Lecture 6
23rd August, 1911
E
have devoted much attention in these lectures to a subject that arose out
of the dramatic performances which preceded them, but it is a subject
which is intimately bound up with the aim we have set before us in this
year's Cycle. I am referring to the world of the Greek gods and
the form it took. Since our actual subject is ‘Wonders of the
World, Ordeals of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit’, why
should we have spent so much time talking about the world of the
Greek gods? The reason is that such a study can provide — as
well as much else — the basis we need for a
spiritual-scientific study of the world. I have pointed out that the
concept of nature and natural existence which is generally accepted
today was quite unknown to the ancient Greek. If we call to mind what
the thought and feeling of ancient Greece was really like, we find
there no chemical, physical, biological laws as we understand them
today. What lit up in the soul of the ancient Greek, what was
enkindled in the spirit of this marvellous Greek civilisation when
the eye (clairvoyant or otherwise) was directed upon the wonders of
the world, presented itself to them as a kind of knowledge, a kind of
wisdom; but for us it is the marvellous structure of their world of
gods. Anyone who looks upon this world as having no inner coherence,
which is the usual attitude, knows nothing of what it is trying to
express. This world of the Greek gods, in its wisdom-filled
structure, is actually the Greek reply to the question ‘What is
the response of the human soul to wonders of the world?’ The
Greek response to the riddle of the world was not a law of nature as
we understand it, but the shaping forth of some group or other of
divine beings or divine forces. Hence in these wonderful clues we
have followed up in the last few lectures, and which we sometimes
found so astonishing, but which, pieced together, give us the world
of the Greek gods, we cannot help seeing the equivalent of our own
dry-as-dust, prosaic, abstract wisdom. And if we want to make real
progress in Spiritual Science we must acquire a feeling that it is
possible to think and feel in an entirely different manner from the
modern way.
But when in the last
lecture we were considering the figure of Dionysos, our attention was
drawn to yet another thing. While the rest of the gods represent what
was reflected in the soul of the Greek when he tried to understand
the wonders of the world, we found that in the figure of Dionysos the
Greek has concealed what we might call the inherent contradiction of
life, and we shall get no further unless we give some thought to this
aspect. Abstract logic, abstract intellectual thinking, is always
trying to discover inconsistencies in higher world-conceptions, and
then to say, ‘This world-conception is full of inconsistencies,
it cannot therefore be accepted as valid.’ The truth is,
however, that life is full of contradictions, indeed nothing new, no
development would be possible unless contradiction lay in the very
nature of things. For why is the world different today from what it
was yesterday? Why does anything become, why does not
everything remain as it was? It is because yesterday there was a
self-contradictory element in the state of things, and today's
new state has arisen through the realisation of yesterday's
contradiction and its overcoming. No one who sees things as they
really are can say, ‘Falsehood is detected by proving
contradiction’ ... for contradiction is inherent in reality.
What would the human soul be like if it were free from
contradictions? Whenever we look back at the course of our life we
see that it has been activated by contradictions. If at some later
date we are more perfect than we were earlier, it has come about
because we have got rid of our earlier condition, because we have
discovered our earlier state to be in contradiction to our own inner
nature, and thus have called forth a reality of our own inner being
in contradiction to what was. Contradiction is everywhere at the
basis of all beings. Particularly when we study the entire man, the
four-fold man, as we are accustomed to treat of him in the light of
occultism, do we find this contradiction, a contradiction which
addresses itself not only to our reason, to our philosophy, but to
our hearts, to our whole soul-nature.
We must constantly
remind ourselves of the fundamental basis of our Spiritual Science,
that man as he stands before us consists of physical body, ether
body, astral body and ego. Our being consists of these four members.
Let us look at them as they meet us to begin with on the physical
plane, in the physical world. We will for the present ignore the
question as to how the human being appears to clairvoyant sight, we
will just ask how the four members of the human being appear to
physical eyes, for the physical world. Let us begin with the
innermost member of the human being, the ego, which as you know we
regard as the youngest — or better call it ‘the ego-
bearer’. The outstanding characteristic of this human ego
occurs at once to anyone who studies the world with even a little
intelligence. However widely we search, we shall never find this ego
by the exercise of our physical senses, by exercising our faculties
for knowledge of the physical world. It is not visible to our eyes,
nor in any way perceptible to any faculty for acquiring knowledge of
the outer world. Hence when we meet another man, if we only try to
study him physically, with purely physical instruments, if we do not
enlist the help of the clairvoyant eye, we can never observe his ego.
