Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland
July 17, 1921
It is indeed the case that much of the legitimacy, the secrets of the world's existence, has been obscured in the consciousness of humanity by the misunderstandings that I discussed yesterday and the day before yesterday in relation to the conception of the polar opposites of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Above all, it is only through this that modern materialism has become possible, which fills humanity with the awareness that there are contradictions all around us that are being investigated by today's conventional science and from which the universe will gradually be able to be understood. A simple consideration can teach that in this way an understanding of the universe can never be possible. For just think back to some things that I explained here a few weeks ago and put them in the right perspective for yourself. Remember how those people who are considered to be natural scientists today actually only refer to the human being insofar as the human being is a corpse after his death. That which of the remaining natural laws, of the remaining natural processes, permeates the human being after he has become a corpse, can initially be explained according to the usual natural laws. But what lives in man between birth and death already resists these natural laws. And if we were to judge not according to prejudice but according to reality, we would have to say: Between birth and death, and actually from the time of his first embryonic development, man fights against that which is governed by natural laws as we understand them in our science today.
Take the surrounding nature and everything that physics, chemistry, physiology, biology and so on say about this nature today, visualize all that is said about nature and then think of man as he lives between birth and death, then you will say to yourself: This whole life is a struggle against the realm that is ruled by these natural laws. It is only because the human organization, as it were, wants to know nothing about these natural laws, fights them, that man is human between birth and death.
From this, however, you can already see that if human becoming is to be placed in the universe, in the cosmos, it is necessary to assume different laws, a different kind of becoming for the universe. Thus, with our present laws of nature, we present a world in which man, and even plants and animals, are not included. But today we want to consider only the human being in relation to the rest of nature. Man is not included in the nature that today's science dominates. Indeed, with every breath, man rebels against this nature, of which this science speaks.
Nevertheless, we can speak of the Cosmos, of the Universe, because man also comes forth from the bosom of this Cosmos, just as he stands before us as a physical human being. But then we must think of this cosmos as being of a different nature from what we have in mind when we speak in terms of today's science. We will be able to form a concept of what is actually meant by the above if we bring to mind the following fact, established by spiritual science.
Let us consider the moment when a person dies, whether young or old. The corpse remains behind. We can compare this process, and it is more than a comparison, with the sloughing of a snake or the shedding of the shell of a young bird. The corpse is shed, and what is shed is taken up by the laws of nature, which we have in mind with today's science, just as, for example, the snake skin is taken up by the outer laws of nature when it is shed and no longer follows the snake's laws of growth. That which becomes a corpse is taken up by the laws of the earth. But between birth and death, one has the human form, the human shape. This dissolves, it ceases to exist. In a sense, the corpse still has this shape, but it only has it in imitation, so to speak. It still imitates this shape. The shape of the corpse is no longer the same as the one we have during our life between birth and death. For it is characteristic of this shape that the person feels it, that the person can move with it; this shape has a certain sum of strength that unfolds when the person moves. All that is gone when only the corpse is still present. That which actually gives the corpse its shape has gone from the corpse, but that already disappears when the person has just died. The person does not take that with them. They take their etheric body with them for some time – we will ignore that for the time being – but in any case, they do not take with them what their physical form, their physical shape is. In a sense, he loses this physical form. To put it more precisely, if one were to follow the movements and activities of a person after he has left his body and passed through the gate of death, one would find different movements and impulses than those of the physical form.
So what is actually there in the physical form ceases to be visible to the outer eye when the person has passed through the gate of death. The corpse has only had this form, and it still retains it. It loses it little by little, it is no longer its own. Just as if you – if I may use a rough comparison – have a pot shape and put it over the dough of the cake: the cake then also has the shape, but it is not part of the pot shape, and you cannot say that the cake you then have has this shape from its own material; no, it has received it from the pot that was put over it. And just as the cake retains the shape of the pan when you remove the pan, so the corpse retains the shape of the human being when that shape is removed. But this form itself, which is actually the form with which we walk around, ceases when the human being passes through the gate of death. However, the fact that we have this form, that this form can develop out of the laws of the world, just as a crystal develops out of the laws of the world, is inherent in the laws of the world. So we may ask ourselves: What becomes of this form? And here spiritual scientific research gives us the answer: That which is spirit continues to nourish and sustain itself from the Hierarchy, which we call the Archai, the Primordial Foundations. So we can say: Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai.
It is indeed the case that the physical form we receive at birth and discard at death comes from the realm of the archai, the primal depths, the primal forces, that we actually have our physical form because we are enveloped by a spirit from the realm of the archai. We are immersed in a spirit that came from the realm of the archai, which in turn withdraws what it has lent us during our life.
