Lecture 8
25th August, 1911
N
the course of yesterday's lecture we saw how manifold cosmic forces play
into human nature, and we also saw how the Greeks experienced these forces
and gave them pictorial expression in a mythology most of which is
still extant. My frequent references to Greek mythology have not at
all been made with the object of interpreting it, but rather to throw
the light which it affords upon certain pristine truths. Pictures,
together with what we gather from history, are a better help in this
respect than our abstract ideas, which are too impoverished to be
able to bring to adequate expression the great wonders of the world.
Then too in the figure of Dionysos our attention was drawn to
something which is associated with the deepest forces of our souls,
with what we can call the challenges or ordeals of the soul. What
then is meant by the expression ‘ordeals of the soul’?
Ordeals are what come upon a man whenever he tries to enter upon the
paths leading to the spiritual worlds. I made some reference
yesterday to the lightest, the gentlest of them. In general they
consist of the experiences a man can have on his way into the higher
worlds, experiences to which his soul is not equal without having
undergone a certain preparation. The ordeal thus lies in the fact
that a man has to make great efforts to endure certain pieces of
knowledge, to meet calmly certain experiences. A soul-experience of
this nature is indicated towards the end of the second of my
Rosicrucian dramas,
The Soul's Probation,
and this will perhaps help to make clear what such an inner ordeal
actually is.
Let us call to mind
the figure there described, the figure we know as Capesius. We know
from both these two plays of mine the experiences which he has
undergone. We have seen how little by little he draws near to the
spiritual life, how to begin with the sound instinct, which has
alienated him from the kind of scholarship he had hitherto pursued,
gives him premonitions of it but no more. He begins to suspect that
there is a higher reality behind the world of the mind. It is mainly
because he gives rein to these premonitions, it is because he allows
them full play, that he inevitably becomes impressed by the exoteric
teachings of Spiritual Science. The communications of Spiritual
Science differ fundamentally from those of other scientific or
literary discourse. Whereas the other simply appeals to our
intellect, and perhaps indirectly through our intellect to our
feeling, a man is only allowing Spiritual or Occult Science to work
upon him rightly if he is stirred to the inmost depths of his soul,
if his soul is turned inside out, so to say, if it is completely
changed by what flows therefrom, not as abstract content, but as life
itself. Something like that is what Capesius is depicted as feeling
in the first scene of the second Play, after he has wrestled with
himself as a result of his premonitions, and then plunged deeply into
the writings of Benedictus, into the ‘Book of Life’. And
that not only causes him to ponder, to rack his brains to try to get
at the meaning of what he reads, as he would do whatever he was
reading, but he feels the spiritual world break in upon him in a way
he does not understand. It has yet another effect upon him. It would
be easy to compare the mood which prevails in the first scene of the
second Play with the mood at the opening of Goethe's
Faust;
it is however essentially different. The mood of
Faust merely shows that, having arrived at a certain scepticism, a
certain doubt, as to all knowledge, a man then has an inner urge to
find other ways of obtaining knowledge than the usual ones. In
Capesius's case something else happens. To begin with he is
torn in two, because it makes him recognise doubt, persistence in
ignorance, as man's greatest sin. He learns to acknowledge that
something lies in the depths of the human soul of which the normal
consciousness is quite unaware. A treasure slumbers in the deepest
strata of our souls; we are harbouring something in depths of soul
which the normal consciousness is at first incapable of
recognising.
