A
mong the mysteries of
ancient times Ephesus holds a unique position. You will
remember that in considering the part played by Alexander
in the evolution of the West, I had to mention also this
Mystery of Ephesus. Let us try to see wherein lies the peculiar
importance of this Mystery.
We
can only grasp the significance of the events of earlier and of
more recent times when we understand and appreciate the
great change that took place in the character of the Mysteries
(which were in reality the source whence all the older
civilisations sprang) in passing from the East to the West,
and, in the first place, to Greece. This change was of the
following nature.
When we look back into the older Mysteries of the East, we have
everywhere the impression: The priests of the Mysteries are
able, from their own vision, to reveal great and important
truths to their pupils. The farther back we go in time, the
more are these Wise Men or Priests in a position to call forth
in the Mysteries the immediate presence of the Gods themselves,
the Spiritual Beings who guide the worlds of the planets, who
guide the events and phenomena of Earth. The Gods were
actually there present.
The
connection of the human being with the macrocosm was revealed
in many different Mysteries in an equally sublime manner to
that I pictured for you yesterday, in connection with the
Mysteries of Hibernia and also with the teachings that
Aristotle had still to give to Alexander the Great. An
outstanding characteristic of all ancient Oriental Mysteries
was that moral impulses were not sharply distinguished from
natural impulses. When Aristotle points Alexander to the
North-West, where the Spirits of the element of Water held
dominion, it was not only a physical impulse that came from
that quarter — as we to-day feel how the wind blows from
the North-West and so forth — but with the physical came
also moral impulses. The physical and the moral were one. This
was possible, because through the knowledge that was given in
these Mysteries — the Spirit of Nature was actually
perceived in the Mysteries — man felt himself one with
the whole of Nature. Here we have something in the relation of
man to Nature, that was still living and present in the time
that intervened between the life of Gilgamesh and the life of
the individuality Gilgamesh became, who was also in close
contact with the Mysteries, namely, with the Mystery of
Ephesus. There was still alive in men of that time a vision and
perception of the connection of the human being with the Spirit
of Nature. This connection they perceived in the following way.
Through all that the human being learned concerning the working
of the elementary spirits in Nature, and the working of the
Beings of Intelligence in the planetary processes, he was led
to this conclusion: All around me I see displayed on every side
the plant-world — the green shoots, the buds and blossoms
and then the fruit. I see the annual plants in the meadows and
on the country-side, that grow up in Spring-time and fade away
again in Autumn. I see, too, the trees that go on growing for
hundreds of years, forming a bark on the outside, hardening to
wood and reaching downwards far and wide into the Earth with
their roots. But all that I see out there — the annual
herbs and flowers, the trees that take firm hold into the Earth
— once upon a time, I, as man, have borne it all within
me.
You
know how to-day, when there is carbonic acid in the air, that
has come about through the breathing of human beings, we can
feel that we ourselves have breathed out the carbonic acid, we
have breathed it into space. We have therefore still to-day
this slight connection with the Cosmos. Through the airy part
of our nature, through the air that gives rise to the breathing
and other air-processes that go on in the human organism, we
have a living connection with the great Universe, with the
Macrocosm. The human being to-day can look upon his
out-breathed breath, upon the carbonic acid that was in him and
is now outside him. But just as we are able to-day to look upon
the carbonic acid we have breathed out — we do not
generally do so, but we could — so did the initiates of
olden times look upon the whole plant-world. Those who had been
initiated in the Oriental Mysteries, or had received the wisdom
that streamed forth from the Oriental Mysteries, were able to
say: I look back in the evolution of the world to an ancient
Sun epoch. In that time I bore still within me the plants. Then
afterwards I let them stream forth from me into the far circles
of Earth existence. But as long as I bore the plants within me,
while I was still that Adam Cadmon who embraced the whole Earth
and the plant-world with it, so long was this whole plant-world
watery-airy in substance. Then the human being separated off
from himself this plant-world. Imagine that you were to become
as big as the whole Earth, and then to separate off, to
secrete, as it were, inwardly something plant-like in nature,
and this plant-like substance were to go through metamorphoses
in the watery element — coming to life, fading away,
growing up, being changed, taking on different shapes and forms
— and you will by this imagination call up again in your
soul feelings and experiences that once lived in it. Those who
received their education and training in the East at about the
time of Gilgamesh were able to say to themselves that these
things had once been so.