You see, it is something else that makes you realize how you actually belong to the whole cosmos. It is already the case that, so to speak, the archai extend their feeler horns. If that is one of the archai, it extends its structure: this forms the human form, and only then is the human being inside. You can only imagine your existence within the cosmos correctly if you imagine yourself, so to speak, clothed in an outgrowth of the archai. If you now imagine that man, like me, has also dealt with this in these days - in the Lemurian period, as a being such as the earth man is, only emerging and only gradually taking on this form, then you get in what can be provided as a description, as I have given it in “Occult Science in Outline” of the transformation of the human form — just recall how I described it in the account of the Atlantean world — you get the description of what the archai actually do. You get a description of how the archai work from their realm down into the earthly realm, how they metamorphose the human form. This metamorphosis of the human form from the Lemurian period to the time when the human form will disappear from the earth is something that is constituted and shaped from the realm of the archai. And as the archai work on the human being in this way, they simultaneously bring forth that which is truly the spirit of the age. For this spirit of the age is intimately connected with the shaping of human beings, in that, as it were, their skin is given a certain form. The spirit of the age essentially resides in the very outermost sphere of human perception. And if one understands the working of these archai, then one also understands how not only human forms change, but also how the spirits of the age change in the course of earthly existence.
Now you know that in the order of the hierarchies behind the archai lie the spirits of form, the exusiai (see list on page 236). If you look up from the earthly existence of what constitutes the human being to its form, to what is inherent in the entire planet from its beginning to its end, then you will see something more comprehensive in terms of external cosmic law than that which already contains the human form. For, do we not have, when we describe the evolution of the earth, first an echo of the old Saturn time, we call this the polaric epoch; we have an echo of the old sun time, the hyperborean epoch, an echo of the old moon time, the lemurian epoch. Then comes the actual Earth time, the first Earth time, the Atlantean epoch, and now we live in the post-Atlantean epoch. Man has only just developed in his form. The Earth must have more comprehensive laws than those that express themselves in the part of the Earth's development in which man in his present form, or rather in the metamorphoses of his present form, is possible. We must look back to the first beginning of the Earth, when man had not yet attained his form, when he was still present as a spiritual-ethereal being, and we must look forward to that which will also yet happen on Earth, when, after a series of millennia, human beings will have disappeared from the Earth as physical beings. Then the physical earth will continue to exist for a time, yes, it will even be inhabited by people, but no longer in visible human forms, but as etheric beings.
If we take this whole shaping of the earth, including the human being, but going beyond the human being: if we embrace the laws, of which our present natural laws are really only the very smallest part, with the spiritual view, then we have in them that which belongs to the realm of the Exusiai. From the realm of the Exusiai the earthly has been formed in the same way as the human being has been formed from the realm of the elemental forces, the human being together with all that must be in the earth so that the human being can come into being at all. So that we can say: the earthly form passes, when it once dissolves, into the realm of the Exusiai.
If we now consider the second link in the human being, the human etheric body, it is also the case that we may not address it as our complete property at all, but just as the physical form actually belongs to the realm of the Archai and we are clothed in an outgrowth of the realm of the archai, so we are clothed in relation to our etheric body in an outgrowth of the realm of the archangels, the archangeloi. So that we can say: When we go through the gate of death, we still retain this etheric body for a short time. We know that it then dissolves, but its dissolution does not mean that it disappears into nothingness, but rather that it returns to the realm of the archangeloi. They, in turn, lay claim to it; they lower, as it were, a part of their being to the earthly human realm and thereby constitute the human etheric body for the duration of its life. We can therefore say: something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the archangeloi.
And with regard to the astral body, it is certainly the case that there is a similar relationship to the realm of the Angeloi, the angels, as there is to the realm of the Archai with regard to the physical form and to the realm of the Archangeloi with regard to the etheric body. We do not have our astral body entirely of our own either. It is an evagination of the angelic beings. So that we can say: From the human astral body, something passes over into the realm of the Angeloi at death. We also have our astral body like a garment of our being from the realm of the Angeloi. So you see how, by having a physical human form, an etheric body, and an astral body, we are actually embedded in the realms of the next higher hierarchies. And by participating in the laws of the earth, by walking around on earth as human beings, by developing a will, by developing actions on earth, in short, by participating in the laws of the earth, we also participate in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form, the elohim.
