the earth; and I shall attempt to show
you the nature of the Mysteries at any rate from one point of view,
in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the 10th
to the 15th centuries.
I do not speak of this epoch of time because it is
particularly complete in itself, but because it can to a certain
extent be useful in showing what form the human soul-strivings took
in the most civilized parts of the earth at that time. The spiritual
striving of that period is often described as the Mysteries of the
Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite
justifiable, but one must search behind it, not for the charlatan
element which is so often met with in literature, without one's being
aware of this fact — one does not always realize what an
element of charlatanism is at work in these things — but we
must look behind, and direct our attention to that deeply earnest
striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost
every region of Europe, in Central Europe, Western and Southern
Europe. We must realize clearly that the figure of Faust as described
by Goethe, with all his deep soul-striving, with all his earnest
efforts, is really simply a later figure, no longer anything like as
deep in soul as many an investigator to be found in the medieval
laboratories, figures of whom nothing reaches us by way of history,
but who laboured between the 14th and 15th centuries. I mentioned in
the last lecture that in the investigators of this epoch a tragic
note predominates. The peculiar trait is the feeling which existed in
those investigators that they must strive after the highest, the
highest which is creatively active in man; yet not only could they
not reach this highest, but from a certain point of view their
striving after the highest is even doubtful.
I have said that we do not find theoretical, easily
obtained knowledge among these scientists in their alchemical
laboratories between the 14th and 15th centuries, but something which
is deeply connected with the whole man, with the longing for
knowledge which came from their inner feeling, a cognition acquired
with heart and feeling.
Now what was the origin of this? This can be best
explained to you if I try to make you understand the tragic
scepticism of the medieval investigators, by once again turning our
attention to the form taken by human cognition on earth in very
ancient days.
The most ancient form of human knowledge, which was so
closely connected with the life of the individual human being, was
not of such a nature that man looked up to the planets and saw the
mathematical grandeur and mathematical movements, which can be
calculated and observed today; at that time each planet, as all else
spread out in the heavens, was a living being, and not only a living
being but it possessed a soul. Indeed it was not only an ensouled
being but a being permeated by spirit. Man constantly spoke then of
the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies,
for he knew that just as there exists a blood relationship between
the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner
relationship, between the members of a planetary system. There was a
parallelism between the human element and what revealed itself
outside in the cosmos.
I should like to depict one aspect of what was perceived
and known by man in the very oldest Mysteries, when he looked up to
the sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries which
were so arranged that there was a specially prepared kind of
skylight, so that at certain definite times of the day the sun could
be seen through a diminished light. Thus you must imagine that the
most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple was that in the
roof, in which a skylight was inserted and the window filled with
some kind of material — not glass in our modern sense —
but a material through which one saw the orb of the sun in a dim
twilight at a certain definite time of the day. The pupil had been
prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right feeling,
the right mood of soul. He had to make, his feeling so receptive, so
inwardly perceptive that when, so to speak, he exposed his soul
through his eye to the sun orb it made an impression on him which he
could really bring to his consciousness.
Now,
of course, many people today look up at the sun through smoked glass,
but they are not prepared in their feeling to receive this impression
which the sun makes as a special impression. But the pupil in these
ancient Mysteries received this impression of the darkened solar orb
after long exercises had been undergone, and this impression was then
a quite definite one. A man who, as a pupil of the Initiates of the
Mysteries, was able to have this impression could truly never forget
it.
With this impression the pupil also gained something
which, from that time on, gave him more understanding for certain
things around him than he formerly had. The attempt was made, after
the pupil had been prepared through the majestic and magnificent
impression of the sun to permit the especial quality of the substance
gold to work upon him; and through this preparation, through this
sun-preparation, the pupil was led to a deep understanding of the
quality of gold.
When one looks into these things, it is really painful
to experience the triviality of our modern consciousness which we
find in so many historical works in which we are told the reason why
this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the sun or
attributed the same symbol to gold and to the sun. Man no longer
knows what was known by this means in these olden times, and which
really was evoked by means of these many exercises and through
preparation. I mean that this direction of the vision inward into the
dimmed direct light of the sun, prepared the pupil to understand the
substance gold on the earth.
How then did he understand this? After he had undergone
this preparation, his attention awoke to the fact that gold is not
affected by that which, for the organism, constitutes the breath of
life, i.e., oxygen, and to which most of the other metals are so
thoroughly receptive. Oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This
non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that from
which man really has his life, made a deep impression on the pupil of
the ancient Mysteries. Thus he received the impression that gold
cannot directly approach life. Now the sun too cannot directly
approach life; and it is well that neither gold nor the sun can
directly approach life. Then the pupil was gradually led to the fact
that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, with the breath of
life, that therefore when in a certain dose it is introduced into the
human organism it has a quite special effect on the organism of man.
