Lecture II
5th January, 1918.
It was my task yesterday to show how the special configuration of
such mythologies as the Osiris Myth, the Greek mythology and
in a certain sense even the Old Testament teachings to which we will
return presently is connected with changes in the stages of
human consciousness. We know of the development of consciousness
in mankind, we know that we have to look back to earlier times of
man's evolution in which there existed an old clairvoyance, a
perceptibility of super-earthly things. It is well to look back at
such things for this retrospection gives us orientation. Mankind
is again to achieve vision directed to the super-sensible; it is
to be achieved on the path of Spiritual Science, through spiritual
scientific thinking. The realization of what each one can do, no
matter where he stands in the world, can be helped by the will to
orientate oneself for what is to come by considering what has been.
In a certain sense
things take place in later times in connection with events of earlier
times. We look back from our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the
development of which we are standing, to the Fourth Post-Atlantean
epoch, the Greco-Latin, and to the Third, the Egyptian; we come then
already to the time in which it was natural for men to express in
certain mythical pictures and imaginations what they thought and felt
about cosmic mysteries. In another connection we have already stated
that we in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have to recapitulate in a
sort of inverted way what had happened in the Third, the
Egypto-Chaldean epoch, so that it emerges again differently. The
booklet
‘The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind’,
also refers, as you know, to this subject.
Now we saw yesterday
that in the time of the Greco-Latin evolution, in the time that
begins with the 7th or 8th century before our era, there was a kind
of looking back of mankind, and this looking back to other states of
consciousness in fact expressed in imaginative myths facts about
the ruling spiritual beings, as we described yesterday. Men in the
Fourth Epoch knew: when we look around us we see only the physical,
on the other we can reflect. You know, moreover, if you have followed
attentively what is said in my book
The Riddles of Philosophy,
that in Grecian times, and even much later, people saw
Ideas as it were as Goethe still did, and that they
could really say: we see them. Entirely abstract thinking has only
come about in modern times. But at that time there was indeed a
seeing of ideas, a seeing of spiritual realities, a living in
spiritual realities.
In the Fourth
Post-Atlantean epoch this was no longer so in the full sense, but the
people remembered that it had been so earlier. They said and
in fact this represented the truth: there are, however,
Beings in existence, who are not human beings, who live in
super-sensible worlds and have still preserved life in the imaginative
consciousness. The Greeks saw such Beings in the individuals of the
Zeus-circle.
The Egyptians again
said to themselves: that age in which men still lived directly with
Imaginations was the age when Osiris wandered upon Earth. They meant
of course not one Osiris, but it was believed that there had
been a time in which men on earth lived in Imaginations. And this
type of human soul which was able to live in Imaginations was
described by saying: Osiris lived upon earth. Lost and slain had been
this life-in-Imaginations. Osiris has been killed by his brother
Typhon that is, by that force of the human soul, which to be
sure is still directed to the super-sensible, but will no longer
evolve the Imaginative faculties. The ancient clairvoyance exists no
more. The forces active in the old clairvoyance are now amidst the
dead. Hence Osiris is the Judge of the dead; the human being meets
him when he has passed through the portal of death. The figures of
Osiris and Isis were brought into connection with the Death-Mystery
by those people who set the Osiris myth into the centre of their
thought. Moreover, in the details through which the Osiris myth has
been elaborated there actually lies all that I have been stating. The
point of time has also been specified in which according to the
legend, Osiris was killed by Typhon.
And just as we could
point to a quite definite heavenly constellation, which the Magi
of the East knew as the constellation in which the new cosmic age was
to approach (we have pointed out in the Christmas lectures that by a
certain constellation of the ‘Virgin’ the Magi of the
East knew that they were to bring their offerings to the new
World-Saviour) so too have those whose thoughts centred on the Osiris
myth looked back to quite definite star-constellations. They have
said: Osiris was slain. They meant to say: the old life in the
Imaginations vanished when the setting sun in autumn stood in
seventeen degrees of Scorpio and in the opposite point of the heavens
the full moon rose in Taurus or in the Pleiades. This constellation
of the full moon rising in Taurus at a definite point of the year in
connection with the Scorpio position of the Sun, this moment of
evolution has been given by the followers of Osiris as that in
which Osiris has vanished from the earth, that is, in which he was no
longer there. These things naturally come about in such a way as to
leave legacies behind. There have always been people, stragglers even
up to recent centuries with Imaginative clairvoyance, but the
point is to show when Imaginative clairvoyance disappeared from earth
as a normal faculty of the human soul. And men were aware that in the
ages when Imaginative clairvoyance prevailed on earth conditions
were quite different from what they were later. And this too was
plainly indicated in the Osiris-Isis myth. But it is just this that
is so very little understood by those who explain the myth of Isis
and Osiris.