But here a significant moment occurs. When you look at your physical form in the state in which you are asleep: when your body is in bed, it has its form; you will find this form again in the morning. This form is certainly not dissolved at all, and so one cannot say that the physical body is a corpse, that it is merely a cast like a pot, but the form is really there. So that the archai, by participating in this form, are constantly connected with what is present on earth as a physical being. Likewise, the archangeloi are connected with the human etheric body. But the situation is different with regard to the human astral body. This human astral body is by no means connected with the physical human form from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up; this astral body is, so to speak, in a completely different environment from falling asleep to waking up than from waking up to falling asleep. And the point is that while the archaic principle is inevitably connected with the physical form from birth to death, and the archangelic principle with the etheric being, it is the case with the angelic principle, with the angel principle, that it must, so to speak, accompany the human being from one state to another and back again. This principle of the angeloi, this essentiality of the angeloi, must, as it were, accompany the path into the state of sleep and back again.
You see, a new element arises when we speak of the angelos. And in fact, it depends on the person themselves – on their attitude, on their inclination of their entire emotional world to the spiritual world – whether the angel accompanies them when they leave their physical body and etheric body to enter the state of sleep. It goes with children, but with a person who has reached a certain maturity, it actually depends on the person's disposition, on whether the person has an inner affinity with the angel in his soul. And if this affinity is not present, if the person believes only in the material, if the person harbors only thoughts of the material, the angel does not go with him.
Because if you imagine the fully developed human being (see illustration on page 234), the earth as the result of the exusiai (outer red), the human physical body as the result of the archai (inner red), the human etheric body as the result of the archangeloi (yellow), the human astral body as a result of the work of the angeloi (blue), if you can imagine all this, you can say: as long as the human being is awake, the angel is in the bosom of the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, in short, the higher spiritual beings. When a person leaves their physical body and etheric body, and if they leave with a materialistic attitude, then the angel would indeed deny its own realm, its affiliation with the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, if it were to go with them. You see, here we enter a realm in which human thinking is decisive for an important event, for an important fact within human life, for the fact of whether or not a person is present during the angel's visit in his sleep.
Today, we cannot say: Well, if angels exist, we do not need to believe in them when we are awake, because when we are asleep, they will take care of us. No, they do not go with us when they are denied during the day! This is something that leads very deeply into the secrets of human existence and at the same time shows you how a person's disposition is just as much a part of the whole cosmic order of things as, let us say, a person's blood circulation is a part of what external natural science overlooks or actually does not overlook.
Man himself, with his ego and the prospect of becoming an independent being, is then included in the whole. But man only acquired this sense of self in the course of his earthly existence. And he came to it slowly. And if we go back to ancient times, when there was the so-called instinctive clairvoyance of mankind, then people did not yet have this sense of self at all. When these ancient inhabitants of the earth had their special insights, these instinctive insights, then these were actually not their own insights, because this I was not yet awakened at all. It surrendered to what the angel thought, to what the archangel felt, to what the arche wanted. It lived in the bosom of these entities. Today we look back on the wonderful ancient wisdom. But it is not human wisdom at all, basically, but a wisdom that came to Earth through the Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, who clothed human beings and entered human souls through this ancient wisdom, which much higher beings actually possessed and appropriated before the Earth became Earth. And man must acquire his own wisdom with the help of his angel, to whom he should be connected in mind. We are now approaching this time. And now, in this period that has now begun, when man has awakened the ego more and more, man was, if he did not pull himself together through his own resolve, so to speak abandoned by what the angel, the archangel, thought in him.
But because man was abandoned by these angels, he only then really came into contact with earthly existence. And this coming into contact with earthly existence is what, on the one hand, makes man free, but it is also that which causes the necessity for man to now strive up out of his strength to that which makes the higher hierarchies possible, to live with man in his consciousness. We must strive to receive thoughts again that enable the angels to live with us. These are thoughts that we can only receive through the imagination of spiritual science. And when we again orient our whole feeling towards the world through receiving such thoughts, then we can again reach up into the realm of the archangeloi. Now, when a person wakes up and returns to their physical body, they are in danger of not even realizing that they have an etheric body and that the substance of the archangeloi rules in this etheric body. They must first learn this again. And they must learn that the primal forces, the archai, rule in their physical form. He must learn to understand the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.
For man came out of the realm of the higher hierarchies by advancing to his ego, by experiencing this ego. He became an independent being. But as a result, he entered into another realm, the realm of Ahriman. The I goes, and now especially in an awakened state, into the realm of Ahriman.