Gold has a quite special relation with the human organism when, as we
have said, it is introduced into it in the correct dose. It has no
relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body;
but gold has a direct relation to what lies in human thought, in
human thinking.
Just consider how far removed thinking lies from human
life, especially in our modern age. A man can sit down like a piece
of wood and think quite intellectually. He can think quite livingly
in an intellectual way; but on the other hand he cannot by thinking
bring about any change in his organism. Man's thinking has become
more and more powerless; but thinking is set in motion by the
ego-organization, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human
organism can bring back power into thinking. It restores to thinking
the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric
body; thus thinking can be animated by gold.
That was one of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries;
the secret of the connection of gold with the sun. The relationship
between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the sun was
perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries of which I have
just spoken.
And in a similar way, the pupil of these ancient
Mysteries was then led to experience the opposite pole of gold, the
opposite effect. Gold is an impulse for the animation of human
thinking, so that human thinking can work down as far as the etheric
body. And what would be the opposite pole of that?
In regard to the human organism, in its several members,
the ego-organization, the astral body, the etheric body and the
physical body, we may say that through gold the ego-organization
becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric
body can then work further on the physical body; but gold brings it
about that thoughts can actually be maintained in all their power in
the etheric body.
What is the opposite pole of this? We have the opposite
pole, the opposite working, and this effect is what is produced when
the breath of life — oxygen — is attracted by something
in man or in nature; then, just as gold is obstinate in the face of
oxygen and repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and therefore
has no influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but simply
on the thought-world of the ego-organization, in the same way what
exists in man as carbon has a direct relationship with oxygen.
We breathe out carbonic acid. We produce in ourselves
carbon dioxide. We unite carbon with oxygen. The plants require
carbon dioxide for their life; and this carbon possesses the opposite
characteristic of gold.
Now, this substance of
carbon played an enormous part in the ancient Mysteries. On the one
hand, gold was referred to as being a quite special substance for the
study of man, while, on the other hand, carbon was referred to in the
ancient Mysteries in such a way that it was called the Stone of the
Wise, the
Philosopher's Stone.
Gold and the
Philosopher's Stone
were very important things in olden times. Carbon was the
Stone of the Wise.
Carbon appears on the earth in a number of different
forms. A diamond is carbon, hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coke is
carbon; anthracite is carbon. On the earth carbon appears before us
in many diverse forms; but through those methods which were customary
in the ancient Mysteries, men learnt to understand that there existed
other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on the earth. And
so another preparation was necessary for the Mystery pupils besides
that of which I have spoken as the sun preparation. In addition to
that there existed the moon preparation.
Now if we turn to these
ancient Sun Mysteries, we find there in addition to what I have said
above a kind of observatory wherein a man could open his soul and his
physical vision to the moon forms. At certain definite times he did
not merely behold the sun through a diminished light, but for a
period of time lasting for weeks the pupil had to open his psychic
vision, his soul-filled eye, to the different forms which the orb of
the moon adopted by night. Thereby the pupil received a quite
definite experience in his soul, an experience which led to
knowledge. Just as the soul capable of exposing itself to the sun
became endowed with the power of the sun, by so exposing it to the
phases of the moon it became endowed with the power of the moon. He
now learnt what metamorphoses the substance of carbon could undergo.
On the earth carbon is either coal or graphite or diamond or
anthracite; but on the moon that which we find here on the earth as
diamond or anthracite or coal, is silver — and that was the
secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon on the moon is
silver. Carbon is the
Philosopher's Stone,
and on the moon it is silver.
What in the ancient Mysteries was so profoundly
impressed on the pupil was the knowledge that any substance, however
it looks externally, is only this in one place on the earth and at
one definite time. None but an ignorant man was then unaware that
carbon is only diamond, coal or anthracite on the earth; for what
exists on the earth as diamond or graphite, that, on the moon, is
silver. If we could at the present moment take a piece of our
ordinary black coal and as it were carry it over into the moon, it
would there immediately become a piece of silver.
A perception of this radical metamorphosis was what the
pupil obtained in these ancient times. Now that is not to be found at
the basis of that fraudulent alchemy which is spoken of today, but it
does lie at the basis of the true ancient alchemy. And this ancient
alchemy could not be acquired as we obtain our intellectual knowledge
today. Today we observe or think about things, but alchemy could not
be attained in that way. Today man directs his telescope to a certain
star, he gets parallelisms and such like things. He calculates and
calculates; or he may study a certain substance and place the
spectrum on it, and so on; yet everything which can be learnt in this
way is, after all, infinitely abstract, compared with what could in
olden times be learnt of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this
real Astrology, could only be learnt, as I explained in the last
lecture, by a real living intercourse with the Intelligences of the
Cosmos. The knowledge then attained was knowledge through which man
could speak in his soul, in his spirit, with the Intelligences of the
Cosmos.
