Appendix III
THE SERPENT AND THE LAMB
What Dr. Steiner is giving
here is of the greatest importance and must be clearly understood.
What was given in the
Baptism experience was a vision of the etheric body. To the baptized
this was a revelation of his connection with the spiritual world, and
of his being as the result of his whole past. In this he saw how his
etheric body — and consequently its effect upon his physical body
— had been deeply influenced by the Luciferic beings who had united
themselves with it.
He saw his etheric body
in the form of the SERPENT. Dr. Steiner does not here enlarge upon this
image, though he speaks of it elsewhere. It would appear in two ways
to be a significant image. The serpent exists in almost undifferentiated
length. Moreover, as it grows it sloughs its skin, and emerges whole,
a complete image of its former being, upon which there hardens the new
and larger skin, and so on. It is an earthly image of man's reincarnations,
sloughing off the physical body, but keeping the whole impress of the
inner experience of the bodily existence, upon and out of which is
fashioned a new body. The temptation of Eve was to seek satisfaction
in her experience of the outer world. The tempter was the SERPENT.
In John's Baptism the
etheric body was to be seen under the image of the LAMB. What did that
signify?
The fundamental feature
of the etheric world is the interrelationship of all its parts, and
the capacity of the soul to experience itself in other souls and to
receive them into its own experience. This is the etheric expression
of man's true spiritual nature. In the physical world, it is realised
in sacrifice and self-offering, of which the Lamb is the symbol. Man
was to see the outer physical world, not merely as the stage of his
own inner experience, but as the place where he was to learn obedience to
the laws of his own spiritual being. He was to identify his newly-evolving
ego, which no longer only discovered itself in the etheric manifestation
of its inner experience, but was seeking to realise itself in the physical
body, in mastery over the outer world, — he was to identify it
with the Lamb: the outer world was to be to him a path of self-offering
and sacrifice. Thus the new etheric body was to bear the image of the
LAMB, and was to imprint that image upon man's physical body in which
the ego was manifesting itself. In this, man would be opposed by the
self-centredness of Lucifer.
This formation of the
etheric body as the Lamb could not arise out of man's old serpent-like
etheric body. It was to be the gift of Christ, who would thereby triumph
over Lucifer. This would be manifest in Jesus.
Could it have been manifest
in some incipient form in some of those baptized by John? Yes, in some,
specially prepared. The Nazarenes — the Essenes — manifested
this self-offering life. They were universally regarded as manifesting
the purest, most unselfish communal life. They would be forerunner souls,
fitted from their past to have the change wrought by Christ in their
etheric body, so as to fit them for the change in their physical being
when He came to the earth. Some who were baptized by John could not
have this experience, namely, the Pharisees, the “children of
the Serpent.” To others he could say, without explanation,
“Behold! The Lamb of God!”
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