LECTURE FOURTEEN
September 18, 1924
I
will try to answer your prepared questions during the course of
this lecture. Except that I would like to answer some of them
in a special session with the arch-rulers even if they were
asked by others. This could be done in the next few days, and
the answers could then be passed on.
I
would especially like to draw your attention to a seal in the
Apocalypse which is an Imagination of the Apocalypticer and
which has often been depicted by artists in connection with the
Apocalypse. One cannot always say that these pictorial
renderings of what is in the Apocalypse are very felicitous.
However, one can hardly fail to recognize the individual parts
of the seal that is involved here and which will be realized in
our time, as we saw yesterday, for they come to meet one in the
Apocalypse in a quite characteristic way. However, in order to
understand this seal, we will have to discuss something which
goes parallel with it, which is very important for our time,
and has already been touched upon in an Anthroposophical
connection and which we find illuminated in a particular way at
this point in the Apocalyptic discussion.
If
one looks at the development of man and notices how he becomes
a being who is split into three parts, as his consciousness
makes the transition from the physical, sensory world to a
perception of the spiritual world, as I described in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, —
if one looks at this one will say to oneself, a triad and a
monad are united in men through the integration of these into
the form of a physical being. This union is really quite
obvious. One can see it if one studies the opinion about the
division of the human being that is expressed in
Anthroposophy.
Let's look at man and his spirit, soul and body. The way this
division is related to the others that are given in
Anthroposophy should be clear without further ado. Now,
thoughts live in the spirit which man has today. These thoughts
are like I the ones which I refer to in my
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
for instance, where one has pure
thoughts that are freely created in man's consciousness, and
not the kind that are permeated by sense perceptions. Here,
thoughts are almost completely illusory from a qualitative
viewpoint; they are a full reality to such a small extent that
we don't have quite enough inner force because we don't have a
mirror image, and so we can't quite, compare them with mirror
images, and yet in a certain sense we can. The image that
appears in a mirror doesn't unfold any forces along the
directions of its lines, it is completely passive. Human
thoughts have some force when they are developed, so that we
can catch this force and we can permeate it with will —
as I said yesterday in the esoteric class. But the ordinary
thoughts that man has during his lifetime are really like
mirror images in comparison with the universe's existence and
its full content. So that although we hear spirit in our human
being, it's a mirror image of the spirit.
What we bear within us there comes from a world which I called
spiritland in my
Theosophy.
So when we think on earth
we're really bringing the ingredients of the spiritland down to
the earth as an illusory reflection. When we think we carry what
Theosophy
calls devachan down into the earth
sphere, even though this is only a faint reflection of it. We
bear these contents in us on earth; we bear a faint reflection
of heavenly splendors in us.
If
we pass on to the soul element we mainly find feeling there. It
exists as feeling during the waking state, and as pictorial
dreams while we're asleep. The only difference between dreams
and feelings is that one is the content of the soul during the
waking state and the other is its content during sleep. What we
experience in our feelings as men on earth between birth and
death comes from another world that I described from a certain
viewpoint in my
Theosophy.
It comes from the soul world
which we experience in its real form after death. Cur feeling
life is not a mirror image of this real form but an image of it
which is maintained in our soul by creative elemental powers.
We only dream of this soul world in our feelings and there is
no reality in our image of it.
What constitutes men's bodies on earth today does not develop
any consciousness of archetypes, but it contains the strongest
realities of existence. We are real in our body, but we are
only active in the physical, terrestrial world in it. Thus the
three members of man's being belong to different worlds.
You
must develop a correct view about these things, since you want
to work upon the being of man, and therefore you must have
something in your feelings that points to what exists in man's
being. Quite good philosophers have failed to understand my
division of man's being altogether. They have expressed one
misunderstanding after another about it, which shows how
difficult it is even for good thinkers of the present time to
really get into Anthroposophy.