And
when they looked abroad upon the meadows and beheld all the
growth of green and flowers, then they said: We have separated
the plants from ourselves, we have put them forth from us in an
earlier stage of our evolution; and the Earth has received
them. The Earth it is that has lent them root, and has given
them their woody nature; the tree-nature in the world of plants
comes from the Earth. But the whole plant-nature as such has
been cast off, as it were, by the human being, and received by
the Earth. In this way man felt an intimate and near
relationship with everything of a plant-nature.
With the higher animals the human being did not feel a
relationship of this kind. For he knew that he could only work
his way rightly and come to his true place on the Earth by
overcoming the animal form, by leaving the animals behind him
in his evolution. The plants he took with him as far as the
Earth; then gave them over to her that she might receive them
into her bosom. For the plants he was upon Earth the Mediator
of the Gods, the Mediator between the Gods and the Earth.
Men
who had this great experience acquired a feeling that may be
put quite simply in a few words. The human being comes hither
to the Earth from the World-All. The question of number does
not come into consideration; for, as I said yesterday, they
were all and each within the other. That which afterwards
becomes the plant-world separates off from man, the Earth
receives it and gives it root. The human being felt as though
he had folded the Earth about with a garment of plant growth,
and as though the Earth were thankful for this enfolding and
took from him the watery-airy plant element that he was able,
as it were, to breathe on to her.
In
entering into this experience men felt themselves intimately
associated with the God, with the chief God of Mercury. Through
the feeling: We have ourselves brought the plants on to the
Earth, men came into a special relation with the God
Mercury.
Towards the animals, on the other hand, man had a different
feeling. He knew that he could not bring them with him to
Earth, he had to cast them off, he had to make himself free
from them, otherwise he would not be able to evolve his human
form in the right way. He thrust the animals from him; they
were pushed out of the way and had then to go through an
evolution on their own account on a lower level than the level
of humanity. Thus did the man of olden times — of the
Gilgamesh time and later — feel himself placed between
the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. In relation to the
plant kingdom he was the bearer, who bore the seed to the Earth
and fructified the Earth with it, doing this as Mediator for
the Gods. In relation to the animal kingdom he felt as though
he had pushed it away from him, in order that he might become
man without the encumbrance of the animals, who have
consequently been stunted and retarded in their
development.
The
whole animal-worship of Egypt has to do with this perception.
The deep fellow-feeling, too, with animals that we find in Asia
is connected with it. It was a sublime conception of Nature
that man had, feeling his relationship on the one hand with the
plant world and on the other hand with the world of animals. In
relation to the animal he had a feeling of emancipation. In
relation to the plant he felt a near and intimate kinship. The
plant world was to him a bit of himself, and he felt a sincere
love for the Earth inasmuch as the Earth had received into
herself the bit of humanity that gave rise to the plants, had
let these take root in her, had even given of her own substance
to clothe the trees in bark. There was always a moral element
present when man took cognisance of the physical world around
him. When he beheld the plants in the meadow, it was not only
the natural growth that he perceived. In this growth he
perceived and felt a moral relation to man. With the animal man
felt again another moral relation: he had fought his way up
beyond them.