It is related, as you
know, that when Isis discovered that her spouse, Osiris, had been
slain, she departed on a search for the dead body. She found it at
last in Byblos in Phoenicia and brought the corpse of Osiris from
Phoenicia back to Egypt. A deep wisdom is expressed in such a myth, a
wisdom of humanity's physiology. What sort of conditions were
there then during the Osiris-time? During the Osiris-time there was
not yet such a script as the later script. What prevailed in Egypt
during the age of Osiris was a picture-writing and this was
considered sacred. And how actually was the picture-script brought
about? It was brought about inasmuch as the most important signs were
taken, not from animal or earthly forms, but from the
star-constellations, in fact from what clairvoyance saw in the
star-constellations. If I were to make a comparison from something
lately in our minds, I might say: You have heard in the
‘Dream of Olaf Åsteson’
how he experiences the spirit-snake, the
spirit-dog and the spirit-bull; he describes what he feels about
them. Imagine to yourselves such pictures, but in a far more perfect
form, as signs such signs then are images of Imaginations.
Such signs as the signs of the earliest writing were held to be holy.
In such signs was cosmic wisdom contained for ancient times, this
cosmic wisdom which in fact was at the same time a heavenly wisdom,
inasmuch as men read the cosmic mysteries in the star-script, as the
dead alone are able to do now. The gift of possessing a writing which
is really a reproduction of Imaginations only belonged to
humanity at a certain period of time, and then vanished. And the
ancients knew: this imaginative way of writing existed in the age of
Osiris. Together with the dying away of the old life of the world in
Imaginations, the ancient picture-script disappeared and there arose
that which has become the abstract script. This no longer expresses
mysteries, but gradually, since it has become abstract, only serves
to express the sense world namely, the ordinary
letter-script. Just as Osiris was looked on in those ancient times as
the hero, as the divine hero of the Imaginative script, so is Typhon,
his brother but his opponent, the hero of the abstract script of
letter, developed from it.
This is also indicated
profoundly in the Osiris-Isis myth. Over to Phoenicia must Isis go to
find the corpse; that means to find the picture-script transformed
into the letter-script to find the corpse of Osiris. The
letter-script was ‘found’, invented, as we say, in
Phoenicia. From Phoenicia back to Egypt the abstract-script has come,
whereas the Egyptians in their old mysteries in the Osiris-time had a
picture-writing reflecting Imaginations. Thus the transition from the
old concrete conception in the Imaginative-script to the newer
concept in the abstract script has also found expression in the
Osiris-Isis myth.
All these things lie in
the course of mankind's evolution. We are there looking back to an
older experience in Imaginations. Real physiological wisdom is, in
fact, expressed in the myths. Thinking gradually passed over to
abstractions not immediately to the quite empty
abstractions of today but to the somewhat fuller abstractions of
about the 6th and 5th-centuries B.C. in the work of Thales,
with whom one generally begins the history of philosophy. (You can
read of it in my
The Riddles of Philosophy.)
But you can see from
this that humanity has to look back to earlier evolutionary periods
with quite different conditions of soul. Certain Brotherhoods of
modern times know, to be sure, about these entirely different
conditions, but they hold that such things should still be kept under
lock and key. That is not right for the present day, but it is a
little dangerous to talk of these things beyond a certain degree. Up
to a certain degree, however, it is not only a case of should,
these things must be spoken of today, because the knowledge of
ancient conditions of human consciousness helps to give orientation
for what is to develop as the new. If we have knowledge of what once
existed, that can help us to further the necessary new conditions of
evolution, although of an entirely different kind.
Now today you find in
boys who develop to the age of puberty a change of voice. It is as we
know, the expression in the boys of an organic process, which occurs
differently in the female sex, and which apparently makes greater
inroads into the human being in the case of the female, since the
process reaches more directly into the physical. But that is not
true. The influence on boys is just as strong, though it lies in
a different sphere, so to say, and though externally it only comes to
expression physically in the change of voice.
