V
THE
WORKING TOGETHER OF THE FOUR ARCHANGELS
During
the last few days I have brought
before you the four cosmic Imaginations which can be called up
through an intimate human experience of the seasons of the year. If
we are to arrive at an understanding of the whole place and situation
of man in the world, we must seek it through the working together of
the Beings who appear in conjunction with these imaginative pictures.
And here I would like first to say something by way of introduction.
If
we open our souls to the impressions
which may come to us from the content of these pictures, then at the
same time there will come to us much that has been experienced
in the course of human evolution as an echo of old, instinctive
clairvoyance; to-day this is sometimes treated historically, but
fundamentally it is not understood. Real poets and spiritually
inspired men lay hold of these often wonderful voices which sound
from the traditions of the past, and make use of them just when
they wish to express their highest and greatest conceptions. But even
then they are very little understood. So in the first part of
Faust
there rings out a wonderful saying which is scarcely at all understood,
though it is quoted often enough. It occurs when Faust, having opened
the book of Nostradamus, comes upon the sign of the Macrocosm:
Wie
alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen
How
each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.
[From the translation of
Faust:
Part One, by Bayard Taylor, revised and edited by Stuart Atkins.
Published by Collier Books, New York, 1962. (snippets of this
translation are included, as necessary, throughout this lecture
— e.Librarian.)]
A
magnificent picture — but if one
knows Goethe one must say that it is real to him only through his
feelings. For what Goethe has evidently drawn from his reading
of old traditions and his feeling for them — all this stands in
its full significance before our souls only if we have in mind the
four great cosmic Imaginations, as I described them to you —
the Autumn Imagination of Michael, the Christmas Imagination of
Gabriel. the Easter Imagination of Raphael, and the Midsummer,
St. John's Day, Imagination of Uriel. You must really picture to
yourselves how from all these Beings, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel,
Michael, forces stream out through the cosmos and as formative forces
stream again into man. In order to understand this, we must see how
man stands within the cosmos in — I might almost call it
— a purely material way.
In
this connection there is very little
understanding, unfortunately, for how things really are. For example,
medical textbooks always describe how man breathes in oxygen from the
air and how the carbon within him takes up the oxygen; this process
is then compared with external combustion, in which all sorts
of external substances combine with oxygen. The whole process
in the human organism, whereby oxygen is taken up by carbon, is then
called combustion.
All
this is said because one essential fact
is not known — the fact that all external substances and
processes become different directly they enter into the human
organism. Anyone who speaks of this peculiar combination of
oxygen with carbon in man and thinks of it as combustion is
talking in just the same way as if someone said: “There is no
need for a man to have two living lungs; he could equally well have a
pair of stones suspended inside him.” That is more or less how
these people talk in speaking of the combustion of oxygen and carbon
within the human organism.
Everything
that takes place externally in
nature is different as soon as it enters a human being. No process
within the human organism takes place in the same way as in outer
nature. A flame that burns externally is dead fire; that which
corresponds to it within the human being is flame living and
ensouled: Just as a stove stands towards a lung, so does the
external flame stand towards the living activity that goes on in the
human organism when carbon unites with oxygen there — a process
which, viewed externally, is indeed combustion in chemical terms. All
spiritual progress at the present day depends on our being able to
grasp these things in the right way. Suppose you take salt with your
food, or eat some albumen or anything else, people assume that it
remains just the same substance within you as it was outside. That is
not true. Whatever enters the human being becomes different
immediately. And the forces which make it different proceed in a
quite definite way from those Beings whom I have pictured in
the four Imaginations.
| Plate V Click image for large view | |
Let
us recall the last picture: how at St.
John's tide, Uriel hovers in the heights, weaving his body out of
golden light in the golden radiance of the Sun
(see Plate V, red.)
As I told you, we must picture him with grave, judicial eyes, for
his gaze is directed down towards the crystal realm of the earth, and
he sees how little are human errors compatible with the abstract but
none the less shining beauty of the crystallisation process
that goes on below the surface of the earth. That is the reason
for his gravely judging gaze, as he looks down and compares human
errors with the living activity in the crystals of the earth.
I
spoke also of Uriel's gesture as a warning gesture, indicating to men
what they ought to do. It calls upon them, if they understand it rightly,
to transform their faults into virtues. For up above in the clouds
appear the shining pictures of beauty, woven out of the Sun-gold, and
they are pictures of all that by dint of virtue humanity has achieved.