Now what gold is for the human organism is connected
with the secret of the sun; and through the fact that the pupil
exposed in the manner described his own soul to the sun Being, he
thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the sun
themselves, and they it was who told him of the properties of gold.
In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the
moon.
Now the pupil learnt to know these Intelligences of the
moon as those great Teachers who existed on the earth in very ancient
times, and who taught the primeval wisdom on the earth. They were the
same Teachers who today, I would say, send down their forces, their
impulses to the earth from the moon. They withdrew at a definite time
from the earth to the moon, and there as it were they founded a
colony on the moon, at the time when the moon separated from the
earth.
Thus with this second-secret, the secret of
carbon-silver, those Intelligences have to do who once lived on the
earth and today constitute the moon Intelligences. Such was the
knowledge, the cognition acquired by the pupil in ancient times.
I will bring forward a further instance. Just as the
pupil could receive impressions from the sun or from the moon, so by
means of a still further preparation of his soul he could also
receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets
thus obtained in ancient times was that which related to Venus. Venus
is today studied through the telescope, and is regarded as being like
other stars, like other planets. The human body is studied by
investigating first part of the liver and then part of the brain,
analyzing them only according to their cellular structures (for
although the liver and the brain are radically different substances,
they are investigated today as though they were both alike.) So a
student now directs his telescope towards Mercury, Venus and Mars,
and so on, and thinks that they are all substances of a like nature.
But in these ancient times it was known that if a man looked with his
eyes at the moon or the sun, he saw something which still had a
relation with the physical earth, with the earthly, the watery, the
fiery; while if he extended his observation to the moon in a
spiritual way, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his
observation to Venus, he came to a spiritual world, a purely astral
world. What we see as the physical Venus is in a sense simply the
external sign for something which lives and works in the astral
light. The physical light of Venus is something quite different from
the sunlight, for instance; for physical sunlight still has a
relationship with what can live on the earth as the light which
belongs to the earth, but as regards the light from Venus, it is
childish to think that it is simply reflected sunlight, for the light
from Venus shines out from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed
his soul nature to this light he learnt to know what Intelligences
were connected with Venus.
Now these are Intelligences who, I might say, live in
continual opposition to the Intelligences of the sun; and a great
part, a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this
opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences
of the sun. It was then said, with a certain justice, that there was
a continual conflict between the Venus Intelligences and the sun
Intelligences. There existed a starting-point for such a conflict
when the Venus Intelligences first began to combat the Intelligences
of the sun. Then there followed intensifications; and through this
conflict there came about catastrophes and crises. In that interval
which lay between an opposition and a catastrophe or crisis,
occurred, as it were, a section of that great conflict which really
takes place in the spiritual world, but which only appears in its
external symbol in the astrological and astronomical relationship
between Venus and the sun. That which then took place occurred in
successive phases. Now, no one can understand what lives on the earth
as inner impulses of history if he does not know of this conflict
between Venus and the sun; because what takes place here on the earth
as conflicts and battles, what occurs here in the course of the
evolution of civilization, is simply an earthly picture, an earthly
copy, of this Venus-solar conflict.
This was well known in the ancient Mysteries. Such
knowledge existed then because there was a relation between human
beings on the earth and these spiritual beings, these Intelligences
of the Cosmos.
Then came that epoch of which I have spoken to you, the
epoch from the 10th to the 15th century after Christ. The medieval
investigators, in their alchemical laboratories, were no longer able,
as humanity evolved, to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They
could only get as far as the spirits of nature; and while these
alchemical investigators made certain alchemical experiments —
of which I gave an instance in the last lecture of the particular
transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid — while these
medieval investigators made numerous experiments of this kind which
should reveal to them the working and weaving in the processes and
things of nature, they could only do so when they had prepared
themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I
have spoken: having done this, however, then through their
experiments, the spirits of nature could speak to them. Let us
realize clearly the situation in which such an investigator found
himself.
Such an investigator stood in his laboratory. He said:
“Here I have in my laboratory substances, retorts, kilns. I
make various experiments. When I direct my questionings to Nature
through my experiments, there enter my laboratory quite visibly the
nature spirits with their revelations.”
This occurred as late as the 15th century, that the
nature spirits appeared to the Rosicrucian investigator who was
rightly prepared. This really occurred! But he knew from external
knowledge that in olden times it had been possible to reach out not
merely to the nature spirits, but to the higher Cosmic Intelligences,
to those Intelligences who spoke of the Gold-secret in connection
with the sun, of the Silver-secret and the Carbon-secret in
connection with the moon, of the historically important Venus-secret,
etc. True, this medieval alchemist knew all this from information
imparted by tradition. But that was not the important thing. He who
has been under the influence of the spiritual world, to him
historical documents are not so terribly important as they are to
modern materialistic times. One is always so astonished to find how
infinitely important it is for many people when something like the
Dinosaurus is found in the Desert of Gobi as recently. That is an
important find, but these are only broken fragments, whereas we may
really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos in a spiritual way.