One
philosopher spoke about this division of man as if it were an
arbitrary one that had been made with the intellect and which
amounted to a formal schematism. Of course one can also divide
a table into legs, top, etc., even though the whole thing is
made of wood. One could also divide it from left to right, but
the division of the human being has nothing to do with such an
arbitrary classification. One could put it like this: if one
has real hydrogen and real oxygen and one combines them one
gets water. They are realities and not just artificial
schemata. Likewise, man's members are not separated in an
arbitrary way; they are integrated into the reality of human
nature, so that one can say that the spirit comes from spirit
land, the soul from the soul world and the physical body from
the physical world. These members of the human being come from
three different worlds and they are integrated in man. And when
man leaves the physical world with his consciousness, his inner
elements split up, and the one becomes three. However, what
happens in individual men in this way takes place in the whole
of humanity throughout its various racial and national
evolutions, although not everyone has to participate in it. One
can say that the evolving humanity which is present in the
sub-consciousness of every single human being and which doesn't
become noticeable to ordinary consciousness, goes through
stages of development that are similar to the ones individual
men go through.
Something like a splitting into three and a crossing of the
threshold by mankind is taking place in our time. In our
consciousness age individual men have to acquire something
which constitutes a going past' the Guardian of the Threshold,
if they want to do it. However, mankind is going past the
Guardian of the Threshold in our time, although, individual men
are unaware of this. The whole of humanity is crossing the
threshold. Whereas the physical body still gave something to
men on earth up to the end of the 18th century because of the
elemental beings which are living in it, men must now get their
virtues and everything productive that they will find inwardly
from the spiritual world; this is mankind as a whole, not
individual human beings. So that a crossing of the threshold is
occurring in the evolution of mankind as a whole, which appears
to the Apocalypticer before he has his vision of the
sun-illuminated woman with the dragon under her feet, because
it actually precedes it in time. Here the Apocalypticer has
another vision that clearly reflects what he wants to say: The
time is coming when the whole of humanity, or at least its
civilized parts will have to cross the threshold. And a triad
appears which is the cosmic Imagination of what mankind is
going through. There will be ever more men who will have the
feeling: My thoughts want to run away from me, and my feet are
being pulled down by the earth's gravity; this is in addition
to other feelings that men can develop when these things become
more pathological. Many people today have the strong feeling
that their thoughts are running away from them and that their
feet are being pulled down to the earth too much. Except that
our present-day civilization talks people out of something like
this, just as children are talked out of visions they have
which are nevertheless based on a real foundation.
However, what lives strongly in our time appears before the
clairvoyant eye of the Apocalypticer as a figure that forms out
of the clouds, has a face like a sun, goes over into a rainbow,
and has fiery feet, of which one is planted on the ocean and
the other on the earth. One could say that this is really the
most significant vision that the present-day human soul should
look at. For the thoughts that belong to spirit land are in the
face which is born out of the clouds above. The rainbow is the
feeling world in man's soul which belongs to the soul world.
What is contained in the bodies of men who belong to the
physical world is in the fiery feet that get their strength
from the power of the earth Which is covered by the ocean.
One
could say that this points to a real cultural secret of the
present, which is that there are three kinds of men, and not
that each man is split into three parts. One can see this very
clearly today. We have cloud men who can only think, whereas
the two other parts — rainbow and fiery feet —
remain stunted. We have rainbow men where the main development
is in the feelings. They can only grasp Anthroposophy with
their feelings and not with their minds. However, this type is
also present in the outside world and not just in the
Anthroposophical Society. They can only grasp the world with
their feelings. These people's feelings are well developed but
their thinking and will are stunted. Then there are people
today who act as if they only had a hypertrophically developed
will; their thinking and feeling are stunted; they charge like
bulls and act in accordance with direct, outer impulses,
— they're the fiery footed men.
The
vision of John the Apocalypticer depicts these three kinds of
men which we meet in life. We should become aware of this
secret of our present-day civilization so that we can look at
human beings in the right way. One can also discover them if
one looks at larger world events.
