FIFTH
LECTURE:
JANUARY 1, 1914
I have spoken to you about the Sibyls, pointing out how
they appear as shadows of the Greek philosophers in Ionia. Through
centuries they conjured up from their chaotic soul-life a mixture of
deep wisdom and sheer spiritual chaos, and they exerted much more
influence on the spiritual life of Southern Europe and its
neighbouring regions than external history is willing to recognise. I
wanted to indicate that this peculiar outpouring from the souls of
the Sibyls points to a certain power of the human soul which in
ancient times, and even in the third post-Atlantean epoch, had some
good significance. But as one culture-epoch succeeds another in the
course of human history, changes occur. The forces which the Sibyls
employed to produce, at times, sheer nonsense, were good, legitimate
forces in the third post-Atlantean epoch, when Astrology was studied
and the wisdom of the stars worked into the souls of men, harmonising
the forces which later emerged chaotically as Sibyllism.
You can gather from this that forces which prevail
anywhere in the world — including those which prevailed in the
souls of the Sibyls — should never be called good or bad in
themselves; it depends on when and where they appear. The forces that
appeared in the souls of the Sibyls were good and legitimate, but
they were not adapted to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch; for the
forces that were then intended to prevail in human souls were not
those that come from subconscious depths, but those that speak to the
soul through the clarity of the Ego. Yesterday we heard how the
Hebrew prophets strove to suppress the Sibylline forces and to bring
out the forces that speak through the clarity of the Ego. This indeed
was the essential characteristic of the old Hebrew school of prophecy
— to press back the chaotic Sibylline forces and to bring out
those which can speak through the Ego.
The fulfilment of this task given to the Hebrew prophets
— we could call it a task of bringing the Sibylline forces into
the right path of evolution — came about through the Christ
Impulse. When the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of
humanity in the way known to us, one result was that the chaotic
forces of the Sibyls were thrust back for a time, as when a stream
disappears below ground and reappears later on. These forces were
indeed to reappear in another form, a form purified by the Christ
Impulse, after the Christ Impulse had entered into the aura of the
earth. Just as in human life, after we have been using our
soul-forces throughout the day, we have to let them sink into nightly
unconsciousness, so that they may reawaken in the morning, so it was
necessary that the Sibylline forces, legitimate as they had been
during the third post-Atlantean epoch, should flow for a while below
the surface, unnoticed, in order to reappear — slowly, as we
shall hear.
The forces — legitimate human forces — which
emerged so chaotically in the Sibyls were cleansed, so to speak, by
the Christ Impulse, but then they sank below the surface of the soul.
Human beings in their ordinary consciousness remained entirely
unaware that the Christ continued to work on these forces; but so it
was.
From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it is a superb
drama to watch this impact of the Christ Impulse; to see how, from
the Council of Nicaea onwards, human beings in their normal
consciousness quarrel ardently about dogmas, while what was most
important for Christianity takes its course in the subconscious
depths of the soul. The Christ Impulse does not work where there is
strife, but below the surface, and human wisdom will have to uncover
a great deal that we may think strange, if we look at it
superficially. Much will have to be revealed as a symptom of the
Christ Impulse working below the surface. Then we shall understand
that essential developments in the historical configuration of
Christianity in the West could not come about through the quarrels of
Bishops, but sprang from decisions which were reached below the
surface of the soul and rose into consciousness like dreams, so that
men were aware only of these dreamlike apprehensions and could not
discern what was going on in the depths. I will mention only one
symptom of this. There are events that reflect, as though through
dreams, the activity which the Christ was undertaking in the depths
of the soul in order to bring human soul-forces into a right
alignment with the course of Western history.
