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Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit. Lecture 8 of 10.Rudolf Steiner, Munich, August 25, 1911:
In the course of yesterday's lecture we saw how manifold cosmic forces play into human nature, and we also saw how the Greeks experienced these forces and gave them pictorial expression in a mythology most of which is still extant. My frequent references to Greek mythology have not at all been made with the object of interpreting it, but rather to throw the light which it affords upon certain pristine truths. Pictures, together with what we gather from history, are a better help in this respect than our abstract ideas, which are too impoverished to be able to bring to adequate expression the great wonders of the world. Then too in the figure of Dionysos our attention was drawn to something which is associated with the deepest forces of our souls, with what we can call the challenges or ordeals of the soul. What then is meant by the expression ‘ordeals of the soul’? Ordeals are what come upon a man whenever he tries to enter upon the paths leading to the spiritual worlds. I made some reference yesterday to the lightest, the gentlest of them. In general they consist of the experiences a man can have on his way into the higher worlds, experiences to which his soul is not equal without having undergone a certain preparation. The ordeal thus lies in the fact that a man has to make great efforts to endure certain pieces of knowledge, to meet calmly certain experiences. A soul-experience of this nature is indicated toward the end of the second of my Rosicrucian dramas, The Soul's Probation, and this will perhaps help to make clear what such an inner ordeal actually is.Let us call to mind the figure there described, the figure we know as Capesius. We know from both these two plays of mine the experiences which he has undergone. We have seen how little by little he draws near to the spiritual life, how to begin with the sound instinct, which has alienated him from the kind of scholarship he had hitherto pursued, gives him premonitions of it but no more. He begins to suspect that there is a higher reality behind the world of the mind. It is mainly because he gives rein to these premonitions, it is because he allows them full play, that he inevitably becomes impressed by the exoteric teachings of spiritual science. The communications of spiritual science differ fundamentally from those of other scientific or literary discourse. Whereas the other simply appeals to our intellect, and perhaps indirectly through our intellect to our feeling, a man is only allowing spiritual science, or occult science, to work upon him rightly if he is stirred to the inmost depths of his soul, if his soul is turned inside out, so to say, if it is completely changed by what flows therefrom, not as abstract content, but as life itself. Something like that is what Capesius is depicted as feeling in the first scene of the second play, after he has wrestled with himself as a result of his premonitions, and then plunged deeply into the writings of Benedictus, into the ‘Book of Life’. And that not only causes him to ponder, to rack his brains to try to get at the meaning of what he reads, as he would do whatever he was reading, but he feels the spiritual world break in upon him in a way he does not understand. It has yet another effect upon him. It would be easy to compare the mood which prevails in the first scene of the second play with the mood at the opening of Goethe's Faust; it is however essentially different. The mood of Faust merely shows that, having arrived at a certain scepticism, a certain doubt, as to all knowledge, a man then has an inner urge to find other ways of obtaining knowledge than the usual ones. In Capesius's case something else happens. To begin with he is torn in two, because it makes him recognize doubt, persistence in ignorance, as man's greatest sin. He learns to acknowledge that something lies in the depths of the human soul of which the normal consciousness is quite unaware. A treasure slumbers in the deepest strata of our souls; we are harboring something in depths of soul which the normal consciousness is at first incapable of recognizing.
When we enter
fully into the meaning and the true significance of spiritual science we
realize that it is no mere selfish yearning, but deep-seated duty toward the
macrocosmic forces not to allow the buried treasure in our souls to be wasted.