Just look at what is, happening in Russia. We have the
influence of the cloud man, of the man who mainly thinks, in
whom feeling and will are neglected. They would like to
surrender their will to a social mechanism, and their feelings
are used by Ahrimanic powers because they don't have any
control over them. They are thinkers, but since man on earth is
organized in an Ahrimanic and Luciferic way, their thinking is
like - - I will use an analogy that will seem like a perfectly
natural one to anyone who knows spiritual science; it will only
scare such people away who haven't worked their way into this
kind of thing yet. If one takes the thoughts of Lenin and the
others and one looks at these thoughts, that is, if one tries
to imagine what the combined thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky,
Lunacharski, etc., looks like, if one imagines what is growling
and raging in the heads of leading Russians today, one gets
what one calls a system of forces in physics. If one was a
gigantic elemental spirit one could form clouds and arouse
thunder and lightning up in the sky over a large territory with
these forces. But they don't belong on earth. This image might
surprise you, but anyone who can look into the occult depths of
existence must say that the same forces that weave and live in
the heads of leading Russians are also in the lightning that is
formed in the clouds over our heads and that they flash the
lightning down to the earth and roll the thunders. This is
where these forces belong. Their action in leading Bolsheviks
is out of place.
So
you see that the Apocalypticer clearly foresaw many things that
are present in our time. And he knew that such an epochal
period of time can be indicated with a number. I myself have
indicated the approximate number of years which the development
of the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind soul, etc.,
covers. I said that such a period lasts one twelfth of 25.920
years.
Now
the place in the Apocalypse to which I'm referring gave me
quite a bit of trouble for a while. For the Apocalypticer
supposedly prophesies about things that will take one thousand
two hundred and threescore days. They used to speak of days
when they meant years. Anyway, the Apocalypticer mentions the
number 1260. It took a lot of intensive research to discover
that the 1260 days is really a printing error, as it were, in
the Apocalypse that was handed down. It should say 2160 days.
Then it agrees with what one can see today. It's quite possible
that an un-clarity arose in some school where the things were
handed down, because many numbers look like their mirror images
to seers. However, this is something that is not too important
when one feels one's way into the Apocalypse.
Now
the people who stand within their race in such a way that
they're really cloud men are confronted by others who are
rainbow men. Their thinking is relatively inactive, they mainly
like to use traditional thoughts and they are rather timid
about approaching the spiritual world with their thoughts. One
meets a large number of such rainbow men in central European
regions.
Thinking and feeling get increasingly stunted the further we go
west, where we find a pathological development of fiery footed
men. One finds large numbers of such fiery footed human beings
in the western part of Europe and presumably in America. So
that we can divide the earth along these lines: In the east
there are many cloud men, in the center many rainbow men, and
in the west many fiery footed men.
If
we take racial developments into account, one could say that
something like a picture of the figure which we encounter here
in the Apocalypticer is spread out over the earth, if one looks
at it, spiritually from outside. One can't do this in a balloon
or airplane, but if one would raise oneself up spiritually into
the heights from a point in Westphalen and would look down at
the earth, Asia would have a kind of a cloud form face with
solar shapes, and one would see rainbow colors spread out over
Europe, and further over would be the fiery feet, with one
planted on the Andes in South America and the other in the
Pacific Ocean. And then one has the earth underneath this
image.
This is one of the most incisive prophecies that the
Apocalypticer has for our time. This is something that is very
important for priestly activities, for the great riddle of our
time that developed with Napoleon consists of this. This
striving of men into races and nations that has come to
expression so incomprehensibly throúgh Wilsonianism today
really only arose in a distinct way under the influence of
Napoleonism, of the first Napoleon. The way that men are
striving towards races and nations and the way that they
basically want to bury all cosmopolitanism today is really
quite terrible. But the reason for this is that this passage
through the threshold, place is occurring.
Just as a human being splits up in the spiritual world when he
develops further, so men on earth split up into regions that
individual human beings remain unaware of, namely, into cloud
men, rainbow men and fiery footed men. This splitting of men
into three parts — which I described for individuals in
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?,
has occurred for humanity on earth; it's
here. The powerful sign which the Apocalypticer sketches is
there in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. People cannot find the
harmony between the three parts at first, and so they look for
things in the split rather than in the union; which sometimes
leads to rather strange results.