Now from the
Being who has to be described in this way — and can be
described in no other way — there proceed forces which
work directly in man, but have also a characteristic further effect.
All that I am depicting goes on in high summer. The Uriel-Being,
however, is not at rest, but in majestic movement. This must be so,
for when it is summer with us, it is winter in the opposite
hemisphere, and Uriel is there in the heights. We must picture
this clearly, so that if we have the Earth here (see sketch), Uriel
appears to us in summer, and then follows a course which brings him
after six months to the other side. Then it is winter with us. While
Uriel descends (yellow arrow) and while his forces are thus coming to
us from a descending line, summer with us passes over into
winter, and then Uriel is over the other hemisphere. But the Earth
does not hinder his forces from coming to us; they penetrate through
the forces which come to us directly from above
(red arrows), seeking to permeate us with the Sun-gold of summer,
penetrate right through the Earth in winter and permeate us as an
ascending stream (red) from the other side.
If
we bring before our
souls the midsummer working of Uriel through nature into man —
for his activity works into the forces of nature — we must
picture the forces of Uriel streaming out in the cosmos, raying into
the clouds, the rain, the thunder and lightning, and raying also into
the growth of plants. In winter, after Uriel has made his way round
the Earth, his forces stream up through the Earth and come to rest in
our heads. And then these forces, which at other times are outside in
nature, have the effect of making us citizens of the cosmos. For they
actually cause an image of the cosmos to arise in our heads,
illuminating us so that we become possessors of human wisdom.
We
speak rightly if we
say: Uriel makes his descent as summer passes through autumn into
winter. Then in winter he begins to re-ascend, and from this
descending and ascending power of Uriel we get the inner forces of
our heads. Thus Uriel works in nature at midsummer, and during the
winter season he works in the human head, so that in this connection
man is truly a microcosm over against the macrocosm.
We
understand the human
being only if we place him in the world not merely as a being of
nature, but as a spiritual being. And just as we can follow the
forces of Uriel and see how they stream into man through the course
of the year, so must we do with Raphael, who pours his forces into
the forces of nature in spring, as I have described. I had to show
you how the Easter Imagination is completed through the teaching that
Raphael, the great cosmic physician, can give to mankind. For
precisely when we allow all that Raphael brings about,
working in the springtime forces of nature as Uriel does in
summer — when we allow all this to work on us at Easter through
the spiritual hearing of Inspiration, then we have the crowning of
all the truths of healing for mankind.
But the springtime
activity of Raphael travels round the Earth, as Uriel does. In terms
of the cosmos Uriel is the spirit of summer; he moves round the Earth
and in winter creates the inner forces of the human head. Raphael is
the spirit of spring, and in autumn, as he travels round the Earth,
he engenders the forces of human breathing. Hence we can say: While
during autumn Michael is the cosmic spirit up above, the cosmic
Archangel, at Michaelmas Raphael works in human beings —
Raphael who is active in the whole human breathing-system, regulating
it and giving it his blessing. And we shall form a true picture of
autumn only if on the one hand, up above, we have the powerful
Michael-Imagination, with the sword forged from meteoric iron,
the garment woven out of Sun-gold and shot through with the
Earth's silver-sparkling radiance, while Raphael below is working in
man, aware of every breath that is drawn, of everything that flows
from the lungs into the heart and from the heart through the whole
circulation of the blood. Thus man learns to recognise in himself the
healing forces which play through the cosmos in the Raphael-time of
spring, if in autumn, when the rays of Raphael pass through the Earth,
he comes to know how Raphael is active in human breathing.
For
this is a great secret: all the healing forces reside originally in
the human breathing system. And anyone who understands truly the
circuit of the breath, knows the healing forces from the human side.
They do not reside in the other systems of the human organism; these
other systems have themselves to be healed.
Look
back and see what I have said about
education: the breathing system comes specially into activity
between the ages of seven and fourteen. There are great
possibilities of illness during the first seven years of life, and
again after fourteen; they are relatively least during the period
when the breath pulses through the body with the help of the etheric
body. A secret activity of healing resides in the breathing system,
and all the secrets of healing are at the same time secrets of
breathing. And this is connected with the fact that the workings of
Raphael, which are cosmic in spring, permeate the whole mystery of
human breathing in autumn.