The earthly form enters the realm of the Exusiai
Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai
Something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the Archangeloi
Something passes from the human astral body into the realm of the Angeloi
The I goes into the realm of Ahriman (Maja of Ahriman).
The danger of falling into the realm of Ahriman was most acute around 333 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the time when people began to rely on mere intellect and mere logic. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred and soon took root in humanity. And from the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, the time began when man must consciously strive into the realm of the higher hierarchies.
Admittedly, because of the onset of intellectualism in the 15th century, he has not yet risen again from the realm of Ahriman. But by living in the intellect, and not in reality, he actually lives in the image, he lives in maya. And that is his good fortune. He does not live in the real realm of Ahriman, but in the maya of Ahriman, in mere appearance, in the sense in which I have explained this in recent days. Through this he can in turn turn back. But he can only do so out of freedom. Because it is Maya, we live in images; the whole intellectualistic culture is only an image. Since that time, since 333 BC, it has been placed in the freedom of man to strive upwards. The Catholic Church tried hard to prevent this; it must finally be overcome in this direction. Man must strive upwards to the spiritual worlds.
333 BC
333 AD
= 666
If you add these two numbers together, you get 666. That is the “number of the beast”, where man was most exposed to really sinking into the realm of the animals. But of course he remains exposed to it, even after the year 333, when he, after the Maya of Ahriman has occurred, does not strive upwards. So it is a matter of the fact that by sailing into the realm of Ahriman as far as its Maja, we have thereby become free beings. No providence, no world wisdom could withhold from us sailing into the realm of Ahriman, otherwise it would have left us unfree.
But consider, it is one thing for man to acquire a spiritual attitude and thereby keep his astral body connected to the Angelos when he is asleep, but quite another for man to acquire no spiritual attitude, in which case the Angelos does not accompany the sleeping person, for then man brings with him from sleep that which is the inspiration of Ahriman. And it is indeed the case that in the present epoch man's whole materialistic way of thinking, his whole being filled with materialistic thoughts, is emerging with ever greater rapidity from the sleeping state of man. Man can protect himself against the fact that he again and again brings with him from his sleep that which condemns him to materialism, that is, to being connected with the earth, to becoming matter, to mortality in his soul; he can only prevent it by permeating himself with the attitude that fills him when he absorbs spiritual-scientific concepts. The state of sleep is therefore in itself something that slowly brings about materialism. But Ahriman also makes other efforts to distance man from his angel, and these conditions are becoming more and more frequent. In 1914 they were particularly bad, where people were numbed by Ahrimanic forces, where their consciousness, their straight consciousness, was taken from them, so that they came into states where the angel was not present and where therefore the Ahrimanic influences became great. That was why I told so many people in 1914: one should not believe that, for example, the correct view of the origin of the war in 1914 could ever be seen from external documents. In the past, something could be discovered from the documents in the archives. What happened this time happened more spiritually, from the spiritual world, and a large part of those people who were involved at the time did not do so with their full consciousness, but were led over by Ahrimanic forces into a paralysis of consciousness, where the realm of the Angeloi did not participate. If we want to understand our time, we must look at the influence of the spiritual world in this time. This is absolutely necessary.
But there are many other ways in which we are striving today, which come from Ahrimanic sources, to detach people, so to speak, from their connection with the realm of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai and so on, to draw people to the Ahrimanic, to draw the whole of culture to the Ahrimanic. Just think how often one hears today – I have said this over and over again, mentioned it for many years – when someone has once again told a lie, a whopper of a lie: But he believed what he said, he said it to the best of his knowledge and belief. — Yes, that changes just as little about the objective fact as it changes something when you stick your finger in the flame to the best of your knowledge and belief; no providence will help you that you do not burn your finger when you stick it in to the best of your knowledge and belief. In the cosmic context, invoking one's best knowledge and conscience is of little help either – and it would be sad if it were otherwise. Man does not have the freedom to tell untruths out of best knowledge and conscience, but man has the obligation to take care that what he says is true. He must stand in such a relationship to the world that what he entertains as thoughts is born out of the world, and does not live in him alone, cut off from the world. If what one says to the best of one's knowledge and belief is not true, one can only realize it when one says it, in isolation from the world. For if anyone writes: There is a group in the world that has Luciferic characteristics above and Ahrimanic traits below. And when others claim, as they repeatedly do, that he has said it to the best of his knowledge and belief, this means that through such an attitude Ahriman is declared to be the ruler of the world. For the one who makes such an assertion has the obligation to convince himself whether or not what he says is true! And it is an Ahrimanic influence when even jurisprudence has been taken over by it today, when one does not strictly prosecute someone who has been accused of telling a lie, and says that he did it in good faith, in this or that good faith. This good faith is something that is precisely the Ahrimanic seduction and temptation in the worst sense. There is basically no word more tempting and seductive than this one of good faith. Because this good faith is the lazy person's friend for the most indolent of humanity, who does not feel the obligation, when asserting something, to first convince themselves whether it is true or not, whether something corresponds to the facts or not.