We come to realize that deep down in every man there lies something which once
upon a time the gods implanted in him out of their own body, their own
substance. We come to feel: ‘The gods have sacrificed a piece of their own
existence, they have as it were torn away a fragment of their own flesh, and
have deposited it within human souls.’ We men can do one of two things with this
treasure, this divine heritage. We can out of a certain indolence say: ‘What do
I want with knowledge? The gods will soon direct me to my goal!’ But they do not
do so, for they have buried this treasure within us in order that we may bring
it to the light of day out of our own freedom. Thus we can let this treasure go
to waste. That is one of the courses which the soul can take. The alternative is
that, recognizing our highest duty toward the heavenly powers, we should say to
ourselves: ‘We must raise up this treasure, we must lift it out of the hidden
depths into our consciousness.’ What are we doing when we bring up this treasure
out of the unconscious? We give it a different form from the one it had earlier
in the body of the gods, but in a mysterious way we give it back again to the
gods in the form which it has acquired through us. We are not cultivating in our
knowledge any private concern of our own, we are not doing anything merely in
the interests of our own egotism, we are simply carrying back into the higher
worlds, in the changed form which it has acquired through us, the noble heritage
which the gods have given us, so that they may share it with us. But if we
neglect this treasure, if we allow it to deteriorate, then we are in a
very real sense being egotistic, for then this treasure in our souls is
irrevocably lost to the world-process. We are allowing our divine heritage to go
to waste, if we are reluctant to recognize its presence in us.
The mood of
Capesius springs from this. In the first scene of the second play he feels it
his duty not to stick fast in doubt, not to persist in the feeling that one can
know nothing; he feels that it would be a violation of his duty to the cosmic
powers to allow the treasure in his soul to go to waste. Only he feels to begin
with incapable of using the apparatus of his body to draw out these riches, and
that is what causes the conflict in his soul. There is nothing of the Faustian
attitude here. On the contrary, Capesius says to himself: ‘You must acknowledge
that you cannot persist in your ignorance; you may not surrender to the feeling
which overtakes you when you think how little strength our customary life has
placed at our disposal for drawing out this treasure.’ Then there is only one
resource left to us — confidence in our own soul. If the soul patiently develops
what lies within it, little by little, then the strength which it feels as yet
to be inadequate is bound to become ever greater, until it will at length really
be able to fulfill its obligations toward the cosmic powers. This trust in the
soul's powers of endurance and its fruitfulness must uphold us when, as often,
because we only bring with us strength drawn from the past, we feel afraid, not
knowing what to do; when it seems: ‘You must, and at this moment you cannot.’
All the soul's ordeals are like this. From this fear, this feeling of impotence,
we at first shrink back, and it is only when we find the strength which arises
from this confidence in ourselves, from this trust which grows in us gradually
through our deepening in spiritual science, that we are able to pass safely
through such trials.
You will already
have recognized from the whole trend of these lectures that two cosmic
influences play their part in man, in his whole nature and being. And to bring
these two currents into harmony great strength of soul is needed, strength to
confront them both with fortitude and courage. This is clearly expressed at the
end of my second Play The Soul's Probation. There we see how Capesius has
undergone important occult experiences, how he has been permitted a glimpse into
his previous incarnation, how he has been allowed to know what he was centuries
ago on Earth. Then we come to a sentence which is really not to be taken
lightly. We come to the saying that knowledge of one life lays obligations upon
us for many lives, not simply for one. When we look back into our former
incarnation, when we see how we have behaved to this or that person, when we see
the debt we have incurred toward them, we feel that we have a heavy burden of
debt to repay. And then there comes to us a thought which might well rob us of
all courage; we recognize: ‘It is quite impossible for you to make good in your
present incarnation the debt which you have brought upon yourself.’ Many men
have a great longing to make all the reparation possible, but that springs from
egotism. Most men in their egotism find it intolerable to have to carry through
the gate of death so very much of their debit account, unbearable to have to say
to themselves: ‘You must die and must take your debt of guilt in respect of this
or the other matter with you into your next incarnation.’ But courage to admit
freely and frankly ‘You have wickedness upon your soul’ calls for a high
degree of disinterestedness, whereas usually the human being wants to think
himself as good as is his idea of a good man.