This reaching maturity
by the human being is today in fact since the times when
Osiris was dead for the outer world almost a physical
process. It was not merely a physical process in the ages when Osiris
lived, no, it was a soul process. The boy of fourteen or fifteen
years as you know we have already spoken of other experiences
at the time of puberty experienced not only that his voice
changed, but that what today only enters, presses into, the region of
the voice, extending from the sexual essences of the organism, in
those ancient times pressed also into the thoughts, the conceptual
world of the young boy. We must deal with such things truthfully; the
voice apparatus is simply pervaded with the sexual essences of the
organism. Today the voice breaks; in those days the thoughts ‘broke’
too, since it was still the ancient Imaginative time. In those times
the young boy before the age of puberty had certain Imaginations; it
was a living process and all knew that the child up to nine or ten
years of age had Imaginations Imaginations of spiritual
events in the atmosphere. (Today there are still slight remains of
this in almost every child of tender age, it is only that people pay
no attention to it, or talk the children out of it as being foolish
nonsense.) In the air spiritual events are taking place around
us all the time. The air is not only what physical science describes,
but spiritual events are taking place. These spiritual events,
essentially events of the etheric world, were perceived by
children in full Imaginations up to the time of puberty. And when
puberty entered not only for the voice, but the life of
concepts the human being felt something in him (it was in
fact that which shot up out of the forces which are usually called in
physiology the sex forces), felt something in him of which he said:
what I saw as a child through the Imaginations in the atmosphere, now
comes to life in me again, it is perception, it lives in me. That
took place. The man was aware that he had taken something into
himself out of the atmosphere. Formerly he had seen it outside; now
he felt it within him.
For woman too, in those
ancient times, there had been, before puberty, a perception in
Imaginations of what was outside in the atmosphere. But after
puberty that which in the case of boys merely emerged in the feeling
of an alteration in their mental life, in the case of the woman was
like an ascent of still more inward Imaginations: it was the human
image that the woman perceived within her again and again in
Imagination. And then she said to herself: what I now perceive
Imaginatively, is the same as I experienced in childhood before
puberty, out in cosmic space, as Imaginative pictures. Both sexes,
only in different ways, experienced the fact that they actually
knew in the soul: in me something is born which cosmic space has
fructified in me.
There you have a still
more concrete form of the Osiris-Isis-myth: it is universal wisdom in
so far as it is won from the atmosphere, but it is in organic
connection with man, the deeper layers of the human spirit. You can
get an idea of it if you seek it in the following way. You see, men
think nowadays in an abstract way, inasmuch as they desire to know
through the head what the world contains of laws and so on. In these
old times men were clear that in this way, merely through head
knowledge, one cannot know, but one knows through the whole
human being. One knows what goes on outside in space, goes on
etherically, by having perceived it formerly as it were, outside, and
then after puberty pictured or felt it inwardly. How do you perceive
then today, with the abstract perception that you have? You discover
something which you see with the senses; then you think it over
afterwards. That happens in rapid succession. With those mysteries,
through which man in ancient times penetrated into the laws of the
atmosphere present in Imaginations, it was a different matter.
As child, up to puberty, he perceived, he only perceived;
afterwards he worked this over inwardly. One might say it is only a
perceptive process and a thinking process spread out in time; whereas
today it is placed at man's own discretion to observe abstractly and
to reflect, conceive abstractly. Over the whole life was spread
what we now crowd together in a few moments as regards the outer
physical world, perceive, conceive. That was something which in his
relation to the world man thought of as spread out over the whole of
human life between birth and death. To the age of puberty he
perceived certain things, afterwards he reflected upon them. Such an
age was once in existence.
But now think. People
said to themselves: ‘this perceiving and reflecting, this is
connected in a certain way with the day, with the rising and setting
sun. With the rising sun, one wakes, gets up, begins to perceive and
to think; with the setting sun this ceases, since one lies down to
sleep.’ Thus people connected perceiving and thinking with
the day; and what was spread out over the whole life between birth
and death they brought into connection with more widely extended
cosmic events in the heavens. Just as it depends on the sun, on the
ordinary rising and setting of the sun, that I can perceive and
think, so does it depend on greater, more extended star
constellations which appear after centuries, after millennia, what
man develops in perceiving and thinking of the kind that I have
described. And as in those old times people connected the ordinary
perception and thinking with the day, with sunrise and sunset
indeed as people do today though they don't think so and even believe
they go by the clock so they connected matters concerning
more comprehensive cosmic mysteries with the other
star-constellations, with the other events in the heavens.