When we enter fully
into the meaning and the true significance of Spiritual Science, we
realise that it is no mere selfish yearning, but deep-seated duty
towards the macrocosmic forces not to allow the buried treasure in
our souls to be wasted. We come to realise that deep down in every
man there lies something which once upon a time the gods implanted in
him out of their own body, their own substance. We come to feel:
‘The gods have sacrificed a piece of their own existence, they
have as it were torn away a fragment of their own flesh, and have
deposited it within human souls.’ We men can do one of two
things with this treasure, this divine heritage. We can out of a
certain indolence say: ‘What do I want with knowledge? The gods
will soon direct me to my goal!’ But they do not do so, for
they have buried this treasure within us in order that we may bring
it to the light of day out of our own freedom. Thus we can let this
treasure go to waste. That is one of the courses which the soul can
take. The alternative is that, recognising our highest duty towards
the heavenly powers, we should say to ourselves: ‘We must raise
up this treasure, we must lift it out of the hidden depths into our
consciousness.’ What are we doing when we bring up this
treasure out of the unconscious? We give it a different form from the
one it had earlier in the body of the gods, but in a mysterious way
we give it back again to the gods in the form which it has acquired
through us. We are not cultivating in our knowledge any private
concern of our own, we are not doing anything merely in the interests
of our own egotism, we are simply carrying back into the higher
worlds, in the changed form which it has acquired through us, the
noble heritage which the gods have given us, so that they may share
it with us. But if we neglect this treasure, if we allow it to
deteriorate, then we are in a very real sense being
egotistic, for then this treasure in our souls is irrevocably lost to
the world-process. We are allowing our divine heritage to go to
waste, if we are reluctant to recognise its presence in us.
The mood of Capesius
springs from this. In the first scene of the second Play he feels it
his duty not to stick fast in doubt, not to persist in the feeling
that one can know nothing; he feels that it would be a violation of
his duty to the cosmic powers to allow the treasure in his soul to go
to waste. Only he feels to begin with incapable of using the
apparatus of his body to draw out these riches, and that is what
causes the conflict in his soul. There is nothing of the Faustian
attitude here. On the contrary, Capesius says to himself: ‘You
must acknowledge that you cannot persist in your ignorance; you may
not surrender to the feeling which overtakes you when you think how
little strength our customary life has placed It our disposal for
drawing out this treasure.’ Then there is only one resource
left to us — confidence in our own soul. If the soul patiently
develops what lies within it, little by little, then the strength
which it feels as yet to be inadequate is bound to become ever
greater, until it will at length really be able to fulfil its
obligations towards the cosmic powers. This trust in the soul's
powers of endurance and its fruitfulness must uphold us when, as
often, because we only bring with us strength drawn from the past, we
feel afraid, not knowing what to do; when it seems: ‘You must,
and at this moment you cannot.’ All the soul's ordeals
are like this. From this fear, this feeling of impotence, we at first
shrink back, and it is only when we find the strength which arises
from this confidence in ourselves, from this trust which grows in us
gradually through our deepening in Spiritual Science, that we are
able to pass safely through such trials.
You will already have
recognised from the whole trend of these lectures that two cosmic
influences play their part in man, in his whole nature and being. And
to bring these two currents into harmony great strength of soul is
needed, strength to confront them both with fortitude and courage.
This is clearly expressed at the end of my second Play
The Soul's Probation.
There we see how Capesius has undergone
important occult experiences, how he has been permitted a glimpse
into his previous incarnation, how he has been allowed to know what
he was centuries ago on Earth. Then we come to a sentence which is
really not to be taken lightly. We come to the saying that knowledge
of one life lays obligations upon us for many lives, not simply for
one. When we look back into our former incarnation, when we see how
we have behaved to this or that person, when we see the debt we have
incurred towards them, we feel that we have a heavy burden of debt to
repay. And then there comes to us a thought which might well rob us
of all courage; we recognise: ‘It is quite impossible for you
to make good in your present incarnation the debt which you have
brought upon yourself.’ Many men have a great longing to make
all the reparation possible, but that springs from egotism. Most men
in their egotism find it intolerable to have to carry through the
gate of death so very much of their debit account, unbearable to have
to say to themselves: ‘You must die and must take your debt of
guilt in respect of this or the other matter with you into your next
incarnation.’ But courage to admit freely and frankly,
‘You have wickedness upon your soul’, calls for a high
degree of disinterestedness, whereas usually the human being wants to
think himself as good as is his idea of a good man.
