F
rom the foregoing
lecture it will be clear to you that it is only possible
to gain a correct view of the historical evolution of humanity
when one takes into consideration the totally different
conditions of mind and soul that prevailed during the
various epochs. In the first part of my lecture I attempted to
define the Asiatic period of evolution, the genuine ancient
East, and we saw that we have to look back to the time when the
descendants of the races of Atlantis were finding their way
eastwards after the Atlantean catastrophe, moving from
west to east and gradually peopling Europe and Asia. All that
took place in ancient Asia in connection with these peoples was
under the influence of a condition of soul accustomed and
attuned to rhythm. At the beginning of the Asiatic period we
have still a distant echo of what was present in all its
fullness in Atlantis — the localised memory. During the
Oriental evolution this localised memory passed over into
rhythmic memory, and I showed how with the Greek evolution that
great change came about which brought in a new kind of memory,
the temporal memory. This means that the Asiatic period of
evolution (we are now speaking of what may rightly be called
the Asiatic period, for what history refers to is in reality a
later and decadent period) was an age of men altogether
differently constituted from the men of later times. And the
external events of history were in those days much more
dependent than in later times on the character and constitution
of man's inner life. What lived in man's mind and soul lived
too in his entire being. A separated life of thought and
feeling, such as we have to-day was unknown. A thinking that
does not feel itself to be connected with the inner processes
of the human head, was unknown. So too was the abstract feeling
that knows no connection with the circulation of the blood. Man
had in those times a thinking that was inwardly experienced as
a “happening” in the head, a feeling that was
experienced in the rhythm of the breath, in the circulation of
the blood, and so on. Man experienced his whole being in
undivided unity.
All
this was closely connected with the altogether different
experience man had of his relation to the world about him, to
the Cosmos, to the spiritual and the physical in the Cosmic
Whole. The man of the present day lives, let us say, in town or
in the country, and his experience varies accordingly. He is
surrounded by woods, rivers and mountains; or, if he lives in
town, bricks and mortar meet his gaze on every hand. When he
speaks of the cosmic and super-sensible, where does he think it
is? He can point to no sphere within which he can conceive of
what is cosmic and super-sensible as having place. It is nowhere
to be laid hold of, he cannot grasp it: even spiritually, he
cannot grasp it. But this was not so in that ancient oriental
stream of evolution. To an Oriental, the world around him which
we to-day call our physical environment, was the lowest portion
of a Cosmos conceived as a unity. Man had around him what is
contained in the three kingdoms of nature, he had around him
the rivers, mountains, and so forth; but for him this
environment was permeated through and through with Spirit,
interpenetrated and interwoven with Spirit. The Oriental of
ancient time would say: I live with the mountains, I live with
the rivers; but I live also with the elemental beings of the
mountains and of the rivers. I live in the physical realm, but
this physical realm is the body of a spiritual realm. Around me
is the spiritual world, the lowest spiritual world.
There below was this realm that for us has become the earthly
realm. Man lived in it. But he pictured to himself that where
this realm ends another realm begins, then again above that
another; and finally the highest realm which it is possible to
reach. And if we were to name these realms in accordance with
the language that has become current with us in
anthroposophical knowledge — the ancient Oriental had
other names for them, but that does not matter, we will name
them as they are for us — then we should have above, for
the highest realm, the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim,
Thrones; then the Second Hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis,
Exusiai; and the Third Hierarchy: Archai, Archangels,
Angels.
And
now comes the fourth realm where human beings live, the realm
wherein according to our method of cognition we to-day place
the mere objects and processes of Nature, but where the ancient
Oriental felt the whole of Nature penetrated with the elemental
spirits of water and of earth. This was Asia. Asia meant the
lowest spirit realm, in which he, as human being, lived. You
must remember that the present-day conception of things that we
have in our ordinary consciousness was unknown to the man of
those times. It would be nonsense to suppose that it were in
any way possible for him to imagine such a thing as matter
devoid of spirit. To speak as we do, of oxygen and nitrogen
would have been a sheer impossibility for the ancient Oriental.
To him oxygen was spirit, it was that spiritual thing which
worked as a stimulating and quickening agent on what already
possessed life, accelerating the life-processes in a living
organism. Nitrogen, which we think of to-day as contained in
the atmosphere together with oxygen, was also spiritual; it was
that which weaves throughout the Cosmos, working upon what is
living and organic in such a way as to prepare it to receive a
soul-nature. Such was the knowledge the Oriental of old had,
for example, of oxygen and nitrogen. And he knew all the
processes of Nature in this way, in their connection with
spirit; for the present-day conceptions were unknown to him.