We go about among men, but with organs of perception for the outer
world we do not see their egos. If anyone thinks he can see egos he
is utterly deceiving himself. With physical faculties for acquiring
knowledge of external things we cannot observe the ego as such; we
can only contemplate its manifestation through the organs of the
physical body. A man may be inwardly a thoroughly untruthful person,
but so long as he does not utter the lie so that it passes over into
the external world, we cannot see it in his ego, because egos cannot
be observed with external physical instruments. Thus, however far we
go in investigating with the forces of physical knowledge, we only
encounter this ego once. Although we know quite well that there are
many egos upon the Earth, only one of them is to be perceived, and
that is our own. In the physical world, or for physical instruments
of knowledge, each man has only one opportunity of perceiving the
ego, that is his own ego. So that we may say that the peculiarity of
this youngest and highest member of the human being is that its
existence, its reality, is capable of being perceived in one example
only, in ourselves. The egos of all other men are hidden from us
within their bodily sheaths.
From this ego, as the
innermost, as the youngest, but also the highest member of the human
being, let us now turn to the outermost member, to the physical body.
As you know from things I have written or said on various occasions
in recent years, the physical body can only be known in its true
inner being to clairvoyant consciousness. To ordinary consciousness,
to the physically based powers of physical knowledge, the physical
body manifests itself only as maya or illusion. When we meet a man,
what we see as his physical body is maya, illusion. But there are as
many instances of this illusion of a physical body as there are men
to be met with on Earth. And in this respect — as maya —
our own body is just like that of other men. Thus there is a great
difference between the perception of our own ego, of which only one
example is given, and the perception of human physical bodies, of
which we have as many examples as the people we know on Earth. We
only learn to know the ego when we direct our physical faculty of
knowledge upon ourselves. We have to look into ourselves with the
power of knowledge which we have acquired upon the physical plane if
we wish to learn to know our ego.
I should perhaps add,
because there is so much unclear thinking, that what I mean by the
ego which we perceive with our physical powers of knowledge belongs
entirely to the physical world. It would be idle nonsense to say that
what a man's normal faculties find within him as his ego ever
belongs to any other world than the physical. If anyone were to
consider the ego, observed not with clairvoyant but with normal
faculties, as belonging to any other world than that of the physical
plane, he would be making a mistake. In the higher worlds things look
quite different; the ego too for clairvoyant consciousness is
something very different from what man finds within him in normal
consciousness. We must not think of the ego of which ordinary
psychology and ordinary science speak as belonging to anything but
the physical plane; only we are looking at it from within, and
because we stand within it, as it were, because we do not confront it
from the outside, we are able to say: ‘Admittedly we learn to
know this ego upon the physical plane only, but we do at least learn
to know it in its own inner being, by direct knowledge, whereas what
we know of the physical body, of which we see so many specimens in
the world, is only maya.’ For as soon as the faculty
of clairvoyance is turned upon the physical body it dissolves like a
cloud, vanishes away, reveals itself as maya. And if we wish
to get to know the physical body in its true form we have to rise,
not just to the astral plane but to the highest region of Spirit-
land, to Devachan; thus a clairvoyance of a very high order is needed
if we wish to learn to know the physical body in its true form. Here
below, in the physical world, the physical body has only a quite
illusionary stamp, and it is this counterfeit image that we see when
we look at this physical body from outside. Thus these two members of
the human organism, the highest and the lowest, show a very
remarkable contrast. Here in the physical world we see the human
physical organism as maya — that is to say, it is not
at all in accordance with our inmost being; but the ego we see here
in the physical world is in its physical manifestation quite in
keeping with our inmost being. Please take note of that, it is an
extremely important fact. Let me put it in another way, half
symbolically, and yet with all the seriousness which the reality
demands. Half symbolically ... yes, but this pictorial approach has
a fulness about it which comes nearer to expressing the truth than
any abstract concepts.