You see, a deep logic,
a deep wisdom lies in these things. With superficialities one cannot
get at the facts. But something else too is bound up with it. These
ancient peoples and we could speak of others besides the
Egyptians and the Greeks these ancient peoples knew that the
more inward-lying forces of human nature are connected with what come
to expression in celestial happenings, in star-constellations.
That decadence of man which is expressed in the modern attitude to
the sex problem, and that greatest decadence which is expressed in
the most modern attitude to sexual problems, of this nothing was yet
known to those ancient peoples of the ages of which one must speak
when one deals with these things. For them it was something very
different when they had the feeling: it is the sexual essences which
are suffused into the human being when the voice breaks and therewith
the thoughts break too or when the other appears of which I
have spoken. That the divine was then pouring itself forth in man
that was the conviction of the ancients. Hence what is only viewed in
a pernicious sense today is found in all old religious rites: the
sex-symbols, the so-called sex-symbols, point thus to this connection
we can call it the connection between the atmosphere with its
air-events and the human processes of knowledge which take place
during the whole human life between birth and death.
‘Through my eye,
through my ear’ so said these people ‘I
am connected with what is brought by the day. Through the deeper,
more inwardly lying forces, I am connected with something quite
different, with the secrets of the air, which, however, are only
perceived in Imaginative experience.’ And this Imaginative
experience in its concrete form I have described for you with
reference to these early times.
The Old Testament
conception in these matters was different inasmuch as it put doctrine
in the place of actual experience. The Egyptian of the Osiris-age,
especially of the earlier Osiris-age, said as follows: ‘The
true human being only enters me with puberty, for I then take in what
formerly I saw in Imaginations. The air transmits to me the true
man.’ In the doctrine of the Old Testament this was transformed
into the conception: The Elohim or Jahve have breathed into man the
living breath (Odem), the air. There the essence was lifted out of
the direct living experience and became doctrine, theory. This was
necessary, for only so could mankind be led and that is
the meaning of the Old Testament be led from that living in
union with the outer world, which still had an inner connection
between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the world, to their
further evolution (of which I will speak later). As this connection
gradually vanished, it was necessary to fall back on just such a
doctrine as that of the Old Testament.
But now there came the
time of the death of Osiris and therewith the time too in
which, while one thing became finer, the other thing, as it were,
became coarser. How is that to be understood? Well, you can imagine
it thus: When we go back into the old Osiris-time, then the human
being saw or felt before puberty the Light-Imaginations within the
outer air (see sketch) if I speak for the one sex
Thus he saw in his
environment the Light-Imaginations in the air up to the time of
puberty. Afterwards he had the feeling that they had entered into
him, and the changes occurred of which we have spoken. For the child
the air was everywhere filled with Light phenomena; for the grown
man, the matured man, the air was certainly still there, but he knew
that as child he had seen something else in it. He knew that the air
was at the same time the bearer, the mother, of light. He knew that
it was not true that when he looked out into the air there was
nothing in it but what was shown physically. Beings live in it which
are to be perceived in Imagination.
These Beings were for
the Greeks the Being of the Zeus-circle. Thus man knew that
there were Beings in the air. But all this the fact that
human states of consciousness became changed all this is
connected with the fact that even objective things became different
in the finer substantiality. Naturally, for the modern clever man it
is an outrage if one says such things. I know it is an outrage, but
nevertheless it is true: the air has become different. Naturally it
has not changed in a way that can be tested by chemical reagents;
nevertheless the air has become different. The air has lost the
strength to express the Light-Imaginations; the air has one
could say become coarser. It has actually become different on
earth since that ancient time. The air has become coarser. But not
only the air, but man himself has become coarser. That which formerly
lived spiritually in the essences which permeated the larynx and
the rest of the organism, that has also grown coarser. So that in
fact if one speaks today of the sexual-essences one speaks of what is
different from what one would speak of in ancient times.