There were a few individuals who knew them, and they were the
Initiates. The rest of mankind had as their ordinary
everyday consciousness a consciousness very similar to a
waking dream; it was a dream condition that with us only occurs
in abnormal experiences.
The
ancient Oriental went about with these dreams. He looked on the
mountains, rivers and clouds, and saw everything in the
way that things can be seen and heard in this dream condition.
Picture to yourself what may happen to the man of to-day in a
dream. He is asleep. Suddenly there appears before him a
dream-picture of a flaring fire. He hears the call of ‘Fire!’
Outside in the street a fire engine is passing, to put out a
fire somewhere or other. But what a difference between the
conception of the work of the fire-brigade that can be formed
by the human intellect in its matter-of-fact way with the aid
of ordinary sense-perception, and the pictures that a dream can
conjure up! For the ancient Oriental, however, all his
experiences manifested themselves in such dream-pictures.
Everything outside in the kingdoms of Nature was transformed in
his soul into pictures.
In
these dream-pictures man experienced the elemental spirits of
water, earth, air and fire. And sleep brought him again other
experiences. Sleep for him was not that deep heavy sleep we
have when we lie, as we say, ‘like a log’ and know nothing of
ourselves. I believe there are people who sleep so in these
days, are there not? But then there was no such thing: even in
sleep man had still a dull form of consciousness. While on the
one hand he was, as we now say, resting his body, the spiritual
was weaving within him in a spiritual activity of the external
world. And in this weaving he perceived the Beings of the Third
Hierarchy. Asia he perceived in his ordinary waking-dream
condition, that is to say in what was the everyday
consciousness of that time. At night, in sleep, he perceived
the Third Hierarchy. And from time to time there entered into
his sleep a still more dim and dark consciousness, but a
consciousness that graved its experiences deeply into his
thought and feeling. Thus these Eastern peoples had first their
everyday consciousness where everything was changed into
Imaginations and pictures. The pictures were not so real as
those of still older times, for example the time of Atlantis or
Lemuria, or of the Moon epoch. Nevertheless they were still
there, even during this Asiatic evolution. By day, then, men
had these pictures. And in sleep they had an experience which
they might have clothed in the following words: — We
‘sleep away’ the ordinary earthly existence, we enter the realm
of the Angels, Archangels and Archai and live among them. The
soul sets itself free from the organism and lives among the
Beings of the higher Hierarchies.
Men
knew at the same time that whereas they lived in Asia with
gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, that is with the
elemental spirits of the earth, water, air and fire, — in
sleep, while the body rested, they experienced the Beings of
the Third Hierarchy in the planetary existence, in all that
lives in the whole planetary system belonging to the Earth.
There were however moments when the sleeper would feel: An
utterly strange region is approaching me. It is taking me to
itself, it is drawing me away from earthly existence. He did
not feel this while immersed in the Beings of the Third
Hierarchy, but only when a still deeper condition of sleep
intervened. Though there was never a real consciousness of what
took place during the sleep-condition of the third kind,
nevertheless what was then experienced from the Second
Hierarchy impressed itself deep into the whole being of man.
And the experience remained in man's feeling when he awoke. He
could then say: I have been graciously blessed by higher
Spirits, whose life is beyond the planetary existence. Thus did
these ancient peoples speak of that Hierarchy which embraces
the Kyriotetes, the Dynamis and the Exusiai. What we are now
describing are the ordinary states of consciousness of this
ancient Asiatic period. The first two states of
consciousness — the waking-sleeping,
sleeping-waking and the sleep, in which the Third Hierarchy
were present — were experienced by all men. And many,
through a special endowment of Nature, experienced also the
intervention of a deeper sleep, during which the Second
Hierarchy played into human consciousness.
And
the Initiates in the Mysteries, — they received a still
further degree of consciousness. Of what nature was this? The
answer is astonishing; for the fact is, the Initiate of the
ancient East acquired the same consciousness that you have now
by day! You develop it in a perfectly natural way in your
second or third year of life. No ancient Oriental ever attained
this state of consciousness in a natural way; he had to develop
it artificially in himself. He had to develop it out of the
waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking. As long as he went about with
this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, he saw everywhere
pictures, rendering only in more or less symbolic fashion what
we see to-day in clear sharp outlines; as an Initiate however
he attained to see things as we see them to-day in our ordinary
consciousness. The Initiates, by means of their developed
consciousness, attained to learn what every boy and girl learns
at school to-day. The difference between their consciousness
and the normal consciousness of to-day is not that the content
was different. Of course the abstract forms of letters which we
have to-day were unknown then; written characters were in more
intimate connection with the things and processes of the
Cosmos. Reading and writing were nevertheless learned in those
days by the Initiates; although of course by them alone, for
reading and writing can only be learned with that clear
intellectual consciousness which is the natural one for the man
of to-day.