Many of you will perhaps guess something of what I mean
if we observe that on October 28, 312, when Constantine the Great,
the son of Constantine Chlorus, was making war against Maxentius on
the outskirts of Rome, a decision was taken which proved to be of the
highest importance for the configuration of Christianity throughout
the West. This battle in front of Rome was not determined by military
orders, or by the conscious acumen of the leaders, but by dreams and
Sibylline omens! We are told — and this is the significant
thing — that when Constantine was moving against the gates of
Rome, Maxentius had a dream which said to him: “Do not remain
in the place where you are now.” Under the influence of this
dream, reinforced by an appeal to the Sibylline Books, Maxentius
committed the greatest folly — looked at externally —
that he could have committed. He left Rome and fought the battle —
with an army four times the size of Constantine's — not
within the protection of the walls of Rome, but outside them. For the
message received from the Sibylline Books ran thus: “If you
fight against Constantine outside the gates of Rome, you will destroy
Rome's greatest enemy.” A truly oracular utterance!
Maxentius obeyed it and with faith and courage went outside the
gates. As on an earlier occasion another Sibylline oracle had guided
Croesus, so was Maxentius guided by this one. He destroyed the enemy
of Rome — himself.
Constantine had a different dream. It said to him:
“Carry in front of your troops the monogram of Christ!”
He did so and he won the battle. A decisive event for the
configuration of Europe, brought about by dreams and Sibylline
sayings! There we gain a glimpse of what was going on below the
surface in the soul-life of Europe. Truly, like a stream which has
disappeared into mountain cavities, so that it is no longer to be
seen up above and one may form the strangest conjectures about it, so
the Christ Impulse works on below the surface — works, at
first, as occult, i.e. hidden, reality.
My dear friends, allow me at this point to confess to
you that when in my occult researches I tried to follow this stream,
I often lost trace of it; I had to search for places where it
reappeared. I could suppose that the stream of the Christ Impulse had
reappeared slowly, and that even today it has not fully reappeared
but can only give evidence of itself. But where and how did it come
to the surface? That is the question. Where did it lay hold of souls
sufficiently to make an impression on their consciousness?
If you follow up the various expositions in my books and
lecture-courses, and if you feel about it as I do, you will find,
especially in the older ones, that what I have said in connection
with the name of the Holy Grail is one of the least satisfying parts.
That is how I feel and I hope that others have felt it too. It is not
that I have said anything that could not be upheld, but simply that
when I spoke of this, I felt unsatisfied. I had to give out what
could be told with confidence, but often, when I tried to trace the
further course of this stream — when I tried to unravel the
further occult development of Christianity in the West — then
before my soul rose the admonition: “You must first read the
name of Parsifal in its right place.”
I had to experience the fact that occult researches are
guided in a remarkable way. So that we may not be enticed into
speculation, or into realms where we can very easily be borne away
from occult truth on the wings of fantasy, we have to be guided
slowly and by stages, if at last our research is to bring to light
the truth which can of itself impart a kind of conviction of its
rightness. So I often had to be content with waiting for an answer to
the injunction: “Search out where the name of Parsifal stands!”
I had quite understood something you all know from the Parsifal saga
— after Parsifal returns, in a certain sense cured of his
errors, and again finds the way to the Holy Grail, he is told that
his name will appear shining upon the Holy Vessel. But where is the
Holy Vessel — where is it to be found? That was the question.
In occult researches of this kind one is often held
back, delayed, so that one may not do too much in a day or a year and
be driven on to speculate about the truth. Landmarks appear. For me
they appeared in the course of really a good many years, during which
I sought an answer to the question — Where will you find the
name of Parsifal written on the Holy Grail?
I knew that many meanings can be attached to the Holy
Vessel in which the Host, the holy bread or wafer, is placed. And on
the Holy Vessel itself “Parsifal” was to shine. I was
aware also of the deep significance of a passage such as that in St.
Mark's Gospel, Chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, 33 and 34, where we
are told that the Lord often spoke in parables and only gradually
clarified their meaning. In occult investigation, too, one is, led
gradually, step by step, and very often only in connection with
karmic guidance, and on encountering something that seems to have to
do with a certain matter, one very often does not know what will be
made of it in one's own soul under the influence of forces
coming from the spiritual world. Often one does not know in the least
whether something drawn from the depths of the occult world will have
a bearing on some problem that one has been following up for years.