Historical documents were therefore certainly not such as deeply to
affect these medieval investigators; but in another way the medieval
alchemist acquired the knowledge that it had formerly been possible
to attain this cosmic cognition, but that now they could only reach
the Spirits of Nature, the spirits behind the elements, when certain
observations of nature were made, or certain experiments performed —
i.e., when these investigators approached the sphere of the Spirits
of Nature, then certain Spirits of Nature came around them and told
the investigators that there formerly existed human beings who stood
in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. It was a deep piercing
pain to the investigators when the Spirits of Nature spoke to him of
a former age in which man himself was able to come into connection
with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. So these investigators had to
say: “These Spirits of Nature tell of a still earlier age, now
vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and experiences.”
Thus this gift of the medieval alchemist of access to the Spirits of
Nature was really of a dubious nature. While on the one hand they
could come to the Spirits of Nature, to the spirits of the air, water
and fire, and could approach them in all their living reality, on the
other hand there were some amongst these spirits who told the
investigators, and this information crushed them, how at one time
humanity not only stood in connection with the Spirits of Nature, but
with the living Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Spirits of
Nature still stood in connection, but with whom man could no longer
get into touch. That was the feeling of these medieval alchemists and
it often came to expression in a much grander, much more tragic way
even than we find in Goethe's Faust, beautiful and mighty though that
is.
That utterance which
Faust addressed to the moon, the silver shining light of the moon in
which he seeks to bathe, this Faust utterance would have been made in
a much more intense manner by the investigators of the Middle Ages
when the Spirits of Nature came to them and told them about the
secrets of carbon, the secrets of silver, that secret which again is
closely connected with man. What was it then that man experienced in
ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold
is connected with the sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and
carbon work in man, and how other metals related to the other planets
work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the very
circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a
conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and working through his
head, and at the same time he felt this as allied to a picture of the
whole earth. He really experienced that when he felt the blood
streaming up through his head. And there, in that sphere where the
head is not enclosed by the bones, where it opens itself downwards
towards the breast, man felt a copy in miniature of what ascends from
the earth in the atmosphere. Thus in that which man learnt from the
cosmos outside he recognized that which he transmuted in his own
organism, he could follow the planet in its passage through the
various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of
Mephistopheles' lines in Goethe's Faust, which are written in
such a penetrating way: “Blood is a very special fluid;”
because in its various metamorphoses our blood really reflects those
metamorphoses which are so magnificent — the change from carbon
to silver. All this lives in man's blood.
So the medieval investigators experienced this loss of
the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own
humanity. In reality it is but a faint reflection of this which we
find in Goethe's Faust, when he opens, as it were, the Book of the
Macrocosmos, seeking the Cosmic Intelligences; and shuts it again
because he cannot approach them. He can only get as far as the Spirit
of the Earth. That is simply a faint echo of what we find in so
terribly tragic a way amongst the best of these medieval
investigators, whose names have not come down to us. The greatest of
these medieval investigators underwent this experience when they
heard from the Spirits of Nature, whose sphere they entered through
their alchemical investigations, that there once existed a connection
between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.
Now all this is very deeply connected with what still
had to develop in ancient Greece when the necessary need arose for
what we have studied in these lectures as the Mysteries of
Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be weakened down into the
philosophy of Aristotle, and which then played such an enormous part
in the Middle Ages, while below the surface what we know as
Aristotelianism worked so strongly right on into the 15th century,
but in a tragic manner, as I tried to describe to you in a
fragmentary way.
Behind the Macedonian epoch, was a Mystery which
extended even as far as Greece. The significant details of this will
be given to you in the, coming historical lectures; but with
reference to this Mystery, which saw so deeply into the secrets of
the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic
Intelligences, we have a Mystery which descended from the Cosmic
Intelligences to the Spirits of Nature. Then man's vision had to be
closed to these Cosmic Intelligences, and simply directed towards the
Spirits of Nature. That was the crisis which was accomplished at the
time of Alexander and Aristotle. We can still see in Aristotelianism
how the abstractions of Aristotle are based upon the ancient
Mysteries.
I
must say here that anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret,
and then reads the observations of Aristotle — even those few
observations which have come down to posterity, for the most
important writings of Aristotle have not come down to us —
anyone who reads these writings, the observations of Aristotle
relating to the secret of the moon, will realize the connection of
those olden times. Now these are the things which are to be
illuminated more in detail in the Christmas lectures which I want to
give concerning the historical development of humanity from the
standpoint of Anthroposophy.
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