We
have learnt to know Gabriel as the
Christmas Archangel. He is then the cosmic Spirit; we have to look up
above to find him. During the summer Gabriel carries into man all
that is effected by the plastic, formative forces of nourishment. At
midsummer they are carried into man by the Gabriel forces, after
Gabriel has descended from his cosmic activity during the winter to
his human activity in summer, when his forces stream through the
Earth and it is winter on the other side.
And
when at last we come to Michael, we have
him as the cosmic Spirit in autumn. He is then at his highest; he has
reached his cosmic culmination. Then he begins his descent; in spring
his forces penetrate up through the Earth and live in all that comes
to expression in man as movement and the power of will, enabling him
to walk and work and take hold of things.
Now
bring before you the
complete picture. First, the summer picture at the time of St. John:
up above, the grave countenance of Uriel, with his judicial look, his
warning mien and gesture — and, drawing near to men and
permeating them, the mild and loving gaze of Gabriel, Gabriel with
his gesture of blessing. So during summer we have the working
together of Uriel in the cosmos, Gabriel on the human side.
If
we pass on to autumn,
we have the — I will not say commanding, but rather the guiding
— look of Michael. For if we see it in the right light,
Michael's gaze is like a pointing finger, as though wishing not to
look into itself, but to look outwards into the world.
Michael's gaze is positive, active. And his sword forged out of
cosmic iron is held so that at the same time his hand points out to
men their way. That is the picture up above.
Below,
in autumn, is
Raphael, with deeply thoughtful gaze, who brings to mankind the
healing forces which he has first — one might say —
kindled in the cosmos. Raphael, with deep wisdom in his gaze, leaning
on the staff of Mercury, supported by the inner forces of the
Earth. Thus we have the working together of Michael in the cosmos,
Raphael on Earth.
Now
we go on to winter.
Gabriel is then the cosmic Angel; Gabriel up above, with his mild and
loving look and his gesture of benediction, weaving his garment of
snow in the clouds of winter. And below, Uriel, with his grave
judgment and warning, at the side of men: the positions are reversed.
And
as we come round again to spring, up
above we find Raphael, with his deeply thoughtful gaze; with the
staff of Mercury which now in the airy heights has become
something like a fiery serpent, a serpent of shining fire, no longer
resting on the Earth, but as though held forth, using the forces of
the air, mingling and combining fire, water and earth, so as to
transmute them into healing forces, working and weaving in the cosmos.
And
below, quite specially visible, is
Michael, coming to meet mankind, with his positive gaze; a gaze that
shows the way, as it were, into the world and would gladly draw the
eyes of men in the same direction, as he stands close to mankind, the
complement of Raphael, in spring.
So
there, you see, are the pictures:
Winter:
Gabriel above, Uriel below.
Spring: Raphael above, Michael below.
Summer: Uriel above, Gabriel below, with man.
Autumn: Michael above, Raphael below, with man.
Now
let us take the words which have come down through the ages like
an old magical saying and were used again by Goethe:
Wie
alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andren wirkt und lebt!
How
each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives
Yes, indeed, Uriel,
Gabriel, Raphael and Michael work together, one working in the other,
living in the other, and when man is placed in the universe as a
being of spirit, soul and body, these forces work magically in him.
And how far-reaching is the truth in these words, how far they go!
Think what they mean:
Wie
alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
How
each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
—
rising and descending! And then the lines that follow:
Und
sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchlingen!
their
golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.
Remember
how in yesterday's lecture I spoke of it all passing over from plastic
form into musical sound, universally resounding harmony.
I
cannot tell you what I
felt when this stood before my soul and I read again these lines by
Goethe:
vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen!
This durch — it can shake one
profoundly, for that is just how it is — it is true! It is
staggering to realise that these words ring through the world like a
peal of bells and are regarded as poetic licence or something of the
sort — or as words that anyone might write in letters or
articles. It is not so. These are words which correspond to a cosmic
fact. It is really shattering to read these words in the
context of Goethe's
Faust
and to know how true they are.
Now
we will go further.
We have seen how the heavenly Powers with golden pinions — the
Archangels — permeate the universe in harmony, working and
living in one another. But that is not all.
Let
us look at Gabriel, who draws nutritive
forces out of the cosmos and carries them into man at midsummer.
These forces are active in the human metabolic system.