Supposing that somewhere or other this world of the ancient
East were to re-appear, inhabited by human beings having the
kind of consciousness they had in those olden times, and you
were to come among them with your consciousness of the
present day, then for them you would all be initiates. The
difference does not he in the content of consciousness. You
would be initiates. But the moment the people recognised you as
initiates, they would immediately drive you out of the
land by every means in their power; for it would be quite clear
to them that an initiated person ought not to know things in
the way we know them to-day. He ought not, for example, to be
able to write as we are able to write to-day. If I were to
transport myself into the mind of a man of that time, and were
to meet such a pseudo-initiate, that is to say, an ordinary
clever man of the present day, I should find myself saying of
him: He can write, he makes signs on paper that mean something,
and he has no idea how devilish it is to do such a thing
without carrying in him the consciousness that it may only be
done in the service of divine cosmic consciousness; he does not
know that a man may only make such signs on paper when he can
feel how God works in his hand, in his very fingers, works in
his soul, enabling it to express itself through these letters.
Therein lies the whole difference between the initiates of
olden time and the ordinary man of the present day. It is not a
difference in the content of consciousness, but in the way of
comprehending and understanding the thing. Read my book
Christianity as Mystical Fact,
of which a new edition
has recently appeared, and you will find right at the beginning
the same indication as to the essential nature of the initiate
of olden times. It is in point of fact always so in the course
of world-evolution. That which develops in man at a later
period in a natural way had in former epochs to be won through
initiation.
Through such a thing as I have brought to your notice, you will
be able to detect the radical difference between the
condition of mind and soul prevalent among the Eastern
peoples of prehistoric times and that of a later civilisation.
It was another mankind that could call Asia the last or lowest
heaven and understand by that their own land, the Nature that
was round about them. They knew where the lowest heaven
was.
Compare this with the conceptions men have to-day. How far is
the man of the present time from regarding all he sees around
him as the lowest heaven! Most people cannot think of it as the
‘lowest’ heaven for the simple reason that they have no
knowledge of any heaven at all!
Thus we see how in that ancient Eastern time the Spiritual
entered deeply into Nature, into all natural existence. But now
we find also among these peoples something which to most of us
in the present day may easily appear extremely barbarous. To a
man of that time it would have appeared terribly barbarous if
someone had been able to write in the feeling and attitude of
mind in which we to-day are able to write; it would have seemed
positively devilish to him. But when we to-day on the other
hand see how it was accepted in those times as something quite
natural and as a matter of course that a people should remove
from West to East, should conquer — often with great
cruelty — another people already in occupation and make
slaves of them, then such a thing is bound to appear barbarous
to very many of us.
This is, however, broadly speaking, the substance of oriental
history over the whole of Asia. Whilst men had as I have
described, a high spiritual conception of things, their
external history ran its course in a series of conquests and
enslavements. Undoubtedly that appears to many people as
extremely barbarous. To-day, although wars of aggression do
still sometimes occur, men have an uneasy conscience about
them. And this is true even of those who support and defend
such wars; they are not quite easy in their conscience.
In
those times, however, man had a perfectly clear
conscience as regards these wars of aggression, he felt
that such conquest was willed of the Gods. The longing for
peace, the love of peace, that arose later and spread over a
large part of Asia, is really the product of a much later
civilisation. The acquisition of land by conquest and the
enslavement of its population is a salient feature of the
early civilisation of Asia. The farther we go back into
prehistoric times, the more do we find this kind of conquest
going on. The conquests of Xerxes and others of his time were
in truth but faint shadows of what went on in earlier ages.
Now
there is a quite definite principle underlying these conquests.
As a result of the states of consciousness which I have
described to you, man stood in an altogether different relation
to his fellow man and also to the world around him. Certain
differences between different parts of the inhabited Earth have
to-day lost their chief meaning. At that time these differences
made themselves felt in quite another way. Let me put before
you, as an example, something which frequently occurred.
Suppose a conquering people has made its way from the North of
Asia, spread itself out over some other region of Asia and made
the population subject to it. What has really happened?