Everyone in older times knew: ‘The perception of the day is
connected with my personality; the other, which I experience from the
atmosphere, experience with my whole life, that, however, is
connected with mankind as such, that goes beyond the individual
man.’ Hence they also sought to fathom the social mysteries
under which men live together, through the link which bound them with
the macrocosm, they sought for social wisdom through the star-wisdom.
But what lived in man as social wisdom bound him in fact to the
celestial. This came to expression in the most everyday concepts. A
human pair before the death of Osiris would never have felt anything
else than that they had received a child from heaven. That was a
living consciousness and corresponded also with truth. And this
living consciousness could develop because man knew that he received
out of the air-filled space what he himself experienced.
Of all this the coarse
dregs, so to say, have been left. As in the air the coarse sediment
has remained behind of that power of the air that revealed itself to
man in Imaginations in earlier ages, so in man himself are the coarse
dregs left behind. This had to come about since otherwise men could
not have attained freedom and a full consciousness of the ego.
But it is the dregs that have remained. In this way, however, all
that the ancients meant by the divine, which as you can now readily
realize, they connected in a roundabout way with the sexual
essences, all this has been coarsened, not only in idea but also in
reality. But it is there nevertheless; naturally not only in the one
way, but in the other way too. The reproduction of mankind was in
those olden times thought to be in direct connection with the
micro-macrocosmic bond of mankind, as you have seen, but the whole
social life of man on earth was in fact also thought to be in
connection with this micro-macrocosmic bond. Numa Pompilus went to
the Nymph Egeria to receive information from her as to how he should
arrange social conditions in the Roman Kingdom. This, however, means
nothing else than that he had let the star wisdom be imparted to
him, had let the star-wisdom tell him how social conditions should be
organized.
That which men
reproduce on earth, and which is connected with successive
generations, was to be placed in the service of what the stars have
to say. As the individual man directed his life with his ordinary
perceiving and thinking, according to the rising and setting of the
sun, so the interconnections of mankind which later became ‘States’,
were to be placed under the star-constellations as expressions of
cosmic relationships.
In our language
and languages often contain memories of old conditions we
still have a remembrance of this connection in the fact that the
relation of male and female is described by the word ‘Geschlecht’
(sex) and also the successive generations as ‘Geschlechter’
(races). It is one and the same word: the ‘Geschlecht’
the family, interconnected, blood relations and then
the relation of man and woman. And so is it too in other languages,
and it all points to how man sought to find a recognizable connection
with the macrocosm for what lay in his nature, in the deeper strata
of his being.
These things have
become coarsened in the direction we have discussed. Among other
things that have remained behind is the attachment in longing and
feeling to nationality, the clinging to the national, the
chauvinistic impulse for the national; that is the lingering relic of
what in older times could be thought of in quite different
connections. But only when one looks into such things does one know
the truth contained in them. What is expressed by the nationalistic
longing? When man develops to excess this national feeling, this
sentiment for the nation, what is living in it? Exactly the same as
lives in the sexual, in the sexual in one way, in national sentiment
in another. It is the sexual human being that lives his life through
these two different poles. To be Chauvinistic, is, nothing else
really than developing a sort of group-sexuality. One could say that
where the sexual essences, in what they have left behind, grip men
more, there is present more national Chauvinism; for it is the very
force living in reproduction that comes to manifestation too in
national sentiment. Hence the battle-cry of the so-called ‘Freedom
of the Peoples or of the Nations’ is really only to be
understood in its more intimate connections if one said in a
most respectable sense of course ‘The Call for the
Re-establishment of the National in the Light of the Sex-Problem’.
It is necessary to realize as one of the secrets of the time-impulse,
the fact that the sexual problem is proclaimed in quite a special
form over the earth today, without people having any idea of how out
of their subconsciousness the sexual clothes itself in the words:
‘Freedom of the Peoples.’ And far more than men imagine
are sexual impulses present in the catastrophic events of today, far
more than men imagine! For the impulses to what is happening today
lie, in fact, very, very deep.