Raphael rules
in the breathing system. And now Gabriel and Raphael, as they ascend and
descend, work together in such a way that Gabriel passes up into the
breathing system those forces of his which are otherwise active in
human nutrition, and there they become healing forces. Gabriel hands
on the nourishment to Raphael, and it then becomes a means of
healing. When that which is otherwise only a nutritive process in the
human organism is interwoven with the secret of breathing, it becomes
a healing force.
We must
indeed observe carefully the transformation which external substances
undergo in the nutritive system itself: then we come to recognise the
significance of the Gabriel forces, the nutritive forces, in man. But
these forces are led over into the breathing system. And in working
on further there, they become not only a means of quenching hunger
and thirst, and not only restorative forces: they turn into forces
for the inward correction of illness. The transmuted nutritive forces
become healing forces. Anyone who understands nutrition correctly,
understands the first stage of healing. If he knows what salt should
do in a healthy man, then, if he allows the metamorphosis from the
Gabriel-way to the Raphael-way to work on him, he will know how salt
can act as a means of healing, in this or that case. The healing
forces within us are metamorphoses of the nutritive forces. Raphael
receives the golden vessel of nutrition from Gabriel; it is
passed on to him.
And
now we come to a secret, familiar in
early times but entirely lost to-day. Anyone who can read
Hippocrates, or, if he cannot read Galen, can still gather
something from him, will notice that, in Hippocrates, and even
in Galen, those old physicians, there survived something of what is
really a great human secret. The forces that prevail in our breathing
system are healing forces; they are healing us continually. But when
these breathing forces rise into the head, the healing forces become
spiritual forces, active in sense-perception and in thinking.
Here is the secret that was known at one time; the secret that is
almost explicit in Hippocrates and can at least be drawn out of
Galen. Thought, perception, the inner spiritual life of man, are a
higher metamorphosis of therapy, the healing process; and when the
healing element in the breathing system, which lies between the
head and the digestive system, is driven further up, as it were, it
becomes the material foundation for the spiritual life of man.
So we can say:
The thought which flashes through the human head is really a
transmutation of the healing impulses that reside in the
various substances. Hence if a man sees truly into the heart of this,
and has some healing salt-substance, let us say, in his hand,
or some remedial plant-substance, he can look at it and say:
Here is a beneficent healing force which I can give to man in
accordance with his need. But if this substance penetrates into the
man and passes beyond the realm of breathing, so that it works in his
head, it becomes the material bearer of the power of thought: Raphael
then hands on his vessel to Uriel.
Why
does a remedy heal? Because it is on the
way to the spirit. And if one knows how far on the way to the spirit
a remedy is, one knows its healing power. The spirit cannot of itself
lay hold directly on the earthly in man; but the lower stage of the
spirit is a therapeutic force.
And just as
Gabriel passes on to Raphael the nutritive forces, to be transmuted into
forces of healing — in other words, he passes on his golden
vessel — and just as Raphael passes on his golden vessel to
Uriel, whereby the healing forces are made into the forces of
thought, so it is Michael who receives from Uriel the thought-forces,
and through the power of cosmic iron, out of which his sword is
forged, transforms these thought-forces into forces of will, so that
in man they become the forces of movement.
Hence
we have this second
picture: Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, ascending and descending;
Uriel and Gabriel, let us say, working in one another, but also
working with one another, one giving his possession to the
other, so that it can work on further in him. We see how the heavenly
Powers rise and descend, passing to one another golden vessels
— the golden vessels of nourishment, of healing, of the forces
of thought and of movement. So these golden vessels move on from one
Archangel to another, while at the same time each Archangel
works with the other in cosmic harmony.
And again in
Faust
we find:
Wie
Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!
See
heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
True indeed,
down to the very word “golden,” for these things are woven
out of the Sun-gold radiating from Uriel, as I described yesterday.
Goethe
had of course read
the old saying to which he then gave poetic expression, and it made a
tremendous impression on him. But the meaning I have been able to
picture for you here — that he did not know. It is just this
which staggers one — to find that when out of a certain poetic
feeling a spirit such as Goethe's takes hold of something handed down
from old traditions, it so incredibly reflects the truth! This
is the splendid thing that unites us, if we are cultivating Spiritual
Science to-day and these things are revealed to us: when we truly see
how Uriel and Raphael and Michael and Gabriel are working together,
and how they really do pass on to one another their own particular
forces. If we first see this for ourselves and then, having perhaps
come across indirectly an ancient saying, through Goethe in this
case, we let it work upon us, we see how an old instinctive truth
— no matter whether mythical or legendary — was at one
time widely current in the world. And then times change, and in our
own time we see how the ancient truth has to be raised to a higher level.