Anyone who has had
occult experiences of the kind we have been speaking of has to
recognise his evil propensities frankly, and he must go further, he
must accept the impossibility of making everything good in this life.
Romanus expresses this in
The Soul's Probation
[ 1 ]
in a speech which may serve to
illustrate this point. He says that guilt from the preceding life has
to be carried through the gate of death, and that we must have the
courage to face the moment when the Guardian stands before us and
presents us with our debit account. This situation has to be taken
seriously. It brings us face to face with the other current which may
be described in the following way. When the human being cultivates
self-knowledge — not just superficial self-knowledge, but true
self-knowledge — when he really learns something of his inmost
being, then as a rule he discovers something in himself which he
finds it very difficult to accept, something which is in the highest
degree repugnant to him, something which, when it really dawns upon
him, is absolutely shattering. Contrast this crushing feeling in the
depths of the soul with the sentiment which prevails in so many
people, even in those who have some acquaintance with Spiritual
Science. Flow often do we hear it said: ‘I do that with no
thought of myself, I don't want anything for myself,’ and
so on. It may be that just when one is most self-seeking one puts on
a mask, one hides this fact from oneself by saying, ‘I want
nothing for myself.’ That is a common experience. But it is
better to acknowledge to oneself the truth, that at bottom even the
most unselfish actions are performed for our own sakes, for by
recognising this we lay a foundation which will enable us gradually
to bear the true picture with which the Guardian of the Threshold
confronts us.
Now let us consider
the question at a higher level. Why is it that we find so much in
ourselves which is inharmonious? That is connected with the whole of
evolution. We shall have to undertake a deeper study of human
evolution if we want to understand why it is just when the human
being plunges more deeply into his own nature and his own being that
he finds so much that is inharmonious. Let us assume for a moment
that there is a treasure hidden in the depths of our soul of which
the normal consciousness today is quite unaware, and that when in the
course of our soul's trials we discover it, we find so much to
shock us that we probably shrink back in terror, feeling completely
shattered. What is it that we carry within us? We all know that
humanity underwent a very complicated evolution before man reached
his present stage. We know that in order to reach his present form he
had to go through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions and that only
after having done this did he enter upon Earth evolution. One day the
complexity of the facts of life will be recognised in wider circles
and people will realise that it is impossible to understand man or
his environment without taking into consideration the Saturn, Sun and
Moon evolutions; people will then see how very naive, how
superficial, is the contribution of the abstract science of today.
Thus what we have today as the fourfold human being has been slowly
prepared and formed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. By
the time the Moon evolution came to an end, the human being had
developed up to a certain point. The time between Moon and Earth
evolutions was occupied in working upon the spiritual element which
had been present in man during the Moon evolution, elaborating it
into a new germ for Earth evolution.
What, then, was man
like — man, the product of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions
— when he arrived on Earth? We have already dealt with this
question from very many aspects. Today we will look at it from yet
another side. We cannot come to know occult facts by pinning
ourselves down to a few abstract concepts; we have to approach the
truth by throwing light on the facts from all sides. The paths of
higher truth are complex, and only he can walk them who is willing
patiently to trace their labyrinth.
What was man like
when, bringing with him the fruits of his Moon evolution, he arrived
on Earth? Nothing of what we are familiar with today as the physical
body of man was present at the commencement of Earth evolution.
Although the first rudiments of this physical body were present in
the Saturn evolution, were further developed on the Sun, and had
already reached a high stage of development on the Moon, we must
nevertheless understand that in the intervening periods between
Saturn and Sun, and again between the Sun and Moon evolutions, all
that had evolved of the physical and other bodies had reverted to
spirit. Everything again passed over into imperceptible
substantiality at the end of the Moon evolution. The physical which
had evolved on Saturn and subsequently been further fashioned was no
longer physical, everything had been taken up into the spirit again;
the physical was as it were in solution, was present only as forces
— forces with the capacity to call forth physical forms, but
with the physical element not actually present. When Earth evolution
began, what we call the physical was not there in a physical, but
only in a spiritual form, a spiritual form which was capable of
condensing little by little to the physical. That has to be borne in
mind.