Anyone who has
had occult experiences of the kind we have been speaking of has to recognize his
evil propensities frankly — and he must go further: he must accept the
impossibility of making everything good in this life. Romanus expresses this in
The Soul's Probation [scene 13] in a speech which may serve to illustrate this point. He
says that guilt from the preceding life has to be carried through the gate of
death, and that we must have the courage to face the moment when the Guardian
stands before us and presents us with our debit account. This situation has to
be taken seriously. It brings us face to face with the other current, which may
be described in the following way. When the human being cultivates
self-knowledge — not just superficial self-knowledge, but true self-knowledge —
when he really learns something of his inmost being, then as a rule he discovers
something in himself which he finds it very difficult to accept, something which
is in the highest degree repugnant to him, something which, when it really dawns
upon him, is absolutely shattering. Contrast this crushing feeling in the depths
of the soul with the sentiment which prevails in so many people, even in those
who have some acquaintance with spiritual science. How often do we hear it
said: ‘I do that with no thought of myself; I don't want anything for myself,’
and so on. It may be that just when one is most self-seeking one puts on a mask,
one hides this fact from oneself by saying ‘I want nothing for myself.’ That is
a common experience. But it is better to acknowledge to oneself the truth, that
at bottom even the most unselfish actions are performed for our own sakes, for
by recognizing this we lay a foundation which will enable us gradually to bear
the true picture with which the Guardian of the Threshold confronts us.
Now let us
consider the question at a higher level. Why is it that we find so much in
ourselves which is inharmonious? That is connected with the whole of evolution.
We shall have to undertake a deeper study of human evolution if we want to
understand why it is just when the human being plunges more deeply into his own
nature and his own being that he finds so much that is inharmonious. Let us
assume for a moment that there is a treasure hidden in the depths of our soul of
which the normal consciousness today is quite unaware, and that when in the
course of our soul's trials we discover it, we find so much to shock us that we
probably shrink back in terror, feeling completely shattered. What is it that we
carry within us? We all know that humanity underwent a very complicated
evolution before man reached his present stage. We know that in order to reach
his present form he had to go through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions and
that only after having done this did he enter upon Earth evolution. One day the
complexity of the facts of life will be recognized in wider circles and people
will realize that it is impossible to understand man or his environment without
taking into consideration the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions; people will then
see how very naive, how superficial, is the contribution of the abstract science
of today. Thus what we have today as the fourfold human being has been slowly
prepared and formed through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. By the time the
Moon evolution came to an end, the human being had developed up to a certain
point. The time between Moon and Earth evolutions was occupied in working upon
the spiritual element which had been present in man during the Moon evolution,
elaborating it into a new germ for Earth evolution.
What, then, was
man like — man, the product of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions — when he
arrived on Earth? We have already dealt with this question from very many
aspects. Today we will look at it from yet another side. We cannot come to know
occult facts by pinning ourselves down to a few abstract concepts; we have to
approach the truth by throwing light on the facts from all sides. The paths of
higher truth are complex, and only he can walk them who is willing patiently to
trace their labyrinth.
What was man
like when, bringing with him the fruits of his Moon evolution, he arrived on
Earth? Nothing of what we are familiar with today as the physical body of man
was present at the commencement of Earth evolution. Although the first rudiments
of this physical body were present in the Saturn evolution, were further
developed on the Sun, and had already reached a high stage of development on the
Moon, we must nevertheless understand that in the intervening periods between
Saturn and Sun, and again between the Sun and Moon evolutions, all that had
evolved of the physical and other bodies had reverted to spirit. Everything
again passed over into imperceptible substantiality at the end of the Moon
evolution. The physical which had evolved on Saturn and subsequently been
further fashioned was no longer physical, everything had been taken up into the
spirit again; the physical was as it were in solution, was present only as
forces — forces with the capacity to call forth physical forms, but with the
physical element not actually present. When Earth evolution began, what we call
the physical was not there in a physical form, but only in a spiritual form, a
spiritual form which was capable of condensing little by little to the physical.