Thus we find in the Mysteries over in the East a sublime
conception of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. Later there were
Mysteries in Greece, too, but with a much less real perception
of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. The Greek Mysteries are
grand and sublime, but they are essentially different from the
Oriental Mysteries. It is characteristic of these that they do
not tend to make man feel himself on the Earth, but that
through them man feels himself a part of the Cosmos, a part of
the World-All. In Greece, on the other hand, the character of
the Mysteries had changed and the time was come when man began
to feel himself united with the Earth. In the East the
spiritual world itself was either seen or felt in the
Mysteries. It is absolutely true to say that in the ancient
Oriental Mysteries the Gods themselves appeared among the
priests, who did sacrifice there and made prayers. The Mystery
Temples were at the same time the earthly Guest Houses of the
Gods, where the Gods bestowed upon men through the priests what
they had to give them from the treasures of Heaven. In the
Greek Mysteries appeared rather the images of the Gods, the
pictures, as it were, the phantoms, — true and genuine,
but phantoms none the less; no longer the Divine Beings, no
longer the Realities, but phantoms. And so the Greek had a
wholly different experience from the man who belonged to the
ancient Oriental culture. The Greek had the feeling: There are
indeed Gods, but for man it is only possible to have pictures
of these Gods, just as we have in our memory pictures of past
experiences, no longer the experiences themselves.
That was the fundamental feeling that took rise in the Greek
Mysteries. The Greek felt that he had, as it were, memories of
the Cosmos, not the appearance of the Cosmos itself, but
pictures; pictures of the Gods, and not the Gods themselves.
Pictures, too, of the events and processes on Saturn, Sun and
Moon; no longer a living connection with what actually took
place on Saturn, Sun and Moon, — the kind of living
connection the human being has with his own childhood. The men
of the Oriental civilisation had this real connection with Sun,
Moon and Saturn, they had it from their Mysteries. But the
Mysteries of the Greeks had a pictorial or image-character.
There appeared in them the shadow-spirits of Divine-Spiritual
Reality. And something else went with this as well that was
very significant. For there was yet another difference between
the Oriental Mysteries and the Greek.
In
the Oriental Mysteries, if one wanted to know something of the
sublime and tremendous experience that was possible in these
Mysteries, one had always to wait until the right time.
Some experience or other could perhaps only be found by making
the appropriate sacrifice, the appropriate super-sensible
‘experiments’ as it were, in Autumn, — another only in
Spring, another again at Midsummer, and another in the
depth of Winter. Or again it might be that sacrifices were made
to certain Gods at a time determined by a particular
constellation of the Moon. At that special time the Gods would
appear in the Mysteries, and men would come thither to be
present at their manifestations. When the time had gone
by one would have to wait, perhaps thirty years, until the
opportunity should come again when those Divinities should once
more reveal themselves in the Mysteries. All that related to
Saturn, for example, could only enter the region of the
Mysteries every thirty years; all that was concerned with the
Moon about every eighteen years. And so on. The priests of the
Oriental Mysteries were dependent on time, and also on place
and on all manner of circumstances for receiving the sublime
and tremendous knowledge and vision that came to them. Quite
different manifestations were received deep in a mountain cave
and high on the mountain top. Or again, the revelations were
different, according as one was far inland in Asia or on the
coast. Thus a certain dependence on place and time was
characteristic of the Mysteries of the East.
In
Greece the great and awful Realities had disappeared. Pictures
there still were. And the pictures were dependent not on the
time of year, on the course of the century, or on place; but
men could have the pictures when they had performed this or
that exercise, or had made this or that personal sacrifice. If
a man had reached a certain stage of sacrifice and of personal
ripeness, then for the very reason that he as a human being had
attained thus far, he was able to have view of the shadows of
the great world-events and of the great world-Beings.
That is the important change in the nature of the Mysteries
that meets us when we pass from the ancient East to Greece. The
ancient Oriental Mysteries were subject to the conditions of
space and locality, whilst in the Greek Mysteries the human
being himself came into consideration and what he brought to
the Gods. The God, so to speak, came in his phantom or
shadow-picture, when the human being, through the preparations
he had undergone, had been made worthy to receive the God in
phantom form. In this way the Mysteries of Greece prepared the
road for modern humanity.