And anyone who seriously wants to fight against the spread of Ahriman, to fight in a concrete way, must fight against this: Something has been said in good faith - must be fought against in the first place; for by invoking good faith, man cuts himself off from the objective world context. That which lives in us in such a way that we consider ourselves authorized to assert it must also agree with the world context; it must not merely correspond to us; for whatever else is in the external world is abandoned by angels, is at the mercy of Ahriman. And all that is asserted as untruth in good faith is something that most powerfully drives people into the Ahrimanic, that draws them into the Ahrimanic with a strong rope. And the appeal to good faith in the case of untruths is today the best means of delivering world civilization into the hands of the Ahrimanic entity.
You see, if you look into what actually constitutes the world, then you have to understand something like this. But you don't just have to fantasize in generalities like the mere nebulous mysticism of angels, archangels, archai and so on, and stick to theories. You have to go to the world where it is concrete. For it is indeed the case that people lose the support of the world of the angels by lying down on the lazy bed of good faith for that which they have not tested and which they nevertheless assert.
These things show how what flows out as an attitude is connected with real life, with directly real life, and how it permeates us with spiritual scientific truths and insights. And these spiritual scientific truths and insights must send their power down into the details of life.
It is precisely this that makes many people so angry about what spiritual science is: that spiritual science is not just another theory like the other worldviews, but that it is something living, that it demands of people, above all, to overcome such laziness - laziness in both senses of the word - as this, which lies in asserting good faith when representing untruth. People do not like this, and excuses are rife everywhere: so-and-so claimed something in good faith. As a result, our science, especially historical science, is thoroughly corrupted. For you can easily imagine that such people, who go before the world with mere assertions of the caliber I have told you about, do not deserve any credence, even if they claim anything else, if they for example, somehow represent external science; then one must first check whether he has copied it from someone else who still belonged to the better generation, where one still felt inwardly obliged to what one wrote. And when you see how people today officially imitate these Frohnmeyers, then you will see how great the trust in official science and its representatives can be! But it is most important that these things are looked into. And one would very much wish for a following for spiritual science that would be truly imbued with the fact that today a serious commitment is needed to insights that will bring about a strong change in the world. Because today it does not work with small things.
This is what one would like to see: that Anthroposophy could acquire an enthusiastic following that would be passionate about realizing it. Over in the building, I mentioned that today, from the side where the lies can be counted by the dozens, a new, sensational, that is, scandalous, brochure is being announced. These people are at work. Why? Because out of their bad feelings of the soul they can feel strongly enthusiastic. They can lie enthusiastically. We must get used to being able to advocate the truth with equal enthusiasm, otherwise we will not be able to advance with civilization, my dear friends!
Anyone who looks around the world today must be clear about the fact that the path back to the hierarchies must be seriously sought, out of the Ahrimanic embrace. But this means that we have to look at the details. Time and again, when some nefarious opponent comes along and throws this or that into the world, even our own followers still come and say: We still have to examine whether this or that was done out of this or that weakness. In the Anthroposophical Society, unfortunately, there is always a yearning to accuse those who speak the truth much more than to accuse opponents who would like to trample all truth into the mud from the depths of their souls. As long as it is still the custom in the Anthroposophical Society itself to repeatedly have compassion for the lie, we will not move forward.
It must be said again and again from time to time that we must recognize the lie as a lie; for it is into the lie that Ahriman slips, and it is mostly the lie that, when it has been told, refers to good faith, to the best of one's knowledge and belief. I have given you enough examples where this good faith, this best knowledge and conscience, is invoked. But examine the facts and see this Ahrimanic influence of so-called good faith, which even plays a constant role in our jurisprudence, so that one can say that humanity has been seized by Ahriman even in jurisprudence. These are the things that must be seriously considered. If the Anthroposophical Society is to be what it wants to be, then it must be imbued with a fervent sense of truth, because today that is identical with a fervent sense of humanity's progress. Everything else is only filled with the will that leads into the forces of decline and drives ever further into them.
What I am saying today is not just another of those truisms, but something that individual people need to know, because the signs of the times demand it.
Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive
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