That has to be borne in mind.
We can go
further. We know that we are now in the post-Atlantean age, and that this was
preceded by the Atlantean and the Lemurian ages. Beyond the Lemurian age we come
to still earlier periods of Earth evolution. But at the beginning of Lemuria man
was still not to be found in his present form as physical body. What today is
physical was at that time, even where it was densest, still only in etheric
form; that is to say, the forces of our present physical body were at that time
in solution, as it were, within the ether body, but the forces of this ether body
were such that when they condensed in accordance with their own nature they were
then able to bring about our physical body. Thus these etheric forces were in a
way the forces of the physical body but they were not present in a physical
condition. Thus when man entered upon his Lemurian development, his densest body
was still an etheric one. Condensation to the physical body only began from the
Lemurian time onwards. It was brought about in a very complicated manner. Thus
for spiritual vision man was there at the outset in an etheric body, and this
etheric body contained those physical forces which had been acquired through the
course of Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. These forces had the tendency to
condense, so that little by little the physical body could come into existence,
but they were not yet in physical form. But had the forces of the physical body
condensed in the way they tended to do at that time, even in his physical
appearance man today would have looked very different.
We must be quite
clear that, in fact, man's appearance today is quite different from what he was
by predisposition in the time which preceded ancient Lemuria. During the course
of the Lemurian, Atlantean, and post-Atlantean epochs there have been at work in
human nature not only the forces which were already present in man in
rudimentary form, but other forces as well. If we wish to form an idea of what
the further working of the forces of the etheric body has been, it can best be
illustrated in a particular organic system of the human physical body. Let us
consider what a part of the human being originating from the ether body has
become since the time of Lemuria; let this diagram represent the human ether
body as it was at the beginning of Earth evolution, before the Lemurian epoch.
In it we find numerous currents, manifold directions of force, which are the
outcome of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions; from among these we pick out a
certain number the purpose of which was to bring into being in man's physical
organism his blood circulation with its centralization in the heart. Thus there
are forces which were acquired under Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions which were
anchored in the etheric body before Lemuria, and which then condensed in such a
way as to bring about the blood-system with its center in the heart. We have
been describing a particular organic system which from the time of Lemuria
onwards, out of specific etheric forces in our ether body, has little by little
reached physical densification. Just as, given the right treatment, you can see
salt-crystals crystallize out from a solution of common salt in water, just as a
crystalline form becomes visible in the solution, so in a higher sense something
of the same kind happens to the blood-system and the heart. They crystallize out
of special forces in the human etheric body which have an inherent tendency to
condense to this physical organic system. It has only been during the course of
Earth evolution that they have been able to develop into the physical heart.
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We have yet to
see why that took place in the course of Earth evolution, and not for instance
in the Moon evolution. What really do the blood circulation and the heart mean
to us? They are the ether-world condensed, they are the densified forces of the
etheric world! Now, from the moment these forces reached the degree of density
manifested today by the physical heart, by the blood and the whole circulatory
system, they would have come to an end as far as Earth evolution is concerned, a
kind of death would have set in. The important and mysterious feature of Earth
evolution is not only that this densification took place, not only that the
forces which had come over from Saturn, Sun, and Moon condensed to such an
organic system, not only that what was in the etheric body became physical, but
that as regards each of our systems of organs in Earth evolution an impulse
entered whereby what was once etheric, and had become physical, is once more
dissolved, is changed back again into the ether. That this is so, that after the
etheric forces have condensed to a system of organs they are not allowed to rest
at this as their goal, but that other forces then intervene which dissolve them
again, is one of the most momentous impulses of our Earth evolution. In the very
moment when our human organs have reached the point of greatest densification in
earthly evolution, certain macrocosmic powers re-dissolve the substantiality of
the organic system, so that what was there before, and had gradually lapsed into
this organic condition, now emerges from it again, again becomes visible.