We can go further. We
know that we are now in the postAtlantean age, and that this was
preceded by the Atlantean and the Lemurian ages. Beyond the Lemurian
age we come to still earlier periods of Earth evolution. But at the
beginning of Lemuria man was still not to be found in his present
form as physical body. What today is physical was at that time, even
where it was densest, still only in etheric form; that is to say, the
forces of our present physical body were at that time in solution as
it were within the ether body, but the forces of this ether body were
such that when they condensed in accordance with their own nature
they were then able to bring about our physical body. Thus these
etheric forces were in a way the forces of the physical body but they
were not present in a physical condition. Thus when man entered upon
his Lemurian development, his densest body was still an etheric one.
Condensation to the physical body only began from the Lemurian time
onwards. It was brought about in a very complicated manner. Thus for
spiritual vision man was there at the outset in an etheric body, and
this etheric body contained those physical forces which had been
acquired through the course of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. These
forces had the tendency to condense, so that little by little the
physical body could come into existence, but they were not yet in
physical form. But had the forces of the physical body condensed in
the way they tended to do at that time, even in his physical
appearance man today would have looked very different.
We must be quite
clear that, in fact, man's appearance today is quite different
from what he was by predisposition in the time which preceded ancient
Lemuria. During the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and
post-Atlantean epochs there have been at work in human nature not
only the forces which were already present in man in rudimentary
form, but other forces as well. If we wish to form an idea of what
the further working of the forces of the etheric body has been, it
can best be illustrated in a particular organic system of the human
physical body. Let us consider what a part of the human being
originating from the ether body has become since the time of Lemuria;
let this diagram represent the human ether body as it was at the
beginning of Earth evolution, before the Lemurian epoch. In it we
find numerous currents, manifold directions of force, which are the
outcome of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; from among these we
pick out a certain number the purpose of which was to bring into
being in man's physical organism his blood circulation with its
centralisation in the heart. Thus there are forces which were
acquired under Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions which were anchored in
the etheric body before Lemuria, and which then condensed in such a
way as to bring about the blood-system with its centre in the heart.
We have been describing a particular organic system which from the
time of Lemuria onwards, out of specific etheric forces in our ether
body, has little by little reached physical densification. Just as,
given the right treatment, you can see salt-crystals crystallise out
from a solution of common salt in water, just as a crystalline form
becomes visible in the solution, so in a higher sense something of
the same kind happens to the blood-system and the heart. They
crystallise out of special forces in the human etheric body which
have an inherent tendency to condense to this physical organic
system. It has only been during the course of Earth evolution that
they have been able to develop into the physical heart.
| Diagram 4 Click image for large view | |
We have yet to see
why that took place in the course of Earth evolution, and not for
instance in the Moon evolution. What really do the blood circulation
and the heart mean to us? They are the ether-world condensed, they
are the densified forces of the etheric world! Now from the moment
these forces reached the degree of density manifested today by the
physical heart, by the blood and the whole circulatory system, they
would have come to an end as far as Earth evolution is concerned, a
kind of death would have set in. The important and mysterious feature
of Earth evolution is not only that this densification took place,
not only that the forces which had come over from Saturn, Sun and
Moon condensed to such an organic system, not only that what was in
the etheric body became physical, but that as regards each of our
systems of organs in Earth evolution an impulse entered whereby what
was once etheric and had become physical, is once more dissolved, is
changed back again into the ether. That this is so, that after the
etheric forces have condensed to a system of organs they are not
allowed to rest at this as their goal, but that other forces then
intervene which dissolve them again, is one of the most momentous
impulses of our Earth evolution. In the very moment when our human
organs have reached the point of greatest densification in earthly
evolution, certain macrocosmic powers re-dissolve the substantiality
of the organic system, so that what was there before and had
gradually lapsed into this organic condition, now emerges from it
again, again becomes visible.