Now, the Mystery of Ephesus stood midway between the ancient
Oriental Mysteries and the Greek Mysteries. It held a unique
position. For in Ephesus those who attained to initiation were
able still to experience something of the tremendous majestic
truths of the ancient East. Their souls were still stirred with
a deep inward experience of the connection of the human being
with the Macrocosm and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings of the
Macrocosm. In Ephesus men could still have sight of the
super-earthly, and in no small measure. Self-identification
with Artemis, with the Goddess of the Mystery of Ephesus, still
brought to man a vivid sense of his relation to the kingdoms of
nature. The plant world, so it taught him, is yours; the Earth
has only received it from you. The animal world you have
overcome. You have had to leave it behind. You must look back
on the animals with the greatest possible compassion, they have
had to remain behind on the road, in order that you might
become Man. To feel oneself one with the Macrocosm: this was an
experience that was still granted to the Initiate of
Ephesus, he could still receive it straight from the Realities
themselves.
At
the same time, the Mysteries of Ephesus were, so to speak, the
first to be turned westward. As such, they had already that
independence of the seasons, or of the course of years and
centuries; that independence too of place on Earth. In Ephesus
the important things were the exercises that the human being
went through, making himself ripe, by sacrifice and devotion,
to approach the Gods. So that on the one hand, in the content
of its Mystery truths, the Mystery of Ephesus harked back to
the Ancient East, whilst on the other hand it was already
directed to the development of man himself, and was thus
adapted to the nature and character of the Greek. It was the
very last of the Eastern Mysteries of the Greeks, where the
great and ancient truths could still be brought near to men;
for in the East generally the Mysteries had already become
decadent.
It
was in the Mysteries of the West that the ancient truths
remained longest. The Mysteries of Hibernia still existed,
centuries after the birth of Christianity. These Mysteries of
Hibernia are nevertheless doubly secret and occult, for you
must know that even in the so-called Akashic Records, it is by
no means easy to search into the hidden mysteries of the
statues of which I told you yesterday — the Sun Statue
and the Moon Statue, the male and the female. To approach the
pictures of the Oriental Mysteries and to call them forth out
of the astral light is, comparatively speaking, easy for one
who is trained in these things. But let anyone approach, or
want to approach, the Mysteries of Hibernia in the astral
light, and he will at first be dazed and stupefied. He will be
beaten back. These Irish, these Hibernian Mysteries will not
willingly let themselves be seen in the Akashic pictures,
albeit they continued longest in their original purity.
Now
you must remember, my dear friends, that the individuality who
was in Alexander the Great had come into close contact with the
Hibernian Mysteries during the Gilgamesh time, when he made his
journey westward to the neighbourhood of the modern Burgenland.
These Mysteries had lived in him, lived in him after a very
ancient manner, for it was in the time when the West resounded
still with powerful echoes of the Atlantean age. And now all
this experience was carried over into the condition of human
existence that runs its course between death and a new birth.
Then later the two friends, Eabani and Gilgamesh, found
themselves together again in life in Ephesus, and there they
entered into a deeply conscious experience of what they had
experienced formerly during the Gilgamesh time more or less
unconsciously or sub-consciously, in connection with the
Divine-Spiritual worlds.
Their life during this Ephesus time was comparatively peaceful,
they were able to digest and ponder what they had received into
their souls in more stormy days.
Let
me remind you of what it was that passed over into Greece
before these two appeared again in the decadence of the Greek
epoch and the rise of the Macedonian. The Greece of olden time,
the Greece that had spread abroad and embraced Ephesus also
within its bounds, and had even penetrated right into Asia
Minor, had still in her shadow-pictures the after-echo of the
ancient time of the Gods. The connection of man with the
spiritual world was still experienced, though in shadows.
Greece was however gradually working herself free from the
shadows; we may observe how step by step the Greek civilisation
was wresting its way out of what we may call divine
civilisation and taking on more and more the character of a
purely earthly one.