For
instance, through this whole external way of thinking that
takes hold of people, one can see that people don't find their
way together with inner understanding, that is, they often
unite for superficial reasons. For instance, we can
see that the Czechs whose land is between the Krusnehory and
Fichtel mountains, the Bohemian Forest and down to the Morave
River and over to Bratislava (formerly Pressburg), and up to
the Ceskyles and Sumava Mountains as the southern boundary,
— that these Czechs are cloud people in the most eminent
sense of the word, who have only developed their thinking. They
were welded together with the Slovaks in a way that shows a
lack of inner understanding, for the Slovaks are definitely a
rainbow people who are not the thinking type at all. On the
other hand, we see that another quite external relationship
which had been formed shortly before is dissolved. All of
these human, earthly activities are not very sensible, because
they want to exclude the spirit.
We
see that the whole of Slovakia was recently separated from
Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which is the territory which I
just indicated. We see that all of this Slovakia was previously
united with Magyar country and with real Magyars. You must
distinguish the real Magyars from the immigrated ones, and you
can do this just by looking at their names. A real Magyar has a
name one can't even pronounce in the west, especially if he's
an older type. But he's called Hirschfeld, if he's one of those
agitative and screaming Magyars of today. One has to go back to
the genuine Magyars who are all fiery-footed men, and they were
briefly welded together with the rainbow Slovaks. The
non-spirit in the world today throws the dice in such a way
that the Slovaks are first thrown together with the Magyars and
then with the Czechs.
That is the way the dice are being thrown in general today.
This comes to expression in deeper symptoms, such as the fact
that a really significant person like Masaryk who is standing
at the helm in the Czechoslovakian Republic, is a Slovak, and
not a Czech. Anyone who knows Masaryk knows that he is a
rainbow man who can't think at all. If you read his books you
will see that our age is speaking in them. He is a rainbow man,
a real Slovak.
One
has to be able to look at contemporary human beings in
accordance with these categories in order to see the kind of
crap game that is being played, although of course this is
based on world karma. Here we must look at the age —
which is really ours — which can say of itself that it is
entering ever more into men's consciousness and into the
consciousness soul. People previously saw the starry script
written outside; they saw the contents of old traditions and
old wisdom written outside. There is a kind of a memory of this
man who is split into three in ancient books. Everything which
the wise men proclaimed about the world in the mystery centers
in Macedonia, Greece, Ephesus, Samothrace, Delphi and in other
places in Asia Minor and elsewhere is the book which is
preserved from ancient times, which is in the hand of the angel
whose face is fashioned out of clouds, his chest out of a
rainbow, and his feet out of fire, and he stands firmly in
America with the rest of his body spread out over Europe and
Asia. However, as consciousness men we can only keep this
active and alive for ourselves if we have to look within
ourselves for the source which enables us to learn how to see
spiritual things. We must devour the book, which could
previously only be brought from outside, and bring it into
ourselves. This book which contains the world's secrets is
sweet in the mouths of some people at first. People like to
come to things which can give them spiritual views; so that
they taste like honey to them. But as soon as one has to
fulfill the exacting conditions in life which are connected
with a spiritual comprehension of the world then what the
Apocalypticer says is sweet as honey becomes a stomach ache,
especially to the people who have become so materialistic
today. These people find that the digestion of the spiritual
nourishment that is so necessary for them is painful.
If
we look at this, we have to admit that all of this dice
throwing and confusion indicates that a force which can measure
everything in a new way must come from the spiritual power that
can be seen in threefold man. A reed, or really a measuring
rod, is sent down from heaven, with which everything is to be
measured in a new way. Just look at our time. Doesn't
everything have to be measured anew? Shouldn't we add something
like a cloud shape to that abstract Asian shape that we find on
our maps, rainbow colors to Europe and fiery feet to the
Americas? Don't we have to measure everything anew from the
viewpoint of the spiritual life? After all, we're right m the
midst of what the Apocalypse is showing us here.
If
we grasp what we must stand in in a fully conscious way, we
will get away from the layman's attitude that is often present
in the depths of our sub-consciousness today and we will
acquire a non-rationalistic grasp of the tasks of our time
through what is to be a new priesthood. This is something that
should be said in connection with this particular chapter of
the Apocalypse. The things agree in every detail. Vie will have
more to say about racial and individual evolution tomorrow.
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