This process can
be most closely followed by the occultist in the case of the heart and the blood
streaming through it; it is possible to see how this dissolution comes about,
how the Earth-impulses enter into the substance of such an organic system. For
clairvoyant sight something streams continuously out of our heart — our heart,
the outcome of our blood circulation. If you see clairvoyantly the blood
pulsating through the human body, then you also see how this blood becomes
rarefied again in the heart, how in its finest elements—not in its coarser, but
in its finer parts — it is dissolved and returns to the etheric form. Just as
the blood has gradually been formed in the ether, so in the human body of the
present day we have the reverse process. The blood becomes etherized, and
streams of ether flow continuously from the heart toward the head, so that we
see the etheric body built up in an opposite direction by way of the blood. Thus
what crystallized out from the etheric during the early part of Lemuria to form
the human blood circulation and the heart we now see returning to the etheric
form and streaming in the human etheric body toward the brain. And unless these
streams of ether were to flow continuously from the heart toward the head,
however much we tried to think about the world and to know about it, we should
be quite unable to make use of our brain as the instrument for thought. As an
instrument for knowledge the brain would be completely useless if it were only
to function as physical brain. We have to resort to occultism to learn how the
brain would work today if it were left to itself. The human being would only be
able to think thoughts connected with the inner needs of his body. For example
he would be able to think ‘Now I am hungry, now I am thirsty, now I will
satisfy this or that instinct.’ If he were entirely dependent upon his physical
brain man would only be able to think thoughts connected with his own bodily
needs, he would be the perfect egoist. But currents of a fine etheric substance
coming from the heart stream continuously through the brain. These etheric
currents are indirectly related to a delicate and important part of the human
brain called the pineal gland. They continuously lave the pineal gland, which
becomes luminous, and its movements as physical brain-organ respond in harmony
with these etheric currents emanating from the heart. Thereby these etheric
currents are brought again into connection with the physical brain and give it
an impress which enables us to know, in addition to egotistic knowledge,
something of the outside world, something that is not ourselves. Thus by way of
the pineal gland our etherized blood reacts upon our brain. You will find an
even more detailed description of this from a certain standpoint in the lectures
which are about to be published under the title Occult Physiology, lectures originally held in Prague. There I have pointed out
from another aspect something of the function of the pineal gland. So you see we
have not only a process within the Earth which leads to solidification, but also
a reverse process of rarefaction. When we grasp this we are driven to the
conclusion that we bear in us forces which will cause us to revert to the form
we had during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions.
In his normal
consciousness today, man knows nothing of the marvelous play of forces in his
ether body; he knows nothing of this communication between heart and brain.
Anyone who is made aware of it through occult development becomes aware of
something peculiar about these etheric currents — and here self-knowledge yields
something very striking, something of the highest significance. One comes to
know how these forces stream upward from the heart to the brain, to form the
brain in such a way that the human being may be able to make use of it as the
instrument of his soul-life. But at the same time one learns that these forces
have not passed through the human organization unscathed, that they do not leave
the heart in the same state in which they entered it. All that man has meanwhile
developed out of the unconscious by way of lower instincts and appetites, all
his natural propensities, are carried along in the etheric stream which is borne
upwards from the heart. Thus we received this current in ancient Lemuria as a
pure etheric stream which had no other craving, no other will, so to say, than to
condense to form the wondrous structure of our heart. Since that time we have
gone on living as physical men with this heart and this blood circulation: we
have passed through a number of incarnations without knowing anything of this
solidification of our original ether bodies into the physical parts of heart and
blood circulation. And we have become permeated with desires, longings,
sympathies and antipathies, emotions and passions, habits and mistakes, and the
reborn ether body which now streams upward to the brain is darkened, is filled
with all this. We send all this upwards from our heart — and now, in real
self-knowledge, we become aware of it. We become aware that what we received
from the gods themselves in the depths of our life-body we are unable to give
back to the gods again in the same state in which we received it, but that it
has become sullied by our own being.