Thus I did not know how to proceed when I once asked the Norwegian
Folk Spirit, the Northern Folk Spirit, about Parsifal and he said:
“Learn to understand the saying that through my powers there
flowed into the northern Parsifal saga
‘Ganganda greida’”
— “circulating cordial”, or something like that!
[Another possible
rendering is “journeying viaticum.” (See
note
at the end of the lectures.)] I had no idea what to
make of this. It was the same when I was coming out of St. Peter's
in Rome under the strong impression made on me by Michelangelo's
work that you find on the right-hand side as you enter — the
Mother with Jesus, the Mother who looks so young, with Jesus dead
already on her knees. And under the after-effect of looking at this
work of art (this was a leading of the kind I mean), there came to
me, not as a vision but as a true Imagination from the spiritual
world, a picture which is inscribed in the Akashic record, showing
how Parsifal, after he has gone away for the first time from the
Castle of the Grail, where he had failed to ask about the mysteries
which prevail there, meets in the forest a young woman who is holding
her bridegroom in her lap and weeping over him. But I knew that
whether it is the mother or the bride whose bridegroom is dead
(Christ is often called the Bridegroom), the picture had a meaning,
and that the connection thus established — without my having
done anything about it — had a meaning also.
I could tell you of many indications of this kind that
came to me during my search for an answer to the question: Where can
I find the name of Parsifal inscribed on the Holy Grail? For it had
to be there, as the saga itself tells us; and now we need to recall
the most important features of the saga.
We know that Parsifal's mother, Herzeleide, bore
him in great suffering and with dream-like visions of a quite
peculiar character; we know that she wished to shield him from
knightly exercises and the code of knightly virtue; that she arranged
for the management of her property and withdrew into solitude. She
wanted to bring up her child so that he would remain a stranger to
the impulses that were certainly present in him; for he was not to be
exposed to the dangers that had surrounded his father. But we know
also that from an early age the child began to notice everything
glorious in Nature; from his mother's teaching he really learnt
nothing except that there was a ruling God, and he conceived a wish
to serve this God. But he knew nothing of what this God was, and when
one day he met some knights he took them for God and knelt before
them. When he confessed to his mother that he had seen the knights
and wanted to be a knight himself, she put on him a fool's
garments and sent him forth. He met with many adventures, and later
on — people may call this sentimental but it is of the deepest
significance — the mother died of a broken heart because of her
son's disappearance: he had not turned back to give her any
farewell greeting but had gone forth to experience knightly
adventures.
We know that after many wanderings, during which he
learnt much about knightly ways and knightly honour, and
distinguished himself, he came to the Castle of the Grail. On other
occasions I have mentioned that the best literary account of
Parsifal's arrival at the Castle is to be found in Chrestien de
Troyes. There we are shown how, after often mistaking the way,
Parsifal comes to a lonely place and finds two men: one is steering a
little boat and the other is fishing from it. They direct him to the
Fisher-King, and presently he encounters the Fisher-King in the Grail
Castle. The Fisher-King is old and feeble and has to rest on a couch.
While conversing with Parsifal, the Fisher-King hands
him a sword, a gift from his niece. Then there appears first in the
room a page carrying a spear; the spear is bleeding and the blood
runs down over the page's hand; and then a maiden with the Holy
Grail, which is a kind of dish. But such glory streams forth from it
that all the lights in the hall are outshone by the light of the Holy
Grail, just as the stars are overpowered by the light of sun and
moon. And then we learn how in the Holy Grail there is something with
which the Fisher-King's aged father is nourished in a separate
room. He has no need of the sumptuously appointed meal of which the
Fisher-King and Parsifal partake. These two nourish themselves with
earthly food. But each time a Dew course — as we should say
nowadays — is served, the Holy Grail withdraws into the room of
the Fisher-King's aged father, whose only nourishment comes
from that which is within the Holy Grail.
