LECTURE ONE
KRISTIANIA —
May 9, 1909
WE HAVE OFTEN SAID THAT
Theosophy should not be
regarded as something new. Other, external approaches of knowledge
often want to see something new. But Theosophy wants to be, and
should be, an expression of the striving for wisdom appropriate
for our time, a manifestation of the striving that has existed
through all time. Theosophy sees in all the temporal manifestations
the various forms of a primal wisdom that has been flowing through
all ages.
The Apocalypse, which
belongs among the oldest ancient documents of Christianity, has been
explained in the most various ways during every age of Christianity.
These explanations always carry a subjective imprint of the understanding
characteristic of different epochs.
On the whole, if we quickly
survey the centuries of Christian development, we see, even in the earlier
ages, a dawning materialistic interpretation brought to bear on this
book. We find the mistake soon made of seeing in the pictures of the
Apocalypse certain events in the evolution of the earth and humanity,
for example, the descent of the Messiah who had been proclaimed, or
even the establishment of a heavenly kingdom in the physical sense in
this world. When the subsequent ages neither fulfilled nor revealed
any of this, people in the various regions of the Occident believed
that a mistake had been made in calculation; the date for the fulfillment
of these prophesies was pushed more and more into the future. Around
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Apocalypse began to be interpreted
in a more inner way. At that time people began to see the kingdom of the
Antichrist in the externalization of Christianity. For many, the Roman
church itself became the expression of this kingdom of the Antichrist;
the Roman church, on the other hand, saw the same thing in
Protestantism.
In more recent times,
times entirely permeated with a materialistic attitude, it has been
said that, of course, the writer of the Apocalypse could not have known
anything about the future; he was describing events that lie in the
past. It was thought, for example, that he saw in the beast with two
horns an opponent of Christianity as great as Nero. When the descriptions
then went on to include earthquakes, swarms of locusts, and so forth,
it was not hard to prove that such events did occur in those regions
at that time. That is what is called “objective research”;
nevertheless, it is wholly prejudiced by subjective understanding.
Theosophy should become an
instrument for us to spiritually comprehend the Apocalypse again and
thereby penetrate its meaning. One could also think that the explanation
given by Theosophy is as subjectively colored as all the other
explanations. In a certain sense it is, but there is a difference between
it and the other explanations. Those who describe history externally want
to be objective, but they can only be subjective. We, however, want to
explain subjectively in the sense that we are aware, in all modesty, that
the wisdom of the world is always in harmony with advancing evolution, with
the advance of time. When we do what is right for our time it is a force
that works into all of the future. Theosophy must not become a dogmatism.
What we teach today as Theosophy will not change in its essence but
in its form. When the souls of the present age are born again in future
times, they will be mature enough to take up other, higher, future forms
of the spiritual life. Our explanation of the Apocalypse will age; future
ages will go beyond it. But the Apocalypse itself will not, therefore,
age. It is much greater than our explanations and will find even higher,
even loftier explanations.
Let us place before our
souls the first lines of the Apocalypse as they are read in truth. We
are told that the mystery of Jesus Christ is given to us in signs, that
these signs are to be interpreted and that the writer is attempting
to explain — to the best of his ability — as much of the
signs as possible. The Apocalypse was written with a different intention
than John's Gospel. We are dealing with a personal experience
when the writer tells us that he is describing the revelation of Jesus
Christ, the appearance of Christ. It is something similar to Paul's
experience on the way to Damascus, similar to the mystery of Paul.
Paul is the one who did
the most to proclaim and spread Christianity despite his not being one of
the disciples who experienced the events in Palestine with Jesus. Neither
did he experience the tragic ending of those events: the crucifixion
of Jesus Christ. Through the descriptions in the Gospels we know how
all of this entered into the hearts of humankind at that time. Paul
had heard about all that is described in the Gospels. Paul knew exactly
what had happened in Palestine; nevertheless, he simply could not imagine
that the one who had ended up on the cross was the promised Messiah,
the redeemer. The Messiah, Paul said to himself, could not end up like
a common criminal. Paul is not well understood unless we look deeply
into his soul, unless we look at what lived in him as the knowledge
of a Jewish initiate. He knew that the savior, the Messiah, had proclaimed
himself ahead of time in the burning bush, in the fire of Mount Sinai.
Christ points to this when he says, “But if you do not believe
his [Moses'] writings, how will you believe my words?”
(John 5:47)
With these words Christ is saying that he had announced himself
earlier through external means, through the power of the elements, and
that he then, however, went on to reveal himself through life, suffering
and dwelling in a human body — that he had descended, so to speak,
from the fire of Sinai. Certainly the Jewish initiate, Paul, knew of
the Christ who had been previously announced; for behind the mystery
of Moses lay the following.
During the time of the
Old Testament and in ancient Jewish occult teaching there were, as in
all ages, mysteries and initiates. Let us bear in mind the fundamental
principle, that initiation must adapt to the conditions prevailing during
any given age. If we consider initiation according to that principle,
then we must begin by thinking of the human being as the human being
presented by Theosophy or spiritual science. We must think of the human
as a four-fold being, a being with four members — as endowed with
a physical body in common with the mineral world; an etheric body in
common with the plant kingdom; an astral body in common with the animal
kingdom; and finally with an I or I-bearer. Standing before us, the
human being consists of these four members. During the day they are
bound together with one another but at night the I and the astral body
are in the spiritual world. During the night the present-day human being
perceives nothing. When human beings develop to a higher spiritual vision,
they must apply certain methods of inner development to themselves.