Such truths must no
longer in our present age be kept under lock and key. Certain
Brotherhoods have been able to keep them under lock and key, because
in the strictest sense of the word they have excluded women. Although
joint work with women can nevertheless lead to all sorts of bad
things, as has indeed constantly been shown today, yet the time has
come in which right views, general views, on these matters must be
spread among humanity. Ideas are nevertheless spread abroad which are
impure, foolish, empty, inasmuch as from certain directions, without
knowledge of the more intimate connections, all sorts of things are
treated today as sexual problems. But you see how what here is pure,
genuine, honourable truth comes in contact, on the one hand, with
what can be the most impure, lowest way of thinking, as is shown from
time to time in the outgrowths of Psycho-Analysis or similar things.
You will always find, however, that what on the one hand, rightly
understood, is profound truth, needs hardly to be altered at all
in words, but only to be permeated with a low-minded type of thought,
and it is simply a pernicious, stupid, objectionable conception.
A former age could
speak of ‘nations’, when one pictured ‘Nations’
in such a way that one nation had its guardian spirit in Orion,
another in another star, and one knew that one's life was ruled from
the star-constellations. One then appealed, as it were, to the
ordering in the heavens. Today where there is no longer such ordering
in the heavens, there is the appeal to the merely national, the
Chauvinistic appeal to the merely national, that is to say, an
asserting of an impulse, psycho-sexual in the most pronounced sense,
a backward luciferic impulse.
If one would see
clearly and plainly what is today, one must not shrink from
the actual underlying truth. But one can also see from such things
why people are so afraid of the truth. Just imagine if, in the outcry
on the freedom of nations and so forth that is raised today, people
were to hear ‘that comes from sexual impulses!’ One
should just imagine that! One should picture for once the crowing
cock ... I don't mean any special one, not simply Clemenceau ... one
should picture all the declaimers on this theme ... and
imagine that they had to realize that what they crow is after all the
mating-voice of the cock, however finely it is decked out in national
garments.
These are things which
mankind must learn to know today, and which they do not want to hear,
for, as you know, of things that are black it is asserted that they
are white, and of those that are white, that they are black. The
point is, that that ancient time of which I have spoken has come now
to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch in which abstraction has gradually
developed. There where the boundary lies between the fourth and fifth
Post-Atlantean epochs (you can read about this in my book
The Riddles of Philosophy),
there men strove with all their might
over the intellectual value so to say of the
abstract. Read afterwards in my
The Riddles of Philosophy
where I speak of the nominalism and realism of the Middle Ages. Abstraction
had grown to such a pitch that they asked themselves: When I form a
concept, has that any significance for the things outside, or is it
only a name in my head? Today people no longer reflect on such
things. Of what interest is it to people to know that men have
tormented themselves in the Middle Ages, when the abstractive
power of thought was felt, what role the so-called universals, the
general ideas, play in the world! That one wrestled and strove about
what role abstractions play! Nowadays one thinks no more about
it; one has already become used to abstractions; one does not strive
to get beyond the abstract impulse but, on the contrary, to get
thoroughly within it. The conflict over ‘universals’
this ultimately came to the point where it was said: ‘Universals,
General Ideas, are at first as certain Ideas in God: those are
Universals ante rem; then the Ideas are in the objects:
Universals in re; and then the Ideas are in our mind, our
soul: post rem Universals post rem.’ That
was an expedient, in order to take up a stand on the question: is a
man connected with reality when he thinks, when he only thinks ideas?
They still felt something of how in ancient times men had been
connected with reality. When they reached maturity they thought over,
as it were, what as a child they had formerly perceived; they
knew therefore that only then had the true human being entered in.
One had to struggle desperately over the Universals, as to
whether, when one thinks, there is still something of reality left in
one's thought or whether it is entirely divorced from reality and has
nothing to do with it. Since that time people have grown accustomed
to take the universals, the abstractions, as abstractions, and
are more or less completely cut off from reality in their
consciousness.
Such a process is
taking place continually on a small scale. Think for a moment: words
which are the representatives of concepts, are originally in
direct connection with what is seen. For instance, a small group of
fighting men has one man at the head, they have this one man before
them, they call him the foremost, the first, Fürst (Eng: Chief,
Prince). There one has it linked directly with what is beheld, later
it was set free, it became a word which denoted something without any
sort of connection with a direct perception. Just think to how
many words this applies! And the next step is that then certain words
become privileged, that speech becomes monopolized, becomes the
property of the State. Even in language certain things are developing
in this direction, are they not? ... Take the simple case that
someone has learnt a great deal, has become wise let us say,
without meaning anything foolish by it he is a learned man.