In
characteristic instances that are a true expression of the
trend of historical evolution, we find that the aggressors were
— as a people or as a race — young, full of
youth-forces. Now what does it mean to-day to be young? What
does it mean for men of our present epoch of evolution? It
means to bear within one in every moment of life sufficient of
the forces of death to provide for those soul-forces that need
the dying processes in man. For, as you know, we have within
us, the sprouting, germinating forces of life, but these life
forces are not the forces that make us reflective, thoughtful
beings; on the contrary, they make us weak, unconscious. The
death forces, the forces of destruction, which are also
continually active within us — and are overcome
again and again during sleep by the life forces, so that not
until the end of life do we gather together all the death
forces in us in the one final event of death — these
forces it is that induce reflection, self-consciousness. This
is how it is with present-day humanity. Now a young race, a
young people, such as I have described, suffered from its own
over-strong life forces, and continually had the feeling: I
feel my blood beating perpetually against the walls of my body.
I cannot endure it. My consciousness will not become reflective
consciousness. Because of my very youthfulness I cannot develop
my full humanity.
An
ordinary man would not have spoken thus, but the initiates
spoke in this way in the Mysteries, and it was the initiates
who guided and directed the whole course of history.
Here was then a people who had too much youth, too much life
forces, too little in them of that which could bring about
reflection and thought. They left their land and conquered a
region where an older people lived, a people which had in some
way or other taken into itself the forces of death, because it
had already become decadent. The younger nation went out
against the older and brought it into subjection. It was not
necessary that a blood-bond should be established between
conquerors and enslaved. That which worked unconsciously in the
soul between them worked in a rejuvenating way; it worked on
the reflective faculties. What the conqueror required from the
slaves whom he now had in his court was influence upon his
consciousness. He had only to turn his attention to these
slaves and the longing for unconsciousness was quenched in his
soul, reflective consciousness began to dawn.
What we have to attain to-day as individuals was attained at
that time by living together with others. A people who faced
the world as conquerors and lords, a young people, not
possessed of full powers of reflection, needed around it, so to
say, a people that had in it more of the forces of death. In
overcoming another people, it won through to what it needed for
its own evolution.
And
so we find that these Oriental conflicts, often so terrible and
presenting to us such a barbarous aspect, are in reality
nothing else than the impulses of human evolution. They had to
take place. Mankind would not have been able to develop on the
earth, had it not been for these terrible wars and struggles
that seem to us so barbarous.
Already in those olden times the Initiates of the Mysteries saw
the world as it is seen to-day. Only they united with this
perception a different attitude of mind and soul. For them, all
that they experienced in clear, sharp outlines — even as
we to-day experience external objects in sharp outlines, when
we perceive with our senses — was something that came
from the Gods, that came even for human consciousness
from the Gods. For how did external objects present themselves
to an Initiate of those times? There was perhaps a flash of
lightning (to take a simple and obvious illustration). You know
very well what a flash of lightning looks like to a man of
to-day. The men of olden time did not see it thus. They saw
living spiritual Beings moving in the sky, and the sharp line
of the flash disappeared completely. They saw a host, a
procession of spiritual Beings hurrying forward over or in
cosmic space. The lightning as such they did not see. They saw
a host of spirits hovering and moving through cosmic space.
The
Initiate also saw, with the rest, this spiritual host, but he
had developed within him the perception that we have to-day,
and so for him, the picture began to grow dim and the heavenly
host gradually disappeared from view, and then the flash of
lightning could become manifest.
The
whole of Nature, in the form in which we see it to-day, could
only be attained in olden times through initiation. But
how did man feel towards such knowledge? He did not by any
means look on the knowledge thus attained with the indifference
with which knowledge and truth are regarded to-day. There was a
strong moral element in man's experience of knowledge. If we
turn our gaze to what happened with the neophytes of the
Mysteries, we find we have to describe it in the following way.
When a few individuals, after undergoing severe inner tests and
trials, had been initiated into the view of Nature, which
to-day is accessible to all, they had quite naturally this
feeling: consider the man with his ordinary consciousness. He
sees the host of elementary beings riding through the air. But
just because he has such a perception, he is devoid of free
will. He is entirely given up to the Divine-spiritual world.
For in this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, the will does not
move in freedom, rather is it something that streams into man
as Divine will. And the Initiate, who saw the lightning come
forth out of these Imaginations, learned to say: I must be a
man who is free to move in the world without the Gods,
one for whom the Gods cast out the world-content into the
void.