Half symbolically
then, but also half seriously, I ask how we have to think of Adam and
Eve in Paradise before the Fall. We know that according to the Bible
they were unable to see each other's outer physical bodies
before the Fall, and that when they did begin to see them they were
ashamed. That is the expression of a most profound mystery. The Old
Testament tells why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their bodies after
the Fall. It indicates that before the Fall the bodies they had were
more or less spiritual bodies, bodies only accessible to clairvoyant
consciousness, bodies of quite different appearance from physical
bodies, bodies which expressed the ego in its true form. We see that
even the Bible recognises that quite a different bodily form, one
only perceptible to clairvoyant vision, was really fitted to the
deepest being of man, and that the external physical body we have
today actually does not measure up at all to the inner being of man.
What then did Adam and Eve feel when their relation to each other was
no longer one in which they did not see their physical bodies, but on
the contrary, one in which they did see them? They felt that
they had fallen into matter, that, out of a world to which they had
formerly belonged, denser matter than had been theirs formerly had
been instilled into them. They felt that man with his physical body
had been transplanted into a world to which, if the true nature of
his ego is taken into account, he does not belong. No more striking
expression could be found to mark how little the outer expression of
his being, the sensible reality, really measures up to the divine ego
than this being overcome by shame.
But we can look at
the matter from another aspect, which throws quite a different light
upon it. If man had not descended into his physical body, had not
taken into himself the denser matter, he would not have been able to
acquire his ego-consciousness, or in terms of the Greek mind, he
would not have been able to participate in the Dionysos forces. That
also was felt by the Greeks. They felt that the ego of man as it
lives on the physical plane has within it not only those forces of a
higher spiritual, super-sensible world which it had had before the
Fall, and which stream into it out of the spiritual worlds above, but
that it is also dependent upon forces which come from quite another
side, from the opposite direction. We know that before man had
acquired his present ego-consciousness it was normal for him to have
a clairvoyant consciousness. But this clairvoyant consciousness was a
pictorial one, a dreamlike one, it was not a consciousness lit up by
any real intellectual light; man only acquired that later. This old
clairvoyant consciousness had to be lost to man in order that a new
ego-consciousness could arise. To this end the old form of the ego,
the old Dionysos Zagreus had to be destroyed.
We had before us
yesterday the impressive picture of how this came about—of how
in the language of Greek mythology the elder Dionysos was dismembered
by the Titans, and emerged again later as the younger Dionysos, that
is, as our present ego-consciousness, the consciousness which has
come about in human evolution as the achievement of time. But in
order to bring about the birth of the younger Dionysos the human
mother, Semele, has to play her part. The figure of Semele furnishes
another example of the unerring wisdom of Greek feeling for the true
wonders of the world.
A necessary condition
for the coming into existence of this younger human ego was that the
old clairvoyant consciousness had to die out, had to sink below the
horizon of consciousness. Anyone who knew that—and those who
built up Greek mythology did know it—said to himself:
‘Once upon a time the human soul was endowed with a clairvoyant
consciousness which looked up into a world full of spiritual beings
and spiritual deeds, into a world in which the human being was still
a fellow-citizen. But in course of time man has withdrawn from this
spiritual world, and has become a quite different being, a being
permeated by an ego.’ What would happen to a man of today if,
without his having undergone any preparation, any kind of esoteric
training, suddenly, in a moment, there were to stand before him,
instead of the physical world as it appears to physical eyes and
physical ears, the world that was there for the old clairvoyant
consciousness? Let us imagine that, by some miracle or other, instead
of the world which displays itself to him in the star-strewn heavens,
in the rising and the setting of the sun, in mountain and cloud, in
minerals, plants and animals, suddenly the world of old Atlantis were
to stand before a normal human consciousness of today ... the man
would be shattered, so dreadful, so alarming, would seem the world
which is nevertheless all around us; for this world is there behind
everything, it is all around us ... but it is covered over
by the world of our ego. There is a world around us which would fill
the man of today with fear, would shatter him with terror, if he were
suddenly confronted by it. But the ancient Greek felt this too. That
is also implicit in the wonderful, wisdom-filled form of the Dionysos
saga. Dionysos had to come from another direction from that of the
world-wonders in which the ancient Greek consciousness had placed
Zeus and the other figures of the upper gods ... the ancient Greek
felt that in what constituted the world of men there lived something
different from what lived in the gods of Zeus's world.
That the world in
which we live has a heterogeneous constituent was felt too by the
Greek. He felt that an element is included in our physical human
existence that is certainly not present in the super-sensible world.