Little by little
we must come to know more closely what it is that I have just described as a
kind of impurity of our own being. If we would understand the matter we have to
bear in mind the following considerations. At the beginning of the Saturn
evolution, or rather before it had begun, there was one single etheric stream
for the whole of mankind and for the whole of Earth evolution. At the very
moment when the Saturn evolution started, a split occurred in the cosmic powers.
We shall learn later why that happened; now I only want just to mention it. This
duality in the whole of cosmic activity only started from the moment when Saturn
began to develop. Greek mythology indicates it by making ancient Saturn — or
Cronos, as the Greeks called him — the opponent of his father, Uranus. This shows
that they were aware of the original unity of all the macrocosmic forces. But
when Saturn, or Cronos, began to crystallize, at once something hidden in the
nature of Cronos put him in opposition to the general evolution. To repeat what
has been said before, we can put it in this way: The totality of the
divine-spiritual beings who held sway in evolution when the development of the
planet Saturn began, split in two; so that we now have one evolutionary stream
which is directly involved in everything which takes place through Saturn, Sun,
and Moon evolutions down to our Earth, and another stream side by side with this
main one.
You can form a
rough idea of this secondary stream if you think of the air, the atmosphere
surrounding our Earth, as a finer substance, and compare it with the denser
parts of the Earth, with water and with the solid elements. We could likewise
imagine that a denser development went on in Saturn, Sun, and Moon, but that this
denser evolution was all the time sheathed in a more rarefied evolution. We
could imagine that there were divine-spiritual beings working directly on
Saturn, Sun, and Moon in their own substance, but that there were always other
divine-spiritual beings in the periphery, who surrounded the spiritual beings
working directly in Saturn, Sun, and Moon, just as air surrounds the Earth. Thus
we have indicated two realms of gods, two spiritual realms, one of which plays a
direct part in all that takes place successively in the Saturn, Sun, and Moon
evolution, the other holding itself aloof, so to say, and only intervening
indirectly. Now we must try to form an idea of how the one category of gods is
related to the other. Please take careful note of the relationship of those gods
whose range is properly speaking more comprehensive — I mean those who take part
directly in the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions — to those others who encircle
this cosmic globe in its successive stages.
You will get a
better idea of this if you first have a look at man himself. Take the human
soul: it thinks. What does it mean, to think? It means to bring about thoughts.
Thinking is a process which goes on in us, and while on the one hand it makes
real soul-beings of us, on the other hand it draws us upward and causes our
thoughts all the time to envelop our souls. Now, man with his thoughts, even as a
being of soul, is still at a relatively subordinate stage of world-organization;
but the beings whom we have just referred to as gods, dividing them into two
streams, are at a far higher stage. Imagine for a moment that man was capable
not only of grasping his thought purely as thought, but that the human soul was
so strong that what it thought immediately became a being. Imagine that we were
to give birth to our thoughts as beings, that whenever we grasped a thought it
straightaway existed. (In a certain way it does remain in the Akasha Chronicle,
but it does not become so dense that we are confronted by it as a reality.)
Imagine that we were not just to think thoughts, but that with each thought we
were to bring forth a being! Then you would have grasped what takes place within
the divine-spiritual world. The gods who were living in the complete harmony,
the perfect unity, which existed among them before Saturn, represented
themselves; they thought. But their thoughts were not like human thoughts, which
we have to pronounce unreal: their thoughts were beings, they were other gods. Thus we
have generations of gods whose reality is original, and others who are merely
the representations — the real ideas — of the gods directly associated
with the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. They are the gods who surround the
world-sphere in the course of its development through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon
evolutions.
Thus we have two
categories of gods; one of them is the thought-world of the other, is in fact
related to the other as our thoughts are related to our real soul-existence.