In a certain naive way one would then say: he is a ‘Doctor’.
Here we have a connection with fact if we call someone ‘doctor’
who is seen to be learned. For it still has a certain significance
when there is documentary evidence held by a Corporation which gives
this recognition. But it loses the significance when it is
monopolized ... Yet mankind is enthusiastic about such monopolizing
nowadays. All possible words are to be monopolized. A man is not
supposed merely through his gifts to be an ‘engineer’,
but this must also become a recognized title from heaven knows where.
And increasingly things are to be loosed from their connections.
There you can see the abstraction-process on a small scale, but
it is accomplished wholesale with infinite significance. A family has
a father. What is the connection between the pater, who
is the father of the family and the Pater, who is a priest?
This tearing loose of what is contained in the word I wanted
to bring it forward as illustrating the abstraction-process
taking place in humanity.
And in the case of
ideas it is much more mischievous than in language; people often make
use of concepts without having the least idea of their connection
with what is perceived. Sometimes people then search for the real
observation, become comic, frightfully comic in this search! Only
remember how there is a whole literature today about the cross-sign,
which is really a universal sign, spread over the world. Most amusing
is all the learnedness applied to it! This sign
is traced back to this
That was supposed to have been the cross of former times.
Sometimes they then
trace that back by saying: only the parts have been left, the
swastika and so on. Yes, it is frightfully
clever
what has been written about it, quite immensely clever, the way
‘cleverness’ has been applied to such things. I do not
wish at all to go in for detailed criticism. But to know what is
true, cleverness is not enough. One ought, of course, to know that
the cross-sign means nothing else than that the human being takes
his stand, stretches out his arms and then he is the cross. From
above downwards goes a stream of existence that binds man with the
macrocosm, and through the outstretched hands too. And the Cross is
the sign for Man.
And when you find
distinguishing marks of the Assyrian kings or of the Egyptian kings,
medallions, for instance, then they are medallions with the
cross-sign.
And two other signs (the cross on the medallion is one sign that
ancient kings had) were, for instance, these.
The
star in the sign is generally made in such a way that one does not
immediately recognize the pentagram in it or is it even a
hexagram; however, that is not the point.
Specially clever
people have said: that is the Sun, that is the Cross, that is the
moon, that is the star. But the deeper meaning lies precisely in the
fact that it is man, the microcosm, who is compounded of sun and
moon. You see from this ordinary cross-sign, how the concept has
been separated from the real object. The direct perception is this,
the sign is this: man in the form of a cross. People today know so
little of how to connect the object with the sign, that, as I have
said, an immensely clever literature exists which seeks to find out
how this sign is connected with what it wants to express. And so one
could write quite clever articles over the most everyday words
without discovering how these things, these words, were
connected with the realities.
Humanity had to go
through the period of abstractions. We know that today we are no
longer in the sign of Aries, in which the Sun stood at the beginning
of Spring when the transition took place from the old Imaginative
time, of which echoes still lingered, to the age of abstractions. We
have entered the age of Pisces. A special characteristic of this age
is that man receives the force for abstract ideas out of the
macrocosm. Man receives this force today from the macrocosm. But in
the meantime man does not know how he is to unite the abstract ideas
again with reality. They must be united again with reality.
I said at the
beginning of the lecture that in this fifth Post-Atlantean epoch
there must be a kind of recapitulation of the time in the
Egyptian-Chaldean epoch when one looked back to the ancient
Osiris-age, when Imaginations were in existence. The reverse, as it
were, must take place: man must find the way back again to the
Imaginations. One could say in another form: Osiris must become
alive again, we must find ways and means to bring Osiris to life. I
have spoken very concretely in these studies by saying that we must
find forms of experience which are common to the dead and the
living. Since Osiris was slain he has been with the dead; he will
remain with the dead, but he will have to come again among the
living, when there are concerns which are common to the dead and the
living for the social life of men.
This brings us to the
fact that people must understand something which it is above
all necessary for our time to understand: how will Osiris be
revivified? How can Osiris come to new life? How does man approach
again life and experience in the Imaginative consciousness?
We will speak of this
tomorrow how he is to rise again, and how the resurrection
is to be brought about. Tomorrow's considerations shall have
then, as their subject, the Imaginative consciousness.
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