Hence the younger Dionysos, macrocosmic representative of our modern
ego-consciousness, could not be like the elder Dionysos, a son of
Persephone and Zeus, but he had to be a son of an earthly
mother—he was the son of Semele and Zeus. But we must bear in
mind what the Greek consciousness added in the further development of
this saga. It was brought about through the machinations of Hera that
Semele saw Zeus in his true form, not as the old Atlantean hero, but
as he now is. That could only happen by means of clairvoyant
consciousness. What then does it mean that Semele was to see Zeus for
a moment as he now is? It simply means that Semele became for a
moment clairvoyant. She was destroyed by flame because she saw Zeus
in the flames of the astral world. Semele bears witness to this human
tragedy, a tragedy which would immediately come about if man,
unprepared, were to enter clairvoyantly the spiritual
world.
Hidden somewhere or
other in the world of the Greek tales, all the truths about the
wonders of the world are to be found. We find secreted there how
Dionysos, the macrocosmic representative of the ego—the ego
which no man endowed with normal consciousness can see in more than
one exemplar —derives from a being of the physical world; that,
so to say, what only meets the eye for normal physical consciousness
as a maya was embodied in Dionysos; in other words, we see how
Dionysos had to participate in the great Illusion, in maya.
Today when we discuss the wonders of the world in our prosaic,
dry-as-dust way, we speak of physical, chemical, biological laws. The
Greek used splendid pictures which really penetrate far deeper into
those wonders than our laws that only skim the surface. This is true
of the whole world of Greek legend and Greek mythology.
Thus we see as if in
a mighty occult script, the question arising out of this Greek myth.
If this essential human ego is to manifest in a bodily form, can we
expect to see it in the human form we have in the physical world? No,
for this form is maya, it is not at all a manifestation of
the real ego, it is truly of such a nature that the real egos in Adam
and Eve were right to be ashamed of it. What we as men are confronted
by today is in fact a real contradiction, and the Greek felt that
too. Although it has often been said, very superficially, that he
only paid attention to the outer beauties of Nature, even the Greek
felt the self-contradiction in the external human form. He was not a
naturalist in the sense in which modern man believes he was, but he
felt profoundly that the human form as it walks the Earth today is a
compromise, from no aspect does it show itself to be what in reality
it ought to be. Suppose for a moment that the human form had only
arisen under the influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies,
suppose that no ego had entered into this human form, then it would
have been fashioned as it was when it came over from the previous
embodiments of our Earth, as it came over from Saturn, Sun and Moon.
Then the human form would be different from what it actually is. If
the Earth had not endowed man with the ego, men would be walking
about with quite different-looking physical forms. Secretly, in the
depths of his soul, the ancient Greek wondered what the human form
would look like if earthly men today were ego-less, if men had not
participated in the blessings bestowed by the Earth, had not
participated in the coming into existence of the ego, had not taken
Dionysos into themselves! If there were among us on the Earth men
who had developed purely under the influence of the forces of
physical, etheric and astral bodies, he wondered what they would look
like. And the Greek — uplifted, inspired by the spirit, and
moved by unutterable depth of feeling — even put to himself the
corresponding question: ‘If there were only the ego, if the ego
had not been drawn into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, how
would it be formed?’
It would not have a
physical body such as it has now, it would have a spiritual body that
would be quite different from our external human body. But this
spirit-body exists only for a clairvoyant consciousness, it is
nowhere to be seen in the physical world. What, then, really is the
man who actually walks about the earth? He is neither the ego-less
man, purely under the influence of astral, etheric and physical
bodies, nor is he the ego-man, but a compromise between the two,
something coming about as the result of a combination of both. The
man we see before us is a composite being. The Greeks felt this and
they said to themselves: ‘Since Dionysos, the younger Dionysos,
is really the first teacher of intellectual civilisation, we must
imagine him as not yet in a body which has already been subjected to
the influence of the ego, for it is through the effect of the
Dionysos civilisation that man has first to acquire the intellectual
ego. Therefore Dionysos must be represented as this human ego still
outside the human body.’ So when the Greeks depicted the
procession of Dionysos, which I have called a march of civilisation,
they could only accurately represent it on the basis that the
essential ego of Dionysos had not yet entered the human body, but was
just on the point of doing so; they could only imagine that Dionysos
and all his followers had the kind of bodies which would inevitably
come about if there were no egos in them, if their bodies were under
the influence of forces emanating only from the physical, etheric and
astral bodies. They said to themselves: ‘Dionysos and his rout
should not look like the man of today, whose bodies are the combined
result of the invisible ego and the visible body, but the invisible
ego should hover as an aura over the bodily form and the body should
be so fashioned as would inevitably come about under the sole
influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies, that is, as a man
would inevitably be formed if he had continued to develop the forces
he had brought over from the Moon without taking in the Earth
ego.’