O
Hippocrates — it
is all the same whether we now give the name of Raphael, or Mercury,
or Hermes to the one who stood at his side — this Hippocrates
lived at a time when twilight was falling over the knowledge of this
working together of Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, and of how the
healing forces in the human organism lie between the thoughts
and the nutritive forces. This was the source from which an ancient
instinctive wisdom drew those wonderful old remedies which in fact
are always being renewed. Today they are found among so-called
primitive folk, and people cannot imagine how they have been come by.
All this is connected with the fact that a primeval wisdom was once
possessed by mankind.
But
now there must really
be a problem left in your minds. It is this. If you take everything I
have put before you — how for example the Raphael forces are
active in spring and in autumn are carried over by Raphael into the
inwardness of the breathing system — you must have been led to
suppose that man is entirely bound up with the working of the forces
of the cosmos through the course of the year. Originally, indeed,
that is how it was. But because man is a being who remembers, so that
an outer experience is preserved in memory and after days or years
can be relived as an inner experience, so these truths remain
entirely valid for the cosmos; but a man does not inwardly experience
the Raphael force in his breathing system only in the autumn, but on
through the winter, summer and spring. A kind of memory of it, more
substantial than ordinary memory, remains.
So
while things are arranged in the way I
have described, their effects are active in human beings
throughout the year. As an experience remains fixed in the
memory, so these effects continue all through the year; otherwise man
could not be a uniformly developing being all the year round.
In physical life, one person forgets more readily, or less readily,
than another. But the influence Raphael has implanted in our
breathing system during the autumn would disappear by the following
autumn when Raphael came again. Until then this nature-memory in the
breathing organ remains active, but then it has to be
renewed.
So
is man placed in the
course of nature; he is not excluded from the way the world
goes, but planted in the midst of it. But he is placed there in yet
another way. It is true that man, standing here on Earth, enclosed
within his skin, with his organs embedded in his body, feels
himself somewhat isolated in the cosmos, for the connections I
have described are indeed full of mystery. But this is not so when
man is a being only of spirit and soul — in his pre-earthly
existence, for example. Between death and a new birth he lives in a
realm of spirit; his soul gazes down not at an individual human body
— it chooses this in the course of time — but at the
whole Earth, and indeed at the Earth in connection with the whole
planetary system, and with all the interwoven activities of Raphael,
Uriel, Gabriel, Michael. In that realm, one is looking at
oneself from outside.
It
is there that the door
opens for the entry of souls who are returning from pre-earthly to
earthly life. It opens only during the period from the end of
December to the beginning of spring, when Gabriel hovers above as
cosmic Archangel, while below at man's side is Uriel, carrying cosmic
forces into the human head. In the course of these three months the
souls who are to be embodied during the whole year come down
from the cosmos towards the Earth. They remain waiting there until an
opportunity occurs in the Earth's planetary sphere: even the souls
who will be born in October, let us say, are already within the Earth
sphere, awaiting their birth. Much, very much, depends on whether a
soul, after it has entered the Earth sphere and is already in touch
with it, has to wait for its earthly embodiment. One soul has a
longer wait; another, a shorter one.
The
particular secret
here is that — just as, for example, the fructifying seed
enters the ovum at only one spot — the heavenly seeds enters
into the whole yearly being of the Earth only when Gabriel rules
above as the cosmic Angel, with his mild, loving look and gesture of
benediction, while below is Uriel, with judicial gaze and
warning gesture. That is the time when the Earth is impregnated
with souls. It is the time when the Earth has its mantle of snow and
surrenders to its crystallising forces; then man can be united with
the Earth as the thinking earth-body in the cosmos. Then the souls
pass out of the cosmos and assemble, as it were, in the Earth sphere.
That is the annual impregnation of the Earth's seasonal being.
To
all these things we
come, if we have insight not only into the physical aspect of the
cosmos, but into the activities of those cosmic Beings I have
described for you in the four pictures. And if we have arrived at
that, we can find in many a poem some indications of the cosmic
creative activity, for it is there in the world:
Wie
alles sich zum Ganzen webt
Eins in dem andem wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Von Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen!
How
each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.
In
these very words we
can discern something of that wonderful working together of the four
Archangel Beings who, in conjunction with the forces of nature,
permeate and animate the bodily nature, the soul and the spirit in
man — working in one another, working with one another.
|