This process can be
most closely followed by the occultist in the case of the heart and
the blood streaming through it; it is possible to see how this
dissolution comes about, how the Earth-impulses enter into the
substance of such an organic system. For clairvoyant sight something
streams continuously out of our heart — our heart, the outcome
of our blood circulation. If you see clairvoyantly the blood
pulsating through the human body, then you also see how this blood
becomes rarefied again in the heart, how in its finest
elements—not in its coarser, but in its finer parts — it
is dissolved and returns to the etheric form. Just as the blood has
gradually been formed in the ether, so in the human body of the
present day we have the reverse process. The blood becomes etherised,
and streams of ether flow continuously from the heart towards the
head, so that we see the etheric body built up in an opposite
direction by way of the blood. Thus what crystallised out from the
etheric during the early part of Lemuria to form the human blood
circulation and the heart we now see returning to the etheric form
and streaming in the human etheric body towards the brain. And unless
these streams of ether were to flow continuously from the heart
towards the head, however much we tried to think about the world and
to know about it, we should be quite unable to make use of our brain
as the instrument for thought. As an instrument for knowledge the
brain would be completely useless if it were only to function as
physical brain. We have to resort to occultism to learn how the brain
would work today if it were left to itself. The human being would
only be able to think thoughts connected with the inner needs of his
body. For example he would be able to think, ‘Now I am hungry,
now I am thirsty, now I will satisfy this or that instinct.’ If
he were entirely dependent upon his physical brain man would only be
able to think thoughts connected with his own bodily needs, he would
be the perfect egoist. But currents of a fine etheric substance
coming from the heart stream continuously through the brain. These
etheric currents are indirectly related to a delicate and important
part of the human brain called the pineal gland. They continuously
lave the pineal gland, which becomes luminous and its movements as
physical brain-organ respond in harmony with these etheric currents
emanating from the heart. Thereby these etheric currents are brought
again into connection with the physical brain and give it an impress
which enables us to know, in addition to egotistic knowledge,
something of the outside world, something that is not ourselves. Thus
by way of the pineal gland our etherised blood reacts upon our brain.
You will find an even more detailed description of this from a
certain standpoint in the lectures which are about to be published
under the title
Occult Physiology,
[ 2 ]
lectures originally held in Prague. There I have pointed out from
another aspect something of the function of the pineal gland. So you
see we have not only a process within the Earth which leads to
solidification, but also a reverse process of rarefaction. When we
grasp this we are driven to the conclusion that we bear in us forces
which will cause us to revert to the form we had during the Saturn,
Sun and Moon evolutions.
In his normal
consciousness today, man knows nothing of the marvellous play of
forces in his ether body; he knows nothing of this communication
between heart and brain. Anyone who is made aware of it through
occult development becomes aware of something peculiar about these
etheric currents, and here self-knowledge yields something very
striking, something of the highest significance. One comes to know
how these forces stream upwards from the heart to the brain, to form
the brain in such a way that the human being may be able to make use
of it as the instrument of his soul-life. But at the same time one
learns that these forces have not passed through the human
organisation unscathed, that they do not leave the heart in the same
state in which they entered it. All that man has meanwhile developed
out of the unconscious by way of lower instincts and appetites, all
his natural propensities, are carried along in the etheric stream
which is borne upwards from the heart. Thus we received this current
in ancient Lemuria as a pure etheric stream which had no other
craving, no other will so to say, than to condense to form the
wondrous structure of our heart. Since that time we have gone on
living as physical men with this heart and this blood circulation, we
have passed through a number of incarnations without knowing anything
of this solidification of our original ether bodies into the physical
parts of heart and blood circulation. And we have become permeated
with desires, longings, sympathies and antipathies, emotions and
passions, habits and mistakes, and the reborn ether body which now
streams upwards to the brain is darkened, is filled with all this. We
send all this upwards from our heart and now, in real self-knowledge,
we become aware of it. We become aware that what we received from the
gods themselves in the depths of our life-body we are unable to give
back to the gods again in the same state in which we received it, but
that it has become sullied by our own being.