Because the Greek
soul has given a graphic answer to this world-riddle quite in
accordance with the truth, it has portrayed in the figure of
Dionysos, and particularly in the figures of those who constituted
his band of followers, human figures who have the ego outside them,
and whose own external forms really show only the forces of physical,
etheric and astral bodies. These are the satyrs and Sileni who follow
Dionysos on his travels, that wonderful creation of picture forms
which comes to us from Greek thought. That is what man would look
like if we were able to separate the composite form into its
component parts. Imagine for a moment that by some kind of magic the
physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man could be so treated that
the invisible, super-sensible body of the ego could be torn out of
him, then he would turn into a figure resembling those who followed
in the train of Dionysos.
But the Greeks in
their admirable mythology have also drawn attention to something
else. We know that the ego has only gradually drawn into the human
form, that in the time of Atlantis it was not yet within the body.
What then, were these Atlantean bodies like? In the satyrs and the
fauns and in Pan, as we shall see later, Greek fantasy and Greek
intuition has elaborated pictures of the average Atlantean. Under
present Earth conditions such human forms can of course no longer
arise. The figures of the satyrs and the fauns and the whole rout of
Dionysos represented those stragglers who had most closely retained
the ancient Atlantean form. Dionysos had to take with him on his
travels the very men who bore the least trace of the ego within them,
because he was to become the ego's first teacher.
We see then that the
Greeks represented in this train of Dionysos the forms of average
Atlantean men. Atlantean men were so formed that they did not have
skeletons such as men have today. The human body has become more
solid; it was much softer in Atlantean times. For this reason it was
incapable of preservation, and the geology, the palaeontology, of
today will be hard put to it to find any trace of the real Atlantean
man. But a geology, a palaeontology, of quite a different kind has
preserved the Atlantean man for us! It is not in the geological
strata of the earth that we have to delve if we wish to know the man
of prehistoric times, the man whose higher corporeality was still
outside the physical body. To burrow in the earth is quite absurd; in
the earth we shall never find traces of prehistoric man which are
anything but decadent. But in the strata of human spiritual life, in
the strata of spiritual geology which have been preserved for us in
the wonderful Greek mythology, there we shall find the normal,
average, Atlantean man, just as in the geological strata of the earth
we find snail shells and mussel shells. Let us study the
configuration of the fauns, of Pan and of Silenus; it is there that
we have the spiritual fossils which lead us to the Earth's
prehistoric humanity. Therein we see how the ancient Greek
consciousness had an answer to wonders of the world which today may
be dubbed sentimental, dreamy, fantastic, but which nevertheless was
imbued with a kind of science more profound than our modern abstract,
prosaic, intellectual science. There are today many Darwinian and
anti-Darwinian hypotheses as to what prehistoric man looked like. The
Greeks set this world-riddle before us in a way that can satisfy the
soul. Neither Haeckelism nor any other branch of Darwinism, nor the
excavations of geology, tell us anything about the outward appearance
of prehistoric man, but Greek mythology has supplied the answer to
this question for us by its representations of the rout of Dionysos
in its plastic art.
We must come to feel
that Greek mythology really provides a serious answer to questions
about the wonders of the world, and then we shall be able to enter
into it ever more deeply. It is only someone who does not understand
what underlies these things who can say, ‘I can't accept
that interpretation, it is too far fetched.’ Anyone who knows
the whole story in all its ramifications, besides knowing the true
development of man as revealed by the Akasha Chronicle, knows that
there is nothing fantastic, nothing sentimental in what is being put
before you today as Spiritual Science. The fancifulness, the
sentimentality, lies in the abstract, empirical science of today,
which imagines that it can dig up from the strata of the physical
earth something that is not there, and can make a study of that while
it ignores the wondrous script of spiritual geology which comes
before us, to the rescue of human wisdom and its evolution, in the
impressive mythology of ancient Greece.
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