My
dear friends, it is only too true that the very most important
things in the history of human evolution are simply passed over
in the materialistic external history of to-day. Of
extraordinary importance for the understanding of the whole
Greek character and culture is this fact: that in the Greek
civilisation we find no more than a shadow-picture, a phantom
of the old Divine Presence wherein man had contact with the
super-sensible worlds, for man was already gradually emerging
out of this Divinity and learning to make use of his own
individual and personal spiritual faculties. Step by step we
can see this taking place. In the dramas of Æschylus we
may see placed before us in an artistic picture the feeling
that yet remained to man of the old time of the Gods. Scarcely
however has Sophocles come forward when man begins to tear
himself away from this conscious sense of union with
Divine-Spiritual existence. And then something else appears
that is coupled with a name which from one point of view we
cannot over-estimate — but of course there are many
points of view to be considered.
In
the older Grecian time there was no need to make written
history. Why was this? Because men had the living shadow of
everything of importance that had happened in the past. History
could be read in what came to view in the Mysteries. There one
had the shadow-pictures, the living shadow-pictures. What was
there then to write down as history?
But
now came the time when the shadow pictures became submerged in
the lower world, when human consciousness could no longer
perceive them. Then came the impulse to make records.
Herodotus
[Herodotus of Halicarnassos, the first Greek
historian, lived in the fifth century B.C.
Wrote history of the Persian Wars.],
the first prose historian, appeared. And from this
time onward, many could be named who followed him, the same
impulse working in them all, — to tear mankind away from
the Divine-Spiritual and to set him down in the purely earthly.
Nevertheless, as long as Greek culture and civilisation lasted,
there is a splendour and a light shed abroad over this
earth-directed tendency, a light of which we shall hear
to-morrow that it did not pass over to Rome nor to the Middle
Ages. In Greece, a light was there. Of the shadow-pictures,
even the fading shadow-pictures of the evening twilight of
Greek civilisation, man still felt that they were divine in
their origin.
In
the midst of all this, like a haven of refuge where men found
clear enlightenment concerning what was present, as it were in
fragments, in Greek culture, — in the midst stood
Ephesus. Heraclitus received instruction from Ephesus, as did
many another great philosopher; Plato, too, and Pythagoras.
Ephesus was the place where the old Oriental wisdom was
preserved up to a certain point. And the two souls who dwelt
later in Aristotle and Alexander the Great were in Ephesus a
little after the time of Heraclitus and were able to receive
there of the heritage from the old knowledge of the Oriental
Mysteries that the Mystery of Ephesus still retained. Notably
the soul of Alexander entered into an intimate union with the
very Being of the Mysteries as far as it was living in the
Mystery of Ephesus.
And
now we come to one of those historical events of which people
may think that they are mere chance, but which have their
foundations deep down in the inner connections of the evolution
of humanity. In order to gain an insight into the significance
of this event, let us call to mind the following. We must
remember that in the two souls who afterwards became Aristotle
and Alexander the Great, there was living in the first place
all that they had received in a far-off time in the past and
had subsequently elaborated and pondered. And then there was
also living in their souls the treasure of untold value that
had come to them in Ephesus. We might say that the whole of
Asia — in the form that it had assumed in Greece, and in
Ephesus in particular — was living in these two, and more
especially in the soul of Alexander the Great, that is to say,
of him who afterwards became Alexander the Great.
Picture to yourselves the part played by this personality. I
described him for you as he was in the Gilgamesh time; and now
you must imagine how the knowledge that belonged to the ancient
East and to Ephesus, a knowledge which we may also call a
“beholding,” a “perceiving,” —
this knowledge was called up again in the intercourse
between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, in a new form.
Picture this to yourselves; and then think what would have
happened if Alexander, in his incarnation as Alexander, had
come again into contact with the Mystery of Ephesus, bearing
with him in his soul the gigantic document of the Mystery of
Ephesus, for this majestic document of knowledge lived with
extraordinary intensity in the souls of these two. If we can
form a idea of this, we can rightly estimate the fact that on
the day on which Alexander was born, Herostratus threw the
flaming torch into the Sanctuary of Ephesus; on the very day on
which Alexander was born, the Temple of Diana of Ephesus was
treacherously burnt to the ground. It was gone, never to
return. Its monumental document, with all that belonged to it,
was no longer there. It existed only as a historical mission in
the soul of Alexander and in his teacher Aristotle.