Little by little we
must come to know more closely what it is that I have just described
as a kind of impurity of our own being. If we would understand the
matter we have to bear in mind the following considerations. At the
beginning of the Saturn evolution, or rather before it had begun,
there was one single etheric stream for the whole of mankind and for
the whole of Earth evolution. At the very moment when the Saturn
evolution started a split occurred in the cosmic powers. We shall
learn later why that happened; now I only want just to mention it.
This duality in the whole of cosmic activity only started from the
moment when Saturn began to develop. Greek mythology indicates it by
making ancient Saturn or Cronos, as the Greeks called him, the
opponent of his father Uranus. This shows that they were aware of the
original unity of all the macrocosmic forces. But when Saturn or
Cronos began to crystallise, at once something hidden in the nature
of Cronos put him in opposition to the general evolution. To repeat
what has been said before, we can put it in this way: The totality
of the divine-spiritual Beings who held sway in evolution when the
development of the planet Saturn began split in two; so that we now
have one evolutionary stream which is directly involved in everything
which takes place through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions down to our
Earth, and another stream side by side with this main one.
You can form a rough
idea of this secondary stream if you think of the air, the atmosphere
surrounding our Earth, as a finer substance, and compare it with the
denser parts of the Earth, with water and with the solid elements. We
could likewise imagine that a denser development went on in Saturn,
Sun and Moon, but that this denser evolution was all the time
sheathed in a more rarefied evolution. We could imagine that there
were divine-spiritual Beings working directly on Saturn, Sun and Moon
in their own substance, but that there were always other
divine-spiritual Beings in the periphery who surrounded the spiritual
Beings working directly in Saturn, Sun and Moon just as air surrounds
the Earth. Thus we have indicated two realms of gods, two spiritual
realms, one of which plays a direct part in all that takes place
successively in the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, the other holding
itself aloof, so to say, and only intervening indirectly. Now we must
try to form an idea of how the one category of gods is related to the
other. Please take careful note of the relationship of those gods
whose range is properly speaking more comprehensive, I mean those who
take part directly in the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, to those
others who encircle this cosmic globe in its successive stages.
You will get a better
idea of this if you first have a look at man himself. Take the human
soul: it thinks. What does it mean, to think? It means to bring
about thoughts. Thinking is a process which goes on in us, and while
on the one hand it makes real soul-beings of us, on the other hand it
draws us upward and causes our thoughts all the time to envelop our
souls. Now man with his thoughts, even as a being of soul, is still
at a relatively subordinate stage of world-organisation, but the
Beings whom we have just referred to as gods, dividing them into two
streams, are at a far higher stage. Imagine for a moment that man was
capable not only of grasping his thought purely as thought, but that
the human soul was so strong that what it thought immediately became
a being. Imagine that we were to give birth to our thoughts as
beings, that whenever we grasped a thought it straightaway existed.
(In a certain way it does remain in the Akasha Chronicle, but it does
not become so dense that we are confronted by it as a reality.)
Imagine that we were not just to think thoughts, but that with each
thought we were to bring forth a being! Then you would have grasped
what takes place within the divine-spiritual world. The gods who were
living in the complete harmony, the perfect unity, which existed
among them before Saturn, represented themselves; they thought. But
their thoughts were not like human thoughts, which we have to
pronounce unreal; they were Beings, they were other gods. Thus we
have generations of gods whose reality is original, and others who
are merely the representations — the real ideas
— of the gods directly associated with the Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions. They are the gods who surround the world-sphere in the
course of its development through the Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions.