Now
you must understand, this condition would have been unbearable
for the Initiate, had there not been for him moments that
compensated for it. Such moments he did have. For while on the
one hand the Initiate learned to experience Asia as
God-forsaken, Spirit-forsaken, he learned also to know a still
deeper state of consciousness than that which reached up to the
Second Hierarchy. Knowing the world bereft of God, he learned
also to know the world of the Seraphim, Cherubim and
Thrones.
At
a certain time in the epoch of Asiatic evolution, approximately
in the middle — later on we shall have to speak more
exactly of the dates — the condition of
consciousness of the Initiates was such that they went
about on Earth with very nearly the perception of the kingdoms
of the Earth which is possessed by modern man; they felt it,
however, in their limbs. They felt their limbs set free from
the Gods in a God-bereft earthly substance.
In
compensation for this, however, they met in this godless land
the high Gods of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. As
Initiates they learned to know, no longer the grey-green
spiritual Beings that were the Pictures of the forest, the
Pictures of the trees, they learned as Initiates to know the
forest devoid of Spirit. Theirs, however, was the
compensation of meeting in the forest Beings of the First
Hierarchy, there they would meet some Being from the Kingdom of
the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.
All
this, understood as giving form to the social life of humanity,
is the essential feature in the historical evolution of the
ancient East. And the driving force for further evolution lies
in the search for an adjustment between young races and old
races, so that the young races may mature through association
with the old, with the souls of those whom they have brought
into subjection. However far back we look into Asia, everywhere
we find how the young races who cannot of themselves develop
the reflective faculties, set out to find these in wars of
aggression.
When, however, we turn our gaze away from Asia to the land of
Greece, we find a somewhat different development. Over in
Greece, in the time of the full flower of Greek culture, we
find a people who did indeed know how to grow old, but were
unable to permeate the growing old with full spirituality. I
have many times had to draw attention to the characteristic
Greek utterance: Better a beggar in the world of the living
than a king in the realm of the shades. Neither to death
outside in Nature, nor to death in man, could the Greek adapt
himself. He could not find his true relation with death. On the
other hand, however, he had this death within him. And so in
the Greek we find, not a longing for a reflective
consciousness, but apprehension and fear of death.
Such a fear of death was not felt by the young Eastern races;
they went out to make conquests, when as a race they
found themselves unable to experience death in the right way.
The inner conflict, however, which the Greeks experienced
with death became in its turn an inner impulse compelling
humanity, and led to what we know as the Trojan War. The Greeks
had no need to seek death at the hands of a foreign race in
order to acquire the power of reflection. The Greeks needed to
come into a right relation with what they felt and experienced
of death, they needed to find the inner living mystery of
death. And this led to that great conflict between the Greeks
and the people in Asia from whom they had originated. The
Trojan war is a war of sorrow, a war of apprehension and fear.
We see facing one another the Greeks, who felt death within
them but did not know, as it were, what to do with it, and the
Oriental races who were bent on conquest, who wanted death and
had it not. The Greeks had death, but were at a loss how to
adapt themselves to it. They needed the infusion of another
element, before they could discover its secret. Achilles,
Agamemnon — all these men bore death within them, but
could not adapt themselves to it. They look across to Asia.
There in Asia they see a people who are in the reverse
position, who are suffering under the direct influence of the
opposite condition. Over there are men who do not feel death in
the intense way it is felt by the Greeks themselves, over there
are men to whom death is something abounding in life.
All
this has been brought to expression in a wonderful way by
Homer. Wherever he sets the Trojans over against the Greeks,
everywhere he lets us see this contrast. You may see it, for
instance, in the characteristic figures of Hector and Achilles.
And in this contrast is expressed what is taking place on the
frontier of Asia and Europe. Asia, in those olden times, had,
as it were, a superabundance of life over death, yearned after
death. Europe had, on the Greek soil, a superabundance of death
in man, and man was at a loss to find his true relation to it.
Thus from a second point of view we see Europe and Asia set
over against one another.
In
the first place, we had the transition from rhythmic memory to
temporal memory; now we have these two quite different
experiences in respect of death in the human
organisation. To-morrow we will consider more in detail
the contrast, which I have only been able to indicate at the
close of to-day's lecture, and so approach a fuller
understanding of the transitions that lead over from Asia to
Europe. For these had a deep and powerful influence on the
evolution of man, and without understanding them we can really
arrive at no understanding of the evolution we are passing
through at the present day.
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