Anyone wishing to ascend to higher worlds must allow meditations and
concentration to work on their soul. They must immerse their souls in
certain things; one example among hundreds is the Rose Cross.
When human beings of the
present day are asleep what they experience during the day does not
make a strong enough impression on their astral body for it to continue
working at night. When a normal person of the present day falls asleep
in the evening, day life is as if extinguished. With students of initiation
it is different, even if they do not notice the transformation of their
astral body for a long time. In a meditant who has begun and practices
the exercises prescribed in occult schools, a clairvoyant sees entirely
different streams, other forms and organs than those unorganized and
chaotic forms seen in ordinary people. This shows itself as the results
of the exercises even if the students themselves have not noticed any
results for a long time. The astral body changes, it becomes a different
being even if the meditation is very short. The astral body was chaotic
before and everything the human being did was drowned out by the
impressions of the day. Only the prescriptions from the occult school
provide something that drowns out the impressions from everyday life.
Therefore, this transformation of the soul is called purification or
catharsis. The student is purified while the astral body continues to
be chaotic and unordered in an ordinary person.
Now, the teacher must
also make the student aware of the nature of the surrounding spiritual
world. For what happens in the astral body to carry over into the etheric
body, the following steps were undertaken with the student in earlier
times. When the students were ready, at the peak of their initiation,
so to speak, they had to spend some time, usually three and a half days,
lying down, during which time the initiator brought them to a state
of complete lethargy or torpor. The etheric body was then lifted out
of the physical body and the astral body impressed into the etheric
body all that had been prepared in the astral through occult exercises.
Otherwise the physical body is a hindrance to bringing to consciousness
what the person experiences in the spiritual world. In this moment, when
the initiator led the etheric body out of the physical body, enlightenment
occurred and the enlightened one experienced the spiritual world; after
three and a half days the student was an initiate who could tell others
about the spiritual world.
We can find the same process
in the mysteries of various ancient peoples. But initiation was different
with the initiates of the Old Testament, for they experienced yet again
what Moses had experienced at Sinai. In this way they were able to tell
the people that the Messiah would appear, that the Messiah would come
forth from the nation itself, that he would incarnate the principles
of development for all human evolution in a body of flesh. That was
the supreme moment of the initiation — when the enlightened Hebrew
was allowed to experience that the Christ would arise in the future.
Paul, as a Jewish initiate, knew all of this; nevertheless, before the
Damascus event he could never have believed that the one who died on
the cross was the same one as the Messiah.
Paul said of himself that
he was a “premature birth,” that is, an initiate through
grace. He stresses that he did not receive initiation through a training
that required a sequence of steps. But he stood closer to the spiritual
world than those people who had descended deeper into matter. He was
able to experience the “crown of life,” the last act in
Old Testament initiation. This was the crowning through the appearance
of Christ. What the Old Testament initiates always experienced appeared
to them in a glorious light. What they had experienced as a future event,
he now saw as a vision that told him this being was the same one who
had lived and died in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Now he knew that
the Messiah, the Christ, is already here.
The greatest element of
the old initiation had been the knowledge that the Messiah was to come,
that he had died and yet still lived, now united with earthly existence
— and continues to work in the evolution of humankind —
this we see from all the letters Paul wrote. He saw this event as something
that had already become present.
Let us put ourselves in
the place of all the other initiates who were not ancient Hebrews and
not Christian. They knew that in the ancient Atlantean times we come
to a form of the human being entirely different from that of the present.
The etheric body creates and forms the physical body, of course, and
through initiation they could always see the etheric body that formed
the basis for the physical body. In the spiritual world they had to
do without a picture of the physical human body; they saw only the etheric
body of the human being.
But the ancient Hebrew
initiates always saw the physical human being spiritualized and placed
in the spiritual world as its crowning, and such people understood the
Christ to be the first real human form that could be seen in the spiritual
world from the point of view provided by the physical world. In this
way those receiving the Hebrew initiation saw how, in the distant future,
the “Son of Man,” the Christ, would heal and purify the
physical form. For this reason Paul knew that what appeared to him before
Damascus in human form could be none other than the Christ.
The writer of the Apocalypse
describes the same thing to us when he speaks of the “Son of
Man.” He calls the seven communities the “seven stars,”
and he saw the “Son of Man” as the spiritualized, purified
form of the physical body, not only the etheric body, but the
spiritual-physical form of “Man,” the human being, now
purified and sanctified.
In this way he places
before us the same being that Paul beheld outside Damascus. Then he
details what the impulse behind this Christ event should mean for all
humanity. He speaks to us of the seven communities in seven letters
to the communities. They are messages concerning the tasks of the seven
post-Atlantean cultures. In the seven seals, he portrays the seven cultures
following our fifth main epoch. [This fifth main epoch is called the
post-Atlantean. It consists of seven cultures of which we are now in
the fifth with two more to pass before the start of the next main epoch.]
And in the seven trumpets, he portrays the seven cultures of the seventh
great main epoch.
What takes place in our
present-day culture we can see in the physical world. But what will
take place in the sixth great main epoch can be seen ahead of time in
the pictures of the astral world. The seventh great main epoch, on the
other hand, can be experienced in the sounds heard in the harmony of
the spheres, in the devachanic world. They are experienced as a result
of an impulse given by Christ.
In this way, the Apocalypse
is a portrayal of what the Christian initiate experienced. It is a
description of Christian initiation, a picture of the experiences of a
man initiated in the Christian sense who has understood what has come
into the world through Christ.
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