Parsifal, to whom it had been intimated on his way from
Gurnemanz that he ought not to ask too many questions, does not
inquire why the lance bleeds or what the vessel of the Grail
signifies — naturally he did not know their names. He then goes
to bed for the night, in the same room (according to Chrestien de
Troyes) where all this has happened. He was intending to ask
questions in the morning, but when morning came he found the whole
Castle empty — nobody was there. He called out for someone —
nobody was there. He got dressed, and downstairs he found his horse
ready. He thought the whole company had ridden out to hunt and wanted
to ride after them in order to ask about the miracle of the Grail.
But when he was crossing the drawbridge it rose up so quickly that
his horse had to make a leap in order not to be thrown into the
Castle moat. And he found no trace of the company he had encountered
in the Castle on the previous day.
Then Chrestien de Troyes tells us how Parsifal rides on
and in a lonely part of the wood comes upon a woman with her husband
on her knees, and weeping for him. It is she, according to Chrestien
de Troyes, who first indicates to him how he should have asked
questions, so as to experience the effect of his questions on the
great Mysteries that had been shown to him. We then hear that he went
on, often wandering from the right road, until exactly on a Good
Friday he came to a hermit, named Trevericent. The hermit tells him
how he is being cursed because he has wasted the opportunity of
bringing about something like a redemption for the Fisher-King by
asking questions about the miracles in the castle. And then he is
given many and various teachings.
Now when I tried to accompany Parsifal to the hermit, a
saying was disclosed to me — a saying which in the words I have
to use for it, in accordance with spiritual-scientific investigation,
is nowhere recorded — but I am able to give you the full truth
of it. It was spoken — and it made a deep impression on me —
by the old hermit to Parsifal, after he had made him acquainted, as
far as he could, with the Mystery of Golgotha, of which Parsifal knew
little, although he had arrived there on a Good Friday. The old
hermit then uttered this saying (I shall use words that are current
among us today and are perfectly faithful to the sense of the
utterance): “Think of what happened on the occasion of the
Mystery of Golgotha! Raise your eyes to the Christ hanging on the
Cross, at the moment when He said, ‘From this hour on, there is
your mother’; and John left her not. But you” —
said the old hermit to Parsifal — “you have left your
mother, Herzeleide. It was on your account that she passed from this
world.”
The complete connection was not understood by Parsifal,
but the words were spoken with the spiritual intention that they
should work in his soul as a picture, so that from this picture of
John, who did not forsake his mother, he might discern the karmic
debt he had incurred by his having deserted his own mother. This was
to produce an after — effect in his soul.
We hear then that Parsifal stayed a short while longer
with the hermit and then set out again to find the Holy Grail. And it
so happens that he finds the Grail shortly or directly before the
death of the old Amfortas, the Fisher-King. Then it is that the
Knights of the Holy Grail, the Knights of that holy Order, come to
him with the words: “Thy name shines in the Grail! Thou art the
future Ruler, the King of the Grail, for thy name shines out from the
holy Vessel!”
Parsifal becomes the Grail King. And so the name,
Parsifal, stands on the holy, gold-gleaming Vessel, in which is the
Host. It stands there.
And now, as my concern was to find the Vessel, I was at
first misled by a certain circumstance. In occult research — I
say this in all humility, with no wish to make an arrogant claim —
it has always seemed to me necessary, when a serious problem is
involved, to take account not only of what is given directly from
occult sources, but also of what external research has brought to
light. And in following up a problem it seems to me specially good to
make a really conscientious study of what external scholarship has to
say, so that one keeps one's feet on the earth and does not get
lost in cloud-cuckoo-land. But in the present instance it was
exoteric scholarship (this was some time ago) that led me astray. For
I gathered from it that when Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write
his Parsifal poem, he had — according to his own statement —
made use of Chrestien de Troyes and of a certain Kyot. External
research has never been able to trace this Kyot and regards him as
having been invented by Wolfram von Eschenbach, as though Wolfram von
Eschenbach had wanted to attribute to a further source his own
extensive additions to Chrestien de Troyes. Exoteric learning is
prepared to admit, at most, that Kyot was a copyist of the works of
Chrestien de Troyes, and that Wolfram von Eschenbach had put the
whole thing together in a rather fanciful way.