Thus we have two
categories of gods; one of them is the thought-world of the other, is
in fact related to the other as our thoughts are related to our real
soul-existence. What have we so far usually called the gods who are
merely the thoughts of the others? Because of certain characteristics
of theirs we have called them Luciferic beings, and henceforth we
must assign to the category of Luciferic beings all those of whom we
can say that ‘the original gods had need to present themselves
to themselves in self-knowledge.’ Therefore they confronted
themselves with the Luciferic beings as cosmic thoughts, or cosmic
thought-beings, just as the human being is confronted by his
thoughts. And just as man actually first comes to know himself in his
thoughts, so the original gods learned to know themselves in Lucifer
and his hosts. We could express that in another way; we could say
that these beings, who are really only the ideas of the others,
always lagged behind the others in their development. The advanced
gods have so to say left something of themselves behind, so that they
could look back and see themselves in this mirror thrown off from
their own substance—just as we in everyday life can only see
ourselves in a mirror. Thus in fact the Luciferic beings are backward
beings, entities thrown off by the original gods, entities who are
there to form a mirror of self-knowledge for the progressive
gods.
In a certain sense
what goes on in our own souls is a complete picture of this
macrocosm. Only the pattern prefigured in the macrocosm occurs in us
reversed. We bear in our microcosm a copy of this division between
the ranks of the gods, of whom one class is original and the other
born out of this original class and existing in order that the
original gods may present themselves to themselves. From this you can
well see that there must be a great difference between these two
categories of gods.
The difference is
quite obvious. It is shown in the fact that our entire self,
including all that is unconscious in us, the whole comprehensive self
from which our bodily organisation, has also sprung, derives from the
original generation of gods. But what we experience, what we can span
with our everyday consciousness comes from the generation of gods who
are only the thoughts of the original gods. Our being comes to us
from two sides. Our organisation as a whole, with all that is
unconscious in us, comes from the original generation of gods. What
we are conscious of comes from the other side, from the generation of
gods who only hover around the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Hence
when we examine closely our own life of ideation we feel that the
idea or mental representation is, in a higher sense, only the
youngest daughter, so to say, of a line of gods; we feel the
unreality, the merely notional transience, the elusiveness, of our
life of consciousness. That is something which also dawned upon the
pupils of the Greek Mysteries, in that it was made clear to them:
‘There are divine streams running through the whole of
evolution which are all-embracing, all-inclusive, which pour their
entire being into us, streams of which we are quite unconscious; and
there are other streams which are only taken into the ordinary normal
consciousness.’ Then the Greek pupil became clear that he must
disregard his formal consciousness and turn to the ancient gods, who
were also called the gods of the underworld, gods in whose nature
Dionysos shared, for only so would he be able to acquire knowledge of
the true being of man.
There is only one
Being in Earth evolution through whom something quite new can enter
into us — a new element of clairvoyance, but also a new element
of feeling and activity, steeped in occult forces.
The fact is that of
the divine stream which hovered over the Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions, up to a certain point of time only what I have just
described could enter into human life. It streamed into human
consciousness from outside, so to say, without man's descending
into his inmost being, into the region of the lower gods. And what
flowed in in this way was something incapable of ever reaching true
world-reality. It was not possible to reach the true world-reality
through external knowledge. In order to reach that it would have been
necessary for something to be instilled into what through the long
ages of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, had entered our normal
consciousness from without — something which was not just the
thought-life of the sub-earthly, the Chthonic deities, but something
which was itself a reality, something which would cause our mere life
of thought — all that seems to us to have been exuded from our
soul as our unreal thoughtlife — suddenly for a moment to be so
laid hold of by a substantial reality ... that a particularly
precious thought should stand fast and abide with us, close to us as
our very soul, as a reality. Something like this would have to happen
if the gods moving in the periphery were to work in the way that the
other gods have acted throughout the ages — the gods who
through the more extended self have worked right into our bodily
organisation. Something would have to stream into us from without,
which would signify a kind of renewal from the spiritual world, a
resurrection, a revivification of what had first organised us and
then withdrawn into the depths of our consciousness.