And
now you must bring all this that was alive in the soul of
Alexander into connection with what I said yesterday, when I
showed you how the mission of Alexander the Great was inspired
by an impulse coming from the configuration of the Earth. You
will readily understand how that which in the East had been
real revelation of the Divine-Spiritual was as it were
extinguished with Ephesus. The other Mysteries were at bottom
only Mysteries of decadence, where traditions were preserved,
though it is true these traditions did still awaken clairvoyant
powers in specially gifted natures. The splendour and the
glory, the tremendous majesty of the olden time were gone. With
Ephesus was finally put out the light that had come over from
the East.
You
will now be in a position to appreciate the resolve that
Alexander made in his soul: to restore to the East what she had
lost; to restore it at least in the form in which it was
preserved in Greece, in the phantom or shadow-picture. Hence
his idea of making an expedition into Asia, going as far as it
was possible to go, in order to bring to the East once more
— albeit in the shadow form in which it still existed in
the Grecian culture — what she had lost.
And
now we see what Alexander the Great is really doing, and doing
in a most wonderful way, when he makes this expedition. He is
not bent on the conquest of existing cultures, he is not trying
to bring Hellenism to the East in any external sense. Wherever
he goes, Alexander the Great not only adopts the customs of the
land, but is able too to enter right into the minds and hearts
of the human beings who are living there, and to think their
thoughts. When he comes to Egypt, to Memphis, he is hailed as a
saviour and deliverer from the spiritual fetters that have
hitherto bound the people. He permeates the kingdom of Persia
with a culture and civilisation which the Persians themselves
could never have produced. He penetrates as far as India.
He
conceives the plan of effecting a balance, a harmony between
Hellenic and Oriental civilisations. On every hand he founds
academies. The academies founded in Alexandria, in Northern
Egypt, are the best known and have had the greatest
significance for later times. Of the first importance however
is the fact that all over Asia larger and smaller academies
were founded, in which the works of Aristotle were preserved
and studied for a long time to come. What Alexander began in
this way continued to work for centuries in Asia Minor,
repeating itself again and again as it were in feebler echoes.
With one mighty stroke Alexander planted the Aristotelian
Knowledge of Nature in Asia, even as far as India. His early
death prevented his reaching Arabia, though that had been one
of his chief aims. He went however as far east as India, and
also into Egypt. Everywhere he implanted the spiritual
Knowledge of Nature that he had received from Aristotle,
establishing it in such a way that it could become fruitful for
men. For everywhere he let the people feel it was something
that was their own, — not a foreign element, a piece of
Hellenism, that was being imposed upon them. Only a nature such
as Alexander's, able to fire others with his own enthusiasm,
could ever have accomplished what he did. For everywhere others
came forward to carry on the work he had begun. In the years
that followed, many more scholars went over from Greece. Apart
from Edessa it was one academy in particular, that of
Gondi-Shapur, which received constant reinforcements from
Greece for many centuries to come.
A
marvellous feat was thus performed! The light that had come
over from the East, — extinguished in Ephesus by the
flaming torch of Herostratus, — this light, or rather its
phantom shadow, now shone back again from Greece, and continued
so to shine until the dramatic moment when beneath the
tyranny of Rome
[Justinian, Byzantine Emperor from 527–565,
son of a peasant, sent an edict to Athens in 529 forbidding the
teaching of philosophy and law. Thereupon the last seven Athenian
philosophers left the Roman Empire and emigrated to Persia.]
the Schools of the Greek philosophers were ultimately
closed. In the 6th century
A.D.
the last of the Greek philosophers fled away to the academy of
Gondi-Shapur.
In
all this we see two elements interworking; one that had gone,
so to speak, in advance, and one that had remained behind. The
mission of Alexander was founded, more or less unconsciously,
upon this fact: the waves of civilisation had advanced in
Greece in a Luciferian manner, whilst in Asia they had remained
behind in an Ahrimanic manner. In Ephesus was the balance. And
Alexander, on the day of whose birth the physical Ephesus had
fallen, resolved to found a spiritual Ephesus that should send
its Sun-rays far out to East and West. It was in very truth
this purpose that lay at the root of all he undertook: to found
a spiritual Ephesus, reaching out across Asia Minor eastward to
India, covering also Egyptian Africa and the East of
Europe.