So you see in what direction external research goes. It
is bound to draw one away, more or less, from the path that leads to
Kyot. At the same time, when I had been to a certain extent led
astray by external research, something else was borne in upon me
(this was another of the karmic readings). I have often spoken of it
— in my book
Occult Science
and in lecture-courses —
and should now like to put it as follows.
The first three post-Atlantean epochs, which occur
before the Mystery of Golgotha, reappear in a certain sense after the
fourth epoch, so that the third epoch reappears in our epoch, the
fifth; the second epoch will recur in the sixth, and the first epoch,
the epoch of the Holy Rishis, will recur in the seventh, as I have
often described. It became clearer and clearer to me — as the
outcome of many years of research — that in our epoch there is
really something like a resurrection of the Astrology of the third
epoch, but permeated now with the Christ Impulse. Today we must
search among the stars in a way different from the old ways, but the
stellar script must once more become something that speaks to us. And
now observe — these thoughts about a revival of the stellar
script linked themselves in a remarkable way to the secret of
Parsifal, so that I could no longer avoid the belief that the two
were connected with each other. And then a picture rose before my
soul: a picture shown to me while I was trying to accompany Parsifal
in the spirit on his way back to the Grail Castle after his meeting
with the hermit Trevericent. This meeting with the hermit is
recounted by Chrestien de Troyes in a particularly beautiful and
touching way. I should like to read you a little of this, telling how
Parsifal comes to the hermit:
Er gibt dem Ross den Lauf
Und seufst aus tiefstem Herzen auf.
Weil er vor Gott sich schuldig fühlt
Und Reue in der Brust ihm wühlt.
Mit Weinen kommt er durch den Wald,
Doch vor der Klause macht er halt,
Steigt ab von seinem Pferde,
Legt seine Wehr zur Erde —
Und fand in einem Kirchlein klein
Den frommen Mann. In seiner Pein
Er vor ihm auf die Knie sinkt,
Das Nass, das ihm vom Auge blinkt,
Rollt endlos nieder auf sein Kinn,
Als er in kindlich schlichtem Sinn
Die Hände vor ihm faltet.
“Der Ihr des Trostes waltet,
Mein reuiges Geständnis hört:
Fünf Jahre war ich wahnbetört,
Dass ohne Glauben ich gelebt
Und nach dem Bösen nur gestrebt.”
“Sag mir, warum du das getan
Und bitte Gott, dass er dich nah'n
Dereinst noch lässt der Sel'gen Schar.”
“Beim Fischerkönig einst ich war;
Ich sah den Speer, auf dessen Stahl
Es blutig tropft. Ich sah den Gral
Und unterliess die Frage.
Was dieses Blut besage,
Und was der Gral bedeute.
Seit diesem Tag bis heute
War ich in schwere Seelennot.
Weit besser ware mir der Tod!
Und da vergass ich unsern Herrn
Und blieb von seiner Gnade fern.”
“So sage mir, wie man dich nennt.”
“Als Perceval man mich erkennt.”
Da seufzt der Greis aus tiefster Brust,
Der Name ist ihm wohl bewusst.
Er spricht: “Dem Leid hat dich vermählt,
Was ohne Wissen du gefehlt.”
[Quoted from Eduard Wechssler's
Die Sage vom Heiligen Gral
(Halle, 1898).]
He roused the steed to start
And sighed from out his deepest heart,
For guilt to God doth rack his breast,
Remorseful feelings give no rest.