What entered into
these peripheral gods at a certain moment was in fact the Christ, who
at the Baptism by John in the Jordan took possession of the body of
Jesus of Nazareth. In Christ a divine Being entered into physical
life by the same path which had been taken by those gods who earlier
had only been the thought-life of other gods. But now for the first
time a real Being enters, a Being who is not just the thought of the
other gods, but who is substantial and autonomous. Out of the
world-space, in which hitherto only the thoughts of other gods had
lived, there comes a divine thought which is real. What had made that
possible? It was possible because this significant event of the
Baptism by John in the Jordan had been preceded by a long preparation
lasting through the whole of evolution through Saturn, Sun and Moon.
What happened on the banks of the Jordan, and later in the Mystery of
Golgotha, echoes another momentous event that took place in the
far-distant past, as far back as the time of the Sun evolution.
We know that prior to
Earth evolution there were the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. On
Earth we experience the Mystery of Golgotha and the Baptism by John
in the Jordan. It can be elicited from the Akasha Chronicle that
during the Sun evolution another important event took place. You
could describe it as the culmination of a long process. The upper
gods were the thoughts of the lower gods, and these upper gods found
that it suited them better, (putting it colloquially) to live in the
rarefied element of the upper world rather than in the denser element
of which the Earth was composed. It was during the Sun evolution that
this separation took place between the two different generations of
gods, of whom one elected to continue to live, as the real ancient
gods, with the elements of earth, water and air, whereas the other
found it too difficult to enter into these dense elements, and
continued to live only in what we call the etheric elements, first
with warmth, then with light, chemical and life ether. We can also
designate these two generations of gods working side by side by
saying that the one chose the more difficult path, that took them
through the denser elements, while the other chose the easy way,
flitting around the first generation in the chemical and life-ether
out of which they formed their bodies. Everything which lives in the
finer etheric elements was developed in this way, forces were
developed which in the long run were only able to live in these finer
elements. This took place in the main during the Sun evolution.
But towards the
middle of the Sun evolution something stupendous happened. A Being
developed forces not in accordance with the finer, rarer etheric
elements. Side by side with the Mystery of Golgotha which we call the
great Earth-sacrifice we can speak of a Sun-sacrifice in that a
Being who had chosen to dwell among the gods who only wanted to live
in the finer elements nevertheless developed powers of densification
adequate to the Earth elements. And so, since the Sun evolution, we
have had in the ranks of the Beings equipped only with forces adapted
to the etheric spheres, a Being who, within the cosmic ether, has an
inner relationship with the earthly element. From the time of the Sun
evolution this Being waited for the right moment to introduce the
forces He had developed into the Earth itself. It was
Zarathustra's great merit to recognise ‘In the sun in the
heavens above us something remains from the old Sun evolution. For
the present this Being is in the sun. But the moment is drawing near
when He will also bring down to earth his form that is suited to the
earthly elements.’ Then came the time when humanity, though
still not mature enough to recognise this Being who had become part
of the etheric world in Himself, was nevertheless able to recognise
Him in reflection; that was a stage on the way.
Thus in course of
evolution, for reasons which we shall speak of tomorrow, this Being
showed Himself to humanity to begin with not directly, but in a
reflected form, which we can describe as related to reality as
moonlight, which is reflected sunlight, is related to the direct
light of the sun. That Being who began to prepare Himself for His
great deed on Golgotha during the old Sun evolution, was first shown
to humanity in mirrored form. And this reflected form was called by
the ancient Hebrew people, Jahve. Jahve or Jehovah is the reflection
of Christ; he is really the same as Christ, only seen in a mirror, so
to say, seen aforetime, prophetically — prefigured until the
time was ripe for Him to show Himself not merely in reflection, but
in His own, His pristine form.
Thus we see the most
important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see
humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew
civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the
Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too
that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say
in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ
just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the
representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through
things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak
of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the
Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you
would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets
have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people
spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all
that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is
related to its archetype.
Notes:
1.
Scene 13.
2.
Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., 1951.
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