What have we so far usually called the gods who are merely the thoughts of the
others? Because of certain characteristics of theirs we have called them
Luciferic beings, and henceforth we must assign to the category of Luciferic
beings all those of whom we can say that ‘the original gods had need to present
themselves to themselves in self-knowledge.’ Therefore they confronted
themselves with the Luciferic beings as cosmic thoughts, or cosmic
thought-beings, just as the human being is confronted by his thoughts. And just
as man actually first comes to know himself in his thoughts, so the original
gods learned to know themselves in Lucifer and his hosts. We could express that
in another way: we could say that these beings, who are really only the ideas of
the others, always lagged behind the others in their development. The advanced
gods have, so to say, left something of themselves behind, so that they could look
back and see themselves in this mirror thrown off from their own substance — just
as we in everyday life can only see ourselves in a mirror. Thus in fact the
Luciferic beings are backward beings, entities thrown off by the original gods,
entities who are there to form a mirror of self-knowledge for the progressive
gods.
In a certain
sense what goes on in our own souls is a complete picture of this macrocosm.
Only the pattern prefigured in the macrocosm occurs in us reversed. We bear in
our microcosm a copy of this division between the ranks of the gods, of whom one
class is original and the other born out of this original class and existing in
order that the original gods may present themselves to themselves. From this you
can well see that there must be a great difference between these two categories
of gods.
The difference
is quite obvious. It is shown in the fact that our entire self, including all
that is unconscious in us, the whole comprehensive self — from which our bodily
organization has also sprung — derives from the original generation of gods. But
what we experience, what we can span with our everyday consciousness, comes from
the generation of gods who are only the thoughts of the original gods. Our being
comes to us from two sides. Our organization as a whole, with all that is
unconscious in us, comes from the original generation of gods. What we are
conscious of comes from the other side, from the generation of gods who only
hover around the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. Hence when we examine closely
our own life of ideation we feel that the idea or mental representation is, in a
higher sense, only the youngest daughter, so to say, of a line of gods; we feel
the unreality, the merely notional transience, the elusiveness, of our life of
consciousness. That is something which also dawned upon the pupils of the Greek
Mysteries, in that it was made clear to them: ‘There are divine streams running
through the whole of evolution which are all-embracing, all-inclusive, which
pour their entire being into us, streams of which we are quite unconscious; and
there are other streams which are only taken into the ordinary normal
consciousness.’ Then the Greek pupil became clear that he must disregard his
formal consciousness and turn to the ancient gods, who were also called the gods
of the underworld, gods in whose nature Dionysos shared, for only so would he be
able to acquire knowledge of the true being of man.
There is only
one being in Earth evolution through whom something quite new can enter into us
— a new element of clairvoyance, but also a new element of feeling and activity,
steeped in occult forces.
The fact is that
of the divine stream which hovered over the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, up
to a certain point of time only what I have just described could enter into
human life. It streamed into human consciousness from outside, so to say,
without man's descending into his inmost being, into the region of the lower
gods. And what flowed in in this way was something incapable of ever reaching
true world-reality. It was not possible to reach the true world-reality through
external knowledge. In order to reach that, it would have been necessary for
something to be instilled into what through the long ages of the Saturn, Sun, and
Moon evolutions had entered our normal consciousness from without — something
which was not just the thought-life of the sub-earthly, the Chthonic deities,
but something which was itself a reality, something which would cause our mere
life of thought — all that seems to us to have been exuded from our soul as our
unreal thoughtlife — suddenly for a moment to be so laid hold of by a
substantial reality that a particularly precious thought should stand fast
and abide with us, close to us as our very soul, as a reality. Something like
this would have to happen if the gods moving in the periphery were to work in
the way that the other gods have acted throughout the ages — the gods who
through the more extended self have worked right into our bodily organization.
Something would have to stream into us from without, which would signify a kind
of renewal from the spiritual world, a resurrection, a revivification of what
had first organized us and then withdrawn into the depths of our
consciousness.