With weeping comes he through the wood
Yet halts where hermitage has stood.
Makes ready to dismount,
Lays weapons on the ground —
And finds within a chapel cell
The pious man. ’Fore him he fell
Upon his knees in woeful plight,
The tear that blinked before his sight
Now rolls at last down to his chin
As he with simple childlike mien
Doth fold his hands together
That he may solace gather.
“Hear ye my sad confession:
Five years I bore delusion
While without faith my life I led
And only strove towards the bad.”
“Say me wherefore thou this hast done
And pray to God that He ere long
Will draw thee near the holy Bond.”
“I once by Fisher-King did stand.
I saw the spear upon whose steel
Hung drops of blood. I saw the Grail
Yet did forbear to put the word
What signified this blood,
This Grail, what signified —
’Twere better had I died!”
Until this day indeed
My soul's in direst need.
Our Lord I thought of never more
And from His Grace I stayed afar.”
“Now tell me what thy name may be.”
“As Parsifal men speak of me.”
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
“What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.”
[Translation by M. Cotterell.]
Then come the conversations between Parsifal and the
hermit of which I have spoken already. And when I sought to accompany
Parsifal in spirit during his return to the Grail, it was often as
though there shone forth in the soul how he traveled by day and by
night, how he devoted himself to nature by day and to the stars by
night, as if the stellar script had spoken to his unconscious self
and as if this was a prophecy of that which the holy company of
Knights who came from the Grail to meet him had said: “Thy name
shines forth in radiance from the Grail.” But Parsifal, quite
clearly, did not know what to make of the message of the stars, for
it remained in his unconscious being, and therefore one cannot so
very well interpret it, however much one may try to immerse oneself
in it through spiritual research.
Then I tried once more to get back to Kyot, and behold —
a particular thing said about him by Wolfram von Eschenbach made a
deep impression on me and I felt I had to relate it to the ‘ganganda
greida’. The connection seemed inevitable. I had to relate it
also to the image of the woman holding her dead bridegroom on her
lap. And then, when I was not in the least looking for it, I came
upon a saying by Kyot: “er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral”
— “he said, a thing was called the Grail.” Now
exoteric research itself tells us how Kyot came to these words —
“er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral.” He acquired a book
by Flegetanis in Spain — an astrological book. No doubt about
it, one may say: Kyot is the man who stimulated by Flegetanis —
whom he calls Flegetanis and in whom lives a certain knowledge of the
stellar script — Kyot is the man who, stimulated by this
revived astrology, sees the thing called the Grail. Then I knew that
Kyot is not to be given up; I knew that he discloses an important
clue if one is searching in the sense of Spiritual Science: he at
least has seen the Grail.
Where, then, is the Grail, which today must be found in
such a way that the name of Parsifal stands upon it? Where can it be
found? Now in the course of my researches it had been shown to me
that the name — that is the first thing — must be sought
for in the stellar script. And then, on a day which I must regard as
specially significant for me, I was shown where the
gold-gleaming vessel in its reality is to be found, so that through
it — through its symbolical expression in the stellar script —
we are led to the secret of the Grail. And then I saw in the stellar
script something that anyone can see — only he will not
immediately discern the secret. For one day, while I was following
with inner sight the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon, as it appeared
in the heavens, with the dark moon like a great disc dimly visible
within it ... so that with physical sight one saw the gold-gleaming
moon — ganganda greida, the journeying viaticum — and
within it the large Host, the dark disc. This is not to be seen if
one merely glances superficially at the moon, but it is evident if
one looks closely — and there, in wonderful letters of the
occult script, was the name Parsifal!
That, to begin with, was the stellar script. For in
fact, if this reading of the stellar script is seen in the
right light, it yields for our hearts and minds something —
though perhaps not all — of the Parsifal secret, the secret of
the Holy Grail. What I have still to say, briefly, on this subject I
will give you tomorrow.
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