It
is not really possible to understand the spiritual evolution of
Western humanity unless we can see it on this background. For
soon after the attempt had been made to spread abroad in the
world the ancient and venerated Ephesus, so that what had once
been present in Ephesus might now be preserved in Alexandria,
— be it only in a faltering hand instead of in large
shining letters — soon after this second blooming of the
flower of Ephesus, an altogether new power began to assert
itself, the power of Rome. Rome, and all the word implies, is a
new world, a world that has nothing to do with the
shadow-pictures of Greece, and suffers man to keep no more than
memories of these olden times. We can study no graver or more
important incision in history than this. After the burning of
Ephesus, through the instrumentality of Alexander the plan is
laid for the founding of a spiritual Ephesus; and this
spiritual Ephesus is then pushed back by the new power that is
asserting itself in the West, first as Rome, later under the
name of Christianity, and so on. And we only understand the
evolution of mankind aright when we say: We, with our way of
comprehending things through the intellect, with our way of
accomplishing things by means of our will, we with our feelings
and moods can look back as far as ancient Rome. Thus far we can
look back with full understanding. But we cannot look back to
Greece, neither can we look back to the East. There we must
look in Imaginations. Spiritual vision is needed there. Yes, we
can look South, as we go back along the stream of evolution; we
can look South with the ordinary prosaic understanding, but not
East. When we look East, we have to look in Imaginations. We
have to see standing in the background the mighty Mystery
Temples of primeval post-Atlantean Asia, where the Wise Men,
the Priests, made plain to each one of their pupils his
connection with the Divine-Spiritual of the Cosmos, and where
was to be found a civilisation that could be received from the
Mysteries in the Gilgamesh time, as I have described to you. We
have to see these wonderful Temples scattered over Asia; and in
the foreground Ephesus, preserving still within its Mystery
much that had faded away in the other Temples of the East,
whilst at the same time it had already itself made the
transition and become Greek in character. For in Ephesus, man
no longer needed to wait for the constellations of the stars or
for the right time of year, nor to wait until he himself had
attained a certain age, before he could receive the revelations
of the Gods. In Ephesus, if he were ripe for it, he might offer
up sacrifices and perform certain exercises that enabled him so
to approach the Gods that they drew graciously near to him.
It
was in this world that stands before you in this picture that
the two personalities of whom we have spoken were trained and
prepared, in the time of Heraclitus. And now, in 356
b.c. on the birth-day of
Alexander the Great, we behold the flames of fire burst forth
from the Temple of Ephesus.
Alexander the Great is born, and finds his teacher Aristotle.
And it is as though from out of the ascending flames of Ephesus
a mighty voice went forth for those who were able to hear it:
Found a spiritual Ephesus far and wide over the Earth, and let
the old physical Ephesus stand in men's memory as its centre,
as its midmost point.
Thus we have before us this picture of ancient Asia with her
Mystery centres, and in the foreground Ephesus and her pupils
in the Mysteries. We see Ephesus in flames, and a little later
we see the expeditions of Alexander that carried over into the
East what Greece had to give for the progress of mankind, so
that there came into Asia in picture-form what she had lost in
its reality.
Looking across to the East and letting our imagination be fired
by the tremendous events that we see taking place, we are able
to view in a true light that ancient chapter in man's history,
— for it needs to be grasped with the imagination. And
then we see gradually rise up in the foreground the Roman
world, the world of the Middle Ages, the world that continues
down to our own time.
All
other divisions of history into periods — ancient,
medieval and modern, or however else they may be designated
— give rise to false conceptions. But if you will study
deeply and intently the picture that I have here set before
you, it will give you a true insight into the hidden workings
that run through European history down to the present day.
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