What entered
into these peripheral gods at a certain moment was in fact the Christ, who at
the Baptism by John in the Jordan took possession of the body of Jesus of
Nazareth. In Christ a divine being entered into physical life by the same path
which had been taken by those gods who earlier had only been the thought-life of
other gods. But now for the first time a real Being enters, a Being who is not
just the thought of the other gods, but who is substantial and autonomous. Out
of the world-space, in which hitherto only the thoughts of other gods had lived,
there comes a divine thought which is real. What had made that possible? It was
possible because this significant event of the Baptism by John in the Jordan had
been preceded by a long preparation lasting through the whole of evolution
through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. What happened on the banks of the Jordan, and
later in the Mystery of Golgotha, echoes another momentous event that took place
in the far-distant past, as far back as the time of the Sun evolution.
We know that
prior to Earth evolution there were the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. On
Earth we experience the Mystery of Golgotha and the Baptism by John in the
Jordan. It can be elicited from the Akasha Chronicle that during the Sun
evolution another important event took place. You could describe it as the
culmination of a long process. The upper gods were the thoughts of the lower
gods, and these upper gods found that it suited them better (putting it
colloquially) to live in the rarefied element of the upper world rather than in
the denser element of which the Earth was composed. It was during the Sun
evolution that this separation took place between the two different generations
of gods, of whom one elected to continue to live, as the real ancient gods, with
the elements of earth, water, and air, whereas the other found it too difficult
to enter into these dense elements, and continued to live only in what we call
the etheric elements, first with warmth, then with light ether, chemical ether, and life
ether. We can also designate these two generations of gods working side by side
by saying that the one chose the more difficult path, that took them through the
denser elements, while the other chose the easy way, flitting around the first
generation in the chemical and life-ether, out of which they formed their bodies.
Everything which lives in the finer etheric elements was developed in this way:
forces were developed which in the long run were only able to live in these
finer elements. This took place in the main during the Sun evolution.
But toward the
middle of the Sun evolution something stupendous happened. A Being developed
forces not in accordance with the finer, rarer etheric elements. Side by side
with the Mystery of Golgotha, which we call the great Earth-sacrifice, we can
speak of a Sun-sacrifice, in that a Being who had chosen to dwell among the gods
who only wanted to live in the finer elements nevertheless developed powers of
densification adequate to the Earth elements. And so, since the Sun evolution
we have had in the ranks of the beings equipped only with forces adapted to the
etheric spheres, a Being who, within the cosmic ether, has an inner relationship
with the earthly element. From the time of the Sun evolution this Being waited
for the right moment to introduce the forces He had developed into the Earth
itself. It was Zarathustra's great merit to recognize: ‘In the Sun in the heavens
above us something remains from the old Sun evolution. For the present this
Being is in the Sun. But the moment is drawing near when He will also bring down
to Earth his form that is suited to the earthly elements.’ Then came the time
when humanity, though still not mature enough to recognize this Being who had
become part of the etheric world in Himself, was nevertheless able to recognize
Him in reflection; that was a stage on the way.
Thus in the course
of evolution, for reasons which we shall speak of tomorrow, this Being showed
Himself to humanity to begin with not directly, but in a reflected form, which
we can describe as related to reality as moonlight, which is reflected sunlight,
is related to the direct light of the Sun. That Being, who began to prepare
Himself for His great deed on Golgotha during the old Sun evolution, was first
shown to humanity in mirrored form. And this reflected form was called by the
ancient Hebrew people Jahve. Jahve, or Jehovah, is the reflection of Christ; he
is really the same as Christ, only seen in a mirror, so to say, seen aforetime,
prophetically — prefigured until the time was ripe for Him to show Himself not
merely in reflection but in His own form, His pristine form.
Thus we see the
most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun; we see humanity
prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilzsation. We see the
Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to
the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a
mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to
the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones: he is the
representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things,
resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ,
and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the
Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses
and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people
spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said
of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its
archetype.
Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0129/19110825p02.html
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